Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 17-minute session, Khensur Rinpoche opens with a brief exchange on whether defensive anger rooted in fear carries greater consequences, then pivots to a tightly focused doctrinal question: are ignorance and the “view of the transitory collection” the same mental factor, or mutually exclusive? He traces the disagreement across three sources — the Abhidharmakośa of Vasubandhu, Dharmakīrti’s Pramānavārttika, and the Consequentialist school — explaining that the first two treat them as incompatible because ignorance obscures its object while the view of the transitory is a form of wisdom, whereas the Consequentialists sidestep the issue by not defining ignorance in terms of clarity. He briefly enumerates all five views before closing with the antidote to ignorance: systematic hearing, reflection, and meditation culminating in the realization of emptiness. Suited to students engaged in serious Buddhist philosophical study of mind and mental factors.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 32 AK 1989-03-02.mp3
UUID: ce7db3a2-bc16-4a21-a226-8ca82e24a1e9
Teacher: Khensur Rinpoche
Collection: Awareness and Knowledge 1988-1989 (Khensur Rinpoche)
Date: 1989-03-02
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 17.1 minutes
Words: ~803
So you think what? That in what? If somebody was going to harm you? We’ve done a lot of war stuff because one country’s frightened. A lot of these people Uh-huh.
You know, like, it’s fear that creates a lot So so there are cases where anger could arise in defensive. There are a few cases where there is a relationship between anger and fear. It could be what? Occasions. So in dependence upon great fear, could develop great anger, and therefore your anger could have greater consequences.
View of the transitory collection. So there’s different there’s different different schools of opinion on the relationship between ignorance and the view of the transitory. In the consequent school in the consequent school, ignorance and the view of transitory view of the transitory collection are the same. According to the treasury of knowledge, Abhidharma, Abhidharmakośa of Vasubandhu, then they’re mutually exclusive. If something is ignorant, it’s not the view of the transitory.
And also according to Pramānavārttika, Dharmakīrti’s commentary to Dignāgā’s Compendium of Valid Cognition also says that they’re mutually exclusive, that there’s nothing which is both. So there’s So in these two texts of the Abhidharmakośa of Vasubandhu and Pramānavārttika, they say that they’re mutually exclusive because if the factor of wisdom is present, it has a nature of clarity, and the factor of ignorance has an nature of of unclarity with respect to its object. It’s not able to see its object. So in this in this With respect to these two lower, these two texts, according to their opinion, ignorance is unclarity with respect to its object, whereas the view of the transitory is a wisdom, and therefore its object must be clear. Must be the object must appear to it clearly.
So therefore, ignorance and the view of the transitory collection must be mutually exclusive according to these these two texts. So according but in the higher school, according to the consequent school, they don’t talk about the ignorance in terms of whether the object appears clearly or not. Therefore, they don’t have this problem about whether about this it being mutually exclusive, whether the object is clear, whether there’s wisdom present or not. But they do differentiate with respect to the ignorance with respect to persons and ignorance with respect to phenomena. And, of the transitory only is regards to ignorance with respect to persons.
That would be the only differentiation. So when we talk about, ignorance, a more literal translation would be not knowledge. You know, they have this word rigpa which means knowledge. Marigpa means not-knowledge. It doesn’t matter.
So what So it’s Well, anyway. It’s a not knowledge. And when we say rigpa, when we say knowledge, we mean knowledge with respect to the nature of persons and phenomena. And so ignorance, or not knowledge, is is simply the reverse of that. The mis-knowledge with respect to persons and phenomena.
Yeah. So there are are five views. So these five views are instances of view. You know, if we divide up view, there would be five. And so the view of the transitory collection is one of these five.
So there are five views. The the first is the view of the transitory collection. There’s the, view holding to an extreme. There’s perverse perverse view. There’s the conception of a bad view as supreme, And there’s bad ethics and mode of conduct.
No. There is the view of the transitory collection, the view holding to an extreme, perverse view, conception of a bad view as supreme, and the conception of bad ethics and modes of conduct as supreme. Conception of bad ethics and modes of conduct as supreme. These are the five views. So we don’t have we had limited time to go into the views tonight.
We weren’t able to go in to explain them. So desire does not take an uncontaminated object as its object of observation. The objects of desire are said to be objects to be abandoned, and therefore they are only contaminated. Desire cannot take an uncontaminated object as an object of observation. So the way to where we can begin to eliminate ignorance is, initially through hearing, and then dependence upon hearing, then reflecting, and then meditating.
The objects of which we initially hear are to be the the all the various vast and profound subjects. Are we to to first to listen to them, then reflect upon them, then to meditate on them. A met So we have to, it takes a while. Takes a lot, we have to have a great, a vast amount of hearing. We have to realize emptiness.
So the main way to eliminate ignorance is through the realization of emptiness. In order to, realize emptiness, we have to have a lot of hearing.