24 April 2020, Friday: my first experience with the Mixed Nuts Reading Club reading a section of Sunlight on the Path to Freedom: A Commentary to the Diamond Cutter Sutra by Choney Lama, Drakpa Shedrup (1675-1748) translated by Geshe Michael Roach with Elizabeth van der Pas.
Mixed Nuts Reading Club is a series of in-depth episodes on Buddhist philosophy and practical applications of the philosophy. The videos are not focused on discussing translation or linguistics. The focus is on having an engaging discussion related to Buddhist practice and philosophy as it emerges from translation.
This reading club was apparently started to thank sponsors who have been regularly contributing to the Asian Classics Input Project, was it’s not exclusive to only the sponsors.
The Asian Classics Input Project is a not-for-profit 501(c)3 organization dedicated to the preservation of ancient Asian wisdom. ACIP conducts preservation projects in libraries, monasteries, and institutes throughout Asia. We are committed to creating a searchable digital database that provides scholars, academic institutions, and practitioners access to a virtual library of authentic sacred and classical texts.
As a first-time participant of the on-going reading club, I really didn’t know what to expect from it.
It started with a moderator appointed for the session of the week introducing the text and the various panelists who would be discussing the text for that session. Then they will take turns to read one or a couple of verses, pause where the moderator or one of the panelists would ask questions, a discussion ensues, then back to reading more verses, until they complete the section.
As participants, we are basically attending a webinar where we can leave questions in the q&a section in ZOOM, but that doesn’t guarantee you any answers.
The text for this session:
Sunlight on the Path to Freedom: A Commentary to the Diamond Cutter Sutra
by Choney Lama, Drakpa Shedrup (1675-1748)
translated by Geshe Michael Roach with Elizabeth van der Pas
- Section 20 (I counted and numbered the sections for my own reference)
- Verse 162 – 168
- Infinite good karma
You can check out the translated commentary here and simply search (command + f for macs or ctrl + f for others) “infinite good karma” and you will get to the section I’m talking about.
Obviously I missed 19 sections before this.
Verse 162
And thrust into the first verse I see, verse 162, what really jumped out was “take all the planets of this great world system, a system with a thousand of a thousand of a thousand planets.” Despite the reference to covering these thousands of planets with “seven kinds of precious substances and offering to someone,” something else caught my attention.
What was it?
The word, “this.”
But I’ll tell you why in a bit after we look at the next verse, where the panelists discussed what it means by “ultimately” and “nominally.”
Verse 163
“Neither these, nor any other object in the universe, exists ultimately. Nonetheless, they do exist nominally.”
So here’s a summary on what was discussed:
- To better understand the above, you have to know emptiness, you have received a good teaching on emptiness, otherwise it will be very confusing.
- Things don’t exist ultimately. But they do exist nominally. In “pen” language, when you say “doesn’t exist ultimately,” it means it doesn’t come from its own side.
- It’s a little confusing to say it exists, but it exists nominally; it exists in name only: it means the picture coming from your mind.
- Usually there is a big fight about the word ultimately—that it has two different meanings
- When you say ultimate reality: that means highest reality (highest & most important thing in the world that exists)
- When you use it as an adverb: then it’s like a bad word in Buddhism.
The last point about the word “ultimately,” I guess not just for translators but for the readers, is sufficient cause for confusion given the nuance of the word “ultimate” in Buddhism.
My sense is this.
- Ultimate, in Buddhism, refers to the highest reality that exists—the foundational reality that all realities are based on.
- Ultimately, as an English adverb, means finally or at the most basic level, fundamentally—which means if we go back to the verse itself, “Neither these, nor any other object in the universe, exists ultimately,” we’re saying that nothing exists fundamentally, independently (independent of karma, or sometimes this word “self-existently” is used, or the expression “existing/coming from its own side”).
Verse 164
Moving on to the next verse, verse 164 talks more about an elementary world system, a second-order world system is of an intermediate type and finally a “third-order system is a thousand of these.”
Ok I’m confused because it feels like esoteric, but again, it’s bringing me back to why I was hung on the word “this” earlier.
And if I tie it back to
“Neither these, nor any other object in the universe, exists ultimately. Nonetheless, they do exist nominally.”
It feels like even the universe doesn’t exist ultimately.
That this universe is but one of the many world systems that exist nominally.
Verse 165
And to finally get to why the word “this” caught my attention, you’ve got to look at verse 165
“that they were to cover all the planets of this system with the seven kinds of precious substances”
See!
“this system”
Again, the word “this.”
Verse 168
Skipping to verse 168, we see a summary of this section: infinite good karma.
The summary’s like code.
Okay first, I get that the section is talking about infinite good karma. And the discussion between Lord Buddha and Subhuti really tears apart the idea of things existing ultimately which can be extremely confusing to the uninitiated.
But at the same time, I am also exploring the ideas in the background—world systems, planets, universe. As well as a mention of “mind stream” of a person. And the word “this.”
These are ideas that we have always understood from a scientific standpoint.
(I mean, I have a 5-year-old nephew at home educating me on the solar system, the number of moons that Jupiter has, and in how many trillion years, planet earth and whatever else will be destroyed. He lost me after a while.)
Conclusion: What’s Next?
Using the understanding of ultimate, ultimately, and nominally in this section, it really makes you think—almost mind expanding, but wait a minute, the mind doesn’t exist ultimately but nominally too, right?—how everything works.
This section here, is definitely intriguing and contentious, it challenges the way we have understood how everything works. More than just science in the sense of the solar systems–planetary science, but quantum physics, science that is trying to explain how everything works.
And it also challenged how we understood our world from a linguistic standpoint.
Hence, my obsession with the word, “this.”
Because this apple, this idea, or even that, these, those—demonstrative pronouns, based on what I understood from the section above, demonstrates how we have always understood, thought, felt that things, even the words we use, exist ultimately.
Thoughts?
(They don’t exist ultimately, but nominally too. Okay, pushing the joke too far.)
What’s next for me, I gotta go look at the past 19 sections that I missed, and start from the top, so I can continue on my quest.
What do you think? (Not just my next step, but what you’ve read.)