An unsurpassed, penetrating and perfect dharma is rarely met with, even in a hundred thousand million kalpas, having it to see and listen to, to remember and accept. I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's word. So I'm delighted to introduce our speaker for today, who's Jay Garfield. Jay Garfield is a Doris Silbert Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy, Logic, and Buddhist Studies, Chair of the Philosophy Department and Director of the Logic Program at Smith College, also a Visiting Professor of Buddhist Philosophy at Harvard Divinity School, Professor of Philosophy at Melbourne University and Adjunct Professor at the Central University of Tibetan Studies.

[01:05]

I am utterly delighted to have Jay Garfield speaking with us. Thank you for coming today. Should I begin? Please do. I will begin. Can everybody hear me okay? Okay, then I'm very happy. First of all, thank you all very much for having me at the San Francisco Zen Center and for coming in these very odd circumstances. It's an enormous honor to be at the center, a center that I've always respected enormously. I should say in advance that I... don't have any special realizations to transmit, I don't have any special expertise. So whatever I say, you should just accept as the musings of one person thinking about Buddhadharma, and it will be as shot through with error and delusion as any human thought is.

[02:19]

I don't promise infallibility, and I advise you to take everything I say with a grain of salt. Now, normally when I talk, I very much like to have people interrupt me with questions or observations as I go, partly because that ensures that I'm not being totally obscure, and partly because it saves you from the boredom of listening to me drone on and on and on forever. But given the exigencies of Zoom teaching, that makes no sense, especially with as many participants as we have. So I ask you to bear with me, try to stay awake, And to save questions till the end, I will try to leave plenty of time for discussion and questions. So my plan is to talk to you about Yogacara and what Yogacara teaching has to tell us about non-duality and about self and selflessness, all very important ideas in Buddhadharma.

[03:23]

And the Yogacara tradition, as many of you will know, is extremely important to the Chan and Zen tradition. It's one of the principal Indian roots of Chan and Zen. And once you study Yogacara a little bit, you begin to see it every place in the Chan tradition, even though very often Chan teachers and students don't study Yogacara as much as I think they should. I'm going to be beginning with a little bit of discussion about the self and about selflessness, and what we mean by that. And then I'm going to turn to one of the founding sutras of the Yogacara tradition, the Samdiyamocana Sutra, or the Sutra Unraveling the Buddha's Intent. I'm then going to turn to a short text, and only a few verses of that text, by the great Indian philosopher Vasubandhu, called the Triswa Bhavanyadesha, or the Treatise on the Three Natures. And then I'm going to come back to talk more generally about non-duality,

[04:26]

and the illusions to which we are subject when we begin thinking about our own minds and the self and conclude there. So that's the rough plan, four main parts, and I'll try to be as concise as I can without being too obscure. So I want to begin by talking about the self. As some of you will know, and as the background I'm choosing indicates, my primary teaching lineage comes from the Tibetan tradition, and in particular from the Galut tradition in Tibet. My principal teacher is Geshe Yeshitapka, to whom I bow now and thank for all that he has taught me. I don't hold him responsible for my errors, but certainly I'm grateful to him for everything that I do understand. So what I'll be talking about will derive a lot from Tibetan understandings. Fortunately, I don't think they're very far from Chan and Zen understandings. So I think that some of what I say will be familiar, even if some of it may seem very odd.

[05:28]

In the Tibetan tradition, we like to begin any critical analysis by identifying the object of negation, that is, the thing whose existence we want to critically examine and ultimately perhaps find is not as existent as we thought it was. And in this particular case, that's the self, because Buddha Dharma really fundamentally is all about discarding the self and really coming to understand the absence of any self. But it's important to figure out what we're talking about. Chandra Kirti, great Indian Madhyamaka teacher, uses the wonderful example of a man who's got a snake living in the wall of his house, and he wants to stop being afraid of that, so he searches and searches and convinces himself that there's no elephant around, and so thinks he can relax. If we don't properly identify the thing that's the source of our problems, we might convince ourselves that the absence of something else is sufficient to relieve us of our difficulties.

[06:34]

But that's why it's important to first really get a fix on what the self is. And I like to do that with my students with a very simple thought experiment. I want you to imagine, and this may be something that is... that resonates with you on experience, but of course it may not, but you can still get the imagination going. I want you to imagine somebody else's body that you'd like to have, even for a very short time. You might want it because it's a really cool body, because you want to know what that kind of body can do, and so forth. I'll be candid with you. I'll tell you whose body I would love to have. I'd love to have Usain Bolt's body for about 9.4 seconds, because I would love to know what it feels like to run that fast. Now, I don't want to be Usain Bolt because Usain Bolt is already Usain Bolt, and that doesn't do me any good. What I want to be when I form that fantasy is me, Jay, with his body. Now, I'll bet even if this is incoherent, you can get yourself into the right kind of body envy and desire to want to inhabit somebody else's body for a few minutes.

[07:39]

If you can, then if you can form that imagination or that desire, you've distinguished yourself from your body. You've said, I could be me, Jay, with his body. And that tells you that you don't identify yourself with your body, but rather something that has a body, that could experience a body, that could know a body. Now try doing the same thing with a mind. Think of somebody whose mind you would like to have, even if only for a few minutes. There are certain theoretical physicists' minds I'd love to have for a few minutes. How about Stephen Hawking's, even though he's no longer with us? When he was with us, I still desire to have that mind. Again, I don't want to be him. I want to be me, Jay, with that mind, so that I know what it's like to understand quantum gravity and general theory of relativity. If you can form that desire, however incoherent it might be, then you know that you don't identify yourself with your mind. You think of yourself as somebody who has a mind, but might have a different mind, just like you have a body and might have a different body.

[08:45]

You think of some core possessor of body and mind. It's you. Now, a little bit of reflection easily convinces us that that's a crazy view. But being convinced that a view is crazy doesn't mean that we don't have it. As I say, even if you don't want somebody else's body right now, even if you don't want somebody else's mind right now, if you can even understand that desire, then you are representing yourself as a self. a thing that stands behind body and mind that possesses them but is not identical with them. The 20th century Austrian philosopher Wittgenstein used an analogy to explain what it's like to think of yourself that way. It's like to think of yourself in the way that we think of the relationship of the eye to the visual field. It's something that sees but is not seen, something that stands outside the visual field but represents the entire field and experiences it. And we often think of the self that way.

[09:48]

That is, we think of it as something that acts on the world, that experiences the world, but we don't represent ourselves as part of the world. When we think of ourselves as acting, we think of ourselves as standing against the world and doing something. When we think of ourselves as perceivers or experiencers, we think of ourselves as the unperceived, unexperienced subjects who experience our objects. The moment you put it that way, You recognize that this self-illusion, as I like to call it, this atavistic tendency, no matter how much we know, to represent ourselves as selves, is also the root of what we might call subject-object duality. It's the root of thinking that we are different things from the objects we represent. And we're different as agents, we're different as experiencers. And that allows us to think, for instance, that we're free of dependent origination, that we can do whatever we want in an unconditioned way.

[10:48]

That, of course, is an illusion. It allows us to think that the world that we experience is simply delivered to us by our senses as it is, and we stand back as the impartial witness, which, of course, is also crazy. But as I say, the fact that views are crazy doesn't mean that we don't hold them. And in fact, I think the central insight of the second noble truth is that we are... atavistically, instinctively, imbued with terribly distorting views that give us a misapprehension of our own nature and of the nature of the world. And all of Buddha's practice, I think, is about undoing that, about unraveling that scheme of views. So as we target the self, we're also targeting subject-object duality. And what I want to do now is to explore how subject-object duality And this kind of natural attitude of self standing against the world as subject and agent is unraveled in the Yogacara tradition.

[11:49]

And then come back to what that says about the very foundational dualities that afflict our everyday life. So I'm now going to be turning to a brief exposition of the seventh chapter of the Samhdhinya Mocha Sutra, the questions of the Bodhisattva, Paramata Samudgata, which you could roughly translate as the very gone guy. So the sutra is represented as a series of questions that a sequence of bodhisattvas ask of the Buddha. And when we get to the seventh chapter, Paramata Samudgata is asking the Buddha a very simple question. He says, hey, Buddha, you've taught again and again that things are empty of any intrinsic nature. And I'd like to know what you had in mind when you said that. So he's asking the Buddha to unravel the idea of emptiness that we find so often in the turning, in the sutras of the second and the third turning, the Mahayana sutras that represent the foundation of the traditions in which we all practice.

[12:57]

And the Buddha answers Paramatya Samadgata by saying, actually, Paramatya Samadgata, I had three things in mind. And now I want to explain to you. the three kinds of emptiness, or the three kinds of naturelessness, as they are put in this sutra. As a footnote, remember that when we say that things are empty, we always have to ask, empty of what? A glass that's empty of milk might not be empty of water. A glass that's empty of liquid might not be empty of air. A room that's empty of people might not be empty of furniture. And so we'd always need to ask when anybody says that something's empty, empty of what? That's Chandrakirti's point when he says it's one thing for your house to be empty of elephants and a different thing for it to be empty of snakes. And in this case, in the case of the Madhyanaka and Yogacara traditions, that are the two major traditions of the Mahayana, when we talk about emptiness, we mean emptiness of intrinsic nature, emptiness of qualities that make things the things that they are.

[14:05]

in favor of an understanding of things as interdependent and always having whatever character they have conventionally, relationally, and extrinsically. So anyway, that's the first question that Paramatya Samargata asks. And the Buddha says, I had three things in mind. First, he said, I'm teaching that things are empty of characteristic. They have an emptiness with respect to characteristics. And by that, he said, I mean just this. that when we perceive things as having the characteristics that they have, they themselves are empty of those characteristics. And you might wonder, what the hell does that mean? That doesn't sound like much clarification. But it's actually a deep clarification, and I'm going to try now to clarify the clarification. Suppose I imagine myself looking at my copy of the Samghi Namo Chana Sutra. There it is. So I look at my copy of the Samghi Namo Chana Sutra, and as I see it, I see it as being a kind of vibrant state, a color of orange on the cover.

[15:10]

And in a very natural, instinctive way, I take that characteristic of being orange to be a characteristic that that book has. But somebody in emotion invites us to ask, do we really think that that orangeness is sitting there on the book in the way that it presents itself to naive perception? And again, a moment of reflection tells us that that's crazy. How do I perceive that orange? Well, light bounces off the book. It enters my eye through my lens. It's turned upside down, refracted through some more or less clear jelly, hits the sensory neurons at the back of my eye, photoelectric. reactions take place, electrical impulses are transmitted through the optic nerve to various parts of my brain, a bunch of stuff happens in my occipital lobe, and I experience an orange book.

[16:14]

Nothing about that process is orange. There's no orange in my brain, I hope. If there is, I'm in more trouble than I think. There's no book in my brain either. If there is, I'm in much more trouble than I think. Instead, a complicated set of causal processes have resulted in my experiencing an orange book in front of me. But to pretend that that orange is just out there in the world independent of those perceptual processes and is somehow just delivered to me like some kind of photocopy or fax through my eyes is just the height of folly, whether philosophical or scientific. The book that I create, I imagine to have the color orange. But that characteristic is not present in the book at all. It's rather present in a complicated perceptual process. The book is empty with respect to those characteristics. That's the first thing the Buddha had in mind. And then he says, hey, Paramatisamagada, I had a second thing in mind.

[17:17]

I have in mind that things are empty with respect to production as well. They're empty with respect to the way that they come about. So for instance, again, if I take the perception of the book as an example, And I think to myself, well, there's just a book being delivered to my consciousness. Maybe it's not orange, but it's still a book being delivered to my consciousness. And I ask, well, what's going on there? And I pay attention to that entire causal process, a causal process in which I have an experience at the end. The book that I think is on my desk isn't an experience. It's a real book. At least I think so. But in fact, all there is is a complicated causal process with some matter outside of me perhaps interacting causally with my sensory organs and with my mind and my mental faculties and my brain giving rise to an experience. Nothing in that process contains anything that has the properties that I take the book to have. Those are all constructed. One way of understanding this is to say that the fundamental aspect of the primal confusion

[18:24]

that stands at the root of ignorance and hence at the root of suffering, is our constant confusion of things that we've made with things that we found. We forget that we construct perceptually, cognitively, through action, through affect, the world around us, and then we experience it as though it was there independent of us, and we just happen to find it. That confusion of what we make with what we find is the root of cyclic existence. And when we say that things are empty with respect to production, we mean, in fact, the items of our experience are things that we make, not things that we find. So that's the second kind of emptiness that the Buddha asserted in the sutra that he had in mind. And then he said, I also had a third thing in mind. I had the idea that things are ultimately empty. And by that, the Buddha meant something very, very simple. He meant that when we experience these things, when we experience the world around us, every aspect of the world around us that we take ourselves to experience, we take something with which we take ourselves to be passive, just receivers of it.

[19:39]

And so we take it to have those properties in that kind of existence. And we forget again that we've constructed it, that none of the qualities we attribute to the world around us is somehow external and independent of us. All of it is in some sense internal to us and entirely dependent on our cognitive processes. Then the Buddha said something really interesting, which really generates the second aspect, more positive, or the more negative aspect, I should say, of the Yogacara program. That is, he said that corresponding to each of these three kinds of naturelessness or three kinds of emptiness, there's also a positive nature. And so when we say this, when we talk about the three natures, the trees, the three modes of existence, what we're doing in the Yogacara tradition is talking positively about the characteristic of the objects of our everyday experience, experiences of books, experiences of apples, experiences of dogs, experiences of other people, but also experiences of ourselves, our own bodies, our own minds.

[20:50]

and the way that we think of ourselves and our relationship to the world. So now let's talk about the three natures. Corresponding to emptiness with respect to characteristic, that first level of emptiness, the Buddha said, all things have an imagined nature. That is a nature we naively imagine them to have and take them to be. So with respect to my book, its imagined nature is being external to me, standing against me as object to subject. being orange, being rectangular, being hard, having all of those properties. All of the properties that my senses and my cognitive reflexes deem it to have. That's the way that the book I experience is imagined to be. And that's a positive nature of that experience that is the positive correlate of the negative property of being empty of those characteristics. It's empty of those characteristics, but nonetheless, the percept that I have the object of my experience is imagined to have all of those properties that it doesn't in fact have.

[21:56]

That's the imagined nature. That's the book as it appears to naive experience. And if we don't understand the book as having that imagined nature, we don't understand what the book is like as an object of experience. But if we don't understand that that nature is merely imagined, then we don't understand the nature of our experience and where it comes from. Corresponding to emptiness with respect to production the fact that all things are produced by causes and conditions and don't exist independently is what the buddha called the dependent nature or the other dependent nature as it's sometimes translated and that means that the book i experience the content of my consciousness and perception is not an independent object that i happen to have encountered but rather is something that arises dependent upon countless causes and conditions, including prominently my own perceptual apparatus, my own cognitive apparatus, and all of the causal phenomena to which I'm subject.

[23:01]

So in that sense, the book has a dependent nature as well as an imagined nature. And that's the nature that, for instance, we might expect a good neuroscience or psychology to reveal that our experience has, or just good meditative practice. The third nature that the book has is what the Buddha called the consummate nature. And that is the nature that corresponds to ultimate emptiness. The consummate nature is technically defined in Yogacara terms. And I'm first going to use that technical jargon. And then I'm going to unpack it as the emptiness of the dependent of the imagined. And that's really hard to parse in English. Sounds marginally better in Tibetan and Sanskrit, but only marginally better. Really what it means is this, that when we pay attention to the dependent nature of the book, the dependent nature of any object of our experience, and we understand the way that that experience arises as the coming together of countless physical, perceptual and cognitive and affective causes and conditions, we realize that all of that is entirely empty of the way we imagine the book to be.

[24:14]

that that dependent nature doesn't contain the imagined nature. When I put together all of that causal story, I don't get orangeness and rectangularity and being external to my mind and standing over and against me as object to subject. I just get a continuous causal process of which my body and cognitive processes, as well as perhaps processes external to me, are all part. All of that is empty of the imagined nature. And when I understand that the dependent is empty of the imagined, then I understand the actual mode of existence of things. That's the consummate nature, the way that things ought to be understood to be. And that's the third of the three natures. Now, the Buddha's idea in the Samdhi Nirmocana Sitra, and this idea is utterly foundational to Yogacara thought, is that every phenomenon we ever experience, is characterized by those three natures. For anything of which we're aware, there's a way we imagine it to be.

[25:20]

And in fact, it doesn't exist that way. We might think of that the way we naturally take it to be. And in fact, things are not as we naturally take them to be. There's a dependent nature. There's the way the thing has actually come about, the way that experience has actually arisen. And there's a consummate nature. And the consummate nature is the fact that the way things actually come to be has nothing to do with the way we experience them as being. And that's a characteristic of all of our experience. Now, note right now immediately that when I say all of our experience, I also mean that those three natures are natures of objects of our inner experience. So even when I pay attention to a sensation that I'm having, a thought that I'm having, a desire that I'm having, a mental state that I'm in. To the extent that I'm aware of that thought or that desire or that sensation or that mental state, it's an object of my awareness.

[26:24]

And so it has an imagined nature. It has a dependent nature and it has a consummate nature. And the imagined nature is the way that I naively experience it. as something in my consciousness that I experience just as it is. And we often say to ourselves things like, well, I may not know what the world outside is like, but at least I know what I'm feeling. I may not know what this person is like, but I at least know what my experience of them is. But if we pay attention to our experiences, to our feelings, and to our mind as objects of our consciousness, we see that those are only given to us by mental sense faculties, by introspective capacities. And so we only understand them as they're delivered to us by our internal perceptual capacities, by our cognitive capacities, not as they are in themselves, even though they appear to be present to us just as they are. So our own inner experience has an imagined nature, a dependent nature, and its consonant nature, the way it is at the end of analysis is that it can't be the way that we imagined it to be.

[27:32]

So this is a very powerful analysis, applying not only to external phenomena, but to internal phenomena. Now, I want to turn now from the Somnian Emotion of Sutra to the Trees from Havanudesha, to the Discourse Treatise on the Three Natures by Vasa Bandhu, probably written about 100 or 200 years after the Somnian Emotion of Sutra. Now, I should probably say, in the interest of scholarly honesty, that the authorship of the Treatise of Bahavener Desha, Treatise on the Three Natures, is contested. There are many those traditionally ascribed to Vasubandhu, and I actually believe that it was written by Vasubandhu. There are also a number of scholars who believe that it was not written by Vasubandhu, that was written later and attributed to Vasubandhu, and I don't really care about that right now. even if it was written by somebody else that did a damn good job of copying Vasubandhu's style and ideas.

[28:33]

So we could call it pseudo-Vasubandhu if we wanted. But there's just as much evidence to suggest that it was written by Vasubandhu as that it wasn't. That's the end of my plea for scholarly honesty. Now I'm just going to talk about the text. I'm going to be talking about a simile that appears near the end of the text. And the simile is drawn from early sutra literature, but I'm going to talk about it as it appears here, because Vasubandhu does a particularly good job with it. And the simile is that of a roadside magic show, a common kind of occurrence, not only in classical India, but in current India, where an illusionist or a magician sets up on the street corner and does amazing tricks to convince people of things. And then people give them money. It's a job, not my job, thank God. So the idea in this particular magic show is that the conjurer, through the use of some illusory stuff, maybe mantras, magic spells, and a certain amount of deceit, takes a pile of sticks by the side of the road as a prop and convinces people that they're actually seeing an elephant, conjures an elephant out of thin air.

[29:44]

Now, you might say, well, that's impossible. And of course, it is impossible. But if you've seen David Copperfield or some other good illusionist, you see lots of illusionists who are good at producing experiences that we know to be impossible. So say your Indians were just as good at that as contemporary American magicians are. And that's the example that Vasubandhu taught. And the way he sets it out is there's the prop, there's the pile of sticks, and then the magician uses some mantra, a magic spell, and causes the audience to see an elephant that's not there. And then he focuses on that illusory elephant. And that illusory elephant is going to become the basis for understanding the three natures. And here's what Vasubandhu says about that. I'm going to work through the verses of the text of some of the verses and explain them to you, because I think it's a beautiful way of elucidating the three nature theory that we just encountered in the Samdhinya Mochana Sutra, which provides the sutra foundation for this particular Indian scholarly literature.

[30:46]

So he says, like an elephant that appears through the power of a magician's mantra, that's what we've just been talking about. Only a percept appears. The elephant's completely non-existent. So when we're in the magic show, and we've obviously paid to see a good magic show, not to see an elephant, because elephants are a dime a dozen in India, but magically apparent elephants, that's something you're willing to pay to see. And when we pay to see the elephant, we know that we're experiencing it, but we also know that it's not a real elephant. Because if we thought all the magician did was to trot out a real elephant, then there's no big deal. Anybody can do that, to make somebody see an elephant by bringing an elephant. It's a real trick to make somebody see an elephant by using a pile of sticks and a mantra, right? That's Vasivandi's point. Now, I say that, but notice what a great trick it is to make people see a world of books and computer screens and apples and dogs and people when all they've got is a bunch of electrical impulses running up their nerves.

[31:49]

And that's really where Vasibandhu is going. You think that it's an amazing thing that a magician can conjure an elephant out of a pile of sticks. Look at the way your brain and mind conjures a world out of a bunch of sensations and electrical impulses. That's just as astonishing a feat. And Vasibandhu wants you to focus on that fact. Just as the magician has created the elephant, your mind and sense organs create the world around you. They don't produce it. That's the introduction there. And he says, look, here's how to think about it. The imagined nature is the elephant. So the elephant's now going to stand for the imagined nature. I'm going to unpack this verse in a minute. The other dependent nature is the visual percept. That is my perception of the elephant. The non-existence of the elephant therein is the consummate. So we've got three things going on here. We've got an elephant that appears. And it's completely non-existent, but we imagine it to exist. We think that it exists.

[32:49]

That's the imagined nature. It's the characteristic that things in the world appear to have, that we perceive them to have, that any decent philosophical reflection tells us they don't have, but which we imagine them to have. That's the imagined nature. That's like the elephant. The other dependent nature is the percept. That is, while there might not be any real elephant, if the trick has worked, There's a perception of an elephant. And that perceptual experience is what's convincing us that there is an elephant. That's a real thing. If we didn't really have the percept of the elephant, the trick failed. If the elephant was really there, it wasn't the trick. So that's really important. And again, the way perception works, if you're perceiving a computer screen in front of you now or an iPad or an iPhone, then it's really important that that percept be real. But it had better be the case that the percept is different from the computer screen or the iPhone, because the percept is happening in your mind or in your brain, and you wouldn't want an iPhone or a computer to be lodged in your brain.

[33:56]

There'd better be a difference between those two things. And the idea here is that the thought that the thing external to you exists as it appears is completely false. But the fact that the percept is there has got to be true as a condition of even that deceptive appearance. And then he says the non-existence of the elephant is the consummate. So the way things really are, the way that the thing really exists, is that when we understand that dependent nature, we understand it to be completely devoid of the experiences that we take our object to have. Now he continues the story. the foundation consciousness, our basic unconscious processes, the non-existent duality appears. But since the duality is really non-existent, there's only a percept. So he's now focusing on this idea of subject-object duality. And it's subject-object duality that permeates our perceptual experience.

[34:57]

That is the experience of ourselves standing as spectators with respect to the objects of experience we enjoy, or to think of ourselves as standing as uncaused agents behind the actions we perform. That is the image of ourselves as like the eye with respect to the visual field, standing against the world of its subject rather than non-dually part of the world. And so what Vasa Bandhu says here is that that sense of duality which is part of the imagined nature, is the product of what he calls the foundation consciousness, or we might call unconscious psychological processes. To say that we are cognitively, neurologically, psychologically wired to take a bunch of experiences happening in our nervous system and to convert them into a representation of an external world and an internal subject dualistically related to each other. That's the workings of psychology.

[35:59]

That's the workings of our cognitive process, not the world being delivered to us just as it is. So then he gives us another way to understand the metaphor, the simile. He says the root, the foundation consciousness, that is these unconscious psychological processes are like the mantra. That's the kind of thing that's getting us into action to have this experience. Reality can be compared to the wood. That is, the way the world is, is completely invisible to us. When we're in the magic show, we're not seeing a pile of wood and then an elephant. We're seeing a pile of wood as an elephant. So we're seeing reality or seeing the world as a dualistic relation between subject and object. But that is the product of deeply unconscious psychological processes. Imagination is like the perception of the elephant and duality is like the elephant. The perception of the elephant is a real imagination, but the duality that we imagine is as non-existent as the elephant itself.

[37:03]

Now, skipping a bunch, Vasibandhu then says, through the non-perception of the elephant, that is when it's all over and you don't see the elephant, the vanishing of the percept occurs. When the spell is over, when you've broken through the spell and are no longer alive, transforming a prop into an elephant. The elephant completely disappears. That's how it is in a magic show. And in the same way, Vasubandhu says, through the non-perception of duality, duality vanishes, non-dual awareness vanishes, and with the absence of an object, there is also the absence of a subject. That, I think, is the most profound part of Triswam Havana Desha, of this treatise on the three natures. That... The goal here is not to stop experiencing the world, but to stop superimposing the natural reflexive duality on our experience of the world, or at least to recognize that the duality that we experience naively in our ordinary perceptual life is not a duality that we stumbled on and discovered.

[38:15]

We didn't wake up one day and say... wow, I've been having all of these amazing sensations all my life, all this amazing stuff happening in my central nervous system. I'll bet there's an external world and an independent subject, and that's the way it is. And then we say, damn, I've just found it. The world is fundamentally constructed as me, the subject, and everything else as object. That's not how we live our lives. Instead, we live our lives having experience. that we immediately, unconsciously, as a psychological reflex, reconstruct through the lens of subject-object duality. And it's important to see that there are two poles of that duality, and that those two poles are mutually dependent and equally problematic. One is the object pole. We take external objects to be delivered to us just as they are. The other is the subject pole. We take our own subjectivity or our own experience to be delivered to us just as it is.

[39:18]

And our existence as subject only makes sense if we think of ourselves standing over and against the world of objects. But the trees from Havana Desha and the Sandhina Mocha Sutra are admonishing us not to try to get rid of the object in favor of pure subjectivity, not to say, oh, gee, all there really is, is our own mind. and we have immediate infallible access of that. They're urging that we get rid of subject-object duality with both of its poles, that it's just as erroneous to think of ourselves as autonomous subjects and agents as it is to think of the world that we have as a pre-existing object waiting for our consumption. The dissolution of the superimposition of subject-object duality, then, is not meant to give us just a luminous consciousness or mind that's self-presenting, but to give us neither subject nor object, rather a dependent nature, an interdependent world in which we figure rather than a world external to us that's reconstructed and re-delivered in an inner world of thought.

[40:31]

So now I'm going to come back after this brief tour through these two texts to think with you about self-experience, illusion, and subject-object duality. The reason that I've taken this detour is because very often, when either within the Buddhist tradition or within just cognitive science, we think about illusions. We often think about illusions regarding the external world, visual illusions, such as color illusions or the Mueller-Lyer illusion. auditory illusions such as the illusions we have in speech perception and so forth. And we think that when you understand an illusion, what you understand is that the thing that you're perceiving exists in one way, but appears in a very different way. But that nonetheless, at least, even if you're wrong about the nature of the thing that you're perceiving, you couldn't possibly be wrong about the nature of your own perception or your own experience.

[41:36]

What, we might ask, could possibly get between me and my own inner world of thought, emotion, affect, intention, and so forth. But if we really take the lessons of the Yogacara tradition, as Adam graded in the Samnina Mochanasitra, and the trees from Havanir Desha seriously, we see that quite a lot can get in between us and our own psychological, affective, and perceptual states. Because when we're introspectively aware of our apparent inner world, we're only aware of it through the lens of our introspective faculties, through our cognitive powers. In the same way that when we're aware of the external world, through our external senses, like vision and smell and sound, we're only aware of what things sound like, smell like, or look like as filtered through our visual senses. olfactory or auditory apparatus.

[42:39]

And so we know that the world of colors, smells, and sounds is a constructed world. It's a world that we make, not a world that we find. The lesson here is that the inner world is just as much a constructed world. Our thoughts, our sensations, our experiences, our desires, our realizations are things of which we're only aware through our inner sensibility, through our introspective sense. And that can be as distorting. as our external senses. And in fact, we can see that distortion at work. And this is where we come back to the analogy with which I began. That is, if I look inside now and I ask myself what I'm experiencing as opposed to looking outside, and I say, oh, there's a slight pain in my shoulder from leaning into the computer more than I should. There are thoughts about Vasubandhu. There are worries about people maybe not understanding this boring lecture. There's all of that stuff happening in me, thoughts, worries, emotions, sensations.

[43:44]

And I think, well, what's the nature of my experience of those? And I think, oh, my God, what I'm doing is I'm saying there's me, Jay, examining my thought, me, Jay, examining my pain, me, Jay, examining my worry. That is, I see myself as standing as subject, and my pain, my thought, and my worry as my cognitive object. And by doing so, I've now come to see myself as a self, not identical with my thought, not identical with my worry, not identical with my pain, but standing behind it as the guy who has the pain, has the thought, has the worry, representing it through subject-object duality. a subject-object duality that isn't in the pain, isn't in the worry, isn't in the thought, but is in my experience of them. And damn it, I say to myself, what have all of those years of studying Buddha Dharma done for me?

[44:48]

Absolutely frigging nothing. Because the moment I try to experience my own mind, I experience it. as dualistically, through as much reification, through as much primal confusion and illusion as I ever did. I just convinced myself that I'm doing so in the service of Buddhadharma understanding. And that's probably terrible treason itself. So part of what I want to convince you of is that when we really understand the message of the Sandhya Namochena Sutra and of trees from Havana Desha, When we really understand this profound Yogacara analysis that, as I say, stands historically at the very root of the Zen tradition, we realize that illusion really is endless. It's endless because it's not just external illusion, it's internal illusion. And even when I become aware of internal illusion, I become aware of it subject to the same illusions as the illusion that I had before.

[45:52]

And even being aware of that illusion... I think of it as my illusion, and there's the subject-object duality and the projection again, and it's illusion all the way down. One way to put this is that insight, really trying to understand the nature of mind, the nature of experience, reveals that illusion is bottomless, reveals that reality is bottomless, reveals that our fundamental craving is a craving for a foundation. The reason that we like to think of ourselves as selves and agents is it gives us a ground for the world. It's the same impulse that leads us to think of, say, the objects of theoretical physics as the foundation of our world. And one of the very deep lessons of Buddha Dharma is that there aren't any foundations, that the deeper you dig, the deeper the hole that you find lying beneath wherever you've got to.

[46:53]

One way of putting that is this. To achieve genuine insight into the nature of reality, to really accept that there are no foundations, is kind of like leaping off a very great cliff. You've just got to give up that sense of stability and that sense of ground. And that can be frightening because you're afraid that people get hurt. from leaping off of cliffs, that it's nice to have firm ground under us. But that's also false. Nobody has ever been harmed by falling. You only get harmed if you hit the ground. And if there's no ground, there's no possibility of harm. It's that kind of fearlessness that bodhisattvas are meant to cultivate. When it says in the heart search of bodhisattvas are without fear, That's the fear. It's not that they're not scared of spiders. It's not that they're not scared of snakes. It's the ground or the groundlessness that requires a kind of absolution from fear.

[47:58]

The late John Prine has that wonderful lyric, just give me the one thing I can hold on to. Buddha Dharma tells us there is no one thing that you can hold on to. You can't hold on to external objects. You can't even hold on to the experiences of external objects. You certainly can't hold on to the experience of yourself, and you better not hold on to yourself. There isn't any such thing. Giving up the one thing to hold on to is the real task of practice of Buddha Dharma. Now, I want to close just with a few remarks about the circumstance in which we find ourselves, because I think it's crazy, given this time, given this period, to just talk about the stuff that I've been talking about. profound as it might be in these texts and confusing as my presentation might be. We're living in the midst of a pandemic, and it's a pandemic in which a lot of our fellow beings are suffering horribly from death, illness, loss. And I think that as we think about Buddhadharma, we have to remember that the fundamental reason for cultivating the insights that we're talking about is in order to deepen

[49:12]

our care for other people, to deepen our sense of friendship with other people, our ability to rejoice in their joys and to give up the kind of partiality that places that non-existent self as the most important object in the moral universe and sees everything else in dualistic relation to it. Our goal is to experience ourselves as interdependent members of a world. And we do that not just because it represents a metaphysical truth. But we do it because by experiencing that interdependence, we can cultivate the care for others in the recognition of impermanence, in the recognition of the pervasiveness of suffering and the pervasiveness of delusion that allows us to be positive agents for the alleviation of suffering in the world and for the achievement of freedom. And so I would really like to dedicate any merit that any of us achieve to and any understanding that any of us achieve by thinking about these ideas to our growth as agents for the elimination of suffering.

[50:17]

Thank you very much. Jay, thank you so much. We have about 14 minutes to have some discussion, offer questions and responses. If you would like to participate in by way of offering a question or a comment, you can open your participants window, and then you should see a button to raise your hand. So we'll proceed in that fashion. I'm happy to unmute you, and then we'll have some response. Thank you very much. I've stunned them into silence. First on the list here is Jerry. Thank you. Thank you, Professor Garfield, for your remarks. I don't know if you can see me, but I thank you.

[51:19]

You mentioned toward the end one word that hadn't occurred previously, which was practice. How do you see, and again, we only have 15 minutes for all the questions that will follow. That's okay. How do you see practice fitting into the perspectives of the imagined, the dependent, coming to understand the distinctions? Yeah. I'll tell you my own view about how I would see it in my own practice. But, of course, people have very different practices and very different lineages. And so don't take this as instructions. Just take this as autobiography. I find that the most important practice for me with respect to this is what we call in the Tibetan tradition analytic meditation. And analytical meditation involves focusing very clearly on one kind of object and trying to understand the way it's experienced, the way that we project it, the nature we project onto it, and the absence of that nature.

[52:37]

its emptiness, and its nondual relation to mind. And I very much use the three natures and the three naturelessnesses as a rubric for doing that. If I can really get myself to appreciate the role that my own consciousness, that my own cognitive activity, that my own affect plays in constructing my world, it allows me to take that world a little less seriously and to make that world a little less distant from me. If I understand that interdependence and that emptiness of quality, I find that important. And I sometimes do that by visualizing or trying to visualize how other kinds of beings might experience the same environment in which I exist. So if I think a lot about my dogs and the fact that they experience a world of volumes of smell, might happen to have colors or sounds, where I experience visible volumes that might have smells, and try to see that difference, and to see that they are each ways that a mind can construct a world and imagine it to be, and that they're inconsistent with one another.

[53:52]

I see that that world that I experience really is an imaginary world. And I try ethically to do that in the context of the Brahma Viharas, to see that An absence of care is constructed by thinking of myself as fundamentally disconnected from you. An absence of mudita by the same thing. And by this vision of the world in which I think of myself as existing at the moral middle pole and everything else around me. And to try to dislodge that vision. So I see a lot of this as trying to dislodge natural but really bad psychological habits. Does that help at all? Kristen. Hello, Professor Garfield. Hi. Thank you very much for your talk.

[54:54]

I feel really lucky to have been here for it today, given that I've been recently rereading the Samrini Murchin Sutra and have recently sent a passage from this chapter, which is sort of, for me, the first among some very profound chapters in the book, to a teacher to help me in my contemplation. You were talking today primarily about the illusory nature of compounded phenomenon. This is the chapter in which the Buddha says to, or to, he says, he refers to permanence in this chapter. And I'm wondering how you make sense of this permanence to which he refers to, if not a... I'm wondering how you make sense of this permanence to which he refers to in this chapter, if not a fundamental, somehow impersonal subjectivity, and obviously not a permanent objectivity.

[56:08]

So without me spending time, I don't know if it's helpful, but I... unless you tell me it is, I won't read this short passage. Please do. Please do. Okay. It's always nice to hear these words. He says, an ultimate lack of own being. Actually, maybe I should start a little further. Thinking of an ultimate lack of own being that is distinguished by being the selflessness of phenomenon I taught. All phenomenon are unproduced, unceasing, quiescent from the start. and naturally in a state of nirvana. Why is this? An ultimate lack of own being, distinguished by being the selflessness of phenomena, abides solely in permanent, permanent time and everlasting, everlasting time. That uncompounded reality of phenomena is free from all afflictions. And he goes on from there.

[57:11]

Yeah. So... The use of the word permanent there is very much connected, as you pointed out, with space and time, which in the Abhidharma system are regarded as permanent, uncompounded phenomena. But the sense of permanent there isn't the sense of one thing that continues in existence. It's rather the sense of permanence that we have when we talk about an uninterrupted, unending continuum. So if you imagine, for instance, say the numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, they keep on going forever. No single number goes on forever, but the sequence of them does. And so this sense of permanence isn't the sense of a permanent object. It's the sense that you've got a continuum of moments of time that doesn't end. A continuum of moments of regions in space that doesn't end. And in... That understanding of classical India, space and time, we're thought of as just unending processes.

[58:18]

And for that reason, the word permanent is used there. You don't come to the end of time or the end of space. I see. So you understand that as a statement of deductive reasoning. I don't know about that, maybe, but... simply the important thing to realize there is because what we're trying to resolve is the tension between saying that all phenomena are impermanent and yet this word permanent gets used here. And the way that that's put, for instance, in Madhyamaka texts is to say that the extreme of reification or thinking of things as eternal is to think that anything continues to exist. But the extreme of nihilism is to think that continua don't continue. So when we're talking about impermanence, we're talking about the impermanence of phenomena. When we're using the word permanence, we're talking about the fact that the continua of those phenomena don't end in samsara.

[59:25]

Thank you. Absolutely. Thanks for the wonderful question. Michael Fisher. Hi, Professor Garfield. I really appreciated your talk, and I'm finding it really illuminating to think about this subject-object dualism. And I'm also realizing that I'm quite confused by some of the implications. So let me just try to flesh out one example maybe you can help me with. Sure. And some of the examples seem to kind of suggest, and I think you said this a few times, that we are utterly deluded. by our sense perceptions, such that we really understand almost nothing about what we call reality. And what confused me about that is that we somehow seem to have something like science, medicine, engineering, et cetera.

[60:31]

The plane, as you call it, takes off in Cleveland and it lands in New York. That's an improvement, yeah. Yeah. So how is that simultaneously true if it's true also that we don't know anything and seem to be completely lost in terms of grasping reality? Isn't that wonderful? Here's the way that I see it. And this comes out from the Madhyamaka tradition, more than it does from the Yogacara tradition. But I think that these two traditions are very much complementary with one another. In the Perfection of Wisdom Sitras and in Nagarjuna's Mulamajanaka Karika, the fundamental verses on the middle way, two truths are distinguished, conventional truth and an ultimate truth. They're distinguished and then they're identified. So a central idea in Nagarjuna's philosophy, and these things percolate through the Chan and the Zen tradition as well, that we need to be able to distinguish cognitively conventional truth from ultimate truth, but then to recognize that

[61:36]

Ontologically, those things are identical. There's no duality between them. Now, airplanes, photographs, people, plants, books, all conventional truth, all conventional entities. And as long as we remain within the conventional, and we're just talking about the imagined nature, we can know quite a lot about that. We can know a lot about the imagined nature. Thought. when we really want to ask not to do conventional analysis, not to just try to figure out how things work, but to try to figure out what things final nature is and whether they exist as we experience them, we're asking a different question. We're asking a question about the relationship between things, conventional reality and their ultimate reality. When we do that, we come up empty. We come up with an incomprehensibility. So when we, chant the great vows and assert that delusion is endless.

[62:38]

The fact that delusion is endless isn't an affirmation of our stupidity. It's an affirmation of the fact that if our quest is to understand ourselves and other things as they are, that's a hopeless task. Thank you. That distinction really helps. I appreciate that. Thank you so much for the question. It was a good one. Perhaps time for one more question. Terry Baum is next on my list. After this exchange, we'll close with the Bodhisattva vows. Hi. Hi. So I had an experience that I never had before, and I've gained some understanding about it listening to you, but I would love to hear you. talk about it more. Also, I just have to say at least on my screen, you have this amazing radiating halo of hair that keeps pulsing and changing.

[63:47]

That's what happens when you use virtual backgrounds in Zoom. The edge of it kind of constantly reconstruct it. It's kind of fun. Yeah. So I woke up in the middle of the night and I was... overwhelmed with despair and also flooded with conspiracy theories and I felt it was a result of my underlying worry and despair and anxiety about what's going on in the world and also the movie that I had watched that night. The thing that was unique was I felt that that there was like a light in the center of me that was gone. I mean, my experience of it was my soul was gone. And I never really thought about having a soul, but I felt there was something missing that I had always had in the center that I depended on.

[64:54]

And it was very terrifying. And then I just picked up the book on my, you know, Bedside Table, which was about Confucian theories of hierarchy. It didn't really matter, but it was, you know, one of my books that I found in the little free library. And I started reading, and then the light came back on. So just sort of relating to a book. So can you speak to what I experienced as feeling that I had a soul, recognizing that something was gone that I'd always had? And then it came back. Yeah. And the feeling that I was gone when this light inside was gone. Yeah. I'll try. Of course, me trying to understand your experience is dangerous. But I'll tell you what my first thoughts would be. First thought is, if Buddha Dharma teaches us anything, it teaches us that we don't have souls.

[66:00]

And if we thought we had them, we were wrong. And if we pinned our hopes and identity on them, we were looking in the wrong place, right? That's the thing that stands outside of space and time, outside of the world, and is the act, all of that stuff, right? All right. But that doesn't mean that we aren't real persons. And persons are conventionally constructed entities. They're beings. whose stories we tell. I like to think of it this way. You can think of yourself as the protagonist in a novel that you and your friends are constantly writing, a character. So is Captain Ahab real? Well, he's not real outside of the narrative, but he's really real in Moby Dick. And while you might not be real as a soul outside of the narrative that you're telling, you're real as a person within that narrative. Now, sometimes we lose track, we lose the plot. We lose track of the story.

[67:02]

And when we lose track of the story, we don't know what character we are, what our purpose in life is, where we've come from, where we're going, what's going to happen next, what the next chapter will bring, why we're bothering to read the book or write the book in the first place. And that can be profoundly terrifying. I think it's important to see that that's not the loss of a soul. You never had that in the first place. It's the loss of a grip. on the narrative that we're constantly spinning that creates us as persons. And that reality we have as persons is every bit as important as the unreality of our souls. Just like the imagined nature is every bit as important as the emptiness with respect to characteristic. The self is on the negative side, the person is on the positive side. But you don't want to think that because I've lost track of the person, that I've suddenly lost my soul. You never have that in the first place. That's the elephant or the serpent.

[68:03]

Yeah. Does that make sense? Yes. Yes. Thank you so much. Okay. Thank you for that wonderful question. And thank you for coming. Thank you everyone for participating today. And thank you so much, Professor Garfield, for the discussion. Shall we close with the Bodhisattva vows? Everyone can find them in the chat window. Let's begin. May our intention equally extend to every being and place. With the true merit of God's way, beings are numberless. I vow to save them. Fusions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them. Dharma gates are boundless.

[69:07]

I vow to enter them. Buddha's way is unsurpassable. I vow to be coming. Thank you so much. And at this point, if you'd like, you should be able to unmute yourselves and we can say farewell. Thank you so much for your talk. Thank you. Thank you all for coming. Thank you. Pleasure. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Have a wonderful day, everyone. Thank you, everybody. Have a great day. Great to see you. Stay safe and healthy, please. What's it like where you are? Gorgeous, sunny, blue day after many cold, rainy ones. So we're kind of feeling optimistic.

[70:09]

Can you go outside? I'm about to. I'm about to take my wonderful dog outside, toss some frisbees for him in an open field, and enjoy the sunshine. Excellent. Wonderful. Have a lovely day, everybody. Bye. Bye. Thank you. Bye. Thank you. Good to see you, Jay. Thank you for your talk. Thank you so much. Tammy. Wow. All these years. I worked for Jay when I went to Smith College for Three out of my four years. Oh, it's so nice to see you. I never expected this would be the vehicle of our reunion. I know. Thanks to me, too. That's wonderful. We're not actually here. This is the background of Tatsahara. I'm not actually here either.

[71:11]

I don't think any of us are. That's how Yogachara works. We're never actually where we think we are. Wow. Wow. Well, thank you all. Thank you very much, Jake. Take care. Take care. Thank you, Jay. Oh, thank you. It's been a real joy being here.

[71:41]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_96.4