Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Ven Robina Courtin deconstructs a mala (prayer beads) to teach emptiness and dependent arising in this 47-minute session. She traces how nothing exists independently but depends on causes and conditions, component parts, and ultimately mental labeling. Using the mala itself, she shows this principle extends through craftspeople, trees, and the entire universe. She applies this three-level analysis to the self, showing how ignorance falsely grasps at an independent “I,” fueling attachment and aversion. She cautions practitioners against two opposite errors: nihilism (thinking emptiness means nothing exists) and eternalism (clinging to inherent nature). Realization of dependent arising cuts the root of all suffering. For practitioners already grounded in Lamrim teachings.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 16 DAR 2003 06 22.mp3
UUID: 2777c624-8fac-43a9-b90a-9eb14065b258
Teacher: Ven Robina Courtin
Collection: y Death and Rebirth (Ven Robina Courtin)
Date: 2003-06-22
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 47.5 minutes
Words: ~8,410
This precious human life, these amazing qualities we have to continue to just develop more of the same, Plus to continue to know our minds more deeply, to discriminate between positive and negative states of mind so that we can completely understand the nature of suffering and want to go beyond it so that we can then start to see the suffering of others, which we’ll talk about now, so we can benefit them, thus becoming a Buddha, becoming who we really are. So there’s so much more to say about the mind in the second in the second scope of practice, understanding how the mind functions, understanding all the various delusions, but I think we’ve broadly touched on the essential points of all these delusions that they’re suffering for me. They’re liars. They’re deceptive. They deceive me.
They cause me to act and speak wrongly. So therefore, the cause of my suffering suffering that set me up for future suffering, not to mention suffering right now. So we need eventually to develop what they call renunciation, which again is this forbidding kind of religious concept. But again too, it has a very specific meaning. So renunciation, as Lama Zopa Rinpoche says, is what you’ve what you get, what you achieve, what you realize when you finally when he says when he says when he says, just the thought when you have just the thought of another moment of attachment, just the thought of another moment of attachment.
Not to mention anger, jealousy, pride, and all the rest. Just a thought of another moment of attachment. So when you’re so aware of it, when you so deeply understand it from done from having done much analysis, much contemplation, then it’s when just the thought of another moment of attachment is so disgusting to you, it’s like being in a septic tank. Then you have renunciation. Then you really have understood the causes of your suffering, and that means you really have developed this amazing respect for yourself.
Or you could say you’ve really developed this compassion for yourself. So again, just to make a few points about the difference between the positive and the negative states of mind before we move on to the third scope, which is the compassion wing. Again, you know, we have the sensory consciousness and we have the mental consciousness in this mind of ours. The sensory consciousness is the capacity of our mind to be aware of tastes and smells and touch and sound and so on, you know, through the medium of the senses. And that’s all they have the capacity to do.
They’re very limited. They’re our doorway to the experience of things. Where the work is, where the workshop is, where the suffering is, where the happiness is, where everything is, where the potential for enlightenment is, is in the mental consciousness. This entire this huge, you know, layers and layers of concepts, thoughts, feelings, emotions, unconscious, subconscious, intuition, spirit, soul, instinct, you name it, the whole lot. All propelled by a habit of having done it, which is the action of which is the energy of karma, which not only produces the the the continual habit to do it, but the experience of it from the outside.
So the source of our suffering and indeed the source of our happiness. These these delusions have these various characteristics. Generally speaking, they’re known as delusions because they’re liars. They’re deceptive. Blind our mind.
They cause us to be delusional. They cause us to not see what’s realistic and therefore to act and speak in the wrong way. And they’re all the common characteristic they all have is they’re based in the I, in the wrong sense of I. The so let’s talk a bit about emptiness here. So what’s the right sense of I?
How do things really exist? I mean, can talk about things at a conventional level, and we can talk about things ultimately. So emptiness. Just kinda strange word. You know?
We have all sorts of ideas of what we think it means, but let’s just look at how the word is used just in the way the word is used. It’s very simple, really. If you if you look at a microphone and you see it’s not you can see this microphone is black. Here is black, isn’t it? We can see that.
All of us can see that. Well, you could say, although you don’t speak like this, you could say, oh, no. We can see, can’t we? We can see that it’s not red, can’t we? So we don’t speak like this, but we can say accurately it lacks redness, can’t we?
That’s an accurate statement. It does lack redness, we can see that. So another way to say that is it’s empty of being red. Empty in this use in this way, the Buddha uses it as simply a synonym for lack or absent. You know, you’re empty of be I’m empty of being a female, a male, we could say.
I’m not a I’m not a male, in other words. It’s just a it’s a strange way to say it, but there’s a very there’s an appropriate would’ve used it in a very skillful way. But this is the meaning simply. The use of the word is is is used like this. It just simply is is meaning lacking or absent or not.
You know? Empty. He’s curious that he should use that word. Not for me, think it’s a strange way he uses it. You know?
It’s how he’s using it. So he says, you know, the shorthand for this is that everything is empty. So really, it’s shorthand. You can say everything’s empty. So, of course, you have to know what you mean.
It’s like saying equals m c squared. Oh, yeah? Well, a five year old could learn that. How does it help? Doesn’t help at all.
You have to give all the the, you know, the years and years of buildup to actually get some kind of direct meaning of it, don’t we? We have give a we have give it masses of work to understand the meaning of it. Well, the same here. Everything’s empty. So it sounds pretty good.
You know? So, obviously, it needs a lot of interpret it needs interpreting. You have to know exactly what Buddha’s talking about. So what’s even the first question is what’s what is everything empty of? So that’s obviously the first question.
Well, Buddha is saying okay. So Buddha is saying that everything that exists in the universe without exception, we can talk about it in two ways. We can talk about it from the from the point of view of how of how it exists conventionally. And we can talk about it from the point of view of how it exists ultimately. These are the words.
So Buddha would say that ultimately, this is the shorthand, ultimately, whatever exists, including me, you, toilets, good, bad, Hitler, Mother Teresa, love, hate, mind, karma, whatever exists, everything that exists necessarily lacks, is empty of a certain way of existing, a particular way of existing, a particular way of existing. Now that seems a bit abstract to us. And this particular way of existing that Buddha says that things don’t have is what we think they do have. But we don’t even think we think they have. That’s the big problem.
So when we hear the Buddha says, sorry, guys, everything is empty of existing from its own side, existing in and of itself, existing, you know, inherently. These are all the they’re all synonyms. This is what Buddha’s saying things are empty of. It seems a completely abstract concept to us because it’s like saying, you know, microphone is empty of of of of, you know, something that you’ve never heard of. Let’s say you’ve never heard of wood.
Let’s say you’ve never heard of wood, and the microphone doesn’t you know, is is empty of having wood. It has no meaning for you. You don’t even know what wood is, not to mention that it doesn’t even have it. But what Buddha is saying is we are continually projecting onto as if we’re projecting onto microphone a certain characteristic of woodness, let’s just say, that is so spontaneous in us that we don’t even know we do it. So he comes along and he recognizes that because we grasp that everything is having a particular characteristic, in this case, as I said, the characteristic of being inherent from its own side, which is, you know, we don’t understand what it means, then he’s saying he can notice in our minds that we have this deeply profound primordial ignorance, a state of mind that’s pervasive in the whole mind that constantly is grasping at me and all other phenomena as having an inherent nature of existing independently, of existing from their own side.
He can see this clearly, and he’s saying, hey, guys, you don’t exist like that. So obviously, for us to even discover that microphone is empty of wood, you have to even know what wood means, don’t you? Then you can know, oh, I see. It doesn’t have that. So that’s the difficulty for us.
So to even begin to understand emptiness, we’ve to start to understand even what he means by that thing, and then we have to even begin to see that our mind is projecting that. Because, you know, one of the key characteristics, as we’ve talking, of all the delusions is that they’re projecting something onto some onto something else that it doesn’t possess. As Lama Zopa says, all these delusions are decorating on top of what does exist, all sorts of characteristics that don’t exist. It’s like if you’re color blind, you’re projecting redness onto this. It simply doesn’t have redness, it’s not red.
It appears red to you, you believe it’s red, but it ain’t red. It doesn’t possess redness. It’s empty of being red. But, you know, let’s say you’ve never seen it any other way. No one’s ever told you it’s black.
You’ve never known it isn’t red. It appears to you as red. You believe it’s red. You grasp it as red, and then Buddha comes along and says it lacks redness. You know, you don’t even know what he’s talking about.
You don’t even have a reference point for that. What is he talking about, you know? You don’t even know your mind’s making a mistake. So it’s it’s kinda we’ve gotta get our heads around all this. How?
No secret. By listening to it and thinking about it at the gross level, using your concepts, you know. This is conceptual process, not some mystical, you know, well far out mystical process. I mean, do not insult it, you know. So we have to understand what emptiness, just even the concept.
We have to understand what self existent is. We have to understand the implications of it. We have to understand how this ignorance, which is the the the mind that does it, the state of mind that does it how it functions, you know. Just in just the same way we’ve been looking a little bit at how attachment functions, at how aversion functions. We didn’t look at the others at all.
And they have this broad characteristic, as I said, of all these delusions, all these neurotic emotions, all these these disturbing emotions, they have this characteristic of exaggerating certain characteristics of the object. So as I said, aversion exaggerates John’s ugliness, exaggerates his badness. We can see this, you know. Attachment exaggerates the deliciousness of the chocolate cake, and then it also causes us to just believe that chocolate cake’s the cause of my happiness, which causes us to grasp after it. Aversion Aversion exaggerates his ugliness, which causes me to believe he’s a cause of my suffering, which causes me to want to push him away.
Kill him, sue him, whatever you want to do, you know, however much the anger is. These are all distortions, Buddha says, that we’re not in touch with reality. We’re distorting. We’re exaggerating. So ignorance exaggerates the very microphone ness of microphone.
This is why it’s so much more subtle and kind of a bit mind boggling initially because we as I said, we don’t even think. I mean, to say that microphone is empty of existing empty of microphone nature sounds a weird bit weird. We don’t think like this. So we have to start thinking like this, just getting our heads around it, you know. And, of course, you have to think about it again and again and again and again and meditate again and again and again and think about it again and again and hear it again and again and slowly slowly, you know, like anything, practice makes perfect.
Just like e was m c squared in relativity and everything else, you know. You can’t get it overnight. So let’s look at how things do exist and how things don’t exist. Let’s look at the way, you know so there are different ways of presenting Buddha’s teachings about how things exist and how things don’t exist. And Lama Tsongkhapa, the fourteenth century lineage lama of the tradition of this center Buddha house and of the lamas our lamas, Lama Tsongkhapa, the other lamas.
All the different Lamas have different ways that the the traditions even in Tibet have different ways of presenting, you know. This is this is Tsongkhapa’s way. He has this very kind of very very tasty way of describing reality, ultimately, how things do exist, how things don’t exist, you know? And so what we have to eventually realize, they say, what cuts, as I said before, what cuts the root of all the delusions, what cuts the root of saṃsāra, the the final cause of suffering is this one called ignorance, this delusion, this neurotic state of mind, this misconception that in the mind that’s so pervasive we don’t even notice it. When that’s cut, then suffering stops, you know?
It’s the source of suffering. Okay. And so, I forgot where I was going there. Never mind. So okay.
Let’s look at this. Tsongkhapa has this yeah, particular way of presenting. Okay. What we have to finally realize is the lack of this the lack of the projection of ignorance. Ignorance is projection, as I said.
Attachment’s projection is is deliciousness. Aversion’s projection is ugliness, you know. Ignorance’s projection is thingness, you could even say, which is obviously more abstract. So when we’ve when we’ve cut that, then we’ve realized the the what we’ve realized then is the is emptiness. We can say it shorthand.
We’ve realized emptiness. But so how so, you know, how do we how do we realize that? What’s the what’s the method? Well, there’s particular way Tsongkhapa uses, and it’s there are many okay. Okay.
Remember we said it before about meditation. We have the concentration and we have the insight mode, and the and the and the technique we use to get insight is analysis. Analysis. Same here, absolutely. So in your meditation, you’d have your concentration, then you go to your insight mode, and then you’d employ your analysis.
You’d employ your analysis using many arguments, basically, many wisdom arguments to ego to argue with ego’s views, wrong views, just about how microphone exists. So you what you’ve meditate in in all in order to meditate on is not so much emptiness itself. That sounds too cosmic. Well, meditate on emptiness. What’s emptiness?
Find emptiness. Where’s emptiness? How’s emptiness? Emptiness, you know? No.
You meditate on how things do exist. So Tsongkhapa’s wonderful way, wonderful tasty way of presenting it is in the context of what they call the two truths. There’s the ultimate and the relative, conventional. So Tsongkhapa says, don’t worry about emptiness. He’s sort of saying like that.
Let’s look at how things do exist. Let’s look at conventional reality, and that’s what you employ in your analysis, how things do exist conventionally, because Buddha is saying we don’t even get that right. And what that leads to, inexorably, is the conclusion, that feeling I talked about. You do the analysis and then the feeling comes. So you do your analysis of dependent arising, which is and dependent arising is the shorthand for this conventional way things exist, and it’s the opposite to the emptiness.
Not the opposite, sorry, it’s the flip side. You do your analysis on how things exist in dependence upon many factors, and I’ll talk about this, and the conclusion you come to, the insight you get is is emptiness. So you don’t meditate on emptiness. You meditate on dependent arising and it brings you to emptiness. As Lama Yeshe says, and he’s paraphrasing Tsongkhapa, he says, dependent arising is the king of logics, as he puts it, to prove emptiness.
So let me talk about this. I’ll explain. You can say that whatever exists has these two modes of existence. Two modes of existence, we can say. One is the conventional and one is the ultimate.
It’s just it’s just a different way of talking from different perspectives about the same thing. So if I’m talking from the point of view of microphone, we can say, you know, ultimately, it doesn’t have an inherent nature. Ultimately, it does not exist from its own side as an inherent microphone, ultimately. Conventionally, we can say it is a microphone. It does is microphone that exists in dependence upon many factors.
It exists in dependence upon its parts, and and most subtly, it exists in dependence upon the mind imputing microphone upon it. Okay. Let’s describe that, what that means. Because this is the this is the the substance of one’s analysis, this dependent arising discussion. Okay.
There are hundreds of different logical reasons that one could use to argue with this entrenched view of ignorance. And Jeffrey Hopkins’s book, for example, professor Jeffrey Hopkins’s book called Emptiness Yoga is full of them. It’s got as one it’s kind of all the classical arguments that one would use in order to deeply deconstruct ignorance’s very profoundly held misconceptions. The conclusion of which is the realization of emptiness. So okay, let’s look.
Let’s look at dependent arising. What does it mean? The reason we’re looking at dependent arising is is in order to realize emptiness. So let’s just use the word, let’s just use any old thing, use this use this mala as an example. So before you even begin to okay.
This is an important point too, before we start even. When we talk about emptiness, we tend to get again very mystical, that it’s like some absolute it’s sort of like there’s absolute reality, then there’s boring old relative reality, you know, and really and the real one’s absolute, and it’s beyond ordinary, beyond words, and it’s somewhere out there somewhere. But this is a very bizarre concept because emptiness actually is simply a characteristic of things. Emptiness is form. Form is emptiness.
Emptiness is nothing other than form. Form is nothing other than emptiness, as the Heart Sūtra says. You can’t possibly find emptiness unless you first establish a thing because emptiness is a characteristic of things. Emptiness is not out there. Emptiness is a characteristic of things.
So it’s the same. So let’s just say you’re discussing the qualities of red. We can establish, you know, such a thing as red exists, doesn’t it? And we can say it exists this, it has this, and it’s in pigment of this, and you have this much this, and a bit of blue, and a bit of this. That’s kind of the the general red, isn’t it?
You can discuss it generally. But then when you’re gonna actually start to realize red, means means to actually see red, you’ve gotta you’ve gotta get a particular object that is red, don’t you? Red doesn’t exist in an abstract sense. Red is a characteristic of things, isn’t it? Things that are colored red.
Do you see my point? So the same with impermanence. You can discuss it in general, which is very necessary. But to realize impermanence, you have to find a thing that is impermanent. Because impermanence doesn’t exist apart from things.
How can it? It’s bizarre, you know. Nor can red exist apart from things. So emptiness can’t exist apart from things. It’s emptiness is simply a characteristic of what exists, things.
Houses, tables, talks, you know, toilets, kaka, love, hate, generosity, Hitler, anything, whatever we can posit as existing, possesses particular characteristic of being of of we call it emptiness. All that is to say, it it it exists it is empty of existence from its own side. It. You have to say it, a thing, form, you know? Form is emptiness.
Emptiness is form. So conventional reality, the same. We’re dealing with a thing. So we have to establish a thing before we can discuss it. So here we’re establishing a thing called a mala.
This is the Sanskrit word that refers to what we might call a rosary in English, you know? And this particular malas Buddhist malas tend to have a hundred and eight beads. So it has so, you know, again, defining it, we have the two parts of the definition. It’s a string of amber beads, we’ll say. Well, that’s helpful, but what do you do with it, please?
So the second part of the definition tells you its function. It you count your mantras. Now you understand a mala. Once we’ve got the definition clear and we all are in agreement that mala refers to that, then we can begin to discuss how exists. That’s the point.
How it exists. And so this way of discussing in terms of the two truths, Buddha is saying it has two ways of existing. It exists conventionally as a mala and and it exists in dependence upon many factors and there are three levels of it, as I said, which we’ll discuss. Then ultimately, you can say it is it, it, it, Mala is empty of existing from its own side, in and of itself, inherently, independently. I mean, it’s not quite the same meaning, but it’s one of the many things it’s empty of.
So in order to understand that statement, is a bit of but it’s abstract to us, we then we we look at how it exists in reality. We look at how it exists in dependence upon court, know, dependence upon factors. We look at the conventional reality of it in order to understand how it is empty. So let’s look at dependent arising. So dependent dependent arising, this curious term, which doesn’t fit very comfortably with our English.
But apparently, the Germans envy the way English is very flexible because I know when I go to Germany, and they have like a whole phrase for one for one simple because you can’t sort of it doesn’t seem to be so flexible. Do you speak German? You? No. Dutch.
Dutch, I thought so. Yeah. But you guys speak German. Okay. Well, maybe Dutch is the same.
I know Dutch is more like English, isn’t it, in that way? No. No. A bit more like German. Is English divided in two words?
Yes. Dutch has a small Yeah. That’s right. Same in German. It’s not at all flexible.
We can make a noun out of dependent arising. It’s not as in German, it’s not at all like that, you know, so they envy. Very flexible language, apparently. I wouldn’t know. I don’t speak anything else.
My Australian mouth is very lazy. So, okay. Also, how how do we look at dependent arising? How do we look at how it does exist in order to discover how it doesn’t exist? Because at the flip side of the same coin, there’s no contradiction between these two.
They they’re different ways of saying the same thing. So, okay. Mala, we can say, mala, let’s look at the first level. There are three levels of dependent arising. The first, the grossest, the second, more subtle, and the third, most subtle.
So mala, the first level, and we could happily spend the rest of our life doing just this one. Mala, we could say, exists or comes into being or arises in dependence upon, in fact, countless, as they say, causes and conditions, countless factors, that you cannot find mala among any one of those causes and conditions, but that mala is nothing other than all of those causes and conditions. So what’s most interesting when I first began to hear these teachings, a long of of many years ago, and I was studying with Geshe Tegchok, Geshe Jampa Tegchok. Think he’s coming to New Zealand soon. He might be coming to Australia.
I don’t know. But he’s the ex-abbot of Sera Monastery, the monastery of Alamas in India, and he’s also the ex-abbot of our monastery in France, an old friend of Lama Yeshe. And he initially was the was the you know, teaching us what we call Geshe studies, when I studied Geshe studies in the Buddhist philosophy at our center at a center in England many years ago. So he we were discussing all this and he in in class, and he used the example, not Marla, but he used the example Robina, which is probably why I remember it. And he said, it really struck me, he said, it can be said that everything in the universe up to the first moment of Robina can be said to be a valid cause and a condition or cause of the existence of Rubina.
And I remember thinking, that’s pretty cosmic, you know, but he didn’t describe it. But this is what he means. You check it out. It’s perfectly true. We can see it if we think like this, you know.
So think of Mala. So we can take this from any direction to begin to find the causes and conditions that that mala is nothing other than. So first of all, you could say, this is the one I often start off with, it’s obvious, that that one of the main causes of the existence of this mala, not malas in general, this one in my hand now, is you could say the person’s mind who who in the person’s mind where this picture of the mala first appeared. You’re with me? Because we know it didn’t fall out of the sky like this.
So, you know, in this case, it’s Rabina’s mind. I was in Lebanon, Beirut, about six weeks ago. I don’t remember how far long ago. A couple of months ago. Yeah.
A couple of months ago to teach, and my friend, Mazen, invited me you know, we went to this little town, we went to a shop where they sold, you know, beads that that Muslims use, and they have ninety nine beads. And I said, well, you know, Buddhist ones have a hundred and eight. So he bought two malas for me, two two two things, you know, like this with amber beads on them, and he gave them to me. So then I unstrung them and then strung one together with a hundred and eight beads on it. So I my mind then, clearly, my mind is one of the main causes for the existence of this mala.
Without my visualizing it, right, how could I possibly how could this be this mala? No way. So there’s a crucial cause for this existence of this mala. Then my hands doing the job of, you know, cutting, stringing, putting together, sticking this bead here, you know, that’s without, you know, without my hands, how can I possibly do it? So my hands are a valid cause and a condition for existence of this mala.
Then you can look more you know, you can say, well, then there’s the shop that I walked into without that shop that sold this mala. How can I possibly how can I be this mala? The man who was behind the shop, the shelf, the person who made the shelf, but that shelf, I wouldn’t have seen the mala. The person there was a person who made the shelf. The shelf was wooden.
It came from trees. The people who cut down the trees, the trees themselves over all the centuries, and all the creatures who died, you know, all the mulch, and then all the rain that kept the tree alive so that a person could cut it down, so it could be shipped to the tree place, so it was made into a shelf, which was sold to the shop where it put this mala on so I could see it. I mean, all without the shelf, no mala. Without the tree, no shelf. Without the person who cut it down, no shelf.
The person the the tree factory, where, you know, the mill where they milled the wood and blah blah blah. And the person who cut the tree down, the axe handle, that would came from a tree too. And all the people who cut those trees down. But for that, no axe handle, but for the axe handle, no no no cutting down tree, but for no tree, no shelf, but for shelf, no mala, etcetera, and so on. You can see it.
Everything in the universe, we can see because everything that exists is existing in dependence upon something else. This is causes and conditions. This is what it means. And it’s not just some cosmic nice idea. We can see it’s factual.
It’s a scientific. It’s truth. But we don’t think of it like this because why? Because we have this ignorance that that when we see something, because of eons of grasping at it as having an inherent nature, we just it appears to us in this way. So we know this is intellectually true, but it has no impact on our mind.
You know? Wherever you go, you cannot find a single thing about this mala that’s nothing other than all the countless causes, and if you keep going back, you end up with the whole universe up to the first moment of this mala. Because obviously, once the mala is existing, things after it can’t be a cause for it. So it sounds rather abstract, we think it doesn’t have much impact on our life. It doesn’t kind of move us and give us a mind blowing realization, but actually, if we thought about it and meditated and meditated and thought deeply enough, we would get a direct insight into emptiness because this is the conclusion you would come to.
But the more you break it down and think about how it’s nothing other than causes conditions, then you conclude, therefore, it doesn’t exist from its own side. It doesn’t have an inherent nature, which is what ignorance thinks it has. But like I said, we don’t even understand what it means that ignorance in our mind thinks it has an inherent nature, and we certainly don’t understand the implications of that. And of course, Buddha’s saying the implications of this ignorance are that we cling primordially to one’s sense of self as a self existent phenomenon that exists in and of itself from its own side inherently, and that this is the cause of attachment, anger, pride, jealousy, suffering, pain, war, garbage, rebirth, and all the rest. The entire universe is is a construction coming from this ignorance.
And then when we cut the ignorance, the whole construction, the whole house of cards collapses, collapses, saṃsāra ceases. So that sounds interesting intellectual concept. We can’t certainly experience that now because we’re so seduced by the appearances of things as having an inherent nature. Like I said, we can’t even see we do it. That’s we have to think about it and meditate on it.
The second level of dependent arising is that and it seems simpler, and it can seem simpler, but again, it’s more subtle if we do it in meditation, is that mala exists in dependence upon its parts. Exists in dependence upon its parts. That mala is nothing other than the parts, but you can’t find mala among any one of those parts. So Candrakīrti in the seventh century, in his various discussions, and he was one of the supreme masters of of explaining emptiness on the basis of Nāgārjuna’s teachings, in turn, who was a main explainer of Buddha’s teachings. I mean, this lineage of lamas going, masters going down, these great Indian masters.
And so his is his texts are the source of of all the study of emptiness in the monasteries in Tibet, you know, all the traditions. And so one of his things was, you know, roughly speaking, that we, you know, use the example of the chariot. In order to really find the chariot nature, which ignorance clings to, which we don’t think we do, we need to break it down into its component parts to sort of deconstruct it and try to find this inherent maleness, chariotness. So think of that in relation to yourself. It’s a very interesting one, this.
Now this way we’re discussing here is a very gross way of putting it, but it’s very helpful. You know, the strong impulse and the strong sense we have is that this and even the way we talk, our dualistic language expresses even this this mistake. I have a nose, we say. I have anger. I have jealousy.
I have this. I am happy. You know, I have, possess. So it’s like, you know, it’s like we are the possessor of all these things, isn’t it? It’s like I possess a nose.
I possess a nose. But what Buddha is saying is in the same way with the mala, I is a label. Know, I is nothing other than all the parts. I is nothing other than all the parts, you know, and you can’t find I among the parts. I is nothing other than the parts, and you can’t find I among the parts.
Well, we can prove that pretty quickly. You just break down like Candrakīrti says, you get you break down yourself into your component parts. There’s mind, and mind has all these different parts, love and hate and jealousy and kindness and eye consciousness. You you break all the bits of the mind down into their component parts. Then the body, all the bones and the blood and then this and the excrement and the urine and all the rest, you have all the component parts.
So the the kind of the the feeling we have very strongly is as we sort of strip away all the packaging of of eye, we’re gonna sort of end up with this little naked kind of embarrassed little eye that owns all these things, isn’t it? It’s how it feels, isn’t it? It’s extremely vivid. There’s I mean, the way we have our words, I have a nose. So we think of it as like two things, possessions.
Just like the table has a has a stick on it. There are two things. We say my table has a stick. It’s true. You can separate table and stick.
No worries. I have a nose, can you separate your eye and your nose? I mean, you can separate your nose from the rest, but where’s your eye? You know? You so you deconstruct your whole self, and this is not the real meaning of emptiness, but it’s extremely obvious and rather tasty.
It helps us. It’s very helpful to think this way. So it’s it’s not just a simple way, as says in Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand. I mean, it’s very extensive discussion about emptiness in it and how one meditates upon it in the discussion of the the six perfections in the Lam Rim. As he says, it’s not this you don’t have this slavish just eliminating everything and ending up with nothing.
It’s not that this is a slavish kind of, that’s a mistake. You end up with this nihilistic, oh, there’s nothing there, we say. But it’s still interesting that we can hear this and sort of shake a little bit the view that there’s a little eye there, that we think of the eye as a possessor, as the I as an owner. The eye is kind of like the boss, you know? But as if it’s two things, isn’t it?
There’s the eye that has a nose. There’s the eye that has a hand. There’s the eye that has anger. Well, as we’re saying here, there’s no eye apart from the parts parts, and the I is nothing other than the parts. And you can’t but you can’t find I among the parts.
Just like mala. You know, my mala has a hundred and eight beads. My mala has white string. That’s easy. There’s only a few parts.
You put the string there, the beads there, and you have this impulse again to think you’re gonna end up with a mala that owns them. It’s obvious it doesn’t. Look, we know that. So even our dualistic language is what leads us up the garden path, you know. And definitely feel it when it comes to this eye, don’t we?
I mean, my god, look at it. This vivid sense of eye we have, and as Lama Yeshe calls it the self-pity I. It’s the poor little I in there, all sad and lonely that wants to be loved and doesn’t wanna be hated and is lazy and is and we have this very vivid picture of this eye, don’t we? It’s a lazy I and unloved I and a jealous I and an important I and a handsome I and a depressed I and a this eye and I am this. And we reinforce this little I every day, dressing it up, combing its hair, taking care of polishing it, reinforcing it, you know?
Like we said right at the beginning, instead of doing this, like identifying with being this little, you know, little brown thing with a hat on it, the acorn, how about identifying with your Buddha nature, which you’re not yet, but just by identifying with it, you’ll become it. Long as we keep saying, oh, I’m lazy, oh, this is just how I am, and I’m really hopeless, and I just can’t do it, I’m just too busy, and I’m just this, and I’m just that, and I’m too oh, I’m angry, we say it so easy, it falls out our mouth. It’s so easy, you know, and it’s so comfortable. But we’re staying entrenched, entrenched, you know, in our view of who we think we are. This sort of disservice to ourself, terrible disservice.
So we can see we have this view. And there’s and again, we can see it when we have this sort sense of I that gets hurt and is insulted and isn’t loved and is depressed and is hopeless and is no good and is needy and is grasping and is greedy and it’s not fair, and it’s always this poor little eye that is is having it done to it, you know.
We’re always having it something’s always being done to it. It’s not fair, is it? This little lie here that’s like a little victim. Totally mistaken, Buddha says. Completely dualistic, completely wrong.
It isn’t like that. We don’t exist like that. So even to hear these words can be encouraging, but we just have to get to realize it, that’s all. And the method, one of the methods we use to realize it is to use our analysis in terms of dependent arising, deconstructing. Again and again and again, and slowly, little insights come, come, but we have to do it.
We can’t just hear it once, you know. And then say, well, I’ve heard that. Oh, yeah. Believe in dependent arising. It’s not helpful to believe in it.
You gotta get it. You gotta taste it. Because it’s the lack of this realization of dependent arising and therefore of emptiness that is the source of all our pain. That’s what’s interesting to hear. Never stop hearing that.
We might not see that that’s the cause of all our pain right now. Of course we don’t. But it’s very tasty to think that. We have to deconstruct this iron clad, watertight views and the bones of our being, you know? And there’s no shortcut.
It’s by hearing it, thinking about it, meditating on it. Hearing it, thinking about it, meditating on it. There’s no shortcut. There’s no other way. So the subtlest level of dependent arising leads on inexorably from the second one, which is parts.
You know, when you think that I is nothing other than a parts and you can’t find I apart from the parts, you can’t find I among the parts, then it leads you to this next one that therefore, I, mala, whatever, is a label, a mere label. I is merely a label imputed by the mind on the parts and interestingly, on valid parts. There have to be valid parts. Know, we have to establish that mala is the name given to a string with a hundred and eight beads on it. Once we’ve established definition, then we can begin to discuss the emptiness of the mala.
There has to be a thing that we establish, then we can discuss its emptiness, then we can discuss its emptiness, then we can discuss its dependent arising. Otherwise, it’s just cosmic, you know, meaningless. So, ah, Mala, I, I, I, is this is the subtlest level. Merely a label imputed by the mind on the valid parts. There is no I from the side of the parts.
There’s no inherent I. That’s a that’s a given. Okay? It’s assumption it’s assumed. There’s no inherent there’s no I inherent in the parts.
There’s no I from the side of the parts. There’s no I in the parts. But as says it doesn’t mean there’s no I. That’s the catch. That’s the trick.
That’s the infuriating part because that’s the point of the moment. Buddha says we have these two extreme views just deeply ingrained in our mind, just spontaneously from eons of mistaken views. The two extreme views, as soon as we hear that I or that mala is empty of existing from its own side, emptiness, that there is no mala, immediately we go too far to this one extreme, we chuck the baby out with a bathwater and we end up with nihilism. Nothing. Oh, there is no mala.
Nothing. Therefore, conclusion, who cares? Doesn’t matter. No good, no bad, no me, no it, no you, nihilism. Completely wrong view.
Too far. We chuck the baby out with the bathwater. Wrong view. As soon as we hear emptiness, the way our mind works now, we can’t do anything but hear the wrong view. There is therefore nothing.
Then we hear that Buddha says that things do exist and depend us upon causes and conditions, dependent arisings. So instantly we hear this, we have the other wrong view of what they call eternalism. We to it as having an inherent nature. Instantly, that’s the other wrong view. So Tsongkhapa says, we are starting to go in the right direction when whenever we hear emptiness, instead of going out that way to the wrong view, to the wrong extreme, we go inwards if you like, to the middle way, towards dependent arising.
If every time we hear emptiness, it reminds us there’s a dependent arising. And if every time we hear it’s a dependent arising, it reminds us it’s empty. It’s like this is the middle way. You can say like this, and eventually, when you’ve achieved Buddhahood, you realize simultaneously dependent arising and emptiness. Right now, there’s this like they’re constant there’s kind of a clash between them because we have wrong views.
And so when we’re on the right track, whenever we think about emptiness, it leads us towards dependent arising. We think dependent arising. Whenever we think dependent arising, it leads us towards emptiness. We think emptiness. Then we are on the right track.
We’re going towards the middle way then. You can say it like that. So instead of thinking, as soon as we hear empty, empty, empty, we go, oh, empty, empty, out, out, out. No. Go in no.
No. Go dependent arising. dependent arising and think about how it exists in terms of dependent arising from it doesn’t exist from its, you know, existing dependence upon parts, upon conditions, upon this, upon the mind labeling, whichever one, you know? And every time you hear dependent arising, go, oh, it’s empty, therefore, it doesn’t exist from its own side, doesn’t exist from its own side, empty, doesn’t from its own side, blah blah blah. Practice doing this, then we’re going in the right direction, in the middle way.
Now there’s many ways of describing middle way and some are quite cliche, but the the final meaning of middle way is is is the is the realization simultaneously of these two, or they say of appearances and emptiness. And only a Buddha, only an omniscient mind can actually experience that directly, you know, eventually, the middle way. It’s the non contradictoryness of these two. For us now, they’re completely separate, immediately go in opposite directions. So just these are the words for it, some of the words.
You know? Maybe some questions about emptiness before we move on to the compassion wing. If not, that’s okay. Okay. So let’s go on to the compassion wing.
Yes. Where? Yes. How do you tell if what you don’t understand? That’s what wisdom is.
You know? How do you tell if when you’re playing grade five of piano that you know you’re doing the right thing? Because you’ve done grade one, grade two, grade three, and you slowly internalize the instructions from your teacher, and you know how to put your hands, you know where the way the sounds are, and you know what a note is worth, and you know what you you know to the extent that you know it, and if you don’t, then you’re not at grade five, are you? So it’s a step by step organic process of knowing, learning simply, and then growing gradually. So then you, you know, if you think you know what you don’t if you think you know more than you are, if you think you’re at grade six and you’re only at grade five, you’re in trouble, and if you think you’re at grade four but in fact you’re at grade five, you’re in trouble.
So what wisdom is in its nature is knowing where you are and what you’re doing, but it assumes you’ve done all the steps first, step by step, you know. Do you see? Makes sense? Yep. What do you mean by that?
I’m not sure because I’m still breathing. Yes. Yes. I wondered whether that’s what I sometimes think might be. Well, me say this.
Okay? Let me say this. When you’ve realized emptiness, you’ll be as big as the universe. Put it like that. Because we see it as a nihilistic thing now, we tend to hear it as negating and as empty and of nothing and as this is what I’m saying, we go in the wrong direction.
So that’s the point. When you’ve realized the lack of inherent existence of yourself and all phenomena, when you’ve truly this has become an experiential thing, you will be the most amazing, stunning being, full of love, full of compassion, full of wisdom, full of joy, full of awareness, and you’ll be your mind will be pervading the universe. So in that sense, you’ll be hugely full. That’s the way to say it. You can’t say correctly speaking technically that emptiness is fullness.
You can’t say that. But it’s a nice way to talk that when you realize emptiness, you’ll be as you’ll be huge. In other words, the more the less the more the more ego and delusions we have, to that extent, the further away from emptiness we are, the more miserable, the more lonely, the more pinhead sized big, the more unhappy, the more neurotic, the more miserable, the more suffering. You understand? As you get rid of delusions, as you get wisdom, you get bigger and more strong and more amazing and more confident and more loving and more wise and more blissful and more kind and more compassionate.
And when you finally cut the root of delusions, you’re as, as I said, as big as the universe. That’s the way to say it. That make sense? Anyone else? Yeah.
That’s right. I understand. So even from what I’ve said, can you even see theoretically? Even just the words I said just now, for example? Well, can understand The words, yeah.
But experientially, you can’t. Yeah. That’s the point. That’s the that that’s difficult. That’s why we have to start theoretically first.
You can’t expect to experience it. If you can experience if you can see when you hear about emptiness, it actually impacts on your life, then you’ve already got a pretty good realization of it. So it’s gotta start with just conceptual. That’s all. It can’t it can’t be more than that.
You can’t expect more than that. Do you see what I’m saying? Yes. So I just have to keep Keep going at it. That’s exactly right.
You gotta have some confidence that it’s that that you’re clinging to your sense of you’re clinging to an inherent self as the source of all your suffering. You gotta have some confidence in that even roughly conceptually. Okay. Let’s so let’s talk about it just in more more more sort of in a colloquial way, more tasty. Let’s just see.
You know?