← Guy Newland

Understanding Emptiness: In Search of Reality (13 March 2010, 3)

Guy Newland · 13 March 2010 · 2 h 1 min · Tse Chen Ling via Internet Archive

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  • 0:52

    And that was, we could say in one way, the idea, the distinguishing between the idea of something's being refuted when you analyze and reason and then don't find it and distinguishing that from something's not being able to sustain analysis or to bear analysis or to hold up under rational analysis.

  • 3:12

    This idea that when you analyze something and you don't find it, what exactly have you accomplished? Have you proved that it doesn't exist or not? And then on the other hand, the fact that our senses are always fooled all the time, yet somehow we're going to trust them to give us valid information anyway. Those two things, which both Tsongkhapa's genius ideas, at the root of them is one thing,

  • 26:50

    When you want to realize that things are empty, you have to figure out... Exactly what is emptiness a lack of? It's an absence, it's a lack, but you have to figure out exactly what it's a lack of. It's one thing to say, oh yeah, I know it's not nothingness.

  • 50:37

    And Chandrakirti then, he has many quotes from Chandrakirti as well, saying, look, we're not refuting dependent arising. So that's the first thing, the heart of the view.

  • 1:16:36

    And then you get all confused. Well, you know, the fact that when you ask what is it really, you don't come to anything, that doesn't refute the table. It just means it refutes a table that you imagine to exist in such a way as to be findable when that question was posed. That's the point, really. That's the...

0:15 Good morning, everybody. Report an error

0:24 Today, as I said last night, we're going to be talking about the issues that I think are really the heart of Tsongkhapa's main genius contribution to history of philosophy. You could say the history of Tibetan Buddhism, but why sell them short? Report an error

0:52 And that was, we could say in one way, the idea, the distinguishing between the idea of something's being refuted when you analyze and reason and then don't find it and distinguishing that from something's not being able to sustain analysis or to bear analysis or to hold up under rational analysis. And people had just taken those to be the same thing. Report an error

1:24 And Tsongkhapa said, this is the source of great confusion, even though it sounds like the same thing, I'm going to explain to you why it's different. And then, so we'll take that as one thing, differentiating what it means when you look for something analytically and don't find it, whether that proves that it doesn't exist or just shows something else. Report an error

1:45 And second, the fact that our sense consciousnesses are pervasively And continually having a false appearance of things as intrinsically real. That all of our sense consciousnesses are deceived in terms of how things appear to them. But that doesn't mean that they're useless. They're actually crucial. We have all the information that we're going to have as a database to do analysis comes. Report an error

2:23 From these deceived senses. So this is, you could say, well, that seems a problem. You know, you've just admitted that your main witness is a liar. How are we going to proceed with the case, the prosecution of ignorance for causing the train wreck of cyclic existence when you just admitted all you got is the testimony of somebody who lies all the time? Report an error

2:49 So people were like, well. Why would someone even argue like that? That's not going to make any sense. When Tsongkhapa does argue like that, and he says that that's what Chandrakirti meant, and he makes a good case. Report an error

3:02 So those sound like two different things, but they come down when you think about, when you understand what they're about, they come down to the same thing. This idea that when you analyze something and you don't find it, what exactly have you accomplished? Have you proved that it doesn't exist or not? And then on the other hand, the fact that our senses are always fooled all the time, yet somehow we're going to trust them to give us valid information anyway. Report an error

3:30 Those two things, which both Tsongkhapa's genius ideas, at the root of them is one thing, is distinguishing. Intrinsic existence from existence, which is a big trick to do because it always appears exactly the same. It's always appearing if something's appearing. I'm just not talking about how people understand things or think about things, but just how they appear to our senses. They're always appearing together. Report an error

4:01 It always looks like things are... At the sensory level, they just always, for something to appear, it appears as it has its own distinctive character on its side. That's how you know it's a duck and not a hat and so forth like that is because it has something that makes it distinctive on that side as its own character that's shining from that side. Report an error

4:25 That's how things look. And so it's a good trick. To tease them apart, right? It's a very difficult problem. It's not like something that everybody had thought was obvious that this is what the texts from India meant. They hadn't, and that's why it hadn't been figured out in this way before. Report an error

4:52 But Tsongkhapa makes just an overwhelming case that when you go back and you read these texts really carefully and not just in a sloppy way and try to say, yeah, they're using these words, but what could this really mean given the whole purport of their text? And you analyze very carefully, right? Then you can see that this is what Chandrakirti meant. Report an error

5:16 That this is what Nagarjuna meant. This is how we can make sense out of the Heart Sūtra instead of just mystical nonsense like we were talking a little bit about last night. And that if you don't make this distinction, as people hadn't, that you just create sort of a hash out of all these things. And not only do you create a hash out of it, but it's not just a possibility that it will be a toxic hash. It will... Report an error

5:44 For many people, actually be a toxic hash. That is, the misunderstandings that arise from reading these texts without making that distinction will actually lead to harm. Report an error

5:58 Okay, so that's what we're going to try to look at today. But before we get into that, just sort of a, I don't know, side... The exploration, we're going to have sort of a little look back at what we did last night and starting before we go into that topic because not everybody was here. And one of the things we talked about last night was this thing that Tsongkhapa says at the end of Volume 2, the thesis or epigram that all virtue everywhere, meaning from us to Buddha, arises from, Reflecting on facts with an undistracted mind. And I was thinking about how we kind of tested that last night. Report an error

6:51 We tried to think about, well, is that really true? How is it true? How does it relate to different other teachings that we've heard or other information that we know about our experience in the world? And we didn't just say, all right, I'll... I'll tattoo that on my chest because Lama Tsongkhapa said it. And if we do like that, if we test it in our mind and see how it works and in what sense it's true, then we're doing what Tsongkhapa himself was doing in the text because, as I said, he came up with this thing, all virtue everywhere comes from reflecting on facts with an undistracted mind, because he was reading an Indian Shastra which said, All virtue everywhere comes from the fifth and sixth perfections together. And he's like, well, what sense could that make? How could all virtue everywhere come from the fifth and sixth perfections? Report an error

7:47 How would you ever get to the point of having the fifth and sixth perfections if you didn't already have some virtue? And then how could that be seen as a backwards cause for your having had that virtue before you? Report an error

7:59 In other words, when he heard that, he said, this has to make some sense, it has to have a meaning, it has to have some significance, it's a teaching I have to turn over in my mind and think about. And so then instead of saying, oh, this is to be discarded, or I just have to believe it even though it doesn't make any sense, he found the sense that it made for him, which was that... Report an error

8:25 All virtue arises from reflecting on facts. That's the insight part. With an undistracted mind, that's the fifth perfection part, the concentration. So he takes it as being, well, when they say the fifth and sixth perfections there, they're not really talking about the full-blown forms of it, but similitudes of them that... Report an error

8:45 He could all have to some microscopic extent all the time. Every time we are able to calm our minds down and pay attention to a situation and then think it through carefully, we have the rudiments of that. And he's saying, well, that's where virtue comes from. So anyway, my point was not to rehearse all that again, but to say how we were thinking about what Tsongkhapa said is like how Tsongkhapa was thinking about what the Shastra was said. Report an error

9:12 It's like we're taking his way of behaving as a model to emulate, not his determinations as gospel to say, oh, well, we have to go without examining this. He didn't go without examining, and that's how he got to be this sharp about stuff. He examined it. Report an error

9:39 So yeah, I think teachers, good teachers, Tsongkhapa's a good teacher, His Holiness is a good teacher. They don't want people parroting them. They don't want parrots, right? They want people to use the full analytical skills they have to think about what's being taught. Tsongkhapa, of course, went around during his lifetime to a whole bunch of different teachers, and he had a really hard time finding any Galukpas to study with. Report an error

10:07 That's my joke for the morning, right? Report an error

10:12 Yeah. So, gosh, he had to study with a Nyingma teacher, Namka Gyeltsen, to work out the view. Some people say that he's a Gatamba. You want to come up here? Report an error

10:34 Anyway, Namka Gyeltsen was in a Gatamba lineage, but some people say that his practice was really Dzogchen, that he was really a Nyingma, and he's a person that... Tsongkhapa was studying with to work out the view of emptiness quite a bit, although then he needed some extra help later on from Manjushri and so forth. Report an error

10:54 And then, of course, his main teacher most of the time for a long time was Rendawa, who was a Sakyapa. And so he obviously had to take, he didn't write the great treatise based on compiling all the things that he heard from his teachers. Report an error

11:16 And smooshing them together. He based it on testing everything he'd learned from them, trying to figure out how it made sense in relationship to the sutras and then meditating deeply on what he was figuring out. So that's what the model is for us. We have to have faith and confidence, faith in the sense of confidence in Buddhism. Report an error

11:43 It's not like... We can always just understand everything by reasoning. You know, that's not what I'm saying. We need support and guidance from teachers. Report an error

11:55 But how do we, you know, to know, okay, well, which teacher can I rely upon? Of course, we're told you have to examine the qualities of the person. You have to do analysis in order to decide where to put your faith. And there's, you know, if you look in Volume 1 of Lama, the Great Treatise, it's... It goes into a bit about, you know, well, how do you know what teacher, and there's looks at all the Shastra literature about that and what is actually said about the qualities of a teacher and not just going and saying, okay, this is a teacher and they're on a throne, so therefore, you know, they have to be my teacher or something. Report an error

12:31 No, you have to look at their qualities. It talks about, you know, a process of observation. An analysis of what you're observing, gathering evidence and analyzing it and thinking about it before you put your confidence in somebody. And there's all these different qualities teachers are supposed to have. Report an error

12:49 When His Holiness the Dalai Lama teaches about this, he always says, well, the most important one is that they embody what they're teaching about. They have to actually be realized or able to practice what it is they're telling us to do and not be at some... Trans-ethical level themselves while teaching us the rules. That would be an example. I don't know where that comes to mind. Report an error

13:19 So anyway, I'm not trying to say we don't have to have faith, we don't have to have confidence, we do. But the good teachers that I've had, including His Holiness and Genlos Angatso, they say, well... But, Report an error

13:36 We really want to see some factor of doubt within our students when we teach them something new, which is like, oh, that seems counterintuitive. But that's why, because it's only by having this sort of like doubt in the sense of like, well. Let me be curious about this rather than just accepting of it is what leads to an analytical testing which leads to a kind of deeper understanding and of acceptance of this from one's own side and not just as a repeating of words. Report an error

14:12 Yeah, and His Holiness said exactly that when he was teaching the Great Treatise at Lehigh in the summer of 2008. And then I was reading this book by... Again, Losangatso, who was, as I mentioned, one of my teachers in India, called his commentary on Tsongkhapa's harmony of emptiness and dependent arising. Report an error

14:34 And I came upon this passage, I don't know, just by coincidence when I was thinking about this, where he says, when one develops a lot of doubts in the sense of having a desire to ask a lot of questions about the Buddhist view, then this is a good sign. Report an error

14:53 To acquiesce to the highest view, say, well, it's Chandrakirti's view, Tsongkhapa's view, and just parrot it, merely because our teacher says it's the highest view, is not something even those who incline to Buddhism of the heart should really be content with. Report an error

15:12 It's as if Buddha deliberately delivered teachings that were open to different levels of interpretation in order to provoke his followers into debating Various sides of the issue with one another so that they could refine and sharpen their minds to a level where they could begin to understand what the teachings were and not just repeat them. Report an error

15:36 And then finally get to correct conclusions through the active power of reasoning. And in this way the truth will not remain as a dogma to which we feebly assent. It is still true, but we're feebly assenting to it. We're feebly assenting to the right thing. That's, I guess, better than otherwise. But it would be better if we had the courage, I guess, to sort of test it in our minds. And both Genlo Tsongkhapa and His Holiness used the word doubt about that. Report an error

16:07 You know, it's a doubt in a sense of curiosity, like, well, let's take this apart and see what's there. And he says, when we do this, then... Our understanding becomes a powerful force that vanquishes our confusion and bestows clarity and is much more powerful for doing good than just having the right words lined up. Report an error

16:32 Okay, so that was my opening reflection. And then what I wanted to do just quickly because some people... If you weren't here last night and then also it's helpful to the rest of us as well is just quickly look at looking at page 114 and 115 in the book and just sort of use that as a way to briefly summarize some of the things I said last night. Report an error

17:02 Anyway, if you weren't here last night, I'm a professor from Central Michigan University and I'm a Buddhist but I'm just a person who's studied a lot about the philosophy of emptiness. Report an error

17:16 Tsongkhapa's system and that I got involved through knowing Tibetan with doing translating and editing of this big translation of Tsongkhapa's first mature work on the stages of the path, the great treatise on the stages of the path to enlightenment back in the early 90s I guess and we worked on it for a long time and eventually it all came out in this century. Report an error

17:47 And then that having been done, people said, oh, the first volume is so beautiful and everybody loves it. And everybody is like, oh, you know, now we can see what Lama Tsongkhapa said about how to rely on a teacher and sufferings of the realms and taking refuge in the three jewels. And then the second volume came out and it's like everything that he said about... Report an error

18:10 Bodhicitta and everything he said about the six perfections, especially the first four, but a little bit about five and six. But everything he said about the first four perfections. And so beautiful, you know, it's great. And then when we got to that third volume, we didn't know what was going on. We couldn't understand any of that stuff. Are you sure you had the right translators? Report an error

18:30 And I was like... Well, yes, we had the right translators. It's just that it's very difficult. If you're translating Kant, then when you put it in a different language, it doesn't become easier no matter how good the translators are. This is like very complicated philosophy. And when you translate it clearly into a different language, it's still very complicated philosophy. So that's the book he wrote. Report an error

18:57 You know, he wrote a book that is proclamated. Proclaiming its personal guidance for your spiritual practice and many times speaks in a voice like that. But then in certain sections, in order to be absolutely clear and to differentiate his position from others that have been there before, it goes into very complicated kind of intellectual analyses of exactly how does this view differ from other ones. Report an error

19:24 And well, One could feel, yes, I will believe that all of these analyses of the four wrong positions on how Svatantrika differs from Prasangika are all personal advice for my practice, but not right now. Maybe sometime I will, but it's a little bit, you know, the connection gets harder to make in some parts of the text to understate it a little, frankly. Report an error

19:55 So anyway, people said, well, you have to fix that because you know what it says since you translate it and edit it. And so then you write something that says what it says so people can understand it. So then that's why I was asked to write Introduction to Emptiness. Okay, so then what did we do last night? Report an error

20:14 We said that we suffer unnecessarily because we have this persistent sense of ourselves as existing independently that's contrary to how things actually are, that we don't see things as they are, and that's the basis of needless, unnecessary suffering. That's the basic idea of Buddhism. Report an error

20:37 That emptiness is the word for the lack of this extra kind of existence that we're falsely adding on to things. And so emptiness doesn't mean nothingness. It doesn't mean hopelessness. It doesn't mean meaninglessness. In fact, if you understand it, it is the basis of hope. But it feels bad to people, as we were talking about a little bit last night. Report an error

21:01 And it feels bad for a reason. It goes against the grain of how we want things to be. You know, for everybody, right? It's like, what a bummer. We don't exist. I always sort of do, but it's so subtle that we don't understand it. Report an error

21:19 Yeah. But to me, that I, you know, I feel like I'm losing myself, right? If you don't feel like you're losing yourself, then did you really get it? Because the self that you're holding on to is something that's being said as well. You're not losing it. You never had it. It was an illusion that there was something real that was there that was your intrinsic essence on your own side that made you a real, substantial person. Report an error

21:48 Okay, so we talked about that a little bit. And then we talked about how for Tsongkhapa, wisdom means not just realizing ultimate reality. Realizing emptiness, that's wisdom. But that wisdom also involves not reducing everything to emptiness sometimes, but being able to, within the conventional level, make clear distinctions. Report an error

22:12 It's not just you have, well, let's... Let's play a game world here where anything can be made up to be anything. And then you have emptiness world where, of course, everything boils down to emptiness. No, there has to be a way for wisdom to make reliable distinctions at the conventional level without immediately reducing everything. Report an error

22:35 And then that constitutes wisdom or reliable knowledge. That's like a huge issue for Tsongkhapa. That's the core, you could say, of his... We'll argue his success in reform, not just like attempt to reform Tibetan Buddhism, but his transformation of the landscape in Tibet was based on this idea that I'm not just going to tell people that they should become monks or tell people that if they become monks they should actually keep their vows even if they're practicing Tantra and so forth. Report an error

23:07 No, I'm going to show them what the philosophical basis is for actually saying that they're... Is a difference between right and wrong. And just because you understand emptiness doesn't mean that you've obliterated it or transcended it. So that's actually historically, as distinct from philosophically, historically in terms of the landscape of what happened politically, grew out of the power of that idea, I think, in a lot of ways. Report an error

23:43 And skipping over a little bit, then we talked about the idea that for Tsongkhapa, you have to, you can't just like to understand emptiness, you can't just space out and set your, stop thinking dualistically, that that would be just like having somebody knock you in the head and then you stop having thoughts and why wouldn't that be the same as being enlightened? Report an error

24:04 But instead you have to study, I mean you have to read. Definitive sutras and reliable interpretations of them and understand what they're trying to say. And then you have to take what you've understood as an object of cultivation and meditation. And I pointed out that he three times quotes the same stanza from the King of Concentration Sūtra, which says that just that. Report an error

24:33 If you analytically discern, right? Sorting out what is what through using reason, if you analytically discern the lack of self in phenomena and then you take that which you have discerned and not some separate thing as the basis of further analytical meditation in practice, then this will lead to nirvāṇa and not... Report an error

25:04 Some other practice that's separate from that. So actually the line manages to use the word analysis twice, once in terms of our initial practice and then further, even when you're meditating, it involves when you're on beyond studying and you're in the phase of practice and on the cushion applying it to yourself, it's still analytical. Report an error

25:27 It's only when you've understood emptiness as an idea and understood how that idea relates to... right here behind my sternum and how real it feels and dissected it and apply these ideas intellectually to your heart and then when you've understood that then you can take And basically... for a one-pointed focus in meditation and try to attain to that understanding non-dualistically. Okay. Report an error

26:00 And basically... That's like what we did up to now. So for today, I'm going to be sort of looking at... Actually, my book itself is sort of a root text for not all, but a lot of what I'm going to do. And I'll be starting in sort of the area of the third chapter and then working through the middle of the book, if you have the book. Report an error

26:29 And if you don't, then just look at the quintessential points that pertain to those sections. So, A huge part of the great treatise's treatment of wisdom has to do with the identifying of the object of negation. Report an error

26:50 When you want to realize that things are empty, you have to figure out... Exactly what is emptiness a lack of? It's an absence, it's a lack, but you have to figure out exactly what it's a lack of. It's one thing to say, oh yeah, I know it's not nothingness. It's another thing to be very precise in knowing exactly what it is that's being negated, yet we know it's intrinsic nature or things existing. Report an error

27:15 But what does that exactly mean? To get precisely clear about what's being refuted and to... When you have that clear intellectually, then to have that clear in your meditation, find within yourself the mind that's conceiving. It's like to notice yourself having the deluded thought that thinks of things as existing in the way that because of thinking that you suffer in cyclic existence, then you know the enemy, you know the target that you're aiming at. Report an error

27:48 and it's just, it's Tsongkhapa, this is just like, and all, you know, Gyalupa teachers since then, it's like, well, you absolutely have to start with identifying the object of negation and knowing what you're refuting. Otherwise, what? You refute too much, you refute too little, right? So we have this, right? Buddhism's the middle way and the Madhyamaka school branded itself that way, you know? Report an error

28:16 Other ones all think that they're the middle way too, but, you know, Madhyamaka. Got the copyright on the name there. And so there's a middle way between extremes of eternalism or reification on the one hand and extremes of just negating too much or nihilism on the other hand. And, you know, it's like a lot of Tibetan, well, you could say in India, let's say in India. Report an error

28:52 Many people thought that Chandrakirti's view was too extreme, that he negated too much. And they thought, well, that Baba Viveka's way was a little bit better because it gave a little bit of essence to things. Report an error

29:08 Or that maybe it would be better to just stick with the Saṅgha and do mind only because then you knew you had a solid foundation. Yeah, a root consciousness that wasn't going to... Wasn't going to be, you know, deconstructed in the same way that everything else was. So, I mean, in terms of, we don't know for sure, right? Report an error

29:31 You can't go back in time. But it's starting to look like from Western scholarship, you know, on the history of Buddhism that, you know, Chandrakirti was not huge in India. I mean, he was... It wasn't like everybody said, oh, Chandra Kurya has come, let's all now follow him. They were like, well, this is kind of fishy because, you know, you're saying there's no intrinsic nature at all to anything. Report an error

29:56 How is anything going to work? People weren't really comfortable with it. And it doesn't have to be. They don't have to be, right? Maybe they shouldn't be right now, right? I mean, it could be that for a lot of people that's – and this is the advice, right, that is given. It's like, well, there's all these different Buddhist views. Report an error

30:15 It's not just for the sake of arguing like Genlo Tsongkhapa was talking about earlier. Some are more suited to different people's minds at different times. And you want to maintain the view that is sort of, you know, I say the most profound view of emptiness. Within the context of which, you can maintain confidence that your actions make a difference, that there's an effect to what you do, that you don't get that sort of, well, nothing matters feeling. Report an error

30:44 When you get the nothing really matters feeling, then you're like, okay, well, it's starting to go over the edge. Since if everything's empty so nothing really matters, then you have to say, well, I'll go back to one rung lower for the time being because I'm not really getting it. So I always think of this idea of the middle way as not a path but a precipice, a very narrow ridge. Report an error

31:11 And it's like, okay, so there's this like... We're trapped inside a canyon or something, and the only way out, the break in the walls of the canyon, there's a gap that we could get out. But the only way out is along the crest of this really narrow ridge. And now where we are, there's a gradual slope that goes up to the ridge. Report an error

31:38 But then when you get to the top, there's like a cliff on the other side of the narrow ridge. And so we're kind of like, we're like, okay, right now we're down here at the bottom. We're definitely not getting out of the canyon. We're going to have to go up to that ridge in order to find our way out. And so it's like we start to inch our way up. Well, if we don't get all the way up to the top of the ridge, then we can't get out through the gap in the wall of the canyon. On the other hand, if we go just a little bit too far, then we fall over the cliff on the other side, right? Report an error

32:11 And that's, you know. As we've fallen into nihilism, we don't have any confidence that our actions make a difference. So it's very important to be in terms of like, well, anyway, the idea is that if you don't refute enough, then you have some benefit from the practice, but it doesn't actually get at the root of cyclic existence. Report an error

32:34 If you refute too much, then you have, in a sense, a worse problem, Then you don't have a philosophy that can be the basis of a good practice in terms of even accumulating good karma and so forth like that. So that's one huge way of thinking about this. The other way is that sometimes they talk about is just, okay, it's like analysis is... Report an error

33:06 You know, shooting an arrow or something like that. And you have to set up the target first so you know what you're shooting at. You're not just like shooting arrows of deconstruction out, you know, in all different directions and hitting, you know, innocent bystanders. Like my thought that this is a cup has been destroyed because if I thought that this is a cup has been destroyed because I realized emptiness, well, maybe I didn't think about what the analysis is supposed to be accomplishing and identify the object of negation at the beginning. Report an error

33:35 And yeah, so I don't know, Don Lopez wrote an article that he called Painting the Target, you know, paint like, you know, when you have a laser sight on a gun. And he said, you know, yeah, you have to paint the target with it. You have to see exactly what you're aiming at before you begin the reasoning. Otherwise, the reasoning can, I mean, when you get into it, it could be very powerful and it could leave you over the edge, right, and destroy the wrong thing. Report an error

34:02 Okay. Okay, so what Report an error

34:10 we're identifying is, anyway, what we're identifying when we set out to identify the object of negation is a wrong thought, a wrong idea that's in the stream of our continuum that is the basis of our affliction and cyclic existence, but which we don't. notice or catch ourselves having, but How can we think about that? Report an error

34:55 Um, uh, I was, um, You know, I use this example here in the book of thinking about this situation that actually happened where, you know, teaching in front of the university classroom and sitting on top of a table every day when I sit or when I teach, I just get up in front of the table and sit on the table. Report an error

35:16 And then one day I got up in front of the table and, like, the table collapsed. Like, right, I don't know if I gained weight or probably. It was just that the table had come, its time had come. Report an error

35:30 And so there wasn't a table there anymore. I mean, it wasn't a broken table. It was not a table. It was like just like very small parts and like particle board and it was debris. It was no longer a suitable basis. No one would say broken table. It was like pile. Okay, so I'm sitting on the pile and I was thinking, you know, it was like. Report an error

35:56 This is interesting because I never was aware of having thought this table was permanent. I never noticed myself and yet I feel so surprised. Report an error

36:12 Yeah, that's interesting. And then, of course, this is a fun example, but something breaking like that and disappointing us is like people dying, right? that, right, Report an error

36:29 Maybe people get to a certain age and a certain degree of sickness and it's not a shock. But normally that's not the case. Often people die when we're not ready for them to die. And it's just like the table, right? And it's like we still have this picture in our mind of this person and yet then we're at the funeral. Report an error

36:55 And there's this profound sense of discordance that runs through our whole bodies between our expectation that the person will continue as before and the actual reality. Well, there's a corpse and it's not moving or breathing and where is the person and so forth. and so And that is obviously not the fact that people are sad when people they love die. That's not what I'm talking about. The fact that we have a sense of shock when someone dies, just like with the table, that we didn't really think that they were mortal. Report an error

37:39 But of course, we weren't aware of thinking they were immortal. Who would think that? You know, it wasn't like we were going around thinking that they were immortal. It's just that at some level, we had a built-in expectation that things will continue as they have been. Report an error

37:55 So in order to attack and get at, you would say, a sense that things have this sort of exaggerated, built-in quality to continue as they were before, we have to sort of recognize that without consciously acknowledging it, we have some sort of false assumptions about how things are. And we have to sort of pull that to the surface and then critique it. And so this is what I'm using this as an example. This isn't emptiness, but I say this is like what we're talking about. Report an error

38:31 It's like, well, we're not aware of thinking that things are permanent. We're not aware of thinking that people are immortal. But then we get shocked when they turn out to be mortal. Why is that? It's like because at some level we had some idea that was an expectation or built-in habit of mind that was like projecting onto them an able-to-continueness. Report an error

38:53 So you have to like pull that, identify that and pull that to the surface and then make that the object of critique. And that would be, for example, meditation on death, you know, in the first volume of the great treatise is like working on that kind of thing. So I don't know. This reminds me a little bit of what you do. This whole process actually has a structure that's like what's done in cognitive psychology where the idea that people are suffering unnecessarily because they've... Report an error

39:25 Swallowed hook, line and sinker, something that someone had told them and then are not even necessarily aware of that they think that, but that thinking that about themselves or the world then becomes the basis of problems later on. So then you have to identify what your wrong thought is. So I'll just use a very simple example of myself is that I was always the next to last person picked for the sports teams in school. Report an error

39:55 Because I was like the really skinny, scrawny one. And so then they would take the fat one last and they'd take the really skinny, scrawny one next to last. So I thought of myself as sort of essentially, intrinsically unathletic. And then I had a tennis teacher who hit with me the first time. He said, oh, you're so athletic. And I was like, this guy's conning me. I don't understand. Report an error

40:24 What you're saying. I'm just here to play with the ball. I really thought he was lying to me. And then separately I had other people say this to me. So I started saying, what do you mean by that? When you say that, what do you mean? And they say, oh, you have good hand-eye coordination. That's what we're talking about. Oh, well, then that's different. So then I started to think, well, it's not that... Report an error

40:52 There are different kinds of things. I have a sort of fixed belief about myself that is so rigid that it was limiting me and closing things off in a certain way. It wasn't really fully factually based. Well, that's an example. This is a very painless example, actually. It's not a big deal, but it's a very painless example. You get all kinds of very painful examples of what The damage that parents, with good intentions or bad, do to their children passing on from generation to generation on certain ideas and then the children absorb them. Report an error

41:34 It's like, well, you have to figure out what it is you're really strongly believing and holding on to. You don't even know. It's like it's a taken for granted structure of your universe kind of thing because that's what you... took in with your mother's milk. So anyway, Report an error

41:53 that's the idea. It's not like we're going around thinking all the time, oh yeah, these things intrinsically lose. I never noticed myself having that thought, but then I don't really go around thinking that my wife is immortal either, but I'd be very surprised when she died. I would be shocked if I find out that she's dead. Report an error

41:49 and it's a priori, it kind of feels like that. So anyway. Report an error

42:11 yeah so um that's kind of the Basic idea of identifying the object of negation. Tsongkhapa talks about it. That's a huge chunk of the book, and so therefore it also is the hugest part of my book explaining his book. Report an error

42:33 He says, if you want to be sure whether a certain person, like Charles, is present or not, then you have to know that person. Report an error

42:47 In order to be certain of the meaning of selflessness or the lack of intrinsic existence, you must very carefully identify the self or intrinsic nature that doesn't exist. As like, well, how can we identify if it doesn't exist? Well, you have to know what that is as an object of mind, you know, what it would be like, what it would be like if it were there or what it feels, what the mind that's imputing that or thinking of that, what it's holding on to, right? Report an error

43:18 You can't just be vague about it. All right. Okay. So that being the case, the next, you know. A huge chunk of Tsongkhapa's book is divided up between going against people who he thinks are refuting too much, have gone over the line, have refuted more than they should be, and then later on coming back around and going after people who haven't refuted enough. Report an error

43:47 So I'll start, and we're going to be coming to the point that I was advertising earlier on. about analysis and what it doesn't accomplish or not accomplish. A lot of... A lot of Tibetans who were considered those followers of Chandrakiri before Tsongkhapa, they thought that when you analyze things and see what they are really, that this eliminates any kind of valid basis for ethical distinctions. Report an error

44:16 They didn't therefore say, oh, go and do whatever you want. But they did think that there couldn't be any valid basis for ethical distinctions, that ethical distinctions had to be posited, as I was saying last night, just within this sort of as-if or... Let's pretend mode, but that they couldn't be validly established because everything was collapsed into emptiness by ultimate analysis saying, what's really, what's the essential character of right that makes it different from wrong? Report an error

44:46 Dude, well, I just told you, everything's devoid of intrinsic character, so how could they have any... Some of them said we'll follow Bhava Viveka. We'll do a thing where we have a little bit of, instead of Chandrakirti, we'll get a little bit of intrinsic nature to build things on. Or they say we're going to do a Dzogchen thing where we're going to have a mind vajra that's the basis of everything that we, and we'll say that that's reality or something like that. Report an error

45:35 So I have some kind of something real solid to hold on to. And so this is what situation that Tsongkhapa found himself in. Now all of the Madhyamaka philosophers, including Baba Viveka and Chandrakirti, agree that when you analyze and you search to say, you know, what are things ultimately that you don't find anything. Report an error

46:03 And Tibetan interpreters, you know, as I said, did tend to think that this could be understood as refuting the existence of things. Report an error

46:16 So... So when Tsongkhapa came up with this idea that cars, tables, people and so forth, that they do exist, even though he's saying that he's a follower of Chandrakirti, people were quite shocked. I mean, people gave him flack. There's some rather pointed refutations of him from other parties. and um, people Essentially, it comes down to this. Look, either cars and people and so forth, either they're found when you analyze and say, what is it, or they're not found. Report an error

46:55 And if you say they're found, then you're asserting that there is a real car and a person, and we think that is what you're saying. That's why you're insisting on these valid ethical distinctions. Report an error

47:09 So you're not really a mad yamaka at all. You're just... But, you know. Report an error

47:13 Claiming that as a brand, but you don't really believe what we believe, which is that everything, when you analyze it, doesn't exist at all. On the other hand, if you're going to say that when you analyze things and when you analyze them and you realize what they really are, you don't find anything, then you should acknowledge, like we do, that... Report an error

47:38 Things don't exist, basically. Basically, they don't exist. And since they're refuted by reason, we're not going to posit them as existing in our system. We're not going to have a system that says there are tables. Why would we do that? We know that they're all empty, right? We're not going to posit them as existing. Report an error

47:59 That's contrary to reason. Reason just showed that when you look for the table, you never find it, okay? So Tsongkhapa says to them, well, look, you can see it. It appears, you know, it's like I'm not, there's no optical illusion here. I'm not on drugs. I, you know, I have, you know, this is, I can see that there's a cup. Report an error

48:33 So isn't that some useful information that we could use from our senses when they're not being messed up? And then in response to that, people say, well, you can say that, but that puts you clearly outside of Madhyamaka because if we look at Chandrakirti, he has a passage say, well, the senses are not valid in any way. Report an error

48:54 And also the King of Concentration Sūtra, which you yourself are quoting all the time, says the eye, ear, nose and consciousness are not valid cognitions. So they've got this evidence, you know, they have scriptural things that they point to that say this is just a contradiction for you to say that our senses are valid sources. Report an error

49:15 You've admitted that they're deceived constantly, right? And so why would you say that they can have this legitimate information? Report an error

49:24 So... So Tsongkhapa doesn't, in his book, he kind of creates this drama, I would say, philosophical drama, because after presenting this problem, as I just did, he doesn't then answer his critics directly by telling them what he would say about that. Instead, he kind of starts by going on the offensive against them. Report an error

49:56 And saying, look, the whole meaning of, this is just like Buddha taught dependent arising, and then later on Nagarjuna and Chandrakirti figured out that emptiness destroyed it. Not at all. You should know, you've read these same books, that Nagarjuna teaches that dependent and arising and emptiness have the same meaning. Report an error

50:18 So they have the same import, you know, 24. 18 of the Karakos, 24, chapter 18, first, right? Emptiness and dependent arising have the same meaning. That's what the middle way is, is understanding that these things add up to the same thing. Report an error

50:37 And Chandrakirti then, he has many quotes from Chandrakirti as well, saying, look, we're not refuting dependent arising. So that's the first thing, the heart of the view. Not just Tsongkhapa, like he didn't think it up. Let's say emptiness equals dependent arising. No, it's like this is what Nagarjuna says. He says it at a crucial point in his most fundamental text. Report an error

51:05 So if you're going to have a version of what emptiness means that says, yeah, but in our system dependent arisings don't exist because everything's empty. Haven't you just contradicted the fundamental teachings of the... Report an error

51:19 And the Buddha said, well, first Buddha taught dependent arising, then later we realized everything was emptiness and rolled it out. Emptiness and dependent arising have to add up to the same thing in some way. Report an error

51:31 This depends on, independence on this that arises. What happens makes a difference in what will happen has to be compatible with emptiness and in some way come down to. Two ways of talking about the same thing. Okay, that's his first argument. Then he goes on about this. He says, if you guys are going to say that there's emptiness blots out dependent arising, then you're not going to be able to become enlightened. Report an error

52:04 You think you're becoming enlightened by realizing emptiness. But you won't be able to become buddhas because a Buddha has to become Have the form body of a Buddha that's compassionately, spontaneously acting to help others. You have to have the practice of ethics and compassion on the path. It's not just like you realize emptiness and everything else is destroyed and then you're a Buddha. That could be the nirvāṇa closet or something like that. Report an error

52:37 You disconnect, just go in a cave and go inner emptiness. A Buddha realizes, the great Buddha realizes emptiness underneath the tree and why would he ever get up? There's nothing out there. Report an error

52:57 So it can't be enlightened as a Buddha unless you have a practice of compassion that culminates in the Buddha's compassion and you can't have that unless you have a way when you come to the ontology, the basis. A way to talk about conventional things is something people and they're suffering. And, you know, so Buddha got up to go out and teach and preach out of sympathy for the world. Report an error

53:27 I was like, well, you know, it's like he said, I, I got up, you know, and went out to teach and preach out of sympathy for the world. So there has to be a way, you know, to posit those things. And I, it's Ankhapa here, right, saying you guys have just said that there isn't any way, that it's just sort of a trick. Report an error

53:48 Okay, so then that's number two argument against that, that dependent arising and emptiness have to be the heart of the path. Then he starts to make fun of these Chandrakirti nihilists, you know, pseudo people who name themselves follow the Chandrakirti but really have a nihilistic understanding. And by saying that, look, the whole thing is that, as I mentioned at the beginning, This session here. The whole thing is the distinguishing existence from intrinsic existence. And your whole problem is that you think that these things are the same thing. Report an error

54:32 And that's the same thing that the Buddhist realists thought back in India. In other words, you think that you have the profound view of Chandrakirti. But actually, your idea has at the core the same assumption. As the realist that Nagarjuna was refuting. And what is that core assumption that your supposedly profound idea has in common with the Buddhist realist? Report an error

54:57 It is that existence and inherent existence are the same thing. So the nihilists, the Tibetans that Tsongkhapa is considering as nihilists, he's saying, well, these people think that existence and inherent existence are the same thing. So they think that all the arguments that establish emptiness are refuting existence. Report an error

55:16 And they're wiping everything out. Whereas then the Buddhist realists in India, they were like, well, we can't have this Chandrakirti business. We can't have this Nagarjuna business because existence and intrinsic existence are the same thing. And we need both. Because that's what makes things work. It's like things are able to work. And so we can have a path and we can have Four Noble Truths because things work. And things work because they have some nature. Report an error

55:46 It gives them the quality of being able to function, of course. So that's what it means for something to be there, is to have some characteristic that lets it work and do its job. That's all we're saying. It's not a reification. That's obvious. It was obvious to them. And Chandrakirti was the one. So he's saying, well, look, don't you realize you pseudo-profound Tibetans following Chandrakirti? Report an error

56:13 You think you have something deep. Actually, you have the same assumption as those guys. You think that inherent existence and existence are exactly the same thing, and you've got to have one. If you have one, you have to have the other, and you've just bought the other option. You've bought neither, and they bought both, right? Report an error

56:32 But those things, the whole point of everything from the beginning. Was to pull those two apart and say, yeah, we're going to have a practice of the path that's founded upon this profound understanding of things not having any intrinsic character. Now, I haven't begun to try to tell you, well, only a very, very, very brief moment. We're going to have to get to, like, well, exactly how are they going to pull this off? You know, how are we going to be able to tell this from that if there's no intrinsic character on the side of the object, right? Report an error

57:01 But anyway, we'll come back to that. Report an error

57:05 So anyway, you guys understand this idea of ultimate analysis a little bit. Report an error

57:14 If you look for the, if you say, you know, what is the table, then, you know, I have a sense that the table's here, but then if I, you know, say, well, when I feel that it's here, like if I'm not just satisfied to say, oh yeah, there's the table, but I say, yeah, but what does that mean? How does it exist? What is it? What is it really? There's the big what is it really question. They use this phrase in Indian text, in the Modyamatic text, and say, well, things give satisfaction as long as you don't analyze them. Report an error

57:55 Tsongkhapa doesn't use that phrase very much, but it's because he wants to talk about that analysis doesn't always mean reducing everything to emptiness. And in that phrase, it does. But yeah, that's a really common stock phrase in Indian Madhyamaka texts. Things give satisfaction when not analyzed. So it's obviously working as a table if I just say... Report an error

58:18 Charles, where's the table? I'm not asking about the mode of being a table. Should we use this table or that table? It's like we're not investigating the nature of the table. Yeah, we think there's a table here, but what is that really? And we start looking into it. Why are we so justified in calling this a table instead of a cup and so forth? Report an error

58:38 We look into the table, and then, of course, as you guys probably all know, then you have run into these all kinds of... dastardly problems locating what it is that he felt was there like I'm convinced that there's a table here, but when I go and look and I find this little part, and I find this little part, and I find this little part, and I find this little part, and there's some parts down here, and none of them are a table. Report an error

59:12 So you're going to say, well, you know. Of course not. It's the collection of the parts of the table. And it's like, well, you can have, obviously, then the person who's pointing out, so you have the complete collection of the parts of the table, and there's still not any table there. So you just spread them out. Like when you go to the store, like the big box store, and you buy a bookcase, and then they give you this collection of bookcases parts with the badly translated from Chinese. Report an error

59:44 Description of how to make those parts into a bookcase. So, God, I thought I was buying a bookcase. And then I got this thing. I can't put any books on it. Report an error

59:55 It's just a collection of bookcase parts. Maybe I'll make art with it since I can't figure out how to put it together. Yeah. Report an error

1:00:06 So there's a problem then with that. So then it was like, oh, well, it must be the shape. You know, it's a certain shape that's the bookcase. But you can have that shape without it being a bookcase either, right, in all different kinds of forms. We'll say a hologram. That is not a traditional example. Report an error

1:00:26 Anyway, obviously you can have table shapes, right, that aren't tables, and you can have full collections of table parts, right, which aren't tables at all and so forth. So you have this difficulty in sort of feeling like that. Report an error

1:00:45 It's a bit of a mystery here that is vividly appearing to me that there's a table here. But then when I go and look, you know, I don't seem to be able to put my finger on it. When I think about, you know, how like a table maybe appears to me that I feel that there's something hidden within it. I'm just telling this is my own and there's something hidden within it. Report an error

1:01:11 Obviously then when I stop to think I realize I don't even really think that but then I feel like that at one level that there's something within it that makes it a table because I know the different parts of the table aren't the table but there's something like I usually think it's like right down here where I can't see and it's like pulls together on all the non-table. Report an error

1:01:37 Parts, because I know this isn't a table and so forth, but it coalesces them, that's the right word. It pulls them together as a table and constitutes them as a table. In some sense, maybe it's... Maybe it's like a heart that's pumping out tableness through all the non-table parts. I can't actually see that, but it's like a subtle thing, like in tantric channels. Report an error

1:02:08 And it's like constituting all of the parts of the table as a table and unifying them into that nature. Well, of course, this is all like... Why am I thinking this? Because I don't really believe that, but I'm trying to feel like, well, how do I feel that it is? It feels like it has something like that. Report an error

1:02:32 It's sort of mysterious. In my classroom with students, I write a letter, write the letter A on the board and everybody just feels like that, okay. yeah. Report an error

1:02:48 I'm getting the message. I'm passively receiving the message that the professor has written. The A is the message, something about this A. But then, of course, it's just like some bits of chalk dust and one slant line this way and one slant line that way and then this little crossbar. And then, of course, it is an A, but it's being constituted as an A. Report an error

1:03:13 Through the active participation of the students, which they didn't notice because they were like just thinking, okay, what's next? Report an error

1:03:23 It's like there's some radar signal coming, radio signal coming from the side of the blackboard that's shooting, you know, A is coming, like the pulsar message, and I'm not doing anything. I'm just here picking it up, wondering what it means. But it's like coming from that side that it's named. And then they can laugh at themselves, right? Report an error

1:03:48 Because you just pointed out to them that like, well, we just ate that thing. We all did it together. There wasn't any like little heart behind the crossbar that was like pulsing out that message. We did a big A thing on it. We imputed it or ascribed it as an A. Without noticing it and then recognize that ascription as something that was appropriate and that we were receiving. Report an error

1:04:18 So that way, I don't know, we can think a little bit about how ultimate analysis is breaking down a kind of ordinary sense of things that we have. Report an error

1:04:36 so, um... Report an error

1:04:42 I don't know. The idea then that Tsongkhapa is we have to tease apart somehow the sense of things as existing from things intrinsically existing as the core. And then I was thinking about this and I was thinking about a core of all these ideas and it was like, well, whoever sees them separately anyway. Report an error

1:05:00 I mean, in terms of appearance level, just like as appearance, you know, oh, now I just have the appearance of things existing, but I've gotten rid of that bad appearance of them intrinsically existing. Like, who would that be? That would be Buddha. That would be Buddha. That's just, that's not even, you know, that's not even an advanced bodhisattva. Report an error

1:05:19 That's like, that's like you have to really be in, to actually have it appearing to your senses. In just the way it is, was totally stripping off not just any idea that it's false, but any false appearance at all. That's what it means to be completely and perfectly enlightened. So of course it's not going to be easy. We can't do that. But what we can do is have an understanding that there is a difference even though we're not perceiving it all the time. Report an error

1:05:48 So it's like, do you think that people who are colorblind, red blind, colorblind? Are these people unable to understand the distinction between red and green and then they never get driver's licenses? Not necessarily, right? It's like always appearing wrongly to them, but they have other resources whereby they can figure out how to, knowing that I see things wrongly, knowing that they always appear to me wrongly, knowing that I have some other reliable. Report an error

1:06:23 Evidence that's mixed in there. Maybe I can figure out a way to get everything done that needs to be done, even within this false appearance. Report an error

1:06:34 That's one of the examples I thought up for this book is colorblindness as ontological colorblindness. All right. Report an error

1:06:46 It's incurable, almost incurable. I mean, our ontological colorblindness is curable only at the level of complete and perfect enlightenment. But we don't have to be stupid about it and say, oh no, we're not colorblind like that. We can understand that we have that ontological colorblindness. Report an error

1:07:08 Okay, so Tsongkhapa saying that dependent arising and emptiness have to be the same. They have to have the same import. That's his argument against these Buddhist nihilists. And he goes on to say that's why dependent arising is the very best reasoning to use to meditate on emptiness. Things are empty because they are dependent arising. Things lack inherent existence because they are dependent arising. Report an error

1:07:38 So an easy way, you know, and actually this is like in Lama Yeshi's introduction to Tantra, you know, he has examples like this, like you see something very, an impressive new school building. Well, this is my example, but it's based on that book, you know, you see an impressive new building and then it's sort of like it appears as though it's just there from its own side, but then you just start thinking about all the causes and conditions without which it... Report an error

1:08:07 It is not there at all, right? Like the cloud in the piece of paper example. But thinking in terms of an impressive new object that's manifesting itself or impressing itself on your mind and then reflecting on just the vast matrix of causes and conditions without which it doesn't appear at all. And then you start to think, well, dang, the building, when I look at it, it doesn't seem to... Report an error

1:08:35 Disclose to me any of this information, which would seem pretty relevant. Do you know what I'm saying? That's kind of important about all the stuff, that there wouldn't be this building without all the efforts of all these people. There wouldn't be this building without a certain concept of education, a certain value system, a certain political system. Report an error

1:09:02 The absence of Khmer Rouge hegemony. It's not manifest. You know what I'm saying? It's like, these things are relevant because with those things were present, those things were, you know, those conditions, without those conditions, then the building wouldn't appear at all. So, you know, then I have this feeling when I do this that the building is bad because it's lying to me. Report an error

1:09:32 You know, that's, you know, some... I have a problem with it because it's so deceptive. And I'm an innocent observer of this highly disguised phenomenon that's shooting these deceptive appearances toward me. I still feel like it's there from its own side, but now it's a liar. Report an error

1:09:59 Bad building. And then it's like some afflictive, you know, the architecture must have been done by some. Afflictions. That is my new idea for today. It's been constructed by our afflictions in the past as the basis of this appearance that's completely misleading as to how it exists. Not that it exists, but as to how it exists, the way it's set up there by itself. Report an error

1:10:34 In that way, and this is what Lama Ishi does when he's talking about emptiness a little bit in Introduction to Tantra. In that way, it's not very hard to get started on thinking about emptiness and dependent arising and why you can think of dependent arising as a reason for understanding that things are empty. Report an error

1:10:51 But it's really not that easy to get all the way to the core of it. Report an error

1:10:59 Everything's devoid of even a shred of intrinsic nature. Nothing has any unique distinctive character on its own side that is the basis of it being what it is. How is it that apple trees make apples and pears make pears and ethics leads to good rebirths? You know what I'm saying? Why doesn't ethics lead to bad rebirths if there's no distinctive character on the side of the... Report an error

1:11:33 The phenomenon that allows it to be like this rather than that. It's not that easy, that's my point. It's easy to think about how things are interconnected and therefore they're not just quite as real as we think. But to understand how in the utter absence of intrinsic existence the pendant arising could even function at all is not supposed to be easy to understand. Report an error

1:11:55 It's supposed to be, and Tsongkhapa said it, it's extremely difficult. He says, in fact, I was like, eh. Report an error

1:12:04 I slightly understated it in my book. I said it's extremely rare, but if you look at what he says actually in the great treatise, he says, it almost never occurs. It almost never occurs that people can be confident, have just in their minds a strong confidence in both emptiness and exactly how dependent arising works at the same time. Report an error

1:12:26 These two things have the same meaning. Why does it almost never occur for people to understand them? Report an error

1:12:33 That's the profundity of it. It's like we can start to use dependent arising to work into emptiness, but to understand emptiness fully just as it is in a way that eradicates, understanding which eradicates the root sickle existence, it's subtle to be able to posit how cause and effect works. Report an error

1:12:58 So people easily go astray. They get familiar. They read a little stuff about how to do dynamic analysis like at the table of the person. They set out to look for the table and they find out it's not so simple. It's not this part. It's not that part. It's not the collection of parts. It's not something other than the parts. Report an error

1:13:21 Either there's no table soul or table spirit separate from the body of the table that inhabits the table. So then it seems like then the table has been refuted by rational analysis of this question, interrogation of what the table is and that it's just sort of a pretense that there's a table here. And then this is what happens next. They say, okay, so... Report an error

1:13:49 If the thing that I'm analyzing is just refuted and does, you know, it seems to be just refuted when I analyze it, then what about the analyzer? Who's doing the analysis that shows that this, and then there's like this problem that arises, right? Because there's a feeling that, well, someone must be doing the analysis, but then we know that when we look, we won't be able to find anything. Report an error

1:14:16 So then people will say, well, that's what it means to say that things neither exist nor don't exist. That's the meaning. It's like we can't hold any position. We can't say that things utterly don't exist because somebody has to be doing the analysis, but we can't say they exist because it's clear that when you reason shows that they don't. Report an error

1:14:33 So they're just like, well, no position. That's the teaching of the Buddha, right? So Tsongkhapa thinks this is terrible and sloppy and doesn't represent the way at all. Other people might disagree, but he's really on about this, that now you're holding a view that there's no view and you've immediately contradicted yourself. Report an error

1:14:59 You claim you've found the view and the view is that there's no view. It's not that you don't have a view, you have the no view view, which is immediately self-contradictory. And... Report an error

1:15:12 What you've misunderstood is, of course, this exact point, is that when you do reasoning, when you ask the question, this is the point of how these things come together, when you ask the question, what is this really? Report an error

1:15:26 That's similar, it is the same thing as saying, what is the intrinsic essence of this? So when you say what is the table really and you look for the table in and among the collection of parts of the table and so forth, when you look for that, you're looking for an intrinsically existent table. And sure enough, it doesn't exist at all. It doesn't exist at all. So the complete unfindability of a table under analysis doesn't prove. Report an error

1:15:57 At all, that it doesn't refute the table. It doesn't refute the table exists. Of course it's completely unfindable because it doesn't exist in such a way as to be findable when you look like that. When you look like that, of course you're not going to find it. It doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. It doesn't mean it doesn't exist in such a way as to be found when you ask that perverse question, what is it really? Report an error

1:16:20 If you just used it to put your cup on, then everything would have been fine. But you had to say, what is it really? And then, you know, feel that there would be something graspable there that you would come to at the end of that investigation, or else it wouldn't be suitable to hold the cup. And then you get all confused. Well, you know, the fact that when you ask what is it really, you don't come to anything, that doesn't refute the table. It just means it refutes a table that you imagine to exist in such a way as to be findable when that question was posed. Report an error

1:16:50 That's the point, really. That's the... You know, the number one genius move of the great treatise. Because people hadn't thought of it that way. I mean, I would say, you know, it's like he understands this as being is what Chandrakirti and Nagarjuna meant, but they didn't ever say it in exactly that way. Report an error

1:17:09 He had to figure out that that's what they meant. And everybody else who'd read them had like gotten confused and not figured it out. Report an error

1:17:16 It's amazing. I'm not saying that they didn't mean it. I think they did, but it had to be drawn out of what they'd said. Things have not even the slightest element or the slightest trace of findable under ultimate analysis kind of existence, which doesn't mean that they don't have any existence. Right, that's the point. Report an error

1:17:41 So in Report an error

1:17:50 order to... Explain this a little bit more to... Well, let's see. Let's see. How does Tsongkhapa talk about this? What does he say about it? It says it's a great sentence. Like I saw one of my first favorite sentences was, all virtue arises from reflecting on facts with an undistracted mind. Here's my second favorite sentence. We do not see sounds no matter how carefully we look, but this does not refute them. Report an error

1:18:21 I was like... Why is he talking about this? This is just about sounds. I want to know about emptiness. That's an analogy. It's not an example. It's an analogy. Two ways of perceiving what's there, getting at two different kinds of information about what's there, like two different channels, two different wavelengths that you can tune into. Report an error

1:18:52 We can look really, really, really, really, really, really closely and never see something that's there, you know, the sound. And in that way, when we look very closely, you know, for the sea, you know, what the essential nature of the table is, we never see it. But it doesn't refute the table because that's something you have to listen for in a sense. It's like it's on a different wavelength, the mere existence. Okay, so then trying to figure out how do I translate this for my students, I came up with this idea of two radio channels. Report an error

1:19:27 And this represents, in Tsongkhapa's philosophy, conventional. conventional of knowledge. So Channel A is all things considered radio. It has all the diverse phenomena of the world are discussed all the time and frequently argued about. And people tune into that and they take all of these discussions as to be the universe. It's all things considered. Report an error

1:19:56 I mean, that would be the whole all things, right? It's not like there are sort of a different dimension. It's more that there's like, wow, there's a whole different way. There's a different channel, which tunes you into a different way of looking at the same things. And that's the channel that's like, well, what are these things really channel, right? Report an error

1:20:22 And over that, Channel B. It's all emptiness all the time radio. It's like a place. Different kind of programming. And it's all about the cars and the tables and the chairs and the people. It's all the same tune because they're of one taste, as they say in Tibet, right? They're all of one taste. So, you know, whatever. Report an error

1:20:48 You're listening to the red car, blue car argument on channel A. And so this is the same thing going on on channel B, except it sounds completely different. Empty, empty, empty, empty, empty, right? It's like all emptiness and radio. So this idea is like that we're stuck on channel B, channel A all the time. We just take these things as like that that's the whole story. Report an error

1:21:07 But then if we can, one late night programming, the Buddhism thing comes on on channel A. There is another channel. We're still on channel A, but now we're on channel A hearing about the other channel. That's what we're doing right now. Report an error

1:21:29 So then they're like, how do I tune that dial? I don't even see a dial. You have to figure out how to get the radio tuned over there to channel B. And then you're hearing about the same things that were before, but now you're... Tuned into the other way of looking at them, which is what are they fundamentally? What are they ultimately? What is their ultimate nature? Report an error

1:21:56 How do they really exist? And in that, you see you're liberated, right, from attachment to the kind of reification that you had about the way things were on channel A before. You see that they're all ultimately empty. And then when you come back to channel A, It's like, well, they're still talking about the red car and the blue car and the superiority of one to the other. And there's proponents of each that are debating their positions. Report an error

1:22:26 But you hear that in a completely different way now because now you understand that all of this discussion is not based on any intrinsic character in the cars, but is like... Report an error

1:22:45 Taking place in an illusion-like mode is what I say. Things appearing to you is like there's a very vivid appearance of their intrinsically existing, but you know that fundamentally they're all empty. So this is what Tsongkhapa, you know, this is a very important idea, this moment of coming back to channel A after having been to channel B. Report an error

1:23:08 That's, you know. Buddha doesn't just stay sitting underneath the tree. Buddha gets up and walks around and is like, it's going to be tough, but I'm going to try to explain it because I care. Report an error

1:23:20 So all these things appear, and they appear at the same time as completely knowing that things are empty. So as long as you can maintain within the kind of afterglow of really vividly remembering how empty things are, right? Then, you know, your activities of giving and ethics and so forth are under the influence of your prior realization of wisdom. Report an error

1:23:48 But then after a while, it kind of wears off. And now you have to go back over to Channel B and refresh the clarity of your understanding that all of these things are empty. Report an error

1:24:02 So, hmm. So, Report an error

1:24:12 then, Report an error

1:24:16 I think, just enough to say about the other idea here is that when you come back, it doesn't just sort of mean that, okay, there's no, in Tsongkhapa's way, it doesn't matter whether I choose a red car or a blue car. Maybe it doesn't in that case, but if red card represents harm and the blue card represents restraint from harm, it still makes a big difference. Report an error

1:24:54 There's a wisdom, as Tsongkhapa was saying in the beginning, there's a wisdom that goes along with knowing what's what on channel A, as well as the wisdom of not reifying or exaggerating that comes from having tuned in to channel B and then coming back again. Report an error

1:25:11 Again, my teacher used to say, well, if you want to know what potato to plant, don't ask a philosopher which one to plant, which one to eat. Then you don't ask the philosopher because they'll just tell you that they're all empty. But then you don't know which one to do. You've got to ask a farmer who knows how stuff works with that stuff. Report an error

1:25:36 Well, when I first said that, I was like, well... I'm not sure how that really helps me very much because it means sort of like, well, we have to go around and just ask. It seems like it's just kind of going by majority rule or something like that, you know, what people say in the world. How can that be the same as conventional reality? Because if it were, then, you know, we would just have slavery and whatever people voted for, that would be. Report an error

1:26:06 That would be what's true, except for emptiness. It would be what people vote for and then emptiness. That would be it. It's not very appealing. Report an error

1:26:18 So then as I think about this more, I came to understand that this idea of this farmer doesn't actually represent a farmer. A farmer represents the ordinary conventional... Knowledge of the world that everybody has all the time, including the philosophers themselves. So like the philosophers are arguing about emptiness. They have to give examples about horses and cows and tables and chairs and letters and money. Report an error

1:26:46 And whether when you put a log in the fireplace, it makes cold. And whether we light a butter lamp, does that shoot out darkness or light? I mean, right? They have to give these examples in order to think about whether things are empty or not. Well, how do they know about that stuff? Report an error

1:27:02 That's the mundane knowledge, basic conventional information. Everybody's got this database of practical information about how things work. And then analyzing using that information is how you figure out something that, oh, I'm actually ontologically colorblind. Report an error

1:27:28 You didn't know that, but you have some information you can use to analyze to figure it out. Report an error

1:27:37 So, I don't know. Some people might feel, oh, you know, it's really good that I've found out that Tsongkhapa is, you know, telling me that the existence of things isn't refuted because I was worried there. You know, you had me worried. And you kept saying nothing has a shred of nature from its own side. But I'm really happy to find out that the table exists. Report an error

1:28:11 I knew it all along. My suspicions were confirmed. Things really are real. And then there's this intrinsic nature thing, which I don't really know what you're talking about. But you can refute it if you want. Report an error

1:28:30 Why am I saying this? I mean, this is actually a really serious problem. It relates to a question last night about scholasticism and Gilukba. Report an error

1:28:43 One of the, you know, I think one of the fifth Dalai Lama, no, is Dendar Hlarumba in a commentary on the fifth Dalai Lama's sacred word of Manjushri. And he's saying, well, when you're doing this analysis of how, you know, whether things are one with their... Different from their basis of designation. You shouldn't have the idea that this intrinsic nature is some extra horn that's on the top of the thing and then that gets lopped off by the analysis. Report an error

1:29:18 And then it's like, oh, well, presto chango, back where we started. We've got everything we wanted in the first place. I think this is a real problem because... I mean, it's a practical problem for those of us, you know, it's like Prasanghika system teaches that there's an external world. Report an error

1:29:41 Well, we believe in an external world, so we're already right. Report an error

1:29:48 Thank goodness we're not Chittimatrans and we have to go around trying to figure out how everything's of one nature with the mind. You know what I'm saying? It's like, that's pretty good. And not only do we believe in an external world, but, you know, we believe that there's a validly existing table. And, you know, it's a valid, conventionally established. Report an error

1:30:09 That's the way I think, too. You know? And it's like, oh, this is a very good system for me. You know, my point is that, like, as Gilukba thrives, you know, down to today, as an institution. As an institution, right, then not everybody penetrates into the meaning of emptiness. And the moves that Tsongkhapa fortunately made to ward off Tibetan nihilism turn around and become a basis for... Report an error

1:30:46 Philosophical reification or philosophical justification, misunderstanding that uses Tsongkhapa's moves against nihilism as a philosophical legitimation of our own innate ignorance, like when you've added extra buttresses onto it. Before, I just took it that the table existed as it appears. Now I know it's real. Tsongkhapa said, told me that it's validly established. Report an error

1:31:14 And it exists externally. So that's pretty good. I've got good reasons. Anyway, that's why I brought that up. It's potentially a bit of a problem. Report an error

1:31:33 We've been through chapters 3 and 4 as much as I wanted to do right now. And it's 11.31, going for an hour and a half. Okay. Anyway, um... Report an error

1:31:42 So I think this would be a good time to take any questions if people have questions and if you don't I will like tell you some more things. Report an error

1:31:58 What you're saying this morning is really interesting in terms of Buddhist ideas of the origins of life that at one point we were less corporeal and through chasing delusion we became more and more physical, more corporeal, more reified. What does this mean though in terms of if we were to really embrace dependent arising and emptiness would we become less corporeal? Report an error

1:32:19 Go back to the sort of original state that we existed in at one time. Well, if we completely embraced it in the sense of having fully realized it and then we were Buddhists, then you have – so that's like – I'm taking your question as what would the world look like if we were Buddhists. Yeah, I was thinking about it. It's very – first of all, you have to say this is the kind of thing that everyone says is inconceivable to start with before they say anything else. Report an error

1:32:50 Okay? That's clear. First of all, I mean, everybody says that. The sutras say that and so forth. So we don't get it. Like, we can't even, like, for example, think about, well, what would it be like to be a dog? What would it be like to be a parrot? What would it be like to be a sea slug? We already have, like, oh, what do you mean, what would it be like to be a sea slug? Well, I'm sure a sea slug's way of perceiving the world is more like ours than a Buddha's is. Report an error

1:33:13 Do you know what I'm saying? It's like you have a big problem of, like, imagining yourself into such a perspective that's so different from yours. That's one problem. Then another level of problem that's on top of that is that there's this saying in Tibet that, you know, If you want things presented from the point of view of where we are now, then you listen to the Galukpas. If you want things presented from the point of view of the way they're realized on the path, then that's Gaguba. Report an error

1:33:40 If you want things presented from the point of view of how a Buddha sees them, then you talk to the enigmas. This is like the idea. So my point being that the Galukpas are more concerned with making... It's a coherence and making sense and that works for us where we are because we have to use conceptual thought to start breaking our way out of the prison. Report an error

1:34:08 The downside of that, which I think is a good trade-off, is that it really becomes even harder to make a completely sensible picture of what Buddhahood is like in a way that... And if you read the 12, which I'm not saying you should, but if you read chapter 12 of my book, The Two Truths, it goes through in detail all of the efforts of Gilukba scholars to talk about what omniscience is like. Report an error

1:34:36 And they all run into problems, actually, which I think are serious problems in a way that... You know, it's very difficult. And like with all these other things that I've been saying today, hey, this is like genius. This is a completely coherent presentation. It's like amazing. And you don't get that same feeling when you're saying like, how are we going to explain omniscience? Report an error

1:34:56 It gets a little bit like they get in. A lot of the people, like century after century, you'll see these great scholars will take up this issue. And then at the end, they'll say, Chai Bar Jiao, meaning, well. This remains to be analyzed further, which is like such a great thing. Well, no, but it's such a great thing because they don't say this makes no sense. Report an error

1:35:21 They say, look, it deserves to be analyzed. I've analyzed it. I think I've figured out something that the last guy didn't figure out. Report an error

1:35:32 Someone else is going to have to take the baton because I haven't solved all these problems. Okay, so that's saying that and saying the other thing. I was sort of thinking this morning, I just had this thought about this this morning. I was thinking, well, from your own side, if you're fully enlightened, then you see a pure land. Report an error

1:35:57 Because... Report an error

1:36:01 The point of view in which things appear otherwise is one that is driven by karma and the afflictions, whereas the point of view in which a pure land appears is one that's created by the collections of wisdom and merit, and within that, especially from the collection of merit. Report an error

1:36:22 In the Galupa way, it wouldn't be that there's nothing. It would be that simultaneously, So, um, uh... Report an error

1:36:31 All phenomena appear without being mixed up. So do the radio channels, you know, it's like channel A, channel B, channel A, channel B, channel A, channel B. That's the practice of the path. It's like the practice of the path is alternating between wisdom and focus on wisdom motivated by compassion, focus on compassion in the context of a wisdom understanding. Report an error

1:36:55 But you're not perfectly able to be, can't be on channel A and channel B at the same time. You can only be a person who's... Getting better and better at integrating the information from one into the other. But you can't be on both at the same time. That's what it means to be omniscient as a Buddha. As you have simultaneously, you're on both channels at the same time. Report an error

1:37:19 Completely and directly and non-dualistically understanding everything is empty and at the same time seeing all forms. Now you're seeing all forms however from the point of view of an enlightened being who doesn't have any karma or afflictions in their continuum to cause things to appear in the way they appear to us from our side. Report an error

1:37:39 So then that's my thought is that you know and I think this fits with what Tsongkhapa says in Kedrup and so forth, that from the point of view of the Buddhist perspective, of course every sense pour in their body, every pour of their body is realizing emptiness directly. But at the same time, forms are appearing and those forms are pure. They're the forms of a pure land. Report an error

1:38:09 Then you're thinking... Like, well, if everything from the Buddha's point of view is a pure land, then what about us? Well, they have to be able to see that we see other stuff. But that other stuff doesn't appear to them from the point of view of their karma and afflictions, but from the point of view of their understanding our minds. Report an error

1:38:35 And that's what they say. And then when they, then from. So there's a picture. It's just that when you think about it more than what I've just said, you start getting into some tricky parts. Well, just to finish up with this, the other part of this is that is it possible then, with a proper understanding of emptiness, for saṃsāra to ever truly be emptied and everyone to become a Buddha? Report an error

1:39:02 I mean, this is what we have as a model, but is that really possible? I don't know. I don't know. We aspire to liberate everybody from sickly existence, but then we say there are an infinite number of beings. We say every one of us has the potential to become fairly enlightened. I don't know. It's sort of an issue that's never really addressed in the traditional text, but then everybody asks it these days. And so then I've heard different teachers say different things. Report an error

1:39:39 Do you know what I'm saying? Report an error

1:39:45 So I don't know. I'm not going to make any positing about that. I was wondering, how is Channel A really different from the as-if mentality? Like the idea that if you ask different questions, you come to different answers, which is what you don't see sound no matter how hard you look. Is that different from the as-if mode? If you ask this question, you get this answer. How is that different from the as-if mentality that preceded? Report an error

1:40:16 Okay. Well, the difference is that Tsongkhapa thinks that there are two kinds of valid knowledge, that there are two kinds of knowledge. There's knowledge of conventional phenomena and there's knowledge of... How those conventional phenomena exist, let's put it that way, right? How those conventional phenomena ultimately exist is one kind of way of looking at the world. Report an error

1:40:48 And then saying, is this a potato or a rock, is a different way of looking at the world. And he's saying those are both valid kinds of questions to ask and that you can have valid knowledge about those things, okay? Right? So if you just put it like that, it's not saying that, well, when you know how, Everything is. When you see how the potato and the rock are, how they are in Channel B, that destroys the distinction between them. The whole point is that the distinction between the potato and rock is in no way destroyed by the understanding that they're both completely empty. Report an error

1:41:26 Whereas the other people, what I was calling the as-if mode, they really feel that that distinction is what we mean by ignorance. Because how do you make the difference? Their point of view is, How are you going to make the difference between the potato and rock? One has to have a rock nature and one has to have a potato nature and that's what we mean by emptiness is that there isn't any nature like that. Report an error

1:41:49 And what Tsongkhapa has to be able to say that valid knowledge knows the difference between the potato and rock even though at the same time in the midst of the fact that each of them is completely devoid of any essential character as that. I haven't told you how that's going to work yet. I'm just telling you that that's the case. Report an error

1:42:10 Yes. Yes. Well, is it later? Later today, when you kind of go a little bit further than that, with like the example that they use in teachings is like you have some kind of a vessel filled with liquid. Yeah, yeah. Three different beings, they all see it differently. I'm going to do that. So that's like your potato and your apple. No, I'm going to get to that. Okay. I'll get to that. Report an error

1:42:35 I'll wait. Yeah, yeah. No, I just thought I would, I thought it would work, I mean, absolutely. We're going to talk about the god ghost and the human go to the river. I mean, it seems a little premature, but yeah, the god ghost and the human go to the river, right? And the god sees nectar and the human sees water and the ghost sees pus and blood, right? Report an error

1:43:11 I was like, I'm always, well, that's the kind of thing you would see if you had that funky preta karma than that and you're going to, you're hungry ghost karma, you're going to see that kind of thing. But it's like, well, you know, which one's right? And this is a whole huge discussion about this. The example originally goes back to Chitta Mantra. And their whole idea with this was to try to prove that there are no external objects. Report an error

1:43:36 There's no object separate from the mind, a different entity from the mind. and saying because you can You know, understand that even in the same place at the same time, different kinds of beings are constituted to see something different and therefore there must not be any external objects. And Lama Tsongkhaka has to do something different with that because, you know, they believe the basic idea that there is this, you know, situation where different beings see things differently. Report an error

1:44:03 So how they have to explain it without collapsing everything into mind. Yeah. Yeah, I definitely will be coming that. I'm sorry if this is going too slowly for some of you. Oh, okay. All right. I know everybody's in a different place. Report an error

1:44:19 Okay, yes. Report an error

1:44:24 I just want to go back a little bit onto the Pure Land experience of a Buddha. And how would he or she then see the suffering of others and be up for helping? Everything's purulent. I mean, you almost touched upon it. Yeah, the suffering validly exists from within the framework of the being who's experiencing it. Report an error

1:44:54 I mean, it exists, but it exists within the context of our framework. I don't know, it's like... Okay, so Buddha does see that we're suffering, right? But it sees our suffering as being... Report an error

1:45:16 A dimension of our own mind, of our minds, right? Is something as the, like, okay, so Buddha's seeing the world as a pure land, we're seeing it as not so much, right? And the Buddha's seeing us as seeing it as not so much, and therefore seeing that we need to be helped. That's the idea. Report an error

1:45:42 Would it be not necessarily negative? I mean, we see suffering as negative, but would... Within them seeing not necessarily suffering as negative. Well, I think that that is the idea, is that it's a problem, right? For it is negative in a way, right? And that's why you have compassion. Buddhists have compassion activities to try to help us to see things the way they do. Report an error

1:46:10 That's the idea. Yeah. I just wanted It seems like she was we were to only seize. Sorry, it seemed like she was getting to the point of does the Buddha only see things through their pure land view? And I think you were making the point that they can see it through their pure land view. They can also perceive the world through everybody else's view. Right. Not on the basis of their karma, but on the basis of their collection of merit and wisdom enables them to know our minds and then understand our point of view, the framework within which we see things, which is one of, you know, then... Report an error

1:46:45 And that's why Avila Kateshwar gets the head split open because there's an understanding that that's a very painful perspective to be in that we have. Precisely. Report an error

1:47:00 When you were speaking about the table and how, well, is it a table and you're looking at it and you're examining it and what you're saying, but something in me says. That there is a table there from its own side, right? Oh, from its own side, yeah. Right. Yeah, something in us says that for sure. Right. Something in us says it and also at the same time, it says it in a way, it's not off base in the sense that it's aligning itself with the way the table appears. Report an error

1:47:32 This is one of the points. I mean, not everybody agrees about this within Madhyamaka, but the Chandrakirti Tsongkhapa line says, yeah, you know, we think like this because... There's a deceptive continuous. Even Baba Veka agrees that the table is appearing to us even before we think about it as though it's set up on its own side. Report an error

1:47:55 And so we go along with that false appearance. I don't think she's finished her question on that one, is it? Is that our karma then? Report an error

1:48:06 You mean is it our karma to see things that way? Yeah. it's... Report an error

1:48:10 As you're looking at it, and of course that's my experience also, yes it is a table, and yes that is that, and yes that is that, and yes it's coming at me. Is that our karma? And if it is, how do we get, how does the ultimate analysis, how do we free ourselves from that point of view, that karmic point of view, so that we can have a realization of emptiness? Report an error

1:48:35 Karma refers to our actions and technically it refers to the intentions that motivate our actions. Report an error

1:48:49 These actions are driven all too often by afflictions like greed and hatred and delusion and anger and jealousy and fear. fear, hatred, and... And so one of these said to be the root bad guy, the real enemy, right? The enemy is never other people. It's always an aspect of our own mind. It's a really powerful enemy. It's just these afflictions within our own mind. Report an error

1:49:27 So it's not so much that... Karma makes us see it that way, although it's cyclical, but usually we think of it as like, well, we have these afflictions in our mind and on the basis of those we engage in actions, right, which cause us to be reborn over and over again. So, you know, I wouldn't think of it so much as like it's my karma, if you're thinking of it as like that's my, Report an error

1:50:02 My fate, we don't want to have that idea. Think of karma as your actions or your choices and then what's driving those choices and have what's driving your choices. Look at that in terms of the degree to which it's being driven by afflictive feelings like my table. No, I don't want my sister to inherit that. Report an error

1:50:26 That was mine and that sort of thing, you know what I'm saying? and So that's an affliction when you have this greed Report an error

1:50:40 for an object, we'll say, or anger at a person. So I use this example in my book that works for me. If somebody cutting in front of me in line, then my anger at this person feels not only quite strong in my imagination, but... Report an error

1:51:04 quite justified and it's justified not just because this person has like you know cut in front of me in line but because they're cutting in front of their line is just like the kind of thing that they would do because obviously they're that kind of person by which i mean that you know they really really they are they're We have names for this kind of people that really need to be smacked. Report an error

1:51:30 They call out from their own side to be smacked. They so richly deserve it. It's in their nature to have it coming. And yet, because I'm a Buddhist and I try to practice the first precept, I'll have to let someone else take care of that. Maybe there's a Muslim around. You know what I'm saying? It's like, oh, God. Report an error

1:51:59 So what is that? That's like anger collaborating with delusion. It's not just like, oh, I got angry and then it's gone. It's like anger is reinforced, justified, fueled, stoked. By the deluded sense that the other person is naturally a legitimate object of my anger. And of course, this is how war works. Report an error

1:52:29 It's very difficult. Sometimes people get angry and hurt one another. But to organize whole masses of people who really don't know anything about the other people on the other side and organize them en masse to go out and slaughter each other, then you have to systematically, intentionally inculcate people. Report an error

1:52:51 With the idea that the others are suitable objects of harm by way of their nature, that they're agents of evil. So even if they're not doing a bad thing at a given time, they're enemy from their own side. So that's how I switched over from using the greed for the table to using the anger and hatred. But you can do it either way, like with object of desire or object of intended harm. Report an error

1:53:20 You can just think and play with this in your mind and see how a deluded idea about how things exist is, theoretically, it's not exactly simultaneously with the hatred, but that's just theoretically. If you examine phenomenologically and say, how does it feel? How does it seem to work? It seems like they're right there together, like just... Report an error

1:53:43 As a tag team, you know, they're just fueling each other. The anger reinforcing the reification of the person is naturally bad. The sense of the person is naturally bad. Then justifying and reinforcing the anger toward the person. This is like how the world, you know, so much misery. That's why analysis of things as emptiness is so important in terms of how that actually works, right? Report an error

1:54:08 and they usually have to like it as i'm saying you have to identify what that wrong Do you think things exist as a way of thinking about things is? Then you have to analyze and say, do things really exist the way that I'm thinking about them? I strongly believe that things are existing. This person is naturally bad, but do they even naturally exist at all? When I look for the person, when I think of that person as naturally bad, I'm thinking of them as having some satanic essence. Report an error

1:54:41 Built into them that's like, you know, just causing them to manifest these, you know, evil activities. But like then when I look into what do I find, I was like, well, there's a forehead and eyebrow and, you know, these different moments of consciousness. And I was like, well, you know, it's like there's not anything that we can ever get to or grasp there that is this like justifies this kind of superimposition. Report an error

1:55:09 Any kind of intrinsic nature at all. The other example is in order to not use sex in the classroom. uh as because you know it just seems unnecessary Unnecessary. Usually I always talk about pizza, then the students can substitute sex in their mind. But I was like, oh, you're hungry late at night, you order a pizza and then it's late and coming and you're getting hungrier, you know, and then you love pizza and you're already, and then the pizza finally arrives. Report an error

1:55:38 So then as the, opening the box, the pizza is radiating from its own side, natural goodness. It's not just like objective. Report an error

1:55:50 Comesting has arrived, you know, we will now take in calories. You know what I'm saying? Or this isn't medicine, you know, so that our minds will be clear and we can understand things. It's... Report an error

1:56:06 Fighting over the pieces is a potential if not enough has been ordered. Hopefully it has been. Everything will become. But then people will still burn themselves because of the obvious natural goodness from the side of the pizza itself. And so that's obvious. You can substitute different kinds of desire situations. That's how it works. And these things have to be subject to... Report an error

1:56:33 Analytical deconstruction to take out the legs from underneath the other afflictions by deconstructing this deluded thought about how real things are. That's the idea. Okay, I'm sorry. I was Report an error

1:56:49 just going to go back to the table and wondered, you keep referring to it, it's commonly referred to the appearance of something. And actually, I wonder why you don't speak to the function. Because... You really don't care about how a table appears. It's the function of the table. How do you dispute that? Report an error

1:57:15 Well, things do work, so I wouldn't dispute that they work. That's part of the point. But they don't naturally work as X. Because of some property that they possess on their own side. Report an error

1:57:47 For example, and this does relate to the earlier question and go a little bit ahead, but for example, this is from Practice of the Wild, Gary Snyder's book. He's like playing with Dogen and he's saying a doll sheep looks at... A rocky, icy ledge, and it's safety, home, palace, refuge, sanctuary, and I look at it as death trap. Report an error

1:58:25 And some beings see hot water as home and safety, right? And others see it as death, and some see it as a wall. When I say they see it as a wall, that is, they see it as we would see a wall. Report an error

1:58:51 How things function and what they are is relative to the framework or perspective of the kind of being that you are. It's not that they have, they do function, I'm not saying they don't function, I'm just saying that they don't have any intrinsic character on their own side that makes it so that they, independently of who's involved in them, whether it's a sea slug or an ant or a giraffe, that it naturally functions as X. Report an error

1:59:26 That's how it functions for us. It's fortunate, we're all humans, And we're just kind of taking that as the normal way to see things. I was like, oh, of course, those hungry ghosts, they would see it that way. But it's like, well, we can easily substitute for the hungry ghosts, you know, kittens or something that we, you know, feel more confidence about. Report an error

1:59:53 And it's like, oh, how they don't see everything the same way we do. And why are we right and they're wrong, you know, or if kittens not enough, then you try ant. In my book, I use the spiders up in the corner. They have all their eyes intact. They have their entire spider neurological system, such as it may be intact, not suffering from any spider dementia or anything. Report an error

2:00:19 There's no damage to the way that they see the world. It's just right. Not like how we're seeing it. Nothing's working the same. Report an error

2:00:33 I think we should stop. And see you at two. Thank you. Report an error

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Talk by Guy Newland, recorded 13 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.

Recorded at Tse Chen Ling Center, San Francisco, and archived by the center on Internet Archive. More from Tse Chen Ling

Listen on Internet Archive · CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US