Нагарджуна, курс 6 — Заключительные главы (2024, Аризона), занятие 2

[Speaker 1]
Let's go to Arya Nagarjuna. You guys ready? I told the AI to show a confused guy in the dark.

And he did pretty good. My AI is like a 60% AI. It's artificial intelligence and artificial idiot.

He mixed together. But anyway, Nagarjuna finally says, are you done criticizing me about emptiness and why emptiness means there cannot be the four higher truths, and all those other things. Are you finished?

The guy says, yeah, I think I covered everything. You're not a Buddhist. And then Arya Nagarjuna says, if you think emptiness means those things, then you don't get the purpose and you don't get the essence and you don't get the point of emptiness.

You don't get the purpose, you don't get the essence, and you don't get the point of emptiness. And then the rest of the chapter, he's explaining the thing. But I thought, since you guys have nothing to do today, you could figure out these three.

Or I'd like to hear tomorrow, your opinion of what are these three. What's, when Nagarjuna says, you don't understand the purpose of emptiness and you don't understand the essence of emptiness, and you don't understand the point of emptiness, and point, how does that differ from essence? I'd like to see what you think.

By the way, we don't have any commentary by Arya Nagarjuna. We have Chandrakirti four or 500 years later. We have Je Tsongkapa.

But we don't know exactly what he meant. And I'm curious what you guys think. So maybe cook it today in your retreat cabin.

Retreat cabin is for cooking, here, right here. So, cook it in your retreat. Let's talk about it tomorrow.

We have class tomorrow. No, we don't have this class tomorrow. Tuesday we have?

Okay. Tomorrow we have two translation classes. Sometimes the organizer of where I'm giving a teaching, they say, could you just move the two classes?

And I say, no. They are part of every program. So, if you want to irritate grandpa, say, why don't you just move it?

Okay. And I say, move your program. Okay, all right.

It's part of every program, I think. And anyway, all right, let's get to the next one. Yeah, in fact, I get my deepest questions in the boys' bathroom.

I'm trying to do my work. And people always ask, I can't go anywhere, and they're asking me questions. So I got this question just now, in the boys' bathroom.

If you're the person who asked me the question, now it's my answer. And I told you it was coming. So, basically this verse says, when the Buddhas teach the Dharma, they use both realities.

What are the two realities? The deceptive reality of the world, and the reality which is ultimate. Two realities.

And it means Buddha needs both realities. Like, you can't say, oh, Buddha just spends all their time in emptiness. It's not the case.

They also need apparent reality, or normal reality. They use normal reality, and they use ultimate reality. And they have to balance them.

And we have to balance them. And the person in the bathroom asked me, they asked me about normal reality in the sense of earning a living. And it's so frustrating that I can't just sit and think about emptiness all day.

I also have to make money. And I think Arya Nagarjuna is answering that comment in this verse. This is verse number eight of the 24th chapter.

And he says, look, you need both. You need both. And I think we all have seen the extreme of someone who just uses normal reality.

They just make money. They just work hard. They just raise a family.

They just have kids. And then that's all they do. And then it fails.

Because of impermanence, it fails. The kids grow up or the kids pass away. The job fails.

The business fails. Or what's worse, if you're successful and then you die. Like, there's no future to those things.

They must fail. They must cause problems. They must.

They have to. That's their nature. That's normal reality.

And then on the other hand, you have doing retreat at Diamond Mountain. You have studying emptiness, studying the classics, sitting in one of your five houses. You have this other side of things.

And the Garjuna says, you cannot have the second without the first. You have to have a life. And then you can make that life amazing.

But don't think you can just make life amazing without a life. And it's very beautiful. And I've had some students insist.

My teacher had a student. I not only had 50 years of suffering with my own students, but I suffered with his students for 25 years. And I saw many, many...

So there's a guy, he heard about renunciation. He heard Lam Rim. And he said, he came to my teacher.

He said, I'm going to live like Milarepa. My teacher's like, oh really? And he said, yeah, no more of this working.

I'm going to just live like, free, like Milarepa. And my teacher's like, hmm. And then this guy...

So we lived in New Jersey. We lived in a small town. And there was a small forest next to the town.

And he said, I'm going to go live in the forest. And my teacher's like, well, you know, it is autumn in New Jersey. And we're headed towards winter in New Jersey.

And before global warming, we used to get this stuff called snow. And I'm talking four feet, five feet of snow. And he's like, I'm going to go stay in the forest.

My teacher's like, okay. He said, I'm giving up this working and impermanence and having a family and all this normal stuff. I'm going to go to the forest.

And my teacher's like, okay, yeah, okay, I'll see you later. Then like two weeks later, he came back. And he's like, he sit down at the kitchen table and eat everything in the refrigerator.

And he's like, that forest, they don't have refrigerators. And we're like, yeah, you know. And refrigerators, they come from a thing called money.

And that comes from a thing called working. And he's like, oh. And you need both.

Nagarjuna here is saying, you need both. You need normal reality and you need ultimate reality. And in fact, they support each other.

In fact, they go hand in hand. Have a nice job. Get a nice income.

Don't go crazy. Don't work 18 hour days. Every job in the universe creates something that people want.

That's why they pay you. And then that helps people. If you build houses, if you make refrigerators, if you build cars, it helps people.

My dad, I thought he was this terrible capitalist imperialist because he was a builder. He built neighborhoods. And I always was afraid to introduce him to my teacher.

And then finally one day, they had to meet each other. And I was embarrassed. My wife knows my dad.

She came when she was 16 and spent time with us. And so anyway, I'm not looking forward to this. My dad, the capitalist, meaning my teacher, the dharma man.

And then they sat down in the kitchen of the temple, Mongolian temple, and my teacher looks at my dad and says, I heard you are a big business man. Yeah, and I heard you build houses for people, big neighborhoods, hundreds of houses. Yes.

That is such cool dharma. I'm like, what? And he's like, that's such a dharma activity.

You are giving so many families a place to stay. You're such a bodhisattva. I wish I could be like you.

And I'm like, what? What's going on? Then after that, my dad said, before I was hoping you would become a Christian priest, but now I think it's a good thing.

So anyway, in this verse, Arya Nagarjuna says, you need both. You need both. And the ultimate argument that he gives here, it's very sexy.

He says, when Buddha taught you emptiness in the Deer Park or wherever, Rajabiraha, Vulture's Peak, when he taught the Heart Sutra at Vulture's Peak, did he use words? Did he write down anything? Did people write down the Heart Sutra?

Yes, that's not ultimate reality. That's deceptive reality. That's normal reality.

The books, the teachings, the translations, the programs at DM, these are all normal reality. We're going to go over there and eat normal food, I hope. And somebody had to pay for it.

And by the way, the sponsor who paid for the student center is Dr. Wu. Very, very, very, very kind. The first time I met him, he said, is there anything you need?

I said, yeah, I need a cafeteria. And he's like, how much does that cost? And I'm like, I don't know.

You always double when you talk to a sponsor. So I said, I think it's, I thought 100,000, so I said 200,000. He said, okay, I got it covered.

And I'm like, whoa. And then we built it and it was 1.2 million. And I had to go to him.

So anyway, he covered it. And if you ever meet him or take a class from him this week, you should thank him. And we're very, very grateful.

You want to hear a secret? So I had to have a translator to talk to him. And there's this young lady from Xiamen who's living in Guangzhou.

And she said, I'll translate. And then I start my thing. Oh, we have a retreat center, we don't have a cafeteria.

Then she's, she's crying. And then the sponsor's like, you need more money? You need more money?

Then I always took her with me after that. Xiaobing. So anyway, you need both.

You need a construction company to make the place. Thank God those guys aren't Dharma students. They can count, they can build, they can put the roof on.

Really a good Dharma student should be both. And that's what our indigenous is saying in this verse. You need both.

There has to be a organization. There has to be buildings. There has to be books.

There has to be money to do Dharma. They go together. And that's what he's saying in this.

And it doesn't have to be, business doesn't have to be nasty. Business can be time-trained. And we talked about it already.

Business can be diamond way. If you do business with the right state of mind, it's unbelievable practice. You just, you have to have that state of mind.

And you actually, the two need each other. What Nagarjuna says to his critic, critic, criticizer? He says, look, you need what we call deceptive reality.

Deceptive reality means normal reality. You need normal reality in order to study ultimate reality. You need both.

You have to have both. They go together. Who invented that?

Buddha. Okay, not me. Here he says, the Buddha, when the Buddha teaches the Dharma, he needs both.

They need both. Somebody's got to pay for the air conditioner. You know?

Okay? You need both. He's saying.

It's very nice. Okay. What?

[Speaker 2]
Hang on. I'm sorry.

[Speaker 1]
Let's try that one. What's your next picture, you guys? Yeah.

Okay, good. Nagarjuna says you need a balance between deceptive reality and ultimate reality. There has to be a balance.

I like this thing. What's it called? A teeter-totter?

Huh? Oh, what's the other one? Seesaw.

Yeah, okay. Anyway, I don't know why they're hard to find pictures, but I've seen seesaw, teeter-totter. Yeah, he says, and I'll quote his verse.

He says, without relying on terms, okay, words, without relying on words, you could never reach ultimate reality. Words are the ultimate deceptive reality. They are not ultimate reality.

Okay? They are the ultimate cause and effect. Okay?

Words. So he says, without words, you couldn't reach ultimate reality. And without ultimate reality, you can't reach nirvana.

Okay? Without emptiness, you can't reach nirvana. And that's the Tibetan language says, THA NI LA NI MA BSTAN PAR DAM PA'I DUS NI BRTEN MI NUS You can't teach the Dharma without terms, without words.

But words are not ultimate reality. They are deceptive reality. Okay?

So you need deceptive reality. You need fake reality to get to real reality. DAM PA'I DUS NI MA STOB PAR NYANGS YIN DE PA THOB MI RGYUR All right.

But what Nagarjuna is, he has a famous, famous line where someone says, tell me what you really believe. Tell me what's your real position. And he says, I believe whatever farmers believe.

That's his famous, famous quotation. Canadian tree keepers or something. Whatever they believe is what I believe.

Okay? And it's very famous. He says, I believe whatever farmers believe.

No farmer thinks you can get a tree without a seed. Right? He said, whatever they say, I say.

Okay? All right. Next picture.

Weird picture. I tried, okay? I really tried.

You don't know how hard I tried. Ask my wife how hard I tried. Half an hour negotiating with the AI.

I want a lady taking a jewel off the forehead of a snake. And the AI doesn't know what's possible or impossible, right? They're just supposed to do what you say.

And I tried like 20 times. And this is the best. I don't know what's the gloopy red thing in her eye.

Okay. I'm sorry. Am I going to spend an extra hour to take it out?

No. Okay. Anyway, here's the verse.

He says, when people disrespect emptiness, when they say emptiness is stupid, or I don't see any point to emptiness. You know? Like, how is it going to help you in your life to think that something's empty?

Okay. They say, I don't understand. So when they talk bad about emptiness, those of little wisdom are ruined.

Okay. They are ruined. Okay.

And then he has an example. And in ancient times, if you wanted to, in ancient times, it was believed that very poisonous snakes would have a jewel here, a red jewel, like a ruby or something. And he said, people who disrespect the idea of emptiness or who try to study emptiness and don't understand it are like people who go looking for poisonous cobras to take the jewel off their forehead, and they end up dying.

They end up getting bitten by the cobra. And everything Arya Nagarjuna says is deeper. Right?

There's always a deeper meaning. And what he's saying is that the study of emptiness is dangerous. It's like a cobra.

And you can take the emptiness out of it. You can get emptiness out of, you can pluck the jewel from the... By the way, why is the snake important for him particularly?

He's Nagarjuna. His name means king of the snakes, king of the cobras. And by the way, Shensang, who walked for 17 years through 51 countries of Asia to bring the Buddhism to China in the Tang Dynasty, for the Tang Taizong, who wanted to kill him and then wanted to give him a tower.

Isn't that the way it goes? He visited a great library in South India. I think it was John Brady's previous life.

And like A.L.L. or something. And Shensang visited Arya Nagarjuna's library. Arya Nagarjuna was a book collector.

Arya Nagarjuna tried to save the books of his time. He was the A.L.L. of his time. And he had a great library in South India.

So he thought it was important to save the books. And he spent a lot of his life trying to save the early books. The early sutras were 700 years before him.

Heart Sutra, Diamond Cutter Sutra. These are 700 years old by the time of Nagarjuna. And he's trying to save them.

He built a library. He's trying to save the books. Shensang went there.

Shensang came home with 1,000 books, translated them. That became Chinese Buddhism. And he heard there were some books missing in this world.

And anyone who has watched Lord of the Rings knows that Smaug, the dragon, they like shiny, precious things. Especially gold and diamonds and stuff like that. So when dragons hear that there's something valuable, they will try to hoard it.

They'll try to collect it. And then they sit on it and make sure nobody uses it, which is what people do with money. And so anyway, he heard that the dragons had some scriptures that they took home to their world.

And so he learned how to speak to them. And he became the master of them. Master means Arjuna, the great bowman of the Bhagavad Gita, the great arrow shooter.

So he became the great master of the dragons. And he collected some of the Boroboromito, some of the President Paramita from these Nagas. And he brought them back to this world.

So he knows about approaching a dangerous snake thing to get the most precious jewel out of them. He did it. You understand?

So when he mentions it here, you got to know the background. And he says, emptiness is like this jewel on the dragon's forehead. And to approach a poisonous snake is dangerous.

And there's a chance you will get bitten. And then you got to think about that. Why did Nagarjuna say, well, it doesn't take much thought.

People who don't know what they're doing go after emptiness. They go to try to learn emptiness from someone who doesn't understand it. And then they say, close your eyes.

Hey, hey, hey. Everything, okay, in Chinese it means black, black, black. In rock and roll it means, hey, hey.

Okay, but it means just close your eyes and think about nothing. And then you got bit. You understand?

If you try to learn emptiness from someone who doesn't know what emptiness is, you will get bit by the same emptiness. Which means, what do you guess is bitten by fake emptiness? What's it look like?

You spend your whole life staring at a wall in a monastery and trying to think of nothing. And you spend your whole life trying to empty your mind. And then you got poisoned.

It would have been better if you worked in the gas station your whole life than to sit and stare at a wall and try to think about nothing. Because that's the ultimate waste of human life. They don't even pay you for that.

At least in the gas station they pay you, right? So, okay. He says they get hurt.

And then he gives another example of something called vidya in Sanskrit. We had it like Dharani, medicine Buddha mantras. Okay.

And he says people who use a Dharani and don't know what they're doing can get bitten. They can get bitten by the Dharani. Okay.

So you have to, I think it was, oh, it was Hwang Ha So mentioned yesterday. If you're really interested in medicine Buddha practice, for goodness sake, read the essay in the book, you just got. That explains how the mantra works.

Otherwise, you'll get bitten by the mantra. And then you end up your whole life, you will die. And the people you're trying to help with the mantra will get sicker and, you know, it won't work.

I think worse than disaster is when it doesn't work. To die of cancer is one thing. To do mantras and then die of cancer, that's frustrating.

All right. Anyway, Arya Nagarjuna says, you need emptiness to understand mantras and you need emptiness to, and getting emptiness has to be done wisely and carefully. You don't ask an Arizona rattlesnake to give you the jewel on his forehead without some careful negotiation.

You will get hurt. So it's interesting. He's saying people who study emptiness wrong, the wrong way, get hurt.

It's interesting. You can imagine, right? I'm sorry.

I have 1,200 pages of notes and it's a little tricky.

[Speaker 2]
That's not it. Hang on. Okay.

[Speaker 1]
Is it, what's your next image, you guys? What number is it?

[Speaker 2]
I'll tell you what number it is.

[Speaker 1]
Hang on. Okay. 6.11. What's 6.10?

[Speaker 2]
Hang on. Okay, here we go. Yeah, okay, 6.11. Hang on. No. Yeah, okay. Hmm.

[Speaker 1]
This image, okay, I always like to, because of DCI, because I write the DCI courses, I like to find modern images that represent ancient images. And this represents Lord Buddha's hesitation to teach for seven weeks. Okay?

After he got enlightened, he refused to teach for seven weeks. And that's what this picture represents. When you see this picture, it's like the professor sat down in the classroom and wasn't comfortable to teach yet.

And Arya Nagarjuna, in this chapter, he says Lord Buddha was aware that if he didn't teach emptiness carefully, people would misunderstand. And I'd say that in the last thousand years, more people have misunderstood emptiness than who understood emptiness. I think so.

And you can go to, I listen all the time. I hear things from strange people who say, oh, emptiness means empty your mind. Don't, and try to think about nothing.

Nothing matters. You don't have to be kind to people. Everything's empty anyway.

Like that. And why do you think this picture relates to that? Huh?

Say again? Well, yeah. It means Arya Nagarjuna is admitting that emptiness is difficult.

And he says, why the heck do you think that Buddha sat there without saying anything for seven weeks? He was afraid. Not only no one would understand, he was afraid they would misunderstand.

So he thought it was better not to talk about it. And that's very deep. So here's the greatest emptiness explainer in history, the second Buddha, Arya Nagarjuna.

And then he's like, why do you think Lord Buddha hesitated to teach? If it wasn't dangerous, if it wasn't easy to misunderstand, why do you think Lord Buddha refused to teach? And he puts it in an interesting way.

He says, THUGS PA'I THUGS NI CHOS BSTAN LA RAK TU LOG PAR GYUR PA YIN The holy heart, the holy heart of the Buddha was hesitant to speak. He says the holy heart of the Buddha was hesitant to speak because he was afraid people would misunderstand. And especially they'd say, oh, everything's empty, so I can do what I want.

Or I don't have to be nice to people. Or I can, you know, everything's empty, I can do anything. He was afraid that people would think that.

That's why he refused to teach originally. He's talking to a guy like that. What's he saying to the other guy?

You're the reason why Buddha didn't talk. Okay, understand? Really, he's like, people like you is why Buddha didn't talk.

Okay, maybe he's finally criticizing the other guy. Now, if I had to choose one verse out of the 40 verses of this chapter, which is called an examination of the four higher truths, if I had to choose the most famous verse, it's this next one. Okay?

And because we, my teacher, my Sanskrit teacher was, he was into statistics. He kept manual paper notes of how many times a word was mentioned in a book. He kept count.

And it's a kind of a statistical approach to the study of the classics. Okay? And I was brought up on that partly.

And when I write an introduction to the Mixed Nuts books, I like to be able to say clearly what's Nagarjuna's most famous verse? Which one was used in the last 2,000 years the most? What's the top 10?

What's the biggest hit of all time? This is one of them. Okay?

And you can check. I do this. I do weird things like this.

Where was I? I was doing it in Peru, in Lima, in a coffee shop. Was Stanley Nelson, or I forget, for Nagarjuna.

And this is one of the most famous. Okay? This is in the top 10.

Okay? Everything is right with anything for which emptiness is right. If emptiness fits something, everything will fit.

If emptiness doesn't fit something, then nothing will fit that thing. It's like jeans. And I'm not going to explain the same example I usually do.

But it's like a pair of jeans. Okay? They will fit if there's emptiness.

And they won't fit if there's no emptiness. Okay? And this is very, very famous.

GANG LA STONG PA NYID RUNG BA DE LA THAMS CAD RUNG BA RGYUR If it's empty, everything's good. If it's not empty, disaster. Okay?

Nothing works without emptiness. Okay? Don't think that emptiness means nothing works.

Emptiness means everything works. If it's not empty, it won't work. Okay?

Let's talk pants. Let's talk pants. I don't have pants.

Okay? Simple demonstration. Okay?

And 100% correct. And if you don't think so, then I built a billion dollar business by accident. Which is possible, but unlikely.

Okay? So, what's the emptiness of, what's the dependent origination of this pin? What does it really mean to say all things depend on something else?

What does it really mean? It just means it's coming from seeds in your mind. That's all.

I read these long, long sociology books. I read a book about Buddhism. It means we're all connected.

You know, blah, blah. It's not what it means. Dependent origination just means everything's coming from seeds in your mind.

That's all. Simple. And that comes from how you treat other people.

Therefore, everything is coming from how you treat other people. That's all. Zero.

That's all. That's all. That's dependent origination.

Don't worry about everything else. Pant is coming... Did this pin come from a factory in Japan?

Or did this pin come from Geshe Michael's mind? It came from the seeds in your mind. The factory also came from the seeds in your mind.

That's how the factory can be. But anyway. And that's the dependent origination.

So what's the emptiness of the pin? For $1,000, and you cannot raise your hand before I ask a question. For $1,000, you got to find the money, honey.

Okay. For $1,000, what's a good way to teach emptiness to a crowd of people?

[Speaker 2]
Don't use the finger to point anything.

[Speaker 1]
Which hand, please?

[Speaker 2]
Left hand.

[Speaker 1]
Oh. Diamond way. Hidden Buddhism.

Ask them. Okay? For the rest of your life, if you want to teach emptiness, say, everybody raise your left hand.

Point your finger. This finger, okay? Don't use the other finger, especially in Arizona, they all got guns.

Point to one thing in this room that does not come from the seeds in your mind. Then you got to make it dramatic. You can't just say, ha-ha.

You got to go. And then, don't forget, you got to do, then you got to kind of do this, okay? I mean, you can't just go like that.

You got to go. And that's emptiness. That's all.

That's perfect emptiness teaching. Okay? That's a perfect emptiness teaching.

Oh, do you understand? Yes. Then why did you get upset at your husband yesterday?

Okay. There's an old Diamond Mountain joke, which I'll tell you again, because old men forget which jokes they've told and which jokes they didn't tell. There was a...

We just finished that topic at Diamond Mountain, I don't know, like 10 years ago, okay? Nobody's here who was in that group. And one person was visiting.

You know, they were a new person. And they came in, just after that lecture, and they came in and they're like, they were always complaining about Diamond Mountain. And it was hard.

We didn't have anything. And they're always complaining. They come in and we said, are you okay?

And they said, I'm surrounded by idiots. And we were in a circle around this person. And we're like, and then we all go, get it?

Meaning, we come from you. Okay? All right.

And there's no more emptiness than that, okay? That's all. If things are empty, everything works.

If things are non-empty, nothing works. He said the opposite at the beginning of the chapter. And he took the most important thing, the four truths, the first teaching of Lord Buddha.

And he said, emptiness cancels the four truths. And we say, no. If the four truths have emptiness, they work.

And if they don't have emptiness, they don't work. Okay, got it? This verse is very, very famous.

Sometimes you should memorize a verse. If you want to learn Sanskrit, there's no more clear and simple and meaningful Sanskrit than this book, this verse. And I'll put the...

By the way, I'm using a commentary by Choney Lama Drakpa Shedrup, who lived 300 years ago. Someday I'll translate it, if I ever have time. And other people don't ask me, and there's so many things.

Okay. 6.10, 6.12, at least. We are going to do Q&A in 12 minutes, Tim, am I right?

Yeah?

[Speaker 2]
Okay, all right. Next one.

[Speaker 1]
I think it's, yeah, 18. This is verse 18. By the way, if you did a statistical analysis, this is a popular chapter in the last 2,000 years.

It's like a hit song. And by the way, if anyone asks you, what does middle way mean? What does Madhyamaka mean?

This is the answer. Who's better than Nagarjuna to say what is the middle way? So this is a super famous verse where Arya Nagarjuna explains what is the middle way.

What is middle way? And he says, the thing we call dependence, what's dependence means? Everything's coming from seeds in your mind.

When I say dependent origination, blah, blah, I hate that word. When I say dependence, I hate that word. It just means stuff is coming from seeds in your mind, from how you treat other people.

That's dependent origination. That's all. That is emptiness.

Who said? Nagarjuna. He should know.

That is emptiness. Is it technically emptiness? No.

Emptiness is a negative thing. Dependence is a positive thing. Tell me the way things work.

They come from seeds in your mind. Tell me the way things don't work. They do not come from seeds in your mind.

Got it? Emptiness is always something missing. And then dependent origination is always something's there.

Therefore, they cannot be the same thing. Technically, logically, they cannot be the same thing. One is an absence.

One is a presence. They cannot be the same thing. Then he says, do you want to know what dependence, which is emptiness, is?

It's the fact that things are labeled. Label is a middle way expression for created from seeds in your mind. Is this a pen?

Yes. Is it labeled a pen? Yes.

Is that because we call it a pen? No. Label normally means a name that you put on, like a price tag, you put on some bread or something like that.

But that's not what it means in middle way. It means, comes from your seeds, labeled by your mind. And that labeling is always done with mental pictures.

The seed opens in your mind and a mental picture comes out and it covers this. I love to use the image of ice cream. Two balls of vanilla gelato ice cream at Moscato restaurant.

And then you say, put on the chocolate sauce mixed with the heavy coffee. And the images cover the stick like that. And then it becomes a pen.

So when they say name only, it means picture only. When they say labeled, it means labeled with pictures. And that's why a dog can look at it and say, I'd like to chew on it.

By the way, the dog thing sounds easy. It sounds too simple. It sounds like Geshe-la is trying to be easy.

I'm not. If a dog sees something else, if a dog wants to chew on this instead of write a poem with this, it proves the emptiness of the pen. And you don't need 2,000 years of the classics house.

Okay, seriously. If a dog sees something different, it proves it has emptiness. That's all.

So simple. So simple. And no one in the universe can argue.

No one can say, no, a dog sees it as a pen, they just forgot. It's not here. No, you can't say that.

If a dog really sees something else, which is proven by how they react. They chew, they don't write. They must be seeing something different.

That proves the thing is empty. That's all. You don't need anything else.

The fact that a dog doesn't see a pen is proof of Buddhism. It's proof that Buddhism is correct and it's proof that you cannot die if you understand Buddhism. It's proof.

The dog thing is proof. And no one's ever tried, no one ever succeeded to prove to me it wasn't proof. There was a guy in Florida who tried.

Got to be from Florida. I'm not saying. There was a funny thing, something funny happened there recently.

Anyway, I'm not going to talk about politics. Okay. And the fact that the pen is coming from your seeds, what's the final line here?

That is the middle way. Don't ask me what's madhyamaka, madhyamika. By the way, either one is correct.

Don't ask me. Don't ask me what's middle way. That is the middle way.

Things are halfway between dependence and emptiness. Okay. And that's the middle way.

And that's the highest school of Buddhism. There's nothing higher than that. That's also the Buddhism which is used for tantra.

Diamond Way depends on madhyamika. Diamond Way is a madhyamika school. Okay, cool.

All right. We got four more minutes of...

[Speaker 2]
Okay.

[Speaker 1]
Okay, now... Okay, these great Buddhist thinkers, they're also cute. They do cute stuff.

I think he'd play Jimi Hendrix if he was here. So, someone has to tell me, next verse. Why is this cute?

Go ahead, I'm not offering money. You can just yell. Yeah.

Yeah, he's using the opponent's logic against the opponent, which is where nirgajuna always ends up. It's similar to a wife or a husband. Okay.

So, he's like, listen. By the way, he uses exactly the same Sanskrit words as the opponent used in the first line. And then he comes back with, you know what, honeybunny?

If things are not empty, then the four truths are wrong. Because the other guy started out the whole chapter, he said, if things are empty then, the four truths are wrong. And then nirgajuna says, we're on verse 20.

We're halfway through the chapter. And he goes, you know what? When I think about it, if things aren't empty, the four truths are wrong.

And the guy's like, oh. He's using the same words. He's using the same language against the guy.

By this time, he's explained about mental seeds. And he's explained about the pen. And then he says, you know what?

When I think about it, if things are the way you say, then there's no higher truth. And by the way, I did not add to the class the whole next series of arguments, which is, if there's no emptiness, there's no four higher truths. And you cannot relate to those four higher truths.

And you cannot get the results of those four higher truths. And he goes through the whole thing. If things are not empty, we have a problem.

Okay? Okay, that's cute. And that's typical Nagarjuna.

Let me see how my time's doing. I think I got... Let's finish this.

I know Q&A is coming up right away. Let's finish. I'm going to try to stay on track because we have a job.

We're going to finish the whole book. Okay. Okay, good.

Next picture. Gibson. He's like, can you read the Tibetan?

Are you... SONG SONG KHA'I KHANG KHA LAG Good. ZHES LA ZHES PA ZHES LA ZHES PA Okay.

By the way, we have typed in the classics using Roman letters. Why didn't we use Chinese characters? Why didn't we use Hebrew characters?

At the time we started the project in 1983, at 87, 83, at Pine Hall, all computers in the world were based on ASCII characters and they were using Roman characters. So, we started inputting the data in Roman characters. There's one weakness of the Shenzong Tower classes is that the translators are not used to reading wood carving.

And it's hard to read a wood carving. Wood carving is... There's a problem with wood.

There's knots in wood. Then they twist the letters. They twist the letters to fit the grain of the wood.

Therefore, it's difficult to OCR. That's why we have people typing. We don't do optical character recognition.

The optical character recognition makes as many mistakes as a typist who just drank a lot of maltai. It's the same. Same result.

So, anyway, here you can see the problem. Now, for $0, Gibson, who's Buzuko? Master Shantideva.

Yeah, good. This is Master Shantideva's nickname. And it means lazy, good-for-nothing, slob.

So if you want to pay a high compliment to your friends, you can say, you remind me of Shantideva. You're just a Buzuko. Because the people in his monastery thought that he was a lazy, no-good guy.

But actually, he was busy writing at home and he couldn't do all the other activities that people were expecting. And then he wrote one of the greatest books ever written. And I was very hesitant to take it out of the requirements, the prerequisites, but I did, because it's three courses, 10, 11, 12.

So I was very hesitant to take it out of there. But anyway, otherwise it'd take you too long. So anyway, Buzuko is the master of bodhisattva activities.

No one wrote a greater book about the lifestyle of a bodhisattva than Buzuko, okay, of Shantideva. By the way, in the ancient carvings, they call him Buzuko. It's interesting.

It's like a pride. He's proud. You call me Mr. Lazy?

I am, honey. I'm so lazy, you have no idea. All his work was secret.

Anyway, so Arya Nagarjuna says, if things are the way you want them to be, and if things are not empty, then there's no Buddha. And then there's no bodhisattva jaya. Yeah, there's no bodhisattva's way of life.

According to you. He's really attacking the guy. First he said, yeah, you're right.

There's no fourth truth if things are not empty. And then he said, and by the way, there's no three jewels if things are not empty, because there's no Buddha if things are not empty. And then you can't get to be a Buddha because there's no six perfections according to you.

Got it? Okay, so at this point, Arya Nagarjuna is criticizing the other guy. According to you, the six perfections are out the window.

We don't need them. And Shantideva was just, I don't know, maybe he was Buzuko, wasting his time. Okay, got it?

So now when you see this picture, you will remember. Without emptiness, no bodhisattvas. Forget three jewels.

No bodhisattvas. Nobody could be a bodhisattva without emptiness. You cannot practice Buddhism, the six perfections, if you don't understand emptiness.

And it's emptiness that makes them perfect. Okay. Then, I think, oh, this is the last one, then we'll do a Q&A.

Ready? Yeah. New books are out from Rosa van Grieken.

You should thank her. You should say hi. So she's doing two cool things.

She's in charge of publishing all the Mixed Nuts translations. They have done 14 or 15 books now. And no one in history has done that for the last, Shantung, 1400?

16. Yeah, no one's done it for 600 years. Right?

1410? 1400. Yeah.

No one's done what we're doing in 600 years. Okay. And it's amazing.

And a lot of it is Rosa. So when you see her, you should thank her. But she's been working really hard.

She did two cool things. So some of my early books, I did with a big publisher in New York, and they have the copyright. I cannot print the book.

She bought the copyright from them, or she negotiated. So we have the right to print a certain number of my own book. Thank you so much.

Because they still make money off it, and they don't want to give us the right, but we bought the rights. So she did a cool thing. And a couple of these books are 25th anniversary books.

So it's 25 years since I wrote The Garden, which is about an amazing angel. And it's, sorry. And it's about 20, it's 30 years since I translated the principal teachings of Buddhism and the Yoga Sutra.

Anyway, we got permission to republish them. You can get the books now. So there's a QR code.

Do you know what to do with a QR code? Yeah. And then we have come out with a hardback edition of Emptiness Meditations, which is Venerable Utpala, Betz Greer's translation.

And it's the best emptiness meditation book you can buy. And it includes all of the details of proper meditation technique. So even if you don't want to read the emptiness part, the second half is how to meditate.

And it's Kamalashila's instructions on how to meditate. So anyway, those books are available. I'm not doing an advertisement.

I'm pointing out something. Nagarjuna says at the end here, and by the way, we just finished this chapter, okay? He says, if you really understand emptiness, you understand seeds, okay?

If you're an emptiness master, you understand seeds. And there came to be, out of that statement, there came to be a famous, famous genre of literature, a whole kind of literature where people sing love songs to Lord Buddha for teaching dependence. You know, you're so beautiful, you taught seeds.

You know, like you taught emptiness in seeds. So this whole theme of his, of this songs, and there's a whole collection of songs that are to Lord Buddha. And they're like, you are so beautiful because you taught emptiness through seeds.

And the important part is through the seed. And the most beautiful of those songs is called tendrel tupa, which means the praise of Lord Buddha for teaching emptiness in the form of seeds. And that was, there's a translation of that.

And a commentary is just, you're going to finish it tomorrow. Gibson's finishing it tomorrow, okay? You can be there, all right?

He's on the last couple sentences. We keep slowing down just before we get to the end. It's very similar to asking your husband to clean the toilet.

Just slower and slower, but we're almost done. I think we have to finish tomorrow. There's only three words left.

I don't think we can stretch it out. But this is where it comes from. This verse is where it comes from.

The last verses of this chapter is where Nagarjuna says, look, there's nothing sexier than dependent origination hugging emptiness. If you really understand them, you see them as a couple. And so he talks about that.

Yeah, that's enough. We'll stop there. Okay, Q&A.

Don't say I didn't do Q&A. I'll leave it up to you guys with the microphones.

[Speaker 2]
First of all, thank you for teaching, Geshe-la.

[Speaker 1]
Thank you for coming. It's good to see you.

[Speaker 2]
Thank you, thank you.

[Speaker 1]
Manny's, I think he was there when ACI started 100 years ago.

[Speaker 2]
Feels like it, yeah. I've been thinking a lot about truth and the nature of truth lately. And in particular, the truth of the law of karma, which gets dangerously close to the dreaded is the law of karma self-existent question.

But I'm curious, especially with what's going on in the world today, how to think about the truth of the law of karma. And is it like the truth of two plus two equals four? And how do you relate that to what are apparently other people's truth?

And to take an extreme example, your average jihadist would say that the fastest path to paradise is acts of heinous violence. Is that true for them? Is there an absolute?

So if you could comment on how to think about truth and how to define what is true, it would be most helpful.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, cool. I'll tell what I think of. And I think what Buddhism would say is, we call it the three tests of gold, right?

And it took me a long time to understand those three. And I kept going back to them again and again and again. So in the ancient times, when you bought a horse, you would pay with corn or something.

So the guy would say, 400 pieces of corn. You'd say, no, 390. And there wasn't any, there was no, what do you call it in China?

You pay or? Alipay. There wasn't any alipay.

Before there was no alipay, there wasn't any credit cards. Before there was no credit cards, there was no cash. Before there was no cash, there was no gold coins.

And before there was no gold coins, there was no corn. And so when you bought a horse, you paid for it in corn and you agreed on how many pieces of corn. And by the way, the ancient way to burn money, literally, is to burn grain.

And that's what the fire offering is all about. It's like, I have more faith in the Buddha than the grocery store. I will burn money to offer to Buddha.

And I won't be able to use that money after that. I won't be able to eat it after that. I believe so much in Buddha, I will burn the money and offer it.

That's what a fire offering is. So anyway, people started to use pieces of gold. And then dishonest people popped up about 10 minutes later and started covering lead with gold.

And then there came to be a thing called the Three Tests of Gold. SIG, CHE, DAR. Say SIG.

SIG, CHE, DAR. SIG means burn it. CHE means cut, snip it.

And DAR means file it. And then they say, how to establish truth is the Three Tests of Gold. This is traditional language.

Goes back to horse base. So SIG means one part of deciding whether something is true or not is can it be confirmed with your personal direct experience. And that's hard in the case of jihad.

Like, did you ever kill an infidel and then go to heaven? And you're like, I don't know. I haven't got that far yet.

So, that would be direct experience. So, in this case, it's probably not, it's not practical, I guess. And then there's a second test, which is called CHE.

Which is to snip the gold and see what's inside. With metal scissors or something like that. And that refers to confirming something with logic.

And that's kind of where a Buddhist would answer initially. They'd say there's a consistency between cause and effect. When you plant a pumpkin seed, you get a pumpkin.

When you plant an apple seed, you get an apple. When you plant violence, you don't get happiness. We would say that's illogical.

Just objectively, forget religion, forget how you brought up. It doesn't make sense that you would plant a hot chili and get a banana or something. They're not similar.

So, it's illogical to say that violence could lead to happiness. Okay, that's second test. Dhar, what's dhar?

Dhar is to file it. By the way, these are all what we call destructive tests, which are discouraged in the diamond business. You don't want to smash a diamond to see if it's real.

Okay? But the third test is to file it and see if you hit lead. And that's called, that's called, what do you call it?

You can say authority. Authority, now, authority is tricky. And kind of the definition of authority is, up to now, I followed that advice and everything was good.

That's the best you can say with authority. Authority is a little bit weak compared to logic. Authority means Geshe Michael, so far in my life, the stuff he told me to try, I tried it and it worked out.

Now he's saying I shouldn't kill people because I won't go to Nirvana. No, I can't confirm it. But given his track record, given that everything he told me in the past worked out, I'll take a shot.

And by the way, that's weak because it could be Geshe Michael fails on this last one. But that's the three tests of gold. But if you find a person who is trustable, that's why you have to spend so long choosing a spiritual teacher.

You have to check, check, check, check, check, and then you start to follow what they say. So anyway, that's what a Buddhist would answer. Those are the three tests of truth.

And if they pass those tests, then we would say it's likely to be true.

[Speaker 2]
Cool?

[Speaker 1]
All right. Now it's true that we are having breakfast. I'm having breakfast.

I don't know what you're doing. Is it? So I say it's true.

Now you just find out if I'm telling the truth or not. Okay. Thank you.