Вступление на срединный путь (текущий курс, Аризона), занятие 112

[Speaker 1]
Okay, I did some, I filled in the translation from last week, so if you don't, I mean from Friday, so if you don't have it, you can get it off the web, I think. Right? Are we already tied up?

Oh no. And a few, there were some weird expressions in the line so far. And so I looked up a commentary by an Indian master and I filled it in from Rinchen Tewa, from Arya Nagarjuna's String of Jewels.

Like it said, the three ways, and then it explained, it was something really weird, which you can look at. And then it talked about the two natures, which was really weird, and you can look at that. It's not what you would expect, and it's not what I said.

So, okay, and maybe it's just this commentator, but it makes sense, the way he comments. It's Master Jayananda, old Sanskrit commentary. So we continue with, this is Rinchen Tewa, this is Arya Nagarjuna.

Oh, we've got to do some alphabet, right? Let's skip the alphabet for now, because we're late. Did I do vowels with you?

Let's do that, that's easy and short. Five vowels in Tibetan, and only four of them have a symbol, because... Yeah, one of them is considered innate in every other consonant, so they don't write it.

So if you see an R by itself, you understand it to have an A in it. So it kind of saves time, right? If you just wanted to say, I don't know, like la-la-la, it would just be an L there, and everybody would know that there's an A.

If it was just L by itself, with two spaces on each side of it, everybody would understand, oh, it saves writing all those As. Everybody understands there's a la there, okay? And then the other four vowels, say I, U, A, O.

I, U, A, O. And they have their own names, those four vowels have their own names. The I sound is called giku.

The U sound is called shabkyu, which means foot hook, and you see that hook under the letter, and then say dengbu. Dengbu means a little thing that's halfway up, like this flag at Iwo Jima thing, like not perpendicular and not flat, but 40, what is it, 45 degrees, like that. So deng means to be lifting up a flagpole, so it's halfway up already, and that's called a flagpole mark, dengbu.

And then I, U, A, O, naro, say naro, which has the connotation of bull's horns, and it's that one that looks like a seagull, okay? So that's all. So if you have, for example, ra, and there's nothing attached to it, it's just ra.

There's an A vowel there, okay, a, an A vowel. If there's a little thing on top, like a little hook, that's a giku, and then you pronounce it as ri, roll the R, okay, ri. If there's a foot hook under it, you say ru.

If there's a half-raised flagpole on top of it, it's re. And if there's bull horns on it, it's ro, ro. Okay, that's all.

It's easy, okay? Get used to that, practice that, practice reading that. Then we'll go, next time we meet, we'll go into suffix letters, because they change the vowel sounds, like to u and i and i and i, and, you know, because you have to know the vowels first.

So get used to the vowels, you know, practice making the sounds, and then we'll do the suffix letters next time, okay? So if you have any, okay, I'll read it. I think there's still a time delay, I'm not sure.

Yeah, anyway, this is still a verse from the Rinchen Tantra, of Aya Nagarjuna, and it says, if you have any hope at all of achieving matchless enlightenment for yourself or for the world, then you will need to have its root, the wish for Buddhahood, firm as the king of every mountain, which is referring to Mount Meru, yes, Sumeru. By the way, there's a Greek thing about that, but I won't go into it. The word derives from the thigh of Hercules, but that's another thing.

Firm as the king of every mountain, along with compassion that reaches as far as limitless space itself, and the wisdom that falls into neither of the two, what? Yeah, so we'll put that here. So I guess we'll have two footnotes, let me see.

Already? What is this thing?

[Speaker 2]
D.F. Murai.

[Speaker 1]
Oh, here we go. We'll have two footnotes here. Yeah.

[Speaker 2]
The mythical...

[Speaker 1]
No, it's always... Mount Meru is used for anything that should be unwavering. And then you find it, for example, in Jetsun Kappa's Lamrim Duden, or in Yamaguru, his short lamrims, to describe samadhi or concentration.

So it's a pretty standard allusion for things that should be unshakable. The mythical... What do you call it?

[Speaker 2]
Center of the world.

[Speaker 1]
Center of the world. And...

[Speaker 2]
Would it be possible to increase the size of the tank?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, I'll try.

[Speaker 2]
Just increase the view to... Is this 100%?

[Speaker 1]
Here?

[Speaker 2]
Yeah. 150. Is that better?

You can put it in view to fill the whole page. Here? Zoom.

The whole page. Oh, I'm sorry, not the page. Margin width.

Text width.

[Speaker 1]
Text width.

[Speaker 2]
Very good.

[Speaker 1]
That's nice. That's probably about the biggest we can get.

[Speaker 2]
Are you okay?

[Speaker 1]
Oh, you want to read that one? Okay. We threw in two footnotes.

We'll just pronounce, okay? Ready? We're going to be doing this line here.

Say, ngunpo. And I'll try to do the cursor. Ludup.

Ki. Tenda. Sabmu.

Dekonanyi. Lungrik. Nyikigone.

Tensul. Tetar. Yina.

Tejendangnam. See that? Jendang.

Right? There's the prenasal. Okay?

Jendang. Namki. Tensul.

Jitabu. Ranguk. Delpa.

Kangi. Jesu. Dangne.

Chepayin. Shena. Shena means, do you know?

That's like, yeah, if you say. Meaning, suppose someone asks, okay? Someone may ask.

In the pronunciation, I've heard the apostrophe I sound pronounced as like boy. After an O. After a bull's horn.

Like, Roy. Like, of the corpse, Roy. Yeah.

And then after an E, it's just a longer E, re. And like that. Depends on what came before it.

So it's probably not Chen boy. Oh, no. In colloquial, it's Chen boy.

Okay. Yeah. Sometimes you want to make it, emphasize it for a foreigner.

You say Chen boy. Okay. Okay.

[Speaker 2]
All right.

[Speaker 1]
Okay. There was, there were like four words.

[Speaker 2]
Shesun. Shesun. Shesun.

[Speaker 1]
Oh, I moved it up. See, I moved it up to here.

[Speaker 2]
Okay.

[Speaker 1]
Okay. Yeah. Because it's just the thing at the beginning of this quotation.

Okay. It's, it's, it's a quotation mark. Okay.

Okay. Who's Lu Drup? Yeah.

Lu means Naga and Drup means Arjuna. And so Naga, Arjuna. He who has power over the Nagas.

And you know that story. I don't have to tell you. Okay.

Someone may, someone might ask the following question. I made a little macro to indent things. Right.

This whole thing has been to say, all these quotations have been to show how Arya Nagarjuna himself presented emptiness in two different ways. One through scriptural authority in a book called Compendium of the Sutras where he just pulled out quotations about emptiness. And then in his famous collection of six works on reasoning.

And I always thought those were logic books, but now we know they are reasoning about what? It's reasons for why emptiness is logical. Right.

Going back and forth. Like he makes a statement and somebody complains, oh, your words must be empty. And then he says, no, not really.

And then there's this six steps in the exchange between Arya Nagarjuna. He starts out with root wisdom, the root text on wisdom, mula prajna. And then he's defending himself in the five other works.

But these six works are not written so much from quoting Lord Buddha. They're more like logically why emptiness makes sense. And why things still work if things are empty.

And why you can still prove things with words and disprove things with words and like that. So we're done with that. We're done with describing how Arya Nagarjuna presented emptiness in those two ways.

So now someone comes up and says, okay, I like your presentation. I understand how Arya Nagarjuna presented emptiness both through scriptural authority and reasoning. Because you have to do both, right?

A lot of times you'll be in a yoga class in Kansas City and they're not going to take Arya Nagarjuna's word. Because they never heard of him. So they're going to need a logic.

And then sometimes you're going to be in the monastery and they're not going to want to hear your American version of logic. And they want a quotation from Arya Nagarjuna. And then you've got to be able to do both.

Different people need different kinds of proofs. You can't tell everybody so-and-so said so if they don't know so-and-so. And then some people, they want so-and-so.

They want to know that someone authentic said it. You'll find both. You should have both at your disposal.

That's why Ken Rampache's assistant attendant is named Japa Lungring. They thought it was so cool they named him that. Scriptural authority and logic.

Japa, scriptural authority and logic is his name. It's so cool. Let's call him that.

So now he's asking, the guy's saying, so Arya Nagarjuna, who's like the inventor of Madhyamika, right? He's the shinde-sulje, he's the founder of Madhyamika system. How did people who came after him explain emptiness?

And which one are we going to follow? Because there's a lot of different versions of emptiness, right? And in the confusion immediately following Arya Nagarjuna, I mean in the next seven centuries or so, you see all the ideas that you yourself might get about emptiness.

So it's not just a historical exercise. It's a review of all the wrong ideas you can get in your own mind about emptiness. So these historical figures are archetypes for ideas that we ourselves get about emptiness, which are not correct, but which are very close.

They weren't dummies, right? And in the end they would say they're all highest view. But they presented different flavors of that view, which are not correct, technically, but which are close and interesting and educational.

And we say they're like emanating to help us, these different schools. So, who are we going to follow? The guy asks.

And then Bill Gates says, we will. So the first master he's going to describe is the person who's thought of most in connection with Arya Nagarjuna, which is Master Aryadeva. Okay, say Pagpahar.

So, sometimes they're called Pagpayabse. Say Pagpayabse. The Arya son and father and son.

Okay, and sometimes you'll just see Pagpayabse. The father and son of... The Arya father and son.

Nagarjuna is called an Arya because he saw emptiness directly. Aryadeva is called an Arya because that's part of his name. I don't think there's so much thing about him being an Arya.

But anyway, he's Arya Nagarjuna's main disciple. He was his direct disciple. Everyone agrees he was his direct disciple.

That's a Mahinga. What's a Mahinga? There's something else coming.

Okay, we'll get to it. So, we'll start with Aryadeva. Okay, here we go.

Okay, Arya Nagarjuna is generally thought to be around 200. Nobody knows. I mean, Indian and Tibetan history are very vague subjects.

Indian history is especially vague. Like, you can be off by a thousand years. I mean, look at the dates people give for Master Patanjali and they differ by 1500 years, 15 centuries.

And they're not crazy people. And it's complicated by the belief that Arya Nagarjuna lived for 900 years. We're going to get into it.

So, according to normal scholars, then you'd put Aryadeva around 200. Yeah.

[Speaker 2]
I like it.

[Speaker 1]
Let's do that. It's legal. Is it a prepositional phrase?

No, it's legal. It's an adverbial phrase modifying presenting. Really, really.

It's legal. It's legal. It's okay.

We're okay. Okay.

[Speaker 2]
Hmm.

[Speaker 1]
Hmm. What do you want to call Nelda and Cipa? It's Yogacara in Sanskrit.

Those who act according to their yoga. Is it yogi's way?

[Speaker 2]
Yeah?

[Speaker 1]
Okay, let's go for that. Yeah? I'm not going to capitalize it this time.

I'll tell you why later. Setting forth both... Yeah, okay, we'll capitalize it.

If I can. Anyway, he wrote a famous book called Shigyapa. Say Shigyapa.

Shigyapa. Chatur Sataka. And 400 verses on the Middle Way.

Okay? And what our author is saying is that he wrote it according to the yogi's way. Which is another name for which school?

Yeah, mind-only school. So, that's totally different from Arya Nagarjuna. Arya Nagarjuna is the higher half of the fourth school.

Mind-only is the third school. Okay? So, but here his main disciple is writing a book called the 400 verses, which is very famous, and there's a famous commentary by Gyaltsabje, where he's explaining emptiness, but according to the mind-only school.

Okay? And he doesn't explicitly attack the lower Madhyamika school. Okay?

And we'll talk more about that. Okay? Okay?

And those who followed after Master Aryadeva, they considered Aryadeva, since he was such a close disciple of Arya Nagarjuna, that he must be equally as much an authority as Arya Nagarjuna. Okay? Yeah?

[Speaker 2]
Just as much?

[Speaker 1]
Every bit as much?

[Speaker 2]
It's boring.

[Speaker 1]
Much of an... Is that okay?

[Speaker 2]
Yeah.

[Speaker 1]
Every bit as...

[Speaker 2]
As much of an authority? No, you can just say, as much an authority.

[Speaker 1]
I like that. Yeah. When Bill comes back, we'll do that.

[Speaker 2]
Because you don't need the... Okay.

[Speaker 1]
To be...

[Speaker 2]
As much...

[Speaker 1]
As much an authority. You know what it is? It's to be as authoritative...

[Speaker 2]
Ah, that's good.

[Speaker 1]
A source, is what the Tibetans say. Oh, and I like it when you do that. So please do.

Every bit... Oh, okay. Okay.

Okay. When Bill comes back, we'll change that.

[Speaker 2]
Okay.

[Speaker 1]
Okay. How's that? Okay.

I think we should stick this up... Here. I'll write something, and you fix me, okay?

The masters... It's like grandfather or grandfather or mother... The mother classics.

It means they wrote the mother classics or something like that? Chimo means like ancestor, forefathers, or something like that? Or the originals.

You want to call them the originals? It's not feminine. Sorry?

The original masters of the Middle Way. Say again. It's the classics which are the mother, and that's the problem.

It'd be easier to say the original masters of the Middle Way, but that's not what the Tibetan says. They are the masters of the original books of the Middle Way. That's good.

[Speaker 2]
The mother classics on the Middle Way?

[Speaker 1]
Masters... How's that? Okay.

Although the Tibetan is more like... grandfather or something. Okay, but anyway.

That's okay. Yeah, you could say that. Yeah, that's fine.

But you see, here's a problem already coming up, philosophically, right? Just because one was the direct disciple of the other, then his works start to be as revered and as taken as truth as Arya Nagarjuna's. But he has interpreted Arya Nagarjuna as a mind-only person.

So already in the first generation you have some problems. And then they're being lumped together by the next generation as being equally infallible. Although their views are contradictory, you see?

And then you're going to have problems. That's what he's trying to say. Okay?

All right.

[Speaker 2]
So that's the mind-gut?

[Speaker 1]
Part of the mind-gut. Anything that makes something shorter is good. Yeah.

Okay. Sorry? Right.

[Speaker 2]
You mean...

[Speaker 1]
You add the word... Say again. Say again.

Do you like it? Okay. He's an English teacher.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah, yeah.

[Speaker 1]
You're cheating because it sounds so good when you say it. Is that as much...

[Speaker 2]
Oh, oh, oh, oh.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah. Sorry, we're hung up again. Okay.

Um... It's authoritative. No, it's not a question of their...

It's not a question of their authenticity. It's just a question of their authoritativeness. Okay.

Are we going to split long Sanskrit names or leave them in one word? Sanskrit scholars think it's a coin. Normal people think it's too long to read.

Who's our audience? It's pretty normal, I think. We'll see.

When I split... Patanjali... Patan...

Patanjali... Everyone got upset. But anyway, okay.

Yeah. Did we? Okay.

People will get used to it. So I'm going to do this. Master Buddha Palita...

[Speaker 2]
Yeah, that's more common.

[Speaker 1]
Sanskrit is much more... And Master... What's his name?

Ayadeva. Okay. There you see their other name, right?

Okay. Maybe we should split it, but let's think of it.

[Speaker 2]
You could say, he furthermore clarified. Yeah.

[Speaker 1]
I'll tell you what. My Russian teachers always said, split the sentence, split the sentence.

[Speaker 2]
I think it should be furthermore clarified, rather than clarified.

[Speaker 1]
Okay, let's do one thing at a time. Hang on. He interpreted the true intent of the realized mind as being that of the confluence group.

Let's just stop it there. How's that? That is...

He did explicitly... Because the last guy didn't. The idea that working things could exist through some nature of their own.

Which is the lower half of my... That is the independent group's position. See what I mean?

They get stuck on the idea that gas can't run the car. You know? It's impossible.

It's just impossible. You know? Things...

Or that fire can't be hot. Hot is not part of fire. Heat is not a quality of fire.

They get stuck on that. They get stuck on the idea that the sun must be rising because you have the karma. You see what I mean?

Like that. Working things. Okay, so anyway.

That is, he did explicitly refute the idea that working things could exist through some nature of their own. He furthermore... Yeah?

I don't like the two logicals. There's some... Well, he's very careful to say jepak and not unsam.

See, jepak... Jepak is a logical understanding of emptiness. That comes...

When I explain emptiness to you, you get a jepak of emptiness. But it's no way it's a unsam, which is an Aya's direct perception of emptiness. He doesn't use the word conception.

He uses the word logical. Thogpa is very strong here. And it means a realization.

It's a big deal. That's important, maybe. How about a realization through...

Yeah. ...reasoning doesn't go so well.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah.

[Speaker 1]
How about the word aid? To gain... That's pretty close.

I don't mind. Do you mind intellectual? It's much easier, right?

I think that's what I end up saying when I explain it in a class. Okay. Got it?

By the way, statement of logical consequence is like... Somebody says, all fruits are yellow. And then you say, well, I guess an apple is yellow then.

You know, that's a telangira. That's a prasangika. And so that school came to be called the prasangikas, who say that you can develop an intellectual understanding of emptiness merely through a sarcastic statement.

You see what I mean? Somebody comes up to you and says, you couldn't understand emptiness from a comic book. You know, and you say, well, then I guess I didn't read that Dr. What was his name?

Hook? When I was a kid. Strange.

Dr. Strange. I think it was Dr. Strange comic books. But there was a Tibetan monk in there.

I was like nine years old. I was so like, wow. And he's sitting with this lama and he's teaching about emptiness.

And I'm like, wow. You know, and you know. Really.

Really. So anyway, just by giving a sarcastic response to someone who says something, so I guess I didn't read that comic book then. That's enough to trigger a basic understanding of emptiness in somebody.

But it's a little deeper than that. It's got to be realizations. It's a real big word.

It's a real like big word. But what I was going to say is that you know it's got to be deeper than that. Like even the lower middle way school gets it that prasangika is a normal, logical what do you call it?

Technique to give somebody understanding. It's very common in all debate parks that you're saying sarcastic things all night. You know.

Oh, well then I guess you know, blah, blah, blah. You know, so it's not like the lower middle way school thinks you can't use them. So it must be something more.

And when you get deeper into this subject you realize that the prasangika is called prasangika because they understand the emptiness of logic. You see. They understand the emptiness of logic and the emptiness of a sarcastic statement, you see.

And the lower middle way school has to always be saying no, it works. So it must have some efficacy of its own. You see.

Somewhere in the words there must be the power to understand emptiness. Right? And when I give you a prasangika and say oh, so I suppose blah, blah, blah and you get it.

Is it because of my words? No. You're projecting onto my words.

You have good karma. You were kind to someone in the past. Ultimately kind.

Then I say some sarcastic thing and suddenly you're like, bam, wow, I get it. Everything's empty. You're making my words have power.

My prasangika, my sarcastic statement, which follows from your stupid statement, has nothing at all. There's nothing there. It's just syllables.

It's just gikus and shepkus and denbus, you know. And then your mind ties it together and says, wow, I understand emptiness now. So that's the real point of why they call them prasangika.

Everybody understands that a sarcastic statement can be a very powerful logical tool. But does it exist in and of itself, you see, to produce an understanding of emptiness in somebody? And that's the idea.

That's what he's saying here. Okay, got it? It's a little delicate, as Geshe Thubten Rinjan would say.

So here's the first person to interpret Arya Nagarjuna as prasangika, higher middle way. So far we have Master Aryadeva interprets him as mind-only and doesn't even bother to refute the independence course ideas. And who did we have after that?

Was there somebody else? Oh, so Buddha Baleda did it prasangika way. He interprets Arya Nagarjuna and Aryadeva.

Am I right? Yeah, yeah. Well, he says true intent.

So Aryadeva may have written a mind-only book, but of course his true intent was to say that things are prasangika.

[Speaker 2]
He has to say that because he says real earlier.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, yeah. Somebody earlier didn't didn't refute the lower middle way school. And I wanted people to think he didn't mention that, but he did.

I want people to wonder why it says did, and then they'll equate thinking that a logical statement has its own power with the lower middle way school. You see what I mean? Sorry?

You could, but how often do you see certitude in Time magazine? You see, in fact, I used to get the New York Times online, I mean a CD, of the New York Times for the last 30 years or 20 years, and when a student proposed a word, I'd say, let's see how many times it's been used in the New York Times, or Time magazine, or whatever you consider the standard of conventional English for Americans in the last... Sorry, Kevin.

In the last... No, in the last 20 years. Like, we tried it with sentient being one day.

We had all the books written in English. There's a project called the Gutenberg Project, and they've typed in a lot of the books written in English in the last 100 years, and we searched that CD for sentient being. It only occurs once in 100 years, in H.G. Wells' description of people on Mars. No, and it's become Dharma lingo, but then when non-professional Dharma students run into that word, they don't know how to read it. They don't know what you mean. It just means a living person, right?

They have trauma. Anyway, one of my pet peeves. I don't want to put Arya because of the Aryan supremacy connotations.

I don't want to put it in a... Right, yeah, but they just call them both Arya, Arya father and son. So I'm...

That's called smudging it, you see, because they smudged it. They... It's...

What do you call it? When a word has two meanings? But there's a negative way to say that.

There's a way to say it with a negative connotation. You are... What do you call it?

No, you're using a word in two different ways, illegally, illogically. Sophistry, is it? Or something like that.

Anyway, I'm doing that purposely. It's purpose. Huh?

Like that. Mm-hmm. Okay.

Yeah. Now, what do you want to call Xingde Shulje, right? The one who opened the system of the chariot, meaning the innovator.

How about the innovator? But as a verb. Introduced?

It's sad because you miss all this cute thing about invented the chariot, you see, but I don't know. Think about it.

[Speaker 2]
I like that.

[Speaker 1]
We can say this became the... What's it called? Consequence.

School? I'll say school here. I keep saying group because I like to say two subgroups of the Madhyamaka school, but here it just would sound weird.

Where did I go this time? I like this because you're getting a history of of emptiness schools, and I don't think I've seen it much else, elsewhere, okay? And I like it.

That's one strength of this particular commentary, which is really a history of your misconceptions about emptiness. You see what I mean? These people in the monastery, they become archetypes.

They become mythological figures. They don't care when they lived. They could have lived yesterday.

They could have lived 10,000 years ago. They represent that kind of wrong idea about emptiness. So in the monastery, you ask Rinpoche, I always used to tell people, when did Buddhapalita live?

He'd say, after the Buddha and before Jetsun Kappa. And that's how many years? 1,900 years, okay?

And, you know, that's about it. They don't care. I mean, you know, anyway.

They are archetypes. They are mythological figures. Okay, anyway.

And they would think it was kind of funny to argue about was it 1403 or, you know, yeah. He's not considered the founder.

[Speaker 2]
So what did he believe that he belonged to?

[Speaker 1]
Ah, that's a huge debate that we'll get to in this book, you know. And could you be Prasangika and think you're mine only? And can you see emptiness directly without being Prasangika?

You see what I mean? Can you still be anything else after you see emptiness directly than Prasangika? You see, I mean, there's a whole...

We'll get to that.

[Speaker 2]
But if you see emptiness directly, you still teach it in a different way.

[Speaker 1]
That's a nice point. Did you hear that? Yeah.

Could you see emptiness directly and still teach it in a mine only way?

[Speaker 2]
Yeah. So now we get another person coming along.

[Speaker 1]
Okay. And he's going to interpret it in a new way. Okay.

Yeah.

[Speaker 2]
I like then too.

[Speaker 1]
It's sort of bridges. You build bridges. Bridges flow.

It bridges the flow. Otherwise the hypertextures like Venerable Phil would get lazy, you know. Like, here's something that's not in the Tibetan.

Okay. There's a procedure. But anyway...

But if they had been... If they had been writing in English they would have put then too. You see?

Because it makes it flow. The Tibetan flows in such a way that if you didn't put then too you'd be mistranslating the Tibetan. Because the English wouldn't flow as the Tibetan flows.

So that's another thing. But anyway... Get it?

Is that okay? So Master Buddhapalita gets it right. And then Master Bhagaviveka comes along and says, No way!

And he really takes him to task. He really, really wrote. And when they say extensively it's like two volumes in Tengyur.

It's like 2,000 pages, okay? That he's criticizing Buddhapalita for saying the right thing. Okay, ready?

I'm going to stick this up a bit. And this is important because this kind of thinking got into commentaries on Maitreya's Uttaratantra and became the basis of some of the Tibetan schools' interpretation of emptiness. Like Kagyu and Samyingma.

This particular author's presentation became the basis of how they read that book we studied last year. And that became the root of their beliefs about emptiness. So this is important.

Yeah, the Rangyupa, the lower middle way became the foundation for those schools. But if you ask them, they'd say it's not. They say we're the true middle way.

Right? We had that in the Uttaratantra. Okay, so anyway.

Yeah?

[Speaker 2]
Say again?

[Speaker 1]
Say again. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, by then, yeah.

By then, yeah. By that stage, yeah.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah.

[Speaker 1]
Well, either they haven't seen it and they're arguing about it or they have seen it and they're arguing about it for the benefit of their students. Yeah, and very, very often you'll see the best Geshes in the monastery, they don't come up and beat somebody. I saw this many, many, many times.

The real Geshes, the great ones, they come up and they present an idea which is subtly flawed. And the next four hours is can that younger Geshe catch the flaw? And it's all for the benefit of the listeners.

And by the end, the older Geshe is like, oh my gosh, you're right, I'm wrong. You know, and then he just walks out with this little grin. And the younger Geshe has learned something.

You see what I mean? And the audience has learned. It's really for the audience who's still awake at that time.

[Speaker 2]
Okay.

[Speaker 1]
I like it. The first time, it was Geshe Tutankhamen in Australia that I first figured out that he was doing that. You know what I mean?

Yeah. Okay. He did that to me.

Okay. Yeah, yeah. Like that?

He throws that in. That may have been their true intent, but they're ultimately true intent.

[Speaker 2]
Okay.

[Speaker 1]
He was no dummy. I mean, his works are unbelievable. There are like thousands of pages.

Svatantrika. Yeah. Because they believe that a statement of logical consequence or absurdity independently possesses the efficacy to convey an understanding of emptiness.

In and of it, in the words themselves, is disability. And it can never... How could it have been projected by the person that's just getting it?

Well, you never know that they're making a mistake. Like when I say that Kagyu Nyingma idea, when you read Jamgon Kongtro, you get the feeling that he perfectly knows very well what emptiness is, and he's trying to help people of a lower capacity. And that's all.

Because the rest of his stuff is so amazing. You know what I mean? Like that.

Well, wouldn't you... You know, like, every time you ever have a disagreement with someone, you're following that school. Because I told you, you know, I like ice cream with fat in it and not sugar, you know.

But they don't interpret those words the same way as you do. You see what I mean? And you think that if you said a thing that's grammatically correct in the English language with the normal words, that it should mean that to them.

But they don't hear it that way. You see? Yeah, you think that a word possesses a meaning, and that fire possesses heat, and that cars run on gas, and it's so hard to think anything else, really.

That's why you have every disagreement you ever have.

[Speaker 2]
Which school?

[Speaker 1]
Oh, yeah. Maybe. I'll do it.

I can't remember the name. Maybe. Go ahead.

[Speaker 2]
We do struggle. Like, you're translating, and we're struggling. Is this the right way to say it?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, I'm not teaching you translating. Your karma is ripening. Yeah.

If you learn Tibetan, I have nothing to do with it. Really? You created me to either teach you Tibetan or for you to fail to learn Tibetan.

But I... So, really, the best way to learn Tibetan would be to teach someone... No, like, Ken Rinpoche forced me to teach him English.

We sat down at the breakfast table the first day, and I said, you know, kala kare re. And he said, we're speaking English. You know?

And I'm like, I didn't come here to learn English, you know? And then I'm like... So, for 20 years, I taught him English, right?

But he forced me, because he knew that's how I would learn Tibetan. You see? Get it?

It's very interesting. So, if you really want to learn Tibetan, help somebody else. With anything.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's why Rinpoche would force us to edit his books. You see what I mean?

Like that. Because then we would get the karma of understanding. Hypertexting, for example.

Yeah, it's not just for the people who will read it. It's your collecting heavy-duty karma that will open your eyes to the meaning of the words. It's very beautiful.

It's a very weird system, right? Guru Yoga thing. Yeah, okay.

Master Bala Mimveka... How do you want to call it? It's a work which is not commenting on somebody else's work.

Because he's going to divide his text into two. One in which... You could say original, but also the others are original also.

Well, I want to say... They're going to say he wrote two bodies of literature. The first kind are totally his own idea.

The second kind where he's commenting on somebody else's books. Stand-alones to... to computeries.

You can have stand-alones that aren't innovative. How about independent? Primary is pretty good.

Wrote his own primary works.

[Speaker 2]
Well, the other commentaries are his own works too.

[Speaker 1]
Wrote primary works. How about primary? I think that's what they call them actually.

Let's see how it reads.

[Speaker 2]
I like primary. We should start more clubs. We're the independents.

Well, let me finish the second part, then we'll continue. Kevin says primary. Let's go.

[Speaker 1]
Okay.

[Speaker 2]
He should call it the secondary and the tertiary. Right. That's what we wanted to imply.

No.

[Speaker 1]
Let me do the second part of the sentence and then I think you'll...

[Speaker 2]
See, it's primary as opposed to commentary.

[Speaker 1]
You could say just wrote works of his own, such as... I don't know.

[Speaker 2]
Well, as soon as you say commentary, you're... it's a mein gack that the first thing is something else. Right.

[Speaker 1]
This is hard. String of lanterns or something like that? I don't know.

It means a string of... It's like Christmas tree lights like you put around the background. Is that all right?

[Speaker 2]
Okay.

[Speaker 1]
Now, what did we call the other guy? He became the originator. Okay.

Sorry? You still want to kill primary? Oh, by the way, the Tibetan word for explication there is commentary again, but we already got two commentaries in the sentence, so I'm trying to...

You know. Or you could say an explication. Works of his own?

He also wrote works of his own? If the other not a zone? Unless the original works?

[Speaker 2]
I'm sorry.

[Speaker 1]
I mean, when you throw in the second sentence, I think you don't have a problem. You can use a couple of different words in the first sentence, as long as the second sentence comes along and says he also wrote commentaries on other people's works, then I don't think anyone's going to have a... No one's going to misunderstand the point, right?

By that time. Okay.

[Speaker 2]
What is the, like, that-ness, that-ness of your teaching, is that what you're saying?

[Speaker 1]
Where are we?

[Speaker 2]
Like, you were saying... That-ness.

[Speaker 1]
That-ness? Oh, such-ness?

[Speaker 2]
That-ness.

[Speaker 1]
Such-ness, thus-ness, that-ness, they all mean emptiness. Tat-va. Our Dharma talks about that-ness and such-ness.

Yeah, they all mean the same thing. It's tat-va in Sanskrit, such-ness, yeah. Yeah.

Sorry? How do you guys feel? Okay.

I like a pond for a meter. Okay. Anyway.

[Speaker 2]
Now, I don't know this master's Sanskrit name, so I'll show you how to look it up.

[Speaker 1]
You go to Gopher. You say Yeshe Nyingbo. You go to the unique ACIP Sanskrit-Tibetan dictionary.

Maybe I didn't spell it right. No. Spelled right.

This ran faster before Windows was invented. Jnanagarbha. Okay.

It's right there. You see? It's Jnanagarbha.

For Yeshe Nyingbo. So... You don't like this one here.

The Y. Would you prefer a senior? I don't think...

Oh, yeah. I don't use diacritical marks for the general public. Everyone in the 4,000 Buddhists who read Snowland's books...

Not really.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah, yeah.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, in Arizona. The next author is of interest to those of you taking the Bokchenpa class. Thought I'd get her attention.

You know, the Tibetan is a little bit repetitive. Just to show you. Because we're hanging up anyway.

Here it says Rangyur-dodawa and here it says Rangyur-dodawa. You see? So I'm trying to catch that repetitiveness.

Which seems a little unnecessary and there's probably a reason for it. So I feel as a translator, you reflect it in the English and you let the readers worry about it. You know, why did he say that twice there?

Because you never do that. No real master would do that unless he had a reason. I'm not going to get into it.

Maybe you guys will get into it. When you say, Dhammastablah, you don't capitalize it. When you say, Mastablah, you capitalize it.

It's a little tricky. By the way, there is a reason why I keep saying... Now, there is a reason why.

All of this is in dialectic. All of this is in debate language. He's saying...

He's not saying Shantarakshita and these other people commented upon it. He's saying they did comment upon it because they did... It's always da-da-da-da because da-da-da-da.

You see? He's setting you up for the dialectic of his style. The whole book is going to be dialectic.

How does that work? It's beautiful. It's the beauty of the Tibetan monastic system and the monastic textbooks.

They're all written in dialectic. What does that mean? Somebody comes up and says, Are you telling...

I say fire must have heat within it. You don't get a... It never starts out, Now, fire doesn't really have heat.

Why? Because they never start like that. There's always this poor stooge coming up.

Fire's got to have heat of its own. You know? And then you attack the guy.

And you get this feeling of a debate ground through the whole book. Dialectic. Like Socrates.

It's a great method. It probably came from Socrates. But anyway.

So even now he's starting to say stuff like that. He makes a statement. He says because da-da-da-da.

Now there is also... Notice all he says is just lighter. Master Shanta.

So Shanta Rakshita was one of the very first Buddhist masters into Tibet. And who is his spiritual son? Master Kamalasiddha.

Master Kamalasiddha. Okay. So we're going to find out.

Which is kind of cool. Alright. Do you remember the story?

Did you hear the story? Did you tell him the story? How did Master Kamalasiddha get to Tibet?

How did he get to Samya to have the debate?

[Speaker 2]
There was going to be a problem. When the problem occurred, send for my...

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Master Shanta Rakshita is in Tibet first. And he says, there's going to be a problem.

And when the problem breaks out, don't forget. He's telling the king, right? Don't forget.

When the problem happens... So far there hasn't been any big schism in Tibet. But when it comes, send for the cavalry, which is my disciple Kamalasiddha back in India.

Then he dies. Right? And then the king...

Then this debate starts about, should you meditate on nothing or should you meditate on something? And then it gets violent. People are fighting.

And then the king says, oh, we better... First he does something else and then somebody says, no, no, don't you remember what Master Shanta Rakshita said? Oh, yeah, I have to call for the cavalry.

Then he calls for Master Kamalasiddha and then the debate happens. By the way, it had a powerful effect on many of the Christians at the church the other day. So we met with some of them afterwards and they were like, oh, we always heard that you were just supposed to empty your mind and not think about anything.

And this lady was saying, I've done that for 20 years, you know. And I've just been sitting there trying to empty myself. And she was really grateful.

She was like, oh, well, I hope Mercedes is going to talk about how to really do it. And that's a very exciting thing. So their first...

We asked the Christian leadership, what would you think should be the first courses? And they said meditation. Teach us how to meditate properly.

Because people have just been coming in with this vague thing of just empty yourself, you know. And this sounds very exciting, what you're saying. So she's starting tomorrow.

She's coming too. Yeah, yeah. So she's starting tomorrow.

And it's a five-week course on how not to empty your mind. So anyway, some benefit from that. And the goal there, just to clarify, is that they stay Christian.

And they just know how to meditate on their own path in a powerful way. And not to try to make them change it into a blue, six-armed, you know. That's not their thing, you know.

So it's not to try to convert anybody. It's just to give them the tools to reach the goal through their own path. You know what I mean?

Okay. But we've got to finish Kamalashila, right? I've got two minutes.

Is that right? Not responding. Should I cut it?

Okay. I can cut it because we don't need the rest of it except on some occasions. Okay, here we go.

Rangrik, how do you want to translate it? It's the ability of the mind to know itself in a single instant. In psychology, it's called apperception.

Yeah. Yeah.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah.

[Speaker 1]
And you know, we say, for example, some schools would say you're aware of yourself in the next moment. That's what self-awareness is. Like, you're always a millisecond behind yourself.

When you hear yourself thinking, that thought must have been thought a millisecond before you heard it, right? But there's a heavy debate that there must be the ability of the mind to compartmentalize itself like a horseshoe so that part of the mind is listening to another part of the mind as you think, simultaneously, and there's no timeline. Okay.

So what are you going to call that, rangrik? In Tibetan, it's called own-knowing. Yeah.

You can use a phrase. Phrases are legal. Later it might get a little clumsy, but we can worry about that later.

Self-awareness is... Do you like self-awareness? Self-awareness in the moment?

Okay. The mind is aware of itself? Is self-aware?

But it does.

[Speaker 2]
I don't know. Instantaneously.

[Speaker 1]
Self-awareness? Yeah.

[Speaker 2]
Simultaneous self-awareness is like the two selves. Yeah.

[Speaker 1]
Nobody will know what you mean.

[Speaker 2]
I think it's simultaneous. To answer your question, Michael, it's so much more helpful to do what you did, because the mind is able to know itself in the moment. Yeah.

[Speaker 1]
Okay. Okay? This is the big mind-only thing.

That's their two bulwark, foundation ideas. The mind can know itself in the moment, and that, secondly, the things, the walls here are just part of your own mind. You're watching a part of your own mind.

Nothing exists outside of your own mind. Like that. Okay?

All right. Sorry? Yeah.

So that becomes... So, so far we've got prasangika, which is higher middle way. We've got general independent group, which is lower middle way.

That group is now going to be split into those who hang more with the mind only, and those who hang more with the sutras. And then below all of those are who? The mind only.

And these are all schools which are created by different masters throughout the centuries to explain Arya Nagarjuna. So now, I think it's really beautiful. Nobody ever gets this, this clear, you know.

And it took really Jetsun Kapa to clarify on this. You get a real sense of how all these archetypical wrong ideas came up. And you have very worthy defenders of them writing thousands of pages in defense of the idea that there's nothing outside of you.

You know? Or that fire, heat really is a quality of fire. And that gasoline really does run your car.

Okay? Like it's true that the pen is a projection. That's okay.

A static object in a moment, physical object, is your mind putting those parts together. But the interaction of objects could never be a projection. There has to be some efficacy, some power of the cause to create the result.

It can't be me granting the power to the gasoline to run the car. It can't be me. There must be some power inherent in the gas to run the car.

The pen thing I buy, the pen thing I'm comfortable with. But the gasoline thing, it's a little too much. You know?

Over a period of time, cause to effect. Not static. Not just one pen sitting there at 8.03. You know? But for one thing to cause another thing to happen, that can't be my projection. It can't be that my mind is imbuing gasoline with the power to run a car. That's impossible.

So all that idea on down is coming up after Arya Nagarjuna. Like Buddhapalita gets it right. And then Baba Viveka says, you're wrong.

And then all these people buy Baba Viveka. Right? Jnana Garbha, Kamalashila, Shantarakshita, Haribhadra, and Vimuktesena.

Okay? All those people buy it. And then there's going to be one guy riding on a white horse and reinstate Buddhapalita as the highest viewpoint.

We didn't get to him yet. He's the last guy on the stage. Who is that?

Chandrakirti. Okay? So that's where this is going.

Okay? It's very exciting. It's like...

No, it's like there's all these skirmishes going on. And then he's going to come in on the white horse with this lance and knock everybody off. And then we're going to study Chandrakirti.

And that's going to be the announcement at the end of this section. What's our system come from? Chandrakirti.

And then... Master... Lord Atisha is going to go so far as to say, if you don't get what Chandrakirti said, you can't get enlightened.

He's going to come and say that. And he's also going to say, obviously Chandrakirti was Nagarjuna's direct disciple.

[Speaker 2]
In Chandrakirti's Western dates?

[Speaker 1]
450 years later. Okay? We'll stop there.

Roughly. Okay. Okay.

Okay, so hang in there in this class. You don't have to know Tibetan suffixes and prenasals, okay? Or grammar.

You're just... This is going to leak into that mahogany, slowly. Now, and three years from now, you'll be sitting there in meditation and boom, you'll see emptiness.

You see what I mean? And this is how it happens. It's just slogging through the textbooks.

And you think nothing's happening. You know? And then three years from now, like, it don't happen just by accident.

There's no such thing as like, what they call satori or something. There's no such... It's hard work.

It's slogging through these texts. It's struggling with these ideas when it's hot or it's cold. And it's not understanding what's going on.

And then three years later, you're just sitting there, you know, thinking about lunch, and then suddenly it goes off. And it ain't for no reason at all. It's because you sat in that class for a few hundred hours or something, you know?

And so just come. Whatever percent you're getting, it's fine. We are purposely manipulating the deep seeds and it will come out.

So don't worry about the prenasals and stuff. Okay. All right.