Transcript for:
Vertiefung des Mittleren Wegs und Ansichten

hi good evening I'm Elijah I'd like to welcome you to week three of introduction to the middle way uh so first let's just review what we covered last week so first um as we think about what it takes to accomplish Enlightenment we realized that Enlightenment is a result of elimination or a result of absence we call drag so we think of our path as being something like cleaning a window right there's different kinds of dirt on our window which we want to get rid of and in particular there are two kinds of defilements or obscurations which are denzin which is the clinging to True existence and Tenzin which is clinging to marks or characteristics so we'll talk about that a little bit more in particular we can also divide it as clinging to the self of phenomena and clinging to the self of the person now actually they're all subcategories of uh the self phenomena because the person is just one of many phenomena but we divide it into two uh for the purposes of differentiating between the path that is common to all Buddha schools and then the Mahayana path and as we saw last week that's a little bit like the difference between the shravaka ahats and the bodhisattvas with the with the example of the baby Prince and the minister so denzin is when we cling to this story of self as being real is truly existing and when we believe that it leads to emotion it leads to action leads to the three poisons that cause samsara um both in the moment so for example we can become reactive we can get triggered emotionally you know the classic amygdala reaction but also over time so if we cling to the notion that a good life is based on wealth or fame or popularity if we believe these things truly exist then that will guide our path that will guide our life choices and these types of clinging to True existence they can be unaware so for example many of us aren't even aware that we have a story of a truly existing self but in other cases we are aware of them we hold our stories deliberately so this might be true of political beliefs campaigns or perhaps if you think of people who chose to fly an airplane into the Twin Towers in New York right clearly you've got to believe of you fairly strongly for it to guide your behavior in that way and when we overcome all the clinging to True existence all the dungeon of all the different kinds that's termed Nirvana right because at that point there's no longer any reactivity anymore of the three poisons in either the short term or the long term which means there's no more suffering now on the body side of a path we wish to go further because even after you've accomplished Nirvana you still have tenzen right you still have clinging to some kind of marks or characteristics some kind of dualism some kinds of stories or labels so even though you don't think they're truly existing you still have these differentiations these characteristics and when you've overcome the tens in then you have no moduleism no more phenomena and that is considered complete enlightenment and just to be clear when we say no more phenomena it doesn't mean a blankness it doesn't mean some kind of blowing out of a candle it means that these dualistic thoughts Concepts language the way we normally draw boundaries around what we consider a phenomenon those no longer exist and as we saw on the hot Sutra form is emptiness so we deconstruct all of the form but at the same time Emptiness is form right so in the vagina we talk about the three kayas we still have manifestation it's just that it's no longer dualistic and at that point as we saw last week it becomes very difficult for us to talk about it words fail us the only real where forwards at that point is our practice now the other thing we touched on last week and we'll talk a little bit more this week is two kinds of ignorance and it's not the same as these two kinds of clinging to the self of the person the sulfur phenomena so these two kinds of ignorance are innate ignorance and imputed ignorance so the innate ignorance is also sometimes known as Cohen Merchant ignorance sort of forgetting or losing one's mindfulness and awareness and we purify that through our practice whereas the imputed ignorance is what we purify by Logic and reasoning and that's all the stories the marks that sends in the denzin right so this is where we establish The View that none of these things exist truly but even though at that point we may have refuted the labeling we can't actually get rid of the ignorance until we practice so as we said before yes it's very important for us to establish the view to understand that these labels that we've been clinging to are not actually truly existing labels but even once we have that intellectual understanding we then need to practice Okay so this week um now that we know what we want to do is to deconstruct this imputed ignorance all these different stories and wrong views we're going to ask a little bit about well what what is a view we're going to explore how views are connected stories and remember as we said in previous weeks it does matter because our views our mindsets they drive our behaviors right so a view is extremely important on the path and in particular this week we're going to look at views in terms of how we explain arising and it turns out that all of our opponents have origin stories to explain why things exist in the world so that's what we're going to be deconstructing and in particular we're going to take nagarjuna's approach of breaking up these different forms of origin story or arising into four types you know whether things arise from themselves from other things from both or from neither we're also going to touch on um the debate a little between the prasangika and this schools um so the question there is you know can we just show how our opponents views fall apart by pointing out contradictions or do we actually need counter arguments and views of Our Own so we'll talk about that a little as well so in terms of the actual text we're going to cover from a verse 8 to verse 44 of chapter 6. so the first few verses from 8 to 13 we're going to be refuting the sum care that's one of the six Orthodox Hindu schools which held a belief in rising from the self then verses 14 to 21 we're going to be refuting truly existing other arising and here our opponents would be some other Buddhist schools and then actually most of the rest of the verses from 22 to 44 that's going to be responding to objections from our opponents in particular um Chandra Kitty as you know he does not uh hold to any views of his own he doesn't believe in any views in fact he says we should refute all views which then leads to an interesting dilemma because if indeed our behaviors are governed by views how are we supposed to live in the world if we don't have any views and here chandrakeet is uh approach is to accept the conventions of Ordinary People so yes he knows we still need to attend to the basics of Health money shelter you know relationships friendships but he wants to do this without getting caught in attachment to samsara and there are many actually the many famous stories of uh Masters great Masters who ended up just doing very ordinary jobs in the world um seemingly insignificant and unimportant Irish himself famously taught at one point that um a good job for people in the world is to become an electrician or a plumber and he was there being it's very practical you know what kinds of jobs can provide you with a steady income and actually as we head into the age where artificial intelligence is going to start replacing workers it may not be bad advice actually because it turns out that electricians and plumbers are going to be among the last jobs to be automated anyway we'll come back to all of that in week eight but this notion of accepting the conventions of Ordinary People we don't want to be weird right we don't want to stick out there's no point in you know if if we're trying to ask someone for a glass of water in using different language people won't understand what we're talking about now if we want a glass of water we should ask for a glass of water as Russia said you know the advice for living in the relative world is always don't burn other people's noses so Tibetan saying but it has this idea of you know don't be outrageous for the sake of it you know don't do things just for the sake of not fitting in and here our opponents will say well you know gender care to you say you accept ordinary people's views but they believe in other arising right so why don't you know it's true in the normal World We tend to say that a cause and an effect they're two separate things and the cause is other than the effect so how will he answer that right so a lot of what we'll talk about today is the two truths right distinguishing the ultimate and the relative truth distinguishing The View and the path and really two different kinds of views right the views of the ultimate truth yes that is all around the lack of uh any kind of extremes going beyond all extremes as we saw last week but in the relative truth our view will be as gender Katie says just holding to ordinary conventions and this has got nothing to do with being attached or clinging to the self of the person the sulfur phenomena just the things that are necessary to function in the world for example you know driving on the left rather than driving on the right asking for a cup of tea rather than a glass of water we need to make these practical distinctions to function and this is particularly important for those of us on the Mayana path because we aspire to be body scientists who are going to help sentient beings and we can't help someone or teach someone unless we understand their conventions think about a classic example would be you know the history of so much development Aid in Africa and other such countries um so often it didn't work because the donors just did not understand the conventions of the recipients of their aid right so it was inappropriate technology things didn't work there's a very similar kind of idea here right we need to work with conventional truth as a means of communication a means of understanding and to do that you know as the saying says when in Rome do as the Romans do we need to understand what do uh the ordinary people think and in particular they don't talk philosophically right they'll say please pass me a glass of water they won't say please pass me a set of H2O molecules right so and likewise when we tell stories in the Ordinary World we do so very naively and randomly it's not really a structured philosophical approach right we might sometimes believe in theories of arising from self right we might say hey this is a picture that I painted or we might sometimes have stories that believe in arising from others we might say oh my boss gave me some tough feedback on my work right so so much of actually what is going on in our everyday world is about stories right we'll see this as we talk today but if you think of so many of our problems in ordinary life they're around Independence versus codependence boundaries secure and insecure attachment accountability helpful and unhelpful mindsets and narratives and yes we can certainly work with a therapist or with a coach but we can also apply The View so that's what we're going to spend today talking about right a lot of today is going to be then refuting the same care the Buddha schools and then talking about the two truths so as in previous weeks just to connect this to the hero's journey once again in fact one was the setup the context the first week was scene one starting in the Ordinary World some kind of catalyst the possibility of something exciting the journey to enlightenment and usually in in act one one here's the theme of The Story and there's some kind of resonance but we don't really understand it yet we don't have enough experience or enough context and scene two which was last week we start a face resistance we start to find the reasons that yes it might seem like a good idea but we don't have the time we don't understand it we have all kinds of fears and excuses and reasons not to proceed so then we have to gather our resolve really make the case for the journey and overcome our fears and then that transitions into act two which is where we begin today and that's now the main Journey the adventure begins so now we'll start to meet the bad guys will engage in and overcome challenges will start to become seasoned adventurers rather than the naive beginners we were before so this week is really leaving behind our familiar world and going into this world of analysis this world of logic and philosophy where we start to question reality where mountains are no longer mountains we start to look at our world rather than just work within the world nice language for this that uh Ron haywards from the Harvard Kennedy School uses he talks about the difference between the balcony and the dance floor where if you're on the Dance Floor what you notice is just the people in your immediate surroundings you don't really have much context or overview of the whole but if you leave the dance floor and go up onto the balcony then you can observe the whole thing you can see what's going on so that's what we're going to do we're going to meet our first opponents and we're going to start to distinguish right and wrong views and actually in the hero's journey um at the beginning of the second I actually usually find What's called the B story in movie scripts there's usually some discussion about the theme or some nugget of truth that takes place between the main character and some kind of love interest and that gets resolved in act three so if you think well who might be the love interest in this story well for Chandra Kitty his real love is compassion for all sentient beings and in particular for ordinary people right so I might propose that our love interest here is going to be the cow herd and this will come up today and throughout the rest of the weeks and certainly the end in week eight will take all of our understanding of the view and bring it back into our practice in the world and one other way we can think about where we are on the journey is um the classic presentation of the five parts it's another Buddhist structure um these are the paths of accumulation the part of preparation the path of seeing path of meditation and the path of no more learning and the first path path of accumulation starts really that's act one right we we have a strong desire to overcome suffering and then we decide to leave behind our ordinary lives so on the teravada path that might be renunciation on the Mahayana path that's taking the bodhisattva vow and starting to Embark upon the path of entering boriciza and then that moves into the second part the path of preparation and here we do two things right we we start to practice in our meditation and we really then establish the view and then start to practice the view so this is what we're doing right now the path of seeing uh that is the first boomi when we actually realize emptiness for the first time the path of meditation then is the second to the seventh boomias when we're purifying and removing our tens in and then the last three boomies so the path of no more learning and also um as in previous weeks I'd like to uh cite the relevant verse from the ten Bulls and this one is perceiving the bull the third one of the ten bulls and usually it's intended to refer to our first real experience um of our minds the nature of our minds but we could also apply it perhaps in this case to our first real experience of applying the methods of refutation actually engaging in logic and reasoning and observing and experiencing how it works so here's the verse I hear the song of the Nightingale the sun is warm the wind is mild Willows of green along the shore here no bull can hide what artists can draw that massive head those Majestic horns in the comment when one hears the voice one can sense its source as soon as the sixth senses merge the gate has entered wherever one enters one sees the head of the bull this Unity is like salt and water like color in dye stuff slightest thing is not apart from self okay so now turning to uh the text the commentary um page 72 and the PDF um as we said we're going to be establishing the view of emptiness that's the subject to be explained and we're going to do this in two stages the first stage is uh the view of empty is to be realized by all vehicles of Buddhism and that's going to be verse 8 to verse 178 and the second is the view of mention is to be realized exclusively in the Mahayana which is the rest of chapter six from verse 179 to 226. so for the first one um the view to be realized by all vehicles now when we're practicing uh the way we do it is we first tackle the cleaning to the self of the person and then later clinging to the sofa phenomena as we saw first we deal with our denzin right the true attachment to self of the person which causes samsara and then on the boomies we purify our tens in but in this text in the mademic avatara what we're going to do is first we'll do the other way around right first we're going to uh refute clinging to the sulfur phenomena so that's up to verse 119 and that's going to take us this week and next week then we'll do the cleaning to the self of the person which is 120 to 178 and that's in week five and one important note the room she made is when we talk about emptiness to be realized by all vehicles we have to be careful because we are going to be refuting a lot of opponents from Buddhist schools and we don't want to start looking down upon other Buddhists right so the emphasis here is that all of the shravakas pratika Buddhas bodhisattvas now the taravada the Mahayana they're all practicing emptiness right they're all practicing to realize the anatsam or the non-self as taught by the Buddha was said they're all looking at the same emptiness although perhaps one might say some are closer and see more clearly and some are further away a little bit like seeing the other Shore that we discussed last week although in particular the Mahayana considers the the state of Nevada the shravaka ahat state as being some kind of Island enlightenment right and so if that is where you are if you're following the travel key on a path you will nevertheless need to continue on the bodhisattvaana path to take you to buddhahood actually for those who read the uh pre-reading from Walpole rahula even though he's writing from a more terrible perspective he points out that even the theravada accepts that the bodhisattva is the highest ideal and the attainment of the Buddha is greater than the attainment of the Buddha so from the purposes of the actual practitioners on the path we all have the same aspiration we're all aiming at the same goal so what then is the difference here well there's actually a lot of different philosophical schools in Ancient India and then of course in Tibet and many of which certainly the old Indian terravada schools no longer exist um but and they all emerged because of a need to explain what does this non-self is another actually mean in practice because in particular as we saw last week there are a number of paradoxes that seem not to make sense for example how can we talk about Karma how can we talk about you know doing something today and having some kind of consequence tomorrow if there is no self right how might we understand that so in Buddhism there were four main schools and we'll look at them today at the verbashica the sotrantica the chitamatra and the madamika and all of them have ground path and fruit and in particular the other schools they would say and the madamica is uh that's a nothingnessayer to which in contemporary philosophy we might say as nihilists we all need to defend ourselves against that accusation and explain why that's not the case and also when we talk about the view being common to all vehicles just to you know emphasize this is actually the first aspect of the Eightfold Path right um samadita or right understanding which we call Right View here and hear from uh while Paula rahula's book what the Buddha taught in chapter five which is about the path he says you know right understanding is the understanding of things as they are and it is the four noble truths that explain things as they really are so right understanding therefore is ultimately reduced to the understanding of the Four Noble Truths this understanding is the highest wisdom which sees the Ultimate Reality according to bosom there are two sorts of understanding what we generally call understanding is knowledge and accumulated memory an intellectual grasping of a subject according to certain given data this is called knowing accordingly Buddha it's not very deep real deep understanding is called penetration which is seeing a thing in its true nature without name or label this penetration is Possible only when the mind is free from all impurities it is fully developed through meditation okay so you can see even there classic theravada explanation this idea of going Beyond name going Beyond label going beyond all kinds of impurities and likewise in the mindfulness teachings right very popular in modern world and indeed when it's taught even today in the west mindfulness teachers always refer to these Sati patana the foundation of mindfulness um and in this Twitter it refers to four foundations of mindfulness right the first is white in the for a body feelings mind and mental objects so the first the mindfulness of body or Kaya that leads to exercises like you know the classic mindfulness of breathing mindfulness of walking which are taught all the time now in the West but also meditations on repulsiveness things like the nine symmetry meditations which are not taught so much in the West the second mindfulness of feelings and Sensations so here this refers to Pleasant unpleasant and neutral Sensations bear affect right it's not really what we would call emotions so there of you know he hurt my feelings that's part of the self-narrative right that's not this or part of Sensations now the third is mind or cheetah but most interesting is the fourth right which is mental objects or phenomena which can also include teachings or truth there's other other meanings of the word dhamma right so mindfulness of dharmas and if you look at this that includes things like the five hindrances the Aggregates the sense bases the facts of Enlightenment and again the Four Noble Truths so it's very interesting because in contemporary mindfulness actually that's largely developed out of the Burmese teravada tradition very simplified version of the Sharma Guyana path which really only focuses on the first three forms of mindfulness it doesn't actually really teach the fourth so it has no view as such so ironically even though it's called vipassana um the true vipassana would be the study of madiamika which is very much not present in contemporary mindfulness and Rafa has talked about this a lot right he talks about the kind of mindfulness that's turned into relaxation you know mindfulness and five-star resorts which is really not what it intended on the Buddhist practice of mindfulness at all okay so but on page 73 as we mentioned we're going to be um proceeding through uh refuting birth or arising and um now from the Dasha bhumika Sutra here there are 10 equalities or ten ways in which phenomena are equal I should just say just for reference is actually chapter 26 of the other tomsaka Sutra in the flower ornaments who draw the flower Garland Sutra which is one of the most influential Mahayana sutras of East Asian Buddhism and um academics are not entirely sure but the leading theory is that this is a a composed of a number of originally independent structures of diverse provenance which were then combined probably in Central Asia sometime in the late third or early 4th century was first translated into Chinese in the third century and the first complete Chinese version of the whole text was around 420. um and I know we've talked a lot about how the my democritara this text is a commentary on nagarjuna hisarika but it's also a commentary on the Dasha bhumika Sutra right the 10 bhumiya Sutra and a lot of the descriptions of the tambumis are taken almost quoted directly from this other Sutra as indeed are the 10 equalities on the bottom page 73 um if you look at the Thomas Cleary translation of the avatanica Sutra you'll see it's almost exactly the same on page 744. so out of these ten we're just going to focus on one which is the absence of birth and we know this because it was stated by nagarjuna verse 1 chapter 1 and is one of the majority of caricas not from itself not from another not from both nor without cause never in any way is there any existing thing that has arisen so why are we focusing so much on arising in birth well obviously conventionally because we see birth and origin stories as a validation if something's provenance it's validity the organic vegetables made with genuine Italian leather things like that But ultimately um a phenomenon is defined as something that has birth remaining in cessation now think about it something that doesn't have birth it's hard really to say that it's a phenomenon I don't know what we describe it exactly but um not a phenomenon so when we talk about the idea of a truly existing phenomenon right remember that's what we're trying to refute here Notions that there might be a truly existing self what we're really saying is that would imply something that has clear characteristics clear boundaries that we can point to just an example so let's imagine we were saying it is is a does a person count as a phenomenon and I might say well you know I know if someone's sitting in the chair across from me or not right they're either really there or they're really not there surely that would count then as true existence right either they're there or they're not or what's the doubt well it might seem obvious but actually if you ask about Origins then it starts to become a little less obvious if you think about you know debates on abortion how long after an egg has been fertilized does it count as a person and there's really no clear cut off right um except for conception itself but then at the point of conception all you really have is a fertilized egg nobody would say that's a fully functioning person yet right and likewise as a person ages particularly if they get degenerative diseases you know Alzheimer's or other kind of brain damage we would say that you know they're no longer the same person I likewise our self of today is not the same person when we were five years old right most of us would say well probably not I mean maybe it's not an entirely different person but once we start to reflect on what it is to be a person we immediately see well we can't really point to something that's sort of unchanging is actually pretty much everything is changing all the time right yes we can trace a Continuum from what we call a fertilizer egg to what we call a adult human but they're not the same things by the way when I say what we call a fertilizer or adult human notice that even those things are just conventions right the notion of adults is totally arbitrary you know when do we Grant people the age to drink vote get married is different in different countries I mean I live here in Vancouver um we often get American teenagers crossing the border especially in the summertime because in Vancouver you can drink when you're 19 but right across the board you can't drink till you're 21. so completely arbitrary right so how do we you know we can't say there is a truly existing definition of what it is to be adult but even though we might begin to understand this intellectually that doesn't mean we've internalized that knowledge as we say so many times just because we have a view doesn't mean it's our theory in use right we might know that our hands are going to age and our skin will become less Supple than radiant as we grow older but that's done nothing as Russia says to Dent the prophets of the huge industry that sells our skin cream in an attempt to preserve Our Youth and our Beauty and on that point I would say look I mean for most of us this idea of a true existing self is not an espouse Theory we never fully established it right it's just another assumption Okay so I want to spend a little more time actually just again preparing for what we're going to work on this week in terms of the verses the verses are not actually that difficult as long as we have the right foundation so I'm going to spend perhaps a little longer on the foundation because I think it's going to help us a lot when we get to the verses themselves so I want to talk a little bit more about View and stories now stories may not be the language that the text uses but I think it might help us understand things because in particular a lot of viewers based on a story or an explanation of causality right how did things come to be how do things work in the world and if you think about a lot of myths or Legends or religions they're based on Origin stories you know where does the teacher or The God or the Savior come from what's the origin of his teachings or commands you know why should we accept them and believe them and follow them even as we said in the Ordinary World the birth or origin story is a validation like organic vegetables um and yes as we've also seen we we may have these explanations of causality but they are arbitrary sometimes self sometimes from other and they're very much a partial description so yes I painted this picture I got promoted because I worked hard yeah self-rising stories my boss gave me tough feedback my bank pays me Interest and those are stories from other arising right so we explain the way the world works with these stories they're very arbitrary they're not systematic they're not really any particular Theory they're just ad hoc and yes we have them backwards looking to explain the past but we also rely on stories and Views um forward-looking right as we think about our purpose and things that we're going to do to guide our action so for example we might say I'm working hard I want to be rich because money makes you happy you might believe that and if you believe that story that will guide your action you might say I eat vegetables in order to be healthy you might even say I practice the Dharma in order to lead to enlightenment so notice all of these stories they always have some kind of because or some kind of in order to right and they're often an answer to a why question is in well why are you doing this why did you do this why are things the way they are the stories you know they're not necessarily a bad thing but it's just the reality of in the conventional world we explain using stories and one other thing I think it's really important to understand especially as we start to consider the ultimate truth and whatever an ultimate story and explanation might be all of our stories are partial or incomplete right so if I if I hold up this piece of paper and I say to you where does this piece of paper come from you might say Well it comes from an office supply store or you might say it well it comes from a tree now I mean both of these perhaps are true although these two stories they're very different and they would lead you in very different directions depending on which part of the story you focused on so if you followed the first you might decide you want to become a businessman who sells office supplies that might be your way of being a body cycle to help sentient beings but perhaps if you like the second story you might become an ecologist right maybe you want to understand and fight tree diseases but even these this is also incomplete right and in Buddhism we I mean one of the things we're going to end up concluding in this chapter six is that um the only way we can really explain causality is through interdependence or dependent arising there's a lovely story to illustrate this um from the Vietnamese zen master technatan also uh on the topic of where does a piece of paper come from let me read it to you he says if you are a poet you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper because without a cloud there will be no rain Without Rain the trees cannot grow and without trees we cannot make a paper the cloud is essential for the paper to exist if the cloud is not here the sheet of paper cannot be here either if we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply we can see the sunshine in that if the sunshine is not there the forest cannot grow in fact nothing can grow even we cannot grow without sunshine so we know the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper and if we continue to look we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper and we see the wheat we know that the logger cannot exist without his daily bread and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in the sheet of paper and the logus father and mother are in it too when we look in this way we see that without all of these things this sheet of paper cannot exist and so hopefully now the problem is becoming a little clearer right we can't tell even a simple story like where does this paper come from we can't tell it completely it's going to take us too long right we simply cannot cover off all the different causes conditions and aspects of the story so it's inevitable we have to simplify our stories that's what we do all the time right and we just have to hope that nothing important is going to be left out if you think for example about the environmental movement it turns out that we've now learned a lot of things were left out of our economic production processes right economists call these things externalities but it turns out if you pollute if you have toxic emissions these come with real consequences right so now we realize we can't leave them out after all right so our story of what it is to have sustainable production what it is to have a good economy has become more inclusive but also more complicated so one other thing I think that's also interesting is when you think about when you think about the stories of your own life what counts as a good explanation what should you leave in what should you leave out um and I think Notions of personal accountability are very important here there's a lovely example from Fred Kaufman who used to be a professor of Economics at the MIT Sloan School he says you know if you're holding an apple and you you drop it to the floor you might ask what caused this and yes of course we all know what causes an apple to fall all its gravity yeah Newton's famous story of the Apple falling on his head but actually if you think about it there's another cause here as well the other cause was we were holding the apple and now we let it go and so if you think about it well which one of these two do we have any choice over right we don't really have a choice when it comes to gravity but we do have a choice about whether or not we let the Apple go so in this way I think Buddhism also focuses on Karma personal accountability right really looking at the part of the story that we can do something about so Moral Stories right I mean our stories they are like maps of the world right they encode knowledge they allow us to navigate the world now many or most animals survive on instincts but we know actually many animals and we have an ever-growing number of examples they also build sophisticated models of the world we know chimpanzees can recognize themselves in the mirror we know that Scrub Jays they're going to sneak back and re-hide the food if another bird was watching them hide it the first time unless of course that Watcher was their mate we know that rats when they're doing experiments where they push leaders to get rewards if they push the wrong lever and they fail to get a reward they'll gaze regretfully at the lever they should have pushed and likewise for us right it's useful to learn that lions are dangerous it's useful to know which mushrooms are edible and which ones are poisonous and much of what we think of as experience and knowledge is about building this good map of the world right so we want good stories in the relative truth but then we also have you know problematic stories it's not like all our stories are good right for example I mean there was a time when many cultures were very concerned about eclipses especially solar eclipses because they thought that demons or animals consumed the Sun and they had all kinds of Ceremonies or songs or dances and sometimes even sacrifices sometimes even human sacrifices duplicate these demons from destroying the world now of course we have a better story about a map right we know from science how eclipses work which is good right we don't sacrifice as many people in the name of preventing them demons from eating the Sun but you know throughout human history we've had all kinds of dangerous and wrong views right things that we've believed that have been dangerous either to ourselves or to others some examples maybe you know burning witches in the Middle Ages I mean estimates of something like 50 to 200 000 women were tortured and burned killed right no no evidence except that people thought they were witches or perhaps human sacrifice in the Aztec or Mayan cultures in mesoamerica or you know throughout the modern world at that time you had tripanning right drilling a hole in the head supposedly to let out evil spirits and the fact that so many people died once you drilled a hole in the head well that just served to show that yes the evil spirit had really done its damage so I think we can see now with the benefit of a little scientific hindsight that these stories weren't very helpful but at a moment Day level most of us also have stories that are distorted or inaccurate or incomplete which lead us to see the world inaccurately or to behaviors that are ineffective unhelpful which lead to bad outcomes or to suffering and in particular in the madamica are stories that lead us in bad directions as stories about the self right that's what we're going to do so as we said ultimately we don't want any stories and relatively we're just going to follow the conventional stories of the everyday world and again if we're concerned about nihilism we're not eliminating reality right we're not we're not destroying reality all we're doing is we're eliminating our stories that refer to any truly existing self in the personal phenomena because those are the stories that make us suffer right Buddhism is never nihilistic I don't know if she said on this point he said you know often we think of this teaching or this text as a text on the ultimate truth which in many ways it is but actually it's mostly about stories and theories about arising right it's really about relative truth it's one other thought about um the difference between irrational and rational stories really touched on this we'll often teach on how we journey from irrationality to rationality to Beyond rational and there's some a lovely uh interview with the philosopher AC Grayling sort of touch on this um where he talks about about rationality and belief he says you know not only is there no good evidence for the existence of Supernatural agency gods and goddesses and demons and so on but there's a very great deal of evidence suggesting this universe is not the kind of place that has those sorts of things in it very often people will say you can't prove there aren't gods and goddesses and I say you can if you understand the nature of proof in the contingent case of course in the formal case of mathematics and logic proof is something completely coercive the conclusion is entailed by the premises but in the contingent case what we mean by proof is test we prove a bar of Steel by bending it until it snaps that's the test a bit this is where we get expressions like the proof of the pudding proof is the contingent empirical sense about the world around us or it's a matter of testing it and this argument's beautifully done by Carl Sagan famous astronomer he talks about the dragon in the garage so if somebody says I've got to drag it in my garage and you say well I'd love to see it ah says the other person it's invisible and you say well let's sprinkle some powder on the floor and see if we can see its footprints ah now lands on the floor well maybe then we can hear its wings fluttering ah it's got silent wings and so on and so on nothing whatsoever will count as a test one way or another for the clan that there is a dragon in the garage and that's simple straightforward but very deep observation applies to all clams to the effect there are Supernatural agencies or entities in this universe of ours and for that reason it's not rational by rational we say ratio it has this idea of proportion we're proportioning evidence to judgments right so it's not rational to think there are fairies at the bottom of the garden Gods on Olympus or Poseidon under the sea so part of part of what we will be doing is using rationality in our logic and our arguments but as we saw we're taking that time part of our challenge is a complete rational explanation is also impossible and as we go towards non-duality as subject and object to transcend it and begin to break down then even rationality will break down um so page 76 I'm actually just this there's an extended section here which I'm not going to go through in detail on the difference between the Press San Diego and this for tantrica mademica and really these are two schools um which were although they were both present in India they didn't really have those names until the Tibetans later gave them those names and really comes down to how they establish uh the view of ultimate truth and how they approach conventional truth and essentially the prasangaka and that's Chandra curtina they would argue we don't need logic uh we don't need positions of our own we don't need our own views all we need to do is show that all other views collapse when they're investigated but this for tantrica modelica they wish to establish a theory in the relative truth right because they don't just think it's enough to deconstruct the opponent and there's there's a very good book I'd recommend to you if you really want to understand more um it's called Moon Shadows by a collective of contemporary media Scholars call themselves The Cow herds and um chapter one just talks a little bit about trying to get his View and so this is Guy Newland and Tom tillerman's they say you know one way to look at the prasanga customer tantrica Tibet within indo-tibetan madamika is in terms of allegiance to or rejection of the unschooled world's opinions on conventional matters samprasangakas who style themselves as madiamakas who accept as conventionally true just what the world acknowledges to be true they seem to Advocate a kind of extremely pure conventionalism in which a Buddhist should just read off the surface and acquiesce in the world's opinions and epistemic practices as they are the swatantrikas like the 8th Century Indian thinker kamalashiela strongly argue against the deliberate adoption of the world stance their argument is essentially that when the truth loses normative force and collapses into simply what is widely accepted then criticism and growth of knowledge becomes impossible so that's a it's a very powerful argument since indeed there's a lot of debates you know theories of knowledge Buddhist epistemology which go into that in a lot of detail we're not going to do that here um but I encourage you to read that if you're interested in learning more so page 80 um so we've established that we have a view well at least we have these four statements that things don't arise from self other both or neither but a classic counter argument for our opponent it says look well if you if you Chandra Katie say you have no view what on Earth are you teaching for right why are you writing these extensive texts I mean that sounds an awful lot like you have some kind of view if you're writing all this stuff and indeed I mean what about the Buddha's teachings in the Four Noble Truths I mean you say you have no view but how can you accept that that sounds an awful lot like of you as well so here the percent against two answers first chapter will say look I mean I accept these things but only as conventional teachings right I'm not saying that ultimately true I'm accepting them just as a path just as a means of communication as something illusory something paradoxical something untrue but that will lead you to the truth and secondly I'm doing it because I have compassion right I want to lead all sentient beings to Enlightenment and I can't do that unless I communicate with them in some way armchair quoted uh his phone is Dalai Lama always teaches this verse of homage before he teaches even before he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize he says to the Lord Buddha who taught us the viewless teaching in order to destroy all views I prostrate and so as you've seen before yes we Have No view that is our view um and Chandra kid yes he accepts the Buddhist teaching but just like a rafter as we saw last week it's for crossing over not for holding on to it's not the ultimate truth it's not the ultimate goal I was thinking it's actually very similar to the role of medicine in teaching in treating disease right if you look at the dictionary definition it's interesting health also has this drill Dre right this result of absence and the definition is health is the state of being free from illness or injury synonyms well-being healthiness Fitness good condition so you know just like the Dharma path to become healthy we we get rid of our illness yeah so for example we might take antibiotics if we need to get rid of a certain kind of disease but once we've got rid of the disease you don't want to keep taking antibiotics right just like you don't want to take the boat with you once you've reached the other Shore because if you keep taking antibiotics right you know as we know over prescription of antibiotics has led to this crisis in modern medicine where there are now all these superbugs that are resistant to antibiotics so similar idea right so yes we have the path we have these views but they're purely conventional they're purely as a means to lead sentient beings to the other Shore but it's not like we're attached to these views right one other thing that's very important we touched on it last week already but it's this difference between view language and path language right so in terms of view language we say we have no views indeed there's nowhere to go but in path language we're not at our destination yet right so we need the Right View we talk about right View and wrong view we talk about right direction and wrong direction because although ultimately we want to get beyond all views we want to get to action that's not limited or driven by dualistic narratives we're not there yet right so in the meantime we need relative views but especially a view of the path now the thing with path language um unlike view language which we're studying here in a very precise um you know we talk about refutations we establish the lack of true existence path language can be incredibly varied right and there's some classic stories of like naropa and tilapa you know where the master can hit the student with a shoe and give him a moment of insight or the classic story of Patrick and Yoshi long talk right where saying look at the stars in the sky and just that invitation to look that moment shifted completely the world view so room should give an example of sunglasses right so yes this is it's a great example if we're wearing colored sunglasses if we put on a pair of orange sunglasses the world looks Orange we know that's not real and we also know to see the true colors we can take off our sunglasses right so in this case the truth again it's a result of elimination and in some cases it can be perhaps as instantaneous as removing sunglasses but more typically again as we saw last week we have a gradual path which then will after accumulation of practice lead to sudden results so I'll give an example right perhaps your child is unhappy perhaps he's gone to a new school he says everyone hates me I don't like my school and then well let's suppose you you say first well that's not true they don't really hate you and maybe just that is enough where your child will sort of calm down and say well I suppose that's true more likely though they may not be that satisfied with that and they so you're probably going to have to engage in more of a password you might say well didn't you say you like your friend Adam doesn't he gonna spend time with you and help you with your homework you say I guess so and then what about your friend Stephen I know you like to go and kick the football around together and so slowly but surely you teach a gradual path and you get rid of the wrong view right in this case the view that everyone hates me which is causing your child suffering you get closer to the truth but you know it may be that even after you've given all these different examples maybe nothing works right so what counts as a good path teaching as opposed to view teaching is really what can we hear what can we absorb at any given time which is why it is said that 84 000 different teachings and we saw last week already you know to whom should the middleware be taught and we saw there there were different kinds of audience and you know the ideal audience for the mediamaker is somebody you know whose eye is well up with tears whose hairs on their skin stand up on edge when they hear these teachings classically you give a lovely example he talked about three different kinds of students and he said you know there's one kind of student you'll give them a teaching they'll hear it once and immediately they'll act on it is that there's a second kind of student you'll give them the teaching but they won't do anything and you'll repeat the teaching over and over perhaps over many many years and then finally at some point they'll finally hear you and they'll actually take some action and he said then there's a third kind of student you can teach them again and again until you blue in the face and nothing's going to shift they're just never going to get it until they have some sort of life experience right some sort of crisis some sort of catalytical event that wakes them up and maybe at that point they can hear it so again the encouragement for us is how how do we engage in our practice so that we become that first kind of student um I was reading a lovely interview um of the American hip-hop artist and producer J Cole on NPR in 2014 it's a great interview just actually on sufferings of samsara wrong views Freedom Liberation I mean it's not it's not a Buddhist interview per se but it's very Buddhist in its uh Outlook but in particular there's a lovely section which sounds just like what I just uh you know explain in terms of room shares perspective on these three three views so the the interviewer Franny Kelly says to him so you were talking about you know evolving and sort of figuring it out do you think you can just tell people that and they'll just believe you and like change what they're doing or do you think that everyone has to figure it out on their own and J Cole says well you can leave breadcrumbs for kids or for whoever at whatever points in their life so I could explain it to someone right now well let's say there are three people one I can tell in my story and what I understood about life and this person might hear that and be like oh my God that hits me perfectly right now at this point in my life that's what I needed because I'm going through this and I wasn't sure that this gives me perfect clarity ah I was putting importance on the wrong things and that person gets it the second person might hear it and like it I totally understand but like it but it still doesn't change their life not right then but you give them a year two years five years ten years they'll come back and they'll hear it differently with new life experiences they'll come back and be like oh my God that's what he meant and then it'll change them later it'll help them change them and then you have the third kind of person who might never get it they might not ever get the life experience for that talk to ever get through to them you know what I'm saying I realized that listening back to park who I always loved but the more I live my life the more I understand more what he was saying every year I go back to park and I mean I'm on him more every year but every new year of my life I have a new level of understanding so you know here J Cole was talking about the rapper Tupac but this could just as easily be us describing our relationship to our understanding and our realization of the mediameka around the Buddhist teachings I just want one other example of view and path language so lovely another Zen story or called Nothing exists as a young student of Zen visited one master after another he called upon dokwon of shokoku Desiring to show his attainment he said the Mind Buddha and sentient beings after all do not exist the true nature of phenomena is emptiness there is no realization no delusion no sage no mediocrity there is no giving and nothing to be received who was smoking quietly said nothing then suddenly he whacked yamaka with his bamboo pipe this made the youth quite angry if nothing exists where did this anger come from that's why I love that story and again just an invitation make sure we actually practice and don't get too caught up in how well we think we know the view all right so um 82 what is to be established uh in the ultimate truth that all phenomena are free from extremes and in this case extremes include extremes of existence non-existence both in nether and in relative truth that all appearances are like illusion and for both we need to negate clinging to all appearances as truly existent I have a notice here about how View and path mutually reinforce so um again now page 83 um we're talking about some refuting wrong views on the part of others how are we going to establish this view this phenomena being free from extremes this appearance as being like illusion well the path is going to purify to lose reappearances so delusions like anger are refuted by love and compassion things like that but here we're going to refute these wrong these wrong stories or views by the Buddha's words and logic and actually we're not going to use the word defilements as Russia said because that's path language so here you'll notice the text uses very precise almost surgical language Right View language we say what we're going to do here is we're going to refute the labeling created by imputation and innate ignorance right so just again imputation that's Concepts right conceptual ignorance that's explicit or implicit views and beliefs whereas um being innate that's labeling we can also have a labeling that is from in or after innate ignorance implicit Notions of I um the the Sanskrit is innate is sahaja or co-emergent ignorance which is defined as the ignorance that's co-emergent with our innate nature and remains present even as the potential for confusion to arise when meeting with the right conditions whereas imputed that's invented or contrived or settled and I quite like there's a nice definition from this book of Address speech where he says there are two types of ignorance co-emergent and conceptual ignorance in the moment after seeing our Essence it almost immediately Slips Away we get distracted and we start to think of something co-emergent ignorance is simply to forget conceptual ignorance comes in the moment after forgetting forming thought after thought as one thought follows after another a long train of thoughts can develop forgetting and thinking this is the twofold ignorance co-emergent ignorance and conceptual ignorance if these two were purified we would be Buddhas but as long as the co-emergent and conceptual aspects of ignorance are not purified we are cons sentient beings Okay so how then are we going to do this refutation um prejudify it now um in the prasangaka we use the four methods of pointing out contradictions using inferential logic of our opponents our reductive ad absorum and circularity right so basically we don't use any of our own arguments our own statements we just show our opponents views Fall Apart and as we are now going to get into our first opponent we need to just talk a little about what do we mean by true existence so I think this is where a lot of the confusion stems as we saw earlier right A lot of the time we'll talk about things in the relative World we'll see things are there we'll say yes I have a you know I'm I'm here you're over there we'll talk about phenomena in the world as if they're real as if they're true but we're not doing it analytically right this isn't a philosophical position because for a phenomena to be truly existing you'd need to be able to sort of Define and demarcate its boundaries right like we saw earlier with the example of the embryo and the baby right conventionally we'd say an embryo and a baby are two different things right so if we had such a thing as a truly existing human or a truly existing baby we'd need to be able to draw some kind of boundary around it in other words it must be unchanging right we can't have these boundaries shifting all the time otherwise it's not a fixed identifiable ultimate thing and once we know it's unchanging or has to be unchanging it must also be independent right because we also know as soon as something is dependent on other causes and conditions it will be changeable it will be impermanent right so we'll often use the words independent and unchanging to talk about uh the absolute or the ultimate truth so you know I like to think about it almost like um the old atomic model of matter right a kind of billiard ball this idea that there are these solid billiard balls which are independent and unchanging and those are sort of the the elements that we're talking about we'll come back there's actually a couple of the British schools have a view very much like that just back to the dictionary um we sometimes use absolute truth sometimes ultimate truth um ultimate means being or happening at the end of a process final or synonyms eventual final concluding terminal I think actually absolute is closer to the meaning um absolute has viewed or existing independently and not in relation to other things not relative or comparative synonyms are Universal fixed independent non-relative non-variable absolutist and you know for our path we we obviously want to base our path on something that we can trust right I mean any path there needs to be a foundation something we take refuge in and if this source of Refuge is changeable it means we can't trust it right if today our paths telling us to take the left-hand path and tomorrow the right hand pass it's not reliable right it's not consistent we can't follow a path that's changeable all right so if you think of The Navigators of old they would use the pole star in the sky right Polaris because it's a fixed star so similarly you know what is it that we're going to use to guide our ethics to guide our practice what is the foundation and when it's variable right another example might be you know someone trying to lose weight you know a couple decades ago all the guidance was fat is bad so people gave up fat now we know it's not fat that's bad it's carbs that are bad right so now the focus is on low carb diets The View changed so the practice changed I think the other the other important thing is you know religions they will they will say um we need to pay homage or to pray to the ultimate cause usually some kind of God because the object of Refuge is the object of prayer because if God creates the universe and God is responsible for all things it's rational it makes sense to pray to God because he's the source he's the only one who can actually change your circumstances right so if you believe that God is the truly existing Source the all things arise from God then your rational path would be to pray to God right so it does actually matter that we have the right uh true existence um because that determines our path right um so turning to the verses so that's actually taken us all the preliminaries now are done verse 6 first two lines no page 89 this is negan's famous four statements that set out the view not created by itself how can it be created by another not created by both what exists Without a Cause um now I know here in the uh in the commentary I'll take all these four affirmations that's actually I would say he's misspoken here because they're not actually affirmations we'll come back to that in a bit um that if you're interested I strongly recommend another part of the background reading which was a there's a piece I offered um from the stamp and Cyclery philosophy on negation just making the point that and just because you're negating something does not mean you are affirming its opposite right um so what we're going to do now is negate the four different forms um of arising which from self other both the neither and traditionally um at the time of trying to get to these were related to four classical schools of Indian philosophy so arising from self was the same care it's a Hindu School strongly dualistic where on one side there's Consciousness on the other side there's minded matter arising from others with the lower Buddha schools but also the chitamatra arising from both as uh Jainism which has um arising from both self or soul and matter and interestingly both in the soul the jivan Mata the kudgala are both considered active ontological substances while the other components are inactive so it's an unusual some unusual Theory where there is a data Rising for both self and other and finally arising from neither is the chavacas who are non-hindu atheist materialists now the there's a brief introduction to the some care here um the background reading I had a lot more detail if you really want to get into it I'd encourage you to read that um so uh um in the western philosophical traditions we equate mind with Consciousness and we see that separate from Mata actually there's some QR viewpoints a little different um the the line there is between Consciousness and matter and matter for them includes mind so they see two uh irreducible innate independent realities they call purusha and prakriti so prakriti is Mata body and mind and uh purusha is the Consciousness and there can be multiple purushas in the world and uh prakriti is uh unintelligent unmanifest uncaused and yet ever active whereas the purusa is the conscious principle but it doesn't interact with the procrity right it's a very strong dualism so it is a passive enjoyer right it's called bhakta when prakriti is the enjoyed bogia um so it's interesting in terms of the arising the the Consciousness the parisha is not regarded as the source of anything in the inanimate world which is very I find this view quite interesting I mean I know it seems ancient Hinduism but if you think about contemporary uh philosophy of Consciousness we have this question of how does the material physical mind and brain give rise to consciousness right and there's a lot of people who argue well Mata cannot give rise to Consciousness which is something that some cat would agree with right so you know we might if we're if we're a contemporary philosophers who who argue that you know we need something separate because you can't explain consciousness materialistically what what then would we say for the opposite direction I mean can how can Consciousness influence the world the material world if the world can't influence consciousness it's very relevant to but assassinations of Karma and rebirth so we'll come back to that but I strongly invite you you maybe start to read ahead because it's already put up some references for week five how might we understand this um and so in the same care the causality the the model there is that um the causes are all already in uh the property so if the example is the Potter who makes the clay pot well you could argue the pot is already in the clay right the sun can I call this the SAT career that or the existent effect Theory says you know all you need to really know is that the cause already contains the result right actually it's interesting if you look again at the background reading their path therefore because we know the portion of criteria are independent of one another escape from the endless circle of samsara is only possible through realizing the fundamental difference between this nature the recurity and persons the poor show whereby an individual parisha loses interest in the nature of equity and is thereby liberated which is fascinating right if you think about why then did the ancient Hindu schools renounce samsara why then did they practice Transcendental Meditation it's still active today if you you know people who practice TM it's really abandoning the world and again if you hold to this some care philosophy that makes sense right because if you can't influence the world if your Consciousness is just a an observer then it makes no sense to stay engaged in the world of samsara so you know similarly in Christianity if God created the world this is all-powerful the only path that makes sense is to submit to him and his will to pray and so on and so forth Almighty clue safe we believe money is The Root of Happiness we'll make money if we believe money is the root of all evil will become renunciant monks now you might think this some care view seems a little outrageous but as Richard said it's very important because a lot of us we might think we're more sophisticated than this but actually our understanding of Buddha nature might well be a lot like this right a lot of us think you know especially if we study the utara Tantra we already have put a nature within us and all we're doing is removing the defilements right sounds an awful lot like saying the result is already present even now and a lot of the you know third turning teachings use language like that if we don't understand it we could very easily get confused right we could get a view very much like some care of you separately if there's any interested philosophical scientists out there we say there's no self-arising what about radioactive decay right the seemingly no external cause but from nothing randomly a radioactive nucleiad emits radiation you know alpha particles beta particles neutrinos how do we explain this uh we know um Einstein famously said you know God does not play with dice but you know what then how to explain that kind of self-arising so the verses themselves actually they're really they're almost absurdly simple um and perhaps easiest to understand if you just remind yourself look well if we say prakriti is truly existent which indeed some can't do well they can't be referring to the whole Loop Equity because we know that Equity changes right and we know that something through an existing can't change so they must be referring to individual phenomena within property right and as we said these must be like billiard balls right so when we talk about a pot coming from clay we can't talk about a half part because there's no because then it wouldn't be ultimately existing it would be emerging right a bit like it would be then a process like the embryo to the baby to the adult but if the pot didn't appear from nowhere it's already in the clay you might equally have another example like the seed and the sprout right there's no half Sprout the Sprout is already there in the seed and so then you read the verses uh why do I read them all but as it says there is no purpose in something already Arisen arising again right or in verse 9 if you truly believe something already created could recreate production such as germination could not occur right because the cause would just keep recreating the cause you just have seed after seed after seed right and so on I think all these examples are actually fairly straightforward um and really the conclusion then is well yes there may well be a rising in the samcare theory but we cannot hold to the idea that it's true or Rising right there's no truly existing self it doesn't make sense it falls apart which then means we say okay we reject the truly existing self-arising which means yes it's just another story it's not actually something we take refuge in it's funny actually I if you read the uh the background article on uh on the same calf on the internet inside computer philosophy the author there says um this some care analysis causation opposes the view taken by the nyaya philosophy and actually if you think about the sunk have you taken literally literally it's not tenable if the cause existed why was it not perceived prior to the point called as production so it's funny right even a contemporary commentator cannot make sense of the same care in the same carezone terms and you know the nyaya which was another school at the same time at the Hindu School basically said you know they said the opposite they said an effect does not pre-exist in its cause right the cause has to come before the effect in any case from which they say look the selfborn is not really a big problem for most of us we mostly don't believe in that it's really more some Vedic religions for us it's much more other arising right so this is our Buddhist schools all the way up to the Central chromademica's explanation of the relative truth and so um one of the definitions we'll see well let's just first hit the dictionary definition other is something that is different or distinct from one already mentioned or known about and we'll see that in the madamica one of the aspects of the definition is that it must be present at the same time now why would that be because if it's not present at the same time there can be no interaction right back to the billiard balls colliding right you have a billiard ball yesterday and a billiard ball today unless they're there at the same time the same day you cannot say that they Collide right there's no way you can make yesterday's Billet ball hit today's bullet ball right so this problem of causality is Central to all these conversations about all these theories of Buddhist schools um a particular the problem we already mentioned is how to explain causation over time right because if you believe in other arising you need some kind of connection between the chords which is in the past and the results which might be in the present so a lot of these other schools talk about this kind of connector but the verses themselves actually are not are not too difficult because once you accept that things are truly other right in other words they don't have anything in common because you know they're like two billiard balls that are separate from one another then verse 14 if something were created based on something other than itself you could have deep Darkness arising from a flame right and the point here is why would a plane a flame necessarily come from um another flame why couldn't Darkness come from a flame they are equally other right in the sense there's nothing connecting the two um our opponents as well because verse 15 he says yes but there's a Continuum now rice only gives rice seeds only give race shoots not barley but then here you know we say well yes but actually that's just uh proving nothing right it's a circular argument because we've just repeated our statement um page 106 just in parentheses I'm sure at this point we're just talking about the structural outline in the commentaries um for those of you following along on the text you'll notice at the back of the book there are a number of these uh structural outlines which which structure the text into a sort of tree structure now this was not part of the original text um but but added by the commentator right now in this case the uh the structural outline the trees at the back of this text were the ones from garampa um he was a 15th century sakya scholar and I'm sure says outline is quite similar so for those of you who have the padmakara translation that's using the perm structural outline um in when she continued teaching that's the second year in 98 he said he uh used rendawa's commentary another psycho scholar this time the 14th century and uh he was a teacher at sonkappa it's on campus presentation of the medium is actually very different and we really don't have time to go into that and for those who are interested in the Kinsey lineage um she also said and during cancer tricky lidra they mainly used the commentaries by the dushan Kemper Jenga doesn't really have too much Tibetan fabrication so he was a 19th 20th century a remake master actually one of the teachers of generations so just to say there's um a lot of different uh commentaries one can draw upon and even in this text from Shay's drawing from several different commentaries um okay continuing so verse 17 . um now we've talked about the necessity for things that are other to be coexisting but that gives rise to a different set of problems right because if they're both there how do you differentiate cause and effect right if they're both there you can't say that the cause caused the effect because their effect was already there so you couldn't say the cause is necessary so our opponent objects and says well maybe it's like a pair of scales where one Rises as the other Falls and actually this example comes from the rice seedling Sutra it's a Buddhist Sutra so it's a good Buddhist example but astronicity says look this is um it's a provisional teaching and in any case it was used to teach dependent arising not true arising and if you have a true cause then as long as something is arising it hasn't yet Arisen right so as long as the baby is still in embryo the baby hasn't yet Arisen but likewise when something is ceasing it still exists right so we might say that the tree is growing old and dying but until the tree is ceased we still have the tree yeah it's also very interesting if you look at contemporary philosophy here because um there's a big challenge with the What's called the arrow of time in science now we know the time is relative and we finally even know now that um Einstein's theory explains it very precisely right our naive intuitions about simultaneity don't actually hold um so for example we know our GPS is run by satellites and the time on the earth is different from the time on a satellite because it's moving quite quickly around the earth sufficiently quickly that the theory of relativity applies and actually if we didn't correct for these relativistic effects between the time on the satellite and the time on Earth you'd have a navigational error of two kilometers per day right so it's really very significant on the Earth um and I mean I find it quite interesting because um you know it's if you look at the Wikipedia entry on the Arrow of time so this was uh developed by Arthur Eddington the British astronomer in 1927 and it remains an unsolved General Physics question because physical processes in the microscopic level I believe to be entirely or mostly time symmetric right at the time direction would reverse the theories would be true still and yet we know at the macroscopic level uh it's not the case right there seems to be an obvious directional flow to time so what does I mean what does all of this mean right if time itself does not truly exist and by the way in the automatic nagarjuna himself said this right he he refuted that there is true to existing time he even refused to true the existing causality right so I think again continuing I think the other the other verse is quite similar so verse 20 if cause and effect don't coexist you can't say the cause gives rise to an effect makes sense and 21 we refute it in terms of the fourfold classification basically saying you know if you have if you say an effect comes from a cause do you say this effect exists or it doesn't exist because if you say it doesn't exist well then you can't say the cause actually caused anything but if the effects are already there then you don't need a Cause right so same problem now so that that's that's sort of the expression of the sort of absurdity of the view of true to existence other arising you can already start to see well yeah I guess as long as we are thinking in terms of true existence in terms of true phenomena that are like Billet balls it doesn't make sense right how can this work but now our opponent says well you know Ordinary People they accept other arising and huge undercuties say you're going to follow them so now we need to introduce the two truths right to to explain what's going on here we'll refute this in three steps he'll say that he accepts what makes people's older people's experience but only as relative truth right as a means of communication not its validity right so not his ultimate truth and therefore he'll show Ordinary People and don't contradict madamica and in fact he'll show those who do have problems with ordinary people are our opponents because they have theories about the relative which then start to interfere with and contradict what Ordinary People Say he said whenever there's agreement or disagreement between two people the two truths of functioning all right so anytime we have different ideas of what is real what is actually the case right when we're using different facts and different evidence we're deriving different conclusions all of this is the two truths in action um example again of sunglasses and I guess a good example so yes if you're wearing some green sunglasses and you're looking at a white tent or a white wall you might see it as green right it's a mistake so your perception your experience right that's relative truth right your experience which for you you would swear this is what you're genuinely experiencing Here and Now but that isn't actually corresponding to the truth right but as Russia says we are wearing sunglasses not we are the sunglasses right so like the drilled Ray we talked about before we can remove our obscurations our Distortion is not permanent this is this is a good um a good example because we're emphasizing the subjectivity of the two truths there's a lovely quote on page 119 that's one of my favorites from Jubilee param sure said as soon as we talk it is all contradiction as soon as we think it is all confusion this is very much the percentage of Euro there's no point trying to rely on thoughts or on language because it's all just going to fall apart right all our traditional tools of rationality just will not serve us right and as we're discussing also on page 119 he says look you know the thing with relative truth is once you start to analyze it it will collapse right so classic example you might say well you know my hand you know what is my hand made of what's its true Essence we say well made of fingers it's made of skin it's made of bone it's made of Bloods but once you start to analyze it once you've got skin and bones and blood you're not you don't have a hand anymore right it falls apart as a concept right and remember she said look if when you deconstruct when you when you analyze if at the end of your analysis you find something that's truly existent then you have a problem right then you have found something ultimate and then your whole system of relative truth will collapse and again just repeating right I mean Ordinary People we don't think that way right we don't talk about theories of other arising yeah I mean you ask the cow hurt and say well where do the cow's horns come from or where does milk come from and if you see what comes from the cow you know we don't explain things in terms of a theory now maybe a scientist would say you know things come from atoms or molecules but um even then I mean we know from philosophy of science that you know this isn't an ultimate View so let's talk a little about the the two truths um and we'll see actually that for for the other schools um part of the challenges they actually Define the two truths objectively right based on um phenomena out there and this is a mistake because once you've done that that means there are actual objects in the world which are true or untrue whereas for gender Kitty the two truths who differentiate based on the subject right so like the example of green sunglasses or no green sunglasses reality itself doesn't change it's the way we view it right that determines whether or not we see things correctly whether it's relative truth or not and um made a provocative statement on one two one he said um only in Buddhism is truth differentiated based on the subject and again I for those of you who want to contemplate a little like interesting question what about the observer effect in quantum physics right because they're that's the subject so the Observer actually has you know changes the truth that we observe in the world so that's an interesting example too and just as a translation I know we use the word relative truth but so if she doesn't like that word um the the Tibetan and Sanskrit they both they both have this connotation of obscured or deceptive truth right now again if the idea is we are actually it's not not just that it is not ultimate that it's relative but it's somehow been interfered with so let's look at our opponents um for if you I mean again it's gone through pretty quickly in the text here um if you really want a much Fuller explanation in the pre-reading again there's this really excellent overview by a son of a toucher in the uh Stanford encyclator philosophy so I'm not going to go through it in detail if you want the detail please do read that but essentially the four Buddha schools the the vibashika they believe the Ultimate Reality is irreducible spatial units right sort of small atoms and irreducible temporal units right Point moments or instance of Consciousness so there's someone like an enhancement material and an atom of mind at that school lead the South trantica another terrible School similar right they also have these these units but they say that uh ultimate truth uh is a phenomenon that is ultimately existent and that means ultimately causally efficient right so it's all in terms of function right uh if uh if something doesn't have a causal function then it isn't considered an ultimate truth and as Russia points out both the vibraska and Saturn because they are physically realism schools right you can see and you can touch the ultimate truth which intriguingly means just seeing the truth won't liberate you why because the truth is based on the object so very different from my domica because for us the path of seeing right the first boomi that already now is a form of Liberation but um Indies and satrantica schools you can see things and it won't necessarily liberate you now chitta Mantra we're going to spend a lot more time with them next week but just briefly they have three Natures where they do have an ultimate truth as part of it so one of their Naturals is the dependent reality or in Sanskrit para Tantra this is this substantially exists right this is conventionally real it's the base for second nature which is the projections labeling or Kentucky these are the appearances right so we look at something and based on our projections we see different things we project onto this underlying reality get very they're very contemporary sort of phenomenological Theory right so we'll see the church Mantra comes in quite handy uh and then we'll see us a lot later on in terms of explaining how the mind works and then the third nature is what they call wisdom this is non-duality this is ultimately real and they their basic argument is that all appearances are actually just creations of the mind right there are no conventionally real objects outside the mind it's actually have you seen the movie The Matrix very similar idea right it's almost like we're living inside a simulation actually you might think that's uh completely crazy but um if you follow Elon Musk um he now I'm been saying for a couple of years that he actually thinks it's more likely than not that we are living inside a computer simulation now there's a quote he gave uh he said the chances that we're living in base reality in other words you know the real reality around the simulation he said it's a billion to one so you know we may think these chitamatron views have long since been refuted but I think we have people like Elon Musk who well you know well and truly alive in the present day holding what seems to be very similar views so I would say and actually you know even amongst the Tibetans many of them are not really convinced that was ever truly defeated so as we said last week we might say as presences that we've uh we're Victorious but um maybe not so sure so verse 24 we we talk about two kinds of subjects subjects with clear faculties and subjects with impaired faculties and what they see would correspond to valid and invalid relative truths right so validity true valid relative truth is the findings of sensors that are working uh and invalid is the findings of impaired sensors and so we can all think of examples you know we all you know if we drink too much if we take drugs we experience things that are not actually there right the classical examples are jaundice where supposedly if you are jaunders you see things yellow another classic example is this disease called RAB rip which is a disease an eye disease where you see it's like floaters I guess where you see falling hair right and so all of these things the experience of you know when you have this eye disease when you have jaundice when you're under the influence of drugs and alcohol your experience your perception at that point is considered invalid relative truth in the sense that if you talk to someone else you know who does not have this disease for example you go someone and say can you see the falling hair they would not see it right it would not correspond to a valid relative perception a valid conventional reality and you know if you're trying to guarantee all these other schools their their conclusions their findings their philosophies are findings of an impaired mind right they're just as invalid because if you were to talk to a normal cow herd he does not talk about you know the a liar he does not talk about the dependent nature he doesn't have any theories like that right he wouldn't even talk about this you know Atomic moments of mind I mean this is all false invalid relative truth so um just again there's another love League pre-reading and the one I gave him from Jay Garfield where he gives example of the Mirage so we'll use this example quite a lot I just wanted to read that for you he says um among many similes from conventional truth that litter majelic attacks the most fruitful is that a mirage conventional truth is false chandigaretti tells us because it is deceptive he spells this out in terms of Mirage a mirage appears to be water but as in fact empty of water it is deceptive and in that sense a false appearance on the other hand a mirage is not nothing it is an actual Mirage it's just not actual water right so we must be careful to spell this out with cat to avoid extreme of nihilism the inexperienced Highway traveler mistakes The Mirage for water for him it's therefore deceptive the experienced traveler knows it's a real Mirage that's empty of water so in the same way conventional phenomena appear to ordinary beings to be intrinsically resistant even though they're just conventionally real they're empty of intrinsic existence right but to Sublime beings they just appear to be merely conventionally true and they're actually empty for us sentient beings they're deceptive and false appearances for them they're simply conventional existence it's the analogy imagine three Travelers on the hot desert highway Alice's experience builds a near fight and Charlie is wearing polarizing sunglasses so Bill points to Mirage and says hey let's be careful there's a puddle on the road Alice knows it's a mirage and says there's no danger Charlie because he's wearing polarizing sunglasses he sees nothing at all and wonders what they're talking about now if the Mirage were entirely false if there were no truth Charlie would be authoritative and indeed the Buddhas would know nothing of the real world but that is wrong just as bill is deceived and believing there is water on the road Charlie is incapable of seeing the Mirage and so he fails to know what Alice knows that there is an actual Mirage which appears to be water but is not there is a truth about the Mirage despite the fact that it is deceptive and Alice is authoritative with respect to it precisely because she sees it as it is not as it appears to the uninitiated so this is very much the approach that um Kitty is going to take um seeing the Mirage as water is invalid relative truth seeing the Mirage as a mirage is valid relative truth seeing new Mirage mistake right nihilism because you're denying relative truth it's another another lovely quote on the same topic from Daniel Danette talks about magic and he talks about a wonderful book by his friend Lee Siegel it's called net of magic wonders and deceptions in India about the history of Indian street magic and um in that book the author says I'm writing a book on Magic and I explain and people ask me real magic and by real magic people mean miracles pharmacological acts Supernatural powers no answer Conjuring tricks not real magic so real magic in other words refers to the magic that is not real while the magic that is real that can actually be done is not real magic so I mean I love that because again um beautiful example of the Paradox and we'll we'll come back to it uh in week five when we talk about uh self and again particularly uh as you know Daniel Dennis done a lot of wonderful work on refuting theories of self but from a very different yeah non-butus perspective on philosophy of Consciousness but he ends up in a very similar place to where trying to get the ends up so um in the remaining verses we talk a lot about um how we use a relative truth as a method right and just clarifying why we say this because it's a means of communication as we said before if if I want to teach you the diamond if I want to teach you about the Liberation I need to be able to relate to your world right if everyone in your in the world calls and Implement a fork and I call it a spoon nobody's going to understand what I'm saying right so I can't teach a path so this is why having the correct understanding of relative truth really matters for us as bodies out of us right so any theory that gives us an incorrect relative truth that's a problem right so page 130 you know just him re-clarifying this point about mirages when we say well can we use mirages and dreams as a path aren't they invalid relative truths and just to be clear as I'm sure saying we're not using the dream or the Mirage as the path we're using the idea that the dream is false right that the Mirage does not truly exist and as we just saw with jaycarfield's example that is true um verse 28 again another distinction again we're sort of going over this same content now in different in different language the example here is the magician performing a trick so for the audience who doesn't know they're descented beings they see the magic they think it's real it's denzin the magician sees the magic he still has to read he's going to do the trick correctly but he knows it's magic he isn't attached to it he doesn't have this problem of true existence so he's not hooked right for him it's just sends in um verse 29 the example of the disease of falling hair so for somebody with this disease they might be collecting it in the plate right they collect all this falling hair and they say to trying to get can you see all this hair in my plate he sees no hair and again as we said before this is not realism he's not denying the hair because in reality there is no hair right so very similar language right when we say there is no self we're not denying the self because there is no self in reality now just because the person with this eye disease experiences the falling hair just because we experience the self doesn't mean that it's really there right so really important because I think that's where a lot of us get confused we think Buddhism is being realistic and it's not right um so in this way then the mariamaka neither contradicts nor is contradicted by ordinary experience um whereas what does contradict ordinary experience well that's the denial of relative truth right so here the example is if someone steals your virus and a philosopher like an atomist like a Babushka might say well there's no vars the vars does not exist substantially only atoms well then of course as a sentient being a relative person you're a world you'd be pretty unhappy with this philosopher right because as far as your concerned someone stole your verse right so that's an example of denial of the relative truth um I think if you a lot of the other verses are pretty straightforward verse 33 I think quite helpful just saying that this once we've no longer holding to views of true existence we then don't fall into the extremes right because we don't have a true Sprout we don't have a true seed they're not other than one another and so we don't have this problem that the seed is destroyed which will be nianism nor do we have the problem of eternalism Right Where um the Sprout doesn't as cease to exist so 34 um another very important verse if indeed phenomena really did truly exist then emptiness meditation would become the destroyer of phenomena right as we know this is uh something about Buddhists we practice emptiness meditation so this is a real criticism uh of the chitta matrim because they are Buddhists they've practiced the personal parameter indeed a lot of the early geometry texts were commentaries on the personal perimeter and yet they hold to the true existence of dependent nature so if so verse 35 if anything is found um we have found an ultimate truth because the reality is if you analyze conventional truth it is destroyed but 4 37 right for our opponent who says well this doesn't make sense how can you even explain anything if you don't have some sort of theories of existence how can illusion explain things so here the example is reflection in the mirror because we all know Reflections exist right if you're a woman putting on makeup using the mirror you're using an illusion in the world right so 38 the concise conclusion because there is no inherent nature in the two truths there is neither eternalism nor nihilism right and yet 39 says you know the effects of action are not lost because just like the enhanced story of the origins of the piece of paper it's all part of our story of how things came to be right we're not thinking in terms of an atomic structure of true existence instead we have this web of causality so one thing affects another thing which affects another thing so causes continue to Ripple forwards another analogy in 40 like a dream even though the dream is over a person may wake from a dream and still think of the dream objects yeah so very similar you may have a past event that was not real that did not truly exist that can still manifest results in the present um we will have you know challenges if we talk about you know some of the schools about you know the Babushka they have this notion of a connect revision how do we explain Karma how do we expect explain rebirth but for China Kitty he does not have this problem because he has no theories of true existence established by reasoning and logic there's nothing to explain right um verse 41 it's very interesting um it says just because for someone with a disease eyes sees only floating hairs but not other forms similarly you know we only see the things that are a consequence of our particular delusion I must say when I first read this verse These verses the next one as well I I struggle with it because you know I thought I have a strong everyday rationality this idea that you cannot explain things seem very unsatisfying but I think that just says just how much we rely on you know some kind of explanation of the relative world because again in verse 42 we kind of think that you know if we don't have true existence surely everything will become random and incoherent but actually here the Buddha rejects that and actually discourages speculation about consequences because really all these theories if you're worried about good and bad you're just trying to improve your life in samsara rather than trying to get Beyond samsara rather than transcending good and bad and yes it's very good practice advice but not very satisfying worldly philosophy but I think that just shows how much we're attached and addicted to Ultimate answers to explain our world whereas as Russia said you know in reality madamica has no Philosophy for us it is a philosophy of non-philosophy and actually this this verse 42 Roche is one of his favorites he quotes it all the time often he actually paraphrased it slightly he says um those who are ignorant engage in bad deeds and go to hell those who are ignorant engage in good deeds and go to heaven those who are wise go beyond good and bad and detain liberation okay so again really encouraging us not to think of good and bad and not to engage in all this analysis of the relative truth because all it's going to do is just fall apart and so yes 43 well why did the Buddha teach all these things well because you know means of communication like we saw earlier for path teachings different beings need different parts and finally 44 some lovely quotes from the sutras just a couple I'll leave you with if the Buddhas do not act according to ordinary people's acceptance then ordinary people will never have a chance to understand who is the Buddha and what is the teaching that he taught and things have never Arisen things have never dwelled things have never ceased to exist yet for the sake of sentient beings he said things arise exist and cease to exist they are impermanent and so on that is also for the sake of ordinary people and in accord with their experience so this brings us to the end of week three um we've started our adventure we've defeated our first opponents I hope you feel good about it and next week we're going to meet our toughest opponent the chitamatra so again I encourage you to read ahead and really get a sense of what are they trying to say um and look forward to seeing you again next week