ACI 13 «Искусство аргументации», занятие 1

Class One: Why Study the Art of Reasoning



[mandala]
[refuge]

Okay. Welcome. This is something like class number thirteen, okay, course
number thirteen. When we started the courses, we , [unclear] and I went out
and we bought six chairs at Ikea in New Jersey and brought it back in a Honda
and I figured if we could make six good translators it would be a big
achievement you know. So I’m happy to see that there are many people here.
Tonight we’re gonna study Buddhist logic. We’re gonna start Buddhist logic. I
waited twelve courses, thirteen courses to start Buddhist logic because I was
afraid ure my first job is to sell you on the idea of studying Buddhist logic and
then maybe you won’t run away to like the third class or something. So, I’ll tell
you the story about Gyaltseb Je. Gyaltseb Je was the main disciple of Je
Tsongkapa. Je Tsongkapa is really the beginning of our lineage and he was the
teacher of the first Dalai Lama. His dates are 1357 – 1419, okay.

Gyaltseb Je – the word Gyaltseb means regent,meaning he took over the show
after Je Tsongkapa passed away. He was assigned by Je Tsongkapa. He was
appointed as Je Tongkapa’s replacement. Perhaps you don’t know the story of
their first meeting. Gyaltseb Je, at the time,was the most famous logician in
Tibet, and in fact, in the winter, we have inter-monastic competions and we
study from his book on logic. It’s about four hundred pages long. It takes
fifteen years to get through the first two chapters in the winter debate.

So he was an incredible logician. So he heard that this guy from east Tibet was
making sort of a big smash in Central Tibet, that he had come from the East.
And that people were starting to come to his classes a lot. So he was curious and
he thought he would go and blow this guy away in debate. So he heard that Je
Tsongkapa was teaching outside of Lhasa somewhere and he decided he would
show up and disrupt the class. So, he put on his big debaters costume and his big
pandit’s hat, you know, and he started off. And he got lost on the way,
[laughter] and, and he was on the path, the lecture was already starting you
know, and he, finally he’s wandering through this pasture and he meets this
young lady who’s tending the cows, you know, like a cow-herder. And she’s
covered with dirt and she’s all dishevelled and her hair is all messed. And he
says, do you know where big-nose is teaching tonight? Because Je Tsongkapa
had a big nose, [laughs] okay. His enemies called him ‘big-nose from the east’.
And, he said, do you know where big-nose is teaching tonight? And she says,
well, what do you mean big-nose? And he says, you know, that guy Tsongkapa
coming from, came from, came in from the east recently, you know, lot of
people coming to his classes, you know. And she said, no I don’t know, but
aren’t you Gyaltseb Je the famous logician, you know. And he says, yes I am,
you know [laughter] [laughs] and [laughs] and she says, I’ve always wanted to
meet a great logician. I, I have this burning question in my mind and I always
wanted to meet a great logician, you know, and so. He says, don’t worry, I can
answer any question about Buddhist logic. So, she points to a cow who’s taking
a [laughter] making a cow-pie, okay. And, I have this question, you know, when
they raise their tail and the poop comes out, it’s kinda going up. But then, when
they’re done, it falls down. And I was wondering which is the top and which is
the bottom of the cow-pie, you know. ‘Cos going out it’s one way and going,
when it falls down it’s the opposite, you know. And then Gyaltseb je was
stumped you know [laughter] [laughs] and he took about ten minutes and then
he couldn’t get it, he couldn’t figure it out and he turned around and he looked at
her and suddenly, there’s this goddess, blazing with golden light, you know.
And she had this incense stick between her hands, you know. She says, I don’t
know what you mean about big-nose from the East, but if you mean the
incomparable, glorious, incredible Je Tsongkapa, master of all the world, you
know, of Buddhism, he’s teaching over there, you know. [laughs] [laughter]
And then there’s this beautiful story of what happens. So you never know
who’s who, okay. That’s one of the reasons to study logic and we’re gonna get
into that. So, I thought I’d tell you what we’re gonna study and then show you
how it fits into the master plan of, of what you’re doing over the long run, five
years, okay. So, I think we’ll do first the, first the syllabus, okay.
This is what you’re going to be studying. Class one, we’re gonna go over the
class policy – finished that. I’m gonna give you an overview of the course which
is what I’m doing now. And then each class will be divided into three parts: first,
you’ll get content, okay. Content means something to debate about, okay.
When we teach logic, which kids in the monastery start at about twelve years
old. It’s the first thing you ever study in a Buddhist monastery. We’ll do the
content of logic for about twelve different, ten different classes about, about
what are you studying to debate about. And these are great subjects from the
ancient logic books that were written about thirteen hundred years ago. And I’ll
go into that, where it comes from. Then each class, the second part of each class
will be the format of logic. You know, like how do you make a good reason,
what’s a bad reason, you know, how do you know a reason is a good reason,
and things like that, okay. The third part of each class will be, I’ll teach you a
little bit about Buddhist debating, okay. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it in a
Buddhist monastery, but it’s a lot of fun. And, and we’ll be doing some, a little
bit of Buddhist debating, okay. So that’s never been taught to a wide public
audience in the United States, so I thought it would be fun for you guys to do it.
It’s a very, very powerful tool for learning Buddhism. In the monastery we
debate every day, except Tuesday, which we’re off because it’s market day.
Every other day we debate twice a day. The evening debates start at six o’clock.
You might get out at eleven, you might get out at three in the morning. But you
take the lesson that you learned that day and you get in a group of like ten or
twenty of your fellow studentsand you rip it apart by screaming at each other,
okay, and it’s a lot of fun. If you’ve ever seen, seen it in a Buddhist monastery,
but I’ll teach you a little bit about it. This custom has existed for two and a half
thousand years and it’d be really good if we could do it in this country, okay. So
we’ll talk a little bit about that. So, every class will be three parts. First part is
something to debate about, some part of Buddhist philosophy,okay. Second
part of the class’ll be the format of logic – how to make a good reason and
what’s a false reason. And then, thirdly, the forms of debating – how do you
debate,okay. So each class’ll be like that.
Section two, class number two, the topic will be – there’s a beautiful section in the
logic books that outlines the, all of existence. How do you divide, classify all
existing things. And it’s very useful for Buddhists, okay. We should know. And
that’ll be the subject matter. The logic, formal logic subject, will be, we’ll start to
get into how you make a good reason, how do you make a logical statement,
okay. And then, the debate thing for that night will be how do you stand, how
do you bang your foot, how do you use a rosary. You gotta have a rosary when
you debate, okay. You might have to hit your opponent with it, you never
know, okay [laughter] and how to formulate a logical statement on the debate
ground in the midst of fire,okay.
Class three, there’s a special subject called ‘Quality and Characteristic’ { chi
chedrak}. If you want to see emptiness directly this is the most powerful thing
you can study. It’s about how do you make mental images and how you
confuse them with the objects. And it’s a very, very powerful subject and we’ll
do that for the third class. Formal logic will be the idea of similar cases and
dissimilar cases. Debating will be how to give your answers. Debating is like a
flowchart. It’s really cool. The guy that’s attacking says, ‘I think the Buddha
meant this when he said that’. And you, all you’re allowed to do when you
respond is, ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘yes’, no’, ‘not necessarily’, you know. So when you see a
debate, you’ll see one guy standing up screaming like, you know, his lungs off,
and then the other guy just sitting there going, ‘yeah, no’ [laughter] yeah
[laughter] no’, you know. And it’s really beautiful exercise because it’s like a
computer program. It’s like on-off switch. The guy who’s answering can only
say yes or no or not necessarily, or something, you know, he has like four
answers he can give. Sooner or later, if you frame the questions correctly, you
must reach truth, okay. It’s very interesting process. And this is the point of
debating. If you frame the questions properly, if the questioning goes in a good
line, by the end of the night you must reach the truth of something just by
answering yes or no, you see. It’s like a flowchart. If ‘no’ go this way, if ‘yes’ go
this way. And you keep throwing questions at the guy and sooner or later you
reach the truth of anything. And you can pick any subject that you’re confused
about, anything you don’t understand very clearly, just by answering yes or no,
if the debater is a good debater, by the end of the night you must reach the
truth, you see. And that’s the point of Buddhist debate. It’s not who won. You
know, Americans are always asking me,they, I had fifteen people went with me
when I did my Geshe exam, and I’d come home all sweaty and they’d say, well
who won, you know. And I’d say, nobody, everybody wins, you know. It’s just
yes-no, yes-no and then you reach the truth and everybody’s happy and then
they go home, you know. And that’s the point. It’s not a competition. That’s a
Western idea I think. In a monastery you’re just trying to reach the truth and if
the questions are good you must reach the truth. And it’s really nice. It’s really
exciting. So you go into the debate ground with all your unanswered questions
and you throw them out in front of all your classmates and then sooner or later
you get the truth out. And it’s really nice. It works. And you can do that about
anything you’re not sure about in Buddhism. That’s the whole point. Formal,
class four will be ‘Cause and Effect’. There’s a beautiful essay on cause and effect
in the logic scriptures. For the formal logic subject we’ll start to talk about a
syllogym, a syllogism; what are the different parts of a syllogism. And then, for
debating, there’s a really nice thing called a {telngyur}which is, somebody says,
‘emptiness is just this black space that you put your mind on’. So, you say, ‘well I
guess you could perceive emptiness by closing your eyes or something, right?’
And that’s called a {telngyur}. In Sanskrit it’s called a prasangika. And it’s a
method of seeing emptiness, you see. It has a special ability to help you see
emptiness. And the highest school of Madhyamika, the school of Nagarjuna, the
school of Je Tsongkapa, the school of the Dalai Lama, is is that. So you’re gonna
learn to do that. You’re gonna learn to make what’s basically a sarcastic
statement, okay. Oh yeah, so I guess if you close your eyes you see emptiness,
right. Okay, {yinpa ta} like that, okay. That’s called a {telngyur}.
Class five, we’ll talk about ‘Mind and their Objects’,okay. Subject minds and
their objects of the mind. There’s a lot of people who teach emptiness wrong.
They say when you see emptiness the mind who’s seeing emptiness and the
emptiness that it sees, they somehow melt into each other, and blah, blah, blah.
And if you study this basic subject from the logic texts you won’t think that any
more, okay.        So we’re gonna study, that’s important for your study of
emptiness.
For the logic we’re gonna study the different kinds of good reasons. There’re
three types, we’re gonna study the first one. And then for the debating we’re
gonna learn how to answer a sarcastic question, you know. If somebody says,
Oh, you think you can close your eyes and see emptiness? And then you have to
learn the two kinds of answers that you give back. And you’re gonna, you’re
gonna learn that, okay. By the way, the debate will be in English, all right. So
you don’t have to run away tonight, you can wait ‘til next week.
It’s getting hot in here. I think better – they’ll fall asleep you know.
[laughter] [unclear] [laughter] It means if you try it long enough you find out it
really works, you know. If you study Buddhism for a while it starts to work
[cut] that’s illegal, but anyway [laughter]
Okay, class number six, yeah, ‘Negative and Positive’. There are different kinds
of negative statements, there’s different ways to define negative-positive and it’s
very important. Why? There are schools of Buddhism, even in Tibet, which
define emptiness in a very mistaken way. Emptiness is an absence of something.
Emptiness means the self-existent thing, which never existed anyway, isn’t there,
okay. And a lot of schools says other things which are completely wrong and if
you study this subject, you’ll never fall into that trap. So it’s very important.
Each subject you study has importance for understanding the higher schools of
Buddhism, okay. Emptiness, okay.
Class number seven, the idea of ‘Contradiction and Relationship’. What does it
mean for two things to be connected or related to each other and what does it
mean for two things to be the opposite of each other, okay? And we’ll study the
logical statements which are used to prove the absence of something. And these
are important because those are the logical statements used to prove emptiness
itself, okay. So you have to learn them, okay. All the major reasonings used to
prove emptiness have to do with proving something, proving that something’s
not there, okay. And there are two different forms of that kind of logic and you
have to study them, okay. The forms of debate on that night, don’t miss class
seven, debating tactics. How to distract your opponent [laughter], how to taunt
him properly [laughter], how to embarrass him in front of a large group of
people [laughter], stuff like that. Very good, okay. Okay. We won’t do anything
like that. Number eight, ‘Definitions and How Things are Defined’,okay. They
define how to define things, okay. And that’s a very wonderful thing to know,
okay. The logic part of that will be a special kind of proof for something that
you can’t see, okay. How to prove something that you can’t see; the absence of
something you can’t see, okay. We’ll get into it. Class nine is very important
because it’s called ‘The Concept of Elimination and Perception’. What it means is
that according to the logic schools, when you see something, it’s because your
mind is blocking out all the other things which are not it. Got it? When you
perceive something, what’s really happening is your mind is eliminating all other
possibilities and that’s how you establish that something exists, okay. Some
Buddhist schools in Tibet believe that that is emptiness. It’s called {shentsel} and
it’s completely wrong. And you have to study all of these wrong ideas about
emptiness. So, one of the reasons to study this is to understand why {shen tong}
is a mistaken idea, okay. And that’s important. You can spend your whole life
studying {shen tong} you’ll never learn, you’ll never ever see emptiness. And
you have to understand why that’s wrong, and, and this is a presentation of why
that’s wrong, okay. You got a lot of different stuff in the formal logic there, but
basically, it’s a summary of the formal logic up to that point. And then, in the
forms of debate, we’re gonna study what is it that the monks debate. There are
about twelve or thirteen different classes debating in the debate ground at any
given time and I thought you might like to know what each class is debating.
Like, what are the sophomores debating, what are the juniors debating, what are
the freshmen debating, okay. And there will be, in a typical night, there’ll be
twelve or thirteen different groups of monks debating. So I thought it’d be
interesting for you to hear all the subjects they’re debating. Class ten is really
interesting I think. It’s the concept of time, time itself, you know. How do we
perceive time, what is the nature of time, does the future exist, does the past
exist, does it assert any effects on us, how do we define time, why do you
perceive the passage of time? And that’s gonna be the subject of class number
ten. We’re gonna discuss, very importantly, bad logic, okay, incorrect logic.
There’s a lot of things that are incorrect logic in Buddhist logic that are not
incorrect in western logic, okay. For example, in Buddhist logic if you present an
argument to somebody that they already accept, it’s an incorrect reason, okay.
It’s an untrue reason, okay. If you present, if you try to argue something with
somebody that they already accept, then the reason you give is, is false
according to Buddhism, alright. If you try to give a reason to someone which
they can’t already accept, but they just haven’t tied it together, that’s also untrue
logic in Buddhism. And that’s very relevant for westerners, you know. Your job
is gonna be to be able to discuss Buddhism with other Americans, you know.
And the rules of Buddhist logic require that they accept everything you say
already but they just haven’t tied it together yet. So, you’re not allowed to
present anything in an argument, like you’re not allowed to talk about future
lives in an argument with a person who doesn’t already accept future lives, okay,
as a , as a proof, you see. You’re only allowed to give or to talk about the things
which they already accept but they just didn’t tie it together. And, actually, that’s
how western logic works also, but maybe you’re not very sensitive to that fact,
you see. If you go beyond what that other person already accepts, already
you’ve blown the argument, you know. They may agree with you but it won’t
be good logic. Probably they won’t agree with you because you’ve, you’ve
mentioned something that they can’t accept yet, okay. So, the idea in Buddhist
logic is to only use ideas which the other person already accepts, put them
together in a new way and help them see the truth of something that will help
them, okay. You will be studying that.
I thought you’d like to see the traditional debate year. Like, there’s a whole
rhythm of the debate in the monastery, how it goes throughout the year. And
so we’ll, we’ll talk about that. All these subjects have never been written down
and, and this is the result of a lot of research done over like fifteen years in the
monastery, you know. There’s this vague schedule and then if you study it for a
year or two you figure out there’s a logic to it. And it’s kind of beautiful so we’re
gonna be writing all that down for the first time and you’ll see an example of
that tonight, okay.
That’s the general design of the course. I wanted to let you see where this course
stands in the whole five year program which has become like I think a seven
year program or something like that, okay. I’m not gonna, I mean I have a
transparency but forget it, okay.
I wanted to place this course into the context of the courses you’ve had so far
and the courses you’re going to have. And I wanted to give you an idea of
what’s going to be happening in this class for the next five years, okay, because I
think some of you know I’m going on a three year retreat and I wanted to
clarify that and I wanted to talk a little bit about it, okay. This is the plan for the
next five years. You’ll get a copy of this, I don’t know, you have it, okay. This
class is the first thing. February, March ‘98,these dates are approximate, okay,
give or take a month, alright. But I thought it would help you plan your
vacations and stuff like that. We’ll do this Art of Reasoning. In the Friday night
course, which already started, we are studying the first great Buddhist book to
be introduced into Tibet. It’s the first Lam Rim text and that’s by somebody
named Atisha. And we’re studying a commentary by a great scholar from Sera
Me monastery, which we located in Russia only about a month ago. And they
typed it in and shipped it over here a week ago and you’ll be getting instalments
of the translation. But this book has been missing for, since 1959. It was written
three hundred years ago. It’s a beautiful commentary to the first important book
ever written for Tibetans, to study Tibetan Buddhism. So I think it’s kind of
auspicious that as American Buddhism begins we have this book to start from,
okay. April ’98 I encourage everyone to go take retreats, have some short
retreats like what we did up in Conneticut, which was really great. May to June
’98 we’ll be studying Lojong. Lojong is a special kind of Buddhist book, they’re
usually very short, they were written about a thousand years ago, and they are
dealing with every day problems of life, you know. How to use Buddhism in
your office; how to use Buddhism with your husband or your wife or your kids,
you know, how to apply it to your every day life. And they’re very, very sweet.
They’re very short, very profound. We’ve never studied any of them in this
class. We will pick about three or four lojong texts and you’ll be studying those
in the next course. That’ll be course number fourteen. July – August ’98, I
encourage everyone to take all of July and go on retreat, one month retreat if
you can if Rinpoche has finished teaching by then, which I think he will be, okay
[schedule plans for next 5 years]
There’s another document in your notebook, which kind of, I don’t know, you
have the overview, yeah, okay. It’s a very beautiful summary of what this
course has been, okay, of all eighteen courses and there’s about five or six
supplementary courses, like how to do a mandala, and stuff like that. This is an
outline of what a geshe studies for eighteen years, the thing that’s called the
overview, okay. And we’re done, I mean the concept’s done. You’ll be finished
by the end of ’98 and you’ve covered all the things that a geshe covers, okay.
And that will be that. During the three years there’ll be courses called seminar
courses [plans]
But then I would expect each of you to get out of town and go start a Dharma
centre somewhere. Je Tsongkapa took his dearest students and like from Lhasa,
and told them to walk to eastern Tibet, a thousand miles away, and don’t come
back until you’ve started a hundred and eight monasteries. Like, Ngawang
Drakpa, for whom ‘The Three Principal Paths’ was written – that was a letter
written to this poor guy who got banished to east Tibet and he couldn’t come
back until he had finished a hundred and eight monasteries. And he did it. I
don’t know if he ever came back though.[laughter][laughs] Anyway, I’d like to
see you guys start teaching after that and then you’ll be qualified to teach after
that. And there’s no reason why not, okay. Geshe [unclear] good geshe from
that other place, Sera Je I guess it is [laughter] he grabbed me, he called me in
Boston and says, you get those Americans going, you can’t depend on Tibetans
all the time, you know [laughter]. Make a couple of geshes, start some
monasteries, get some courses going. You don’t need us, you know, get your
arses in gear, you know. And he screamed at me for like an hour, [[unclear] so I
think we should do that, alright. There’s no reason why not. Frankly, that’s all
they teach you in the monastery, okay. And there’s precious few people who
finish it. Out of a class of sixty maybe three or four people finish. In my class
two people have finished and maybe one more will finish, okay. And that’s all
you learn, okay. So that’s, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t start teaching
then and helping other people, okay.
Okay, now we’ll start the actual class and I’ll give you a break pretty soon. I
know it’s hot and try to stay awake, okay.
If you don’t know the rules of this class, you don’t have to learn Tibetan, okay. I
just put it up for the people who want to learn Tibetan, alright. You can do all
the answers in English on the homework, no problem, okay. But you should
try, you should try to learn it, okay, if you can. The Buddhist Logic tradition
comes from this guy called Shakyamuni, okay. It starts with the Buddha, 500 BC.
He started logic. He was a very good logician. He was a master debater. The
Sutras are full of stories of him wiping out other schools with, with debate. And,
and it was a popular thing in those times. It was not a joke, okay. In ancient
India, representatives of different religions, would meet before the king, in the
court of the king, and they would debate it, they would slug it out in debate for
two or three weeks. And then the king and his ministers would decide who had
given the most convincing arguments and the losing religion had to give up their
religion and join the religion of the winner. So the stakes were very high. And I,
and I, we didn’t always win, okay. I mean the Buddhists lost sometimes. And
then they would send in the heavy-duty guys and they would recoup it, you
know. But there were cases where, you know, Nalanda monastery where they
sent a light-weight monk out, he lost, it looked like we had to switch over, and
then they’d send Nagarjuna out and he would win the day or something, you
know. But it was very high stakes and even up to the 800’s and the 900’s, the
style of meditation followed in Tibet was decided by a debate of that nature.
Kamilashila from India, representing the Indians, debated Hashang, representing
the Chinese who said Oh, close your eyes and think about nothing. And it was a
very serious debate and it went on for quite some time and, and, and luckily,
Kamilashila won. And he wrote a huge book that’s in the Tengyur, two volumes
about how to meditate, which is all the basis of Tibetan meditation is that. So
even up to the beginning of Buddhism in Tibet, everything was decided by
debating, okay.
In the monastery you start debating at age, you start studying Buddhist logic at
age twelve. You learn how to write, you learn how to read, and by age twelve
you are thrown into your first Buddhism class, it’s how to debate, how to make a
good reason, how to think straight, okay. And you do that for three years with
your house teacher. Your house teacher is like a big baby sitter who has to teach
all the kids. When it reaches a certain point then they’re allowed to go and study
with the great geshes and things like that. But for three years you’re stuck with
your house teacher. Rinpoche has great stories about his house teacher and how
he tortured him [laughter] – mutually. And you study like that. Then, at age
fifteen, you’re qualified to enter the debate, the debate ground, okay, and you’re
allowed to enter the debates and start. But it’s the very first thing you study in
the monastery. The book we use, to study Buddhist logic in the monastery is
called {tsema namdrel}, okay. It was written by {Lopon Chukyi Drakpa}.
{Chukyi Drakpa}’s name in Sanskrit is Dharmakirti. I used to confuse him all the
time with Chandrakirti, okay. Don’t do that okay. Chandrakirti’s the great
Madhyamika scholar. Dharmakirti is the big Buddhist logician, alright. He lived
about, what is it, 650 AD I think. [cut] Yeah. His book in, well, at the time there
were some very heavy debates going on about Buddhist logic. The big founder
of Buddhist logic in India was Master Dignaga. He passed away before
Dharmakirti was born. Some people say Dharmakirti studied with him directly.
We don’t really know, okay. But people started to attack Master Dignaga’s
presentation of logic and so Dharma, sorry, yes, Dharmakirti came to the rescue,
alright. And he named his, it’s a defence of Master Dignaga’s idea about
Buddhist logic. And it’s name is {tsema namdrel},okay. Say {tsema} [repeat]
{namdrel} [repeat].      {tsema} means ‘valid perception’.       It’s like a correct
perception but there’s a reason to say ‘valid’. I always make the distinction like
this. I worked in this corporation for sixteen years. Me and Pelma, we used to
work on the J.C Penny account. J.C Penny would order like two thousand rings
with a quarter carat stone in it. I would have to decide if they were gonna get a
cheap stone with a black spot in it or a cheap stone with a yellow colour
[laughter]. Sometimes I would make the wrong choice based on their request,
you know. They would ask for that. They would say we want yellow colour
‘cos the customer doesn’t care, they just want something big and cheap. So, so
we would go out and buy them. Sometimes we would go out and buy the
wrong thing according to the instructions we got. Then my boss would come in
and scream at me and you know the emptiness thing about my boss screaming
[laughter]. But he would come in and scream at me and he would say, you made
a really bad decision to send them that thing they asked for. And I’d say, yeah
but at the time it was the right decision based on what I knew. You were out of
town, they asked me for that, I bought it for them, I shipped it to them. And he
said, it was the right decision at the time, but it didn’t work out, so it was stupid
and it was wrong. And I said, no, no, it was right at the time so it’s a right
decision, you know. And that’s the difference between valid and correct if you
think about it, okay. Valid perception means given the information I had it was
the best decision I could’ve made. It turned out to be wrong, okay. And that’s
the difference between a valid perception and a correct perception. {tsema} is, is
really the study of a valid perception. Based on what you know, this perception
is valid, okay. Is it right? That’s another question, okay. That’s another
question. My argument to my boss was valid is right. He said, no, what makes
money is right. [laughs] [laughter] Alright.          Okay.      {namdrel} means
commentary, okay. And Master Dig-, Dharmakirti’s famous book is called, ‘A
Commentary on Valid Perception’, okay. Valid perception here is a code word
for Dignaga’s original work, okay. So it’s a commentary on the presentation of
valid perception according to Dignaga, okay, but it’s written by Dharmakirti,
okay. It’s important to know what book you’re studying. I’ve told this story. If
you ever meet some great Tibetan lama and they ask you what are you studying
on Tuesday nights, it’s very embarrassing not to know what you’re studying or
to give the wrong name, okay. So it’s very useful to know it, okay. This
happened to me with the Dalai Lama’s teacher, His Holiness’s teacher, and I
didn’t know the name of the book. And my teacher was sitting there with me
and he was very embarrassed. I don’t want that to happen to me, okay.
[laughter] So that’s on your homework. You’re studying the basic Indian text
you’re studying, Dharmakirti, written thirteen hundred years ago, ‘The
Commentary on Valid Perception’, okay, in Tibetan. If you want to know the
Sanskrit, it’s Pramana Varttika, pramana warttika. You could read that book for
the rest of your life,you would never understand one line of it. Trust me, okay.
You need a commentary. Luckily, we have these great Tibetan commentaries,
alright. And you’re gonna be studying the one called {rik lam trul gyi deamik}.
By the way, if you’re new, all you have to know is the English, okay. We’ll
torture you with the Tibetan later, alright. By the way, if you’re just starting out,
you can catch venerable Phuntsok’s got a good class going on Friday night about
how to learn Tibetan and we have a good video series about how to pronounce
the alphabet and stuff like that. So you can try either one of those or both, okay.
But you might have to sit and copy the tapes yourself,okay.
Okay. Say {rik lam} [repeat] {trul gyi} [repeat] {deamik} [repeat]
Okay. {rik} means reasoning or logic, okay, {rik} okay, {rik} means reasoning,
the science or the art of reasoning. {lam} means a path, okay, a path of
reasoning. {trul} means a machine, okay. {trul} is the Tibetan word back in 1900
for a machine, okay {trul kor, trul kor}. {du mik} which in modern Tibetan is
called {deamik} means key or starting key. So, you’re gonna study a book
called, ‘The Key for Starting the Logic Machine’, okay, ‘The Key for Starting the
Logic Machine’, okay. Who wrote it? His name is Purbuchok Jampa Tsultrim
Gyatso, okay. He was from Purbuchok, I don’t know where Purbuchok is, like,
Idaho or something. [laughter] We just call him Purbuchok, so if you’re lazy on
your homework you can probably get away with ‘Purbuchok’, alright. [cut] This
is a very, very relatively recent Tibetan commentary. It’s an explanation of the
art of reasoning, okay, without which you’d be lost. If you try to study, we
memorise parts of Dharmakirti’s work in the monastery, and they’re totally
obscure. You need a commentary, okay. Gyaltseb Je, you can spend one month
debating one page of Gyaltseb Je’s commentary. It’s not appropriate for this
class. In the winter debates we often spend four or five days on one page of a
four hundred page text. It takes fifteen years to get through it. Nobody reaches
the third chapter. There’s four chapters, okay. The one guy who knew how to
read it passed away in Tibet last year – Yeshe Wangchuk, Geshe Yeashe
Wangchuk, okay.
Purbuchok Jampa Tsultrim Gyatso was also known as Yongtzen. Yongtzen
means the Tutor, capital ‘T’, meaning he was the teacher of [student] the Dalai
Lama. Okay, he had the position of being the teacher of the thirteenth Dalai
Lama, the last Dalai Lama. And his dates are 1825 to 1901. This is the standard
textbook used in modern Tibetan monasteries, okay, especially Sera. I believe,
yeah, Sera Je and Sera Me both use the same book which is unusual since they’re
so retarded [laughter] but [laughs] just kidding [laughs] [laughter], but I’m
getting you ready for the debate style [laughs] alright. Just kidding, okay, not
supposed to do that, except when you’re debating, okay. And it’s all in good
humour. It’s like Yale and Princeton thing, okay. And he was a very great
master and teacher of the Dalai Lama. Normally, the person who gets to be the
teacher of the Dalai Lama, is the smartest dude in Tibet at the time, okay. And
he was a great writer. I’m gonna give you one little more piece and then we’ll
take a break, we’ll take a break after that.
Why study logic, okay? I have like half an hour to sell you on the idea of staying
in this class, you know. I was expecting the drop out rate for this class to exceed
the last one, but nobody left the last one [laughs] okay. We’ll see, okay. By the
way, it’s gonna be a lot of fun and don’t worry about it, you can do it, okay. It’s
really, really fun. By the way, Gyaltseb Je said that the kindest thing Je
Tsongkapa ever did for him was to teach him this subject, you know,
madhyamika, tantra, everything else, he didn’t say anything. He said the
kindest thing that he ever did for me was to teach me about logic. Why?
Because this is the key to seeing emptiness, okay. If you learn logic well you can
see emptiness directly. It’s, it’s like a, it’s a great, I don’t know. You can be ready
by studying Lam Rim, meditating, etcetera, guru yoga, helping your teacher,
helping the Dharma, etcetera, etcetera, and then, if you study these subjects that
you’re about to hear, it triggers the direct perception of emptiness. If you’re
ready for it these, these subjects are very famous for triggering that in people’s
minds, you know. It just goes off. You wouldn’t expect it you know, you’d
think logic would be the last thing, but there’s something about, especially the
study of mental images, which is essential for understanding emptiness. So
that’s my first sales pitch, okay. It has occurred that by studying these subjects
people have seen emptiness directly, okay, especially {chi chedrak}, especially the
teaching on mental images which is an important part of the study of logic, okay.
So, so that’s the first reason to study logic. Secondly, and I’m gonna put up a
quotation by the Sakya Pandita, okay, the greatest master of the Sakya teachings
that ever lived. There are two kinds of people who study Buddhism and
Maitreya also mentions this in his text that I spoke about, okay. There are two
kinds of students of Buddhism. This is on your homework, okay. Here’s the
first kind. By the way, I’m sorry it’s uncomfortable. I’m sorry my head’s in the
way. But, I think by next week we get to go to the higher realm? [laughter]
[student: unclear] Sooner or later we get to go to the higher realm, okay
[laughter]. It’ll be more often than a blind turtle [laughter], okay.
Say, {wang tul} [repeat] {depay} [repeat] {jedrang} [repeat].
There’s a big debate in the monastery about the perfection of wisdom. Who did
Maitreya have in mind when he taught the Abhisamayalamkara, you know?
Two kinds of people; was it type a. or type b.? Okay, what’s type a.? Type a. is
{wang tul depay jedrang}. {wang} if you know the word for tantric initiation is,
means power, okay. {wang} means power [cut] [end side A]
[side B]
Okay, {tulpo} means dull, like a dull knife, okay {tulpo} means dull, stupid head,
okay,{wang tul}. You want a good word to use for your debating opponent,
there’s a good one, {wang tul}[laughter] {depa} means faith, {depa} means faith,
{depa} means faith, okay; {jedrang} means to follow somebody, or to follow
Buddhism, okay. So what this expression is saying, and this comes from
Maitreya, okay, the future Buddha and according to, well, can’t talk about it.
Anyway, this is from the future Buddha. He says, people who follow Buddhism
out of blind faith are stupid heads. And that’s the first kind of student there is,
okay. They follow Buddhism because they like the guy who’s standing up there.
He looks nice, saying nice things, who cares if it makes sense or not, such a nice
guy, you know, and he looks nice. He’s got those red robes on, it must be what
he’s saying is okay, you know, even if the next guy for next week says the
opposite, okay. And this is considered the lousy way to follow Buddhism, okay.
You don’t wanna be a {wang ngun}, okay, who follows blindly whatever
somebody says, okay. You see all these advertisements, you know, so-and-so
Lama, close friend to the Dalai Lama. There’s so many close friends to the Dalai
Lama, I’m not sure how they get time, but, is gonna teach next week, you know,
come, you know. And then people go and I, you know I met one one time, I
was like, you know, where did you study? He says, well to tell you the truth I
didn’t study, you know. So I, well, what monastery do you belong to? This is on
the phone, right. To tell you the truth I’m not a monk. And, and you’re giving
all these initiations and stuff? He said, yeah, yeah, yeah I am, you know. So I
went home and I said to Rinpoche, you know, this is crazy, this guy is claiming
to be the highest Lama in such-and-such an area, and he isn’t even a monk and
he never studied anywhere, you know, and people are running to his initiations,
‘cos they heard he’s a friend of the Dalai Lama. And he said, well, everything he
said is true [laughs]. He is a great Lama. He’s not a monk, he didn’t study and he
is the incarnation of Jetsun Dampa from Mongolia, you better shut up and not
judge people [laughter] [laughs], okay. Alright. Anyway [laughter] to [unclear]
after a Lama, just because you heard something is not good, okay [laughter].
You have to evaluate what the person is saying. You should not follow what
people say out of faith. Faith is lousy. Faith breaks down. Faith changes his
mind next week, you know what I mean? If it makes sense to you, you should
follow it. If it doesn’t make sense to you, you should reject it. Period, okay.
{depay jedrang} is not preferred method. It should be logical. It should make
sense, okay. That brings us to the second type of person. [cut]
Say {wang nun} [repeat] {rikpay} [repeat] {jedrang} [repeat] {wang} again means
power, which means mental capacity. It’s explained two ways in scripture. One
is IQ, okay, one is IQ. One is spiritual smarts. I don’t think we have a word for it
in English, okay. It’s a spiritual IQ. So {wang, wang} can mean spititual IQ and
intellectual IQ, okay. Like, if you’ve done a lot of good deeds in your life, you’ll
have a high spiritual IQ. You might not be the smartest person around in a
conventional sense, but you have {wang}, okay, you have power, mental power,
okay.
{nun} means sharp, very sharp;{rikpay} you had in that book name, means logic,
reasoning, okay, reasoning; {jedrang} means they follow that. They don’t go
after faith, they don’t run after somebody ‘cos they look nice or they have a nice
suit on or they speak nicely, okay. They say to themselves if what this guy
makes sense, says makes sense, I’ll do it and if what he says doesn’t make sense I
won’t come back, you know. And that’s considered the most, the highest
intellect in Buddhism. And that’s called a, that’s called a person of sharp powers.
And you’re supposed to be like that. Maitreya said I didn’t write my book for
those {wang tul}’s. I wrote my book for {wang nun}’s. If you wanna study my
book, you better be a bodhisattva who’s a {wang nun}, okay. Meaning, you
don’t accept what I say unless it makes sense, okay. Don’t accept what I say
unless it makes sense. And I’ll show you a quotation after the break by, in fact,
I’ll put it up during the break and you can copy it. It’s by the first, it’s by the
Sakya Pandita, who lived around, I got his dates on there. It’s around 1200,
okay. One of the greatest scholars who ever lived in Tibet and really the person
who founded the Sakya tradition as we know it, okay. Great logician and a great
translator from Sanskrit. He memorised the eight thousand verses in Sanskrit –
Prajnaparamita. He used to recite it going down the road, okay. He says the
seconf reason to study logic – what was the first reason? It really helps you see
emptiness. It’s a big shot in the arm to see emptiness, trust me, okay. Number
two: he said if you think about the survival of Buddhism in this world, which is
{tendzin}, okay. The Tibetan word {Tendzin}. Whose name is that? Like His
Holiness, okay, is called Tendzin. Tendzin means keeping the Dharma safe in the
world, okay, keeping the Dharma safe in the world, that it shouldn’t get lost,
okay. The Sakya Pandita has a very famous quotation from his logic text, which
says, the only people who are qualified to keep Buddhism safe in this world are
people who understand logic clearly, okay. People who understand how to do
logic. And this is his quotation. You don’t have to write it now, we’ll write it
during the break, okay. You thought you were going to get some refreshments.
{deta} means like that; {drup} means how to prove something; {dang} means
and; {sunjin} means destroying your opponent, okay, disproving something,
okay. You can write the Tibetan later, just get the pronunciation, alright;{rigpay}
means logic; {shunluk} means the books that teach logic, okay, the great books
that teach logic {shunluk}; {gangi shey} means anyone who understands that,
okay. {gangi} means anyone and {shey} means understands. Anyone who
understands the great books that teach you logic of how to prove things and
how to disprove things, okay, that person is a {kepa}. {kepa} means a wise man,
Buddhist master, okay; {kepa} means a Buddhist master; {deni} means that guy,
okay, that guy is a Buddhist master, alright, {deni}; {dzokpa} means totally
enlightened, okay,{dzokpa} means totally enlightened; {dzokpa yi} goes
together, totally enlightened, okay; {sangye} means Buddha, okay, Buddha
{sangye} is Buddha; {kyi ni} means of; {tenpa dzin} means Tendzin, it’s the long
form of Tendzin, what does that mean? Somebody who keeps Buddhism in this
world safely, okay, a protector of the teachings, a keeper of the teachings, a
keeper of the Dharma. So what he’s saying is, the second reason to study
Buddhism, sorry, Buddhist logic, is that if you get good at it you will really be a
person who can keep the Dharma safe in the world. The implication is, if you
don’t study Buddhist logic, if you don’t know how to reason out what’s correct
explanation of emptiness for example and what’s not a correct, what, what’s an
explanation of emptiness that doesn’t make sense, if you can’t tell the difference,
if you can’t think about it, you’re corrupting the Buddhist teachings in the world.
You’re destroying the Dharma in the world, okay. You have to learn how to
think clearly. You have to learn how to prove something. If you can’t prove
what you know to yourself then Buddhism will get corrupted in this world and it
will be destroyed. There may be Buddhist books around, there may be Buddhist
teachers around, they may be writing very beautiful, flowery books about
Buddhism, and Buddhism will be lost, okay. We need people who follow reason.
We need people who can understand why they believe something, okay. If it
doesn’t make sense to you, you should drop it, okay. If it does make sense to
you, you should drop the other stuff and follow this, okay. And, what he’s
saying is, if you learn how to prove something or how to disprove something,
then we consider you safe, you know. We consider you someone who can keep
Buddhism safely in the world and we don’t want other kinds of people, even if
they speak nicely and look nice and wear nice robes or whatever, you know.
We want people who speak truth and who can prove it in their own minds,
okay. And that’s, you must study logic. So, two reasons to study logic so far:
first one, it’s a big kick-start, jump-start for seeing emptiness. It really is, believe
me. Second one: you can’t really be a good Buddhist unless you learn how to
think clearly and prove things to yourself, okay. And you have to study how to
do that. And if we want Buddhism to stay pure in this world, which means it still
works, okay, right? It won’t work if it gets corrupted, you see what I mean? If it
gets corrupted bad enough it won’t work anymore. It has to be kept clean
which means a good Buddhist shouldn’t believe anything until it makes sense to
them, until they can prove it in their own mind. And that’s the second reason.
By the way, it doesn’t mean like some dogma or something like that. It means if
you corrupt Buddhism to a certain point it won’t work anymore, you know.
Work to do what? Oh, stop your death and suffering, how’s that? You know
what I mean? Stop every negative event that ever happens to you and stop
your own death, okay. That’s the promise of Buddhism, that’s the goal. Four
Noble Truths. One is to stop suffering, that’s the goal of Buddhism. Never to
have a lousy thing happen to you including your own death, okay. This is the
goal and at a certain point, if Buddhism gets passed down sloppily, without
thinking about it, it will lose that ability, you know. At some point, somebody
will teach it so wrong that it doesn’t work anymore. For example, if you teach
emptiness wrong in the ways that I mentioned, they don’t work, you know. It
won’t work anymore. If you want to kill Buddhism in this world, teach
somebody emptiness in the wrong way, and within a generation nobody will be
able to achieve anything. You see what I mean? So it depends on logic. You
have to study logic.
We have one more reason to study logic and we’ll do that after the break. So
please come back in about ten minutes, okay, ten to nine we’ll start.
One question, yeah.
[student] He said, can you see emptiness without studying logic and without
studying {chi chedrak}, which is one of the subjects that you’re gonna study.
You cannot see emptiness directly if you do not understand the content of {chi
chedrak}, okay. Which probably means you studied it in some life, you know.
But without knowing the content of it, impossible, okay.
[cut]
Okay, we’ll start again. Last reason to study logic, okay. And this is very
famous; this comes from the, from the scriptures. The first thing that every kid
in the debate ground learns is {nga am dang drawe gangsak gi tsu zung gi
gangsak gyi gangsak gi tsu misung te nyampar gyur tare} okay, [laughs], very
first thing that we ever learn in the debate ground. I’ll put it up for you.
This is the last long thing, okay, so have hope. [laughter] [laughs] I’ll give you a
minute to copy it. [cut]
  Okay, this is the last and maybe the most important reason for studying
Buddhist logic. And this is a very, very famous quotation, kids in the monastery
start memorising at age seven. This is one of the first things you ever have to
memorise. Say, {nga am} [repeat]; dang} [repeat]; {drawe} [repeat] ;{gangsak gi}
[repeat]; {tsu} [repeat]; {zung gi} [repeat]; {gangsak gyi} [repeat]; {gangsak gi}
[repeat]; {tsu} [repeat]; {misung te} [repeat]; {nyampar gyur tare} [repeat]. Okay,
[laughs] alright [laughter]
This is a Scriptural proof for a classical kind of logical reason. The logical reason
is called {minowa …}which means trying to prove something that you can’t
normally see, okay. Trying to prove something that you can’t normally see. An
example would be like a hell realm. You know, do you believe in hell? Are you
sure that hell exists or doesn’t exist? I mean I think that, basically, anyone in this
room who says I’m sure it does, I’m sure it doesn’t, is being illogical, okay.
You’re not sure, okay. You haven’t seen it or you haven’t seen that it doesn’t
exist, okay. I mean a good Buddhist at our level should say, I don’t know,
Buddha talked about it, His Holiness talked about it, Khen Rinpoche talks about
it, but I’m not sure. I think it’s probably true, but to be honest, you know, if I’m
really logical, I have to say I’m not sure, okay. And that’s an example of this
kind of reasoning, okay. And this is the Scriptural source that’s always used to
describe this kind of reasoning, okay. First, I’ll go through the quotation and
then I’ll talk about the context, okay.
{nga, nga} means ‘me’, me, okay {nga}; {nga am} means ‘me or’, okay, me, me
or; {nga am drawe} means ‘somebody like me’, okay. So that first part means,
‘me or somebody like me’, me or somebody like me. By the way, who’s
speaking here? The Buddha, okay. This is a direct quotation from the Buddha,
okay. And the first thing he says is, if you are me, meaning an enlightened
being, who sees every object in the universe in one instant, or if you are like me,
meaning some other Buddha; {gangsak} means ‘other people’; {tsu zung} means
‘you can judge them’, you can judge them, okay. So the first part here, oh by the
way, the {gi} at the end means ‘but’, alright, but, you know what’s coming right,
but, okay. So, so far what we have is, the Buddha is saying, if you’re me or
someone like me, then go ahead and judge other people from their appearances,
okay, {gi} but, okay; {gangsak gyi} means ‘other people’ who are not like me;
{gangsak gi} ‘people other than them’; {tsu misung} okay, {misung} means ‘don’t
judge’, okay. So that second part means, but normal people shouldn’t try to
judge other normal people, okay. If you’re me, or somebody like me who can
read other people’s minds directly, you can judge them, otherwise normal
people shouldn’t try to judge other normal people. Why? Why not? {nyampar
gyur tare}, it’s very famous in the debate ground, {nyampar gyur tare}okay,
{nyampar gyur tare} means ‘you’re gonna get in trouble’, okay, [laughs] okay.
{nyampar} means ‘you’re gonna fail’{gyur tare} means ‘you’re gonna’, okay.
You are gonna fail, you will get in trouble, you will get in hot water, okay. And
we memorise that over and over again. When you’re first studying logic, when
you first get to the debate ground, they drill it into you, {nga am dang drawe
gangsak gi tsu zung gi gangsak gyi gangsak gi tsu misung te nyampar gyur
tare}and you do it over and over again. You see these kids like standing next to
a wall, you know [laughter] and doing it over and over again, you know. And
they have no idea what it’s talking about really, I mean. This is the Buddha and
that’s all you ever learn.
It’s to prove, that logically speaking, if you’re gonna be logical, you have to be
very careful about judging other people because you cannot see what’s in their
mind, you see what I mean. You have to be very careful about judging other
people, okay. And here you have to, there’s a {ta chepa} means you have to
draw some distinctions here, okay. If you see another person beating up another
person you can judge them to the extent that you should try to stop it, okay.
Obviously. It doesn’t mean you should stand there and say, Oh Buddha said
don’t judge anybody, go ahead, mug this guy, you know [laughter] who knows,
you might be a bodhisattva. Who am I to stop you? You know, don’t be like
that, okay. Doesn’t mean that. It means it’s your duty as a Buddhist and a
bodhisattva to try to stop anyone hurting another person. You must try to stop
them but at the same time you have to reserve judgement, okay, about their
motives and their state of mind. You don’t know. And the better you get at
logic the better you will get at knowing who knows who the people around you
are, okay. You could make huge mistakes. And people have, okay. You can
judge their actions and say, killing is not good, mugging is not good, I have to
stop you. I have to try to stop you but by the way, please excuse me if you’re a
bodhisattva and you’re doing something special that’s gonna take effect a
hundred years from now, I don’t know. But, based on what I know, valid
perception, this action is wrong and I have to stop you but I don’t judge you as a
person. I don’t know, I don’t know who you are. And lots of great yogis do lots
of strange things, you know what I mean. It means don’t judge other people as
people. Judge their actions of whether they’re correct or not or whether you
should resist them or not. And if they’re hurting someone you should resist
them, but, you have to keep in your mind some logical, logically you have to
keep something reserved in your mind that, I don’t know, maybe something
special’s going on here, you know what I mean. Maybe this person is somebody
special. I, I don’t have any idea, you know. Logically, strictly logically speaking,
you have to reserve judgement from other people unless you are {nga am dang
drawe} you know, unless you’re like, can read the other person’s mind. And by
the way, you will reach a point where you can. Then you can judge them, okay.
You don’t have to be enlightened to read people’s minds. You can do it, but until
that time, you can’t judge them. Something very cool happened. I looked for
this quotation in the Kangyur and in the Tengyur. I surfed the database. We
have this database. I found it. It’s only there once. It would take you years to
find it if you went through the pages. The whole story exists in a very beautiful
book by Lord Atisha, okay, by Atisha. And collected all these neat stories from
the Sutras that existed in his day. I don’t even know if this Sutra exists now, but
in his day the Sutra was available, and there’s a long beautiful story. And so I
did, I translated the whole thing and stuck it in your reading, okay. It’s really
beautiful and they don’t teach it to us in the monastery. I’m not sure if anyone
knows about it, okay. And it’s in the time of a former Buddha, like, zillions of
years ago. And he passes away and he assigns this monk to keep his teachings
in the world. And then there’s another monk who’s very, very good monk, a
very strict morality, very good meditator. And the second monk opens a
monastery, a small monastery. And he calls all his friends and they get very
good at Vinaya, at keeping the monk’s discipline. And they get very good at
meditating. And they’re following what we would call a classic Hinayana
lifestyle. They are staying quietly, they don’t do a lot of things, they meditate a
lot, they keep their monk’s things to the letter of the monk’s vows and they are
making nice progress like that. Then this other guy shows up, the one that the
Buddha had appointed, right, and he moves into the monastery with a couple of
his followers. And, some people from the nearby town start ask him if he could
come over and teach, like come over have lunch with us and then if you could
stay and teach us something about Buddhism. So, out of compassion, he agrees
to go. And he starts to visit the town more and more and then most days and
most nights he’s gone, teaching the common people Buddhism. Teaching it to
lay people and, and trying to help them because of his bodhisattva motivation.
The first monk gets, starts to judge him, he starts to doubt his motivation, and he
starts to spread rumours that this monk is doing something strange or
something improper in town. And he shouldn’t be going to town and teaching
the lay people, he should stay in the monastery with us and meditate and
concentrate on these things here and the Buddha said that we should do that.
And here’s this monk going off to town everyday and we don’t know what he’s
doing and we don’t know where he’s going. He says he’s teaching people but
we don’t know. And he starts to spread rumours about monk number two,
okay. Eventually, the monk’s mission in the city becomes so, so successful that
he all his followers are going everyday to the city to teach all the people. And
there’s this great movement is opening up and starting to form in the town
among normal people.           And so, for the first time, the lay people are
understanding Buddhism and everyone is happy and the monks are going
everyday. And the other monk is getting more and more jealous and more and
more upset. And then, finally, he calls a big meeting of the monks and he says,
this is really bad, you know, all these monks are embarrassing us. They’re going
out in the town, they spend their time with lay people, we hereby make a rule in
this monastery that no one can go to town. And so for three months the other
monk, out of consideration, follows the rules. Meanwhile, the people in the
town are getting upset at all the monks and they’re saying, this is terrible, you
know, the monks aren’t coming anymore.                    It’s all because of this
misunderstanding and now it’s hurting us, you know, and they’re all upset. So,
eventually, the second monk moves out, starts a new monastery, starts to teach
in one city. It spreads to another city, it spreads to another city, it spreads out of
state, it spreads to several states, then the whole country is practising these
things and eventually, the whole country is being taught ways to get
enlightened, okay. The other monk is going crazy with jealousy, right, and, and
not happy at all about it. The other monk eventually died. And then the story is
that for, you can read, it’s like ten billion periods of ten million years or
something, he was born in the lowest hell. After that, he became a monk in a
certain Buddha’s lifetime but he lost his robes in every lifetime, and these
horrible results for millions of years from slandering the other monk.
Then, the Buddha says {nga am dang drawe gangsak gi tsu zung gi gangsak gyi
gangsak gi tsu misung te nyampar gyur tare}. That is where this quotation
comes from. He says, you can’t judge other people. You have to be very, very
careful about other people’s motivations. You don’t know who’s a bodhisattva.
You don’t know who’s a tantric deity. And, and that is the goal of logic, you
know. This is what we learn. This is the most important lesson of Buddhist logic.
You don’t know who the people around you are. Concentrate on your own
practice.
And then the Buddha says, look go home, don’t look around you, concentrate,
you know your own mental afflictions, you know you’re not enlightened if
you’re not okay, and, and you know you have to work on your own mind.
Don’t worry about other people’s practice. It’s enough trouble to keep your
own straight, you know. Don’t worry about judging other people’s Buddhist
practice, you know, work on your own. And this is the justification that they
give for studying logic because if you study long enough logic, you can prove to
yourself, that you don’t know who the people around you are. You really don’t
know. Does that mean you shouldn’t judge their actions? Of course not, you
must judge their actions. You don’t join a bunch of muggers because you don’t
want to judge them, okay. It’s not like that.
Here’s the punch line, okay, which they never teach you in the monastery. Lord
Buddha says, you think that good monk in those days was just anybody? Hey,
that was Buddha so-and-so who became enlightened just after that. You know,
the bodhisattva who went out among the people. And you think the guy that
got, that went to hell for millions of years; do you think the guy who lost his
robes for millions of years, was just anybody? Well, I got news. It was me.
Okay.[laughs] [laughter]
And it’s very, you know, you read it in the Scripture and you’re like, ewhhh
[laughter] it’s like, wow. He’s describing the time he spent in hell for judging
other people, you know; as a result, the karma of judging other people. And it
just makes your spine tingle, you know. The last lines of the Sutra are, ‘that was
me’, okay, ‘in my former life’. I made that mistake. Don’t make that mistake.
And they never teach you that in the monastery so I thought you’d like to have
the whole story. And, it’s in your reading.
Okay, last few minutes. Oh, I’m sorry. I’m gonna give you the first little bit of
formal logic. It’s a thirty-second video clip, okay. [laughter] That’s all you have
the attention span for left, or maybe less, okay. I’ll just give it to you in a minute.
Say, {tak si kupa} [repeat] {tak kyi tsennyi} [repeat]; {tak si kupa} [repeat] [tak kyi
tsennyi} [repeat], okay. What is the definition of a reason in Buddhism? This is
the central and the first question that you have to ask as a Buddhist, you know.
How do you define that thing called a reason, okay? {tak} means reason, alright,
{tak}, {tak}; {tak kyi tsennyi} means that’s a definition of a reason, okay, {tak kyi
tsennyi} means here’s the definition of a reason, okay, what is it? {tak si kupa},
say {tak si kupa} [repeat], {tak si kupa} [repeat]. Very interesting: anything I give
you as a reason. There it is, okay. I’ll be easy to be a reasonable Buddhist, right?
[laughter] [laughs]
[cut]
And that’s your last thing tonight, okay. The {tak} means ‘reason’, okay. {tak}
means ‘reason’; {tak su} means ‘as a reason’, {tak su} means ‘as a reason’; {kupa}
means ‘to put forth something’. When you set out your water bowls in the
morning, those of you who do, [laughs] that’s called {kupa}, okay, it means to
arrange things. {tak si kupa} means to give somebody a reason, okay. {tak kya}
here means ‘reason’ again; {tak kyi tsennyi} means the ‘definition of a reason’;
{tak si kupa tak kyi tsennyi} means, the definition of a reason is anything I want
to give you as a reason, okay. So how’s this one? It’s right to study Buddhism
because the sky is green, okay. It’s right to study Buddhism because the sky is
green, okay {…}okay, It’s right to study Buddhism because the sky is green. Is
‘the green sky’ a reason? Yeah. Why? Because I gave it to you as a reason,
okay. It fits the definition. I didn’t say anything about good reason, did I?
[laughter] So the first thing you do in Buddhist logic is study the definition of a
reason. We’ll get to good reasons later, okay. [laughter] And then we’ll get to
bad reasons, okay. But the basic schtick is that, you begin all your, what’s the
first thing you debate? What’s the first thing in a logic book? {nga am dang
drawe..} you know, that quotation. After you get passed that, they say hey,
here’s the definition of a reason: anything you want to say is a reason, okay.
And if you think about it that’s what a reason is, okay, {tak si kupa tak kyi
tsennyi] {..} Say {yu me} [repeat] {unclear…} doesn’t matter whether it exists or
not; everything in the universe is a reason. You can use anything as a reason,
okay. It doesn’t even have to exist, okay. It’s right to study Buddhism because
rabbits have twelve inch horns, okay, very famous in the monastery { … }okay,
alright. That’s the first thing, that’s the first definition you have to understand,
okay, {tak si kupa tak kyi tsennyi},very important. And that’s enough, that’s a
{tendrel},that’s an auspicious beginning to your logic study. And you have to
memorise that, okay, in the English or Tibetan. The English is in your reading,
okay. That’s {tak si kupa tak kyi tsennyi}.
We’re gonna hand out rosaries now. We got about six minutes to talk about
debating. I’m not gonna start tonight. We’ll do a little bit next week. I wanted to
give you a little background about what it feels like to debate. So you can start
handing out those rosaries. We’re gonna give everybody a rosary. They’ve
been sponsored by the rabbit’s horns [laughter] credit card [laughs] and they’re
just an offering to everyone, okay. Do you have a rosary? [student:unclear]
[laughter], okay
I mean the way you debate, I, we’ll go through it, okay. I’m not gonna do it
tonight. I’m not, but rosaries are very important. If you look in the temple at
Leon’s, there’s a guy like that, you know, and that’s Dharmakirti, or Dignaga,
there’s both of them there, but, but, rosaries have been used since ancient India,
okay. Every debater has to have a rosary so we’re gonna get one tonight. Don’t
lose it, okay. You wear it on your left wrist, you know. You can tell a guy who’s
faking it as a debater if he’s got it on the wrong arm [laughter] [laughs], you
know. By the way, this is why His Holiness always wears them. That’s a sign in
the monastery, you walk around with that it means, I’m a gun-slinger,{laughter]
okay, and they never take them off. I mean the good debaters are, you know,
it’s like a statement, you know, you want to debate with me, you know.
[laughter]
Yeah. [student:unclear]
What’s that?
[student:unclear]
Yeah, it’s good, okay. I mean, it’s why a debater uses it, because, because most
people clap with their right hand, okay, most people. But it’s very useful, okay.
It’s very common to ask the guy to count, oh count for me the seven parts of the
arya path, okay, come on, come on, come on, one, two, and you count it with
him, you see what I mean.
If he’s getting sleepy [laughter] there’s a disciplinarian and the assistant
disciplinarian who is usually your class mate which is very bad [laughter]. And
they’re allowed to whack people who are sleeping or getting lazy, okay. And
you see guys come back from the debate ground with these dots across their
head [laughs] [laughter]. It’s very embarrassing, it happened to me once
[laughter] you come back home with these dots across your head [laughter]. But
this is commonly used in a debate. That’s your only weapon in a debate, okay.
They, they, they play a gong from the top of the temple, the main temple. You
can hear it for about a mile. It’s called a {kangar}, say {kangar} [repeat]; {kangar}
means ‘sky drum’, and it’s a name for this huge gong and then one of the guys
gets up there, you know, and goes bong, you know. And the first time you hear
it, you get this, the adrenalin starts to go, you know. And they start ringing it
about fifteen minutes before the debate starts, and then they start speeding up,
you see. They’ll go gong and then they’ll wait for a minute and then they hit it
again. And then they’ll hit it every half a minute, and then they’ll hit it every
quarter of a minute. Then they’ll start going dong, dong, dong, dong, dong,
dong.. and then you gotta be sitting there in the debate ground. If you show up
late you get this [laughter]. I had a debate master who used to have an electric
cord, but these are better [laughs] these don’t hurt as much. And, and you gotta
be sitting down in the debate ground. You’re not allowed to take a scrap of
paper. You must do everything from memory, you know, everything must be
in your mind. Everything has to be ready in your mind. I remember debates
we had where the lights went out and you don’t even hesitate, you just keep
going. You can’t see the other guy and you just keep going. You’re supposed to
keep going. We had a defence one night and, and I was up there, you know, and
the lights all went out and I said, the powerful American debater has made the
lights go out, now answer the question [laughs] [laughter] and, you know,
you’re meant to use things to taunt your opponent. [laughter] It’s like [laughs]
but, it doesn’t matter you see because everything has to be in your mind. You
memorise everything. And your arguments are, it’s beautiful because later
when you, especially in America, it’s gonna be your job to reach Buddhism to
other people. There’s not gonna be any more challenging of Buddhism that’s
gonna, than is going to happen in America in the next ten years, you see.
Buddhism as a, as a belief system, as a world view, it’ll be challenged in this
country in the next ten years. Buddhism is gonna take off. It is taking off. I
mean, we sent out twelve thousand tapes so far without any, it’s just word of
mouth, you know, and, and it, thousands and thousands of people are gonna be
studying it. And it will be questioned, you know, people will question it and you
have to be ready to answer it. That’s the thing about debate gives you the
experience of being questioned constantly. And then, when you have to teach
other people, you’ll have answers ready because you went through it before.
You’re good at it already. So you go to the debate ground all you get is a little
Tibetan carpet about this size, and you set it down and you sit there. And it’s
cold, okay, I mean at night. And in my day there was no electricity and we
would just be debating under the stars. You don’t, you debate outside, in a park.
And it’s really, really nice at night. And you might go ‘til three in the morning,
{..damcha} all night, you debate all day and all night, twenty-four hour debate. In
the winter debates. And it’s just beautiful. It’s like being at a football game or
something [laughs] or a rock concert, I don’t know, but anyway, it’s really
exciting and it’s going on for the whole day and the whole night. And you sit
there. But the first thing you do when you get there is a thing called {ku-rim}.
Say {ku-rim} [repeat]
[cut]
By the way, don’t lose your rosary. If you come next time without one, you’ll
get one. [laughter]
If you didn’t sign your name please raise your hand, okay.
Okay, say {ku-rim} [repeat] {ku-rim} [repeat]. I wanna talk a little bit, we have
like one minute, about the motivation for debating, you know. And the first
thing you do when you get to the debate ground, they close the gate and, and
the new debate ground, which I designed with Rinpoche’s instructions, is eight
feet high. The wall is eight feet high [laughter] and you can’t get out and nobody
can see you, you know. They close the gates and then you’re in and you sit
down in this huge circle, maybe three hundred debaters. In the winter debates
there’ll be a thousand or twelve hundred debaters, and you start the {ku-rim}.
{ku-rim} is prayers before you debate and you will spend, on a typical night, half
an hour to forty-five minutes just praying to al these wonderful angels, tantric
angels, that you have the right motivation for the debate. That you’re not
debating for competition, you know, competitiveness; you’re not debating to
show-off. You will come to the debate ground and you will explore reality with
your friends, you see. And this is so cool, you know. You’ll explore truth with
your friends and you will get to the bottom of truth with your friends. Why?
Because then you’ll be qualified to, it’ll get you enlightened faster, you see.
You’ll see emptiness much faster. You can help other people, you know. A
typical person, you and me, how many hours in a day, you know, how many
people can you teach? How many people can you touch? How many people
can you talk to? How many phone calls can you take, you know? You quickly
reach your limit. I know, okay. You quickly reach a limit. You can’t help more
people than that. I mean there comes a logistical, physical limit. You can’t be on
the phone more than that. You can’t sleep less than that, you know. This is our
condition. If you debate it, quickly speeds up your perception of emptiness,
direct perception of emptiness. And, and quickly after that, you are, you can
reach a different kind of body, you know, a Buddha’s body. Remember the
quality of a Buddha; the quality of a Buddha, you can sit here in the Quaker
house on your chair and be appearing to every living being in the universe at the
same time. Period. And you can help them directly because you can read their
minds. And you can help them everything they need, automatically, okay. This
is the quality of a Buddha, okay. The reason to do all the wimpy little helping
that you and me do now, is that it causes that other thing, okay. And that has to
be your motivation for debating, okay. I know the word logic and the word
debating it sounds a little scary, you know. I hated logic in College, you know. I
purposely got out of that class, okay, ‘cos they’re so boring and so stupid, you
know. I did [laughs], okay. And it is, okay, if you did it that way. The purpose
of Buddhist logic is totally different. If you learn Buddhism well, if you see
emptiness directly, you can get very close to a state where you don’t have to die.
And you can understand why all the bad things happen in the world and you can
stop them for? For yourself, you see what I mean. I can’t stop them for you,
okay. I mean, I can, if I practise Buddhism very, very well, I can in this life enter
another reality. You would still see me and I would still look like a normal old
guy, okay. What I’m seeing is totally different, okay. I mean if you think His
Holiness is like a sixty year old guy who’s getting arthritis in his back and he’s
balding and stuff like that – forget it. He doesn’t look like that way to himself,
you see. What does the Dalai Lama see when he looks in the mirror? You have
no idea. {gangsak kyi gangsak gi tsu misung nyampar gyur tare}, you have no
idea what he sees. I have a feeling it’s something much different, okay. Really.
Honestly, okay. And that could happen to anyone here. And you wouldn’t look
much different to us, you see. But what you’re seeing about yourself would be
totally different. What I’m saying is that, I claim right, it’s not logical, okay, I
claim that if you study this stuff well and you debate it well, you can become a
tantric deity in this lifetime, okay. No problem. You can do it, okay. The
instructions are all there. It depends on your effort and your learning Buddhism
correctly and keeping your book, okay. Frankly. That’s what divides the men
from the boys, you know, that’s what makes you different than you were before
is watching your behaviour and changing it. You can learn all the Buddhism you
want, if you don’t change your behaviour, I promise it won’t do anything, okay.
It doesn’t, why would you expect it to do anything, right. But, if you learn
Buddhism well, you will find out that it’s true that a person can stop all the
suffering of this life, from the smallest lousy thing on the sidewalk, you know,
up to death itself. You can change it. You can avoid it. You can transform it,
you know. You really can. That puts a big responsibility on you, especially the
people in this room ‘cos you’re the first American Buddhists, right. If what I said
is true you have the potential to save people’s lives, okay. If what I said is true
every person in this room is a potential teacher and to teach other people how to
save their lives. I’m not talking meditating calmly in a corner. I’m talking going
to a realm where you don’t have to die and where you are a different kind of
being. You can do that, if that’s true. You have a tremendous responsibility.
The longer you fool around, the more people are getting hurt, okay. Every day
you lose, is many other people getting hurt, you see. And that’s the motivation
you have to have when you debate, okay. That’s the only reason we’re
debating. I’m not trying to embarrass you. I’m not trying to make you
nervous, you know. It’s not some game. It’s not some intellectual game or like
that. It’s not. It’s life or death for you and other people, okay. It really is. It
honestly is. The purpose to debate is that it quickly gets you to see emptiness
directly. It quickly gets you to your spiritual goals, much quicker than anything,
than any other intellectual way to study Buddhism. I studied in New Jersey for
eight years, every day, under Khen Rinpoche.                   We translated the
Abhidharmakosha. It took me eight years. I went to the monastery to debate
for six months. I came back and threw out everything and started over again.
You debate for a few weeks, you will learn this thing, it’s just wonderful. There’s
things that will happen in your mind that cannot happen when you sit and read a
book and they cannot happen if you sit and listen to someone teach Buddhism.
You learn to rip it apart and, and you learn to figure out what you believe and
what you don’t believe. And there’s no way that’s better than debating. So it
has to be your motivation, you know. You’re saving lives, okay. You have to
think like that. I’m not just doing it for fun. And I don’t want you, it will be fun,
but, but people’s lives are at stake.         And I’m not kidding and I’m not
exaggerating, okay. If Buddhism is true, that’s the stakes. And this is the best
way to learn it fast, you know. And it’s a lot of fun, okay. So that’s my
advertisement for the motivation. And, and we do {ku-rim}in the monastery
every Thursday night you don’t debate, you do {ku-rim} for three or four hours,
you know. And you just sit there and think about these things and that’s part of
the debate experience. And I want you to remember that. That’s my first night’s
spiel, okay. Don’t forget {ku-rim}and we’ll do {ku-rim}, okay. {ku-rim} means
you sit there and you think about these things. Why am I doing this? Okay.
And you never debate without that. There’s no debate in any monastery,
Gelugpa monastery, that doesn’t start with a {ku-rim}, you know. You sit and
you think of why, you know, why am I doing this, alright. That’s all. I wrote
out the whole {ku-rim}[unclear] for the first time it’s ever been written down.
And Khen Rinppoche helped me and some other Lamas helped me. I was
mostly wa-wa during the {ku-rims}. You know wa-wa? [laughter] Wa-wa, if the
{ku-rim}’s three hours long and you’ve only memorised five minutes of Ganden
Hlagyama [laughter] you go wa-wa-wa [laughter] [laughs]. But I just vtrid to
have the right motivation, right [laughs] okay, we won’t do wa-wa, okay. So
remember {ku-rim}and there’s a description of {ku-rim} in your reading and I
think that’s the first time it’s ever been written down the whole thing. It’s very,
very powerful prayers. In an extensive {ku-rim} we do Heart Sutra eighteen
times in a row, okay. And you’re thinking about emptiness through eighteen
Heart Sutras. That’s why it’s the only thing that I memorised that well, okay,
alright. We’ll stop there, okay, we’ll do prayers.
[cut]
[mandala]
[dedication]
The Asian Classics Institute
Geshe Michael Roach
Course X111: The Art of Reasoning