I vow to teach the truth of the Dharmic justice words. Good morning. We are very pleased to have a wonderful Dharma event. Ajahn Amaro will speak, and we also have our friends from Santa Cruz and Monterey, and those who've come up for a visit. So, it's a great Dharma gathering. Ajahn Amaro is a Thai, the tradition of Thai forest monk, and he became, was ordained as a bhikkhu in 1979, and has spent quite a lot of time in England, And for the last, I think, two years, has been? Six years. In this country? Visiting this country.

[01:01]

Visiting this country for the last six years. Well, he will say his thoughts about this situation, which is another chapter in how Buddhism comes to the West. Thank you. And let me just say that after the talk, will go into the community room and they will be served a lunch. And as soon as they are served, there will be a blessing and then the rest of us who want to stay can have some food. It will be laid out in a potluck style in the kitchen and take our food into the community room and we will eat and in silence, I think, and then after Ajahn Amaral is finished eating, but we may have some time for discussion. Namo Tassa Bhagavato Arahato Samma Sambuddhassa Namo Tassa Bhagavato Arahato Samma Sambuddhassa Namo Tassa Bhagavato Arahato Samma Sambuddhassa

[02:44]

I'm very glad to be here. here at the Berkeley Zen Center. I think this is the second time I've been invited to give one of these Saturday morning Dharma talks. When I arrived this morning, I asked Meili and Sojourn what they might like me to talk about today. The immediate response was, well, why don't you tell us about what you do? We know what you think. What do you do? I thought that was a very emphatic lion's roar.

[03:51]

I'm impressed that they know what I think already. Since I'm often unaware of that myself. But anyway, Well, we have just, to clarify the little sort of exchange between Meili and I, I've been visiting California for a few months each year since 1990. Is that seven years now? And then we just settled last year in June to start up a monastery, a forest monastery here in California, up in Mendocino. And so this foundation has finally begun in earnest. In a way, talking about what we do, to give a little bit of a background, as many of you are, I'm sure, aware, the Theravada tradition, as it's established or being established in the States,

[04:59]

has got two very distinct arms, one of which is the Asian community from say Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma, Sri Lanka, and to an extent from Vietnam, which is very much aligned with the Asian communities within the USA. And to have a certain involvement with meditation practice and meditation traditions, And the other arm of it is what's become known as the vipassana tradition, with the emphasis on lay practice and vipassana meditation retreats and local sitting groups and so on. broad generalization. What is derived from the Theravada world is settled in these two different wings, if you like. So the former largely serves the Asian community within the USA and the latter largely serves the non-Asian population of people interested in Buddhist practice.

[06:16]

It's interesting, I was told at a gathering of Buddhist teachers at Spirit Rock about a year or so ago, maybe 15 months, they asked, they were getting a feel for how many people there were from different traditions and they said, you know, how many Tibetans, people from the Tibetan tradition, how many Zen people, they said that. How many Theravadans? And three people put their hands up. How many people from the Vipassana tradition? And 35 put their hands up. So that was interesting. And so there's a kind of middle ground in there where sort of Theravada as a whole tradition and a tradition related to meditation practice is kind of vaguely understood or not highly developed or people don't within the meditation the Buddhist meditation community, people don't necessarily feel that aligned with Theravada as a whole.

[07:23]

Now, a number of, way back in 1976, actually slightly before then, the head of our community, Ajahn Sumedho, when he was in Thailand with his teacher Ajahn Chah, one day, The conversation came up about Buddhism in the West. This would have been back in about 70, 71 or 72. And Ajahn Chah asked one of those kind of leading questions like, do you think you'll ever go back to the West, Sumedho? And Ajahn Sumedho said, oh no, never. They don't really understand Buddhism in the West. I mean, how could you live as a monk there? People wouldn't know about offering alms, food, and they wouldn't know about helping, you know, being able to support monks keeping the Vinaya discipline. No, it would be impossible. There's no way I'd ever go back there. I mean, you couldn't survive as a monk.

[08:26]

Then Ajahn Chah kind of leaned forward and looked at him and said, you mean there are no kind people in America? Aha. And he said at that point, that was the moment that he knew he was eventually going to go back to the West. Because his feeling, you know, our life is very much a mendicant tradition. We live completely on what's offered. And so survival as a Buddhist monk in the Theravada world is very much related to, you know, the daily offerings of food. I mean, if you're not around sympathetic people, you don't eat. full stop. So that was his immediate association as well. How would you eat? How would you survive? You couldn't live for very long. But Ajahn Chah's vision was a bit broader and realized you don't have to be Buddhist to be kind or to feel sympathy and interest in supporting spiritual practice.

[09:31]

So anyway, he having had a long association with Jack Kornfield, I think he was the first monk that Jack ever met up on a hill in Northeast Thailand way back in probably 68. I mean Jack was in the Peace Corps. Jack had come back to the States and had started up a meditation center on the East Coast with Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg and was setting up things here on the West Coast. So he would invite Ajahn Sumedho to come and teach a retreat every year. Since Ajahn Sumedho's family lived in San Diego, he would come back and visit them and do a retreat. Well, when he'd first come back through and Jack and Joseph and Sharon were on the East Coast and Ajahn Sumedho had visited his family back in 76 and he thought, okay, well, you know, I guess I'll be coming back to the West and I'll go travel around in America and I'll meet the people there and see what emerges.

[10:34]

And as he came through the States it was quite clear that he was definitely, like, not interested. Monasticism is not what we're doing. Very nice to see you. Hello, old friend. We're not inviting you to take over this. We're not inviting you to stay here. We're not inviting you to set up a monastery. So you go, oh, that's interesting. Well, nothing happening in America. On this score, there's just a very strong sense of the lay community wanting to make their own way to define the the teaching in their own way to set up their own centers, and not to build things around a traditionalistic form. So he thought, well, fair enough, that's the way they want to do it. That's okay. I can go back to Thailand. Because a part of him didn't really want the responsibility of launching a whole movement in the West. A large part of him didn't want it.

[11:34]

But then he made the mistake of having a three-day stopover in England. And where they found there was a community that was established in London that was specifically set up in order to invite a Buddhist monastic, to establish a Buddhist monastic presence in England. And he ended up meeting these people and staying over and they said, please will you stay here in England? Oh, well I have to ask my teacher. So he got back to Thailand and then Ajahn Chah received an invite to go and visit the place in England and then we ended up starting our monasteries there. So anyway, he would be invited back here each year by Jack and would visit here on the west coast and also teach over in Barrie, Massachusetts on the east coast. Still for many years there was really no feeling within the Vipassana meditation community for wanting to have monastics around in a form other than as visiting teachers.

[12:38]

There was no real feeling for wanting a monastery. And then in the late eighties a few people started to emerge who had stayed within monasteries and had lived amongst contemplative monastic communities amongst other westerners and had developed a sense of wanting to support that or wanting to participate in that. And feeling there was a dimension of practice or a dimension of Buddhist training that was there, present within a monastic environment that they couldn't get just from doing retreats and living a life with a regular job and an ordinary family existence. And so a small cluster of people started to emerge in the late 80s. And so Ajahn Sumedho decided that, well, maybe there is some interest here after all.

[13:39]

Maybe we should make an effort. And then Jack Kornfield, also by that time, was also being very supportive. And he convened a conference on monasticism in 1990 called The Joys of Monastic Life. and to which I was invited along. I came with Ajahn Sumedho and two of the elder nuns from our community came. So that was my introduction to California was that year. That was a very fine occasion. He also invited a number of other Christian contemplatives because what Jack was aware of was that the whole concept of monasticism within America is a very, very vague thing. I mean, most people's experience of monasticism is in what those nuns were like in Catholic school. I don't know if any of you have seen those little kind of puppets of the boxing nuns. Someone was produced a year or two ago, these nuns with a kind of fierce face, sharp featured nun in full habit with boxing gloves and you could kind of pull the levers and the nun would start thumping.

[14:51]

So obviously somebody had, and many people had very kind of painful memories of being dominated by aggressive nuns in Catholic school. And for many Americans that's the image there is of monasticism. Or Thomas Merton, whose name was known as a great writer within the Catholic tradition. But the concept of monastic life and monasticism and how it works is a kind of vague and remote thing for many people. So Jack's idea with convening making that conference was to help introduce and bring into people's minds how monastic life works, what its fruits are, how it functions, and also bringing that more and more into the field of perception within the USA. So since that time I was invited to come along and coming for a few years and slowly introducing this tradition and our ways of practice and our way of life and to the point where we were given some land by the abbot of the city of 10,000 Buddhas last year up in Mendocino and we bought another patch of land next to it.

[16:12]

We now have this forest monastery, germinal forest monastery beginning there. and setting it up to be a place where those who are interested in monastic life can go forth, can enter into that environment. Because the way a monastery works within the Theravada tradition and from the original Buddhist times is that it's a place for everybody. It's like an environment for spiritual practice that tries to encourage those qualities. just as a place like this Zen Center, it's an environment which is sustained by the residents and the visitors there to support all that which is good and worthwhile in spiritual practice, to support the cultivation of kindness, of gentleness, generosity, of meditation, cultivation of wisdom, and an appreciation of nature and learning to live simply, frugally, close to the earth,

[17:12]

and living in harmony with the natural order of things. So this is why, say, within the Theravada tradition, the meditation monasteries have almost invariably been associated with being in the countryside, in the forest, in the mountains, away from the larger urban situations. because of that particular element of learning to be away from the world of human constructions and to recognize our place in the universe when it's not defined by human concepts, human creations, human constructions, but our participation in the grander and larger natural order of things. And for example, one of the most impressive experiences when I began my life in the monastery in Thailand was that I'd never related to myself as a food source before.

[18:17]

You know, food is something that I eat, I am not eaten. But then you realize that living in a forest, particularly in a tropical country, that a large blob of protoplasm like this is a major you're a major part of the food chain for quite a number of creatures. And to plant yourself in the middle of this kind of large Petri dish and to expect not to be bitten by things is absurd, crazy. Because you You know, we tend to live in a very protected environment. But, you know, you're sitting there in your hut and you're like, well why am I, I'm sitting here resenting the fact that these creatures are coming along and biting me, but I've come and sat down in their forest. They were here before me. What have I got to complain about? So there's the training within the monastery, and

[19:23]

In a way I think it seems as though the Zen tradition within this country has held a lot more of its formal aspects than the Vipassana tradition has, whereby within the Vipassana community there's much more of an emphasis on the formal meditation practice. but very little structures around that. Here there seems to be a degree more of a greater sense of ritual, of say an adherence to and a working with traditional forms that have come through from China and Japan and originally from India. And that's obviously much more explicit even though these two traditions have kind of grown up in parallel. And so we're very much of that same spirit that we have tried to sustain, that those qualities of ritual and tradition and form that work and that are, you know, say, create a bond between you and the lineage from which you have derived, but also which accord with the world in which we're living.

[20:38]

So when we first came to England, a whole, well even before the community came to England, when they were in Thailand as well, particularly when they came to England, a large succession of people would come and visit and tell Ajahn Sumedho all the things that we had to stop doing and that we had to change. Like we can't bow. The English will not stand for bowing. And they won't sit on the floor. You've got to sit on chairs. None of the hippies sit on the floor. And you know what they're like. But since most of the Sangha have been extremely long-haired and shaggy before they entered the robes, that was not a very good argument. But our policy, what we did was we'd say, okay, well let's just do what we know and then change things when we have to. To change out of pragmatism rather than out of ideology. Because the Buddhist path is very much one of a, it's a pragmatic path, it's not an ideological path. It's led with what works, not led by what we think is a good idea.

[21:44]

It's like the Buddha established the Vinaya rules out of what was needed, not what he thought was going to be a good idea. So he waited until there was problems and difficulties and conflicts and people went off before establishing a rule. So we followed that same spirit, keeping what we knew from the forest tradition in Thailand, And then changing what we had to when we went along, like these jackets. You'd never wear this kind of thing in Thailand. You'd die of, you'd kind of expire with heat stroke. But in England where it's very cold, the weather's like this, it became obvious very quickly that we needed some way of keeping ourselves warm. So one of the monks had spent some time with a Korean bhikkhu and He said, oh, they've got these really neat jackets in Korea. And he was good on a sewing machine, so he knocked up a few of these and says, here, try these on. And next thing we knew, we had developed this. So what happens, and I'm sure this has been the same with the Zen Center, is that you start to boil things down to what is the core training for your life, and both deriving from your faithfulness to your lineage, and also what works in the current society.

[23:09]

And so within a monastery, the essential training is practices are lived by even the guests who come and stay and the novices. The basic form of training is what's called the eight precepts for conduct. And it's also very much a part of our life that the Buddha within our scriptures refers to the Dhamma and the discipline as like one word, the Dhamma Vinaya. I don't know if it's the same within the Japanese tradition, but it's like one term, the Dharma Vinaya. That's the dispensation or what was transmitted by the Buddha. Not just the Dharma, it's the Dharma Vinaya, which means both the higher teaching, but also that which is its container. So within our monastic tradition, then you have what's called the Eight Precepts as the basic form for monastic living. So that is, many of you are probably familiar with this already, but I'll just whip through them quickly.

[24:17]

That's to refrain from taking life, to refrain from taking what is not given, celibacy, to refrain from any kind of sexual activity, to refrain from false, harsh, gossiping or backbiting speech, to refrain from consuming intoxicating drink or drugs, to refrain from eating between midday and dawn of the next day, to not sing, dance, play games, do cartwheels, play frisbee, wear makeup, jewelry, or have fun. Fun is strictly verboten. Any kind of fun. You're allowed to delight in the dharma. Everything else is off. And then the last one, the eighth precept is to not use a luxurious sleeping place.

[25:24]

So, and then the additional, basically the rules for the monks, the fully ordained monks and nuns, it's just a kind of a refinement on that, but that's the basic core of it. And the main refinement that you have as a monk or a nun is that you have far less control of food and no control of money. So someone on the eight precepts, a novice, can look after the kitchen, take care of the stores and can cook food. But a nun or a monk, you can only use the make use of food or drink that's put into your hands between dawn and midday. And then after that, I can't store away something that was given to me yesterday and keep it for today. Or I can't even ask the novice, say, could you offer this tomorrow? So you have very, very tenuous control over food and no control over money.

[26:31]

So those are the additional sort of renunciant aspects. But basically all of the rules and observances that we have, like 227 rules for a month, they're kind of refinements on those basic eight precepts and the precepts on food and money. So what this is trying to do is to create an extraordinarily simple and gentle life. a life where one is living as honestly and as harmlessly and as simply as it's possible. Not because there's a virtue in going without or in those precepts in and of themselves, but they create an environment of uncomplicatedness wherein the contemplation of the nature of mind can be more effectively cultivated, so that the conventions of the moral training, and the conventions of the monastery, they are there simply as a vehicle, or as a container.

[27:41]

But without the container, it's understood that the access to the Dharma, or the ability to use the Dharma, is greatly diminished. It's like having water. I mean, water is great, marvellous stuff and useful and crucial for many aspects of our life. But if we don't have things to contain it in, what can you do with it? You know, how can you have a drink of water? You have to kind of have some way of conveying it through pipes or holding it in glasses or cups, putting it into pots to cook with. If you haven't got a cooking pot, it's kind of hard to cook. You haven't got a cup or a glass or a bowl, it's hard to contain the water. So the essence of water is the same, the essence of the Dhamma is still the same, but without the means to contain it effectively, and in an effective and pure way, then the water becomes useless to us, or very greatly diminished in use. It's also, even though one says that, the practice of the discipline that we keep within the monastery, and this is, as I said, this is for the guests and as well as for the residents, you know, that everyone who's in the monastery will live by the eight precepts.

[29:02]

This is, it's not a kind of irritating aspect that you begrudge, oh well this is the stuff that we have to do in order that we can really make the meditation work. But what is crucial is also that the very establishment, the formal commitment to their discipline, and to the routine, and also to the hierarchy of the monastery, because the community is always ranked in accordance with who was ordained first. Even if it's just like I was ordained a minute before this other monk, I will always be senior to him. Or I was ordained two days after that one. I'll always be junior to him. So that what that does is it creates a mirror effect, so that the formal commitment to the training rules, they reflect back to you, I mean all of my urges towards greed, towards violence, towards fear, towards wanting to have my own way, towards

[30:10]

towards other people, in creating opinions about things, the presence of the discipline then becomes a meditation tool enabling us to be much more mindful of the movements of consciousness. towards the things that we like, away from the things that we dislike, around the things that we have opinions on, and the whole self-creation mechanism around what I think, what I like, what is mine, what is yours, so that the training rules and the discipline that we have are not just an adjunct to the meditation, but they are the tool of meditation itself. So that, say there's a rule like when you take your shoes off, you know, you put them side by side. You don't kind of have them skew width or one halfway down the steps. And that's so that when you are taking your, when you're taking your sandals off, then you know the precept is there, but it's like saying, be mindful. Or when you're speaking with someone, you have precepts about being honest.

[31:25]

As your speech starts to veer off and become a little bit kind of expansive, or you start to adjust the truth a little bit for the sake of a good story, then you know that. You become aware of that. And so within yourself, you can see, aha, I'm drifting, I'm creating. This isn't honest. And so that even though the precept is there, it's causing the generation of mindfulness and integrity to be established. Now I realize this isn't very far away from much of Zen training. And I think the major differences are things like probably when you're on retreat you don't have much say in what food you eat. You think you're just served up whatever's there. And then the strictures on sexuality, that within the Zen tradition, at least from Japan, then this is not a celibate tradition in particular, which makes a big difference obviously.

[32:41]

and then the use of money that individual people within the Zen tradition have their own supplies of and usage of money. So those particular areas say within a monastery or monastic training are areas where Along with the restrictions about honesty, which I'm sure you all have, and violence, which I'm sure you all have, those three others, food, sex and money, It's strange how just the words have a certain potency. Food, sex, money have a certain role in our life. But it's interesting that the whole training is recognizing that yes, when you enter this training it is deeply frustrating. There's this marvelous phrase in a book about Ajahn Chah's teaching where he was talking to a newly arrived Western and he said, when you enter upon monastic life, you should be aware that you will necessarily experience a great deal of abrasion and frustration.

[33:56]

This is normal. But they also have this phrase, this is the suffering which leads to the end of suffering. Because by consciously entering into a zone of restraint and restriction. It's not because you're wanting to give yourself a hard time, but it's recognizing that renunciation makes us strong. Learning to meet the passions of acquisition, of fear of not getting enough, fear of not having what I want or what I need. Being attracted towards a person and then having to relate to them in a sisterly or brotherly way, rather than in terms of the possibility of sexual contact. And then money, not having money, being powerless. Yesterday we had a monk who'd been staying with us, we just dropped him off at the BART station in Michelin 24th, getting the BART to Fremont. Okay, venerable, here's your ticket. Will you be alright? Oh yes, I'll be alright.

[34:57]

You know, because you have to be. And so you enter into a zone, you have no money, so you enter into a zone of risk. But also, as you're then off on your own, and you've got your ticket, and you think, what's going to happen? Then also, all that comes up is like, well, what can happen? You know, there's the experience of the five kundas changing, form, feeling, perception, mental formations, consciousness. They come, they go. Painful feeling, pleasant feeling, neutral feeling. So what? It's just the five kundas, you know. That which was never born can never die. That which I don't possess can't be lost. That which is real, that which is the real refuge is untouchable. And so, it kind of by deliberately entering or being ready to experience those zones of relinquishing control on your very life support systems and relying upon faith.

[36:00]

that if you live in a good way, then the world will respond, like Ajahn Chah's comment to Ajahn Sumedho. If you live in a good way, if you are honest, and if you have integrity, if you practice meditation, if you are worthy in your spiritual practice, the world will come forth and will support you in that. You may not have names and addresses right now, but if you have that faith, then the world will respond. Also an element of our teaching, just to make another couple of points on this, one of the other elements of the Theravada teaching is that the Buddha, it's a very unmetaphysical approach towards spiritual practice and that with the Mahayana scriptures there's a lot more say, supplementary material.

[37:05]

I think the Zen tradition was very much trying to stay at the core of things in a similar way. But the Theravada tradition is, that's very much our ethic, that there's a recognition that the Buddha explicitly only spoke about a very small range. He deliberately limited his teaching to the absolute essentials. And so that Over and over again, you get this phrase, you know, I just teach one thing, suffering and the end of suffering. And there were many, many exchanges where people would come and ask him, well, what's the nature, what's the ultimate origin of things? Or what's the nature, where does an enlightened being go after they die? Or what's the real nature of a Buddha? Where does an enlightened being go when they die and so on? And the Buddha was stoic in refusing to answer these questions or even Go near them and say, this is not salutary, it's not useful, it doesn't conduce to the realization of truth.

[38:06]

You don't need to know. And the famous example is that of him with a handful of leaves saying, what I know is comparable to the leaves in this whole forest. What I tell you is comparable to the leaves in my hand. Not much. I used to think that's really stingy. I want to know. But then, in a way, I think that's something that is kind of off-putting within the Theravada tradition, is it's so frill-less. You know, it's nice to have a little bit of embroidery, a little brocade here and there, a few jollies. But there's this kind of uncompromising rawness that is there within the Theravada tradition, which I found quite hard, bold, raw at the beginning. But I have a mind that is generally fond of frills and brocade and embellishment. And you realize that by setting the focus extremely narrow and sharp, then the Buddha realized that the natural tendency of the human mind is always to embellish and decorate and add on and write poems about it.

[39:13]

And if he did that himself, then, you know, after a few generations it'll be totally gone. So he said, well at least I'll establish it absolutely firmly. This is the only important thing. Now I'll leave all the embellishments to the ones who come after. But that's a crucial aspect that the Buddha was pointing at. It's not... The thing that makes the difference, the thing that really makes the difference within spiritual practice is not writing poetry about the nature of ultimate reality, but to recognize that experience of dukkha, of unsatisfactoriness, to realize that has a cause and that that cause can be terminated. We do not need to create suffering for ourselves. And that, that is the experience that we can all relate to. And that, in focusing upon that, it can seem that, you know, on the one hand, that the Buddha's teaching is very dualistic.

[40:25]

Like it's focusing on, it doesn't focus on ultimate reality, it focuses on the experience of suffering. And people think that the Buddha's saying, the ultimate reality is dukkha. because of that expression saying, there is dukkha. But it's important, the term, he used terminology extremely precisely. So he used the term noble truths, the ariya satya, for the four noble truths. They are not ultimate truths, they're noble truths, which means if we pick that up and use it, it will lead us to the realization of the ultimate. So the Four Noble Truths in themselves are simply tools, they're not statements of ultimate truth. So I think people often pick up Theravada texts in their usually appallingly off-putting translations and think, oh God, this looks terrible. I'm interested in spirituality for light, for universality, for freedom, for joy.

[41:30]

The most you get is the ending of suffering. It's like being put out of your misery. It's like being taken to the vets to be given a shot, to be put down. And earlier translations would be like extinction. Nirvana is the complete and utter extinction. But what is important to recognize is that the Buddha's lack of speaking about the nature of ultimate reality. I mean the most you get is like him saying, it's peaceful, or it's worth realizing, or it's good. It's the safe place. But not much else. Because his emphasis is very much on the path to the realization of it, rather than creating Baroque poetry about what it's like. Which is not to put... I mean, I do this myself.

[42:34]

It's not to put down that other side of it, but by creating that focus in a very clear and explicit way, and keeping our attention on that, then we actually do the necessary thing to get through our self-obsession, through our compulsions of aversion, of greed, of fear, and of insecurity. And then we find that which is free from fear, that which is secure, that which is stable, that which is timeless, through that. It's kind of interesting that even though people look at the Four Noble Truths and think they look sort of very plain and dualistic and uninviting, within the Mahayana tradition, and I realize I'm getting into unfamiliar territory but I'll do it anyway, But it's interesting how within, say, the Zen tradition, also the Chinese Chan tradition, you have both an emphasis on the realization of emptiness, like the Heart Sutra, which I believe you chant every day, and also then the Bodhisattva Vows.

[43:45]

which are also very much the heart of Mahayana tradition. People say, and oftentimes people are attracted towards Mahayana Buddhism because it has this very expansive and all-encompassing tenor of practicing for the sake of all sentient beings. And you look at Theravada and it's like suffering in the end of suffering. As if all that a person in the Theravada tradition cares for is like my pain and the rest can go wander. But what's kind of emerged to me over the years and seeing that how most Theravadan teachers spend like 18 or 20 hours a day helping other people, the Bodhisattva practice and ideal is very close to the Theravada way also. And also the quality of emptiness. Is it crucial to Theravada practice? And that both those elements, if you look at the Heart Sutra, it's built upon the Four Noble Truths, and the cycle of dependent origination.

[44:59]

There is no suffering, there's no origin of suffering, there's no cessation of suffering, there is no way. Alright? Okay. So, that's saying, yeah, these are noble truths, don't forget it. These are just noble truths, they're not ultimate truths. And this is what our own teacher frequently says this, He says, don't stop suffering because there isn't any suffering in the first place. There is no suffering. If you really look, you realize that dukkha is empty. The experience of frustration, difficulty, alienation. It's just a feeling. It's got our name written on it, deep and large. But when there's clear seeing, you realize there is just a feeling. Dukkha is just a feeling. And so too the cause and the origin, the path, all elements of the path of practice. These are all empty formations, mental formations, sankharas. So that the Heart Sutra and the emphasis on emptiness within Mahayana tradition is helping to clarify the Four Noble Truths as seeing them in their correct perspective.

[46:13]

that they are tools that we pick up, they're conventions that we pick up, like the form, a ritual, we pick it up, we follow it, but we leave it transparent, we do not look at it as a thing in and of itself that has permanent existence, it's just an empty form, like a cup that we can use for a particular purpose, for a way of looking at and understanding our experience. Similarly, the Bodhisattva vows are also built upon the Four Noble Truths. So as the Heart Sutras are kind of an extension or an elaboration, expansion on them in terms of understanding emptiness and ultimate reality, then the Bodhisattva vows are the way of of extrapolating them more explicitly away from your own personal feelings into the world at large.

[47:19]

Not only am I suffering, but all beings are suffering. So, living beings are numberless, I vow to save them all. That derives from the first noble truth. The afflictions are limitless, I vow to cut them all off. That's the cause of suffering. Second noble truth. The Buddha way is unsurpassable. I vow to accomplish it. That's the third noble truth. There's a cessation of suffering. And then the fourth one, Dharma doors are endless. I vow to enter them all. That's the cultivation of the way. So these are, and these are a very, these, I don't know if you refer to this within, but in the Chinese scriptures, in the Brahmanet Sutra, it's very explicitly outlined how these these vows are derived from the Four Noble Truths. And it's not as though they're surpassing them, or that, you know, it wasn't all there in the first place, but it's just a way of elaborating their meaning.

[48:20]

Because there's this, right in the very first discourse that the Buddha gave, the turning of the wheel, there's an interesting passage where he says, not until I had understood four things Until I understood four things and I and you have travelled on and on in this infinite round of rebirths and these four things were the Four Noble Truths. And then once I had understood these Four Noble Truths in all their dimensions and aspects, only then could I claim full and complete and perfect enlightenment. not until they were understood in all their dimensions, in all their aspects. So that it's like, these are the central principles for all of us within the Buddhist world. And their dimensions extend in many, many directions. Like I just mentioned these two, but that is a kind of an emphatic statement that the Buddha made at the beginning of his career, after his enlightenment.

[49:31]

The realization, the penetration of these four elements of our life. This will take you to the end of the road. This is all we need to know. This is all we need to do. And so that when we look at them, they look pretty bald and unexciting. But as we pick them up, we contemplate them, we look into them, we research them, we see how they work. We allow our practice to be shaped by them. then we find that they extend into all dimensions, into that of serving all sentient beings, and that to the complete abandonment of being altogether, and through all dimensions of Buddhist practice and realization. So our our practice within the monastery, what we actually do in terms of meditation, a lot of it is just focused around the contemplation of the Four Noble Truths.

[50:39]

That's the main teaching that we follow. That's the kind of the preliminary and the medium and the higher. We recite the first discourse of the Buddha, the Dhammacakka Sutta, quite often, quite regularly. We learn that and recite it. And that's on this basic principle that within those four truths is contained the entire universe of the Buddha Dhamma. Everything is there. It's just a matter of kind of opening them up like those fractal patterns. The further in you go, the more there is. It's like you look at it on paper, like the Four Noble Truths. Okay, this is Beginner's Buddhism, Chapter One, Page One. Okay, done that. What's next? But it's curious how after all these years I've been looking at the Buddhist teaching, it's still like, you know, you're still trying to get to the bottom of the four truths, that they open up infinitely.

[51:45]

So, That gives you a few threads of understanding, or at least I've made some noises. The understanding is up to you. And to put out some overview of our style of life and the kind of core of our practice of the Dharma and so I hope some of these words are useful. I see it's now about ten past eleven so we should wind up fairly soon. I'm not sure about the formalities of how we wind up, if there's a dedication of blessings and so on. But whatever I've said this morning, please take whatever is useful, take that with you. And anything that is not useful or is useless or you don't understand or you realize is completely wrong, just leave it on your cushion.

[52:58]

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