Sherab Dorje wrote:Now you are being clear.
I'm happy one of us thinks so. Apologies to this sangha again for giving offense earlier - I lob missiles from behind a wall I build when I am unsure then come crashing through when I am sure.
Sherab Dorje wrote:First of all, the Nagarjuna quote you use is talking about the "designation" as being a phenomenon, not emptiness per se.
Per se means in itself. Emptiness means a thing is devoid of existing in any way other than in your mind as a result of karma forcing you to organize the data. It indicates there is no such thing as "in itself" because nothing has any nature of its own. Since nothing has any nature of its own emptiness itself has no nature of its own. So emptiness can only be defined negatively, dun gang shik ngunsum du topke dri ma separ jepa, that which when directly realized permanently finishes all impurities. This negative definition is a designation. Everything is a designation, everything is imputed. That's what emptiness means. So this negative definition is also just a designation, in other words, it is conditional, imputed, dependent. This doesn't mean nothing exists at all. It just means that emptiness is like everything else, something we've learned to hold self-existently true. And it can't be self-existently true because nothing is self-existent. So it has to be dependently true. Emptiness is like everything else, just a mental concept projected on the basis of a collection of parts.
Sherab Dorje wrote:If emptiness is dependently arisen, then what is its cause?
Ha we may as well ask why Nagarjuna negated causation in verse 1 of the first part of his treatise then affirmed the conditions for dependent arising in verse 2. It is not self caused, not other caused, not both, not neither. Yet there are conditions for it to arise. How can he do this? Oceans of ink have been spilled to explain. Perhaps because we can think of two senses of nirvana: rangshin gyi nyande, "natural nirvana", which means chu tamche rangshin gyi tongpa, everything is empty of any nature of its own, and "real nirvana", lo bur namdak gi nyang de, the purity of eliminating the afflications as a result of great effort. Perhaps the first sense responds to this question.