Нагарджуна, курс 4 — Мудрость Арьи Нагарджуны, курс 4: Тайна глав (2022, Аризона), занятие 3

[Speaker 1]
Hi, welcome back to the Nagarjuna Series. And we're now in class number three. And we're ready to attack the chapters.

We're ready to get into the six chapters of the 27 chapters, which we're going to cover in this particular session of Nagarjuna Teaching, session four. This first chapter we're going to cover is chapter 18. And as I mentioned earlier, we're going to do six chapters, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23.

And pay close attention to chapter 18. I'm going to give you the names of these six chapters just to whet your appetite. And then we'll go into them.

By the way, I hope, as I mentioned these six chapter names, that you are already in the mood to guess what's the connection. And if you're like me, you're going to hear the six names and you're going to say, I don't see exactly how one would flow into the other. But that's not my problem, that's your problem.

Okay, here we go. Chapter 18 is called An Investigation of the Person and Things. An Investigation of the Person and Things.

And most of you know this classic division of all emptiness into the emptiness of Michael and the emptiness of things. Or sometimes you can say, the emptiness of me and the emptiness of mine, meaning all the things around me and the other parts of me. So you can say, now we're going to investigate the emptiness of the person.

And then sometimes you can say things in the universe. Sometimes they specifically say the parts of Michael. And some sophisticated commentators will say the universe as one of the parts of Michael because Michael perceives the universe.

So really the universe becomes just another part of Michael. And I wanted to point out that this chapter we're going to start with, chapter 18, it's a really, really popular chapter. So I would say, as I mentioned before, chapter 18 and chapter 24, which we're going to cover next session of Nagarjuna Teachings, 18 is extremely popular.

And you've heard me talk about it. You've heard many teachers talk about this emptiness of me and the emptiness of my parts. It's an extremely important emptiness.

Why? Because it's the first link. Misunderstanding me and misunderstanding my parts is the first link of the Wheel of Life.

It's called, what's the technical name, the strange technical name of that? Jigtsokpa Dawa. The View of the Perishable Assemblage.

And it's a special kind of misunderstanding of the world which triggers all our personal suffering. So it's one that you should learn. Okay, all right.

So I actually had some mixed nuts help me out, especially Wordsmith and Nick Lashaw. And I said, check all the chapters of the 27. Tell me which are the most quoted chapters in the last thousand years of commentary by the great Tibetan writers.

And they said, yeah, this chapter 18 is a very, very popular chapter. And the only one which is close to it is chapter 24. 24 is an examination of the four higher truths, the four Arya truths.

And that's going to be actually the single most popular chapter of all of them. So we'll get to that next term. But in this term, we're starting with chapter 18, which by itself is then probably the most important chapter of the whole work.

So get yourself ready. Get your thinking cap on for chapter 18. Chapter 19 is an investigation of time, past, present, and future.

How does that flow from the emptiness of me and my universe is an Einstein question. So you guys are supposed to think about that. From the investigating the emptiness of Michael and Michael's world, Michael's universe, we go directly to investigating the nature of time itself.

And we included a lot of those ideas from the 19th chapter in the DCI presentation of time management. Because there are ways to modify time. There are ways to stretch time.

If you want to get more things done, I encourage you to take that course, the time management course of DCI. I think it's level 11. I think so, yeah.

Okay, good. Okay, chapter 20 is a very sexy chapter. My teacher would say, oh, the other chapters aren't sexy.

No, they are, but this one's really sexy. It's called an investigation of how causes and conditions come together, how they converge. And there's an expression there called, what's it called?

The ultimate convergence, consummate convergence of causes and conditions. What's it mean for causes and conditions to come together in a perfect way? And what are the implications of the perfect coming together of causes and conditions?

Shouldn't that trigger a result immediately? Once you get all the necessary causes and all the necessary conditions, you have a flower seed, then you have fertilizer, warmth, water, time, gardener. Then shouldn't that consummate collection of causes and conditions immediately trigger a result?

And where's the emptiness there? Okay, that's chapter 20. Chapter 21, once you talk about, and all we've talked about so far in the first 20 chapters would be how things happen, then wouldn't it be natural to talk about how things die?

Yeah, how do things die? How do things pass away? Oops, I just gave you a connection.

But that's up to you to, what do you call it, to explore it. How do things occur and then pass away? Chapter 21.

Chapter 22, why it jumps in here, an investigation of Buddhas. And wow, that's cool. You didn't talk about Buddhas pretty much in this whole book.

And then suddenly, after investigating time, et cetera, you jump off, Mr. ADD, Nagarjuna, you jump off into the emptiness of Buddhas. What's that all about? Where's the connection?

We're going to explore that in chapter 22. Chapter 23, really interesting to explain how this flows from the last chapter because chapter 23 is dedicated to examining the mistake we make in our life, the mistakes we make in our life. Chapter 23 is pretty much dedicated to mistakes, especially in perceiving things.

Not understanding the emptiness of things. So again, it's up to you guys to explore the flow. I'll give you the six chapters again.

18, person and things, the emptiness of Michael and his universe. 19, we're going to investigate time. 20, when causes and conditions come all together into what I like to call a consummate convergence, perfect convergence of causes and conditions.

How do we look into the emptiness of that? How could that not have potency inherent within it when all the causes and conditions are assembled? How could that not have some inherent power?

Because things always pop up right after that. Chapter 22, we'll look into those gone thus, the tagata. Sorry, 21 is how things occur and then pass away.

22 is the ones gone thus. Sorry, okay. And then 23 is an investigation of error.

All right, like in the chapter numbers. Okay, all right, good. All right, here we go.

Each time we do a class together, now starting today in this class, I would like to teach you three important Sanskrit words. They say that all Buddha speak Sanskrit after they become enlightened. And they say that the syllables of the Sanskrit language have a deep, almost inexplicable effect on your chakras, on your mind, on your body.

Somehow, Sanskrit language has an immediate effect on your body and mind. So I thought we could talk a little bit about the important words in each chapter that we cover. And if you are going to read the Sanskrit, we're very fortunate that the Sanskrit for this wisdom book still exists.

We can still read the Sanskrit. It's a wonderful place to memorize Sanskrit, especially the opening two verses. And it's a wonderful place if you want to learn Sanskrit, to learn it in the way that Nagarjuna used Sanskrit, which is probably one of the greatest authors in Sanskrit.

So we're going to explore, we're going to have an investigation of three Sanskrit words during each class. And these are words that are important for that chapter. Here's the first one today.

I want to talk about the word atman. Say atman. Atman.

Atman means dark in Tibetan, which means a self or a self-nature. You probably heard the word Mahatma Gandhi, which means the great being or the great self, meaning Gandhi himself, Mohandas K. Gandhi.

So atman means self or a self-nature. I like the parts of this word. I think it's very sexy.

The ARA, the initial long A, used to be a short A. And sometimes a short A will change to a long A at the beginning of a Sanskrit word. So it used to be atman.

And this initial A in a Sanskrit word is called the privative A in Greek. It survives in Greek. And it means not.

So when an A comes at the beginning of a word in Sanskrit, it can mean not. And that survives in English in words like apolitical or atheist or apathetic, meaning don't care. And you see an initial A meaning not.

The root Sanskrit tam, T-A-M means to be separated. And so atman, the word for self and the word for atom means inseparable, a coherent, single, unitary soul. Soul or self of a thing.

And atom means, A-T-A-M means indivisible particle. Cannot be split. Once you split an atom into smaller particles, it loses its elemental identity.

Then it's no longer an identity. It no longer can be, it no longer has unique characteristics that other atoms don't have. So A-T-A-M means that, unsplittable.

Atman means a soul. And when you put atman in a sentence, the N drops off. When you use it as a soul, then it's atma.

Another example of that is yogin, which means a practitioner of yoga. And then when you use it in a sentence, what's it called? The noun, as the noun of a sentence, it loses the N.

It becomes yogi. A practitioner of yoga is a yogi, but the original form is yogin. So you might see atman as atma, and like in Mahatma Gandhi.

And the classical example of the use of the root tam is in this picture that you see here. This is a classic stone church, stone temple in Eastern Europe. And typically they had a wall, a stone wall would separate the village from the church or temple.

And then those structures became called temple, the set apart, the place which is set apart. So that's a use of the root tam. The temple is built on that root also.

So atam or atma means a real self, a solid core to all things. Once you say it that way, do things, does Michael and does Michael's universe have a solid core that's independent of my perceptions or independent of my actions towards others, independent of my kindness degree, the amount of my kindness, that would be atman. That would be a solid core to Michael, which is independent of how Michael treats other people.

If the world doesn't come from karma, if the world doesn't, if my life, if the quality of my life is not determined by how well I treat others, then atam. Then I'm an atman. Then I'm a self-existent self and I'm not affected by how I treat others.

So that's one word I'd like you to learn in the Sanskrit. Now, I promised you three, right? The next one is skandha.

Skandha, which means in Tibetan, pumbol. And in English, when we describe a person, we say the body and mind. In Buddhism, we say the five parts, the five parts of a person.

And each of those parts in classical Buddhism is not called part. It's called a heap or a pile. And the Abhidharma says, SPUNG DANG SKYE DGOS RIGS KYI DGOS PHUNG PO SKYE BYAS GANG RNAM YIN The reason we, why do we call, why don't we just say body and mind?

Why do we say the five piles of a person? Is that each part of a person, in Western terminology, the mind and the body, they also have multiple components. So we call, we don't say body and mind.

We say a pile of multiple component groups. Where the word skandha comes from, if you trace Sanskrit back to older roots, which are called Indo-European roots, there's a root skand. And that's the root in English for scatter and shatter.

So you've got this idea of a scattering of leaves, meaning each part of my body, I'm sorry, my whole body and my whole mind is made of multiple smaller parts, smaller components. In that sense, my body and my mind are both piles. In classical Buddhism, we don't say body and mind.

We say the five components of body and mind. And mind has four components and body has one component. So we have a physical side of us, one component, composed of many parts, scatterings.

And then we have the four mental components, which is your general awareness, your tendency to feel at all times, night and day, your tendency to discriminate, this is good, this is bad, this is tall, this is short, this is blue, this is green. And then the other parts of your mind, classically about 50 other parts of components of your mind, they are divided out in Buddhism to five skandha, five piles or five heaps of things which you consist of. It's important in the 18th chapter, which is a discussion of the emptiness of the person and their parts, because this is the most typical division of parts to a person, is the five parts.

In the West, we say body and mind. When I say five heaps, five skandhas, five parts of a person, I want you to think body and mind. That's like a perfect translation into Western thinking, body and mind.

Does your body have a core? Does your mind have a core? Do body and mind together, as Tim, have a core?

An unchanging core, an atman. All right, did I promise you three words? Do I have a third one here?

No, just two, okay. All right, sorry about that. I'm going to go back to the beginning of the chapter.

He says, when you talk about, when you start your examination of emptiness, which is what he's doing with the 18th chapter. Now he's specifically starting our journey into emptiness itself. He says, let's proceed in five steps.

Let's proceed in five steps. And generally, I'm not reading you the commentary because it would take a few years. But when I see a part of the commentary, which is particularly sexy or interesting, or will help you understand emptiness, then I'll pause and I'll just read straight from the commentary.

So that's what I'm going to do now. DANG PO LA SNGAR When we examine, how do you get into the idea that things are not themselves? How do you first enter?

How do you first take off into this idea that a thing is not themselves? And he says, five steps. If you want to explore how things are not themselves, let's look at it from five different points of view.

Number one, DE KHO NA NYID LA GZUGS TSUL I'm going to describe to you how you first get into emptiness. He calls it here suchness. Same thing, tattva.

I'm going to explain to you how you enter into suchness. First thing. Second, LUNG DANG RGYAL PO'ANG LUNG DANG RGYAL PO'ANG looks, look, I know Buddha talked about the parts of the person.

I know the Buddha talked about solid, apparently solid powers of a person. But look, I'm not contradicting what he said about people in the First Turning of the Wheel. I'm not contradicting that.

What we say, when we say Michael and Michael's parts are not coming from Michael and Michael's parts, what we mean by that is clear if we can show how we are not contradicting what the Buddha said when he first started to teach. He talked a lot about things as if they were solid and if they had their own identity, as if they had their own identity. And basically, we're just going to show that in the beginning of his teaching career, Lord Buddha talked about things as sort of concrete things because he was warming up to get to tell you why they're not concrete.

He was just warming up. LUNG DANG RGYAL PO'ANG We will work out these seeming contradictions between the later teachings on emptiness and the early teachings on the parts of a person in which they seem to be so concrete. Third topic here, if you really want to get into emptiness, DE KHO NA NI LA RGYI BA'I RIM PA What are the proper stages for introducing these deep ideas to a student?

You can't just sit down and say, hey, you're emptiness. You're just made of emptiness. We should rather have a strategy.

What's an intelligent, effective way to introduce emptiness to another person? If you have tried to talk about emptiness with your family members, for example, you have immediately encountered this problem. There are skillful ways to start to talk about the meaning of emptiness.

For example, in the kitchen. And there's ways that you shouldn't start talking about emptiness, which will just confuse people. So the third step here is, what are skillful ways, what are skillful strategies for introducing people to emptiness?

I love the next section, which is DE KHO NA NI RGYI BRTZE NI If emptiness itself is empty, does it have any defining characteristics? Does it have any special features which are unique to emptiness? And it does.

And they are really sexy. I really like them. So he's going to talk about the defining characteristics, the special features of emptiness itself.

We tend to think that if emptiness means nothing, it shouldn't have special characteristics or typical features. But it's quite the opposite. Emptiness has many features or characteristics which are typical of it.

And Nagarjuna's explanation of those characteristics is really, it's intriguing, very intriguing. Okay, fifth, BRTZEN DANG NGES PAR GRUG DGOS PAR BSTAN PO And isn't it fitting that the last section in our introduction to emptiness should be, well, how are you going to improve your life by understanding emptiness? BRTZEN DANG NGES PAR GRUG How are you going to put this emptiness into a practical application in your life to have a more successful and meaningful life?

So isn't that a wonderful final category that we'll be discussing? Okay, you learned this big idea, this big theory of emptiness, but how is that going to improve your life and the lives of other people? Okay, so there we go.

Here we go, now down to, I have a picture for you here, okay, of a lady on a swing, I guess. Yeah, people tend to think, I don't know, I saw this picture and I thought, oh, this is perfect. People kind of think that their relationship to emptiness, they wouldn't, you wouldn't say, I have a personal relationship with emptiness.

It sounds kind of weird. It's like this lady's boyfriend is the son or something. And the fact is that there are ways in which you can have a relationship to emptiness, almost a personal, intimate relationship with emptiness.

And that's a big part of the chapters we're going to cover. How can you start to have a personal, a meaningful personal relationship with emptiness? We'll be going through that.

Okay, and then he says, let's start off on that first, if you remember the first category, it was called DE KHO NA NYID LA SBYUGS TSUL. How should we enter emptiness? Anybody want to tell me the special implication of the word SBYUGS?

It's the same one as starting off on a boat across the ocean, right? Avatar. So how should we get started on our journey to emptiness?

What are the first steps we're going to have to take? And then he says, oh, those first steps, they come themselves in two parts. The first steps you're going to have to make to dig into emptiness has two parts itself.

And normally I'm not reading you his whole outline, which is really a long story, how Choney Lama organizes Nagarjuna, which it's extremely beautiful, extremely helpful, but it would take us a year or two. And I am charting it. I'm keeping a separate chart of the, like, what do you call that thing?

A mind map of the outline. And it's beautiful. I'm keeping it separately, but it's very complex.

But I have some parts of his outline that are just too sexy to ignore. And he says, entering emptiness, like getting into a ship and starting across the Pacific Ocean, it has two parts. LTA BA BRTEN LA DGOS PA and SGONGS PA'I NYE RKYEN RDOG TSUL LTA BA BRTEN LA DGOS PA and SGONGS PA'I NYE RKYEN RDOG TSUL The exploration of emptiness necessarily comes in two steps.

That a personal exploration of emptiness should involve two separate steps. Number one, LTA BA BRTEN LA DGOS PA You have to work hard to learn the scriptures that describe emptiness. LTA BA BRTEN LA DGOS PA means you got to work hard on, you know, it's what we're doing now, is struggle your way, fight your way through the teachings on emptiness.

You got to kind of submit and surrender. It's going to be a long journey through a thick forest, many scratchy trees and many muddy spots. But your first job is to understand emptiness in a theoretical way.

And that implies the second step, which is put it into practice in your life. Use it in your life. Use it to become more successful.

Use it to have a better family life. Use it to have a better business life. Use it to be a happier person throughout the course of your life.

BSGOMS PA'I GNYIS GYON DUG TSUM Second step. Use those teachings on emptiness. Meditate on them using the personalized instructions of John and Connie O'Brady.

And by doing so, DUG all your GYONS. BRTEN? GYON MIN DU GYON DU Yeah, stop all your problems in your life.

GYON means problems in your life. GNYIS PA also means problem in your life. GNYIS GYON means problem, problem.

And DUG TSUL means if you meditate on emptiness, if you get used to emptiness, you can clean out the crap in your life. And guess what? If you one by one clean out the parts of your life that aren't very nice, or aren't very happy, or aren't very successful, there's this weird experience at the end.

All you're left with is success. All you're left with is great happiness, great satisfaction, wonderful life. If you dig away, it's like cleaning out your house, right?

Like nowadays, I forget why I'm trying to clean out my house. And I go room by room, mostly tchotchkes, mostly dumb little things I have in my house. I don't use them.

I don't think about them. I don't even look at them. And if you're just patient and you're methodical and you work one by one through the garbage in your house and get rid of it mercilessly, like don't even compromise.

Don't say, maybe Rosa would like this. Just toss it, because she's got limited space in her house too. So if you clean out one by one the difficult parts of your life, what you're left with is pure happiness.

That's all you're left with. So there's the two steps that already we got presented to in the study of emptiness. Number one, go through the theory.

Work through the book. Work through the ideas. And then secondly, put them into practice.

Meditate on them and use them to clean out the house called your life. Throw out one by one the stuff that's not very important or that's not very pleasant. And what you're left with is an elegant, beautiful house like John Brady's house.

All right, so I'm going to show you a picture of a little boy on two steps. I was trying to find a picture of two steps and I saw this one. It kind of got more steps than two.

But two main steps? And I hope this picture will remind you. The foundation step below his tennis shoes is what you're doing now.

Do the hard work of understanding the theory behind emptiness. And then second step, which is where his butt is sitting, is use that theory in your real life to clean out the rotten parts of your life. And then all that's left is the beauty and elegance of your life.

Okay, cool. Let's move on. Oh my gosh, there's another divinity.

Okay. I'm still following the outline, I'm sorry, but we won't follow it too long. He says that first subject we talked about, which is getting a theoretical grasp on emptiness, going to emptiness theoretically, that itself has two parts.

You got that Tim? You want to show it? And by the way, Tim's doing all this on the fly and God bless him.

It's a great job. DANG PO LA GNYIS means, okay, can you further describe the theoretical study and background that we should have to take off across the ocean of emptiness? And he says, yeah, I'll tell you what it is.

These two, BDAG NGO NYID KYIS SGRUB PA RGAGS PA DE BDAG GIS BDAG GIS BA MO'I GRUB PA'I KHYAD TSUL Say BDAG. Say BDAG GIS BA. BDAG.

BDAG GIS BA.

[Speaker 2]
BDAG GIS BA.

[Speaker 1]
BDAG means Atman, means self, core nature. BDAG GIS BA means of that. So when you study emptiness, in theory, you cover two topics, me and mine.

Me and mine. BDAG means Atman, means me. And then BDAG GIS BA, which means mine.

Why is this important? When you talk about the Wheel of Life, when you look at Juana Clark on the Wheel of Life, and you look at what causes the Wheel of Life to spin, it's always misunderstanding two things, me and mine. Me and the stuff I own, or me and my hand, or things like that.

When you explore emptiness, it's always done in terms of exploring the emptiness of Michael and exploring the emptiness of things that belong to Michael, including the world and my hand. Things like that. All right.

So first we're going to stop our misunderstanding of me. And then we have to stop our misunderstanding of myself. No me leads to no mine.

Here's a picture for you guys. Okay. It's supposed to be two feet, I guess.

Oops. Yeah, I like this. The me is your legs, okay?

The mine is your shoes. Get it? And I was trying to emphasize two things.

Okay, me and mine. Okay, me ends just before the shoes there. And me and mine.

You have to explore the emptiness of me and mine if you want to clean out the house called your life and be left with a clean, elegant house called nirvana and enlightenment. Okay, good. All right.

Let's go one more. I'm sorry. I just want to touch a little bit more on the outline.

The exploration of me has two parts. The exploration of me. When you're talking about exploring me, that has two parts.

Say, CHU LUG. CHU LUG. CHU LUG.

[Speaker 2]
CHU LUG. CHU LUG.

[Speaker 1]
And BSTAN LA BAS PA. BSTAN LA BAS PA. Okay.

CHU LUG. CHU LUG. BSTAN LA BAS PA.

BSTAN LA BAS PA. Okay, good. And this is that cool division.

CHU LUG means how do you investigate me and mine, especially me here? How do you investigate Michael? Okay.

Let's go off on an investigation of Michael. In fact, Tim is going to translate a book called Tathagata, which means analysis. So we have to analyze Michael.

And by analyzing Michael, we will come up with a strategy. BSTAN LA BAS PA means we'll come up with a strategy for life. First, we'll examine Michael, and then we'll come up with a strategy for how to deal with Michael.

How to make Michael happy. So here's a picture for you guys. This is Sherlock Holmes.

All right. So he's a famous detective. And this represents the two steps we have to take to understand the emptiness of Michael.

Number one, investigate who is Michael. Investigate who is Michael, really. And then secondly, develop a strategy based on that for how to make Michael happy.

First, figure out who is Michael, and then develop a strategy to make him happy. That's the two. So I'm going to go backwards through this outline.

We're going to investigate Michael and strategies to make him happy because we were investigating me and then we're investigating mine. Why? Because we were going to do the theory work with emptiness and then we were going to do the practical work on emptiness.

And that's all because we wanted to investigate the emptiness of the person and the parts, right? Parts of the person. That's the outline that we're going through.

I'm going to go back to the end here. And we're actually, oh, I thought it's a good place now to show you an image of the emptiness book that...

[Speaker 2]
Q.R. Code.

[Speaker 1]
Can you do it tomorrow? I will do it tomorrow. Okay, we'll do it tomorrow.

I'm going to give you a Q.R. Code and I'm going to give you how to get the book that John and Connie are going to explain for you guys. I'll explain it tomorrow. Okay, here we go.

We have a little bit of time left. There's a tradition in these teachings. How much time I got left?

In five minutes? Yeah, there's a tradition to jump, to put your toe in the cold water. Okay, so here we go.

We're going to put our toe into the water and then we'll swim to Japan, okay? We're just putting our toe in the water. And that's the first two lines.

He doesn't even go through the whole first verse. He only gives you half of the first verse because he doesn't want to drown you. And here's the first verse.

,GAL TE PHUNG PO BDAG GIS NA, ,SKYE DANG GCIG PA CHEN DU RGYUR, Hang on a second.

[Speaker 2]
It seems wrong to me. ,SKYE DANG GCIG PA CHEN DU RGYUR, Oh, okay, good. It does make sense.

[Speaker 1]
Okay, it says, ,GAL TE PHUNG PO BDAG GIS NA, If your body and mind were you, then TIM would have to be TI. I mean, T. I mean, IM.

I mean, M. Okay, I'm not being funny. If you are only your body and mind, then since your body and mind are constantly, according to Buddhism, ,SKYE GCIG GI SKYE GCIG GI, ,KEN GCIG BYED PA BYED PA BYED, Say SKYE GCIG GI.

SKYE GCIG GI. You got to say it twice. And you got to say it with rhythm.

SKYE GCIG GI SKYE GCIG GI.

[Speaker 2]
SKYE GCIG GI SKYE GCIG GI.

[Speaker 1]
,KEN GCIG BYED PA BYED PA BYED, We had it recently, right? Yeah, things that, TIM is coming into existence and popping into existence and popping out of existence, instant, millisecond by millisecond. TIM, in Buddhism, we don't see TIM as a constant flow.

We don't see TIM's body and TIM's mind as a constant flow. Rather, they are milliseconds of events or milliseconds of perception that are following each other, like da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. SKYE GCIG GI SKYE GCIG GI.

They are starting and stopping almost in the same moment, in a stream of moment. TIM's body is changing from instant to instant, which is, you all know that. You're getting older instant by instant.

Your mind is changing instant by instant. But does that mean that TIM is changing instant by instant? Do we not call him TIM from the day he was first christened as TIM to the day we write his obituary, not meaning you'll ever have one.

But we don't change the name, do we? The name is constant. What the name refers to, the body and mind that the name refers to is something that you can't even grab onto a single moment of it.

It's constantly in flux. But the name is not in flux. Tim is Tim.

We don't change his name every time his body changes because that would be millions of names. So somehow we feel, and there's an emptiness here, we feel that Tim has some continuity. Tim's body may be changing from instant to instant, and Tim's mind may be changing from instant to instant, and Tim may own his body and mind, and Tim may even be his body and mind, but somehow Tim is constant.

We have this feeling. Tim was born. Tim lived a life.

Tim passed away. It's still Tim, right? The body is born, the body goes, but body changes, body melts away.

But Tim is the one who had the body, and Tim didn't change. Tim was constant. Tim didn't change to Mike, and Mike didn't change to Rosa in three minutes of the change of Tim's body and mind.

It was still all Tim. So he says, if the body and mind have their own existence, if the body and mind exist from their own side, then Tim must change names every millisecond. Then Tim should follow.

If Tim is the sum of Tim's body plus Rosa, plus Tim's mind, and if he is self-existent, if he comes from his own side, then since the body and mind are collapsing, just falling apart from millisecond to millisecond, then Tim, as an idea, and Tim as a concept, should change moment by moment, and he does not. Okay, that's evidence that Tim's relationship to his body is not coming from its own side. All right, got it?

All right, so the first place to explore Tim is to explore his parts. His parts are his body and his mind. If his body and his mind are Tim, and if Tim's body is changing per millisecond, and if Tim's mind is changing per millisecond, and if Tim is made of his body and mind together, then Tim should be changing by millisecond.

And then it won't be Tim's body and mind, it will be Mike's body and mind in the second millisecond, and Rosa's body and mind in the third millisecond. It should change. If the relationship is self-existent between Tim and his parts, if it's coming from their side and not from us, especially not from Tim, then Tim shouldn't last more than a millisecond.

And in fact, he would be unrecognizable since that millisecond wouldn't have a front end and a back end. Okay, all right. So I'll leave you there, but just one idea to leave you with.

Arya Nagarjuna, his whole life, was bothered by the contradictions of life. That's what made Nagarjuna Nagarjuna. He was disturbed by the inconsistency of life.

I imagine it would deeply disturb Nagarjuna if one business strategy led to success for one business and then led to failure for another business. For example, if putting your money into equities, worked for one person and failed for another person, Nagarjuna would find this deeply disturbing. He would say, why?

It's the same equities. Why should one person make an investment and fail? And why should another person make a very similar investment and succeed?

Why? It really bothered him. So Nagarjuna's approach for us is to say, look, this stuff is, it bothers me.

I don't get it. And that's how he teaches. He says, I don't get it why Tim should be there his whole life, but his body's changing every millisecond.

His mind is changing every millisecond. Shouldn't Tim be a different Tim in the second millisecond if he doesn't have the same body and mind? It bothers me.

Something here ain't right. Something here ain't right. If you start to feel like that, then you're starting to understand Nagarjuna's approach.

Things don't look right. If things are coming from their own side, it don't look, things look fishy. Something's wrong.

And his whole life was spent trying to figure out how to make it right. All right, we'll see you in the next class. And we'll get to the answer.