I now have to face the truth about his pointless works. I want to continue a little bit

[01:29]

to talk about the Heart Sutra. I talked a little bit about the beginning, now I want to talk a little bit about the end. We'll leave out the middle. The end of the Heart Sutra, gatte gatte, paragatte parasangatte bodhisvaha, that's the mantra. And the sutra says, the great bright mantra, and so forth. Mantra is literally a kind of spell, but a spell means various things to us. We tend to think of a spell as something thrown at us by a witch,

[02:33]

magician or something like that. But it kind of has the meaning of a concentration and Whatever we're attracted to has some quality of spell, some spell-like quality. If you listen to a piece of music, we come under the spell of the music, under the influence of the music. And if we go out to the woods, we come under the spell of the woods.

[03:43]

Or we go to the beach and we come under the spell of the beach. Or we go to a movie. So it's a kind of seduction, in a sense it's a seduction, but it's more of an environment or influence. It doesn't have to be seductive, but we tend to think of it in a seductive way. because of our association. But mantra is not exactly spell in that way. But it is a kind of, maybe it's a kind of samadhi. kind of absorption or concentration, something that contains the means for absorption, or elicits our attention, and in a certain way.

[04:56]

There are no dharanis in Prajnaparamita Citrus. So to have this dharani at the end of the Heart Sutra is rather unusual. The dharani refers, of course, to the title, prajnaparamita dharani. the dharani that expresses paramita, or crossing to the other shore. Gathe, gate, parangate, parasamgate, gone, gone, going to the other shore. Svaha, or svaha is not translatable exactly. It's a kind of dharani, swaha, but something like well gone, so be it.

[06:12]

So, this dharani is called, I mean this mantra is called the Great Bright Mantra. supreme mantra, unsurpassable, so forth, all these invectives about it. But we always wonder, well, what is the mantra? What does that mean? How does that apply to the sutra? There must be a lot of pollen in the air right now. Do you agree? So, I used to think of Suzuki Roshi's life as a mantra.

[07:24]

We tend to think of a mantra as something that we repeat over and over again. Someone said, will you give me a mantra? And someone said, okay, da, [...] these words and we repeat them over and over again in order to be in some kind of state. And I used to think of Suzuki Roshi's activity as a mantra. The way his, the form of his life was like a mantra. His life had very obvious form. And every day I would see him come out of his office and go into the zendo and light the incense and sit down and so forth, do service. And every day he did the same thing, which was amazing to me. I'd never seen anyone do that kind of activity before, whose life was devoted to sitting zazen, bowing, lighting incense, and the various other things that he did, when there were so many other things to do in the world.

[08:45]

When there were so many other things to do, there was this person doing these things over and over again every day, and he'd been doing them over and over again every day for all of his life. And I had never thought that of myself as ever doing anything like that over and over again every day. As a matter of fact, my life was trying to find something new to do every day. Something more and more amusing. Something interesting. So I was rather impressed by that. And after a while, it occurred to me that his life was a mantra. and every day he had these things that he would do and he was always concentrated on it and somehow his mantra was not just repetition but from the form of the mantra

[09:59]

He was always producing light, kind of in the way that when, in order to get energy, to produce energy, you have something going around in a circle. because of the path it makes, it creates energy. And if you hook up something, some kind of conductor to that energy-producing machine, then the energy flows from it, kind of like a dynamo. So his mantra was kind of the mantra of a spiritual dynamo. And that's why he had so much power, spiritual power, because he was so well concentrated on his activity, on his mantra, that he collected power and produced power.

[11:14]

And that's actually the form that he gave to Zen Center was what made Zen Center so very powerful. We continued the form that Suzuki Roshi gave us, the forms. And if you look at the forms at Tassajara, At some point after a few years of figuring out how Tassajara could be run, it stabilized. The forms stabilized. And Tassajara came to the point where it could run by itself. As long as you kept the forms going, Tassajara could run by itself and became very powerful. I don't know if you know how powerful a place that is. It's powerful to go there and it's powerful to think about it when you leave, you know?

[12:29]

I mean, people are attracted there. And in the summertime, there's this very strong attraction for people, even though they don't practice, but they love to go there. And the thing that creates that power and attraction is form. the strength of the form, the strength of the mantra. That's not the only thing that's necessary. Mantra is a powerful basis, but there also has to be sincerity and a real ability to, there has to be some incorruptible hit to it. So with good leadership and a strong, powerful, dynamic mantra form,

[13:39]

The prajnaparamita reveals itself and is lived through the form. Thich Nhat Hanh, when he was here in Tassajara during a seminar, was talking about, he talked a bit about the Heart Sutra. But he always said, you shouldn't just revere the Heart Sutra as some ancient Buddhist document. He said, you should use it. The Sutra is here for it to be used. It's not just something to be revered and worshipped or respected or something. You should use it. That's what it's for. You should know how to use it.

[14:49]

And he kept saying that every day. So you should think about how to use the sutra. And the mantra is the most important part. The most important part is the mantra, because the mantra is not just gatte gatte, but our activity, our mantra. What is our mantra? What is our prajnaparamita mantra? Citra is kind of an electric, tells us something, prepares our mind. dynamics of the mantra is our actual use of the sutra.

[15:58]

In the tiger's cave, Abbot Obora is talking about the great bright mantra. Great bright mantra means when your mind is like a mirror. When we sit in zazen, our mind is like a mirror. sometimes called great mirror samadhi. It means whatever comes in front of us is reflected just as it is without any thought or concept or idea standing in between ourself and the thing perceived. perception is direct and intuitive without some kind of concept or idea.

[17:26]

And that kind of direct perception is when our mind is like a mirror just reflecting everything in its dustness, without explanation or without contrivance. So we see its nature, but we may not understand its nature, but we perceive the nature because we perceive our own nature. It's like, if you see, when you come out of Zazen, and there's this bright morning, and the trees are glistening, and everything has a very fresh feeling, and you feel, I don't remember saying it this way before,

[18:45]

It's beautiful. That's because you're beautiful. You're seeing a reflection of your own mind. But you're seeing it just as it is. It's not beautiful. We think it's beautiful. It's okay to think it's beautiful, but we feel something. We feel something and then we say it's beautiful. But before we say it's beautiful, we just have some feeling. And that feeling is what's real. And we see our own reflection reflected back on us. And when we see somebody, we have some feeling about someone.

[19:52]

Some kind of wonderful feeling. And we see ourself reflected back. Some wonderful feeling reflected back at us. Some, not identification, but reflection. Because there's nothing standing between us and it. And this kind of mirror samadhi, which we have in zazen, we say, well, when I leave to zendo, I can't stay in zazen, I can't walk out with my legs crossed, that samadhi kind of fades.

[21:12]

Then I start thinking about things and discriminating and pretty soon I see somebody and I don't like them more. I see the sky and it bothers me. And Abbot O'Borah describes, talks about a talk of A monk says to Hogen, Zen master Hogen was one of the very famous Zen masters in China. A monk said to Zen master Hogen, what do I do with a bright mirror? What do I do with this bright mirror? And Hogen says, smash it into a thousand pieces. Smash it into a thousand pieces means... In all the thousand pieces of your daily life, each piece should still be a mirror.

[22:38]

in all the splinters of our bits and pieces of our daily life, each one of those bits and pieces is still a mirror reflecting in its own sphere, having that clear mirror quality. It's like when Dogen says, even in a dew drop, in the grass the whole universe is reflected. So our mantra must be extended through all those bits and pieces. And mantra is like thread. that runs through all of those bits and pieces, even if you don't see it.

[23:50]

It's not a thread that ties it all up into a neat bundle, but it's a thread that makes all the pieces consistent with each other. And this is how we express the mantra and how prajna is brought forth in our daily life. It's an interesting way to think about it. So the mantra is our daily activity expressed moment after moment.

[25:09]

It's not just something written down at the end of the page. You don't have to say gattei gattei all day long. Just practice zazen all day long, which is constantly being in touch with bodhisattva mind, your own bodhisattva mind. And it means that when you have to make a decision, you should make the decision based on your bodhisattva mind and not based on some other idea.

[26:18]

If you want to practice the mantra, then your decision should always be based on preserving bodhisattva mind. So that you never let it get upset through anger, delusion, greed, and so forth. But even if it does get upset, to keep always bringing ourself back to bodhisattva mind. No matter how much we want to do something right, we're always doing something wrong. And so our day, you know, is we do one thing right and we do five things wrong. Then we do one thing right and we do ten things wrong. And every once in a while we do something right.

[27:20]

But knowing when we do something wrong, that even in doing something wrong, there's life in it. It's our life. And realizing that no matter how much we want to do something, we can't live a perfect life, life perfectly according to the way we want to do it. And this way we know our compassion. We can feel compassion for others and for ourself. First you have to be able to feel compassion for yourself. And then you have to be able, then when you can do that, you can feel compassion for others. We should be strict with ourself.

[28:22]

But strict doesn't mean no compassion. But we shouldn't try to always impose certain kind of strictness on others that we impose on ourselves. And we shouldn't stand back and tell people to do something while we sit back on a soft cushion. Being strict with ourselves means that we should know what we have to do and really try to do it. If we really make an effort, we won't do so much wrong, actually. And if we do do something that is wrong or something that we can't do so well, the very fact that we know that we're trying or the fact that we're always facing our failure and not turning away from it is compassion.

[29:41]

We have to have some... Even, you know, if we have that really deep compassionate mind, even though our life is just nothing but failures, we still have some joy of life. We can appreciate our life. And no matter how much our life hurts, we still have some joy in our life. We always want things to come up to our ideal, but if

[31:07]

we're just concerned with our ideal, then we're always in a state of disappointment. But if we neglect our ideal, then we just let things go, and our life is not satisfactory. So practice is like always trying very hard, always constantly trying hard. And sometimes we're successful and sometimes we're not. But in that success and failure is we can enjoy our life within that success and failure. In one moment things are right, the next moment things are wrong.

[32:10]

But the practice of zazen is to always be in that right here place, like when we sit zazen. And then our life is zazen. Like when your legs hurt, And you don't know what to do, things are terrible, and you're just there in a very calm place. And the only thing you can do is get calmer and calmer. The world is raging right through you. And you just can do nothing but just get calmer, calmer, calmer, until you finally come down to the bottom of your life. When you finally come down to the bottom, then you know how to practice through all of your activity.

[33:34]

Always come into that still place. And then your compassion comes out of that still place. And your mirror mind is always reflecting through all the splinters. Each splinter of your life, each section of your life, each moment's division reflects your true mind. What I would like us to do, you know, when we read books about Buddhism and Zen, they're either very intellectual or talking about some time in the past in China, or speaking from some distance.

[34:48]

So it's always, I think it's good for us to study or read books by priests, Japanese priests, contemporary Japanese priests, in order to get a real feeling from our immediate past or the practice that's come to us immediately. And how those people interpret Buddhism, and Zen, and Dogon, and what their experience is. There's some books, there's a lot that hasn't come to us, but the Tiger's Cave is one that's came out in about 1967 or something, 68, 69, and it was a translation of Abbot O'Borah's lectures on the Heart Sutra by Trevor Leggett.

[36:08]

It's a book that every one of us should have. It was recently, it's been out of print for years, but it was recently published again in paperback about a year ago. And every Zen student who practices here should own a copy and read it over and over again. And Uchiyama Roshi from Antaji I've talked about him before. He wrote lots of books, but one that's been translated is... That's another one. That wasn't the one I was thinking of. I was thinking of Approach to Zen. It's the first one that he wrote that was translated. And also the one that Bill mentioned. Refining Your Life, which is about a commentary on a Tenzo Kyokun.

[37:18]

And there's also some talks by Sawaki Kodoroshi, who was a very famous Soto Zen priest in Japan, who died around 1950. A friend of mine translated some things of his. It's in the library. But these kind of, and of course Zen mind, beginner's mind, these kinds of things which are talking about this contemporary Soto Zen practice are good things for us to read and study because they express Zen and Buddhism from the standpoint of are teachers, immediate teachers. And we can get some flavor of how the people who are transmitted to us think about and what their training is and how you can see where it comes from.

[38:32]

And you can see their compassion and their day-to-day thinking, which is very important. How they think day-to-day. And there's also a lot more background which hasn't been translated, which I hope will be at some point, but I want to make a list of things that should be required reading for us. And if we understand some of these things, if everybody understands some of these things, then we can see more easily how to develop our own practice, knowing some of those things. So I want us to study those more, be more familiar with those texts. I want to know if you have any questions about, or how you feel about Sachine.

[39:43]

We have about a few minutes. I have a question about I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the bodhisattva mind in reference to what you were saying. Today? Yeah. Well, the bodhisattva mind is the mind which is always turned toward practice, which means is always fundamentally founded in emptiness and is expressed through activity. And bodhisattva mind is the mind that is always giving up self-centeredness in order to see into the truth.

[40:58]

So we always keep returning to that mind. It's like when you sit in zazen, you have all this stuff going on, and thoughts are coming, and desires are coming, but you always keep returning to zazen, right? So in your daily life, no matter what you're doing, when something comes up, you always return to zazen. You always return to your fundamental mind. When some question comes up, you always return your mind to the fundamental in order to get the answer. How does it accord with this fundamental mind? How does my decision accord with this? And if you keep doing that, then you're constantly practicing. If you're just getting carried away by your feelings and thoughts and emotions and starting to follow all these tracks, then you get lost. But if you're always coming back to basing your decisions on your fundamental mind, then you don't get lost and you know how to practice.

[42:12]

You may get lost, but you know how to come back. You always know what to come back to. So constantly coming back, just like, and it's Southern, constantly coming back to our fundamental mind. And that's our mantra.

[42:38]

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