Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. The image of a hardened clay bust — versus the same clay soaked in water, suddenly workable and open to dramatic reshaping — is the central teaching device in this 44-minute session by Ven Jampa Gendun. He builds toward it through a reading from the Dalai Lama’s Compassion and the Individual and a George Bernard Shaw quip that getting what you want disappoints as much as not getting it, arguing that beneath cultural conditioning we are searching for the sacred, and that including others in our motivation moves life from circular to spiral. The clay image then illustrates how understanding emptiness dissolves fixed self-identity, making inner transformation beyond mere cosmetic change possible. Gendun closes by examining naive realism, using cross-cultural examples of beauty to show how misperceiving qualities as inherent in objects is the root of attachment and aversion.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 15 HMA 1997 09 03.mp3
UUID: a4d89921-a415-4023-b724-83cd4467ed2a
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: The Heart and Mind of Awakening 1996-1997 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1997-09-03
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.9 minutes
Words: ~6,377
I was reading this very small short booklet by His Holiness the Dalai Lama compassion and the individual, and I I thought I’d like to share the first two paragraphs. And last week we were in in this process of reorientating ourselves and and the the great necessity to get in touch with our priorities, to keep them sort of as best we can, utmost before ourselves over the course of our daily busyness, kind of be mindful of where we like to be headed in the overall terms of our life. Question underlies our experience. Whether we think it consciously or not, what is the purpose of life? I have considered this question and would like to share my thoughts in the hope that they may be of direct practical benefit to those who read them.
I believe that the purpose of life is to be happy. From the moment of birth, every human being wants happiness and does not want to suffer. Neither social conditioning nor education nor ideology affect this. From the very core of our being, we simply desire contentment. I don’t know whether the universe with its countless galaxies, stars, and planets has a deeper meaning or not.
But at the very least, it is clear that we humans who live on this earth face the task of making a happy life for ourselves. Therefore, it is important to discover what will bring about the greatest degree of happiness. You know, the I think it was George Bernard Shaw said, there are two great disappointments in life. One is not getting what you want, and the other is getting what you want. I think it’s often times we after a long struggle, after all the blood, sweat, and tears, we we finally get hold of that which we’ve been seeking.
And it turns out to be not what we wanted at all. So it seems like it’s terribly important to ourselves to take the time and really question deeply. And I don’t I think the problem is we take it for granted that our desires are the objects of our desires are what we really want. But we perhaps have never really examined very thoroughly or in any depth what it is in fact that we want, or in fact what has brought us happiness in the past, what actually works for ourselves within our own lived experience, what resonates with ourselves at a deep level of our being. You know, for ourselves, it’s a tremendously difficult question to genuinely answer for yourself.
You know, beneath all of the cultural and social cultural and social conditioning, beneath all the religious indoctrination, beneath all the oughts and shoulds that we’ve been brainwashed into accepting as part of our persona over the course of our life what works for me, what makes me happy. So much of our lives is spent in longing, in a search for what we do not know. So many of our ostensible goals, so many of the things we think we want turn out to be the mask behind which our real desires hide. They are symbols for the actual values and qualities for which we hunger. They are not reducible to physical or mental things, not even to a physical person.
They are psychological qualities love, truth, honesty, loyalty, purpose something we can feel is noble, precious, and worthy of our devotion. We try to reduce all of this to something physical, a house, a car, a better job, or a human being, but it doesn’t work. Without realizing it, we are searching for the sacred, and the sacred is not reducible to anything else. Sacredness is, in a sense, a feeling, but a feeling that goes to the very heart of life. It is the feeling of recognition directed toward what is great and high enough to give our small lives meaning, to put our personal journeys in a greater perspective.
It is the feeling of reverence. What we call the sacred is ultimately a universe of meaning against we measure our personal efforts, our personal lives, to see whether they too have meaning. You know, what is it that we’ve been searching for? What is it that drives all our wonderings? And what is it that what image arises in your mind when you begin to, in the intimacy of your own mind, ask yourself what it is that I really want, what really has meaning for myself, creates purpose, a sense of connectedness with others.
You know, that is getting back. And we only have this life in terms of ourselves as personalities and individuals, Jampa and all the rest of us present here tonight, perhaps something else will continue on. But we as a particular unique individual, we end it at the end of this life. And, you know, we have to, I think, remind ourselves that. And no one it is only that we it is only ourselves who will die and have to go on.
And therefore, that’s the sign that it’s only that we who can actually live our life and beginning to to question, you know, to to to to search out one’s heart. You know, this decisive heart searching is the beginning of a person’s way, you know, the beginning of a of a human way for ourselves, the beginning of a path for ourselves in in actualizing what it is that you want. You know, but first we have to find what it is that we indeed do want. You know, how many times do we have to get what it is that we supposedly want and to be disappointed in realizing it’s not what we wanted at all? So in terms of the process that we’re working with, I guess search of the sacred, whatever term we want to use, whatever label we want to apply, in terms of a way of being, an embodiment we call Buddha, a sacred way of being.
And we we, you know, we have to if that’s what we want, then we have to do something to get it. Mere wishful thinking of itself is not going to bring that about. We have to enact some kind of means, implement some methods, and that we call the dharma. And looking to others who are doing very much the same, perhaps they’ve gone a little bit further on their journey or have some insight or some knowledge, some resources they can share with us, and assisting them and asking for their assistance, that is to say, looking to the spiritual community as fellow travelers on our journey. And, you know, trying to raise the the level of our motivation behind all of this, all of this searching, all all of this question, this way that we’re trying to travel such that we’re doing it not just for ourselves alone.
You know, maybe that’s part of our answer that we have overlooked. Maybe that’s the solution. A great deal of what we’ve been looking for is in terms of other centeredness, beginning to live not just for our own self, our own self centered needs, our own exaggerated self concern and interest, but beginning to find meaning in terms of a social awareness of living more and more for others, to begin to take on social values as central to our life, to begin to see ourselves as part of a greater whole than we perhaps have up to this point. So the inner focus of our life becomes Buddha, which we seek to enact, to realize by means of the Dharma within the social context of the spiritual community, and trying the best we can in whatever our own humble limited fashion to raise motivation to include if only one other person in the goal of which we’re seeking. Then we can be assured that our journey is moving on and that it’s going somewhere.
It’s not continually going around in a circle, this sense of circular motion of our minds and lives which has never gotten us anywhere. That our life, if anything, is beginning to form some kind of spiral. It’s beginning to move in some sort of positive direction where we would we would want it to go. You know, certain boundaries will be passed. We’re actually moving on in our journey.
You know, because it’s we can that in itself is not unmeaning. We can have some take some kind of heart in that. We can have some kind of self respect in that. Some kind of You know, in all the difficulties that life brings us, we can take some solace in that. To the Buddha, the Dharma and the Supreme Community, I go for refuge until awakening.
Through the creative potential of my listening to the Dharma, may I achieve the state of a Buddha for the sake of all living beings. To the Buddha, the Dharma and the Supreme Community I go for refuge until awakening. Through the creative potential of my listening to the Dharma may I achieve the state of a Buddha for the sake of all living beings. To the Buddha, the Dharma and the Supreme Community, I go for refuge until awakening through the creative potential of my enlightenment. May I achieve the state of a Buddha for the sake of all living beings.
Reverently, I pay homage with my body, speech and mind and present clouds of every type of offering, those actual and imagined. I disclose all my destructive acts, human and existence time without beginning, and rejoice in the skillful actions of holy and ordinary beings. Please remain until cyclic existence has ended and turn the wheel of dharma for living beings. I dedicate the skillful actions of myself and others to the great awakening. So in adjusting our motivation, we can take think of an individual who something about them, their appearance perhaps that we don’t like.
You know, it’s not particularly them, they themselves in in terms of our relationship with them, but just in terms of their appearance. Maybe they’re of a different color. Maybe they have some kind of physical defect that it makes us uneasy. We don’t it makes us uncomfortable to be around them. So in trying to work with such an individual for for no other reason than their mere appearance, we sort of don’t want to be around them.
I have some kind of, even if only slight aversion for them, working with this person and see if we can work through that initial kind of aversion that we feel simply by the force of their appearance. And then I thought then we’ll do mindfulness of breath. And I thought we could trace back some of the many meditations and teachings that we’ve been working with, you know, over the course of the year, you know, looking at some of the possible versions of ourselves in terms of working with imagination. And I think if something that we’re learning here, if nothing other nothing else, is that how much the mind plays a role in the shaping of our reality. And therefore, it is, you know, it is very much our imagination, the images and ideas which we play with within our mind, which very much play a part in the reality we come to know with in term in the experiences we come to live.
So we can but also we can begin to apply some of our understanding. You know, we’re going to look at possible other versions of ourselves. You know, why isn’t that why is it that so difficult to change? You know, it’s like it’s it’s as if, you know, we we we continually put in different costumes, you know, on the same ego. And best we can make cosmetic changes, but but but we have a we hold to a core unchanging unchanging set of about ourselves, whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we’re aware of that or not.
This is the way I am, very much fixed, unchanging set of core elements or characteristics of who I am, in fact. And we we it’s like this is this is where the the this is where the understanding of emptiness is transformative, breaking down this notion of a fixed core identity of who I am. When it becomes more open ended, more fluid, more susceptible to to remodeling and change, ultimately, Buddha. You know, it’s like this is an image I I have to share with you. It’s like if you had if you took a if you formed a clay bust and and and you allowed the clay to dry, And you wanted but you wanted to make some changes in it.
The best you could do it, you could choose away, you know, maybe a little bit of the mouth, know, reshape the nose a little bit, a little bit of, you know, remodeling here and change here. But you couldn’t make any dramatic changes in that in that shape, in that form, in that figure, in that expression. And essentially it’s very much fixed, only only cosmetic changes would be possible. But if if you took that that same bust that made of clay and you soaked it in water, for example, for some time, and and and became soft and pliable, then you could begin to really rework it. You could begin to reshape it almost in any form that you desired.
You could you could do you could go beyond simple superficial cosmetic changes and begin to change it in dramatic ways. Likewise, we, you know, at present it is if we have we have a core fixed personality, this hardened structure of who we think of ourselves, who we are, how we conceive of ourselves, this identity that we hold to, that we fixate upon. And at best we can make very superficial cosmetic changes, and even those are difficult. Difficult. But what happens if we if we dip the entire personality structure into the waters of emptiness?
And then the whole thing becomes more open, more fluid. We can begin to make dramatic changes. You know, the personality is simply those reoccurring structures of mind and behavior which we which we we single out over time and which we fixate upon as being who I am. But in between, there have been a variety of other behaviors and personality qualities and and structure structures of mind which go over which are overlooked, which aren’t taken as part of one’s overall identity, which are filtered out. And but they’re none they’re there nonetheless.
So if we can begin to you know, there are enlightened moments every day of our being, but they we they go unnoticed, because not looked for. But but they but they if we could if we could develop a sense of more fluidity and openness in terms of who in fact we are, then we could begin to incorporate those elements. They could become we could begin to tell ourselves another story about who we are. We could begin to We could draw forth the subplot of our personality, those structures of mind and behaviors which are more of who we would wish to identify ourselves with. We could promote the hidden story of our lives and who we are into the dominant theme of our life.
We could begin to tell ourselves a Buddhist story, an enlightened story about ourselves. But it’s much necessary to have this sense that of and gain some appreciation that we aren’t these fixed, solid, concrete selves with this fixed identity, that it is workable, that it’s only a matter of habit patterns, that it’s open to change and restructuring. And this is the insight this is the insight of which emptiness brings to us, this possibility of reworking, a dramatic reshaping of our lives, of who we are. We can become anything that our imagination will allow us to be. This is a so in this meditation, if if you can combine it with the sense that of my I I have an overall identity of who I conceive of myself to be, But this identity is not fixed.
It is not unchanging. It’s simply a more or less stable pattern of ways of thinking, that systems of belief, of ideas, and images within my mind. But there are other personality qualities. There are other ideas and images and beliefs which I and ways of thinking which I can draw upon, I can promote to play a greater predominant part of how I conceive of myself, my self identity, my self image. I can promote them to become the dominant quality of who I now conceive of myself to be and therefore begin to express more and more.
We can explore other possible versions of ourselves through our imagination and allow the and, you know, like, this understanding of emptiness is like it’s like, you know, there’s these there’s these subplots and these these seeds of other possibilities within our mind. It’s like parting this but they have been more or less overgrown by, shall we say, weeds, you know. And we part the weeds and we we allow the the light, the light of our own wisdom to to to warm the earth and nourish those other possibilities and give them give them a chance to nurture them to grow and develop. You know, if you think of yourself as an angry person, as a hateful person, how are you ever going to be a loving person? It would be incompatible with your self identity and never have a chance to grow and develop.
And we have to allow the possibility that we may often be angry. But that’s not that’s not the nature of our being. That’s not who we inherently are. We have no inherent identity whatsoever. You know, this is the message of emptiness, selflessness.
We can begin to play. We can begin to manipulate the very our very personality and how who we who we we in fact are. We can develop sacred being. So anyway, all of this I think can be made use of in this meditation. Anyway, we’re going to explore other versions.
And especially so if we if we can just think, even in a understanding, limited fashion, that there is no fixed identity. There’s no there’s no core to my being. There are simply more or less stable reoccurring patterns of thinking, more or less stable reoccurring patterns of thinking, habitual ways of thinking and conceiving various images. But these are susceptible to change. They’re not fixed by any any means.
And there are other ways of thinking, there are other beliefs that we that we presently have and that we can nourish and that we can promote those to play a more predominant part in this overall, you know, constellation of of identity of who we can self conceive of ourselves to be, and therefore the way that we actually are. So, you know, like allowing you we we don’t have to be afraid of this, you know, this a more a a possible, more fluid and open way of being. There’s nothing to be afraid. We don’t have to to cling to this fixed idea about ourselves. If I’m not this way, then I’m I’m not way any way at all.
I won’t be at all. That’s a fiction which keeps which which forces us to live our lives in fear, which which brings out resistance to change, which keeps us going in the same circles, in the same sufferings again and again and again. So, you know, this is this is the transformative possibilities of the understanding of emptiness and selflessness. We could be anything that we imagine. It’s all workable.
So if you take a a firm comfortable posture. So we’re working our way up the rungs of reality through these various stages of, you know, trying to not quite take No. The idea that was presented before in the motivation. You know, why is it even when we find what it is that we want that somehow there’s a disappointment. You know, Buddhism is trying to address the problem of suffering at the most basic level possible, at the very level of perception.
That even at the level of perception there’s something distorted about the way we come to know the world. And therefore there’s a disharmony, there’s some kind of tension, anxiety, there’s suffering in one way or another. And I try this is what we’re trying to address here coming to development of awakened mind and beginning to come become aware of that there’s something even at the level of our basic perception of the world which is somehow flawed or inaccurate and therefore is a source of our ultimate source, a basic source of our problems and our suffering. And we can we it is we can work at and it’s quite necessary and useful to to adjust or work with methods at the remedial level, but at the same time begin to work at some kind of ultimate level, at a very basic and deep level. You know, we can we can apply antidotes to our very specific emotions.
If we have if we’re dominated by anger, we can meditate on tolerance and love. If we’re dominated by desire and repulsion. You know, there’s all these possible remedial measures that we can take to lessen these afflictive emotions and therefore lessen to a certain degree our problems. But none of these remedial measures can ever remove the basic problem, which is at the level of our very perception itself, our conception of the way things exist, the way they appear to exist. Buddhism asks us to entertain the possibility that in many ways, large and small, our common sense is flawed.
What we have taken for granted as necessary or dangerous or even real may not be so at all. We have, in fact, been living in unlicensed premises, assumptions which would not hold up under examination. How come, then, that we have been so blind to them? If our game is founded on false assumptions, why have they not come to light? What Buddhism is saying is that we are like a man who believes that he is five foot tall when he is actually six foot tall.
It seems to be stretching our tolerance too far to suppose that he would continue in this belief despite constantly banging his head on doorways and buying trousers that leave his calves freezing in the winter. Yet this is precisely the pickle we are all in, we are told. And we keep banging our head on the doorway. But we know if we haven’t quite put put it together, why? The problem lies in our misunderstanding of our own psychology.
One of our false assumptions is that our experience is reliable. That most of the time the way we think this is our assumption. That most of the time that the way we see things is the way they really are. That we assume that to be the case. We subscribe to a philosophic tradition without knowing that we are in any way doing that called naive realism, which says that our perception is in general a direct picture of the way things are.
We are brought up to take our experience for granted so that when we feel that things are unpleasant or problematic, we then have to act, do something extra to try to get rid of them, to try to get them right. To use the analogy of we try to use the computer program to correct its own faults. We try to use the computer program to correct its own faults. I think it might be difficult for a faulty program to correct itself. It keeps the fault would continually be compounded.
It would loop back in on itself. We are not inclined to inquire into how we came to construe the situation in that way or whether there might be alternative points of view we could adopt from which things might look completely different. Part of our common sense is to treat perception as unproblematic and therefore of not much interest. So, you know, this is very much the antithesis of that position, what we’re doing, what we’re involved in now. Perceptions are problematic, and we’re trying we’re trying to draw into question our very perceptions and the perceptual process itself.
It’s not an easy effort because, you know, we it’s the world about us is taken so much for granted that it’s tremendously difficult even to gain appreciation that it could be in some way miss being misperceived, that we could be wrong about the the appearance of things about us. Therefore, And therefore, mistaking what are our problems actually the source of our problems, where the source source of our problems actually lie. Just to have that doubt that these appearances about us, the, you know, the people and the things, that they are appearing in a different way than they actually exist. And I don’t mean that tables aren’t tables. We’re not questioning that at all or that, you know, human beings aren’t human beings.
But but in terms of taking it for granted the way they exist, as if they exist out there independent of my mind, independent of language and concept, independent of the perceptual process itself, Out of that misconception arises all the various conceptual elaborations, the various scenarios that we get become entangled in, which become problematic, which causes suffering. All the very all the various attachments and aversion, they all arise out of this basic misperception of the way things exist about us. If that perception if that perception is removed from the mind, then all of the scenarios that we become entangled in no longer arise. The world remains that is no longer problematic because that most basic fundamental cause has been removed. This misconception, this distorting factor within our mind which causes us to conceive of things in a in a problematic fashion, in a problematic way.
It’s very difficult to to undermine even our naive realism. It’s something that we have to work with, we have to familiarize ourselves with. So, you know, we’re looking at a level misperception that we call the in the school which is we’re looking at, it’s called the Svatāntrika Madhyamaka school. In general, you know, there there were two middle way stages, the Svatāntrika stage and the Prāsaṇgika Madhyamaka stage. So both of the middle way stages or middle way schools assert that nothing whatsoever exists.
And that is to say that nothing whatsoever has an independent reality of its own, independent of our minds, independent of causes and conditions, independent of what parts, but most importantly, independent of language and conceptuality. Though it appears it appears that that glass on the table there has nothing whatsoever to do with me. I’m not involved in its creation at all. You know, okay. You know, we can what is the what difference does it make?
You know, we can take in a glass, it doesn’t make very much difference probably. What happens but what happens when you see a desirable quality? You see a beautiful a handsome man or a beautiful woman, You know? And it’s that that beauty. You know, I I remember I used to be a an art student and I would be in life drawing class and I would look at the model and, you know, maybe maybe it’d be a very attractive model, for example.
Yeah. And I I I tried to maybe it’d be this element almost of beauty. And I tried to analyze like her face. Okay. Case of a woman.
Okay. What was it about her? Was it, you know, was it the cheekbone that that made her beautiful? Was it the nose, the shape of nose, the length of the nose? Was it the the width of the lips, the fullness of the lips, the way the the, you know, the nature of the chin?
All of those. Where was that? You know, there’s something there that that was impressing me which I which I thought of as beautiful. But what what was it? You know, what happened when when when when, you know, she turned slightly and I saw that big pimple on the, you know, on her on her cheek there or something there, And all the ones that that that conception of beauty kind of withered away.
Why was that? So, you know, this what happens when you think, you know, there’s an internal logic in in terms of the afflictive emotions. It makes attachment and hatred, attachment and aversion make complete sense in the context of ignorance. You know? And if things were inherently existent, if things were truly existent, if things existed out there independent of my mind, if that beauty and what is it about what is it that beauty has to offer us?
Bliss. That’s why it’s beautiful. That’s why we conceive of it as beautiful because it it brings us some sort of bliss, some sort of pleasure. If it if it were inherent in that that in that object itself, then by all means, hold on to it as best you can and gather up as many as you can and keep them for yourself. That would be that would be the logical, legitimate, rational outcome of that of that of that premise.
If something were inherently blissful in its nature, it could bring you bliss from its very by its by the just by its own nature. You know, just the fact that of its beauty, then by all means, keep beauty about you. Collect as many, you know, beautiful objects of bliss of that nature as you can. Always keep them with you because they’re because by their very nature, they’re going to bring you bliss just by contacting them, you know, having them near somehow. Not quite sure how, but that’s the notion.
Keep them in your pocket. When you get bored, take out your little bag of bliss. You know? And then kinda take a hit of bliss. That’s the notion.
That’s the internal logic. And it’s makes it makes sense except there’s one basic flaw. That is the the premise in which it all is based. That that that beauty is in fact doesn’t reside by its very nature in the object itself. Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.
It would be nice if things were always beautiful, if they could always bring us bliss, but that’s not their nature. If we could always conceive of things beautiful, by all means, that’s a different story altogether, but that’s not that’s that’s not the inherent quality of the object. That’s something about our own minds. And Buddha sees only a pure land, a blissful land that’s dependent upon his or her own mind, not the nature of some object of reality, not the not what is out there. So, you know, we’re we’re we’re trying to begin to undermine our taken for granted assumptions about the will and begin to have some sense or feeling about the way the the part that the perceptual process plays so that we’re not sucked in by this internal logic of ignorance that we see that there’s at work a basic flaw in the premise.
And, you know, that there is beauty in the world. You know, for example, you know, there are you know, there’s the you know, these are just some ideas. I know the the the Amazon some of the native Amazonians who live along the Amazon in Brazil, they put these large plates in their lips. Have you probably seen that? And this is some people might find it quite attractive.
Know? Of course, or in some of the upcountry parts of Burma, the women put rings around their neck and begin to stretch their necks by placing more and more rings on the neck. And this is this is a mark of beauty. You know, you can imagine a situation. You know, wow.
Look at the neck on her. You know? Know? You know? Foot foot and a half long neck.
You know? I’ve never seen anything so beautiful on my neck. Or look at the lips on him. You know? But so so but what does that, you know, what does that tell us?
Some people from another culture would find it terribly repulsive. They wouldn’t even want to look. So one person sees the same object as repulsive, another as beautiful. So that begins to tell us something about the nature of beauty. You know, that nature that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, that it’s culturally conditioned.
There is beauty in the world. You know, we’re not saying that beauty doesn’t exist, but it doesn’t exist from its own side. We begin to see it more as a we as a social construct, as a as a product of culture, as a product of of a belief system, if you like. And therefore, we don’t get sucked in keeping that being mindful of that fact too, that that beauty residing in the object itself. And therefore, the aversion, attachment no longer arise with regard to the object.
We can enjoy that beauty. We can but we don’t try to possess it because we know we can’t. We can’t hold on to it. And we move on to something else and enjoy that beauty. We move on to something else and enjoy that beauty.
You know, it’s our clinging and grasping at pleasure which turns pleasure to pain. There’s nothing wrong with pleasure. We should all be blissed out. So what we mean by true existence? We’re we’re saying that the middle way school, their their their main assertion is that nothing truly exists.
And this sounds strange, know, unless we begin to have an idea of what we mean by true existence. And what we mean is the way something appears and the way it exists are not congruent or in disagreement. You know, just, you know, just a simple minded notion of when somebody acts one way, you know, they they what if they say something if they speak in one way and in fact they believe a a very different way, you know, then we say, oh, they’re they’re a phony or they’re false. They’re they’re deceptive. And likewise, with these appearances, when they appear to exist and we’re always talking about the way it exists, not whether a glass is a glass.
We’re not questioning that. That we’re going to take for granted. We have no reason to to question that at present. If we had just taken it, you know, LSD, then maybe we could question it. That maybe it’s not really a glass, maybe it’s my my uncle or something like that.
Like the guy who mistook his wife for a hat or something. Anyway, we have reason for us to question that at present. But there is a reason we’re trying to introduce the the notion that there is a reason to begin to question the way that glass exists. I don’t know why I keep picking on that piece of that glass. It’s it’s never caused me any problem.
Anyway, in terms so we’re beginning to question that, that things appear to exist to appear one way. Things appear to exist one way, but in fact exist another, and therefore they do not truly exist. Why? Because they exist one way and appear another. Therefore, they are false.
They are true for ignorance. Ignorance. This is a, you know, where if we the notion of the two truths, a very important area we need to look at, the two truths. There is what we call conventional truth and ultimate truth. Conventional truth now we use the word conventional, but actually the the Tibetan word for what not usually translated as conventional truth means would be more literally translated as truth for a deceiver.
And what what is the deceiver? The deceiver is ignorance. For ignorance, this class truly exists. It appears to truly exist, and for ignorance, ignorance conceived conceived of it to truly exist. Therefore, it is true for ignorance, but it’s not true for valid cognition.
It’s false for for a cognition which sees things sees things as they actually are. So in introducing the the the idea of illusion, illusion like, that there’s an illusory like appearance in the way things exist. So we we have to begin to to we’re going to begin to make a subtle distinction and between the Svatāntrika Madhyamaka stage and the Prāsaṇgika Madhyamaka stage. They both assert that nothing truly exists. Why?
Because they both assert that all phenomena whatsoever are dependent upon mind for their existence. But they don’t appear that way. Therefore, because there’s a difference between the way they exist and the way they appear, they don’t they’re not true. They’re false. They don’t truly exist the way they appear.
But so we’re introducing a subjective factor in the perceptual process that there’s something coming from the side of the mind in the in terms of the way we come to know things, the way that we understand the world and therefore relate with it, that there’s a subjective element. There’s something coming from the side of the mind in this process, that things simply aren’t out there independent of my mind. You know, that that and and I am more or less a passive observer stuck down in this world, and things seem to force themselves upon me. But on the contrary, I am an active participant in bringing forth my lived reality, the participatory universe. So but we’re going to begin to make a subtle distinction between these two stages on the degree