Incorrect Views of the Deepest Truth of Things

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Introduction and Question about Concepts and Nonexistent Phenomena

We started going through the second half of the text, the chapters that deal with voidness, (specifically the topic is refuting or overcoming the incorrect views regarding voidness and the deepest nature of how things exist). And we finished chapter nine, which was “indicating the meditations for refuting static functional phenomena,” and now we’re ready to begin chapter ten, which is “Indicating the Meditations for Refuting a Static Impossible ‘Self’ or ‘Soul.’”

And, as we did with chapter nine, what I’ll do is just briefly go through some of the major points of argument or lines of reasoning that Aryadeva uses to refute the various wrong positions from the Prasangika point of view, without going into too much detail about this. And, again, the method that is going to be used here is to point out the absurd conclusions that follow from everybody’s assertions. We did see in chapter nine, if you recall, Aryadeva was showing the inconsistency within logic – there was the argument that if something is not produced, that means that it’s permanent. And Aryadeva pointed out that just because something is not produced, that doesn’t mean – it’s not logically pervasive – that it is permanent, because nonexistent things also are not produced. So this is going more in the direction of Svatantrika, trying to actually prove or disprove something in terms of logical pervasions; whereas the actual Prasangika method is just showing the contradictions and absurd conclusions that follow from the other person’s assertion, rather than actually going through fallacies in logic. To work with fallacies in logic is the Svatantrika method.

[See: The Appearance and Cognition of Nonexistent Phenomena]

Things that don’t exist are, nevertheless, concepts, and concepts are permanent. So isn’t this a problem with this example that we just mentioned?

No. There is a difference. You can have a concept of something that doesn’t exist, but that doesn’t mean that the thing that doesn’t exist exists. There’s a difference between a concept or an appearance of true existence and actual true existence.

Now the big question comes: How could a nonexistent thing actually appear? And a nonexistent thing doesn’t actually appear. (This is an objection, actually, that is raised, I believe, by one of the Karmapas to Tsongkhapa’s explanation of dealing with nonexistent phenomena. I have an article on this on the website.) And it’s not that true existence itself is appearing; it’s something that represents or seems like true existence, but not actual true existence that is appearing when the mind makes an appearance of true existence. And so when we have conceptualthought about a rabbit’s horn, it’s not actually… I don’t want to get into a complicated explanation about conceptual thought and permanent phenomena and nonpermanent phenomena, or static and nonstatic – they’re involved in that – so let’s leave that aside. That’s also discussed quite thoroughly on my website, and it’s quite complicated. But, in any case, you would have an appearance, let’s say, of a rabbit and goat horns – or cartoon horns, or something like that – on the rabbit, but you couldn’t have actual rabbit horns, an appearance of rabbit horns, on the rabbit. Or the example that I often use is chicken lips. There is no such thing as chicken lips. You can picture some cartoon lips on a chicken, but not actual chicken lips on a chicken.

The concept is impermanent?

Concept – I won't go into that. There are permanent and impermanent aspects, and there is no equivalent of the word “concept.” Because we’re dealing with, here, categories and the images that are involved with thinking in terms of categories, and so on. Far too complicated to go into. Let’s simply say that categories are static.

But that’s the problem. You have the category of rabbit horn.

You have a category of “rabbit horn,” but you don’t have rabbit horn.

And the category exists?

The category exists.

But then this example doesn’t fit.

Why not? The category isn’t the same as an individual member of the group. You can have a word “rabbit horn” and you could have a category “rabbit horn.” It doesn’t necessarily refer to actually existent phenomena; it can refer to nonexistent things which are represented or mistaken for existent things. Let’s really not get into this. This is going to take far too long. There isn’t time. I would suggest reading the article on cognition of nonexistent phenomena on my website, and then we can discuss it.

Logical pervasion is what we’re talking about in the example. If something is static, it is pervasive that it is not produced; if it’s not produced, it’s not pervasive that it is static. Simply logical pervasion. If it’s a dog, it’s pervasive that it is an animal; if it is an animal, it’s not pervasive that it’s a dog. If something is static, it’s pervasive that it’s not produced by causes and circumstances; but just because something is not produced, it’s not pervasive that it is static.

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