Todayand#8217;s FBA Dharmabyte, and#8220;Sunyata as Conditioned Co-Productionand#8221; comes to us from Nagapriya as he explores the important concept of sunyata in Mahayana Buddhism. Nagapriya explains how sunyata reformulates the fundamental Buddhist concept of conditioned co-production in the talk and#8220;The Philosophy of Emptiness.and#8221;
Talk given at Manchester Buddhist Centre, 2009
This talk is part of the series Visions of Mahayana Buddhism.
[music] Dharma Vites is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for real life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, come and join us at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. Thank you, and happy listening. Okay, in doing that, really, I aim to present Shinnutar in a very, very simple way. I don't regard myself as very able to grasp difficult ideas, so I like to simplify things. I like to see things in very, very simple terms, and to me, the idea of Shinnutar is really actually quite simple. It's a very straightforward idea. It is simply a restatement of the basic teaching of early Buddhism. And what is that teaching? Does anybody know? Would anybody risk a guess? Well, you should know. Let's have someone else. [laughter] Someone else? Pardon? No, sir. Okay, I'll give you that, because I think that would work, too. But there's a more fundamental way of expressing that, usually, and a more fundamental way of expressing that. [inaudible] Right, so we collectively arrived at the three marks of condition existence, yeah? So, no fixed self, actually, we didn't, sorry, you repeat the same one twice, didn't you? But anyway, no fixed self, impermanence, and suffering, yeah. But these are expressions of a more fundamental teaching. Perhaps you didn't know this. Does anybody know what the more fundamental teaching is? You're going to have to tell them, Chandana. [inaudible] I think it might be conditioned co-production. It's conditioned co-production or dependent origination, yeah? So, dependent originations, yeah? Could have got that one wrong. Dependent origination says that all things arise in dependence upon conditions. When the conditions cease, the things themselves cease. So, this essentially means that everything's transitory, everything's changing, everything comes to an end. And therefore, everything is impermanent, nothing has a fixed self, and ultimately things are, well, unsatisfactory. They have an element of unsatisfactoriness because they don't stay in the way that we want them to. Yeah, so, my approach will be to see Shinjita as a re-expression, as a restatement of this fundamental teaching of dependent origination. And I hope that by the end of what I've said, you'll understand how they connect together, what that means. Before I go any further, although I said that I quite like simple ideas, and I think that Shinjita is quite a simple idea, sometimes the way that simple ideas are expressed is very, very complicated. And certainly when one is dealing with the philosophy of Shinjita, the philosophy of Majarmika, one can find oneself winding down very, very dark alleys, winding through all kinds of intellectual labyrinths and ending up completely lost, not knowing what any of it means. I think if any of you have ever tried to read a Majarmika text, you'll probably recognize that kind of experience. So, it can be quite difficult. It can at times be quite abstruse. I will warn you of that. So, I'm hoping that you're able to make the effort to try to get on board with this, to get to grips with what we're trying to deal with. And I think if you're able to do that, then by the end of it, you'll feel, I think you'll really feel, you will have grasped something important about Mahayana Buddhist ideas. So, just before I go any further, I've got a little quiz for you. So, I'm going to read out a short passage, and I'd like you to tell me if you can where this text comes from, where this passage comes from. Form is emptiness, and the very emptiness is form. Emptiness does not differ from form. Form does not differ from emptiness. Whatever is form, that is emptiness. Whatever is emptiness, that is form. The same is true of feelings, perceptions, impulses, and consciousness. Fantastic. It comes from the heart sutra. That's right. Yeah. And I imagine it's a text that many of us have recited many, many times. But what on earth does it mean? Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form. Emptiness doesn't differ from form. It doesn't differ from emptiness. What does it mean? It just sounds, in some respects, it sounds a little bit like gobbledygook. So, I'm hoping also, by the end of what I've said, it will mean something if it doesn't already. You'll have a sense of what is being communicated in that passage. Just before going into more detail, really, about the perfect wisdom text and the philosophy of Shunutah, I wanted to kind of say a little bit about the word philosophy and how it might be used in the context of talking about Mahayana Buddhism. As a term philosophy, as you might know, comes from the Greek. And it's a tradition of thought that has evolved within Western culture. And fundamentally, philosophy is concerned with two things. At least this is my understanding of it. The first thing that it's concerned with is what is called ontology. Ontology is thought about what exists in the world, thought about what is. That's what ontology is. What is the world made up of? What is the world really like, these kinds of questions? These are ontological type questions. So, Western philosophy is very much concerned or is often concerned with this question. The other thing that it's concerned with is called epistemology. "Pistemology" is thought about the nature of knowledge, about what we can know, and about how we would know it, what structures of thought and understanding we would use to know things. So, philosophy comprises ontology and epistemology. Why am I talking about this at all? Why is this remotely relevant? Well, because I would say that fundamentally, Mahayana Buddhist thought is not concerned fundamentally with either of these things. Its main purpose is not either A) to describe what there is in the world, or B) to tell us what we can know and how we know it. Which is not to say that these things are not embraced within Mahayana thought. I would say its key, or the key to, well all Buddhist thought really is what I referred to the week before last, is soteriology. Soteriology is simply a doctrine of liberation, and it may even be a path to liberation. That's what Buddhist thought is concerned with. So, it is concerned to liberate us. That's its purpose. And any other purpose that it serves is subordinate to that overwhelming purpose to liberate us. And to liberate us means to free us from all of the limitations we experience, in particular, greed, age and delusion would be a simple way of expressing that. So, the reason why I've spoken about this, to some degree, is that at first sight, magiarmica philosophy, the philosophy of Shen Yutah seems to be very, very concerned with ontology, in other words, what there is. Although as well see, it's actually more concerned with what there isn't. But I'll come on to that in a moment. So, it appears as though it's very, very concerned with that, and it can therefore seem to be a very abstract form of philosophizing, and maybe not that related to the realities, the needs of spiritual practice and transformation. But I hope that as we go along, some of that relevance will be drawn out, and I'll be able to make a link between some of the seemingly abstract thoughts and the more spiritual, underlying spiritual purpose that this thought serves. We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebutestaudio.com/community. And thank you. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]
