Нагарджуна, курс 4 — Мудрость Арьи Нагарджуны, курс 4: Тайна глав (2022, Аризона), занятие 1

[Speaker 1]
Hi, this is Geshe Michael Roach and back to the Nagarjuna Sessions, Arya Nagarjuna's teaching called Wisdom, just called Wisdom. And I think the title of the book kind of reflects Nagarjuna's style. He loved to write things short and sweet, very poetic, very, very short, and a little bit mysterious.

In fact, we're going to call this series The Mystery of the Chapters. And why we're going to do that is that this first class is a review of where we've gone so far. We've been through three sessions of the Nagarjuna teachings so far.

There are going to be five sessions total. And the three that we've gone through, we have covered 17 chapters of the total of 27 chapters. And I don't know if you've been following it.

Every time I go back to prepare for the class again, I start to wonder, why are the chapters in this order? First of all, it's kind of unusual to write a book with 27 chapters, where some of the chapters might have, I don't know, 20 verses. Remember, it's poetry, right?

And then some of the chapters are like two verses or three verses. So that's the first confusing thing. And then people throughout the centuries for 2,000 years, almost 2,000 years, they've struggled with, why did he write the chapters in this order?

Because it's hard to see what's the connection between the different ideas he's presenting. It's kind of difficult to see any clear progression. Each of the chapters by itself is a beautiful, beautiful teaching.

And some of the chapters obviously hang together. There are groups of chapters, two or three chapters that are obviously meant to go together. But there's no clear flow through the 27 chapters.

So Tim Lauenhout and I, we had this idea. Choney Lama himself, whose commentary we are following, he also struggled, obviously, with this problem. And he kind of cheats when he explains the flow of the chapters.

He makes up a flow and then he fits the chapters to the flow. So when he explains the flow, it's out of order. Like the first chapter comes halfway through or something.

Like, it's strange. And he doesn't really tell you that. And he says, here's the logic to Nagarjuna's, the most famous book ever written on emptiness, except for this famous sutras, like Heart Sutra or Diamond Cutter Sutra.

It is the most famous book ever written on emptiness. And it's not apparent what's the meaning of the flow. So we decided to have a special challenge for all you guys who are listening to this course.

And we're going to ask you to get into teams of three or four people each. I think it'd be cool if the teams were from different countries. We'll figure that out when we show you the rules.

But each little team, three or four guys, three or four people, they try to figure out why is the book presented in this order? And then they present their reasoning or they present their flow suggestion. Each team will do it separately.

We'll sit down and watch all these teams try to explain why. Was Nagarjuna just drunk? Or was he having ADD?

Or is there really a deep, deep reason behind the flow? And normally with these great, great ancient books, there's a reason why they do anything. There's always a reason in the background.

And one of the most interesting things in my life is to try to figure out what they were thinking about. What was he thinking about when he put the order in this order? In fact, yesterday I was teaching the Diamond Cutter Sutra.

And it's the same question in that sutra. And if you study it carefully, if you look at it for a long time and you think about it, you meditate on it, you can see a flow. You can see a divine flow in that sutra.

And I challenge you guys to do the same with Nagarjuna's wisdom. We'll have a little contest and we'll ask you guys in teams of three or four to make your presentation about what you think is the order. And I really encourage you to meditate on it.

And maybe that's why he messed up the order, is because he wanted us to think about it. And then by accident, we get to think about the book. Maybe that's why he did it.

So by the way, nobody can present that. That's my presentation. It's that he messed it up on purpose because we would have to think about it.

But what I'm hoping is that you and me will have to think about the order and we'll meditate on the order. And that's a real meditation on emptiness. So we'll tell you more about that challenge as we go along.

This first class is a review. We've been through 17 chapters. They're called chapters.

What are they really called? Does anybody remember? Yeah, takpa in Tibetan or pariksha in Sanskrit.

But what does it mean? Yeah, an examination or... I don't know, I came across this translation.

Well, I thought of a translation called investigation. So there are 27 investigations of different ideas. And each one investigates a different question.

And this is also Nagarjuna. He loves investigations. He loves to dig into something and see what's the logic behind something.

So really, there are 27 chapters which are each called an investigation. And I'm going to review with you the first 17 investigations. And by the way, I'm going to give you a clue.

When you present your idea of the order of the chapters, I'll make your life easier. Some of the chapters hang together in clumps. It's kind of hard to sit down and think of the logical flow of 27 different things.

But really, it's only about 12 or 15. Some of the chapters obviously belong together. And I'm going to review those with you today.

And so that will cut down the amount of work you have to do. You don't have to look at 27 different connections and see what's the flow. I think you can do it with about 12 or 15, okay?

Different connections between the flow. So I'll help you with that. Now, when I'm going to review the chapters, I'm going to use this famous section from the beginning of Choney Lama's commentary.

And to me, it's a section that I keep coming back to because I keep wondering, why did Nagarjuna go to that? And why did he go to that? Why did Arya Nagarjuna skip around like that?

What was his logic? And obviously the question bothered Choney Lama as well. And he gives an answer.

He says, here's the flow. Here's the logical flow of the 27. And then he gives it.

But he gives it out of order. He changes the order to make it logical. He cheats.

So I'm going to do the same thing today. I'm going to cheat and use Choney Lama's order. I'm going to teach you, I'm going to explain to you what he thinks each chapter is about.

And I'm going to take his order and put it back in order. Like he does the first chapter after the second and third. Like he mixes them up when he explains the logic.

I'm going to put them back in order. What we should come out with is a nice review of all the ideas we've had so far, out of order. Choney Lama put out of order.

And so I'm not even going to try to explain why. Why does he go to chapter two after chapter one? Why does Nagarjuna go from this topic to this topic?

I'm just going to give you Choney Lama's mini explanation of each chapter by putting Choney Lama out of order. I'm going to present Choney Lama in Nagarjuna's order. And then it doesn't make any sense anymore.

But at least you'll get a nice review of each chapter. And then it's your problem. It's my challenge to you.

And it's the kind of challenge as a teacher, those of you, I think most of you will be teachers in your life. And it's the kind of challenge that helps you as a teacher. It makes the students part of the process.

It makes the students part of the team that's trying to figure out the book. And that's the nicest way to do a commentary. That's the nicest way to have a teaching, is to ask your students to help you with a sticky problem.

And then the interchange between the teacher and the student teaches the students and teaches the teacher also. And that's just a healthy thing. And you can learn a lot as a teacher from the students' ideas.

Some of the ideas obviously are completely dumb. Just kidding. But they're all interesting and they're all stimulating and they stimulate your brains.

And you all come out with a better understanding of the book. And maybe, I mean, maybe Nagarjuna wrote the chapters and then put the names in a jar and mixed it up and took them out one by one. Maybe, I don't know.

Okay, all right, it's possible. Okay, let me start with the title of the book, which to me is exquisite. The book is called UMMA TSA'O BA'I SHES RAB GYI RNAM SHES RIGS PA'I RGYAL TSOG RGYUD PA'I THU ZING That's the first line, section one, Tim.

UMMA TSA'O BA'I SHES RAB GYI RNAM SHES By the way, these are all my notes and things like that. Thank you for getting that already, Tim. I know you're extremely busy already.

Let's go through the different words here. UMMA, as you know, means middle way, Madhyamaka. Basically, if you think about the kitchen example and your husband yelling at you when you get home, suddenly, there's two extremes in the kitchen.

One is that he's yelling at you because he had a bad day or he's yelling at you because he's hungry or something like that. Some cause for yelling at you, which is not your fault. So if you believe that the husband is yelling at you for some outside reason that's not connected with you personally, then that's one of the extremes.

That's like a ditch on the side of the road. And we don't want to crash our car into a ditch. My particular road, I live on a dirt road.

The state and the county, they don't pay for my road. We pay for it ourselves. So we have a big ditch on either side.

It's totally unsafe. And drunk people, once in a while, they just fall off. Their car falls off.

We don't get sued because it's a private road. We tell people you're not supposed to drive here. So think of a ditch on one side.

Is this extreme idea or this extremely wrong idea that the reason your husband is yelling at you is not connected to what you did in the past? That's one extreme. What's the opposite extreme?

You guys want to guess? If he's not coming from himself, he doesn't exist at all. And there's a famous comment about the second extreme is that you can't go to the second extreme without a bad explanation of emptiness.

So if someone explains emptiness to you and at the end of the explanation, you feel like your husband never existed or doesn't exist, and therefore you have every right to ignore him, you're going to get into another kind of trouble. So middle way means thread a middle way, thread a middle path between those wrong ideas that the husband's not my fault and that if he's not my fault, he doesn't exist. There's no husband in the kitchen who's not not my fault.

Okay, got it? All right, so that's the middle way. RTZA BA means root text, MULA.

And it means the root text or the most important basic classic about the subject of emptiness. And a lot of people include those two words into the title, but they don't belong in the title. They are just a subtitle.

So the real title of the book is simply SHES RAM, PRABDZUN YANG, Wisdom. And isn't it like Nagarjuna to name a book Wisdom? And try to think of it like that as you learn it, as you go through it.

Yes, it is the root text on the middle way, but Nagarjuna wanted you to think of it with elegant simplicity, which seems to be the mark of samaryas, just wisdom. He just calls it wisdom. SHES RAB KYIS, RNAM SHES means an explanation.

Someone's going to give us an explanation of the root text on the middle way called Wisdom, Wisdom. And that's by Choney Lama. So this RNAM SHES means a commentary on the meaning of Nagarjuna.

And then comes the... By the way, everything so far in Tibetan is the subtitle. In English, you say main title, colon, subtitle.

In Tibetan, you say subtitle, colon, main title. So the real name of the book comes next, which is RIG PA'I RGYA MTSOR GYUG PA'I DRU ZHING. Say RIG PA'I RGYA MTSOR GYUG PA'I DRU ZHING.

Okay, DRU ZHING means a boat or a ship. What's a RNAM DRU for $110? RNAM KHA'I DRU, RNAM KHA'I DRU.

An airplane, a ship that goes through the sky. Okay, so DRU, it's cute, right? By the way, DRU means a triangular shape, meaning the prow of the boat.

So DRU ZHING, who's keeping track of the money? I don't know. We'll have Ellie go through the recordings.

Okay, JB.

[Speaker 2]
$10 for two?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, $10 for two. So DRU ZHING means a ship. GYUG PA is avatara, right, in Sanskrit.

And I wanted to talk about GYUG because GYUG PA normally means to enter or to engage in something. But when you're talking about a journey across a wide space, GYUG PA takes on a special meaning. And it means like almost a point of entry.

Okay, like what? Portal, yeah. What's going to be your portal?

Okay, what's going to be, what's the port of exit? Is it Los Angeles or is it Guangzhou? Where are you going to, where will you step into the ocean?

See, it kind of means that where will you set off on your journey across the ocean? It's called GYUG PA, avatara in Sanskrit. Okay, all right.

And then he says to the ocean, RGYA MTSOR. And then he calls the ocean RIGS PA, which means it can mean logic, or it can mean reasoning, or it can mean clear thinking. Okay, now there's a couple of puns going on here.

RIGS PA'I RGYA MTSOR, the ocean of reasoning is what Tsongkapa called his commentary to wisdom. So Tsongkapa wrote a separate commentary to this book, Wisdom, which he called The Ocean of Reasoning. And so really, there's a pun here, or there's a joke here.

And Choney Lama's saying, look, Tsongkapa wrote a book called The Ocean of Reasoning to explain the Garjuna. But in my opinion, if you try to use just that book, you're going to drown in the ocean of reasoning. It's very funny.

And he's like, you need a boat. You need my commentary to Tsongkapa's commentary on the Garjuna, or you're never going to be able to swim to Guangzhou. So you need my ship.

It's kind of cute. He doesn't make a big deal about it. He doesn't mention it.

But those in the know, you know he's talking about that. And it is talking about a few other things. What's the other things?

Did Avatara strike any chord in you guys? Avatara. There's two famous avatars, Bodhicharya Avatara and Madhyamaka Avatara, which is Chandrakirti's great explanation of the Garjuna.

So he's also making another pun here. Chandrakirti avatared you, and I'm avataring you too. I'm going to get you into the book.

I'm going to get you off on your trip. And jukpa often means, avatara often means to cross the ocean. So there's a specific meaning of avatara.

It's a clever use by both Tsongkapa and Choney Lama to refer secretly to Chandrakirti. Chandrakirti's explanation of the Garjuna is the greatest book ever used for emptiness teachings after India. So after India in Tibet, the greatest book ever is not considered Nagarjuna necessarily.

It's Chandrakirti's explanation of Nagarjuna. Chandrakirti lived about 350 years later, something like that. Now there's another pun here.

Just so you, in case you want to know, and we could do this all day, but we will try to get through the book. RIGS PA, which means logic, or it means reasoning. But this is not a normal reasoning.

This is a secret reference to RIGS SOGS GRUGS, the six books of reasoning. The six books of reasoning. Who wrote them?

Nagarjuna. Wisdom is only one of them. Nick just finished translating one of them called the 60 Verses.

We got the String of Precious Jewels, for example, Ratnamala, very, very famous, very popular. So we have six great books on reasoning. And that in itself is kogyur, it's not evident.

Is it just a book about reasoning? Is it a logic text? Is it a pramana text?

And they say, no, it's not. It's STONG NYID KYI RIGS PA. STONG NYID KYI RIGS PA What's that mean?

Reasoning for emptiness. Reasons to prove emptiness. And that in itself is another reference to a famous teaching by Lord Buddha that says, great students, intelligent students, they want RIGS PA THA YED.

There's the same word, right? RIGS PA THA YED THA YED means they want infinite explanations of emptiness. A good Buddhist student, a sharp Buddha.

In fact, the measure of a sharp Buddhist student is one who wants many explanations of emptiness. They're asking, okay, I got that one. I understand the one in many argument.

I got that one. I got the cause argument. Do you have any other arguments for emptiness?

So truly great students. And the mark of a WANG NON, of a sharp student, highly intelligent student, as far as emptiness, is that they are craving more explanations of emptiness. They're begging for more explanation of emptiness.

And the kind of student who cannot be satisfied and wants more explanations of emptiness is pretty much the kind of student who's going to see emptiness directly. I mean, it's identified that way. So how do we respond to people who say, oh, this is all too much talk.

This is all too much logic. This is all too much. Well, it's kind of like, yeah, that's who you are.

It's actually an insult to a Buddhist student, disciple, to say they don't want more teachings or they have enough teachings on emptiness, or they're tired. They want to go off and think about the void. And it's considered a fault in a student.

If they're not hungry for more kinds of reasons for emptiness, then we would say they need to learn more so that they learn enough to know they haven't learned enough. And that's our lineage. And it didn't start with my teacher.

It didn't start in Sedona. It started with Nagarjuna. And it started with Lord Buddha.

Lord Buddha, how many sutras and tantras? 990 survived. They say there were tens of thousands, but 990 direct teachings survived and have been input by the ALL extraordinary effort to save the ancient books.

They saved all 990. They are all input. They're all free online.

And God bless John Brady and Asian Legacy Library. So we have to appreciate chances to learn more reasons why things are empty, why things have emptiness. And that brings me to a very great topic is that the Diamond Cutter Press and the Mixed Nuts, which means the crazy translators who belong to the Diamond Cutter Classics Translation Group, they just put out a new book, thanks to the hard work of Venerable Udpala, Venerable Jigme and Rosa Van Kreeken.

They just put out Emptiness Meditations book, a book about emptiness meditations, written by Choney Lama again. And it's, how many is it? It's 58 proofs of emptiness.

Sorry, 38. 38 proofs of emptiness. 38 different ways to meditate on emptiness.

And if you're going to be a sharp student, an intelligent student, you got to get that book. Now, just packing 38 emptiness meditations into a book is a kind of cruelty. If you don't teach people shamatha at the same time, if you don't give people the tools to do the meditation on the 38 kinds of emptiness, and you just hit them with the 38 arguments for emptiness, and you don't give them the tools to develop the meditative concentration that you need to go deep into these emptiness meditations, then I would say that book is not complete.

So we had a great inspiration. Choney Lama inspired us. He said, join this with a shamatha teaching.

This is vipasyana. This is emptiness meditations 38. Join this.

Go get yourself a good shamatha teaching and join it to these meditations so that you can reach the meditative state you need to really meditate on these proofs of emptiness. You're going to need another book to study how to meditate on these emptiness teachings. So we had an inspiration.

We put, and who inspired us, was Nagarjuna. Nagarjuna wrote a book called The Stages of Meditation. Bhavanakrama.

He wrote a book called The Stages of Meditation, The Steps, The Stages of Meditation. And it's an extraordinary, sexy, sweet, extended poem about the connection between emptiness and meditation. Then, about 500 years after him, a great Buddhist teacher called Kamalashina, he said, I like this Nagarjuna poem.

It's a great poem, but it needs a little more practical detail. Like how do you set up your meditation seat? How do you set up your altar?

What's the common problems that you're going to bump into if you try to meditate? He said, we need something more structured. So he stole the name of Nagarjuna's book.

And he wrote a book called Bhavanakrama. And then he had to go to different parts of India to teach it. And he even went to Tibet to teach it also.

And he even taught it to Chinese from central China. So you kind of got three different versions of Kamalashila's Stages of Meditation, the name he stole from Nagarjuna. And those three versions, you can say one for Chinese, ethnic Chinese, ethnic Tibetans, and Indians.

And we still have all three. We, all three have survived. And we even have the Sanskrit from one of them.

So we took Choney Lama's suggestion. And in the Emptiness Meditations book, you have Nagarjuna's Stages of Meditation translated. And then you have Kamalashila's first, I think it's the, I believe it's the first, but maybe the third.

But one of his three presentations where he stole the name. And it's a very practical guide to meditation. I'm not done yet.

Pabongka Rinpoche, how many years after Kamalashila? 12, 12, basically a thousand years after Kamalashila. Well, no, that's too much.

1,200, something like that. He took Kamalashila's presentation, put it in his lam rim following the example of Jetsamkabba. And he made a beautiful practical presentation on how to use Kamalashila's meditation to read Nagarjuna, to meditate on Nagarjuna.

So we translated that and threw it in the book. And then Pabongka Rinpoche's student, Trijang Rinpoche, who was my teacher's teacher, he carved an incredible poster called The Stages of Meditation. He stole the name from, it's called Kumbha Japa Latuk.

The thief coming home at night after stealing the TV set out of the guy's house, ran into, he got mugged on the way home. The thief, the mugger hit the thief. Okay, Japa Kumbha Latuk.

It means, Trijang Rinpoche stole the name that Pabongka stole from Kamalashila who stole it from Nagarjuna. They all use the same name. Why am I telling you that?

If you really want to meditate on these emptiness teachings that you're getting, then I suggest you get that book. It's called Emptiness Meditations. It's also by Choney Lama.

It has the sweetest teachings on how to meditate, which are too difficult. And you really need someone who has done a lot of meditations. The ideal combination would be a human being who's still alive, who can introduce these steps of meditation to you and guide you through the meditation, how to develop shamatha, and then get to the deeper meaning of vipasyana or emptiness.

And so we're very fortunate that John Brady, the director of ALL, Asian Legacy Library, and his wife Connie O'Brien, who's the director of YSI, Yoga Studies Institute, at the request of people all over the world, they have agreed to write a book of meditation or a series of instructions that will become a book about how to do the major emptiness meditations with a big emphasis on the technique for the meditation and leading into a technique of retreat. So they both finished three-year retreat, the Great Retreat. So I think it's going to be very sexy.

We got Nagarjuna's book on emptiness wisdom. And then we got Nagarjuna teaching you the steps of meditation. And then we got Kamalashila making those more practical.

And then we got Pabongka making them even more practical. We got Chidjar Rinpoche making those more practical. And then we got the O'Brieys teaching you how to do it in the modern world.

Nagarjuna, Kamalashila, these guys didn't live in the world of the internet and the airplane and the car, the automobile. And we're so lucky that we have Jon and Connie to do that. So I encourage you to follow those meditations and those videos and the book as they come out online.

Okay, let's get back to, I can see, guess what? So let's go back to the title. Let's wrap up the title.

A Ship for Taking Off Across the Ocean of the Different Explanations of Emptiness, which means I'm offering you a ship to cover wisdom. I'm offering you a ship to understand the meaning of this extremely deep ancient book, which is the mother book, TSA BA, MULA. It's the mother book of all emptiness books.

So that's the title. We're getting an advertisement for the mother book, How to Cross the Ocean of the Mother Book of Emptiness. And that's what we'll be doing in the next class when we start getting into the different chapters, the topics of the different chapters and going through those different chapters and finding out what's emptiness all about according to Nagarjuna.

Okay, we'll see you in the next class.

[Speaker 2]
Thank you.