Well, it's funny how with this disease we can sometimes really get ourselves up for doing something we really want to do, only to come crashing down to Earth when it's over.

I got back close to 1:00 a.m. on Sunday morning from a quick trip San Francisco to see the Dalai Lama, wheelchair at the ready and under my arm, as it were, for the whole trip. My musician (drummer) brother picked me up at the Oakland airport of Thursday night and we spent most of the next three days together. I had a good time, but I can't say that he is an easy person to spend time with. Still, I'm glad to have done it. The teaching itself was fairly difficult. Two texts on one of my favorite topics, something called "dependent origination," but the first of the texts, written by Nargajuna - the altogether amazing First Century C.E. philosopher who wrote the text that he presented last year in the course of a three-day teaching in Pasadena - was particularly inscrutable in places, and will clearly require more study on my part. Not a bad thing, I suppose.

I understand that Vic has asked that I fill in a little bit what is meant by dependent origination. What follows is adapted from something I wrote a couple of months ago. If you'll bear with me for a moment, it's interesting because it's really far more of a philosophical than a religious construct:

Nagarjuna is credited with extending the doctrine of Dependent Origination – or pratitya-samutpada in the ancient Pali language – the fundamental Buddhist teaching that all phenomena arise in dependence on causes and conditions and lack inherent being. Early sources indicate that the Buddha became enlightened under the Bodhi Tree when he fully realized the profound truth of Dependent Origination, that all phenomena are conditioned and arise and cease in a determinate series.

In his so-called Middle or Madhyamaka School, Nagarjuna, writing five hundred years after tge time of the Buddha, gave a new perspective to Dependant Origination, whereby it becomes associated with the “emptiness” – by that he means only that anything that is empty is devoid of inherent essence – of the composite of the causes and conditions which we conventionally understand as being.

But Nagarjuna did not stop with the “emptiness” of conventional causes and conditions, but the emptiness of emptiness and indeed, the "emptiness" of the most fundamental of Buddhist doctrines (the "Four Noble Truths"), which Nagarjuna explain can have no independent essence but must serve as the description of the relationship between other concepts, namely suffering, craving and aversion. But he further argues in another of his primary texts, “The Fundamental Stanzas on the Middle Way,” that not only are concepts such as motion dependently driven - and there is a nice little discussion of what 2,000 years later would be called special relativity - but that emptiness too is empty, i.e., there is no absolute world beyond that which arises conventionally.

This someone doing heavy lifting by any standards of modern Western philosophy but he's funny too, referring to humans as "large bi-peds," and maybe anticipating Darwin for all I know. Clearly, he walked the Earth as a genus, but I hadn't heard of him until I attended the Dalai Lama's teaching at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium in September of last year.

In that earlier talk, and then again just last week, the Dalai Lama referred us to Chapter 24 of the “The Fundamental Stanzas on the Middle Way.” Two verses – 18 and 19 – stand out as central to that Chapter:

Whatever is dependently co-arisen
That is explained to be emptiness.

That, [i.e. emptiness] being a dependent designation
Is itself the middle way.
Something that is not dependently arisen,
Such a thing does not exist.
Therefore a non-empty thing
Does not exist.

The import of 24:18 and the Middle School doctrine is that conventional existence and ultimate nonexistence and are the same thing. Hence the deep identity of the two truths. And this is because emptiness is none other than dependent-arising, and emptiness being dependently designated is therefore empty.

But "emptiness" in this context is not nonexistence. The lack of inherent existence that is asserted is not the lack of a property possessed by some entities but not by others, or a property that an entity could be imagined to have, but rather the lack of an impossible attribute. Nagarjuna explicitly and repeatedly rejects nihilism, the doctrine that nothing exists, is knowable or can be communicated. From this perspective the world is quite real, so long as we realize that everything and anything arises only in relationship to everything else.

Returning then to the world of relative arisings, I should say that before I left for my little trip, I signed the final set of papers waiving all contingencies on the purchase of the a new house! In a nutshell, we're moving to the Valley so that my 14 year old son can take advantage of an admission into a very good high school in Chatsworth. It's a huge move for us. We've been in this townhouse in Santa Monica for over 15 years, and even though we've really outgrown it, it is, after all, the only house the kids have ever known.

So on Sunday, both set of brokers where gracious enough to open the house up so that the kids and my mother in law could see it. The kids really liked it. My mother in law, having warned that it was now a done deal and she could only be positive, kept remarking on "how interesting" she found the floor plan to be.

Then last night, we went out to dinner at a Moroccan restaurant in West Hollywood for my birthday. Very nice, I got among other things a book by the Dalai Lama with the same colors on the dust jacket as had been up in the hall in San Francisco with a picture of him looking exactly as he had the day before. (A little spooky, actually.)

So that's what's more or less what's going on with me. Physically, I'm not in great shape. I ran a couple of small errands this morning and now have pretty bad spasms, offset to a certain degree with the warm glow of opioids. Unfortunately, our sitter is on vacation this week, and because I was in no shape to pick up the boys from their respective schools this afternoon, my wife had to leave work early to do so, so fat chance of me making a friend's meditation class which starts tonight. But that's the price I pay for having enjoyed a couple of days of liberation on San Francisco. And what would anyone gladly trade for that?

Mike