Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. What makes George Bush “president” rather than just a man with that label? Geshe Pema Tsering uses this example to anchor this 45-minute session: things exist only when a valid cognition and a valid label come together — not through characteristics on the object’s own side. He begins by surveying how the four main Indian Buddhist schools understand selflessness, then focuses on the two highest Mādhyamika schools. The Autonomous school holds that phenomena carry some defining characteristics from their own side; the Prāsaṇgika (Consequentialist) school insists nothing exists from its own side at all. Along the way he explains the Mind Only school’s three categories of phenomena and its definition of emptiness as non-duality of subject and object. The session closes by equating dependent arising with emptiness as two names for the same insight. Suited to students following the Four Noble Truths series.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 11 ItB 2003 03 31.mp3
UUID: e5ca4b5a-0f9c-4c4b-9375-8db8ad547558
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: IB Introduction to Buddhism (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2003-03-31
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.9 minutes
Words: ~2,856
Okay. We’re going through the four noble truths. Oh, you said you’d probably understand it very well. Right. You can hear that though.
Yeah? Yeah. Okay. Right. Now, we were going as an introduction to Buddhism, we were going through the four noble truths, which was the first teaching of the Buddha.
And we talked about the truth of suffering, which is the truth of origin of suffering and then within the truth of suffering there was a division of four. The first one being impermanence we’d already talked about. The second one being suffering itself we already talked about and the fourth aspect of emptiness, we also already talked about that it is not autonomous, fabricated, and singular. Then we’re up to the fourth section which was selflessness. Selflessness has different many different ways of looking at selflessness there’s four main different schools in Indian philosophy that were then translated into the study of tenets in Tibetan Buddhist philosophy and they are the Sautrāntika school or the Vaibhāṣika school or the particularists, the Sautrāntika school or the Sūtra school, the Cittamātra school or the Mind Only School and the Middle Way School or the Mādhyamika School which is then again divided into the Autonomous School or the consequentialist school.
The consequentialist school is called in Sanskrit the prasangika school. Now each of these different schools has a different description of what selflessness means. Okay, so out of those previously mentioned Tenet Schools or the different philosophical schools, the ones that are considered the highest two would be the two Mādhyamika schools the autonomous school or I remember the name Svatāntrika school and the Prāsaṇgika school or consequential school now the Svatāntrika school or the autonomous school they make this presentation of selflessness that says there is two different types of selflessness the selflessness of the person and the selflessness of phenomena the selflessness of the person is a rough selflessness or grossest form of selflessness the selflessness of phenomena is the more subtle form selflessness which is also present in the selflessness person so therefore because a person is a phenomena right so the selflessness of the person the more gross form is that a person isn’t individual, it isn’t autonomous and it isn’t self empowered or so yeah individual yeah and the selflessness the subtle selflessness of the person and this subtle selflessness of phenomena is that it isn’t inherently existent or truly existent. They do say however, but they do say that phenomena and persons are both established by way of their characteristics that means truly established by way of their characteristics Okay, so the way that they explain how things are selfless is, first of all, the selflessness of persons, the reason that persons or beings aren’t truly existent or they aren’t autonomous which is their gross form of selflessness is because a person doesn’t exist wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for causes and conditions bring them into being if they didn’t have any help, any friends, any helpers to bring them into existence they wouldn’t just come into existence they need causes conditions within causes direct cause and the helper, the manifesting karma alright so that was for the gross aspect of selflessness and selflessness of persons now the selflessness of phenomena works in such a way that according to the Svatantika or Autonomous School that things work and our perception of phenomena works from both ways they say that things aren’t inherently existent that means they don’t exist by way of their own power but they exist dependent on causes and conditions but they say they are also defined by their characteristics so what they say is we label things that we see with our consciousnesses with our taste, sound, sight etc and also our mind consciousness we label things that we experience but also those things have characteristics that we need to experience in order to label them so they say that there’s these two things the label is working from consciousness out and that the characteristics of the thing that we’re labeling work towards us emanate towards us so when our labeling and those characteristics come together then that establishes something as being existent that’s the way that we see things as existent does that make sense So, are difficult concepts to understand.
They actually come from the words of the Buddha and because he was the Buddha, he was able to understand them quite easily, but because they’re of a different dispensation dispensation of the his students he actually taught them in four main different ways and lots of different ways in order for students to understand them easily and the ones that we’re talking about now the most difficult from among the different ideas that he put forward in order to explain emptiness. So, we shouldn’t be discouraged if we don’t understand it easily. Okay, the next one kind of down from that or last one which was the autonomous school is what’s called the mind only school or the Chitamatran school. Now, the way that they present reality is that everything, every phenomenon falls into one of three different groups there’s that which is called the thoroughly established phenomena that which is called the imputed phenomena and that which is called the other-powered phenomena now the first one of these is usually referred to the powered by other phenomena what powered by other phenomena’s definition is is that it is created in dependence on causes and conditions and that’s what is referred to by the other like powered by other this is basically all normal phenomena that we would encounter what’s known as all dharmas in Sanskrit or experiences as well as all objects.
Now, the next one, thoroughly established phenomena is emptiness itself which is a permanent, it doesn’t change by moment to moment and is the absence of something the other one the completely labeled phenomena is the other types of permanence that aren’t emptiness so for example concepts, uncompounded space and everything there included within the completely labeled phenomena so there’s these three different types of things that can exist now forgot the last bit. From amongst these three completely labeled phenomena such as permanence itself or on compounded space etc that they’re the only things that aren’t truly existent. That’s according to the Cittamātra or Mind Only School. Okay, so the reasons that they established some of these as being truly existent and others as not being existent varies according to the section obviously so the first one why are other-powered phenomena are considered truly existent and the reason is because they are truly established by the cause and conditions that bring them into being so if something relying on causes and conditions comes into being then they’re established by the causes and conditions so therefore they consider them to be truly existent. Now the thoroughly established phenomena are said to be truly existent because they are the object of meditation or the object focused on by the path of release which is the realization stage that people go through once they’ve realized emptiness after they’ve realized emptiness they move on to what’s called path of release where they abandon the non-realization of emptiness so if the thing that they were focusing on when this happens wasn’t truly established then they couldn’t focus on it and there would be no realization so therefore the mind only school says that that is has to be truly established and has to be truly existent but they say that all imputed phenomena are only labeled by the mind, that’s all the concepts that we have about things.
They don’t exist inherently, they are labels that the mind puts on things. Okay right now how they are empty of inherent existence is stated this way for example the first ones, the objects that are powered by other phenomena, they are said to be not separate from the causes and conditions so therefore phenomena that are other powered are not said to be separate from the causes and conditions that brought them into effect, so that’s what they are empty of — empty of duality they’re not separate from their causes and conditions the emptiness, the thoroughly established phenomena which is the object of perception of the path of release is not separate from the mind that perceives it so it’s the thing that people focus on when they’re trying to understand reality but it cannot be separate from the realization that cognizes it so therefore it is it is not — the mind that realizes it and the object it is focusing on are said to be not separate — there is no duality there and then the third the third lot, thoroughly labeled phenomena, they are not defined by their own characteristics, they’re only made up in our head so therefore they’re not said to be any different from the objects that they’re labeled on, so there’s no differentiation, there’s no duality between the mind labeling them and the things that they’re labeling and it’s this lack of duality which they say is emptiness.
So, say that non separation, the non duality of objects and their causes, the non duality of emptiness and the mind perceiving it, the non duality of the objects and the labeled consciousnesses and the consciousnesses labeling them is what emptiness is. That’s their definition of emptiness. So, what’s considered the highest school, the Mādhyamika Prāsaṇgika school or the Middle Way Consequentialist School, it defines phenomena as being merely labeled. That means the five sense consciousnesses and the mental consciousness merely put a label or designate a concept to something and by the power of that conception, the concept or the consciousness then something exists but it doesn’t exist truly or from its own side at all, they say. So the reason for arguing this is that they say the other school’s wrong because you can’t have something being a little bit existent so what they’re saying is with the other schools are saying well it’s a little bit existent because it’s it’s defined by its characteristics or it’s a little bit existent because it’s just not separate from the object and there’s no just no separation of object and subject but they say you can’t be a little bit existent you either are existent or you’re not so therefore things are only made existent by a label but they don’t exist at all from their own side So, then, it becomes this argument between the two higher schools, the school of the autonomous and the school of the consequentialist.
The autonomous say the consequentialist, so you reckon that if we just label something something that’s the only way exists does that mean if we go around saying a man is a child that the man becomes a child and if we say a child is a horse that the child becomes a horse is this what’s happening that when we decide something is something different that we can change what it is that’s what the autonomous argue to the consequentialist. Okay, so then, what the argument from the consequential school back at the autonomous school would be is that, no, if we start calling horses humans, that doesn’t make them humans. We’re not saying that. In order for something something to be labeled correctly, it has to be what’s called a valid cognition. It has to be correctly cognized, therefore valid cognition or sometimes called pramāna.
So, you have to have these two things happening: the consciousness has to validly cognize the object and then it has to have what’s called a valid label that goes with it so therefore when you validly cognize a horse and then have the concept horse or your eye consciousness labels it horse then those two are coming together but if you start calling horses humans and humans horses then you don’t have these two things so the so the consequentialist schools argued back that it was when a valid cognition and a valid term term or a valid label met together then that’s when you had that’s when the way you establish something relying on its label that it didn’t need something from the object side as the autonomous were arguing so therefore if you label a horse, then a horse a human it doesn’t have a valid cognition happening and it doesn’t have a valid label happening, so therefore the whole consciousness involved in that operation is not considered valid and therefore the object isn’t established even by a mere label. So the way that this works is that, for example, if we have a horse, the horse has to have taken birth as a horse, to have had the causes and conditions come together in order to take birth as a horse and then from that process then what is generally accepted as definition of horse that is the valid terminology horse along with a conscious label of horse have to come together in order to establish something as a horse in the same way if we talk about the American president now before the American president became the American president if someone went out to him and said you’re the American president that wouldn’t have been true he wouldn’t have had the causes and conditions come together to establish him as an American president he would have just been a non-president and someone may have been able to say to him you could become a president today or tomorrow or next year but they couldn’t say you are the president now because the causes and conditions had come together so even if they were saying that, even if they’re putting that label onto him and their consciousness thought that he was the president, then that consciousness wouldn’t be valid and that consciousness wouldn’t have established him as the president because it wasn’t valid and it didn’t go along with a suitable terminology of being of him being president.
So so what happened was because America has democracy then all the American people large majority of the American people put their votes in the ballot box and when they counted the ballots then George Bush was elected president and it was after that those causes and conditions had come together that they started saying George Bush is president, alright? Up until that point, any labeling process that would have happened wouldn’t have been valid but after that point because the causes and conditions had come together then he was labeled George Bush as president. So, yeah, so this is how the the we would say that the establishing of George Bush as president came into being that because there was a valid valid terminology applied and there was a valid cognition happening now that something else that is happening on a more subtle level perhaps is that we already labeled George Bush as human there there is like a general consensus that he’s human and therefore Okay. There’s there there most people would say that he he was and then that would be what was called the terminological suitability or the valid terminology, and then this word human and that would go along with a valid cognition of him being human and those together would have established him as a human.
So, there we have George Bush as president, we have George Bush as human, and then we also have George Bush as George Bush. Because his parents gave him this label as a child when he was born, then he started to think of himself as George Bush, when people said George, he answered. So therefore he is labeled as George Bush, is labeled as a human, he is labeled as American president and as a combination of those labels is brought into existence and in the same way everything, every type of phenomena is once it’s labeled, we say that it exists, but not that it exists inherently. So therefore we say that things come together based on what’s called a dependent arising that means that based on the causes and conditions coming together the causes and conditions from the causes and conditions we label something as something and the causes and conditions act as the base, and from that base something is labeled, and so from these dependent situations something has arisen so this is also said to be a synonym of emptiness because dependent origination and emptiness are two different ways of looking at the same concept.
So we say in Buddhist philosophy, especially Prāsaṇgika or consequentialist schools philosophy, that it is said that all phenomena depend on causes and conditions and therefore they are what is called a dependent arising because they are dependent arising they are empty and what they are empty of is empty of inherent existence so therefore they’re empty from these different points of view and this emptiness is what is referred to as their selflessness because they lack inherent existence, they lack their own solid self