Heart Sutra — 2009-10-24

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

About this talk. In this 2 hour 47 minute afternoon session, Tenzin Chogkyi provides deep instruction on the Heart Sūtra’s core teaching on emptiness and dependent arising. Starting with practical analysis of how language and concepts shape our perception, she examines questions about enlightenment, language prerequisites, and the relationship between karma and emptiness. The bulk of the teaching guides students through direct meditation on the five aggregates and the selfless nature of the self, explaining how both are empty of inherent existence yet validly function through conceptual designation. To anchor this understanding, Chogkyi introduces the five Buddhist paths—the milestones of spiritual realization from path of accumulation through path of seeing, when one achieves direct non-conceptual perception of emptiness and becomes an ārya being. She emphasizes that seeing emptiness requires rigorous study and meditation, not thought-suppression, and that fear during emptiness meditation signals genuine progress. The instruction is grounded in the consequentialist school and explicitly teaches the bodhisattva vehicle, suitable for serious practitioners engaged in long-term study and retreat practice.

File metadata (for organising)

File: Heart Sutra3 2009 10 24.mp3

UUID: 3ce746c7-c295-4ead-84ef-34e5d973469d

Teacher: Tenzin Chogkyi

Collection: Heart Sūtra (Tenzin Chogkyi)

Date: 2009-10-24

Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide

Words: ~22,203

Okay. So let’s take a minute again just to reset our motivation for the afternoon session, thinking about our bodhicitta motivation for studying this subject for the benefit of all sentient beings. So just take a minute to reflect. Okay. So we had some hands up before we stopped for lunch, and I think there were some leftover questions.

Does anybody have some questions? Yeah, Matthew. I had a question about imputation and cons I guess conceptualization of things. I I’ve always sort of assumed that saying, quote unquote, human beings, how do you say it? I guess they order their experience with language Mhmm.

Is the way to put it. Right. And so I guess with if you were I was thinking of like this like, just this hypothetical situation to help me try to understand this. If a child if a baby is born like, let’s just say a baby’s born an enlightened being, does it need to know language? For what?

Exactly. No. I mean That’s For what purpose? What do you mean does it need to know language? Well So I guess the other way to look at it is, is the understanding of language a prerequisite to becoming enlightened?

Do I need to understand language? Yeah. At some point, at some point, you need to receive teachings in some lifetime. It doesn’t need to be the one that you get enlightened in. There’s these beings called solitary realizers, and they don’t have teachings directly in that lifetime, but they use what the imprints and the teachings that they’ve gotten from previous lives.

So Mowgli the wolf boy could be a solitary realizer, and that would be fine, They never need to communicate with anybody and never need theoretically, yeah. You could become you know, they say that solitary realizers don’t get the full enlightenment of Buddhahood, but get liberation a certain kind of liberation. As far as whether you could become a Buddha in a lifetime that you hadn’t received any teachings, that’s not explained in the scripture. They just say it’s these solitary realizers, so they don’t explain that. Okay.

So the since that’s not my scenario, most people’s. It’s really a combination of conceptualization, which is manifest in language and previous lives. It’s sort of like the two things together that sort of train our minds or whatever for how to see the Right. For us, as humans, our conceptualization is so dependent on language. It’s really hard to separate.

It’s like the eleven words for snow in Finnish. It’s really hard for us to separate as humans, you know, and so much of our concepts are learned concepts that were taught to us through the medium of language. We’re not like Mowgli the wolf boy that was just taught what was food and not food by the mother wolf by demonstration. We can be taught in abstract concepts like the circle and the square and calculus. We can learn that through the medium of language.

So So it’s language and past imprints, past lives together that do Yeah, you could say that. You could say that because as we learn as and also we learn by example, too. Like, for example, I think of my relationship with Lama Zopa Rinpoche, one of my main teachers. And yeah, I learn things from him through language when he’s up on the throne teaching, but I feel like I’ve learned so much more just from hanging out with Him and from example. So you can learn things, but to learn how to meditate on emptiness precisely enough to get that realization, I think, you know, would depend on language at some point in some lifetime.

Yeah. Thank you. Good. Yeah. Morgan.

Could we is it possible to close that window? Just because it’s kind of noisy, and I’m sorry it’s gonna make it stuffy, but I live in a really quiet place, and I get really distracted. Okay. So my question is in relation to kind of the fabric of karma behind this, because one of the things I thought about is the dependent arising on the object, pretty easy to get in some basic analytical levels. But then you look at like some of these monks who’ve been tortured and they’re kind of like, oh well, this is just purifying negative.

Yeah. Right? So my question is, you know, there’s not really mentions of of, like, the fabric of karma being empty of existence. Mhmm. The causes, the output means, you know, they welcome someone beating them where I would flip out.

Right. And so there. So where does that fit? Why isn’t it really mentioned? Because I’m reacting to the cup because I have also some karmic imprints to light blue.

Right, right. So where does that sit? Where does that know emptiness and karma are so linked, so linked because our conceptual designation and imputation is forced on us by our karma. And it’s sort of in concentric circles. Like we all have some shared karma to be born as human beings.

That is forced on us by our karmas. So because of just being humans, we have certain neurologically, physiologically certain perceptions. Dogs can hear sounds at some wavelength that we can’t hear. So just by being human, we have a certain kind of perception and a certain kind of concepts. And then twenty first century modern post industrial culture has a certain shared reality and then a certain country has a certain shared consensual reality and then the people that live in a city and then everybody in this room has a certain consensual reality.

But it’s always individual at a certain point and every level is dependent on karma. Every level of consensual reality all the way down to the individual reality. So karma forces our conceptual imputations. It’s forced on us by our karma. So the difference between the reactions to certain people.

Recently I was talking to this monk, this friend of mine, and he was complaining about somebody and saying that this person was so annoying because they did this, that, and the other thing. I was just like, wow, I don’t have that experience at all. That’s one of my favorite people that he’s talking about. And it’s just like Casper and the other guy hearing about Bodhicitta. Because of karma and past life imprints, the one guy storms out, slams the door, checks out of the meditation center, and then the other one, like shaves his head, does retreat.

You know, imprints. The idea of Bodhicitta is empty. And then whether you perceive it as something completely inspiring or completely ridiculous is all dependent on your karma. So it’s like that with the torture. Is the torture unpleasant?

It all depends. If you’re a great Lojong yogi, you’ve practiced thought transformation, you realize you’re just experiencing the result of something that you created the cause for in the past. And then instead of making you angry, making you suffer, you have compassion for the person torturing you because you realize they’re just starting a whole round of karma. So it can be the cause of an incredible realization of compassion for you if you’re trained in that way and you see it in that way. Whereas for most people it would be the cause of pain and anger and suffering because it’s empty.

So there’s two elements to it. We put a label on the Buddha. The Buddha is this being who became an arhat, reached this level. He’s beyond karma. Even when he went to the hell realms that time, he experienced no suffering because he doesn’t have karma.

So karma technically is also empty. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely, absolutely. And that’s why it functions. And that’s the dangerous thing, right?

And that’s why the Buddha taught all these different levels of emptiness because if you think that something’s empty of inherent existence because it’s just a concept, Then you start to lose your faith in cause and effect and you go, Well, if karma’s empty, then I can just decide what result I’m going to get from No. No. Because it’s describing a certain function. Positive karma is defined as that which leads to happiness in the short term and liberation or enlightenment in the long term. Negative karma is defined as that which will lead to suffering in the future.

So they’re defined according to their function, how they function. Yeah, it’s empty but it functions to produce suffering. That’s because it’s empty and that’s what we’re labeling negative karma. Any action that will lead to a suffering result in the future, because of the function and consensus remember, we decide that that’s what we’re going to call negative karma. But just because it’s empty doesn’t mean it doesn’t function and you can somehow just decide.

We’re creating a concept of negative karma labeling on a function, on a certain function, and that’s how it’s empty. But not because it doesn’t exist or not because you can just decide any more than I can decide to make a phone call with this. Like, oh, I’ll just decide it’s good karma. You know, I’ll just do something, like, really ridiculous, and I’ll just decide that it’s good. Yeah, see how that works out for you.

So where does that why wasn’t their teachings on that specifically? So like an example, say causes and conditions. Some guy thought about a cup, he said, okay, we’re gonna make it in this shape. He found some clay, these parts, he added a handle, he’s good there. Now, someone says, he says, this is a cup.

Now, everyone around says, oh, great. It’s a cup. Right. Right. Where where did he teach the karmic aspect with this dependent arising?

Because it’s dependent upon your reaction to previous whatever’s in your mind stream of like, I hate cups. I got hit by a cup once. Where is that in press? It’s all over the place. It’s everywhere.

It’s in the twelve links. In fact, it’s so interesting. Choden Rinpoche, this lama who teaches here, I think it was two years ago at Land of Medicine Buddha, somebody asked the question, How can you tell a fully qualified teacher? Instead of listing all the lists that are in all the ten qualities and all this stuff, he said, If the teacher teaches the relationship between karma and emptiness. Isn’t that interesting?

That was his answer. Isn’t that beautiful? And I was just like, Cool! That’s so cool because it’s so important, the relationship between karma and emptiness. He’s like, That’s how you can tell the relationship, because it’s a dependent arising.

That’s how karma does function. So it is in there. It’s not always as explicit as I personally would like it to be, which is why I really emphasize it and why I bludgeon everybody over the head with the twelve links over and over and over again, to show exactly which points karma and emptiness create those twelve links. And that’s a whole another story. We could actually do a little mini twelve links thing tomorrow because it relates to everything.

But that’s how it all relates. It’s like our very perceptions of reality are forced on us by our karma. Then we have a reaction because we’re seeing it as negative from its own side. We’re seeing that boss as a jerk from his own side. We feel totally justified in yelling back when he yells at us instead of seeing how our karma has created the very appearance.

Not only has it on the grocery level, it created the experience. On an even subtler level, it creates the very appearance of that person as negative and that’s a subtler way of taking the twelve links when we talk about contact with the object, giving rise to a feeling and then we usually ignorantly respond with either aversion or attachment when you understand, Hey, not only is this experience happening because of karma but I’m even perceiving it the way I’m perceiving it as of karma. And that’s what really cuts the wheel, you know, because that’s that antidote to that root ignorance right there. Because you can apply antidotes and you can go around thinking it’s your karma all the time, but you’re still going to get pissed off. Like, I’m sorry.

Whoops, I shouldn’t say words like that. It’s being recorded. If you just see, Wow, even my karma creates this appearance of the situation as being negative. That’s really going to do it. Like that’s the like Islam is Oprah says, the atom bomb, you know, the atom bomb like against your delusions is realizing that because otherwise you’re just going to go around saying, okay, I’m just paying back all this stuff, You’re not really going to have the tools you need to stop your afflictions.

But it’s really knowing that view that’s what stops it. Great question, as usual from Morgan. Okay, Lynn has something in the back. Marcella gets extra credit from the teacher. Thank you.

Passing the microphone around. I have a couple of questions that have bothered me that I for a while. When I first heard about dependent arising, I found that yes. You know, because if we think about Gaia, the planet, of course, everything is dependent on causes and conditions. Yeah.

So I am still struggling with the idea of geological time, which if you think in those terms, empty makes a sort of sense. But I don’t know if they really quite come together. So asking for, have you I mean, how do I address that in my own So geological time, tell me more about what seems like conflict or seems like it’s not Well, if we have a planet that is changing all the time Right. And, you know, a million years from now is not gonna be here because the sun, because because Right. All these things we hear about, How that how do we think about empty in terms of the whole planet?

That’s my question. In terms of causes and conditions, it came into being because of certain forces. In Buddhism they talk about the Big Bang and the Big Crunch and it keeps repeating over and over and over again. So what some astronomers and physicists have figured out happens, Buddhists will say, Well yeah, of course. And it just keeps happening over and over again.

So that would be the level that it’s a dependent arising due to causes and conditions, then we’re labeling the universe on the basis of certain parts with our concepts. We call things certain geological ages. So it’s all empty, but again, it functions perfectly because it’s empty. It doesn’t mean that it’s not happening. It doesn’t mean that our planetary system isn’t going to be destroyed when the sun explodes and all of that stuff.

But it’s equally all empty. So it applies not just to the personal but to the geological and the astronomical and the physical reality. One other question. I have struggled with this is a karma question how to understand if you have a group of nuns and monks in Tibet who are being killed, tortured, whatever, how to understand karma when something happens to a group of people. And there’s something called collective karma, When people experience a similar result, they’ve all created karma in the past to be sharing that experience.

Often they say that they created the cause together in some past life or at least to be sharing a similar experience because they’ve all created a similar enough cause in the past to be having that experience. But really interesting! Then it gets down to the individual. How many of those people are really suffering? How many of them are using it as part of the path?

Is it good karma or bad karma? It’s very subjective. Just because it looks like a negative experience from the outside for that person, if it’s something that they take into the path and take as a lesson and take as something positive, it’s not negative karma for them. So you can never tell from looking from the outside it looks so terrible, but what kind of experience is that person having. Then it shows whether individually it’s a result positive or negative karma for that person.

So that gets really interesting. So we can’t presume all those people are experiencing the result of something. And then you think, in terms of karma, we have these deep pockets of both negative and positive karma that we’ve created in countless past lifetimes. So we’ve got to get over this thing of karma means somehow you deserve it like you did something bad to somebody and you deserve payback. Because one of the qualities of karma it expands.

So you can experience a huge result from some teeny tiny little karma. If you didn’t purify way back yonder in some past life, you had a negative thought about somebody. And then over so many lifetimes, it expands to the result of you getting tortured and killed. So it doesn’t mean that it’s equivalent, and it doesn’t mean you deserve it. It just means that somehow, some seed was planted that finally grew and flowered into this result.

Yeah, you’re welcome. Anything Chris had something before lunch. Did I? Okay, okay, great. Anything else before we continue?

Yeah, Carla. Actually, it’s sort of a follow-up to Morgan’s question. I think what I understood that he was asking is like, it’s just like earlier during the class I was thinking, so how about inventions, right? I think somehow that’s what I got that he was also asking, you know, like there’s no labeling, there’s nothing yet, you know, and there’s so many people inventing things all the time. Right, right.

Well, I’m a perfect example, right? I was in this long meditation retreat for six and a half years. I come out of retreat and I go to a teaching I’ll never forget I went to this teaching and when I went into retreat, when people wanted to record the teaching, they had a little thing and then every ninety minutes they had to take the thing out and flip it. Remember those? And then all of a sudden, everybody’s passing up reincarnated cigarette lighters and TV remote controls to the front of the room.

I had no idea what these things were, and you didn’t have to change any tape, and they just sat there for hours. And I’m like so I didn’t have the label mp3 recorder. I didn’t have that generic image at all. I’d never heard of these things. You know, I disappeared for years.

I had no idea. But I could label small metal object with little buttons and windows. So I didn’t know that it was an mp3 recorder yet. I found out pretty soon, but I could at least label small electronic device with little buttons. So there’s different levels that you can label, and even the baby without any of these refined concepts labels, round you know, they might not even have the idea round, but they have some kind of concept and some kind of recognition of the object.

So with new inventions, it’s like that too. New things like mp3 recorders get invented. Then there’s this kind of conceptual generic image learning curve for everybody, and now then everybody recognizes what it is. So we can get new generic images, you know? And that’s what learning is.

I mean, our whole elementary school is all about stuffing our mind full of generic images. That’s what learning is because we don’t have the concepts and we don’t have the images And all the books that we have when we’re little kids and this is a ball and this is a cat and this is a dog and this is a choo choo train is just learning both language and generic images for things. I think my question is, is it all the same even if you’re just supplying a generic, more the functional aspect of it as opposed to labeling? For example, when it comes to a cup, it may not make much difference. But I think in other levels, it may make a difference if you’re just, you know, seeing it as a function as opposed to labeling it.

I’m not quite sure What you just said about the the you know, instead of labeling m three MMP three player as opposed to something that is used an electronic device for recording. Are both the same labeling system? I mean there’s no difference in level there? Yeah, no difference in level. Because we still have some generic image in our mind that we’re imputing on the object.

And it may be that we have more sophisticated we have a different image if we know what mp3 recorders are and we have not only the label of the word, but the concept, then we can label it. But it doesn’t matter if I don’t know what they are. I’m still slapping a conceptual label of small electronic device of some kind on it. So yeah, there’s not that really any difference. Okay, anything else before we carry on?

Are you all totally confused? Are you kind of sort of okay? A little bit getting there somewhat? What? Wow, there’s a realized being in the room.

I rejoice. Okay, so what does this have to do with anything? Okay. And why is Avalokiteśvara saying? Because again, let’s get back to where we are.

He said that, meaning Śāriputra asked the question, and the bodhisattva, mahasattva, ārya 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 is empty of inherent nature. So what’s the main thing that we’re meditating on? Don’t know, grammatically I’m going to mess this up. The emptiness of which we’re meditating upon.

What’s the main object? And Lynn has the mudrā, the the self mudrā. It’s about me. It’s all about me. Right?

So that’s our main object of meditation at the beginning of the path, and in a second we’re going to start talking about how the path works. So who cares about the cup? I don’t really care. It’s a nice cup. It’s got a nice dragon, I like dragons, like whatever.

I have no attachment to the cup, I could care less. It’s very nice and it has my tea in it, but what am I really attached to? What do I really think exists inherently? Like, sure, I walk in here and the cup seems like it exists as a cup from its own side, but this is the real troublemaker. So it’s the emptiness of the personal self that’s the main object of meditation.

And that’s first thing, by the way, that you get a direct realization of the emptiness of. It ain’t the cup and it ain’t the mp3 recorder. It’s moi. That’s the one. So how is the self empty of inherent existence and how does the self exist?

Let’s talk about that a little bit. So the self me. I’m a product of causes and conditions. That’s pretty obvious. My causes are the sperm and egg of my parents and all the nutrition, you know, all the food.

I mean, don’t know, it’s Sé Chen Ling, it gets to a whole new level. When I have lunch here, it’s just unbelievable. They bring this tray with like fifteen different things down, you know. I was teasing Michelle saying we had a secret website for FPMT teachers where we say where we’re treated well and where we’re not treated well. She’s not sure if I’m serious or not, she’s like I’m gonna hack into that, But the food here, everything about Sé Chen Ling really rates.

So all of that went into making my physical body. Those were the causes. And then the conditions are somebody took care of me. My mother changed my diapers when I was growing up, I was nurtured, I went to school, all of that stuff. So that’s obvious, just like the cup.

The causes and conditions that went into making me. And then the parts, the parts of me. This torso, legs, arms, very long, you know, head. How many parts could be missing before I could not be called Tenzin Chökyi anymore? I could probably lose a leg, maybe even two.

A lot more. Could I lose my torso? No. Could I lose my head? No.

That’s pretty I could be like a thalidomide baby and still be a person, but basically we’re dependent on our parts. We exist in dependence on all of these component parts that I’m calling my body. The parts of me, my body and mind. The five aggregates. We just went into that because of this.

Those are our parts: the form, the feeling, the discernment, the compositional factors, the consciousness. Those are the five parts of the body. And then, this is where it gets really interesting, just like the cup, I’m labeling just like I’m labeling on the cylinder with the bottom and the open lid and the handle and I have a concept cup just like that I’m labeling on the form, the feeling, the discrimination, the compositional factors and the consciousness Tenzin Chökyi. And that’s how I exist. Okay?

That’s how myself does exist conventionally. That which is merely labeled on the aggregates. And that’s why the self isn’t just whoops previous chart that’s why it’s not just consciousness because that’s not what we’re attached to. Right? That subtle, little mental consciousness that goes from life to life, that’s not what you think about when somebody insults you and you just go, How dare you say that about me?

You’re not saying, Oh, the storehouse consciousness that takes the karmic seeds to the next life. You’re not thinking about that at all. Our view of self, that wrong view that we have of self, is so much more than that. And the way the self does exist is labeled on all the parts, not just that one of consciousness. So sometimes we get fooled between the self and that which goes from life to life because we’ve got this sort of programming of this idea of that which is eternal, unchanging, partless, like a soul.

Right? We have this idea that there’s some essence inside of us that when we die, like Casper the ghost kinda comes up and goes into either the next body or to heaven depending on your world view. But you feel like there’s some essence. In Hinduism, they call it the Ātman, the self. There’s a self.

Sometimes in Hindu schools, go big s self and little s self, and the big s self is that one, that essence that’s permanent, unchanging. So sometimes we have that kind of an idea about the Self. And the Buddha famously taught the doctrine of An Ātman, no self. Refuting that one, saying there is no such thing. And I think kind of subconsciously thinking that that exists makes us think that, Oh, okay, it’s that subtle consciousness that goes from life to life.

That’s like the soul, but it’s not. It’s so much more subtle than that, and it’s changing moment by moment. It’s not permanent. It’s not partless. It’s just a continuum of mind moments changing moment to moment.

So the Buddha refuted that there was any such self as this permanent, partless, unitary is the way it’s usually described. Okay, a self like that that would correspond to the Christian idea of a soul or the Hindu idea of Ātman. So the Buddha said there’s no such essence like that. That was the grossest idea of the self that the Buddha refuted. Permanent, partless, unitary.

Then there was another idea of self that the Buddha refuted, and it’s called the philosophical word is substantially existent and self sufficient. And what this means is like the controller or the driver of your body and mind. Like the real you is some kind of controller or driver of your body and mind. It’s like cranes on a construction site, right? There’s some big crane and the thing is coming down and lifting the I beam and doing this thing.

There’s some little guy in some little box somewhere sometimes it’s a woman it’s usually a guy running the gears. So you’ve got this big thing and then there’s somebody running the show. And we kind of think there’s some such thing like that in us. I remember when I was a little kid, I used to think, oh, the real me is in my head, and it’s looking out my eyeballs like the windows of the soul. Right?

Like you’re in your head somewhere, and it’s really that you’re looking out of your eyeballs. So it’s some kind of an idea like that that we have. It was actually reified in Western philosophy I think it was the late 1700s the homunculus, a little guy who lived in your pituitary gland. Remember that? And it was the late 1700s he probably had a top hat and a tuxedo and he lived in your pituitary gland, like doing that thing.

I mean that idea is exactly the epitome of this idea that the Buddha is refuting, that there’s such a self existent, substantially existent, self sufficient, meaning a me separate from the aggregates. That’s what that means, that there’s some controller running the body and mind somewhere. And the Buddha said, It ain’t like that either, guys. Neither is it inherently existent, meaning there’s no part of it that’s independent of my conceptual imputation. So what happens?

Just like the cup, I come along with my body and mind, a continuum, a body and mind both constantly changing. And then I have this idea, Tenzin Chökyi, that I slap onto that body and mind. That’s how I do validly exist. Fine. No problem.

That’s how everything exists. It’s merely designated onto what we call in philosophy a valid basis of the designation. Valid meaning it functions like that. Remember consensus, function, and continuity. So there’s a continuity that has that function and then I label it Tenzin Chökyi.

That’s all. But it doesn’t feel like that. It feels like there’s something else coming from its own side. And boy, nobody better insult me or if they praise me. I’m like, yeah.

Know, because it’s like feed I mean, we talk about feeding the ego. It’s like feeding that view of self that we have. Do we feel like we’re just that which is merely labeled on a continuum of body and mind? No way. You know?

And that’s how it helps us. Because that ignorance about the way we exist just happens to be the root of saṃsāra, folks. It ain’t the ignorance about the way the cup exists. It’s the ignorance about the way that we exist. So that’s the main meditation that we do.

We’re meditating on our emptiness, the emptiness of the self. And during the direct realization of emptiness, that’s the realization that we get in that first meditation. Just like Chenrezig meditating intellectually on the emptiness of the five aggregates. Also because he’s meditating on each aggregate individually and the whole ball of wax, which we’re going to do in a minute. Okay?

Yeah. So I’m clear when you said that the Buddha refuted this controller view, this crane operator view of a substantially existent, self existent something. Yeah. But is there some kind of connection or translation from that phenomena or feeling to one of the mental factors or one of the types of consciousness that Buddhism does define? That’s just ignorance.

That’s just what we say is one of the flavors of that root ignorance about how the self does exist. It’s just a complete misperception about the way that we exist. I don’t think it really relates so much. I mean, can’t think or I’ve never really heard it explained that it relates so much to a specific mental factor, that one. It’s just an ignorance about the way we exist that sort of just pervades and gives rise, flavors a lot of the mental factors.

Because the delusion and the attachment and everything else comes from that view and just the plain feeling of feeling inherently existent. We just feel that there’s something more than that which is merely labeled on that valid basis of body and mind. It’s even subtler than the controller crane operator one. It’s just this view that, yeah, there’s something inherently there. Yeah.

Morgan? I have a a quick question that’s probably through the meditation. So, like, a lot of times when you sit with the cup and you’re doing this dependent arising meditation, it it almost it does seem mirror like when you start to once you get to a point, it seems like you’re like you get that and it reflects on kind of the emptiness of the own self and To me, I just get really jammed up and it just feels like this, like vertigo. And it just and it and it’s this what so what I’m curious is if, you when you see that, you first get that point where you’re like the emptiness of self, it’s standing on a high dive for a second. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But it keeps happening. So what do you do? Awesome. That’s great. You got it.

But doesn’t feel good. It doesn’t feel good. It doesn’t. And it’s perfect because it’s not going to. Because we’ve been attached to it, by the way, since beginningless time, this wrong view of how the self exists.

And Lama Zopa says when you get that fear, it means you’re hitting the mark. If you’re doing meditation on emptiness of self and you don’t feel that subjective feeling, it means you’re not getting it. So that’s perfect. It means you’ve got it. And Lama Zopa has this beautiful thing.

There’s this book called Teachings from the Vajrasattva Retreat that Lama Zopa it was nineteen ninety nine at Land of Medicine Buddha. He did this three month Vajrasattva retreat and taught on the Lam Rim throughout it. And there is this beautiful book and he talks exactly about what it’s like to have a direct realization of emptiness. And he talks about that fear. And he says there’s two kinds of people: some when they’re having that direct realization of emptiness, they have great joy.

But he says before that, as you’re going into it, this incredible fear arises. Because this thing that you’ve always thought was there since beginningless time, by the way He said it’s like thinking that you had a million dollars in your pocket and you realize it’s not there at all. You always thought you had a million dollars in your wallet and you open it up and there’s nothing there. And he says, The fear comes because it has to come. And then he says, You just push through it like wading through a river.

It’s so beautiful because he talks about when that fear comes, it means you’re on the right track and you just push. You just keep pushing. He says, If you back off at that moment, you may lose your chance to see emptiness directly. And it’s this whole thing about he says, And then you see it and there’s incredible joy on the other side. But the reason the fear arises, we think we’re losing something that we had.

Right? Because we’ve been clinging onto this idea since beginning of this time, so we have some fear or some hesitation thinking that we’re losing something precious that we’ve always had, and the only thing we’re losing is the root of saṃsāra. The only thing we’re losing is a wrong conception about ourselves that just happens to be the cause of every iota of suffering we’ve had since beginningless time. Get rid of it, for God’s sakes. Just get rid of it.

But that’s why the fear arises. And he said it has to. It has to. Because if it didn’t arise, you wouldn’t be meditating on the right thing. So it’s awesome what you describe.

And it feels scary as hell, doesn’t it? Yeah. Perfect. Right on. Sorry, Morgan.

Yeah, but just, you know, that means you’re on the right track and so you just keep pushing with that. Because if you have doubts at that point, if you back up at that point, but when that fear arises it really is because you’re going for the jugular, you know, of your ego and it fights back like crazy and that’s what Mara is. You know in all of these Buddhist sutras they talk about Mara and sometimes people say oh it’s the Buddhist version of the devil forget it it’s your ego fighting back you know because when you’re really giving it you know when you’ve got it in a choke hold you know, and you’re really wrestling it and you’re doing your emptiness meditation on the self, it’s gonna try and do anything. Oh, this is too you’re going too far, Morgan. It’s too intense.

You know? You’re not gonna be able to relate to people after a while. Just give it up. This Buddhist thing, you know, you’ve just gone too far. I mean, it’s sneaky.

It has all those voices trying to convince you to stop killing it because it doesn’t want to die. Oh, look over there. Oh, look, look, you know? Look at that thing. And you just have to go for it.

You know? You just really have to go for it because it’s wily and sometimes its voice sounds a lot like wisdom intuition, but then you get pretty good at it. I used to have these battles with Mara in my long retreat, and I’d use these very unnun like words to Mara, you know, when I felt like, you know, he was fighting fighting back. And it was, you know, you battle with that because you just feel it arising when you’re when you’re on the path and you just can’t let it win. What I used to say is, look.

Look. You’ve won since beginningless blank time. You’re not going to win this round. You know, this is my big chance to win because I have all the teachings that I need. I’ve got the perfect teachers, the perfect circumstances, the perfect human rebirth, so f you, Mara.

You know? And you have to because it can talk you out of this rebirth, and you can not progress. So we have to. But it’s awesome. That fear is really good.

Janet. On rare occasions, I come up again at different times against, like, a a really intense fear like that. Yeah. Not very often. But it feels to me almost like I’m gonna die.

Great. And and I can watch the I can watch that incredible fear and know that that’s not true and not go any further. So I’m wondering, it’s fear of death, basically. Come down to it. Fear of death.

So in this little ego body mind with all this ego running around, practice is to release that fear of death, that fear of change is is basically what it comes down to. We’re so afraid of changing anything. Right. Right. Right.

Right. Do you have any advice? Yeah. It’s like You know, I think that, you know, the more we study and the more we understand intellectually that you’re not losing anything and that’s what the fear of death is. I mean, that’s what the fear of physical death really is.

We feel that we’re not going to exist anymore. And when you realize that understanding the emptiness of yourself doesn’t mean you’re not going to exist anymore because you never existed like that ever in the first place. And the more you can convince yourself intellectually through your study of that, then I think you have enough ammunition when that fear starts to come up that you can counteract it. It doesn’t mean it’s not going to come up, but the more you’re convinced that that wrong view about how you exist is the cause of every iota of pain you’ve had since beginningless time, and it’s just believing that it’s just overcoming a total like Lama Zopa just dismissively calls it this hallucination. You know, it’s this complete hallucination about how we exist.

So you’re overcoming a hallucination. It’s not like you’re overcoming somehow or killing something that exists. Feels like that I’m really gonna die. Yeah, great. Go Janet.

Just go for dying. Just go for it. That’s great. That’s great. Because it’s exactly because of that grasping.

We call that self grasping, like grasping onto that view. We call it in philosophy the view of the transitory collection. What’s the transitory collection? The five aggregates. What’s the view?

Thinking that they’re a self. So we say the root ignorance is the view of the transitory collection, which is shorthand for thinking that there’s something more than the five aggregates. Transitory collection. Isn’t that ephemeral? Right?

Transitory collection. That’s all we are. It’s this transitory collection. But we never feel that way about ourselves, that we’re just a transitory collection. I love that, the view of the transitory collection, somehow solidifying that and reifying that and making that into an idea of a concrete self.

So that’s great. And that is the fear of death. And if we didn’t have that view of the transitory collection, we wouldn’t fear death because we’re not losing anything at death. The consciousness will go on. It will become associated with another form body.

What’s the big deal? No big deal. And that’s why the Lamas, they say when they die, it’s just like changing an old worn out pair of clothes. I remember Ribur Rinpoche manifesting the aspect of cancer, And his main attendant and translator, Fabrizio, this Italian man, was begging him once not to leave. Please don’t die, Rinpoche.

And Rinpoche says to Fabrizio, what are you saying? Why do you want me to stay in this old, worn out body? Why on earth are you wishing for that? Because from his side, it’s like, God, get rid of the old body that doesn’t work anymore. Give me one that can benefit beings because I’m just old and tired and I’ve got cancer.

Get rid of it. So from their perspective, it’s like, Yeah, give me a fresh one. It’s just like trading in the old used Ford or something. Get rid of it. Yeah.

I’ve heard the Dalai Lama say the same thing in in a video. It was a movie that we were watching. He said exactly the same thing. He says, why keep an old body? It’s just like changing your clothes.

You get fresh clothes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s only us with our wrong view.

Like, all those things we do and all those things are freezing some DNA so that you’ll be able to it’s like so you know, from a Buddhist view, it’s just nuts because you’re not your body. It’s that whole scientific materialist reductionist thing that you’re your DNA. Like, please, you know? Like, so you’re gonna regrow it at some point in the future and then you’re gonna be you again? I don’t think You know?

Boy, it would be pretty sad if you were limited to your DNA, wouldn’t it? I can it’s it’s pretty easy to grasp intellectually. Yeah. But Yeah. To actually solidify the belief and and embody that change of mind You have to meditate, meditate, meditate.

That’s the difference between understanding something intellectually and getting the realization. None of this stuff, like I said yesterday emptiness is not rocket science. It’s not that hard to understand intellectually. Really hard to get it to change your view of how you exist. That’s completely dependent on habituation and meditating over and over and over and over and over again on it.

Yeah. Yeah, we had Oh, I have the mic, so Yeah. Oh, I’d like to hear the question. Can I use your scenario and then tag on to it? What happens is like Janet has young children.

She wrote a will out but she didn’t hasn’t printed it and signed it so it’s not legitimate. And but then she experiences there of dying. She should let go or she said, no. I can’t. I I haven’t done all these yet.

I tell my children. What do you say to that? I think we should be ready for death all the time. You know? In His Holiness, the Dalai Lama meditates on death every day, and I think we should just completely be prepared so we don’t have any clinging.

Because it’s that clinging at the moment of death that creates a very powerful cause for continued samsaric rebirth. So would you say that we should always complete as much as possible on a daily Absolutely. You know how these people get diagnosed with cancer and they quit their job as the CEO of some major company and do what they really wanted to do, which is like sail around the world? We should be that way every day. We should wake up in the morning and go, it’s a miracle I woke up in the morning.

It would be a miracle if I lived until tonight. Let me do the most important thing every day. So yeah, don’t wait till you’re eighty to make out your will. I mean, that’s ridiculous because we should just be able to let go as much as possible at any moment because we just have no idea. Yeah, yeah.

Thank you. You’re welcome. Yeah. I was also wondering, in terms of the constant change of yourself, and going with the issue of disconstructing yourself, I guess, and the sense of fear and anxiety about yourself. But in terms of the relationships that we have around that count on a definition of that role, how do you work it through?

Yeah, and you just, you know, I think you take it very lightly and very loosely. You know, sure, we conventionally exist. Buddha wouldn’t say that we’re not all sitting here in this room. Sure, we exist. But just as that which is merely labeled on our aggregate.

So there’s not so much identification with any aspect of who you are, which causes a lot of suffering. Sometimes we can get into these roles or we identify so much. Chris was saying before we identify with our emotions. I am an angry person, like I’m angry, or I’m an engineer, like I’m this or I’m that. What happens when you’re an engineer for sixty years and you lose your job because it’s the recession and then you commit suicide because you can’t deal with the loss of identity.

So I think it can help us just to hold those things with a very light touch. Sure, that’s an aspect of what’s happening, that’s part of what I’m labeling me right now, It can change at any moment. So we just deal with it conventionally. That’s fine. But in terms of really solidifying it and hanging on to it, it’s that attachment that’s what causes suffering.

Because that’s when change happens. You know, you identify as being really good looking and if you’re lucky, you’re going to live long enough that you ain’t going to be as good looking anymore. And if you really hang on to the identification with that, you’re going to suffer. But if you have a mind just going, I’m constantly changing. My body and my mind are constantly changing.

It works because of the continuum to label me my whole life, but just hold it kind of more lightly. Because I think that clinging, especially to aspects of identity, is just a setup for incredible suffering. But I was referring in terms of people who depend on you for that particular identity. Well, that’s interesting. Can you give an example?

Well, was thinking about the mother. Being a mother and you identify with that role. Identify yourself. And mother only exists in dependence on a child. You’re not a mother without having a child.

So it’s this relationship. It’s this relationship of mother and child. You can function that way. It’s a valid label for a woman who has a child, completely valid. You function like that.

So there’s no problem. Again, just because things are empty doesn’t mean that they can’t function. Somebody’s depending on you to act in a certain way towards them. That’s fine. That’s valid.

That functions. That’s part of the label of who you are. It might change. Then what happens if you lose your child, if you really attach to the idea of mother or the empty nest syndrome that the kid goes off to college? It’s useful to look at those aspects identity that we really attach to and try and just breathe a little relativity into it.

Because the more we solidify it, the more potential for suffering when it changes, which it is bound to do because everything changes. So that’s all. Yeah. Yeah. Anything else before we carry on?

Yeah. Jessica has it. Jessica, right? Yes. Okay.

I was gonna ask about the relationship between suffering and no self kind of in the opposite direction. Like, if the purpose of suffering is not to help us give up our concept of self, and I think there’s a prayer that we could have the appropriate measure of suffering to be able to do that. If you could just elaborate a little bit. Okay. I think, you know, when I think that helps us with renunciation.

You know, I think the more we realize that saṃsāra is a broken realm and it’s not fixable, that’s what enables us to just let go of clinging to saṃsāra, and that may be what they’re talking about there. Which of course, then on the basis of that and renunciation is one of these words I hate. It’s one of the ones I’d like a new definition for, but since we use it, but it means the Tibetan word translates as definite emergence, meaning the definite wish to get free from saṃsāra. And I think that one of my friends who’s a teacher says, to really have renunciation, you need to have suffered enough to just really be over it and to want to get free. Sometimes with new students, when they start studying Buddhism, they don’t really want a pacified mind.

They’re a little bit addicted to the highs and lows. We’re a little bit addicted to the roller coaster ride, but if you’ve really hit bottom, I mean if the roller coaster has crashed majorly, that’s when you just feel like, Hey, wait a minute. I think I want to get out. So I think that’s the function of suffering. And when suffering comes in our life, even as Buddhist practitioners, which it must because we’re not arhats yet, right?

We’re not free of our karma. I think that’s how we can use it in the path. Oh, wow. Because I find that way I mean, I have a great life. I’m a Buddhist nun.

I travel around the world teaching, which is my favorite thing to do, meeting these great people. And then every once in a while, I still will have a really bad day or a conflict with a friend or something like that because I’m still subject to my karma. And it’s really great because it reminds me, Oh, I’m not free yet. I have a great life, but it’s still in saṃsāra and I’m still subject to karma and delusion. So I think when we have that kind of suffering, that’s the purpose of it and we can use it to reinforce our renunciation.

Yeah. Good. All right. Why oh, Carla? Why don’t we have Carla and then why don’t we take a slightly early break and then do our meditation after because I really wanna do the meditation on the five aggregates and the self.

Maybe a few more questions if we’ve got them. Yeah. It’s just since some people brought up fear, you know, during this the self meditation or analysis, I I think in my experience, I have rarely encountered a situation where it’s just like realizing that there’s no self. But I think at some point, I mistake that by the nihilistic view. And I’m wondering if you could just put a few words on that fine line in between having no self, not finding a self, but at the same time not falling into the extreme.

Right, right, right. And I think that’s, know, Lama Tsongkhapa, who’s the founder of the Gelug tradition, was sometimes criticized for emphasizing a valid establishment of how things do validly exist, and he was sometimes criticized for that, but he was trying to bring people from what we call it the chasm of nihilism, of going to that extreme of thinking that nothing exists, especially thinking that karma doesn’t function, by emphasizing how things do exist. So they say, we talk about the middle way in Buddhism a lot, and it means different things in different contexts, but we talk about the middle way between the two extremes of eternalism and nihilism. Eternalism would be the extreme of thinking that everything exists and it’s just the way it appears. About ninety percent of the people, they say, tend towards that extreme.

And then there’s the other ten percent of us. I think we’ve done all those recreational substances in the 60s or 70s, then we don’t believe that things appear in the way that they do at all because it’s transmogrified so many times. And then we tend towards, oh, nothing exists, the extreme of Nothing exists, nothing matters. So I think to bring yourself from the extreme of eternalism, you focus on emptiness. Then if you feel that you’re getting over into the other extreme, you focus on dependent arising.

Right? Because that’s how things do validly exist and thinking, okay, I’m empty because I’m nothing more than that which is merely labeled on the valid basis of my aggregates and then when you’re starting to get a little too extreme in that but I do exist is that which is very you know, that’s how I conventionally exist and that’s fine, to tilt yourself because it’s a razor’s edge, that middle way, without denying either half. Remember when we said that emptiness, dependent arising are like two sides of a coin. They’re like two ways of explaining the same kind of characteristic. One is in the positive way of explaining and one is more talking about what isn’t there.

So I think to get from extreme of nihilism, you think about how do you validly, conventionally exist, not inherently one iota, but in dependence on conceptual designation onto those parts of the five aggregates. So that helps. That helps. So it’s almost like, well, I really find a self here, but there’s still a head and a body with two legs and so forth. I mean Yeah.

And it functions, and it’s fine. And that’s who Carla is. You know? Carla is an ever changing continuum of body and mind with a label on it and a concept. And thank goodness because if Carla were anything more than that, Carla couldn’t become an enlightened being.

If we weren’t empty, there’s no way we could become a Buddha. So thank God for emptiness. Because if it weren’t for emptiness, there’d be no way we could transform. Because we’re empty, we can create the causes and conditions to have the body and mind of a fully enlightened being and label that with our concepts. That’s cool.

If Karla were inherently existent, remember Nāgārjuna said, Because of emptiness, everything is possible. If it weren’t for emptiness, nothing would be possible. Because of emptiness, Carla the Buddha and you won’t be called Carla anymore is possible. So that’s all. Just thinking I mean, yeah.

And again, we just have such a solid thing that emptiness means it doesn’t exist because we just conflate inherent existence and existence and we’ve got to peel those two apart. But since beginningless time, we’ve thought existence meant inherent existence. So part of our job is just separating existence from inherent existence and seeing that they’re two different things. Okay. Anything else?

Are we okay? Kind of? Sort of? Okay. Why don’t we take a we’ll take two short breaks this afternoon.

Why don’t we do that? So let’s take ten minutes now and come back a quarter after, and then we’ll do our meditation. And then if we need to, we’ll take another little mini break later. Alright. So as I mentioned before, this was a meditation that Lama Zopa Rinpoche told me to do at a certain point of my retreat and I found it really very significant, very good at kind of hitting the mark.

And he said, Recite the Heart Sūtra, get to that point of the sūtra where Avalokiteśvara gives that instruction: Stop and meditate on the emptiness of the five aggregates and then the emptiness of the self and keep going back and forth. And that was one sort of part of my practice, and I would just keep repeating that for a session. So I do about maybe twenty minutes or half an hour of the meditation on the emptiness of the five aggregates and then the self. And so we’ll do that. We’ll just experiment for about twenty minutes or so and go back and forth, and I’ll lead you through.

Maybe what I’ll do is go back to this page so you’re kind of familiar with the five heaps, but we’ll go back to that. So let’s just sit for a few minutes watching our breath. First, getting in your meditation position with your back straight, your legs crossed comfortably, your head tilted slightly forward, your tongue on the roof of your mouth right behind your teeth, your hands with your right hand over your left and the thumbs touching just a few finger widths below your navel, your eyes slightly open, gazing down the plane of your nose, and then just take a few minutes to focus on your breath to settle your mind. So first we’re going to meditate on the five aggregates, on the emptiness of the five aggregates, the five aggregates of a person. Think about first the dependent arising of form.

Form aggregate, the personal form aggregate is your body. Think about how it arises from causes and conditions. The causes being, first of all, the sperm and egg of the parents, the regenerative material, the food that you ate, and then the conditions being the care that you got growing up, the education that you got, exercise that went into making your body what it is. So think about how our body, our form aggregate, is a result of causes and conditions. It It doesn’t exist independently.

Sometimes it feels like we just have this body, but it came into being as a result of causes and conditions. And then your body feels like something unitary, but it exists in dependence on parts. So think of the parts of your body, your arms and legs, your torso, your head, your ears, your toes, your fingers, all the parts of your body. And then at an even subtler level, all those parts are composed of parts. Your hand seems like we can talk about my hand as if it were some kind of unitary discrete entity, but it’s composed of fingers, thumb, the palm, the wrist, the front, the back of the hand.

So all the parts of the body, the gross parts, are composed of smaller parts. Then at an even subtler level, we have the cells, the components of the cells, the atomic and subatomic particles, And then let’s look. What we call my body is just a concept. It’s just an idea imputed or labeled onto these parts. So on the basis of a validly functioning, valid basis, we label my body.

So think about how your body, just like the cup, exists in dependence on concepts. There’s no my body there from its own side independent of your labeling onto the constituent parts. So take a minute to see how your body exists like that, that which is merely labeled on the functioning parts. So your body’s emptiness is its lack of being anything other than a dependent arising. The body isn’t inherently existent.

It depends on all three of these levels for its existence. So its emptiness is its absence of being anything other than a dependent arising. Then let’s look at the mental parts of the person. We have the aggregate of feeling, pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. That very basic response, feeling to sense contact.

So it’s dependent on an object of consciousness. We need to have that contact with an object. We need to have a consciousness, that perceiving awareness. So it exists in dependence on the cause of a continuum of consciousness, the conditions of the contact with an object, And then we have memory, past association, all giving rise to that feeling in response to that sense of contact. So it doesn’t arise independent of those causes and conditions, those parts.

So we don’t inherently have any kind of pleasant or unpleasant feeling. It exists on dependence on that event of that contact with an object, that apprehending consciousness, past memory and association. So think about that, how feeling is dependent in that way. And then we label that mental function feeling. We have an idea, feeling.

We have a concept of the aggregate of feeling. So we pull apart, we isolate that one function of consciousness and we call that feeling. So in a way, we’re sort of artificially identifying one aspect of any kind of complex response that we have to an object and we’re just calling that one aspect of response feeling. So in that way, it’s dependent on our concepts, dependent on our imputation. And now let’s look at discrimination or discernment.

So again, we have the component parts of the contact with an object, the contacting consciousness, the object that we come into contact with, any of the sense objects or a thought. And then we have recognition, discernment, discrimination, recognizing what that object is. But it’s in dependence upon the different component parts, the causes and conditions of the consciousness, the contacted object, and so forth. So it doesn’t arise inherently. It’s not independent.

And then we label that function of our consciousness, that mental factor, we label that discrimination or discernment. We create a concept to label that one function? When we come into contact with an object, there’s so much going on, but that one aspect, that one mental function, we label discernment. So it’s created by our mind, by our concepts, by our labeling. And then we have all the other compositional factors, all of the other mental factors that flavor our consciousness, the six omnipresent mental factors, the things that we call emotions, both positive and negative.

And so we’re creating these categories. There’s forty nine left over in that fourth aggregate, forty nine mental factors after we take out feeling and discernment. And again, we’re creating with our concepts these forty nine categories to describe various functions of our consciousness. So it’s a little arbitrary. They don’t exist from their own side.

We’re just kind of carving out little aspects of our mental function, giving them these labels. So think about how all of these forty nine mental factors that make up the aggregate of compositional factors are dependent on our mental labeling or conceptual designation. And then we have consciousness, the most fundamental level, the fact that we’re a sentient being. We have this consciousness which is a continuum coming from our past life and it’s changing moment by moment by moment. Consciousness or mind is that which is clear and knowing, clear and aware.

It holds objects and is aware of the objects that it’s holding. So it’s caused every moment of consciousness caused by the previous moment of consciousness, what we call consciousness composed of all of these parts, all of these moments of consciousness. For example, when we’re having a sense consciousness of an object, whether it’s an external sense object or a thought. Component parts of that moment of consciousness are the object being contacted, the the sense contact, and then our consciousness coming into contact. So that’s the way that consciousness arises in dependence on causes and conditions and parts.

And then we call that consciousness. We have an idea of consciousness based on that function of clarity and awareness, function of holding sense objects and being aware of them. And we label that consciousness. So consciousness itself is created by our concept, by our conceptual imputation and designation. And then on the basis of those five component parts, all of which are dependent arisings, we label me.

So that’s how we exist, is that which is merely labeled on those five component parts. Our emptiness is we’re nothing more than that. Think about this deeply. We’re nothing more than that which is labeled by concepts on those five aggregates that themselves are empty of inherent existence. There’s no concrete essence.

There’s nothing other than that. So the way we do exist is merely labeled on the five component parts, the five aggregates, which themselves are merely concepts labeled onto functions of body and mind. And that’s all we are, that which is merely labeled. Our emptiness is. There’s we’re nothing other than that.

Try and hold that realization strongly. So let’s dedicate the positive energy of this meditation towards being able to see the emptiness of our self so that we can overcome that fundamental grasping that’s the cause of all our problems, the root of saṃsāra. Okay. So that’s how you do that meditation. And you can if you’ve got a longer session, you can just kind of go back and forth, and it just chips away, you know, Because you see that you’re labeled on the aggregates, and then you go to the aggregates and see that they themselves are empty of inherent existence.

And then you go back to the self and back to the aggregates, and you just keep going back and forth, seeing that we’re just that which is labeled on components that themselves are empty. There’s nothing to hang on to. There’s nothing to solidify. So I found that really powerful. And like I said, what I’d do is get up to that paragraph that we’d gotten up to in the text, stop there.

We got to that first part of Avalokiteśvara’s answer, saying, Beholding those five aggregates also is empty of inherent nature. Or you can get to the same next part, form is empty, emptiness is form, because the next section talks about the emptiness of the aggregates. So one of these paragraphs right in here, and then you stop and you do the meditation and then you continue on with the rest of the Heart Sūtra, and it’s a really powerful meditation. So like I said, I think I had I can’t remember two hundred repetitions of it, and it took me a couple of weeks and it was great. It was one of the best parts of this long retreat that I just did all these different things, but I remember really clearly that two week period because it felt like it really started to shake that strong grasping that I had.

Did do an entire session on that one or did you incorporate it with other practices? No. I only did that. I mean, I did my other commitments, but then that was just my only focus. Oops.

Where’d it go? Well, let’s hear practically how you did that because you did more than one recitation in a session. So I would take maybe what I did in that retreat I was doing the traditional four sessions a day. So I would have like a two hour session in the morning, then a three hour session before lunch, a three hour session in the afternoon, usually about two hours in the evening. So each one I would take about forty five minutes, and then I just break for five minutes, and then I do another one.

So I do maybe two or three per meditation session. So but I’m saying you’d say you’d only recite this once and then go into the the meditation Yeah. And then come out again, recite it again. Yeah. One session, you do about three or four Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Two or three because each one was about forty five minutes. So, yeah, I do two or three. You know?

Because then I just have a little break in between and just go, oh, wow. That was cool. And then I do it again like that. And so just kept repeating over and over. So I do maybe, I don’t know, like ten a day or something, and it took two hundred, so it was about, yeah, maybe three weeks or so that it took because I get through about ten a day.

Because he said, do it really slowly. Don’t just do, You know, really meditate on it. It got really trippy. It was great. It was just like, Wow, you know, as got more and more into it.

It just felt like it was one of the most effective periods of meditation. So I just do that, alternate between the five aggregates, then go back to the self, see how it was just merely labeled on the aggregate. So I was using they say the meditation on dependent arising, they call that the king of reasonings for getting an insight into emptiness, which is why we emphasize understanding dependent arising so much when we’re trying to understand emptiness, because they say it’s the king of reasonings for understanding emptiness, because emptiness is just the flip side of dependent arising. So you see how you exist is just dependent on being labeled onto those five aggregates, then you just go, I’m nothing else. That thing I thought was there that freaks me out so much when I start to see that it’s not there.

It never was there, never could be there, never will be there. You ain’t losing nothing you ever had. You’re just losing the cause of suffering. Like that. So the emptiness is So just back to the practicality that so you would stop, let’s say I think I would stop at after form is empty.

I think I would stop actually after the next one. Form is empty. Emptiness is form. So you’d say that whole paragraph and then you’d stop, meditate, then you’d finish the meditation or that kind of level and then you’d continue Śāriputra and then you’d finish up. Oh, cool.

Yep. Thank you. Yeah. Morgan. Just a real quick one.

When you get that, kind of feeling you said the fear kinda like that Janet went into as well. Do you change do you change the the focus of your meditation onto that? So like it kind of comes in waves, like you’re kind of like it feels like a little like someone’s shocking you a bit. Yeah. Do you do you basically like whatever triggers that, like there’s various things.

It was a difficult meditation in a group setting for me, but Right. But do you go from like, once you kinda get that feeling and you’re kinda sitting there on that high dive or whatever that feeling is, is that now do you do you try to hold on that object? No. No. You could you do whatever freaked you out in the first place harder.

You know, whatever it was that brought up that fear, you push it at that point. It’s like that thing that Lama said of going through the river, and I’ll try and find that so I can read that passage to you tomorrow because it’s so cool the way you described it. So whatever brought you to that feeling instead of shifting to the fear somehow, you you just keep pushing whatever it was that made you afraid because that’s that’s getting to the point. So whatever got you to that point of fear in the first place, you just trust. And that’s when you need refuge, man, because refuge is the safety net.

And you’ve got to have refuge and you’ve just got to go. I just trust that this is the answer and I’m just going to go for it because I’m really freaked out right now, but I’ve just got to trust what Lord Buddha said about how I do exist and how I don’t exist and what the cause of all of my trouble is. So really that faith and that trust and that refuge is really the only thing that enables you to go through the fear, I think, and to really push it. Because otherwise you’re like, I’m just going to go psychotic or something. Sometimes that’s a real fear when people start to meditate really deeply and that’s why we have refuge in Buddhism, you know?

Because they you know, the Buddha really pulled the rug out, which is why he backtracked in the third turning of the wheel Because so many people experience that fear and then he just put the rug back a little bit or put a safety net, Oh no, no, you know, was just exaggerating to make a point. It’s really like this. But to really cut the root of saṃsāra, we have to go through that fear. But that’s why we have the safety net of refuge and of really trusting that. Because otherwise, yeah, it’s way too scary if there’s nothing.

But we do have refuge in the Buddha’s teachings and just some faith that the Buddha is really showing us the unmistaken path to get out of our suffering. And you’ve trained enough in that. I think when you get to that point, you’ve trained enough in that that’s what gives you the courage to keep pushing it when you get to that point. Question. Sandra?

Was just wondering if you did that before or after your retreat. During. It was during. Yeah, that was one of the things. I did a first three and a half years of retreat, and then that wasn’t enough, so I did three more years.

And then during the second three years, I met with Lama Zopa in between the two, three years, and he gave me my game plan for the second three years. That was one of the practices he told me to do for that second three years. Shine Land in yeah, Shine Land in Central California. Yeah, Keith. Want to ask, Corey, what happens with me is when do a meditation that meditation or like that, I begin to get a feeling of of hopelessness that it’s just too hard.

Mhmm. And then I then my mind begins to work, I for me or against me. I said, Well, if there was actually another aggregate and that produced this is really just all a dream, that this life is a dream, kind of like the mind only school, well then it’s okay. It’s not that hard. This seems so hard, and so then I fall into that.

I think it’s sort of a self defeating kind of mechanism, but it does seem to work. So what should I I mean, it be best just to stay with the hopelessness and the helplessness that this is and the feeling this is just too hard. You’ll and you’ll never get out of it. So sorry this way. It’s just because if if something if things actually have an inherent some kind of an existence Right.

If it’s not all a product of my mind Right. How will I ever let go? Right. Right. Right.

How I do the renunciation, the letting go? Right. Right. Right. It just seems so difficult.

But then But there’s almost like there’s a shortcut. Yeah. Yeah. In there in Lama Zopa, I’ve heard him say I remember once in San Francisco, I think it was nineteen ninety three, it was actually venerable Chuky’s first teaching of Lama Zopa I took her to and he talked about the emptiness of the carpet for nine hours, like very typical Lama Zopa Rinpoche teaching. And I remember at a certain point this woman, like he just went on because this is the way he teaches.

It’s like a nine hour guided meditation and the emptiness of the carpet and the emptiness of the carpet over and over. And this woman, like at a certain point this woman got really agitated and it was a big room full of people and she kind of calls out from the back row, but wait, wait, like, does that mean the carpet doesn’t exist or does that mean it’s an illusion? And he said, it’s it’s not an illusion, but it’s like an illusion. And then he said it over and over again and she was totally pacified. She was just like, oh He’s like, it’s not an illusion, but it’s like an illusion.

It’s not an illusion. It’s like an illusion. He said, it’s so like an illusion that it’s almost like nothing’s there. You know? So it’s really, really close to being an illusion, but it’s like an illusion.

It’s not an illusion. Because what is there is so incredibly subtle. Like how things do conventionally exist is so extremely subtle that for all intents and purposes it is an illusion, you know? Because everything that we’re perceiving, we’re totally creating. So the mind only school isn’t that far off.

Buddha just kind of swung a little bit into this one direction. It was on the basis of all these sutras that say everything is mind. Mind is the producer of everything. It’s all true. And what does exist conventionally is so extremely subtle that it’s as if it’s an illusion.

There’s just that subtle difference of like, No, it’s not an illusion. It’s like an illusion. But for all intents and purposes, what we’re perceiving is completely illusory because we’re just reifying so much. Our conceptual imputation is just so far out there. So I don’t know if that helps, but we have to get, again, on the razor’s edge.

And often we will tip to one side or the other and we’ll get depressed when we go into nihilism or we’ll hold on too tight when we go to eternalism and it takes a long time to actually get it right. But then Lama’s open that same thing after he says you just push through like wading through a river and you just get this image of like, okay, I’m just gonna go for it. You know? And then he says you have this incredible joy. Like you realize that thing, that million dollars that you all saw in your was in your back pocket and it’s not, and then you just have this incredible feeling of freedom and joy.

So I think just tilting and it’s not easy. It’s definitely not easy. Getting the middle way consequent school’s view is the subtlest and the hardest. But we can work with the other views. My friend Venerable René, who taught at vajrapani for so long, he really advocated working your way up through the views of the philosophical schools.

Because sometimes we think we have the middle way consequence school, and we don’t at all. We don’t have a clue. But if you really work your way up through the views and meditate on the different views, it’s okay. It gets you higher and higher. So meditating or on the mind only school view is great.

I told him, I I thought I was confessing at one point. I said, you know, when I studied the four schools, always thought I was a middle way consequence person, but I realized I was really a middle way independent. And he goes, oh, that’s wonderful. And he said, oh, very good. Just stay there.

That’s great. Because I was like, I kind of think the cup is hinting to me that it’s a cup, which is that view. Like there’s something there that makes it a cup but then I label it cup and I’m kind of thinking the cup is like, hey, don’t I kind of look like a cup? Look at me. Don’t I look kind of cuppy to you?

And then I’m going, okay, you’re a cup. And that’s the Middle Way Independent School and the Middle Way Consequence School say, The cup isn’t even hinting to me that it’s a cup. It’s all me labeling it. So it is interesting to study those different things and fine to be meditating at that level because it’s all better than being at the bottom of the ladder, which is where we mostly are. You know, it’s rungs leading us up to that higher view.

Good. And I’ll find that thing. I’m sure that book is here somewhere, so I’ll find that little quote about pushing through the river to encourage us all. Is there so many in front of you? I don’t think so.

Yeah. I think it’s to follow-up on both of you. When you say, look, no, wait a minute. Go back to that, you know, seize that moment where it was rough or where it is I don’t think I can identify the actual thinking concepts that happened before that feeling of roughness. So do you go back to the quality of the I mean, Rubina once said years ago, you know, feelings are just thoughts.

So the best I can do is just go back to that feeling like, ew. Or whatever logic got you there. Repeat that So in other words, identify what the process was that got you to that point. And just repeat the process, like keep doing that analysis that got you that When that kicks in, okay. Thank you.

Yeah. Yeah. Good. Alright. Anything else about yes.

Henny. I’m still thinking about the what you just said, Lama Sopa said, it’s not an illusion but it is like an illusion. Was remembering teaching on dream yoga tradition that life is a dream. It is a dream. It is not like a dream.

So where is this in relation to what you just talked about? I’m not sure whether I’m understanding the two The difference, yeah. And what is the difference? Yeah, yeah. Okay, in the Mind Only School, for example, they say that reality and our perception of reality come from the same karmic seed.

So that’s what mind only means. It means that you and my perception of you came from the same karmic seed. The middle way consequent school’s view says, No, there are external objects. There are external objects, but I’m creating them to be what they are through we’re creating them to be what they are through our concepts. So they’re like a dream or like an illusion in that there is something there that’s the basis of our imputation and our concepts.

So it’s not just hallucination. There are external objects. There is something there. But the way that they exist for me is completely created by my conceptual imputation. So it’s almost as if they were an illusion.

It’s like ninety nine percent illusion, one percent. There’s nothing there from its own side, externally. So that’s the difference between the mind only school that says there’s no external object independent of my karmic seed giving rise to my perception of the object and the object itself. Middle way consequent school says, Yeah, there’s external objects, but then the way that I create my reality is through my conceptual imputation. So it’s very subtle, the difference.

And it may be during that teaching that they were going and trying to get people from the extreme of eternalism by exaggerating and saying, It is a dream. It’s all a dream. But Lama Zopa differentiates and he goes, No, it’s like a dream. It’s like an illusion, but it’s not strictly speaking in the way that some Buddhist schools say it’s just all created by mind. It’s almost all created by mind, you know, it’s almost all mind only, you know, but just slightly not.

Yeah. Yeah, Jessica. Can both of those views be right for different people, like with different karmic Yeah. You know, inheritance? And Right.

Also, is that sort of like the second turning of the wheel and the third turning that both could could have a very skillful way of helping us Yeah. In the past. Yeah. Exactly. And the Lord Buddha taught all these different philosophical schools, and it was all appropriate for different minds.

And studying that mind only school really helps us get out of the extreme of eternalism. Then the middle way school just adds a little bit more so you’re not tilted because there’s some problems with that. If Hinny and I are both a result of my karmic seed, where are other sentient beings in this? If everything that I perceive is just created by my karmic seeds, am I the only sentient being? And then if everything that you’re perceiving is created by your karmic seeds, how can you be perceiving me and how can you have So there’s loopholes in it.

But it was taught to get people out of that view of eternalism, so like that. So yeah, and it was all appropriate for people with different minds and it all kind of brings you at least out of that strong clinging that you have in saṃsāra. Yeah. So is that kind of like there’s no final ultimate, that it’s all skillful means and we don’t have to be right? Is that Well, according you know, it just depends on who you talk to.

I mean, according to Tibetan Buddhists, they say the middle way consequent school is the ultimate. So different people say that what’s the ultimate. So you just have to kind of choose what suits you, I think. According to Tibetan Buddhism, there’s a certain hierarchy with the middle way consequent school as the ultimate, and then they say that’s it. That’s really the definitive view of how things exist.

But then you go to some other country and they say that it’s some other different way, and so I think it’s just up to your own experience and what suits you. And it may be that you work with a certain view for a while and then work with another one, and I think they all function to tear down our solid clinging to things is inherently existent somehow. So yeah, it just depends who you talk to. Who says what’s the ultimate? Yeah, Sarah.

Could you talk a little bit about karma? And if everything’s coming, arising out of our karma, what is the there seems like there has to be a lot of faith in that, in following that. Right. Because if you can’t see how karma works The mechanisms of karma, yeah. Is that true that it requires a lot of trust or faith?

Right, right. Because we can’t see the mechanisms of karma. That’s one of the things I think I had mentioned yesterday there’s three levels of phenomena. There’s a phenomena we can directly perceive, then there’s a kind of phenomena we can figure out through some sort of analytical process, like it’s a kind of perceivable through analysis or through some sort logic like that. And then there’s things that there’s no way we can actually have even a direct or a conceptual imputation of.

And those are the things that we do have to rely on an enlightened being and just have faith in the mechanisms of karma. But there’s certain ways I mean, for one thing it makes sense, right? It makes a lot more sense than thinking that everything’s random. It’s sort of like physics, you know, Newton’s third law of motion: for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. So it sort of kind of makes sense.

And also, it’s so fundamental to Buddhism. And if the Buddha was right about so many things, why would he have lied about something that was so fundamental? Like, we can figure out what the Buddha said about our suffering is true, for example. And most people are attracted to Buddhism because they are going through some kind of suffering. And we can sort of study what the Buddha said about our suffering.

And I don’t know about you, you know, I study these lists and it’s like, yep, been through that. Uh-huh. Yeah, that too. Yeah, been through that. The way the Buddha describes just our condition, you know, is so subtle and so right on, and there are things that we can verify.

So it seems like the one thing that we can’t verify that’s so fundamental to the Buddha’s teachings yeah, we do have a certain faith. But it’s not just blind faith. There’s a difference between faith and blind faith. I have faith that I ate my lunch today and it’s going to give me some nutrition and get me through the afternoon because it’s always worked before. I don’t know for sure that it’s going to work this time, but I have some faith based on experience and based on some kind of background.

And sort of the same thing with the kind of faith that we have in the Buddhist teachings that we can’t directly check ourselves, but on the basis of other things that we can check, we have some kind of confidence. But it’s not like blind faith of just trusting like that. Anything else? All right. So there’s one more piece that I want to get to before we go back to the sūtra, because with the beginning of Śāriputra’s answer is where we start to talk about the five paths implicitly.

There’s explicitly what Avalokiteśvara is talking about, and then implicitly he’s starting to talk about how we meditate on the five paths. And so since I’m American, I made you a diagram. I’m not a Tibetan, I have Microsoft Word with all the little drawing thing. So this is the diagram. It will be a lot easier to explain it when you have the diagram.

So what we’re going to do in the time we have left do you guys need another break now? It’s been about an hour since we came back. Are you all right? Yeah? Okay.

Because this will be different. So what we’re going to talk about now and this is the last thing we’ll do today because I think you have enough of the puzzle pieces. And like I said, for the rest of tomorrow, we’re just going to tie everything together. We’re going to talk about the five paths because then, starting with Avalokiteśvara’s answer, he’s giving us the instructions about how to meditate on all of these five paths. So yeah, there’s a bunch.

Avalokiteśvara’s answer, Shariputratra’s I think I misspoke. Yeah, yeah. It’s Avalokiteśvara’s answer. When he starts saying Śāriputra. Yeah.

Blah blah blah. I think it’s funny to say, just an ordinary book. Yeah. Right. No.

Yeah. Like, oh, yeah. Just your run of the mill bodhisattva. Ones as opposed to the lousy. Right.

Right. Right. The great ones as opposed to the normal ones. So when we talk about the five paths, it’s not meaning path so much in the method that you follow as much as it’s talking about the realizations in your mind at that point. So we’re going to talk about this.

And you see at the very left hand side of the chart we have fear, faith, and compassion, which are the causes of refuge, which is the first vertical line right here. Okay? So fear, faith and by the way, this is the bodhisattva’s path. So this is specific to bodhisattvas, what we’re going to be talking about here. It’s not the same thing that happens to arhats.

Arhats have five paths too, but they’re five different ones. So this is specific to bodhisattvas, and this is the middle way consequence school since we’re biased because we’re Tibetan in the Tibetan tradition. This is their explanation. So fear and faith, they often say, are the causes of refuge. Fear meaning, I don’t want to suffer anymore.

I don’t want to anymore. I don’t want to be in saṃsāra anymore. And then if you’re a bodhisattva, there’s compassion. I don’t want anybody else suffering either. So I’m going to enter the path.

I’m going to take refuge, meaning it makes sense what the Buddha said. And that’s where the faith part comes from. What the Buddha said about the Four Noble Truths thing makes sense to me. What he said about the suffering and the cause of suffering, it all makes sense. So I’m going to give it a shot.

I’m going to have a certain amount of faith that if I practice what the Buddha taught, it could free me. Because that’s really what refuge is. And refuge is a weird word we don’t use much in English. But we talk about refugees, don’t we? And what is that?

It’s a person who’s going from a situation of danger to a situation of safety. Right? A refugee. And we’re doing exactly the same thing. We’re refugees.

We’re going from the really dangerous situation of saṃsāra to a situation of safety by relying on what the Buddha taught, because the Dharma teachings are the main refuge. You don’t just say, Oh Lord Buddha, please save me, like those other religions do that. Oh please save me. It’s kind of a drag because Buddhism is a lot of hard work. You’re taking refuge in the path which means you have to practice it.

You can’t just pray to somebody to save you. It’s not theistic. Nobody’s going to come along and clean your karma and save you. What you’re taking refuge in is, Yeah, what the Buddha said made sense. I’m going to practice what the Buddha taught in the last two noble truths about how I can cease my suffering.

The cessation of suffering and the path leading to it, that sounds good because I’m sick of the first two. I’ve been doing that since the beginning of this time. So that’s why we say that fear, faith, and compassion are the causes of refuge. So that’s where we enter into the diagram. And congratulations.

Most of the people in this room are somewhere on the chart. Since beginning of this time, we’ve been off the chart, way off here somewhere. High fives to everybody. You know, we’re on the page. Right on.

Okay? So fear, faith, compassion you’re somewhere in here. And then we take refuge and then we practice the three principal aspects of the path is what we call this renunciation, Bodhicitta, and wisdom. So renunciation, again, being this wish to definitely get free of saṃsāra Bodhicitta, the wish to get enlightened for the benefit of all sentient beings and then wisdom, realizing emptiness. And then when we have actual, uncontrived bodhicitta, we’re at the second vertical line.

So actual bodhicitta means that one I was talking about before. Uncontrived, twenty fourseven. That’s the baseline. That’s your MO for everything is actual Bodhicitta. And then you get called an ordinary bodhisattva.

I mean, sorry, right? It’s amazing to be a bodhisattva. But we differentiate between ordinary bodhisattvas and ārya bodhisattvas. So anybody that’s not ārya is called in Tibetan there’s a word so so pa and often they translate it as the childish ones. And it doesn’t mean four year olds.

It means people who haven’t had a direct realization of emptiness. So often in the text you’ll see the ordinary ones, the childish ones. So it just means anybody who hasn’t seen emptiness directly but you can still be a bodhisattva even before you’ve seen emptiness directly. What you need is uncontrived Bodhicitta really hard even renunciation is really hard uncontrived bodhicitta. And then you enter with renunciation, actual renunciation and actual bodhicitta, you enter the first path called the path of accumulation.

So the milestone for that is actual renunciation and actual uncontrived Bodhicitta. Why do you need renunciation to have Bodhicitta, do you think? Why is Bodhicitta dependent on renunciation? Okay, on that wish to definitely get free of cyclic existence. Yeah.

If you think that saṃsāra is a good deal for you and that your happiness is right around the corner with that next job or that next relationship, what? You’re going to become a Buddha to free all beings from suffering forever? No. So you need to realize it on your own behalf first, which is what renunciation is. Oh, saṃsāra, as long as I’m in it, bad news.

I’m never going to have ultimate lasting happiness. So actual renunciation and on the bodhisattva path, Bodhicitta, is when you enter the path of accumulation. So that’s the milestone there, is actual Bodhicitta, actual renunciation. And then what’s happening during the path of accumulation? What you’re doing is, as the name indicates, mostly accumulating virtue, doing practices to accumulate virtue, make merit.

You’re also working on your single pointed concentration during this path. So you know that thing that we talk about śamatha, calm abiding, single pointed concentration. You’re working on that during the path of accumulation. So that’s your job purification, accumulation of merit, working on your śamatha, working on your single pointed concentration that’s your job. And then at a certain point you have perfect single pointed concentration that you’re using to meditate on emptiness because that’s the point of having that single pointed concentration, to use it for all your meditations but especially your meditations on emptiness.

So when you enter the path of preparation, you have perfect single pointed concentration conjoined with insight into the nature of reality. It’s still intellectual, but you have perfect single pointed concentration you’re using to meditate on emptiness. At that point, you’re in the path of preparation, the next step. Why do you think it’s called the path of preparation? What are we preparing for?

Yeah, that terror. So we’re preparing to see emptiness directly. So what we’re doing on the path of preparation, we’re using that unbelievable tool of that single point of concentration that we developed. We’re meditating on emptiness over and over and over again. Now, it’s still intellectual.

It’s still conceptual. But it gets subtler and subtler and subtler during the path of preparation. So we get subtler and subtler intellectual realizations of emptiness until the very end of the path of preparation Oh by the way, at a certain point during the path of preparation it has four stages. During the third of the fourth stage we have a permanent cessation of the possibility of any rebirth in the lower realms. That’s our first permanent cessation.

That’s cool. No more rebirth in the lower realms. We don’t even have to be an ārya yet for that to happen. That’s a big score. No more rebirth in the lower realms.

So that happens because of our intellectual understanding of emptiness. Even that is powerful enough to purify the karmic seeds that would cause a rebirth in the lower realms. So that’s the path of preparation. Go ahead. This may be where I’ve been asking this question this morning.

At some point along here, I thought you lost the ability to accumulate or to create more karma but maybe what I’m We’re not quite there yet. Yeah, you do lose the ability to go to the lower realms. Okay. So that happens first. That’s the first cessation.

Path of preparation. It has four components. We won’t get into that right now, but on the third of the fourth stages of that path of preparation is when that first permanent cessation happens. Then you’re at the very end of the path of preparation. You have a direct realization of dependent arising.

The very, very last stage of the path of preparation is called highest mundane Dharma. That means it’s the highest place you can go as an ordinary being. That’s the very last stage. Highest mundane Dharma means that’s the end of the road as an ordinary being. Next, you’re going to be an ārya.

You’re going to be a completely different kind of being. So highest mundane dharma you have a direct realization of dependent arising. Just before that you have a direct realization of subtle impermanence, which is also very powerful. So you’re having all these direct realizations just preceding the direct realization of emptiness. So direct realization of subtle impermanence, a direct realization of dependent arising.

And then you go into meditation, your last meditation, as an ordinary being and you have the direct realization of emptiness. That’s the path of seeing, the next one. The minute you go into the direct realization, the very first direct realization of emptiness, you become an ārya, you’ve entered the path of seeing. Three things disappear at the end of that meditation, which is why the arrow’s a little bit in because it’s at the end of the first meditation. It’s not the moment you enter the path of seeing, it’s when you come out of that meditation.

The acquired obscurations to liberation are abandoned. So any idea that you have that you exist inherently remember I said the view of the transitory collection is one of the things completely eliminated at the end of that first meditation. You no longer believe that there’s some driver, know, the little homunculus thing. You’re over it. Just don’t believe at all that there’s any inherently existing self.

So that’s one of the views that you abandon completely. And that’s one of these acquired obscurations, deliberations. Anything that you’ve learned, any worldviews that are learned, those are the acquired ones. Right? The acquired ones like anything that you were taught as a child or in Sunday school about the way things work that’s not the way it works, you abandon them at that point.

Now, what’s the direct realization of emptiness like? Okay? So we say that what you’re experiencing in that meditation is a mere absence. So what’s the object of that first direct realization of emptiness? Yeah, the Self.

Okay? So you’re meditating on the emptiness of me. So you go through the analysis, you’re going through the analysis, and then at a certain point you get that direct realization of emptiness. At that point, no conventional phenomena is appearing at all. Not even you, even though that was the object of the meditation.

All you’re seeing is a mere absence of inherent existence. So how do you have a direct perception of a mere absence, you might be wondering. There’s this great example, and for those of you that have heard it a million times, excuse me, but it’s just such a great example I can’t resist. This is courtesy of a friend of mine, Thubten Pende. I heard him give this example in nineteen ninety four or something, and it’s just so perfect that you have to use it when you’re explaining how to see a mere absence.

So let’s say you’ve had a really hard day at work and you come home after work and you and your roommate decide you’re going to stay in and you’re going to get a DVD. These days the latest Netflix thing just arrived. So you’re going to just chill out, watch a movie, get carryout pizza. So you call up Domino’s and you order the extra large vegetarian, of course. And then that comes, and you’re sitting there and you’re eating the pizza and you’re watching the movie.

You get the extra large but you weren’t really that hungry, so you got two slices left over. At the end of the night, you put the white box in the fridge and you go to work the next day and you have this really busy day and you have to skip lunch. You just get the peanut butter crackers out of the machine and like a cup of soup or something. So you’re driving home and you’re really humry and you’re thinking about that cold pizza because what’s better when you’re really humry than cold pizza? So you’re thinking about the pizza and you come home and you walk in the kitchen and you see the white box with the red and blue dominoes on the top on the kitchen counter and you walk up to it and you lift it.

And what do you see? A mere absence. Okay? So the very first minute, you’re not seeing the tomato juice on the tissue paper and the funny little plastic thing that keeps the top open and the little green pepper, all you’re seeing is an absence of what you thought was there. Okay?

And it’s the same thing. Okay? Same thing when you see emptiness. You’re not seeing what’s there, you’re seeing what’s not there. Only later do you see the tissue paper and the green pepper.

That’s not what you’re seeing. You’re just seeing a mere absence of what you thought was there. Okay, so that’s what the direct realization of emptiness is like. Just perceiving that mere absence, just like the pizza. Gina.

But you said earlier that it’s not conceptual. That’s right. Or realization. That’s right. So maybe this is hard to put into words, can you talk about that a little bit more?

It’s just they say you see it like you see the BAM on your hand. You just get it? You get it. You’re perceiving it directly. So you’re not thinking about it.

They say until that point during the path of preparation, they say that our intellectual realizations or emptiness in philosophy they say it’s mediated by conceptual image, just meaning you’re thinking about it. You’re meditating on it using concepts. It’s not that you’re actually seeing it directly. So in that moment, you’re seeing the mere absence directly. You’re not just thinking, Oh yeah, there’s the self and it’s not really inherently existent.

It’s dependent on the five aggregates. You’re not kind of going through that analysis. You’re actually like you’re just seeing that it’s not there at all, just like the pizza. Yeah. So is it as shocking as not seeing the pizza?

I mean if you Apparently so. Yeah, that’s what they say. Yeah. Really takes your breath away? Exactly.

And that’s when Lama Zopa in this book, he’s just like it’s not there. He just goes on and on. And then, of course, at the end of this lecture, says, not like I’ve seen it or anything. And you’re like, yeah, right. I mean, the way he explains what’s happening, he’s just like, and then you just see that it’s not there.

What you always thought was there. It’s not there at all. And then he says, you cry with tears of joy running down your face. You know, that’s after the fear and the pushing through the river thing. So, yeah, apparently, it’s just a total, like, this thing that I always thought was there since beginning of this time, much more significant than the two pieces of pizza, believe me.

You know, and this thing that you always thought was there since beginning of this time, it just ain’t there at all. And, yeah, it just totally like afterwards, apparently, you just spend the next couple of days in a total daze. You come down from that meditation. And then after that meditation, all you’re seeing during that meditation is a mere absence. You’re not seeing conventional phenomena at all.

And then after you come out of that first meditation of the path of seeing, you’ve eliminated these acquired obscurations to omniscience. Collection. You have no doubt about the path. You no longer believe that ascetic practices are the path. That’s not so meaningful for us.

But in India, you see it. People doing ascetic practices, staring into the sun, sleeping on the bed of nails, holding up their arm that it just withers. We don’t do that. We do the other extreme, so that’s not a big deal for us. But you eliminate all of that, and then they say after the direct realization of emptiness, you see what’s called the sixteen aspects of the Four Noble Truths directly.

The Four Noble Truths Noble is a kind of wimpy translation of the word ārya. So it means the four things that are true for an ārya is what the Four Noble Truths. So you see those directly. So you’re no longer relying on faith in what the Buddha said about our suffering and the cause and how it ceased. You see what’s called the sixteen aspects of the Four Noble Truths after that.

But during that meditation itself, you’re only seeing that mere absence. Every time you meditate on emptiness, all you’re seeing is the mere absence. Whether you’re headed towards being an arhat, whether you’re headed towards being a Buddha, the quality of that meditation is exactly the same every time you go into it. It’s just that mere absence. So any other questions about that so far?

Can we just go back to Highest Dharma? Carla asked, Can you go back to Highest Mundane Dharma? That’s the last part of the path of preparation. That’s the last moments that you’re considered an ordinary, non ārya being. One of the things that happens during that path is the direct realization of dependent arising.

So that precedes the direct realization of emptiness which is why we emphasize meditating on this so much because it’s the key to seeing emptiness directly. So that’s what’s happening during that state. Yeah. We are talking about following Heart Sūtra in terms of the realization of emptiness. At what point do you challenge or at least use the reasonings, the four reasonings?

Yeah. You’ve been doing that all along. Okay? You’ve been doing that all along up until here. You’re using those reasonings to get during especially the path of preparation.

You’re meditating over and over again on emptiness using reasoning, using logic, using analysis. At that point, you’re also using debate. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So all the way through, and that’s how you get a direct realization of emptiness.

His Holiness said, How do you get a direct realization of emptiness? And he said, Study, study, study. So we have to use analysis. We have to use conceptual thought. And there’s another interesting misunderstanding.

Because this is a direct realization of emptiness and it’s not mediated by concepts, it’s a non conceptual realization. There’s a misunderstanding that any non conceptual state is to be pursued. So in some Buddhist systems, they train in trying to empty their mind of thoughts. But it’s not that any non conceptual state is a direct realization of emptiness. This happens to be a non conceptual state, but we’re not going to get there by just trying to empty our mind of thoughts.

It’s our mind’s job description to think. It’s a Yul Chen, an object holder. So we use conceptual thought, we use analysis to get to this point over and over and over again using logic, using analysis. And then it shifts into the non conceptual direct realization, but not by just trying to wipe out thoughts in our mind because that’s not going to get us the direct realization of emptiness. So it’s a misunderstanding.

Yeah, it’s a non conceptual state of mind, but there are other non conceptual states, and just trying to somehow push away thoughts is not the way to get there. Yeah. Okay? So path of seeing. You’re an ārya now.

You know, after all these countless lifetimes of being off the chart and then you’re finally on the chart and then you get to that point and you’re a completely different kind of being, you’ve achieved the first bodhisattva ground here, the path of seeing. You’re an ārya bodhisattva now. So then after a certain point you enter the path of meditation, the next path. Now the path of meditation, the word for meditation literally means habituation. So we can call this the path of habituation.

You’re getting used to what you saw, using it to eliminate the first obscurations, the innate obscurations to liberation, which are those defilements that we talked about before karma and delusions. So you’re using the direct realization of emptiness to slowly, slowly eliminate karma and delusions over and over and over again. Now, it’s very interesting. Once you become an Ārya you can no longer generate new negative karma, which is really cool. So no more new negative karma because we can see so much of a relationship between karma and emptiness in terms how karma is created.

You need to have that solidification of reality. You need to see things as self existent. That force creates a karmic seed. When you don’t have that, you’re still seeing things the same way but you don’t believe it anymore at all. Once you’ve had that direct perception of emptiness, there’s no more force to implant new karmic seeds.

The afflictions that give rise to those karmic actions are completely dependent on ignorance. So you no longer have enough force to implant new karmic seeds. It doesn’t mean that you’re free of delusions. It doesn’t mean you’re free of old karma, right? Because we still have the karma that we have to that point that we have to purify.

So you’re still purifying the old negative karma. You’re still subject to, you still have the potential for those afflictive states, those mental afflictions, anger, attachment, jealousy. But there’s no longer the power to plant new karmic seeds. That’s extremely cool. So then you keep meditating on emptiness.

You keep going into that meditation over and over and over again during the path of meditation. And at a certain point, after the seventh ground or seventh Bhumi, you’ve eliminated the old karmic seeds and all of your delusions and you’re now liberated from saṃsāra on the bodhisattva track. So it happens by the way. It’s not your goal but it just happens because you’ve eliminated karma and delusions which is what causes you to be reborn in saṃsāra. So now we’ve eliminated that, but we have other obstacles to eliminate.

We’ve got the obscurations to omniscience to eliminate. So that’s what we work on on the last three bodhisattva grounds, and those are these subtle, subtle tendencies that prevent us from seeing conventional and ultimate reality simultaneously, which only a Buddha can do. And there’s a really interesting correlation between that and omniscience. So being able to see conventional and ultimate, like being able to see the thing and the emptiness of the thing at the same time, there’s this really interesting relationship between that and omniscience, and I ask every Tibetan lama I run into and I’ve never gotten a good explanation I think it’s because I can’t get it yet. But that obscuration, those obscurations to omniscience then are removed.

Remember, and that’s why we said the Buddha had pretend to be meditating on emptiness because he could see it and be talking at the same time, but he went off in the corner and went like that. So those are eliminated and then the path of no more learning, which is the goal of Buddhahood. Okay? And then you’re an aryabuddha at that point. So that’s a quick version of the five paths.

Okay? And it’s something if it’s the first time you’ve heard them, your head’s probably swimming. But we’ll keep going over them. This is kind of the last little component that you need to understand the rest of the Heart Sūtra. Avalokiteśvara is telling us how to meditate on emptiness at each stage.

That’s the instruction for the rest of the Heart Sūtra. He’s given us the instruction for the path of accumulation and preparation. Meditate on the emptiness of the five aggregates. That’s our first instruction. So that’s where we are in the Heart Sūtra.

He’s just given us our meditation instruction for these first two paths. And then the instructions will come for the path of seeing, the path of meditation, each stage of it. Okay? So questions about this? Where to begin?

Right? Anything about yeah, Carla. I just want to confirm I think what was said earlier but now looking at this chart to clarify. Can you have a direct realization of emptiness before being a bodhisattva or you need uncontrived Bodhicitta? If you’re going on the bodhisattva path this way, you do it this way.

But it is possible to be an ārya before you’re a bodhisattva, they say, for some beings of sharp faculties. Sometimes they do that one first, but you still have to be at the path of accumulation and accumulating the merit. So they say even, for example, they say that you can be an arhat, you can already be liberated and be in arhat and then enter the bodhisattva path. You newly generate Bodhicitta but you have to enter at the beginning of the path of accumulation. Even if you’re already liberated from saṃsāra but you don’t have Bodhicitta yet, you always have to enter here at the path of accumulation because you need to generate renunciation Bodhicitta, accumulate all of that merit like that.

So even if you’ve had the direct realization of emptiness before you’ve generated Bodhicitta, you still need to generate Bodhicitta and go through the path of accumulation. Even if you’re already an arhat, So even more for an ārya being who hasn’t generated Bodhicitta, yet they have to. Of course, obviously they’ve already had the direct realization of emptiness, but we don’t call it the path of seeing on the bodhisattva track until they’ve gone through accumulating the virtue, generating Bodhicitta like that. That’s the way it’s explained. So you don’t somehow skip over.

If you’ve had a direct realization of emptiness without Bodhicitta, you don’t sort of skip, you always have to go back to the beginning of the path of accumulation. Is it because of how we practice? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s how we accumulate merit as a bodhisattva. To create because remember we talked about the six perfections which creates the causes for the body and mind of a Buddha?

And so we still need to create those causes. We still need that merit and practicing the six perfections to create the causes for the body and mind of a Buddha, so it’s about how we practice, mostly in terms of the method side. Because we got the wisdom side which is the same for both aryas and bodhisattvas, but we need to backtrack and catch up in terms of the method side. Yeah. Yeah, couple more in the back.

So this is following the sūtra teachings. And at one point, how the Tantrayāna melts or works together with sūtra because it seemed like there are different time periods for practitioners of sūtra. Yes, definitely, definitely. And this is all according to sūtra, and it’s really interesting to study the five paths as they’re explained in terms of tantra or vajrayana. The five paths are explained, but where they happen for a tantric practitioner and what’s going on in their practice is completely different.

And that’s very cool to study. For people who have that empowerment, highest yoga tantra empowerment, there’s a book called Tantric Grounds and Paths. Well, there’s one called Grounds and Paths According to the Guhyasamāja Tantra. Unbelievable. Fascinating.

Also, there’s a book by Daniel Cozort called Highest Yoga Tantra that talks about the five paths and when you get those realizations if you’re practicing tantras. So we talk about the five paths the same way we do in the sūtra of Bodhisattva Vehicle. We call this the pāramitā yana, you know, the vehicle of the perfections. But what’s happening in your tantric practice to give you those realizations is somewhat different than it is in sūtra. Yeah.

Had yeah, Lynn. Wow. I’m like, wow. It’s cool, It’s Isn’t it exciting? This is previews of coming attractions.

That’s amazing. Because remember, we’re on the chart. That’s a great I’m sure. So I’m thinking I’m trying to think of examples, and I’m thinking of His Holiness and where he would think he was. Well, he says he’s, like, here, and I think he’s here.

Yeah. So it’s just perspective. Are there I bet they see themselves, but they won’t say it, right? Because there’s actually vows that you’re not supposed to say your level of realization except to your closest students. So the cool thing that happens is then after that person manifests the aspect of passing away, their close disciples write books about what they really realized.

And actually, Ribur Rinpoche was working on a secret biography of His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, because he got the real scoop. And His Holiness will just tell us, oh, I’m a simple monk and I really kind of admire the idea of bodhicitta. And then he tells Riba Rinpoche what’s really going on is you’re allowed to tell your close disciples if it will inspire them. And there’s this great book called The Biography of Ajahn Mun, this Thai forest master. And his closest disciple, who he talked to about his realizations, spills the beans after he dies.

And it actually has this passage that’s just mind blowing where he achieves liberation, and it talks about the meditation where he achieves liberation. And meanwhile, he’s dressed in rags and going around all humble with the begging bowl, and he’s in arhat. And he teaches the devas. There’s this whole thing that he teaches the monks till midnight, and then the monks go to bed, and then all the devas come. And devas of different neighborhoods come for teachings on different nights, like the devas of this neighborhood have Tuesday night and the ones that I mean, it’s mind blowing stuff.

And this is a Thai Forest monk. This isn’t even Vajrayāna we’re talking about. I mean, those are even more out of control. So that’s how we know, because they told some close disciple. So sometimes we have these secret biographies.

Apparently there’s a secret biography of Lama Tsongkhapa. I don’t think it’s been translated in its entirety, but there’s a book called Enlightened Beings by this friend of mine, Jan Willis, who’s a professor at Wesleyan University, and she gives the secret biography of five of these really major Gelugpa lineage lamas and what was really going on behind the scenes. But there’s all kinds of vows that you’re just humble and you don’t show off and you’re just because for me, if His Holiness the Dalai Lama tooted his own horn a lot, it would be weird. But he says, oh, I’m a simple monk and I admire Bodhicitta, and then you just look at what he’s doing. And for me, that gives me more faith, which is why I think you have the vow.

It’s one of the monastic vows. Actually. There’s all these monastic vows about not talking about your realizations because it doesn’t really promote faith unless it’s somebody really, really close to you. But to publicly make declarations usually makes people suspicious rather than inspired. You know, a lot of us have a vow that we we would never claim Yeah.

To have a direct realization of emptiness when we haven’t. Yeah. So how do we know who to imitate? Look at the qualities. They’re so obvious.

Mean, look at His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. He’ll never say there’s any quality and it just exudes mean, it’s just like radiance. It’s unbelievable. So I think you just look at the qualities, which are just so clear. Don’t trust the words that they say about themselves, but it’s just you can taste it.

You can really feel it. Mean, you look at Lama Zopa and he says, I’m the greatest simpleton among the disciples of Śākyamūni Buddha, and you’re like, Yeah, right. No, that’s me. And you just look at their activity and you can just taste that there’s no ego at all. I’ve just never gotten a shred of any kind of ego around Lama Zopa ever in twenty years of being really close to him for many years, like working for him and zero.

You can tell. You can tell. They don’t have to say it. You can feel it. Yeah.

What happened to Ribur Rinpoche’s biography of His Holiness? Guess the next rebirth is gonna work on it. Good. I hope. I don’t know.

I don’t know. So let’s see. Matthew. Somebody mentioned that this chart is based on the Sūtra path. Yes.

And so this is something that I’ve always I guess, well, have misunderstood. I always assumed that because you said that the tantric path is completely different? No, it’s not completely different. We still have the five paths. Happens in different you know, not in a different order.

It’s still in the same order. You still have the direct realization of emptiness. All I’m saying is it’s very interesting to study which practices lead to, you know, if you have those empowerments, which practices you do to get to that point. And the time frame is quite different, right, because we can get the whole thing in one life, whereas the time frame according to the sūtra is, you know, many eons to progress along the five paths. So it’s not different in terms of the realizations and in terms of the order, but it is different in terms you know, it’s just unique in terms of what mediteachings are you doing to get the realizations of the path.

Yeah. Okay. So within this tradition, there’s no there’s no, like, non tantric path and then a tantric path? I guess Yeah, there is. Oh, is.

You know, you can do the whole thing according to Sūtra, or you can do it according to tantra. And most of us do both, right? Like we incorporate, of course, because the sutras are the basis of everything. And then, you know, tantra is just techniques. It’s not any different conceptually from the bodhisattva path.

It’s just specific techniques of the Mahāyāna. So it’s not like a whole different yana. It’s not like you have Theravāda and then Mahāyāna and then vajrayana. It’s not really whole it’s a subset of very, very specific techniques that you use within the Mahāyāna. The other question I had, could you repeat you were talking about the obscurations to omniscience abandoned.

Yeah. What was the quality of that you were describing? The ability to do what again? Okay. It’s to see remember we said that, until you’re a Buddha, you have to flip back and forth between a direct realization of emptiness where nothing is appearing at all it’s the empty pizza box thing.

Right? It’s just that mere absence is the only thing that appears. And then you come out of that and you see things the way they always are. So you can’t see the emptiness of the thangka of Medicine Buddha and the thangka of Medicine Buddha simultaneously. Use that as your object of meditation.

And then when you have that direct realization of emptiness, that conventional object disappears from your consciousness. All you’re seeing is that mere absence. Until you’re a Buddha and then they’re simultaneous. So the obscurations to omniscience are those subtle, subtle tendencies for seeing things as self existent that prevent that simultaneity of perceiving ultimate and conventional reality at the same time. And what that’s like, God knows, you know?

I don’t know. That’s what they say. I’m a visual person. Too. Help me out here.

Okay. Okay, I’m looking up there and I see the mere absence of the thangka and that’s all I’m seeing is the absence No, not looking at it when you’re getting the mere absence, it’s not visual seeing. Realizing. So actually can you even know how to lie down? Mean your mind wouldn’t even be looking for bed because it would Not when you’re in that realization.

When you’re in that realization, nothing is You ain’t thinking about bed, food. It’s just you’re there. Was anybody here when Geshe la said that recently and I burst into tears? Which part did he say? That nothing existed.

And I don’t mean, you know, in here. I thought, wait a minute. I’ve been listening to these details for years. I never heard but I’m hearing it again right Yeah. Yeah.

If that’s what I’m saying, I think I’m hearing Yeah. Nothing. Nothing appears. Nada. Doesn’t it?

It’s not that big. So, I’m saying, visually, that’s a big deal for me. It’s the empty pizza box thing, Lynn. Tell me it’s blissful. It’s apparently.

That’s what they say. I’ll find that book. I swear. I’ll read it to you in the morning because it’s amazing. It’s this whole passage titled Meditating on Emptiness or Meditation on Emptiness.

And then it’s this whole thing, and it’s just so personal. I swear, then at the end he goes, Hey, but not like I’ve seen it. Is this from the Vajrasattva? Yeah. Do you have that book as well?

I’m sure it’s somewhere in this. Okay, bring it. Bring it just in case. I think Chökyi has it. Where is she?

She’s gone. Do you have book of the teachings from the Vajrasattva retreat? Great. Okay, got it. We’re on it, Lynn.

We’re on it. I’ll just read you I mean, whole thing is ten pages, but I’ll read you the going through the river thing and then what he says, the joy that happens when you see it. It’s awesome. When you see it. When you realize it.

Okay. Alright. Is that enough to chew on overnight? Yeah. Okay.

So you have all the pieces. Are you okay? Does everybody promise to come back tomorrow and get the rest, please? Okay. Okay, great.

That’s the right answer. Okay, review your notes. If you have them, review your chart. Get ready for a review, and you know I call on you by name. So we’ll review what we’ve gotten up to, all the chunks, and then we’ll finish the rest of the sūtra.

It’s always like this, by the way. We’re in three paragraphs in on the first day because we have to explain all the concepts before we can get to the rest of the sūtra. We did it in two days with Spanish translation, so I promise you we can do it. Finish the sūtra tomorrow. Because once you get all the basic concepts, the rest of it just goes easily.

All right, right on. Sort of easily. More easily. All right. So let’s take a minute to dedicate thinking of all of the positive energy that we’ve generated from our sessions.

Unbelievable. Really unbelievable to be thinking of these concepts all day long. Unbelievable merit. Incredible. Huge.

Just to doubt it for even a second, and we’ve been looking at these concepts deeply, doing the meditation. So let’s dedicate all of that energy towards being able to attain the path of seeing on the bodhisattva track, that realization that will cut the root of saṃsāra and get us free. Okay. Great. Thank you.

So tomorrow we’ll review, and we’ll get to those famous cryptic lines. Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form.