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Looking at the Mind within Appearances

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T here are three different approaches to insight practice that are presented in this text on mahamudra: looking at the mind within stillness; looking at the mind within occurrence; and looking at the mind within appearances. The point of presenting three techniques is that any particular individual may respond more to one of these three approaches than to the others. In Pointing Out the Dharmakaya, five approaches, including these three, are presented. Of these three presented in The Ocean of Definitive Meaning, looking at the mind within stillness is presented as the main one. The other two—looking at the mind within occurrence, and looking at the mind within appearances—are presented as supplements to that. That is why, if you look at the outline of your text, you will see that, although we would think of looking at the mind within appearances as the third section, it is called the second. It is called the second because it is the second supplement to the first section. Here calling it the second section means that it is the third [laughter].


Even though it is, in a sense, supplemental to looking at the mind within stillness, looking at the mind within appearances is presented here somewhat elaborately, which means it is divided into four practices and four presentations: seeing appearances as mind; seeing mind as emptiness; seeing emptiness as spontaneous presence; and seeing spontaneous presence as self- liberation.


Before I start to explain the first of these, seeing appearances as mind, I would like to relate something about my own experience of these ideas, simply because I imagine you may have undergone this yourselves. When I was quite young and began to study texts, the first thing about emptiness that I encountered in my study was the presentation of the selflessness of persons. When I first studied this, I thought it was ridiculous, because what was being said to me was that mind did not exist. I thought, “Well, that is weird. I know my mind exists.” But when I analyzed my mind, according to the reasonings presented in the context of this study, the reasonings that have been produced by the various scholars and siddhas, I became certain in the sense of conceptual understanding that the personal self does not exist.


Then, when I went on in my studies and was exposed to the idea that not just the personal self but all phenomena lacked true existence in that same way, I first thought, “Well, it is true that the personal self does not exist; this has been proven to me. But to say that all things are empty is going too far. After all, I see things, I hear things, and so on. How can these be nonexistent?” Then when I encountered the reasonings of the middle way school, and they were explained to me by my tutors, I realized that I had been wrong. It was true that all phenomena lacked true existence. At that point I developed certainty based upon a theoretical conceptual understanding of the selflessness of persons and the selflessness of phenomena. Then I started to be advised by some of my teachers that theoretical understanding alone—which makes you, in pejorative terminology, what we call a thinker or speculator—was not enough. They began to encourage me actually to look at my own mind without analysis, and they said, “If you look at your mind, good experience, direct experience, is possible.”


When I started to look at my mind, I became convinced that emptiness is not something distant from us. It is not something that we have to turn outwards to discover. It is always potentially available to us as a direct object of experience. What I am saying to you is that these doctrines are not mere superstition. They can actually be validated through your own direct experience of them. I mention this because, on the face of it, these four statements—appearances are mind; mind is emptiness; emptiness is spontaneous presence; and spontaneous presence is self-liberation—may sound somewhat grandiose and unverifiable. But if you actually go through these practices you will be able to experience the truth of these assertions on your own.


The first of the four stages of looking at the mind within appearances is seeing appearances as mind. When the subject of the relationship between mind and appearances is presented using inferential valid cognition, we return to the basic format of the Buddha’s three dharmachakras. As you know, the Buddha taught in three distinct phases, which we call the three dharmachakras. Subsequently, the teachings given in that way were formalized or codified by scholars and siddhas as what we now call the four systems. The four systems— called the vaibhashika, the sautrantika or sutra system, the chittamatra or mind only, and the madhyamaka or middle way—are not really understood as different systems, but as different stages of subtlety or profundity in the presentation of the buddhadharma. The first, the vaibhashika, is designed for beginners; the second is more profound; the third more profound than that; and the fourth more profound than the third. They can be divided in different ways. The first two systems, the vaibhashika and the sautrantika, have in common that they assert the true existence of external objects. The second two, the chittamatra and the madhyamaka, have in common that they assert the nonexistence of external objects. Here we are talking about understanding, rather than realization. We are talking about a conceptual view.


Because of the progressive refinement of these four views, we generally use the first three systems—the two which assert the existence of external objects, and the third, the mind only school—to describe how things appear, which we refer to as relative truth. And we use the fourth, the middle way school, to describe how things are, which is absolute truth.


The first of the two schools that assert the existence of external objects, the vaibhashika school, has a quite rough or coarse assertion of reality. They, and the sautrantikas, do assert or accept the existence of external objects. However, they do so in a particular way. Essentially what they say is that what we see—mountains, buildings, and our own bodies, etc.—are not merely projections of our mind. These things actually exist externally, but not in the coarse way that they seem to, not as what we see them to be, but as subtle particles. So, according to the vaibhashikas and the sautrantikas, the subtle particles, which are the building blocks of physical phenomena, have true existence. Coarse appearances, according to these schools—in other words, the appearance of things that are made up of particles but appear not to be made up of particles, but to be solid units—these coarse appearances are mental designations, based upon the experience of things that are really just made up of particles. To put this clearly, a mountain, according to the vai- bhashikas and sautrantikas, is not really one thing. We designate it as one thing with the concept, mountain. It is actually many things. It is made up of many, many subtle particles. In the same way, your body is not one thing. Your body has parts: a head, a trunk, and four limbs. Even if you select one of the limbs—for example, your hand—your hand is not one thing. It has many parts: the five fingers, the palm, and so forth. Even if you select one of these five fingers, such as the thumb, the thumb is not one thing. It has three joints. (Translator: “Mine only has two. [laughter] Anyway, it has some joints.” [laughter])—And then if you select any one those joints, that joint is not one thing, because it consists of skin and flesh and bone and muscle, and so forth. If you continue this mode of analysis, eventually you get to the point at which the only things that you can say that exist, according to the vaibhashikas, are the subtle particles of which all of these physical substances are made. Therefore, they say that the entire world is made up of particles and that the particles truly exist, but that the coarse appearances that we designate, based upon the presence of the particles, do not.


The vaibhashika and sautrantika presentation of the true existence of s ubtle particles, and, therefore, the existence of external objec ts, is the same. They differ, however, in their presentation of how external objects appear to us— in other words, as to what we are actually seeing when we see something. The vaibhashikas say that objects are external to us, and that they exist because they are made up of particles. Mind cognition, they say, is internal, And what happens when you experience things—for example, when you look at columns, houses, mountains, or different colors—is that you are actually seeing them. The object is out there and it exists; you are in here, your cognition functions, and you experience it. In other words, the vaibhashikas’ presentation of perception is very much the way we normally think of it.


But the sautrantikas dispute this. The sautrantikas say that the defining characteristic of cognition, that which experiences, is cognitive lucidity, the capacity to be aware. The defining characteristic of external objects, which they assert to exist in the sense that they are compounded of subtle particles, is matter. They say that matter and cognition are of utterly different natures. Therefore, the sautrantikas say that, when you see something, you are not actually seeing the thing itself. You are seeing a mental image of it. According to the sautrantikas, in any act or event of perception, what is actually happening is that your mind is adopting the form of the object. The sautrantikas assert that the object exists externally; it is composed or compounded of particles. In the very first instant of contact with the object, the characteristics of the object are perceived. But in the second instant, what you experience is a mental replica, or a mental similitude, of the object. So, according to the sautrantikas, what we see and hear, and so on, is mind, not the object.39 But, they also say that the objective basis, in the language of the sautrantikas, the hidden objective basis for that [entirely mental event of perception], does exist externally. For, example, when you look at a mountain, according to the sautrantikas, what you are seeing is not the mountain, but your own mind. However, the mountain does exist. The mountain is the hidden objective basis which serves as the cause for your being able to see the mental replica of a mountain. According to the sautrantikas, the relationship between truly existent external phenomena and the displays of mind that we experience is one of cause and result.


So, according to the sautrantikas, appearances are half mind and half not. What we see, what we experience, is mind, but the basis of seeing, the basis of that experience, is not mind. It is external. In his presentation of valid cognition the great master Dharmakirti taught that the sautrantika view is a very useful way to consider external phenomena and our relationship with them. About this he said, “When you look outside, you must mount the stairs of the sautrantika system, because it is a very appropriate and convenient way to evaluate your relationship with external phenomena.” As much as the sautrantika way of describing experience is valuable, when we actually consider the status, from their own side, of external phenomena, we tend to resort to the third system of tenets, which is the mind only school. The mind only school differs from the sautrantika in that it does not accept the existence of the objective bases of appearances. There are two parts to their presentation of this. According to the mind only school, the sautrantika description of experience as the appearance of mind in the guise of external phenomena, is very good. But one of the bases of that assertion, that there is an objectively existent external phenomenon as which the mind masquerades, is disputed by them. The mind only school says that it is unfitting or unreasonable to assert the true or absolute existence of the hidden objective bases of perception. They say that one reason why it is unfitting to do so is that it is unreasonable to assert that such an objective basis could somehow cause the mind to generate a replica of the objective basis. The mind only school says that as a description of relative truth it is useful to talk about particles, because, of course, it can be determined that substances are indeed made up of particles. What they dispute is that if you assert that these particles have a degree or status of existence greater than that of the coarse substances which are made up of them, you must be asserting that the particles or some component of the particles is truly indivisible.


According to the mind only school, if you analyze particles, no matter how subtle in detail this analysis becomes, you always find parts. Every particle always turns out to be made up of smaller particles. And no matter how long you continue to divide them with your mind, you never get to the end of this. No matter how many steps or stages down the way you go in your analysis, you never seem to find something that is not made up of at least two parts [like a right side and a left side, or a top and a bottom]. Even if, theoretically, you were to find a particle that could not in any way be physically reduced to smaller components, and it were in some physical way truly the smallest existent thing, there would have to be more than one of them to make up coarse physical objects. Otherwise, there could be no appearances of coarse, visible objects, since such objects could obviously not be made up of one particle. So if there were more than one particle—let us say if there were two of them—then they would have to be in some locational relationship to one another. That would mean that there would be a surface on each particle, or part of a surface of each particle, that would be facing the other particle, and a surface that would be facing away from that particle. Of course, there would be more than that, but we are keeping it simple for the sake of discussion. In that way each particle would have to have at least two parts. It would have to have a part facing the other particle and a part not facing the other particle, which would mean that it was not truly partless. According to the mind only school, it is true that particles exist as the building blocks of phenomena, but they exist as relative truths. They do not exist as absolute truths.


The mind only school’s basic criticism of the sautrantika assertion of external objects as truly existent because they are composed of particles which are indivisible is that all particles, no matter how subtle, are aggregates, and, therefore, not indivisible. They can always be further divided. This assertion is presented in detail, using the argument of the different faces or surfaces which a particle must have to have a certain identity in relation to other particles. For example, one argument is to imagine three particles that have a certain relationship with one another. We could say that there is one toward the east, one in the middle, and one toward the west. Well, if there is one in the middle, between two other particles, then it must have an eastern face and a western face, by the very fact that part of it is facing the east and part of it is facing the west. Therefore, any particle must have at least two identifiable parts. Through this type of reasoning, the mind only school comes to the conclusion that it is impossible to assert the true and independent existence of external objects on the basis of their being composed of particles, because it is impossible reasonably to assert the true and independent existence of particles, since they are themselves aggregates. So, the first argument was the refutation of the sautrantikasassertion of truly existent particles. The second is their assertion of the centrality of cognition. This has two parts: the assertion of the nature of experience, and the assertion of the unity of experience. The mind only school’s assertion of the cognitive nature of experience is, simply put, that our only reason for asserting the existence of anything is that we experience it. We only come up with the idea that the mountain exists, because we see it. The only proof of things is experience. At some point, proof has to be based on experience. And experience, by definition, always occurs within the mind.


Their second argument, the unity of experience, is that, if what we see truly exists external to our minds, then it should continue to appear independent of a mind, independent of a perceiver. And yet, no one has ever experienced anything without their experiencing it. There can be no appearance without a mind to experience it. In short, the only basis for the assertion of existence is appearance; and the only possible context for appearance is a mind to which something appears. The mind only school admits that, when we look at something like a mountain, it does seem to be outside of ourselves, and that we, therefore, assume that it is outside of our mind, but in actual fact it is appearing within our mind. It is an experience that takes place within our mind. For example, when you are dreaming, say the chittamatrins, you might dream of a house, and in the dream you seem to be inside the house. But in fact, the house is within your experience of it and, in that sense, within your mind. When you dream you seem to inhabit a body, and yet that body in the dream is within your experience within your mind. It is much the same way in the waking state as well; everything that we see, everything that we experience, regardless of whether it seems to be internal or external, is within the sphere of our experience—and therefore within our mind.


All of these arguments and proofs involve inferential valid cognition, and constitute the reasons that the first three systems of tenets respectively have given for considering appearances to be mind. Especially important among these are the reasonings of the third system of tenets, the mind only school. However, the question remains: If that is true, why do we experience things the way we do and why do we experience things at all? For example, when you look at a mountain, it is huge and impressive. It does not seem as though it is within your mind or within you at all. But according to the mind only school, we experience what we do and the way we do because of habits that have been established in the all-basis consciousness. For example, when you are dreaming, the basis of the dream images is your daytime experience. In the same way, according to the mind only school, the basis of experience is not a hidden objective basis, as asserted by the sautrantikas, but the habits within the all-basis consciousness. It is therefore called a subjective basis. If you consider what happens when you dream, as you go to sleep, the undercurrent of thought starts to turn from being simply thoughts into being progressively more and more vivid images. These are experienced, of course, by the sixth consciousness. Nevertheless, according to valid cognition texts, during the dream state the sixth consciousness functions somewhat differently from the way it functions in the waking state. You remember that in the waking state the sixth consciousness only experiences generalized abstractions based upon the sense experiences. In the dream state the sixth consciousness actually experiences the images within it directly. And these images, which are vivid similitudes of sense experience, are therefore not thought of as generalized abstractions. They are thought of as a dream state equivalent to sense experience. In the context of dreaming, within the sixth consciousness, all of the functions of the five sense consciousnesses are duplicated in a way that they are not during the waking state. Of course, these are not true sense consciousnesses, in that the sense organs are not functioning, as they do during the daytime. A duplicate set of the five sense consciousnesses, pertaining to the sixth consciousness, is functioning. Therefore, because of their functioning, appearances resembling those of the five senses occur during dreams.

Those are, briefly put, the arguments for the assertion that appearances are mind. And all of that, of course, involves inference. Now, we turn to direct experience. What is presented at this point in our text is how through meditation direct experience appears as mind. This has three sections: two practice sessions, and one teaching session. The two practice sessions are the two parts of working with the relationship between appearances and mind. The first is looking at appearances and discovering them to be mind. The second part is looking at the body and discovering it to be mind. And then there is one teaching session, which provides support for these two practices by discussing the reasons why this experience or insight is valid by quoting the songs of mahasiddhas. The first practice is concerned with appearances in the sense of external objects, what we normally would regard as outside of ourselves. The practice is to look directly at an external object. When you look at an external object for a long time it becomes unpleasant. You really get tired of looking at it. You want to stop; your eyes start to sting or smart. But if you look directly at the object without any kind of prejudice or reservation about what you are going to discover, you will become aware that what you have regarded as an external object is merely an event within your eye consciousness or an instant of eye consciousness. What you are experiencing does not exist out there; it is not an external event. It is an event of the eye consciousness. Nevertheless, it continues to appear vividly in the way that it normally does as though it were physically external to you.


The second part of the practice is to look at your body in the same way and to scrutinize the relationship between mind and body and to ask yourself several questions: How are the body and mind really connected? What is the true relationship between them? For example, is there such a thing as a mind apart from a body, or a body apart from a mind? Does the mind inhabit the body? Or is the body merely an appearance within the mind? Our text tells us that if you pursue this meditation of scrutiny then you will experience directly that the body is really an appearance to and within your mind. Those are the two practice sessions.


If you practice these meditations, you will experience these things. But if you find it very difficult to do, if you find this approach difficult, then for the time being you can limit your meditation on appearances to the abstractions or generalizations that arise within the mind. In other words, if you do not wish to contemplate the nature of external phenomena in this way, you can simply consider or scrutinize the nature of what the sixth consciousness perceives, because that is also an aspect of appearances.

I’m going to stop there for this morning and continue with the reading transmission. [[[Rinpoche]] continues with the reading transmission.] [[[Rinpoche]] and students dedicate the merit.]



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