Good afternoon. Welcome back. So let's just start with a little sitting, maybe about five minutes of sitting, and then I'm going to be talking about the middle way teaching. Hello again.

[08:05]

So just in those few minutes sitting there, I had this knowing we were going to be talking about Nagarjuna and the middleweight teaching. I was remembering back to when I was pretty little, actually, and my mom would take me to the local high school where they had a great big swimming pool. And, you know, the first step was you get in the water where you could still stand up. And the water was only about to your, you know, your waist. But you could see the deep end, you know, where the big kids were. And, you know, summer after summer, they moved us closer and closer to that deep water. So that's where we are. And we're looking at the Middle Way teachings. We're really kind of at the deep end of the Buddha's philosophical teachings. And so not to worry, you know, we're going to... weighed our way in and we can always grab hold of the side.

[09:08]

And there's really nothing to worry about, actually, because it's empty. It's all empty of any inherent existence, which is what we're going to talk about. So I really am going to read chapter 24 today with you of the fundamental wisdom of the middle way. This is Nagarjuna's famous treatise on the emptiness teachings and the Heart Sutra. So we started some time ago with the Heart Sutra. Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form. That which is form is empty. We chant that. So I think a lot of us have gotten those ideas or those words in a chanted form into our bodies. I mean, most of us who hang around for any period of time at the Zen Center chant the Heart Sutra. We do it every day. At the moment, we're not. But normally when we have service, we chant the Heart Sutra. That's a pretty standard. text for all Zen temples throughout the world. So these words are familiar.

[10:11]

They're something that, you know, like memorized in that sense. They're in my cells, in my brain cells. And yet when you start to step back from the chanting of it and start to look at like, well, what is that all about? So we did go through the Heart Sutra. And that's kind of one way to analyze it is line by line and look at all the elements of the Heart Sutra. And what Nagarjuna is doing is basically stepping a little bit even further back and looking at the whole structure of this understanding of reality. And so chapter 24 is considered to be the heart of his understanding and his presentation. This is the chapter called The Four Noble Truths. And the Four Noble Truths are the... the two sets of causal relationships that the Buddha taught in his very first sermon. After his enlightenment, he went to his former companions, the five ascetics, and he gave them a lecture called the first turning of the wheel of the law.

[11:15]

And in that lecture, the two main themes that are presented, the first one is the middle way. The middle way, he says that in the first sentence of the first sermon, avoid the extremes. And practice the middle way between the extremes. And then the next big thesis of his first sermon is the four noble truths. These two sets of causal relationships. There is suffering. There is suffering. And suffering has a cause. It's caused. It's caused by our ignorance. And by our desire. So desire that's basically... foundation of desire that's ignorance is the cause of our suffering. And what are we ignoring? We're ignoring the non-dual nature of the universe. That things are not separate from us. There is not this possibility of pulling the universe into parts and separating them. And particularly one part that can't be separated is the one that we call our self.

[12:17]

So suffering is caused by not understanding that. And by trying to get things for the self or protect the self and all these moves that we make as entities, as private individuals, separate entities, are at the service of trying to protect something which fundamentally doesn't exist in the way we think it does. So this is why we suffer. And then the second two sets of causal relationships, the third and fourth noble truth, there is a cessation of suffering. This is the good news. This suffering can be brought to an end. And the cessation of suffering is caused by how you live your life, called the Eightfold Path. The Eightfold Path begins with right view. Right view is understanding the Four Noble Truths. It's going around circles, but to understand the Four Noble Truths is right truth, is right view. And then right intention is living by that, with that you understand, now you live by it. And then there's how you behave, how you speak, the kind of job you have.

[13:22]

Your meditation practice, your mindfulness practice, your daily practices in relationship to so-called objects, what you perceive as objects, you treat with great care until that moment when you no longer see them as something external to yourself, but actually as coexistent with yourself, as co-creations. So that's liberation. That's the freedom from suffering. And it's a way of life. It's not this one-off thing like, aha. You know, it's more like, okay, ha-ha, now go back to work, and aha again. And again, like all day long, you want to bring your awareness to the truth, which ends suffering. So that's kind of the basic thesis. So we're going to hear about the Four Noble Truths in just a second, because Nagarjuna is being charged by his opponent of violating the Buddhist teaching through this teaching of emptiness. The first six verses of chapter 24 are this challenge by what's called the opponent.

[14:28]

It's one of the philosophers who undoubtedly living in the same monastery with Nagarjuna and they were very fond of debating. They had lots of, just like the Tibetans still do that. They have these active debates in public and they kind of argue their points. The Zen school is very good at kind of the teacher and this disciple or two teachers. So koans are all about. There's this little discussion about koans. What's the right way of understanding this present, this thing that's present for us right now? And these are really fun to look at. It's like a wrestling match, a mind wrestling match. Who came out with the most satisfying response? And usually at the end of those wrestling matches, one of the teachers will say, well, let's have a cup of tea. Let's just have a cup of tea. That was fun. Now let's have a cup of tea. So the first six verses of chapter 24 present this challenge by an opponent to the doctrine of emptiness, and he's charging Nagarjuna with nihilism. He's saying that as if this empty refers to nothing.

[15:30]

So if we hear empty in our own minds as nothing, then we too are charging the middle way teachings with nihilism. If you're saying nothing, then that's nothing. That's nihilism. And that's an extreme view. So the two extreme views that the Buddha said to avoid, one side was nihilism and the other was eternalism. That there is something that's ever-present or that there's nothing there. So these are two extreme views. The middle way, which is why Nagarjuna claims that title for his work, avoids these extremes of something or nothing. That's how he's doing this very clever little mind trick of resolving these two extremes. these two, what seem to be oppositional, is or isn't. There is or there isn't. Pick and you fail. So after these first six verses of the opponent challenging Nagarjuna, then the next eight verses, Nagarjuna counters his opponent by saying, it's your misunderstanding of the middle way teaching that's the problem, not mine.

[16:37]

In fact, it's hurting you the way you understand it. And then beginning with verse 15, Nagarjuna lays out his case for the correct understanding of emptiness, which has three components. There's emptiness itself. That's a term. Term that we hear and need to understand, be able to define in our own minds. Other than as soon as you think nothing, just that, well, it's not that. It's not nothing. So it's got to be another definition. Okay. It's not nothing. So emptiness. And then the second important term that partners with emptiness is conventional designation. Conventional. There was a convention and we agreed on the meaning of words. So conventional designation is basically words, language. What I'm doing right now, I'm conventionally designating in something called the English language. Strange as it is, that's what I'm doing. And I learned to do that. That's kind of one of the limitations that I have as a person is I am going to be explaining things in this funny language that was decided and agreed upon long, long ago by some mysterious ancestors of mine who then taught their children and so on down the line.

[17:50]

And then here I pop in with this language that I've inherited, as probably most of you as well. So that's the second. There's emptiness, there's conventional designations, language, and then there's dependent core arising. Dependent core arising is how everything comes up together. Nothing is born independently. Everything is born independence. Independence on basically everything else. If you really start to look at it, there's nothing that you can't include in how you got here. You know, no stars are out of place. No atoms are out of place. It's all coming together or else it wouldn't happen. Something else would be coming together. So every single existent thing is dependent on all that which has brought it into being. Okay, so these are the three dependencies. Empty, dependent designation, and dependently co-arisen. So these are... the terms that Nagarjuna is using as part of his puzzle.

[18:52]

That's how he's putting the puzzle together to define what he means by the middle way between the extremes. Okay, so we're going to do this along with him. I just want to lay out some of the kind of familiarity, some of the vocabulary that you're going to see here in Nagarjuna's thesis. So he argues that these three, these that I just said, have... to be understood not only as deeply intertwined, but even more, if objects and processes were not empty of inherent existence, if they actually did exist inherently, there were things that existed independently, then this very nihilism that the opponent is charging him with would be the result. So he's turning the tables on his opponent, and it does a very good job. It's held up for... A couple thousand years now. So in his own teaching on the Middle Way, the Dalai Lama goes on to say that when Nagarjuna states that we humans are obscured by ignorance.

[19:58]

So the first step, the first cause of suffering is ignorance. We are obscured by ignorance. He is not talking about some kind of passive not knowing. Like, well, I didn't know. No, that's not ignorance. He said ignorance is about a mistaken known. It's about an active ignorance that is afflicting our minds. It's something that we're actually doing or believing. Some way we're caught, you know, quite inherently. We've been born into this kind of active ignorance. And the afflictions that result from ignorance are the greed, hatred, and delusion. They're born of separation, the belief in a separate self. Greed, hate, and delusion. Greed, I want it for myself. Hatred, I want to get it away from me. And delusion, I'm not quite sure yet what I want to do about it. But I'm working on it. So those are the big three. They're called the poisons, the three poisons.

[20:59]

So these afflictions, greed, hate, and delusion, although they're false, they're based on a false belief in a self. So their underpinning isn't there. They're in free fall, really. They come along with a degree of certainty, you know, that seems to come from inside the way we think. We're kind of made that way. We sort of inherited this tendency to actually think in terms of I. I do believe that I know and that I'm right and that you're wrong. I'm quite certain. I'm quite sure. And therein all the quarreling. There's a very early teaching of the Buddha where he said, you know... Don't hold views. Don't hold views. If you hold views, you'll quarrel. If you quarrel, you'll fight. If you fight, you're going to do harm. You'll hurt somebody. So don't hold views. I think I said to you last week, open, open-handed, open your hands. If you have a view, that's fine. Kind of like a little butterfly in your hand. Here's my view. You want to see it? But don't hold it. If you hold it, you're just going to not only hurt your view, but probably nobody will be interested in it for one thing.

[22:08]

And then they'll be holding their views too. So there you go. And then you just have another quarrel like we can see so every day in the news. It's amazing. People holding views are really hurting each other very badly. So in order to counter these afflictions, we need to apply a powerful antidote that also engenders certitude. We got to have something as strong as our belief in our own opinions that can counter that belief. That's got to be pretty powerful, right? And the Dalai Lama says that insight into emptiness directly opposes this grasping mind and brings freedom. Ignorance is transformed into wisdom. So emptiness is really important. It's really held up as a very important kind of cornerstone of liberation. To dispel the root cause of suffering... the delusional grasping at the true existence of things, we need to gain insight into emptiness. And he says, Dalai Lama, apart from insight into emptiness, there's not really another alternative.

[23:16]

So that's good. I mean, if we thought there was a whole medicine cabinet full of possibilities, all those vitamins and all that stuff that we like to take to be healthy, there's not. There's just this one thing that we need to understand. Emptiness, not just understand it, but have certitude about it, the truth of emptiness. And furthermore, when we gain insight into emptiness, we gain insight into the meaning of emptiness, which is none other than dependent core rising. Emptiness means dependent core rising. Okay, so that's their equivalent. There's an equal sign there. Emptiness equals dependent core rising. That's pretty simple. And then that said, and that said, which I just said, in so saying, right away, we have the third element, which is conventional designation. That said, in so saying, I'm talking.

[24:21]

That's how you got that thing that I told you about emptiness and dependable arising. Blah, blah, blah. I could go like that and you... We wouldn't have much information. So we use language. That's a dependency. We depend on language to understand emptiness, to understand the pentacle arising. So these are the fingers, the fingers pointing at the moon of conventional designations of words. And these are the words that we teach to our children and that we use with one another. And they're very important. But that's all they are. It's mere words, mere language, and extremely important. So according to the Dalai Lama, the identity of that object cannot be separated from the conceptual mind once it's labeled it. So it's very hard for us. Someone was saying, I think it was... Who was saying that last week?

[25:22]

Bill, I think, was saying that he spent time as a child looking at something like a flower and noticing that the word flower and this object were not... The same, there was no real connection there, you know, like flower, flower, flower did not do much to this thing, you know. And that's a difficult exercise because it's very hard for us to separate. Once we've got a label for something, it's very hard for us to separate out. Right away, the mind goes to moon or lamp or, you know, the name of somebody or that various kinds of identities we have. We've spent our whole life learning how to point fingers at more than just the moon at just about everything. When I used to do this class some years ago, I'd bring in this. My daughter, she was young, had these kind of things you could stick together and make kind of funny shapes. It was like a little construction set, and they bent, and you could make all kinds of things. And I'd bring it in there, and I would say, so what is this? What is this called? What is this? What's the name of this? I don't know.

[26:25]

It had no name yet. Yeah. So we're kind of like, we don't quite know what to do with things that don't have a name. You know, what is it? You know, guess the object. What is that? You know, so we try, we kind of get frustrated if we can't put a label on it. So language actually does away with a need for the object. You don't need the moon. I think I said to you last week, you don't need the bell. You don't need, you know, the glass of water. I don't need it. I can just simply hold it in my hand and talk on and on and on. Make up stories, write novels, and so on. And I mentioned to you last week about this book, Sapiens. I brought it because I'm very fond of it. It's wonderful. This is this book by A Brief History of Humankind. And he was on the top 10 bestsellers for quite a while. I think people found this very entertaining. Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli thinker and scholar. Anyway, it's really an interesting, he does a really interesting job of telling us about how language was invented.

[27:26]

And then the consequence of that. So language is often described as the horse that you're riding in the sutras, the horse that you're riding. And then they tell the story of the man who brings to market 12 horses. And then he accuses the buyer of having stolen one. He says, I only have 11 horses here. Where's my 12th horse? And the buyer finally says, it's the one you're riding. So language is the horse that we're riding, and it's so easy for us to forget that we're talking, that we're speaking, that we have replaced actual objects with concepts of objects. So this is a really key, very important key to understanding everything, actually. So here we go. Chapter 24 of the... So I'm going to kind of read through it and make a few comments, and then we can discuss some of this. I don't want to get through the whole thing.

[28:27]

It's dense. So verse 1, this is the opponent talking. And he's, you know, he's pointing at Nagarach and he's saying, you know, if all of this is empty, now the opponent is thinking is nothing. If all of this is nothing, so that's what he's accusing Nagarjuna. If all of this is empty, then neither arising nor ceasing, coming or going, then for you it follows that the four noble truths do not exist. So he's right off the bat accusing Nagarjuna of heresy. If it's empty, then there's no four noble truths. There can't be any cause and effect. Things can't happen. It can't create suffering and we can't end suffering. if it's empty, if there's nothing. And he goes on to say, verse number two, if the four noble truths do not exist, then knowledge, abandonment, meditation and manifestation will be completely impossible.

[29:29]

So he's just knocking down the whole tradition. The opponent's saying, if you've done away with the four noble truths, then you've done away with the accomplishment of enlightenment and so on. And in verse three, if these things do not exist, then the four fruits will not arise. And without the four fruits, there will be no attainers of the fruits, nor will there be the faithful. So now he's eliminated the Sangha. So he's first eliminated the Dharma, and now he's eliminating the Sangha. And if so, the spiritual community will not exist, nor will the eight kinds of persons. And if the four noble truths do not exist, there will be no true Dharma. So he's really hammering, hammering away here. Verse five, if there is no doctrine, no Dharma, and no sangha, how can there be a Buddha? If emptiness is conceived in this way, the three jewels are contradicted. So Buddha, Dharma, Sangha, gone. Getting kind of bleak. Verse 6.

[30:33]

Hence, you assert that there are no real fruits and no dharma. The dharma itself and the conventional truth will be contradicted. So, you know, Nagarjuna set this up. This is kind of his straw man. He's introduced his own work with the opponent. So he's got this nice target area, you know, that he's going to shoot at now. And so now this is Nagarjuna responding in verse 7. We say that this understanding of yours, of emptiness and the purpose of emptiness and of the significance of emptiness is incorrect. And as a consequence, you are harmed by it. So he's telling the opponent, you're hurting yourself by seeing it this way. And then in verse 8, Nagarjuna says, the Buddha's teaching of the Dharma is based on two truths. The truth of worldly convention and an ultimate truth. So this is the first place in this text where Nagarjuna explicitly states this teaching of the two truths.

[31:39]

And this is really key. It's key to understanding the Heart Sutra. It's key to understanding the Prajnaparamita. It's the key to understanding the middle way. The fundamental teaching of the middle way are these two truths. And then it says, so the two truths later on. So it's really important. At the beginning of this talk, of his explication, Nagarjuna is basically making a distinction between the two truths. So they're distinct. Later on, he shows how they're not actually two different things. They're just two ways of seeing the same objects, all objects. This is all about objects. The two truths are true of this object and of this object and of each object. It's not like there's some truth out there floating around. That's the second truth, the secondary truth. This is the truth about one phenomenon. This is kind of the tricky part.

[32:40]

But it's how you look at the phenomena that determines your understanding. If you only look at it conventionally, you're in delusion. And you're pretty much blocked away from awakening. If you see the ultimate truth and how the conventional truth and the ultimate truth pivot on one another, then that's how Buddhists see the world. They see both sides at the same time. Most of us have to flip back and forth. And we kind of get a glimpse of the... the reality behind the object, that it's not like the flower is not the flower. You begin to be able to peel off briefly, but then you get stuck back on again. So we can sort of get a glimpse of how that's so, but it's really hard for us to maintain that view for very long. So there's the truth of worldly convention. Okay, so now we're going to have these two terms. He's going to define them a little bit here. This is not the verses. This is Jay Garfield speaking. So this term translated here as the truth of worldly convention in Sanskrit is called the Samvritti Satya.

[33:44]

Samvritti Satya denotes a truth that is dependent upon conventional agreements, an everyday truth, a truth about things as they appear to ordinary investigation, just the way we walk around talking about things. as judged by inappropriate human standards. So it's kind of like any kind of usual normal person on the street would agree when you point it, you know, at chocolate cake, that that's a chocolate cake. They're not going to argue about that. So that's the conventional truth. The ultimate truth in Sanskrit is Parimarthasatya, Parimarthasatya. Denotes the way things are independent of conventions. Or put another way, the way things turn out to be when we subject them to analysis with the intention of discovering the nature that they have from their own side before we give them names.

[34:50]

Like what's there before I impute my... understanding or my labeling on them? What's actually there? So we're starting to investigate. We're starting to do some kind of mind surgery on the object. What's actually there? You know, if I take off the top and I take off the bottom and I take off the sides and I lay them all out on the table, is it a box? That's not a box anymore. So I have to put it all back together again to make a box. So you can begin to see by taking things apart that you have to actually conventionally assemble them in a certain way in order to get this agreement that, yeah, that's a box, and I take it all apart, and that's not a box. So we begin to explore what is it that makes something so that we agree that that's what it is. So this is kind of the science, the study of conventional and ultimate truth. Okay, back to the verses. Nagarjuna, those who do not understand the distinction drawn between these two truths,

[35:52]

do not understand the Buddha's profound truth. Without a foundation in the conventional truth, the significance of the ultimate truth cannot be taught. Without understanding the significance of the ultimate truth, liberation is not achieved. So this is a big verse. So he's saying if you don't have a kind of grounding in the conventional understanding of the teaching, if you haven't heard some of this stuff before, you just walk in the door and people are talking, you're going, I don't know what they're talking about. But once you get a grounding in the conventional truth, in this case, Buddhist teaching, then the significance of this ultimate truth can be taught to you. You know, you say, oh, I think I get it now. I think I get what you're saying. So you need this conventional language in order to access the value of the ultimate truth, the one that you can't access with language, the one that's just there all the time, just waiting for you patiently to stop talking.

[36:55]

It's just one that when we did last week, you just take a few breaths and clear out your mind for a moment. And there you are. You're right there in the things as they are. Without understanding the significance of the ultimate, without knowing there's something beyond language, there's something beyond conception. The inconceivable, as we call it, which is another word, right? So the universe, we have all these words for things like inconceivable. Well, I just said that. So we got to let go of the word inconceivable in order to have some kind of experience of what that might be. Something I can't conceive of. I got to stop talking. Stop... giving names to inconceivable or unfathomable, you know. Just keeps being fathomable every time I say something. So without understanding the significance of the ultimate, liberation is not achieved. Liberation is not achieved. So... Oh, okay, then this Garfield says...

[38:02]

liberation in Nagarjuna's view can only be achieved by insight into the ultimate nature of things. They're emptiness. They're emptiness. They don't have any, that box doesn't exist just because I called it a box, you know. As soon as you break it up and put it in the trash, my box is gone. So, you know, it can only be achieved by understanding their emptiness. And indeed, the ultimate nature of emptiness, which we will see later on, is also emptiness. Emptiness too. You know, there's this little story that I really like about from the Native American tradition, or that's what someone told me anyway. The little girl's out in the forest with her teacher, and there's other children there, and they're talking about the universe and how it was all created. And the old woman's teaching them about the plants and the stars and about the moon and how things move. And she said that the earth is being carried on the back of a turtle. through the heavens.

[39:02]

That's why everything's moving. And the little girl raises her hand and she says, old woman, what's the turtle riding on? And the old woman says, oh, well, the turtle is riding on a bigger turtle. And then she goes back to talking about stuff and the little girl, you know, her hands goes up again and says, old woman, what's that turtle riding on? And the old woman's getting a little bit cranky. She says, well, an even bigger turtle. And then she goes back to teaching. And finally, of course, the little hand goes up again. And then the woman says, listen, it's just turtles all the way down. So that's kind of like it's emptiness all the way down. You're not going to land. You're not going to land where there's a substrate or where there's a thing that you can count on. You know, it's kind of like free fall, but there's no ground to land on. So it's OK. You know, you're not going to hit anything. You're just falling. You're just falling through these, you know, attempts to try and grab a hold of, make substances out of things.

[40:04]

The things we do with our mind to try and grabbing is the cause of suffering. Wanting things, getting a hold of things. Attachment is why we suffer. And ideas are one of the most insidious ones because, you know, where's your idea? Where'd it go? As I'm getting older, I notice they go pretty quick. I have one and then, you know, it's gone right away. Okay, so back to the verses. Now, that was verse 10. Very important one. Verse 11. By a misperception of emptiness, a person of little intelligence is destroyed, like a snake incorrectly seized or like a spell incorrectly cast. So there's some concern here for the well-being of these who are spiritual seekers. He's talking to monastics. people who actually are making their careers or their vocations out of studying the mind, studying reality. So if you misunderstand emptiness, you know, that's like handling a snake badly, and you will be destroyed by misunderstanding of emptiness.

[41:09]

Okay, so now number 12. For that reason, that the Dharma is deep and difficult to understand and to learn, The Buddha's mind despaired of being able to reach it. So we know the story of the Buddha reluctant to teach. So he had his realization under the tree. And he realized that this was a pretty big deal, what he had understood. The bottom dropped out of his bucket, as they say. And he was there with this kind of, whoa. Everything that he'd been using to climb up, climbing the ladder, the 100-foot pole, all of that became, you know, dissolved. And then he was there at the top of the mountain. It was called nonimaginative wisdom. You're not imagining things. You've ceased languaging. And for a while, anyway, you're free of that. And whatever is there is simply dropping away, as it would at the top of the mountain.

[42:17]

You just... Like kind of falling down, falling down. As Dogen says, body, mind, drop. Body, mind, drop. Body, mind, drop. Drop body, mind. And he was just sitting there in the zendo when that happened to him. And the Buddha was just sitting under a tree. So this isn't literally mountain climbing. This is this kind of mountain climbing. Climbing up here inside this grand hallway, this imaginarium. So... Difficult. Difficult. It's difficult partly because how are you going to explain something that is inexplicable? And the experience that the Buddha had of knowing that the star wasn't external to himself, that was not outside and that there was no self to be outside of either. Either way, subject-object collapsed. The middle way, non-duality is the subject-object collapses into presence. Just mere presence. Awareness.

[43:19]

Bright light, one bright pearl. There's all kinds of metaphors for that. So how do you talk about that? What are you going to say about that? The first offering the Buddha gave, according to the Mahayana, is this Avatavsaka Sutra, which is this huge tome. I think I mentioned to you that we chant, we read on New Year's. People have done that. It gets very heady. It's quite a trance induction. You start reading the sutra and it's all about what the Buddha saw when he became enlightened. And it's, you know, diamond pear trees and rivers of gold and like flowers falling. And it's just this, you know, metaphor after metaphor of the most glorious, imaginable scenery and beings. And it's all just extraordinary, you know, beyond anything that Hollywood could probably produce. And this text, this Avatamsaka Sutra, the Flower Ornament Sutra, was so inconceivable. I mean, you can try reading it.

[44:20]

It's kind of a thrill. But, you know, as soon as you close the book, you're like, what? Where did that go? You know, the trance closes down. You close off this. You come out of the trance. So then the Buddha, you know, he tried. First of all, he tried to do it that way and then realized that nobody really knew what he was talking about. He was kind of like some of the hippies that ran off into the woods having taken too much psilocybin. It's just like, well, this guy is just totally weird. So he had to come back to his conventional communication. He was well-educated. He knew how to speak in normal language. So he came back into the world of human language. And that's when he taught the Four Noble Truths. Okay, okay. If you can't handle this vision, then how about there is suffering? There's a cause of your suffering. There's a cessation of your suffering. And there's a cause for the cessation of your suffering.

[45:21]

So then that's where he entered. That's where he began. This first turning of the wheel was talking to humans on the level where they could actually follow what he was saying. And then little by little, he worked their way up to Vulture Peak. where he taught the Prajnaparamita. So I mentioned to you the Heart Attack Sutra. So as a result of like bringing them up to this level of his awakened vision, this is very challenging. You know, people fall off from there. It's like, it's scary. It's really scary to be in a place where free to fall. And, you know, until you gain confidence in the fact that you want nothing to hit, you won't get hurt. It's just this kind of liberation of your... Your mind is always crunching on reality as if what you're thinking is true. So, for this reason that the Dharma is deep and difficult to understand and to learn, the Buddha's mind despaired of being able to teach it. That's verse 12. And 13, you talking to the opponent, you have presented fallacious refutations that are not relevant to emptiness.

[46:30]

Your confusion about emptiness does not belong to me. as Nagarjuna is speaking to the opponent, your confusion does not belong to me. So, Garfield says that it's pretty much understood that, you know, the entire Majamaka system, middle-way system, depends directly on how one understands this concept of emptiness. If it's understood correctly, then everything else falls into place. If it's misunderstood, then then the system doesn't make any sense at all. So this is really the linchpin. Verse 14. For those for whom emptiness is clear, everything becomes clear. For them to whom emptiness is not clear, nothing becomes clear. Verse 15. When you foist on us, he's still talking to the opponent. When you foist on us, all of your errors... You are like a man who has mounted his horse and has forgotten that very horse.

[47:33]

So this is the language thing. You've forgotten the language horse. You've forgotten your own error. You're writing your own errors and accusing me of them. And then verse 16, he says, If you perceive the existence of all things in terms of their essence, of having substantiality, of what's called own being, if you perceive the existence of all things in terms of their essence, You know, this person. That person. That thing. That thing belongs to me. Those are essential beliefs I have. That's mine. This is me and that's mine. That's kind of the core. Me and mine. Then this perception of all things will be without the perception of causes and conditions. How could it get there? If it's already set, how could it come into being? What could make something happen that already exists? You know, where's, show me, how did you get here? How did it get here? You know, everything is, is dependently core risen.

[48:34]

It's not just born, you know, as an independent existence. So this is where it's getting a little bit like linking into dependent core rising as what emptiness means. So he's trying to help the opponent understand. He's not talking about nothing. He's talking about everything and how it gets here. And that's what makes it empty of being independent. Everything is dependent. everything else and we don't think like that you know it would be great if we thought like that we that would solve all the problems we have we just knew we were dependent on each other you know and that that's how we're gonna take care of this planet is by taking care of it together because we depend on it we depend on the air and the water and the sky being blue and not gray This is what we depend on. And maybe it's more obvious these days. I don't know. People still seem to want to say blame something else. So verse 17. Effects and causes, agent and action and conditions and arising and ceasing and effects will be rendered impossible.

[49:40]

So he's basically telling the opponent that the entire Buddhist teaching doesn't work if things are essentially existent. You basically are breaking the law. You're basically defying the Buddha's Dharma. And then he says, this is verse 18. This is the big one. So verse 18, you know, I don't know exactly why, except I've been muddling around with this stuff for... quite a number of years, trying to get a handle on it. I'd heard a lot about emptiness. I chatted the Heart Sutra. I'd read about all that. And I kind of got the emptiness and the dependent core rising. But something was missing for me that I couldn't quite grok. Well, okay, so where's the glue? How do these things, what are these things actually connected by, you know? So verse 18, which is, as I've said, is probably the most commented upon verse in all of Buddhist philosophy and considered the the kind of the philosophical core of Nagarjuna's teaching.

[50:44]

Here it goes. Whatever is dependently co-arisen, so whatever is dependently co-arisen, you pick out an object anywhere around you, and that's it, one of those things, whatever is dependently co-arisen, I got my bell, that is explained to be emptiness. That is explained. To be emptiness. That. Being a dependent designation. Is itself the middle way. So these four points. He's now made kind of a. I usually draw a baseball diamond. You know. So you've got the middle way. That's non-duality. Non-duality. And one side of. First base is emptiness. And. Third base is dependent core rising. And home plate is conventional designation. It's just what I said.

[51:48]

It's no more than that. That's all there is to it. Mere conventional designation. Beyond that, you're free falling. And you're free. So, you know, if we're going to be caught by language, this is the kind of language you want to be caught by. The language that liberates you. From the trap of language. So this is why this is such an important... I mean, he's really... The thing that got put in there, which for me was so amazing, was this language conventional designation. The horse that I forgot I was riding. It's like... oh, my God, I never really noticed about language, the role language plays in my confusion and my presumptions and my stories about everything, everybody, myself, the world, right and wrong. There's not one single thing that I could call suffering in my life that wasn't language. My understanding is about language. So it's kind of like if you take that out and start to look at it,

[52:53]

Like, what are you thinking? Is it true? Rarely. Is it interesting? Sometimes. Is it important? Not so much. So the argumentation falls out. The need to argue. The need to fight. The need to create a self-image. To see yourself in a certain way. It's all about image. And image is all about stories. Telling stories. One of the names for causality... is storytelling. So in a way, we tell stories that you have this, and then something happens, and then that, and then you have that. So it's called this, that causality. First, this happens, and then he left home, and he ran away, and he found a nice girl, and they lived happily ever after. That happened. So this, that causality is the basis of storytelling. So when the Buddha was enlightened, one way of understanding his enlightenment is this and that came together. They were no longer separated.

[53:55]

So he collapsed these two places where we basically project the idea of something over time, something in space, something where people are involved. We create all of these notions through our storytelling. It's just a story. And if you take down, if you get the basic elements of storytelling and put them together, it's very quiet. Silence and stillness. And then we can tell stories. But to know you're telling stories is part of the key to what makes this so important. It's just a story. My teacher for years was drilling us, and we'd go in there to see him, and we'd go, well, she said that to me, and I was really hurt, and then I did that, and we'd go on and on with all of our stories. And then he would say, so it's just a story. And I'd go, no, it's not just a story. Well, yeah, it is. It's just a story. And all these emotions. You know, they're called emotionalized conceptualizations. As soon as you add feelings onto your stories, you're really, your horse is running now.

[55:00]

It's not just the horse of language. It's the galloping horse of language. Passion, big horse, strong horse, going somewhere. Don't know quite where, but it's going somewhere. Whatever is dependently co-arisen, that is explained to be emptiness. That being a dependent designation is itself the middle way. So there's a lot of freedom going on here. He's pulling, even his own position, he's pulling out. It's just a story. I'm just telling you a story about emptiness. And then he says, something that is not dependently arisen, such a thing does not exist. Therefore, a non-empty thing does not exist. To exist is to exist conventionally. Both conventional phenomena and their ultimate natures exist exactly in the same way. So now he's putting the two truths together. The ultimate nature and the conventional nature exist in the same way as conventions.

[56:03]

So emptiness and the phenomenal world. So emptiness and the phenomenal world phenomena. Phenomenal world. are not two distinct things. They are rather two characterizations of the same thing. Empty phenomena. To say of a thing that it is dependently arisen is to say that its identity as a single entity is nothing more than its being the referent of a word. Nothing more than being the referent of a word. To say of a thing that its identity is merely a verbal fact about it is to say that it is empty. So there's a lot of weight in this teaching on the horse of language. Get off the horse. What happens if you get off the horse? This mind is no longer going along like that, you know?

[57:16]

You get off the horse, there's a possibility of quiet. And it's not a permanent, that's not permanent either. That's just another thing that you can do. It's just another way to take kind of a pause, a refresher, you know, so that you just aren't always going like that. That there's just not an interminable, lifelong, la [...] la. And that's all you know, and that's all you believe, and that's all you've ever been told. You know, this is radical to stop the horse. Get off the horse. Be quiet. Without feeling insulted. Could you be quiet? Just be quiet. It's really hard when the new students come, you know, say, now we're going to practice in silence. And they're like whispering away, you know. So, you know, sometimes they'll come in there and look kind of stern. Excuse me. But, you know, they don't get it that this is actually a real gift to them. To be able to touch things and work with things and cut carrots without blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[58:21]

My brother's getting married next weekend. You know, so on and on and on. So, oh, no, it's almost six o'clock. I knew I wouldn't. I said this hunt. So I'm going to end there with with verse 18, which is the big one. And there's most of the rest of it is really kind of like that's kind of the uphill. That's the peak of this. this verse, this chapter. And after that, he's kind of just reinforcing what you've already heard. But I will, I'll finish it off next week. And then we'll move on to something else. If you like, if you come, we'll do that. So I wonder now that we have one minute left, For those of you who need to go at six and others who are welcome to stay for a few minutes, if you'd like, if you have any questions or comments you'd like to make about the deep water.

[59:23]

shallow water? Yeah. Hey, Gal. Please. Yeah. Well, I was just wondering, it seems that it's not just words, but it's thought, speech, and action. Because, you know, like, so thoughts... You know, I've heard that neurons that fire together wire together. So, I mean, we're kind of set up for things that dependently or just coincidentally colorize. They coalesce into objects and action. I don't know. Do you know the book Behaved by Robert Sapolsky? No, it's an amazing thing. I mean, it basically dissects a behavior and it goes through layer after layer of, you know, evolutionary. know physiology to society to all these things that you know you have an action but it's really like just all these things that but yeah i mean i've heard in other contexts thought speech and action so i i guess the question is for you is it just whereas well i would say you know start the starting place is is the thought you know it no thought

[60:56]

unlikely action. I mean, you might scratch your head or something, but have an impulse around a sensation. But, you know, the Buddha really talked about these three trainings because it's the behavior that we have some way of possibly, I don't mean control, but you can pause before you step off the cliff or before you... knock somebody down or whatever it is. So body, speech, and mind are the three training arenas. And the precepts are basically lined up around those three categories. So the most consequential behavior is physical action. And those three are sex, killing, and stealing. And those are the big three, the ones that you go to jail for, their behaviors. So those are precepts. Not killing, not stealing, not abusing sexuality. Those are the first three of the bodhisattva precepts, of grave precepts, or what are called the prohibitory precepts.

[62:00]

And then the next three are basically about speech, slander, praising yourself at others' expense, lying. So these are consequential around verbal expression. And then the last three are about thought, which... I sit in the Zendo with people for hours, and I don't know what they're thinking. And they're behaving very nicely. Mostly they're just sitting there, and they're not saying anything. So the least consequential karmically is thought. And this is the least control. I have very little control over my thought, if any. I don't know what's coming next. But in terms of my behavior, as you're saying, there's some wiring there. I have learned. I've been trained. I'm a fairly well-trained human. I've gotten lots of lessons throughout my life. Don't do that and don't do that. Starting at the table, don't put your fork there and do that.

[63:03]

Don't grab your food. So I've been trained for years to behave in a certain way. And we do that here too. We train people around behavior, around deportment. The Buddha taught deportment, etiquette, behavior. And as a result, his young monks got fed. They were well received. They weren't loud and they weren't stealing or sexualizing or killing. So I'd be interested in reading the physiology of that very much so. But I think in terms of our practical application in Dharma teaching, basically behavior, we work on behavior because that's the one that has the most karma, most outcome. Does that make sense? Yeah, OK. Lisa?

[64:16]

Hi. So as you were saying that, I was thinking in the book also that was mentioned, I was thinking about some of the research I've heard on what our brains are actually doing when we think we're making a decision to do something. And there is some evidence that you're actually doing it. Milliseconds before. Your mind is activated to say, well, I'll do this. Yeah. Yeah. I've seen those. Those are fascinating. You know, and so what how does that. You know, where's that that micro breath? Where's the little bit that you can separate the thought from the action? And, you know, is is that even even possible? Probably not.

[65:22]

Probably not. But, you know, if you're not, if you're just sitting like Zazen is really great because not a lot of action. Yeah. I mean, one of the great moments is when you have an itch. Okay. I'm going to do it. I have resisted mostly not scratching my face during Zazen, you know, even though sometimes I know itches really well. I know what they do. They're horrible. They last a long time. And you can try to wiggle your eyebrow or something, you know, whatever. But the impulse to act, actually, if you're engaged and committed to not moving and not speaking, all of that kind of stuff is pretty vivid. You know, all the impulse to take action. All the impulse is like, I'm tired of this. Will somebody ring the bell? You know, one of the most murderous rages I think all of us get into is when the Doan goes to sleep. who's supposed to ring the bell to end the period.

[66:23]

You know, you start to lay your eyes on them, you know, like, who doesn't ring the bell? And they don't hear you. So it's amazing to be given an opportunity to study, in terms of your experience, how it is to have a thought and an impulse to act when you don't. I think it's interesting about your point is another one. I don't know if we can ever engage on that lag there. It seems like it's just we're not made to be able to be aware of our actions. Right. At the same time, we're intending to do them, that there is that amazing thing of I already said red before I'm aware that I'm going to say red. You know, that's just kind of funny. That's almost like a game show or something. Can you catch your thoughts? Yeah. But I'm not sure what the application would be. You know, maybe did the person who wrote that, I remember reading or watching those or something. Did they say anything about how useful that was? It's kind of, you know, the way I heard it framed is that it's, you know, it's almost hopeless.

[67:32]

You know, you've got a, you've got a limbic system and it has made its decisions. It's out the door. And, you know, your cortex is just trying to make excuses. Yeah, right, right. That's right. It's kind of depressing. Well, maybe we got to, you know, like, just accept how we are. And the thing I read recently that I really was moved by was this study of the vagus nerve. There was a scientist who gave, and I'm sure you all who are scientists know more about that than I, but there was this lecturer who's a neurobiologist who was talking about compassion. Yeah. is why i was looking at it and he said you know we evolutionarily he said come through the tortoise line and the tortoise has a vagus nerve and when the tortoise is scared it goes inside its shell and so we have that impulse we still we haven't forgotten that yeah so when we get really scared they sometimes say well why didn't she scream or why didn't she do something because she was paralyzed yeah you're paralyzed go inside the shell

[68:37]

And then the mammal, the mammalian vagus nerve, which kind of spread out into all our limbs, we're able to run or to fight. So fight and flight. So we've got this new set of tricks that we can do when we're scared. And then he said, you know, for the humans who have this capacity for compassion or this additional possibility, but you have to be calm. You can't be in a state of panic. Or else you're going to either be doing the tortoise or you're going to be doing the mammalian fighting or running thing. So in order to be compassionate, you have to actually find safety. You have to find a place where you're not afraid. You know, which made a lot of sense to me as a practitioner. A lot of what people are working to overcome in their practice is fear. You know, and how it makes them behave. Like their assumptions that there's something bad that's going to happen to them. And the way they contract. around fear. Well, I mean, me too. I mean, I'm not, I'm very familiar with that as well.

[69:39]

So I think all of these kind of, you know, evolutionary data about us, how we are is really helpful. I find it very helpful. Like, well, that's just how we came in here. You know, that's how we are of that, dependently co-arisen from all of those tendencies. And yet we do have this capacity for compassion. That was the good news. We can be compassionate. We can learn not to just be reactive, you know, that we can be responsible. We can respond with consideration. That little gap before you act, I feel like that's what we learn in Zazen is patience. There's a little patience there. I don't have to jump. You know, I can actually look. And consider and then go over there. I mean, unless somebody's fainted or something. That happens occasionally. But I don't have to jump. I can think about it a little bit.

[70:41]

Maybe you can see your mind saying jump. Maybe. If you're lucky. Really good. Yeah, those guys get really deep down there. Thank you. Thank you. Anshul. Hello, Anshul. There, you should be good. Now it works, yes. All right, good to see you. Good to see you. I was wondering if you might be able to share a personal anecdote or story where you, you know, lines of what you were describing earlier where you said um there's something happening and then you feel like maybe this is the ground that you can rely on but it's not and then you go one level deeper and then you go one level deeper and maybe this is happening over months or years and you're realizing oh this is maybe this is the thing this is the absolute truth that i can hold on to and then and then only to realize later that that's empty too and and

[71:56]

And so on and so forth. And I was wondering if something comes to mind that you might be able to share. And I'm curious to see if that might spark something for me. Well, I like that story of turtles all the way down. You know, it's like we keep wanting there to be. Well, what's that turtle riding on? Well, it's riding on another turtle. What about that turtle? It's just turtles all the way down. It's like we can't hold that kind of we can't hold on to adding an infant number of turtles. We run out of. patience with that. So at some point, the mind despairs of an answer, and that's good. You know, when you run out of stories, when you run out of another, just another way of understanding something, and you begin to feel like, I just don't know. There's a saying in Zen that not knowing is most intimate. And, you know, we're supposed, like, not knowing in the way I went to school was like you get an F. You're supposed to know. You're supposed to have the answers to everything. That's how we're trained.

[72:58]

Knowing knowledge is like, that's where you make your way in the world. But this is entirely different than that. It's like, stop, just let that go for a while. I mean, it'll be there when you need it. That's not a problem. You don't have to give up your intellect. But during the exploration of reality, you know, those guys, like I think I shared with you that David Baum video, Did you see that one about the infinite potential? Did you see it? No, I don't think I've seen it. It doesn't seem to be. I think they take these things away after a while. I tried to pass it to somebody and it said video not available. But it's this David Baum, B-O-H-M. It's called infinite potential. And he's a quantum physicist. And he's just kind of going, he's just using his mind to try and understand that which cannot be understood, like, you know, the nature of the universe. And he came up with a wonderful theory that sounds a lot like Buddhism.

[74:02]

And it's, you know, he was close to Krishnamurti and he also was a friend of the Dalai Lama. understanding as the meditators. And so, and he looks kind of like that, you know, it's just kind of this really wide open face and, and very, you know, very amazed in awe of what he's learning and what he's theorizing, you know, and the other side, the other guys like Oppenheimer and stuff, they tried to get rid of him. They were making atomic bombs and he's talking about plasma. producing, all things are being produced simultaneously. He was talking about Dependent Core Rising. And anyway, it's just a lovely, lovely film. I really hope you'll find it and look at it. It would be something like maybe what you might enjoy.

[75:05]

What also came to mind was the paradox of the ship of Theseus, which is also from... This is also from the Western Philosophical School where the question is you have a ship which is made of planks and at some point the ship needs, the planks need to be replaced. So at some point you start replacing one plank after another and another plank breaks and you replace that with a plank from a different ship. At what point does it stop being the original ship and start being a different ship? It's interesting that that's kind of like emptiness because what is the identity of the ship and at what point does it change? That's right. And now it's, you know, Odysseus' ship because it's given another name. Right. Right. So it's, you know, it's kind of labeling. We want to be able to label things. Yeah. So that is a, that's very similar. The dependent core rising.

[76:05]

Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. You're welcome. You're welcome. Okay, well, wonderful to see all of you at 6.15. And I hope you enjoy the rest of your evening. The sky is blue. It's wonderful to have what looks like fresh air for a change. And yeah, well, next week I'll finish, hopefully we'll finish 24, chapter 24. And then my hope is to go forward in the transmission of light to Vasubandhu. So this teaching that we're looking at here is the middle way, which is one of the major philosophical schools of the underpinning of Zen. The other major school is the mind-only school, and that's Vasubandhu. And it's wonderful stuff. Yogacara, the mind-only. So there's a book by a man by the name of Ben Conley called Vasubandhu's 30 Verses, which is really well done, really accessible.

[77:10]

And one of the best texts for understanding Yogacara. And it's not very thick. It's something like that. And Ben is a really sweet guy, Zen teacher. And he's done a lovely job. So if you have a chance to grab a hold of that, hopefully that would be the next thing that we look at together. Okay. So have a nice evening. Please take care. If you'd like to unmute to say goodbye, please do. Bye-bye. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, Heather. Thank you. Hey. Hi, Logan. Thank you. You're welcome. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Take care. See you soon. You're welcome. Bye-bye, Lisa. Bye, Kate and Paul. We're heading your way one of these days, guys. You better get ready. Let us know.

[78:11]

When you get some snow. Might be a while. Well, we're not in a hurry. Bye. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Bye. My internet keeps going out. Oh, no. Oh, dear. Your talk this afternoon was wonderful. Thank you. This morning. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Lots of light bulbs. Yeah, yeah. Hey, there you are. You have a great way of bringing the understanding. Thank you. Thank you. I'm glad you're coming. I'm glad you're joining me. I really do appreciate it very much. I look forward to seeing you guys, all three of you. earlier. Well, we'll have to talk about it at some point, but I'm in conversation with a friend about starting something, but I don't know, it might be a little early to start having thoughts of making anything concrete, but it's in the works.

[79:21]

Don't use concrete, that's all. Aircrete, that's the new one. Yeah, there you go. Planks. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Bye-bye.

[79:33]

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