Interval 7

This is the interval seven. And it shows not the juxtaposition between history and science, but rather an interval that allows for our education to move from history as a phase into science as a phase. And of course, this is the most difficult of all of the phases of education, and the one that has proved to civilizations to be the ultimate stumbling block, one which the 20th century did not solve. And part of the state of the world in the early 21st century is that we have regressed increasingly towards a medieval world again because of not making the transition of including science in our learning, in our education. Why would we regress to a medieval standpoint? Because a historical slide goes to the last place that was stable in terms of its sociological distribution. It's like a regression goes to its lowest common denominator. And the Renaissance world, the world of the enlightenment, the world of the American and French revolutions, the world of the development of science and technology over the last several hundred years. Based on the last 500 years, all of that was never stable in the sense that it was sociologically distributed in the working population of people. And so now we're going back and rapidly reassuming a world that ostensibly was left behind a thousand years ago. So again, we have assassins and crusades, and it would be a world that would be very recognizable to Richard the Lion-hearted and Robin Hood and finally Frederick Hohenstaufen. But it's not a world that we can live in, and hasn't been a world that we could have lived in for a very long time, so that this is a very difficult. Transition to make and each interval. Each of the eight intervals in the education present a week of transition. When those transitions are included into the design so that the design comes alive as an education, then those intervals, instead of being just transitions, become transforms. And part of the presentation today is one of the greatest transforms that civilization ever managed to make. And this was a transform that was done largely at the end of the first century AD and the beginning, just the very beginning of the second century AD. I would say that the locus of the transform was roughly about 70. To about 110 AD in that time period. The document that we're looking at, the book that we're looking at is very difficult to find. The translation I'm using is by Edward Conze. It's translated as the accumulation of precious qualities, and it is the original form. It's the short original form for the earliest sutra that appears in the traditional Mahayana, the Ashta Sahasrara Prajnaparamita. That's as the academic presentation of it. But we have to back up from this and take a look at our material. Take a look at the setting of it, both in terms of its own historical occurrence and in terms of its place in our education, to maybe understand something that's really quite simple and quite fundamental in basic. India around 330 BC. I was surprised to find an invader named Alexander the Great, and his armies that had come into northern India had come in through the Great Khyber Pass from what is today Pakistan, into the northern area, which is today Pakistan, Peshawar and Kashmir in that area. And Alexander's incursion brought with it a vision of a one world, Hellenistic based empire, which was itself an overlay of an earlier empire ideal, which was that of Persia, the Persian Empire, and that northern India had been incorporated into a Persian empire as early as about 200 years before Alexander the Great. By the five 30s BC, Cyrus the Great in Persia, who had taken over a whole series of Empire designs and made them his own, took over aspects of Iranian civilization that went back in turn almost to the beginnings of civilization in the Near East. Cyrus the Great had reformed all of these and put the various layers together in such a way that the arrangement led to his accomplishment and Alexander the Great, when he came in with his Hellenized vision of a single world, took the pattern that Cyrus the Great made and transformed it partially into a Greek ideal. But his Greek ideal, Alexander's Greek ideal was not based on Athens. It was not based on an Athenian Hellenism, not based on a Greek exclusive empire. But his idea was one of melding the Persian and the Greek together. And pursuant to this vision, Alexander had all of his generals and senior officers take Persian wives so that the children, the next generation, would be half Greek and half Persian. That they would have no fundamental allegiance to either, and yet have both together. When Alexander proved out to die so young. Every single Greek general and major officer put their Persian wives aside. Except one. The only man who kept his Persian wife was a general named Seleucus. And Seleucus came back after Alexander the Great's death to Reassume. Control over the by then shrunk but still fairly large Persian Empire, and it became known as the Seleucid Empire. The House of Seleucus. And it was under the descendants of Seleucus that you find the incursions all the time of trying to recapture the rest of the Greek possessions. The major one, of course, was what is today Israel was Palestine, because it was the natural end of the Fertile Crescent caravan routes and fronted on the Mediterranean Sea, so that all of the history of that southern Iranian Akkadian almost back to Sumerian times, all of their empires depended upon trade routes, trade routes that started somewhere and ended somewhere, and that you controlled the entire range of the route. Trade routes are not very good if you only contain part of it under your authority. You have to have all of it. You have to have your network in place. The Seleucid attempt to come back into India after Alexander died and left was thwarted by a very powerful Indian general, and his name was Chandragupta maurya, and Chandragupta maurya understood military tactics as well as Seleucus or any of the other generals that were left after Alexander died. And so, in northern India, what was forced into being was a Hellenistic empire that did not have a Hellenistic general at its head, a Hellenistic empire which had an Indian general at its head. And so the Mauryan Empire that was set up sought to supply its armies, its military machine, to keep it on a level with the pressure of the Seleucid Empire, trying constantly to come in and encroach, and so the Mauryan Empire constantly took in more and more of India, so that they had the resources in manpower and in money, in goods, in sheer logistical support, to keep the pressure so that northern India was in the Mauryan Empire and not in the Seleucid Empire all the time. In order to justify that the Mauryan Empire was indeed on a par with the Seleucid Empire in terms of legitimacy. The Mauryan Empire sought to make itself the legitimate heir of the Alexandrian world. Vision. Just as Ptolemy in Egypt was a competitor to Seleucus, and just as other Hellenistic kingdoms were competitors to Seleucus, so that you had a world that stretched largely from the Balkans to India, from Egypt into the Black Sea area, that are all grouped together, as you can call Hellenistic empires. The farthest eastern one is Marion, India. The Mauryan Empire in India. Now Chandragupta maurya, being a very wise tyrant, realized that he had to have his empire go to his descendants and in order to make sure that they would do that, he had many sons. In fact, he had more than 50 sons, and he had them all trained to be soldiers, to be candidates, to take over the Empire. And of course, all of these sons were raised to have the Alexander the Great temper. The military general outlook that what's mine is mine, and what's yours is negotiable. Over swords and all of the 50 sons of Chandragupta, within about 20 years of Chandragupta's death, had killed each other off. So that India was laid waste by this internecine warfare. And the only surviving son was the runt of the pack, who was a mulatto. He was part South Indian and part Greek princes, and his skin was splotched. His features were somewhat distorted. He had quite thick lips so that he looked like the stereotype of the ugly mulatto. And yet that son was the son who inherited the Mauryan Empire and his name was King Ashoka, and King Ashoka became the paradigm of the great enlightened ruler in Indian history, maybe the greatest of all Indian rulers. And it is under Ashoka that Buddhism spread from being a local phenomenon in a limited area of North India and became the most pervasive religious outlook and method of the whole Indian subcontinent. But because it was spread and distributed by the Mauryan Empire, it was always held to be ready to oppose any kind of Hellenistic incursion by others, by virtue that we're as good Greek Hellenistic people as you are. And so the whole northern section of India, all the way down to just there was one little portion of South India, the tip of the Indian subcontinent, that was not subsumed under the Mauryan Empire. All of that was promoted for several centuries, at least 200 years. We're as good a Greeks as anybody, but we're Indian Greeks. And so you have a king. Later on, after Ashoka, about a hundred years after his Greek name would have been The knees, but in the dialect of the way in which the histories were written. He is known in traditional history as King Melinda and Melinda. Megasthenes. Menander was partly of Indian heritage and partly of Greek heritage, and what he wanted to know was how to keep these two different aspects of his world and of his life together, working together, melded together in an operative way, so that it could be used as the central synthesizing core of the whole empire to keep it together. The biggest challenge was how to keep the Dravidian aspect of ancient India in interface with the Aryan aspect, not only of ancient India, but of the Greek incursion. And so they looked at this time to try to find some way to have a dialogue between these two, separate the dark native Indians, the light Aryan pioneers, invaders, and how to keep these two together so that in history there is a collection known as the Questions of King Milinda, and he has as his complement a dark Dravidian Buddhist monk named Nagasena, and he asks all the poignant questions of Greek philosophy to Nagasena and the dialogues of King Milinda are so profound that they were the only thing other than the Buddha's sermons to be included in the canon of Theravada Buddhism. It's the only thing other than the sayings of the Buddha that were included in the questions of King Milinda. One sees the dialogue form that one recognizes that this was the dialogue form of Plato. It's the dialogue form in its souped up dramatic mode that's Greek tragedy or Greek comedy. It is a form where the dialogue is not a sermon, but is a discovery mode, trying to bring two incommensurate together and the only way Incommensurate can be brought together is in a set which contains either a paradox because of transform, or a paradox because the disjunctive ness is seen to be illusionary. And out of this comes the development of a whole literature in North India known as the Prajnaparamita literature. They are all in dialogue form. They are not sermons. They claim to be a special enlargement, a visionary development of the native Indian Buddhism, and yet containing the seed of philosophical discussions that would be universally recognized as valid and interesting and germane throughout the world. They certainly knew of the West. Two of Alexandria. They knew of Athens. They knew of Rome. They knew of of the British Isles. But their emphasis in the Prajnaparamita dialogue literature is to find a way to bring in their own time the discussion of incommensurate to this kind of meeting. Either the polarity between the two disjunctive elements is an illusion, or that the two disjunctive units brought together form a unity in a paradoxical way, and this was the tact that was taken. The earliest of the Prajnaparamita literature. This Thus the Prajna paramita, ratna guna, Samkhya Gatha has within it the basic form of the entire array of issues and questions that were absolutely essential to be discussed, to be talked of. And in this dialogue, very much like the Hermetic literature, the Hermetic literature, having Hermes Trismegistus being a kind of a teacher to taught or to Asclepius, or there are usually one, two, or at the most three other figures other than Hermes in the Hermetic literature, which is contemporaneous with this, so that the Alexandrian Hermetic literature is an Egyptian Form of resolution, which is parallel to the Prajnaparamita. Form of resolution. Literature in India. So if Egypt and India, and at the same time in China, you had a literature which matured just a little bit before that, which was a Daoist literature, not Lao Tzu, not the Tao Te Ching and not Chwangtse, not the not the early classics of Daoism, but the Huainanzi. The discussions around Prince Weinan and his group from about 130 BC, and the way in which that developed into a Daoist wisdom literature later on. And by 150 A.D., you had in China A discussion of the deeper meaning of Lao Tzu by someone named Ho Sheng Kung. Who was a sage who lived along side of a river. A recluse or a young, brilliant man who died in his early 20s. Wang P, their commentaries on Lao Tzu became what was used rather than the Daodejing. Their understanding of the developments out of Zhuangzi became the developments that finally led to the beginnings of a real Chinese philosophy, not based on the classics, but based upon a transformation of all the commentaries and the classics, commentaries and commentaries, and finally a deeper Penetrative, visionary insight into the origins of the classics themselves, back to the basic nature out of which the classics would have come themselves. So the Daoist literature in China, the later Daoist, not what we would call. Classic Dao, but Taoism, a study of the Dao that is a parallel with the Prajnaparamita literature in India and with the Hermetic literature in Egypt. All of these are happening about the same time, and all of them have in common a need to present resolutions, either of the illusory quality of disjunctive ness, or of the paradoxical quality of a further reality yet to be discovered, whose bounds are not known and perhaps not knowable. And we're taking the Prajnaparamita literature because it's a very interesting case. The Prajnaparamita literature, as I'm saying to you, even though it is Buddhist, even though it comes from India, has triggers everywhere in it of the Hellenistic vision of the world. Now that Hellenistic vision of the world focused itself on Alexandria in ancient Rome. At the very beginnings of the Hellenistic era. The Alexandrian vision was a Greek transformation of the Egyptian. The early Ptolemies and Alexandria, when they had their statues made, they were made to look like ancient pharaohs with the headdress and the whole thing telling me the second looks exactly as if he were. Rameses looks exactly as if he were Khufu. He was raised by Greek tutors on the Isle of Kos in the Aegean, and was a perfect Greek gentleman. In this development in India, in the Prajnaparamita literature, their constant attempt was to look at the way in which the Greek had interpenetrated with the Egyptian, because they were having a very similar kind of a situation in India. They didn't know the Chinese tradition at this time. There was hardly any contact whatsoever. The contact Game. So long before the Prajnaparamita literature as to be almost unheard of and unknown. And for that we have to go back to the origins of the way in which Iranian civilization around 2500 BC, contemporaneous with the pyramids in Egypt, that the trade routes that were then being kept track of were not only trade routes between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea, that fertile Crescent, but Iran is like a great plateau, and that fertile crescent was a southern fertile crescent, and that north of the Iranian plateau in Central Asia, the big cities that were there then in nascent form, Samarkand and Bukhara had enormous long trade routes, their own kind of fertile crescent that went on to the east instead of going down through the Iranian plateau. They went along the river valleys and part of them went west. If you go from Bukhara or from Samarkand and you go west, you follow the rivers into the northern Caspian Sea or into the Aral Sea. And from there you can go on the Volga, and you can go into Russia, and you can go into the. As a matter of fact, all the way into the ice free northern oceans. And there was that kind of a contact. But the main thrust was to go from Samarkand and Bukhara into what is today China. But it wasn't China then. It wasn't Chinese, that whole swath of Central Asia. Once one came along, the various areas, as rivers were called then and emerged into this enormous basin that now is the Gobi Desert, the big Tarim Basin. At that time, 5000 years ago, most of the rivers flowed out of the mountain ranges to the south and the mountain ranges to the north, and fertilized a great deal of what is today Gobi Desert, one of the driest deserts in the world. So that there were interspersed in this vast land, large oasis, trading towns that were of Iranian foundation and the largest of the towns was a city that is still there. Hotan. Khotan. In ancient times, and Khotan was the place where the great caravan routes from Samarkand and Bukhara ended. There were trade routes that were developed beyond Khotan, but they were always run not to be a part of the inter commerce of the ancient Iranian trade route empire, but to be an interface with the Chinese people of central China. And so those trade routes were different in kind. They were not part of the network of the company, but they were franchising certain things out so that the Chinese trading counterparts could reach out to them And at this time about 2000 BC. We know now that about 90 some percent of the population of the Gobi Desert area was, as is generally called, Indo-European. Here's a woman who was buried in the middle of the Gobi Desert at Loulan, and she was buried 2000 BC, and she is of Iranian descent. And the same cemetery that she was found in in 1979. They excavated over 300 bodies, all mummified because of the salt in the minerals of the sand and because of the dryness perfectly preserved. Even some of the tattoos on the men's faces preserved the clothing, preserved everything there. And 20 years ago, when they were dug up, it confirmed what two early explorers in the 20th century, a Swede named Sven Hedin and a English Jew named Sir Aurel Stein, had both gone into Central Asia around 1900 and had both discovered that there were in fact out in the desert beyond places that anyone would have conceived, ruins that on the surface, look like just a swirls of wood sticking up out of an endless sea of sand dunes. And of course, it's beyond belief, because the Gobi Desert for several thousand years has not had enough water to support the kind of vegetation that would have made all this wood, so that these ruins obviously were from ancient times, and in these ruins, for various reasons, the rivers not only dried up, but shifted course, so that, for instance, one of the largest lakes in the Tarim Basin Gobi Desert area, the Lop Nur, periodically shifts its location so that it is a migrating lake, and it wasn't discovered how this happened until about ten years ago. Why is it that such a large lake can shift its place in the desert, almost as if it were a mirage? The woman whose mummy was found was in a cemetery of a place called Loulan. Loulan is about two thirds of the way to China, from where the mountainous border of what is today China and Tajikistan would be once you get to Loveland. The next place, the next oasis, is Dunhuang. And from Dunhuang, the trade routes become very easy to go into the Yangshao, to go into Chang'an, to go into China proper. This whole area of Central Asia, from about 2500 BC, was a part of a great trading route that went to Iran, Central Asia. And one of the things that was brought along that trading track later on was the chariot. And you find when you look at Egyptian history that there are no chariots until the Hittites come to Egypt about 1700 1800 BC, then you find Egyptian chariots. Before then, there are none. The same in China. You do not find chariots in Pre-dynastic, China. But all of a sudden when you find chariots, you find the beginnings of dynastic China. You find what is sometimes there used to be called academically the Phantom dynasty, the Shah dynasty. The Shah founded around 2222 ten BC, and that it was the Shah for many hundreds of years, 6 or 700 years, that formed the matrix out of which Chinese dynastic civilization came into being. That Shah dynasty, that so-called phantom dynasty, which gave way finally to the Shang, the first really powerful indigenous Chinese dynasty. The Shang, who were the equivalent of the Mycenaean Bronze Age warriors in ancient Hellenic geography. The Shang, who finally gave way to the Jo and the Zhou dynasty when they came in around 1100 BC. They harkened back to the Shah back before the Shang. The Shang are decrepit. They are corrupt. We are coming back and we are taking over again, because it is our right to assume the rule. And one of the peculiar things about the Jo dynasty, when it comes in its ancestral figure, is the god of millet, not of rice, but of millet. This Indo-European woman, dug up in 2000 BC, had a sack of millet next to her for her journey in the netherworld. The hoochie, the ancestor figure for the whole Zhou dynasty, was from far western Central Asia, and so the Jo people, whose great splendour is written in the poems that make up the Book of Songs, the first collection of Chinese poetry. It's there in the Book of Changes, the I Ching. The version that we have is the alternate name, for it is the Book of Jo, the I Ching, the Book of poetry, the Shu Ching. Many of the early classics that come into play in the early jo, the Western jo, their whole source of vitality and splendor comes from the far west of Central Asia, and the figure that looms poignantly is a figure that is brought back into play about a thousand years later, when the Han dynasty, replacing the Jo that had, after many hundreds of years, had fractionated into a thing called the the. The history of it is called the spring and Autumn annuals, that the huge period of hundreds of years of vacillation and the Han dynasty came back into play and looked back over a thousand years to contact the fabulous figure that was mysteriously poignant to the early Jo, because the early Jo Joe had hearkened back a thousand years before that to the mysterious figure who vivified the Shah. And that figure was a woman. That figure was an archetypal woman. She was an archetypal mother in the Han dynasty. The name given to her was XI Wangmu, the Queen mother of the West. In the show, you can recognize her already as a figure who was ancient at that time, very, very similar to the kind of royal Iranian woman. What would have found 4000 years ago in the cemetery of Loulan Loulan at the time was a huge resort city on the banks of Lop Nur. Before it had moved and was a center of trade between Iran and China. This figure is important to us because in the whole welter of the Prajnaparamita literature crisis, the Queen mother of the West was personified as the Lady Prajnaparamita, the mother of the Buddhas, and became worked into Chinese lore so tightly that we today would not have any question that Kuan Yin was Chinese. And yet her origins are Iranian. Goes back that far, goes back many thousands of years. But we're concerned now with the Prajnaparamita literature of about 100 AD that started in India and made its way almost in a. Tolkien once said, we don't have a word in English for a happy catastrophe. He said, we're so used to tragedies. So he made up a word. He called it a. Eucatastrophe, a catastrophe of happiness. Because in one generation, the Prajnaparamita. Literature that got its little campfire going in South India was spread throughout Central Asia by a man who imagined himself to be a more powerful version of Ashoka, a much wiser addition than Chandragupta maurya. And his name was Kanishka, and what he used as his lover to spread his empire throughout Central Asia to take over northern India. He used a wise man named Ashvaghosha. Now Ashvaghosha. And we're going to take a break in just a minute. Ashvaghosha. His name is very peculiar in Sanskrit. His name refers to horses. Ashva Asva his horse in Sanskrit. Ashvaghosha his name means the sound of horses. Whinnying in their vitality. So here's a man whose wisdom has the great strength and power of the horse, whinnying in its vigor to carry what he says everywhere on scale of horse supported empire. And Kanishka used him for that purpose. It's interesting to see because Ashvaghosha was a little dark Dravidian Indian, probably about five foot two, with very dark skin. And yet he was the genius that provided the template by which the Mahayana spread to Central Asia. And the Prajnaparamita literature became the standard for about a thousand years of this enormous space in between China and Europe. Let's take a little break. Let's come to the the text that we're dealing with. When it begins. It begins in a very uncharacteristic way, given the severe ascetic traditions of India for thousands of years. It reads in translation. Call forth as much as you can of love, of respect, and of faith. Remove the obstructing defilements and clear away all your taints. Listen to the perfection of wisdom of the Buddhas, of the gentle Buddhas taught for the wheel of the world, for heroic spirits intended. Now, if you are familiar with ascetic disciplines, you don't talk this way. This is an invitation not for a discipline, but for an opening Out in resonance in such a way that you're not expecting any conclusion. The first of the Paramitas. There are six of them was called Donna. And Donna literally means giving. The gifting. The entire ecology of giving is an enormously profound perfection, as they would say. Not a quality, but a perfection. A paramita. The Sanskrit word paramita is juxtaposed to a yogic term that was used in Sanskrit for many thousands of years and brought into philosophic exactness, and the term was Skandha skandhas. And there were five skandhas the paramitas. The six parameters have nothing to do with the five skandhas, so that the Prajnaparamita literature looks with gentle, loving kindness completely through the formal structure of Indian thought of Indian discipline, and yet presents its self in such a way that those who developed it at the time sometimes referred to as a school, and the school was called the Yoga Akharas, or a complementary group. We're called the Madhyamikas. The Madhyamikas were followers of the Middle Way. The Yogacara were those who carried yoga into a transcendent, immanent set of infinities. The protagonist. The person, the hero who carried the paramitas was the Bodhisattva literally means body enlightenment. Like in Bodhi tree, Sattva means a being, The term used in Indian philosophy before the Prajnaparamita literature was mahasattva, which meant great being. Someone is a great being if they're rather larger than life. The Bodhisattva is a being who lives in enlightenment in the field of enlightenment, but who does not achieve enlightenment because enlightenment is acquired in Indian ascetic tradition, by discipline, by the yoga, by the building of tapas, and that the tapas accumulates, and in the accumulation of the strength of the tapas one learns to bring karma to a close. And as one brings karma to a close, you then shift out of the realm of samsara, where karma is a universal law. You emerge from samsara through your tapas, through the generation of your yoga, and you acquire a different characteristic instead of your actions acquiring karma or engendering karma. The karma now works a different way and becomes the translation has always been merit instead of being subject to karma. You're now gathering merit that the tapas through your yoga, through your asceticism Criticism has engendered now the accumulation of merit. What is radical about the Prajnaparamita literature is this is the first thing the Bodhisattva gives up is his merit. He gives it to others. Whatever merit he has, he gives to others instantly so that he does not acquire merit at all, nor at the same time is he subject to karma. That merit and karma are a measuring scale of polarity that is dissolved in the paradox of his dynamic and his energy. Or we should use the feminine because the prototype of the Bodhisattva is a feminine figure. Kuan Yin. Or any of the other great Bodhisattva figures are always related to the feminine in the sense of, like Sophia, Lady wisdom being feminine and not just on the primordial level of the mother. The wisdom of the mother. The Queen mother of the West. Matricide in Sanskrit. It's not just the feminine in that this is the mother to us all, but the more mysterious, deeper than the fundamental mothering quality of the feminine that we talked about this last year, that the primordial feminine is not mother, but the lady of the wild things. She in her she ness, doesn't originate life as a mother so much as she loves the wildness of the universe, and she protects the wildness of the universe through her willingness to receive and give without prejudice, without measuring, without counting, without toting up, so that the Lady Prajnaparamita, the Mahayana, Sophia, the Kwan Yen origin figure goes back to the most ancient trace that we can find in language, and that most ancient trace is in the European language. And her name there is Anahita Anahita, and she is not a mother so much as she is the lady of the wild Things. Her participation in reality allows for wildness to be real wild in the sense of not going crazy, but of being untamed. She guarantees that the cosmos will be a wilderness of reality and never will be commandeered by any empire, by anyone taming it in any way whatsoever, and that all real births. Occur within the wildness of reality, and not within the constraints of any sociological or military or theological combine. That birth is real because it actually happens in wild reality, untamed by anything that man thinks of dreams up, or any animals or any beings in any star system, anywhere in the universe. It doesn't matter where that reality is wild in the sense of untamed. And because she participates in this when we participate with her, We also then occur in the realm of wild reality, untamed. And so the Prajnaparamita Sutra Gatha that we're reading reads. No wisdom can we get hold of no highest perfection, no bodhisattva, no thought of enlightenment either. When told of this, if not bewildered and in no way anxious. A bodhisattva courses in the well Gone's wisdom. There isn't any attainment. There isn't anything to have to grasp. Now, in the classic yoga of Buddhism, graha grasping is very close to the way in which kleshas or imperfections occur. The tanha, which is the desire for things, reaches its really refined and invidious quality in the desire to not have desire. The deep, abiding passion to be passionless is like the better mousetrap. What is caught in that is the ego. The ego that prides itself on not having these imperfections and what the bodhisattva practices is not desiring, even not having a practice of not desiring. And thus the term that's translated here courses. Courses in well gone wisdom. Gone is the language root for the epithet of the Buddha, not called Buddha, but called Tathagata. Tathata means suchness, the ability to be and gata means gone, so that the Buddha was someone whose illness was gone in the sense that there was no existentiality that registered. Including the existentiality of the mind that the mind, especially in its language correlation to existence, had the ability to logically delineate the way in which we would take reality and life and make the very best of it and keep it logically together. All of this was taken as a parenthetical by the Prajnaparamita literature and just left hanging wasn't argued against, and because of this, concomitant with the Prajnaparamita literature was the development of a school powerful school called the Nyaya, sometimes called Nyaya by Sakha. The original sutra. Logic sutra. The Nyaya Sutra of Gautama's, here in four volumes and translation. And here's a monograph from the University of Hawaii. The logic of Gautama. And all of this was the basis of a deep logical scholasticism in India. Not only Gotama's great huge sutra, which was very difficult to understand because Gautama understood that in order to be logically trim, you should not repeat anything. You should just give the essence of it, and that the essence should be given in such a way that you don't have to repeat it. And so Gautama's Nyaya Sutra is extremely refined to the point of almost like a shriveling of all excess, of all superfluous detail, of all repetition, down to the bare skeleton of necessary declamation, so that in order to read Gotama, you had to have a commentary that opened up the possibilities of intellectual understanding of what that sutra was and that first commentary. I don't want to get you bogged down with names, but that first commentary is always printed with it. And that's why there's four volumes. But the commentary itself was so true to the succinctness of If only saying what is logically necessary, that there had to be a commentary on the commentary. And not only that, a couple of hundred years later, a really brilliant Indian logician made a commentary on the commentary on the commentary of the sutra. And so that entire parfait, that entire target of logical thought in India, was in place by 4 or 500 A.D. and that you had this tremendous thing. All of this was concomitant with the development and the expression of the Prajnaparamita literature. It grew up with it. So that just to jump ahead, just for a second, around 600 AD in India, It became apparent that ordinary men and women were not able to understand the Prajnaparamita literature, the high Dharma way, because what got in their way all the time was the refinement of the mind in its logical structure. And so a whole new movement was developed in India that led away from this understanding of sutra. We talked last week about how originally sutra meant thread. Sutra in Indian logical law doesn't mean thread. It means the aphorisms that are only necessary and shrunk to the essential. So that sutra by the time 600 A.D. came along, was getting a very bad rap because it meant something that was just reduced, boiled down to aphoristic qualities that needed interpretation, needed commentaries. And so a whole new kind of literature developed, called the Tantra. And what the tantra was, was a presentation of the end run around the problem of the mind. Because the tantra is about two people, about two minds, that in some way exchange operative centers so that each is the other's core, and that this is like a physiological infinity sign dynamic. And so the development of tantric literature after that proceeded along those lines. We're looking at something 500 years before that. We're looking at something which says in form, in feeling, in will, in perception and awareness. Nowhere in them do they find a place to rest. So that these five skandhas, those five qualities that go up to make the way in which we experience everything, those five skandhas, um, the two basic triggers in this are feeling and perception. The vedana is feeling not Vedanta, but Vedanta, Vedanta and perception as ssamjang and feeling and perception have their concomitants. Feeling has its concomitant in what is called samskara, which in the skandhas means. Sometimes it's translated as disposition, but it actually means will. That feeling develops into the ability to will, and that perception deepens into the ability to form. And the Sanskrit word for form is rupa. Sometimes it was paired together. In very ancient times it was paired together with naming namarupa name and form. But in classical Indian philosophy. And now we're talking philosophy. The ability to form from perception, the ability to will from feeling all brought together with awareness. Sometimes it's translated as consciousness. It's not a good term. Vijnana in this usage means awareness because it has a physiological basis for its certainty of gestaltung. That's why it was usually had its strength of saying all this Prajnaparamita stuff is phantasmal. This is common sense. This is good logic. You can really learn this and you can get good at it. It can be taught. Whereas the Prajnaparamita literature, who knows? You don't ever know that if you know or not, because it's always paradoxical. It's always mysterious. Here's some more. Without a home. The bodhisattva's wander. Dharmas never hold them, nor do they grasp at them. Enlightenment they are bound to gain. The wanderer Cyrenaica, in his gnosis of the truth, could find no basis through the Skandhas. And though the skandhas had been undone just so the Bodhisattva, when he comprehends the dharmas as he should, does not retire into blessed rest in Wisdom. Well, gone he dwells. Now, this kind of language we recognize from 21st century nuclear physics was being talked about. Here is a continuous dynamic flow that has no boundedness, and that this flow has a dynamic. It has a current, but the current is not based upon polarity, nor is it based upon the reverse of polarity, which would be a resolution. Let me back up for just a second and go back to the ancient way in which the Buddha would have taught. When the Buddha was teaching, there was such a thing as presenting all four possibilities of a statement within a set. For instance, he would have said, enlightenment is not something to be desired, nor is it not something to be not desired, nor is it both those together. And it is not both those not together, so that there are a there is a set of four possibilities that are always there, and together they constitute the entire range of a polarized possibility. A fifth quality. A fifth possibility is that this set of four is an illusion, and therefore it's the waking up from that illusion. That is what you want to do. The Prajnaparamita literature says all five of those are not workable, because all five of those lead to gamesmanship and not to the real. And that the mind in and of itself, in and of its structure, will always pursue. The certainty of something or its negation. The certainty of an identity, or likewise, the confidence in the negation, and that identity and negation are necessary for logic, and that the trigger or the kicker in the works. Logical form. The middle term has three different possibilities of its relationality, and a couple of processes that are related, so that the middle terms related to the first or related to the second, the minor or the major, and that all of this together, the entire set of these possibilities together, are a structure that the Bodhisattva ignores. And so it reads like this. What is this wisdom? Whom and whence? He queries. And then he finds that all these dharmas are entirely empty. Uncowed and fearless in the face of that discovery. Not far from Bodie. Is that Bodie being then to course in the skandhas. In form in. Feeling and perception, will and so on, and fail to consider them wisely, or to imagine these skandhas as being empty means to course in the sign. The track of non-production ignored. But when he does not course in form, in feeling or perception, in will or awareness, but wanders without home, remaining unaware of causing firm in wisdom his thoughts on non-production, then the best of all calming trances cleaves to him. Though the Bodhisattva now dwells tranquil in himself, his future Buddhahood assured by antecedent Buddhas, whether absorbed in trance or whether outside it, he minds not. This is a very curious quality in yoga, the ability to bring one's physiological structure to quiet, and to align that with the quieted mind, so that that tandem has still. Is irrelevant to the Prajnaparamita literature. Why is it irrelevant? Because that stillness occurs only within the mind and only at a singularity of locus within the mind. Only at the centre of the mind. The only still place in the whole cosmos is the black hole centre of the mind. Because all the rest of the universe is constantly in joyful movement, so that the Bodhisattva courses in reality, which is always dynamic and energised in movement, and shuns the sandpit traps of the quiet centre of the mind, because the mind's willfulness and its sense of form and its sense of perception and feeling and its awareness all come to a very nice rounded boundedness for that calmness to be. And it becomes then an object that is desired and desirable. And the Bodhisattva has no desire of this whatsoever, so that the Prajnaparamita literature has the ability to go into this paradox, that the mind needs to be taught as if it were a child. And that the teacher of the mind, because the mind will not listen to paradoxical language from without. One has to go to the inmost sphere from which the mind derives its whole basis of language. Interiorized meaning in the first place, and that sphere is the heart. That the heart sphere is the locus where language can be improved so that the mind will interiorize that meaning and realize it, and try to put that realization into this form, into this calmness. And if the heart is schooled to be truthful, the mind will interiorize that meaning and carry it right to the center, and will discover that its calmness is a bogus location. And that participation in the real universe of dynamic infinity and Energized. Boundedness is actually where we live is where all beings live. And not just sentient beings, but all beings imaginary or fictitious or future or past or historical or alien or mineral or plant or rock or whatever, all participate in that, uh, that realm so that it reads form, perception, feeling, will and awareness are ununited never bound and thus cannot be freed. They can't be freed because they were never bound in the first place. That the mind's insistence that they were bound and now are freed is the last bit of hubris of Pridefulness saying, well, now I have earned my liberation. And the Prajnaparamita literature says, what liberation? There were no handcuffs on you in the first place. There weren't even any wrists to handcuff. There was no one there to care whether you're handcuffed or not. In fact, there was no you there to care whether they were not there or not. This, of course, was extremely distressing. And so the makers of the Prajnaparamita literature looked to a classic way of over presenting so as to make a mockery of the critical commentaries that were wanted to boil it down to its logical skeleton so it could be argued. And so the Prajnaparamita literature went into repetitive overload in the sense that they would just repeat phrases and repeat them, and they would have whole musical sets of language that would build in huge repetitions, maybe 2 or 300 times to some kind of a curlicue that didn't really say anything, and they would back off 2 or 300 times in nice Homeric geometry, so that there was such a thing as the great, the Maha Prajnaparamita Sutra, that had 100,000 lines, 100,000 slokas, which is 200,000 lines because the sloka is a double line. So they went to that way, that proliferation. Then they also tried making it so that the language repetitions were brought together so that you could intuit the shape and form that the repetitions were around. No point that was being made at all. And so there was a Prajnaparamita sutra, so-called in 700 lines, and then finally in 500 lines, finally in 25 lines. And there was an ultimate where it was in one syllable. The 25 line Prajnaparamita Sutra is called the Heart Sutra. And every Buddhist monk in the world, recites the Heart Sutra every morning, and you wonder if they understand. Because if you understand the Heart Sutra, you live in a very joyous cosmos, and you're not busy performing rituals for people who aren't ever there in any reality, because there's no sense in doing that. Whereas the givingness of loving kindness to them is always true and always real. The heart runs in powerful. Of all the Prajnaparamita sutras was done very late in the career. There was a man who was born in the one of the big oasis towns in the northern part of the Gobi Desert, called Kucha. Kucha is still their big trading center, always was, and Kucha used to have caravan routes that went across the Gobi Desert down to Khotan, and all of that has been desiccated. But he had a very distinct liking and tone for Chinese poetry and Chinese language. And when he was 40 years old, in 385 A.D., he was induced to come into China and to translate the Buddhist material, especially the Prajnaparamita literature, into Chinese. And he agreed to do this. And when he was translating the Prajnaparamita literature into Chinese, he realized that the Chinese practicality had a different emphasis from the Indian asceticism the Chinese practicality Had a tone of looking for the real value in the scintillating multiplicity rather than in the reduction. And so Kumarajiva put together a number of Prajnaparamita phrases in such a way that they were like facets of a jewel. And he called that sutra the Vajracchedika. The Diamond Cutter Sutra and the Diamond Sutra comes out of that. That's what the Diamond Sutra is. And the Diamond Sutra is to show that all these beautiful facets together make a jewel, but that the jewel is not the gestalt of the language. The jewel is your seeing that all these facets that Together, make this sutra do not touch anywhere. And because the facets do not touch anywhere, the fact that there was a jewel meant that you extended those facets in yourself so that they would touch, and that the jewel was made because of your comprehension. Your encompassing was the treasure, and this ability to encompass a gestalt that is non-logical and non-mental, but shows the ability to take a multiplicity of facets and integrate it anyway, was a proof positive that form is emptiness, and emptiness is form that they form a set like zero and one and are not limited to discursive structure, but are capable of a different quality of meaningfulness, a quality that's there in jewel like poetry, a poetic and that because language has a poetic as well as a logic, that there is a different possibility of human forms, a logic always yields to a politic, whereas a poetic opens out to an aesthetic, and that there are communities of human beings that are nonpolitical because they're aesthetic, that there is such a thing as the art of living, and that the cosmos is such a form. There is no interstellar government whatsoever. There is no galactic Empire whatsoever. Those forms are aesthetically jeweled. And so the phrase that came later on was the jeweled cosmos. And that man is free here to participate, if he will, but just do it. And so let me just skip over here. Forms are not wisdom, nor is wisdom found in form, in consciousness, perceptions, feeling, or in will. They are not wisdom, and no wisdom is in them like space. It is without a break or crack of all objective supports. The essential original nature is boundless Of beings. Likewise, the essential original nature is boundless, as the essential original nature of space has no limits. Just so the wisdom of world Knowers is boundless. So that the Prajnaparamita literature in its origins called the accumulation of precious qualities, the precious qualities, the jewel like facets, are not accumulated in the manuscript. They are not there in the language. In fact, they are not anywhere that the accumulation is by virtue, we would say, an astrophysics today of density waves. You can't find density waves anywhere in a spiral galactic structure, but the spiral arms themselves are due to the fact that density waves still happen. There are no metallic struts holding the spiral waves of a galactic structure together. By all the laws of physics, the center of the galaxy should wind up and the spiral arms should collapse in. They don't do that. The entire spiral moves together as if it were a single cosmic snowflake. Because of density waves which don't exist and still work.