Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this brief 6-minute session, Ven Jampa Gendun uses the everyday example of a dog and an animal to pin down one of Buddhist logic’s trickier concepts: same entity. He walks through the three criteria that make something an instance of a generality — the two must be different, they must appear indistinguishable to direct perception, and eliminating the generality eliminates the instance. A second pair, thing and object of knowledge, tests the same framework, with permanent phenomena and space introduced to show why a generality can still have a common locus after a specific instance is removed. Gendun closes by previewing the shift to formal syllogism next week and inviting students to sit as debate defenders — a compact consolidation session within an ongoing Collected Topics logic course.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 43 CT 1988 07 26.mp3
UUID: f2b072a0-cd6e-4ea2-aeb4-bc682fdaa2bd
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Collected Topics (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1988-07-26
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 5.7 minutes
Words: ~662
I was wondering what the context of it, you know, to see the the similarity or the affiliation of the I was trying to catch the dog. Okay. What do you think about animal and dog? Is dog the same entity as animal? So why?
Because the dog is an instance of an animal. That’s what we’re trying to prove, If you eliminate animal, you eliminate dog. But there’s those things, isn’t it? For things to be the same entity, two things must be different, and they must appear to direct perception that’s not different. Okay.
That’s good. So you see a dog, you see an animal, and you see a dog. But the dog and animal don’t appear you can’t distinguish with your direct perception that this is dog, this is animal. They appear as one, same entity. Yeah?
That’s right. That’s good. Dog and animal. One way we can tell is if we get rid of animal, get rid of dog. If we get rid of Alistair, get rid of Sue’s husband.
If we get rid of cat, don’t get rid of dog. And also from direct perception, we can see a cat and a dog as being different entities, as being different, or just to say different. We can’t see animal and dog with direct perception as being different. Are thing as a subject? Why is it the same entity with object of knowledge?
Because it is different from object of knowledge. This other part is not necessary at this point, because it is different from object of knowledge in context of being the same entity. It’s just different. That is to say, dog and dog. We wouldn’t talk about them being the same entity because they’re not different.
At least it has to be a little dog in the corner or something, the dog and the dog in the corner. If object of knowledge is eliminated, like if animal is eliminated, then thing is also eliminated, as in the case of dog. Why are there many phenomena? Okay, this third part, other common locus. Why are there many phenomena which are not thing, which have a common locus with object of knowledge?
Because permanent is not a thing, space is not a thing, and they have a common locus with object of knowledge. So we can get rid of thing, and there are still some other phenomena, in this case permanent and space, a common locus with object of knowledge, such as in the case of permanent phenomena — analytic cessation, in the case of space, the space in the north, space the north is space, and space in the north is an object of knowledge. There’s a common locus, which is still left over even when we eliminate this particular instance. So there’s three qualities. If something has these three qualities, that is the complete way of applying instance with regards to a particular generality.
You’ve been working with this. Whenever you have the case of three possibilities, whenever there’s a three possibility, it’s always a case of generality and instance. Cat, animal — thing and form, animal, dog. So we’ve actually been working with it, but we didn’t quite know why things were three possibilities, or we didn’t call it generality. Any questions about that?
I thought, you know, we’ll we’ll sort of consolidate everything that we’ve debated, what we’ve learned up till now. And then next week, introduce, begin to introduce syllogism, reasoning, you know, actual presenting of syllogisms, and we keep applying this this this to all this body of information that we’ve been built up that had been built up rather than keep introducing more new information because there’s quite a bit that we can work with. Should we would anybody like to two people like to volunteer to sit as the defenders in debate, and then we’ll line up and we’ll have our debate. Any volunteers? You’re shaking your head, Rudy.
Yeah.