Lankavatara 2:IV:10-end

*transcript rendered by AI

All right, so welcome everybody, good to see you.

We are continuing our investigation of the Lankavatara Sutra today.

Last week we spent our time with the beginning of the first kind of 10 paragraphs of what the Red Pine Calls Chapter 2, Section 4, and that kind of finished a little bit on this idea of relying on dharmas and conditions, right?

So I’m going to just go back a little bit to read what we’ve covered so far, that won’t take a minute, and then we’ll just kind of go ahead and pick up where we left off, and as we go through that, then we’ll continue, okay?

So without going too far back and opening up all sorts of questions that came with last week, we’re going to go ahead and start here, we say, From beginningless time, conceptual proliferation has perfumed the mind, Mahamati.

As the various perfumed tendencies of the alaya consciousness’s diluted distinctions are brought to cessation, the sense faculties likewise cease, Mahamati.

This is called the cessation of characteristics.

Mahamati, the cessation of continuity, the second type of cessation, occurs when the cause of continuity ceases.

When both the cause and conditions cease, continuity ceases, Mahamati.

This is what is meant by relying on dharmas and relying on conditions.

Continuity relies on dharmas, phenomenon, and relies on conditions, the interplay of phenomenon with our own mind.

Relying on dharmas refers to the beginningless perfuming of the mind by conceptual proliferation and false ideation, meaning relying on dharmas refers to how our alaya consciousness has these unconscious formations within it.

And those unconscious formations interact with what we experience through our sense of activity, and we create ideas, we create abstractions.

Relying on conditions refers to one’s own mind consciousness perceiving and discriminating the field of phenomenon.

So where dharmas are the phenomenon that we experience as we interact with them, conditions are the actual process of perceiving and discriminating something as a phenomenon.

Okay?

It’s a little bit confusing, a little bit technical, so we might need to unpack that.

But this analogy really helps, which is where this goes next.

Mahamati.

For example, a lump of clay and fine dust particles are neither different nor not different.

Gold and the ornaments made from it are likewise neither different nor not different.

Mahamati.

If a lump of clay were truly different, it couldn’t give rise to form, but it does.

So it is not different.

Yet if it were not different, there would be no distinction between the lump and the dust.

Mahamati.

So too with the transforming consciousness and the alaya consciousness.

If their characteristics were truly different, transformation could not arise from alaya.

But if they were not different, then when transformation ceases, alaya should also cease.

Yet in its own nature, alaya does not cease.

There’s still three paragraphs left in this section, but that’s already a pretty good juicy chunk of stuff.

So I’ll stop there with the reading and see what’s arising, especially in terms of this notion of relying on dharmas, relying on conditions, because that’s kind of an important set of sort of technical pieces of what we’re investigating in our meditation.

So does everyone have any questions about dharmas and conditions?

Or anything really that maybe seems more foundational than that, that we need to shore up in terms of background.

Yeah, super basic question.

Can you remind me what the alaya consciousness is?

Great question.

Yeah, we’ll have to keep going back to it.

Alaya consciousness is classed as the eighth aspect of consciousness, and that is the one that holds the kind of the collective unconsciousness, the sankaras, the seeds that sprout as they interact with the sense organs.

So that’s the alaya.

That’s the storehouse.

The storehouse, yes.

Yeah, just a clarification.

So all the dharmas are everything that we perceive.

It could be thoughts, feelings, concepts, abstract thoughts, large bodies of intelligence.

The dharmas that arise in our conscious experience, right?

Sort of.

Well, say the next part, and then we’ll see.

Well, the next part is another distinct question.

Okay, so dharmas here is like the actual…

So it refers to the beginning of the mind by conceptual proliferation and false ideation.

Dharmas are like what we make things to be.

It’s like when I sit as subject, and I have an experience, and that thing is a thing, and that interacts with me as a subject, then that’s a dharma.

And that thing interacts with me.

Yeah, so like when I… For example, let’s try and make this a little bit more real.

Okay, a condition is that this consciousness, this body has sense organs, and my eye is a sense organ, interacts with a sense object, the altar here, the central altar here.

So the condition is that I have a sense organ that perceives a sense object.

Okay, and then I have a sense consciousness that turns that into, oh, that’s an altar.

The flame represents the light of the Buddha’s wisdom, and the water represents the Buddha’s generosity, and the incense represents the passage of time.

So each of those, these things represent this to me, that happens when the eye consciousness makes sense of what the sense organ perceives as the sense object, right?

So that sense organ, sense object, conditions, sense consciousness, dharmas, perceives, yeah.

So not conditions in terms of like clarity or lack thereof, or understanding or lack thereof, or not conditioned in terms of either physical or mental condition, just conditioned in terms of perception of a given skills.

It’s like the sensing.

So if we want to split this one way, we could split this and say that conditions are like sensing, the actual feeling, the sensation of sentience, and then dharmas are like the the intellectual, or the thinking, or the perceiving aspect of experience.

So we have to have a direct experience before we give it meaning.

So the dharmas is giving a direct experience, meaning conditions are the direct experience.

Okay, I feel like that could round up a little bit.

It could.

Only because, well, we’ll just leave that as a process.

The sutra invites us through the rabbit hole.

So some of this is just patiently following the cadence of the teaching.

So as long as we’re sort of clear on the idea that there’s dharmas and conditions, there’s perceiving and sensing, then we can probably go forward with whatever Michael’s next question.

Yeah, okay, thanks.

I’m going to let that go.

I think there’s more in there, but that’s fine.

So when they talk here of discrimination, discriminating thought is basically discerning thought.

I want to make a distinction because as we think of discriminating thought in contemporary language, as soon as we hear discriminating thought, we think, oh, we’re discriminating in a derogatory way in our thinking towards other beings or situations, right?

Discriminating is just being discerning.

Correct.

Okay, okay.

Thank you.

Okay.

So there was a condition, right?

Loud car goes by and there was a dharma, my subjective experience of it.

My consciousness was perfumed.

What was it perfumed by?

It was perfumed by being in this container and having a contemplative conversation.

If I was at a dirt bike rally and I heard the exact same noise, I wouldn’t find it such that I would want to go and make a comment of it, right?

So we have a condition.

We have dharma.

These things go together.

There’s a direct experience and a subjective experience, an objective experience, subjective experience, and they arise together.

And they are like particles of dust and a lump of clay.

They’re like particles of dust because our direct experience is fine and subtle.

And then we lump them together as we discriminate them and turn them into a lump of clay.

They’re not the same.

They’re not different.

One constitutes the other.

Same with gold jewelry, right?

You take a lump of gold, you pound it into an earring.

Does it stop being gold?

No, of course not.

It can return just like a lump of clay can return.

Are we getting it so far?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yes.

So then this next line, I think, is a real juicy one.

So it says, Mahamati, so too with the transforming consciousness and the alaya consciousness, if their characteristics were truly different, transformation could not arise from alaya.

Alaya is like the dust here.

But if they were not different, then when transformation ceased, alaya should also cease.

Yet in its own nature, alaya doesn’t cease.

The storehouse consciousness, the collective unconsciousness doesn’t cease.

If we have a meditative experience of cessation, we come back online.

And we typically come back online with a fully coherent memory of who we are, and what our life was, and where we’re sitting, and all of these types of things.

So there’s something that persists.

The storehouse consciousness persists even when we experience no conditions.

And we are creating no dharmas from those conditions.

But yet they have to be related somehow.

What is that relationship?

The alaya is like the dust.

Transforming mind is creating the lump.

We mush the lump away.

They’re different.

They’re different enough that the lump can go away, but the alaya consciousness doesn’t go.

So from here now, with these kinds of extra metaphors and relationships to things, what’s coming up?

So from that chunk, just that, the only difference between the two would be perception.

You still have an underlying consciousness there.

What is not, you know, you still have that.

Whatever you’re coming back to, if you have an experience of cessation, just because you have that experience of cessation, you’re not perceiving things as you normally would.

You being, you within your, whatever the underlying I is there, that underlying, or that base consciousness doesn’t change necessarily.

It’s just the how we perceive it in a given moment.

If that makes sense.

I don’t know if that makes sense.

Seems like it was really wordy, but I apologize.

Yeah.

Jimbo is just saying pure awareness does not come or go.

Yes, that’s much better than the 85 words that I just tried to try to use the wall.

Yeah, you can see what, you know, this all reflects simple simplicity, right?

Yeah.

The, oh, you know, I’m just thinking, you know, the way these are written, the old days, the way these are written, the old days, you know, lumps of clay and dust.

And, you know, is there a, like, what’s a really more bold contemporary metaphor?

I mean, I’m just thinking that the back of my mind, just speaking out loud.

But anyway, hello.

I’m here.

You can say the blacktop road and the asphalt if you want.

Oh, well, yeah, no.

OK, well, that’s an interesting point because it’s very there’s something really kind of concrete about here.

And the notion of kind of really get, you know, get a little more sophisticated about, like Brian was saying, the perception, like we talked about perception, we’re perceiving.

I have perceptions that could be different from you or Tyson or Robin, like all of our the way it comes together.

Or, you know, like we all would have a slightly different take on the way we perceive things or a situation, right?

Of course, I mean, I would even break that down a little bit more and say, you know, if you set the same flower vase, bowl, object, whatever it is in front of.

However, many different people, each person’s perception of that identical object, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a scenario, it could just be a concrete singular thing.

Each person’s perception of that thing is going to be slightly different, even though you’re all perceiving the same thing.

It’s just like the, you know, because I’m strange like that.

If you look at something as simple as a color, it’s the color green that I see the same as the same green that you see on the same thing, the same red, the same blue, the same what happened.

Everyone’s perception is slightly different, even though we’re all perceiving the same object surrounding the scenario.

Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, that that just kind of comes into the kind of, for whatever reason, we don’t know why if we look at a color where we say, oh, I really like yellow.

You know, and somebody else says, oh, that’s okay.

Like you just, there’s just something very similar, you know, nothing harsh in it, but we all have that kind of subtle preference.

Yes, right.

Yes, right.

Yes.

Is that what we’re kind of getting at with perception?

I mean, not, not quite.

So the sutra isn’t trying to encourage people to understand that everyone perceive everyone has their own perfuming that’s going on.

It’s in this text, it’s kind of like a given that you’re perfumed is different than the way I’m perfumed.

This is actually to investigate the mechanics of how perfuming happens and how perfuming impacts what we experience and being able to separate through the way our perfuming influences our experience from what the actual experience was.

Right.

So this is asking us to go deeper into the mechanics of meaning making the mechanics of how direct experience of something that is undeniably outside of me, but I’m still creating it with my own mind.

Gotcha.

Okay.

So we can all, we can all agree that there is a statue in front of that window.

You might not be able to see it well from here, but we can all agree that there’s a concrete thing out there.

And we would all say that it is not, that thing is not inside any of our bodies.

But to be true, the only way that we can understand that thing is the way we experience it in our own mind through its interaction with, through light hitting our retina, going into our brain, interacting with our nervous system, that, that electrochemical impulse combining with deep memories of Sankaras and other statues and other associations we have and all of these types of subjective experiences.

So that, that statue really only exists in my mind and is created by my mind.

So the Dharma of the statue is created by me, but the condition of that Dharma is that there is some external thing there that I’m using language to arbitrarily call the statue because we all come from a same, generally speaking, we’re all Anglophones.

We all have a similar background.

When I say statue, everyone knows that I’m referring to the statue and not the platform it’s sitting on.

Everyone knows I’m referring to the statue and not the oil candle in front of it.

But that’s just a collective hallucination as we agree semantically to say that statue designates this type of thing, right?

Right.

Actually, as it exists to me, only exists in my mind and is created by my mind because there’s nothing happening outside of me.

Yes.

And now we have our conditions and our Dharmas and these two interplay, interpenetrate.

These two are dynamically related to each other.

However, that dynamic relationship does not mean that if I died, that statue disappeared.

It also does not mean if that statue disappeared, my consciousness would die.

That’s how they’re different.

So I’ve been trying to tie these different terms and concepts into personal experience.

And I would say my first experience with cessation was absolutely terrifying in that I knew that I was gone and I didn’t know if I would come back.

But I knew that there was something different that I used to be that I now wasn’t.

Is that the storehouse still being online?

And then what is it that I mean, besides just the I that came and went, does that term tie into this?

Totally.

So that is a cessation of characteristics.

Okay.

All right.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Exotic animal farm in Iowa, camping in a teepee.

But, you know, memorable moment.

That’s the story we want to hear.

What’s going on?

All right.

Okay.

All right.

I like what I said.

I think it’s going to be good to keep moving a little bit because we could dwell on this topic for the whole time.

I think it’d be good to keep moving.

So I think we can finish this section today because in the way this is kind of all wrapping it up.

So then what comes next in the sutra is, yet in its own nature, alaya does not cease.

This is what we just talked about.

Then it says, therefore, Mahamati, the self-characteristics of various consciousnesses cease.

With the cessation of self-characteristics, karmic characteristics also cease.

If self-characteristics cease, the alaya consciousness should cease as well.

Okay.

And what’s happening here is that self-characteristics are the idea of things in themselves.

Okay.

So as my eye consciousness ceases, then my eye consciousness no longer produces karma.

There’s no longer cause and effect happening in my eye consciousness.

Okay.

As I detach from sight, then I actually lose the nature of sight.

Like we talked about last week, no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind.

So as the self-natures of these different things are interrupted through our meditation practice, the various consciousnesses that are activated by them cease.

And as they cease, then cause and effect, karma, action, the function, the cyclical movement of samsaric engagement also ceases.

Okay.

All right.

Now, that in itself is kind of cool.

And it goes back to the song of Zazen.

Even those who practice meditation for just one sitting will see all their twisted karma erased.

That.

Okay.

Now, but the point here of the sutra is different.

The point is to say, hey, the alaya consciousness should cease as well, but it doesn’t.

Even if you hold that long enough where there’s so little stimulation that you even lose the sense of continuity and continuity ceases.

When you come back online, you still come back online.

Right.

So the alaya consciousness can’t have ceased even if your sense of continuity ceased.

Okay.

Not to be nitpicky, does that sentence end the alaya consciousness should cease as well?

It does.

What’s the next sentence?

Yeah.

Because that’s where you thought I was like, wait, that contradicts the entire thing that we just talked about.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay.

So here we go.

Should cease, but doesn’t.

Should cease, but doesn’t.

Here’s what happens.

Mahamati, if the alaya consciousness were to cease, this would be no different from the annihilationism of the heterodox schools.

So annihilationism is like nihilism, which says that when I die, nothing that I do persists in any way, shape, or form.

I’m just done, blank, gone.

Okay.

That’s not what this teaches.

It’s not what this teaches.

Mahamati, those teachers say when separated from all phenomenal objects, continuity consciousness ceases.

Okay.

So when our dharma shut down and our characteristics cease, then we can have an experience of the cessation of continuity, which is fine.

They’re not saying that doesn’t happen, right?

But they’re saying that with the cessation of continuity consciousness, all consciousness is extinguished, right?

And you would hear people say such things where like nirvana is just the end.

You’re just done.

It’s proof that there’s nothing after you die because the experience of cessation is nothing.

Or if you want to just get straight philosophical about it and not talk about meditative experience, lots of people come up with the idea with what happens after you die.

Just blank, just nothing.

You’re just gone.

Well, this is saying, well, if that’s true, and I can have the experience of dying on my cushion, all conditions cease.

There’s no more sense of continuity.

I really just am completely blanked out, gone.

Then how can I come back?

This doesn’t make sense.

Furthermore, when I come back, I still have the karma that was with me.

Yes.

In the deep meditation, all the twisted karma was erased.

I’m no longer experiencing karma, but my alive consciousness is still perfumed.

I still am able to recognize that that thing is associated with the concept of statue, and it has these qualities and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So clearly the alive consciousness persisted through the experience of cessation.

So then, but Mahamati, if continuity consciousness truly ceased, then the beginningless stream of all consciousness would already have ceased.

Okay.

And this is another form of logic that basically says that if every time somebody enters cessation, then this continuity of consciousness would have to cease.

Well, if it can’t be identified as ever having started, and it constantly is restarting, then how could it ever stop?

Which is kind of more of like an Indian debate rhetoric, just to be fair, that line, I don’t think is as important as the one that just came.

So, and then the heterox, I’m going to finish reading this and then we’ll wrap it up.

So unless anyone has something that they think they’ll lose if I keep going.

Because the last part here, I think is a real gem.

It says, Mahamati, the heterodox schools say that the continuity of consciousness arises from a creator.

So this is how they get around the inherent paradox.

They say, yeah, when you go into cessation, you cease and you die.

And then you’re nothing.

And then something restarts it.

Okay.

So their argument is that you can end it and then restart it.

You get like a blank slate of some kind.

And they say that, you know, what the Lankavatara Sutra says is that consciousness arises from the interplay, the conjunction of I form space and clarity.

Okay.

I form space and clarity.

Just another formulation of the same thing we’ve been talking about the whole time.

There’s an object, there’s a sense of organ, there’s a consciousness we create.

Meaning that’s how our experience comes together.

That’s what reality fundamentally is, right?

But the heterodox, when they say creator, they said there’s a doer.

There’s something that is doing it outside of my own consciousness, outside the interplay of these things.

And what is that?

A superior person, a sovereign, time, atoms.

These and other like them are said to be creators.

So they say that these specific things that are not us, not part of the human experience will generate the consciousness that we experience.

And the Lankavatara is explicitly refuting that, saying that the consciousness we experience is unique to the interplay, the dynamic interplay of light, never ending, never failing, mysterious manifestation of truth, the dynamic interplay of light and the awakened one’s vow.

Here it is, right?

A couple thousand years earlier.

So that is to… Oh, I’ve got plenty I can say.

I’m sure you do.

I think I see Robin doing… Oh, you just cut out for a bit there.

So we’re kind of hanging on, or at least for me, you cut out.

I don’t know what the last things you said were.

Uh-oh, what was the last thing you heard?

You think I have a memory?

Well, bummer.

Does anyone remember what the last… Michael, did I cut out for you?

No, I’ve already moved on to the other chapter two minutes ago.

I’m sorry.

No, I just, I’m really with you.

I’m just thinking ahead here.

Okay, so this… Robin, do you have anything based on what you experienced from what you heard?

No?

Okay, so what I love about this section is that very early in the text takes us straight into, takes us straight into, you are creating the world through the dynamic interplay of your sense organs interaction with the sense object and the way your consciousness is perfumed by your past experience.

And that is reality.

Yes, okay.

And it just drops us straight into that.

That’s the first thing that it talks about, which is really interesting, okay?

Because we’ve got a lot of sutra left and that already kind of laid out the prime nugget for the liberation from the Yogachara perspective.

It’s basically saying, if you can get this and you can start to differentiate between what you’re directly experiencing and what you’re adding to that direct experience, then you no longer have to be walking around so dang confused.

You realize that you are creating your experience based on a direct experience.

And if you can separate out what you’re adding to it or what you’re taking away from it, then you can account for that.

This doesn’t say that you’ll stop doing it.

And that’s really important.

It doesn’t say that you’ll stop adding stuff to it.

It just says that because you can see clearly, you can account for it, okay?

And then the Samdhi Nirmal Kama Sutra, there’s a beautiful metaphor that I’m going to use instead of going into 2.5 because we will pick up 2.5 cleanly in the next practice session.

But there’s a beautiful metaphor for this process.

And it says that if you take a diamond and you lay it on a green cloth and you show it to someone who doesn’t know, they would say, wow, look at that beautiful emerald.

And then you take that diamond and you lay it instead on a red cloth and you show it to someone who doesn’t know.

Say, wow, what a beautiful ruby.

Okay, and then you take and you engage in this practice.

And that’s like being able to lift up the diamond and hold the colored cloth and go, ah, there’s a diamond and there’s a colored cloth.

And now I can swipe out the colored cloth.

When I see the diamond in front of the red, I can recognize that it looks like a ruby because there’s a diamond and there’s a colored cloth.

And I can account for that.

And I can account for that.

Likewise, one of the things that I think, you know, I take this further than maybe than they originally intended, but what you also realize is that when you have a diamond, you’re the one who gets to put the cloth under there.

You’re gonna put some cloth under there.

So you might as well put the cloth under there that you really wanna have.

And that makes us active agents in the creation of our karmic evolution.

Because we’re saying, well, if the causes and conditions that I bring to the situation, the perfuming that I bring to the situation makes the diamond look like this or that, but I can’t really change the diamond.

Well, I better pay attention to the cloth I’m adding.

And that is a very interesting life practice.

So what are your questions?

Situation-dependent?

Everything depends on it.

For everything, I have mechanical questions.

Mechanical questions, okay.

I don’t know if I could fit in in five minutes.

Okay, your practice for precise speech begins now.

Okay, so the beginning of that whole situation, we spent a lot of time talking about cessation.

We have experience of cessation.

So we sit, we meditate.

That is the basis of the practice.

How do you practice cessation?

Obviously, you can close your eyes.

Okay, well, that’s cessation of sight to an extent.

How do you practice cessation of hearing, touch?

Yeah, so it’s like, have you ever been so locked in on something that somebody called your name and you didn’t hear them?

Touch.

Cessation of hearing.

Okay, okay, okay.

So that’s kind of the parallel, the post-parallel.

And the method is by putting our attention on increasingly internal, increasingly more subtle aspects of experience until we can take consciousness itself as an object of meditation.

And we fully look, we’re just turning back the clock, we’re looking into the thing that is eliminating all the experience.

And when that is the object of concentration for long enough, then the rest of the things fall away because there’s just consciousness, not consciousness of.

And that leads to cessation.

So then what do you call that thing that you’re focusing?

So that, well, I guess that is my mechanical question is like, obviously I’m going to sit here and I’m going to try to just be not focusing on thinking about what I’m feeling until I want to have my leg off, but that’s a different thing.

I guess the bare bones of that, the bare bones of that question is, can you practice or fundamentally, if we can put it into words, like if you try this, yeah, practice that.

Once you have that down to this, absolutely.

You have that down with, okay.

So then maybe I’m missing something back here that is stopping up here.

So most Zen instruction that came through the 60s did not carry rigorous meditation instruction.

That was left.

So oral instruction for people who became serious students and actually work with somebody.

And what was published was very much a, you know, take your posture, sit down and watch your breath.

Right.

Okay.

Because that was the traditional way that one would enter.

What’s called the Jons.

Okay.

Was through concentration on the breath.

And it’s basically being so locked in on your breath that, and what happens is your breath becomes an internal phenomenon.

That’s no longer an external phenomenon.

Now you’re no longer really focusing on the in and out breath.

It becomes like a felt experience of breath.

And as breath becomes that subtle, then the mind slowly starts to shut off.

And that’s the traditional instruction for that.

But then secular mindfulness and MBSR and Jon Kabat-Zinn and mindfulness-based therapies started focusing on nonjudgmental awareness, slightly based off of its own time teaching that you are the sky and your thoughts are the clouds and allow them to pass by.

But it still has everyone fucking looking at the clouds.

Right.

You’re not supposed to look at the clouds.

Right.

So like, that’s the whole, like, okay, well, you know, if the thought arises, acknowledge the fact that the thought arose and then just, but you’re still acknowledging something, which is still.

Right.

Like you’re not getting out of that.

Like, you know, I can sit there like today, my legs killing me.

I can sit there and go, Hey, yep.

Leg hurts.

That sucks.

Move on.

And then you try to.

Right.

But then you’re still locked in that hole.

Right.

Coming back.

So in this practice, you don’t even note.

There is no noting in this practice.

It’s just, I will focus my concentration first on, and we can talk more about this mechanically in our discussion.

Yeah.

But there’s a. I won’t waste.

It’s not wasting anybody’s time.

It’s more just, we need to get those and check in.

But no, you absolutely can take your attention, poke it on an external anchor, visualize the external anchor and take, put your attention on that thing through your mind’s eye.

Take that thing through your mind’s eye and shift it to embodied sensation.

Take that embodied sensation and shift it to a sense of well-being that arises.

Take that sense of well-being and shift it to a sense of contentment that arises, which is a mental quality, not a physical experience.

Eight steps.

The last one, not a perception or non-perception.

Boom.

Cessation.

Done.

It’s a trainable.

It’s a totally trainable skill.

Robin just did the training with me over January, February, March.

And it seems like it did things for your meditation practice.

Most definitely.

Most definitely.

Wish I would have known this training 15 years ago.

Yeah.

But a little advertisement.

I learned more in three months than I did in 15 years.

That’s a, that’s a good advertisement.

Really?

Yeah.

Or a resounding critique for all the other poor guys, poor fellows.

But anyway, with that, with that little side jab, we’ll go and do our technique in the midst of our beautiful, yeah, it’s feeling warm.

So everyone’s going to be out on their bikes and their sports cars.

And I think that was just a really crappy old Toyota though.

Next week, we will pick up on two section five, which is very short.

And I expect that we’ll move right into 2.6.

My translations of those sections are already on the website under the Lhakravatara tab in the menu.

So I’ll be reading from my translations.

Please continue to look at Red Pine because he does a lot of more scholastic, more scholarly historical commentary.

I’m not concerned about that.

I’m just rendering the Chinese into English that feels like the Chinese, which is a very different project than giving you English that makes sense to you.

And so with that, I look forward to those conversations to come and thank everyone for their engagement with the Lhakravatara so far.

Let’s go ahead and do our closing round.

We’ll have Tyson and then Robin and Michael and Brian.

Yeah, Tyson here in Erie, Colorado.

Relatively confused.

I missed last week because I was cheering for Denver University that lost in the second overtime.

And next week I’ll be cheering for granddaughter and college softball in Minnesota.

So I need a guide.

And it sounds like go to the website and you’ll figure out where we are.

Yeah, I’ve built a tab that is going to have all of the sections and then the discussions that go with each of those sections.

So within the next couple of days, this recording will be put up there as well under section 2.4 so that you can follow along.

And it’ll go like that for the remainder of this training period.

But it will reference where we’re reading because I’m jumping around on red pine going, where is he?

Where is he?

Yeah, absolutely.

It’s all going to be clearly laid out in the titles of the different things.

OK, well, I’m in with great hope.

Oh.

Am I up?

Who’s up?

Whoever.

Oh, OK. Yeah, gratitude to be here.

And.

Yeah, gratitude.

Thanks.

Thanks for all your effort to be very insightful.

I would argue some points with you, but it’s all good.

Thank you.

OK, that’s why we have it.

Yeah.

Yeah, glad to be here.

Glad to be starting to put this all together in a way that makes sense.

And yeah.

Energized to go on to the rest of my evening.

So I’m in.

Same.

Very grateful to be here.

A little bit of catching up to do, which is very fun.

Yeah.

I’m in, so I’m going to make it back.

And it’s the highlight of my week as far as not working on family related things.

So thank you all for sharing the space again.

I’m in.

And let me check in.

As always, grateful to have a chance to nerd out.

I’m also grateful to have a chance to be challenged and have discussions.

So definitely bring it.

Yeah, we’ll see what happens.

And with that, I too am enjoying a wonderful evening.

I’m looking forward to seeing you all next week.

Take care.

Bye.