The Union of Appearance and Emptiness

So tonight I want to, in a way, continue this movement on this spiral that may or may not yet even seem like a spiral to you, and, in a way, also tie a few things together, in a way ... not. [laughs] Well, we'll see. I want to start by going back to something that was up a little while ago, and talk a bit more about emptiness, and equanimity, and Eggs Benedict. So what do we know, what can we say about that particular trinity? [laughter]

Yogi 1: Thursday, I'll let you know.

Rob: [laughs] Okay. 'Eggs Benedict,' like it or not, is a built-up concept. It's a built-up concept. Despite ... [laughter] Despite ... [laughs] Treading on dangerous ground here! [laughter] Despite what one might think at certain [moments], or feel ...

Yogi 2: How about a soufflé? [laughter]

Rob: At certain moments -- I'll stretch this -- it's not inherently wonderful. If you've had 100 soufflés in a row, and you're on your 101st, it's not going to be inherently wonderful. It's not even that everyone in here would even like Eggs Benedict. So there's nothing in Eggs Benedict per se that's inherently wonderful. Not everyone will like it. I mean, if you ask the pig, you know, with the bacon, I mean ... [laughs] I'm not sure the pig would be particularly keen on Eggs Benedict. So it's built up. How is it built up? How does it get built up?

Well, we build things by thinking about them, through thinking, and through repeated thinking. That's one of the ways we build a substantiality to things. We give -- and thinking a lot, we end up obsessing about something. And that obsessing, that thinking, is part of the building process. And we bring in memory also, and that memory is part of the building process. And we bring in association. I associate Eggs Benedict in my memory with whatever.

But then, other factors can play into that as well, in this building of Eggs Benedict. Loneliness -- interesting how factors like that affect -- particularly around food, loneliness ends up being part of what can build Eggs Benedict. A perception or a feeling or an emotion of deprivation also ends up feeding this concept of Eggs Benedict. Desire, of course, and then there's the visual appearance -- if a miracle ever happens, and one goes into the Gaia House dining room, and there it is, lo and behold, in all its glory, Eggs Benedict -- the visual appearance, and then the mind says, "Eggs Benedict! Yippee!" Or, "What on earth's that? I've never seen anything like [it]." [laughter] But let's say it's "Eggs Benedict! Yippee!" And in all that, through all that building, the solidity, the substantiality in the mind of something called Eggs Benedict is increased. It's gotten more substantial.

Now, what if -- and I hope no one would ever do this, but what if someone, one of the coordinators, one day, put in the dining room, on the buffet table -- you know those Korean restaurants, in the window? Do you have that in England? [somebody groans] It's where they put, like, plastic replicas of ... [laughter]

Yogi 3: All over the city. I've seen sushi.

Rob: Yeah, okay. Plastic -- plastic Eggs Benedict. [laughter] Someone put plastic Eggs Benedict -- now, clearly, that's not Eggs Benedict. Clearly, you can't -- you know, it's not going to give you the Eggs Benedict experience.

Yogi 3: It might right now ...

Rob: [laughs] So it's not in the visual form. The Eggs Benedict is not in the visual form. You say, "Well, it's in the taste. It's in the taste." Well, what if, like, what they give to astronauts when they go up into space, you got some kind of pill that you chewed, or like a toothpaste-like substance that you squirted into your mouth, and chomp chomp chomp a little bit, and then exactly the replica of the Eggs Benedict taste ... [laughs] It's not going to do it for you. We can keep going with this, but basically, if we did a Chandrakīrti chariot on the Eggs Benedict, we wouldn't actually be able to find Eggs Benedict.

So that's one thing. But let's take the approach of mindfulness. If I bring mindfulness to the taste, and the realm of taste -- at first, in bringing that mindfulness, in bringing that care of attention, that presence, that simplicity of attention, the difference of taste between Eggs Benedict and porridge will be heightened. The mindfulness brings a sensitivity. It brings a kind of cleaning of the perception, and I actually notice, with more delicacy, more sensitivity, more vividness, the different tastes and kind of constituent tastes, even, of a mouthful of food.

But if I'm even more mindful, if I'm really putting energy into mindfulness, and the mindfulness has really a lot of energy behind it, and there's equanimity (which, remember, I'm defining as 'a quietening of the push and pull of aversion and grasping'), if there's a lot of mindfulness, very, very keen mindfulness and equanimity (this relaxing the push and pull), and perhaps letting go of the identification with the 'one who knows' the taste, or with the mouth, and all of that, then we will find, actually, that this initial surge of heightened taste, and heightened separation between the taste of Eggs Benedict and porridge -- that actually will begin to dissipate. We will see through it. The solidity, the substantiality to the taste will actually dissipate, [6:53] will decrease and eventually fade.

So for practitioners -- and this may take, you know, years, for a practitioner. There's this kind of bell curve that I was talking about. Things begin to get more vivid, and then with real kind of penetration of the mindfulness and the equanimity, etc., they actually begin to fade. Some of you -- well, it depends. Sometimes a person on long retreat, perhaps, or doing particular practices, let's say, a lot of mettā practice or a lot of jhāna practice, or for any other reason, has a lot of happiness inside, a lot of well-being through the samādhi, through the mettā, or something. And people regularly come to me -- not just long-term retreatants -- and say, "It's interesting. You know, the food is just not a big deal. It feels like so not a big deal, what's for lunch." And some people on a simple diet -- let's say, bland every day, same thing every day, boiled, steamed tofu, boiled vegetables, and boiled rice. And it's really, really, profoundly okay. There's enough -- and I'm not saying this to make anyone feel bad. I'm just stressing something which is actually important to realize, that there can be enough joy inside (for whatever reason, hopefully from practice) that there isn't that deluded investment in food, with a kind of promise of happiness. That just subsides. And one has enough happiness and peace inside that that investment goes, and then we don't bring out the dualities between porridge and Eggs Benedict, or whatever else. [8:38]

And what's on offer, when we go into the dining room or whatever, it doesn't -- it's not that we don't perceive it. It just doesn't stand out so much as such a prominent and important thing. So we're still perceiving this and that, but its prominence has subsided. In a way, we're taking in much more of the totality of the experience of being in the dining room, or the totality of the day. And in that equanimity, we take in more of the totality. This or that particular is not so prominent. And it could even be that, with really a lot of, say, joy or mettā or compassion, actually, these particulars, again, they fade in a field. What we perceive when we go into the dining room is a field of love. What we perceive when we go in is the expression of joy, somehow. And these are palpable but, you could say, mystical perceptions. But they're very real. The citta state, the state of the citta, as we've said, colours our perceptions. It colours our perceptions. How we perceive the dining room, how we perceive whatever, will be coloured by the state of our heart and mind at that moment. So when there's love, we tend to see love, we tend to see warmth. When there isn't, we don't tend to see that. When there's joy, again, we tend to see that. It's what will stand out to us. That's what will appear to consciousness. Compassion, likewise. And in that, one is not, so to speak, 'impregnating' food with a kind of meaning or significance, and burdening it with that, which it doesn't actually inherently have.

So, there's the experience in the dining room, and moving through the queue. And there's experience in meditation, and this kind of deep, attentive looking at things, ways of looking that we've talked about. And in meditation, the possibility is that -- as we've been saying over a few weeks now, a couple of weeks, or ten days, whatever it is -- the experiences, the perceptions can begin to fade. And maybe you're just getting a tiny glimpse of this right now, maybe they're really fading a lot -- whatever. Eventually, they really can fade, at times, quite dramatically. And in that, we see the emptiness. In the meditation, they fade. Post-meditation, coming out, we move in the world of appearances and perceptions, and the world of form and colour and substance. But post-meditation, when it's gone deep, we say, that world of appearances and perception appears "like an illusion." It has a kind of magical quality to it. It's not quite the same world before the seeing of the emptiness. So perceptions and appearances are there, but we know they're empty.

When I focus and emphasize the emptiness with my mind, when I'm emphasizing the emptiness, and focusing on the emptiness, the perceptions will fade. When I back off emphasizing the emptiness, the perceptions kind of reappear. And I can actually -- again, spectrum -- I can play with that spectrum: play with more appearances, forget about emptiness; appearances and know the emptiness; really emphasize the emptiness, appearances begin to fade. So this fading, and last night I was talking about this cessation -- what are the reactions to that? You know, what were the reactions last night? What were the reactions to hearing about this whole phenomenon of fading? What are the implications of it? What are the implications?

So yesterday, I touched very briefly on -- remember I said, just asking, "What do you want the answer to be?", for instance. I want to just say a little bit more about that. We have different dispositions as human beings, different leanings, and different inclinations, and different yearnings, in a way, different things that move us. I may have a disposition, a yearning, a tendency towards -- and I use this word lightly, and with a lot of respect, because I consider myself a 'religious' person, whatever that might mean -- but we can have a tendency to go to a 'religion of That' -- with a capital T, That, the Transcendent -- a religion of That. And that's kind of where the heart -- not just the mind, but the heart -- tends to go, with a sense of yearning, even, towards the Transcendent, towards what is beyond the world, and beyond the senses, beyond the mind.

And oftentimes, another person will look at that and kind of denigrate that or pooh-pooh that: "I don't want any of that." But unwittingly, another person may have a 'religion of This': 'This -- This is the reality. This is -- This is it," somehow. And that religion of This can be there for different reasons, can take different forms. Maybe, a religion of This because there's fear. I don't know if yesterday, talking about this Unfabricated, going completely beyond the senses, etc., including, like, completely beyond phenomena and consciousness -- whether for some people, that sounds like it's ringing bells of nihilism. And then there's fear. Or perhaps there's fear because it might sound like something like that is denying Life, Life with a big L. And there's something Life-denying and nihilistic about it, or implying a lack of meaning and lack of love.

So it could be that we gravitate towards a religion of This because of those reasons, because of fear. It could because of a feeling like, "This is it. This is it. This palpable, ephemeral, phenomenal, tangible, earthy reality -- This is it." And again, that could be because of a sense of the beauty of that tangibility, earthiness, ephemeralness, the poignancy of it. It could be because of that. Could be because of a sense of connectivity and groundedness of it, the immanence of it. Or it could be given a slightly different colour. These are by no means all the possibilities, by any means, but I just want to draw attention to some. Could be given a -- "This is it" -- given a slightly different colour. It's more a kind of (what would you call it?) grim, existentialist view of "This is it. Get on with it. Deal with it. This is it. Doesn't -- you know, this is it."

I use the word 'religion.' As I said, it's probably not the right word, because, you know, I don't mean to denigrate that word at all. And as I said, I would call myself religious, you know. But my point is more, where are we leaning? Where are gravitating towards, and why? And are we aware of that? And to me, that's absolutely crucial for integrity, for self-honesty, for all of that, for real inquiry. So I just want to point that out and kind of give it to you as an inquiry, as an ongoing inquiry. I think it's really, really important. And you come across that split within the Buddhadharma -- those splits, actually, and those emphases and those tendencies in the Buddhadharma, within teachers, within scriptures, within writings, within talks, and within practitioners.

But this phenomenon of fading, and all the way down to cessation -- that needs explanation. That needs explanation. I cannot ignore that. I mean, people do ignore it. In fact, a lot of people ignore it. But it actually needs explanation. As delusion, etc., drops -- if you remember my analogy of the poker chips, that poker chip's the first link in dependent origination. As that drops, all the rest drop. That pile drops, all the rest -- pile drops. Things fade. Less delusion, less appearances, less perception, less nāmarūpa, etc.

Now, either -- again, it could be two different types of people, three different types of people. Either I'm a person who doesn't care much what the Buddha is supposed to have said in the Pali Canon -- fine, and I have no problem with that at all, I have no problem with that. But sooner or later, in my meditation, if I'm really giving my heart and my soul to meditation, I'm really inquiring, I'm really going deep, I'm going to run into this phenomenon of fading. And if there's intelligent questioning, I'm going to have to -- what does it mean? What are its implications? [17:32]

So either, based on my own depth of experience in meditation, I'm going to have to reckon and wrestle with this phenomenon, or I may be a person who's perhaps not there yet in meditation, or a person who, anyway, tends to go for a sense of authority to the words of the Pali Canon, and the Buddha, and this sutta, and that sutta. And, as I read, last night, I don't know how many quotes from the Buddha -- very, very clear. Very clear -- it's there. People ignore it, but it's there. So if you're that type of person, it's there, and you have to reckon with it. You have to wrestle with it.

And the Buddha says, "The cessation of avijjā, the cessation of delusion, cessation, remainderless stopping, stopping, the fading" -- different words he uses -- "cessation of delusion brings the cessation of saṅkhāras, brings the cessation of consciousness." What does that mean? Cessation of consciousness and the cessation of perception, vedanā -- which doesn't just mean vedanā all get neutral. It means the cessation of even the sense of neutrality, and cessation of contact -- all this is part of nāmarūpa.^[1] So I have to reckon with that.

He doesn't say it's the cessation of the colouring of consciousness, that consciousness is just more neutral. It doesn't tend to be so biased. It's not what's being said. It's not there. He doesn't say it's the cessation of a kind of distortion of consciousness. He doesn't say it's a distortion -- "Oh, it's a cessation of an egotistical consciousness." Something very, very -- I don't know -- disturbing, really, is being said. Or you could be a person -- both that you give authority to the Pali Canon, and you see it in meditation. Then, definitely, you have to reckon with it.

So it seems, it seems that either there is the force of delusion, or the force of saṅkhāras -- which, we could say, are habitual ways of looking, habitual patterns of ways we perceive things -- that bring the perception of conventional experience. Either we're in that mode, or we are contemplating emptiness, etc., letting go of clinging, etc., and there's lessening of delusion, and so, a fading. And I touched on this last night. I just want to fill it out a little bit more. This is something to be reckoned with. At some point, it's something to be [reckoned with]. I can't ignore it. Plenty of people do, but to me, it's something to be reckoned with. And the question, then -- and it will come up. It will come up for people who have the experience of deep fading and cessation. What is that that remains? What is that, this Deathless, this Unfabricated? Is it that it's the ultimate existing thing? Is it that it's a thing with true, inherent existence? Or does it not exist at all, or what?

I feel, when one has the experience -- well, there is a sense of holiness there. And maybe that's just telling you which religion I tend to -- [laughs] -- to go to. But it's funny, teaching, because sometimes, teaching around this subject, around teaching emptiness, sometimes, it's very hard, in language, to get the exact Middle Way. It's very hard to communicate that. And so, sometimes, in the talk, I will lean slightly this way, or even quite a lot this way, in terms of reifying a sense of an Absolute. Sometimes, I will lean the other way, and it will sound to people as if I'm just saying everything, everything, everything is empty. And people get angry. One way or another, people get angry. It's not a safe job. [laughter] A lot of reactions one way or the other, because the other one stinks of nihilism, or has the fear of nihilism, for people. And as I said last night, the Buddha talks, or one translation of my teacher is actually 'unbinding' -- nirvāṇa, 'unbinding,' rather than "It's an object." And it might seem like an object at first.

Śāntarakṣita -- I think I mentioned him once -- he was eighth or ninth centuries, a Mahāyāna teacher that went from India to Tibet, so I think the first Indian teacher to go to Tibet and spread the Dharma, I think. And he says that, like my teacher was saying, it's not really that the mind is cognizing, or there is a cognizing of an unconditioned, inherently existent object, really, really. And he actually, in one of his seminal texts, he actually goes through a proof of why it cannot be inherently existent, which is very complicated, and I'm not going to get into it tonight.^[2]

Coming back to the Pali Canon, some of you will know, and sometimes it's in morning chants: sabbe saṅkhārā aniccā. Have you heard this? Sabbe saṅkhārā dukkhā. It means: all compounded things, all fabricated things are impermanent. All fabricated things, saṅkhārā, so all fabricated things are unsatisfactory. So those are the first two characteristics. And then it says, sabbe dhammā anattā. I'm not sure if my grammar's right, but sabbe dhammā anattā. It changes the word from saṅkhārā to dhammā. Dhammā is, sort of, not just fabricated things but also unfabricated things. All phenomena: anattā. And you could say, "All phenomena: not me, not attā, not-self." I would prefer a wider meaning, a deeper meaning to that anattā: "All phenomena are without essence." All phenomena are without essence.^[3]

So as I said, this causes, or there is -- in relation to this whole notion of the Unfabricated, and actually experiencing the Unfabricated, teaching on the Unfabricated -- a tremendous amount of hoo-ha and reactivity. And so, a person will say, "The Transcendent has no inherent existence." And that may be quite right. It is quite right. But to me, it's really important, really, really important that that's not implying, and that does not imply (A) that it doesn't exist -- because actually, the alarm clock doesn't have any inherent existence; it still exists conventionally -- and (B) even more important, that it has no value.

So we could say the Unfabricated, the Transcendent, whatever name you want to give it, the Deathless, ultimately has no more existence than the mundane, the worldly -- although you could say it's less fabricated. So it's like, when you get, you know, a whole big papañca about something, and a whole storm, and you've created this whole reality, and you think, "God, I was completely in some unreal belief about something." And as we get less tantrum, less tantrum, more and more, then we actually see, in a way, things are getting more real, you could say. So we could say the Unfabricated, by its very name, is less fabricated. But ultimately speaking, it has no more existence than mundane. But -- what can we say? -- experientially, or empirically, it's no less of a fact, and it's no less existent.

I could say, "Love is empty." And is love is empty. I could say, "Generosity is empty." And generosity is empty. Compassion is empty. Insight is empty. Insight, realization is empty. They're all empty. But they're all completely and utterly crucial, fundamental to our well-being as human beings, and fundamental to our path, and of such great value. Who would say -- who's going to throw love out the window? Who's going to throw kindness out the window? The very same people who say, "The Transcendent has no inherent existence. Therefore, there's no place for it in the teaching" -- would they say the same about kindness? "It therefore has no place and no value"? There's immense value in that, I feel. If we go deep, deep, deep into the fading, then we're going deep, deep, deep, we're understanding deeper dependent arising and emptiness. The meaning of that is more palpable, more deep. It means a lot, lot more, seeing it that way. Its force and its penetration, its comprehensiveness, its depth, its radicality of what it means -- means much, much more.

There are other implications, and I'm a little hesitant to get into them, but I will. Classically, or -- what could you say? -- in what has come to be the kind of classic Theravādan way of seeing things, an arahant, a completely enlightened being, the model is that they are freed. This being is freed from saṃsāra, freed from the world of the six senses. And while alive, after their awakening, there's a question: how do they see things? If delusion is what's giving rise to experience, how does an arahant see things? It's a question. I'll come back to that. But you know, if you buy this classical model, at death, their saṅkhāras, their karmic motivation is exhausted, and there's no more fabricating of experiences, etc., for rebirth. So in that model the Buddha kind of goes for, there's no questioning of the world out there, and whether it exists, or in what way it exists, etc. And that's the more phenomenological model. Also, in that model, or rather, in the classical Theravādan model, for the most part, there's come to, then, be a split between ultimate reality and the Unfabricated, the Unconditioned, the Deathless on one hand, and this worldly phenomena, the conventional reality -- and they're two completely and utterly separate things. As one of my teachers said, there's no connection between them whatsoever. They have no contact. They're two radically different, separate things.^[4] So ordinary consciousness is something very, very different. [28:30]

Yogi 4: Can I ask something?

Rob: Can it wait, or does it need to ...?

Yogi 4: Yeah. It's just that I missed something when you talked about what the arahant is. And you said that, at death, their karmic motivation is exhausted.

Rob: Their karmic momentum is exhausted.

Yogi 4: Momentum is exhausted. And then what?

Rob: And so they don't fabricate any more experiences. In other words, they don't fabricate a life. You know, they're not reborn.

Yogi 4: But it doesn't say, at death, that the ... what does that mean for the consciousness?

Rob: Well, the Pali Canon would not say anything. It will say, "You can't say it exists, doesn't exist, both, or neither." Buddha emphatically does not go there, emphatically does not go there.

Yogi 4: Yes. But he doesn't say...

Rob: But what he says ...

Yogi 4: Nothing?

Rob: No, actually, well, what he says is there's no rebirth. But when he's asked, on several occasions, "What, then, do they exist after death? Do they not exist?", he said you can't go there. But he very clearly says there's no rebirth, which means there's no rebirth of appearances, okay?^[5] So this is why -- this has a lot of implications. Whether I've arrived at it through deep practice, and I've never read a text of the Buddha -- I've just practised, practised, practised, and drawn my own conclusions, I might have seen my own stuff scientifically -- or whether I'm relying on the Buddha, if it's delusion, as the first element in dependent arising, that gives rise to consciousness and experience, how do you feel about that?

A lot of people would feel sad. It seems to relegate or denigrate life and perhaps, you know, cast a sort of veil or shadow of meaninglessness, perhaps, on life. All life is is appearances that are arising based on delusion. Take away the delusion -- nothing's there. A person could have that reaction, and I know people do. And that would be very understandable. However, if one sees it for oneself, and you see emptiness deeply enough, you see this fading deeply enough, I do not think -- I know that will not be the reaction. That will not be the reaction. What happens if you see emptiness deeply enough, you see this fading, is quite different. There's a bowing, I feel. There's a bowing. And life is not what it seems. One realizes life is not what it seems to be. But that very not being what it seems to be brings a bowing, brings a freedom, and also a deep, deep reverence. It's not that we don't care. But we can let go of what we know are empty, phenomenal experiences, which is what life is. But within that, there's no less care. Or it's actually more care -- more care, more love, more reverence. That's the actual experience. If we haven't had the experience, very easily the mind goes, "Well, that must mean da-da-da-da-da-da-da."

There's a second problem. And it's sort of in the air. If it's delusion that gives rise to consciousness and experience -- and I'm aware this might sound extremely abstract. I don't know. No? Okay.

Yogi 5: It's really interesting.

Rob: Okay. At a certain point, it becomes very relevant. That's all I can say. So I hope it's okay to talk about it. So the Buddha said, no appearances for an arahant after death, no appearances for a Buddha after death, in the Pali Canon. Several hundred years after the Buddha died, there was a kind of -- actually, around the same time as Jesus was preaching in Galilee and then Jerusalem -- and the emphasis on love and compassion. Seems very -- two different -- but extremely strong re-emphasizing of love and compassion. And the notion of what a Buddha was took a transformation. And you get this sort of split between Theravāda and Mahāyāna. And for a Mahāyāna Buddha, it's a very different thing than a Theravāda Buddha. A Mahāyāna Buddha is around eternally for the sake of compassion, for the sake of healing the suffering of sentient beings.^[6] However, if a Buddha is also a person who's gotten rid of delusion, how is that possible that they sustain appearances, and consciousness, and perceptions? Do you see?

There's a difficulty there. This spawned debates that went on for hundreds and hundreds of years, and different attempts to explain it -- incredibly sophisticated philosophy. I really want to say, I have huge, huge respect and love for -- and I actually don't even make a distinction between Theravāda and Mahāyāna in myself. It doesn't mean -- I'm just pointing something out historically. I don't want to take the stance of a historical scientist and just say, "Well, they have this belief because they needed to find a way to make it work, that a Buddha could do this." That doesn't sit okay with me. I have too much respect for those teachings. However, I can see from that point of view how the philosophies had to kind of come up with something like that. But I don't want to say that. I really don't want to say that. For me, I have a conundrum there.

The Mahāyāna perspective, anyway, on emptiness, is slightly different. Rather than pulling apart a kind of "disconnected ultimate" from a conventional reality, Madhyamaka Mahāyāna, the Middle Way Mahāyāna, is actually looking, right from the beginning, at the emptiness of all phenomena, and has this kind of more ontological bent that we've been talking about, though that is already there in the Pali Canon. And I've shared several quotes with you where the Buddha says, "This is like an illusion," and he or she has become "conjuring-free," and it's "like a magic show," or "all this is unreal."^[7] All this is unreal. But most Mahāyāna, the ultimate and conventional is not separate. The ultimate, meaning emptiness, is the very nature of phenomena. So in my thread through this retreat, I have neither been totally classical Theravādan nor totally classically Mahāyāna. And that's just because I've shared what seems to me the best way to move through this for a practitioner. But in the Mahāyāna, the emphasis is on the ultimate. Emptiness is the very nature of phenomenal reality. The difference is not in an object being different. It's in the cognizing subject, in the recognition within the subject. So there are several quotes from Nāgārjuna and Chandrakīrti which said the final nature of phenomena is peace.^[8] The final nature of phenomena is peace -- beautiful.

They also talk -- I said yesterday, there are several meanings, there are four meanings of nirvāṇa. One of them is what's called 'natural nirvāṇa,' which means -- natural nirvāṇa is the actual emptiness of things, that all phenomena are actually empty; suchness, that their suchness -- meaning emptiness -- means there's nothing there to be a problem. They're actually fundamentally peace.^[9]

There's a text called the Saṃdhinirmocana which, weirdly, I can't really understand, but it's translated as The Sūtra Elucidating the Buddha's Intention. It's a Mahāyāna text:

The fabricated realm and the definitive ultimate are defined by the lack of sameness or difference [the lack of being the same or different]. Whoever imagines them to be the same or different is possessed of mistaken imagination.^[10]

So Nāgārjuna also, in his Mūlamadhyamakakārikā -- and I think it might even be the final chapter; I can't remember -- says:

There's no difference whatsoever, there's not the slightest difference between saṃsāra and nirvāṇa.^[11]

There's not the slightest difference between saṃsāra and nirvāṇa. It's a radical teaching of non-duality. [37:39]

Now, into all this, into all this comes the whole notion of what's called in the Indian Buddhist philosophy that arose a few hundred years after the Buddha's death -- the whole of notion of, "What, then, is a valid cognition?" If things fade when I take away the delusion, if things are really empty, what can I say about what's really there? What can I say is a knowing that's valid? And this became a huge, huge philosophical project in India. So Chandrakīrti says, only a direct cognition of emptiness, when no phenomena appear at all -- the cessation that we were talking about -- only a direct cognition of emptiness is really a valid cognition. Everything else is invalid because it's based on delusion, and it's not seeing things how they really are.^[12] But again, that was something that took hundreds and hundreds of years of debate. It wasn't easily swallowed, partly because this trend of wanting to establish, "What can we actually know as human beings? What can we say about this world?" And actually, you know, as people were saying, if a train comes, it's like, don't lie in front of it, because it's going to hurt, at the very least. So that stream in Indian Buddhist philosophy, of valid cognition philosophy, that was already well-established. It had to be kind of addressed.

In Tibet, this teacher Tsongkhapa that came in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, he had a look around. He was a great, great teacher. He had a look around him, and he felt that people's understanding of emptiness was nihilistic at that time in Tibet. And in their nihilism, I think that he also felt that they were ignoring ethics, that actually, "Emptiness means that nothing really exists, so I can do whatever I want, and it's all fine. I don't mind. It's all empty. Nothing matters." So he had a real concern to actually not dismiss conventional reality, and actually really, really go into this question.^[13] There is valid cognition of conventional reality. This really is an alarm clock at some level. And the third thing that had to be woven in was that, how is a Buddha going to abide, knowing things? So it was said, or it is said in the Mahāyāna, that only a Buddha -- not even an arahant, but only a Buddha can see conventional reality and ultimate reality, meaning 'emptiness,' fully at the same time.^[14] And I say, if I have practised -- "And never mind all the texts. I don't care about any of the scriptures. I don't believe anything anyone says" -- what I notice as a practitioner, going deep, deep, deep, when I contemplate the emptiness of things deeply, it begins to fade. When I don't, it comes back. Only a Buddha, it's said in the Mahāyāna teachings, only a Buddha can see, deeply and fully, both the emptiness and the conventional reality of things.

I don't have any answers for this. Reading -- just the limited amount of reading I've done, you'll get different answers within different Mahāyāna traditions, different answers from different Tibetan traditions, quite different. What's going on here? We have a tendency as human beings to want to ask, "Well, what's really there?" Even if we've heard about emptiness, "What's really there? I want to know what's really there." We can see, with dependent arising, there's a malleability of perception. And we've talked about, you know, when there's love, I see a certain way. When there's samādhi, what appears as pain, I can colour it as, actually, bliss. A person can do that. And then, the more you see the emptiness, the more you can actually colour your experience how you want. You shape, you -- what was it? -- malleate your experience how you want, to a certain extent. And that story of the Buddha, with Māra's arrows, and became flowers. And a person's like, "Shhhh. What are the implications of that? How far does that go? Surely there are limits." [laughs] Mark's not sure. I don't know the answer to this. I don't know the answer.

I feel a little ambivalent about ending the retreat with some questions. But that's partly what I want to say. This emptiness business goes so deep, so deep. If you think, if we think, if I think, "I've got it. I've finished now," there's more. We haven't actually gone deep enough in terms of what we've seen the emptiness of. And if we go deep enough, it raises other questions that are just really difficult to answer. As far as I can tell, so far, in my limited study of this so far, there isn't a satisfactory, totally satisfactory, or at least agreed-upon answer in the Buddhist traditions. Sometimes people say, "What we perceive is dependent on our karma." So even that train, we perceive that train dependent on our karma. If you know a little bit about tantric practice, what tantra is is partly the attempt to imitate a Buddha's mind, of being able to see deeply the emptiness and the conventional phenomena, and actually have that shaped at the same time. And the more deeply you go into emptiness practice, the more you can actually practise that, actually modulating this: appearances, fading, appearances, fading, and mix it with love, etc. And a lot of compassion can come out of that. [43:22]

So there's a teacher -- I mentioned him once -- Mipham Rinpoche, who I'm growing very, very fond of, and he died in the early twentieth century. He's from the Dzogchen tradition, but he was very conversant with all the Tibetan traditions. And he said, "Well, if that's what a Buddha understands, this coalescence, this union of appearances and reality, that's then the final view and the final wisdom: the union of appearances and emptiness. The union of appearances and emptiness."^[15] In a way, leaving aside all this "What happens after death?" and "I don't believe in rebirth," and that's completely fine, just scrapping all that, we move in the world of appearances and perceptions, whether we like it or not. That's what we move in. And the way to move in it as freely as possible, to the depth of freedom, is seeing: appearances appear, and they're empty. And that emptiness is not separate from appearances. Appearances and emptiness are together, together. Talk about the union of appearances and emptiness.

So, I veer off that topic -- not really veer, but move in a slightly direction. It's still very much connected to that, but like I said, I don't have the answers, and I'm not sure anyone really does. What's more important for practice, as we, all of us, go deeper in practice, and we practise more and more, this emptiness, this dependent arising is said to be the Middle Way. It's the Middle Way. And that, again, is something from the Pali Canon. And I think I told you the story, the Buddha was talking to someone called Kaccāyana, and he said, basically, people view and feel things -- either they exist, or they don't exist. And there's that polarity and duality in the way we feel about the world. And he said, "That's the way beings see the world for the most part. But I, the Buddha, I" -- can't remember the word -- "I buy neither 'exist' nor 'non-exist.' I say neither 'exist' nor 'non-exist.' I teach the Middle Way beyond existing and not existing of all phenomena."^[16] So what does that mean, the Middle Way between really existing or not existing?

Yogi 6: Which sūtra is that?

Rob: I can't remember, actually. I'm sorry. I found it once, because someone else asked me, and then I lost it again. Sorry. It's in the Pali Canon for sure, and it's -- the guy he's talking to, Kaccāyana. I can see if I can find it for you.

So all these Mahāyāna teachings actually have their root in the Pali Canon, if you're interested. But this Middle Way is not a kind of compromise between existing and not. It's not a kind of like, existing is there, and non-existing is somehow in the middle, or a sort of mixture of existing and not existing. Or to quote Jeffrey Hopkins, it's also not a "gray area of agnostic doubt."^[17] It's not that either. As I keep saying in the retreat, it's something we can really know. It's important. It's not just, we shrug and say, "Whatever."

So, quote from Tsongkhapa -- it's a little wordy, but:

[The] combination of [on the one hand] ... refuting, without residue ... [what he's calling] the object of negation (inherent existence) ... and [on the other hand] ... the feasibility of positing, as left after the negation, without losing anything, all the functionalities of dependently arisen causes and effects as like illusions -- [that combination is extremely rare, he says. Extremely rare.] ... Therefore, it is very difficult to gain the view of the Middle Way.^[18]

Yes? It's little wordy, so should I just explain it? Would that be better? Yeah. So what he's saying is, it's very rare for someone to go really comprehensively and thoroughly and deeply into emptiness, and actually see deeply the emptiness of things. So I said, before we said, you could say, "The self is a process." And I said, "That's great, but it doesn't quite go completely -- you've left something inherently existent." You would say, "Awareness. That's" -- you know, you've left something inherently existent. Or time. To go all the way and see thoroughly what it means, how deeply it means to say that things lack inherent existence, on the one hand, and on the other hand, or complement to that, to actually realize that things preserve, in that very emptiness, preserve their functionality of cause and effect, and appear like illusions. But cause and effect works. If I lie in front of that train, it's going to hurt, you know. Those two together are the Middle Way. And it's hard, hard, hard to realize, something very hard to realize.

I'm going to explain a bit more. Either we tend to go nihilistic and over -- what's called 'over-negate,' over-empty things, and go ignoring cause and effect. Or -- and I feel, more often, nowadays, it's that we don't go deep enough, and we don't actually refute this innate sense of inherent existence. It's not just a theory. It's not just a theoretical, philosophical problem of inherent existence. We look at the world, and we feel in our guts that things exist inherently -- certainly that I do, the world does, awareness does, time does. So either we don't go enough, or we go too much. [49:04]

So Tsongkhapa had these concerns in fourteenth and fifteenth-century Tibet. I just have a question, whether the same concerns are so important now in the West. And again, it's about personalities. What's my tendency? And I've thrown this out a couple of times. Maybe I go like this. Maybe I tend to one side. Maybe I tend to the other side. Maybe I flip-flop as the understanding goes deeper. That Middle Way is a 'razor's edge,' I call it, a razor's edge.

Last year, I was lucky enough, I met a lovely guy called Peter. Again, he lives in Berlin, and he's a scholar of Buddhism. And he invited me, because I was just beginning to learn Sanskrit, and he said, "Come, and I'll give you -- I'll teach you," you know. And so I went for a week, and he helped me with Sanskrit. We were studying the Heart Sūtra -- so a very famous Prajñāpāramitā text, and the Heart Sūtra, and some of you will know it. And it usually gets translated as "Form is emptiness" -- or, a passage in it -- "Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form." Or "Form is empty. Emptiness is form." And he had a theory, a hypothesis which I found very interesting.

So the actual Sanskrit reads, "Form, emptiness, emptiness, form."^[19] I can't remember the exact words, but there's no "is" there. There's no "is" in the middle. Now, Sanskrit, you can get away with that, because you can often have sentences without a verb, and it's just implied. [50:43] But when it was translated into Tibetan, they left the "is" out. So the Tibetan also reads "Form, emptiness." But Tibetan has an "is." And you could put an "is" in there.

And apparently, historically, the translations were made with Sanskrit scholars, Indian Buddhist Sanskrit scholars and Buddhist scholars together with Tibetan scholars. So the Sanskrit guy could have told, you know, "No, it means 'is,'" but didn't. So, "No, don't put the 'is' in." And Peter had this theory, or has this theory, that actually, what it's really saying is -- so it reads, in English, "Form, emptiness, emptiness, form." So he said it's like, if you say "form," I'm going to say "emptiness." If you say "emptiness," I'm going to say "form." If you say -- and it goes through all the aggregates like that. If you say "consciousness," I'm going to say "emptiness." If you say "emptiness," I'm going to say "consciousness." In other words, wherever you lean, I'll pull you the other way.

Yogi 7: Rebalancing.

Rob: Rebalancing -- the Middle Way is a razor's edge. So I have no idea if that's true, but I found it very interesting, and it's very skilful as a teaching. So it may or may not be historically correct. It's very skilful as a teaching.

So we see this, and I've thrown this out already, we see this in cultures: Indian Buddhism tends to lean one way, on the whole. Chinese and Japanese culture and Buddhism tends to lean the other way, on the whole. You can't really generalize. But we also see it in individuals, and we see it in the movement of practice over time, perhaps. Probably for a practitioner, what's more true, I would say, as one gets deeper, is this more gradually seeing more and more of the comprehensiveness and the depth of emptiness. Rather than swinging like that, it's more, you just see more and more.

And I wonder if, contrary to Tsongkhapa's time, nowadays in the West, the tendency is actually not to go far enough, and not to negate enough. And just being around, and reading different things, and talking with people, etc., that seems to be my sense, on the whole. Occasionally you meet people, and they say, sort of, "It's all empty." Or "Everything's empty. Therefore, I can do whatever I want." But they haven't really seen emptiness. And they're in minority anyway, and they tend to go looking for an excuse to disregard ethics. [53:05]

So there are ways that we can not negate enough. Many of these I've mentioned already, but I really want to stress this: how deep, how thorough, how comprehensive, how radical this teaching of emptiness is.

(1) It could be that we say, "Emptiness teachings -- all they're really doing is pointing to the limitations of language, and particularly the limitations of language in our culture." Not enough -- language is not the problem.

(2) It could be, and this has been said, and you'll find this if you read a lot, that the Madhyamaka emptiness teachings are only kind of -- it's a philosophical system that, all it's interested in doing is refuting other philosophical systems, and not saying anything else. It's just kind of shooting other intellectual positions down.

(3) Or it's an attack on reasoning and logic. Some people say emptiness is really -- what it's getting at is that the reasoning mind, the logic, are invalid. But actually, even just reading the text, let alone practising, liberation is the point. Freedom is the point.^[20] It's not some clever opinion about the limitations of language or reasoning or something.

(4) A slight variation of that -- sometimes people think emptiness is saying that thought and the thinking mind is the problem. And they say, "Just don't think. Don't think. Just experience," or whatever. And again -- I've been through this -- then that brings us back to the notions of bare attention, of staying with contact, this moment, etc. And we've been into this. That's not enough. It's not enough because delusion is wrapped up in our perception, in our very seeing of the world. We see, we feel, at a gut level, we feel the inherent existence of things. [54:56]

(5) Another way we can not negate enough -- this is number five, if you're counting -- that we just use emptiness teachings, or we just believe emptiness teachings are just aimed at concepts like 'God,' or concepts like 'an awareness that's inherently existent,' or 'the Unfabricated,' concepts that -- maybe we're a religion of This, and we actually get a bit nervous with anything that seems to smell of a religion of That. And those, as concepts, are refuted, but in that, without realizing, one leaves ordinary experience and the world of ordinary experience only kind of nominally challenged. One's too busy getting rid of God and dispelling any religious notions, getting rid of the Unfabricated or awareness as having inherent [existence], [getting rid] of a vastness of awareness -- that one actually leaves all this other stuff, which is the stuff we actually suffer over most. And it's only gone, kind of -- usually that's for people who don't have very deep practices, and it's just a kind of intellectual position.

(6) Sixth possibility -- and this can be in different traditions. So it can be in some Tibetan traditions, or Zen traditions, or vipassanā, insight meditation traditions. But some people will deliberately -- said this already -- give awareness inherent existence. Or the inherent existence of awareness is just left unnoticed and unchallenged, but it's still there. Or, as I said, say, "Awareness lacks inherent existence because it's unfindable. It's not blue or green, or it doesn't have a shape." And that's not deep enough.

(7) And lastly, and I've touched on this in this talk, coming out of Tsongkhapa's concerns, and some of that, that one gets too concerned with preserving conventional reality and truth. One just is a little nervous that emptiness will go too far, and "I want to keep this, you know, I want to make sure I'm preserving conventional truth." So in that, sometimes teachings say -- and this is true -- "I'm not denying the object. I'm denying its inherent existence. I'm refuting its inherent existence." But if I'm a little not careful with that, what ends up happening is, just intellectually, I say, "This body or this suffering or this being -- it lacks inherent existence," as if inherent existence is something I could take out of it, and get rid of it, but it's okay, because the self is still there, and everything is still there. [laughs] It ends up being a kind of careful intellectual position that ends up bringing very little freedom. It's as if we could take away the inherent existence, say, "That's empty, but the thing is still the thing. The vase, or whatever, is still the thing." A danger, and not much freedom will come from it.

Chandrakīrti (you can ask later, if you like):

I do not propound that things do not exist [I do not state, teach, that things do not exist] because I propound dependent arising. But if you ask, "Are you a Proponent of true existence, then?" No, I am not, because of just being a proponent of dependent arising. If you ask, "What do you propound?", I propound dependent arising. If you ask, "What is the meaning of dependent arising?", it has the meaning of non-inherent arising ... non-inherent production, it has the meaning of the arising of effects which have a nature similar to that of a magician's illusions, mirages, reflections, cities of gandharvas [some kind of celestial beings], emanations, and dreams, and it has the meaning of emptiness and selflessness.^[21]

So sometimes, very often, it's come up in here -- I can't remember -- in the question and answers, "Well, you know, the important thing is, don't lie in front of the train. We can talk all we want about emptiness, but basically, come down to it, you don't lie in front of the train." And of course that's true, but sometimes what that goes to, it's kind of -- inside it's like, "Yes, this is all very nice, this talk about emptiness and lack of inherent existence. But so what? Because when push comes to shove, it's the train that matters. It's physical reality that matters," and that gets equated with conventional reality. That feels like the most important: "Don't lie on the tracks." But sometimes, this is so subtle. It's so subtle, and for a practitioner who's caring about this and going deep with this, it's so subtle, the balance, so subtle. And it moves. Sometimes in that, there's a kind of -- may not even be conscious -- "So what?" Lack of inherent existence ends up not meaning too much or seeming like it's that relevant. We underestimate how much freedom can come from seeing the lack of inherent existence, understanding it. We underestimate that that's where the freedom is. And that's where our capacity to love grows and grows. [1:00:18]

Seeing that deeply, seeing emptiness deeply, the whole sense of existence changes. The whole sense even of life and death is different. It changes. The whole sense of one's being is different. And see the emptiness of death, the emptiness of life and death, the emptiness of dukkha -- and that brings, at a certain level in the being, it brings a whole other level of freedom, and not without ethics -- not without ethics, because it's that Middle Way. So as I said -- I threw it out a couple of times -- it's funny: I don't think it's obvious that our suffering is actually tied to our perceiving inherent existence. I think it takes quite a while to see that.

This is from Nāgārjuna's Sixty Stanzas of Reasoning:

Those who assert [that] dependent phenomena [contingent phenomena, dependently arisen phenomena are] like [reflections of] moons in water ... not real and not unreal [that's the key point: not real and not unreal], are not [captivated] by views.^[22]

So this, as Tsongkhapa said, this Middle Way is so hard to find, to see, to rest in. So it's a profound, profound thing to really journey into the depth of what this means. It's about practice. And I keep saying over and [over], all this is about practice. It's not about abstract philosophy. I've been a bit more abstract/philosophical tonight than I have in other talks, but it's not really about that. It's about practice. All this, for me, is about practice. The more we see in practice, through practice, the emptiness of things, the more and more deeply we see that, the more it brings, unquestionably, the more it brings freedom, the more it opens up this capacity to give in life, opens up the capacity of the heart -- extraordinarily so.

And it doesn't lead to not paying one's bills, to not taking care of one's personal hygiene, to walking around bumping into things, to not caring, etc. If that is the case, that there's a respect for conventional reality, an increase in freedom and love and the rest of it, you know you're on the right track. And in terms of practice, that I know. That I know: the more deeply we see into emptiness, the more that this affects, without contradicting ethics or anything -- actually, with more care, more reverence and honouring, and wanting to serve life, despite its emptiness, and the planet, and all the rest of it. It comes organically out of the seeing of the emptiness. And that I know.

Just to finish with a quote of Nāgārjuna:

Relying on actions and effects [or relying on cause and effect, relying on karma; whatever, however you like] within knowing this emptiness [within really knowing this] of phenomena is even more amazing than the amazing and even more marvelous than the marvelous.^[23]

Yogi 8: Can you repeat that?

Rob: Repeat it?

Relying on actions and effects within [really] knowing this emptiness of phenomena is even more amazing than the amazing and even more marvelous than the marvelous.