Нагарджуна, курс 4 — Мудрость Арьи Нагарджуны, курс 4: Тайна глав (2022, Аризона), занятие 15

[Speaker 1]
Hi, welcome back to Arya Nagarjuna, class number 15. We were reviewing these chapters that we were going through because we were trying to get a picture of the flow of all the chapters which we didn't get when we were focusing on individual hard ideas. And so we were talking about, we were talking just now about kind of somebody complaining to Arya Nagarjuna and saying, well, if these things don't exist from their own side, then why didn't Buddha say that?

And why did he say things did exist from their own side for a long time? And then Arya Nagarjuna has pointed out that it did kind of, and as our audience said here, who was that? And it depended on the students.

It was just up to what students he had. It's very interesting that Choney Lama, before he moves on to the next topic, he goes to something that's a big favorite of ours, which is, Tim, the next picture. The Diamond Cutter Sutra.

And I love, this is very famous. This is the Diamond Cutter Sutra in Chinese, the oldest dated book in the world, with a date inside of it, which I think it's 880 or something like that, AD. And why we brought it up here is that Choney Lama, who wrote the great commentary to Diamond Cutter Sutra, which you should buy online as an e-book from Diamond Cutter Press, because it just came out.

It's on his mind. It's on Choney Lama's mind. And he says, by the way, while you're on the subject of complaining about what Buddha said or didn't say, do you remember in the Diamond Cutter Sutra, he says, Buddhists don't teach.

He said, don't complain to me. Buddha said Buddhists don't teach. Don't complain about the content.

Complain about the fact, he said, I shouldn't be teaching at all. And again, of course, that means that as we know, as we've talked about many times, when you read this sutra or any other sutra, actually what's happening is your mind is projecting the words down on a blank page. And in a way, you can say you are the author of the Diamond Cutter Sutra.

Does that mean you understand it? Not necessarily. Well, how can I be writing a book that I don't understand?

Karma expands 100% every day. You figure out the numbers. What's the interest rate?

It's like a million or something, but I don't know. All right, so there's a famous statement in the Diamond Cutter Sutra that when the Buddha teaches, they don't teach. And what that means is when the Buddha does teach, that's coming from you.

Okay. All right, we said there were five big topics in the me and mine stuff. Here's the third one.

DE KHO NA NYID LA GCIG BA'I RIM PA Which means they get into a small discussion of what's the best way for us to teach other people these ideas. And that got into some different ideas about the meaning of the word pure. G here, B-K-R-I, means when it comes time for us to teach other people emptiness, then what are his suggestions?

And he basically says the same thing. He says, teach them according to their capacity and don't go over their capacity. Okay, fourth step about examining me and mine is that it's called the DE KHO NA NYID KYI TSE NYID which means what are the main...

I always think of a nice car, Seiji just bought a Tesla, which I'm looking at because it's so pretty. I just don't know if I want to sit on two tons of electromagnetic cancer. DE KHO NA NYID KYI TSE NYID means when you're selling a Tesla, you say, oh, look, it's got this beautiful front end and it's got this navigation system.

It's got special brakes. Like when you let off the brakes, they put on the brakes. And stuff like when you go around a curve, you let off the gas, it puts on proportional braking.

So you kind of only drive with one foot. So anyway, those are the selling points of the car. Those are the cool things about the car.

He says, hey, you want to know the cool things about emptiness? Let me tell you the selling points of emptiness. And that's the fourth main topic here called DE KHO NA NYID KYI TSE NYID, which means I'll give you some selling points for emptiness.

And the verse is very important. The verse is very famous. You got this verse?

GZHAN LA Yeah, boy, there was a big mistake in the Tibetan. Not the input operators. It was a mistake of the carver.

But I'm going to just read this to you because it's very famous. GZHAN LAS ZHES MIN ZHI BA DANG PHYIR PA LENG GI MA PHYIR PA DANG STO MED DON THA DE MIN DE NYID DE NYID TSE NYID DO Last line says DE NYID DE NYID TSE NYID DO means, hey, you want to know the big selling points for emptiness? Which here he calls DE NYID, which is TAT PA, which means suchness.

Let me give you the main selling points for suchness. And then he said, it's an amazing list. GZHAN LAS ZHES MIN means no one, it's not something you can learn from somebody else.

It's not something you can learn from somebody else. Then Geshe-la, why every day of the year you're sitting here talking about emptiness, making videos? It cannot be communicated so directly that a person sees emptiness right after you talk to them.

It's not possible. It never happens. Well, it almost happens.

But it never happens that you can meet someone who saw emptiness directly and say, look, just give me five minutes. Let's sit down and you just tell me what you saw and that's it. And he says, no, GZHAN LAS ZHES MIN.

It's not something that you can learn from another person immediately. They need to teach you over, over, over, and then you'll have the experience. ZHI BA, and I'm going to define these different selling points.

There are five of them. Five Tesla selling points. The first one is, GZHAN GYIS BSTAN PA TZAM LAS NGOS SU ZHES PA MIN GYIS You cannot have the direct experience just by listening to someone describe you, even the direct experience.

GNYIS RNANG LOG PA'I TSUL GYIS MTHONG DGOS PA You must work on your habit of misunderstanding where things come from, that's all. You have to work on the pen, work on the pen, and then it will be communicated to you. But no matter how much a person would love to sit down and describe it to you, it's not possible.

It just never happens. You don't have that many seats. First selling point, which is kind of a negative selling point.

You can't learn it just by listening to someone for 10 minutes. It's not going to happen. Second, then it says peace.

And then you're like, oh, if I study emptiness, I will enjoy my life. I'll always sit around on my couch and feel good, even without Netflix, which is almost inconceivable. But the peace here is not the peace that means to feel good.

The peace here as a selling point of emptiness is dead. Rest in peace. RIP, rest in peace.

So this SHI BA means killed, dead. SHI BA in Tibetan means dead, SHI BA means peace. But he says, this peace is DE SNGO BA NYID KYI SHI BA.

The second selling point for emptiness is that it is peace in the sense that there's no war going on inside the bottle of thinking it comes from itself. It doesn't mean, oh, it doesn't mean that. It means the state of this bottle is peace.

Why? It doesn't have a war inside. Why?

It doesn't have a self-nature. And it never had a self-nature. SDUG MA NAS SHI BA It is peace from the beginning of no beginning.

It was always peace. It never had self-existence. You made the war.

You put the war here. It was peace. Meaning, it didn't have the war of, of thinking it was self-existence.

That's cool. Peace from its own side. Self-peace?

Well, that's illegal also. All right, number three. BSTAN DAG PAR GRO BA BYAS PA'I SNGAG GI GRUB PA RNAMS KYIS MA GRUB PA BSTAN PA GRUB PA RNAMS How do we say this?

When you experience it directly, it's not with concepts. When you experience it directly, you're not talking in your head. It's a direct communion.

It's a direct communion with ultimate reality. GRO BA means, PRABAN CHA means, there's no blah, blah going on in your head. It's a direct experience.

It's free of that kind of blah, blah. GRUB PA means constructs, mental constructs. All right, okay.

Number four, RNAMS STOGS KYI RGYUD BA MED RNAMS STOGS KYI RGYUD BA MED means, when you talk about the qualities of emptiness, an important one is RNAMS STOGS. RGYUD BA means racing through your head. It's also the word for car race, horse race, RGYUD BA.

And RNAMS STOGS KYI RGYUD BA means, you're not just, how do you say? You don't have blah, blah thoughts going on in your mind, but sometimes blah, blah thoughts means thinking that the thing came from its own side. So that's tricky here.

Number five, PHYIR THAMS CAS KYI BDE KHO NA NYID RIGS TSUN PA DON THA DE PA MIN TE Every object in the universe is as empty as any other object. And anyone who sees emptiness once, sees it as well as, directly, sees it as well as anyone ever did or will. A Buddha doesn't see emptiness directly better than an Arya for the first time.

It's 100%. It's totally 100%. Then that's that idea that you can't have degrees of emptiness.

There can't be a 40% mouse not in the kitchen or something. Either it's there or it's not there. If it's not there, it's 100% emptiness.

If you see emptiness directly, at age 20 or something, as a human being, you see it exactly the same way as Buddha does. No different. It's interesting.

Okay, those are selling points. Having discussed the features that emptiness has, he goes into a little bit about the features that things don't have. And the picture was keystroke.

Yeah, and I keep talking about seeds and sprouts, but the number of friends I have who really understand gardening is one. I mean, we don't grow things. When I was a kid, I honestly believed the watermelons, sandia, came from the back of the store.

I thought that. I thought they made them in the back of the store. So we don't live in an agricultural society.

It's like the Bible, right? We don't live in a society where we do much growing things, but we do keystrokes. So to think that when your finger comes down, the screen changes.

To believe that... Choney Lama does a cute thing. He says, you know what?

The Garjuna is jumping from the five qualities that emptiness does have to the one quality that nothing has. And isn't that cool? So he's seeing a connection where maybe he's making it up in a way, but aren't we always?

He's like, here's the five great features of emptiness, but by the way, there's things you think are features of things that aren't. Like what? Like thinking that you make the letter on the screen by hitting the key on your finger.

Hitting the key with your finger doesn't bring the letter on the screen. That's how we would say it nowadays. That connection between keystroke and something changing on the screen is not natural.

Which you will discover whenever your computer breaks. You make lots of keystrokes and nothing happens. That connection is not natural.

That's also coming from you. And it can wear out. And then your computer breaks.

Then you're pissed off because you lose half your stuff. All right, fifth major section of this chapter. SDUG BSNGAL GNAS PO'I GRUB DGOS PA BSTAN PO He says, don't just study emptiness, do something.

GRUB DGOS means do something. You got to do something. Don't just study emptiness.

Now you got to do something with it. And he's got a picture here. I call this picture plant seeds for Joe.

Yeah, for the next guy. We were talking about putting aside retirement money today. It's just polite to your elder self, older self.

Put some money aside for your... What happened today? I forgot what I was doing.

I was being grateful that my earlier self did something for me. The database, I guess. Michael at 35, Michael at 30 was getting books typed in for Michael at 60.

You see what I mean? And I was thinking, good job, Michael at 30. Thank you.

Thanks for thinking of me. Thanks for giving me a database. So it's the same idea here.

When you study emptiness, it's not just for you. You're taking care of your future self. It's like putting aside retirement money.

And your future self will thank you. And I'll challenge you guys. He said a pretty awesome thing here.

At this point in the text, he said a pretty awesome thing. He said, if you do take care of your future self, if you do study emptiness from the Nagarjuna courses, then you're taking care of your future self because... I'll keep giving you clues if nobody can guess.

Come on. Yeah, yeah. Even if you were scheduled to die and go to a world with no dharma, you will create the dharma in that world.

That's cool. That's pretty cool. Okay, got it?

What specific practitioner was he talking about? Self-made Buddhist. Self-made Buddhist, good.

That's amazing. I've never seen anyone say that so cool. Yeah, what's another reason why you have to study emptiness?

You got to take care of Joe. Who's Joe? Joe's your next life.

Send him a gift. Send him some stuff to study in the next life. It's a very sweet feeling when you consciously do something for your future self, like 10 years from now.

You do something to... You kind of send a present to yourself 10 years from now. But this time you're doing it to yourself 100 years from now or 1,000 years from now.

You can make it a Buddhist practice to do cool things that send anonymous gifts to your future self. That's so cool. That's such a nice idea.

It's like putting chocolate in drawers at your house and forgetting about it. And then later you're like, oh my God, what's in there? Thank you, Michael, three months ago.

That's a cool idea. All right, what's our time frame here? I stop at 5.05. Okay, got it. Plan C is for Joe. Guess what? We finished the review of chapter 18.

It's kind of slow, but that's our theme. That's actually the most important chapter that we covered, is 18. On the emptiness of me and mine.

Okay, good. Then we went on to talk about what? Do you remember chapter 19?

Time, yeah. I was writing this review notes for myself and I said, they're going to have to figure out why the order of the chapters is what it is. Maybe I can just give them some hints.

I'll give them hints from what Choney Lama says in the opening of the 19th chapter to connect it to the 18th chapter. And guess what? He doesn't.

He doesn't even try. So while you get time coming, an investigation of time coming after an investigation of me and mine, he doesn't even guess. He just jumps into it.

It's up to you guys. If you don't do it, no. Maybe Choney Lama left it for you.

All right. We learned some Sanskrit at that point. Kala?

Time, okay. Related to accelerator, car, all that. And then in the same class, we went to the next chapter, which was already talking about convergences of causes and conditions.

And the important word there is hetu. If you study Buddhist logic, hetu is the single most important word and it means reason or cause. In this discussion, it means cause, but it's extremely important in logic because it means reason as a cause.

So we talked about those words. Then the whole theme of the time chapter was triads. Groups of three.

SUMTSAN The whole theme of the time chapter was triads. Do you guys remember the first triad?

[Speaker 2]
It's like the third one. Yeah, it was like, if something exists...

[Speaker 1]
No, don't make it past, present, future. Just past, present, future. And then he said, look, when you discuss a triad, a natural thing to do is compare two to one.

It's not comparing one to one. If you're talking about three things, well, how do these two relate to this one? How do these two relate to this one?

So what's the first two that he lumps together? How do the present and the future relate to the past? And how can the present and future even relate to the past?

It never touches them. They never touch each other. So how do fish relate to green drinks?

Sorry, that's almost connected. JB, give me something random. How do javelinas wandering around your lawn relate to green drinks?

I mean, they still have no connection. They can't touch each other. The present and the future cannot touch the past, but without the past, the present and the future have no meaning.

They rely on the past. The present and the future rest on the past without touching it. Ah, that's all this made up in your head.

Ah, that's correct. Okay, all right. So technically, the present and the future, how they happen is going to depend on what happened before, but they have no connection to what happened before.

Why? Well, that's good. Yeah, the past is gone.

How can you have a relationship with somebody who's dead or an animal? Then also what? Point of contact, point of contact.

What's the point of contact between nothing and something? And even if the past did exist now, and even if the future, the present does exist now, where do they meet?

[Speaker 2]
If they touch, they have to be the same thing and something like that.

[Speaker 1]
If the present touched the past, then that part of the past would be the present. It's messed up. Something else must be going on.

All right, we had calendar pictures. I don't know. We don't really need it, but you get the point.

He plays with 22 and 23 depending on 21, and then he says, well, do 21 and 22 depending on 23, and maybe 21 and 23 need 22 nested in the middle to make sense. He looks at the triads in different ways. What else did he say about groups of three?

Yeah, any group of three you ever have, just use it for that. I think he gave two examples. Like one, two, three.

In fact, it was so simple I didn't understand the Tibetan. I was like, one, two, three. And then he said, chok men ding.

Chok men ding. Better, worse, in between. Good, bad, in between.

They also depend on each other. But where does good touch in between? Because is that part good or is that part in between?

They can't touch each other. If they don't touch each other, you can't compare them, and you can't say this chocolate is better than that chocolate if they're never in the same room or in the same mouth. We'll experiment.

We'll experiment. Then he asked a question. R15, if you got it.

I think it's a person jumping. He said, which happens first, the future or the past?

[Speaker 2]
Two answers. They both. One answer is past is first, and the other answer is future is first.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, good. What's coming up next is the future. But then it's the present.

By the time you looked at it, it's past. Our idea of time is messed up. I spent a long time thinking about our relativity and Einstein and stretching time, shrinking time, bending time.

It's a lot easier to understand Einstein if you read this part about the emptiness of time. Then it makes a lot of sense.

[Speaker 2]
I'll show you another picture. Here's R16.

[Speaker 1]
It's just a personal suggestion. When you're trying to understand emptiness better, instead of using the word self-existent, it's like trying on jeans. See where it fits you.

I always tell the story that me and Vy we went to the cowboy store in Kathmandu. She tried on 42 pairs of jeans and didn't buy any of them. That guy was a little hot.

I went back and bought some boots just to make him happy. Try on different words that fit you and see which one helps you understand it. The word natural is a good suggestion.

Is it all natural? Is the way that time flows part of nature or is it artificial? Is it natural or is it artificial?

You know they put stuff in candy bars. Is it natural sugar or is it fake sugar? When you're trying to think about what emptiness means, I suggest that sometimes you think about the idea of natural.

What does it mean? Is the division into past, present, and future natural? Is the nature of time, is time automatically past, present, and future or is there other ways to look at time?

I just encourage you to think about the word natural instead of self-existent. By the way, I test out words, like that audience I mentioned, China's soft power people. They're very intelligent business owners, big businesses.

I'll say, look, let me ask you something. I'm a teacher. I spend a lot of time, I go around the world trying to teach people and I have a question for you guys.

They're like, we're on it. I say, should I say karma or should I say mental seeds? They're like, mental seeds, man.

Forget karma. I felt so happy that they could just give me an honest opinion. They didn't hesitate at all.

They said, oh, forget karma. Don't mention karma. Just say mental seeds.

I'm suggesting to you, think about the word. Personally, self-existent doesn't help me at all. I never walk down the street and say, oh, you're looking at this self-existent.

I mean, I wouldn't even think of it. But one that helps, I think one that helps everybody is from its own side. Is that pen coming from its own side?

Self-existent doesn't mean almost anything to anybody. But if you say, does it come from its own side? Then they say, yeah, yeah, it does.

It's a very easy way to get into emptiness discussion. And I'm suggesting that natural is a good one too. Is the division of time itself into three, does it have to be that way?

Is that natural? Or is it something we made up? Is it somehow coming from us?

Because the idea of past, present, and future is so much a part of our life that we think it must be natural. I didn't make up past. I mean, the idea of past, and the idea of future, and the idea of present, I didn't make those divisions.

God made that, or the world made that, or I don't know. That was here when I got here. People were already talking about yesterday and tomorrow.

And then Nagarjuna says, no, it's not natural. You didn't make it. Personally, I'm interested that there was a new verb that I never saw before.

It's called norwa, B-S-N-O-R, norwa. So nor, low tone, N-O-R, means to make a mistake. And then he said, no matter which of the triad you look at depending on the others, does 2023 depend on 2021 and 2022?

Or does 2022 depend on 21 and 23? Or does 21 depend on 22 and 23? Which is it?

And he says, well, personally, when I taught it to you guys, I started with 21, 2021. And then I tried to show you how 22 and 23's relationship dependent on that. But it could have been anything.

We could take anyone and look at the relationship. And then he says, and no matter how, no matter which two you take together and which one you take separately, norwa. Yeah, it's a cool verb.

It means there will be an eff up. It exactly means that, I'm sorry. You have to add a few letters.

It means things will get screwy either way. Things are going to get screwy. It's a verb.

He made up a new verb. It's like, it's going to screwify. Anyway, it's a new word.

For me, it's very fascinating because I love words. He says, whatever combination you take, it's all going to screwify. Okay, good luck translating that, you guys.

All right, let's look at, let's keep going. Yeah, we looked it up. Then he went on a side trip.

And I challenge you guys to guess what it was. He finished this idea of threes. He finished the idea of relativity of time, which is not, relativity is not the same thing as coming from you.

The fact that the past, the fact that how long the past feels depends on how long the present and future feels is not emptiness. Relativity is not emptiness. The fact that time with your girlfriend goes slower because that's not emptiness.

Relativity is not emptiness. It's not true that if there was no suffering in the world you couldn't have pleasure. That's not true.

That idea, the idea that this is dependent origination, which I've heard repeated many times by Vipassana people, is totally mistaken. It doesn't mean that at all. In that case, the Buddha would have to have a bit of suffering so he could enjoy his happiness.

It's obviously mistaken. So emptiness doesn't mean that something is something only by comparison. Emptiness means you're creating all the degrees whether you see degrees or you don't see degrees in better, worse, medium.

They're all coming from you. That's the point. It's not that you can't have better without worse.

If that's true, then you should just jump off a building because you can't have happiness. You can't have pure happiness. You'd have to go out and get a dose of unhappiness so you could appreciate your happiness, something like that.

Then why am I talking about like that? I forgot. Oh yeah, what was his side trip?

What guest? He's talking about time. He's going on to his next chapter.

He's ready to go on to his next chapter. But he wants to say a little bit more about time. He presents other people's ideas of time.

He stops and takes a break. He says, hey, you want to know what the non-Buddhists in ancient India thought about time? Or you want to know what the lower Buddhist schools thought about time?

And he goes off like that. That's a popular strategy for Nagarjuna. He often will compare his concepts to the concepts of other traditions in his culture, which was Hindu, Jain, other traditions.

Many, Mimamsa. And then he'll say, by the way, and lower Buddhist schools think like this. And then he'll give you more confidence about what your school is by describing other traditions.

So here's the first one. Somebody came from another tradition and said, I don't know why you have all this trouble with time. Because we have definitions of time.

We have seconds. We have minutes. We have hours.

We have weeks. We have months. We have centuries.

We have millennia. What's the problem? We got units of time.

They may be artificial, but they are fixed. An hour is 60 minutes. A month is 30, 28, whatever.

A year is 12 months. It may be made up. It may be an artifice, but it's fixed.

You don't have to stress so much about time, comparing other times. They have a definition. And he says, oh, what's the definition?

Well, a minute is 60, so what's a second? Well, a second is like 60 milliseconds, and 100,000 milliseconds. That's all, a thousand milliseconds.

He says, well, oh, I see. So your years are based on months. Yeah, you got it.

And the months are based on days. Yeah, you got it. Yeah, and the days have hours.

Got it. And seconds and milliseconds. How long is a millisecond?

And then the guy's like, well, you know, it's just a dip. And he says, oh, dip. And then the guy's just like, how many dips inside the dips?

And the guy says, well, you don't got dip-dips, and you got dip-dip-dips. And he says, well, how many dip-dip-dips in the dip-dip? And he says, well, you just cut it down to the shortest moment in time, and then you grab that one.

He says, you can't. SUNG DU MED PA means, you can't grab it. It's too short for perception.

You can't perceive it. If you get a measurement of time which is too short to perceive, what does it mean to a human being who's a perceiving animal? Then it's just, you're making up stuff.

Now you're just making up stuff. He says, you can, I agree, you can define a day as so many seconds, but what do you define as a second? And the guy says, this is many milliseconds.

And he says, but then, what about the parts of that? The guy says, but you can't perceive that. And he says, well, what does it mean to have 50 non-perceivables, and 60 non-perceivables, and then 300 non-perceivables?

Don't you realize it's all BS? You're piling up zeros and saying it's 50. Got it?

Because you can't define the littlest one, because you can't perceive it anymore because it doesn't have any front end and back end. It'd be nice that your third book from today's conversation should be front ends and back ends. I was thinking you could, well, anyway, we can talk about the photo on the front.

By the way, here's the picture of, those milliseconds just kind of run away, fly away. You can't define them. You can't.

The tsultrim mepa means they cannot be perceptual. They cannot be grasped, perceived. They cannot be.

You can't hold them. You can't define them. You can't touch them.

Your comforting units of time are made up of zeros, and you're piling them up and saying it's 50, but it's still 50 zeros. That's all. All right.

Want to go deeper? How much time we got? We still got five?

Okay, having talked about the other traditions of his time, which, by the way, whenever you see that in scripture, I'll tell you a clue. You can pretty much fill in science. You don't have to say Jainism or Sankhya system or Mimamsa or Charvaka.

You can just say scientist because they are as crude and wrong as the non-Buddhist schools 2,000 years ago. Just fill in the name science and it's okay. So he says, okay, we wiped out the scientists.

Who else we got? Well, what about the lower Buddhist schools? Yeah, what about the functionalists?

These are the three lower schools. They say something interesting. Time is measurable and time is definable because you can link it to a physical object like the moon, the phases of the moon, or the sun setting and the sun coming up.

There are physical things in the world and you can tie time to them and say, that's a day. When the sun comes up and when the sun goes down, that half circle is a day. So the functionalists, the Buddhist schools say, we can define time in certain units because we can tie those times, we can tie the theory of time to physical objects in the world that we can watch.

So it takes 30 days for the moon to shrink and come back. That's a fixed amount of time. You can just say it that way.

Then he says, oh, and here's a little bit subtle. I told you we're going to go deeper and that's maybe the last thing we do here. Anybody want to guess what Nagarjuna says?

I'll give you a clue. The lower Buddhist guys, they come and say, look, time is definable externally. Why?

You can link it to a physical event like the change of the moon, or the star circling by the next season as certain constellations come back. These are the three traditional Vinaya measures of time, which are lunar, solar, and stellar. Vinaya has all three.

It's very beautiful. But anyway, last thing today. I'll say it again.

Lower Buddhist schools, we can define time because we can take a physical thing that we can see in the sky and we can link that to the thing called day, or night, or month, or season of the constellations. No problem. That's not artificial.

What? Okay, last thing. $100.

How does Nagarjuna argue back? I'll say it again. They say measurements of time can be fixed objectively because you can tie them to the motion of planetary bodies.

I'll give you a clue. I'll give you a clue. $100.

[Speaker 2]
Is it a problem? Just a thought.

[Speaker 1]
The connection is coming from you. The decision to connect to that is coming from you. So the whole thing is coming from you.

Got it? If one part of the whole thing is coming from you, then it's coming from you. Is there a sun moving in the sky in a certain way?

Maybe. Is there a word called minutes, hours, days? Yes.

Do the words hours, minutes, days make sense without reference to a physical body? No. You got to have a physical body.

Okay, so it's artificial. No, it's not. Yes, it is.

Why? You decided what to connect to what. You decided what to connect to what.

Therefore, it's coming from you. Got it? Who made the $100?

Ralsa, yes. I think it was Ralsa. Anyway, we brought into question the very concept of time itself.

Then that's going to naturally lead into a discussion of the time it takes for results to come out of collections of causes and conditions. Then that's going to naturally relate to how do things come into existence and how do things leave existence. So there's a flow there.

If you heard me, you can do part of your homework. Again, I just encourage you to... I agree that studying emptiness all day and not helping people in need, not helping refugees or poor people or people who are at war, I agree that that's unwise and that you're probably not developing spiritually.

I agree. I agree that if you have no compassion or love for other people, then you're a failure in your spiritual. I agree.

I agree that if you're not doing exercise and doing your yoga or things like that, you're going to hurt yourself. You can't just sit and study emptiness all day. I agree.

But if you don't spend some quality time, and I keep saying that to my close friends. They say, oh, Geshe-la, I look at the books once in a while. I'm okay.

I say, yeah, but do you give it quality time? Do you give it your... For me, my quality time is like 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. or something. That's the quality time. I said, do you consciously give it your quality time? They said, well, I don't know.

What I'm saying is, studying emptiness is not the only thing to do to become a good person, but it's a necessary part of becoming a good person. If you skip it because it seems intellectual, then you're making a huge mistake. You got to use the parts of your mind that are not your physical senses to see deeper things.

You have to develop your mind as an instrument of perception to see deeper things. If you don't practice thinking about emptiness, you won't see emptiness. It's not possible.

It won't happen. This is a muscle also. You got to exercise your eyes.

There's a yoga exercise with your eyes. Do you know that? You go like this.

It actually helps. You can develop your hearing. You can work out in the gym.

But to think that you don't have to exercise your mind to have a happy life is a big mistake. So dig into these ideas. The big, big breakthroughs are with friends.

That's why Buddhist monks spend two, three hours a day in the debate ground. You see pictures of the forum, of the people jumping around and screaming. But the big breakthroughs are the whispered conversations in the hours after, in the debate ground, that people sit down and they're like, God, I don't get it.

Another guy says, I don't get it either. And then third guy says, I kind of got it. And then you see these movies of debates, right?

But there's a big part of the debate ground where you sit down when you're all exhausted and you start talking in the dark. We're in the dark. We're in the starlight.

And it's so beautiful. And you just start saying, could you even get that big? I didn't get it.

So it's crucial that you meet with your friends. You meet with other students. Don't talk about stupid, useless things.

And if you want to be the bodhisattva in your group of friends, you be the one who, when the conversation at dinner starts to deteriorate into politics or some gossip, then say, God, what did you think about that chapter 21? Did you get it? And it's so fun.

You will trigger a conversation. And it's nice to be the one who secretly triggers the conversation. So try to be that kind of person who, when you're with your friends, especially your Dharma friends, try to secretly push the conversation to something about emptiness or something meaningful.

And that's a wonderful skill. That should be one of the perfections. How to push the conversation to something useful.

So do that, and if you do that, you will understand nirgaja. Luckily, we'll have a couple more sessions of nirgaja. See you then.