Нагарджуна, курс 3 — Мудрость Арьи Нагарджуны, курс 3: Пустота мантры (2021, Аризона), занятие 1

[Speaker 1]
Hi, welcome back to Nagarjuna. This is Geshe Michael Roach, and this is our third course covering a very, very famous book. Maybe it's the most famous Buddhist book after the Buddha, and it's just called Wisdom.

And it's by someone that we call Arya Nagarjuna. And Arya, of course, means that he saw emptiness directly. And in fact, he's so famous as a emptiness direct seer that sometimes he's just called the Arya.

He lived almost exactly 2,000 years ago. And I think there may be some interesting connections between some Christian saints, Thomas the disciple who came to India and Nagarjuna. And he really took the Buddhist teachings on emptiness after 700 years, and he really, really woke them up again.

And I think one of the signs that he's an Arya, number one is he's funny. And he's just really clever and funny when he presents things. Secondly, he really enjoyed writing and poetry, and he's very, very simple.

Okay, so I think that's also a sign that he really did see emptiness directly. He prefers to speak very simply, very clearly. It's almost like he's singing a song.

When he wrote his greatest book of all, it's called just simply Wisdom in Sanskrit, which we're going to talk about later. It's called Prajna. And I think that's another sign he's an Arya.

He just named his book Wisdom. And later people would say, oh, the root text on wisdom, or Muladharmakakartika, the verses of the root text on wisdom. But Nagarjuna himself preferred to call his book just Wisdom.

How can we see emptiness? How can I help you to see emptiness? And that little book, 27 tiny chapters in poetry, became, for 2,000 years, hundreds of commentaries were written about these simple 27 small verses.

And it really, all the emptiness teachings that you've ever heard, that I've ever heard, all the emptiness teachings in Tibet, China, Korea, Japan, they're all based on Nagarjuna's wisdom. So I thought about three years ago, I was thinking it would be a really nice break during the Lam Rim if we studied, for dessert, if we studied Arya Nagarjuna's wisdom. And recently we've been doing Medicine Buddha practices, especially because of the virus.

And I thought it would be really, really cool if we connected Arya Nagarjuna's wisdom and the practice of Medicine Buddha. I personally feel strongly that if you don't understand the emptiness of the Medicine Buddha practice, the emptiness of the Medicine Buddha himself, and the emptiness of the mantra of the Medicine Buddha, then I don't think it will work so strong. It will work a little bit.

The mantras will work a little bit. And all the different practices like meditation, retreat, saving the lives of animals, these are all powerful practices. But if you really understand the emptiness of these practices, if you understand the emptiness of saving someone's life, or you understand the emptiness of speaking a mantra, then in my opinion, the practice is a thousand times more powerful.

So we're going to go through Nagarjuna's wisdom together. And then from time to time, we'll try to connect it to the Medicine Buddha practice and supercharge, put an engine, extra booster, rocket booster on your Medicine Buddha practice. My plan was to go through the wisdom text, 27 chapters in five years.

Probably the greatest commentary of many, many great commentaries, for example, by Chandrakirti, Buddhapalita, Bhavaviveka, these great, great ancient Indian commentaries. And then Tsongkapa came along, I don't know, 1200 years after Arya Nagarjuna. And he wrote a book called The Sea of Emptiness, The Ocean of Emptiness.

And that's a great, great commentary on the 27 verses. And then even Tsongkapa is very difficult and after that, Choney Lama, Draupal Siddhu, about 200, 300 years after Tsongkapa, he wrote a funny book called A Ship to Travel Across the Sea of Emptiness. It means Tsongkapa's, even Tsongkapa's commentary is too difficult.

And we need, Choney Lama gives us a boat so we don't drown in Tsongkapa's pool. So we're going to be going through Choney Lama's explanation. I'll be using that.

And I'm translating it as we go. It's very difficult. And the verses are very, very difficult.

Without Choney Lama, I don't think we could understand Nagarjuna correctly. And so here we go. We're going to first review, this first class is a review of the chapters that we finished already.

And we did finish eight different, the first eight chapters of Nagarjuna's wisdom. And we're going to just go through those. Today, in this class, we'll go through those eight chapters and just review them together.

The first chapter is called An Investigation of Conditions. And each of the 27 chapters is called pariksha. Pariksha means an investigation or an examination or an analysis of a certain topic.

So Nagarjuna will take a certain idea. And in the first case here, we're talking about causes, what causes something else. How does a seed work to cause a tree?

So that's the first chapter, the pariksha, the examination or the investigation. And it feels like a Sherlock Holmes investigation. Like, how does this really work?

How do causes, how do seeds really create trees? And how do mantras of medicine Buddha cure a disease to cure a sickness? How does it really work?

How do conditions work? And in this first chapter, Nagarjuna goes through the four classic conditions that are presented in the Abhidharma before Nagarjuna came. So he's looking into causes.

How does a mantra cure a disease in the medicine Buddha case? How does a tree seed really create a tree? And this is the pariksha.

This is the first examination. The most famous lines of wisdom are found here. Actually, it's not even the first chapter.

It's the traditional prostration at the beginning of a book. So it's tradition to bow down at the beginning of a great Buddhist commentary, a great, great Buddhist book, shastra or sutra. You bow down to your teacher or you bow down to some holy object.

And what Nagarjuna chooses to bow down to is always a sign of what he's going to be talking about in the 27th chapter. Who does he choose to bow down to at the beginning of his book? And that verse, those verses, those lines of his first bowing down at the beginning of the book, these are the most famous lines by Nagarjuna and probably the most famous lines ever about emptiness.

So if you wanted to memorize them, this would be a good thing to memorize. Now, what's the topic as he bows down? By the way, I'm going to recite the lines for you.

GANG GIS RTEN CING BRAL BAR CHUNG RGAGS PA MED PA SKYE MED PA BYAS PA MED PA LTA MED PA DBANG MED PA RNDOR MED PA THA DE'I BRTEN MIN BRTEN GCIG MIN BRTOS PA NYER ZHI'I ZHI'I BRTEN PA RDZOGS PA'I SANGS RGYAS MA RNAMS KYIS DANG PA DE LA PHYAG BRTZAL LO GANG GIS RTEN CING BRAL BAR CHUNG RGAGS PA MED PA SKYE MED PA BYAS PA MED PA LTA MED PA DBANG MED PA RNDOR MED PA THA DE'I BRTEN MIN BRTEN GCIG MIN BRTOS PA NYER ZHI'I ZHI'I BRTEN PA RDZOGS PA'I SANGS RGYAS MA RNAMS KYIS DANG PA DE LA PHYAG BRTZAL LO He bows down to the Buddha. And it's very, very interesting.

He starts out this first verse with GANG. And that's in Sanskrit, it's YA. And it's kind of famous way to start a verse.

And it's kind of a guessing game. He goes, I'm thinking of somebody. And then he describes the person.

And then you're supposed to guess who's this person. That's a traditional Sanskrit stotra or a praise of somebody. Singing someone's praises.

I'm thinking of the most beautiful lady in the world. So blonde hair, and brown eyes, and so sweet. Guess who I'm talking about.

And then you're supposed to guess who he's talking about. So this two verses, two shlokas in Sanskrit, they are the most famous verses probably about emptiness of ever, of ever. And let's go through the meaning of them.

Let's talk about, let's break down the meaning of the Sanskrit. Sorry, the Tibetan. And we can do the Sanskrit sometime.

GANG GIS RTEN CING BDE BA CHUNG I'm thinking of somebody who was teaching about the idea that things happen from other things. If this happens, that happens. If this seed is there and it gets wet, it will grow a tree.

And if this mantra, if this Medicine Buddha mantra is here and it's done correctly, then it could cure disease or it could bring someone to enlightenment. So he's thinking, somebody taught us how things really work. Because the whole topic of this book is that things don't work the way you think.

Things don't work the way you think. And I don't know. I have a garden.

It's time to plant some flowers. I put the seeds in the ground. I water them.

I put biochar on all my plants. And then sometimes they grow and then sometimes they don't grow at all. Recently I planted three peach trees and two of them are in very good soil.

They have good water. No stones. They didn't grow so well.

One of them is in rocky soil. It's out in the middle. It shouldn't grow, but that one grew.

So it means that something's going on. It means that the things we think are causes are not causes. And things we don't think are causes are really causes.

And I will say, things that we think cause things don't cause things. Sorry. Things that we didn't think cause things do cause things.

GANG GI RTEN CING BDE BAR BYUNG Then it goes into STANG PAS'I'I KHAL and it's very important for our review, the eight impossibles. Eight different impossibles. Eight things are impossible.

For example, a seed cannot grow a tree. That's impossible. A mantra cannot heal a disease.

That's impossible.

[Speaker 2]
All right?

[Speaker 1]
Not possible. There are three... Sorry, there are eight kinds of impossible.

And in his first bowing down to the Buddha, Arya Nagarjuna gives us those eight. So here they are. BGAR PA MED PA Nothing stops the way you think.

The disease doesn't stop from the mantra, the way you think. SKYE MED PA Your understanding from saying the mantra doesn't come the way you think. BYAS PA MED PA RTAG MED PA Things don't stop.

Things aren't cut off. And things don't continue over time in the way you think they do. OM MA MED PA DRO MED PA Even when you go to sit down on your meditation cushion and then you do your mantras and you get up from your meditation cushion, the way you sit on the cushion and the way you get up off the cushion to do your Medicine Buddha mantras, even that's not what you think is going on.

If you don't even know how you're sitting down, how are you going to understand how to do the mantras? Much more complicated. Even when you put your bottom on the cushion, you don't really know what's happening.

And so if you sit on the cushion and do mantras, how are you going to know what's happening? So you have to understand the emptiness of the mantra, the emptiness of the Medicine Buddha, and the emptiness of sitting down and standing up. OM MA MED PA DRO MED PA THA DE DON MIN DON GCIG MIN Things are not separate from each other.

I'm not separate from the camera right now. And I'm... But I'm also not, not separate.

All right? I'm not separate. But I'm not, not separate.

And what does that mean? Is the seed separate from the tree? Is the mantra of Medicine Buddha separate from curing disease or reaching enlightenment?

Are they separate? Or are they the same thing? If they're separate, do they touch?

If they're the same thing, then why do you have to do the mantra? Because it's already enlightenment. Okay?

So that's a big question. SPROS PA GNYER SHES ZHIG BSTAN PA SPROS PA here means we tend to project our wrong ideas onto other people. The big example, right, is the husband in the kitchen.

We come home from a hard day at work. We walk in the kitchen peacefully. We're not in a fight.

And then suddenly the husband starts acting strange and saying things. And then you're like, wow, I didn't do anything. And he seems unhappy at me today, but I didn't do anything.

So that's an example of SPROS PA. SPROS PA means you're making up a story about your husband that you didn't do anything. That's called SPROS PA, a story that you made up about your husband.

The truth is, as you know the story, you yelled at your kids last week, right? You did something last week. But you made up a story about your husband.

That's called SPROS PA. SPROS PA NYER SHES ZHIG BSTAN PA Nagarjuna says, this person that I'm thinking of, who he hasn't identified yet, I'm thinking of a person who taught us how to shut down those fake stories about your husband, or your wife. There's something who taught us shanti, how to get to the peace, which is shutting down your stupid stories about your husband.

RDZOGS PA'I SANGS RGYAS And then finally, in the second half of the second verse, he says, guess what? I'll tell you who it was. RDZOGS PA'I SANGS RGYAS MA RNAMS KYIS BSTAN PA The totally enlightened Buddha, who is the highest of all teachers.

That's who it was. That's who it was who taught us how seeds really make trees, who taught us why husbands are yelling, who taught us why medicine Buddha mantras work. This is the tantala, the fully enlightened Buddha.

The greatest of teachers, MA RNAMS KYIS BSTAN PA And in DE LA CHAGS BSAL, I bow down to this teacher. The English translation, and the English order will be reversed. I bow down to that highest of teachers, to the fully enlightened one, who teaches us to reach that peace where our fantasies about how things exist are put to a final rest.

I bow down to the one who taught us that things happen in dependence. Nothing ends. Nothing begins.

Nothing stops. But nothing ever lasts forever. Nothing comes.

And nothing goes. No two things are different, nor are any two the same. So there's the beginning of the book.

If you're going to die today, at least you heard the most important part of the book. That's the first verse. And really, if you have time, you should memorize it in your own language maybe.

And by the way, it doesn't matter what language it is. The important thing is to learn it and have it singing in your head. All right.

Then let's go through those eight impossibles quickly. Here's the first idim. Here's the first picture.

Nothing can end. If you do do Medicine Buddha mantras, don't expect your physical problems or those of your loved ones to end because nothing ends. It's not possible for something to end because you did mantras.

Now that sounds very negative. It sounds like Geshe-la is telling you, forget doing mantras. It's not that.

The way you think the mantra works is wrong. And if the way you think about the mantra, how it works is wrong, it will affect how the mantra works. Will the mantra work on its own?

To some extent, the mantra has a power. But if you understand how it works, it will really work. So first of all, and it's very interesting, there's a big debate.

Nagarjuna doesn't say nothing starts and nothing stops. He says nothing stops and nothing starts. And there's a big argument why he starts with stopping instead of starting with starting.

And you guys have to think about it. For some reason, he's in the mood of negatives. You got the clue?

It's empty. Something's not there. Stop thinking like that, and then you can start thinking like that.

All right. And then he talks about how things can't begin and like that. How they couldn't last forever, how they could come, how they could go.

All right. That's pretty much a summary of the first chapter. And again, to teach this book carefully would take about 20 years.

So we're going to try to like jump across the river on the stones of the main ideas. Second chapter is called An Investigation of Going and Coming. Drog-ong gi tapa, incidentally.

And the theme is, look, if there's no me and there's no mine, then who comes into this life and who goes to the next life? If there's no me, then who came into this life and who goes out of this life? Who goes to the next life?

So the second chapter is an investigation of, if there's, according to the opening lines, there's no coming, there's no going. Well then, who comes into this life and who goes out of that life? Who goes out of this life?

And as you may remember, and by the way, I encourage you to go back and look at the earlier segments on the Knowledge Base, probably, right? If you weren't there for the first eight chapters, then I really encourage you to look at the videos for the first eight chapters, because this book is deep. And if you don't have a good foundation in the earlier chapters, you're going to have trouble in the later chapters.

You're going to have trouble in the first chapters with all the preparation, but you're going to have more trouble if you don't prepare. All right, and you will remember that we were talking about, the whole discussion in chapter two was based on three parts of a path. And we'll show a picture here of walking, right?

Walking along a path. And there's this idea, okay, that there's a part of the path that you already walked on, and there's a part of the path that you're going to walk on, and then there's a part of the path between those two where you are stepping now. So how long is the part you already walked on?

And how long is the part you're going to walk on? And how big is the part you're walking on now? And maybe it's so thin that it's not there.

Where's the line between where you already stepped and where you're going to step? How big is that line? And you're like, Geshe-la, who cares?

Who cares? Well, you're going to be doing mantras for medicine, by the way, right? You're going to start the mantra, you're going to say OM, and then you're going to say swaha or something at the end.

And so there's going to be a start to the mantra, a part of the mantra you already said, and there's a part of the mantra you didn't say yet, and there's a part of the mantra that you're saying no. But it can't exist without the start of the mantra and the end of the mantra, but the start of the mantra stopped already, and the end of the mantra isn't come yet. And if the mantra that you're saying is halfway between those two, and one of them doesn't exist, or both of them don't exist, well, how can you be saying a mantra, okay?

So that was chapter two. If you cannot answer that question right now, go study chapter two again. All right, let's look at chapter three, all right?

And this was our... By the way, the first two chapters we covered in the first Nagarjuna course. And then now here's the second Nagarjuna course that we did.

And then after that, we're going to start this course, which is course number three. And my plan is five years. We can get through this great, extraordinary book in five years.

We will do about 15, 15 classes each year. And so I think in about 75 classes, we can finish the book, okay? Something like that.

And anyway, if you have time, you should go learn it. We could go study Chandrakirti, and then we could go study Tsongkapa. That would be a long story.

But these five years of five courses should give you a deep understanding of emptiness. And then you take that understanding, and you use it for your medicine Buddha practice, and you use it for your life. All right, chapter three was an investigation of the powers.

And this power means indriya, means your eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, okay? Your sense powers, mainly your sense powers. And also other powers of your mind, okay?

And this is one of three chapters, chapter three, chapter four, chapter five. They present topics that Lord Buddha talked about in the early stage of his teaching, in the first turning of the wheel, like Abhidharma, basic Abhidharma. And it's famous that in his early years, Buddha didn't deny anything.

He just said, let's learn about the powers. Let's learn about the elements. Let's learn about the five parts of a person.

And nowhere did he say they don't exist. That was in the second turning of the wheel. So remember the three turnings of the wheel.

First turning of the wheel, look, you got these sense powers, mental powers. You got these five parts of a person. And you have these other parts of you called elements, the chemicals that make you up, or the elemental forces that make you up.

And nowhere in the first turning of the wheel did Lord Buddha obviously say they didn't exist, or they were empty, or something like that. So the next three chapters, three, four, and five, we're going to bring up three topics that Lord Buddha covered early in his career, in the days when he wasn't talking about emptiness. Then suddenly, I think he fell down, he hit his head on a brick, and he started saying the heart sutra and the dharmakaya sutra, nothing exists.

And then all the students got confused. And the whole third turning of the wheel was the students, confused students, asking him what the heck's going on. Did you hit your head or something?

Okay, so the next three chapters treat basic Buddhist topics, which I thought were safe, but they're not safe. They're also all messed up. They're also crazy.

And that's a theme of Nagarjuna. Nagarjuna wants you to understand that there's a basic problem with how you see the world. There's something going on that you don't understand.

Why? You spend 30, 40, 50 years trying to make your life work, make money, have relationships, have good health, be a happy person. You struggle, struggle, struggle.

And then somehow it just doesn't work. Didn't you notice yet? Didn't you notice yet?

People do yoga. I have a friend that does yoga all the time. They're having a hip operation soon because the yoga messed up their hips.

And then, wait a minute, the yoga was supposed to make me healthy. Yeah, I know, but it doesn't work like that. The mantra made me nervous.

Yeah, it happens. Well, why doesn't it work? Well, that's not how...

Mantra doesn't work by itself. Mantra works because of something else. So we're going to take the basic, basic facts of life.

And Nagarjuna says, look, something's wrong. People who exercise every day go get hip surgeries. And then there's people who don't exercise every day, like Pachi, who look great.

So how does that work out? What is that? So we're trying to look into this.

Fishy, something's fishy. And in American English, fishy means smells bad. And it means something's going on.

Like I just bought a cafe. And not just. I bought a cafe almost two years ago.

And I'm supposed to go down to the county office, the local tiny government office. I'm supposed to ask, please, I want to add a new door on the bathroom. And then the guy signs it and says, okay, add a new door.

And it's taking me almost two years to get him to sign the paper for the new door. And then I start thinking something's fishy. Maybe this other restaurant guy is paying him not to give me a license or maybe he wants a bribe.

I don't know what's going on. And we say something's fishy. Something's fishy means something's weird's going on.

And the gardener says, everything's fishy. Everything about everything is fishy. Didn't you notice that the people who do yoga go get hip operations and the people who eat all day, like Tim, look great and thin.

Isn't there something going on here? Do you think maybe? So Nagarjuna's methodology is to say, look, something's weird.

Something doesn't work the way you thought it would. Some people eat all day and they look great. Some people eat like carrots all day, once a day.

And then they got this COVID tummy to fight with. I don't know. Something's fishy.

All right. All right. So chapter three, which we're already coming.

And it's talking about how do the sense powers work? Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Which came first, the eyeball or colors and shapes?

And there's a big discrepancy. Something's fishy. Nagarjuna says, look, something's fishy.

Something's fishy about the idea that there's a bottle of orange liquid and your eye, Geshe-la's eye is already sitting on the couch. And then Geshe-la's eye looks at the orange. And something's not right.

Something's wrong about Geshe-la's seeing. And by the way, here we go. If Geshe-la's eye came before the orange juice, then we couldn't call it an eye because it's not looking at anything.

It's not an eye until it looks at something. So you can't say Geshe-la was sitting on the couch with his eyes and he turned the eyes to the orange juice and then he saw the orange juice. Geshe-la's eyes were working before the orange juice was there.

You can't say that. Why? It's not an eye until it looks at something.

If it's an eye before it looks at something, then your nose is also an eye because it doesn't look at something either. It just doesn't make sense. I'll say it again.

And Nagarjuna, you got to say it like 10 times. Was Geshe-la's eye on the couch before he looked at the orange color? And Nagarjuna says, no, are you crazy?

And you say, no, no, I was on the couch and then I picked up the orange. Come on. You saying your eye was an eye before you held up the orange?

Yeah. The eye was waiting and then the orange came. Yeah, well, what's an eye?

An eye is something that sees things. But it wasn't seeing anything before you picked up the orange, so it wasn't an eye. Don't you get it?

But then after you picked up the orange, the eye's already gone. Duh. The orange came.

There must have been an eye before. After you saw the orange, the eye was already gone. Let's put it this way.

The orange made the eye a seer. So the orange came first. The orange came first.

Then the eye came later. Yeah, but if the eye wasn't there yet, who saw the orange? Nagarjuna says, don't you get it?

Something weird's going on. All those yoga guys are getting hip operations. All those people doing medicine Buddha mantras all day, they're also getting sick.

What's going on? He's asking us to think about it, starting with you. Okay, chapter four.

I mean, one of the first great teachings of the Buddha is the five parts of a person. Five heaps, right? So there's five parts to you.

Your body, your capacity of feeling, your capacity of discrimination, all the other parts about you, all the other stuff, all the other parts of Tim. That's like me. I try not to sneeze when I'm sleeping so he doesn't wake up.

But I'm like... Okay, anyway. And then fifthly, your mind, your raw awareness.

So look, Buddha never said, Nagarjuna, that they were empty. So what's that all about? You say they're empty.

And then Nagarjuna says, look, if I discuss the five heaps, the five parts to you, it would take a year. Let's just talk about your physical body, okay? First part.

Pachi's arm, Pachi's ear, Rebecca's mouth. Let's talk about your physical. Let's, in the fourth chapter, which is called an investigation of the five parts of a person, he doesn't bother investigating four of them.

He says, let's get your body straight and then we can talk about that. And we got this lady looking at her arm. The causes that made her arm, which you can say is skin, or chemicals in the skin, they weren't causes until the arm was there.

You can't call something a cause until the result. When you see a result, you can say something is a cause. Oh, look, somebody got better.

What was the cause? They were doing mantras, medicine Buddha mantras. But you can't talk about the causes of good health as causes until the good health comes.

Therefore, they must be the same time. Mantra, you should get, if you do a mantra to stop cancer, then before you finish the first mantra, the cancer should go away. If things work like that.

So he's saying, look, try to understand the things that made your arm, didn't make your arm, because it's not until the arm is there that you can say they were causes. Until the result comes, you can't call something a cause. Until fire, until smoke comes, you can't say there's a fire there.

You can't. The smoke indicates the fire. The arm indicates the causes of the arm.

Until the arm is created by the chemicals in the skin, you can't call the chemicals in the skin causes of the arm, because there's no arm yet. And if the arm's not there yet, the result's not there, if the result's not there yet, you can't call anything causes of the result because the result doesn't have causes yet. So that's the fourth chapter.

If you feel confused, you're in the right place. If you're starting to doubt your mantras, you're in the right place. You should doubt your mantras.

Come on, didn't you notice? Not everyone who says, Medicine Buddha mantras have been said for 2,000 years. All those people died.

Duh. Then there must be something else going on. There must be something else that makes a mantra.

All right. By the way, not all those people died. Probably a lot of them didn't die, but we don't see it.

We can't see it. All right, chapter number five. An Investigation of the Elements.

The investigation stuff. An Investigation of the Elements. And these are SA CHU MED LU, earth, water, fire, wind.

And it's very common to say, oh, here's fire, by the way. There's fire in her hands that helped create her hands. And then she's also feeling a fire.

So, and these are not some stupid Ayurvedic thing from 2,000 years ago. It's not like that. For example, nowadays, in physics, we would call it inertia or gravity or bonding forces.

These are the elemental forces. They are not... It's not that Nagarjuna thought there was some fire inside your arms.

And by the way, Nagarjuna was a master of the elements. He was an alchemist. He was famous for making gold.

He got in trouble for making gold, which is a long story. He knew how chemicals worked. He knew how the elements worked.

And he knew the basic forces of physics. The forces that bond things together, the forces that tear things apart. He understood them.

Gravity and inertia. He understood them. So, if there are certain forces that are underneath everything, if this bottle cap has some fire in it, if it has some temperature, it's not at absolute zero, right?

So it has some temperature. It also has some fluidity. It can stretch a little bit.

It has water, it has fire. If it has those things, well, which came first? And by the way, it's here, in the investigation of the elements, that Nagarjuna really gets into how do you define things?

How do you decide something is a fire? Well, what's your definition of fire? I say fire is an energy that causes heat and is typified by burning.

I say fire is an energy that causes heat and is typified by the burning of things. Okay, that's what I say. Okay, that's a definition of fire.

What? What's the definition of fire? In Saksaytsepa, in Tibetan, quickly, you say hot and burning, okay.

Okay, so which came first? The definition or the thing you want to define? Well, the thing you want to define has to come first.

Otherwise, you don't know what you're defining. I wasn't talking about bananas. I was talking about fire.

Well, okay, tell me what you want to define first. Okay, bananas, fire. What's your definition?

Hot and burning. Which came first? Fire.

Which came second? Hot and burning. How can you have fire without hot and burning?

Are you crazy? Come on, the definition came first. Then the thing came.

Hot and fire. Hot and burning, okay. Then you say what you're defining, bananas.

No, but Geshe-la, there's no connection between bananas and hot and burning. Well, there's no connection between fire and hot and burning. It's just a word.

So, you can't even define the things that make up the bottom that you're sitting on. Okay, so how can you use Medicine Buddha mantras? Come on.

How are you going to use a mantra? All right, chapter six. Don't forget, we're trying to review eight chapters that we had already.

And really, if you try to start with me on course three of Nagarjuna, at chapter nine, if you try to start there without doing the first eight chapters, you're going to get more confused. But anyway, it'll be fun. By the way, in the Mahayana theory, confusion is a technique.

Confusion is a technique. And it's recognized as a technique. The teacher will sit down and say, let's see, it's like, I don't know, December.

Let me confuse my students today. And the goal of the teacher at that moment is that nobody in the class knows what's going on. And then they will get frustrated and they'll work harder or they'll quit.

So you can get rid of the not serious students and save time. And then the serious students are going to work harder because they're so frustrated and angry because they don't understand. So confusion is a tool of the great Buddhist teachers like Nagarjuna.

So if you get confused, it's on purpose. If you don't get confused, it's because I gave a good explanation. Chapter six is an investigation, pariksha, of desire and who feels the desire.

Let's talk about desire and who feels the desire. And by the way, by now you should be smelling or feeling that there's, in English we say, a method to Nagarjuna's madness. He is not just throwing out topics randomly.

When you get, now you're a third of the way through this book and you should start asking yourself, what's the connection between this chapter and last chapter? It seems like Nagarjuna is jumping around like crazy. And Geshe-la and Choney Lama took you through the logic of all 27 chapters in the first course.

So don't complain. It's not that Nagarjuna is jumping around to different topics. He has a plan.

To try to see his master plan is a great achievement. If you can get a feeling for Nagarjuna's master plan, for wisdom, then really you're starting to understand how mantra works. All right, so the picture here is, I tried to find a picture of desire.

This is the one that Geshe-la has, the desire for churros, or ponzi, or yo chow, or donut. By the way, I didn't find a good donut shop in Sedona. The best one in the universe is in the Guadalajara Airport.

[Speaker 2]
Where is it?

[Speaker 1]
You got one? All right, I might have to move to West Sedona. Okay, anyway, so which comes first, the desire or the person who feels it?

That girl has desire for the donut. So who came first, the girl or the desire? She's a girl who desires.

Right. So can we call her a girl who desires before she has desire? No, you cannot.

Do you have to wait till after she has the desire to call her a girl with desire? Yeah, you do. Okay, so what made her desire?

What is she desire about? It's a donut. So the donut has to come before the girl, right?

Before the girl's born, the donut should come. Why? Because she doesn't have desire till the donut is there.

The donut has to be there first. Then you can have a girl who wants a donut. So by definition, you got to have a donut before you have the girl who has the desire for the donut.

Right? Right. But if the girl...

But the girl can't desire the donut till the girl's there. So the donut has to come after the girl. Come on, try to understand what's going on.

How can the girl desire a donut if the donut's not there? If the donut's already there, how can you have a girl desire a donut? And if you have a girl who desires a donut, the donut must have come first.

But if the girl doesn't come first, then how can there be a donut that she has desire? She should feel desire. She should be...

She should have mental afflictions in her mind. And then she sees a donut and the mental affliction wakes up, right? So which came first?

All right, that's chapter six. Chapter seven. This is called an investigation of starting, staying, and stopping.

And the other guy says, look, if things start, then they're not empty. If things stay, then they're not empty. If things stop, then they're not empty.

Why? Because they have causes. How can they say they're empty?

If things don't start, if things don't start, how can they be empty? If things start, how can they be empty? Empty means nothing about them, but they have causes.

They must have causes or they can't start. Causes must be inherent in a thing for it to start because a thing can't start without causes. And especially desire cannot start without its causes.

So desire must have its causes. Therefore, desire is not empty. Nagarjuna, you say everything is empty, but it's not.

Why? It has an inherent thing. What's the inherent thing?

It doesn't happen until it has its causes. It's inherent in that thing. Desire cannot come up unless the causes come up.

That girl's not going to feel desire, I don't know, for a punch in the nose. There has to be something nice there. Then you can have desire for it.

There has to be a seed, then you can have it. All right, we're looking at a foot of a person about to run a race. And where did the race start?

When did the race start? Was it when they shot the gun? Or was it the first part of the gunshot noise or the second part of the gunshot noise?

Or was it the final part of the gunshot noise and then the gunshot went off and then the people ran? Okay, so where did the race start? And you cannot find a place where the race started.

You think this guy's at the starting line, but there is no starting line. Look, his finger is on the starting line or not on the starting line? And how far between the finger and the starting line?

What about the other side of the starting line? Where is the starting line? And the guardian says, come on, something's fishy.

All right, chapter eight, an investigation of agents and actions. Doers and things that they do. Doers and the things that they do.

Let's investigate doers and the things that they do. Well, what's the big example, Geshe-la? Karma.

If there's no me, if there's no Michael, then who makes the karma? If there's no Michael, if there's no me and mine, Nagarjuna, then there's no karma. Why?

Because Michael has to be there to make karma. So according to you, what? There's no karma?

Why? There's no Michael. I didn't say there's no Michael.

You did say there's no Michael. You said Michael never started. Did Michael come without starting?

Yeah, Nagarjuna says you can't find the starting. Okay, then there's no Michael. Okay, there's no Michael.

Well, then there's no karma, okay? Yeah, there's no karma. Well, then why did you bow down to the Buddha who taught karma at the first birth?

Are you crazy? And by the way, it's not BS. It's deep.

It's important. If you understand it, your mantras will work. And if you don't understand it, maybe you get a little power out of mantra because of your faith, but you won't get the full power.

You'll get like one millionth of 1% power out of mantras if you don't understand how it works. How does a mantra work? How does karma work?

How does action work? When did the action start? Who did the action?

What action did they start? When did the action start? Did the person during the action come first or the action came first?

If the action didn't come before the person who did the action, how can you call the person who did the action a person who did the action because there's no action yet? Something's fishy. And it's not just crazy talk.

There's a reason why this book survived for 2,000 years. And there's a reason why hundreds of people, hundreds of great people wrote commentaries. There's a reason.

There's something important about this book. All right, now last thing. Oh, by the way, I have a mom and a daughter baking a cake.

The mom and the daughter who are making a cake, are they bakers right now? No, they're not bakers. Nothing's been baked yet.

Give me a break. They're not bakers. They're just people with weird hats on.

They're not bakers yet. There's nothing baked. Until there's something baked, you can't call them a baker.

All right, got it. But how can you have a baked thing without the baker? The girl and her mom cannot be bakers until the cake is baked because until then there's no reason to call them bakers.

But the cake can't bake itself. Somebody has to come and bake the cake. So the baker has to come before the cake.

No, no, no. The baker, I just told you, the baker can't come before the cake because the baker's not a baker until they bake something. Yeah, but I just told you, if they bake something, there's got to be someone to bake it before that.

There has to be a baker before a baked cake, right? No, no, no. You can't have a baker before a baked cake because until you have a baked cake, the baker's not a baker because the baker didn't bake anything.

And it's not a joke, okay? And if you're going to use the Medicine Buddha mantra to stop cancer, then you got to understand this. Which word in the mantra fixed the cancer?

The first one or the last one? And which mantra was it? Number 10,000 or number 9,000?

Which mantra worked? When did it work? What do you mean mantra?

There's no mantra until something happens. Otherwise, it's just a sentence. You can say banana, and if nothing happens, it's not a mantra.

You can say, om mani padme hum. And if it doesn't do anything, then it's not a mantra, is it? A mantra does some miracle thing.

Until there's a miracle, you can't have a mantra. But if a miracle doesn't happen, you can't have a mantra either. Okay, got it?

All right, now last thing, we have a few minutes left. This wisdom text of Nagarjuna is a great place to learn a little Sanskrit. I call it, what's it called?

Get to know Sanskrit or something. So if you want to learn some Sanskrit, which is what you're going to talk after you become a Buddha, so you better work on it now. Let's learn a little Sanskrit.

This is the perfect book. The verses are short, sweet. If you want to learn Sanskrit, in the monastery they'd say, oh, just memorize the book.

It's not that hard. If you get in the habit of memorizing, you can memorize. ,GANG ZHIG RTEN CING BDE BA'I PHYIR, ,RGAGS PA MED PA SKYE MED PA, ,CHAD PA MED PA LTA MA MED, ,GRO BA MED PO'O MED, ,THA DA'I BRTEN PA'I BRTEN CING MED, ,RDZOGS PA'I SANGS RGYAS MA RNAMS KYI, ,DUG PA DE LA BRJAG TU LA, Something like that.

Okay, you can memorize it. You can do it. All right, so let's learn a few Sanskrit words.

And here's the Sanskrit words that we already learned in the first eight chapters. Okay, Tim, you got it for me? We're going to get to know Sanskrit.

And the first word you should learn is the name of the book. And it's very embarrassing for your teacher when somebody asks you, what are you studying? You say, I don't know, but I've been doing it for three years.

Then Geshe-la feels embarrassed. So what book are you studying? Prajna.

Say Prajna. Prajna. Prajna.

Prajna. So the J is not an English J. It's a DZ.

The Russians are right. Jnaya. Jnaya.

Prajna. And then there's a long A. The last A is a long A.

The Tibetan is shirem. It's a little bit of an E sound, shirem. You don't say shirem.

Shirem. Shirem. All right.

The Sanskrit word, we're going to learn to deconstruct the Sanskrit word. We're going to learn how to break down a Sanskrit word into its parts. And then we're going to learn cognates, which is?

Yeah, related modern words. Okay, so pra means to come in front. It comes in the English words proud, proud boat, front of a boat, forward.

So pra means in front. It becomes like supra, super, super good? Super, super good?

Okay, so pra here means super. And super comes from pra. Then we have the root.

When you see that little square root sign, it means a Sanskrit root, jnaya. And that means to know. That's why there's a K in the English word know, because there used to be a jnaya, jnaya.

And that came in to the English word know, or gnostic, or ken. Is it beyond your ken or not? Meaning your understanding.

So jnaya means to know. The Russians, you've got the perfect verb, jnaya. Yeah, jnaya.

Russian is much closer to the original Sanskrit because it's closer to Greek. Okay, last thing to say about wisdom, it has a feminine ending. Long A, prajna, prajna.

And generally, wisdom is considered a feminine aspect because it gives birth to all kinds of good things. All right, let's do one more Sanskrit word and we're done with the class. Yay!

I'm sorry the classes are so long and I'm not sorry. You should sit there. Okay, say pariksha.

Pariksha. Pariksha, okay. So that means an investigation.

And you've got to know this word if you're going to read the 27 Investigations, 27 chapters of the book called Wisdom. The book called Prajna has 27 parikshas. Pari means all around, like the perimeter.

Generally, A in Sanskrit becomes E in English. So pari becomes peri, like perimeter, periscope. So when you get in a submarine and you look all around the ocean, it's called a periscope.

Pari, all around. Iksha means to see. It's an ancient verb, to look.

And there's a German word, auka, which comes from that. And then that came into English as ocular and even the word eye. So the word eye comes from iksha.

The eyeball, eye comes from aug, comes from iksha, which means to look. So when you look all around something, that's an investigation, a pari, iksha. Okay, pariksha.

So we're going through parikshas. So try to learn those few Sanskrit words. So far we have prajna.

Wisdom, the name of Nagarjuna's great book. And pariksha, which is crucial for the book. It's an investigation of different ideas.

We are investigating, especially why does the Medicine Buddha mantra work. And if you want it to work better or stronger, then understand its emptiness. Try to understand its emptiness.

If you really understand its emptiness, the mantra can make you into a being who can jump from world to world in a few seconds, planet to planet in a few seconds and help billions of people each time. If you really understand the emptiness of the mantra, it can make you a Buddha. Okay, cool.

See you in the next class. And we'll start our new chapter, nine.