Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 48-minute session from the 1990 Mahāmudrā Retreat, Khensur Rinpoche uses a simple glass to walk through three levels of dependent arising as a path into emptiness. First: all functional things depend on causes and conditions. Second: objects depend on their parts — the glass on its bottom, sides, and opening. Third, most subtly: things depend on terms and conceptual imputation; without naming and conception, no glass exists. To explain why accumulating many reasonings accelerates insight, Rinpoche draws a pointed analogy with anger — how rehearsing grievances builds emotional force — then applies the same logic to developing certainty about emptiness. He introduces the magician’s illusion, where appearance combines with emptiness, to clarify how phenomena seem to exist from their own side but do not, closing with the self as equally dependent on the five aggregates.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 13 MR 1990 04 16.mp3
UUID: 1eb11d8f-576e-426d-a058-9b04ba3b48cf
Teacher: Khensur Rinpoche
Collection: Mahāmudrā Retreat (Khensur Rinpoche)
Date: 1990-04-16
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 48.5 minutes
Words: ~2,487
Mahāmudrā. We pray to the magnificent pervading Lord vajradhara, root of all the glorious first Buddha lineages and spontaneously present in the celestial mansion of the three bodies. Bless us that we may quickly attain supreme Mahāmudrā, path of unity, severing the continuum of attachment to the conception of self and bringing consummate skill and love, compassion in the awakening heart. We pray to the supremely wise Mañjuśrī, father who gives birth to the conquerors of the three times in the infinite Buddha fields of the ten directions of the universe. Bless us that we may quickly attain supreme Mahāmudrā path of unity, severing the continuum of attachment to the conception of self and bringing consummate skill and love, compassion in the awakening heart.
We pray to Losang along with the lineage of his spiritual children. Bless us that we may quickly attain supreme Mahāmudrā, a path of unity, severing the continuum of attachment to the conception of self and bringing consummate skill and love and compassion in the awakening heart. Bless us that may we see our holy spiritual teacher as a Buddha, that we renounce our attachment to this place of cyclic existence and taking upon ourselves the burden of freeing all mother sentient beings, may we quickly attain Mahāmudrā, the wondrous union of the ordinary and extraordinary paths. Bless us that our body and your body father, that our speech and your speech father, that our mind and your mind father may become inseparably one. I must, for the sake of myself and all sentient beings equal to space, eliminate all my various faults, and achieve all excellent qualities.
Having attained Buddhahood out of the force of my compassion, I will establish all sentient beings in complete happiness and eliminate all of their suffering. In order to do that, I must practice well the essence of the great vehicle, Mahāmudrā, and developing, cultivating for the next five minutes the motivation of the awakening heart as the intention for receiving this teaching. So Nāgārjuna in his text called Root Wisdom, Prajnamula, said that all phenomena whatsoever are dependent arising. If it exists, then it is a dependent arising. If it is not dependent arising, it does not exist.
All phenomena are dependent arising. That is to say that they depend upon other for their arising, for their coming about. All phenomena depend upon something other than themselves for their coming into existence. The opposite of that is natural existence, true existence, existing from its own side, existing by way of its own power. And the reason which refutes these is emptiness.
That is, all phenomena are empty of being naturally existent, of existing from their own side. They’re empty of true existence. Why? Because they’re all dependently arising. So anyway, we’re talking about dependent arising and beginning to understand that things arise depending upon other phenomena, and there are various ways of depending.
And the first way is in terms of functional objects, that is, things, functional objects. They depend upon the aggregation of causes and conditions. In dependence upon the coming together of causes and conditions, the object arises. Not just one cause, not only one condition, but the aggregate of many causes and conditions and dependence upon that a particular functional object arises. Therefore, they depend upon something other than themselves.
Phenomena are not independent of something else. They are not existing from their own side by way of their own nature. So This is one way in which we can interpret the meaning of dependent arising. That is to say that things depend upon for their arising the aggregation of causes conditions. They depend upon causes and conditions to come into existence.
A second way we can interpret the meaning of dependent arising is that things come into existence in dependence upon their parts. And we take the example of the glass. Now how does the glass come into existence? What does it depend upon for its establishment? It has all its various parts.
It has a bottom, it has an opening, and it has side on the north, the side on the east, the side on the west, the side on the south. It, in dependence upon these, there is, there is possible to contain water. So the glass comes dependent upon this bottom, the opening, the sides for its existence. It comes into existence in dependence upon all of its parts. Therefore the glass is not independent of other things.
It has to depend upon something other than itself. It depends upon its own parts. Therefore it’s not independently existing. It does not come about it does not exist by way of its own power, by way of its own nature. It does not truly exist.
We can even present a more subtle interpretation of what we mean by dependent arising. Again, you know, what do we mean by dependent arising in the fact that things are dependently established? All things are dependently established. Taking the glass — it is dependent upon terms, that is to say names, being labeled by terms and the subsequent conception which arises out of that, which thinks “this is a glass.” If there were no designating of names, terms, and the subsequent conception which arises, glass, the thought glass, then there would be no glass.
That the glass is dependent upon terms and concepts. That without terms and concepts there is no glass. Therefore the glass does not exist independently. It exists dependently on terms and concepts for its existence. It does not exist by way of its own power but by the power of other.
And other is terms and concepts. Therefore, it is the dependent arising. So dependent arising is one type of reasoning with which we can make use of to approach an understanding of emptiness. There are many reasonings by way of which we can reflect upon emptiness. If we use all of these various types of reasonings, we can quickly gain ascertainment — the more reasonings that we’re able to use, the more powerful our ascertainment will come, our realization of emptiness will come.
So we can make an analogy of the power of using various reasonings to develop a particular state of mind. In this case we use the example of someone that we don’t like, an enemy. Immediately upon seeing an enemy we develop a very distorted expression in our face and we become very unhappy. And why is that? And we begin to think, using all types of various reasonings.
Oh this person did this to me before. He said this about me. Yesterday he said this. He said this bad thing about me. He told my friends these nasty things about me.
They spread these various rumors. He’s always given me a bad eye. We go on and on and on about all the horrible things that this person’s done and anger just keeps building up, building up more and more and more. And we get to the place where we get such a powerful anger in our mind that we want to beat them up. And it’s all this total state of mind, the power of this state of mind came about by use of many types of reasoning.
So we can see by this that we can induce a very powerful state of mind by reflecting on various reasonings and likewise the same is true in coming to an understanding of emptiness that things are not naturally existent, that they aren’t true existent. The bodhisattva uses hundreds of different types of reasoning to come to this forceful understanding, this power of mind, this particular state. And though we might not have hundreds of reasons, the more reasons that we’re able to take advantage use of as many as possible, the more quickly and the more forceful will this state of understanding emptiness come about. So in the case of the glass, understanding that it is a dependent arising because it depends upon its various parts. That if things were naturally existent, truly existent, independently existing, then they are established not rely upon others.
Their existence does not rely on anything other than themselves. But we can see that in fact things do depend upon other things. And this understanding that things are dependent refutes independent existence. Just in the case of hot and cold, they are mutually exclusive. They cancel each other out.
Likewise, if something is dependent then this refutes that it’s independent. Just as in the case of hot and cold, that the hotness will cancel out the coldness. Likewise, if something is dependent then we’ll refute that it’s independent. Whatever we might reflect upon, it could be a glass, any type of object, all the various articles about us. Though we might think in fact that they’re dependent arisings and depend upon something else —
they still appear to us not to depend upon anything other than themselves. They appear to exist only from their own side, not dependent. That’s the way they appear. And because they appear that way, we tend to think they don’t depend upon anything else, and in fact that they do exist from their own side.
But just because things appear to exist from their own side, it doesn’t mean that they exist like that. Just because something appears to, it doesn’t mean it actually exists. Things don’t have to exist the way they appear. If we take an example, during a dream, to the dream consciousness there may appear horses, elephants, and people in the dream. And there is a tendency to hold, to grasp, at these dream appearances as actual horses, actual elephants, actual humans.
But we can understand that these are merely appearances, that they are empty of being really horses, really humans, really elephants, that they are not in fact horses, elephants, and humans. So another example we can make use of is a magician’s illusions, that the magician conjures up horses and elephants and the audience watching the performance really grasp at these horses and elephants as being real horses and elephants. But in fact, there is merely the appearance of horses and elephants. The appearance of a horse is empty of being really a horse. The appearance of the elephant is empty of being really an elephant because it’s not an elephant.
So we have this combination of appearance and emptiness. We have the combination of these two, appearance and emptiness, and this constitutes illusion. The combination of appearance of something but in fact being empty of that is an illusion. So this is an analogy that the Buddha made use of to illustrate what he means by illusion, illusory quality. There is appearance of something — there is something which appears like a horse, empty of being a horse. There is something which appears like an elephant, which is empty of being an elephant. So this is how he was trying to explain by true analogy what is meant by illusion, the combination of appearance and emptiness.
So this is if due to a magician by the force of making use of mantra he takes a stone and by the force of mantra blows on the stone and sets it down. The force of mantra, the eye consciousness of the audience is affected such that there appears elephants and appears horses. That this appearance of horses and elephants is brought about by the force of the effect of the mantra on the eye consciousness of the audience. In the same way, taking this analogy and then providing the meaning for it, that there appears to the audience’s eye consciousness, elephants and horses, due to the force, the power of their eye consciousness being affected by mantra. Likewise, there appears a glass which exists from its own side, which exists objectively due to the force of our consciousness being affected by the predispositions to the conception of true existence, due to the predisposition latencies of the conception or grasping at the objective existence or true existence of the glass.
Due to our eye consciousness, latency, this predisposition being this effect predisposition of the conception of true existence, there appears a glass which exists from its own side. So just as just as in this case of the magician in which due to the power of mantra there appears horses, but in fact there are no horses that these objects, though appearing as horses, are empty of being horses likewise, due to the effects of the predispositions latencies of the conception of true existence affecting our eye consciousness, glass appears to exist from its own side independently, truly existent, but in fact is not truly existent, is not existing from its own side, objectively existent, is in fact empty of objective existence, independent existence. So therefore it is the combination of these two appearance and emptiness which constitute illusion. It is in this way that we can say that all phenomena are like illusions, that all phenomena are the the combination of an appearance and emptiness. Just as in the case of the magician’s illusions that the horses, that these objects appeared like horses but were not horses.
They were empty of being real horses. Likewise, all phenomena appear to us to be truly existent but they are not truly existent. They are empty of true existence. So it is this combination of appearance and emptiness which constitutes illusion, in which we can say that all phenomena are like illusions. They appear one way and but are not in fact the way they appear.
They’re empty of that way of existing. The glass appears to exist from its own side. This is due to the force of the latencies and predisposition but this appearance is mistaken. And though the object, for example the glass, appears to exist independently exist, independently existent, naturally existent, objectively existent from its own side, we can understand that it does not in fact exist that way. And because it is not independently existing, it is dependent existing, for example, parts, it depends upon causes and conditions, it depends upon terms and concepts for its existence, it depends upon all of these factors.
Therefore, though it appears to be independently existing, we can understand reasoning that in fact it is not. So when we meditate and we use making use of various reasons in order to come to an understanding of emptiness, can use that this the understanding that this object is not existing because it depends upon others for its existence something other than itself for its existence. In terms of the self, the I, then we can understand that the I is dependent upon the five aggregates. Why? Because if the five aggregates did not exist, the I itself would not exist — the place of dependency of the I is the five aggregates.