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19860405GRJHNLSAS 3

He had a white stupa, around which he used to go and walk. Around the stupa he used to have four secretaries – each on one side – dealing with four totally different subjects. On one side somebody was dealing with grammar and poetry, on another side astrology and so on; four totally different subjects. While walking around his stupa he started dictating whatever subject the secretary on that side was dealing with and on the next side he started dictating another subject. Going around the four sides, he dictated four totally different subjects: astrology, medicine, Buddhist philosophy and poetry. And his poems were beautiful, not of topmost quality, but real good ones. So this fellow going around the stupa, was doing all these four things together and that is why his works piled up to 135 volumes and even then, I think, the work was incomplete, because his works have never been published in Tibet. There is only a copy of the manuscript which in the seventies has been published in Delhi. He wrote so much, so fantastic! Really an unbelievable amount of work, on Kalachackra, on Guhyasamaya, on this, on that! Really volume after volume you open en it continues, continues, fantastic!

Bodong Rinpoche and Tagtsang Lotzawa jumped on Tsongkhapa the moment they read his Golden Rosary. They said they laid on Tsongkhapa a number of objections, called the ‘eighteen laws of contradictory statements'. It were not mere statements but more than two volumes were written on it.

Later, after his presentation of emptiness Tsongkhapa wrote a praise to Buddha. In that he wrote how wonderful Buddha is, how he presented the emptiness. On the basis of Buddha’s presentation of emptiness, Tsongkhapa wrote a short praise of about ten pages in poetry form. That praise became quite popular in central Tibet and the beggars had started memorizing it and were saying it on their way begging.

When Bodong Rinpoche was in Bodong staying in his house and heard the beggars, he heard one of them saying something very important and very nice. Bodong immediately started listening and decided by his mind it had to be a work Nagarjuna which he had not seen. Just when he had decided that, the words came:

And I studied numerous treatises

Both Buddhist and non-Buddhist,

But, still outside, my mind

Agonized in the trap of doubts.

So I went to the night-lily garden

Of the treatises of Nagarjuna

Prophesied to elucidate correctly

The method of your unexcelled vehicle,

Free of extremes of being and nothingness.

So he said: ‘If it is not from Nagarjuna, it has to be from Chandrakirti. Who else can it be?’ But then the beggar continued :

And there I saw, by the kindness of the guru,

Everything illumined by the garland of white light

Of the eloquent explanation of the glorious Moon (Chandrakirti)

Whose expanding orb of taintless wisdom

Courses unobstructed in the sky of the scripture,

Dispelling the darkness of the extremist heart,

Eclipsing the constellations of false teachings;

And then and there,

My mind attained relief at last!

Praise of Buddha Sakyamuni for his teaching of relativity.

in: Thurman, Life and teachings of Tsongkhapa, pg. 99-107

Now Bodong jumped from his seat, ran down the house chased the beggar, caught him and said: ‘Who wrote this book? Who?’ The beggar said: ‘It was done by Tsongkhapa.’ ‘Tsongkhapa did this!?’ That was shocking to Bodong and he asked the beggar to repeat and repeat it. And he wrote it down from the mouth of the beggar. He started reading it and said: ‘The eighteen laws that I have been writing are a very great mistake’. Immediately he packed and went to Central Tibet to meet Tsongkhapa. However, he was too late to meet him. Only two days before he reached the Ganden monastery, Tsongkhapa had passed away.

Emptiness – shunyata

So that very shunyata is very important. The difference between Buddhism and Hinduism is on the importance and the presentation of shunyata. Chandragomin, an early Indian Buddhist saint and scholar who wrote a praise to Buddha, has mentioned :

Those who are not following the emptiness properly,

Even though you go to the highest level of meditation,

when somehow one day something happens,

the power of the samadhi will be shocked and finishes.

When that happens, you instantaneously increase your delusions

and you a total fall-back.

The topmost level of meditation is a samadhi called ‘peak of cyclic existence’. That is a deep concentrated meditation that goes on for eons. It is called the level of: ‘you function yet you don’t function’. It is a sort of half-dead type of existence. Once you get a fall-back from that, you become all over again quite a stupid person, because you have been sitting in samadhi too long,

Buddha has recommended his disciples and followers not to go into these samadhis, not even into the first actual level. There are four form levels and four formless levels of samadhi and each again is divided into three: the preliminary level, the actual level and the conclusion level.

The preliminary level of the first samadhi stage is recommended by Buddha to be developed. It is the stage where you gain stability of mind, which we call zhiné or shamatha. It is the mind that does not go away from the object. You gain the power of control over your mind; that enables you to focus on an object as long as you need to. Buddha has recommended not to go beyond that. Buddha has recommended to cut the samadhi after that level and then use what we call vipasyana. That is more or less analytical meditation rather than concentrating. In Tibetan it is called lhagtong or ‘special seeing'. It is the seeing level and the specialty you see is the emptiness. Buddha has recommended to switch at this point to cutting the root of samsara, to deal with that here instead of going up all the seventeen level of samadhi. Chandragomin has praised Buddha for that :

The followers of Buddha, even if they do not attain the actual stage of the first samadhi,

they are able to cut the root of samsara. It is like removing the eye-ball of the evil.

That much effective you can function.

Four schools of thought on emptiness. Now what is that very, very important emptiness or view? Selflessness, nothing more. If you try to dig, dig, dig inside all that, it is selflessness. You may say: ‘Yes, I heard that, I know there is a self there, I am sitting, I am talking, I am listening, I am very much there, I can see it, I can feel it so how can there be a -less of self? Or is there something else to be -less?’ In other words, selflessness is -less of what?

From the viewpoint of presenting that -less of self there are a tremendous amount of different views, hundreds of different views, Buddhist as well as non-Buddhist. Buddhism recognizes four main theoretical viewpoints.

1. There is the lower viewpoint held by Vasubandhu and others. There selfless is being -less of an independent, permanent, self-existing self. We perceive an I, as an independent self-permanent creator or functioner, a sort of ‘the one’ type of thing; from that one is to be -less.

2. A little better than that: the self which is existing by its own substance, the independent substantially existing I is the I that one is to be -less of. Did you get me?

3. The Cittamatra or Mind-Only school is divided into two: the more and the lesser intelligent one. The intelligent part of this school and certain parts of the fourth one, Madhyamika School, – Nagarjuna’s followers but not the group of Buddhapalita and Chandrakirti – say something better than the previous ones. They say: the self which is not labeled and presented by a perfect mind, is independently existing without depending on the labeling of the true mind; from that one is to be -less. (I am giving you these, because by giving those different views you can understand it better and better. If I just would give you the ultimate viewpoint, you will not understand a word of it.)

4. The Prasangika Madhyamika School. This is the ultimate viewpoint, Nagarjuna’s correct viewpoint presented by Buddhapalita and Chandrakirti. That is: not just only labeled by the mind alone – the difference lies in the just! – but and also existing from its own nature; that is the actual self one has to be -less of.

Because of this, because of the -lessnes of the self, Manjushri has stressed to get to know the dependent arising. If you know the dependent arising, then the selflessness is easy to understand.

Dependent arising

What does dependent arising mean?

(1) Both lower schools will say: dependent arising means depending on cause and effect.

(2) The lower Madhyamika School will say: Dependent arising means that things depend on parts and parcels. The table depends for its existence on the shape of the table, the name of the table, the legs of the table, the top of the table etc. If you start taking it into parts, take the top off, the legs off etc., then you don’t have a table any more. But when you don’t have a table then, it does not mean you understood the emptiness of the table! Then emptiness would be very easy. But the table’s existence does depend on those parts. That is dependent arising.

(3) Buddhapalita’s and Chandrakirti’s viewpoint is: Dependent arising is being dependent on the perfect object and the perfect mind which perceives and labels the perfect object. Existence is dependent on this basis. We call that the subtle dependent arising.

Subtle dependent arising

The subtle dependent arising is what we’ll talk about now. Subtle dependent arising is not true emptiness. However, knowing the emptiness through the dependent arising will protect the individual from falling into the nihilistic viewpoint. Here it has to be the Middle-Way Viewpoint, in Tibetan Uma, also called the Central Path. That must be free from the two extremes: nihilism and ‘existentialism’ or eternalism. If you proceed towards emptiness through the introduction of the dependent arising, you don’t have the danger of falling into the nihilistic viewpoint. Therefore it is important.

From the point of view of dependent arising all phenomena exist because of: the base on which you label, the mind which labels and the labeling itself. There is nothing which exists from its true nature, without depending. Similarly I exist on just the combination of my body and my mind and my name labeled on it. Remember every word of this line, because this is important! I do not exist on the combination of my body and mind without it being labeled. My body and my mind also do exist by combination and they do not exist from their own true nature. Therefore, there is no thing which exists from its own true nature. It is or has been existing just on the combination and also just on the labeling. Without that nothing exists.

Therefore any mind which accepts true existence has been proved to be a wrong mind and the object on which the recognition of true existence is given, is baseless. Did you understand that? The mind which says: ‘This is truly existing’, the mind which acknowledges true existence of all phenomena, has now no base. Because there is no phenomenon which is truly existing from its nature.

If there were a thing truly existing from its own nature, then it should not be dependent on other things. When something is depending on something else, it means it cannot stand on its own. When a person has to depend on a walking stick, it means he cannot walk by himself. If you can stand by yourself, there is no reason why you have to depend on a walking stick. Depending on a walking stick itself proves that you cannot stand by yourself. Similarly when you are depending on your combination, you are dependent, you cannot stand by yourself. So the mind which perceives that you exist from your own true nature, has no base. You do not exist from your true nature, because you are dependent.

Let me make it more clear. Let us say a person has been elected as a president. Ronald Reagan has been elected as president of the United States. Looking at Ronald Reagan you and I will recognize him as president of the US, perceive him as president, project him as president, call him president, and acknowledge him as president. It looks as though his presidency has been existing from its own nature. It looks like a natural-existing presidency, but he does not exist naturally as president. He is simply labeled as president; a correct object was labeled by a correct person in a correct manner. Do you get it?

Labeling. There are three points here: the labeling has to be done on a correct person, by a correct authority, in a correct manner, which means it can not be contradicted by any other true perceiving mind. His presidency is dependent on all these factors. If it were not dependent on all these factors, he would have been president from the beginning. If so, the moment Ronald Reagan was born, the president of the US would have been born. But nobody said at that time: ‘The president of the US is born’; they simply said: ‘The baby is born’. Right? The base to be qualified as president was not there; the factors on which a president depends, had not yet come about. Till all the factors are complete, he will not be called president, he will not handle as president.

So many factors are involved. The labeling is absolutely important, without labeling it cannot work. However, you have to label the correct object, it has to be done by a correct authority and on correct conditions, otherwise it does not work. Suppose we call somebody Mr. President. We label him president. If you do so, it will only be a nickname. He will not become president by that, because the object that you label is not correct or the person who labels is not the correct person to be labeled that way. So labeling one also has to be very careful about. The person that is fit to be labeled as a president, is labeled so on the correct base, by a correct authority, in this case the American public that elected him.

Take the candidate of the opposition. Before the election by the American public, he is labeled as candidate. That means he is labeled as president from the party’s point of view. But neither is he acknowledged as president nor will anybody call him president; everybody will call him a candidate for presidency. Nobody will call him president, though he was labeled so by a big party. Neither he acknowledges that nor do the people call him president, because the labeling authority is wrong. That is simple.

Similarly all other phenomena are labeled ‘This is this, this is that’. Without labeling nothing can exist. Similarly I have been labeled. If I had not been labeled, I could have existed from my own true nature and ever since I am born, you’d have said: ‘Gelek is born’. Nobody says: ‘Gelek is born’, because Gelek does not exist from its true nature. Like that everything depends. The existence of John, the existence of Gelek, the existence of Marianne, the existence of the table, the existence of everything depends on labeling. You get it?

Now I put it the other way round. If you say: ‘Okay, labeling is important; I accept; let me label the gold as brass and the brass as gold’ will that be okay? No. You cannot label gold as brass and brass as gold, can you? Well, someone may do it, but that does not mean the brass has become gold or vice versa, because the object you label is not the correct object. That I have been trying to say with the example of the elections.

There are three commonly accepted, important points needed for the labeling: 1) it is commonly accepted by a relative true mind, 2) there is not a direct contradiction from a relative true mind 3) and there is not a direct contradiction from an absolute true mind. So even in order to label, you have to have three qualities. The existence of you, me and everybody is dependent on the labeling and on the basis. Just on the combination of the basis and the labeling all are dependent; the labeling also has to have the three qualities.

A commonly accepted mind is called a correct mind or a true mind. No contradiction by a true mind means no contradiction by a real reliable mind. The absolute mind should also have no objections. Those three points I have mentioned.

I give you an example. Let us say you are going through an open area. From a distance you see a pile of stones or other material to mark the road. When you see that from a far distance, you may acknowledge there is a human being there. You don’t see it is just an object. You say: ‘There is a human being standing there’. You discuss it with your friends and all look and acknowledge it as a human being. Now what happens? You have labeled that as a human being. After that you accepted it as a human being. The second mind, the second moment, immediately start talking: ‘What is that man doing there? Who is he?’ All sorts of things come up. Then another man comes walking from that side into your direction and reaches you. So you ask him: ‘What is that man doing?’ He’ll say: ‘Which man?’ He will look behind and you say: ‘That one.’ ‘Oh. That is not a man; that is a pile of stones’. ‘Oh, a pile of stones!’ The moment you know that it is a collection of stones and not a man, the labeling as a man and acknowledging as a man will disappear. It disappears like a breath put on a mirror. That is what they mean by: a true mind is contradicting your mind. Your labeling has been contradicted by a true mind, therefore it cannot stand. A true mind here is the person who came and knew for sure. So anything that is labeled has to have a correct authority that is labeling.

If a wrong authority is used, it becomes totally something different, like the example of the nickname of president. A lot of people call their own son their prince. You labeled him that way, but it becomes only a nickname; he does not become prince at all.