Tonight we're going to touch on four topics which arise from this particular layer of Buddhism that we're paying particular attention to in the classical phase of Buddhism, which is represented in the Pali canon. And the four topics we're going to talk about tonight are the Three Treasures, the Three Jewels, the Three Marks of All Phenomenal Existence, that's the second topic. The third topic is the Three Poisons, and the fourth topic is the four immeasurables, or divine states, divine codes. Anne is going to speak about the first two topics, about the three treasures and the three marks of existence.

[01:10]

We'll have a short period of time at the end of her talk for questions. Then we'll have a break. And then the second half or so of the class will be the other two topics. And I'll present those topics. And again, we'll have some time at the end for questions. The first topic is the refuges. And as David said, they're known as the three treasures, or the three gems, or the three jewels. Buddha, Dharma, Sangha. And just as the word suggests, refuges are where we go for shelter or protection or refuge is a place that is safe. It is a place or a state of being or awareness that we can rely on.

[02:15]

Last week, Last week, we got a handout with these refuges in Pali, the way they were chanted in the time of the Buddha, or the language in which they were chanted in the time of the Buddha. And in the early days, when people became members of the Sangha, they were committing themselves to the authority of Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. And it was to become a member of the Sangha, to become a follower of the Buddha, one pronounced this threefold formula. And we do the same thing today. I think that repeat the threefold repetition is interesting. When we repeat things three times,

[03:19]

There are many reasons to say that we do that, but it does have sort of a ritual quality about it. The Sangha, even in the early days of Buddhist teaching, included laymen and laywomen, as well as monks and nuns. This formula is very beautiful. We, of course, chant the refuges in English, at Green Gulch and many other Zen communities, or other communities, they still chant these refuges in Pali. And Jed is going to chant before us. And you know what? A lot of people in this room know this, and you know this. It's been a while. But Jed did this as part of his way-seeking mantra. And it's very beautiful, and anybody else can join in. But just to give a the people who haven't heard this and haven't heard the calling, refuges, and taste for what it's like.

[04:36]

Let's do three times. Duryodhanaṁ sphāraṇāṁ gacchāni paramaṁ sphāraṇāṁ gacchāni sphārāṇāṁ sphāraṇāṁ gacchāni Duryodhanaṁ me Oh, we're just doing a verse now?

[05:50]

Yeah, OK. I love you, Sai Baba. I love you, Sai Baba. I love you, Sai Baba. I think it's interesting that And in Buddhism, you know, the refuges are what someone states to formally become a Buddhist.

[06:55]

But it's not a creed. And in so many other religions, there's, I believe this and [...] this. And that's how you become a member of the religion or a practitioner. But it, you know, it is a statement of assent to the wisdom of the teachings. And I think that the whole issue of taking refuge and when one takes refuge and how one takes refuge is interesting. And I think it's different for different people. I know that His Holiness the Dalai Lama said that the teaching, sometimes in his teachings there's also an empowerment following the teachings. Really, people who aren't Buddhists are not supposed to participate in the empowerment. But he says that a person who takes refuge in Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, and not in anything else, can consider himself or herself a Buddhist, and that it's not really necessary to formally take refuge before a teacher or a lama.

[08:13]

or a community. Although I think, for many of us, it's very helpful, you know, to have a community association and a teacher. You know, I have to say, I forget where I read this, but recently I read, and I thought this was a very strong statement, coming from a Catholic tradition, Taking refuges is as central to Buddhist practice as Holy Communion is to Christian practices based on sacraments. It's very, it's a very strong statement. And I did just want to read also for the people who aren't here regularly, the refuges as we say them in our Bodhisattva ceremony, they are I take refuge in Buddha, before all being, immersing body and mind deeply in the way, awakening true mind.

[09:21]

I take refuge in Dharma, before all being, entering deeply the merciful ocean in Buddha's way. I take refuge in Sangha, before all being, bringing harmony to everyone, free from hindrance. So when we consider, well, what are we taking refuge in? And I think it's important to realize that taking refuge changes for people over time. I took refuge for the first time formally before a Lama. for the first time, I think, in 1998, although I had been practicing here at Berkeley Zen Center and also with a Tibetan teacher for quite some time.

[10:23]

And it never really felt right to take refuge until I did. But my feelings about it, my thinking about it, my experience of it now is different from what it was five years ago. So when we take refuge in Buddha, some of the things to think about that we're taking refuge in, or some people take refuge in the historical Buddha as a teacher. Most of us take refuge in the Buddha nature within each one of us. All of us are Buddha, though we haven't realized it yet refuge in that, maybe you could call it faith, or maybe you could call it a beginning experience. Taking refuge in Buddha is taking refuge in awakening, in the qualities of enlightenment to which we aspire.

[11:29]

And Akin Roshi said, this is taking refuge in Buddha, and it says Buddha is totally empty and charged with energy. And to realize the very heart of essential nature is to take refuge in Buddha. And so with those sorts of ideas, It seems in a way that taking refuge in Buddha is taking refuge in something limited. But in fact, taking refuge in Buddha is taking refuge in something very vast. Could you please put your questions to the phone? Okay, what I think I'll do is stop at the end of the Refuge's part for questions, and then before going to the Three Marks.

[12:37]

Also, in a very concrete and more limited way, or not limited in a negative sense, but concrete sense, you know, our teacher Sojin Roshi is Buddha, and For some of us, part of our Buddha practice is our practice with our teacher. And when we take whatever issues or whatever sorts of issues or problems in our practice or in our lives to him, I mean, part of his function is to bring our issue into the realm of oneness, bring our issues into the realm of practice. and Dharma. So when we take refuge in Dharma, we're taking refuge in the teachings that have been given through history. We take refuge in study.

[13:40]

We take refuge in zazen. We take refuge in whatever it is that serves towards awakening. Traditionally, the Dharma, the metaphor is that the Dharma is a raft to the other shore. we're taking refuge in this raft. And at the same time, that something as broad as the truth that moves, just the truth that everything changes and moves at all times. And Akin Roshi said, to cultivate the garden of realization is to take refuge in the Dharma. When we take refuge in Sangha, we're taking refuge in the great teachers of the past. In a way, this is sort of Buddha and sort of Sangha, but I really liked Ross's comment last week when someone asked about, well, does Buddha have any ancestors?

[14:44]

Who are the people who follow him? And Ross pointed to the lineage chart. with Sangha, all the great teachers and our spiritual ancestors. And I think all of us have had teachers in a whole variety of contexts and situations. And when we take refuge in Sangha, we are also taking refuge in what we've gained from those teachers. Concretely, for those of us who practice here at the Bodhisattva Center, of course, we're taking refuge in our own Sangha here. And Akin Roshi, making this from more broad to more specific, which Sangha is all life, and the universal Sangha containing many, many Sanghas, and the Buddhist Sangha that is all Buddhist, and then the immediate Sangha where we actually

[15:51]

practice. And he said, to share the fruits of the garden is to take refuge in the Sangha. As we take refuge in Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, the implication is that we don't take refuge in other things. I mean, we don't take refuge in money, we don't take refuge in status, we don't take refuge in... We don't take refuge in all the ways we often try to shield ourselves from what is actually the case. The positive implication is that we can free ourselves from blind conditioning and realize our true nature. One of my Dharma friends,

[16:52]

said, mentioned to me recently, this is a really beautiful idea, that Buddha is the absolute and the oneness, and Dharma is the conditioned, the relative, the many. And Sangha is the interaction and the harmony of absolute and relative. And we could certainly sit with that idea for quite a while, And, you know, if we take refuge in one thing, we're really taking refuge in all three things. Because if one lives after Sangha, one's looking after Buddha. And if Sangha functions well, Dharma and Buddha become apparent. And when you touch Sangha, you also touch Buddha and Dharma. And how could the Dharma exist if there weren't any practitioners in a Sangha? So they're very interrelated and actually in some Buddhist art they're often intersecting.

[18:02]

So I thought I would just read, I wanted to read these examples of refuges from this Thich Nhat Hanh book just because still I think especially at the beginning of practice, when one takes refuge in Buddha, Dharma, Saga, it can seem a little limiting. Like, when we do that, what are we really saying that we're doing? But this gives an idea, as our Bodhisattva ceremony vows also, or refuges also do, of the vastness of the refuges. I take refuge in the Buddha, the one who shows me the way in this life. I take refuge in the Dharma, the way of understanding and of love. I take refuge in the Sangha, the community that lives in harmony and awareness. Dwelling in the refuge of Buddha, I see clearly the path of light and beauty in the world.

[19:09]

Dwelling in the refuge of Dharma, I learn to open many doors on the path of transformation. Dwelling in the refuge of Sangha, I am supported by its shining light. that keeps my practice free of obstacles. Taking refuge in the Buddha and myself, I aspire to help all people recognize their own awakened nature and realize the mind of love. Taking refuge in the Dharma and myself, I aspire to help all people grasp the way of practice and walk together on the path of liberation. Taking refuge in the Sangha and myself, I aspire to help all people build fourfold communities and encourage the transformation of all beings. I welcome questions on just the refuges and would also invite, if anyone would like to say anything about his or her own experience of taking refuge, that would be fine too.

[20:16]

Good question, yes. Yeah, I just, I kind of had a, I'm assuming that you, I'm sort of curious about the aptitude. Sort of what is involved, maybe it's a personal thing, I'm not sure, maybe you can talk about what it is to you, or what is the, what is involved in the act of taking that step that took the word, not what comes after that. It's sort of, what comes, it's almost, what's involved in the act of making, of doing that. Why does a person do what you do? Not what's spiritual, maybe? What is the process? What is it? Yeah, what is it? What are you doing when you take refuge? If you're going back, that's what you do, is you get back. I understand. That means you're, like, becoming one with Tlalwa. You talked about it, you compared it to the, I'm not Christian.

[21:20]

That's one of the rights we inherit today. Sacrament, but I don't know. That's not why. Right, right. Well, it's not. I just was surprised at that comparison. I wouldn't normally, to be honest with you, I should get away from the Christian comparisons, probably. But if I were going to compare it with something with Christianity, I would compare it with baptism. It's an initiation into the religion. OK, I understand what there's an initiation, but it's involved with an internal process. And that's what I'm sort of curious about, what that is. Is it a solution? I'm looking for words. Is it an acceptance? Is it a responsibility? Is it a state of mind? Is it an action? Is it a process with you, or is it a state of mind? I mean, one of the things that you stand up and you take the, you say some vows, you say something in front of a group of people, right? Is that, I'm curious about what he's saying too.

[22:22]

Right, okay, well let's go back to his question. Intention. I think it is intention, I think it's a state of mind, but I think taking refuge is a very specific action. You know, it's a specific action, it is words that are said, I would say it's a commitment to follow a path, a commitment to exploit a teaching. You mentioned that you had taken refuge in this situation and that situation and didn't feel right until you took refuge with somebody. No, I said that I had practiced, that I had gone to Buddhist teachings that I had practiced different, some Buddhist meditation. Right, no, no. For me, okay, for me personally, it was very, it sounds very practical and not profound, all right?

[23:30]

And so what it was with me specifically, was I had practiced quite a long time and I did not take refuge. However, I did take refuge with a Lama in Nepal the day before I flew into Lhasa. And I just felt like it was appropriate, it was the right thing to do, to land in Lhasa with the right credentials. And I know that doesn't sound like a wonderful state of mind, it just seemed like the right thing to do. And it was also not in connection with the places that I had been practicing. It was my own connection with the path and a tradition. But you can just say the words, you know, anytime you want. I guess the words imply to me, I guess, a secret shelter. That's right. A secret shelter from what? or seeking refuge implies to me sort of a movement to seek shelter, seeking something, seeking shelter from something.

[24:45]

And I guess maybe I'm thinking about the word more than... Well, I think that that is exactly right. And I think that we seek shelter from what David's going to talk about. our ignorance, our unconditioned behavior. And, you know, whatever obstacles we have that keep us from clarity, that keep us from awareness. And so seeking shelter in this, in my own, in my own potential for that, in our own Buddha nature, in this community, in this teaching as a path, as a path to awakening. Just, Dean, did you have a question? Further? I think I still don't get the thing of prepping.

[25:46]

For example, I could sit here and say, this product doesn't seem to fit. I feel like I wear it. I feel like I don't need it. I feel like I'm stupid. I feel like it's myself. It's in myself. So does that mean I've taken refuge, or have I not taken refuge because I've never sung the bhagavad-gita, or I've never done some ceremony? I don't think that that's true at all. I think that if you can take refuge in Buddha, Dharma, Sangha, in a sense, all these different senses, like in our Bodhisattva ceremony, and what Thich Nhat Hanh said, Robert Aikin said, with the Dalai Lama, you know, all of these If it fits for you, you know, taking refuge doesn't, I mean, I think it's extremely helpful for it to be an outer action. But I don't think it needs to be an outer action. You mean an outer action, like by saying those things out loud and stopping for the people?

[26:50]

Yes. Yes. Ross? I mean, because that's the instruction, ultimately. The instruction is saying that you don't have to be a Buddhist to meditate. But strictly speaking, the act of meditation, just sitting upright and practicing mindfulness. However, there's a strong Buddhist flavor to what we do here, a strong Asian flavor. All that is kind of just mixed up with one step that we conducted with the classes in dialogue. But strictly speaking, what we're doing is just waking up from all the textures and flavors of the practice. kind of evolved from the way that this class has been rolled out. You know, we talk about, you know, what is a real woman. And people think, she's well-spoken, she's a good mother, so dedicated to practice. Well, do you need a mother to practice? No. Do that. Well, why would you so like a sort of real woman? I said, that's not a real woman. There's such a personal phenomenon for people practicing in a community.

[27:53]

That's what's so important to me as a sound artist, is to see all the different expressions of what's being recorded. It's a little confusing, but it's also just the ordinary things that you need to do back in your days as an artist. Yeah, it's a short record. Yeah, one more question, Mark's question. You had said you asked for experience of taking refuge in a refugee camp. Yeah. Yeah, maybe that's something to say to some folks. First, it's the sheen of it. In the end, it's the sheen of it. You take refuge in a specific form. And then you're referring to it. My experience was that I came at the end of a session, came at the end of each day, and I was very, very exposed at the moment.

[29:14]

And the words themselves, and saying the words, and listening to everybody, made me feel that I was experiencing felt safe and chilled in the beauty of tying up the game. It wasn't an initiating experience. Now I know who it is. It was a kind of culmination of experience. It's a yes. It's a sort of reappointment of what's going on in the universe. It's an intensity just in form. experience them each time. You know, I'm going to move on to the three marks. Actually, it's almost time for David to start, isn't it? Why don't you do the three marks?

[30:19]

If necessary, I'll do one topic. Or I'll just... go through this pretty fast. Last week in your handout, I won't read this, but you got the Three Marks of Existence, and sent from the Dhammapada. Simply put, they are, impermanent are all component things, involved with suffering are all component things, unsubstantial or anatta or no-self are all dharmas. In those handouts that you got last week, there was a little bit of traditional teaching and then there were a couple of articles by Thich Nhat Hanh which were more modern or more Mahayana view of suffering especially. But a central, central, central

[31:22]

The teaching of Buddhism is that all things are impermanent, and all things are constantly changing. I mentioned that silly movie last week, The Little Buddha. But I remember in the movie, the little boy, Jesse, asked Lama Norbu, what is impermanence? And Lama Norbu said, 100 years from now, everyone in this room will be dead. That is impermanence. And it's a very, very simple And yet, at the same time, there's this quotation. Instantaneous being is the fundamental doctrine by which all the Buddhist system is established at one stroke. The idea that nothing endures without changing, that the process of change is constant, it's dynamic, and that conditioned existence conditioned by changes in causes and conditions, includes both the external world and the perceiving mind, and it's all characterized by flux, fluidity.

[32:39]

The second aspect, simply, we could do a whole set of classes just on impermanence. The second mark of existence, no self or anatta. Anatta is a... I think anatta is a Sanskrit word. It means no soul. But the basic teaching is that nothing, especially human beings, but human beings like everything else, do not have an inherent or independent existence. And so our sense of ourselves as having an identity, our sense of who we are is really limiting and also quite not valid. I would say the early Buddhists probably meant no self in the sense of conventional identity, I and mine, and as well in the sense of something continuing, some continuing part of an individual that might

[33:49]

continue through existences, and which supports the activity of the individual. The comparison is often made between a car, and if you look at a car, you think, yes, that's a car. But, if you just take all the parts of a car apart, the car really is all these constituent parts without a particular actual, lasting identity, aside from the configuration of those parts. And the teaching of Buddhism is not so different for us, that we too are a collection of constantly changing energies, arranged in different configurations, changing constantly according to causes, or in response to causes and conditions. And I think the deeper, the more deeply we realize that, for some people that sounds like unpleasant, but also the more deeply we realize that, the freer we are and the less suffering we experience.

[35:08]

The basic teaching on that is nothing whatsoever should be clung to as I or mine. And then the third mark of existence is suffering. And that's the traditional teaching. Thich Nhat Hanh, and a little thing I'm going to read from our teacher Sojin, you know, talks about nirvana within suffering. as the third one of existence. But, just to briefly state the traditional definition or analysis of suffering, there's the suffering of suffering, which is what everyone always thinks of as suffering, you know, like headaches, or cancer, or psychosis, or whatever, just, of course, suffering. Then there's the suffering of change, whatever pleasant and desirable experiences we might have, cannot, that they won't last, and even if they last very long we become bored and dissatisfied anyway.

[36:32]

So there's the suffering of change. And then the suffering which is a little bit harder to understand, I think, the suffering pervading cyclic existence, conditioned existence, this sense of conditioned existence is being bound by conditioning. And that, given time, is really all I'm going to say about that. And you have those readings by Thich Nhat Hanh, so I don't need to go over that, I think. I love Thich Nhat Hanh's metaphors of the self of no self with peanut butter peanut butter cookies if you read that the peanut butter cookie dough and then the cookie dough gets separated and then all the cookies are feeling like move over and but really they're all the same stuff and sort of like he uses that as a as a metaphor for our relationship to not being separate

[37:43]

It's not really a relationship to it. It's shipped to it. It's not being separate from. The same metaphor as the wave in the ocean. The wave is never separate from the water. The wave is the water. And that's our same relationship to the ground and inner being, is what Thich Nhat Hanh calls it, which is to what is real. And, you know, since we are running out of time, I'll just read this short transcription, that's what this is, of something that our teacher Sojin said about suffering and enlightenment. Someone once wrote me a letter and said in the letter that Suzuki Roshi had said, I didn't hear him say this, that the mark of an enlightened person is, and I'm trying to say exactly the way he said it, the enlightened person is not disturbed by anything.

[38:52]

There are three marks in Buddhism. No self is one, everything is impermanent, and everything tends towards suffering. But there's also the Mahayana three marks. No self, everything is impermanent, and everything is marked with Nirvana in the midst of suffering. It doesn't mean that to practice enlightenment that you won't feel pain or that you won't suffer. If you practice enlightenment, it will be very painful, extremely painful, but you'll find yourself, your real self, in the midst of your painfulness. In order to practice enlightenment, we have to be willing to accept the painfulness of enlightenment. The reason why people want enlightenment is to relieve their suffering, to get rid of their painfulness, which is a good reason. That is what Buddhism is about, relieving the condition, relieving the painful, suffering condition. But in order to relieve the painful, suffering condition, we have to sink down into the midst of painfulness and suffering. I'm a little bit quick on the remarks of existence, but time-wise,

[39:57]

Right. Do you want to take some questions? Do you have a question? Do you want to take some questions? Instantaneous being is the fundamental doctrine by which all the being system is established and constructed. It's like everything, including ourselves, it's all just flickering, being. Instantaneous, moment by moment. Always. It's easier to see ourselves as

[41:00]

changing moment by moment than it is to see the table changing moment by moment. But it's changing moment by moment, too. It's wonderful to think about how from one moment to the next we're not the same. Some people find it frightening, but with proper causes and conditions, we can handle it, too. Do we ever go backwards? Of course. Backwards, but I don't know about direction here. The kinds of changes that we're talking about. The momentariness. Shall we take a break before David talks? Just very short, very short.

[42:06]

So I'm going to try to cover two topics in the remaining time, and we'll see how that goes. If not, I'll continue next week with the four Brahma viharas. But tonight, I'll begin with, I think, being able to finish a brief discussion and we can have some questions and answers, questions anyway, about the three poisons. So the three poisons is a teaching which comes out of I think I said before, the sort of basic, fundamental, maybe elementary Buddhism teachings that we sort of learn at the outset.

[43:13]

But it's a teaching that's always useful and that can actually be elaborated into quite a complex kind of teaching. So it works kind of like building blocks. So we're going to start, even though I mentioned three poisons, actually we're going to start a little earlier than that with one poison. And the way I'm going to do that, the approach I'm going to take, is to use a teaching which comes from the Abhidharma. Last week Anne gave you an overview of the Buddhist scriptures. in the Pali Canon. And you may remember there are three baskets, or three major sections in the Pali Canon. The first one is the Vinaya, or the rules of conduct for practitioners.

[44:18]

The second is the discourses, the suttas in Pali, or sutras in Sanskrit. And the third is the Abhidhamma, or Abhidharma, which is a relatively analytical or scholastic kind of treatment of many of the topics that are raised in the earlier or previous baskets. So I'm actually going to use, if you, I don't know if you still have that page, but if you have it at home, it's actually the very last item on that list. It's the seventh section of the Abhidharma called the Tathama, or conditions, or relations, or activations. So this is a category of analysis that relates to these three poisons and the way they elaborate into others.

[45:28]

I came upon this wheel of light in an ancient brown folder in my file cabinet, which I think Ananda Dahlenberg, who is still a teacher at San Francisco Zen Center, gave me and other students many years ago. class, and I knew I kept it for some reason, and here it is. So I give you this because it's sort of enjoyable. We used to have a wheel of light hanging right there over the prong, but it seems to have been moved to some other location. I wonder where it is now. But now you have your very own. You can color this in. You've got a key there, you see all the various items.

[46:37]

So, we're going to talk about the central three items that are in the very middle of that circle. Namely, here they're labeled as desire, hatred and delusion. And you'll notice other things arrayed around those core concepts. You see six realms in the circle around that. human realm, the one that we're in mostly, heavens and the realm of ghosts, hungry ghosts, the hells, the animal realms, and so on. And then outside of that is a 12-step process which is sort of the, you might say, the wheel of rebirth. It's the process, the psychophysical process through which humans are born and reborn again and reborn again in the world of samsara or ordinary suffering, ordinary life, boredom, anger, hatred, pain, despair, confusion, and so on.

[47:50]

And good things too. Satisfaction, reliance on satisfaction. So you can see there are three animals there in the middle. I want to come back to the three poisons there in the center. Desire, or more specifically greed, hatred, and delusion. These animals here, most of them Two of the three are fairly recognizable. One, I have some question as to its identity. Traditionally, the snake stands for hate. Snake epitomizes hatred in this context. You may not feel that way. You may have a pet snake and feel that's kind of a slam on snakes. But that's the symbolism that's going on here.

[48:53]

The pig, surprise, surprise, is delusion. We already all think of pigs as greedy, like eat, eat, eat. But apparently not so in this technology. And this seemingly feathered creature here, I think it is feathered. It looks to me like a duck or a goose. But it's supposed to be a cock, a rooster. And it stands for greed. Anyway. Now I've met my responsibilities to Nanda, and I'm going to move on. So, I mentioned that I'm going to refer to this last, very last section, seventh section of the Abhidharma, to try to elucidate, somewhat anyway, these three poisons. You have this handout that I gave you tonight that on one side it says Chapter 8, Root Relations, and on the other side it says, well actually it says Attitude.

[50:05]

But that comes from another section called Food Relations. Just turn it over. It's on the back side. It doesn't say food. It says attitude. Let's keep going. It's on the back. So I mentioned that we're actually going to start with one poison. And just one poison. is called avidya. And it's pictured in figure six here. Hetu is a word that means root relations. So if you're, that's confusing. Figure six, that's the, I think it's the Pali word for root relations.

[51:14]

And what I'm focusing on right now is this item called, in the first row, called the Bitter Tap Root. And that Bitter Tap Root is avidya. Avidya means the basic ignorance. It means the ignorance of the way things are. In Buddhist terms, for example, in terms of Buddhist teaching, it means, for example, ignorance of the Four Noble Truths, which is something we'll begin to talk about next week, a particular teaching. So, a concrete example of manifestation of this kind of ignorance would be somebody who doesn't get the Four Noble Truths. Now, it doesn't necessarily literally mean you've heard the Four Noble Truths and you know that teaching, or you don't know that teaching. It means you don't understand the content of it, or in fact you have a belief in something that sort of runs the other way.

[52:22]

But since the Four Noble Truths is a specific, identifiable Buddhist doctrine, then ignorance of that doctrine is a manifestation of this kind of basic ignorance. Another example is ignorance of the workings of karma, would be another example. ignorance of the Three Jewels and the functioning of the Three Jewels. In Madhyamaka teaching, which is a teaching related to the Perfection of Wisdom Sutras, which is a Heart Sutra, and Zen very frequently said this is a one of the briefer, nicer versions of the Kratonapratnita. So the Madhyamaka school is closely identified with that sutra. And for that school, the basic ignorance would be expressed as obsession with fixed ideas.

[53:32]

That is, being stuck in particular intellectual conceptions of things. as opposed to appreciating the ultimate emptiness of things, the interrelatedness, the radical interrelatedness of every phenomenal thing. So on the one hand, it would be ignorance of chunyata, of emptiness, or it would be some kind of obsession with some other fixed idea, which is wrong. Another fixed idea, like, for example, that things have enduring self-natures which go on and on infinitely. Another fixed idea that would be false would be that things just utterly disappear without trace. They just go away.

[54:34]

That would be called neolithic. So that would be a fixed idea, which is rejected by the Mahayana school and by the emptiness teaching. And so belief in that idea would constitute a kind of fundamental ignorance. If you were really committed to nihilism or substantialism or something like that, you'd have a real hard time getting out of samsara. That's the position. In the Yogacara school, which is the school that is taking us up into Mahayana, into recent, relatively recent history, you know, 1500, 2000 years ago, the kind of basic ignorance that we're talking about would be the belief that things in the outer world, tables, chairs, people, and so on, are utterly separate from consciousness.

[55:37]

that would be a false idea, which is typical of ignorance. Whereas the understanding that the outside world does not exist separate from consciousness, that it's intimately involved with the mind, would be a correct perception and be distinguished from the basic ignorance. So that's the top line there, avidya, the fundamental ignorance called, in the table there, it's called closed mind. And at the bottom is, of course, the opposite, vidya, or open mind, or the mind that appreciates, for example, emptiness. the radical interrelatedness of them, a mind that appreciates the three marks, that not only appreciates it intellectually, but actually has had some intuitive experience that these are indeed the characteristics of phenomenal existence.

[56:54]

There are traditionally two levels of vijja, or open mind, or knowledge. It's called knowledge. The lower level is intellectual knowledge, so what we're doing here in class. And the higher level is intuitive understanding of direct unmediated, non-conceptual grasping of the Three Marks, the Four Noble Truths, the interdependency of mind and matter, inside and outside, and so on. So, going back up to avijja, again, closed mind, the fundamental, basic ignorance, the root of all unwholesomeness.

[57:57]

You get a feeling for this term. I mean, it's interesting, you know, Anne mentioned Christianity. You know, in Buddhism, avidya is, you could say, the basic problem. I mean, if you had to find a flaw in human beings, in many human beings, that's it. It's not sin. Vidya is not sin. It's not a morally reprehensible state of being, although there's a good argument can be made that a lot of morally reprehensible behavior comes out of basic ignorance. Belief in the utter difference between you and me, white people and black people, up and down, and so on. hard categorizing and dualizing of the world, we can appreciate that this is a lot of evil.

[59:06]

But avidya, per se, is not sin. Maybe just as potent. But it has a different feeling about it. It has a different feeling. It's ignorance. It's not knowing what's going on, knowing deepest sense. It could include intellectual knowing, but also very deep, direct grasping. So, beginning with this closed mind, this fundamental delusion, it differentiates into three poisons, three common healing problems. One of them is, there are arrayed there in the second row. These are the three poisonous, bitter roots. Moha, which is greed. Dosa, which is poly, hate.

[60:12]

And moha, which is, again, delusion, but perhaps somewhat more restricted sense of delusion than than the fundamental ignorance. Again, each one of these poisons has its sort of positive antidote. Greed, excessive desire, has an antidote which is called alohpa, non-greed. What's that? Anamita. Anamita. Alohpa. To you too.

[61:15]

So an offsetting practice, for example, to the poison greed would be the practice of dana, or generosity. And similarly, we have dosa, hate, and adosa, non-hate, or maitri, or metta. Metta is the Pali word, which means unlimited kindness, or unconditional. kindness, or sometimes we use the term love, or unlimited friendliness. And this will come up when we talk about the four Brahma, the hearts, the first of those four. And, of course, moha has its offsetting virtue also, ha-moha, non-delusion, which, of course, means

[62:19]

clarity, insight into the way things are. So if you turn the page over, we're actually jumping in this book. This is another book by Grazer, by the way, that this discussion comes out of. It's his commentary on the Athana, this last section of the Abhidharma. This section here, pages 169 and 170, comes out of the notion of food relations, which I suppose in a hate context could mean a food fight, but it doesn't. Basically, food relations means that we nourish our states of mind, both positive and negative. And this teaching

[63:22]

gives you some sense of how you take these three, first the one delusion, then three delusions, and you move toward a sort of wider and more comprehensive understanding of delusion. So he points out that if you take these three bitter roots, greed, hate, and delusion, And you divide them into two kinds of objects. One is objects outside yourself, things. And the other is everything that's left, namely you. So self and other. In this table, figure 12, he calls it self and sensuality, since we're talking about a poised So in the case of delusion related to the self, when it's moved in a positive or inflating direction, you get pride, upper left-hand corner there.

[64:42]

We all pretty much know the experience of pride, its characteristics. the fundamental delusion moves positively towards objects, we call it greed. So we've got one of the original roots plus a kind of new one there in the left column. In the middle we've got two versions of delusion. And this is, I say middle because this is neither positive nor negative, it's kind of stasis. It's just ignorance with respect to objects, and self. When it moves in a negative direction, delusion with respect to the self results in doubt, or I think what's really imagined as self-doubt, lack of confidence in myself, in my worthiness, my capabilities, my competency, and so on.

[65:46]

So on the one extreme, we have pride, and on the other we have self-doubt. And similarly, with respect to objects, the delusion on the negative side moves towards hate. Now, objects in this case could mean other people, of course, as well. So we hate other people. And in fact, the only way we can really pull that off is to make an object out of them. and you get utterly separated from yourself, then you can develop a strong, negative, arbitrary state of mind, like hatred toward another person. So, you see there are six items there, then, in the table on the left, and these are then relisted in Figure 13 as so-called dull kleshas.

[66:49]

Kleshas means defilements, states of defilement. Sometimes there are emotions, there are many, many, many kleshas. But this list of the five dull kleshas, and then what they lead to at an intellectual level, are these so-called sharp clashes, or drishti. Drishti is the Sanskrit word, diti, for quality. It means views. And actually, in particular, it means wrong views. And there is some correspondence here, I think, between the individual items, that is, read, leads to what's called here perverted views. We don't have to worry about exactly what these definitions in the right-hand column mean.

[67:56]

The point of this discussion is, in a sense, to see the flow, how we go from basic ignorance to fairly specific negative states of mind, opinions, and physical states, too. So hatred, at an intellectual level, becomes extremism. Extremist arguments tending to be mustered on behalf of hateful political positions. Delusion of real views, pride, not surprisingly, leads to personality views, that is, incorrect views about what a person is. For example, that a person is something that has an enduring, permanent soul.

[68:58]

That would be an example, in the Buddhist context, of a delusory conviction about human beings. In fact, from a Buddhist standpoint, that's exactly one of the things that human beings don't have. And that's good. because otherwise they couldn't wake up. And finally, the last line there, doubt is paired with superstition. The superstition might be magical, if it is magical thinking. I want to see if there are questions left.

[70:12]

Do you have any questions you want to ask? Concerns? Who is this figure working behind this wheel of life? Yeah. Well, I'll take a wild guess that it's Mahakala, but I don't know. It sure looks like one. Yama? Right. Yama. God of death. That would make sense. It's hard to do. I'm sort of curious about the relationship between the person and the emotion. And I'm just sort of processing the question in terms of the attitude. I think about post-mortems, or lack of awareness, or kind of a very narrow view of how to do this.

[71:20]

I'm not aware of those feelings, or motivation, Thank you. God bless you. It's the idea of a gentle-mindedness in the sense that maybe, of course I'm a person who has been educated in the music world, but they might have a place in mind about themselves and not be able to look outside themselves and look at themselves and examine how they should understand what they're doing. But yet, in my view, a very pardon, maybe not suffer from some of these other things.

[72:27]

Well, I think I could start the response to that. Maybe others will have responses as well. What you've said about closed mind, or narrow mind, or often the term used is fixity of mind, fixed ideas about how things work. And even though I gave examples before using Buddhist doctrine to say, well, this means not appreciating the best in such Buddhist doctrine, an even more fundamental meaning is this kind of fixity or closeness. So a lot of our practice, in fact, is directed toward opening questioning and making the mind more malleable so that it's receptive and it can respond to be responsive as opposed to thick-skinned or unintelligent in the sense of not aware and therefore not able to be

[73:47]

Well, I think that's implicit, too. I mean, emotional reactivity is, in a sense, that's out beyond what we've focused on here. We've been working at much more fundamental and elementary building blocks. But I think when you talk about emotional reactivity or emotional ignorance, That's what we're, that is what we're talking about. Elaborate in the world of thought, image, emotion, self-image, thinking, attitude, behavior. Other comments? Yes. I have a question, David, and that is, in a sense, like, Well, I think that's an example of it.

[74:57]

I think putting another head on top of yours, you know, to sort of build intellectual structures, which, you know, you keep putting in the top of your head, you know, and your head's already got enough trouble. that these intellectual structures tend to be, you know, it's like a Christmas tree. We hang the ornaments of our life on this tree. And it all gets in the way. I think that's the key. Sure. You want to ask a question? Yeah, yeah, sure. Fixed intellectual ideas.

[76:01]

As soon as we start thinking about things, you know, we get things in the realm of language and we construct something and then we, instead of seeing it as a thought, There's nothing wrong with thinking. We can do that. It's very powerful. Our ability to think abstractly is enormously powerful, really, in and of itself. But to the extent that we come to believe in ideas as actually representing reality, that's when we get in trouble. Reality is always changing. Reality is utterly unique and particular. So we get a a conceptual abstraction, and we say, I don't know, that's the way it is, my model here. And actually, of course, it's not like your model. It may be like your model, but you're so invested in your model, you can't see the difference. And then you start making bad mistakes.

[77:02]

So what we've talked about here is the outbreak of the basic ignorance into three poisons. And then that, in turn, in the intellectual context, into these wrong views of which there are, of course, jillions. Now, I emphasize this wrong views because next week, when we begin to talk about the Eightfold Noble Path, guess what it begins with? Right view. So this is when we begin to address address and antidote to these various wrong views. So that's about as much as I want to try to say tonight about the three poisons.

[78:05]

I want to give you one more handout, because I know we don't have quite enough. What's that? More handouts. So you already have, do you not, the reading for next week? No. Okay, we're going to pass this out to her. Let's try to stay quiet and organized here because we're going to give you a flurry of paper to read. What are we giving them? How many? Worth a Bit of Talk. Setting Emotion to Go with the Tree. So two pieces of paper. And one, the same thing for from uh, no we got something else from this book. From, look, Frazier. All right. Very good. We're gonna come around and hand these to you. And do you want this Ponzi now or next week? Huh? Do you want them to have Ponzi, the, the, the Mahayana Four Noble Truths? Remember Ponzi? No, not yet. Not yet? Okay. When we've handed all these things out and taken any last procedural questions, we'll then chant the four vows together.

[79:19]

Now, go home. This is the April pastry? Yeah, this is the April pastry. It's another treasure from my brown book. I'm giving you this because I love it. So this relates to the Eightfold Noble Path, which you're going to start reading about. So I wanted you to have that. It says at the bottom, the psychological attitude Anyway, it's Govinda's book, The Psychological Attitude of Early Buddhism. That's what it's supposed to be. So we'll talk next time about the Eightfold Pace Week. This is the name of the book? The Psychological Attitude of Early Buddhism?

[80:21]

Yes, that's the name of it. Have the other things been handed out? Yes, they have. You might want to remind them to read chapters 2 through 5. So you're going to read chapters 2 through 5 in the 12th hola. And that's what we're going to, first we're going to talk about the four Brahma-Viharas, then we're going to start the Four Noble Truths. Let's chant.

[80:58]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ