Good morning. Well, I'm thinking about how to frame this talk, which grows a little more complex every moment. So, as you know, or as we should know, after studying the Buddha Dharma, that everything is made out of dharmas. According to a Buddhist understanding, dharmas are the building blocks of everything. And the old Buddhists, put together a list of dharmas that are specific for people, human people.

[01:00]

This is what we are. We are the dharmas. That's what we're made out of. And it covers form, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. So the last dharmic collection of dharmas to study was by Vasubandhu, and that's called Vasubandhu's 100 dharmas. I realized that the Platform Sutra of the Huineng, the sixth ancestor of Zen in China, is a kind of commentary on Vasubandhu's 100 dharmas. That's my own idea, but I think it's obvious to me that that may not be directly, but it serves that purpose. And in the Platform Sutra, Huineng, Weilang, Daikan Edo,

[02:10]

There's a chapter of the Platform Sutra called Repentance, and it's a repentance ceremony. It's just the heart of the sutra. The rest is kind of additions and so forth, where he talks about exactly what... talks about how to deal with the dharmas that Vasubandhu is talking about. So I'm going to read you a little bit of that, just to get it in our mind. So he's talking about the four vows, four bodhisattva vows.

[03:19]

And he says, we vow to deliver, the vows are a little bit different, but it's interesting. We vow to deliver an infinite number of sentient beings of our own mind. Our own mind is not something that we have in our particular set of vows, but it's implied. We vow to get rid of the innumerable defilements in our own mind, we vow to learn the countless systems in Dharma of our essence of mind, and we vow to attain the supreme Buddhahood of our essence of mind. And then he says, we vow to deliver an infinite number of sentient beings. But what does that mean? It does not mean that I, Wei Long, am going to deliver them. And who are these sentient beings within our own mind? They are the delusive mind, the deceitful mind, the evil mind, and such like minds.

[04:24]

All these are sentient beings. Each of us has to deliver ourselves by means of our own essence of mind. Then the deliverance is genuine. Now, what does it mean to deliver myself by my own essence of mind? I'm changing the pronouns a bit. It means the deliverance of the ignorant, the delusive, and the vexatious beings within our own mind by means of right views. With the aid of right views and prajna wisdom, the barriers raised by these ignorant and elusive beings may be broken down so that each one of us is in a position to deliver ourself by means of our own efforts. So he's talking about dharmas. All the things that he's talking about, the defilements of our own mind, are dharmas. And the dharmas are laid out.

[05:27]

in the lists, the boring lists of dharmas. This is pre-Huaynam, before Huaynam, when people were still studying Abhidhamma. So here are, I'm not going to go through all of the whole lists, but there are two categories that are relevant to what I'm talking about. And there are the 11 wholesome dharmas and the 20 afflictions. There are fundamental afflictions and derivative afflictions.

[06:31]

So, wholesome afflictions are our strengths, and fundamental afflictions are our weaknesses. So wholesome dharmas, of course, are dharmas which are called, in the sense of karmic, all dharmas are karmic. Dharmas are, all of our actions are karmic in one way or another, even though there's some neutral actions which don't create dharma. very few, but wholesome dharmas are dharmas which lead to freedom, and unwholesome dharmas are dharmas which lead to

[07:46]

bondage. So we are bound by our afflictions, afflictive karma, and we are freed by our wholesome karma. Yes. What do you mean by freed? Freed means non-attachment. You are not bound and directed by habit energy. So, here are the 11 wholesome dharmas. Faith. Vigor. Shame. Remorse. Absence of greed. Absence of anger. Absence of, what he calls, stupidity. There are many names for that. light ease, lightness and ease, non-laziness, non-laziness, laxness, renunciation, and non-harming.

[09:07]

So these are dharmas which are connected with non-attachment, freedom, and exuberance. natural exuberance. What'd you say? Okay. Faith. Faith is like trust and certainty. When you do something over and over, and it's beneficial, and you find your freedom in it, then it becomes faith. It's not something you can cultivate, actually. You can't cultivate. You can cultivate the conditions which lead to faith. Dogen says, without faith you can't really practice. Faith is the fundamental for practice.

[10:11]

You can go through the motions of practice without faith. but you can't sustain practice. Can you hear me? You can't sustain practice without faith. So we have various reactions to faith because we associate it with blindness and so forth. And the Catholic Church. But faith is the most important thing. So all of these, absence of remorse, I mean absence of greed, absence of anger, and absence of stupidity, out of these three dharmas are posited as positive negatives. But absence of greed, Greed, anger, and stupidity, greed, ill will, and delusion are the three poisonous aspects of bondage.

[11:24]

Greed is bondage, anger is bondage, and stupidity is bondage. Some absence of greed, absence of anger, absence of stupidity are aspects of freedom because you're not bound by them. I mean, this morning, you know, I said to myself, I'm going to eat very little this morning. And then when seconds came by, I really like that juice, you know. So my greed came up, you know, I wouldn't say in spite of myself, but because of myself. It's very easy. Very easy. The easiest thing in the world is to get caught by yourself. That's, oh yeah. Renunciation. Renouncing the Jews, not renunciating.

[12:25]

Absolutely, freedom. Oh, that's different. Okay. Well, renunciation is letting go of ego, basically. Letting go of self-centeredness. That's renunciation. So the fundamental bondage is ego. That's our fundamental bondage, and it's actuated through the various egotistical activities. So renunciation basically means to let go of self-centeredness. And all the afflictive The afflictions are bondage makers, ego builders. So renunciation is very important. And renunciation is also an aspect of faith because you put your hands

[13:40]

Letting go of ego is so difficult because we're scared. We're afraid to let go of it. We latch on to anything we can to save ourselves from freedom. Freedom is the hardest thing to accept. That's why we're all bound by What was your response? Was it freeing the sentient being or was it healing the sentient being? Well, you know, that's complex. Life is complex.

[14:46]

I thought, well, one thing I thought, I'm defeated. And the other thing I thought was, it's really good. But I didn't think both of those things at the same time, because you can only think one thing at a time. Even though you think, even when you say our thinking is mixed, it's one at a time. So, faith, vigor, energy, effort, remorse, and absence. Remorse means that, or shame and remorse. I felt some remorse, I didn't exactly feel shame. But, love it. Absence of greed, absence of anger, absence of stupidity. Light ease.

[15:47]

You know, when you have freedom, you have light ease. It's just there, even if you're bound in bed or something. Non-laxness. Renunciation. Non-harming. Not harming. So here, there are six fundamental afflictions which bind us. Greed, anger, stupidity. So the three poisonous fundamental. Arrogance, which is a kind of conceit. Doubt, which means skeptical doubt.

[16:48]

Doubt is actually, can go either way. Doubt can be beneficial. And if doubt is balanced with faith, then it can be very beneficial. I think we should have some doubt because faith is so innocent. Faith is our innocence, actually. And doubt is our little dark side. So those two should balance each other. We should not get rid of doubt. If doubt fades on its own due to faith, that's okay. Faith can absorb doubt and be stronger for it. So improper views means, like improper views

[17:58]

It's like topsy-turvy views in the Heart Sutra, upside-down views. We used to say topsy-turvy. Improper views means thinking there is a self where there is no self, thinking that things are permanent when they're not permanent, and so forth. Those are the improper views. And then there are 20 derivative afflictions. Wrath, hatred, rage, which are all anger. Covering, covering means not revealing, keeping things to yourself, which should be shared. Deceit, flattery, conceit, harming, jealousy, stinginess, lack of shame and lack of remorse, lack of faith, laziness, laxness, torpor.

[19:05]

Torpor is characterized as someone who eats so much that he has to lie on the floor and can't get up. That's extreme. Yes, Sam had something, but did you? No. Okay, Peter? This question always comes up. Why are there so many more? Yeah, because there's so many more ways to bind yourself. This is just a few. If you really want to make a list, These are just characteristic dharmas. It could. Yes, yeah, of course. But it's more rarefied.

[20:08]

You see, because it's simpler and less fussy. And it's more leaning toward air than earth. It's more ethereal than earthy, in a sense, because earthy is what brings you down, whereas ethereal is what lifts you up. So I wouldn't say these are all ethereal, but they're uplifting. so there are fewer of them, whereas what brings you down, there are many more of them, because walking through the earth is full of dangers. It's a dangerous earth, it's a dangerous world, and it's getting more dangerous all the time. So these are wholesome dharmas and unwholesome dharmas, and the unwholesome dharmas lead to

[21:16]

bondage karma. The wholesome dharmas lead to freedom karma. And so each one of us is a teacher. There's a way of thinking about this which I ran into one time. Each one of us is a teacher and the dharmas are our disciples. This is how you practice with these dharmas. Each one of us has a number of disciples, and they're all handed out to us from the beginning. And it's our practice to handle the karmic dharmas, the dharmas of our own mind and body, And we teach them how to act in the world in a way that doesn't create karma.

[22:24]

And it's very hard. So if you want to teach somebody else, you have to teach yourself. And this is exactly what the Sixth Patriarch is talking about. He says, I'm not going to save you. I'm going to save myself. If I can save myself, then maybe I can help you through example. You can tell, it's easy to tell people what to do. Very easy to tell people what to do, you know, and you know the answer and all that. But actually, teaching is about how you take care of yourself. And what a teacher does is set an example. So I'm sorry that I am such a poor example. I'm true, it's true. I'm not such a good example. Sometimes, you know, some things I am. I'll admit that. I shouldn't admit that. But there's so many things, you know, that I struggle with and so many temptations that attract me.

[23:27]

And so we're always dealing with this, you know, we're all in the same pot, so to speak. But the pot is a good pot. The pot, that we're all in the same pot means that we all do this together. And so we have doing this activity creates compassion. So we have compassion for all of these afflictions that are our own afflictions. How do we educate ourself? How do we educate our ego and take care of our ego so that as we take care of a friend, You know, they belong to us in a sense. And the more we hate them, we just create another karmic problem, right? So we have to be careful not to hate our afflictions and not to treat our afflictions as we would afflictions. So how do we reform?

[24:33]

And there are things that we will never ever reforming us. Suzuki Roshi said, the stuff you have now is stuff you'll always have. And we used to say, oh no, don't say that. But it's true. You'll die knowing that you did not reform these afflictions. But it's OK, because you have compassion for yourself or your afflictions. Way in the back, yeah, hi. You have to talk real loud because... Yeah, it's not... That's why I don't like to call it stupidity. I'd rather call it delusion. That's what we usually call it, is delusion. Because it's not a matter of knowledge.

[25:35]

It's lack of prajna. Lack of wisdom. Yeah. When I'm dying, can I hope to look at my disciples and say, although I didn't reform you, we made a good run of it, or what? Yeah, it depends how you did it. I tried my best, but it wasn't really my best. I could have done more, you know, but I didn't realize that I was supposed to do this until I was almost ready to die. Well, they say, you know, someone says, there's a saying that, and maybe Tibetans especially, when you're dying, no matter what your karma was before, if you die in a good state of mind, it's all wiped out.

[26:39]

Yeah, something like that. So, I don't know, maybe so, why not? So, that's called forgiveness in a sense, right? So does the universe forgive us, or what? I don't want to have a conversation, I just... Connecting with that, did you say something how this connects with formless repentance? Oh, formless repentance, that's what the Sixth Patriarch calls it. I think formless repentance, he says, I will give you the formless repentance, which simply means all dharmas are empty. Not only are the skandhas empty, but all dharmas are empty.

[27:44]

So this is the declaration from a Mahayana point of view. that all dharmas are empty. So it means all of these dharmas have no special form or existence. They're all karmically created, and they're all interdependently created. That's foremost repentance. Something like that. So he says, now, since all of us have taken these four all-embracing vows, let me teach you the formless threefold guidance. We take enlightenment as our guide because it is the culmination of both punya, which is merit, and prajna, which is wisdom.

[28:53]

We take orthodoxy, which is the word that's used here, as our guide because it is the best way to rid ourselves of desire or My comment here is the best way to use desire. We can't get rid of desire. Not possible. Desire is like chopping off your head to make your mind clear. So, how do you use desire? So you can use desire to uphold desirable karmas, or the other way around. But mostly desire is associated with bad karma, bad things to do.

[29:59]

My desire is to do bad things, but it's also desire to do good things. So, that's kind of like the feeling of it. Sue? Back to the juice? Yes, I'm going to turn up my juice here. So, in that situation, no harm was done? Yeah. Were you aware of Big Mon? Was there any? Well, a big mind is always present, but it's covered by the small one. Right, so to me it's a good example of, you know, in a situation where harm could be done, the kind of, you know, back and forth between small mind and big mind. Yes, so my big mind said, I was listening, my big mind said, next time don't do that.

[31:03]

But I will, but I will again. Yes. Yes, absolutely. Yes, Big Mind should stop and listen. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So the sixth ancestor says, when you do something that you want to, repentance is important, right? Then instead of making a big deal out of it, you simply acknowledge and you turn around and go the other way. That's simply done.

[32:11]

If you can do that, that's the best way. Just simply turn around and go the other way. And that was, I read the platform, the platform feature is the first Zen thing I read, Zen book around actually, in the 50s. And I had, I didn't understand it completely, but I did love it. And when I quit smoking, that's what I did. One day, I mean, I didn't want to smoke anymore, but when you don't want to smoke anymore, you smoke more, you know. But instead of going through this excruciating process of withdrawal, I just said, I'm not gonna smoke anymore. And I just turned around and I didn't smoke anymore ever. And I never felt any withdrawal symptom at all. It's just one of those, like, I just, instead of, you know, talking it over, you know, blah, blah, blah, just turned around and didn't do it again.

[33:18]

That's what I found in a six-inch cistern. Okay. Jonah. Yes, faith that doesn't come and go. That's called firmness. No matter how things go, good or bad, that's the one thing that you don't give up. That's what gives you practice strength. You don't get blown away by anything. Face allows you to bend, but it's not broken. It bends and is malleable. A face that's too stiff or too dogmatic

[34:28]

Dogmatism is considered one of the harmful karmas, harmful dharmas. Dogmatism is mentioned as one of the… and stiff-neckedness and so forth creates a situation for being blown away. So space is very malleable and soft and at the same time strong and firm. Yes. Yeah, I know, because it's over, you know, it's overused in certain situations. But, um, There's a quality, I think, of shame that is false.

[35:37]

Shame. Everything has its counterfeit. So, all diamonds have their counterfeits. So, the counterfeit of shame is I am such a bad person. I'll never be good again. And you want to hide under a rock and so forth. But shame actually should enliven us. Because our ego doesn't like to be shamed. But our true self loves it. Our true self accepts it. Not as something bad about me, that makes me, that's harmful to me, but something beneficial. So if I feel ashamed that I tripped you, you know, then I own that and I can apologize.

[36:46]

and own my transgression. If I own my transgression, honestly, that makes me feel good, instead of making me feel bad. Rather than holding my transgression, which will make me feel bad. But some people say, shame, shame, shame, shame. So they can use it as a weapon. And shame is often used as a weapon. Shame is Japanese. And it's very, very, it's characteristic. We have something else that's characteristic of Americans that's comparable to that, but I can't remember what it is. Guilt, yes, we have guilt, they have shame. So it's something overused, and in that case, it's harmful.

[38:05]

And so we say, hey, you know, stop doing this. We should stop doing this in society. We should stop doing this in society. But then we're throwing out the baby with the bathwater. because it's actually beneficial when it's done correctly. Is that Ross? That small mind is the activity of big mind. That's big mind acting through small mind.

[39:16]

Yes. Yes. Yeah. Soon? I don't know. So I want to ask about the component of commitment. So the vow is the expression, is how we express commitment? Yeah. And then the commitment around the juice? Sorry, it's a good example. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's a reminder.

[40:22]

I mean, you can use it, it's used, what it uses, it's depending on the situation. Yeah, yeah, it can be very deep or not so deep. And it may be called something else. Like, you know, oh, I'm sorry about that. Go deeply into shame, but I'm sorry about that. And the person says, oh, that's nothing. That's okay. So you're not holding anything. Yeah, every moment, fresh. Every moment, a new moment, fresh. That's called Shikantaza, our practice. The conversations we have with each other as Dharma friends, it seems to me a lot about starting fresh.

[41:26]

Yes, absolutely. We hold stuff against each other. We should never should do that. I mean, you know, we do. They're like, I want to have a talk, mediated talk with you, blah, blah, blah. What's that about? You know, we should forgive each other and acknowledge our bumping into each other in various ways right away and let it go. And then we're free moment by moment. That's called not creating bad karma. The more we ruminate, you know, judge each other, and that's terrible stuff, you know, that really, that's called bondage. This particular bondage session of Sashin. Oh, is it? Sometimes it's a way of seeing how to do that. Yes, exactly. It can be bondage or freedom. Sashin can be, ouch, get me out of here, or freedom.

[42:28]

Either one. It just depends on how you think about it. It really depends on how you think about it and how you let go moment by moment. So Sistine is living moment by moment. That's what it is. And each moment you have an opportunity to either bind yourself or free yourself. That's exactly what it is. Alan. So if I think about it, you're being offered juice.

[43:39]

So you're accepting that relationship to the server and to the juice. But if you had thought, and so that's not unwholesome necessarily. If you had thought, I'm taking this juice from someone else's mouth, then that would be a different service. Well, that's why I sometimes look in the pot. So the server says there are limited seconds on this pot, right? So, but then I think, yeah, it'd be nice to have that. And then the server comes around, and I look in the pot to see if there's enough for everybody else before I take some of that. But I have to say that even though I saw that there was limited seconds on the first pot, I took some anyway. But the second thought I had was, even though I did that, not many people take seconds on the first pot, so it's probably okay.

[44:51]

That's right. If I was not aware, that would be kind of unwholesome. Right. Yeah. Right. Or do you reform them? Yeah. Right, so sometimes getting rid of means reforming them, changing their nature rather than, because these emotions are part of who we are, that is who we are, and these emotions, feelings, and thoughts, and the essence of them is the same.

[46:39]

So the energy, what they are, they're just different forms of the same energy. So when the energies turn, when we can reform, give them a different form, then they become beneficial. Anger can be beneficial if it's used in the right way, instead of using us. where we're being used by our emotions, thoughts, and feelings. That's bondage. When we can use them, that's freedom. And it's time to go. I noticed the skies. I know, Andrea had her hand up. You're the last one. Thank you. So what's the spirit or the attitude or the way that we approach, we hold, we discipline, or we cultivate our disciplines of the various selves that emerge?

[48:12]

To include it, not to exclude it, but to encourage it, to sit, feel, find out, To study the beneficial dharmas and make an effort to conform to them. They're not many, but basically it's compassion. Keeping the precepts is basically compassion. That's the basis. That's why the Buddha is called the Compassionate Buddha. Yes. Well, we have to allow for change. our work in progress.

[49:24]

So, the strict understanding of who we are is characterized in this gatha. No doer of the deeds is found. No one who ever reaps their fruits. Empty phenomena roll on. This view alone is right and true. And while the deeds and their results roll on, based on conditions all, there is no beginning can be seen, just as it is with seed and tree. So let's, I'll leave you with that. which can be controversial. It's just dharma's rolling along. But it doesn't feel like that.

[50:39]

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