Emptiness — 2008-08-09

Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.

About this talk. In this 4-hour 26-minute teaching, Tenzin Chogkyi provides a comprehensive overview of emptiness according to the four schools of Buddhist philosophy, with emphasis on the Madhyamaka Prāsaṇgika (Middle Way Consequence) school. She begins by motivating practitioners to understand selflessness, then systematically guides the audience through the Vaibhāṣika, Sautrāntika, Chittamatrin (Mind Only), Svatāntrika (Middle Way Autonomy), and Prāsaṇgika schools, showing how each progressively refines the view of how the self and phenomena exist. She explains that while lower schools address selflessness of persons, higher schools address both persons and phenomena. Central to her teaching is the distinction that Prāsaṇgika holds nothing—not one iota—exists inherently; all things are merely labeled by mind in dependence on a valid basis of imputation. She illustrates this through meditation on the five aggregates using the Heart Sūtra, then concludes by showing how the twelve links of dependent origination reveal how ignorance, feeling, and craving are critical choice points where practitioners can practice wisdom to cut the cycle of saṃsāra. Practical applications include thought transformation, ethical discipline, and understanding how virtue—not sense objects—creates happiness.

File metadata (for organising)

File: 2008 08 09 Emptiness_20080809.mp3

UUID: 8153fb17-70e4-4fd0-86ad-8c4dfb461121

Teacher: Tenzin Chogkyi

Collection: Emptiness (Tenzin Chogkyi)

Date: 2008-08-09

Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide

Words: ~35,762

And now let’s take a minute to just set our motivation thinking of our reason for coming here today, to spend this day focusing on emptiness. You may have just been curious about this concept, want to know more about this word that you keep hearing over and over again. It may be that you’ve studied a little bit about the nature of our unenlightened existence, the four noble truths, how we keep creating our suffering and understand that this is a key concept, a key realization. And then the highest level of motivation according to the Mahāyāna is to practice not just for our own sake, to gain that understanding of the ultimate nature of reality, not just to liberate ourselves from our own unenlightened state, from cyclic existence, but to attain all the capacity of a fully enlightened being, all the ability to benefit all living beings. So even if you just have some vague understanding of what this is, let’s just try and set our motivation to that highest level of motivation to attain enlightenment for the benefit of all living beings.

And now let’s read together the Heart Sūtra, page nine. I prostrate to the ārya triple gem. Thus did I hear at one time, the Bhagavan was dwelling on massive vultures mountain in Rajagriha together with a great community of monks and a great community of bodhisattvas. At that time, the Bhagavan was absorbed in the concentration on the categories of phenomena called profound perception. Also at that time, the bodhisattva, Mahāsattva, Avalokiteśvara looked upon the very practice of the profound perfection of wisdom and beheld those five aggregates also as empty of inherent nature.

Then through the power of Buddha, the venerable Shariputratra said this to the Bodhisattva Mahāsattva Avalokiteśvara, how should any son of the lineage train who wishes to practice the activity of the profound perfection of wisdom? He said that, and the Bodhisattva Mahāsattva Avalokiteśvara said this to the Venerable Śāriputra, Śāriputra, any son of the lineage or daughter of the lineage who wishes to practice the activity of the profound perfection of wisdom should look upon it like this, correctly and repeatedly beholding those five aggregates also as empty of inherent nature. Form is empty. Emptiness is form. Emptiness is not other than form.

Form is also not other than emptiness. In the same way, feeling, discrimination, compositional factors, and consciousness are empty. Shariputratra, likewise, all phenomena are emptiness, without characteristic, unproduced, unceased, stainless, not without stain, not deficient, not fulfilled. Shariputratra, therefore, in emptiness there is no form, no feeling, no discrimination, no compositional factors, no consciousness, no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind, no visual form, no sound, no odor, no taste, no object of touch, and no phenomena. There is no I element and so on, up to and including no mind element and no mental consciousness element.

There is no ignorance, no extinction of ignorance, and so on up to and including no aging and death and no extinction of aging and death. Similarly, there is no suffering, origination, cessation, and path. There is no exalted wisdom, no attainment, and also no non attainment. Shariputratra, therefore, because there is no attainment, bodhisattvas rely on and dwell in the perfection of wisdom, the mind without obscuration and without fear. Having completely passed beyond error, they reach the endpoint of nirvana.

All the Buddhas who dwell in the three times also manifestly, completely awaken to unsurpassable, perfect, complete enlightenment and reliance on the perfection of wisdom. Therefore, the mantra of the perfection of wisdom, the mantra of great knowledge, the unsurpassed mantra, the mantra equal to the unequaled, the mantra that thoroughly pacifies all suffering should be known as truth since it is not false. The mantra of the perfection of wisdom is declared. Tadyathā gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā. Śāriputra, the bodhisattva mahāsattva should train in the profound perfection of wisdom like that.

Then the Bhagavan arose from that concentration and commended the bodhisattva, mahāsattva, Ārya Avalokiteśvara, saying, well said, well said, son of the lineage. It is like that. It is like that. One should practice the profound perfection of wisdom just as you have indicated. Even the Tathagatas rejoice.

The Bhagavan having thus spoken, the Venerable Shāradvatīputra, the Bodhisattva Mahāsattva Avalokiteśvara, those surrounding in their entirety, along with the world of gods, humans, asuras, and Gandharvas, were overjoyed and highly praise that spoken by the Bhagavan. Okay. So this Heart Sūtra that we’ve just recited is one of the more popular sutras recited in Mahāyāna Buddhist countries. It’s recited in the Chinese Mahāyāna, Zen traditions, Tibetan traditions, slightly different versions are recited. But it’s one of the most beloved and highly memorized and recited sutras.

I also heard once that it’s the only sūtra that has actually appeared on Japanese neckties. So that’s something to I’m not quite sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. But anyway. And this actually teaches about not only emptiness but also the five paths. And we touched on that a little bit last night, the different realizations that you get on the way to Buddhahood between the state of being a completely unenlightened being and all the way up to Buddhahood.

And we’ll talk about that a little bit today. So that’s why we recite it, to remind ourselves. And the more that you study emptiness and it’s actually really great to get commentaries on the Heart Sūtra because then it becomes more meaningful. And every time you you’ve studied it before a teaching, it reminds you of the path, it reminds you of of emptiness, and so forth. So there’s a let’s see.

Is there a couple of seats? ‘s a little room up here yeah there are couple of seats on the side you can’t see the flip chart which is not so good but we may be able to anyway that’ll be alright okay so welcome welcome back those of you who were here last night I was very provocative and kept saying oh we’ll meditate on this tomorrow I think I lured some people back that weren’t planning on it so now what I wanted to talk about today is emptiness and present an overview of the emptiness according to the four schools of Buddhism. And just a little bit of a disclaimer, this is a lot of information. And the reason that I’m doing this is not, you know, to fill your mind with a bunch of more conceptual thoughts. Some Buddhist schools say it’s better not to study at all because your mind just gets full of a lot more concepts.

But in our tradition, we say, no, you really have to understand clearly the object of meditation. You need to understand intellectually in order to be able to meditate well. And I found it very useful myself to study a little bit about the four different philosophical schools because then you learn how you can bring your view up. Your view selflessness can develop by studying the different schools. And there’s Emily in the back of the room, which makes me really scared and embarrassed because she studied all of these schools at great length for seven years in the master’s program.

So she’ll tell me later how much I mess up. But I found that by studying selflessness according to the different schools, you can learn the subtle differences, and each one is actually very profound. Sometimes I think in the Tibetan tradition, especially teachings that we take, we think arrogantly, oh, I’m a Mādhyamika Prāsaṇgika. That’s the highest school. That’s the highest level.

And we think we have some understanding of what that means. But I find that if we study the different schools and their subtle differences in selflessness, we learn. I remember at one point making a confession to my good friend Venerable Renee after studying the four schools a while. And I said, oh, you know, I think I’m really a svetantrika, my demika. I think I’m really After studying for a while, I realized that this is really my view.

I thought it was this. I thought it was middle way consequence. But it’s really middle way autonomy. And he goes, that’s great. He goes, that’s fine.

It’s still really going to cut through your delusions. Go ahead and work with that. For now, he goes, right because I’m kind of going, oh, I feel so embarrassed. It’s really that I think part of it’s coming from its own side and then part of it’s coming from me, and it’s like fiftyfifty. And he goes, great.

That’s really going to cut through delusions. Go ahead and hang out at that look for a while and practice with that. So we don’t think that you need to just kind of leap up to the highest level, especially if you don’t really understand what that is. It’s extremely subtle, very, very subtle. And what it says, the instruction that we’re given in scripture is practice at the highest level that allows you to remain confident in the law of cause and effect.

Because if you start to lose confidence in the law of karma, in the law of cause and effect, you need to back off a little bit and really correct your view. If you start to go to that Joanna Macy hotel towel thing that we explained last night, Joanna Macy didn’t do it. I don’t want to lead anybody to believe that somebody standing in line at the hotel after a Buddhist conference, the suitcase falls open and all the hotel towels spill out. And then this person says, oh, it’s empty. It doesn’t matter.

If you start thinking that emptiness means things don’t matter, back off. Go back and work on your view again. That’s absolute total wrong view. Our view of emptiness should make us have even more confidence and even much more careful about our actions, to realize how we create our reality, you know, how we create our perception of reality and be really, really careful about our karma. So if it starts to make you feel like nothing matters, nothing exists, oh, it’s all just some big hallucination, You know, we need to back off, which is why it’s good to go step by step by step.

Okay? I first taught this course last year right before His Holiness the Dalai Lama taught the text Praise to Dependent Origination in April last year in San Francisco. And I taught for just four Sunday mornings this quick kind of overview to prepare some of the newer students for that class. And some of them said, even though I didn’t understand a word you said, at least I learned some terms that made me able to follow what His Holiness was saying. So another thing to say is, if you’re new, today’s material may just seem way over your head.

Don’t be discouraged. You listen to this, you know, material over and over and over again, and each time you hear it, it sinks in a little bit deeper. So if you feel a little confused, you know, don’t panic. By all means, stop and ask me questions as we go along so I can make sure that I’m clear. But it’s a lot to take in and it depends a lot on meditation, you know.

Really to get what these concepts are and what it feels like depends a lot on actually practicing and sitting with it in meditation. So this is just going to be an overview and an introduction. And then keep going over it over and over and over again. And then with meditation and with further study, you will be able to deepen your understanding. So I heard recently I wasn’t there, but I heard recently that His Holiness the Dalai Lama was asked at one of his talks, how do I get a direct realization of emptiness?

And he said, study, study. It takes a lot of of study and a lot of going over these concepts. So today is just kind of a quick, you know, overview of of these concepts. But like I said, stop me, ask questions. By all means, you you know, most of you have experienced my style is very interactive.

So by all means, stop and ask questions. So what’s the point of studying this anyway? Is this just to support good old Jeffrey Hopkins, bless his heart, and we buy all his books, Meditation on Emptiness, Maps of the Profound, fifteen hundred pages debates on tenet systems. Is it just to fill our minds with all of these concepts? Is it just to support Snow Lion publications and buy all these books and then be some kind of intellectual?

No. It’s to cut through our suffering. Remember the story I told last night about Lord Buddha and the Sūtra and the Handful of Leaves? Hey, you guys. All I teach is suffering, the cause of suffering, the cessation, and the path that leads to the cessation.

That’s all. Study of this By the end of today, hopefully, I will have given you some tools to reduce your suffering. If I haven’t, I haven’t done my job. Fire me. Tell them never to invite me back to Sachen Ling.

You know, the whole point is to reduce your suffering, is to reduce our suffering. And the point is the way we hold onto things so solid, so concrete, ourselves and all phenomena, we hold onto things in this incredibly concrete way. You know? We think that we exist in this concrete way we’re trying to protect. We think that reality comes at us randomly.

We’re helpless victims of this random reality that just comes at us, and it causes us to suffer. We want things to be permanent. You know, we hold on to things as permanent. What happens when things change? We freak out.

Right? All of this causes us suffering. We think we’re victims of random reality. And by studying emptiness, by meditating on emptiness and dependent arising, we see how we co create our reality. And you get some sort of handle on how you can change your reality.

It’s not some random thing coming at you. You know, we’re not this concrete permanent, you know, most of us right in the West, we have this terrible low self esteem thing. Oh, everybody has Buddha nature but me. You know, everybody can become enlightened but me. We’re not like that at all so what studying emptiness should do should open you up to the infinite potential of your own mind and help you suffer less and I have if I haven’t accomplished that by the end of today just fire me you know tell them never bring her back again Okay.

So that’s the point of studying all of this. It isn’t just to learn a bunch of new Sanskrit words and fill our minds with with concepts. Okay? So what I wanna do is just talk a little bit about the different schools, especially this morning, presenting what the self is that these schools deny and what they say the illustration of the person is. Okay.

Remember we said yesterday, selflessness is one of the basic tenets of Buddhism. It’s what differentiates it from a lot of non-Buddhist schools that existed in ancient India around the same time. Most of those non-Buddhist schools said that there was some sort of solid permanent self that existed. Ātman, you know, is the word in Sanskrit. And then the big revolutionary idea that Lord Buddha said was, no, an Ātman, no self, no self.

But he didn’t mean we’re not sitting here in this room on our meditation cushions. You know? It doesn’t mean that we don’t exist. What the Buddha said was he refuted certain false ways of existing that we innately and, you know, learn by our culture believe in. So for each of these different schools, there’s a false way of existing that the Buddha was refuting.

K? False ways of existing at different levels of subtlety of the different schools. And then he said there was an illustrate what they call the illustration of the person. And we talked about this a little bit last night. What is that thing that goes from life to life anyway?

Right? If there’s no self, how does karma work? How does rebirth work? You know? If if that consciousness that goes from life to life isn’t the real self, what’s going on?

You know? If there isn’t some real self that you can hang on to? And all these different Buddhist schools talk about the illustration of the person. And so we’re going to talk both about what level of self is denied and what the illustration of the person according to those schools is. And then we’re going to spend most of our time on this school, the Middle Way Consequent School, which I said before is the school that’s accepted most Tibetan Buddhist traditions as the subtlest and highest philosophical school.

So we’ll spend a lot of time on this one. But we’ll go through. And just to introduce you to some of the terminology, there are two schools that are considered lower schools, lower philosophical systems. And the reason they’re considered lower is, in general, they talk about the selflessness of persons but not the selflessness of phenomena. Okay?

So they talk about how the person does not exist in certain false ways. But they don’t really penetrate and deconstruct phenomena, the five aggregates and other phenomena, and say that they’re equally selfless. So they focus on the selflessness of the person. And the Vaibhāṣika school, also called the Great Exposition School, is one of those schools. And the Sautrāntika or Sūtra School are these schools of the lower tenet systems that refute that there is a self of persons.

And then the higher schools talk about selflessness of persons and selflessness of phenomena. And the Cittamātra, or mind only school, is one of these higher philosophical schools, also sometimes known as the Yogacāra school, mind only school. And then the Mādhyamika or middle way school which has two subdivisions, the Svātantrika, not to be confused with the Sautrāntika. It’s really hard. Two very similar words.

Svatāntrika, autonomy. Sometimes you’ll hear this called the independent school and then the Prāsaṇgika, middle way consequence school. So sometimes I’ll just say Prāsaṇgika, I mean the Middle Way Consequence School, which is considered to be the highest school by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Lama Sopa Rinpoche, Geshe Dagpa, know, Emily Su, all the great teachers of our lineage. Okay. Now it’s interesting where these names come from and I just wanted to mention because you kind of think consequence.

So what? Is it like what’s his name? Truth or Consequences? Those of you that are my age will remember this TV show. Like, what’s the deal with consequences?

And it’s all to do with the way these different schools engage in debate. Debate is a big deal in Tibetan Buddhist monasteries. Right? You’ve seen pictures, and some of you may have been someplace like Dharmasala or one of the monasteries. And you’ve got one guy sitting on the ground kind of going like that, and one guy jumping around and doing all this stuff and swinging his smile and shouting.

And you’re like, are they fighting? Is it kung fu? Like, what’s going on here? And it’s debate. And as one of my friends, this Western monk who studied in the Tibetan monastery, said, it’s a great thing because you’ve got all these young, celibate guys, and they need to let off steam somehow.

So they’re jumping around and leaping and swinging and shouting. So it’s sort of the kung fu thing of debate. So the way the Prāsaṇgika’s debate is not by stating a position, but by pointing out the absurd consequences of the other guy’s position. So this is why it’s called consequence, and this is how it works. And we had a little bit of discussion yesterday about the continuity of consciousness.

And how come if consciousness is beginningless and endless, how come we say it’s not inherently existent? Doesn’t that mean somehow inherently existent? Because it’s permanent in the sense of it never will cease to exist. Right? So let’s say if Jacob this was the discussion we had with Jacob says, because consciousness lasts forever, it’s inherently existent.

Inherently existent. You know, if I were a middle way consequence person, I’d say, so you’re saying that, you know, beings with consciousness don’t have Buddha nature. Because consciousness is inherently existent, it can never change. So you’re saying that beings don’t have Buddha nature. So that would be a way of pointing out an observed consequence to that view.

And that’s the way they debate. Right? They just kind of tear a hole in the position of the person that they think is wrong by pointing out the observed consequence instead of by saying, no. No. Because then, you know, sentient beings wouldn’t have Buddha nature.

But because it’s it’s empty, you just go, oh, so, you know, from what you’re saying, if consciousness is inherently existent, that means it can never change. And thereby, there’s no way for us to progress and become a Buddha. So you just kind of point out the flaw in that other person’s argument. So we won’t get into how to debate. That’s a whole long story.

I was taught that once and all these weird things that you say. And there’s this whole, like, ritual around it. And I remember getting a kind of a little introduction to it. And it’s sort of beyond us. In the West, we study and we take exams and, you know, final exams.

We don’t, like, stand up shouting at each other. It might be interesting if we started doing that at FPMT centers. We need a little more space. You know, I couldn’t do that here. But that’s the reason that this is called the consequence school.

It’s just on the basis of how the debate is carried out as opposed to the autonomy or independent school that posits independent self standing syllogisms, you know, logical points that are self standing that they posit from their own side rather than just doing this Aikido thing of, like, undercutting what the other guy has said about how he believes. Okay that’s another point. So the Vaibhāṣika school let’s start with the Vaibhāṣika school and what they say about how the self exists and how the self does not exist. Okay so the Vaibhāṣika the great Exposition School, it’s based on a text called the Great Detailed Exposition, which is a compendium of teachings of the seven treatises of the Abhidharma or Manifest Knowledge. Okay?

There’s three baskets of teachings in Buddhism. Tripiṭaka, it’s often called. There’s Vinaya, texts on ethics. And especially the monastic discipline is found in the Vinaya. There’s sutras, which are the discourses.

And then there’s abhidharma, the higher knowledge, manifest knowledge. And this basket of teachings includes Buddhist teachings on cosmology, on mind and mental factors, and so forth. So there were seven great treatises of Abhidharma. And then this compendium called The Great Detailed Exposition is the source of this school. In the time of Lord Buddha, or shortly after the time of Lord Buddha, this split into eighteen sub schools.

So there were eighteen sub schools of Vaibhāṣika. And there’s this great chart in Jeffrey Hopkins’ Meditation on Emptiness showing how they split first into a couple of schools and then into these eighteen sub schools. So there’s eighteen sub schools of Vaibhāṣika. Now all of the eighteen sub schools of Vaibhāṣika and everybody else denies that the self exists as oh, I’m just tall enough to deal with this myself. That the self is not permanent, unitary, and independent.

So all Buddhist schools, including all eighteen subschools of Vaibhāṣika, deny a self which is permanent, unitary, and independent. And all of these terms have a specific meaning. So permanent, not relying on production or disintegration, not changing moment to moment. And a lot of us, if we studied Lam Rim, have done meditations on impermanence, meaning that things are produced, they disintegrate moment to moment to moment. Also, things are not unitary or partless.

So this means not having parts, being something that’s unitary, meaning it doesn’t have parts. Also, a self which is independent, not relying on causes and conditions. So the way they usually explain this view of how the self exists is that it’s learned by a philosophical system. And last night, if you were here, we talked about this, you know, the Christian idea of a soul. Right?

There’s something that’s, you know, some permanent solid part of you that exists that doesn’t change moment to moment. It’s that thing that’s the real you in you. And then when you die like Casper the ghost, it kinda comes out of you, and it goes to the other side to meet all your relatives. And then there, you’re, like, better looking than you were before. And you all get along, which you didn’t at Thanksgiving dinner while you were alive, you know.

And then this whole long, you know, whole story about the soul. Right? Like the real you, kind of the pure you, the real essence in there somewhere, you know, that when you die, you know, goes on to your next life. And if you’re Christian, you think there’s I remember one time talking to this Tibetan Lama in Dharmasala, and he was just going to the West for the first time. He was going to a a center in Germany, and he was asking me these questions.

And he said, oh, I heard most people in the West are this religion called Christian. Like, what’s that about? And I didn’t know much about it, but I’m starting to explain certain concepts, and heaven and hell came up. And he goes, oh, you’re talking about Buddhist heaven and hell. Right?

Sounds really similar. And I, no. No. Christians have heaven and hell too. And he goes, wait a minute.

I thought they didn’t believe in rebirth. And I go, oh, they believe in just one. That’s forever. You know? And he goes, well, that’s stupid.

Like, that doesn’t make sense. And I go, you’re right. Somebody was onto something, but they just didn’t see it. You know? So that’s the Christian idea of soul.

That thing that’s the real you that goes to your one rebirth, you get one shot at either, like, heaven or hell. I don’t think they believe in purgatory anymore. I think they threw that one out. So, you know, heaven or hell. Right?

So it’s that thing, that essence in you. Also, this was a view of non-Buddhist schools. And so the Buddhist spent a lot of time in a lot of sutras refuting this view. And there are many different Hindu philosophical systems, but this idea of Ātman, right, the self, you know, capital s self. Sometimes now in these New Age books and stuff, there’s a little s self and the big s self.

So this is the big s self, Ātman. You know, again, something that’s permanent, unitary, and independent, like some essence, some essence that’s the real you. And Lord Buddha said, ain’t no such animal. This doesn’t there is no such thing as this permanent, unitary, and independent self. Now, the main way that you get a realization of this is by meditating on impermanence.

Because the main way that this is seen as something that’s permanent, not relying on production or disintegration. And this brings up an interesting point because often in the West, we have different Buddhist techniques. Right? All coexisting in one country. This is sort of historically unprecedented.

Because of geography in Asia, usually every country has sort of one or a couple of related strains of Buddhist schools. Well, here we are, especially in North America and Europe and Australia too. We’ve got Tibetan Buddhism coexisting with Zen, coexisting with Western Vipassana. It’s all there together. So often people will go to different teachings, and they don’t realize that the view of selflessness that’s explained comes from a different perspective and they get really confused.

Okay? One of the main techniques for having a realization of selflessness according to this philosophical school is by meditating on especially subtle impermanence. Right? Because you’re trying to break down this view of how the self exists. So for example, I had a student two weeks ago in Vermont.

I was teaching in Vermont for a couple of weeks. And he had been meditating with this Burmese master. And meditation that they were using was the four foundations of mindfulness. So you’re meditating on, you know, you just kind of meditate on the body. Often the breath is used as an object.

You meditate on mind and on mental factors Mostly to get a direct realization of subtle impermanence is sort of the goal of that meditation because that breaks through this view of self. Okay? So it’s interesting because he was going, I don’t get it. So I’m just, you know, in in the meditation that he was doing, he was kind of watching every action and watching every thought. And you see the thoughts rise and fall.

You know, you see the breath coming and going to try and get a direct realization of subtle impermanence, which then destroys the view that the self exists as some permanent thing. There’s two levels of impermanence. There’s gross impermanence. People die. Buildings fall down.

But the subtle impermanence is things are changing moment to moment to moment to moment. And getting a direct realization of that level of impermanence helps destroy this false view of self. So this is one thing. When you’re meditating, know, and studying in the different techniques, realizing that they’re based on different philosophical systems. Don’t try and make Western Vipassana have the middle way consequence view of selflessness because it doesn’t it’s just not going to you know so this is this is just a warning for those of us who tend to you know like to go to different kinds of teachings just don’t get confused okay yeah Anna Oh, microphone.

Oops. Thank you. In the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism, it is, though, agreed that there is no person. There is no self. Yes.

Oh, by the way, great point. The four schools on the previous flip chart page have nothing to do with the four lineages of Tibetan Buddhism. Totally different thing. There just happen to be four of each. But in general, there’s a little bit of a debate, but in general, it’s said that all four of the Tibetan Buddhist lineages, meaning Gelug, Kagyu, Sake, and Nyingma, all ascribe to the Middle Way consequence school.

There’s a little bit of debate when it comes to tantric practice and what view is held there. But in general, it’s said that all four of those Tibetan Buddhist lineages ascribed to the Middle Way consequence. I’m glad you said that because often people get confused and they think, Well, which one is Golukpa and which one is Sakya? It’s not like that. Now, of those remember I said there were eighteen subschools of Vaibhāṣika.

Thirteen of those subschools everybody else everybody else also deny the self which is substantially existent and self sufficient. This is the next level of subtlety. This one mostly learned Ātman, Christian idea of soul, and so forth. Everybody, all Buddhist schools deny this. Everybody but five of the eighteen subschools of Vaibhāṣika also deny a self that exists as substantially existent and self sufficient.

Now, everybody but the middle way consequent school says this is as subtle as it gets. This is the subtlest view of selflessness. So what does this mean, substantially existent and self sufficient? This means not depending on the five aggregates, not depending on the parts. There’s a self that exists dependent, substantially existent, meaning independent of the parts, the composite parts of body and mind.

And we’re going to talk about what those five aggregates are. Some of you haven’t had that teaching, and some of you have and need a review. But this is a self that somehow exists separate from the aggregates. And we talked about this yesterday when we said, you know, the the operator, right? Like the crane operator.

You know, there’s this little guy or maybe it’s a woman these days because of, you know, a affirmative action sitting in the cab of the crane operating it. You know, then the bucket goes up and so we think and this is more innate, by the way. You know, we really think that there’s some driver, you know, sometimes it’s called a driver, an operator of body and mind. You know? And I said, for me, I remember thinking it lives in my head and the eyeballs are little windows.

It’s in here somewhere looking out, you know, running the show. And Buddhism says there is no such thing that exists independent of the five aggregates. No such thing. And everybody but five of the Vaibhāṣikas agree on this level. And most of them all but middle way consequence that are the big troublemakers because they’re so subtle say that this is the subtlest view of selflessness.

Okay? Yeah. I think I haven’t quite grasped the distinction between those five, holder outers on the in the of the sub the ATM Sub Schools between Yeah. They agree that of the first three points on the chart. So independent, not relying on causes and conditions, and be not having parts, what’s the difference between that and not being substantial?

Okay. Well and we’ll get to we’ll get to that point. Okay. We haven’t gotten there yet. A second.

Yeah. And but but you brought up something that I forgot to say, so thank you very much. There’s always a bodhisattva emanating in the room to remind the teacher of what they forgot. They to getting back to what how do they think the self does exist? What’s the illustration of the person for the Vaibhāṣika school?

What goes from life to life? What carries the karma from life to life? Because remember I said all of these schools deny a certain false way that the self exists, but then in its place they posit a way that the self does exist. Okay? So for those eighteen subschools of Vaibhāṣika, they’re denying this, but they’re saying that the self exists somewhere within the aggregates.

Okay? Some of those eighteen subschools say it’s the mental consciousness. You know? Some say that it’s the continuum of all five of the aggregates. Some say that it’s all five together.

So there’s something in place of denying this guy that they say is the real self. Okay? So then thirteen of them also deny this one and say that there’s some other way that the self does exist. So let’s look at the five aggregates because this will really help us understand what this one is. So next, we’re gonna look at the five aggregates.

And remember I said yesterday when Morgan had his question and I said the way that we meditate on the selflessness of persons according to the Heart Sūtra for the first two paths the paths of accumulation and path of preparation is meditating on the emptiness of the five aggregates. That’s the main meditation. And then the meditation on the self. And I said this thing that Lama Zopa taught me to do and had me do as part of my long retreat was flip flopping back and forth. You know, break down the aggregates, break down the self, break down the aggregates, break down the self.

So an understanding of the five aggregates will help us do that meditation which we’ll do together later this afternoon. That’s the meditation I wanted to introduce. Okay? So the five aggregates. The five aggregates encompass all phenomena, but we’re mostly here talking about the five aggregates that make up us, that make up the the person.

Okay? So we’ve got form. That’s really easy. Stuff. Material.

Stuff. Body. Right? Body. You know, all the substances, the material stuff.

That’s easy. And then we’ve got four aggregates that make up the mind. So for people who haven’t studied the five aggregates, usually instead of five aggregates, we just say body and mind. You know, the composite the components of body and mind. Okay?

Now we’ve got four of mind. We have feeling. Now feeling in Buddhism is something very specific. Usually when we think of feeling in the West, we think of emotion, despondency, existential anxiety, joy and excitement. In Buddhism, this aggregate just is defined as pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral.

It’s just this raw feeling. Feels good, feels crappy, could care less. Pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral. That’s all that this feeling means here in this aggregate. This also shows up in the twelve links of dependent origination, and we’ll get there in a minute.

This afternoon maybe. Okay. Then the second mental aggregate is discernment. It’s often called discrimination, but that reminds me a little bit too much of, like, civil rights nineteen sixty eight. So I prefer discernment.

Discernment. And this is the mind’s ability to tell the differences between things. Tall, short, red, blue. You all walk in this room, I recognize who people are. It’s the mind’s ability to differentiate, discern between things, between objects of perception.

You discern. Now, compositional factors. According to Buddhism, there are fifty one mental factors. Fifty one mental factors. Two of them get promoted and become their own aggregates.

You know? Lord Buddha promoted two out of the fifty one and gave them a higher status, feeling and discernment. All the rest of the forty nine are lumped together in one other category. So all the forty nine other ones. And these are things there are ones called omnipresent mental factors that accompany every moment of thought.

There are the afflictions, delusions. We talked about the twenty derivative delusions yesterday, the ones that are some combination. Remember those recipes of anger, aversion, attachment, and ignorance. Jealousy. Three parts attachment, two parts aversion, and a healthy sprinkling of ignorance is the recipe for jealousy.

And all of these other were pride, resentment, all of these other ones. And then there are the good ones, too wholesome mental factors. So there’s this whole list of mental factors that Emily will teach you one of these days if she hasn’t already. She’s like, Don’t pick on me. Okay forty nine other ones.

I’ll stop now. Just teasing. So forty nine other ones. Now why do you think that Lord Buddha decided to pull these two out and emphasize them? It’s not random.

Lord Buddha never made any mistakes. So there’s nothing random about why he decided to promote these two guys and give them their higher status. Anybody have an idea? Yeah. Jacob.

Whoops. Microphone. I think it’s ready too. Maybe because of their vitalness to the the perception and thinking process? Okay.

Say more about that. I think feeling is something that is sort of a beginning motivation for any kind of action or thought, in my experience. And, discernment is a way that, I navigate my world. They’re they’re both really, vital to how I interact with myself and others. Okay.

Okay. You’re good. That’s that’s very true. Now think in terms of the four noble truths. You know, think in terms of how we create, especially the first two, suffering and the cause of suffering.

You want me to talk about that? Does anybody have any ideas? Yeah. Jennifer? I’m just saying there.

Microphone. Oops. They’re grosser, you know, along with the sense if we input everything through our senses, you know, feeling is sort of like, oh, you know, oh, good, bad, oh, their visual consciousness, we see that, you know. And then discernment too, we’re able to automatically see red or blue, you know. It’s grosser, and then it seems like the other compositional factors seem to get more subtle based on on after going through our senses, then they’re like a more refined version of it.

So Good. Good. Ty, did you have something? Well, I guess I was gonna say it seems like feeling and discernment are the ones that directly cause you to suffer. Great.

If you didn’t have feeling, you wouldn’t be able to suffer. And if you didn’t make discernments, nothing would be wrong. And also, what happens next after discernment? And then you have a feeling. And then what happens?

I don’t know. Okay. Does anybody have an idea? Do we just hang out with sitting around having something feel bad or good? What do we do next?

Yes. Bingo. Which is karma, right? Volitional action in response to some feeling we have, which is often really stupid, you know? Sorry, but it is.

We’re gonna talk about the twelve links. Usually, what we do in response to this, are we smart? And do we say like we talked last night about the hamburgers? Oh, this feeling doesn’t have anything to do with the cheeseburger. I it you know, if if this cheeseburger makes me happy, it’s because of some virtue we did in the past.

Are we smart like that? No. We usually think that it comes from direct contact with the object. So Lord Buddha kept pointing this out over and over and over again. It keeps showing up in all these lists.

I think he was trying to tell us something. You know, this shows up big time in the twelve links, which we’ll get to later on. He it shows up in the Heart Sūtra over and over and over again. He keeps talking about the emptiness of we’ve got ourselves, we’ve got our sense perceptions, we’ve got the object. The eighteen dhatus, the twelve ayadhanas, he keeps repeating this list over and over again to show us how we get into trouble.

What happens? Sense object, you know, my perception comes into contact with that. Discernment, you know, I recognize what it is. I have a feeling a good feeling or bad feeling about it. And then what the what does that do?

Trigger some action. I want another cheeseburger. Oh, I hate this person. I’ve gotta yell at them so they’ll go away. You know?

Whatever it is. Right? Whether we feel good or bad, we usually don’t hang out with the feeling and get smart about it and analyze and figure that it came from our past karma. We usually react somehow, pushing the icky stuff away, grasping onto the good stuff, even if we would create one of the ten non virtues. Right?

Because we’re not smart about where it comes from. So this is why Lord Buddha pulled these two out. They’re the big troublemakers, aren’t they? You know, when we react ignorantly to the discernment of the object and the feeling that it arises and we stupidly think that that feeling came from that object and not from our past karma, then we tend to do some karmic action which then will relate in suffering for us later on. And in fact, I think I’m gonna oh, it’s too hard.

No. It’s not. Can you can you be my assistant? Keep keep track of this page. Flip back to the beginning, the very beginning.

All the way. All the way. And we’ll we’ll just do this right now since it’s coming up. Here we go. So here’s how it goes.

Okay? We’ve got the basic ignorance about how things exist, thinking that they come at us randomly, inherently existent from their own side. So then that gives rise to an afflictive emotion, attachment, aversion, and ignorance, the three poisons and all the derivative ones, which then causes us to do a karmic action, you know, based on, you know, the afflictive emotion that arises because of our ignorance causes us to do a karmic action which leads to suffering. So this is how the truth of suffering and the truth of the cause relate to each other. So the Buddha is thank you very much.

Let me flip back to this one. So this is why the Buddha pulled these two out because they’re so important in that chain reaction of how we create karmic actions which leads to suffering. Okay so the other forty nine are here and then this is consciousness which is there are six consciousnesses according to this school of Buddhism. The five sense consciousnesses that we usually think about. Right?

Sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. And the sixth one is not, you know, you know, Uri Geller, bending spoons. It’s mental consciousness. The sixth consciousness is mental. So it’s a consciousness that has a thought as the object.

The other consciousnesses have, you know, visual consciousness, some visual sense object, hearing some auditory object. And then the sixth consciousness, the mental consciousness, has a thought as the object. Now many of these schools say that this aggregate is the illustration of the person, is the self, but not according to the Middle Way Consequence School. Some of these philosophical schools say all of the aggregates together are the self. You know many of them say that the consciousness aggregate is the real self.

Will the real self please stand up? The middle way consequence school denies that consciousness is the real self and we’ll get there. We’re jumping ahead a little bit. Okay. So this is a lot.

What questions do you have on the five aggregates or on where we are so far? Yeah. Oh, microphone. So you you mentioned Four Noble Truths with these two aggregates. So I was wondering, do all the five aggregates belong to the First Noble Truths?

Or is it just though too late? Okay. The reason I mention the Four Noble Truths is just to point out how feeling and discernment can lead to our suffering. If If feeling and discernment are driven by ignorance instead of wisdom, we misunderstand where our feeling comes from, good feelings can only come from virtue. Negative feelings can only come from non virtue.

If we don’t understand that and we think that that feeling is a result of the sense contact, we will tend to engage in karmic actions which will lead to suffering as a result. Okay, so the ignorance, the afflictive emotion, and the karmic action are all under the truth of the cause of suffering. Okay? And when discernment and feeling come up, often we react by creating a karmic action, and all of that would be the truth of the cause of suffering. Yeah.

Morgan. So so I have a question on the schools. Is are you saying now that the other schools is they technically would not have directly perceived emptiness because there’s still a subtle Right. Self. So therefore, would would the highest schools basically say they really didn’t have a direct perception of emptiness?

So or if they did have a direct perception of emptiness, how is it possible that they misperceived? Or is it just a direct perception of only phenomena and not the self? Right. Right. And this is that’s an excellent question.

And it’s a huge debate, huge debate, which in order to become because there’s a difference between a being who’s liberated and a being who’s enlightened. Okay? For liberation, a person who’s liberated is called an arhat, a foe destroyer. Okay? They’ve destroyed all the delusions.

They’re free of karma. That’s a result of a direct perception of selflessness. Now, which level of selflessness does an arhat perceive? According to the Middle Way Consequent School, everyone who’s liberated from saṃsāra has to have perceived the subtlest level of selflessness. You know, the other schools say no.

It’s not like that. You know? And then you get into this big debate. How could they have done it if their schools don’t even teach it? Like, how could they have gotten there if their schools don’t even teach it?

So this is a really huge debate. Like which level of selflessness is necessary to be perceived in order to be liberated from saṃsāra? Is it just the lack of inherent existence which is the subtlest level according to middle Consequence, or is it another one? And this is a really, really big debate, and there’s no definitive answer. But according to the Middle Way Consequence School, every Arhat practicing according to Vaibhāṣika tenet systems has the same direct realization of emptiness as His Holiness the Dalai Lama studying Middle Way Consequence School.

And they say something like, oh, when they get there, then it just sort of happens even if they haven’t studied it. Because that’s what things are empty of when they go into that meditation, that’s the level of emptiness that they perceive. But then the middle way autonomy school has a different view and they all have very, very different views of what that selflessness is. Yeah, but that’s a great question, very subtle question. Also two books that I want to recommend since we’re talking for more study on this.

One book that I just find so clear and so amazing, it’s this small book by Guy Newland called Appearance and Reality. And he talks about emptiness according to the four philosophical schools. And he is so clear in my mind. I just love that book, Appearance and Reality. Guy Newland, he’s written two other books.

One is called The Two Truths, which is a little bit fatter and kind of more detailed. I would start with Appearance in Reality if you’re interested. It’s short, extremely clear, talks about these four schools. And you can really see how your view needs to develop according to the different levels. Yeah.

Can I say something really quick? Think Corina mentioned this to you, right? She ordered them and they didn’t come. So if people would like Appearance in Reality, give your name and information to probably why don’t you just do it to me? Because that way Chloe won’t be bothered.

And we can actually mail it to you. You can purchase it and we can mail it to you or we can just call you when that comes in. Because she she was really hoping it would come in time for today. She feels badly that it didn’t come. Yeah.

Then and then these two other books by Guy Newland. One’s called The Two Truths, and he just came out with another one that’s got something about emptiness in the title. Does anybody Introduction to Emptiness, which I haven’t seen yet, but I’m really excited about. Because for me, he just explained things really, really clearly, know, Guy Newland. And then another one is called Realizing Emptiness and it’s by a Tibetan lama named Gen Lamrimpa who passed away about ten years ago or so.

And that’s a really, really good one. It’s transcripts of teachings that he gave. He did a one year retreat, a one year śamatha or calm abiding retreat in Seattle in like the late ’80s. And this is a transcript of talks that he gave that were translated by Alan Wallace, who’s also incredibly clear, good translations. So those two, Appearance in Reality and Realizing Emptiness, if you want to study more, are two that I found especially helpful.

Okay. So now that we’ve gotten some introduction to the five aggregates, let’s go back to this selflessness of being substantially existent, so independent of those aggregates. So some self that exists separately and in dependence upon those aggregates. Okay? Some some part of you, that driver, you know, that crane operator being that exists separate from the aggregates.

Also, in in philosophy, they talk about, like, master and servants. Like, that self is some sort of a master, and the aggregates are sort of the servants that, you know, that master is operating. K? Now, yesterday I mentioned the three levels of dependent origination. Right?

That things are dependent at the grossest level on causes and conditions. Causes and conditions. Then subtler level, things are dependent on parts. And then at the subtlest level, they’re dependent on your conceptual imputation, which I said is only accepted by the Middle Way Consequence School. Now, you can see how these two levels relate to the first two levels of dependent origination.

This is saying things are dependent instead of being independent of causes and conditions, permanent, not relying on production or disintegration, dependent on causes and conditions. The person is dependent on causes and conditions. This one is saying the person is dependent on parts. You can’t say, oh, Tenzin Chokyies five aggregates are sitting here in the Gampa, but the real Tens and Chokies upstairs in Maritza’s old room having a snooze. Know?

There’s no way that the person exists independent of the aggregate. So it’s dependent on those parts. It’s dependent on aggregates. Okay? So the person exists in dependence upon the parts, that second level of dependent origination.

So you can see how those first two levels relate to these two views of selflessness. You’re saying there is no such self that’s self sufficient and substantially existent independent of the five aggregates, the five parts. Okay. Any questions on these two levels so far? Okay.

Okay. Now, those are basically, as I said, you know, this is accepted by everybody. This is accepted by everybody except, you know, five of those subschools of the Vaibhāṣikas. So for all intents and purposes, pretty much all Buddhist schools accept that there’s no such self that exists like this either. So that covers the Vaibhāṣika and the Sūtra schools, the Sūtra schools, the Sautrāntika schools.

So now we’re up to the upper schools, the higher schools, that are also talking about selflessness of phenomena. So what does the mind only school say? Why is it called the mind only school? Is it saying that everything is consciousness? Is it saying that things are just made of consciousness?

Everything’s just a hallucination. Everybody in this room is just some sort of figment of my imagination, somehow part of my consciousness. What this school says is and it gets interesting, and this is why it’s good to study the different levels of the schools. Because what that school says is that, you know, the object and my perception of the object arise from the same karmic seed. Things aren’t independent, meaning, you know, the object that I perceive and my perception of the object arise from the same karmic seed, a result of the same karmic seed.

And you can see how that starts to break down that solid view we have of how things exist, right? The things that are in my reality and my perception of them are a result of the same karmic seed, it starts to break down that feeling I have that it’s all randomly coming at me, I’m just a victim, poor me, the solid, substantial self. All of a sudden, things start to be a little bit more fluid and I have to take a little bit of responsibility for my reality. You can see how I’m starting to co create my reality. And remember we talked yesterday about your karma forcing your perception of reality out there.

So it’s not so different from saying, you know, they arise from the same karmic seed. The same karmic seed dishes out what shows up in my reality and my perception of it. So that’s what the mind only school is saying. It’s not saying that external reality is my consciousness, but it’s saying it’s not a different entity from consciousness and it arises as a result of the same karmic seed, the reality and my perception arises from that same karmic seed. So we’re getting close.

We’re getting closer and closer, aren’t we? And even if you practice at that level remember what my good friend Venerable Renee said, Hey, that’s a lot higher than the way we usually think things are solidly just coming at us. Even if you practiced at that philosophical level, it would reduce a lot of your suffering because you can no longer be a helpless victim of things just randomly coming at you anymore if you think, Oh, wow. You know, the the fact that that obnoxious person is in my life and my perception of them as really obnoxious comes from the same karmic seed. If I want to clean up my reality, rid myself of all the obnoxious people, be kind to people, you know, watch my morality.

And then you really start to clean up your reality and see how you can take responsibility for it, even practicing at that level. Yeah. Morgan, do you wanna grab the Are you sure? Yeah. Don’t be confused.

Go ahead. Really. So the object you’re saying that I understand the perception, obviously, in the karmic seed, how you could come to that argument but conventionally the object exists and you’re not sharing a collective karmic seed with another individual. I understand that you say the perception, the feeling, you know Yeah. Could be the same karmic seed.

But how can you say the object? How how you expressed it? How could that be if it’s multiple parties? Exactly. And that’s one of the big debates.

How the middle way school refutes the the mind only school is exactly that. He always goes for the Essex. This guy should go into the gushy Don’t you think he should go to Italy next? Know, that’s exactly how the middle way school refutes the mind only school. They say, How can there be any consensual reality at all?

Like, how can we have any kind of shared reality at all? If every you know, if if the object of my perception comes from my karmic seed, what about the rest of y’all? It gets really hallucinogenic then. Know, it’s like how on earth can we all like, are we all sitting in the room having a class together or not? You know, if it’s all kind of coming or do we just all share that collective karma?

And I think that’s how the mind only school gets off the hook. They say for any given people in a room experiencing the same approximate reality, we all share the same karmic seed that’s giving rise. But then it gets a little sketchy. It gets kind of sketchy that way. So that’s exactly one of the big debates against the Mind Only School is like, look, you guys.

Then it gets really weird. You know, how can you have any kind of consensual reality even very basic? Like the fact is, sure, we all have different perceptions of our shared reality of this room depending on our karma. But how can there even be like this room show up for all of us if it’s all really dependent on our different karmic seeds. So you’ve gone right to the heart of the crux of the debate against that school.

But you can still see how interesting it is to start operating from that standpoint and see how help create our reality. Yeah, Jacob. Maybe this is better held for an actual debate session about these two schools, I was just, thinking as you were explaining this mind only school that isn’t that part of how, things are said to function anyway. I mean, the reason why we’re here in the human realm to begin with is become a Is because of, we’re creating the cause to be here. We were experiencing the karma to have Be in this realm to begin with.

So, in a sense, we do share reality. Yes. We do Yeah. We do share a consequence with each other that helps create the realm that we’re experiencing together. Right.

Right. Exactly. Exactly. That would be kinda how they would they would probably say something like that. And middleweight contempt school would say that too.

You know, the fact that we’re experiencing a human realm is because of our karma, to be experiencing a human realm. You know, do the other realms exist in some other place? Or is it possible that a being with a certain karma could be right here in this room experiencing it as a hell realm with the burning iron ground? Here we are, nice chandeliers, Victorian, frou frou like wallpaper because we happen to be in the human realm. But other beings could be existing and probably are in this room right now with a completely different karmic experience.

So that’s the way that the realms are created by karma. Master Śāntideva Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life. You know, there’s this famous verse and he says, What do you think? You know, Acme Hell Realm Construction Company created the hell realms? It was created by your mind.

And this is why the Buddha taught this school, you know, to emphasize for the people who thought that they were helpless victims of reality, to really emphasize how things yes, they’re created by mind. We experience things created by our mind, created by our karma. And in Master Śāntideva, the hell realms are created by mind. The main sūtra that the Mind Only School is based on is this sūtra called the Sūtra Unraveling the Thought. And it’s really emphasizing how things are created by mind to pull the rug out from under our eternalism.

Right? Like thinking that things are so solid and so self existent and just coming at us. If we start to work with this level, it really pulls the rug out from under our eternalist view. They say that the Middle Way you know, there’s always this word Middle Way in Buddhism it’s like a razor’s edge between eternalism thinking that things are self existent just kind of coming at us and nihilism thinking, Oh, nothing exists. You know, the hotel towel thing, nothing exists, nothing matters.

It’s a razor’s edge and it’s a very fine line. Most people tend towards eternalism. So Lord Buddha taught the Sūtra Unraveling the Thought, taught the mind only school to pull the rug out from under that thing and to show us, Yeah, you have to be responsible for your actions because mind creates your reality. So watch your morality. Watch your karma.

Last year at Land of Medicine Buddha, this is a little aside, I thought it was so interesting and relates to this, how karma and emptiness relate to each other. Choden Rinpoche last year at Land of Medicine Buddha, somebody asked the question, How do you know whether a teacher is valid? They were talking about Guru devotion, like how do you know whether you have a valid teacher? And he gave this very interesting answer. He said something like, Because they teach karma and emptiness, the relationship between karma and emptiness.

And I thought that was such an interesting answer, you know, to show how emptiness should reinforce your faith in cause and effect because mind creates our reality, right? And karma, you know, creates our perceptions. And then there’s this famous example and for this I’m going use the cup again. There’s a famous example in the sūtra. You have a glass of liquid.

A glass of liquid. Okay? You have three beings sitting around experiencing this glass of liquid. You have a human being experiencing black tea with soy milk and maybe a little agave nectar. I’m not quite sure.

Black tea with soy milk. You have a being with worse karma, and they are experiencing, known as a hungry ghost or craving spirit, and they’re experiencing pus and blood. You know, where Tens and Choki, mundane human realm existence is experiencing black tea with soy milk, Preta would be experiencing this as pus and blood because they have karmic obscurations to be able to experience nice food and drink. Because of their karma, they create an experience of pus and blood here. Would that be in the same way that the prisoners you were speaking of last night would take me as a threat if I was to look up them sort of strangely.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Right? And then a being with better karma in the deva realm experiences this as some kind of blissful nectar because of their karma, because of their mind. And this is what the Mind Only School is saying, to just emphasize, hey, you guys, guess what?

It’s not just random. It’s not just coming at you. You create your reality by your mind. If you’re kind I have another inmate. The one inmate experiences everything as a threat and goes around with a tip on his shoulder and he’s in a hell realm.

I have this other inmate that I gave the practice of, you know, he’s talking about how boring it is in prison. We’re talking about the truth of suffering, and there’s this one list of six characteristics by Buddha Maitreya, and it talks about how you have to repeat the pattern over and over and over again. Like and it’s just unbelievably tedious. And he raises his hand and he goes, you think it’s boring out there, man? It’s really boring in here.

He’s like, you know, you’re in the same cell with your cellmate. They open the gate. You go in the exercise yard. The same guys are trying to kill you. You know, you go back and you got the guard harassing you and then the same horrible food every day.

It’s really boring. Like, how do I stand it? And I didn’t know what to say to him. I don’t know what it’s like in prison. Every once in a while, you feel like you’re channeling, mostly when you’re totally clueless.

So in my mind, I’m like, okay, it’s holiness. I don’t know. You know, Lama’s soap. Help me out here because I don’t know what to say. And I said, make every day a contest.

How many people can you make happy today? Play a game with yourself every single day. You know? How many people can you make happy? It’s not gonna be boring anymore at all.

He was like, that was the right thing. And I’m like, oh my god. You know? I don’t know what I’m saying. He’s like, oh, that I can do.

That I can do. You know? Two weeks later, I go into the prison. He walks in. Oh, you know?

And I go, so how’s it going with the tedium? He goes, I tried that thing you said. It’s so awesome. He goes, I’m just this kind of wimpy, skinny guy. Like, I’m not a threat to anyone.

So I decided I’m gonna be the guy that all the you know, there’s all these big tough guys in prison. You know, I’ve got some in my class, like tattoos on their head foreheads. You know? Like that. He goes, I’m gonna be the guy that those guys can talk to because I’m no threat to anyone.

So I see one of those guys. He looks like he’s angry. I’m just gonna go up and talk to him. I’m gonna be that guy, and that’s what I’m gonna do to make people happy. It is, like, so totally working for this guy, and he’s he just gets more and more blissful.

So here he is in prison, which before he was experiencing his total tedium. Now because he’s his whole motivation is about being kind and making people happy. You should see this guy. I saw him last month, and it was about two years after giving him this, like, channeled instruction from Lama Zopa. And he’s like, remember that thing you said?

Wow. Like, it’s you know? Life is great. And here he is. And the guy next to him, because of his karma, it’s like, you know, like a pitbull.

Everything is a threat. Just, you know, perceiving everything as just a hell realm and threatening. You know, so Lord Buddha was onto something. And by the way, Lord Buddha taught all these schools because they helped us, you know, and they suited different people’s minds. Who taught the four philosophical schools?

Lord Buddha. Why? Because they help, you know? And different people are suited for different levels of philosophical thought, which is why you work your way up gradually. And if I’m stuck at middle way autonomy and I still think that things are kind of halfway coming at me, it’s alright.

Know? Because at least part of it is on the basis of my mind and my karma. So that’s why it’s good to work your way up and not just jump to the highest school, especially if it makes you think you can steal the hotel towels, that nothing exists, and you can do whatever you want. Then you really need to back off. One more question, then I think we’ll take a break.

Jen? Yeah. So in the teachings, they talk a lot about Tonglen and its value of And so is it from this perspective it’s because whatever negative actions or suffering you experience were karmically created by you anyway, by your mind? So if you continue to blame it on external circumstances or continue to hold a negative mind, then you’re gonna create the causes to experience that again. But then if you practice Tonglen, basically, you create the causes to let that karma finish out and then create good karma for you in the future.

Is that? Well, it’s a way of just it’s a way of sort of practicing thought transformation with what’s arising in the moment. And then it also creates you know, it’s the cause for great compassion, which is the cause for Bodhicitta. So the main reason for practicing tonglen is to actually, as one of the tools for generating Bodhicitta, which is non negotiable if you want to become a fully enlightened being. But yes, in the moment, even part of it is to create the cause for Bodhicitta.

But even in the moment, it really changes the way that you relate to certain circumstances. So you can use it as a thought transformation technique in the moment and then as a cause for generating the great compassion that will then lead to bodhicitta. So there’s a whole kind of context for practicing tonglen. But even in the moment, just exchanging your thought of cherishing yourself with cherishing others reduces your suffering even right now, even before generating bodhicitta, which is kind of the long term effect. In the short term, just getting out of your self absorbed me first self pity place for even a microsecond.

I mean, my god. You know, we’ve been stuck there since beginning of this time. So just shifting that perspective even in the moment opens up so much more space. And practicing Tonglen, especially when you’re experiencing a suffering in the moment. Mhmm.

You know, realizing how many other there’s, what, six and a half billion people on the planet. If I’m having a really bad migraine, what are the chances that millions of people in this very second are experiencing the same thing? So is it really all about me, or can I try and, you know, practice tonglen and try and take on the suffering that they’re experiencing? And it just widens your perspective even just in the moment like that. Mhmm.

Did you have something to Come on. Okay. I may be mistaken here, but it seems like the idea that an object and a perception have the same karmic seed is almost identical to the idea of imputation as being so important to perception. But did you say that only the Mādhyamika accept the imputational? Yeah.

And it’s very, very subtle, isn’t it? The difference. You can see how by studying these different schools gets you closer and closer and closer to the middle way consequence school. You know? Because the middle way consequence school says, yes, there are external objects, but then the way I’m perceiving them is dependent on my karma.

Instead of saying they arise from the same karmic seed, my perception of Tai and Tai come from my karma, like, Sorry, Thay, you don’t have a mind stream, you don’t have anything to do about it. Middle way consequent school would say, Yes, there are external objects, but then my perception of you is dependent on my karma. So you can see it gets very, very close, and it’s very subtle sometimes, the differences. So we shouldn’t diss the middle way school or, I mean, the mind only school and say, Oh, how ridiculous. We should say, Wow, you know, they were onto something, and it really pulled the rug out from under a lot of that solid view of how things exist.

And if we even worked with that for a while, we would really undercut a lot of our suffering. Now, just one little final thing before we take a break. The illustration of the person according to the Mind Only School, right? Because we said, how do they think the self does not exist? But then what did they say that the self is?

So the illustration of the person according to the Mind Only School is called the storehouse consciousness. Ālaya vijñāna is the Sanskrit word for it. And that is a separate consciousness that holds all the karmic seeds. So that’s what they say goes from life to life. That’s the illustration of the person.

That which goes from life to life and holds the karma, according to that school, is a separate consciousness embedded with karmic seeds. That’s its function. It’s just that. It only just has that function to store the karmic seeds and to go from life to life. But does it exist in the aggregate somewhere?

Well, according to the Middle Way Consequence School, the consciousness aggregate has six components, right? The five sense consciousness is in mind. According to the Mind Only School, there’s two more. So there’s eight consciousnesses. There’s the storehouse consciousness and the mental affliction consciousness.

So the storehouse consciousness is one of the eight consciousnesses as it’s explained in that school. And again, it’s just a different way of conceiving how mind works. There’s nothing existing about the storehouse consciousness either. It’s just a different imputation on a function of that which holds the karmic seeds and goes from life to life to life. So that’s the illustration of the person according to the mind only school.

Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. It’s helpful for what you just said that even the concept or the explanation of the storehouse consciousness is an imputation because I thought all the schools and I’m not familiar with the distinctions, but I thought what I’m usually hearing is that there is a subtlest mind and that your karma exceeds do you travel for a way of saying it, with your subtlest mind and that’s why you carry karma from lifetime to lifetime. So it’s not like this concept of the storehouse consciousness is so far off, is it, from the concept of the subtlest mind.

It’s just how it’s the type of label and concept we put on it. Saying that that’s what the self is, which the middle way school and we’re gonna get says, No, no, that’s not the self either. There’s something else that’s the illustration of the person according to the Middle Way School. But you can see how all of these concepts arose. There’s got to be something that goes from life to life holding the karma.

And so according to the mind only school, said, Oh, yeah, there’s this thing called the Ālaya vijñāna, the storehouse consciousness, and that’s that thing that goes from life to life holding the karmic seeds. Okay, so you’re right, it’s not that different. Just like seeing that thing in my perception come from the same karmic seed isn’t that different from saying, Yes, there’s external objects but my conceptual imputation makes them what they are. So it’s very subtle like when you work your way up. Yeah, that’s helpful.

And we’ll talk more about the middle way consciousness and the fact that they don’t think that this is the self. And just real quick, when you say the mind only school, were you talking about the top half? It wasn’t just the first lower school, was it? So that’s this one. That’s this one.

Mind Only Cittamātra. Good. So it is a higher school? Of the higher schools that agree that both persons and phenomena are selfless, it’s the first one of those. Okay, thank you.

Okay, let’s take a well deserved What time is lunch? Well, wow. It’s twelve thirty. Twelve thirty? Okay.

But it doesn’t have to be. Is is ten minutes enough? Is that enough? Okay. Come back in ten minutes, and then maybe what we’ll do is just have a meditation on what we’ve done so far and then launch into middle way autonomy and consequence more this afternoon.

It’s been the whole afternoon on that and some more meditation. Okay. But let’s take a ten minute break, and I’ll ring the gong when we’re getting to the point of coming back. And lunch will probably be more likely be twelve forty five to be realistic. Twelve forty five?

Something like Okay. I’ll check out. Okay, here we go. Yeah, that’s working fine. Now it’s working fine.

Okay. Well, for me, the Sruta Mantra understanding of emptiness intuitively makes an awful lot of sense the most sense, really, to me. It’s a great expressive matrix of humanity and animal world. And it’s very useful in understanding social relationships and social history. So from a sociological point of view, it just intuitively makes a tremendous amount of useful sense.

It’s wonderful for teaching. But then as soon as I start to think about the higher, what’s called the higher, I think they’re all actually, to me, they seem all rails on the same path to enlightenment. It doesn’t really matter which rail you’re on. And why do you want to argue about whether you anyway, maybe something gets a little faster. But you’re arguing about different rails going the same direction.

But it seems useful in terms of my present life. It’s more of an intuitive usefulness rather than I don’t really intellectually know how to practically use the other in terms of understanding our social existence. And I think that’s fine. I think that’s really fine to work with. Because like you say, it’s like they’re rungs on a ladder.

Rungs on a ladder kind of going up to a higher philosophical view, which is defined by the Tibetans as the middle way consequence school. But each rung gives you more perspective than standing on the ground. For most of us, we’re just totally standing on the ground without any kind of higher perspective at all. So anywhere you are, working on those rungs of the ladder will really help. And I think if it really helps you in that moment to cut through that solid perspective about the way things exist, to hang out at the Mind Only School perspective for a while and work with that, great.

For sure, it’s going to absolutely undercut the source of delusions. Now, according to the Middle Way Consequence School, to have a direct realization of emptiness, the direct realization of emptiness that you have is the lack of inherent existence, which we haven’t really talked about yet. And that got back to Morgan’s question, is that the same for everybody? No matter what school they’ve been studying, is that direct perception the same in the middle way consequence school? Would say, yes.

But for most of us, we’re a pretty long way from that direct realization of emptiness that cuts through saṃsāra at the root. We’re just looking for techniques to help us work with our delusions and help us loosen that solid grasping itself as objects in that solid standing on the ground level. So any level will help us. So I think if the mind only school makes sense to you and really helps you cut through your delusions and change your behavior, God bless. Like, go for it.

You know, that’s fantastic. And still keep open minded about the other school and just keep kind of working to push. But I think we often jump too far ahead with incomplete understanding, and then often that will lead to that thing of like, nothing matters. Oh, if everything is just my projection, then anything could be anything and nothing really matters, and I could just, like, make up my reality. No.

It’s not like that. You know, I think without understanding, we can often jump to that level. But even, for example, I said in the Vaibhāṣika school, Western Vipassana Theravāda, they work a lot with the meditation on the four foundations of mindfulness to lead to a direct perception of subtle impermanence. That’s an incredible high realization. Middle way consequence would not say that that’s a direct realization of selflessness.

But for sure, to have a direct realization of subtle impermanence and to have any kind of experience of subtle impermanence loosens that grasping. So I think working with these different mediteachings, for sure, incredible. Great, great benefit. Anything that loosens that grasping, that makes you see the relationship between karma and dependent origination and helps you work on your morality and change your behavior at whatever level. So I think that’s fine.

I think that’s fine. And like Ty was saying, it’s so subtle, the difference between that view and middle way consequence. Really subtle. And you can see how it, one, helps you get an insight into the next higher level, which is why we’re spending all day doing this class. Yeah.

Any other questions or comments before we do yeah. Can you pass wherever it is back? I understood that you said that Lord Buddha had already teached all these four schools, five schools. And for me this is really new. I thought that all these schools had developed in Tibet.

In Tibet later. So I was just wondering where can I find it? Is it in the Abhidharma or where? Yeah. The basis of these different schools when I said Lord Buddha taught all these schools, not as such.

He didn’t give them these labels necessarily. He didn’t say, Okay, now for you Vaibhāṣika guys, I’m going to teach Vaibhāṣika. Now we’re going to teach mind only. But they’re all based on sutras that the Buddha taught. And then the ideas developed on the basis of certain things that the Buddha taught in the sutras, Not necessarily in Tibet, but in ancient India and the great monastic universities like Nālānda and Vikramashila, these different schools, like the eighteen subschools first of Vaibhāṣika first developed and then the other schools.

So they were viewed as separate, specific schools subsequent to the time of Lord Buddha. But when I said Lord Buddha taught them all, they’re all based on different sutras of the Buddha and on Abhidharma texts and so forth that all go back to the three baskets, specifically Sūtra and Abhidharma taught by Lord Buddha. So all these ideas were put forth to Lord Buddha appropriate to the trainees. Often we’ll get these quotes from sutras, just sort of some quote out of the blue. But if you look at the context, most sutras that Lord Buddha taught were in response to a question asked by a specific individual.

And one of the great capabilities of an enlightened being is being able to teach completely appropriate to the level of the trainee. So it was all contextual. And we sometimes take these one little stanza out of context, but the whole thing was contextual. Somebody came to Lord Buddha. Often, was a disciple of one of the non-Buddhist schools to debate with the Buddha and to debate certain philosophical points.

Sometimes it would be a disciple of the Buddha asking for clarification about a certain question, and then the Buddha would give a discourse appropriate to the level of the trainee. Then later on, when the great monastic universities started and people really started studying the sutras, they would pull out these thoughts of Lord Buddha from the different sutras, and then the schools would be developed, a certain philosophical school that ascribed to a certain level of teaching of Lord Buddha. But they were all appropriate because we all need different things. For the people for whom the middle way consequence school is going to pull out the rug from under their faith in the law of cause and effect, Lord Buddha taught some of the other schools. Yeah.

So one could say that Nāgārjuna didn’t have a new idea about Buddhism. Thought always Nāgārjuna brought something really new into the world and was like almost a new Buddha. Yeah. And according to Tibetan Buddhism, what Nāgārjuna did was start revealing certain teachings of Lord Buddha that had not been revealed because the time or had only been revealed to certain disciples of Prajñāpāramitā scriptures were taught by Lord Buddha but weren’t appropriate for the minds of all trainees. So they’re not the ones that appear, for example, in the Pali Canon and weren’t taught publicly to all the trainees.

So according to the Tibetan tradition, what Nāgārjuna did was just reveal certain scriptures that had been taught by Lord Buddha. It’s not that he was coming up with some whole brand new ideas on his own. According to the Tibetan school, the Prajñāpāramitā Sutras were all taught by Lord Buddha and then kept hidden because they would be so easily misunderstood by people. It would lead to the hotel towel incident all over the place and undermine people’s faith in the law of cause and effect. And that’s why they weren’t taught publicly at the time of Lord Buddha.

You’re welcome. Okay. Anything else before we Okay. So what I wanted to do is just work a little bit with these two levels in meditation before we go on to the highest level. Later on this afternoon, I’m going to introduce speaking of Nāgārjuna, once again, a bodhisattva just segues us into the next section.

One of the ways of meditating on emptiness taught by Ārya Nāgārjuna is called the four point analysis. And the first point of the four points is identifying what’s called the object of refutation. Gakcha is the Tibetan term, the object of refutation, which is a fancy way of saying that false self that we’ve always thought existed. It’s like the bullseye thing. Before you can aim and shoot your arrow at the middle of the bullseye, you have to be really clear about the target.

And before we can break down that false sense of self, we first need to identify what it feels like to us. What’s our innate sense of self? Is it one of these? Is our innate sense of self the Christian soul idea? Is our innate sense of self the driver thing?

What is that sense of self that we have? That’s the first step. So what I wanted to do before our lunch break is just work a little bit with this in meditation. And then this afternoon, we’re going to delve into the two highest schools and the subtle differences between them and also do more meditation. I want to introduce you to at least two meditation techniques that then you can take home and use on your cushion to just try and get clear and penetrate and really work along with your study in meditation to break that down.

Okay. But we’ll just do kind of a brief meditation on the gakkha, the object of refutation, to just try and identify how it seems to us that the self does exist. So let’s just sit in our meditation posture, back straight, head tilted slightly forward. And just turn your attention to your breath for just a minute. And so now, first, think of the sense of self that you have, the concrete, solid feeling that there’s some you that is exists somewhere within your body and mind.

The real you. When you think of yourself, one of the ways you can tune into this is say your name to yourself in your mind. And what feeling comes up when you say your name? What is that solid concrete sense of self? Try and get in touch with that object of refutation.

Another technique that’s recommended is think of a time that the sense of self comes up very strongly. When you’re afraid, when you’re falsely accused, someone accuses you of doing something you didn’t do, you think, I didn’t do it. Me? No. Not me.

Just spend a couple of minutes just trying to get in touch. When you say your name to yourself, when you think of being falsely accused or afraid or very angry, what sense of self comes up for you? Now analyze that sense of self. Does it seem like the permanent, partless, independent one? Is it that one that doesn’t depend on production and disintegration, that doesn’t change moment to moment?

Does it feel like that? The one that’s partless, like some little chip inside of you, the little piece of ātman chipped off of Brahman or the Christian idea of soul, that real me that exists inside. Check. Does it seem like that permanent unitary independent one? Or does it seem like the substantially existent, self sufficient one, that driver, the master that controls your body and mind.

If it feels like that one, where is it? Where does it exist? Is it in your chest, in your brain, in your eyes? Is it somewhere in your body? Where is it?

If it exists somewhere in your body, where does it exist? Which part of your body is it? If it exists somewhere in your mind, where is it? Is it your brain? Is it your thoughts, your consciousness, some part of your thoughts?

Can you find that me that came up for you? Can you find that self anywhere within your body and mind? Is that sense of self somehow separate from the body and mind? Can this self exist apart from the body and mind? Separate.

If your body and mind are in one place, could the self exist somewhere else? Is it completely separate from the five aggregates? Now consider for a minute the view that what we call me, what you call I, me, is just a label, just a concept that you put on the constantly changing continuum of body and mind. Your body and mind are not permanent. They’re constantly changing, but there’s a continuum.

And on top of that continuum of body and mind, you have a concept, a label, me. So consider that possibility. Instead of existing in the way it seems to exist, this is the way the self does exist, is merely labeled on the continuum of ever changing moments of body and mind. How would your life be different if you lived with a sense of this, realizing that every moment could be fresh, that you don’t have to drag around this solid concrete sense of self. There’s all this space.

The sense you have of me is just merely labeled on this ever changing continuum. There’s so much openness there. You’re not solid, concrete, frozen in time, carrying around this sense of self, but it’s merely labeled on ever changing moments of body and mind. Think of the potential there. Every moment can be fresh.

You don’t have to drag around this fixed self-concept. Think of how this view of how the self exists could liberate you to your fullest potential, make you realize the potential to change into a fully enlightened being. There’s no solid self stuck in delusions, stuck in saṃsāra, but you can actually transform into a fully enlightened being because of the potential, because we’re merely labeled on a continuum of ever changing moments of body and mind. And think especially of how this will feel at the time of death. If you realize that there’s nothing solid and permanent that you were losing, that was ending, but merely a continuum that was just changing form.

And now let’s dedicate the energy from our morning session, investigating selflessness according to the different schools, thinking that by understanding selflessness, we’re able to undermine the ignorance that gives rise to our delusions, which then causes us to engage in karmic action. So by really understanding this, this is the key to cutting saṃsāra at the root so that we don’t have to perpetuate our unenlightened existence, that we can become liberated from the cycle. So let’s dedicate the energy towards getting a deeper insight into the ultimate nature of reality so that we can undercut the root of cyclic existence. Okay. So this afternoon, what we’ll do is talk about the Middle Way School, and we’ll also talk about how things do conventionally exist.

After pulling the rug out from under you completely, we’ll put it back a little bit again and show you how things do conventionally exist to counteract the thing that people sometimes go to this place of like, oh, then this means anything could be anything and nothing matters and all of that. So there are also criteria for how things do conventionally exist. And we’ll talk about that. And then we will also just touch on the twelve links of dependent origination to show how the whole thing hangs together because that’s a really essential piece to understand that we can use in our practice. Again, the whole point of this is to reduce our suffering.

It’s not to give Jeffrey Hopkins and Guy Nuland a job. It’s really to eliminate our suffering. So looking at the twelve links of dependent origination will really help us see how all of this hangs together. And then I also would like to do meditation on the emptiness of the self in relation to the five aggregates, which is the instruction Lama Zopa gave me for retreat using the Heart Sūtra, because this is a practice that you can do every day that I found personally really powerful. I think that was one of the most powerful parts of my retreat for a couple of weeks.

I just did this meditation with recitation of the Heart Sūtra. It was very cool. So we’ll do that. And we’ll have plenty of time for more discussion and questions. It’s quarter to one.

Is an hour and fifteen minutes long enough? Can we come back at two That gives you enough time. And walk around the block, get the blood flowing. The two o’clock session tends to be quite comatose. So have some caffeine if you partake of such a thing and get the blood flowing, and we’ll come back at two o’clock.

Okay, great. Thank you. Enjoy your lunch. Is the flip chart sagging? It looks like it’s kind of collapsed.

Oh, is okay. This is kind of fun. That’s it. Now oh. Can everybody still see?

Can you still see? Alright. Okay. I’ll send it. Kind of Change, you know?

The reality of impermanence. Okay. So first of all, are there any questions that have emerged? Sometimes people discuss over lunch and things come up. Oh, that’s probably a good idea.

It’s so loud. Anything come up that you have questions about? What’s that? Is it on? Okay.

Any other questions besides whether or not the microphone is on? Okay. So we’ll go ahead and continue with the Middle Way School and spend the rest of today pretty much on this school. So we’ve got two divisions of the Middle Way school that, again, is considered, especially the Middle Way consequent school, the highest school according to Tibetan Buddhism. And again, depending on if you happen to go to other teachings of either Western Vipassana, Zen tradition, and so forth, you will hear different views of what selflessness is.

And not to get confused, they’re coming from different what’s called tenet systems. According to many Tibetan lamas, for example, most Zen teachings are based on the mind only school of tenets and the mind only school of selflessness. So if you’ve studied a lot of people have done Zen practice, and then they start delving into Tibetan Buddhism. Or as I mentioned before, Vipassana with the four foundations of mindfulness, that would be more of a Vaibhāṣika school. And so not to get confused if selflessness is presented differently.

It will be. And that’s one of the things of getting familiar with these schools so you can partake of the different meditation techniques without a lot of confusion. Also, some people are very interested in Hatha yoga. And then sometimes they’ll start to study the philosophy behind different yoga systems, which is often the Samkhya or Vedanta schools, which isn’t even a Buddhist school. So they’ll be teaching you that there is a substantially existent self, some sort of Ātman.

So don’t get too confused about the different philosophies. Okay. So let’s review real quickly where we’re up to now. We have the two lower schools, the Vaibhāṣika and Sautrāntika. All but five of the eighteen subschools of this and everybody else refutes that permanent, independent, unitary self.

That’s usually a learned view. Okay? Learned from your religion, your philosophy. That would be like the Hindu view of Ātman, the Christian idea of soul. These two schools also refute this and everybody else refutes the substantially existent, self sufficient one, that one that exists independent of the aggregates.

It’s something else that’s kind of running the show. The mind and body, operating the mind and body, something independent of the aggregates are refuted by those schools. These schools believe that the illustration of the person, what the self is those are the views of self that are refuted. What do they say that the self is? Those schools say some combination of the aggregates or the mental consciousness aggregate, the continuum of the five aggregates.

There’s different views in these different sub schools. But they do say there is a self that exists. There is a self. It’s just not the two views that they refute. They say that there is a self Often in these schools, it’s the mental consciousness aggregate is the real self.

And then we got up to the mind only school, which also now, here’s where we have a little subtlety. Because we said the higher schools say that there’s a selflessness of persons and a selflessness of phenomena. Apart from the Prasad Gita school, these are two different things. So mind only says the selflessness of persons is the same, the lack of being that substantially existent, self sufficient person in dependence upon the aggregates. No.

They also believe that phenomena are devoid of some impossible way of existing. What do they say about phenomena? It’s devoid of being anything but arising from one karmic seed. That’s the thing where you get the object, and the perception of the object arises from one karmic seed. And that’s what the selflessness of phenomena is in this school.

It doesn’t exist independent of having arisen. The external objects don’t exist independent or devoid of arising from the same karmic seed as their perception. So that’s the way that phenomena exist according to that school. Okay? So you can see we’re getting closer and closer and closer to the view of middle way consequence that we touched on last night.

So what does the middle way autonomy school say about the way persons exist and the way phenomena exist? They also say that persons are not substantially existent and self sufficient. Same view. What do they say about the way phenomena exist? Getting really, really close now.

What they say is phenomena are inherently existent but not truly existent. And this gets really tricky. This is really subtle. What they say is this. They say that external phenomena do not exist apart from the consciousness doing the labeling.

But there’s something from the side of the object that makes it what it is. So it’s about fiftyfifty. Right? This does not exist as a cup without my consciousness labeling cup. But there’s something from the side of the cup that makes it a cup.

That’s the part that’s inherently existent. There’s something from the side of the object that is hinting to me, cup. Right? But then I need my consciousness meeting that hint halfway before I can validly label this a cup. And then that’s what makes it a cup.

So it’s not truly existent, meaning that it doesn’t exist apart from the consciousness labeling it, but it’s inherently existent, meaning there’s something findable in that object that makes it what it is. This gets really subtle and very tricky. So this object is out there. It’s not a cup yet because my mind hasn’t labeled it yet. So there’s an external object.

This school says the external object doesn’t depend on the same karmic seed as my perception per se. But what’s happening is very close to that, very close, and we’re just one little level up, That object out there is saying to me, Hey, don’t I look like a cup? Aren’t I kind of cuppish? Don’t you think I’m a cup? So it’s like fifty percent is giving me all of these cuppish signals from its side.

And then I go, Oh wow, that looks like a cup. I respond with fifty percent of my mental labeling. And that’s how the cup exists according to that school. So there’s something from the side of the object that makes it what it is, but it’s not that thing until my consciousness meets it halfway and labels. Really interesting.

Okay? So inherently existent but not truly existent. You know, this is just language. Yeah, Jacob. Yeah.

Can you Ty, do you can you grab I’m just, wondering if I could get a little bit more clarification on what that something coming from the cup might be. Is it characteristics? Is it shape? Is it function? Is it form?

Is it Right. Are those things? Right. And it’s sort of all of those things. The reason the Svatāntrika School says this is they say, You middle way consequent school people go too far.

If something only exists on the basis of your conceptual thought and mental imputation, then anything could be anything. Everything falls apart. How can you pause it even cause and effect? How can you you know, everything is just some random hallucination. You guys go too far.

So there has to be something from the side of the object that makes it what it is. Yeah. They’re saying, hey, if it’s all dependent on your imputation, call this a cup. Call the keys a cup. Call the paper.

Anything could be anything. Let’s steal all the hotel towels. Why not? Because cause and effect falls apart. Everything falls apart.

So they say, There has to be something. Please give us just a little something to grasp onto, just a little ground under our feet. There has to be something coming from its side making it what it is, you know? Hinting at you so that then you can respond by labeling. Wouldn’t I think I’m starting to I think I understand, you know, because have to have First you have to have a concept.

So, like we were explaining earlier how our concepts work. You have to have A cup is something of a certain size that has a bottom that has a this and then that. And so you create this concept and bottom is a concept and a certain size is a concept, but it’s it’s a concept of concepts. And then some kind of phenomenon comes along and it fits into that keyhole which makes it what it is, is that kind of Now that’s middle way consequence. Is it?

That’s middle way consequence school. We’re not quite there yet. We’re still Okay. This is slightly different. Very, very, very subtle.

They say that it’s inherently existent because there’s something existent in the object independent of my mental labeling that makes it the cup. And then I come along with my concepts and voila, one hundred percent cup. Fifty percent coming from the side of the object. I guess I’m not seeing how there’s a basis for that. Good.

You’re a middle way consequence person. Perfect. Right on. Good. And it’s subtle.

It’s so subtle. And we’ll get to middle way consequence in the middle. So subtle, the difference between that and middle way consequence. Because it’s just saying, without there being something from its own side making it what it is, you could say anything could be anything. In the middle way consequence, people say there is nothing at all from its own side that makes this a cup.

And that gets interesting, and we’ll get there. Okay? So nothing whatsoever, not one iota of inherent existence, say the middle way consequence people. I wanna know the basis for for this school’s view. I wanna understand why they say that because I don’t yet.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, they’re just saying that because otherwise they say you fall into the extreme of nihilism. They’re saying the middle way consequence people fall into nihilism because by saying there’s not one iota of inherent existence in that cup, why couldn’t you say, say middle way autonomy people, that anything could be anything? Okay?

So they’re saying there has to be something from the side of that object that makes it what it is. There has to be. Otherwise, how could you posit any kind of conventional reality at all? If it’s only dependent on mental labeling, how could you posit anything that we can agree on? And we’re going to go into how the Middle Way Consequence School says that things do validly exist.

And then it’ll maybe be more clear what the subtle difference is. Okay? So we get that way. There’s a really fat book called the Svatāntrika Prāsaṇgika Distinction by one of these people I’ve forgotten now. It’s not Guy Newland.

It’s somebody else. Fat book that talks about the very, very subtle differences between these two schools. But the basis is they’re saying has to come from its own. Things have to be inherently existent. They have to be what they are from their own side.

And then you label it. And that’s fine. But if it weren’t like that, anything could be anything. And we’d just be all completely psychotic, labeling, trying to make phone calls with bananas or whatever, just thinking that anything was anything. And then cause and effect would fall apart.

So their argument with the middle way consequence people is, if you guys are right, there’s no basis for cause and effect. But the middle way consequence people have their view of how things do validly exist. Okay? And specific sutras and texts that the Middle Way Autonomy School is based on. And you can get into that further in your further study.

There was somebody else. Yeah. I was just wondering why then is the Middle Way Autonomy School considered one of the higher schools with selflessness a phenomenon. So there must be in their view that even though there is this hint of something there that there is selflessness of that object. But I can’t quite see where that is.

Yeah. It’s not the complete selflessness that the middle way consequence school. We’re brainwashed because most of our teachings in Tibetan Buddhism come from this school. So everything seems like reification to us, doesn’t it? Because we’re very brainwashed by the lam rim, which presents things from the middle way consequence school.

Because so we go, well, wait a minute. That really feels like inherent existence to me. And they’d say, yeah. It is. But what it is is you’re saying that at least it depends on your consciousness doing the labeling.

Right? At least here, it depends on the phenomena arising from the same karmic seed. So you can see how at least there’s some engagement in co creating reality. It’s not just coming at you one hundred percent without your perception playing a role at all. This is saying the way your mind plays a role is that your perception the object came from the same karmic seat.

This is the way your mind is playing a role is meeting the object fiftyfifty, hinting at what it is, but then your mind has to meet it halfway for it to exist the way it is. Both of those are tearing holes in way back pre Vaibhāṣika. Here I am randomly moving through life, a helpless victim. Everything’s happening to me. I’m so solid.

I can’t change. It’s all coming at me. So even that is really but we’ve been totally brainwashed by the Middle Way Consequence School already. And we think that’s really inherently existed. It is.

It is compared to the view that there’s not one iota of anything existing from its own side at all. But you can see how, like when I got here, I go, oh, that’s what I think. That’s when I made my confession to Venerable Renee. Oh, wow. I’m a middle way autonomy person.

He says, very good. That’s great. Go ahead and practice there because it’s better than way back yonder where we usually are, not even on any rung of the ladder at all. We’re standing on solid ground and everything’s so concrete. He says, great.

Hang out there for a while and work on your view. Because I was saying, but anything could be anything. And he goes, that’s why this is not Svatāntrika. Half of it has to come from its own side. But we’ve been completely brainwashed because that seems really wrong.

It seems very eternalist to us. Was there somebody over there? Something else? Did you have something, Rose? Yeah.

I get stuck also because I think as soon as I label something, so there is a concept behind, there is already conceptualized and It comes from me so I think I’m more in this mind only state. Yeah, yeah. As, you know, how do they Is Is there a possibility to meet some things which is not labeled yet? Okay, we’ll go through that process when we get to the middle way consequence, of how the whole thing works, that we label something and that it validly exists. We’ll go through that.

Yeah, yeah. Anything else on middle way autonomy? Okay. I think, Jacob, to study more of the To get that book Appearance in Reality, which goes into it in a lot more detail of where that comes from. But the short answer, in the time that we have left this afternoon, is to refute the middle way consequentialists.

They think that the conclusion would be anything could be anything. There’s gotta be something coming from its own side. Okay? And Bhāvaviveka, there were these five great disciples of Ārya Nāgārjuna, including Bhāvaviveka, who was the originator of the texts upon which the Middle Way Autonomy School is based. Some of the other and they were all disciples of Aryanagarajuna.

And then Buddhapālita and Candrakīrti refuted Bhāvaviveka. And these were the main people who were arguing about this. Bhava Vivekananda holding the Middle Way Autonomy School tenets, and Buddhapālita and Candrakīrti, especially, of the Middle Way consequence, all of whom were disciples of Aryanagarajuna. So Aryanagarajuna taught them, and even they came up with different ideas. So this you can read in some of the references about what the subtle arguments are between.

And both of them thought they held the highest view. Bhāvaviveka was convinced that he held the highest view taught to him by Aryanagarajuna, and Buddhapālita was too. So it’s interesting when you get into the original thing that gave rise to these views and the arguments there. Okay. Okay.

So then here we are, middle way consequence. Oh, by the way, the Svatāntrika school, what do they say the illustration of the person is? How does the self exist according to them? They say that it’s the consciousness aggregate. And this gets back to what Chris was saying last night.

Isn’t the consciousness the self? Because that’s what goes from life to life. And it’s very convincing. Even all the way up to Middle Way Autonomy School, they’re saying, yeah, that’s the self, the mental consciousness aggregate. That’s what goes from life to life.

That’s what carries the karmic imprints. Yeah, that’s what the self is. The self isn’t all these other ones, that unitary, partless one. It’s not that substantially self existent one, But it is the mental consciousness aggregates. That’s what the self is.

Okay. So now, here we go. Middleway Consequence School says there’s not even one iota of self existence in anything. Everything is merely labeled by mind, in dependence on a valid basis of imputation. So not one iota of cup ness.

This cup is not hinting to me. Look at me. Don’t I kind of look like a cup? Wouldn’t you love to label me a cup? Wouldn’t you love to think about me as a cup?

Aren’t I cuppish? What happens in the middle way consequence school is I have a concept. My concept is a generic image, a dönchi in Tibetan. Generic image, meaning generality, universal. These are some of the ways that this word dun chi is translated.

So I’m walking around with a mind full of generic images, concepts. Floating around in there is a concept of cup. I meet a cylinder with a bottom and a handle that’s small enough and big enough within a certain range of size that I can hold it with an open top that I can drink liquid out of. I meet up with this raw data in my world somewhere. My mental image of cup gets triggered by that raw data.

So I label this innocent little green cylinder. I label it cup. It wasn’t a cup until I came along and labeled it cup. It was just a little green cylinder with a bottom and an open top holding some tea. It wasn’t green a cylinder either.

Yeah, it wasn’t green or a cylinder either. And there’s levels to that. Hang on. Wait, wait, wait. Okay.

So I come along. So this green cylinder, which isn’t green or a cylinder, there’s the layers of the onion. You keep going down. But on the grossest level, it’s a green cylinder with an open top. I have a concept cup.

This appears in my visual field. I lay the label cup on it. I lay my trip on it. No problem so far. Okay.

But what happens is it looks like it’s a cup there. I walk into this room and Janet very kindly brought my cup, my cup, the green cylinder, down from my room and put it on my table. And so I walk in the room and I go, oh, good. My cup of tea is on the table. And I see it coming from its own side.

I don’t say, oh, I just come in here, and all that’s here is colors and shapes. And I label cup. I label table. I label clock. I label Tonka.

I label Judith. I label Janet. I create this room with all of you in it, with the tankas, with everything in it, by my process of mental labeling. But it doesn’t seem like that to me at all. It seems like you’re all sitting here as who you are and how I perceive you when I walk in the door.

And it’s just me labeling. All that exists in here is colors and shapes. And then I lay all of my concepts onto those colors and shapes and create this room full of people that I recognize and objects that I’m familiar with. And that’s how I create my reality. So middle way consequent school says, Yes, there are external objects, but they’re not what they are until my mind comes along and labels them.

And there was nothing from its side that hinted to me what it was. Not one iota of inherent existence. There’s nothing about this that’s a cup from its own side, not even a shred or a particle that’s a cup from its own side. It’s just an innocent cylinder. It matches up with some concept I have in my head, and then I label that onto the external object.

And that’s what I’m doing with everything. So everything is just merely labeled on the basis of being a valid object. Okay, a valid basis. And we’re going to talk about what makes it valid in just a minute. I exist that way, too.

What’s going on with me? Body and mind, five aggregates, constantly changing, just this collection. By the way, the reason it’s called aggregates, sometimes translated as heaps, is because it’s this whole bundle of stuff. Each one of those five things isn’t one discrete thing. Form, aggregate, whole bundle, molecules, cells, subatomic particles that I call form.

Consciousness, a whole bunch of different kinds of sense consciousness and mental consciousness. So I’ve got these five piles. And actually, when the Buddha taught the sūtra where he explained the five aggregates, he was sitting on the ground in northern India, made five piles of rice in front of him, pointed, form, feeling, discrimination, compositional factors, consciousness. So five literal piles and bundles of stuff. So I’ve got that going on.

And then on top of that, what do I do? I have a concept, Tens and Choki, that I label on top of those five aggregates. There’s no Tensinchoky findable in there anywhere. She’s not even here. She’s nowhere.

Apart from being just a concept, a mental imputation laid on a valid basis of functioning body and mind. And according to Middle Way Consequence School, that’s how the self exists. It’s not the mental consciousness. It’s not any of those other things the other school exists. They call it the mere eye.

What’s the mere eye? That which is merely labeled in dependence on the aggregates. That’s how the self exists, according to Middle Way Consequence School. It is nowhere findable as one of the aggregates within the aggregates or even the whole thing together, independent of that process of mental labeling. So it’s extremely subtle.

And Lama Zopa Rinpoche says, The way the self does exist, really, really subtle. Just a concept laid on the five aggregates. And that’s called the mere eye. Okay? So very, very subtle.

But you can see how, especially of these schools, we’ve gotten closer and closer and closer, haven’t we? Our mental labeling plays more and more of a role. The higher we get intel here, it’s everything. Creates our reality completely. Okay.

So before we get into what the valid basis is for the mental labeling, any questions about that? Have I lost everybody completely? Or you’re just like, Circuit’s blown? Yeah, Rose. Could we say that all the schools without the last one are dualistic schools?

You could use that language. Yeah. You could use that language if you mean I mean, there’s a lot of different ways that the word dualistic can be used. So maybe define what you mean by by dualistic. Because they see everything as composed.

For example, there is me and there is the cup. Yeah. There’s always Duality? There is duality in it. Yeah.

And then in the last one, they neglect, they say, no, there is There is not even some things which can be other than the self or other than publicity But they do say there’s external objects. So we have to be really careful about this word dualistic because it has so many different meanings. So we have to be a little bit careful because this school says, yes, there are external objects. No problem. It’s not just consciousness.

It’s not just that thing that everything is just a hallucination. I’m walking around in my own private hallucination. There are external objects, but then those objects becoming what they are is completely dependent on the process of labeling. Okay. One cannot say that there is no self in the cup and no in the person.

Well, okay. Selflessness refers to both phenomena and people. So, yeah. Oh, by the way, that’s a good point. According to this school, there’s no difference in subtlety between the selflessness of persons and the selflessness of phenomena.

All the other schools differentiate between the selflessness of persons and the selflessness of phenomena. This school says it’s just the same for Tensen Choki. It’s just the same for the cup. Same level of subtlety. There’s no difference at all between the subtlety.

So in that way, that school does say, not only is there one iota of cupness in this green cylinder, there’s not one iota of tens and chokiness in Tenzin Chökyi at all. And everything is exactly the same. The other ones differentiate slightly between the selflessness of persons and the selflessness of phenomena. Okay? Yeah, Morgan.

And then Ty. So what is it specifically that when you talk about the label of the mirror eye and seeing that the aggregates are, it’s obviously seeing that the eye and kind of using your heaps Mhmm. Is associated with the aggregates. Mhmm. But then when you say, you know, we’re the giant label maker, we go around and label, label, label.

Yeah. But then when you took a step just there, maybe I didn’t understand it as you took a step that said, the mere eye is labeled based off of the aggregates. But what I’m going to also say is that the aggregates are not permanent. They’re also empty. So what is doing the labeling in the end?

Or is that so like the labeling of the eye right now? Does it do? Does that make sense? The question? Yeah, so it’s just a concept.

It’s just an idea, right? So the mere I is the concept of self that is labeled on the basis of the aggregates, okay, by consciousness. You know, it’s just the consciousness doing that. It’s just another thought. Remember we said there’s six consciousnesses and the sixth one is mental consciousness.

The object of that consciousness is thought, So the mirror eye is just another concept, just another mental imputation. This time, instead having the concept cup on the basis of green cylinder with the bottom and the handle, I have the concept tendon chokey based on the five aggregates. Okay? So that’s the way that self exists according to the Middle Way Consequence School is only that which is merely labeled in dependence on the five aggregates. So now going back to one of your points, and I forget what school it is that kind of has this karmic seed bucket.

And this one runs around. What is the perception of, know, obviously getting the mirror eye and the concept of that, but where where does that Where does that come from in the beginning? Where does that come in how would the Prasangita school where do they say that karma sits then? It’s like, well, this is a label. Right?

You know, I’m labeling this existing. Oh, that’s the root ignorance. That’s the root ignorance. I mean, that’s the ignorance that, you know, is at the top of all of those flowcharts that lead to suffering. You know, that’s the root ignorance of how things our misapprehension of how things exist.

And the very root one is ignorance about how the self exists and think that we exist in some way other than that. I mean, have you ever thought, oh, Morgan is only merely labeled on the ever changing continuum of mind and body moments of Morgan. No. I’m Morgan. You’ve got something mean, sorry.

But you’ve got something inside. It’s way more solid than that. Your inherent view of Morgan is not, oh, that which is just merely labeled in dependence on an ever changing continuum of mind and body. There’s something more solid, probably one of those previous ones, probably the little driver one in there somewhere. So there’s so much space in thinking, wow, the only way that I exist is constantly changing continuum.

Moment to moment to moment changing and permanent continuum. Then on top of that, I just have this idea labeled on top of that constantly changing continuum. And that’s the way the self does exist. So the Madhya Mika Prasangikas say, yes, the self exists. Morgan is sitting on the cushion.

No problem. But how does Morgan exist as that which is merely labeled, just a mere concept on top of this ever changing continuum? How does that help you? We carry around this baggage, right? Something that happened when you were six years old, right?

You’d completely think that that’s who you still are. Solid, concrete. If we got momentary labeling process on this ever changing continuum. I mentioned before I work with these inmates. One of the things I try and do with them more than anything is get them to drop this concrete view of who they are.

They did something when they were eighteen years old. They have a life sentence in prison. They have so much guilt. They have such a concrete view. They’ve been told usually their whole life, because they didn’t end up there because their childhood was rosy either.

So usually their whole life, they’ve been told they were worthless, they could amount to nothing, they were stupid, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. It’s monolithic for them, this concrete view. And what I try and do so much for them, and it’s just an extreme of how we all are, is break that apart. Look, yeah, you did this thing. Yes, you feel bad.

It’s not who you are. You’ve changed so much. I try and mirror for them how much I see them change. One of them wrote me a letter recently, and he goes, Oh, thank you so much for driving three hours to see us and finding us worthwhile. I’m like, Are you kidding?

They have this terrible because they’re dragging around this baggage in this self-concept based on some story. So historical. So historical. It’s like if we could just see where we are in the moment. But it’s so concrete and monolithic for most of us.

There’s this program that I’ve been investigating. I’m going to New Zealand for two months, and they want me to work with substance abusers. It’s a big problem in the community where I’m going to be going in substance abuse. So I’ve been trying to investigate different ways from a Buddhist framework to work. And there’s something that a friend of mine told me about developed by two psychologists at Yale called spiritual self schema therapy.

And it’s all about changing the label. And they say as long as people label themselves addict, they can never really go into permanent recovery because they have this huge label, addict. And they gave people it’s this whole program. It’s so fascinating. They give people, substance abusers, a questionnaire.

And they say, mark the characteristics of addicts and the characteristic of spiritual people. And then they work with trying to get the people to change the label because they found as long as there’s a solid label addict, there’s no way. But if they can label themselves spiritual seeker, the whole concept changes. So there’s so many applications to this. All we are is labeling in dependence on an ever changing continuum.

And that’s how things exist, according to Mādhyamika Prāsaṇgika. Yeah, Janet. I just wanted to say that that statement that you made about changing the labels or changing your, basically, your mind really, really does work because, I mean, being having been addicted to cigarettes, which was the hardest thing ever to for me to give up. We did a self hedonists video. It was a long time before I did Buddhism.

But one of the thoughts that I found the most helpful out of the five or six little thoughts that they gave us was I’m a nonsmoker. And Yeah. That made it so much easier because even when I thought about picking up a cigarette, if I thought, well, I’m a nonsmoker, why would I wanna smoke? Yeah. Yeah.

Instead of because if I thought of myself as a smoker or, say, an addict trying to quit, then I’d always be that addict. Yeah. Right. Right. Right.

So so you know? And I can see how it works. And we use it in Buddhism and the tantras and that kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah.

You know? Hey. You changed the label radically without changing. Yeah. I mean, we create our reality by our labels, and we can use it to our advantage.

It doesn’t just need to imprison us in saṃsāra. Like, let’s try using it. And the thing is, Okay, at the level that we are, I have human being karma. It doesn’t matter how much I try and convince myself this is nectar. It’s still going to be tea for me.

But if I really clean up my act and start practicing properly, my karma will force me to experience this is nectar. So in the beginning, we work at fooling ourselves a little bit. But this isn’t just some like, Remember in the ’80s affirmations, and he wrote these things on Post its and stuck them to your mirror? I am rich. I am good looking.

I am whatever. Well, cause and effect still works. No amount of just trying to talk yourself into something will make this be experienced as nectar. And this is where karma and emptiness work together because it’s not self existently tea. It’s only tea because I’m a human being with that karma and I put that label on that liquid that’s forced on me by my karma as a human being.

It could be a lot worse. It could be pus and blood. Thank goodness it’s not. But it could be a lot better too. Right?

So what should I do if I want to experience this as nectar? Really be careful about my morality. Keep my vows. Treat people really well. And then my karma will force me to experience this as nectar because it’s empty of inherent existence.

Empty of inherent existence. The only thing that’s there is a liquid I can label it. Not anything I want to fool myself in some kind of affirmation kind of way, but I could create the karma to be born into a realm in which I experience the same liquid as nectar. But we start where we are. We start where we are, knowing that our karma is forcing us to have a certain label of reality.

But there’s a certain amount of subjectivity. It’s not infinite for us yet, but there’s a certain amount of subjectivity. Okay? So we can work with it. Yeah.

I’m a little more comfortable with this concept of self and trying to challenge that it’s this concrete notion. And to me that also ties in with a lot of thoughts of identity and persona. And that it’s I think it’s a little easier for me to think of it that way if you accept reincarnation and the thought of karma and your subtlest mind that right now there’s this persona that I’m living in made up of the five aggregates. But I’m wondering a little bit more about how we got this way. If it’s true that the middle way consequence school, that that’s how reality really is, why do so many of us, and I don’t even mean just in this culture and I mean throughout history, that we’ve gotten so attached to this notion of an I that we have to protect and that we have to promote.

So if that’s the nature of reality, then why do so many of us still kind of get bogged down into this concrete notion Yeah. Of an I, and especially the part where, you know, you have to protect and promote it. Right. Right. And, actually, Morgan asked this question last night.

How did it all begin? You know, where did this innate ignorance begin? And this is one of the questions that Lord Buddha refused to answer. What’s the beginning to ignorance? The fact is, the reality is, unless we’re an ārya being who’s had a direct realization of emptiness and the direct realization of the nature of reality, this is where we’re all coming from.

Any non Ārya, which is probably most of the people on the planet and, by the way, most of the other realm beings, animals, and all of the other realms have this innate wrong view, this innate ignorance, thinking that the I exists in a way other than any of these ways. We’re way back pre Vaibhāṣika, It’s completely concrete, not at all dependent on mind, on any level of this kind of labeling at all. And how did we get messed up in the first place? That’s one of those things the Buddha doesn’t talk about. Consciousness is beginningless.

Did it start out ignorant or not? This is one of those questions that gets asked in the sutras, and the Buddha refused to answer. And the reason he refused to answer was because it would lead to more misunderstanding for us. So he just decided not to answer. Because with our consciousness the way that it is, it would just mess us up even more.

It would just create even more confusion for us. The fact is that we do have this innate ignorance. And by learning and by meditating and by trying to break it down, we can start to rip that innate ignorance apart. But it’s not just us sitting in this room. It’s every being who’s not an ārya being on either the individual liberation track or the mayana track has this root ignorance, which is the cause, by the way, of every iota of suffering that we’ve ever experienced since beginningless time.

So I personally am really fed up with it, and I really want to get rid of it in this lifetime if possible. Because it’s the source of every iota of suffering that we’ve ever had. That’s the root. And you were talking about how the middle way autonomy school, that they think it’s maybe fiftyfifty. Yeah.

That there’s some inherent cupness coming out of that. Yeah. And do they mean more than shape that we’ve attached a certain meaning to or that culturally we use an object in a certain way? They mean there’s more than That’s what middle way consequence would say. Yeah, there’s a consensus.

You know, in our culture, cylindrical objects with handles, and this is like twenty first century Western culture. You know, an Inuit in Greenland, I don’t know what they drink out of, but it probably doesn’t look anything like this. So they may not label this cup. But for us, so our reality is also very consensual. Valid labeling is very consensual.

So we would say, yes, in our culture, consensually, we call such an object a cup. And that’s what validly makes it a cup. And that’s a very middle way consequence school. The autonomy school, there’s more than that. There’s something coming from its own side that makes it that independent of consensus.

It’s very interesting. There’s this lama, Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, this young, completely brilliant lama who wrote this book called What Makes You Not a Buddhist? I recommend it to everybody. It’s so brilliant. When I read this book, none of it was new concepts, but the way he explains stuff just blew my mind.

It’s completely brilliant. When he talks about how things validly exist, and we’re jumping ahead to the next subject, but I love the way he talks about it because it’s kind of a new approach. He said, Things are validly what they are based on continuity, consensus, and function. Really interesting. He said that’s the way Nāgārjuna said something else.

We’ll get to what Nāgārjuna said in a minute. But Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche said, Continuity, consensus and function. So for this cup to validly be a cup, it has to have some continuity that I can even perceive it. Those subatomic particles that have a half life of eighty five micro nanoseconds or something. Those that don’t enter into my reality as an object to be perceived.

They give a little blip on one of those little bubble chamber things, but that has nothing to do with my reality. So there’s some continuity. This cup is changing moment to moment to moment to moment because of subtle impermanence. The molecules, the subatomic particles, it’s just this whirling, wild in motion. But it has some continuity to it.

Even though it’s changing moment to moment, there’s some continuity unlike some of those other things, like those subatomic particles. It also has a function of holding liquid that I can drink out of. And then due to consensus in twenty first century America, that’s what we call a cup. And that’s why I can validly call it a cup. Now, in twenty first century America, this is not a valid basis for the label cup.

It doesn’t have that function of being a cylindrical object from which I can drink liquid. And that’s why it’s not that everything can be everything, that you can just decide what to label things. Oh, I’ll call this a cup. Well, it’s not going to do me any good because it’s not going to hold liquid that I can drink out of. So in dependence on those criteria is how we can validly label something what it is.

But it doesn’t mean that it’s that from its own side at all. Even though I can validly call this a cup because of consensus, because of function, because of continuity, there’s not one iota of cupness here. And this is something you really have to work with in meditation. It seems baffling. You’re like, of course it’s a cup.

Don’t be ridiculous. You’ve been drinking out of it all day. And yeah, that’s true. But it’s only merely labeled on a valid basis of imputation. And the valid basis depends, as Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche would say, on continuity, consensus, and function.

And this is something you really have to work with in meditation over and over again. Yeah, Ty. Kind of backtracking here. Just for clarity, would you say that the difference then the only and the very subtle difference between Svatāntrika and Prāsaṇgika is that in Prāsaṇgika, the actual outside things in the actual outside world do not have characteristics? Whereas in Svatāntrika, they have some characteristics that you then impute more onto?

Well, have characteristics. They just don’t have characteristics making them what they are from their own side. This has the characteristic of being a cylinder. It has the characteristic of having a bottom and a top. But there’s nothing about those characteristics that makes it a cup from its own side, whereas the Svatantrikas would say, yeah, Those characteristics make it a cup.

And then my mind labels it a cup. And then that’s how the cup exists. Okay. Jacob and then Keith. But then if there were characteristics that existed inherently No.

I didn’t say that. It sounded like I didn’t say that. It sounded like you did. Nothing exists inherently. Not one iota of anything in the universe exists inherently.

You would never trick me into saying that. So then I’m confused by Ty’s question and your response to Ty’s question about characteristics. The difference between the and oh, sorry. The and the is that would say that there’s some kind of characteristics that exist on the side of the object that help That make them what it is. Yeah.

Yeah. But the prasangika has no there’s no cup there from its own side at all. No characteristics of a cup. No, no, no. It has characteristics, which enables me to label it because it makes it a valid basis of the label cup.

But there’s no cup. There’s no characteristic that makes it a cup from its side. Or a cylinder or green. Would that be Okay. So let’s go down one level.

Okay. What makes this I say that, you know, on the grossest level, I label cup on the valid basis of green cylinder with a bottom and an open top. What makes me call this a cylinder? Oh, a kind of two dimensional thing curved in this certain way is a valid basis of my label cylinder. Okay?

So on every level, you can go down and down and down. What makes me call this a handle? Oh, a certain part of ceramic sticking out of the cylinder that I can put my fingers through is what I label handle. So no matter how far you go down on any of the characteristics, you can’t find it. Absolutely.

There’s nothing inherent. What’s an atom? Oh, it’s a concept I have about a certain kind of bundle of energy. You know, what’s a subatomic particle? Oh, it’s some concept I have.

You know, I mean, then it gets really sketchy. Right? Because it’s just some scientists, some physicists came up with an instrument that went blip. And I say, oh, electron. I don’t have a bloody clue.

It’s just something was measurable on some instrument invented by some scientist. And then I make up all kinds of concepts, I say, Oh, quarks, neutrinos. What’s happening? Blips recorded on some instrument. I don’t have a clue what’s going on at that level.

You make up theories on the basis of the data produced by some instrument. And math. Yeah, exactly. Right? So on every level, I mean, we’ll leave that to the side because that’s a whole But on every level, every level is merely labeled on the basis of a valid function.

So I call cylinder There’s a certain shape. Remember when you’re a little kid and you have these little tests before you can even read, and they’re like, what’s the triangle? What’s the cylinder? What’s the circle? What’s the square?

What are we doing? Learning all those concepts. We’re filling our mind with dönchis, with generic images, which enables me then to go, oh, cylinder. What’s a cylinder? Something I learned in kindergarten on the basis of a certain shape.

There’s no cylinder. What’s green? I learn the label green. What’s happening? A certain wavelength of light is being reflected from this object, and I think there’s green there.

What’s happening? Green is just some interaction between a certain wavelength of light and my eyeball and my visual cortex. There’s no green there. So on every level, we can break it down. But we don’t have to.

Even on the grossest level, you can see how we’re labeling on the basis of cylinder with a bottom. We label color. And you have to work on it in meditation. This is where it needs to go below the neck. It’s not so hard to understand this intellectually.

But on your meditation cushion, it goes below the neck. And you actually have a realization and you have some insight. Because it’s really easy, relatively, to understand, oh, yes, tenzotoki is merely labeled on the valid basis of a functioning human five aggregates. But what happens when somebody disses me? I still get pissed off.

Like, I’m sorry. Even though I understand that, I don’t have that realization yet. I had it that moment that the two people had a little the veil dropped for a minute. And I saw, wow, it’s just his karma. It’s just her karma.

Wow. But mostly, I’m like, no. How dare you? Because I have a terrible case of pride. So it hasn’t gone below the neck, even though I can explain this all day till the cows come home.

So that happens on the meditation cushion, that it actually changes the way that you relate to the world and cuts through your afflictions, which cuts through the root of cyclic existence, cyclic existence based on delusion and karma. And we’re going to jump to the twelve links as our little grand finale of how it all hangs together in a minute to show how we create our unenlightened existence and how this will help us. It’s not just some theory. But first, we’ll have Keith ask his question. I have a question.

No doubt to me that the presumptive consequence makes sense intellectually. You had mentioned I really like that, getting below the neck or sitting up. In trying to understand or realize emptiness, it somehow seems that it might be easier with the Chitta Mantra system to really understand emptiness below the neck because it just seems to fit more smoothly. Maybe I’m wrong on this. You really like that Chidamantra system.

I don’t know if I it or not because I haven’t realized emptiness with you know, but I think it’s fine to meditate on all of these levels until you get that realization. It will really help you cut through saṃsāra. So be my guest. If you get a direct realization of the selflessness based on the Chitta Mantra system, that will definitely really help you. I think the danger is in I mean, the danger, according to the Tibetans, would be don’t be fooled that that’s the ultimate view and then press on from there.

But I think, you know, doing Vipassana, Four Foundations of Mindfulness, go for it. Some of my students say, oh, want to go to Spirit Rock and do a ten day retreat. Is that okay? And I say, absolutely. Try for that direct realization of subtle selflessness.

It will really help cut through so I’m sorry. Just have an understanding of the different schools and don’t get confused about what selflessness is according to middle way consequence. I agree with that. It just seems that the purpose is to realize emptiness. And so it would seem maybe to do what resonates with a person, be it even whatever resonates at the time, to move with that rather than struggle with something that doesn’t really resonate with them yet.

Why I present all these and work your way up. Work your way up. And if you’re really resonating with mind only, go ahead and work there. But I would say from time to time, kind of bring out this view again and work with that. But for sure, work with mind only school view, it will help get you closer.

That’s why I present all of these. Because if we try and jump right to middle way consequence, we don’t know what the hell we’re doing, frankly. It’s like you have some idea, and you really don’t know. Whereas if you work your way up and we’ve seen how this subtler and subtler and subtler working your way up through the schools. Yeah, so by all means, I give you permission.

Was there something else? Somebody else over here? No. Okay. Okay, so how do things validly exist?

So middle way consequence has pulled the rug out from under us. And then it says, Okay, there is a way that things validly exist. Okay. Aryanagarajuna has three criteria. How do things validly exist?

As something that’s validly labeled on a basis of imputation so that anything can’t be anything. You can’t just decide what things are going to be and go around. Pretty soon, they’ll take you for psychiatric evaluation if you start trying to make phone calls with apples and things like that. Okay. Nāgārjuna’s three criteria.

The things are commonly accepted with respect to ordinary cognition. This is where consensus comes in. And it’s very cultural also. It’s very cultural, commonly accepted with respect to ordinary cognition. So those things that most twenty first century Americans call a cup is a valid cup.

Very consensual, very cultural, commonly accepted by valid cognition. Must not be repudiated by conventional cognition. And this eliminates things like hallucinations. The example they always give in the scripture is if you have jaundice and you’re seeing everything with this yellow tinge, you see a yellow snow mountain, right? This is ancient Tibet.

A mountain that’s really white you see is yellow because you have some kind of visual aberration. The other example they always give is cataracts. It looks like there’s hairs all in your food, falling kind of hairs because you have cataracts. Also, things like how it is when you’re sitting in a parking lot in your car and then suddenly it feels like you’re going forward and you slam on the brake and it’s just the person next to you started backing up. So it feels like you’re going forward, but you’re really not.

So this eliminates things like that. Any kind of hallucination, some aberration caused by some sickness, mental illness, for example, can cause us to have some view that’s repudiated by conventional cognition. Very democratic. Yeah, yeah, it is very democratic and very consensual and very cultural. So you can see, not very solid at all, is it?

Then what conventionally exists must not be repudiated by a reasoning that investigates ultimate reality. So what are we eliminating with this third one? What do you think? Janet, what do you think? Yeah.

And what else? What specific thing that doesn’t actually exist are we eliminating with this third one? What specific thing? Yeah. There’s one thing that doesn’t exist at all that we’re especially eliminating.

Oh, oh, the self. Yeah. You’re right. Inherent existence. Inherent the horns of a rabbit.

The horns of a rabbit. Yeah. What we’re repudiating with this third one is inherent existence, especially of the Yeah, exactly. Because the reasoning that investigates ultimate reality finds no such inherent existence. Okay, so now we’ve covered all the bases.

So what does validly exist? That which is accepted by ordinary cognition, that’s not a hallucination, and that doesn’t exist inherently. So fine. Cup, paper, table, Tins and Choki, no problem. As long as we don’t see it as inherently existent and as long as we’re not under the influence, we’re not tripping or have cataracts or having one of those things with the car backing up.

Yeah, Jennifer. So then according to our definition of that, how about other realms and other beings? If our ordinary cognition, conventional cognition doesn’t perceive them Specific to the realm. Just like twenty first century America. What a pretas see.

We don’t see what a humry ghost sees, but commonly accepted with respect to ordinary cognition of that being with that karma is a little disclaimer, a little footnote. We’re not being human chauvinists here. We’re not saying twenty first century humans have the only valid cognition and nobody else does. I was just going to mention that even in different time periods and different places on the planet in the human realm, There’s people who look at an infected wound and see bacteria. And others in a different time period, different place would see voodoo or Oh, totally, yeah.

Smear alarm or something. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And that would probably be commonly accepted with respect to ordinary cognition. But that’d be a difficult one because it seems like might be a hallucination too. Mm-mm.

Yeah, Yeah, so for us, for example, for ordinary twenty first century Americans, something that happened, we would attribute to scientific reductionism. Then you’ve got somebody who thinks it’s due to demons. Unless they’re a fundamentalist Christian in the South in which culture that might be acceptable, we might start to worry if they saw demons everywhere attacking them. Whereas for some cultures, of course, what else would it be? We don’t have microscopes.

Bacteria? Shmacteria. It’s got to be demons. So yeah, this is very So would demons validly exist in that place? Yes.

I mean, the perception of demons would be a valid cognition in that culture. It gets me Yeah, it’s very interesting. Ty. I’m going to go ahead and continue with his because Yeah, we’ve been going back and forth. So the fact of the matter is, however, that, you know, like a shaman would try to exorcise the demon.

Mhmm. Whereas, the that wouldn’t be the real In his reality, that would be Maybe I’m going, you know, what’s it? Instead of prasangika, I’m going svatantrika. But in his reality, it’s a valid cognition. Mhmm.

There is a demon. Mhmm. He’s exorcised the demon. The person dies. He would maybe think, oh, another demon or I failed.

Whereas a doctor could come against these people’s will and give them medical treatment and cure the disease, and they would not ever, they might even still believe, oh, that demon’s still there. It was never exercised. But the person nonetheless would become healthy. And maybe in their cognition possibly, they would think, well, that person looks healthy, but they must somehow not be. So they wouldn’t really be healthy.

But I feel like in the sense of when you mislabel something, which we all do all the time, but there’s a consensus of ignorance, which there is all the time, then there’s still some then your reality there’s a reality, and there’s your reality. And you live in reality, but your reality is different. I got lost some yeah. Well, just work with this. Work with this.

Because it’s true. Not everybody’s In terms of those subtle things, some people believe in things like spirit possession. Some people believe in viruses. Some people believe So this is very general. This is very general.

And there are going to be specific instances where even within a culture, not everybody’s ordinary cognition is going to coincide for certain levels like that. But just think of the gross level of cups, tables, human beings, cars. And then there are going to be things that are a little bit more touchy and will require a little bit more analysis before you can say, do they validly exist or not? But on the level of showing how this cup validly exists as a cup and not as a telephone according to these criteria. Most people in twenty first century America call this a cup.

It’s not repudiated by conventional cognition. And there’s nothing inherently existent about this. So it validly exists like that. And then there are these other more gray areas that we only have an hour to go, so we don’t really have time to go into all the gray areas. But you get the point of how things and you can see how much it’s that, which is why I like Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche’s thing.

I really like that. Consensus, function, and continuity is how things I like that. I like those three criteria. I’m not sure what the scripture We should have Jack ask him, cause Jack’s with him this weekend. We should have him ask, cause I really like that.

Cause I think it helps us understand more how the valid labeling process works. Okay. Yeah, Morgan. Just a quick stupid question is, so I don’t believe that you have stupid questions, Morgan. You completely eliminated that.

So in regards to the label, and not going down the road that things have some existence and it’s kind of the fiftyfifty match, what is the argument in terms of as things come into existence through dependent arising of thought? An example is is we have a concept, you have form. Someone came up with a concept and was scooping water before there was a cut with their hand or with a leaf or something. Yeah. Where does because you said we have this kinda, I’m just gonna say, a hard drive with all this data.

Yeah. Yeah. So are you basically saying that this hard drive just has infinite kind of information once and then at some point someone associates it with the label. Example going to Ty’s questions, like someone came up with a concept of a demon or whatever, and then someone told that story and then that’s kind of just ignorance So what is that? What would they say the concept is there was no cup?

There’s no existence of cup. No one’s seen a cup before. Where does that sit? Things do come into existence, but then we go down one level. And I’ll give you an example from my own experience of this thing that happened.

I’ll never forget because it was so interesting how my mind was scrambling to find a label. I remember walking in this is vajrapani Institute, nineteen ninety three. I walk into the dining room, and a friend of mine is walking towards me holding an object in her hand. I saw the basis, purple of glistening. My mind is scrambling.

I remember clearly I’m trying to label. I’m frantically because I have no label for this object that she’s holding in her hand. And I remember this sort of micro satikin of my mind desperately scrambling to label the object. It turned out it was this big purple plum that she’d taken a bite out of. So she’s hiding the shape of the plum in her hand, and all I’m seeing is the bitten opening that’s like kind of this shiny purple glistening thing.

And I didn’t perceive Plum because she’s holding it in a way that I couldn’t see the shape or the skin. My mind is like, but I still saw purple. I still saw it glistening. I still saw it as inherently existent, even though I didn’t have a label for what the object was. And then a second later, she moved her hand, I saw it’s a plum.

And then my mind labeled plum. But even before my mind labeled plum, it was like the level of cylinder. My mind was labeling purple, glistening, solid, inherently existent object. And then on top of all of our labeling, we always have the appearance of inherent existence on top of that, that root thing that is coming from its own side. I wasn’t thinking then, oh, the only reason I’m perceiving purple is because some wavelength of light is being reflected in this certain way.

I saw it as an inherently existent purple glistening object. But I noticed my mind desperately trying to scramble to label it. At some point in history, there weren’t cups. People took a little piece of bark with a certain shape. But even for that, they had the label receptacle from which I drink.

And then it evolved in all of that. And that happens. Computers, they didn’t exist when I was a little kid, and now they exist. So we have a mental image laptop computer, which we all have, which none of us had fifty, even forty, maybe even thirty years ago. I can’t remember, a while back.

So things can come into existence. But the fact is we strip it down one label. Even if you don’t know what a laptop computer is, large black plastic rectangle. So it’s like that. And then our minds get more and more full of labels.

Because babies, babies don’t have the labels for anything, but they’re still perceiving everything as inherently existent anyway. It’s not like there’s this New Age thing. Oh, babies are enlightened, and then they get messed up. But according to Buddhism, no. They come into this life with inherent wrong view.

So they’re still perceiving. They don’t know what anything is yet. They don’t have a mind full of those concepts. But because of imprints of ignorance from past lives, they’re still perceiving it as inherently existent. Judith, did you have The baby thing?

Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. So they still have these imprints from beginning of those past lives of seeing things as inherently existent, even before they have animals.

Animals don’t have language, so it’s not dependent on language. It’s dependent on conceptual thought. So even animals have concepts of things, even though they might not have language and labels the way that we We just make things a lot more complicated. Our level of how things inherently exist is sort of complicated by language. And then we get into trouble.

I’m feeling like we should maybe take a break. Everybody’s starting to go into a fade. And then what I want to do is we had said we’d end at four. If we go over fifteen minutes so I can do the twelve links, would people be upset with me? Judith’s giving a thumbs up.

Okay. And Ty came back today just because I promised him we’d do the twelve links. And I’ve been leading him on, and we haven’t done it yet. So I promised. Okay.

So let’s take about a ten minute break. What we’ll do, we’ll come back and do a meditation on the emptiness of the five aggregates and the self to show you how we do that within the context of the Heart Sūtra. And then we’ll finish up with the twelve links to show how everything ties together. Okay. Thank you.

You’re a great group. I wish we had all weekend. Just keep going. So don’t pay attention to this yet. This is next.

We’re gonna meditate first, then we’re gonna do the grand finale. Okay. So what I wanted to do is a meditation on the emptiness of the five aggregates and the emptiness of the self. And this is a way that we can work with this subtle Mādhyamika Prāsaṇgika view of the self existing as that which is merely labeled in dependence on the aggregates. And at one point, I was doing a long meditation retreat, and I met with Lama Zopa Rinpoche.

It’s actually when he gave me my preliminary vows and gave me permission to wear robes and have the appearance of a nun, which is about a year before I went and had novice ordination with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. It’s a ceremony that you go through called the hair cutting. Your mom went through this ceremony where you actually enter the homeless life. You become renunciate, but you don’t have all the formal vows. So that took about five minutes.

And then he spent about three hours telling me how to meditate in this long retreat that I was in, which was great. And one of the practices he gave me was two hundred recitations of the Heart Sūtra with meditation on the emptiness of the self and the five aggregates. And like I mentioned before, found this is a really powerful part of this long retreat that I did, this practice on the five aggregates. Also, recently I just taught a course on the Heart Sūtra at Land of Medicine Buddha that was a lot of fun. And the way the commentaries on the Heart Sūtra explain that meditation on the emptiness of the thank you, Janet.

Meditation on the emptiness of the five aggregates is the main meditation for people leading up to the direct realization of emptiness. So the path of accumulation, the path of preparation, for those of you that have studied the five paths. It’s the main meditation that will give you insight into the selflessness of persons according to the Madhya Mika Prāsaṇgika view. So I thought it would be a good one to introduce you to. So what I thought to do to give you the context is just read through the Heart Sūtra.

You don’t have to read. If you want to just listen to me read it, and I’ll get up to the point where you do the meditation on the five aggregates. And then we’ll just pause there, and I’ll guide you through the meditation. And we’ll do that for maybe twenty minutes, half an hour, and then we’ll just finish with a quick introduction to the twelve links of dependent origination. Okay?

So let’s first just focus on our breath for a minute or two. Get in your meditation posture with your back straight. Chris, do you want to maybe close the doors just so there won’t be the noise of people in the bookstore? Okay. So just focus on your breath, the sensation of the air going in and out of your nostrils or your chest rising and falling.

Thus did I hear at one time, the Bhagavan was dwelling on massive vultures mountain in Rajagriha together with a great community of monks and a great community of Bodhisattvas. At that time, the Bhagavan was absorbed in the concentration on the categories of phenomena called profound perception. Also at that time, the bodhisattva, MaLhasattva, Ārya, Avalokiteśvara looked upon the very practice of the profound perfection of wisdom and beheld those five aggregates also as empty of inherent nature. Then through the power of Buddha, the Venerable Shariputratra said this to the bodhisattva, MaLhasattva, Ārya, Avalokiteśvara, How should any son of the lineage train who wishes to practice the activity of the profound perfection of wisdom? He said that, and the Bodhisattva, MaLhasattva, Ārya Avalokiteśvara said this to the Venerable Shariputratra.

Śāriputra, any son of the lineage or daughter of the lineage who wishes to practice the activity of the profound perfection of wisdom should look upon it like this, correctly and repeatedly beholding those five aggregates also as empty of inherent nature. Form is empty. Emptiness is form. Emptiness is not other than form. Form is also not other than emptiness.

In the same way, feeling, discrimination, compositional factors, and consciousness are empty. So let’s focus first on the form aggregate. So think of your body, what is sitting on this cushion, what we are. So what is it that we call form? What is it that we identify as form?

So feel your body, the physical part of you. This is form your physical substance, your body. And let’s analyze the three levels of dependent origination of form. So first of all, form is dependent on causes and conditions. Your physical body is a result of originally the substances of your parents, the sperm and egg, genetic material from your parents as a material cause, all the food that you’ve eaten, the nutrition first that you received from your mother in the womb, all the food that you’ve eaten that’s been metabolized and have gone to form your tissues, your bones, your organs.

And then moment to moment, your body is constantly changing constantly the causes of the air that you breathe, the food that you eat changing into the substances of your body. So meditate first on the fact that your body is a result of causes and conditions. The air you breathe, the planet being the right temperature to support life, the sleep you get, all of the things that go into being able to have a healthy, functioning human body. And your body is also composed of parts, the second level of dependent origination, what we call my body. It’s composed of the head, the torso, the arms, the legs.

Each of those parts are also composed of parts down to the molecules, atoms, subatomic particles. So what we label my body isn’t inherently existent, isn’t existent except dependent upon its parts that all fit together and form the valid basis of the label my body. And then on an even subtler level, what I call my body is just a concept, a mere label on the physical matter of my body, the different parts of the body. I have a concept of human body, my body. It’s just a label, a concept that I impute on the valid basis of the parts of the body, the substance of the body.

So my body exists as nothing other than a conceptual imputation on the basis of validly functioning parts, the physical matter of my body. So my body’s emptiness is the fact that it’s devoid of existing as anything other than that which is merely labeled, in dependence on the valid physical substance, the valid parts, that which is merely labeled in dependence on the parts of the body. And then, because I have a functioning body, I have sense consciousnesses, the sense organs and the parts of the brain that relate to those sense organs that allow me to have a sense perception. So when one of those sense organs comes into contact with an object, a sense perception arises. And then the mental function of discernment kicks in.

Let’s say I have a visual sense perception, and I immediately label blue, red, green, person, dog, chocolate cake, hamburger, Music, traffic noise, birds singing. I discern. First comes the raw sense perception, the raw data, and then I label with my discernment. That discernment is dependent on a sense object and my sense consciousness coming into contact with that object. So it arises as a result of the causes and conditions of the object, my ability to perceive the object, and then coming into contact with that object.

I have a sense perception which then immediately thereafter gives rise to discernment. Sometimes this aggregate is called recognition. Recognition. Because I know what objects are. I recognize them.

So we can see how that discernment is dependent on the factors that give rise to sense contact. And then it follows right after the raw sense contact. So those are the components of my mind’s function of discernment. And just the fact that I label that ability of my mind discernment is mental labeling. I single out that one factor of my mind, that one ability of my mind to differentiate between sense objects.

And then I conceptualize that as discernment. I label that. So in that way, discernment is nothing other than that which is merely labeled in dependence on the function of being able to differentiate between objects. That’s what I label discernment, my mind’s ability to perform that function. And then I have feeling.

As a result of sense contact, I have the mental factor of feeling, either pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. So feeling arises in dependence on the sense contact, and then the discernment of the object, I label that object friend, enemy, something that gives me pleasure, something that makes me unhappy. So on the basis of all of those factors arises a feeling of pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. And then that function of the mind, that factor of feeling pleasant, unpleasant or neutral, that function or factor, that one out of the fifty one that singled out, I differentiate and label that feeling, the aggregate of feeling. I single that out, that aspect of my mind, that function of my mind, and I label it feeling.

So it exists as nothing other than that which is merely labeled by my mind on dependence in dependence on that mental function. And then compositional factors, the other forty nine mental factors. All of them, just like feeling in discernment that have been pulled out and given their own category, all of them are just ways of conceptualizing different functions of mind. We have factors such as intention, attention, the different delusions like pride, jealousy, resentment, different wholesome mental factors like compassion, non attachment, non aversion. And all of these are just concepts.

We label on the basis of certain mental events. We differentiate and give them the label, mental factors. And then this whole heap of forty nine other mental factors we call compositional factors. So our mind is just merely creating this labeled category. And each item in the category is merely labeled on the basis of some sort of mental event.

So these give flavor to our experience. We have the raw sense data giving rise to a raw feeling of pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. And then following on that are these other secondary mental events that sort of give the flavor to our experience. And these are called the compositional factors, and they’re very just merely labeled on the basis of those mental functions, those flavors of our experience. And then we have the consciousness itself, which is where we started, the raw sense consciousness dependent on an object.

So it arises in dependence on a sense object. Then in coming into contact with that object, the consciousness arises. And then we label consciousness on the basis of that awareness. In Tibetan, one of the names for consciousness or mind is yul chen, object holder. So consciousness is defined as that which has an object, that’s which holds an object.

So it doesn’t exist independent of holding an object. It’s merely labeled in dependence on that function of mind to be the object holder. So the self is that which is merely labeled in dependence on these five aggregates, which are in turn empty of inherent existence. So the self is merely labeled on the basis of the component aggregates. And each of these component aggregates in themselves are merely labeled on the basis of some function of body and mind.

And that’s how the self exists. Very, very subtle is that which is merely labeled in dependence on the aggregates. There’s no other self there, no inherently existent self. It’s just that which is merely labeled, conceptually imputed on the basis of these empty aggregates. Just meditate on that for a few minutes.

Shariputratra, likewise, all phenomena are emptiness without characteristic, unproduced, unceased, stainless, not without stain, not deficient, not fulfilled. Shariputratra, therefore, in emptiness, there is no form, no feeling, no discrimination, no compositional factors, no consciousness, no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind, no visual form, no sound, no odor, no taste, no object of touch, and no phenomenon. There is no I element and so on, up to and including no mind element and no mental consciousness element. There is no ignorance, no extinction of ignorance, and so on, up to and including no extinction of aging and death. Similarly, there is no suffering, origination, cessation, and path.

There is no exalted wisdom, no attainment, and also no non attainment. Shariputratra, therefore, because there is no attainment, Bodhisattvas rely on a dwell in the perfection of wisdom, the mind without obscuration and without fear. Having completely passed beyond error, they reach the endpoint of nirvana. All the Buddhists who dwell on the three times also manifestly, completely awaken to unsurpassable, perfect, complete enlightenment in reliance on the perfection of wisdom. Therefore, the mantra of the perfection of wisdom, the mantra of great knowledge, the unsurpassed mantra, the mantra equal to the unequaled, the mantra that thoroughly pacifies all suffering should be known as truth since it is not false.

The mantra of the perfection of wisdom is declared. Śāriputra, the bodhisattva, should train in the profound perfection of wisdom like that. Then the Bhagavan arose from that concentration and commended the bodhisattva, Mahāsattva, Ārya Avalokiteśvara, saying, well said, well said, son of the lineage. It is like that. It is like that.

One should practice a profound perfection of wisdom just as you have indicated. Even the Tathagatas rejoice. The Bhagavan having thus spoken, the venerable Shāradvatīputra, the Bodhisattva, MaLhasattva, Ārya Avalokiteśvara, those surrounding in their entirety, along with the world of gods, humans, asuras, and Gandharvas, were overjoyed and highly praise that spoken by the Bhagavan. It’s nice, isn’t it? I like that one.

So the Heart Sūtra isn’t just something that we recite at the beginning of a teaching to dispel obstacles. It’s Lord Buddha’s instructions on how to meditate on emptiness and to gain the realization. So this meditation on the five aggregates and the emptiness of the And you flip back and forth. We had kind of limited time, but what you can do when you have more time, do the emptiness of the five aggregates. Then the self, seeing how it’s merely imputed on the basis of the five aggregates.

Aggregates. Then go down and break down the five aggregates again. Then go back to the self. And you can flip back and forth several times in each session. And it’s really powerful, really pulls the rug out from under our false view of how that self exists as that concrete thing because it makes the aggregates really sketchy.

And then the self is nothing more than that, which is imputed on these really fragile aggregates that are nothing more than imputations themselves. So it’s very powerful, really powerful in cutting through. Any questions about that meditation or the aggregates coming through? Yeah, Ty. Microphone.

Is there a visualization that goes along with it or anything like that? No, this is pretty much analytical meditation. It’s not one of the ones some people are very visual and kind of translate the concepts into some sort of visual image. But this is mostly using conceptual thought to go through the analysis emptiness of the aggregates. And one helpful thing is to go through those three levels of dependent origination.

They say that meditation on dependent Origination is the king of reasonings to give you an insight into emptiness. And you can see how in the Manjamika Prāsaṇgika, dependent origination is just the other side of the coin to emptiness. So meditating on the dependent origination on those three levels for each aggregate, dependent on causes and conditions, parts, then conceptual imputation is a nice way to do it. So it’s more using analysis rather than visualization. Yeah, Morgan.

Just a really simple question. Do you recommend that you focus on this because you need to get the calm abiding and the special insight? So do you start with calm abiding, or do you just recommend just, hey, stick with this for a while? Well, you know, it’s good to work on both simultaneously. In our tradition, we don’t wait until we have fully tradition, qualified, calm abiding before we do any analytical meditation.

Obviously, it really helps. The more single pointed concentration you have, then you do meditation, you’re able to focus. But in our tradition, what we say is our meditation, even from day one, should include three components. Purification and accumulation of merit is one component. And you can do that through meditation on the seven-limb prayer, for example, in the preliminary practices, also purification practices like Vajrasattva at night.

So it’s really good to put energy into purification accumulation because then that eliminates the obstacles and creates the stores of merit that you’re able to have realizations when you do sit down on your cushion and meditate. Also to work every day. So that’s every day, purification, accumulation of merit, various practices. Also, every day, work on some calm abiding using an object. And in our tradition, we usually use the visualized image of a Buddha.

So Thay’s question of, does this specific meditation involve visualization? No. But usually, we have preliminary practices. There’s a little booklet called A Daily Meditation Practice on the Basis of Śākyamūni Buddha. So after you set up the visualization of the Buddha, you focus on that and use that as your object of single pointed concentration.

And then the third component should be lamrim meditation, analytical meditation on the stages of the path. And this is a good one to do for emptiness. We’re sort of Pabongka Rinpoche says, it’s like planting a walnut tree, a pomegranate tree, and a pear tree at the same time. And then eventually, you’re able to have a really nice fruit salad. In some other traditions, you work on calm abiding until you perfected that before you engage in any analysis.

But in our tradition, we say, you’d give up. If you weren’t thinking about the Lamrim, if you weren’t thinking about the Four Noble Truths and the nature of unenlightened existence, why would you want to sit around for years watching your breath? You’d lose the motivation. So for us, we work on everything pretty much simultaneously. But you’re right.

You don’t only do analytical meditation. You try and increase your concentration simultaneously. Yeah, that’s a good question. Did you have something? No, okay.

Okay, so this is something pulled from the class that I usually do on the Four Noble Truths and on karma. But since we’ve touched on so many of these subjects of the feeling aggregate and how we create our unenlightened existence, I just wanted to present this, even though it’s not strictly speaking on the subject of emptiness. But we’ve been talking a lot about karma, a lot about how we misunderstand and misapprehend our reality. So I just wanted to introduce this because it really shows how the whole thing hangs together. Now, the twelve links is usually depicted, and it’s probably on a tanka hanging outside the door.

Is it right on the opposite wall? Okay. So go look at it on your way out if you’re not familiar with this. This is usually a drawing with this big monster called the Lord of Death has this wheel in his mouth. And then there are all these little pictures around the edge.

And there’s a guy with an arrow in his eye and some guy getting drunk and some other guy doing this and that and the other thing. That’s what these twelve links are. I’ve made it simple so you don’t have to translate from all of these pictures. So I made this schematic diagram. And then if you learn this, you’re able to then go back to the pictures and match it up.

But I find it a little bit confusing to learn the concepts and then all these pictures at the same time. So we’ll work with this first. And I don’t have handouts with me, but I’ve got my computer upstairs. And I can easily print some out and maybe leave them here if you’d like a printout of this diagram. The twelve links of dependent origination was something that I was taught over and over and over again.

Every Lamrim course, they talk about the twelve links. And this is supposed to be this great revelation of Lord Buddha when he was sitting under the Bodhi tree. And quite frankly, for about twelve years, I didn’t get it. I was like, that’s it? This is the big deal?

So what? It didn’t really mean anything to me. And then at one point in my long meditation retreat, I was really working at it because this is the key to this middle scope of the lam rim, of understanding how we create our unenlightened existence and the wish to get free, the wish for liberation, which is the middle scope. So I’d studied it within the context of the middle scope over and over. It left me cold.

And then I had my big epiphany in retreat. And I don’t know what happened, but I’m going to try and share my epiphany with you. It just happened through purification, accumulation, merit, obviously, and a lot of bludgeoning myself against a brick wall. And then I had this big insight. And I was actually sitting on my porch of this meditation hut in Shine Land, which is in Central California.

And I actually stood up. And if I hadn’t had a neighbor I was afraid of disturbing, I stood up. And internally, I just shouted, I’m free. But I did it really quietly internally. But I was like, you know, so I wouldn’t disturb my neighbor because he would come over to see if I was being eaten by mountain lions or something like that.

So my big epiphany about the twelve links, which I will try and transmit to you, but this is a big deal. So the pink boxes on the outside are the twelve links. So we’re going to start with that. It starts up at the top. Link number one is ignorance.

And this is the ignorance that we’ve been trying to dispel all weekend so far. Okay? The ignorance that says things are inherently existent. This actually has two flavors. This ignorance, ignorance about the law of cause and effect.

So misunderstanding the law of cause and effect, thinking everything’s random, I can do whatever I want. It all comes at me randomly. And ignorance that says things are inherently existent. Things do not depend on those three levels of dependent origination. They’re just inherently existent coming from their own side.

Now, the second link is karmic formations. Now, remember that little flowchart that I showed you earlier today? We had another step in there. We had ignorance, and then we had mental afflictions, especially aversion and attachment. And then we had karmic formations.

So there’s a little bit of a missing step you have to fill in there of the root ignorance gives rise to attachment and aversion. Misunderstanding where that annoying person came from, misunderstanding where the attractive person came from. It didn’t come from the fact that they’re inherently terrible from their own side. It comes from your karma. So that’s how that root ignorance gives rise to the afflictive emotion, which then gives rise to karmic formation is just volitional action, some action you do motivated by a delusion.

Boom. Create a karmic seed. So karmic formation. Boom. New karmic seed planted in your consciousness, which is the third link, consciousness.

Now, the way the twelve links is usually explained is in terms of three lifetimes. So we’ll first start with the three life theory. So this is the past life, this little orange word past. Ignorance karmic formations. Now with consciousness, we’re in the present life.

So we come into the present life with our consciousness loaded with these karmic imprints from past lives, not just the most previous one, but other ones too. So we don’t come in fresh. We’re not an innocent little enlightened baby. We come in with a preloaded consciousness, full of karmic formations on the basis of ignorance. Now, the next link is name and form.

And this is a code word. I’ve left it on here as name and form because you’ll see this Sanskrit word, Namarupa. Name and form is just a code for the five Skandhas, body and mind. Form is body. Name is a code word for those four aggregates of mind.

The consciousness, discernment, feeling, and what do we call it, compositional factors. So name and form, body and mind. So consciousness meets with fertilized sperm and egg. Boom. Got a new name and form in the new body.

Then on the basis of that mind and body, we have the six senses, so the potential to have a sense experience. And usually, when they explain it in the Three Lifetime Model, they say that these are arising in the fetus as it develops. First, it’s just fertilized egg with the consciousness. According to Buddhism, at the moment of conception, the consciousness enters the fertilized egg. And then the body forms, and then the senses form.

And those big photo books, they have of fetal development at a certain point. First, it looks like a guppy. And then it’s like just a ball of cells, then it’s sort of a guppy, then the thing in the tail, and then it all starts happening. So six senses start developing the potential for some kind of sense contact. Then what happens?

Object enters field of awareness. Sense contact is born. And over and over and over again, and you see in the Heart Sūtra too, Lord Buddha keeps emphasizing this sort of triad of sense perception, sense object, and awareness, sense contact happens, giving rise to some sense awareness. Why? It’s the big troublemaker for us.

He repeats it over and over. Every list he’s trying to emphasize over and over and over again. So here it shows up again. Potential for sense consciousness, and then you come in contact with an object, and then you have some sort of sense awareness. Now, remember feeling, one of our aggregates.

And again, this is just pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral. That sense contact seems to give rise to a feeling. Notice I say seems to. We’ll get there. Feeling.

So what happens next? If it feels good, we want more of it. Craving. Okay? Craving, this is just the wish to have more or the craving to be parted from something that’s unpleasant.

Don’t be fooled by this word craving, because the feeling can be unpleasant, and then the craving is to be separated. The reason they use craving and grasping is because we have about one thousand, I want more, to one, get it away from me. Which is why in the Theravadin tradition, they say that attachment is the root of saṃsāra, because it mostly is. We have about one thousand attachment thoughts to every aversion thought. If we’re normal, if we’re one of those inmates with all of that paranoia, it’s one thousand to one aversion to attachment.

But for most of us, it’s mostly about wanting more of the good stuff. So we want more of the good stuff, and then we decide to take action to get more. And then, boom, we do the action and create a new karmic seed. Becoming is new karmic seed firmly planted in consciousness. And then here we are.

Consciousness planted with all of those new karmic seeds drives rebirth, which then leads to old age and death. So all of this is the future life. Up until the point of death, becoming, new karmic seeds, consciousness loaded with new karmas going into the future life. And this is called saṃsāra. This is called the twelve links of dependent origination, otherwise known as saṃsāra.

There’s a specific kind of karmic seed that takes effect here when we’re talking about the three lives, and that is the grasping after embodiment. Apparently, at the time of death, your consciousness is being ripped away from the body that you’re so strongly identified with. We really think that our mind and body together, we’re very attached to our body. So a specific kind of craving and grasping here is the craving for embodiment at the time of death, which drives us into a new samsaric rebirth. So this is how it all hangs together and keeps driving our samsaric existence.

Now, where does ignorance fit in? And how does today and what you’ve learned today help you cut this wheel? Where are some points where this wheel can be cut with wisdom and with knowledge? Can anybody think of a place there’s three major places. Can anybody think of one?

Ty, you wanna grab the mic? Well, one would be grasping maybe. Okay. Tell me more about that. Even if you crave something, if you kind of are cognitively aware that it’s not good for you, you could maybe not grasp at Okay.

Okay. That’s a possibility. There’s a more effective place. You’re in the right region. You’re in the right area of the chart.

I’ll let someone else. Okay. Yeah. Maybe feeling and craving. Okay.

Say more. So the feeling comes in, but if you just let it be a feeling, understanding that it’s in a way empty and just be there without trying to crave it or get more of it. Okay. Great. Where does that feeling come from?

Who said karma? Judith. You go, girl. I recently heard Biko Bodhi talk about this. Beautiful.

I know. And he’s I wish I could remember exactly, but he seemed to think that you could go straight from ignorance to karmic formation to feeling. Okay. But I I I don’t know why, but I I always did think that feeling came from the karmic collection. Great.

Look at this green circle. Look here. Cause is way back here. All of this is an effect of the karma that was created way back yonder, isn’t it? Right?

I have that chocolate cake that I grasp after in my life is an effect of my virtue, if it’s something that makes me happy, not only the happy feeling that I have, but the fact that that object is in my reality is all caused way back yonder with some karmic formation. I don’t have a green word that says cause here and effect here, do I? In understanding that, any good feeling you have is a result of virtue. One of the laws of karma is, virtue leads to happiness. Non virtue leads to suffering.

karma is definite. The first law of karma is you can never get a good feeling from a non virtue. And conversely, you can never have well, what’s the opposite? You can never have a bad feeling from virtue. So if some sense contact, if the contact seems to make you happy, both the contact and the feeling you get from it come from some past virtue, if it makes you happy.

So does it make any sense at all to crave and grasp after more of the object, especially if it would cause you to break one of your ten non virtues in the process? Right? Especially if it would make you steal, cheat somebody, diss somebody, any of those things, to get more of it. You would be nuts to do that. What do you do if you want to feel better?

Create more virtue. You know, engage plant more karmic seeds of virtue. And then it it really doesn’t matter what your sense contact is. It’ll all make you blissed out. Mother Teresa in the slums of Calcutta, blissed out.

Why? Because of virtue. And then all those Hollywood movie stars with everything that they could possibly want committing suicide. I was on the plane the other day, and it’s always interesting when you don’t have the headphones and you glance up from time to time to try and figure out, like, what’s going on with the news clips. There was some famous guy.

This woman next to me told me who it was. Some famous comedian. You know? And there’s this whole big long thing, and, you know, she was kind of filling me in. And I’m looking, and it was all about his suicide attempt.

And then there’s the Rolls Royces and the girlfriends and the mansions. Does that make him happy? Obviously not, cause he tried to commit suicide. So it’s not the sense contact that gives the happiness. It’s the previous virtue, which is why Lama Yeshe enjoyed everything and was so blissed out all the time and never went here, never went to craving and grasping.

Just Judith knew Lamayeshi. I’ve only heard stories. Right? With that light touch, everything blissed him out. Did he grasp onto any of it?

Not at all. Not at all. I’ve seen His Holiness the Dalai Lama. We were at these teachings in two thousand and five in this really fancy resort in Tucson, Arizona. It was like whatever it was with the pools and this.

I’ve never been in a place like this in my life. I’m going, oh, this is so weird. Beautiful place. When His Holiness drove away the last day, did he go, oh, I want to go back there again. No way.

He enjoyed it, it seemed. Why not? We can be happy. In fact, if we’re practicing right, we’re just going to get happier and happier. It’s not like we’re going to be some stoic, oh, I’m detached.

We should get happier and happier, but without any clutching onto the ankles of the objects that we are fooled into thinking gave us happiness and realize that happiness comes from our virtue. So this is the big choice point. In Buddhism, people always ask, where’s free will? If everything is determined by karma, then where’s my free will? Right here, between effect and planting a new karmic cause.

You can’t help the feeling that you’re having. In the moment, I feel I’m from Santa Cruz, so I have all these students that are surfers. I could never surf. I’d fall off and kill myself immediately. But they tell me what it’s like.

You’re on the crest of a wave. So we’re always at this cusp. Our past karma has dished out whatever experience we’re having in the moment. We can’t change things in the midst of the experience because it’s all a result of the past karma. But what we sure can do is use our wisdom.

When we’re having a certain feeling, are we going to be stupid and perpetuate the cycle, or are we going to cut it right here before we plant new causes? So that’s where we can use wisdom here. And this is where free will comes into Buddhism. Because people say, See you later, Janet. Because people say, If everything is karma, how do I get free?

You get free here by being smart, especially here. Is this cool or what? I mean, is my big epiphany. I’m free. Because I got how, understanding yeah, you can open that now.

It’s getting really hot. By understanding that this is just an effect of past karma, what do you do? You get smart. You want to be really happy all the time? Be kind to others.

Be generous. Practice the six Parmitas, the six perfections. Practice like that. And that’s the way you’ll get happier and happier. And then it doesn’t really matter so much.

First, you’ll get more chocolate cake in your life. You’ll have more of the stuff. And then pretty soon, as you practice more and more, everything will make you happy. It doesn’t matter what it is. Serving others makes you happy.

Your whole definition of what gives you happiness changes. So it’s extremely cool. And this is where we practice right here. So the dumbest thing you would do, something makes you unhappy. One of my teachers would always talk about the yelling boss.

You have a feeling of aversion here, a feeling of displeasure because somebody is in your face yelling at you. If you want to absolutely guarantee future lives completely full of yelling bosses, yell back. If you want to guarantee that those yelling bosses will be eliminated from all of your future rebirths, practice patience. And this is a huge place where we practice in Buddhism. Really, really important.

Really, really important. Okay? So please practice there. There’s two other places that I want to point out where we can also practice. Can anybody see one of the other places?

There’s two other yeah, Ty. I’m just gonna guess that it’s once again in between cause and effect. Following the I mean, I’m trying to go in with your logic here. So here. Okay.

In between becoming in birth and maybe also in between old age and ignorance or karmic formations and conscious as Okay. So here. Here is a really important place. Right? And here is where we cut the twelve links as the root.

When we have that direct realization of emptiness, when we’re an ārya, we cut directly here, which collapses the whole thing. So that’s true, right here, at ignorance. That’s the root. But that’s hard. That takes a while.

First, while we’re still learning to practice, this is where all those nifty thought transformation techniques in Lojong come in. And all of those take pain and hardship as part of the path, understand that it comes from your past karma, all of those nifty techniques operate right here. And then in addition to that, we’re meditating on emptiness, first intellectually and then as a direct perception to try and cut through everything at the root. There’s another place where we can also practice. Anna has an idea.

Would it be at the contact stage where when we do things, we do them with the thought of benefiting others? In all our everyday contacts, food, any kind of good that’s good. That’s good. We dedicate for them. For others.

So you’re not engaging in sense contact. That’s true. We have prayers and in the bodhisattva vows, there’s a vows like, all the clothes I use and the food I eat and all that stuff, let me not be doing it because I like it, but just to kind of maintain my body. And that relates to another thing that happens right here. Certain kinds of vowed morality, we limit our sense contact.

Because for some sense contact, it’s almost impossible not to just spin around here. For example, with monastic vows, we’re supposed to limit going to the marketplace, for example. There’s all these monastic vows. I remember one time, Chuky and I, she picked me up. I was going out of retreat at some point.

And she picked me up. And we were going to a bookstore in Carmel. Remember that we were walking down the street. And Carmel is just we’re walking past Tiffany’s and all of these places. And I remember saying to her, this feels really weird, like as a nun walking around like the main shopping drag of some, it just felt so weird because we’ve been trained in terms of our monastic.

You don’t just go around window shopping. One of our vows is to limit sense contact so it doesn’t give rise to some feeling and then grasping. For me, it’s like those office supply stores that have all the cute pens and the glitter. I could care less about diamonds. But yeah, little blank books.

Also, celibacy comes in here. That’s one of our monastic vows. It’s really difficult when you’re having sexual contact that gives rise to a really pleasant feeling not to think it’s the person and grasp on for dear life. And then we all know where that takes us. So a lot of our vowed morality, both lay vows and especially monastic vows, are about limiting sense contact until we get smart about this.

And I posit that people who are able to keep their monastic vows happily understand this. Because you understand how it saves you from saṃsāra. The people that think that their monastic vows are all about Lord Buddha trying to spoil all their fun and get resentful, and then they give their vows back. But if you really under I think that everybody The preordination courses should include a day on the twelve links. Because personally, I found how my vowed morality helps me keep from just plunging ahead and circle I’m not strong enough.

I’m not smart enough. I need vows to help protect me. Otherwise, I’m just gonna create all these extra wheel of misfortune, spin around saṃsāra more and more and more. And I think when you understand that, you’re happy to keep some sort of vowed morality. Because you see how Lord Buddha, instead of trying to spoil your fun, is trying to help you cut this cycle.

You know? This was the big epiphany. He’s not trying to ruin all our fun and be a party pooper. I remember before getting ordained, I had this whole obstacle. Mara arose in the form of these thoughts that Lord Buddha was just a party pooper.

And I remember really meditating on this, and it helped so much for me to understand what Lord Buddha was trying to do. I just wanted to transmit this to you because it’s so important, and it shows how the whole thing hangs together. Why does Lord Buddha and all these lists? And go read the Heart Sūtra again after this teaching. What does he say is empty?

All the sense contact objects, the perception, the object, the sense consciousness. He could say, Oh, the pina coladas are empty and the hula hoops are empty and say, Ling. No. He goes over and over. He’s just like drumming it in over and over.

What gives rise to our saṃsāra is misunderstanding where our happiness and suffering come from and thinking that it comes from that sense contact and not from our past karma. And it shows up in the five aggregates, it shows up in the eighteen sources, the twelve. All these lists, it shows up over and over and over again. He’s trying to give us the message in all of these different ways. And it’s very cool in the Heart Sūtra when you read it from that perspective.

It all makes sense. Okay. Yes? What’s AE? Afflictive emotion.

Okay. So afflictive emotion leading to karma is AE. And if you’d like, I can have Chooky print out copies, and you can get it the next time you come, of this chart. My students in Santa Cruz have all This is on Grace’s mini refrigerators and books and sides of bookshelves in Santa Cruz because I just you know, I have it on my computer. I can just we can just print it out right away.

I’ve got one. I should have brought. I just didn’t think of it. Sign up at the end just so that I know once it’s on all set. Yeah.

Also, I’m teaching tomorrow morning. If anybody wants to come back for more, we’re we’ve got what is it? The Dharma morning service thing? Service or something like that. Yeah.

Yeah. And what I’m gonna talk about is more practical tips. Like what I was asked to do at this course in Vermont was integrating Dharma into daily life. And I think it’s more about integrating daily life into Dharma. So I like to switch it around.

So that’s what I thought to talk about. So more tools of the trade. So if you want more practical advice about how to work with these subjects, come back tomorrow and we’ll try and get that chart photocopied. I’m not trying to advertise for myself or lure you back. But we’ll be able to do that by tomorrow.

Yes, Rose. Oh, microphone. So I can see I can see that, Yeah, we can step out between the feeling and the craving. But then you said there are two other Places. Places where we can step out.

Okay. The one was at ignorance, right? When we have the direct realization of And the one was before the sense contact with our vowed morality, with our vows. Those are the two other major places that we can practice. You know, reducing our sense contact.

And I found that a lot of people do that anyway. Right? You get into Dharma and isn’t there this weird Bardo thing that you don’t like doing the things you used to do so much anymore and your old friends and they think you’re boring and you don’t want to stay up late and party. And then you go through this weird, painful and I know it’s painful. I think we need to have in dharma centers renunciation support groups so that everybody who’s going through that, maybe you haven’t made the new friends yet, and you’re old friends and you don’t like doing the things.

And you think I mean, for me, I remember when I came back from my first trip to India and Nepal and got really into dharma, and I didn’t have any label for what was fun because those old things that I thought were fun, I wasn’t doing anymore. I’m living up in the hills at Santa Cruz at vajrapani Institute. I used to go out in San Francisco to these clubs, and you didn’t even show up before eleven because it was uncool. And, you know, you dressed up and you had some cute, like, object of attachment on your arm, and you did this thing. And then I’m living in these monasteries for a year and a half getting up at four o’clock in the morning and everything really changed.

And I’m not going out. I can’t even stay awake past nine thirty and none of that old stuff is happening. And I’m like, what’s fun? And it took rebirth about six months to really label newly. And fun is sitting around drinking tea, talking about dharma with your friends.

And I just had to change all of my labeling. So I think it’s hard. We go through these weird transition periods. But just be patient and just don’t give up because then life gets really fun. I remember once with Venerable Katie, who used to work for Liberation Prison Project.

And we were going to this prison out in Jamestown, which is the other side of the Central Valley. And we’re driving through Modesto. And we had the LPP car where it reads the temperature outside. It’s like one hundred and ten degrees. And we’ve been driving for two and a half hours.

And I taught that morning in Santa Cruz. And I’m pretty tired. And I really need to pee. And I need a mocha frappuccino like nobody’s business. And we’re driving through.

And I said, Katie, if we were lying on the beach in Tahiti drinking virgin Mai Tais, which we would because we’re nuns, I said, we’d be bored in like ten minutes. And we’re so excited because we’re going to see our guys. And the inmates are so grateful that you come in and teach them. And I love them so much. And I’ve got this guy that’s blissed out because he’s making everybody happy.

And what could be better than that? Even though we’re roasting and really have to pee, but we’re so happy. And then I go, oh, this is weird. This is really different, that I’m really psyched by virtue. It wasn’t like that before.

So I really noticed this transition had happened, and you’ll notice that in your life too. And then you’re really happy benefiting others. Gee, what a concept. Maybe Lord Buddha was onto something after all. Okay.

So I kept you over more than half an hour, but I just really wanted, especially for Thay, to give the little hit of the twelve links. Are there any final, final, final, final, final questions? Okay. So tomorrow, if you want to come back for me to give you more tools of the trade at like ten thirty to twelve, there’s first prayers or something and then Oh, okay. All right then.

We’ll talk. Okay. So let’s just dedicate the merit, sitting for a minute, thinking. As I said before, just doubting. As Āryadeva said in the text, Four Hundred Stanzas, even doubting that things exist in the way since beginningless time, we’ve always perceived them and believed that they exist as concrete, self existent, coming from their own side, even just generating doubt, Unbelievable.

Tears Samsāra to shreds. So in the day that we’ve had together, we’ve gone far beyond just generating doubt. We’ve actually delved into selflessness according to all the schools and spent quite a lot of time on the middle way consequence view. So we’ve accrued a tremendous amount of virtue by our day together. And so that it doesn’t get wasted in some contaminated, some saric happiness, let’s dedicate it, seal it, dedicating it also with a view of emptiness, seeing how even our virtue isn’t inherently existent.

The Buddhahood we’re dedicating it towards is a result of causes and conditions and mere imputation. And because things are empty, we can dedicate our virtue, and it will lead to Buddhahood. If things were inherently existent, there’s no way that our virtue could be dedicated and could make any difference. So because of emptiness, as Nāgārjuna said, everything is possible. If things weren’t empty, nothing would be possible.

So keeping that in mind, let’s think huge store of virtue that we’ve created in this day together that we’re dedicating towards our future enlightenment, becoming a being with all the capacity to really benefit others. And just focus on that for a minute to seal the merit. Thank you. Oh, the kata thing. Oh, alright Okay.

Okay. Alright then. Sure, why not? I have to. What’s that?

Thank you. Good to see you. Thank you. Thank you all for coming. I always just feel like everybody’s an emanation of a Buddha just showing up so that I can remind myself of these wonderful things because otherwise I’d be lying around eating bonbons and watching TV.

True. Thank you. Bye bye. So they’re just starting up there. So here you have a.