Tenets — 2012-05-19

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

About this talk. In this 172-minute talk, HH Dalai Lama distinguishes Buddhist philosophy from non-Buddhist Indian traditions by examining the foundational differences in how each school understands causality, the self, and the path to liberation. After a wide-ranging historical survey of the six classical Indian philosophical schools and a detailed presentation of Advaita Vedanta’s central tenets—particularly the doctrine that Brahman is the sole reality and the individual Ātman is identical to it—the Dalai Lama turns to Buddhist particularity: Buddhism uniquely asserts that logic and reason, not faith alone, are the gateway to both liberation and enlightenment, and that no permanent, independent self can be found under analysis. He examines Vedanta’s model of causality (effect pre-exists in cause) against Buddhism’s assertion of true momentary change, walks through the Four Noble Truths and Four Seals as the core Buddhist framework, and addresses classical Indian critiques of Buddhist non-self doctrine by figures like Kumarila and their rebuttal by Shāntarakshita and Kamalaśīla. Throughout, he emphasizes that philosophical consistency, grounded in reasoning rather than faith or ritual alone, is essential for both understanding and practicing the path.

File metadata (for organising)

File: 2012-05-19 – KR.mp3

UUID: 10305851-a7ec-477f-a4da-6a21eb322b0f

Teacher: HH Dalai Lama

Collection: Tenets

Date: 2012-05-19

Recorded at: Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide

Words: ~21,093

Thank you very much. It’s a delight to see some new faces and a pleasure to greet the Lojong students who have been attending this series of talks since the beginning of the year. Then to recapitulate our presentation so far, in the first conference, as you remember, we presented the so called materialist paradigm, which is the dominant viewpoint from which we all originate as Westerners. And we pointed out its potential flaws and downfalls for the future. Then in the second conference, we addressed the issue of our personal death and the question of survival after death, which is perhaps the biggest extent taboo in Western societies.

If sexuality was the dominant taboo for Victorian societies, death is certainly the dominant taboo in post modern societies. It is not a question we have the luxury to ignore. We are obliged to address it at a personal level. The third conference last month was dedicated to an attempt to show the broad answers the great religions give to this problem. And we focused on the so called Abrahamic monotheisms, in other words, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

And gave an introduction to the answers the great Indian religious traditions offer, specifically those called from the Vedas and from the Upanishads, the sacred wisdom of ancient India. Today, we are going to focus on the Buddhist specific specificity. Buddhism in many respects is radically different from all of the other great Indian traditions and all of the world religious traditions. And it is critical if oneself chooses to become a Buddhist to understand clearly the difference between Buddhist viewpoints and non-Buddhist viewpoints, what the Tibetans call, the difference between the insiders and the outsiders. Now the way we will do this is we will use a time honored method of contrasting two traditions.

So I will resume briefly the six great Indian traditions of which we talked briefly about last time, and then take one of them, which has become the dominant tradition in India nowadays, Vedanta. Give a presentation of Vedanta, specifically of Advaita Vedanta. In other words, Vedanta as it was expounded by Sri Shankaracharya, one of the greatest philosophers of ancient India. And after presenting Vedanta, I will use Vedanta as a springboard to present the Buddhist viewpoint, which is radically different in some, I would say in most respects, but shares some common denominators. And we will address the issues of the debates between the ancient Indian scholars, not so much Vedantic scholars, but scholars from some of the other viewpoints with Buddhism.

Their critiques of Buddhism and the Buddhist answers to their critiques because these are fundamental debates. They are not debates which have aged in the slightest. Now somebody a couple of years ago, a very very kind Australian lady who used to attend my conferences, asked me with the bluntness which characterizes Australians, why should we bother to study what somebody thought 25 ago? The answer in a nutshell is that the human predicament has not changed. Humans are the same now as 25 ago.

We are technologically more evolved, but in other respects, is little difference of note. And more fundamentally, ours as a society since the Industrial Revolution has made a huge gambit. We have bargained that material progress alone can guarantee happiness. This is the gambit of our society. This is a gambit I have shown in the first conference which tends to fail in the best of times.

I showed you the data for, the suicide rates among young people in Australia, which has been multiplied by five over the twentieth century. Friends who are statisticians telling me it’s more multiplication by eight or by nine. And this was in the good times. We are, as many of you know, in the biggest financial crisis in history. Since 2008, we have entered a financial crisis which beggars the crisis we were in in the Great Depression, which my parents remember.

Yesterday, billion dollars were wiped off the Australian stock market. This affects every one of you in this room through your superannuation fund. Instead of looking forward to a future of plenty, you are looking forward to a future of poverty. In Europe, we are facing the biggest crisis since World War II in which half my family was killed. This crisis basically amounts to the collapse of the European Union with a probable exit of Greece within the next couple of weeks from the European Union.

Estimated costs on the European end are €1,000,000,000,000 and it is estimated this will plunge Europe in a durable depression and affect the rest of the world. Therefore, the materialist paradigm of happiness, all of us in this room have built upon, jobs if you want a job, benefits if we don’t want a job, and a guaranteed pension at the end of our life irrespective of what we do, this is something of the past. You will not have this. And therefore, it is critical instead of trying to control an exterior environment which resists control, to try to prepare ourselves for the difficult period ahead. The best way to do this is through mental control, addressing the issue of happiness, which is when all is said and done an interior experience.

And this was driven home to me in the strongest way when I was a young man, I was 19 years old and I traveled to India to study, Buddhist philosophy, which was quite scandalous at the period. I was a student of mathematics and physics. I had been asked to be assistant of physics by the examiner at my high school exam at the university. And then I told to my father I wanted to study Buddhist philosophy, which went down like a ton of lead as you can imagine. So, my father realized he would either help me or I would just work in a photographer’s store, gain the money and pay my trip.

Then he helped me very kindly of him. And I arrived in India with this gigantic knapsack weighing 25 kilos. I think one third of which was books. I had this idea that somehow in India you couldn’t get books. And I went to Dharmasala where some of the great teachers including Geshe Ngawang Dakpa, who was a classmate of our teacher, teacher Khensur Rinpoche, as only a young westerner can be dressing to go a little bit like like Stanley Livingston going to the to Africa.

That was a little bit here, you know. And I arrived and as I was walking up the streets of lower Dharmasala with this gigantic pack which is weighing a ton, I saw an Indian sadhu. And in those days, one still had two sadhus. He was he must have been in his seventies. He just had a loin cloth and a stick with some sort of small bag on the end.

Otherwise, he was stark naked. And this 70 year old pauper, this beggar, was absolutely radiant. He was positively luminous. And I, a young bourgeois westerner with as good an education as money could get in Switzerland at the period, was nowhere nearly close to his level of happiness. Then this is thirty years later an experience which I remember very clearly.

It changed my life. I’ve never spoken to him. I don’t know who he was. But I looked at him and I thought, he is onto something which I am not onto. Because with my wealth, my family was is a wealthy family, my education, excellent health, and back then, good looks.

I had a full head of hair. It’s changed since then. I was not close to this man’s happiness. He was barefoot in the mud, and he was radiant. And at that point at 19, I understood one thing, happiness does not depend on exterior conditions.

Happiness is interior. For that reason, these great Indian traditions of mental transformation are of tremendous benefit to us. They are of benefit when the times are good. But they are of even greater benefit in the extremely hard times, certainly economic hard times we are entering. And then it is critical for us to see which of these traditions are accurate and which are inaccurate And within the accurate traditions, are more accurate and which are less accurate, because we want to transform our minds in this way.

This is not something which is done casually. Every one of us in this room, when we take a mortgage or, we invest our superannuation of which we have lost most of, rely on good advice. On very good advice, we check, we examine. However, in matters spiritual, we are extraordinarily casual. We rely on the good looks of a teacher.

We rely on the the vibes of a center. We rely on what feels good. We would never do this if it was a matter of money or health, which means that in matters of money or health, we have much more common sense than in spiritual matters. Because there’s no domain in which criticism and the critical outlook is more critical than in spiritual matters. And this long prelude is the ex excuse for what will be quite a long talk today.

So I think it will be difficult to finish by 04:00. We will try to finish by 04:30. The material we will cover today will not be easy, but I will try to explain as best I can in the same same way as you would not expect someone explaining structured instruments for your portfolio to explain things easily. Likewise, these are structured instruments for your minds. And if they are difficult to understand, it is because the topic is important and not easy.

So Buddhism was in many respects revolutionary in ancient India. The Buddhist tradition, and this was written by a great Indian philosopher, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, some eighty years ago, was seen as a complete break with the Indian tradition. In the sense that for the great Buddhist thinkers, and this was unique in Indian thought and it is unique in the world history of religions, logic is the main tool for spiritual development, not faith and not devotion. And one can speak of a Buddhist onslaught in ancient India, which had the most dynamic effect both on Buddhist thought and on all of the Indian schools of thought. It led to one of the greatest Indian thinkers of the eleventh century, Vachaspatimishra, to utter this address after undergoing some personal tribulations.

Vachaspatimishra addresses God and says, proud of thy prowess, thou despisest me upon whom thy existence depended when the Buddhists reigned supreme. This was a situation in India up to the ninth century, up to the period actually a little bit later when Atisha traveled to Tibet. There were two dominant schools of thought, we could say, the orthodox Indian darshanas, of which Vedanta is one, and the Buddhist into a much lesser degree the Jaina traditions. The orthodox darshanas were theistic, taught the existence of a god and of a soul, the Ātman. The Buddhist viewpoint taught the non existence of both both god and soul.

If we try to summarize the Indian religious schools of thought, this is a chart I showed last time, but it’s helpful to locate where we are, we can divide them into three broad subdivisions. The pre Gangetic traditions, which are the traditions basically up to around 800 BC. The Gangetic traditions, which are the traditions born in the Basin Of The Ganges and later developments. Now the pre Gangetic traditions are made mainly the Vedic religion, which as you know comes from Central Asia, perhaps some point close to the Caspian Sea and was brought by the Aryans when they invaded India. It is summarized in the four great Vedas, the Rikh, the Sama, the Yajur and the Atharvaveda.

The Gangetic traditions are either commentarial traditions, like the Brahmanical or the Upanishadic traditions, or philosophical traditions like the Darshanas, which developed, broadly speaking, between, let us say, the eighth century BC and the first century BC. And the Darshanas or the schools of philosophy are subdivided into two broad groups. The so called orthodox schools, the astika schools, which assert the existence of a soul, They which include the school of logicians, the Nyaya, the school of the atomists, the Vaisheshika, a school of ritual commentators, the Mimamsa, the great Indian school of Vedanta, which is the latest development, but the most important, and two schools which partly do not accept the authority of the Vedas, the Yoga and Sankhya school, which are interestingly enough the most ancient schools of philosophy in India. The Indian philosophical schools also include non orthodox schools of philosophy, the so called Nastika schools. These include the Buddhist tradition, which we will talk today, the Jain tradition, which we will not be able to talk about, and the materialist tradition, the Lokāyata tradition.

Indian religion and philosophy evolved through interaction of these schools of philosophy. And it is open to debate whether is whether there is such a thing as non philosophical religion in India. So this is profoundly alien from the development of religion in the West. Now if we look briefly at the founders of these schools, we can see broadly that they range from the seventh century BC to perhaps down to the second century BC. The fundamental figures for today’s conference will be the founder of the Vedanta tradition, the famous Badarayana, who lived, you can see how tentative the dates are in Indian chronology, between the sixth and the second century BC and Buddha Śākyamūni, who according to western scholars lived between 563 and 483 BC.

These we will compare these two schools to compare, in the case of Vedanta a strong theistic school, in the case of Buddhism a completely atheistic tradition. Now if we take the theistic schools, in other words the orthodox Darshanas in India, we can say in a very, very summarized fashion that they are subdivided between dualistic realism and monistic idealism. Dualistic realistic schools are schools which assert the existence of matter as an outer phenomenon, and assert the existence of a mind which is totally different from matter. We will not enter into them too much today, there simply isn’t time. It would be marvelous to do so, but there’s a limit on what we can do.

And we will focus mainly in the first part of this conference on Vedanta, a school of monistic idealism which asserts the preeminence of mind, of universal mind. Now in a very cursory fashion, if we try to formulate the differences between the Indian darshanas, the main question all of the Indian schools of philosophy address is how to attain liberation from cyclic existence, from saṃsāra. They disagree strongly on how to do this. They agree strongly on the importance of this liberation. So it can be attained by ritual and sacrifice.

This is a viewpoint of the Mimamsa school. Following the Vedic injunctions is sufficient to certainly lead lead one to a higher rebirth. It can be attained through faith. This is a view of some of the later developments in what is known as Bhakti or devotional practices of which Ramanuja, of whom we will not be able to talk today, was the foremost exponent. Or liberation in Hinduism still can be attained through meditation and wisdom.

It is the viewpoint of the yoga school. This is also the viewpoint of the Vedanta school. So all the Indian Indian schools of philosophy agree on the fundamentals, in other words, agree on the necessity to attain higher rebirth or liberation. They disagree on the existence or the non existence of God, in other words, who created the world, and the existence or the non existence of a self, the Ātman. What reincarnates?

And here when we speak of self, we should understand it really in the Christian western sense of soul. The Ātman is the soul as it is understood in Christian theology, to the difference as it is not created. Now all of the orthodox Hindu schools of thought share certain philosophical positions. All assert the existence of God, called Brahman. All assert the existence of a soul, the Ātman.

All accept the Vedas of which we talked last time, the four great Vedas, and all aim for moksha or liberation to a greater or lesser degree. In the case of Vedanta, it’s a main goal in the case of Mimamsa, it’s a very subsidiary goal. More fundamentally, all agree that the cause of bondage in cyclic existence is ignorance. This is specific to all of the great Indian schools of thought and is something which is totally absent among western religious traditions. Among the orthodox Darshanas, all assert an objective reality, although they disagree what this objective reality is, and from a Buddhist standpoint, a small but important corollary is that all affirm that sound, uttered sound is permanent, since this guarantees that the Vedas, which are sound, are permanent and therefore eternal.

What must be understood as a preliminary to our presentation of Vedanta is that the six orthodox darshanas of India, with perhaps the exception of yoga and Sankhya, are revealed traditions. They see themselves as rooted in scripture and therefore it is important to understand what scripture is in the Hinduist world view. A distinction is made between what is heard, in other words, revealed scripture, and what is remembered. Shruti itself is divided into wisdom knowledge, knowledge which leads actually to liberation, which includes mainly the Upanishads, of which we talked last night, last time, and ritual knowledge, which is necessary to offer the fire sacrifice, which is for instance an obligation if one is of Brahmin caste. Then authoritative texts also comprise the remembered, the smriti, which are authoritative texts which are not revealed.

One of these is quasi revealed, it is the Bhagavad Gita, which has become so important in Indian thought, and which Shankara draws to expound his Vedanta. Others include the laws of Manu which are codexes of laws and the famous Yoga Sutras of Patanjali which I read as a young man with with great delight, I must say. We now have to address the main Indian school we will be covering today as a foil, if you want, to Buddhism, and it is Vedanta. This is a picture of the great monastic complex of Elora, where I was a year and a half ago with this magnificent Hindu temple carved, actually carved from the rock, if you can imagine the labor involved. And it was erected at this turning point in Indian history, which is tentatively between the eighth and the tenth century, when Buddhism, which was dominant among the intellectuals in India, basically collapses and Vedanta becomes the dominant viewpoint and remains dominant with the exception perhaps of Nyaya in Bengal up to the present day.

So the question for us is what is Vedanta? Its name is symptomatic. Vedanta is the end of the Vedas and it is seen to this day as the ultimate viewpoint of the six viewpoints taught in India. If we look at the chronology which underlies the Vedanta, we can see very tentatively that all the Vedas date back to 1,500, maybe 2,000 BC and the Upanishads, and I’m sorry, PowerPoint limits what one can do here, the Upanishads really start 800 to 600 BC and were composed all the way down to almost the Vedanta Sutras. The Bhagavad Gita and the Vedanta Sutras are almost contemporary and were composed a little bit before 200 BC.

And then we have a huge gap, which is not well understood, between the composition of the fundamental text of Vedanta, which are Badarayana’s Vedanta Sutras, and the first great commentary which is available, Gaudapada’s commentary on a specific Upanishad, which is extraordinarily close in some aspects to Buddhist thought, and therefore of great interest to us. Then Gaudapada himself, has disciples whose disciple is Shankara, the founder of Advaita Vedanta. And much later, as I said, unfortunately, are not synchronous, some two hundred years after Shankara appears Ramanuja, who develops a completely different viewpoint on Vedanta, much less abstract and much more personalistic. So it would seem that the founder of Advaita Vedanta, which is now attributed to Shankara, was Gaudapada. Shankara describes him as his Paramaguru, and he composed one of the most important commentaries on one of the Upanishads we talked about last time, the Mandukya Upanishad, in which he actually draws very heavily on Buddhist techniques of criticism from Nāgārjuna’s root verses of Mādhyamika and also from Asaṇga’s mind only viewpoint to develop a Vedantic viewpoint.

So his work is exceptionally interesting for us. Specifically, Gaudapada uses huge swathes of Buddhist terminology in his work and he has been criticized by later Vedantins precisely for this reason. However, the main figure of interest to us today is Sri Shankara, who is perhaps the most important non-Buddhist religious thinker of ancient India. Historically, Shankara is thought to have had four disciples, Padmapada, Sureshvara, who is believed to be the name of Mandana Mishra after Mandana Mishra converted to Vedanta under Shankara’s aegis, and two disciples which left many devotional works, Hastamalaka and Totaka. Padmapada and Sureshvara are critical for the development of Vedanta.

Padmapada especially for its scholastic formulation, which has been very strongly criticized by later Vedantians. So what is Advaita Vedanta? Advaita Vedanta is an attempt to understand the Upanishads and it is in this respect that Advaita Vedanta is systematically misrepresented in the West. In the West Advaita Vedanta is presented as a philosophical school of thought. Advaita Vedanta understands itself as Uttara Mimamsa, the ultimate commentarial tradition.

It is rooted in revelation and if one does not understand this, one cannot understand some of the contradictions or seeming contradictions within Vedanta, because Shankara has to account for the Upanishadic texts, which are the root of his reflection. Shankara is not a philosopher like many of the Buddhist philosophers relying on reason alone. Advaita Vedanta actually is strongly critical of reason as a tool to understand the supreme. So what are these passages from the Upanishads Shankara is trying to interpret? They are the great utterances, mahavakya.

The first of these from Aitareya Upanishad is that a Brahman or God is wisdom. The second from Brihadaranyaka Upanishad is the famous statement, I am Brahman, I am God. The third is a statement from Chāndogya Upanishad, that art thou, this famous statement the teacher in Chāndogya Upanishad addresses to his disciple. And the final one was also commented by Gaudapada in the Mandukya Upanishad is a statement, this Ātman, this individual soul is none other but God. It is these four central statements on which Advaita Vedanta and actually all of Vedanta is constructed.

So I would say in many respects, Vedanta is the penultimate theistic viewpoint. Many great German philosophers recognized themselves in Vedanta, and the greatest commentator on Vedanta of the end of the last century Paul Deussen, who was heavily influenced by Fichte, a neo Hegelian, recognized or thought he recognized in Vedanta the thought of Fichte. There are huge swathes of Vedanta which can basically be almost directly transplanted into German philosophy, German idealistic philosophy. So what are the core tenets of Advaita Vedanta? As we said, bondage is a product of ignorance for all of the Indian traditions.

But for Advaita Vedanta, the true self, the Ātman, actually is not bound. It does not transmigrate and it is already eternally liberated. And the ignorance which is the cause of bondage is dualism, the creation of duality, of separation between self and Brahman, between self and the world. Wisdom understands that all distinctions are false, specifically the subject object distinction. And therefore, according to Advaita Vedanta, any path to liberation which involves distinctions is false.

This is critical, because this means that for Advaita Vedanta, logic and analysis are not paths to liberation. It is therefore an evacuation of what is dominant in Buddhist thought, which is rationality. Then the self, the individual soul, is not different from Brahman. This is the core realization the Vedanta is striving for. And what is critical from a Buddhist standpoint, for Vedanta ultimate truth cannot be realized using a valid cognizer, using a Pramāna.

Ultimate truth escapes Pramāna. Finally, our secondary point is that for Vedanta pure consciousness, which is a central topic Vedanta covers, is experienced during deep sleep. We will go in greater detail in the Vedantic understanding of the soul and of God in a couple of minutes, but it is interesting at present to try to understand the Vedantic understanding of transmigration. And this is very different from the Buddhist understanding of transmigration. So different that it is quite shocking, so it is important to understand the differences.

These differences come largely from the fact that Shankara is bound to the Upanishads. He is bound to the statements in the Upanishads and the Upanishads, from the viewpoint of an outsider, are highly contradictory. There are a series of teachers with very very different viewpoints on what man’s fate after death is. So for Shankara, after death there are three possible paths. One who is ignorant and who has not sacrificed in keeping with the Vedas goes to Yama’s world, in other words to the hell realms.

One who only fulfills the Vedic ritual obligations, but has not tried to know God, in other words to experience God, such a one, according to Shankara, travels what is known as the way of the fathers and is actually reborn in the moon. Finally, the goal of the Vedanta is to know God. This is the so called northern path or the path of the gods, Devayana. Then such a one is reborn in the sun and from here can be reborn in the Brahmaloka, the world of Brahma, unless he actually fully experiences God in this life, in which case he becomes one who is liberated alive, a Jivanmukti, which is the correspondent in the Hindu tradition of the arhats in the Buddhist tradition. And therefore, the model of reincarnation which Shankara proposes for those born in the moon, which would be most devout Hindus, who try to follow the rituals but do not actually gain experience of god, is after their death as a human being and being reborn in the moon with a subtle body made of water, they actually descend through space, air, smoke, mist and cloud as rain.

And they fall on the plants, the subtle body and a form of consciousness seems to be carried throughout and it is when these plants are ingested by human beings that the soul takes its rebirth in a human being which is appropriate to its karma. As you can see, this is a very different presentation from the Buddhist understanding of reincarnation. Now, according to Shankar’s Advaita Vedanta, there are two aspects, if you wish, to God. The first is what we would call in Western theology apophatic deity. This is God which is unknowable, Nirguna Brahman, God which has no qualities understandable by man.

And the second is God which is accessible, God with qualities if you want. Is God understood from the standpoint of ignorance. This is Īśvara as creator of the world and from the Vedantic standpoint, this is all of the gods of all of the great religions. This is what allows Vedanta to be something akin to a super template for all the theistic traditions. All gods, whether it is the Christian, Jewish, Muslim gods or the various Hindu gods are none other but Brahman seen from the standpoint of ignorance.

Brahman seen from the standpoint of ignorance is both the cause of this world, he is the creator in the Christian sense of the term, and he is actually the substance out of which this world is created. This world and all beings within it from the Vedantic standpoint are not different from Brahman. Then if this is the case, the question which arises is what is the relation between Brahman and beings? The function of Brahman is through his play, through his lila, to create the conditions in the world which allow beings to live through the karma they have accumulated. Therefore, the Vedantic tradition conciliates both the existence of a creator god of whose very being the universe is generated and the existence of karma.

The Buddhist tradition focuses only on the existence of karma and denies the existence of both a creator god and of a substance from which he would have created the universe. If we enter into greater depth in the understanding of God in Vedanta, according to Padmapada, whom you remember was one of Shankara’s four great disciples, God is Sat Chit Ānanda. He is truth Sat, he is consciousness, and he is These are the three main characteristics of Brahman or God. As truth, God is permanent. He does not change.

As consciousness, and this is a very uncommon Vedantic assertion, Brahman is pure consciousness with no object. Brahman itself knows nothing and cannot be known. It is not itself an object of thought and it is not even the object of its own awareness. Any awareness of Brahman would necessarily limit Brahman. It transcends all limitations.

So from a Buddhist standpoint, this would be a very problematical assertion since Buddhists consider that consciousness consciousness necessarily has an object. There’s no such thing as a objectless consciousness. But the Vedantins postulate a radically transcendent consciousness whose very stuff is the matter of this world, the material of this world, and parts of whom we are. Through understanding that we ourselves and everything is but part of the universal Brahman, we attain Mokśa. Finally, Brahman is understood by some but not all Vedantic thinkers as bliss.

Shankara especially is very hesitant to see Brahman as bliss, because Shankara focuses much more on Brahman, Brahman without characteristics and bliss raises all sorts of questions. What is it a bliss of, for instance? Later Vedanta, teachers such as Mandana Mishra all attribute bliss to Brahman. So when one addresses a very complicated and profound system of beliefs, like the Indian schools of thought, it is helpful to try to use a multiplicity of ways in. As if when you’re besieging a fortress, if you can’t go through the main gate, you go through the sewers or you try to parachute inside of something.

So there are many ways to try to crack the schools of Indian philosophy. One is to present the Parmanas, it’s too difficult here. But one very helpful way is to presenting their different understandings of causality. And that’s what we will do at present because that clearly establishes the differences between the Buddhist and the non-Buddhist schools. The models of causality are intimately bound up with cosmology, in other words, with the creation of the universe.

And broadly speaking, there are only two viewpoints in Indian philosophy. Cause and effect are either of one nature, this is a dominant viewpoint known as Satkaryavada, or cause and effect are totally different, they are of different natures, The so called Asatkaryavada. Now if cause and effect are of one nature, then when the cause becomes an effect, that change is just an illusion. It is something which is actually rather unimportant. It’s an epiphenomenon, we would say.

And this is the viewpoint of all of the orthodox Darshanas in ancient India. On the other hand, if cause and effect are truly different, of different natures, then there is true change from instant to instant. And this is the exclusive Buddhist viewpoint. So this difference between Satkaryavada and Asatkaryavada is fundamental to understand Indian philosophy and it is fundamental to understand the Buddhist difference. Alone, I think, in the history of thought, the Buddhists assert the existence of true change, where instant by instant, the first instant for instance of, let us say, my body and the second instant of my body are not just different, are different in nature.

The second instant of my body is not some sort of emanation from the first instant of my body and is not of one nature with it. If one asserts that, one is already out of the pool of Buddhism. So Buddhism asserts moment by moment difference within the causal continuum. Now within the orthodox schools, which assert assert that cause and effect are of one nature, and assert basically that change is an illusion, there are two sub schools. What is considered as a lesser sub school in Indian philosophy asserts that the effect is a transformation of its cause.

This is known as parinamavada. In other words, this is a school of thought we find in Sankhya dualism, where the effect is an outcrop. It comes out of the cause. It is actually contained within the cause. There’s a cause which is true.

The effect is not fully true. However, a viewpoint which is endorsed as the supreme view in Vedanta is that the effect itself is imaginary. And this we will talk about briefly leads to Gaudapada’s radical critique of any type of causation. So you can see that there is a fundamental difference in outlook between the schools which assert that change is actually unimportant and is fundamentally illusory, and the schools which assert that change is fundamental and foundational of the world as we know it. And this is the hierarchy of the understandings of causality according to Advaita Vedanta, with the Buddhist understanding of causality at the bottom of the hierarchy, since the Buddhists assert true difference between cause and effect.

And then one moves upwards to all of these Sattkaryavada schools in green, which assert an effect which is identical to the cause in nature. Parinamavada is the lower of these schools. The cause transforms itself into the effect. Vivartavada is the higher of these schools. The cause merely manifests as an effect without changing.

And the highest viewpoint is seen as the Ajativada tradition of Advaita Vedanta, which is rooted in Gaudapada’s critique of causality, where Gaudapada takes Nāgārjuna’s dialectic and applies it to causality. And in a nutshell, we won’t enter it in great detail. Gaudapada says, at the time of the cause t zero, there is no effect e one. The effect hasn’t arisen. At the time of the effect e one, there is no cause c zero.

Therefore, is no single instant of time during which there is both c and e, during which both cause and effect exist. Hence, causality is an illusion. So when I was at Sera Je, I participated in the debates on Buddhist logic which grew to all the monasteries and I really I really enjoyed Buddhist logic and I was told I was very good at it. And this was the main debate I used to defeat my opponents. I took Gaudapada’s position and used it to criticize the presentation of causality.

It’s a very powerful position. It’s actually a position which leads to Mādhyamika, where Gaudapada does not accept Mādhyamika. So I hope that working through this rather difficult material, you do understand some of the core differences between the Buddhist presentation and the Vedantic presentation. We will go into much greater detail into them in the second part of this conference. And you understand why the Vedantic viewpoint and the Buddhist viewpoint are like water and oil.

They cannot be mixed. One has to choose. Now as a pause, I suppose, in this difficult material, we will talk of something a little bit easier to understand and that’s the life of our teacher Buddha Śākyamūni. So this is a resting Buddha. I took a picture of in Cave 26 in Ajanta, Buddha’s Parinirvana.

It is the final phase of the Buddhist dominance in ancient India around the seventh century shortly after all Buddhist philosophical and artistic production ceases. When did Buddha, our teacher, live? You will see how loaded the question is since basically Buddha lived at some point between 09/1400. So according to Tibetan scholars, and frankly, their viewpoint is as good as anyone else’s viewpoint in the matter, Buddha lived from 881 BC to 801 BC. Everyone agreed Buddha everyone agrees Buddha lived for eighty years.

That is the one he was born in India. There’s complete agreement about this. Apart from that, there is much disagreement. Now the Theravāda tradition, which is adopted in Thailand, in Burma, has Buddha living between 624 BC and 544 BC. And the official western tradition has Buddha living between May and April.

However, there is a lot of data which indicates Buddha might even have lived later than this, perhaps as late as 400 BC. We have a terminus at Quem, a point beyond which Buddha could not have lived with the life of Ashoka, the great Indian emperor who converted to Buddhism. So Ashoka’s dates are well known approximately in the third century. Buddha definitely could not have lived after that point. Then, personally, I have no no real position on the matter.

I tend to use the western earlier dictation because it’s the one most people use for no other reason than that. I think it would be very possible to make a case for the Tibetan dictation because Buton Rinpoche, who is its author, was the greatest Tibetan scholar of his age. And he had access to Sanskrit material which has been lost since then. So there’s nothing in the Buddhist teachings which would prevent Buddha having been born in 881 BC at the very beginning of the Upanishadic age. However, more than the dates, it is Buddha’s life which is critical.

It is very difficult for us to to imagine such a life, especially for those of us in this room who are Australian born in a democracy, who are accustomed to equality human rights and perhaps privileges. Buddha was the main son, in other words, inheritor of the king of the Shakyas, a small kingdom to the north of the Gangetic Plain of the border of present day Nepal. As such, was the second most important man in the kingdom. He had the finest education which could be provided in that age and everything we know of Buddha Śākyamūni’s life indicates that as a young man he was an exceptionally gifted and subdued person. It is therefore all the more surprising that he chose the path he chose.

He broke radically with a life of privilege, which we can only begin to imagine to choose the path of asceticism. And this happened after four visions or four experiences. Buddha had been protected from life on the outside by his father on the basis of prophecies which asserted he would become either a universal monarch or universal teacher. And obviously his father, a good king, wanted his son to become a universal monarch, which probably meant a king of India in that day and age and not a universal teacher. But the vagaries of fate led Bodhisattva with his charioteer to leave the palace and first to encounter an old beggar, then to see a sick man, then to see a corpse summarizing the tragedies of life and the unavoidable tragedies of life, from poverty to sickness to death, and finally to see the way to liberation, the monk, Isanyasi, an ascetic.

The ascetics were rife in India at the period. India was the period of tremendous intellectual turbulence and it this was perhaps the most productive period in the Indian history comparable to the period in Greek philosophy between the sixth and the third century BC. It is in this context that almost all of the great Indian schools of thought are created and it is in this context that Buddha Śākyamūni trying to find an answer to the existential dilemmas of existence formulates his system of thought. At the period, he was obviously not known as Buddha Śākyamūni, but as Siddhartha Gautama, Prince Siddhartha Gautama. The turning point seems to have been shortly after these experiences, the birth of Buddha’s son, which instead of have of being lived as a happy event, is seen as a tragedy by the Buddha.

A son is born to me, a fetter has been forged, says the young Siddhartha Gautama. Abandoning shortly after his wife, his child and all of his privileges. This is not some contemporary Indian sadhu at the bottom of society, who by becoming a sadhu gains oars. This is the second most important man in the kingdom. Imagine nowadays the son of Warren Buffett, who walks away from everything to nothing.

Then Buddha trained with the highest teachers of his age. He trained mainly with Alara Kalama, who seems to have taught him the Upanishads and the Sankhya school of thought, and with Uddaka Ramaputta, who taught meditation techniques, which from a Buddhist standpoint probably include śamatha and the four dhyanas above śamatha. Buddha was profoundly unsatisfied with these teachings. In other words, after exhausting the knowledge of his age, this man who must have been profoundly unsatisfied, a man who was searching for ultimate meaning, went to the end of his quest in what amounts to a meditation unto death. This is the famous Mahākāla statue of the Buddha, which is a favorite representation of Buddha Śākyamūni for his holiness, the Dalai Lama.

It is Buddha in the great ascetic meditations where he abstained from all food. And these meditations lasted for six years. We have an account of them in the Digha Nikāya, where Buddha says, thus far did I go in my penance, I went without clothes, I licked my food from my hands. I lived on roots and fruits of the forest. I wore grave clothes, dust heap rags, a dress made of bark.

I always stood refusing to sit down. I lay upon a bed of thorns. Such a level of asceticism is almost inconceivable for Westerners who have no particular interest or reason to search for any meaning beyond this life. But in the age of the Buddha where the quest for ultimate meaning was the dominant quest, such a quest was not uncommon and one does encounter nowadays in India, ascetics who follow this path of extraordinary asceticism. Buddha, however, found this path like the teachings of Kalama let no.

And he then resolved to take his seat in front of a pipal tree, a fig tree, in the area known nowadays as Bodh Gaya and took the vow not to rise until he had realized truth. He meditated, it is said, for forty nine days uninterruptedly. And after forty nine days, according to the Western chronology in 528 BC, he gained full enlightenment. He became to Asia where Jesus Christ is to the West. However, what is very striking after gaining full enlightenment is the silence of the Buddha.

The Buddha refuses to teach. He refuses to teach because he doesn’t see any benefit. Teaching is not a right. Teaching is a privilege. Then to this day, the great Tibetan teachers only teach if they think the student will practice.

If they think student will not practice, their own time is better spent doing something else. The Buddha must have felt the same way for his contemporaries. It is said that it is actually the intervention of Indian gods Brahma, which begged the Buddha to teach, which finally convinced the Buddha to teach after forty nine days. And then begins the Buddha’s mission. This is a statue of the Buddha from one of the early caves in Ajanta in the second century BC, so shortly after the age of King Ashoka.

And Buddha traveled all over India, the India of his age, which is far smaller than present day India. It is what I have called many times the Gangetic Plains, the plains around the Ganges. This is these are the birthplace and the place where the Buddha was educated, Lumbinī and Kapilavastu. The Shakya Kingdom, which as you can see is a very small kingdom. And the two main kingdoms of the age, Kossala and Magadha Kingdom.

The Buddha’s path probably went along the main trade paths of the age and the Buddha after engaging in ascetic meditations in present day Varanasi and Gaya, meditations which were of to no avail, traveled eventually to present day Bihar and meditated in Bodh Gaya and after attaining enlightenment started teaching in Sarnath. Rajgir, which is the main site of the great Mahāyāna teachings, is removed by only a couple kilometers. Then for a little bit less than fifty years after his full enlightenment, Buddha Buddha Śākyamūni traveled on foot toward India gathering ever more disciples, gathering kingly disciples. This was very striking in the Buddha’s mission. Buddha himself was a member of the Kshatriya caste, the military caste.

This may explain his rejection of traditional Vedic Brahmanical religiosity and it may perhaps explain his appeal to the Kshatriya leaders of his age. Buddhist personality is clearly that of a young boy. The asceticism, the drive, the energy are all there. And I have myself often wondered if the Buddhist tradition of shaving one’s head was not at its inception perhaps military in origin. Since it is known that the Roman engineers shaved their beards with their swords to demonstrate their mastery of the blade.

Certainly, most of the great Upanishadic thinkers were Kshatriya. It is in the Kshatriya milieu that the rejection of Brahmanic orthodoxy in ritualism was strongest. And this very stark set of teachings of the Buddha culminate with the Buddha’s final teaching, which I feel encapsulates everything Buddhism has to say. Listen brethren, all composite phenomena are impermanent, strive without ceasing. The initial representations of the Buddha were confined to representations of his funerary monument, his stupa, one of the early caves in Ajanta.

However, very quickly, the Buddhist teachings spread throughout India. And their impact on Indian society is astonishing. We have pillars erected throughout throughout India, the so called pillars of Ashoka, on which the great king Ashoka, one of the great warlords of his age, who converted to Buddhism after his bloodthirsty conquest of the state of Kalinga, in which men, women, and children were massacred, describes his conversion and describes the values which he, as king, wants to see in his country. No living being, keep in mind this was written in the second century BC, third century BC, my apologies. No living being may be slaughtered for sacrifice.

This is a ban of Brahmanical sacrifice. In and outside his dominion, Ashoka has arranged for the medical treatment of man and beast. Ashoka arranges for tours of his kingdom by his officers to teach the Dharma. Then Dharma attendants are appointed to predicate the teachings. Ashoka requests all religious traditions in his dominions to live in peace and amity and stresses self control and purity of mind.

Ashoka requests slaves and servants to show reverence to their masters, to their elders, and restraint and liberality to Brahmanas, in other words, religious practitioners and Shamanas, in other words, monks. Ashoka does not consider glory in this life or fame after death of any consequence except the glory of his being able to induce his people to practice the teachings. This series of extraordinary statements, I think, the likes of which I certainly do not know in human history, certainly not at this period. In the second and third century BC, you do not encounter a monarch at the peak of his success, who converts to an ascetic religious tradition, bans the use of violence in any form in his states, installs universal medical treatment, not just for man as in Australia, but for beasts, for animals. And does not presentatize those who are not the practitioners of his religious tradition, but encourages religious harmony and peace.

These are values, I think, which are far in advance perhaps on our values nowadays. Thanks to King Ashoka and thanks to the extraordinary impact of the Buddhist teachings, Buddhadharma spread in India and became, I think one can say, the dominant tradition certainly among the courtly casts and among the merchant cast leading to the erection of the great monastic caves at Asaṇga, which are a series of monasteries carved into the rock of a cliff along a major trade route, and of which this inner hall is a magnificent depiction. Keep in mind, this is actually carved by hand. Then I think we will take a short tea break. And during the second part of this conference, we will start talking of the Buddhist teachings as such.

Thank you very much. They’re not far from Gujarat. On the Western Coast Of India. Then I hope you are suitably refreshed and you have brought your blood sugar levels back to a reasonable state. This is required for philosophy.

Philosophers take a lot of sugar for certain reasons. It’s to feed the brain. So having covered briefly the historical background, we now have to enter into the gist of the topic. And we will start by a presentation of the totality of the Buddhist path, very brief, by one of the greatest Buddhist thinkers of all times, Nāgārjuna. Nāgārjuna presents the Buddhist goals in his garland, precious garland, his Ratnāvali, as twofold.

They are first higher rebirth and then what Nāgārjuna calls definite excellence. Higher rebirth is a gateway to definite excellence. Nāgārjuna says that the goal of a is from life to life to go from higher rebirth to higher rebirth, either as a human or as a god, until he is able to attain one of the two forms of definite excellence, which is liberation, if he is a practitioner of the lesser vehicle or full enlightenment for a practitioner of the greater vehicle. To be able to attain a higher rebirth, it is indispensable to understand causal interdependence. In other words, karma and causality.

Ethics is the gateway to a higher rebirth. To attain liberation or full enlightenment, understanding of imputation interdependence of which we will talk briefly today is indispensable. Therefore, the totality of the path hinges on an understanding of the two forms of interdependence, causal and imputation. And the quote which underlies this is Nāgārjuna’s quote in The Precious Garland. In one who practices high status, in other words striving for a higher rebirth, definite excellence arises later in many lives.

For having attained high status, one comes gradually to definite excellence. So what is the Buddhist path? What are the main features of this path? What is the core realization of Buddha Śākyamūni in Bodh Gaya? And what does it mean to say we are a Buddhist philosophically?

The Buddhist difference as I see it personally is logic and selflessness. Buddhism is the only path which teaches that logic and reason is the gateway to both liberation and full enlightenment. Likewise, Buddhism is the only religious tradition which teaches that there is nothing findable within man, there is no self. Under investigation, nothing can be found. What precisely this absence of findability is, the great Buddhist schools of philosophy argue about.

This disagreement is extremely important because it is a clear demonstration that the Buddhist path is rooted in logic and reasoning and there is place for disagreement. It is not a revealed tradition. And this is beautifully epitomized by Je Tsongkhapa in his Legs Bshad Snying Po, The Essence of Eloquence, in which he says the difference between passages which can be interpreted in the Buddhist Sutras and the definitive ones which can be accepted as such, must be analyzed through reasoning. As somebody who accepts tenets which are contradictory with logic is not a valid cognizer. And even the acceptability of the suchness of phenomena words emptiness, has proofs of logical establishment.

And he roots this in the famous quote of Buddha Śākyamūni, bhiksus or scholars should not accept my utterances upon thorough examination, just as gold is burnt, cut and rubbed and not out of respect. This is probably a unique statement in the history of religions. So I do not know of another religious thinker who has encouraged such a radically critical mindset in his disciples. This radically critical mindset is encouraged for a very simple reason. What is not ascertained by reasoning and logic is not solid, is not stable.

Faith can only be a gateway. This is the first step. It is through reason and logic that the foundations can be set firmly. And we will see this very clearly if we try to understand the Buddhist division of phenomena in the light of the minds which perceive them. This analysis of mind is called in Western philosophy, epistemology.

All of the Indian schools of thought assess the reality or non reality of phenomena in function of the minds which perceive them. So this is exactly the opposite of the Western outlook. And therefore the nature of the mind is critical. Minds which establish the existence of phenomena are known as valid cognizers or Pramāna. And the quote which we just saw on the previous page is actually interpreted to teach the totality of phenomena which are to be known and how they are to be known.

Valid cognizers are the gold. The valid cognizer examines phenomena and ascertains it. Then how the phenomena is ascertained depends on its nature. If the phenomena can be perceived by the senses, it must be ascertained through a direct valid cognizer. If it cannot be perceived by the senses but is amenable to reason, it must be ascertained through an inferential valid cognizer.

If it is what is known as an extremely subtle phenomenon which cannot be ascertained by the reasoning capacity of a normal being, it can be ascertained through the reasoning capacity of a Buddha and one must rely on the teachings of a Buddha to understand it. So in that context, one relies on belief. However, within these three categories of phenomena ascertained by the three types of valid cognizers, which are referred to in the quote as what is burnt for a direct valid cognizer, what cuts for an inferential valid cognizer and what rubs for inferential valid cognizers who believe. The most important category of phenomena from a Buddhist phenomena, a Buddhist standpoint, are emptinesses, which is the goal of one’s meditation. These are ascertained through reasoning, through logic.

So you can see here a fundamental difference with the path of the Vedanta for which Pramāna, reasoning, is not only irrelevant, it’s actually harmful to a realization of the ultimate nature of phenomena. From the Buddhist standpoint, there is no ascertainment of the ultimate nature of phenomena independent of reasoning. Then the phenomena which can be understood by direct valid cognizers, which include sense cognizers and others we will not talk about today, include matter and some forms of mind. They are less important from a Buddhist standpoint. And inferential valid cognizers through belief enable one to understand subtle phenomena like subtle causality, subtle karma.

Now from a Buddhist standpoint, these categories of phenomena include Buddhist sciences, which covers the explanation of matter, Buddhist philosophy, which covers the explanation of minds and permanent phenomena such as emptiness, and Buddhist religion, which covers those topics taught by the Buddha which are beyond our understanding. Buddhist science stands or falls on its compatibility with modern science. There’s no particular reason one should rely on the science of fifteen or twenty centuries ago. So as far as matter is concerned, the measure of the validity of Buddhist science is contemporary physics, contemporary biology, you know, in their field which is matter. Mind as a phenomenon is not studied in western science.

It’s actually not even accepted. In this matter, I think Buddhist philosophy stands alone and very powerful. Buddhist religion is actually unimportant, because it is this central understanding of the nature of mind and of impermanence and emptiness which is accessible to reasoning. Hence, the importance of study, which can only be engaged by oneself, and meditation. The Buddhist tradition is not a devotional tradition.

Devotion is seen as what one engages in when one can neither engage in study nor in meditation. It is a preliminary to these. Devotion cannot lead to liberation, it cannot lead to full enlightenment, which are the goals of a true Buddhist practitioner. So what did the Buddha Śākyamūni teach and how did he teach it? The Buddha’s teaching was subdivided into three turnings of the wheel of the law or three cycles of teach ings.

The first turning of the wheel of the law was the four noble truths. Buddhist fundamental teaching whose goal is individual liberation and these were public teachings accessible to all. They have been retained in history. The second turning of the wheel of the law includes a perfection of wisdom sūtra’s teaching emptiness and the third turning of the wheel of the law includes the great mind only teachings like the Samdhinirmochana sūtra. These were restricted teachings limited to an audience of Bodhisattvas.

They are not retained in history. They were either transmitted by these Bodhisattvas or retrieved by great meditators in meditative vision. Western scholars consider as historical only this category of public teachings. Buddhist practitioners consider both to be historical in the broad sense of the term. So the foundation of the Buddhist teachings which he imparted in Uruvela are the four noble truths.

The term noble actually does not exist either in Sanskrit or in Tibetan, it’s just the four truths. And they are rooted in a core realization of suffering which is characteristic of the Buddha’s thought and beautifully epitomized in the fire sūtra. Where the Buddha says, monks, all is aflame. I have put in red the key points. The eye is a flame.

Forms are a flame. Consciousness at the eye is a flame. Contact at the eye is a flame. A flame with what? A flame with the fire of passion, the fire of aversion, the fire of delusion.

A flame I tell you with birth, aging and death, with sorrows, lamentations, pains, distresses and despair. And then the Buddha proceeds through each of the sense gate. The ear organ, the nose organ, the tongue, the bodily organ, and finally the mental organ ideas. Even the intellect is aflame with suffering. Ideas are aflame.

This leads us understanding, leads one to become disenchanted with the eye, disenchanted with what the eye sees, disenchanted with consciousness at the eye, and perhaps most difficultly I think for westerners who are addicted to intellectual stimulation, disenchanted with the intellect and with ideas. This disenchantment leads to dispassion and dispassion to release. It is one of the most powerful statements of the Buddhist message, which was ever made. And to understand it well, one must understand the first noble truth, the noble truth of suffering. Therefore, we will address at present the four truths.

The first truth is a truth of suffering. The second is a truth of the cause of suffering. The third is a truth of the end or the cessation of suffering. And the fourth is a truth of the path. This is the inner core of the Buddhist teachings and is based directly on the Buddha’s experience.

This first truth, the truth of suffering, is one which if misunderstood leads one to dismiss offhand the Buddhist teaching. The Buddhist understanding of suffering is much broader than our ordinary understanding of suffering as pain. We are not asserting that the world is pain, that is at odds with experience. There are many pleasant things in the world which are not painful. What is being asserted, however, is the ultimate unsatisfactoriness of every experience in this world.

And hence the truth of suffering is divided into the suffering of suffering which is mental or physical pain. Cancer for instance would be a case of the suffering of suffering. Alzheimer’s would be a case of the suffering of suffering. Then the suffering of change includes all of our so called pleasant experiences. Why are these experiences of the nature of suffering?

They are of the nature of suffering first because they are transient and secondly because if they are experienced continually, they turn into pain. You all have experienced how pleasant that first mouthful of cherry pie is and how by the time you have had 13 or 14 mouthfuls, the sweetness is revolting and you feel bloated. It is nonetheless the same experience which within 13 or 14 mouthfuls has turned into pain. It hasn’t turned into suffering. The suffering which was present from the beginning has become evident.

There are issues here of threshold which enable one to understand very well the suffering of change. The same thing for instance, the pleasure of a massage. Your shoulders hurt, somebody gives you a massage, the pain in your shoulder decreases, the decrease is perceived as happiness. As that decrease continues, that happiness progressively turns into suffering. Were the massage to continue, it would eventually turn into torture.

This shows that the initial experience of pleasure is a false one. Finally, all pervasive suffering actually refers to the fact that our bodies and our minds, in other words, our five aggregates, are preconditioned for suffering. Suffering can arise in them. When the Buddha taught the noble truth of suffering, this is what he taught. That everything is either preconditioned for suffering or that what we call happiness transforms into suffering and is suffering in nature and that the third category of experience is mere pain.

This realization becomes much clearer if one engages in mindfulness meditation. So it is a standard experience for people who engage in mindfulness meditation that when they initially engage in mindfulness, they start to experience tremendous bodily pain. It starts with itching, then cramps, anxiety, fear, eventually the pain can become in support but yet the person is just seated motionless. The itching is not some itching which appears from from anywhere. This is actually pre existing itching which is beneath the threshold of observation.

It is a steady continuum of suffering which is present throughout In the moment the threshold of observation is lowered to cover these phenomena, this pre existing suffering becomes obvious. The peak of the Satipatthana experience is an extraordinary level of suffering before one understands that the suffering is rooted in a cause. And this leads us to the second noble truth, the noble truth of the cause of the origin of suffering. Had the Buddha just taught that all was suffering, then his teaching would be radical pessimism because there would be no way out of this suffering. But the Buddha taught that this suffering has causes and identification of these causes enables us to sever them.

There are two causes of suffering. Karma, in other words, deeds from past lives and afflictions, in other words, negative emotions. Now karma is subdivided into three categories: virtuous karma, non virtuous karma and what is known as immutable karma. Ordinary beings can only create virtuous and non virtuous karma, which lead to higher or lower rebirths. Meditators and meditators who have reached the first Dhyāna and above alone can create immutable karma.

This is a result of concentration and leads to a rebirth in the form of the formless realm. This is the first cause of cyclic existence. The second cause of cyclic existence are the afflictions, which we will not enter into too much today. These are the six root afflictions, which I will cover shortly, and the 20 secondary afflictions. All of these act as the means to generate karma, which in turn creates worldly happiness or worldly suffering.

In keeping with the Buddha’s teachings, both worldly happiness and worldly suffering are actually suffering in nature. Then what is cyclic existence? The understanding of cyclic existence from the Buddhist standpoint is a pyramid of beings. Starting with the hell realms, which comprise most of the beings simply because through a principle of entropy, it is the natural place to which people sink if they follow their instincts. Followed by pretas, hungry ghosts and most of the spirits.

Most of the spirits are classified here. And the two realms which we can actually perceive as ordinary human beings, those in which I think most western Buddhists believe. The animal realm and the human realm. The boundary between higher and lower rebirths lies here. Then above the human realm, have a bevy of higher rebirths in which, as I said again, most western Buddhists probably do not believe, they are the realms of the demigods and the gods, in which one is born through virtuous karma, and the two higher god realms in which, as we said, one can only be reborn through the power of meditation.

It’s not the meditation of an ordinary being, it is at least a being who has the first Jñāna. So from a Buddhist standpoint, for instance, the great practitioners of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras teaching Rāja Yoga, single pointed concentration, would be reborn as gods of the form or gods of the formless realms as a result of their practice of Rāja Yoga. So as we said, the truths of the origins of suffering are subdivided into the six root afflictions and the 20 secondary afflictions. The root afflictions are desire, anger, pride, ignorance, afflicted doubt and afflicted view. The root of all of the root afflictions is ignorance, as in all of the Indian traditions.

It is ignorance which is a cause of bondage to cyclic existence. Doubt itself is not a root affliction. It is only afflicted doubt which is a root affliction. Doubt in itself is very beneficial. A critical mindset is necessary.

An afflicted view is an incorrect view of reality. So we will enter a little bit more into these briefly. An alternative division of afflictions is into afflictions which are related to the view and afflictions which are not related to the view. Ordinary beings only have afflictions which are not related to the view. The normal person on the street has no particular opinion about past and future lives, the existence of God, selflessness.

They probably don’t know what you’re talking about. Then they have all of the delusions we covered. Anger, ignorance, desire, these are afflictions which are not related to the view. However, the view one has, in other words, the ultimate philosophy one has is not minor in one’s lifestyle. If this view is afflicted, it can lead to tremendous problems.

For instance, in the last ten years, we are de facto in a state of war with large swathes of the Islamic world. This is rooted in a incorrect understanding of Islam, which sees holy war as virtuous. Now this is a case of a very sincerely held belief. I mean, if you read the lives of, some of these people, let’s say, Osama bin Laden for instance, led a very virtuous life by Muslim standards. But the view itself is profoundly destructive.

Hence, frankly, afflictions related to the view are far more dangerous than ordinary afflictions because they can lead very sincere and well meaning people to catastrophic decisions. And these afflicted views related to the view are first the view of the transitory collection, which sees the five aggregates of a human being. In other words, the form, feeling, recognition, volition, and consciousness aggregates as belonging to a soul or Ātman. This is the viewpoint of all of the Indian schools. It’s also the viewpoint of all of the monotheisms, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Or the view holding to an extreme, which either sees the five aggregates as eternal or sees them as disintegrating at death. This is a view perhaps of most westerners nowadays. Most western materialists, many people in this room perhaps, really deep down believe that at death it is all over. Now such a view is not minor in terms of one’s lifestyle. It will lead to dramatic choices which from a Buddhist standpoint make very major differences in future lives.

Then grasping these wrong views as supreme, grasping wrong ethics and behavior as supreme and wrong views of the following subdivisions. If you apply them to, for instance, fundamentalist Islam or radical materialism, which are both from Buddhist standpoint wrong views, you can see the extremes to which they lead. One of the big tragedies of our society in many respects is a desperate attempt to try to maintain ethics and morality, where the dominant viewpoint of the society provides no foundation for either ethics or morality. The dominant materialist viewpoint of our society has been beautifully summarized by an English short story novel writer, Somerset Maugham, who said, my philosophy of life is to do what I want with due regards for the policeman around the corner. I suspect most Australians live according to this standard of ethics.

And I suspect most westerners do as well. The third noble truth is a noble truth of the cessation of suffering. We will not talk about it a lot. It is the most difficult noble truth. Because all the Buddha’s teachings on the noble truth of suffering are relatively accessible if one understands what the Buddha means by suffering and the noble truth of the cause of suffering are also relatively understandable if one is convinced in the existence of past and future lives.

What is very problematical is whether there is or not an end to suffering. It is not obvious that there is an end. It is not obvious, for instance, if you take desire that it is possible to put an end to desire. To reduce it, yes. To reduce it maybe even indefinitely, yes.

But from a Buddhist standpoint, is it possible to generate an abandonment of desire, which means a state in which desire will never arise ever again, whatever the conditions. That is what is asserted in the truth of the cessation of suffering. In the truth of the cessation of suffering, what is asserted by the Buddha is that through the application of the antidotes, it is possible to reach a state where all of the, they are traditionally known as 84,000 delusions, can be permanently abandoned forever. This is not easy to understand or to accept. Once it is understood or accepted, practice becomes very easy.

But it is very difficult to be convinced of this. And finally, the fourth noble truth is the noble truth of the path epitomized by one of the greatest contemporary Thai teachers, Ajahn Buddhadasa, who was very close to his one as Dalai Lama and was, I think you can say, astride the Theravāda and the Mahāyāna. He passed on, I think, in 1996. So what is the truth of the path from the Buddhist standpoint? There are three paths for three types of practitioners.

The truth of the path is something only practitioners enter into. The path of the hearers, the path of the solitary realizers, and the path of the Bodhisattvas. Hearers and solitary realizers are practitioners of the Hīnayāna. They enter this path when renunciation is generated and only at that point. Before that, are not beings on the path irrespective of their assertions.

The path of Bodhisattvas is only entered when bodhicitta has actually been generated. This doesn’t mean an intellectual generation. This means that the person is taken over by bodhicitta. The person is taken over by renunciation. This is their soul thought.

And this is very clear if we look at a general subdivision of the paths. So here you see we have in yellow the Hīnayāna practitioners, which are hearers and solitary realizers and in red the Mahāyāna practitioners. Now the truth of the path can also be subdivided into five paths. The path of accumulation, the path of preparation, the path of seeing, the path of meditation and the path of no more learning. These are covered in great detail in Sa Lam, in Grounds and Paths.

But there is there are two turning points in the presentation of the truths of the path. The first is actual entry in the path and the second is direct perception of selflessness. Entry in the path, which means the path of accumulation occurs either through renunciation for the Hīnayāna or through bodhicitta for the Mahāyāna. Before those arise spontaneously within the mind, one is not yet on any of these paths. Then the first path, the path of accumulation, is called the path of accumulation because one accumulates virtuous karma to lead up to the attainment of the first usable level of concentration known as śamatha.

When one has attained śamatha, at this point, one enters into the path of preparation where one trains in meditating on emptiness using śamatha. One still has a conceptual understanding of emptiness, but this becomes more and more subtle. And eventually, one gains a direct perception of selflessness. At this point, one has entered the path of seeing and one has entered the actual truth of the path. Until then, the two lower paths, the paths of accumulation and preparation, are merely imputed truths of the path.

They are known as truths, truths of the path. They are not real truths of the path. A being on the path is necessarily an ārya being. In other words, an Arhat of the Hīnayāna or an ārya bodhisattva. And through repeated meditation over many lives normally, one attains either, if one is a Hīnayāna practitioner, liberation or full enlightenment as a Mahāyāna practitioner and one is at that point on the path of no more learning, which corresponds for the Hīnayāna practitioner to liberation and for the Mahāyāna practitioner to full enlightenment.

Now to understand better the four noble truths, one must understand each of the noble truths in terms of the four wrong engagements of this noble truth. There are four wrong engagements for each of the noble truth. These are things to be meditated upon. It looks very complicated on the whiteboard, but this is something a practitioner would actually sit down and go through in meditation. The four wrong engagements of the truth of suffering, in other words, the four misunderstandings of the truth suffering are seeing the contaminated aggregates, in other words, our body and mind as clean, happy, permanent and having a self.

You would see that seeing them as clean and happy is the dominant western view nowadays. Hence the endless showers people inflict on themselves and the desperate attempt to be happy through self help manuals. The best way to be convinced that the aggregates are not clean is to try to abstain from showering for just a week. It drives the point home very well. As for seeing the contaminated aggregates as happy, we just have to check our own minds.

Seeing them as permanent is a viewpoint of the orthodox Indian darshanas, including Vedanta, and seeing them as having a self is a viewpoint of all world religions apart from Buddhism. So you can see that the four wrong engagements of the truth of suffering are present in western materialism, in the orthodox Indian darshanas, and in all monotheistic religions. A Buddhist meditator meditating on the noble truth of suffering would meditate on it by meditating first on the fact that the contaminated aggregates are filthy, taking examples, then that they are of the nature of suffering, then that they are transient as we said changing instant by instant, different in each instant from their previous instant and finally as lacking the self. The four wrong engagements of the truth of the origin of suffering is seeing suffering as having no cause or only one cause. This is the materialist viewpoint.

Almost all of you in this room probably deep down believe that if people fall sick, if they suffer, if they have an accident, it’s the vagaries of fate. It happens. There’s no particular reason. They are the odd man out in the statistics. From the standpoint of Buddhism, every suffering we experience, we have sown the seeds of ourselves in a distant past.

Alternatively, materialism sees suffering as having only one cause specifically matter. The western response to suffering is yet more scientific research, yet more hospitals, yet more taxation for more benefits. When this doesn’t work, one goes through the same cycle all over again. Now some of the charts I showed you during the first conference clearly demonstrate that throwing money, research and hospitals at problems does not work. If the suicide rate in Australia increases among the eighteen to twenty four age group by a factor of five in the twentieth century, at the same time as a living standard has skyrocketed, this is a clear demonstration that money is not the source of happiness.

It is a clear demonstration that happiness is linked to something else. Then all Abrahamic monotheisms believe that suffering arises through having displeased God. It is the will of God. This way, Buddhist standpoint is a wrong view of the noble truth of the origin of suffering. And there are some schools of Western philosophy, mainly interestingly enough Romanian philosophers, Cioran and Ionesco, who believe that suffering is just permanent in nature.

So this is not the Buddhist viewpoint, thank heavens. The Buddhist viewpoint is that suffering does exist, but it can be addressed. Now the four wrong engagements of the truth of cessation is either seeing liberation from suffering as totally non existent, as only a partial liberation, as a plentiful liberation of many features with some left, or seeing that there is no true cessation as we said, suffering stops but it can come back. All of these viewpoints I think are the viewpoints of materialism. Most westerners believe that there is no such thing as liberation from suffering probably don’t believe that there is any such thing as suffering in the Buddhist sense in the first place.

Happiness is seen as purely happy. Then I think most westerners who come to Buddhist centers believe only in partial liberation. You can perhaps eradicate the source of suffering stress. We advertise this. We bring students to the center.

But that doesn’t address liberation from other factors. Or you can eliminate many delusions, but not all. Or you can reduce or eliminate them but they do come back. In every single case, this is basically a wrong view regarding the truth of cessation. Because there’s only one of two possibilities.

Either there is such a thing as a true analytical cessation, in other words, a cessation which is a product of meditation, in which case our practice is meaningful or there is no such thing as a true analytical cessation, in which case I think we should do something else with our time. Now until we are convinced of this, our practice lacks any type of power. It’s the practice of a dilettante, of a tourist. Practice becomes powerful when the four noble truths become dominant in the mind. There is such a thing as suffering.

The cause of suffering has been identified and there is cessation. At that point, the urge to practice is almost irresistible. So for this reason, this has to be grounded in logic and reasoning. Finally, there are four wrong engagements of the truth of the path, which are to see the past as totally non existent. This is a materialist viewpoint.

There’s no such thing as spiritual practice. There’s nothing before this life, there’s nothing after, why bother? I think you say in Australia, it’s a time buster, right? A way to to spend time. Isn’t that so?

Then the path of liberation is not generated by the wisdom realizing selflessness. This is a viewpoint of all of the non-Buddhist traditions, which do not recognize selflessness. But it is critical in one’s analysis to understand the path of liberation correctly because if selflessness leads to liberation, then it is selflessness we have to meditate upon. If something else leads to liberation, it is that other thing we have to meditate upon. It is we do cannot afford to be wishy washy about it.

Either Vedanta is right or the Buddhist teachings are right. Both are not right. It is not possible. Either there is a permanent unitary and independent self, in which case we are wrong or there is no such thing, in which case we are right. And if we are right, is meditation on the absence of this permanent unitary and independent self the way to liberation or not?

We must be convinced of this. Then if the path to liberation is seen as arising through some feature of meditation, this is a viewpoint of at least four of the Indian Sankhya, Yoga, Vedanta and Jain. We see this very commonly in western centers. People want to meditate, they don’t have a clue what they want to meditate upon. Then that is a waste of time.

Meditation is not a certain bodily posture. Meditation is training the mind in accordance with reality. If reality has not been analytically determined, there is no training of the mind in accordance with reality. First one must therefore study and analytically determine the nature of reality and then change one’s mind so that it fits with reality. This is meditation.

If one’s assessment of reality is wrong, then one’s training is not only useless, it’s destructive. As said, you will gain realizations no one ever had before you. And therefore, this leads us to the main question. Being a Buddhist by reasoning and by faith, the issue of tenets. This perhaps the foremost Buddhist practitioner and teacher of our age, he’s known as Dalai Lama, debating at his examination.

His debating is a way of teaching how a true Buddhist should practice, which is a practice rooted in study, in analysis, and in meditation. And this issue of being a Buddhist by faith or by reasoning is addressed by one of the very great Tibetan scholars, actually asks the question whether one can be a Buddhist by faith alone without accepting what is known as the four seals, which are, if you want, the dogmatic signature of Buddhism. Jetsün Chökyi Gyaltsen feels that one can be called a Buddhism by faith, a Buddhist by faith, if one actually, merely out of fear of the lower realms, is a Buddhist, without really understanding the four tenets. But one cannot be called a Buddhist by tenets. And a true Buddhist is a Buddhist by tenets.

Faith is merely the gateway leading to the realization of tenets. In other words, the philosophical view. Hence, we will cover the four seals which are if you wish the essence of the Buddhist teachings from the standpoint of the philosophical view, it is if you want an alternate presentation of the four noble truths. The four seals are that all composite phenomena are impermanent. All contaminated phenomena are suffering.

All phenomena are selfless. nirvana is peace and happiness. If one subscribes fully to these four seals, then one is fully a Buddhist by tenet And this is the firmest foundation on which to ground refuge, of which we shall be talking in a couple months. You can see there is a fair bit of overlap with the Four Noble Truths. What do we mean when we say that all composite phenomena are impermanent?

When I was a monk at Seraje, I had a very strange experience once and that’s why I chose this picture. I was in a field by a river close to the monastery and the wind was blowing the grass left and right. And when I was watching the little creek gurgling, I suddenly had this very strong sense of the total transience of all composite phenomena. A sense of just being a leaf in the wind as someone once said. Then it’s not I’m not claiming any realisation but it was a very very strong sense of what the first seal probably is.

And to understand this first seal correctly, one must understand what impermanent phenomena are. Impermanent phenomena generally speaking from a Buddhist standpoint are subdivided into two. Impermanent phenomena which change instant by instant and permanent phenomena which do not change instant by instant. Impermanent phenomena have a series of synonyms. There are a series of categories of phenomena which have the same meaning.

So an impermanent phenomena is that which is momentary. It changes instant by instant. It has the same meaning as a disintegrating phenomenon, a phenomenon which dies instant by instant. That is exactly the same thing as an effective thing, a phenomenon which is able to perform a function. Which is also when I will jump the same thing as a cause and a result.

Therefore from the Buddhist standpoint, it is the fact that phenomena are momentary, which means nothing else than the fact that they are disintegrating instant by instant, which enables them to be causes and it enables them to be results or products. This momentary disintegration of phenomena, their death unto themselves instant by instant is the fundamental Buddhist understanding of impermanent phenomena. It means instant by instant there is no identity. I at age 49 going on 50 am radically different from the way I was at age five. I sometimes do not recognize myself in the pictures.

It’s not just the hair. Then if I think that difference comes from the fact that there was momentary change over forty four years. Right now as I am speaking to you, I am holding a flow of thoughts and explanation, but if a physicist were to analyze my body, every single instant of my body at the cellular level is already different from the previous instant. There is mitosis and meiosis going on constantly. At the subatomic level, the particles which compose my body are changing instant by instant.

It is only a view of the mind which enabled me to say that I, Ilya Dubovic, am the same now as one and a half hours ago when we started to talk. It is a conception. The reality based on physical analysis and on biological analysis is that I am a different person. There is a continuum which is the same, but I now at four zero six am different from myself at four zero five, although within the same continuum. Hence the core equation which I put down here, impermanent phenomenon equals composite phenomenon equals effective things equals product equals cause equals effect.

Now there are two types of impermanent phenomenon. As we said, there are coarse and subtle impermanent phenomenon. Both change instant by instant. However, coarse impermanent phenomena are phenomena which end completely. What we know as their continuum is severed.

I am a coarse impermanent phenomena because at the very maximum forty, forty five years from now, I will die, my continuum will cease. The person known as Ilya Derovic will no longer exist and will never return, will never exist again under that name. Subtle impermanent phenomena are phenomena whose continuum is never severed but which still change instant by instant. My mind is a subtle impermanent phenomena. My body will be destroyed but my mind is infinite in the sense that it never will cease.

It will change instant by instant. It is eternal as long as you understand eternal as not meaning permanent. It’s not a permanent phenomenon. Now impermanent phenomena are subdivided into three categories, two of which are important for us. The first is matter.

This includes all the subatomic particles, cells, human body, the human brain. The second is mind. From a Buddhist standpoint, both are impermanent phenomena. Both arise from causes, but they are radically different. Matter can never be the cause of mind, nor mind can the cause of matter.

Matter can only give rise to matter. Mind can only give rise to mind. This is the foremost Buddhist proof for the existence of past and future lives. Now regarding the second seal, that all contaminated phenomena are suffering, I will not develop this too much. It is fully covered in the presentation of the first noble truth.

This is a picture of the lot of many of us in this room. This is an Alzheimer patient who is being dragged up by staff in The UK. These were some of the videos which are taken before the repeated abuse of the patient by staff. She was repeatedly beaten by the staff. This is not something which is uncommon.

This this is from the Buddhist standpoint part of the suffering of old age. When we wish for a long life, we have to be careful what we wish for. The third seal is that all phenomena are selfless. And in this matter, while all Buddhist schools agree on the core meaning of selflessness, there is considerable disagreement on the modalities. Selflessness is seen as the converse of interdependence.

Interdependence means that phenomena depend on each other. In the simplest sense of the term, it refers to causal interdependence. The fact that a cause gives rise to its effect and therefore the effect depends on the cause. In my case, my existence depends on that of my two parents, who are the cause of my body. Without my two parents, my body would not have arisen.

I am therefore not an independent in autonomous phenomenon. However, there is a more subtle form of interdependence which is imputation interdependence, which refers to the fact that phenomena depend on the minds which perceive them. For instance, if we have two very cute, West Highland terriers, If one of them called Bobby were to look at, my projector, he would actually not see a projector. He would see something, but he would not break down the projector and the table to dissociate table and projector because he does not understand the function of either. He is therefore not able to impute projector on the projector.

When anyone of us in this room looks at the projector and the table together, we impute projector on the projector and table on the table. In that sense, the projector as projector comes into existence through our minds perceiving it. In that sense. Since for Bobby it cannot perform the function of a projector, if I saw Bobby fiddling with it, I would worry greatly. Now regarding the subdivisions of selflessness.

Selflessness is subdivided into that of persons and of phenomena. The lower Buddhist schools, the Hīnayāna schools only accept the selflessness of persons. The higher schools, the Mahāyāna schools, accept in addition the selflessness of phenomena. We will not enter into that into too much detail here because it is a complicated topic. We’ll talk about it over the next couple of months.

What we will talk about is within these forms of selflessness, the one which is accepted by all the Buddhist schools, which is the coarse selflessness of persons. This is the selflessness referred to within the four seals when one says phenomena are selfless. And this refers to persons being empty of being permanent, one and independent. Persons are empty of being permanent because they are impermanent. A person in my case, myself or let’s say Chris, Chris, the name Chris is imputed, it depends on Chris’s body and Chris’s mind.

Chris’s body is Chris’s form aggregate. His mind comprises of four mental aggregates. Now when we impute the name Chris on Chris, that imputation is not permanent, because Chris changes moment by moment. Both his body and his mind are constantly changing. Chris is not unitary because his body can be broken up into cells, atoms, particles, subatomic particles and his mind can be broken up into instance of mind.

And Chris is not independent because Chris depends on his body and mind and for the Mahāyāna schools, Chris depends on other people identifying him as Chris. This coarse selflessness of persons is therefore central to all the Buddhist schools. And the fourth assertion within the Four Seals is that nirvana is peace. When one asserts that nirvana is peace, one asserts that nirvana exists, There is therefore a truth of cessation. This is the third noble truth.

And in addition, it is the relief of the peace from suffering. Now we won’t enter into this too much, but there are three schools of thought regarding nirvana. The question basically is what happens to the mind stream of an arhat who has reached nirvana in that life? And it’s the same topic is addressed in Vedanta, what happens to someone who has reached Jivanmukti, who has become freed in that life. Do they continue to exist or do they basically disappear?

Now the lower schools assert, the Sautrāntika and Vaibhāṣika school assert, that someone who has become an arhat remains alive for the duration of that life. But at the end of that life everything ceases. Not just his body, but his mind as well, because the causes which impelled body and mind have ceased to exist. Therefore for these schools nirvana is compared to the extinction of a flame. One of the Buddhist schools, a sub school of Cittamātra, the Cittamātra or mind only school following scripture, says that the mental of an Arhat can be severed.

It does not have to be severed, but the arhats who are practicing on the Hīnayāna and who reach a Hīnayāna liberation will cease to exist at death. The Bodhisattvas will not. Finally, the main Mahāyāna schools, the Mādhyamika and Cittamātra schools, say that even when one becomes an Arhat, there is, in other words, one attains liberation. At death, when the mental continuum continues, one just enters into a very profound state of trance. I would like to address with you in the last fifteen minutes for the question time.

Some powerful Indian critiques of Buddhism and the Buddhist rejoinders because it is only through confronting these critiques and analyzing them that our own understanding can deepen. Although we covered the Vedanta school during the first part of this conference, The most powerful critiques of Buddhism do not come from Vedanta. They actually come from the school of the ritualists, from Mimamsa, and specifically from Kumarila, one of the greatest Indian non Indian non-Buddhist philosophers. Regarding whom there are many stories, Kumarila Kumarila’s life task, if you wish, was to defend the existence of the Ātman. And therefore to critique the Buddhist concept of a continuum of consciousness which is changing instant by instant and which has no self.

Then I don’t know if this is a true story or not and there’s a Hindu and a Buddhist version of this, so I’ll give the medium one. But this is kind of both both traditions. Kumarila supposedly wanted to get the scoop on, the lines of reasoning used by Dharmakīrti, the greatest Buddhist logician of the sixth and seventh century. And therefore, it is said that he enrolled in Dharmakīrti’s school on the sly and studied under Dharmakīrti to understand Dharmakīrti’s reasoning and then eloped from the school and criticized it from the outside. Then that’s a Hindu version as far as I know.

The Buddhist version is actually he listened in on the teachings from outside the window. So I don’t know what happened myself. But Kumarila’s critiques are very strong and their critiques we do hear from Western Buddhists, so they must be addressed. In a nutshell, Kummerila starts by saying in his main work, the Shlokavartika, that he will address Buddhist philosophy for one reason, because through denying the Ātman, all the Veda is open to objection. The Veda are the revealed scriptures of ancient India.

Why are they open to objection? They are open to objection because among other, the Veda teaches the meaning and the importance of sacrifice. If there is no ātman to perform the sacrifice, then there is from Kumarila standpoint no performer and no benefactor from the sacrifice. The sacrifice becomes meaningless. Now what Kumarila says could be said by almost every practitioner of the monotheistic tradition.

By the denial of the Ātman, all monotheistic traditions are rendered open to objection. So the existence or nonexistence of a soul is not a tried topic, and it is to Kumarila’s honor that he understood this. What Kumarila does to address the savage Buddhist critiques of the soul is that he basically redefines the Ātman so that it has some of the characteristics which the Buddhist scholars say are necessary to function. Specifically, Kumarila says that actually the ātman can change. It can experience change.

In saying this, he actually voids a lot of the Buddhist critiques, which said there is no such thing as a permanent unitary and independent ātman hidden within the recesses of our beings. And he says that this liability of the Ātman to change does not imply the Ātman’s destruction. Therefore, it is not at odds with the Upanishads. Kumarila, in other words, is saying that he asserts the existence of the Ātman, but it is not a coarse impermanent phenomenon. It is a subtle impermanent phenomenon.

If you are going to assert existence of the ātman, this is the only way to go about it. And then Kumarila criticizes the Buddhist presentation of a continuum of consciousness on two grounds. The first is he considers that a Buddhist continuum of consciousness, which is impermanent and selfless, is not strong enough to carry memories. Memories are a given in this life and karmic imprints from past lives are also present. For Kumarila, question is what is the receptacle of the memories or the past lives?

How can a sequence of instance which are different in nature, each one from the other, and which form a causal continuum be sufficient to carry memory? The second critique which from my standpoint is a much weaker one is that the Buddhist presentation of the causal continuum would lead to a confusion of one’s own mental continuum and that of others. What this means in a nutshell is that if one’s mental continuum does not have nature of its own, if it’s a sequence of disjoint instance connected within a continuum, what enables us to assert that that is, let’s just say, Edrien’s continuum and this is my mental continuum. An instance from my mind don’t end up in Adrian’s mind, an instance of Adrian’s mind don’t end up in my mind. What in other words from Kumarila’s standpoint is there which connects the elements of the mental continuum?

So the dilemma which Kumarila is trying to impale the Buddhist opponent upon is that the so called Buddhist mental continuum is either too insubstantial to function for retention of memory, retention of karmic imprints and enjoying the results of action or if it is substantial enough, it is just another name for the Ātman. So these are these are things these are things we ourselves must meditate upon because there’s only two roads. We can either assert well, there are three roads. If one is a materialist, one asserts that the mind does not exist. It’s just a function of the brain.

If one is a non materialist and one asserts the existence of a mind which is non material, then within that there are only two possibilities. Either there is a permanent core, which is known as the Ātman or the soul, or there is not a permanent core. There’s no third possibility. These three possibilities that the mind is an epiphenomenon of the brain, that there is a mind and it has a permanent core or that there is a mind and it does not have a permanent core, are fundamental for how we live our lives. So we are going to have to choose.

And the Buddhist rejoinder to Kumarila was mainly the work of Shāntarakshita and his great disciple Kamalaśīla. Shāntarakshita starts out by pointing out that when an ātman is taught, what is taught is permanent and all encompassing phenomenon and not just the mind. This is actually what is taught in the Upanishads, this is what is taught in Vedanta, this is what is taught in the root scriptures, which Kumarila accepts. This is their core position. Then Shāntarakshita says, such an ātman is not perceived.

If we investigate to see within ourselves if there is an eternal omnipresent soul within ourselves, there is no evidence we have of this. And then Shāntarakshita takes an example of the construction of the self. Imagine an Indian gentleman going to relax to see an arched girl, a dancing girl. He sees the girl’s complexion, he hears the sound of the drum, he smells the lotus fragrance in her perfume, he tastes camphor, I assume they ate camphor tablets, he feels the wind emanating from fans and this bit I won’t comment. I’m not quite sure what was going on, but at this point Shāntarakshita points out the construction of a total experience occurs through the recall of all these perceptions.

In other words, it is a conceptual construct which is superimposed on the basis of scattered sense data. It is not a unified experience, it is a fragmented experience whose unification is constructed conceptually. This conceptual construction is memory. It is on the basis of this conceptual construction that this Indian gentleman said, I enjoyed the dance of the nartaki or the dancing girl. But when he says, I enjoyed the dance of the nartaki, what is he saying?

My visual consciousness saw her complexion. My ears heard the sound of the tambourine. I smelled the perfume. I was tasting the camphor tablets and so forth. Where is the unified experience?

Then Kamalaśīla addresses specifically the Vedantic position, which was not fully developed at the period, and points out that the Vedantins believe that it is actually permanent consciousness which transforms into all phenomena. This is we saw is the Vedantic position. And at this point, Kamalaśīla points out the power of the reasonings which establish impermanence. Why refute each of the presentations of a self, which exist in the various schools of Indian philosophy, when the mere presentation of impermanence, which is empirically grounded as well as inferentially grounded, is sufficient in and of itself to demonstrate the non existence not only of the Ātman, that basically all Kumarila has done is he has taken the Buddhist continuum of consciousness and called it Ātman, which is basically what happened. Kumarila was brilliant enough to fully understand the scale of the Buddhist critique of the concept of Ātman and therefore he redefined the term Ātman in such a way that actually in terms of its meaning, it is none other than the Buddhist continuum of consciousness.

But this is actually not what is taught in the root texts, the Upanishads, of whom he claims to be the commentator. Well, he was he was it was a quandary. It was a quandary. He was brilliant enough to see that he had to address this issue and he saw no other way to do it but to redefine the term. Then there is another important critique of impermanence from the Indian, standpoint of the Indian tradition, which was initiated by Jaimini, one of the early Mimamsaka thinkers.

Jaimini’s critique is that impermanence is vitiated by the existence of recognition. If I look, let us say, at Adrian and I say I recognize Adrian, she is the same Adrian whom I met two weeks ago, that recognition in and of itself establishes permanence and identity over time. To which Shāntarakshita responds, I think in a brilliant fashion, that which is a recognition is not suitable to be direct perception because it is conceptual. This is a mere conceptual superimposition on the momentary fragmented nature of the aggregates. Recognition is mistaken.

In other words, the Adrian I see is not the Adrian I saw two weeks ago. Why? Because there is difference, Because moment by moment, Adrian and every one of us is changing. And therefore I would like to conclude this talk with a beautiful verse from the precious garland. Due to having faith, one relies on the practices, due to having wisdom, one truly knows.

Of these two, wisdom is chief. Faith is its prerequisite. Faith is merely the gateway which makes us last long enough until we gain true understanding. It is true understanding wisdom which is the actual refuge. Faith can only be the gateway.

Thank you very much. I’m sorry this was quite long as a presentation. Then I am open for your questions if you have any. Please, please. This What was the bridging?

What is it to keep that discrete This path to continue? The causal chain. The causal chain, it is like a chain of links. Each instant of the mental continuum gives rise to the subsequent instant. They are linked by causality, which from a Buddhist standpoint is real.

From the standpoint of all of the Hindu Darshanas, causality is not real. It is illusory. Then this causality means that the first instance of my mental continuum, let’s say, to make things very precise, the first instance of my eye consciousness which perceives the white color of the projector can only give to the second right to the second instance of my eye consciousness perceiving the white color of the projector. It can never give rise to the second instance of your eye consciousness perceiving the white color of the projector. These are different causal streams, but you can see how fundamental or how critical the difference in the models of cos cosmology is for what we would call the soteriology, the path to salvation.

If you assert that cause and effect are of one nature, you will naturally gravitate to a an atma vada, a view of Ātman. If you assert that cause and effect are of different natures, you will naturally gravitate to an atma vada, to non the path of non ātman. So that link is what then carries memory, carries Yes. If we take the mind as an example, then the Buddhist school disagree on which aspect of the mind carries or is carried on from life to life. From the standpoint of Sūtrayāna, apart from Prāsaṇgika Mādhyamika, to put aside, most of the other schools say it is mental consciousness, which changes instant by instant, which actually transmigrates.

Then the Prāsaṇgika viewpoint I will leave because it’s a difficult viewpoint for us to understand. There is a viewpoint of Anuttara Yogatantra which asserts that it is the fundamental mind of clear light which goes from life to life. But this is also an impermanent phenomenon. It changes instant by instant. It is different from itself instant by instant.

It is not an ātman and can never be. It can never be. For the Mahāyāna school, yes. For the Hīnayāna school, they don’t they don’t accept the existence of full enlightenment. For the Hīnayāna school, the goal is to put an end to the mental continue, which is seen as suffering.

Then if the causes which give rise to the mental continuum are destroyed for the Hīnayāna schools, at death, the mental continuum stops. You know? So for instance, for the Theravāda traditions in Thailand, in Burma, upon his parinirvāṇa, when the Buddha was 80 and the Buddha left us, entered permanent nirvana, the Buddha’s mental continuum ceased to exist. Therefore, the Buddha does not exist anymore. Then, obviously, Śāntideva addresses a very sharp question to the Hīnayāna practitioners.

Who precisely do you pray to? There are statues of the Buddha in Theravāda temples. Then, frankly, a good Theravāda practitioner is obliged to assert they are there for the satisfaction of the faithful who are not well educated. Because the Buddha ceases to exist has ceased to exist. Then the faithful pray to him in so doing, from their own side, they accumulate virtuous karma, irrespective of the existence or non existence of the object to which they pray.

From the Mahāyāna standpoint, we saw it is one of two schools of Cittamātra. The other school asserts that one can have an interruption of continuum. But from the Mahāyāna standpoint, the mental continuum can never be severed. What is the continuum? When when the first instance of full enlightenment is the beginning of Buddhist which is infinite.

Does that answer your question? Are there other questions? Yes, please. So the Theravāda say that the contaminated continuum ceases. But Mahāyāna says that more the contaminated continuum ceases, the mind itself does not cease.

So in the case of the fully enlightened being, when one attains full enlightenment, one’s mind becomes the the wisdom, dharmakaya. And one gains two bodies, which are the bodies of an enlightened being, the body of manifestation known as the sambhogakaya and the body of emanation known as the nirmanakaya. These bodies are not of the nature of suffering. Our bodies are of the nature of suffering. Mind of the enlightened beings permeates all phenomenon.

Like, for instance, it is as a big debate in the monastic textbooks of every single atom, there is a Buddha. Indeed. But those atoms are not the manifestations of the Buddha. They exist independently of the Buddhas. Now from the standpoint of Vedanta, those atoms are the manifestation of Brahma.

They are Brahman, to be frank. They are Brahman. It’s different. It’s different. And one has to clearly formulate the differences.

You have, let’s say, three models. You have the Abrahamic monotheisms, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. You have what I would call the Vedantic model, and you have the Buddhist model. Now the Abrahamic monotheisms and the Vedantic model are theistic. They teach the existence of God.

Otherwise, is a fundamental disagreement between them. The Abrahamic monotheisms are dualistic. God created the universe, and he and the universe are different. They are totally different. The universe is not and can never be God.

Then the creatures in the universe who are created can only hope either for Judaism and Islam to live God’s will, which is revealed in the in the law, the Judaic or Islamic law, or in Christianity, the creature, this is only human beings, can have a connection to God because God incarnated in the person of Christ. That’s what we talked about last time. In the person of Jesus Christ, both natures, the nature of God and of man are fully present. By that choice, God bridges the gap between himself, which is radically transcendent, radically different, and the world, which is completely beneath him. It is through his choice for a Christian that the Christian can actually accede to as much of God as God gives.

That is why faith in Jesus Christ is critical for the Christian because he is the only person in history in which this ever happened. This is Christian viewpoint. God and the Christian are completely different. Then the Vedantic viewpoint, God and creation are one. It is God himself who is manifesting his body in creation to enable the living beings inside creation which are also manifestations of his body to live up the karma which they accumulated in past lives.

There is no difference between God, the world and beings. This is why for Vedanta, the path to liberation is radical non dualism. Then for Buddhism, there is no god and there is no soul. Mind and matter are totally different. It’s a dualism.

Minds are transmigrating endlessly, there’s no beginning, taking on bodies endlessly in function of their karma. Matter itself at the broadest level, at the level of the universe, is a construct of the collective karma of the beings, of all the beings. And then the individual experiences of beings depend on their own karma. So you have totally different viewpoints. In the Abrahamic monotheisms, have a series of unitary souls which have no beginning, have a beginning and have no end, created at the moment of conception by God.

In the case of Vedanta, you have a series of unitary souls which are beginningless and endless and which are striving to fuse into Brahman. When they fuse into Brahman, actually they cease to exist. In the Buddhist standpoint, you have an infinite number of minds, mental continuance, which change instant by instant reincarnating and some of them may attain liberation or full enlightenment. Does that go towards answering your question? Yes.

Are different schools. I mean, in the Mahāyāna, the Cittamātra school asserts that there is no such thing as exterior phenomena. All phenomena are merely the manifestation of the karmic imprints of a given karmic imprint perceived by a mind which is a product also of that karmic imprint. Then the Mādhyamika schools, are at least two different viewpoints. But fundamentally, the Buddhist schools are either realistic, which is a case of the Vaibhāṣika, Sattrantika the Sautrāntika Mādhyamika and Prāsaṇgika Mādhyamika or idealistic, which is a case of the Cittamātra schools.

There is no such thing in Buddhism as monistic idealism, as Vedanta. So the Cittamātra school for instance asserts that there is no exterior phenomenon. It is the karmic imprints, let’s say, within my own mind which cause the appearance of exterior phenomenon and simultaneously the appearance of the mind which perceives exterior phenomenon. But there’s actually nothing out there apart from my mind. This is true, however, for every one of us in this room, which means that there is within this room, let’s say, 30 or 40 different mental continuums.

But there are many many different readings. View of of the mental continuum. A difficult one. I mean, the Prāsaṇgika consider that phenomena are mere conceptual and normal designations. Therefore, the mental continuum is a mere name which is assigned to a stream of instance of consciousness.

Those instances of consciousness themselves, under ultimate analysis, are mere names. There is conventionally an appearance of a mental continuum and of instance of consciousness. Under ultimate analysis, there is no such thing as a mental continuum and instance of consciousness. For this reason, I don’t want to enter into too much because the big problem, when one studies Prāsaṇgika is how to conciliate the utter non existence of phenomena under ultimate analysis with their functionality at the conventional level. And the very big problem if one misunderstands prasanika is it leads to the rejection of the functionality of phenomena at the conventional level, which is why it is basically, I think, better if Prāsaṇgika is not taught too much in the West.

I think for Westerners, the foundations aren’t solid enough. Belief in past and future lives, belief in karma and causality, belief in the a mind which is radically different from matter are all very very fragile beliefs, if they are present at all. Then the Prāsaṇgika viewpoint is only helpful when one wishes to attain liberation or full enlightenment. You can attain every level of the path up to liberation of enlightenment without the Prāsaṇgika view. For that reason, it is perhaps better if the view isn’t taught in too much detail.

It should only be taught in detail to those who are actually ready to commit the time and effort to study, which in dominant centers is a minority of minorities. Do you have other questions? You’re very lucky to confront yourself. I find that most wonderful I was telling I was telling Adrian a couple couple months ago, you know. When I started, all our students came from theosophy.

Then I we used to find it very difficult because obviously theosophy has its own viewpoint. We didn’t realize how lucky we were because theosophists believe in past and future lives, believe in karma and causality, believe in a mind which is non material. It’s like the basics are already there. Now most of our students come from a very strong materialistic background. We have to take it for granted that pretty much nobody believes in past and future lives, nobody believes in karma and causality and the students really don’t believe that the mind is not material.

So there’s been a very big regression. So theosophy is a much higher position. It’s much easier because then all you have to do is ask the question, does this ātman, does this soul exist or not? Now it’s a non negotiable question because if you look at ancient India, it’s very clear. The Buddhists consider themselves as practitioners of non Ātman.

Then the Hindus clearly assert the Buddhist teach or non ātman. Therefore, both sides agree. It is like it is the inner core within the four seals for instance. Those four seals are the Buddhist difference. All composite phenomena are impermanent, all phenomena contaminated phenomena are the nature of suffering, all phenomena are selfless, nirvana is peace.

Then one has to accept all four. If one does not accept all four, one is outside of the point of Buddhism. Has been the very powerful critic addressed to the Jonangpa tradition. That’s why for myself, I find it very sad that suddenly there’s a Jonangpa revival in the West. Because Jonangpa was actually, basically forbidden in Tibet.

Precisely because the publication of the Jonangpa text was banned, as you know, and the monasteries were shut down. Only one or two monasteries were allowed to be open because the, one of the teachers of the fifth Dalai Lama Taranatha was Janangpa. The Jonangpa assertions are basically non-Buddhist assertions. The the Jonangpa’s basically assert the existence of an Ātman. Then it is outside of the pool of the Buddhist teachings.

You know? Now what it can be outside of the pool of the Buddhist teachings, but then it is very problematic for the other Buddhists if one calls oneself a Buddhist because it creates a lot of confusion. There you know. It’s because a lot of people don’t know any better. You know?

I mean, we have to return we have to return to the core. You know? Then the core of the Buddhist teachings is really the four noble truths and the four seals. And I think for myself, everyone can choose freely to practice one religious tradition or another. But if one hopes to gain any benefit from the practice of a religious tradition, it must be practiced purely or as purely as one can.

Soups are of no benefit to anybody. Then this is not something one merely studies, something every one of us has to practice. So how are we going to practice? For instance, let’s take an example. How are we going to meditate on selflessness and emptiness if we have received from one teacher teaching that the self exists, let’s say a Jonangpa teacher, and from another teacher teaching that the self does not exist.

Then what do we do? We have cut the possibility from a Buddhist standpoint of meditating on selflessness, which means we have cut the possibility of liberation. Liberation. We have cut. Then, if there are any doubts regarding the existence of a mind independent from matter, we have cut the foundations or we have cut stable foundations for ethics.

We can still practice some type of ethics, but it will not be stable. When temptations arise, we will not be able to counter them. Because secular ethics is insufficient to, resist temptation, and I think, if you read the newspapers on a daily basis, whether in Australia, in Europe, in United States, you see that the capacity to resist temptation, financial temptation, sexual temptation, the capacity not to abuse authority has disappeared. It has disappeared. Then this is a direct result of non belief in any type of future life.

Secular ethics is, how shall I put it, it is ethics for a no threat situation. Yes. And it’s an ethics it’s a weak level of ethics. You work with it because that’s what there is, you know, but it is not sufficient. Do you have other questions?

It makes the students happy. It’s not like the yen, but it doesn’t have any power. It’s and so Historians doesn’t like all this. The historian has said, you should have in a temple of one statue. You should have in a temple of one statue, statue of the Buddha, if you want.

Then the students like Tibetana, Tibetan things, you know. The iconography represents Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. The iconography, to be frank with you, is either useless or for most western students dangerous or both. It’s either useless because they see it only as Buddhist art. Then Buddhist art has no place in a temple.

It is potentially dangerous because these are representations of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Because westerners do not see them as true Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, they do not treat them with any respect of any type. It’s part of the nice oriental field of the temple. As a result of this, we accumulate a very large amount of negative karma. Buddhist practice is not contingent on representations and statues.

Representations and statues are only relevant if the student is able to be convinced that, let’s say, Buddha Śākyamūni in actuality is present in the statue. I think most western students are unable to do this. At that point, that statue becomes a true object of refuge. But a student who doesn’t believe in past and future lives, doesn’t believe in karma, let alone the existence of an omniscient mind, which is everywhere at every single moment cannot believe in this. Then one of my teachers is a former abbot of Sera Je, you know, He was studying Sanskrit at Sanskrit University, and one of his classmates was one of the greatest living Sanskrit scholars.

And visited his house was since this Sanskrit scholar was was a Buddhist, you know, and he asked him what his altar was. And when he saw his altar, on his altar, there was only a copy of the 8,000 verse perfection of wisdom sūtra. There was no statue of the Buddha. Then Rinpoche said to him, he said, I didn’t realize that you were so poor. You didn’t have a statue of the Buddha.

I will offer you one. And the scholar said, there no statues, no statues. I take refuge in the Satasahasrika Prajñāpāramitā sūtra. That is the refuge. Then Rinpoche told us a story during the teaching.

He was giggling when he told it, and many of the monks were very shocked. And Rinpoche said, he truly understood refuge, didn’t he? Because the true refuge is the teachings, and this is a true refuge actually. This is refuge. If this is integrated within our minds, we have refuge.

Everything else is a prop towards that. So we respect the teacher because he teaches the teachings. We respect the Sangha because he practice the teachings. We respect the representations of these holy beings because he initiated this. At the point where this becomes cozy ritualism, our refuge is probably non existent.

Well, I I mean, these statues are of great benefit. I’m not saying they are not of benefit, but I’m saying they have great benefit if we understand the meaning. If we don’t understand the meaning, then I think the benefit is very limited. And this question, your question is a very nice question because it was asked directly from my source of Dalai Lama in Delhi in March when I saw this gave the teachings on the Four Noble Truths. I was just listening to it a couple days ago.

And an Indian gentleman stood up and he said, your holiness, wherever you teach, it is so beautifully decorated. You have these magnificent representations of the Buddha. Do you yourself give the instructions? And his holiness was extraordinarily dry. He said this is not done in agreement with my instructions.

He said I teach that the true refuge is the Dharma and you need one statue of the Buddha. Then you see, once you start bringing aestheticism in the path, you must be very skillful because you owe equal respect to the beautiful statue of the Buddha and to the intimidating statue of the Buddha, which is why I always show this ascetic statue of the Buddha because I always to be frank with you, I enjoy seeing the expression on the student’s face when I show it. Because this is what people don’t want to be. Right? But this is actually the favorite statue of the Buddha for his one.

Because it shows the effort which is required. This statue of the Buddha has profound meaning. Profound meaning. Do you? Keep in mind that for four, five centuries after Buddha’s death, one was not allowed to make statues of the Buddha.

The Buddha was represented by a wheel, the wheel of the law, or a stupa, a funerary monument. That’s much more powerful for the mind. It was a question is, does the statue benefit the mind or not? Then for someone who has faith, there’s tremendous benefit. But for someone who does not have faith, it becomes part excuse me, it’s a rather direct way of putting it.

It becomes part of a Tibetan trip. Then a Tibetan trip is of no particular mental benefit. But analysis and meditation on the basis of analysis, that is of benefit. And analysis means you have to have courage. First you study, then you have the courage to ask, is this true or is this false?

So it’s not possible indefinitely to practice suspension of disbelief. First one studies, then one has to decide. If it’s true, then my life must change. If it’s false, why do I study this? So this may be a good place to stop.

Stop. The next conference will be much easier, I reassure you. It will be a conference on the empirical data, experimental data indicating that there is such a thing as reincarnation. So I’d like to tie the philosophy and the experimental data together.

Key terms in this teaching

atman dag (Tib)

Self; as opposed to anatman (no-self), the Buddha’s explanation of selflessness in the Four Noble Truths Sutra. LYWA

Cittamatra sem tsam pa (Tib)

The Mind Only school, one of the two Mahayana (Great Vehicle) philosophical schools. The Mind Only school does not accept external objects but does assert truly established self-knowers. LYWA

contaminated aggregates zagchä kyi phung po (Tib)

The aggregates of an ordinary being that are contaminated by the seeds of delusion and therefore pervaded by suffering because they are controlled by delusion and karma. LYWA

four noble truths denpa zhi (Tib)

The subject of the Buddha's first turning of the wheel of Dharma. The truths of suffering, the origin of suffering, the cessation of suffering, and the path to the cessation of suffering as seen by an arya. LYWA

four seals

The four basic tenets that define Buddhism. They are: all compositional phenomena are impermanent, all contaminated phenomena are by nature suffering, all phenomena are empty of self-existence and nirvana is true peace. LYWA

Hinayana theg mäen (Tib)

Literally, Small, or Lesser, Vehicle. It is one of the two general divisions of Buddhism. The Hinayana practitioner's motivation for following the Dharma path is principally the intense wish for personal liberation from conditioned existence, or samsara. LYWA

sadhu

A wandering Hindu yogi. LYWA

Theravada Sthaviravada (Skt); nätenpa (Tib)

A tradition of Buddhism that upholds the Pali Canon and the noble eightfold path, which leads practitioners to liberation (nirvana), a state free from the suffering of conditioned existence. LYWA

Definitions adapted from the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive glossary, as taught in the Gelug tradition.