Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 29-minute session, Ven Jampa Ignyen teaches a debate on emptiness and conception from the Sera Je curriculum. He opens with a subtle distinction: while everything is empty of true existence, each thing has its own emptiness — the emptiness of a bowl in the first moment differs from the next because they lack the same substance. He works through a scholastic debate about whether conception holds a vase to be a generic image (wrong awareness) or merely accesses the generic image appearing as a vase. The discussion turns to whether the mind generates or accesses generic images, concluding with reflections on valid versus invalid conception using examples from memory and present-moment perception. The teacher also discusses the text’s difficulty and considers accelerating to reach the Minds and Mental Factors unit. For practitioners engaged with philosophical foundations.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 08 M and C 2001 08 21.mp3
UUID: 1784b0ad-d473-493f-8ff9-c1daeff4dfa7
Teacher: Ven Jampa Ignyen
Collection: y Mind and Cognition 2001 Month 07-09 (Ven Jampa Ignyen)
Date: 2001-08-21
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 29.2 minutes
Words: ~2,584
The nature the nature of of emptiness is universal. Everything is empty of true existence. Yeah. But the emptiness of different things is different, isn’t it? There’s a Subject object?
We started off with subject topics here. Everything is empty of true existence, but the emptiness of the cat is not the emptiness of the bowl. This we what is it said? There’s a statement in which means that everything has its own cessation. Everything in a sense has its own emptiness and they’re not, they’re not the same emptiness.
It’s not. Exactly. Why? Because the bowl in the first second is not the same as the bowl in the second second. And the emptiness of the bowl in the first second is not the same as the emptiness of the bowl on the second second.
Because the bowl of the first second and the bowl of the second second are cause and result. They don’t even share the same substance. No. It means the bowl is changing. That’s all.
But this this requires some a lot of investigation. In a sense, it’s easy for us to contemplate the impermanence of things. Much subtler than that is the the emptiness of the bowl itself. Okay. We’re just Okay. There’s another debate under this.
Will we do the next debate as well? Okay. Now right at the end the page, says conception holding a vase is discernment holding the generic image of a vase as a vase. Now we say take conception holding a vase. It follows it as wrong awareness because it is discernment holding the generic image of a vase as a vase.
Reason accepted. If so, take that subject. It follows it is not wrong awareness because it is authentic discernment, because it is authentic conception, because it is correct belief, because take a vase again. It follows conception holding it is correct belief because it is an established base. Okay.
So what is it saying there? In brief, it’s saying that, the generic image of a vase is the appearing object, but the conception of a vase is not actually holding the generic image of a vase to be a vase. It’s simply that the generic image of a vase appears as a vase to it. Anyway, this is a if it in fact were to hold the generic image of a vase to be a vase, it would be wrong awareness because the generic image of a vase is not a vase. But the generic image of a vase appears to be a vase to it, but it’s not actually holding that.
It’s just holding a vase. And the last thing on page or the last thing in that debate. No, it’s not. The conception holding a vase, to it, the generic image of a vase appears to be a vase. For that conception of a vase, when we sit and we think about a vase, to that conception, the generic image appears to be a vase.
The conception is not holding the generic image to be a vase. It’s just holding the vase. If in fact that conception held the generic image of a vase to be a vase, it would be wrong awareness. And there would be no this point isn’t very, very important because if that were the case, there’d be no conception which was not wrong conception. And there would be no way by which reasoning could ever establish anything.
Because all conception would be wrong conception, because all conception would be holding its appearing object or the generic image to be the object. Not necessarily. All you’re doing here, you’d be holding the generic image to be that object, which implies that you’re not seeing the generic image as a generic image. So then you can see the object is being somewhere in your mind. Well, not necessarily.
When we have, for instance, when we have the conception of a vase, we don’t hold the vase to be in our mind. Right? When we have a memory of our mother, we don’t think of our mother as being in our mind. We think, oh, my mother. And then we gotta you know, she’s in the kitchen.
She’s making something on the stove. That’s where she is. She’s, you know, two hundred kilometers away. That sorry? No.
This is the whole idea of authentic conception here. When we have a conception of anything, if it’s existent, then it’s authentic. Meaning that the object that’s being held does exist. And we’re not holding that object to exist in a way that it doesn’t exist. Like even, say, the memory of our mother.
No. It’s not actually created by the mind either. Generic images are not we don’t even know them. They’re not created by the mind. We can’t create them.
I don’t when you say we know the generic images to be created by the mind, Well, at present, you know, that to even According to the Well, all it’s saying there is that if we hold, if the conception holding a vase actually holds the generic image to be a vase, then it must be wrong awareness. That’s really all that it’s saying. It must be wrong awareness because it’s holding them what is not a vase to be a vase. And that’s really what wrong awareness is. It’s holding something to exist in a way it doesn’t exist.
Therefore we can establish that conception is not holding the generic image to be the object itself. Otherwise it would render all conception to be wrong. All that happens, it is saying, is that the generic image appears to be a vase. The generic image of a vase appears to be a vase to that conception holding vase. And on the basis of that, the conception holds a vase.
The generic image itself is not created, but is accessed by the conception. Accessed by awareness, which is trying to hold the object beyond the senses or beyond the sense powers, which act as the support or the basis for generating sense awareness. That they’re permanent. They don’t, in a sense, come from Because they’re affirming negations, they’re negations, they’re permanent. It’s a little bit like the nonexistence of a cow here.
Who’s that created by? Like the nonexistence of a cow is not created by the cow. It’s not created by us, but it exists there in front of us. A generic image in a way is similar to that. But a generic image is it’s not quite an but the nonexistence of a cow is a non affirming negation.
Whereas generic images are actually affirming negation. They negate something, but in negating it, they affirm it. So a generic image is the appearance of that which is not not the object. Is it no. It’s the mind.
The mind itself is not creating these at all. It’s not it’s not up to the mind to actually create a generic image. It’s not as if the mind is going out and, you know, like creating that in order to conceive of an object. It’s merely accessing such images in order to hold an object. However, there is a dependence, even though they’re not created, there is a dependence on sensory images.
Like we can we know ourselves that our generic images are dependent on our sense awareness of objects. No. No. No. The generic image is appearing the conception and that generic image, for instance, if it’s a conception of a vase, the generic image is that which appears as a vase when it’s not a vase.
What that is, is the image of the negation of non vase. There’s reasonable ground to it. It’s not mistaken It’s mistaken to object. It’s mistaken to the appearing object. It’s not mistaken to its reference object.
It might be you’re really, in a sense, holding her in a way that she may have existed five years ago. But it doesn’t mean to say that the conception of the conception of one’s mother is non authentic. The object still exists, in other words. If in fact your mother still exists. What your conception of mother that you have now, it would depend on whether your mother still existed or not.
Yeah. We have to be careful with this, otherwise we can even for our sense awareness of the present, you know, we can’t even establish valid awareness of any object because whatever we’re looking at doesn’t exist at the time we’re looking at it. Or here and so on. It’s a little if one takes that to its limit, for instance, our sensory awareness at present, what we’re seeing in this moment is already destroyed. We know that time has passed for even the light rays to reach our eyes.
So what it’s looking at actually doesn’t exist in exactly the present moment. It’s a little bit similar to that. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yep.
If things have to exist in exactly the moment that we are aware of them through our senses, then even senses can’t be established as correct. But common sense tells us that our sense awareness is correct, within limits. Similarly, our conception of objects is is correct belief, within certain limits. We can have a memory of someone, and when we think about them, that object exists, that person. If they don’t, the way we can see them to exist may be dated.
But if it has to be an up to the, you know, the present moment representation, an exact present moment representation of them, then our conception is finished. Also, perception is finished. Right. How are doing for time? Oh.
Sorry. Yeah. Now I’m just wondering, how are we finding the text? Can I just ask a few questions? It is a difficult text.
And actually, if we’re dealing with a text, on a level of, say, conception and so forth. There’s many, many issues and it’s not easy to start to get down to the to a level where we can begin to investigate the material. It’s that’s true. That’s part of it. In fact, it’s not easy for us in a short session to really begin to get down to some of the deeper issues and explore them, which is the purpose of the text, to really provoke thought about the issues.
The author himself, you know, wants people to try and refute what he’s saying and to really, you know, look at the reasons that are being given to see whether they’re valid or not. It yeah. No. That’s true. There’s part part of the reason why I translated this text was because we translated a text before this called dura, and to follow on with the wording of Düra, then I also translated this one to match back with that, and then it’s progressed from there.
One of the problems is that a number of the texts in the basic program have been translated by different authors. And so that if you try and put two texts together, it’s it can be very confusing. And so this here, the reason for this is to try and unify the or standardize terms from, you know, over a number of different texts. Yeah. Yeah.
This yes. Yeah. No. In fact, it’s not easy just to start with this particular text. There’s another three texts.
Like, if one is what the basic program is based on is really some of the debate manuals in Sera Je. And prior to this text, there’s three other texts that precede it, which put this into some context and enable one to understand a number of the debates that occur here. And that also makes it difficult because if we don’t have that reference of these earlier texts, then it makes it that much more difficult to understand many of the debates that exist here. In Chenrezig, we actually did the three texts that come before this, or about half of the three texts. We didn’t do them completely, but we did enough to act as a basis for this.
It made this that much easier to deal with. Yeah. You can experiment with this, and this is often how it is done as well. You can read up, you know, just the reason column, the fourth column, read up and down that to see if those things follow going one way, going the other way. That’s true.
One can experiment with this material. And in fact, the authors of the material, I think, composed it not as an absolutely set presentation of material, but just, you know, bringing up a number of points and also possible solutions to points that are implied in the words. But I’m also thinking that soon we move on to this section of minds and mental factors, and it may be more useful to quickly finish these sections and then move to minds and mental factors and even use another text by Geshe Gyaltsen on minds and mental factors, or at least some of the sections out of that text. Yeah. We would have well, that’s what I’m I’m wondering because to make it meaningful, we have to stop and really examine some of the issues.
But we’re going very slowly in doing that. Maybe it is better to just briefly read through the next sections. And then because here in this particular text, starts Minds and mental factors. Yeah. Yeah.
In a way, I’m you know, I think that it might be good to to go through quickly and then come to page thirty six. And then we can supplement thirty six with some material from, say, another text if we need to. I just did a weekend in a retreat on the minds and mental factors. So that’s why I’ve got the material now with me. But that is possible because really in a way, the central area of this text is minds and mental factors, which occurs on page thirty six.
And what we’re doing at present is another perspective on the nature of the mind using the seven types of awareness. In a way, that’s more a presentation from the point of view of the epistemology or how knowledge develops, how certainty develops. Whereas the mind and mental factors is more about the dynamic nature of the mind itself and how the different states that can exist, from a point of view of the function of the mind. So it might be better if we did move ahead quickly and then get to the minds and mental factors and then settle down again and do that in more depth. So anyway, we’ll think about it during the weekend.
Do you mean you want us to leave by twenty ninth or thirty sixth? If you could, yeah, we could. They’re not so difficult. Don’t worry too much about the debates, but if we can read this section without debate. Yes.
Fair. Fair. Fair. That’s this material is not so I mean, one can get a reasonable understanding of it without going into too much depth. Okay.
Anyway, we’ll if if that’s okay then to read through to, say, page thirty five. And if if with time, then read also the debate. Great. He talked about, yeah, Paramanu. Yeah.
He talked about atoms. No. It was with yogic perception. Yogic perception itself has the capacity to