Dependent Origination — 2011-02-26

Audio recorded at Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.

About this talk. In this 156-minute talk, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher delivers a comprehensive exposition on dependent origination and the correct understanding of emptiness according to the Prāsaṇgika Mādhyamika school. He opens with why emptiness itself is a crucial but treacherous doctrine—misunderstanding it leads to either extreme nihilism or eternalism, both destructive to practice. The talk traces the historical transmission of these teachings from Nāgārjuna through India, China, and Tibet, explaining why Chinese Buddhism remained sūtra-based while Tibetan traditions received the full commentarial literature. He critiques both Tibetan and Western misreadings of Mādhyamika, particularly the doctrine of non-thought associated with the 8th-century Chinese monk Heshang, arguing that such views destroy ethics and the method component of the path. He then presents Je Tsongkhapa’s interpretation: emptiness and dependent origination are not contradictory but mutually entail each other; wisdom realizing emptiness must arise from rigorous analysis, not cessation of thought; and the principle of non-contradiction holds even at the ultimate level. The talk concludes by addressing common Western scholarly errors and warning practitioners against reading unvetted secondary sources on the view. Intended for serious Buddhist students with some foundation in philosophy or practice.

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File: 2011-02-26 – KR.mp3

UUID: 3b673b0a-43fe-49f1-b50a-0ec6cf2c2b58

Teacher: HH Dalai Lama

Collection: Dependent Origination

Date: 2011-02-26

Recorded at: Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide

Words: ~16,648

Thank you very much, Chris. It’s a pleasure to see that all of you have braved the weather to come to this talk today. In a sense it is rather nice that there are a few of us, because we will be able to go into things carefully together, which is often more difficult with a large group of students. Then, as always, one of the problems we have at TBI is a huge range of students. We go from Lojong students of Kensington Posture with great experience, who have studied tenets, who have studied sa lam, who want something meaty and substantial to digest, and students who are very new, and who need a more accessible presentation.

One approach I have found very helpful, and Rinpoche told me it was his own, is the potpourri approach. You mix a bit of everything. So there are simple things for people who are just starting. There are more complicated things for those who like effort. And there are mind benders for those who enjoy mind benders.

Mhmm. You know? And each one of you will phase out at critical moments. But ultimately, hopefully at the end of two hours, each one of you will feel that you have had something from this talk. That is the goal.

Then the next question one has to address is why talk? First about the view of emptiness and secondly, specifically in the case of this conference today, why talk about the wrong views of emptiness? What’s the point? And I think it will become clear by the end of the talk what my my my goal is. The reason to talk about the view is because without the view of emptiness, liberation from cyclic existence and full enlightenment are impossible.

There’s no such thing. And it is not any view of emptiness which will do. It is only a view of emptiness which is rooted in reason and a correct analysis of reality. Then the reason to talk about the misrepresentations is actually specific to a western audience. The way Tibetans would study a topic like this is that they would rely blindly on their teacher.

And this is by far the best way to proceed. It is a difficult topic, it is very easy to get lost, we see many westerners who do get seriously lost, and it affects all their practice. If one relies powerfully at the beginning, when one doesn’t really understand what it’s all about, on a teacher who has carefully studied the topic and who in addition has experience, which is the case of Khensur Rinpoche, or for instance the case of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, or the case of my own root teacher Geshe Rinpoche, then the risks of getting seriously waylaid are greatly reduced. Unfortunately, this is not how Westerners practice. The reality of the practice of most Westerners is that they come to the center, there is a part of their life which we know of, which is their life at the center, and then they read tremendously on the outside.

They read without any supervision. Then we don’t know what they read. And it’s a matter of tossing dice. So sometimes the works they read on emptiness are accurate and beneficial. Sometimes they are rooted in wrong understandings of emptiness.

And the person carries this within themselves. Comes the time for them to try to meditate on emptiness and they don’t have a clue. Or they meditate on the wrong understanding of emptiness. The result of which is actually more harmful than not meditating at all. So for this reason, today we are going to talk of the misunderstandings of the view of emptiness according to the Mādhyamika Prāsaṇgika School, both in Tibet and in the West.

And you will see that they are broadly speaking similar. There are to this day many Tibetan teachers who make an incorrect presentation of emptiness. And, because the students do not have the historical context, they can often get seduced by this. A large number of western presentations of the Madiamica view are simply wrong. Much of what we have in the library is wrong.

We have been in the West rediscovering Madiamica thought And we have a lot of western scholars, and it’s a weakness of academia, who, because they have official positions, because they have PhDs, feel that they can jump blindfolded into the deepest sections of Buddhist philosophy and the result is miscomprehension and misapprehension one after the other. As far as an academic is concerned, this is not terribly important. It makes no difference. Most academics are not practitioners. Their understanding of emptiness or their interest in emptiness is purely philosophical.

This is not our case. We study emptiness to meditate upon it and to practice upon it. If we get it wrong in our reading and our studies, we will get it wrong in our practice. This can have very far reaching effects. That’s what we will talk about today.

And to start with, I would like to quote Nāgārjuna who summarized and presented the Buddha’s teachings on emptiness in his root verses on Mādhyamika with a famous verse in the twenty fourth chapter. If they view emptiness in the wrong way, those of limited intelligence will be ruined. So if one has to choose between meditating on emptiness incorrectly and not even trying, it is much preferable not to try. It is much preferable not to try because if one meditates on emptiness incorrectly, one will fall in one of two extremes. One will fall either in the extreme of eternalism, which is the assertion that basically most of the phenomena exist from their own side.

Or there’s a much greater risk and this was the dominant fault in Tibet and I think the dominant fault in the West of falling into an extreme of nihilism, which is to be unable to posit any conventional reality for phenomena. To think that basically phenomena do not exist. And as a result of this, the very foundation of the practice, which is ethics, which is a practice of the method component of the path is destroyed from the root. So, why do we meditate on emptiness? I mentioned a couple talks ago the difference between specific and universal antidotes to the delusions.

All of us have mental delusions. Desire, hatred, ignorance, they are rampant. When they arise, we have to counter them. There are two ways to counter them. One can counter each delusion individually by its own antidote.

It’s a little bit akin to a marksman who, when an enemy soldier arises, has to rotate his rifle, target the enemy soldier, shoot him and then wait for the next one. He keeps switching his rifle around. He keeps targeting different delusions with a rifle oriented in different directions. He can only shoot the enemy soldier who has arrived if his aim is correct. If he shoots a bit to the right or to the left, he misses him.

This is the problem with specific antidotes. When for instance desire arises, the specific antidote to desire must be applied. None of the other antidotes does the job. The specific antidote to desire is meditation on ugliness. On the skeleton, on the filth of the human body, on the process of degeneration and decay.

If when desire arises, we meditate on love, desire will increase. So not only is love which is actually the antidote against hatred not helpful, it’s harmful. Likewise, when we are meditating on countering hatred, we have a lot of animosity towards someone. The specific antidote is love, compassion. We have to apply that immediately.

If we use the antidote against desire, which is a meditating upon them as a skeleton or decaying, chances are our animosity towards them is going to increase. So this is a problem with specific antidotes. They are specific. And before applying them, you have to identify the delusion and then apply the right antidote each time. So for desire and hatred, it’s evident.

But then if you take other afflictions such as pride, competitiveness, avarice, ignorance, each time one of these afflictions arises, we have to point the gun in the right direction. We don’t necessarily know how to do so. So this is a specific problem of specific antidotes. There is another category of antidotes which are called general antidotes. They counter all the afflictions.

So it is basically the same thing as when faced with an enemy army to use a variant of the atomic bomb. You wipe out everything in the area. You do not have to target. However, if you’re dealing with a powerful foe, you want to wipe everything out. You don’t want a couple of them left, a couple of commandos left in the wood works ready to mount a counter attack.

So the big advantage of universal antidotes is there. We do not have to aim. We do not have to identify the specific delusion, desire, anger, pride, ignorance, competitiveness. Think what is the antidote to this and meditate on this. This takes time.

During the time it takes, the delusion becomes more powerful. If it’s strong anger, it is very possible to completely overpower very quickly. There are several universal antidotes. The only true universal antidote is meditation on selflessness. And all of the Buddhist schools try to find what precisely this surface is.

The whole history of Buddhist philosophy is an attempt to understand what precisely the surfaceness we have to meditate upon is. It’s a difficult topic. There is another antidote which is broadly speaking universal and which is much easier to meditate upon. And therefore, even though today we will be talking about misrepresentations of Madhya Mica, my suggestion to you would be to meditate about this or on this other universal antidote and not an emptiness which we do not understand. This other universal antidote is impermanence.

Both coarse and subtle impermanence can counter all of the afflictions. Meditating on coarse impermanence, in other words, end of the continuum, which for sentient beings means death, for objects mean their destruction, is a powerful counter against any type of attachment. If you love your car and you think that within, let’s say, ten years it’s gonna be rubbished, your attachment to your car will decrease. It’s a powerful counter to hatred. If you love somebody and you think that within thirty years, suppose he and you will no longer be of this world, the hatred is going to collapse.

It’s a powerful counter to ignorance. Because meditation on coarse impermanence is part of the training in wisdom. In addition to meditating on coarse impermanence, one should train to meditate on subtle impermanence, of which coarse impermanence is a mere manifestation. Subtle impermanence refers to the fact that every single perceptible phenomenon, In other words, every single phenomenon perceived by the five physical senses and what we call the mental sense, changes instant by instant. At the time we have perceived it, it has already changed.

So for instance, if I look at Richard at present, the moment I think Richard, the Richard I am referring to no longer exists. My eye perceives the body of Richard and by the time the conception which recognizes Richard’s body as Richard’s body has arisen, that body of Richard has already changed. Now this is something which is scientifically established. Therefore for us, it is quite easy to understand. If you have access to a microscope or to pictures taken with a microscope of cells in the human body, you can see the change.

With an electron microscope, you can see molecular, even atomic change. It occurs quasi instantaneously. This table is disintegrating under my eyes. I am unaware of it. Now meditating in this way on both course and subtle impermanence.

The coarse impermanence of phenomena whose continuum end, the subtle impermanence of all phenomena which we can see, which we can hear, which we can smell, which we can taste, and which we can feel, is the most powerful and easiest antidote, universal antidote to all delusions. And it is almost impossible to go wrong with it. Therefore, this is by far for us at present the best way to meditate. Then all Buddhist schools consider that the person, in other words us, is selfless. And all Buddhist schools, all schools of tenets, the Vaibhāṣika, the Sautrāntika, the Cittamātra and the Mādhyamika schools have the same core assertion regarding the surfaces of persons.

And it is built on impermanence. So this meditation on impermanence can lead us to an understanding of elementary selflessness. This elementary selflessness, what is called the course selflessness of persons, is that persons are empty or lack permanence, they lack oneness and they lack independence. In other words, are not permanent, one and independent. They’re not being permanent is a meditation on impermanence we were talking about.

So if we meditate on persons and preferably all sense phenomena as impermanent, this is the gateway to meditation on selflessness. Then in addition, we meditate on they not being one, in other words composed of parts. And this is fairly accessible to us. All of us have a modicum of scientific training in high school. We all know that the human body for instance is composed of organs, of cells, of molecules, and these molecules are composed of atoms, of subatomic particles, and so forth.

Now whether this process can stop or not is something the physicists will tell us. There is such a thing as Higgs boson, it stops. If there isn’t, probably not. However, in every single case what we can say for sure is that ourselves, which are constituted of body and mind, are composite. We are not one.

Our body is composite and that our mind is composite, we can ascertain just through checking. If you engage and I would heartily recommend this, I think it’s foundational practice for all Buddhists. I trained in this some thirty years ago. If you engage in Satipatthana meditation, mindfulness meditation, and you can train in the school of Mahasi Sayadaw, the great Burmese master, who was received by my own teacher Geshe Rabten, then it will be of great benefit to you. Mahasi Sayadaw was considered and is considered as an Arhat.

In other words, someone who had attained liberation. And even though he was from a different tradition from my teacher Geshe Rabten, Geshe Ratin insisted and made all the arrangements with the Burmese embassy in Geneva that we bring Mahasi Sayadaw to Tharpa Choling so that he could give refuge to Geshe Ratin. Ms. Geshe Ratin said, it is exceptionally rare to get refuge from an Arhat. So this basic training in mindfulness is one which is very easy.

And there are many books, very nice little text of Mahasi Sayadaw with Practical Insight Meditation. If you train in mindfulness, you will see very quickly that not only is the body impermanent, not only are feelings impermanent and transient, but the mind is transient. It changes instant by instant. And this realization, because it is an empirical realization, because westerners respond powerfully to anything which is empirical, and nowadays very poorly to anything which is rooted in logical reasoning, this empirical realization will have a big impact on you. Then on the basis of this, you can then in turn connect this.

And for myself, this was extremely beneficial with Lamrim meditations on impermanence. And then they will bite. They will bite because you will have seen yourself that the flux of sense data changes instant by instant. The flux of bodily sensation changes instant by instant. The flux of mental non conceptual and conceptual experiences is constantly changing.

Then meditating on coarse and subtle impermanence becomes very powerful. So this is therefore the gateway, this meditation on the core selflessness of persons into selflessness. And the final point I will mention briefly is that we said persons are impermanent, they are multiple, or they are composite, and they are dependent. If you prefer, are empty of being permanent, one, and independent. What do we we mean when they when we say that persons are dependent?

In the broadest sense of the term, we mean that they are dependent on their causes. So in my case, if I adopt the traditional Buddhist presentation of the person as composed of five or four aggregates. Five aggregates for the beings of the desire and form realms. Four aggregates for the beings of the formless realms which have no cause body. My personal case I have five aggregates.

My form aggregate, my body, and then four subdivisions of the mind, the four mental aggregates. These are feelings, discrimination, volition, and consciousness. Now this is an arbitrary division. Buddha taught a five fold division of the person in terms of the five aggregates. He could have taught and he taught 10 fold and 12 fold divisions, but the five fold one is actually quite convenient.

Aggregates by the way, Skanda in Sanskrit means heaps. So the term itself indicates that the aggregate, in my case it’s a form aggregate, my body, is itself a heap of other things. It is a composite. My feeling aggregates, all the feelings I’m experiencing at present, At present, and this does not refer to emotions in the western sense of the term, it refers to sensation. It is also a composite.

For instance, at present I’m seated on this chair and if I analyze my mind, I can find that there are mental sensations which arise from my eye sense organs, who are seeing colors like the color red. There are strong continuous bodily sensations, the sensation of my two hands on my chest, the sensation of the chair on my back, the sensation of my thighs on the chair, the sensation of the soles of my feet on the floor. If I analyze more carefully, there is a constant flow of fluctuating sensations of coldness from the air conditioning. All this occurs in the background. When we become aware of this, we realize that the five aggregates which constitute the body form, feeling, discrimination, volition and consciousness are not only heaps, composites, but that they change instant by instant.

There is nothing there to hold upon. Nothing. This is a gateway to an understanding of the selflessness of persons. Then as we said Buddha Śākyamūni, our teacher taught in numerous sutras presentations of selflessness. For the practitioners of the lower vehicle of the Hīnayāna, Buddha only taught the selflessness of persons.

And there are two philosophical schools which are rooted in the Hīnayāna. The so called Vaibhāṣika school and the so called Sattrantika school. Then for the practitioners of the great vehicle, Buddha taught not only the selflessness of persons, in other words of ourselves, but the selflessness of phenomena, in other words of what we own. In other words, my watch, my shirt, your clothing, your cushions, the house, the elements which surround us. However, the most important, especially from the standpoint of practice, is the selflessness of persons.

When we meditate on selflessness, this is what we first meditate upon. Then these various presentations might seem at first sight contradictory. To some, Buddha said that only the person is empty of being one, permanent and independent. To others, Buddha said that all phenomena are empty of this. To some, Buddha said in the mind only school that phenomena, and the mind perceiving these phenomena are of one nature.

To others, Buddha said exactly the opposite. We have a large range of contradictory statements in the Sutras. These statements are contradictory only from a superficial level. For the very simple reason that the main goal of the Buddha, the main goal of all the great teachers is to help practitioners. Helping practitioners means to help the practitioners to reduce the overall level of delusion.

The teachers teach and the Buddha taught whatever is of benefit to that one person. And this is known as the intent of the teacher, the intent of the Buddha. So even though for instance, the Buddhist tradition is one which is characterized as teaching selflessness, The selflessness of persons. Nonetheless, there is one sūtra in which Buddha taught that the person actually has a self. And this very famous sūtra, it’s very short, became the dominant sūtra of one of the Vaibhāṣika schools, the Vatsiputriya school.

Now Buddha taught this simply because the trainees, the students in other words, would have been unable to accept selflessness. It would actually have caused the collapse of their ethics. And therefore it was better to teach them that the self existed from its own side, then to allow them to succumb to what amounts to nihilism. So this so called skill in means is characteristic of the vision we have of the Buddhist teachings. And this in turn means that the sum total of the Buddhist teachings, in other words all the Sutras, are all relevant.

They are all relevant to one or the other practitioner. They may not be relevant to us, but they are certainly relevant to someone otherwise it would not have been taught. So as you know, the key of alarm rim, and this is Je Tsongkhapa’s uncommon, contribution, is to prevent one from falling in the abyss of the abandonment of Dharma. The abandonment of Dharma is to start saying this or that teaching actually is not only not relevant, but is wrong. This could only be said if that teaching was wrong for all beings, which it is not.

Precisely because it was taught for the benefit of one being. And what the Lamrim does is to take the totality of the Buddhist corpus and structure it in such a way in the paths of the three beings, to being a small, middling and great scope. That the import, the meaning of each of the Sutras becomes evident. So this fairly long introduction leads leads us to our topic today. And I will first tell you what I will not do because I know this offered from some students a strong expectation for this.

I am not interested in philosophy for philosophy’s sake. I have basically no time for philosophers. However, in as much as a study of the view for meditation cause for a study of Buddhist philosophy, we have to engage in a study of Buddhist philosophy. It has to be utilitarian. Now at present, let us try to cover briefly, some of the material for today.

And first and foremost, what the source of the Mādhyamika is. Mādhyamika in Sanskrit means middle way. Middle way between two extremes. The two extremes of eternalism and nihilism. This school of thought was founded by Nāgārjuna, but basically Nāgārjuna drew heavily, perhaps exclusively, on a large collection of sutras, the so called Perfection of Wisdom Sutras, of which the foremost is the Perfection of Wisdom sūtra in 8,000 verses, which is perhaps perhaps the most important sūtra of all the Sutras.

The Shattasakha Prajñāpāramitā sūtra. This 8,000 verse perfection of wisdom sūtra was amplified and gave rise to perfection of wisdom sutras in 10,000, eighteen thousand, twenty five thousand and one hundred thousand verses. And to this day they are recited in the monasteries. The 8,000 verse perfection of sūtra was also condensed. It was condensed into Sutras of 2,500, 700, 500 verses, And then in 300 verses the sūtra which is known as the Diamond sūtra.

The Vajracchedika sūtra. In 150 verses, in 25 verses, this is the Heart Sūtra, which is a summarization of the 8,000 verse Perfection of Wisdom sūtra, and in one verse. And the one verse is just one letter. It is the letter A. The letter A in Sanskrit is a privative.

It means no. It simply refers to an absence. So the very essence of the teachings of all of the perfection of wisdom Sutras, from the perfection of wisdom sūtra with 100,000 verse down to the Heart Sūtra of 25 verses, which covers a sizable portion of my library, is just one thing. The absence. The question is the absence of what?

And when we meditate on emptiness if we do not identify clearly there is an absence of, in other words, the object of negation, we will go very far astray. Now regarding the origin, of these sutras, since we’re talking of misrepresentations, I feel it is the place to go into this. The traditional Mahāyāna readings of the perfection of wisdom Sutras is that these Sutras were taught by the Buddha himself, around 500 BC on Vulture’s Peak, Rajagriha, close to Bodh Gaya, to an assembly of Bodhisattvas and Buddhas. Then obviously, as his holiness himself pointed out, if you go on Virchow Peak nowadays, there’s place for five, ten people to stand if they hold their breath. So these vast assemblies seem difficult unless we understand them in a different sense.

Unless we understand and this is a traditional Buddhist reading that Buddha did not teach in a material body, but the Sambhogakāya. And that the bodhisattvas were present in this form. Then spatial limitations and temporary limitations are unimportant. The perfection of wisdom sutras, are considered to have been taught by the Buddha himself some five hundred years before Jesus Christ, were lost. And they were rediscovered by Nāgārjuna, and it is said Nāgārjuna, his name actually means Naga, serpent being, Arjuna, conqueror.

Nāgārjuna, they say, traveled to the land of the Nagas. The land of serpent like beings which are believed in in India. Now westerners do not believe in this, their existence, and it’s not really germane to our topic whether they exist or not. I think the western mind has become extremely narrow, so there’s no point in in pushing things too far. However, there are two there’s one major point I would make regarding the land of the Nagas, which is that there is a possible geographical location for this place.

To the present day, there is a tribe in Eastern India, and I edited many years ago a study for a publisher on this tribe, the Naga tribe, which lives in a remote area, and it is not impossible that the Nagas, which I referred to, in Nāgārjuna’s retrieval of the Prajñāpāramitā Sutras, were perhaps none other than this Naga community. It is not impossible. Some others say that the Prajñāpāramitā Sutras were preserved in Kathmandu Valley, which was a lake for a long time. Be this as it may, while the Mahāyāna tradition considers the perfection of wisdom sutras as the word of the Buddha, the Hīnayāna tradition refuses to acknowledge any of the Mahāyāna sutras as authentic. The Hīnayāna or the Theravāda position is that these Sutras are without exception later compositions.

Of whom? Nobody knows. Then, Śāntideva in the Bodhicaryāvatāra, books controversy rage at India has a famous rejoinder to the Hīnayāna teachers who contest the authenticity of the Mahāyāna Sutras. Śāntideva says, if our Sutras are spurious, then so are yours. Because the Hīnayāna argument is that there is no clear lineage of transmission of the Mahāyāna Sutras from the Buddha to the beginning of our era when they were rediscovered, and that this oral transmission, or partly oral transmission, invalidates their authenticity.

However, we know for a fact that the Buddha’s Hīnayāna teachings, the turning teachings of the first vehicle, the first turning of the law, were transmitted orally for generations. And they were only put in writing during one of the major councils of the Arhats, when the Achats which had as a side effect of becoming Achats, total recall, realized that their numbers were dwindling and there was a chance of losing some of the Sutras. So the very argument which Hīnayāna uses against the authenticity of the Mahāyāna Sutras can be turned against the totality of the Buddhist Sutras. Then modern Buddhologists consider that all of the Mahāyāna Sutras are late productions, and they place them basically between 50 and 700. This is, I’d say, broadly speaking a consensus position of modern Western Buddhist scholars.

It is, however, unsubstantiated. They cannot point to an author, and they cannot point for any individual sūtra to a specific date. So the arguments advanced are hypothetical arguments. These sutras cannot have been composed by the Buddha, because in the present state of our knowledge they refer to teachings which are not contained in the Hīnayāna corpus. Well, if we assume that the Buddha taught three corpuses, the first, second and third turning of the wheat of the law, and obviously these were put in writing at some later date, some in Pāli, some in Sanskrit, both languages were extant.

There is no particular reason on the basis of what we know at present to assume that these Sutras are later creations. It is it amounts to a Western materialistic prejudice. And if it is acknowledged as such, then it’s as legitimate as any other viewpoint. But there is no direct evidence for this, actually. Moving onwards to trying to understand Nāgārjuna and Āryadeva, who are basically the fathers of the Mādhyamika tradition.

Nāgārjuna basically synthesized the teachings of the perfection of wisdom Sutras we talked about, but drew heavily on other Sutras as well. He seems to have drawn on the Avataṃsaka sūtra, on the Lankavatara sūtra, on a bevy of other sutras to try to understand the Buddha’s ultimate thought on emptiness. Nāgārjuna’s works I should first mention when Nāgārjuna tentatively lived, so dating Nāgārjuna is extremely difficult, but broadly speaking, the first century of our era. Nāgārjuna’s works are broadly speaking divided into two categories. What is known as his collection of reasoning, which are six works dedicated exclusively to Madhyamica philosophy.

And a collection of other works, commentaries, praises, poems, prayers and so forth. The six works of Nāgārjuna, and I will mention them by name, so that hopefully there will be karmic imprints from this at some point in the future, are his root verses of Mādhyamika, which is his most important work. It is perhaps, it is actually at present, the most highly commented work of Indian philosophy in the world, both in India and out of India. His 70 stances on emptiness, his 60 stances of reasoning, his refutation of objections, his treaties called the finely woven, and the precious garland, which is traditionally included within this group of six even though Nāgārjuna talks a lot in it about the method aspect of the past. Then there is a collection of other works of Nāgārjuna, which are all, with one or two exceptions, acknowledged by the Asian Buddhist traditions as of the hand of Nāgārjuna, but which have exercised Western Buddhist scholars for two centuries now, trying to find which is by Nāgārjuna, which is not.

You find basically that when one source scholar says the work is by Nāgārjuna, another says it is not. So the opinion seem basically in the present state of affairs completely unsubstantiated. The first of these works is the bodhicitta Vivarana, which Khensur Rinpoche taught, which is a highly problematical work for Western Buddhist scholarship. It’s extremely problematical because Western Buddhist scholarship considers Nāgārjuna lived at most one century, and considers tantra as a historical development which arises in the fifth century at the earliest. The bodhicitta Vivarana, if you look at the Tibetan text, which is what we have now, is a work, if you didn’t know anything else about it, would be obviously Nāgārjuna’s work.

I mean, the manner of thinking, the impact, the cogency, the savage dialectic is just there is no other Indian Buddhist philosopher which is able to manipulate concepts without elegance. Yet, the entire bodhicitta Vivarana is a commentary on one stanza of the Guhyasamāja tantra, which dates according to western scholars at the earliest back to the seventh century. Six hundred years after Nāgārjuna’s official death. The Buddha Chita Vivarana is a gigantic embarrassment for Western Buddhist scholarship. And Western Buddhist scholars to this day remain extremely divided on it.

It is perhaps why His Holiness, who always likes to put his finger close to the wound, teaches it repeatedly. It makes something of a point. So the position of western Buddhology is that the Buddhicitta Vivarana is not the work of the the author of the collection of reasoning, but of a second Nāgārjuna, a hypothetical Nāgārjuna who would have lived sometime in the sixth or the seventh century. There’s no proof of the existence of this hypothetical Nāgārjuna and he composed all the tantric works attributed to Nāgārjuna. It just happens that he has exactly the same style as the first one.

Well, it’s very contrived, you know. Then what makes the position of Western Buddhist scholarship even more awkward is that the bodhicitta Vivarana is quoted by Bhāvaviveka, who lived in the sixth century as a work of the historical Nāgārjuna. So in the sixth century, it was considered already a work of the historical Nāgārjuna. In addition to the bodhicitta vivarana, which as we said is a commentary on the first verse of the second chapter of the Guhyasamāja tantra, which as you remember, Khensur Rinpoche told us to take as a commitment, and which reads as follows, the Tathāgata Vairochana said, abandoning subject and object, sense fields, realms and aggregates, bereft of all entities, one’s own mind, equal in the selflessness of phenomena, is of the nature of emptiness unproduced from the very beginning. In addition, therefore to the bodhicitta Vivarana, Nāgārjuna also composed what we know as doxographical material, prayers, which are also a rather major embarrassment to Western Buddhist scholarship, which likes to see Nāgārjuna exclusively as a philosopher, preferably not as a Buddhist, ideally not as a monk, all of which he was.

And therefore, when Nāgārjuna praises the Buddha historically, these things are passed into silence. Yet these works historically seem very well to be of the hand of Nāgārjuna. And the tantric material of Nāgārjuna, as well as alchemical material, which may or may not be due to Nāgārjuna himself. So if we try to understand and to contrast the western appreciation of Nāgārjuna with the traditional Buddhist vision of Nāgārjuna, which is probably Nāgārjuna’s own vision of himself. What we find is that Nāgārjuna saw himself, and I think the Buddhist tradition sees Nāgārjuna as a religious figure, not as a philosophical figure.

Western Buddhist scholarship likes to see Nāgārjuna as a philosopher, not as a religious figure. This is a fundamental difference. If Nāgārjuna’s goal is religious, then the teachings of emptiness have placed in a spiritual setting. The goal of teaching emptiness is to meditate on emptiness to gain liberation from cyclic existence and eventually full enlightenment. If Nāgārjuna is merely a philosopher as many western Buddhist scholars view him, then it becomes part of the intellectual game playing which has come to characterize much of western modernity.

Nāgārjuna is merely a sophist toying with concepts. Now the reason we can say, I think unambiguously, that this western reading of Nāgārjuna as a disincarnate philosopher is wrong, is because we know for a fact that Nāgārjuna was a monk, a fully ordained bhikṣu, and we have in his corpus of works extraordinary devotional works such as the Lokatita Tastava, the praise to the Buddha. When Nāgārjuna praises the Buddha for teaching emptiness, because emptiness is the gateway to liberation and full enlightenment. Then a second western misreading of Nāgārjuna is the western misreading of Nāgārjuna as an independent author, instead of reading Nāgārjuna as an interpreter. Now it is evident when one reads Nāgārjuna’s works with an open mind that the x extent to which Nāgārjuna quotes from the sutras, the Prajñāpāramitā Sutras, from the Avataṃsaka sūtra, from the Lankavatara sūtra, from the sūtra of King Ajakashastra, clearly demonstrates that Nāgārjuna saw himself as an interpreter, who was merely revealing and fleshing out what was already taught by the Buddha.

And the third aspect or the third difference between the western reading of Nāgārjuna and the traditional one, as well as Nāgārjuna’s own vision of himself, is that it is clear Nāgārjuna saw himself as a Buddhist. And most western commentators on Nāgārjuna do not see him as a Buddhist. It is astonishing when you read, you work through the sum total of works of Western scholarship by scholars of the caliber of David Seyfort Ruegg, or for that matter even my mentor Jeffrey Hopkins, that there is almost no mention in the case of Ruig, no mention whatsoever of past and future lives, of karma and causality, of liberation, and of full enlightenment. In other words, the entire soteriological component, the entire spiritual and religious component is evacuated. What remains is as dry as dust, this incarnate figure, which is nothing else but a retro projection of western philosophy into the second century.

Jacques Derrida, à la mode of ancient India. So my personal feeling is we from our side do not have to subscribe to this. All the more so because it is historically unsubstantiated and flies directly in the face of the totality of the readings of Nāgārjuna and Āryadeva by the Tibetan, the Chinese and the Japanese Mahāyāna traditions. So in a nutshell, I would say that we are dealing at present in the West, that’s why I would not encourage you to read works of Western scholarship on Madhyamaka, unless you are able to sort the wheat from the chaff. We are dealing with a process of appropriation and it behooves us to deconstruct this process of appropriation of Nāgārjuna by a non-Buddhist secular and materialistic tradition and understand Nāgārjuna as he understood himself.

When we read Shakespeare, when we read Otello, we want to know what Shakespeare thought Otello was and what Shakespeare thought Iago’s motivation was. So I apologize for the very archaic approach to textual interpretation, but the author has an intention and the job of a textual interpreter is first to recover the intention of the author. Then he can develop on that. When we read Nāgārjuna, we must understand Nāgārjuna as he understood himself and not impute or project within Nagajana and the entire Mādhyamika tradition our own preconceptions. Then this is a very good point to make a brief tea pause, and after this we will address the issue of the transmission of Buddhism to Tibet.

What I will perhaps do before the T pause briefly, since we have five minutes, is cover with you the charts of the chronology of transmission of Mādhyamika in India, China, and early Tibet. So if you take your first chart, you can see it is divided into three areas. India, which is the mother of our teachings, and to the right we have China, and to the left Tibet. Now this is a chronological development. Indian chronologies are extremely difficult to establish, so don’t be surprised if we are one century off for leading figures.

It is nothing to be be astonished by. But you can see that the root of the Madhyamaka teachings of the perfection of wisdom sutras, as interpreted by Nāgārjuna, who lived tentatively in the first century of our era, and his disciple Āryadeva, so it’s very awkward because nobody really knows when Āryadeva lived, it’s any time between the second and the third century. While at this period Buddhism had not been transmitted to Tibet, around this period the first transmission of Buddhism to China occurred, traditionally under the rule of Emperor Mingdi of the Han dynasty, with his famous dream of a golden man standing astride India and China, which led Emperor Mingdi to send emissaries to India to request the teachings. Be that as it may, what I would like to point out with this chart is that the most important period of Chinese translations of Buddhist Sutras occurs between the period of Emperor Mingdi and the great Kotanese translator, Kumārajīva, in the fourth and early fifth century. By this period, the main corpus of Buddhist rituals received in China was translated.

So what is striking is you can see that none of the commentary literature, which appears in India of the Prāsaṇgika and Svatāntrika school, was translated in Chinese during this first period. And this goes a long way to explain differences in development between Chinese and Tibetan Buddhism. Because Buddhism is transmitted to Tibet, look here to the far right, after the rule of King Songtsen Gampo, which ruled after the major commentary developments in India. Therefore, the Tibetan Buddhist traditions received the totality of the works of the great Indian commentators, Buddhapālita, Bhāvaviveka, Candrakīrti, and some minor authors like Avalokita Vrata. Many, if not most of these were never transmitted to China.

And therefore, if you look back to the section on China, you can see that the Chinese school of Mādhyamika, the so called Sanlun school, followed by Sanlun, was founded on the basis only of Kumārajīva’s translations. Therefore it was founded only on the works of Nāgārjuna and Āryadeva, which are translated by Kumārajīva, and the perfection of wisdom sutras. There was no input from Buddhapālita, from Bhāvaviveka, and especially from Candrakīrti. And the Chinese tradition lived on this. Candrakīrti was translated in Chinese very late, like around the ninth century, and had almost no impact at all.

So this goes a long way to explain what is traditionally said about the difference between Chinese and Tibetan Buddhism. Chinese Buddhism is sūtra based. Tibetan Buddhism is Shastra based, commentary based. And you can see that this is directly due to the different periods of translation or transmission. So because Chinese Buddhism is sūtra based, all of the Chinese Buddhist schools without exception identify themselves with the teachings of one sūtra.

For many schools it’s a Lotus sūtra. For the Chan school, the Zen school, it’s a Lankavatara sūtra. They do not identify themselves with the teaching of a philosophical school of Buddhism, which the Tibetan tradition does. The Geluk tradition identifies itself clearly with the teachings of the Prāsaṇgika school. Seeing the Prāsaṇgika school, one of the two subdivisions of Mādhyamika, as the authentic interpretation of all of the sutras of the second turning of the wheel of the law dealing with the view presented definitively.

And what we will talk about after the break is the famous council of Samye or the council of Rasa, and debates which opposed the Chinese monk Heshang Moheyan, who is here and who all evidence indicates was a Zen monk, a Chan monk of the northern school, highly influential in Tibet, and the representatives of the pinnacle of Indian Buddhism, Śāntaraksita, and specifically Kamalaśīla, who traveled to Tibet to debate with Heshang Moheyan at the Lhasa Council. The Lhasa Council is for Tibetan Buddhism a turning point comparable in importance to the Nikkei Council for Christianity. And we will see after the break the impact Heshang Moheyan’s teachings had in had in Tibet. Khensur Rinpoche said, the dharm, which Heshang Moheyan’s teachings, made in Tibet, was tremendous and it lasts to the present day. So because it’s unfortunately something we would encounter when we study, various Tibetan Buddhist schools, it’s something we have to be aware of.

And then I think we can take a tea break and let’s try to make it short, less than ten minutes. No problem at all. No problem. So, we will now address the famous Council of Rasa or the Council of Samye, which was held at some point between 792 and 794 of our era. The date is unclear.

It is the first important council in Tibet regarding Buddhist doctrine, and it is seen as opposing representatives of the Chinese school in the person of Hua Shang and of the Indian school in the person of Kamalaśīla. If you look at your chart, I gave you a date of July which is a bit late but could be the case. The doctrines in presence are fundamental and I think the opposition between the doctrine of Kamala, Sheila, and Hua Shang can still be felt to the present day. Hua Shang’s teachings were teachings actually all of you may have heard about without knowing what they were. You they’re a bit free floating in Dharma centers, they actually cause a tremendous amount of harm because they never really addressed.

It’s always lurking in the background. Fundamentally Heshang taught that there was an instantaneous road to enlightenment. Instantaneous enlightenment was possible. And it was possible through seeing one’s own inner Buddha nature. And the meditation techniques Hua Shang taught were techniques of non thought, non mentation.

Against this, Kamalaśīla who represents the Indian tradition teaches that there is no such thing as instantaneous enlightenment. Enlightenment is a gradual process which occurs over years, the lives, the tens, hundreds, thousands of lives, as one moves progressively upwards. He teaches that it is through meditating on antidotes that one is able to purify the mind, not trying to see some sort of inner Buddha nature. And rejects completely the doctrine of non thought. Now I am sure, now that we have presented Hua Shang’s doctrines, that several of you have either heard about this or have some sympathy for it.

It is it is free floating in Western Buddhist medieval years, and it’s never addressed. So it’s one of the goals of this talk to address it. Hua Shang, all the evidence indicates was an extremely orthodox Chinese monk of the northern Chan School. By his own account he was not a scholar. In his address to Kamala Śīla, he actually says that his main training was in meditation.

And as we pointed out in our presentation of the differences between Chinese and Tibetan Buddhism, saying that Chinese Buddhism was sūtra based and Tibetan Buddhism was based on commentaries, Hua Shang basically relied on a couple of Sutras, especially the Lotus sūtra and the Lankavatara sūtra which are dominant in the Zen tradition. And relied on a couple quotes in the Lankavatara sūtra which actually refer to states of non conceptuality in the practitioner, specifically in the Ārya beings, to justify the teachings of his school, the Northern Chan School, the Northern Zen School of China, of instantaneous enlightenment through seeing the natural nature of the mind by means of non mentation. And I will give you a couple of quotes of Hua Shang. So this material is actually very difficult to gain access to. We have two different versions of the Council of Lhasa.

One is a Tibetan version, some has been published, but the other which is much more interesting is a Chinese version, much of which was hidden in the Dunhuang Caves. A French scholar, a Swiss scholar actually, Paul Demiéville, translated this material in the nineteen fifties, and it’s the only publication ever made on the topic. I have translated some of these quotes here, which are actually quotes of Hua Shang defending his doctrine based on the Chinese sources. So these really represent what Hua Shang thought. Hua Shang says, it is because of the wrong notions and conceptuality with which they are contaminated since beginningless time, and listen carefully here, that all beings accept these wrong notions of virtuous and non virtuous dharma.

Sometimes virtue increases, sometimes non virtue, and for this reason they are drawn in the flow of births and deaths and cannot escape from this. This is why in keeping with the sūtra, probably the Lankavatara sūtra, all thought which so ever is wrong. So Khensur Dempsey referred to this doctrine when he said that Hua Shang said that in the self same way as white and black clouds both obscure the sun, likewise virtuous and non virtuous thoughts both prevent from attaining enlightenment. What we are dealing with here, in other words, is a doctrine which rejects completely the method aspect of the past. And Heshang and his disciples in Tibet, and to be frank, certainly the northern Chan School in China and some of the Chan schools in East Asia, have downplayed dramatically the method component of the path.

So this is the first major problem with Hua Shang’s doctrine. By downplaying the method aspect of the path from the standpoint of traditional Indian Buddhism, The collection of merit cannot be accumulated and neither the nirmanakaya nor the Sambhogakāya can be created. More fundamentally, Hua Shang misidentifies completely the object of negation in meditation. We are taught in the Tibetan tradition on the receiving end of the totality of the Indian tradition that the Prāsaṇgika view is that the object of negation is the inherent existence of phenomena, both the self and phenomena. This is how phenomena appear, but this is not how they actually exist.

This mode of existence must be ascertained through reasoning and then meditated upon and this acts as an antidote to the ingrained tendency to perceive phenomena as existing truly or from their own side. As we said earlier, this can function as a universal antidote to the delusions by weakening our natural apprehension of phenomena. Just as impermanence can act partly as a universal antidote to the delusions. Non thought, Amanasikara in Sanskrit, cannot act as an antidote to anything. It does not lead to a reduction of the delusions.

If we were to practice non thought systematically, in other words, eliminate both virtuous and non virtuous thoughts from our mind and ideally stay in a state of non action, of inaction, then during that period there would be no non virtue accumulated, obviously. The moment we left that period, since this is not an antidote to anything, the result would be a return to the former state. Now this meditation on non thought became highly prevalent in China and dominant certainly in the northern Chan school. If one studies Hua Shang’s sources, one finds that one of the major problems, not just for Hua Shang’s doctrine, but the totality of the Chan doctrines, is a reliance on one sūtra, the so called Suryangama sūtra. The Shurangama sūtra is probably, actually, almost certainly spurious.

It was said to have been translated in China, in Guangdong, present, close to present day Shenzhen, by Chinese scholars in collaboration with an unnamed Indian monk. When one looks at the text of the sūtra, one finds that the sūtra includes a lot of Taoist terms, which are completely alien to the Buddhist tradition. And some of the key passages referring to non mentation, to non conceptuality, seem to be strongly Taoist in connotation. The sūtra itself was, condemned in Japan in the ninth century by a Buddhist council. And there has been repeated movements in China itself to have the sūtra claim.

But this has never happened. And as a result of it, this the doctrines of this sūtra which seem to be basically a fusion of Chinese Taoism and some early elements of Mahāyāna Buddhism, became dominant in the northern Chan school and especially in Hua Shang’s thought. Leading both to the subatistic or instantaneous vision of enlightenment and this idea of enlightenment through non thought. Non thought is a fixation of the void? No, it is the elimination of all conceptuality.

Then whether a void is fixated upon or not is unclear, it would seem not. The focus is eliminating conceptuality, any conceptuality, virtuous and non virtuous. Now this doctrine was strongly criticized by Kamalaśīla during the Raza Council. Both parties were invited by King Trisong Detsen according to historical sources to debate. Hua was elder in terms of ordination and age.

He sat at the right of the king. Kamala Shilla, which represented the Indian party and the totality of the Indian tradition sat at the left. The evidence we have is that Huashang was tremendously popular at the court, especially among the wives of the king and the ladies in waiting. Because it was a very pietistic doctrine and it is actually if one reads the account of the debate, Hua Shang comes through as a person, as a very attaching person. Misguided, certainly, but very devout, with however little formal training and understanding.

Kamara Śīla was at the left and tradition has it that when they met at Samiye, Kamala Shiloh who was the most powerful debater of his age in India, stood, stared at Huashang, took his monk staff and hurled it in the air and sat down. Asking thereby the Tibetans say the question, what is the cause of saṃsāra? And then Hua Shang, according to Tibetan tradition, stood up, stared at Kamalaśīla, took his cloak and dropped it to the ground. Stating according to the Tibetans, there was a non distinction, it was a distinction of subject and object. So this is a Tibetan version of what happened, but feelings ran very high.

Feelings ran very high. And Kamalaśīla composed his famous Bhavanakama, the stages of meditation, to answer and rebut Hua Shang’s doctrine. The fact that it is one of the two texts His Holiness teaches the most, He always teaches Bodhicaryāvatāra in conjunction with Kamalaśīla’s Bhavanakama, should tell us very clearly how important His Holiness feels to the present day it is to rebut these doctrines. So Kamalaśīla’s position is put very aptly in the following passage. Kamalaśīla says, If you analytically discern the lack of suffering phenomena and if you cultivate that analysis in meditation, this will cause the result attainment of nirvana.

There is no peace through any other means. We have two antipodes here. Two antipodes and Hua Shang’s doctrine was considered by Tibetan sources and by Chinese sources to have been defeated at the Lhasa Council. Heshang left Tibet. It is said that he sent Chinese butchers to assassinate Kamalaśīla.

Kamalaśīla’s life was interrupted shortly after as a result of this. But Huashang’s doctrine survived in Tibet. It survived in an underground form both in the Nyingma and in the Kagu schools. And this is something I would like to address with you. But without perhaps going into too much details.

It survived in the cragious cause of Mahāmudrā under the name of the so called Karpochiktup, the white panacea, which was a universal antidote to all delusions, and which entailed seeing, and you find these expressions a lot, seeing the primordial face of the mind. It survived also in the Nyingma school, in the Dzogchen tradition, with, two dominant teachers of the Nyingma school, Longchenpa in the fourteenth century and, Jigme Lingpa in the eighteenth century, explicitly quoting Hua Shang. Long Qin especially quotes a famous passage in which Hua Shang says that both white and black clouds obstruct the sun. And Jigme Lingpa, who is the main reformer of the Nyingma tradition in the eighteenth century, endorses Hua Shan practices, saying that they lie between the Pāramitāyāna and the Tantrayāna, and they are practices for beings of exceptional capacities. Then adding the qualifier that there probably are no such beings nowadays.

It sort of begs the question if no one can practice it, why teach it? But of anyway. Huashang’s positions were and their survival in certain forms of maha modra, not all, and in certain forms of dzogchen, were violently criticized by the great Sakya scholar Sakya Pandita, who said in his distinguishing the three vows, that these, he called them, these wrong practices of Mahāmudrā and this practice of Chinese Dzogchen, he called it Chinese Dzogchen, can only be the cause for rebirth as an animal. And this is, I would say, the perspective certainly of the Geluk school nowadays. Any type of meditation which focuses on the systematic cultivation of non conceptuality and on the elimination of all thought leads to an ever increasing level of mental dullness in meditation.

Ever increasing mental dullness acts as a cause for the rebirth in a realm where mental dullness is dominant, which is the animal realm. So, because these practices are very widespread, I thought we had to address them in the context of this conference. Then this is by no means the case in all of the Nyingma or the Kagyu tradition, but it behooves one to be able to differentiate very carefully. Meditation when it is correctly practiced, if we take for instance the case of śamatha, which Khensur Rinpoche will be teaching, leads to a sharpening of the mind. Any meditative practice we engage in, which makes us more forgetful and more dull, is certainly misguided.

We can just infer this. So this was the dominant debate, which I would say pretty much founded the main orientations of, Tibetan Buddhism. And then if we pass on to your second chart, the chronology of the transmission of Madhyamaka teachings from India to Tibet. You can see a series of transmissions. You have the early propagation from the eighth to the ninth century, which is basically the introduction of Buddhism in Tibet, which was government sponsored by King St.

St. Gampo all the way down to King Trisong Detsen, with the work of the Tibetan Motsavas, who translated few of the major works of the Indian commentary tradition. It’s mainly Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra. I mentioned Buddhapālita’s commentary, but it was not highly studied. It is in the second cycle of transmission from 09/1970 to the fourteenth century that the totality of the commentaries you have in the first part are translated.

And this leads to a tremendous deepening in understanding among the Tibetan scholars of the Mādhyamika view. Now during the first transmission of Buddhism to Tibet, the dominant Mādhyamika school was the school of Śāntaraksita and Kamalaśīla, which you see at the bottom, middle bottom of Indian Pandas and Siddhas. This was a Yogacarasvatantrika Mādhyamika school, which considered that wall phenomena conventionally were of the nature of mind, ultimately they lacked inherent existence. It represented a fusion of Cittamātra or Yogacāra and Mādhyamika. By the time of the later propagation, the Prāsaṇgika school starts taking over, mainly under the influence of Atisha, who was the main force between behind the second spread of Buddhism in Tibet.

Atisha was a Prāsaṇgika and it is under his impulse that the study of Candrakīrti as the main Prāsaṇgika commentator of Nāgārjuna took off. It is impossible to study a tradition without the texts being translated. That’s why if we see what was translated at which period, we know what is available and what was not. So that is why, if you look here, the first translation to the far right of Candrakīrti’s Madhya Makavatara and his Prasanapara, which is his commentary on Nagadjuna’s 24 verses, is central. It’s at this point, around October, with the work of Ngog Lotsawa, that the main Prāsaṇgika works become available in Tibet.

Until then, there was no basis for an understanding of the Prāsaṇgika school. And then it was a person or the contribution of Patsab, the great translator, a large volume of the Prāsaṇgika works are translated, many of the works of Candrakīrti. Je Tsongkhapa relied heavily on Patsab’s works. This period ends in the fourteenth century. The fourteenth and fifteenth century in the Tibetan understanding of Mādhyamika and of Buddhist philosophy are centuries centuries of integration.

The initial transmission, then the second propagation with systematic careful translation are over. The question which arises is simply how do we address this gigantic volume of material which often seems to be contradictory. And we have a series of systematizers. Three great systematizers specifically. Longchenpa in the Nyingma tradition, the foremost Nyingma scholar whom I mentioned earlier, who endorsed partly Hua Shang’s opinions.

In the Sakya tradition, Rendawa, who was Je Tsongkhapa’s teacher, and in the Geluk tradition Je Tsongkhapa, who is the founder of the tradition of which we are members. Each in his own way tried to systematize this huge volume, not just of sutras, but especially of shastras, of commentaries, and opted for one or the other schools of Madhyamaka thought. Overwhelmingly, the Nyingma sympathized or continued to sympathize with Śāntaraksita and Kamalaśīla’s presentations of a fusion of Cittamātra and Mādhyamika. The so called Yogacarasvatantrika Mādhyamika. This has remained the Nyingma position to the present day, even though the Nyingma tradition pays lip service to Prāsaṇgika.

The samsaric tradition remained also very sympathetic to Yogachara Svatāntrika Mādhyamika. Rendawa was the first to study Prāsaṇgika and to teach it to Je Tsongkhapa. It is Je Tsongkhapa who, because of his reliance on Atisha, felt it was capital to gain an authentic understanding of Prāsaṇgika and put tremendous effort to try to understand the actual meaning of Nāgārjuna and Ārya Deva’s works in the light of Candrakīrti. And this led to four works which are listed here in translation, which are his main works on the view on Madhyamica. Lamrim Chenmo, The Essence of Eloquence, which is Drangle Sheingpo, Clarifying the Import, which is his commentary on Candrakīrti’s Madhyamakāvatāra, and Je Tsongkhapa’s commentary on the root verses, known as Tsashig Tikachen, which is his commentary on Nāgārjuna’s root verses.

These four works represent Je Tsongkhapa’s complete understanding of the Prasanika view, and found, we can say, the Geluk tradition. Then after this, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, we have, and here I have adopted David Seyfort Ruegg’s subdivisions we have the so called post classical period, which is mainly characterized by the composition of manuals and systematic treatises, which try to develop the thought of the great systematizers. So I think it is important to understand the process of historical transmission of Buddhism from India to China and to Tibet, and the process of transmission inside Tibet to understand some of the doctrinal issues, which are historically conditioned. The reason the Yogacarasvattharika school was dominant in Tibet from basically the period of Padmasambhava down to Atisha was simply due to the fact that the foremost Indian scholars sent to Tibet, Shāntarakshita and Kamalaśīla, belonged to the school, and that basically none of the Prasanika works were translated. The reason the Prasanika school became dominant from Atisha’s time onwards is because Atisha himself felt the Prasanika view was the major view.

It was Buddha’s authentic or final thought. And in reliance on him, his disciples tried to understand the prasanika view. And started to translate. Patzap started to translate at the request of one of Atisha’s disciples, Ngog Lekpai Sherab. So I perhaps will not cover with you too many of the details of the controversies in Tibet.

They are difficult. I will focus mainly on Jetsongkhapa’s interpretation and mention in a parte on the side some of the divergent views and try to talk at the end before we finish of Western misunderstandings, so that we all don’t get completely lost. You know from Khensur Rinpoche’s presentation of JitTsongkhapa life that when Jitsongappa asked Mañjuśrī, before his realizations of emptiness, whether he had understood emptiness or not, and whether he had specifically understood the prasagika view, Mañjuśrī responded to Je Tsongkhapa through Lama Umapa. Not only have you not understood the Prāsaṇgika view, your understanding is not even part of the Mādhyamika view. What was the understanding or this non understanding Je Tsongkhapa suffered from to which Mañjuśrī was referring?

It was the dominant view in Tibet at the period before Je Tsongkhapa’s time And there were several strands to this view. The first strand entailed a rejection of reason, which considered that the famous passages in Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā phenomena neither are nor are not, nor are both nor are neither, the so called chatuskoti had to be understood literally. And therefore this reflected a rejection of what is known as principle of the excluded third. The principle of non contradiction. So many of the Tibetan practitioners before Jetsong Kopas time felt that the mind had to be placed in some sort of a state of absence.

Facing which this absence which arose when the mind gave up in the face of contradiction. So you can see a connection with Hua Shang’s view. You can also see a clear affiliation with certain types of meditations on Koans in Zen. I heartily recommend to those of you who are interested a very short booklet. It’s very hard to find unfortunately.

It’s at the bottom of the bibliography. It’s a meeting between His Holiness the Dalai Lama and a Chan Master, Sheng Yen, meeting of minds, a dialogue on Tibetan and Chinese Buddhism, in which His Holiness addresses the problems, Tibetan Buddhists see with Chan Buddhism. And this is one. Seeing Nāgārjuna’s work as paradoxical, seeing Nāgārjuna as a sophist and meditating on the contradiction of existence phenomena neither being existent nor non existent nor both nor neither, this passage taken literally, until one reaches a state of non thought which is induced by this contradiction. This was one of the dominant views on how to meditate on Mādhyamika in Tibet at Je Tsongkhapa’s time.

One of the second dominant views was Mādhyamika and specifically Prāsaṇgika negated conventional phenomena. Now these views fall into what Je Tsongkhapa calls later the category of negating too much. Je Tsongkhapa subdivides the errors of the Mādhyamika Vouyu into two categories: negating too much and not negating enough. So if one negates reasoning, one negates too much. If one negates conventional or ordinary phenomena, one also negates too much.

And this negation of ordinary phenomena arose when Mādhyamika reasoning was applied to ordinary phenomena, destroying ordinary phenomena. Te Trunkhapa has a passage where he describes this magnificently. He says, Therefore the learner do not subject worldly objects to the analyses just explained. Instead they accept that worldly objects are simply the inconceivable result of karma. They accept the whole world as though it were an emanation projected by another emanation.

And regarding this technique of meditation which entailed basically adopting a position, which is called a position of neither existence nor non existence. Je Tsongkhapa says, and this is my qualifier, this erroneous approaches or these erroneous practitioners, and this is actually the passage, finding that the part is neither one nor different from its parts, conclude that there is no part. Then applying the same reasoning to the observer, they conclude that there is no observer. They then wonder if there is no analyzer who knows that there is no part and conclude things are neither existent nor non existent. Now this view was dominant in Tibet up to the time of Je Tsongkhapa.

It remains the dominant view in the Sankhya tradition to the present day. It is a view which was established by Gorampa, one of the main critics of Je Tsongkhapa. It remains a dominant view in the Kagyu tradition to this day. It remains one of the views in the Nyingma tradition to the present day. Such a view is a view which negates too much because it eliminates not only the inherently existing phenomena which actually is the object of refutation, it eliminates all appearances and all conventional phenomena.

The other extreme which Chitungpa refers to is not negating enough, the extreme of eternalism. This was much less of a problem in Tibet. It, we will see, is quite characteristic of western understandings of Madhyamaka. Not negating enough is an understanding of Madhya mica which sees Madhya mica as a critique of other philosophical systems. This is not what Madhya mica is.

Mādhyamika is actually a philosophical analysis which tries to show that our natural way of seeing things is wrong. Naturally, we apprehend phenomena as existing from their own side. And Madiameka merely uses philosophical deconstruction to try to eliminate this natural wrong apprehension. It is not a critique of other philosophical systems as such. There is a Madiamica critique of other philosophical systems in as much as they build on this inherent apprehension of phenomena as inherently existing.

But Madiameka is not merely a philosophical system contesting other philosophical systems, which is how most western scholars have seen it. In other words, the Madhyamica critique is not a mere refutation of a philosophical view, but a refutation of the innate ignorance apprehending phenomena as truly existing. So what was the approach Je Tsongkhapa adopted to try to understand the Prāsaṇgika Mādhyamika view? As we said, Je Tsongkhapa started Prāsaṇgika Mādhyamika under Rendawa, who taught Candrakīrti’s works. Most probably taught them partly erroneously, since Je Tsongkhapa himself had an understanding which was, according to Mañjuśrī, unclear.

And then Je Tsongkhapa engaged in a long process to try to understand Prāsaṇgika by returning to the Indian sources. This is the first feature of JitTsongkhapa thought. And it is, I would say, to the honor of the Tibetan tradition that the greatest Tibetan scholars and practitioners have always tried to trace their thought back to the Indian sources. There is a constant preoccupation with authenticity. This is very clear Je Tsongkhapa thought.

Je Tsongkhapa started out with Buddhapālita’s commentary on Nāgārjuna’s root verses to try to understand the prasanika view. He did not rely on later Tibetan commentaries. And therefore he relied on the Śāstras of the great Indian pandits and not on an oral tradition. Much of Jetsongapas work is a critique of the place oral traditions have taken in Tibet at the expense of a study of the great Śāstras and Sutras of ancient India. Secondly, for the sutras, Je Tsongkhapa relies on definitive sutras, not on interpretable sutras.

As we said, the sutras contradict each other often. There are passages which state one thing, other passages which have a different position. The criterion Je Tsongkhapa used to differentiate between the Sutras which were definitive, in other words, whose meaning could be taken as describing the Buddha’s ultimate thought and those which are interpretable, was a reliance on analysis, in other words reasoning, and on the works of what he called the great forerunners, Nāgārjuna and Asaṇga. Another key feature of Je Tsongkhapa’s thought is an unambiguous commitment to the principle of the excluded third. In other words, the principle of non contradiction.

And Je Tsongkhapa sees this as present in Nāgārjuna’s work. It’s very difficult to see how it was possible for yogis and scholars before Je Tsongkhapa’s time to say that Nāgārjuna flew in the face of the principle of contradiction when you have passages in Nāgārjuna’s root verses which very clearly show his endorsement of the principle of the excluded third. For instance, there’s this famous verse in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā chapter two. A goer is not accepted and a non goer does not exist. What third one apart from a goer and non goer should one accept?

It doesn’t get clearer than this. And in Nāgārjuna’s Vigrahavyāvartanī verse 26. If the absence of intrinsic nature were refuted, then the presence of intrinsic nature would be proven. Again it is unambiguous. If the absence of the one is established, the presence of the other is proven.

This is a clear sign that Nāgārjuna himself endorses the principle of the excluded middle. The final feature of Je Tsongkhapa’s thought, which he uses as a principle of interpretation and which enables him to make sense of the difficult passages in sutras but also in Candrakīrti’s work is that Je Tsongkhapa considers that once for instance Candrakīrti uses a qualifier once in a certain context, it extends to all the passages where he doesn’t use it and which have the same context. And he does so because of the principle of economy which is dominant in Indian thought. Why repeat something when it has been said once? So specifically what Je Tsongkhapa does is to apply this to one passage of Nāgārjuna’s root verses, which is then carried over to the totality of Nāgārjuna’s works.

A famous stanza in the twenty fourth chapter of the root verses. That which arises dependently, we explain as emptiness. This is dependent origination. This is the middle way. This is a verse which Rinpoche quotes, one teaching out of two.

That which arises dependently, we explain as emptiness. This is dependent designation. This is the middle way. In chapter 24 of the root verses of Nāgārjuna. So Je Tsongkhapa’s position is that if Nāgārjuna said this once, it was something which he meant to apply to the totality of his work.

And he did not see the need to repeat this again and again. In this verse Nāgārjuna is identifying emptiness and interdependence. Therefore emptiness cannot refute conventional phenomena which is interdependence and interdependence which is conventional phenomena cannot refute emptiness. There are two different ways of presenting the same thing. Interdependence is a positive and emptiness is a negative presentation of the same fluid underlying reality.

And then I will not enter into greater detail in the Tibetan controversies. We would all have had to study tenets here to be able to do something meaningful with that. I would like to cover some of the Western misunderstandings and then we have ten, fifteen minutes for questions. So the contemporary misreadings of Nāgārjuna’s thoughts you will see resemble a lot the misreadings in Tibet. The first broad category is negating too much, And one of the most common Western positions, and by Western here I refer to Western in the broadest sense of the term, non traditionally Asian visions of Nāgārjuna’s son is that of T.R.V. Murti, the Indian philosopher whose book on Mādhyamika was the first I ever read.

I was 16 years old. And it’s marvelous. There’s lots of quotes from Magadhuna which are beautifully translated, but his reading is completely erroneous. The central philosophy of Buddhism. Murti considers that Madhyamaka is a negation of conceptuality.

Now this is nothing else but Heshang’s view. It’s exactly the same thing. The goal of Madi Amica is to lead to the cessation of thought according to Murti. We have addressed this. We also pointed out that it was very common, inside Tibet.

This view is also shared by the great Danish specialist of Madiarmica Christian Lindtner, whose work we drew upon for the translation of bodhicitta Vivarana. Je Tsongkhapa has a famous rejoinder to this notion that mere cessation of thought is sufficient in meditation. Je Tsongkhapa says to think that mere cessation of thought is sufficient to eliminate the afflictions is the same thing as to think that merely not thinking about the ghost haunting one’s house is gonna make the fear of the ghost go away. It’s a beautiful passage. So how do you make the fear of the ghost go away?

From Je Tsongkhapa’s perspective, you check the house top to bottom to find a ghost. Not having found the ghost, the fear of the ghost naturally disappears. But if instead of doing this, you put yourself in a state which you say, I’m not going to think about the ghost, I’m not going to think about the ghost. You’re going become terrified. A second common Western misunderstanding of Jitsongpa is the one we find in Chris Gudmunsen’s work Wittgenstein and Buddhism, which is to basically co opt Je Tsongkhapa in the light of the latest western philosopher in fashion, in this case Wittgenstein, and to say that Je Tsongkhapa’s Mādhyamika is a critique of language.

Well, it is evident that if all Je Tsongkhapa’s critique was, was a critique of language and if the goal of the Mādhyamika dialectic was merely refuting language, then the lower reaches of the animal realms would be highly enlightened practitioners, which they are most obviously not. So this critique of language is somewhat akin to those who think that the goal of Madhyamaka is a critique of conceptuality. These are very widespread opinions. I’m sure if you polled people in a dharma center, you would find one third to half who actually hold this type of position. It’s surprisingly widespread.

And the crux, I think, with all of these misunderstandings of emptiness is that this misunderstood emptiness cannot act as an antidote. So it’s a very simple question we can ask whenever we’re faced with a presentation of emptiness which seems a little bit odd to us. Can this act as a permanent antidote to delusions or not? If not, this cannot be an authentic presentation. If yes, why?

Now it is evident that when phenomena are seen as non inherently existing, this actually reduces our attachment to phenomena. It is evident that the cittamatra presentation of emptiness, which is that all phenomena of the nature of mind acts as a reduction or acts to reduce our attachment to phenomena with one exception, which is the Paramārthasatya Cittamātra view. All phenomena of the nature of mind for Kittamatra, but mind for Kittamatra is truly existing. Then you become very attached to the mind. You see.

But if we cannot explain the modalities through which meditation on the emptiness of something reduces the delusions, then chances are the presentation is invalid. Then an extraordinarily widespread misconception is the one that emptiness, in other words, the emptiness of inherent existence of phenomena does not exist. This is the viewpoint of a bevy of leading Western scholars including Étienne Lamotte, I talked about a couple days ago, Jacques May, Edward Consey, Frederick String, all the way to contemporary scholars such as Carmen Dragonetti. If emptiness were non existed, it could not act as an antidote against anything. The view of emptiness, the wisdom meditating on emptiness could not act as an antidote.

Moreover, meditating on a non existent phenomenon is clearly a state of mind which is not a valid condomizer. So Jetsongkopar’s view is that emptiness is a phenomenon which exists. It’s a permanent phenomenon. It’s not an impermanent phenomenon. The emptiness, for instance, of a horse in this room is something which really exists because there is no horse in the room.

If there were a horse in the room, the emptiness of a horse in the room would not exist. Right? Then among Western scholars misunderstandings of Madhyamica, within the second category of not negating enough, we find first Madiamica as a critique of other systems of thought. This was something we alluded to. It was the opinion of Richard Robinson, Jeffrey Hopkins’s teacher.

And a very common misconception which was that of the great Russian Buddhist scholar, Stcherbatsky, the author of Buddhist Logic, who considered that Madhyamaka was an attack on all reasoning, which as we demonstrated I think in this presentation cannot be the case. Summa somarum, this was a rather difficult presentation for which I apologize. I hope nonetheless that you have been able to get a sense of why we meditate on emptiness, of the history of Madhya Meeka in India, of the contributions of Nāgārjuna as religious thinker, of the differences of transmission of Mādhyamika to Tibet and to China, and of the consequences this had for the understanding of Madhyamaka in Tibet and in China. Within China, reliance on sutras and considerable difficulty in addressing the shastras which are not translated. And in Tibet, since the transmission was very late, this was the strength of the transmission to Tibet, a very strong grounding in the Śāstras.

And then, in the context of the transmission to Tibet, I have tried to point out the specificity of Jitsong Kapur’s contribution, the key principles which underlay his analysis, which is relying on Sutras of definitive meaning, relying on Indian Śāstras not on the late Tibetan commentary tradition, relying on reasoning, and his key conclusions, which are in keeping with Nāgārjuna’s thought that emptiness is not contradictory with conventional phenomena, that actually emptiness and interdependence mutually implicate each other and help each other. And then we covered briefly some of the Western misrepresentations of Madiarmica. They seem, thank heavens, to be less prevalent nowadays because more budding Western scholars like Jan Westerhoff are exposed to top quality Geluk scholars and their understanding is much more sound. But you have seen that most of the misconception Western scholar scholars have fallen into are similar to those Tibetan scholars fell into. Finally, we used the opportunity of this talk to address the views of Hua Shang in Tibet on meditation on non thought and instantaneous enlightenment.

These are views which are extremely widespread in the Western Buddhist community. I think once one explains Hua Shang’s views clearly, it is very very easy to see why they can be of no benefit. In the best possible case, meditating on non thought would lead to the attainment of Shine or one of the higher Dhyanas on the basis of an absence, which would cause rebirth in the highest of the God realms, realm of nothingness. In the worst case scenario, it will cause rebirth as an animal. These views unfortunately were very prevalent in China, and from China spread to Korea and Japan, and remained quite prevalent in Tibet, in the Nyingma and Kagyu traditions.

The Sakya tradition resisted this quite strongly. And the Geluk tradition, as you know, is the inheritor of the Sakya tradition. This is why Khensur Rinpoche warned some six months ago that all all of the Tibetan schools have the same presentation of the method aspect of the path, there are massive differences regarding the wisdom aspect of the path, and one must be very careful what teachings one receives on the wisdom aspect of the path. Now, this is not to say that they were not Nyingma, Kugyu and Sakya scholars who had a faultless understanding of Prāsaṇgika Mādhyamika. They were, most definitely Guru Rinpoche Padmasambhava, had a faultless understanding of Prāsaṇgika and attained a state of full enlightenment.

Most obviously, the early high Sakyas, Drakpa Gyaltsen, Sakya Pandita himself had a faultless understanding of Prāsaṇgika, otherwise they could have attained neither liberation nor full enlightenment. Most obviously, Milarepa must have had a faultless understanding of Prāsaṇgika, but this was developed over and against the times of the period, generally speaking, through the efforts of the practitioner. Without a correct understanding of prasanika Mādhyamika, and without attaining the path of seeing on this basis, it is impossible to attain liberation or full enlightenment. So whenever we hear of someone of whom it is said that they attain liberation or full enlightenment, they must have developed the Prāsaṇgika view either through receiving it or through gaining an understanding by their own efforts. Otherwise, without that Prasameka Madhya Meka view, it is impossible to eliminate the afflictions with respect to all phenomena.

So when Geshe Ratin acknowledged that Mahasi Sayadaw was an Arhat through receiving refuge from him, Geshe Rabten was acknowledging that Mahasi Sayadaw, who was a Burmese monk, had gained Ahatthood through meditating on the Prāsaṇgika view, even though the Prāsaṇgika view was not taught in Brahma. It is something in the process of Satipatthana he must have been able to infer. Had this not been the case, it is not possible to attain liberation. So this may sound like a very strong dogmatic statement. I hope you do not take it like that, but analyze by yourselves.

All of us here have studied enough to be able to do so. And, if you think it is possible to attain liberation or full enlightenment without the Prasannakavu, then ask yourself whether or not this is the case and whether without the Prāsaṇgika view there would not be at least one object, many perhaps a large category of objects, which would be perceived as existing from their own side, and which would therefore act as a basis for the development of any of the delusions. If there are objects which can act as the basis for the development of any of the delusions, it is impossible to say that one has attained liberation of full enlightenment. Thank you very much. And I will do my best to answer your questions.

Yes, Richard. So that’s Je Tsongkhapa’s reading. What you are proposing is Je Tsongkhapa’s reading of that. The it neither exists nor non exists is understood by Je Tsongkhapa as meaning that it does not exist inherently nor does it nor is it a complete non existent. So Je Tsongkhapa says these passages have to be qualified.

Gorampa with Dakhtsang, these are Je Tsongkhapa’s main psychicritics, see this is not the case. They must be understood literally. Which is obviously to say that the principle of non contradiction has to be rejected as far as the ultimate truth is concerned. So I have not studied Rendawa’s work directly. I have his works at home and I have not studied them.

I cannot vouch for Jitsune Randawa’s positions. But since Jitsongappa was Randawa’s foremost student and Jitsongappa’s positions before he had these series of visions of Manjoshri were inadequate, I assume Randawa’s positions were too. Then the principle of non contradiction is something all of us I think are well advised to see as untouchable. I mean, if we say there is a third state between Richard’s having a car and Richard’s not having a car, I would like to know which one it is. We use the principle of non contradiction constantly in our lives.

And what Je Tsongkhapa is saying, by saying that it extends not just to conventional but to ultimate truths, is that there is nothing special about ultimate truths. So what Je Tsongkhapa’s interpretation of ultimate truth, in other words, emptiness is saying, is that emptiness is accessible to reasoning. This is a very powerful position of Je Tsongkhapa. Emptiness is not some sort of mystic, ineffable, unspeakable phenomenon. The experience of emptiness is incommunicable.

Emptiness itself is actually the way everything exists. It is nothing particularly glamorous. It is just phenomena’s interdependence. Emptiness is phenomena’s lack of non interdependence. It is simple as that.

But the realization of emptiness is a very powerful and holy mind, because that puts an end to all delusions. That’s just on Kapus position. And there were practitioners in all the traditions who rely on JitTsongkhapa. One of the Karmappas actually composed a hymn of praise to JitTsongkhapa. He was overwhelmed with emotion and the thought of JitTsongkhapa contributions a century or so after JitTsongkhapa death and wrote a hymn in which he says, I’ll just paraphrase, in the age of darkness over Tibet where all misunderstood the view, you taught the peerless view.

In the age in which people, in which yogis believed that filling and emptying the stomach like a bladder was the goal to enlightenment, you clarified the meaning of the Tantras. So we are incredibly fortunate to be the recipients of Je Tsongkhapa’s tradition. And, something which many Westerners forget, and I would like to to mention it now, is that Tibet was overwhelmingly Gelug. The dominant viewpoint in Tibet was Geluk up to 1959. The Tibetan government was a Geluk governor called the Ganden Phodrang, the Phodrang, the Palace of Ganden.

The main monasteries were Geluk. The Geluk tradition alone had more monks than any of the other traditions. Actually, the other traditions sent their monks to study in the Geluk monasteries. It was a tradition, for instance, that the Triku monks studied in my monastery, Sera Je. Sakya monks were sent to study in the great seats.

So, the Tibetan people as a nation recognized themselves in the Geluk tradition. They recognized themselves in the purity of the morality, They recognized themselves in the peerless practice of the three categories of vows, Pratyamoksha, Bodhisattva and Tantric vows practiced as one. They recognized themselves in the extraordinarily intensive program of studies which lasted twenty years, followed by meditative retreats. And it is the creation of the Geluk, the Gandenpa tradition. Geluk in Tibetan means the system of virtue.

Gandenpa means those from Ganden. It is a creation of this tradition by Je Tsongkhapa and his disciples Gyaltsabje and Kedrupje, which led to reformation in the other traditions. Reformation within the Sakyad tradition, massive reformation within the the Nyingma tradition, which has become a very, powerful tradition with an excellent educational standard because of reformers in the eighteenth century who wanted to bring it up to the level of the Geluk monasteries, the three seats. So the contribution of Je Tsongkhapa, not just to the Geluk tradition, but to all the traditions of Tibet, is is very hard to overstate. And it also has to be pointed out that Je Tsongkhapa was an authentic non sectarian master who received transmissions from all of the schools.

Je Tsongkhapa’s transmissions in Ksharya and Kriyā Yoga come from the Nyingma tradition exclusively, from Rigdzin Kumaraja, the master of the Southern Cliff. Jetsongkopas transmissions in the six yogas of Naropa come exclusively from the Kagyu tradition. Jetsongkopas transmissions regarding the practice of Yamāntaka and the Heruka cycle come mainly from the Sakya traditions, as well as the totality of Je Tsongkhapa’s teachings received regarding the Pāramitāyāna. So Je Tsongkhapa sits on top of all three traditions. Now this is why the Nyingma yogi, Shabkar, white-footed one in the nineteenth century, was a wandering Nyingma yogi, dedicated his life as an Nyingma to raise funds for the Gelug monasteries.

Instead in a famous practice, the three seats, in other words, Sera, Ganden and Dreppong, are the foremost object of offering in Tibet. So then I think Je Tsongkhapa’s works stand on their own. We are fortunate that Lamrim Chem was translated in English. I would like to encourage you to have the courage to read Je Tsongkhapa’s own words. We have to have courage in our studies.

We can’t always go for the easy works. We start with introductory works. And then I would like to encourage you to assess Lamrim Chenmo and what you can understand of Je Tsongkhapa’s works by yourself. You have to make up your own opinion. For myself, reading the insight section of Je Tsongkhapa when I was 25 years old was an extraordinary transformative experience.

So I think you should try to read for yourselves. Are there any other questions? Yes. No. No.

Madame Blavatsky was a theosophist, but she had nothing to do with Madhyamaka. I think you were quite a Russian author. Ah, Chirbatsky. Chirbatsky. Chirbatsky.

Chirbatsky was the Russian translator of one of the works of Dharmakīrti. It is called in English Buddhist Logic. He was a very great scholar, in the nineteen twenties and thirties in Russia. He believed basically that Madhyamaka was a refutation of all reasoning. Yes.

Molly. They view emptiness as a non existent. Then a non existent cannot act a meditation on a non existent cannot act as an antidote to anything. But this misunderstanding arises from the fact that for these scholars, Madhyamaka is basically a philosophy. It is not a spiritual path.

Then the issue of what is meditated upon does not really arise and whether that which is meditated upon can act as an antidote or not does not arise. If we meditate on nothing, then during the process of meditation, if our concentration is very good, no delusions will arise. Period. As soon as the meditation is over, there will have been no weakening of our delusions and there’s a very high chance that there will be a strong dulling of our minds. So it’s what I pointed out at the beginning that one of the major problems with the Western understanding of Nāgārjuna is understanding Nāgārjuna as a philosopher and not understanding Nāgārjuna as Buddhists do, as an eighth grade bodhisattva who was a Buddhist monk and saw himself as a Buddhist practicing within the Mahāyāna tradition.

If we do not appreciate Nāgārjuna’s own self understanding, how can we understand what he wrote? Does that answer your question? Are there any other questions? Yes. Referring Yes.

To six works of Managena. Yes. And I just wanted to clarify. Missed out two of them. So I will give them to you again.

I’ll give you the English because I’m not quite sure the Sanskrit is terribly useful for anybody. They’re known by their Sanskrit names, that’s the point. You have the root verses, 70 stanzas on emptiness, 60 stanzas of reasoning, the refutation of objections, the treaties called the finely woven, and the precious garland. Every one of them I think can at present be translated in English. Originally, yes.

They are not all extant in Sanskrit, unfortunately. It is very, very prevalent in some of the other traditions. Then it may be helpful for practitioners. However, if it is taken literally, it can lead neither to liberation nor to full enlightenment. So this is a reason for which from my side, I have been extremely careful in whom I receive teachings from.

It’s not the method aspect of the path which is a problem. It’s the wisdom aspect of the path. It’s very helpful. It’s beautifully written. I read it.

Yeah. That’s exactly that is exactly the critique of the wrong understandings of the Tathagatagarama Sutras by Je Tsongkhapa. I mean, Je Tsongkhapa and some of his disciples say that this sort of understanding is akin to a form of Hinduism, which says we meditate on our Ātman being one with the Brahman. You know. Then this not lead to liberation.

More fundamentally, you’re meditating on an Ātman seen as inherently existing, being one with a Brahman seen as inherently existing. The delusions can arise with respect to both. I mean, it is not a coincidence that the monotheisms in which an inherently existing creator god is taught, lead among their many other great qualities to the forts of wars of religion. Wars of religion for the one and against the other. Whenever you accept one phenomenon as inherently existing, you set the groundwork for the delusions to arise with respect to that phenomenon.

Now for the monotheisms, the only inherently existing phenomenon is a creator. All other phenomenon exist by derivation. They are created. They exist independence. Then the creator becomes this gigantic support for the delusions.

Hence, wars of religion. I mean, the Buddhist tradition has the honor of being perhaps one of the only religious traditions in the name of which violence has never been perpetrated. You know, it’s certainly not on a large scale. You know? And I think it is connected precisely to these teachings of interdependence and emptiness.

So that’s why Rinpoche emphasized, that it is important not on the method aspect of the past, where some of the tradition like the Nyingma tradition is really the holder of Śāntideva’s Bodhisattva Jayavatara at present. The lineage meaning we get from the Nyingma tradition. But for the method aspect of the past, one has to be very cautious. And as we said at the beginning, for us it is very difficult to understand these things. Therefore, we made this presentation to try to clarify the bevy of wrong views in the field and it is better if one has any doubts to stick to a meditation on coarse and subtle impermanence, which is riskless and acts as a universal antidote.

And then I remember asking Denma Locho Rinpoche, a very great, very, very great practitioner of Guhyasamāja who was Khensur Rinpoche’s teacher actually. I asked Demoloccia Rinpoche a couple of years ago whether meditation and impermanence could act as a gateway to meditation and emptiness. And he paused for a while and he said yes, most definitely. Precisely because of what we talked about. That it leads into meditating on the core selflessness of persons.

And then in dependence on this, one would meditate on the view in keeping with each of the four schools, using each of the four schools as a stepping stone to the next one. With the Vaibhāṣika view. So you have a very good book in the library, cutting through appearances just on that. Then move up to the Sautrāntika view. Understand the Sartrankika view.

Meditate on that, then move up to the Cittamātra view. Then move up to the Mādhyamika view. And then within the Mādhyamika view, meditate, try to understand the person and phenomena. First in keeping with Sautrāntika Svatāntrika Mādhyamika, then Yogachara Svatāntrika Mādhyamika, then PraPrasangika. Then we can get a taste of emptiness.

So this is something which the monks in the great monasteries do. They spend twenty years doing this, studying all of the four views. For us, this is very difficult. We don’t have the time to do this. But what is important for us is not to fall into extreme wrong views.

And because many Westerners want to meditate, not to meditate wrongly. As Rinpoche explained, on Wednesday, and I felt it was a warning for this class, when Atisha was walking with his teacher, Avadhutipa, India, Avadhootipa said to Atisha, as and how much he said, as you know, Atisha practiced the Prāsaṇgika view, Avadhootipa said to Atisha, Atisha, beware. In the hell realms, there are many scholars and noble ones who meditated on the Prāsaṇgika view. Then obviously for us to meditate and to end up down below is really meaningless. If we didn’t meditate, maybe we would still get a better rebirth.

So when I read the accounts of Hua Shang’s view, I personally felt a tremendous sense of sadness. Because there is tremendous sincerity in Hua Shang’s account of his itinerary and a tremendous amount of hard work in meditating. But he did not have good teachers. Because he did not have good teachers, because he did not rely on authentic teachers, but on some local tradition, which even the historian of Zen, Heinrich Dumoulin, the author of the great history of Zen Buddhism, asserts that Zen is a Chinese religion. So because Hua Shang did not rely on good teachers, what realizations could he get?

All that effort wasted. All that effort wasted. So if we are interested in topics like emptiness, the best is to rely on a teacher like Khensur Rinpoche, who has engaged in these three activities of hearing, studying, and meditating, and who has realizations. And then meditate as much as we can based on Rinpoche’s instructions. Rinpoche has taught the three principles of the path.

He gave a lot of explanations on emptiness in that context. And Rinpoche, at the request of his own minister, has taught Bodhicitta Vivarana. Otherwise Rinpoche does not like to teach about emptiness. Then we have enough there to fuel our thought for a long time. And perhaps one parting advice I would give to you before we stop is do not read Western authors on the view.

With the possible exception of Jeffrey Hopkins. Because there is if you intend to practice as opposed to just toying with ideas, you want to be very careful what you practice. There are results down the line. Then if you have questions about the view, you should ask Rinpoche. In class or during the the conferences or in a private room.

That’s what the teacher is there for. And if you want to read something on the view, you should ask Rinpoche to suggest something and then try to find a good translation. There are a lot of bad translations out there. And on that basis, we can progress. You know?

Otherwise, if it’s just intellectual distraction, one can read anything who notes. So thank you very much. I would like to mention as breaking news and also because, I’m afraid I’m getting the reputation of being high brow, which I’m told is very dangerous in Australia, that I have Khensur Rinpoche’s permission to show documentaries during the seminar on reincarnation. So we will be seeing at least one, hopefully two documentaries, one I have sourced already on reincarnation, and, it’ll be more accessible. Yeah.