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

0:01 So we're doing kind of stuff like we're doing here. In my regular Buddhism class, I don't do Introduction to Emptiness. But once they've had basic Buddhism class, then we read a book like Introduction to Emptiness or other kinds of books where they can start to think about these ideas. Report an error in the passage at 0:01 Highlight the passage at 0:01

0:19 So yeah, I've been reading this book with them. Commenting on that person Guy Newland and why he said this like that, whether he should have maybe said it more like this other way, as though this were like, you know, I have no responsibility. Report an error in the passage at 0:19 Highlight the passage at 0:19

0:39 All right. I don't know if this mic, oh yeah, we have a microphone-age person. Report an error in the passage at 0:39 Highlight the passage at 0:39

0:50 Here they are. type of presentation you give here is very similar to what you would in your class. Report an error in the passage at 0:50 Highlight the passage at 0:50

1:01 This is like a, because see I teach, my students are not like, it's not an elite university, it's just like anybody can come kind of university. Report an error in the passage at 1:01 Highlight the passage at 1:01

1:12 I'm serious, I mean so there's all different kinds of people and if I couldn't really give a talk like I gave this morning in a class like that which has no prerequisite or anything like that, you guys are all interested and you all know something. Even if you don't know everything I was talking about, you know enough to follow what I'm saying. But they would, I think, be discouraged if I had done that talk in there. Report an error in the passage at 1:12 Highlight the passage at 1:12

1:43 But in my Buddhist philosophy class, where they've already had a class on Buddhism, then that's more comparable to like, you know. So, you know, I thought the introduction to emptiness and appearance and reality also are not really quite introductory books. They're books for people who are already... Report an error in the passage at 1:43 Highlight the passage at 1:43

2:01 Know something, but then want to go just another step. It's still not the same as reading a very complicated translation, but it prepares you to be able to read the translation. Report an error in the passage at 2:01 Highlight the passage at 2:01

2:16 Does the microphone need to be in a different... Is the microphone broadcasting this to you? Is that what's happening? It's recording. Oh, it's recording too? Okay. That's the idea. Report an error in the passage at 2:16 Highlight the passage at 2:16

2:30 Is it like a good if I'm like this or like this or in the middle? Back is better? Okay. Report an error in the passage at 2:30 Highlight the passage at 2:30

2:43 Oh, that's probably true. But most of the, you know, well, we're getting to the point where most of the ones that people think are the most important to immediately translate have been translated. Somebody said that, you know, there's going to be a complete version of the Great Exposition of Secret Mantra coming out. Report an error in the passage at 2:43 Highlight the passage at 2:43

3:06 And Jeffrey already has a bunch of the important parts of it out. And then we have all of the, you know, Thurman did The Essence of Eloquence, and there's great treatises out. And Bob, a long time ago, Bob Thurman did the medium exposition in that Library of Tibetan Works and Archives series, and then Jeffrey's done pieces of it, pieces of it. Report an error in the passage at 3:06 Highlight the passage at 3:06

3:37 Other contexts, including the new book, which I really like and recommend, is The Final Exposition of Wisdom, which has excerpts about emptiness from Illumination of the Thought. It's one of Tsongkhapa's other books on emptiness and also parts from the Medium Exposition on emptiness. And then after it does that, it all compares that to... Report an error in the passage at 3:37 Highlight the passage at 3:37

4:05 Another kind of Buddhist philosophy that we're going to be talking about in a few minutes called Shendong. Report an error in the passage at 4:05 Highlight the passage at 4:05

4:16 So I had a question during the break that would seem to maybe merit coming back to. It was from last night actually. Let me get my right place here though. Report an error in the passage at 4:16 Highlight the passage at 4:16

4:34 And that is like when I was talking about Chan Master Sheng Yen and his and then I repeated that again this morning, this thing about like, well, if you think that becoming enlightened is a matter of stopping thought, then why don't you just have someone give you a good whack in the back of the head? Report an error in the passage at 4:34 Highlight the passage at 4:34

4:54 And this is OK. So not not the point of that story was not completely clear to everybody. And it's extremely important. So I thought I would. Like just hit it a little bit more. All through the insight portion, emptiness-related portion of the great treatise, Tsongkhapa is constantly talking about HaShang Mahāyāna. Report an error in the passage at 4:54 Highlight the passage at 4:54

5:17 And actually he almost never talks about anybody by name if he has anything bad to say about them. I was like, is there anybody else that he... No. Pretty much everybody else that he talks about by name, he talks about it because he's... Well, you know, he criticizes Baba Viveka at some point, right? So I guess that's true. But, I mean, he's making a subtle distinction within saying he's good but not the best sort of thing. Report an error in the passage at 5:17 Highlight the passage at 5:17

5:49 Whereas Hashan Mahāyāna is taken as a... Like almost a mythic character, like the idea of a philosophical straw man or kind of a character in a story that stands for a bad idea. So supposedly in the history of Tibet there was this debate at Samye as to whether Tibet should follow kind of a more... Buddhism had already come to China, and so should Tibet follow a Chinese kind of Buddhism or a more Indian kind of Buddhism? Report an error in the passage at 5:49 Highlight the passage at 5:49

6:27 Supposedly there was this debate, although the historicity of this is greatly in doubt now, the more work is done on it. Supposedly there was this debate between Kamala Shila and HaShang Mahāyāna over what it means to... Be enlightened what it means to know reality, what the process is. And Kamala Shila was like very much saying just what we've been talking about. Report an error in the passage at 6:27 Highlight the passage at 6:27

6:52 That is, you have to study, you have to analyze, you have to discern the meaning, you have to focus your mind on the meaning you've discerned, and then you penetrate it yogically. And then that's that direct knowledge of something, some content. That you first understood dualistically and then attain a non-dualistic awareness of that which you have originally realized dualistically. Report an error in the passage at 6:52 Highlight the passage at 6:52

7:15 That is what is liberating. That's what Tsongkhapa says. That's what Kamala Shila says. So the other side in this, I think legendary is a good word. Maybe some basis for it, this legendary debate. Is a Chinese monk. Somebody say HaShang Mahāyāna or HoShang Mahāyāna. And this person represents the view that... Report an error in the passage at 7:15 Highlight the passage at 7:15

7:41 All dualistic thought is elaboration or superimposition upon the sheer reality of things as it is. So by cutting off dualistic thought and stopping elaboration, we're cutting the root of cyclic existence and getting in direct touch with things as they are and becoming free. That's like two significantly different ways of thinking about it. Report an error in the passage at 7:41 Highlight the passage at 7:41

8:06 um um It could relate in some way also to this idea of, you know, are we at some fundamental level already have a full-blown Buddha inside us just waiting to shine out as soon as we cut off dualistic elaboration? Or is our Buddha nature more of... The potential of having a mind which is empty of intrinsic nature, which has nothing that intrinsically prevents it from accumulating, building up a whole bunch of raw material and causes and conditions to create what we have the possibility to be, but we aren't. Report an error in the passage at 8:06 Highlight the passage at 8:06

8:46 And that's kind of the gradual... Gradual enlightenment versus just break off the shell and let your full-blown Buddha body endowed with all the marks and characteristics shine out. So Hoshang Mahāyāna was more on the sudden enlightenment side. Kamala Shil was more on what we call the gradual enlightenment side. So they had this debate and supposedly the idea is that Kamala Shil won the debate and that was the basis of Tibet following a more kind of... Report an error in the passage at 8:46 Highlight the passage at 8:46

9:14 Indian Buddhism oriented way rather than Chinese. But in fact, in practice, in reality, in the world, Chinese Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism interacted and it wasn't just all a drive from the Indian side. And so. Report an error in the passage at 9:14 Highlight the passage at 9:14

9:33 So what Tsongkhapa does is in the great treatise, he's totally against this idea of just stop thinking and you'll be all right. He just thinks it's the antithesis of everything he's trying to say. And so he makes HaShang Mahāyāna a character in his treatise representing that and he's constantly criticizing him. Report an error in the passage at 9:33 Highlight the passage at 9:33

9:57 So for example, quite late in the book, Toward the end, he quotes a sūtra where Manjushri is talking with an enlightened woman. I haven't read the whole sūtra, so I don't know what her name is. Manjushri says, And, you know, Report an error in the passage at 9:57 Highlight the passage at 9:57

10:21 Daughter of good lineage, how do bodhisattvas go into battle with the afflictions? And she says, they go into battle with their eyes wide open, analytically determining the nature of phenomena. It's like, because it has the word analytical in there, you know, Tsongkhapa's going to find that and put that in there. That's what he's looking for when he... Report an error in the passage at 10:21 Highlight the passage at 10:21

10:43 So then his comment on this, Tsongkhapa's comment on that sūtra quote, he says, well, We're not like cowards. We're not like cowards who close our eyes in the face of the afflictions, turn our heads away and think that they'll go away because we're not looking at them. And that's what he means to call this just stop thinking approach cowardly. That's what he means. Report an error in the passage at 10:43 Highlight the passage at 10:43

11:16 He's saying these people are afraid to look the afflictions in the eye and analyze them. It's a lot of work, and they're afraid. So what they really are trying to find a quick fix is to just go like this. I don't see anything. I'm not aware of any trouble. Report an error in the passage at 11:16 Highlight the passage at 11:16

11:38 He also makes another one of his big points is to talk about the life story. and, and, um, so. Report an error in the passage at 11:38 Highlight the passage at 11:38

11:47 Of our teacher and how when the Buddha to be left home he studied meditation with Udraka and Aradha Kalama and these people taught him how to meditate so that he can attain these amazing states of consciousness where his mind was perfectly still and quiet and he had transcended any kind of ordinary conceptuality certainly. No discursive movement of the mind certainly. Report an error in the passage at 11:47 Highlight the passage at 11:47

12:18 And he said that he wasn't going to stay with them. He wasn't going to stay with them and be in their lineage and just teach that method. And he wasn't happy with that. He wasn't satisfied. He hadn't found what he was looking for. Well, why not? He'd cut off all dualistic thoughts, stabilize the mind in an extremely peaceful condition. Report an error in the passage at 12:18 Highlight the passage at 12:18

12:40 Why not? Because when you come out of meditation, you're none the wiser. You haven't learned anything. You had a vacation from the coarser difficulties of cyclic existence, much better than going to the beach. Report an error in the passage at 12:40 Highlight the passage at 12:40

12:57 Really, I mean, you know how that is. First day is good, and then, you know, anyway. It's much better than going to the beach, but then when you come back, you still haven't learned anything. You don't have any insight that changes. The way your life is, the way you relate to your afflictions, the strength. What happens, you understand, is that you suppress the afflictions. Report an error in the passage at 12:57 Highlight the passage at 12:57

13:21 You can attain states of mind in which the afflictions are totally non-manifest, are completely gone. But the idea is that the only thing that eradicates them is it gets at the roots. It's like the weeds are suppressed, but all the seeds and the roots are still there. You can feel very clear. You can feel perfectly clear. Report an error in the passage at 13:21 Highlight the passage at 13:21

13:43 But you haven't done anything to get at the root. Why? Because the root is a conception of which you have not formed the opposite conception because you have not wanted to form any conception. You have no content that is antithetical to the way of seeing the world that's the root of cyclic existence because you've gone to the no content route. Report an error in the passage at 13:43 Highlight the passage at 13:43

14:08 Am I getting closer to the answer? Okay, so then how does this relate to Sheng Yen? Well, that's me. I mean, of course, Tsongkhapa didn't quote Sheng Yen, but I was like saying, well, it's not just Tsongkhapa out on a limb here. You can point to Kamala Shila. His Holiness is constantly pointing and he's saying the roots of Tibetan Buddhism are the Nalanda tradition. Report an error in the passage at 14:08 Highlight the passage at 14:08

14:28 So he's saying, look, this is a huge monastic university full of one genius after another. You know, and many of them were yogis as well. But these people were analytical scholars. And as he was saying, one of the tap roots of Tibetan culture is this analysis of the nature of things that took place within Indian monastic culture. Report an error in the passage at 14:28 Highlight the passage at 14:28

14:52 So anyway, my point was there's an idea, and it is an idea that has basis, not a complete hallucination, that... You know, that Chan and Zen is more on the let's stop thinking side. But my point was, it's not that simple to just say, OK, they're the not thinking people. And so they're all wrong from Tsongkhapa's point of view. I was trying to say, look, the Chan Zen tradition has content, has content. Like, for example, you know, I mean, I don't understand. Report an error in the passage at 14:52 Highlight the passage at 14:52

15:25 I haven't practiced this. But look, if you think about it, it's like, why do you have so many different? Kwan or a Kwan that you work with. If the whole point was just to cut off thought, we could just take one good one that made absolutely no sense, marinate you in it for a good long time until you'd stop thinking, why would we need a whole bunch more? Report an error in the passage at 15:25 Highlight the passage at 15:25

15:49 We don't. We wouldn't. The reason you need different Kwans is because they have content. It's not like Tsongkhapa. It's explaining kind of content, but there's a content there. It's like a joke, you know. The whole point of a joke was to make us just stop thinking and laugh, you know, then we could just have one joke and we'd tell it over and over again each time we told it, everybody would laugh. Report an error in the passage at 15:49 Highlight the passage at 15:49

16:17 But do you see what I'm saying? Jokes have content. There's different jokes, and they work when you see something new, when you collapse two levels. of the world that you hadn't expected to see collapse, and then you have an experience, right? But it has to have content. It's hard to, you know, get it, the same joke over and over again and have this, you know, you have a little bit, but it starts to fade, right? Report an error in the passage at 16:17 Highlight the passage at 16:17

16:40 So you have to have a new joke with a new piece of content. I was like, kohans are like that. They all have content. It's not explained the way Tsongkhapa, but there's content. And so, you know, people like Aitken Roshi, Robert Aitken Roshi. We'll say, you know, the reason we have all these koans is because they teach everything that there is to teach in the Dharma. They just don't explain it, but they teach it in practice if you use them properly. Report an error in the passage at 16:40 Highlight the passage at 16:40

17:10 There's content being delivered. That's what Sheng Yen is saying. He's teaching his students how to meditate. That quote came in the context of a retreat where they were meditating. Report an error in the passage at 17:10 Highlight the passage at 17:10

17:23 on koans, or, you know, koan, and they have something called a huato, I guess, right, is like the punchline of the koan, and, you know, they're working. The point of this is not to make you stop thinking, it's to make you, within non-conceptual understanding, have an insight into reality. Report an error in the passage at 17:23 Highlight the passage at 17:23

17:51 And now the way they're approaching this idea is different because they're not, oh, first we're going to explain it, then we're going to understand it, then we're going to go non-conceptual. No. But there's still content being delivered. That's the key point. It's not just to stop thinking. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, thanks for asking, you know, because I don't always understand what it is people aren't getting. Report an error in the passage at 17:51 Highlight the passage at 17:51

18:18 Okay, so maybe we'll... Go through, look at chapter 5 and maybe briefly, because I think we've said some of the things in here we've already talked about and some of them we haven't. And then in chapter 6 is more about the question of how does ultimate reality itself exist. Report an error in the passage at 18:18 Highlight the passage at 18:18

18:42 So I had mentioned earlier that one of the problems Lama Tsongkhapa had is that he was saying that the sense consciousnesses can be valid sources of information. And he's met by people considering themselves followers of Chandrakirti in Tibet who think that that's quite absurd. And they quote both Sūtra and Chandrakirti himself saying that the sense consciousnesses are not valid cognitions. And they have one or two, they have quite pointed seeming passages. Report an error in the passage at 18:42 Highlight the passage at 18:42

19:24 So Tsongkhapa is looking at this and he's saying, well, you have to read the whole paragraph. You can't just take the one little phrase that you like. And if you look at this in the context of what do they mean when they say these sense consciousnesses aren't valid cognitions, they mean they're not valid knowers about whether things intrinsically exist or not, that they provide no reliable information about the fundamental nature of reality. Report an error in the passage at 19:24 Highlight the passage at 19:24

19:50 They don't give us... Good data about whether things intrinsically exist from their own side. That's his gloss. Of course, other people might not agree with it. You have to go and read the text and see. But, I mean, I think he makes a very good case. You have to read the great treatise and see. He takes, you know, not just his little sentence, but he takes the big chunk and he said, what's Chandrakiri really talking about here? Report an error in the passage at 19:50 Highlight the passage at 19:50

20:15 When he said there's the sense consciousness and not valid cognitions, what was he talking about? He's talking about... The fundamental nature of reality and whether things have intrinsic nature. He wasn't talking about pots and cups and chairs and tables and cars and people and whether they're this or that. Report an error in the passage at 20:15 Highlight the passage at 20:15

20:29 And the point is that it's true. We can't rely on our sense consciousness for accurate, valid information. They're not going to tell us. They're actually giving us exactly the wrong information about whether these things have intrinsic nature or not. They're not reliable in that regard. They're deceptive. Report an error in the passage at 20:29 Highlight the passage at 20:29

20:46 You know, so they're... Right. And yet they His point is that they still can be relied upon for other information. When our ordinary conventional consciousnesses are not impaired by optical illusions or drugs or bad philosophy, they can be valid sources of information about what exists and what doesn't exist. Report an error in the passage at 20:46 Highlight the passage at 20:46

21:14 But they don't tell us about the fundamental... nature of how things exist, right? So This is obviously an ongoing controversy. Many people, not just before Tsongkhapa, but many non-Galupas after Tsongkhapa thought that this was kind of the root of his big mistake, that he should never try to say that there's such thing as conventional, valid knowledge. Report an error in the passage at 21:14 Highlight the passage at 21:14

21:46 And then also try to say that he follows Chandrakirti. They just see this as like a contradiction. But in addition to his reasoned arguments, he is able to point out that Chandrakirti talks about... He has his quote, the world knows objects with four types of valid cognition. This turns out to be direct perception and three different types of inference. Report an error in the passage at 21:46 Highlight the passage at 21:46

22:12 He does talk about this. He doesn't explain it a lot. He doesn't go on about it. He doesn't tell you exactly what it is that these things take as objects. So this actually, you know, isn't. Report an error in the passage at 22:12 Highlight the passage at 22:12

22:23 But the fact that he does say this and the fact that his quote saying that sense consciousnesses are not valid are all in the context of knowing ultimate reality. And Tsongkhapa says, you know, that makes it clear that as far as conventional things, he accepts that we have direct perception, let us like sensing things, right? Report an error in the passage at 22:23 Highlight the passage at 22:23

22:43 And we have inference, you know, using analysis in our mind to deduce things. And that's the way we can know stuff. And that works. And an inferential analysis can work in terms of deducing that things are empty, even though they're appearing otherwise. Okay. So, all right. That being the case, this comes to this question about how the senses can be... If the senses are constantly deceived, then how can they be reliable? Report an error in the passage at 22:43 Highlight the passage at 22:43

23:22 This is what Tsongkhapa is trying to say. Other people just think this is contradictory because deceptive, I'm sort of paraphrasing a Sakya argument. Deceptive and non-deceptive are contradictory. How much clearer can I make it, Tsongkhapa? If something is deceptive, then it's not non-deceptive. Non-deceptive is what we want in terms of getting reliable information. Deceptive is not what we want. You're just admitting that these sense consciousnesses are deceptive and then you're turning around and telling us that we need to rely on them. Report an error in the passage at 23:22 Highlight the passage at 23:22

24:02 That's like the idea I was saying earlier. It's like, well, our best witnesses for the prosecution and our case against delusion are all known liars. Report an error in the passage at 24:02 Highlight the passage at 24:02

24:18 So how do you do that? You have to... You have to parse the situation saying, well, what does this person lie about? They always and only lie about, you know, this mode of existence of phenomena. But they normally don't lie about the difference between cows and cats. If they do, then it's only because something weird has happened. Report an error in the passage at 24:18 Highlight the passage at 24:18

24:44 You know, Jimson weed could be a possibility. Do you know what I'm saying? It's like not... It's not something that just in the run-of-the-mill situation is going to be a problem. It's very different from, it's just, I mean, you have to just think about this. This doesn't sound like a profound philosophical point, but it is like crucial to Tsongkhapa's whole argument. It's like how, what the fundamental nature of reality is, well, yeah, things appear differently from how they are. Report an error in the passage at 24:44 Highlight the passage at 24:44

25:11 That doesn't mean that everything about all senses, nope, who really thinks that on that account we have no useful information from our senses at all? Report an error in the passage at 25:11 Highlight the passage at 25:11

25:24 People certainly, even when maintaining that everything from the senses is unreliable, they still go around and act on it. They never see them putting their teacups on top of their head accidentally. Report an error in the passage at 25:24 Highlight the passage at 25:24

25:37 Thinking that it just could be something else. So they rely on the senses just to, and so, right? And they're just, even while they're relying on them, they're insisting that they're utterly unreliable. Report an error in the passage at 25:37 Highlight the passage at 25:37

25:50 Anyway, so there's a kind of, you could say, almost like a common sense aspect to this. And so in order to, kind of like saying, in the same moment of consciousness, there's false appearance. But then also accurate information being delivered at the same time. So it has to be parsed, a parse. And so they use these words in Tibetan like trula means mistaken. Report an error in the passage at 25:50 Highlight the passage at 25:50

26:18 And, you know, trul mitrul, you know, it's mistaken or not mistaken. That means whether things are appearing in the right way. And then, you know, lokpa yang dak, you know, right or wrong. That's like... Whether the information about what's there is accurate. And it's like, well, they could have done it the other way around. Do you know what I'm saying? It's like there's nothing built into the grammar of these words. Report an error in the passage at 26:18 Highlight the passage at 26:18

26:42 It's like our saying, mistaken is different from wrong. And it's like, please explain. Yes, tell me more. And that's exactly, but you can't. You can't explain. Well, we've just decided to use the word mistaken to mean having a false appearance. As to how things exist from their own side but don't. And we're going to use right or wrong to say within that pervasive mistaken appearance is pointing at this, is it a cup or a cow? Report an error in the passage at 26:42 Highlight the passage at 26:42

27:12 And it's like nobody has any doubt that we can tell the difference, right? Whether it's a cup or a cow, even though it's always appearing from its own side in a deceptive way. All right. I would say from its own side because I'm blaming it on the cup. I really feel that the root of sickle existence is an external phenomena. I'm an innocent bystander. I got called on this before. Report an error in the passage at 27:12 Highlight the passage at 27:12

27:36 They present themselves in an incorrect way, not disclosing all their causes and conditions that gave rise to them. I really don't want to accept any responsibility. Report an error in the passage at 27:36 Highlight the passage at 27:36

27:57 You've got that, right? Report an error in the passage at 27:57 Highlight the passage at 27:57

28:02 Tsongkhapa is saying conventional consciousnesses are reliable sources of knowledge and it does appear to them to be the case that things exist naturally from their own side. That some people might therefore conclude that leaving away this whole question of what you find when you look for ultimate analysis, that just conventionally, right, it must be that... Report an error in the passage at 28:02 Highlight the passage at 28:02

28:25 Things exist naturally at the conventional level. Conventionally, they have their own unique distinctive character. But that's not what Tsongkhapa says. That's not what Chandrakirti says. That's actually what Bhavavika says. So there's two different kinds of Madhyamaka philosophy in India, two big branches, right? Report an error in the passage at 28:25 Highlight the passage at 28:25

28:47 The Chandrakirti branch, which is called Prasangika, and the... Svatantrika branch, which is Bhava Viveka, and these two big sub-schools of Madhyamaka all agree that things appear as though they exist by way of their own character. But according to Tsongkhapa, they disagree about whether that appearance is correct conventionally. And they all agree that when you look for something, you can't find it ultimately. Report an error in the passage at 28:47 Highlight the passage at 28:47

29:25 But still, Baba Viveka wants to say, at the conventional level, how are we going to know, you know, leaving aside, there's no ultimately findable cup in the cup, there's no ultimately findable cat in the cat, but conventionally, how are we going to know the cup from the cat? It has to be that conventionally, they have their own unique distinctive character, just at the conventional level, not ultimately locatable. That's what Baba Viveka says. Report an error in the passage at 29:25 Highlight the passage at 29:25

29:52 And then Chandrakirti... Criticized bodhicitta and said, no, that's not right. That can't be right. Nothing has its own unique intrinsic character, even conventionally, any place, anywhere, anytime. And if you understand the force of that, then you should start to feel a little worried. That's the whole idea. It's like, oh, dependent on rising emptiness, emptiness dependent on rising. Report an error in the passage at 29:52 Highlight the passage at 29:52

30:15 No, nothing has any intrinsic character on its own side. You know, even conventionally. If you start to feel like, oh, I see you, we're getting worried. Yeah, see, that's the idea. You're supposed to, right. How do you know what's what? Right, exactly. Exactly. That's the point. Okay, I'm not, you know, we'll come, but that's the idea. So this is what Tsongkhapa says. Report an error in the passage at 30:15 Highlight the passage at 30:15

30:38 He says, since we refute essential intrinsic existence, even conventionally, It's very difficult. It may seem to be very difficult to posit conventional objects, and this causes most individuals who are trying to follow Chandrakirti to fall into an overly negative view. It's almost like he's warning you, you know, be careful with this stuff, you know, because before his time, everybody he knew in Tibet had become nihilistic when they tried to follow this view. Report an error in the passage at 30:38 Highlight the passage at 30:38

31:15 So for Tsongkhapa, saying that something exists conventionally means it exists because it's found by a reliable mind, like a visual consciousness that doesn't have any impairment associated with it that's recognizing a shape. It just means that. It doesn't mean that there's some... Essence on the object side. I know that you don't completely understand that yet, but that's what it means. Report an error in the passage at 31:15 Highlight the passage at 31:15

31:49 There's no superficial cause of impairment that's affecting the consciousness, such as a disease of the eye or a disease of the mind or an optical illusion. There's nothing of that. Okay, then ordinary conventional consciousnesses give us reliable information about the difference between cows and cars and hats and cups. Report an error in the passage at 31:49 Highlight the passage at 31:49

32:21 Okay, that's what he says. So anyway, I know coming... So this means that tables and chairs and so forth are not found ultimately when we look for them, but they still exist conventionally. That, on the other hand, intrinsically existent tables and chairs and so forth, they don't exist at all in any way, shape or form. And intrinsic existence that would allow us to establish this one as that and this one as the other, that doesn't exist at all in any way, shape or form, even conventionally. Report an error in the passage at 32:21 Highlight the passage at 32:21

32:59 I know it's not that easy to understand. I just like to say that and, you know, that's... If it seems too complicated, then you just think, okay, well, for the time I just remember that emptiness means dependent arising. Dependent arising means emptiness. Each thing arises precisely in a given moment, not because it has some built-in property of its own that allows it to be that, but because of this vast network of conditions, including our own perspective. Report an error in the passage at 32:59 Highlight the passage at 32:59

33:33 Designating it as that at that time. Okay, so we'll just stop with that part at that, and then we'll come back to that. Okay, now I'm on page 52 now in the book. Report an error in the passage at 33:33 Highlight the passage at 33:33

33:48 One of the problems that comes up is that Nagarjuna gives an argument for things being empty, and he said, well, things don't arise from themselves, they don't arise from other things, they don't arise from both, and they don't arise from... They don't arise from neither. They don't arise without a cause. They don't arise from themselves as causes. Report an error in the passage at 33:48 Highlight the passage at 33:48

34:11 They don't arise from some intrinsically other thing that is a different nature from them that generates them. They don't arise from something that's intrinsically themselves, the same as them and something that's different. So how can things arise at all? And, you know, song... Tsongkhapa works through this argument and he says, look, when we search for these different ways that things are produced, none of them hold up. Report an error in the passage at 34:11 Highlight the passage at 34:11

34:44 I'm not going to say that, but this doesn't refute the fact that things arise. This is actually what establishes dependent arising. The way things come into being is, I would say, as I said in the book, Kind of reliable and mysterious at the same time. That is, we can count on apples not coming from pear trees and good results coming from good actions and not from bad actions and so forth. Report an error in the passage at 34:44 Highlight the passage at 34:44

35:18 But when we say, yeah, but how is that really, really working? Then we're doing this kind of... Ultimate analysis. And we can't ever like pin it down in terms of something of the same nature or something of a different nature being able to operate as a cause. So, I mean, I always feel that it must be something of a different nature. Some people feel otherwise, you know, there is like some people say, well, things arise from non-manifest forms of themselves. Report an error in the passage at 35:18 Highlight the passage at 35:18

35:50 I mean, they're only here because, you know, in some sense they always have been, but then they pop out. pop out know what i'm saying it's like it's really here already but then it shines it shows out so somehow like you know the idea that like uh nobody carved this statue but it was in the tree already but then someone let it out like that so The oak tree is already really there, but we'll have to let it out. Report an error in the passage at 35:50 Highlight the passage at 35:50

36:22 Yeah. So if that So that's like the idea of production from self. Some people in India had that philosophy, right? A very developed form of it. Things arise from themselves. They didn't really literally say it like that, but from a non-manifest form of themselves. So Nagarjuna and other Madhyamaka philosophers in India argued against it, saying that something arises from something of the same nature as it. Report an error in the passage at 36:22 Highlight the passage at 36:22

36:52 Then why wouldn't it just be reproduced endlessly? You would keep having the same, if it was the nature of X to produce X, then there you go, X on out all the way. You would always just have acorn, acorn, acorn, acorn, acorn, or whatever it was, how it was. Why would it change into something that appeared differently? Report an error in the passage at 36:52 Highlight the passage at 36:52

37:14 Things would be always arising from themselves. And then on the other hand, like my way, I think, is saying things are produced definitely from things that are intrinsically of a different nature. So you have like a cause over here and then the effect over here and then the cause, which, you know, I believe in and is real, is like bump has some power to like bump the effect up into existence. Report an error in the passage at 37:14 Highlight the passage at 37:14

37:38 But like when it does this bumping, does it like actually come together with the effect or not? This starts to be a little bit of a problem, because if I say, well, you know, they're never simultaneous, of course, dude, because one has to be, you know, so they're never simultaneous, then like how does one bump the other one into existence? Report an error in the passage at 37:38 Highlight the passage at 37:38

38:00 They're like, well, there's got to be, you know, there's a little space in between there, but, you know, it's because this one's right before that one. Well, then what's in that little space that allows the bump to go across from the one that's right before to the one right after? It's like that thing that's right in between and it's transmitting the efficacious power. Report an error in the passage at 38:00 Highlight the passage at 38:00

38:18 That turns out really to be the immediate cause. And when you're talking about the so-called cause, you're talking about the grandfather clause cause. It's like back, it's the cause of the real cause, which is this little tiny space in between has got something in it that's transmitting the effective action. Report an error in the passage at 38:18 Highlight the passage at 38:18

38:34 So then you say, oh, they can't really be apart. They have to, you know, they have to come together at some point. And so if they come together, if they're there at the same point in time, then the cause and effect are simultaneous. You can't really say that the cause is before the effect at some point where they're touching. And then you have that problem. It's like, can this cause really produce the effect if the effect's coming about at a time after the cause? Report an error in the passage at 38:34 Highlight the passage at 38:34

39:01 And then they have other arguments about this. I alluded to this one earlier. It's like, okay, if the effect is really different, it's the effects of a different nature than the cause, then why wouldn't you put a log in the fireplace and it could get colder? Or you light the butter lamp and darkness shines out because things can produce effects of a different nature from the cause. It's like, why? Report an error in the passage at 39:01 Highlight the passage at 39:01

39:28 You know, because then anything could produce anything because anything that has any, you know, like a cow could have cults and it's like just things produce effects of a different nature and so the nature is something other. So then they do all these kinds of arguments and say you can't really say it's other in the way you're thinking of have something of another nature and you can't really say it's the same. Report an error in the passage at 39:28 Highlight the passage at 39:28

39:50 And if it's not the same and it's not, you know, essentially something essentially different of a different nature, then it's not. It's not going to be both of those together either. And then you're kind of left with, well, maybe there's no such thing as causation. Maybe things just pop up, spontaneous manifestation. Causation is an illusion and things just appear randomly. Report an error in the passage at 39:50 Highlight the passage at 39:50

40:16 It's like anything can appear any place, any time, and there's no relationship between anything that happened before. I could become... George Bush in the next moment while I'm talking. Why not? You know what I'm saying? It's like, no, there's no cause. Report an error in the passage at 40:16 Highlight the passage at 40:16

40:41 I'm not saying that that's just possible. I'm saying it's equally possible with anything else, that there's no cause of effect working whatsoever. Report an error in the passage at 40:41 Highlight the passage at 40:41

40:51 So then you get really concerned that we seem to be left without an alternative. that's just... Report an error in the passage at 40:51 Highlight the passage at 40:51

40:48 ever. Mmm. Report an error in the passage at 40:48 Highlight the passage at 40:48

41:01 But then this is what – and then people doing this will say, well, that's what we're talking about. There's no – there isn't any position you can take. There isn't really any such thing as production at all. That's what Nagarja was saying. There's no production. We just pretend that there is because otherwise people will be afraid. But we'll pretend that it is so that they won't freak out. Report an error in the passage at 41:01 Highlight the passage at 41:01

41:22 That's like the – Pre-Tsongkhapa reading of Chandrakirti. So Tsongkhapa tells you, you haven't read Chandrakirti carefully enough, go back and look. And then he has a quote about this. He says, because things are not produced causelessly and they're not produced from causes of a different nature such as a divine creator. Report an error in the passage at 41:22 Highlight the passage at 41:22

41:45 He takes God as an example of something of a different nature. They're not produced from themselves and they're not produced from self and other together. And then... That's the first three lines. He's still got a line left. And what does he say? Because of this and this and this, he doesn't say, therefore, there's nothing. He says, therefore, things are produced dependently. Report an error in the passage at 41:45 Highlight the passage at 41:45

42:07 That's what we mean by dependent arising is how things continue. That's why I said it's mysterious. How things work, seem to be able to work in a reliable way without having a kind of analytically locatable production. So it's just like the fact that, you know. We were talking about before that things are able to work and function and dependent rising is able to operate even though when you search for how causation works with the idea that there ought to – since it works, there ought to be a way that we can pin down what its working nature is that we don't find it kind of like intrinsically – and this is a really important point because everybody Report an error in the passage at 42:07 Highlight the passage at 42:07

42:51 believes in – Interdependence of things, right? It's all connected. And as we were talking about, I guess, you know, last night, it's easy for people to start with that. But then what they're really thinking is that things are able to relate to each other and act as cause and conditions for each other because they all have their own reality power that allows them to do that kind of stuff. Report an error in the passage at 42:51 Highlight the passage at 42:51

43:22 That's what I was saying. Yeah, of course things. connections. Report an error in the passage at 43:22 Highlight the passage at 43:22

43:28 That's the kind of power they got because they're there. If they weren't there, if they didn't have their own thing on their own side, then what would you be hooking together? They have to be there in the first place to have their own distinctive nature, and that gives them the power to form relationships with one another. Report an error in the passage at 43:28 Highlight the passage at 43:28

43:53 My point is that I think I talked about this before and I was talking about process philosophy, that just to understand dependent arising at the level of saying things are connected doesn't mean you've really even begun to refute the idea that things have their own nature. It's like you have a reason that would give you enough evidence to deduce it, but you haven't made the connection. It's not just that things are connected. Report an error in the passage at 43:53 Highlight the passage at 43:53

44:21 They don't exist without the connections. And when you put that piece in, then you're seeing how dependent arising connects to emptiness. I would say most people nowadays say everything's connected, but they don't think the next step. Therefore, they'd have nothing to them except being what manifests out of the interrelationship of all these connections. Report an error in the passage at 44:21 Highlight the passage at 44:21

44:53 And we don't think of things that way, right? We think of them as being able to be connected because they're already there on their own prior to being connected to anything. Report an error in the passage at 44:53 Highlight the passage at 44:53

45:07 Right? Actually, that is how we think. Report an error in the passage at 45:07 Highlight the passage at 45:07

45:14 Right? What? Yeah. How does it work with the building, that the building's already there? Oh, when I see the building, it doesn't show me, you know, it's a bad building. It was built by Afflictions Incorporated. And it doesn't disclose to me how it's merely the effect of all of these interactions. Report an error in the passage at 45:14 Highlight the passage at 45:14

45:41 So I start to think about, yeah, it's only there because of all these interactions. No, it's not there except insofar as all these causes and conditions have interacted so as to make it possible to be there. It has no buildingness of its own. Report an error in the passage at 45:41 Highlight the passage at 45:41

45:58 Okay. So now in thinking about this, you know, somebody says, well, here's this argument and says, look, you can't say that things are – if you're going to say that things are not produced in any of those ways, then – Report an error in the passage at 45:58 Highlight the passage at 45:58

46:26 It adds up to saying that things are not produced. And this just doesn't make any sense. And Chandrakirti, actually, Tsongkhapa finds a password. Chandrakirti answers that. This is important. Chandrakirti says, hey, when we say that things are not produced because they're not produced in the four ways, what we mean is they're not produced intrinsically. Report an error in the passage at 46:26 Highlight the passage at 46:26

46:54 And Chandrakirti says that. That's my point. So Tsongkhapa's not like just making that up that Chandrakirti meant that. He's got Chandrakirti in writing putting in the adverb, right? And this thing of like do you put in the adverb or you don't put in the adverb is like a big deal. Tsongkhapa only wants to put in the adverb. He doesn't say things don't exist. Report an error in the passage at 46:54 Highlight the passage at 46:54

47:15 That's a hard sentence, you know. The only time you find that in Tsongkhapa is when he's quoting somebody else. don't know. Things don't exist by way of their own nature. Things don't exist from their own side. Things don't exist by way of their own character. Nothing is established by way of its own intrinsic nature. Report an error in the passage at 47:15 Highlight the passage at 47:15

47:32 It doesn't just say nothing's established. But if you go back to the Indian text that he's working from, they didn't spell this all out for him. They often just said, there are no beings who ever attain nirvāṇa, like we read in the Diamond Sūtra. Report an error in the passage at 47:32 Highlight the passage at 47:32

47:52 Things are never produced because they aren't produced in the four ways. And obviously, you know, that leaves room for interpretation. And what Tsongkhapa is trying to do is say, look, my interpretation is right. One of the reasons you can tell is because if it weren't, none of this would make any sense and these people wouldn't need to be Buddhists. Report an error in the passage at 47:52 Highlight the passage at 47:52

48:12 They could just be nihilists. And they are Buddhists. They have all these Buddhist practices that they're suggesting. Another reason you know it's right is because every once in a while, Every once in a while, they tell you. They tell you. They don't tell you all the time. They mostly don't tell you that we mean, when we say things aren't produced, we mean they're not produced intrinsically. Report an error in the passage at 48:12 Highlight the passage at 48:12

48:32 They mostly don't tell you. But every once in a while, you get something like Chandrakiri saying, well, when we say things aren't produced, we mean they're not produced intrinsically. And then he finds this great quote in the Descent into Lanca Sūtra, where the Buddha says in Sūtra, Mahamati, thinking in my mind, in my Buddha mind, that things are not produced intrinsically, I said all phenomena are not produced. So the Buddha in the descent on Lama Tsongkhapa gives a commentary on himself in which he says, you know, I've talked about that things don't exist and things aren't produced, but you have to understand what I'm meaning by that and not fall to the nihilistic extreme. Report an error in the passage at 48:32 Highlight the passage at 48:32

49:09 Now, just to finish the final point about this adverb, I mean, using the qualifier in phrases or not is a skill thing. I mean, a bodhisattva thing, a teacher thing. What are you trying to work on with the students or the reader? Report an error in the passage at 49:09 Highlight the passage at 49:09

49:30 And it's clear that in the Perfection of Wisdom Sutras, generally, in Nagarjuna, generally, and in Chandrakirti and other later Madhyamaka thinkers, generally, they were mostly trying to counteract a kind of realism that, well, You know? Report an error in the passage at 49:30 Highlight the passage at 49:30

49:53 That took it for granted that existence meant, of course, intrinsic existence. We wouldn't even be talking about things if they didn't have some unique character by way of which they existed. So existence means just automatically assumed to mean that something is established by way of its own unique character. Report an error in the passage at 49:53 Highlight the passage at 49:53

50:12 And so we're just going to use this very negative language without... to cut hard back against the tendency to reify that one, exists in all of us innately, and two, was the pervasive intellectual atmosphere within which those texts were working initially. That is, most people were Most of the Buddhists were realists. In their philosophy, they'd added on to their innate realism an extra level of realism, which assumed that, okay, the person's not existing as substantially existent, but we can find, when we analyze the person, some real locatable basis that the person's imputed upon. Report an error in the passage at 50:12 Highlight the passage at 50:12

50:55 So they had something that they were clinging to, their own distinctive character of things on its own side. Do you know what I'm saying? It's like in India, the language, the thrust of the language was to cut back against the nihilistic extreme. Whereas Tsongkhapa, at the time that he's writing, 1402 here, Report an error in the passage at 50:55 Highlight the passage at 50:55

51:17 with a few exceptions, most of the Tibetans in the centuries before him had, from his point of view, in one way or another, gone to this extreme of nihilism about conventional reality. Some of them had reifying views about ultimate reality. And some of them just had nihilistic views about everything, but most of them had nihilistic views about conventional reality from Tsongkhapa's point of view. Report an error in the passage at 51:17 Highlight the passage at 51:17

51:44 So he's taking Chandrakirti, which is the most negative about existence, negative about no inherent existence whatsoever, even conventionally, of the philosophers from India. So he's taking the, you know, he's thinking, well, that was a bad choice. If you really... Concerned about nihilism in Tibet, why don't you take something like chitta mantra or at least something that has a little bit of intrinsic nature, even conventionally, maybe that would be more helpful. Report an error in the passage at 51:44 Highlight the passage at 51:44

52:15 But he didn't do that. He went with the hardcore approach of saying nothing exists at all from its own side, even conventionally. And within that, I'm going to explain to you how you can talk about conventional knowledge. So because he was doing that, he almost always adds in the qualifiers. When he means that something doesn't exist intrinsically, he's going to say intrinsically. Report an error in the passage at 52:15 Highlight the passage at 52:15

52:40 He's not going to let you guess about that. And so now that's why he does it that way. But what's the downside? The downside is that... As I was alluding to this morning, is we can read all that and we can say, huh, well, I never really thought that it did. I just kind of think stuff is there. And Tsongkhapa agrees with me, so I'm not really too worried. I never heard this word intrinsically down in the marketplace and didn't really cross my mind. Report an error in the passage at 52:40 Highlight the passage at 52:40

53:14 Now they're telling me that I'm supposed to think that things have intrinsic nature and I'm supposed to stop thinking it. But why not just take a shortcut and not think about it at all? Report an error in the passage at 53:14 Highlight the passage at 53:14

53:29 So my point being that Tsongkhapa's approach in kind of using all these adverbs to ward off nihilism is not cutting back its heart against our tendency to reify, which is the root of cyclic existence after all, right? And both of those things, I don't know which is the bigger problem in our time. You know, you can pick. It's both ways. Report an error in the passage at 53:29 Highlight the passage at 53:29

53:55 It's problematic. All right. Report an error in the passage at 53:55 Highlight the passage at 53:55

54:00 All right. So. Ultimate reality exists conventionally. All right, say something about emptiness now. First of all, emptiness is a lack or an absence. It's said in Gilukba to be a non-affirming negative. That is a mere lack or a sheer lack that doesn't have something else that's shining out because you took something away, but is just the taking away. Report an error in the passage at 54:00 Highlight the passage at 54:00

54:34 It's just not X. It's not that because we have not X, therefore you're able to see Y for the first time. They have all these different examples. This is an important idea. So emptiness is a lack or an absence. So you have to first of all get clear in your mind that absences exist. They're not just non-existent things. They're not nothingness. They're actually a whole bunch of very specific and different kinds of absences. Report an error in the passage at 54:34 Highlight the passage at 54:34

55:06 Absence of the Potomac River flowing through this room. You know, absence of Saturn, you know, anywhere in the orbit around Earth. And, you know, absence of elephant at, say, Chen Ling. You know, and it's like, well, there's just like infinite number of absences that do exist. And we can easily understand that they exist, and we can just make up an infinite number of them. And there's no limit to this. Report an error in the passage at 55:06 Highlight the passage at 55:06

55:33 It's not just some made-up Buddhist philosophy thing. You can ask the Westgram philosophers, they'll tell you the same thing. We can talk about absences as existence. So why talk about this particular absence? Why single out? Nobody talks about all these other crazy absences. Why talk about this one? Well, two reasons. Report an error in the passage at 55:33 Highlight the passage at 55:33

55:54 First reason, very important, is that in this case, the absence of inherent existence, absence of intrinsic nature, we suffer needlessly because we conceive the opposite of it. So it would be like there was a person who was causing himself and others great harm because he imagined there was an elephant in Sei Chen Ling, right? Report an error in the passage at 55:54 Highlight the passage at 55:54

56:22 And was like... Report an error in the passage at 56:22 Highlight the passage at 56:22

56:27 so now there's a problem. Suddenly, it didn't occur to us to even investigate whether there was an elephant here or not. But then, now that we're confronted with a person who's suffering and causing others needless misery because of this... Something that's completely baseless but which they believe. Suddenly a certain absence, which has always been here, comes to be extremely important and that is the absence. Report an error in the passage at 56:27 Highlight the passage at 56:27

56:51 How can we get this person to understand the mere absence and the sheer absence of even a shred of elephant lurking in the halls? It's really important to our piece and to their piece to get this to clear. So then now it becomes something really worth talking about. Well, it's like that. We're all, you know, among all the absences, there's just this one particular absence that's critically important because conceiving the opposite of it, thinking that things do have intrinsic nature, is the basis of all this needless misery. Report an error in the passage at 56:51 Highlight the passage at 56:51

57:27 Okay, you follow so far? Okay, so now the next point is that of all the crazy things that people could imagine and the absence of which could be relieving to them to find out, Report an error in the passage at 57:27 Highlight the passage at 57:27

57:41 Emptiness is a little different because it's the fundamental nature, or that is to say it's the mode of abiding. It's the way all things exist. Lack of elephant is not the way all things exist. It's the antidote for one specific kind of kooky person at one particular time. But when we say how does the elephant exist, how does the cup exist, how does the chair exist, how does the planet Mars exist, how does this card exist, and so forth, Whatever we say, how does it really exist? We always come to this one particular absence as the fundamental way that things exist. Report an error in the passage at 57:41 Highlight the passage at 57:41

58:19 Now it isn't like because it's some mystical fluid that runs like an invisible river that runs beneath the whole world, the feet of the whole world. It's just that when we ask the question, what is this really, we're setting out to search for what is the essential nature of that object. And we only and always find the sheer lack or absence of any intrinsic nature at the end of that search. Report an error in the passage at 58:19 Highlight the passage at 58:19

58:52 And so the mind that gets at what the card is, what the person is, what the car is, what the building is. The mind that is saying, yeah, what is it really? It always comes to the same thing, and that is the sheer lack or absence. So that's what it means to say that emptiness is the, we'd say, fundamental nature of things and the final nature of things. Report an error in the passage at 58:52 Highlight the passage at 58:52

59:22 So it's Chandrakirti Tsongkhapa. Sometimes you use this word nature, rongshin, Tibetan rongshin. Sometimes they use this word nature. Instead of using it to mean the bad nature, the intrinsically existing nature, sometimes they use the same word, darn it, to talk about the ultimate nature of things as lacking any intrinsic nature. Report an error in the passage at 59:22 Highlight the passage at 59:22

59:49 Yeah, that's what they do. So they use different words. Sometimes the most common word for Tsongkhapa is... Tekonani, which we translate suchness, or some people say reality, or just thatness. It's difficult to have a good translation, but it means the same thing as emptiness. Report an error in the passage at 59:49 Highlight the passage at 59:49

1:00:09 But sometimes they might also say ultimate nature, the ultimate... ultimate way that things exist. So sometimes say netzul, which means how do things exist. Tartukbe netzul, what's the final way that things exist, the deepest ontological status of Sometimes they call this lack or absence nature because it's the final nature that you come to when you say what is the nature of things. Report an error in the passage at 1:00:09 Highlight the passage at 1:00:09

1:00:42 Now we have this difficulty over the word nature can be The best thing or the worst thing, depending on the context. And so then there's this passage in Nagarjuna's Fundamental Treatise where he says, nature is something that is not fabricated and not dependent on another. This says this in Nagarjuna. Nature is something that's not fabricated and not dependent on another. So Chandrakirti's commenting on this, and the question comes up. Report an error in the passage at 1:00:42 Highlight the passage at 1:00:42

1:01:10 When he says nature is something that's not fabricated and not dependent on another, is that the good nature or the bad nature? Report an error in the passage at 1:01:10 Highlight the passage at 1:01:10

1:01:18 Is that the one we're trying to get rid of? Is that the one we're trying to show doesn't exist or are they talking about the fundamental ground of reality? Well, it turns out that like everybody disagrees about this and people have different interpretations of that past in the Gardner note. And Chandrakirti, even though most of the time he's accused of always being the most nihilistic one, he says that this means the existent nature. When Nagarjuna says there's a nature that's not fabricated and not dependent on another, he means the ultimate nature of reality. Report an error in the passage at 1:01:18 Highlight the passage at 1:01:18

1:01:48 And that he's saying the ultimate nature of reality, emptiness, is not fabricated and not dependent on another. So now this requires explanation because if you're going to, you know... If it's not dependent on another, then it seems like it wouldn't be empty, and then there'd be one thing that wasn't empty, and that would be emptiness itself. Okay, so Tsongkhapa has to explain what Chandrakirti means here. Report an error in the passage at 1:01:48 Highlight the passage at 1:01:48

1:02:15 Emptiness, not fabricated, means it's not produced in times. Emptiness doesn't arise from causes and conditions. It's not like... It's contingent. You know, there's this idea of contingent and necessary realities, contingent and necessary things in Western philosophy. It's like emptiness is non-contingent. Report an error in the passage at 1:02:15 Highlight the passage at 1:02:15

1:02:35 Is that what that means? It's like, well, and this I'm not making, this is from Chandrakiri. It's like, you know, Buddhas may come or go. It depends on causes or conditions, whether Maitreya comes, you know, whether my next Buddha comes, the last Buddha comes. It all depends on causes and conditions. It's contingent. Report an error in the passage at 1:02:35 Highlight the passage at 1:02:35

1:02:55 On other things, we're Buddha to our eyes. Buddhas become enlightened based on certain causes and conditions. On the other hand, things being empty of intrinsic existence is not like that. It's going to be that way, whether Buddhas come or not come. Things aren't going to suddenly start being empty at a certain point in time. Report an error in the passage at 1:02:55 Highlight the passage at 1:02:55

1:03:23 Or stop being empty. That's just basically the case. So Tsongkhapa then has to go on and say, when you say that it's not dependent on another, this doesn't preclude the idea that it still means that it's not dependent on causes and conditions, but it still has to exist interdependently. Nothing exists in and of itself. Emptiness is empty of any... Report an error in the passage at 1:03:23 Highlight the passage at 1:03:23

1:03:54 It's not like the one thing that's non-empty is empty. Even though it's the final nature, it itself is also empty of any graspable nature. Crucial point. So emptiness exists, and when we look for the ultimate nature of cup, I find only emptiness. So somebody could say, well, no matter what, whenever I search for the ultimate nature of anything, I always come to emptiness. Report an error in the passage at 1:03:54 Highlight the passage at 1:03:54

1:04:16 So it must be that that's the one thing that's really findable. That must be the one findable thing because I always find it. Whenever I ask what is it really, there's only one answer. So why isn't Buddhism the same as Vedanta, Hinduism? Report an error in the passage at 1:04:16 Highlight the passage at 1:04:16

1:04:36 Whenever I say whatever is really, I come to Brahman, the fundamental ground of reality. Whenever I say in Buddhism what is it really, I always come to emptiness. Right? Mm-hmm. So, Tsongkhapa Tsongkhapa's answer to that is, well, that's when you look for the emptiness of the cup, you find, you weren't looking for the cup, you find the emptiness of the cup. You weren't looking for emptiness, you were looking for the cup. Report an error in the passage at 1:04:36 Highlight the passage at 1:04:36

1:05:02 What is the cup really? You find the emptiness of the cup. So you think, oh, emptiness might be real. Well, you weren't looking for emptiness. Look for emptiness, see how that works out. Is there some emptiness that exists in and of itself? What about the emptiness of the cup? Where is that without the cup? Report an error in the passage at 1:05:02 Highlight the passage at 1:05:02

1:05:20 Is that just like waiting around here for the cup to pop in and then it'll be with it for a while? Yeah, I don't think so. I mean, the emptiness of the cup and the cup are right there. Emptiness is not in some different place. Emptiness is like right here. And you could say that it's like a quality or an attribute or a dimension or a way of looking at. Report an error in the passage at 1:05:20 Highlight the passage at 1:05:20

1:05:33 know, always... Report an error in the passage at 1:05:33 Highlight the passage at 1:05:33

1:05:50 Every single thing, every single moment, right? And in that way, and it's nothing apart from that. It's nothing apart from that. It doesn't exist apart from the basis of emptiness, which means by and large conventional things. You have to have a thing that's empty to have emptiness. So it doesn't exist in and of itself. It exists in a relationship, first of all, with its basis, the thing that's empty. It's a quality of not existing intrinsically of X. Report an error in the passage at 1:05:50 Highlight the passage at 1:05:50

1:06:27 Yeah, so you have to have something that's empty to talk about emptiness. There's one reason. There's another reason. It's like everything else, and we'll talk about this, is that things exist because they're designated or imputed by the mind. So something has to say in relationship to the mere lack of inherent existence, oh there it is, it's emptiness, it exists and designate that and posit that as emptiness. Report an error in the passage at 1:06:27 Highlight the passage at 1:06:27

1:06:59 That's how things exist because within a certain framework or perspective of mind, a certain bit of the world is from a certain perspective recognized and designated as X and that's what it means to say X is there. So, who looks at emptiness and says that's empty? You know, what mind designates or imputes emptiness in relationship to the absence of inherent existence? Well, according to Tsongkhapa, it has to be that mind that's been to channel B and just came back to channel A. Report an error in the passage at 1:06:59 Highlight the passage at 1:06:59

1:07:38 That is, when you're directly realizing emptiness, you're not thinking, hmm, emptiness exists. No. You don't. Only emptiness appears to the mind. You don't think, I'm realizing emptiness. You don't think, oh, it really does empty. You don't think anything like that, right? So just emptiness appears. So then right after you merge from realizing emptiness, then you're like, oh, that was emptiness. Report an error in the passage at 1:07:38 Highlight the passage at 1:07:38

1:08:11 Emptiness exists. So at that point, the conventional mind... A conventional mind, looking back on this experience of ultimate cognition, designates emptiness as conventionally existing. That's what Tsongkhapa says about that. Report an error in the passage at 1:08:11 Highlight the passage at 1:08:11

1:08:28 Very important point about emptiness being empty. Now we come to the question about the context for Tsongkhapa. so... Report an error in the passage at 1:08:28 Highlight the passage at 1:08:28

1:08:45 Teaching in 1402, this was a time when I mentioned several times that in Great Trees he's concerned about people who are misinterpreting Chandrakirti. But that wasn't like the really big hot thing at his time. That was kind of like the hot thing in the 12th century and a little bit in the 13th century. Report an error in the passage at 1:08:45 Highlight the passage at 1:08:45

1:09:10 But in the 14th century when Tsongkhapa was born, The hot thing was Shendong, emptiness of other, which was an idea that was either invented or discovered, depending on how you look at it from a religious point of view, by a man named Sherup Geltzen, Dolpapa Sherup Geltzen. So he lived from 1292 to 1361. Report an error in the passage at 1:09:10 Highlight the passage at 1:09:10

1:09:43 He was sort of a genius like Tsongkhapa. He just mastered all the texts when he was young and went around and debated with everybody and beat everybody. So they called him the Omniscient One. And then he went to stay at a monastery named Jonang Monastery. He went to stay at this monastery and he realized that everybody there had realized the ultimate nature of reality except him, the great scholar. Report an error in the passage at 1:09:43 Highlight the passage at 1:09:43

1:10:08 And so then he went into like a... A couple of really extensive retreats. And during the second retreat, he had a really profound experience, which supposedly he didn't tell anybody about for years. But he still came out of it and he was quite famous and he got it together to start building this huge stupa. And about the time, either while the stupa was being built or just about the time it was finished, he started talking about his experience and sort of announcing the outcome of his enlightenment that he'd had during retreat. Report an error in the passage at 1:10:08 Highlight the passage at 1:10:08

1:10:43 And this involved, you know, he had this totally comprehensive vision. In a way, like Tsongkhapa did, it was just a different vision. He had a comprehensive vision that took into account all the different tantras and all the different sutras and how to understand them in a relationship, how to make sense of all this stuff. Report an error in the passage at 1:10:43 Highlight the passage at 1:10:43

1:11:01 You have to think about, you know, like how we're boggled by the mass of Buddhist stuff. And so the Tibetans were boggled. And they were looking for somebody who could really pull it all together. And Dalai Lama had pulled it all together. He had a picture in his mind of how it all worked. And his idea was that all these things are the Buddha's word. Report an error in the passage at 1:11:01 Highlight the passage at 1:11:01

1:11:25 And so you can read them all in the light of each other. You have to understand what Nagarjuna was saying in the light of the Kala Chakra Tantra. You have to understand, you have to read a Saṅgha, and you have to read all of these texts through and within each other, not keeping them separate. It's totally the opposite of what Tsongkhapa did. Tsongkhapa was like, well, if you want to understand the Madhyamaka tradition, we read the Madhyamaka text. Report an error in the passage at 1:11:25 Highlight the passage at 1:11:25

1:11:51 And then we'll think later about how to practice that in the Guya Samadha. But you're not going to like just take, you know, read all of his treatises through the lens of Guya Samadha. You know, that was like not the way. So, but that's exactly what Dolbaba did. It's like you read everything through and within everything. So he came up with a system that was, from my point of view, you know, kind of an amalgamation, a mushing together of chitta matra. Report an error in the passage at 1:11:51 Highlight the passage at 1:11:51

1:12:16 Or it's like mind-only system and the Madhyamaka system mixed together with Kala Chakra into one view. He called the view different things. Maha Madhyamaka, like great Madhyamaka sometimes. Some things called it the ultimate mind-only system, better than the usual one. Report an error in the passage at 1:12:16 Highlight the passage at 1:12:16

1:12:36 And then also it came to be called Shendong, which means emptiness of other. Tsongkhapa doesn't ever mention Sherub Geltzen by name, and he just spends a very brief time on him in the great treatise. But you could argue that some of his other works, like Essence of Eloquence in Thurman's translation, that that whole book is kind of like a rebuttal of everything Doble was doing and saying, he did it all wrong, now I'm going to show you how you really should interpret these texts and read them. Report an error in the passage at 1:12:36 Highlight the passage at 1:12:36

1:13:14 So basically, what is this view? The view is that the ultimate, which you could call pristine wisdom, you know, yeshe or something like this, the pristine wisdom is an ultimate reality or chrini, you know, a fundamental nature that exists on its own by way of its own power. It's not empty of itself. It's not empty, like emptiness is empty. Well, this isn't empty. Report an error in the passage at 1:13:14 Highlight the passage at 1:13:14

1:13:43 This is intrinsically real, this one thing, this fundamental mind, pristine wisdom. And then all conventional phenomena, like everything else, stuff that isn't that, those things are self-empty. So Nagarjuna was right. I mean, that's why he accepts Nagarjuna. He says, all Nagarjuna's analyses are completely right about all phenomena in the universe except one. Report an error in the passage at 1:13:43 Highlight the passage at 1:13:43

1:14:12 There's an exception and that's the fundamental reality of this pristine wisdom. And so the way you get enlightened is by realizing this pristine wisdom. You get enlightened by realizing reality. And reality is not my emptiness of intrinsic nature. Of course I'm empty of intrinsic nature. But the purpose of realizing that is just to clear away some of my gross delusions so that I can let the fundamental pristine wisdom shine. Report an error in the passage at 1:14:12 Highlight the passage at 1:14:12

1:14:46 Realizing that fundamental pristine wisdom, which is always there and self-existent, that's what it means to become enlightened. So that's called Shendong. If you want to see a modern version of it, then you read Andy Carr's book. Contemplating Reality, which is a Kagyupa book. It's already written at the same level of my Introduction to Emptiness book. It does some of the same things that my Appearance in Reality book does and some of the same things that my Introduction to Emptiness book does, except it does it all from a Kagyupa practitioner point of view. Report an error in the passage at 1:14:46 Highlight the passage at 1:14:46

1:15:17 And you go through the different ways of thinking about emptiness and different kinds of Buddhist philosophy. And you get up to Chandrakirti and he explains it all very nicely. And then he says, yeah, but Chandrakirti was a nihilist. And he was slipping over the edge. Because he said everything was empty, and the fact is there's one thing that's not empty, and now I'm going to tell you about it, and it's this pristine fundamental wisdom. So that's the Shendong view. Report an error in the passage at 1:15:17 Highlight the passage at 1:15:17

1:15:39 Now, as I mentioned, this view is hugely popular at the time that Tsongkhapa was writing. And in the great treatise, it was the first time that Tsongkhapa was writing as a mature person in reaction to it. Apparently Tsongkhapa's teacher, Rendawa Sakya, Report an error in the passage at 1:15:39 Highlight the passage at 1:15:39

1:15:58 Because Dalbaba was like the rage through Tibet, right? And so Rendawa had read his works three times. And the first time he read Dalbaba, he said, it's very bad. And then he read it again and he said, this is just amazing. And then he read it a third time and he said, it's very bad. Report an error in the passage at 1:15:58 Highlight the passage at 1:15:58

1:16:20 So I think Tsongkhapa was coming around, this is a really bad point of view. So this is how he describes the view. This is his description of Shendong in the Great Treatise. These people accept that it's necessary to stop the conception of self, the root that binds all to cyclic existence. But then they assert that you don't stop the conception of self by realizing that there's no intrinsic existence in what this delusion apprehends itself. Report an error in the passage at 1:16:20 Highlight the passage at 1:16:20

1:16:50 No, you have to stop the conception of self, but not by refuting. No, you stop it by recognizing as truly existent something else, some other unrelated phenomena, the fundamentally pure wisdom. Report an error in the passage at 1:16:50 Highlight the passage at 1:16:50

1:17:08 So he's making a bit of a mockery out of the Shendong. You could say it's a little bit of a caricature. It's not how Shendong would present itself. But anyway, so then to do to. To show how ridiculous it is, he says, suppose that there's no snake over in the east, but someone is just terrified because they think there is. Report an error in the passage at 1:17:08 Highlight the passage at 1:17:08

1:17:30 What you can do is tell that distressed person, hey, you can't stop your idea that there's a snake in the east by realizing that in the east there's no snake at all. Don't bother with that. Rather, you should just think there's a tree in the west. Report an error in the passage at 1:17:30 Highlight the passage at 1:17:30

1:17:47 Yeah, I think, yeah. It's just too funny. You know, he has to be messing with us. He said, this will stop your idea that there's a snake in the East and will end your distress. Just think about the tree in the West. So, you know, anyway, you could compare that to what? You know, when I've talked to people who hadn't heard of Shendong before and I describe this, you know, they say, oh, it's just like God. Report an error in the passage at 1:17:47 Highlight the passage at 1:17:47

1:18:16 I don't know how many people say, oh, it's just like God. It's like, well, it's not just like the Abrahamic idea of God. But in this way, it is like, you know, it's like, okay, the way to, the real way to overcome, you know, our out of whackness is not to realize that our soullessness or our emptiness is to realize our relationship to the divine source of all reality. Report an error in the passage at 1:18:16 Highlight the passage at 1:18:16

1:18:41 Do you see what I'm saying? And that way, it's like, it is like the... Not the whole idea that this pristine wisdom was the divine creator that made everything in the beginning. It's not like that. But it is like it in the sense that the real answer to getting out of our misery is to look at the one thing that's truly real rather than deconstructing your inner self analytically. Report an error in the passage at 1:18:41 Highlight the passage at 1:18:41

1:19:07 right Report an error in the passage at 1:19:07 Highlight the passage at 1:19:07

1:19:12 I don't know anyway anyway As Gelukpa became very popular, competing with Dolbaba's idea of Shendong, and then eventually as it became popular and successful, it also became politically powerful in Tibet. One of the things that was done was to send some people down to close down the place in the printing place at Jonang Monastery where they were printing Dolbaba's. Report an error in the passage at 1:19:12 Highlight the passage at 1:19:12

1:19:47 So that it stopped the promulgation of this idea. Because Tsongkhapa says, I didn't quote this part, but he says that this idea, unlike other teachings in Tibet, is really beyond the pale of any Buddhist scripture. Essentially, it's not a Buddhist view. He says that. And so it's not just like it's a, you know, I disagree with it, but it's not even legitimately Buddhist. Report an error in the passage at 1:19:47 Highlight the passage at 1:19:47

1:20:13 So anyway, the Galukpa, what do you say, government, tried to stop the promulgation of this view as it came into power. But – and they did success, succeed, and say what? Pretty much stomping out this – Jonang sect that continued in central Tibet and keeping the Jonang sect itself fairly small. But meanwhile, the view, the Shendong view, had spread in eastern Tibet and become integrated into some Kagyupa and Nyingma teachings and in that way continues down to today. Report an error in the passage at 1:20:13 Highlight the passage at 1:20:13

1:20:57 So it's a very popular view in the world. Sidney Pyburn, you know, when I was publishing this and then thinking about how to word this section, you know, he said, well, half of the Tibetan Buddhists in the world, roughly, whether they're Tibetan or not, believe in this. And Tsongkhapa talks about it in a rather rough way, a sharper way here than he does in some other places. Yeah, you can see that he just mocks it almost, really. Report an error in the passage at 1:20:57 Highlight the passage at 1:20:57

1:21:31 right, right? Yeah. So anyway. His Holiness, of course, speaks in a different way. His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, has this responsibility of being the Dalai Lama of all Tibetans. Report an error in the passage at 1:21:31 Highlight the passage at 1:21:31

1:21:49 Tsongkhapa wasn't the Dalai Lama of anybody. He was trying to make it really clear where he stood. What the right view was by drawing sharp lines of differentiation from other people who had gone astray and in that way give guidance. Report an error in the passage at 1:21:49 Highlight the passage at 1:21:49

1:22:08 And everything, if you read very deeply, you can see that His Holiness absolutely agrees with Tsongkhapa. It totally has not mixed up what the message is. But from within that, he takes a very inclusive approach and tries to say, look. Um, but, um... Report an error in the passage at 1:22:08 Highlight the passage at 1:22:08

1:22:26 Lots of these people use different kinds of language and they use different kinds of words and they use the same words to mean completely different things and we have to be very careful about just saying. You know, who's wrong? And he makes a lot of arguments about how, well, you know, we say the view of Chandrakirti has to be correct, but does that mean no one was ever attaining any high states of enlightenment in Tibet before Chandrakirti was translated? Report an error in the passage at 1:22:26 Highlight the passage at 1:22:26

1:22:53 You know, he raises all these questions about, like, well, maybe there's a way that people can have some profound understanding, even if they haven't read Tsongkhapa. Report an error in the passage at 1:22:53 Highlight the passage at 1:22:53

1:23:05 And so, in other words, you might not have to get these exact words in the right order if you get different words in an order that somehow adds up to having the same effect in terms of the transformation of your mind. That's the way His Holiness tends to talk today. And he says that about all four, he usually says about the four Dharma systems, which doesn't, it doesn't count Jonang, you know. Report an error in the passage at 1:23:05 Highlight the passage at 1:23:05

1:23:29 he's saying Nyingma, Kagyu, Sakya, and he, um, Sometimes you add Jonang as sort of a footnote, but then he'll always say what they say that's different. So the status of Shendong, in terms of the Dalai Lama's inclusion, he has a little bit of a difficulty. First of all, Tsongkhapa is directly attacking it, and second, it's difficult to interpret it. Report an error in the passage at 1:23:29 Highlight the passage at 1:23:29

1:23:56 As saying that, because he's going to follow Tsongkhapa, he has to say that to be enlightened you have to realize that everything is devoid of intrinsic nature. And these people are saying directly the opposite of that. So it's hard to get it flipped around to interpret it to be okay. But he has been saying, well, there's good kinds of Shendong and bad kinds of Shendong, and you have to try to differentiate. Okay. Report an error in the passage at 1:23:56 Highlight the passage at 1:23:56

1:24:25 What I haven't talked about, and that's good because you still have two classes tomorrow, right, is coming back to the issue that was raised about what we have left is to talk about when we say that things lack intrinsic nature, what do we mean really? We haven't really explained what it would mean for something to have intrinsic nature, and therefore we haven't. Report an error in the passage at 1:24:25 Highlight the passage at 1:24:25

1:24:52 Really fully explained what it would mean for something to be empty. And since emptiness is the same meaning of dependent arising, haven't really fully explained how Tsongkhapa understands what it means for something to be a dependent arising. Although it has been alluded to a couple, more than a couple, three times. But we could, you know, leave that if, because it's like been about an hour and a half now. Report an error in the passage at 1:24:52 Highlight the passage at 1:24:52

1:25:20 People want to ask questions and we'll still have things to talk about tomorrow. Yeah. Peter. Peter. Report an error in the passage at 1:25:20 Highlight the passage at 1:25:20

1:25:31 Why would the other schools adopt this sort of reification ethic if it's been completely refuted by Tsongkhapa? I don't understand how this Jonang thing continues. Report an error in the passage at 1:25:31 Highlight the passage at 1:25:31

1:25:51 Well, Report an error in the passage at 1:25:51 Highlight the passage at 1:25:51

1:25:55 first of all, their view, I think I said this, is that Chandrakirti has totally... They fall into a nihilistic extreme. Report an error in the passage at 1:25:55 Highlight the passage at 1:25:55

1:26:09 Their understanding is that, you know how it works, we're not going through the tenant system, but you know how in Chittimatra things appear because karma exceeds, karma potentials are ripening in the foundational consciousness. You're familiar with that idea, right? So as they ripen, and um Report an error in the passage at 1:26:09 Highlight the passage at 1:26:09

1:26:33 Things appear. So all appearances are sort of arising from a fundamental consciousness. Report an error in the passage at 1:26:33 Highlight the passage at 1:26:33

1:26:45 Then you have a whole set of sutras, you know, Sandhya Nirmoshana Sūtra, Report an error in the passage at 1:26:45 Highlight the passage at 1:26:45

1:27:02 Mahāyāna Mahaparinirana Sūtra. You have a whole set of sutras that are classified by Tsongkhapa as... You know, the third turning of the wheel. Well, these sutras teach about Tathāgata Garba. They teach about a fundamental Buddha nature. And they teach about it in a way that's quite glorified, right? And this can be this Tathāgata Garba idea mixed together with the idea of a fundamental mind of pure light from Tantra. Report an error in the passage at 1:27:02 Highlight the passage at 1:27:02

1:27:37 Mixed together with the idea of a foundational consciousness from Chitta Mantra, you get the idea that there's a fundamentally pure mind that is the ultimate and is the ground for all appearance. Appearances are illusory. They're the sport of something, though. People feel that it can't be based on nothing. I saw at least one person get worried about the idea that Chandrakirti was going to be a nihilist. Report an error in the passage at 1:27:37 Highlight the passage at 1:27:37

1:28:04 Well, of course. It's sort of like if you're not really getting worried about it, you wonder if you're really understanding it. Because Tsongkhapa is constantly saying, well, it's very difficult to establish dependent arising within the context of emptiness when you really understand how empty things are. Report an error in the passage at 1:28:04 Highlight the passage at 1:28:04

1:28:22 So most people, I don't want to say... I don't know. A lot of people didn't want to go there. They didn't want to go there just not because, you know, they felt that it was the wrong place to go. Look, basically, accepting those of us who end up in some lineage related to Chandrakirti, huge swaths of Buddhist intellectual history, both Mahāyāna and non-Mahāyāna, take the idea that, yeah, things are devoid of some self. Report an error in the passage at 1:28:22 Highlight the passage at 1:28:22

1:28:51 Things have been reified. That reification is the ground of unnecessary misery. But it's reification of something by something. There has to be something that's like the basis for all this. Only a few people going around saying nothing has any intrinsic nature anywhere, anyplace, anytime. That comes to seem like an extreme view. Report an error in the passage at 1:28:51 Highlight the passage at 1:28:51

1:29:13 That's what I'm trying to, you know. But isn't that still a form of eternalism? I mean, it seems more in line with Hindu philosophy in that case. This pure wisdom, like some sort of an Ātman type character. Report an error in the passage at 1:29:13 Highlight the passage at 1:29:13

1:29:26 Are you asking for my point of view? No, I'm just, I'm sort of surprised to hear that, I guess. Yeah, well, I'm here to edify you about the right ways and the wrong ways. I mean, one of the reasons it's relevant to talk about here is because it's one of the... Crucial context for what Tsongkhapa is doing. In this case, I talked to you about people misreading Chandrakirti as thinking that since things are empty that we don't have any ethics. Report an error in the passage at 1:29:26 Highlight the passage at 1:29:26

1:29:56 That's a kind of following Chandrakirti in a mistaken way that leads to nihilism. But this is a way that deprecates from Tsongkhapa's view conventional things because it doesn't really have it. There's no conventionality. Well, you can have different versions of Shendong. Report an error in the passage at 1:29:56 Highlight the passage at 1:29:56

1:30:14 But some versions, some interpretations of Shendong, some interpretations of Dolpapa's Shendong, seem to say that nothing else exists. There's just one reality. The appearance of things is the product of ignorance. Things appear because we're ignorant, but if we got rid of ignorance, then we would see that everything has always been from, there's only one thing that's really real. Report an error in the passage at 1:30:14 Highlight the passage at 1:30:14

1:30:46 How is it different from Hinduism? Well, that's obviously what Tsongkhapa was insinuating and he wasn't the, you know, obviously other Guilupas read that and they knew what he meant and they lined it up and said, this is like Vedanta, this is like Sankhya, you know, they called, they persisted, you know, because it didn't just disappear off the map. Report an error in the passage at 1:30:46 Highlight the passage at 1:30:46

1:31:09 They tried to quash it, but it wasn't within, it wasn't like, you know. Tibet wasn't like a police state or anything where they could go around and make people stop doing this. It was a big, diverse, complicated, really is a bunch of countries with not really a place. I think it just shows how much we want to believe in a thing. Even in these advanced schools, they would still be attached to that in some way. Report an error in the passage at 1:31:09 Highlight the passage at 1:31:09

1:31:37 Well, that's certainly the way... Those of us who have the Gelug point of view, we can't help but react to that in exactly that way, saying, you just can't let it go, can you? Report an error in the passage at 1:31:37 Highlight the passage at 1:31:37

1:31:55 Another word Report an error in the passage at 1:31:55 Highlight the passage at 1:31:55

1:32:03 for pristine wisdom is primordial awareness? Yes. Is this the same thing? Yeah. Nuke, something like that. Report an error in the passage at 1:32:03 Highlight the passage at 1:32:03

1:32:17 I don't know why, but to me that always sounded more like Buddha nature and it's just more of a quality, a constant quality as opposed to a reality in itself. Can you just... Okay. We Report an error in the passage at 1:32:17 Highlight the passage at 1:32:17

1:32:48 don't have any intrinsic nature of being as stupid as we are. So there's... A way, you know, I'm saying that we're not, that we have a kind of, that we all have a Buddha nature and saying, you can say that that includes the innate quality of our mind, which is its lack of having even the shred of intrinsic difference from the wisdom of a Buddha. Report an error in the passage at 1:32:48 Highlight the passage at 1:32:48

1:33:23 That's a Galoppa way to say it. Report an error in the passage at 1:33:23 Highlight the passage at 1:33:23

1:33:28 true, but I know. Report an error in the passage at 1:33:28 Highlight the passage at 1:33:28

1:33:35 What will posit as the primordial wisdom? Is there an enlightened consciousness within us that's always existed? Or is the Buddha nature a way to talk about the fact that we have no essential difference from Buddhas and that because our minds are empty, there's nothing that prevents them from fully manifesting that? Report an error in the passage at 1:33:35 Highlight the passage at 1:33:35

1:34:08 And changing into that. And that's different from saying we only falsely appear. It's only ignorance that causes things to appear in cyclic existence. In fact, everything is always and already only this essentially existent Buddha mind. That's where Shendong goes with it. I have to say that there's a lot of different language about fundamental minds, both in Tantra, in Nyingma, in Kagyupa, and even in Yalupa, because you have to say, how are we going to talk about what the highest yoga tantras teach and how are we going to understand what's going on in the mind-only system? Report an error in the passage at 1:34:08 Highlight the passage at 1:34:08

1:35:02 So then all these different words, you have to like, I think the way His Holiness, It's like, well, you can't just go that this word is a good word and that word is the bad word. You have to look at the whole thrust of what someone is saying. What are they doing with that word? It's not like yeshe is the good word and mind vajra is the bad word or nuksem is the bad word. Report an error in the passage at 1:35:02 Highlight the passage at 1:35:02

1:35:27 What do they mean by yeshe? When they say yeshe, do they mean something that exists in and of itself unlike everything else? Then that's a problem. Report an error in the passage at 1:35:27 Highlight the passage at 1:35:27

1:35:38 From a Galupa point of view, right? Okay, yeah. Report an error in the passage at 1:35:38 Highlight the passage at 1:35:38

1:35:48 I have a question, I think it's about the logic where I get stuck, because if everything is neither from itself, nor another, nor from both, and everything, anywhere and everywhere, cannot exist without cause. I mean, I understand that because something's not white, it's not black. But there has to be, logically, with that reasoning, something. Report an error in the passage at 1:35:48 Highlight the passage at 1:35:48

1:36:12 Can it be other than the mind? Which then takes me back to the Chittimatra way of looking at it. But what else could it be? If it's not black, it's not white, but it has to be something in between that rainbow of colors. That's exactly right. So when you search to say what is production really and you don't find any analytically locatable production, it doesn't refute production. Report an error in the passage at 1:36:12 Highlight the passage at 1:36:12

1:36:42 He refutes some intrinsically locatable production such that would be findable under that kind of analysis. And you still have to say, well, like, what do we mean when we say that things are dependently arising? I mean, the thing is that when you start talking about it, then you have the problem of sort of missing the thrust of the analysis, which is to deconstruct our idea of that, you know, things have to come from a... Report an error in the passage at 1:36:42 Highlight the passage at 1:36:42

1:37:11 This is what I try to do. Things have to come from a cause that is of one nature or of a different nature than the thing being produced. Report an error in the passage at 1:37:11 Highlight the passage at 1:37:11

1:37:24 What if you can't find any nature of it that's essentially one with or different between the cause or the effect? Buddhists define dependent arising in terms of independence on this, that arises. Well, then the problem is like, are this and that, are they the same or different? Well, they're not essentially the same and they're not essentially different, okay? Report an error in the passage at 1:37:24 Highlight the passage at 1:37:24

1:37:51 And that's the point. Now, if you actually get that point and you want to go there, then the next thing to say, and this is what you're like, well, can we say that, you know, that there's a conventionally speaking, merely nominally, all right? Not in any sense other than just how we're going to talk, that things arise from different causes. Report an error in the passage at 1:37:51 Highlight the passage at 1:37:51

1:38:24 But when you try to find what you mean by that, is there some nature of the cause that's different from the effect, then it's just impossible. Do you see what I'm saying? So in other words, the Gallupas, because they're refuting an intrinsically existent production, they do believe that production takes place. Report an error in the passage at 1:38:24 Highlight the passage at 1:38:24

1:38:40 And if you want to say, is the cause the same as the effect or different from the effect, well, the way we'll talk is to say that conventionally or nominally they're different. But if you think that that means we can find them as being of an other nature from one another, then you've missed the thrust of why Nagarjuna taught. Report an error in the passage at 1:38:40 Highlight the passage at 1:38:40

1:39:01 That's the idea. And unfortunately, I think that's, as I said, as Gilukba becomes institutionalized, that's one of the things that's cool about going back. Beyond Tsongkhapa and read Nagarjuna, because you can see how these arguments were originally made in a way that cut very hard against our ordinary way of seeing things, challenged people. Report an error in the passage at 1:39:01 Highlight the passage at 1:39:01

1:39:30 Does that help? This may Report an error in the passage at 1:39:30 Highlight the passage at 1:39:30

1:39:41 not be a central point, but you said that something exists conventionally when it's perceived by a non-impaired mind. help, yeah, okay. Yeah. Report an error in the passage at 1:39:41 Highlight the passage at 1:39:41

1:39:49 Yeah, but non-impaired means, like, it's shorthanded for me for, like, lacking a superficial cause of impairment. Okay. It's different because we're all impaired by the fundamental ignorance. Right. Yeah. Yeah, that just, well, one thing that came to mind was, you know, like, the idea that Eskimos have, like, a billion, you know, like, 30 words for snow and we don't. Report an error in the passage at 1:39:49 Highlight the passage at 1:39:49

1:40:12 So is there, is that, like, a cognitive thing or, like, a social consensus about a concept? Kind of idea. And yeah, and that impairment also seemed problematic because what is, you know, where does the line, like even on the conventional level, where does impairment start? Because the only non-impaired thing would be Buddha, a Buddha mind, right? Okay. But even conventionally, maybe not going that far, but still, what is, you know. Report an error in the passage at 1:40:12 Highlight the passage at 1:40:12

1:40:44 Okay, so this all comes from Chandrakirti. Tsongkhapa didn't make this up. It comes right out. Sixth chapter of Chandrakirti's Madhyamaka Avatara. And he's trying to distinguish between, among conventional things, stuff like mirages and reflections of faces and distinguish that from faces and oases. And so, you know, he's saying that the mirror is like a superficial cause of impairment to the visual consciousness. Report an error in the passage at 1:40:44 Highlight the passage at 1:40:44

1:41:19 Heat rising off the desert sand and the sunlight is a superficial cause of – so a deep cause of impairment is unlike that, something that's fundamental and pervasive in how we perceive the world and is eradicated only by doing analysis that gets at the root of things. So... This idea that we have a conception on the basis of that or an appearance of things as intrinsically existent, that's not a superficial cause of impairment. Report an error in the passage at 1:41:19 Highlight the passage at 1:41:19

1:42:01 So they're just thinking of adventitious things that may or may not occur and, in fact, usually don't. At most times and places are not occurring to each person all the time within a certain place. So, um, uh, this. He used words like circumstantial, right, or adventitious. He tries to gloss superficial cause of impairment with those kinds of words. Report an error in the passage at 1:42:01 Highlight the passage at 1:42:01

1:42:29 It's just like in this particular case you have this kind of circumstance that messes up the way that beings who have that kind of karma normally see things. Okay, so then the issue about cultural relativism. This isn't the way they set it up. Report an error in the passage at 1:42:29 Highlight the passage at 1:42:29

1:42:49 They don't set it up in terms of like people from this culture see it this way, people from that culture will say it that way. They set it up in terms of different types of rebirth, different types of beings. Report an error in the passage at 1:42:49 Highlight the passage at 1:42:49

1:43:05 And this has actually I think some meaning for us in terms of thinking about cultural relativism versus this. Report an error in the passage at 1:43:05 Highlight the passage at 1:43:05

1:43:16 You know there's problems that you run into when you say well for people in this culture it's normal to behave this way. That seems like conventionally valid for them. They all perceive it that way and think that it should be that way. Whereas for people in this culture it seems normal to do it this way. Report an error in the passage at 1:43:16 Highlight the passage at 1:43:16

1:43:34 And so if conventional reality is like can be understood as established in a kind of cultural basis by popular consensus. Then you wouldn't be able to have any knowledge that could discredit the majority vote within one place or one time. You wouldn't have any way of adjudicating between the perspectives of people from different cultural groups as they merged and how to do things. Report an error in the passage at 1:43:34 Highlight the passage at 1:43:34

1:44:04 You couldn't even begin to think about that. There wouldn't be any way. I mean, obviously it's a difficult problem in any case, but there wouldn't be any way, reference points to talk about it. So that's not the way Chandrakirti does it. He does it on the basis of, we would say, well, he basically does it on the basis of what kind of being you are. Report an error in the passage at 1:44:04 Highlight the passage at 1:44:04

1:44:29 So I would say that it goes species by species, but sometimes he seems to be talking about it. You have a certain kind of... Karma that gives you a certain kind of mind-body system. And for beings who have that kind of karma, right, then it's normal to take cups and cows as different things. Do you know what I'm saying? And then people, if people don't, then you consider that that's a problem. Report an error in the passage at 1:44:29 Highlight the passage at 1:44:29

1:45:07 Something's interfering with the proper operation of their construction of the framework. So these frameworks seem to be, I don't know, we usually, I'm not sure, Chandrakiri doesn't actually say that he's doing it by migrations, by which realm people are in. Report an error in the passage at 1:45:07 Highlight the passage at 1:45:07

1:45:30 But it seems to be that's the way people usually talk about it, either by migrations or by species, have their framework. So we could then... Say that as humans endowed with certain types of karmically determined biological setup, that we could over time use empirical evidence of what it feels like, what it's like to be human, to have a human mind and body. Report an error in the passage at 1:45:30 Highlight the passage at 1:45:30

1:45:56 By paying more attention to that meditatively, scientifically analyzing that, thinking about more what we're experiencing. Report an error in the passage at 1:45:56 Highlight the passage at 1:45:56

1:46:10 Sharing with one another what it is like to be, say, thinking of what it's like to be a slave. Have somebody who's been a slave write about what it's like to be a slave and have other people read about what it's like to be a slave and reflect and consider as to whether a popular consensus about slavery needs to be discredited by some further information that's arisen within the conventional realm. Report an error in the passage at 1:46:10 Highlight the passage at 1:46:10

1:46:38 And then people can say, well, it's not. It's not just by popular consensus. Our senses and the analysis of the data of our senses enables us, either as individuals in the practice of the path or as societies trying to create better ways of working together or communities to improve our way of practicing together, even overturning what everybody else thinks. Report an error in the passage at 1:46:38 Highlight the passage at 1:46:38

1:47:07 You could be the only one. That thinks women are equal to men, but you could still be right, right? Even conventionally, right? Because you had done more analysis of the data that everybody else was party to, right? So that's the way I understand. Report an error in the passage at 1:47:07 Highlight the passage at 1:47:07

1:47:32 Yes? Report an error in the passage at 1:47:32 Highlight the passage at 1:47:32

1:47:37 I actually have a couple questions here. So in terms, in reference to the senses being deceptive, would you say that the senses are perfectly deceptive? And that every bit of information you get through your senses has some deceptive quality to it. Report an error in the passage at 1:47:37 Highlight the passage at 1:47:37

1:48:01 That's my understanding. It has some deceptive quality to it. It doesn't mean that everything about it is useless. But it always has some deceptive quality about it. That's right. Now, it doesn't mean that people are always going around all the time thinking, And subconsciously, because obviously not consciously, that's inherently existent. We aren't. But we're just kind of most of the time sort of, well, we don't challenge or doubt or question. Report an error in the passage at 1:48:01 Highlight the passage at 1:48:01

1:48:38 And sometimes we actively assent to the appearance of things as like being established on their own side by way of their own character. That's the way I understand it. Yeah, because I was wondering if... If the senses are all perfectly deceptive, then could you not have, by investigating an object that can be known through multiple senses, that there could be some correlation between these perfectly deceptive qualities of that object that can yield an accurate perception of that object. Report an error in the passage at 1:48:38 Highlight the passage at 1:48:38

1:49:13 But they're all appearing to all the senses in the same deceptive way. Report an error in the passage at 1:49:13 Highlight the passage at 1:49:13

1:49:22 Well, an object to an eye consciousness will appear in a different way than it would be to a smell consciousness or something like that. I see what you mean. Okay. Well, you're using the sounds, you can't see sounds no matter how closely you look, and you're saying, well, if it had some intrinsic nature of being a shape or a color, then why am I hearing it? Report an error in the passage at 1:49:22 Highlight the passage at 1:49:22

1:49:47 Or something like that, do you understand what I'm saying? Something like that, is that what you're getting at? I'm just thinking if you go and look at that cup or sense that cup in some way, then if you just sense it with your eye consciousness, it could be blue, it could be purple, it could look like whatever. Report an error in the passage at 1:49:47 Highlight the passage at 1:49:47

1:50:09 But if I go and touch it, if I go and taste it, ding it and listen to it, then even though all these sensory... Bits of information are deceptive in some way. The collection of them can yield some sort of less deceptive valid perception. Report an error in the passage at 1:50:09 Highlight the passage at 1:50:09

1:50:33 Well, it's not self-evident. It's still going to be deceptive in some way, but maybe less so. I don't think that most of the time... That that in itself helps people very much because then they're just there's a kind of exactly the opposite of what you're saying could be the case. That is, if it appears to my eyes as objectively set up and then I touch it and it feels like it's really essentially different, then I'm like, OK, we've got validation. Report an error in the passage at 1:50:33 Highlight the passage at 1:50:33

1:51:16 And I think that's the way it works most of the time. Exactly the opposite of what you're saying. But you have to then think about some other considerations, like where did it come from? What's it made out of? Can we find that it seems like it has something on its own side? Can we figure out what that is? Report an error in the passage at 1:51:16 Highlight the passage at 1:51:16

1:51:44 Do you see what I'm saying? And when you start to think about, like just for example, If it existed by way of its own intrinsic character, then would it be breakable? Could it come into existence? Why would it need to be made out of parts if it just had its own... Look, if it's already got cupness to it, then it could just be a cup without parts, without causes. Think about stuff like that, and then the idea is to then get a little bit of doubt. Report an error in the passage at 1:51:44 Highlight the passage at 1:51:44

1:52:18 Mostly it's like... Well, I still mostly think that they just exist like they appear, but I'm not 100 % certain anymore. A few qualms. It's like, you know, as things are strongly forcefully appearing this way, it seems that they are that way, but I haven't really worked out how that works yet because these Buddhists keep throwing in these questions that I can't answer. Report an error in the passage at 1:52:18 Highlight the passage at 1:52:18

1:52:45 Anyway, then that's the beginning, right? And then you try to build, keep working the reasonings until the doubt gets a little stronger and then it becomes a doubt leaning the other way, thinking they forcibly appear a certain way, but I'm suspicious, suspicious about whether they really set up that way on their own side. Report an error in the passage at 1:52:45 Highlight the passage at 1:52:45

1:53:06 The other question I had was in regards to dependent arising. Report an error in the passage at 1:53:06 Highlight the passage at 1:53:06

1:53:17 Take, for example, the house. That house is made of this, made of that. It comes together through causes and conditions. So could one picture this house, this event that is an object that we can perceive that we call house as kind of like the node in a network of causes and conditions? Report an error in the passage at 1:53:17 Highlight the passage at 1:53:17

1:53:45 Yeah, I've thought about it like that. And by going and, you know, and that object, that house kind of encodes in a very subtle way all the causes and conditions that brought it into that existence at that particular time. Yeah, we could think about it like that way. I mean, there's a lot of things like that. That's systems theory or information theory. I don't know exactly which one you're using. Report an error in the passage at 1:53:45 Highlight the passage at 1:53:45

1:54:10 I mean, yeah, exactly like that. We have all these. These other ways of thinking in the West that have these interesting parallels. Report an error in the passage at 1:54:10 Highlight the passage at 1:54:10

1:54:21 Right, the Ava Tamsaka Sūtra has this idea about ways in which things are as though interpenetrating with other things insofar as they're all this matrix of things, of causes and conditions. Report an error in the passage at 1:54:21 Highlight the passage at 1:54:21

1:54:44 I think it's in... and mean Report an error in the passage at 1:54:44 Highlight the passage at 1:54:44

1:54:46 It's in a chapter we hadn't gotten to. In my book, I say something that's sort of like this. I Report an error in the passage at 1:54:46 Highlight the passage at 1:54:46

1:55:05 don't know if I can find it right now. But this idea is that each person, each thing, each moment... Oh, here we are. On page 95, I'm talking about dependent arising. Through meditating on how things are empty because they're dependent arisings, we retrain our minds to see things. See that things exist only insofar as they're related to other things, none of which is itself ultimately real. So nothing has its own way to set itself up, and each and everything is the expression of vast networks of relationships with and among other things. Report an error in the passage at 1:55:05 Highlight the passage at 1:55:05

1:55:43 And there isn't any bottom or absolute ground of being, no unconditioned support or starting point. Everything emerges from a surging and relentless complexity of innumerable interdependent conditions, every one of which is analytically unlocatable. Implicit in cliches such as every snowflake is unique is a celebration of our own uniqueness as living beings. The problem is only that we believe, and usually unconsciously, that our own special uniqueness arises from an inner essence that's our private core. Report an error in the passage at 1:55:43 Highlight the passage at 1:55:43

1:56:16 To defend and aggrandize that core, we harm others. To nurture that core, we build up our greed. We act as though anger were our father and craving were our sustaining mother, and no one can begin to measure the pain and anguish this has caused. In fact, our uniqueness arises from our distinctive, ever-shifting and infinite array of connections with other things. We're unique and important, but we don't own our uniqueness. Report an error in the passage at 1:56:16 Highlight the passage at 1:56:16

1:56:42 We have no intrinsic core. We owe our uniqueness to all of our conditions and to our emptiness. Without the open sky of emptiness, the rest of the world couldn't shine into and through us, and we would never be what we are, living beings making choices that matter. Report an error in the passage at 1:56:42 Highlight the passage at 1:56:42

1:57:02 Okay, so with reference to that inability to analytically locate some event in this network, does that also cover the inability to locate it in a temporal sense? As in a causal sense, as in this came before, this came before, this came before that. Report an error in the passage at 1:57:02 Highlight the passage at 1:57:02

1:57:27 Well, usually in Guilupa, it Report an error in the passage at 1:57:27 Highlight the passage at 1:57:27

1:57:36 does in the sense that we were talking about before. When you say, you know, okay, we'll say nominally that there are causes and conditions and that causes proceed effects. But then when you try to say exactly how that works, you can't. It comes to not be able to be pinned down. There are Buddhist systems that talk about causation that causes being simultaneous with or after effects, but they don't really mean causation in the sense that we're usually thinking about. Report an error in the passage at 1:57:36 Highlight the passage at 1:57:36

1:58:13 They mean sort of like retrospective necessary conditions or something like that. So if we say, I don't know, could we say... Like some people, not prosangicas, but some people would say that fire is a cause of fuel. Well, it's not a cause of fuel in the temporal sense, but it's a cause of, so in prosangica they don't say it's a cause. Report an error in the passage at 1:58:13 Highlight the passage at 1:58:13

1:58:41 But it is that fuel is designated only as fuel in relationship to the existence of fire. So that's considered to be like a different kind of dependent arising. Tsongkhapa's system, he doesn't call it causation, but he calls it dependence. He calls it dependent arising. He calls it dependent imputation instead of causation. Report an error in the passage at 1:58:41 Highlight the passage at 1:58:41

1:59:03 That's all I can say about that. I don't know about time running backwards or forward. I never heard people in Guilupa talk about things going out of order. Yeah, because it would seem to me that if you have this large, infinite set of events, Or objects that are all interrelated to each other and just drop the temporal order of it all. Then if you have this infinite system, there should be a way that you can go and take this event here, A, and then go and find some route that comes back to A. Report an error in the passage at 1:59:03 Highlight the passage at 1:59:03

1:59:46 So A to B to C. And then if you go far enough out, you could find one that comes like event D, D, D, D, D, D, comes back and causes event A. And then just plop a temporal order on it. Well, I know that something like that is one of the many competing interpretations of the problem in quantum physics. Report an error in the passage at 1:59:46 Highlight the passage at 1:59:46

2:00:10 And they have this problem, right? They haven't really figured out how to talk. They have these math theories and they work, but no one really knows to say what they mean. And one of the theories is like that. But I have no idea. I've never heard anybody say it like that. Thank you, Luke. Okay, thank you. Report an error in the passage at 2:00:10 Highlight the passage at 2:00:10

2:00:34 Okay, well, that seems – is that okay? Yeah. Let's reconvene tomorrow morning, okay? Report an error in the passage at 2:00:34 Highlight the passage at 2:00:34

2:01:10 Thank you. Report an error in the passage at 2:01:10 Highlight the passage at 2:01:10

2:01:24 Thank you. Thank you. Report an error in the passage at 2:01:24 Highlight the passage at 2:01:24

2:01:41 Good night. Move your class forward in one hour. Report an error in the passage at 2:01:41 Highlight the passage at 2:01:41