The lovely, the holy, the perfection of wisdom gives light. Unstained, the entire world cannot stain her. She is a source of light and from everyone in the triple world she removes darkness. Most excellent are her works, she brings light, so that all fear and distress may be forsaken, and disperses the gloom and darkness of delusion. She herself is an organ of vision. She has a clear knowledge of the own being of all dharmas. For she does not stray from it. The perfection of wisdom of the Buddhas sets in motion the wheel of the dharma. Avalokiteshvara, Bodhisattva, when practicing deeply the Prajna Paramita, perceive that all five skandhas in their own being are empty.

[01:20]

From all suffering, O Shariputra, form does not differ from emptiness. Emptiness does not differ from form. That which is form is emptiness. That which is emptiness, form, the same is true of feelings, perceptions. They do not appear nor disappear, are not tainted nor pure, do not increase nor decrease. Therefore in emptiness no form, no feelings, no perceptions, no formations, no consciousness, no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind, no color, no sound, no smell, no taste, of mind, no realm of eyes until no realm of mind, consciousness, no ignorance and also no extinction of it until no old age and death and also no extinction of it, no suffering, no origination, no stopping, no death,

[02:36]

Also no attainment with nothing to attain. A bodhisattva depends on prajna paramita. And the mind is no hindrance without any hindrance. No fears exist far apart from every perverted view. One dwells in nirvana in the three worlds. All buddhas depend on prajna paramita. Therefore know the Prajna Paramita is the great transcendent mantra, is the great bright mantra, is the utmost mantra, is the supreme mantra which is able to relieve all suffering and is true, not false. So proclaim the Prajna Paramita mantra.

[03:40]

Proclaim the mantra. Good evening, everybody. Charlie, I just realized that that list of names is just the people that are in that book. Is it hot in here? Windows open. I'll give a brief recap from last week, and if there's any questions from last week, we could bring some up, and then I'll just go into today.

[05:39]

Currently, we're on the third line. The first line, Abhilokiteshvara Bodhisattva. Abhilokiteshvara is the Bodhisattva of compassion and in India it was a male figure. And Abhilokiteshvara is one who hears the sounds of the world and the cries and suffering of the world. And being a bodhisattva, which is an enlightening being and not a Buddha, which is just a person who sits and just is without having to do anything, the bodhisattva is an active principle, active spirit of practice And Avalokiteshvara, rather than just sitting and just hearing the sounds, actually comes forward and meets each person intimately to help them through their suffering.

[06:41]

uh... there's a bodhisattva in each of the six realms of existence which is depicted on the wheel of life over there above the telephone uh... and the spirit of that is that in each of the realms of existence there's a bodhisattva there to help us through it that all is not lost just because you happen to be in the hell realm or the hungry ghost realm or even the god realm that each place is an opportunity to wake up uh... In the second, oh, another critical part is Bodhisattvas are the, is the archetype or the ideal for Mahayana practice. And the Bodhisattva is one who waits for the, for other people to reach enlightenment. So they, in a sense, kind of open the door and let other people pass in front of them and then they come in after everyone has gone through.

[07:42]

And the arhat idea, which is in the older school of Buddhism, is more focused on sort of self-cultivation and purification and following the rules of the monks. And they also help people. But the orientation or the focus or the emphasis is a little different. Bodhisattvas can practice like arhats, and arhats can practice like bodhisattvas. In the second line, when practicing deeply the Prajnaparamita, practicing has a feeling of ongoing, never finished, continually practicing. It's moment by moment. It's not fixed, and it never ends. And practicing deeply is practicing intimately, somewhat like swimming in the water. You get completely wet in practice. And what is being practiced is the Prajnaparamita.

[08:44]

And prajna is the wisdom of emptiness. And emptiness simply means interrelatedness. Empty of an inherent self or a fixed self. There's no abiding self. And clearly everything is interrelated. And paramita, prajnaparamita, paramita is the other shore. par is traveling or going to the other shore but in fact there's no place to go. The shore is right here. So through practicing deeply prajna or wisdom sitting zazen we actually see that everything is contained right here on the cushion and we don't have to go anywhere. Mel talked a little bit about this on Saturday during his lecture, Dogen's emphasis just on zazen and that if you really do zazen completely and are intimate with your practice, you don't have to go anywhere. All will sort of unfold in due course, just right there.

[09:51]

And then the third line is where we'll begin today. Are there any questions or comments that people have from last week? There was a nice chemistry last week. Yes? Not that there isn't this time. I don't know yet. Well, things always change. We'll see what the chemistry is next week. Okay. Third line, perceive that all five skandhas in their own being are empty. Perceived gives a feeling of perception, seeing something, perceiving it, being intimate with it, observing it very closely. And again, this is something that we do in zazen, that we, through our practice, quieting down and not attaching to things as they arise will give us clear perception.

[11:07]

And the clear perception is evident later on in the line, own being. When you see something in its own being, it's without any coverings or ideas of what things are, a preconceived notion. The own being is really the essence of each moment and each dharma as it arises. Typically, our suffering is caused by separation, and separation is our ideas about what things are, and we don't really see things for who they are or what they are. like I spoke about during a talk some time ago, our practice is like a spiral, and each time we hit a particular point on the spiral, this point is a particular experience, a particular dharma, and as we're practicing we're going deeper and deeper, so even though we're experiencing the same dharma,

[12:10]

where our perception of it is a little deeper and a little clearer, and when we see it in its own being, we see what? That they're empty, and it's empty of an inherent self, and it is interrelated with all things. And what is being seen are the five skandhas. Now skandhas are how we take the world in. Eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, or the sense of touch, and then mind, or thinking. The five skandhas are sometimes thought of as streams, the five streams that course through us. And like any stream, sometimes they kind of overflow, and sometimes they get very thin and sometimes dry up, but they're always changing. And the influences of the five streams coming together form our personality.

[13:16]

So if we can remember that, we can appreciate that each person has their own set of streams or currents that form their personality. And each one is a little bit different. I know for myself, I've been caught thinking that everyone should be like me, because, well, my dreams seem to be, you know, like this, and why aren't everybody else's? And then as we get to know each other, we realize that people's lives are very different, and what forms the personality is created in such a way that Well, they're just different flowers in a garden, as someone says. Each flower has a different scent. The five skandhas are form, which relates to the four elements, air, or wind, earth, water, and fire.

[14:23]

feelings, which are either positive, negative, or neutral, the realm of perception, which are through the six senses, thoughts and philosophy, mental formations, which are volitional actions or impulses, and consciousness, which is the psychological realm, six senses and ego and whatnot. So those are the five skandhas, and we all have them, and that's how we take the world in. And we have a sense of ourself, and we have a sense that they're fixed. And this Sutra of Liberation is impressing upon us that there's nothing there that's fixed, and that they're inherently empty. And what happens when they're empty is that we're saved from all suffering. The skandhas don't exist alone, they exist in relation to each other and to the world around them.

[15:42]

There's eyes, and there's a cushion and then there's consciousness that puts that together to form Zafu. So that's our relationship. These three things have to be together in order to form a dharma that we can recognize or reality. But from fundamental ignorance, We created an illusory world, but we think this is a zafu, but it's just what it is. We think this is a comb, but these are just labels and things that we put on them for convenience. So in one sense, we have to see things as they truly are without all the labels. And the labels are there for convenience so we can talk about them and relate to them in a way. As you read the literature in our tradition, you'll see really kind of crazy stories and things that don't quite make sense, and this is the world of non-duality, and the Zen masters who are having their little repartees are talking in a way which kind of goes beyond our conceptual thinking.

[17:07]

There's a line in the Lankapatara Sutra that says, things are not what they seem, nor are they otherwise. So where are we in that practice of things are not as they seem, nor are they otherwise? Well, we're treading the middle path between those. They're not as they seem, it's not our idea, they don't fulfill our idea of what we think they are, and yet everything is right here in this moment, so it's nothing other than what it is. So somehow or another we have to balance those two things right in the middle. And if we're dwelling in emptiness, we actually can see that and feel that. I mentioned last week, I think, someone was wondering what Suzuki Roshi thought about as he was bowing out to the students at the end of Zazen.

[18:13]

And when this person came out to Suzuki Roshi, Suzuki Roshi said, I'm thinking about emptiness without even fielding an articulated question. So that's a good tact to remember, thinking about emptiness and thinking about how things are interrelated. The older school, the Theravada school, felt that the skandhas were real. Form, feelings, perceptions, mental formations and consciousness were real, but that the self was not real. And the Mahayana school posits or feels that they're empty and not real, that none of this is real and that they're all empty and just arising and passing away and they're totally dependent on each other for existence.

[19:14]

And the Theravada school felt that the self was not real. And through studying the many different dharmas, which I handed on that list of a hundred dharmas, by studying all these particular things, they would be able to understand reality. By studying the many, they would understand the one. And in Zazen, what we do in our tradition, is we study the one. in order to understand the many. It's kind of a reverse of the two. Excuse me. How do we study the many and the one in order to understand the many and the one? Well, we do. We can't help but study the many because when we open our eyes we see the many, but we're actually studying the self, which is the one self. And then when you see, what in fact, what composes the one self?

[20:18]

Well, it's the many. But there isn't. Well, we have to study that and see that. Keep that question. So the skandhas are the first thing that we kind of get into view. For a healthy individual, you really have to have a sense of self. You have to have a sense of perception, mental formations, feelings, and all this stuff has to be validated, and the person really has to feel that they're real. And then after that, then we can practice and see that they, in fact, are empty. and there's not an inherent or a fixed thing or an essential thing that's there.

[21:20]

There's a Dogon in one of his fascicles that says, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers. And this is a way of seeing the world initially. Or as we enter practice, we see things, we have a sense of self, and there's this zafu, and there's this glass of water, and there's these people here, and there's this person here speaking. And then at a certain point, mountains are no longer mountains, and rivers are no longer rivers. And this is this area of emptiness where things are interrelated, there's a feeling, there's a presence or a sense of life and someone, something participating in that, but it's a little bit hazy. And then we return once again to mountains and mountains and rivers and rivers, but it's with a new kind of worldview. It's a new view of seeing things as they are. And having the deep experience that Dogen had of dropping body and mind, seeing things just as they are, the mountains and rivers don't go away.

[22:31]

They're seen for what they truly are, which are just an interrelated phenomenal world. And we get a taste of that in Zazen and during Sishin, when things are really stripped down bare, just to the essence of just breath and posture, and not a whole lot of interaction. And behind the scenes, things are taken care of for us, meals are cooked for us, there's people hitting bells, and we just participate in that, and we let go of ourselves, and let go of our ego, and just participate fully. All of a sudden, there's three bowls of food right in front of us, and we eat the food. We hear the sounds and the zendo, the masticating of the food. It disappears. Next thing, there's no sound. It's just what's going on. It's really quite wondrous and quite ordinary at the same time. A major ancestor in our tradition is Nagarjuna, who lived in the second century in India.

[23:43]

He studied emptiness and had a number of pieces written on the subject. He is the first person that the Doshi bows during service after Shakyamuni Buddha, Nagarjuna. And he said that shunyata is not a theory. Shunyata and emptiness are the same thing. Shunyata is not a theory, but a way to lead the mind to reality by restraining the conceptualizing tendency. We tend to put things into concepts and think about this and think about that. But if we dwell in emptiness, as Suzuki Roshi was talking about, you see the interrelatedness of all things, then you actually see reality for what it is and not just our ideas.

[24:45]

It's okay to have ideas and have concepts and all that, but the problem is, of course, we attach to our concepts and we think this is the way it's got to be. And if we remember these five streams, which are constantly changing in our being, and we reflect on our life of 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 or so years, we can see that our ideas about things have changed over the years. And because we can really feel and see that these things have changed, we see that things are not fixed. and that by constantly changing, being open to these changes, we can appreciate things without the kind of partiality which tends to bind us. The fourth line, and was saved from all suffering, This apparently was not in the original Sanskrit of 8000 line version, but was later added in the Chinese translations.

[25:55]

Saved is a word which has a lot of kind of charge or juice on it. And this is the word that we're using. And we have to be careful about saving people. First we have to save ourselves. And the Sixth Ancestor says that we should save the beings in our own mind. which is an encouragement to really focus inward and think about what we're attached to and what we're suffering with and work with that as we help others in any way that we can. So with safe from all suffering, it doesn't mean that there's no more pain. It means that suffering potentially is eliminated.

[27:05]

And the suffering comes when we attach to our pain. And we've all had experiences of attachment to pain, and we suffer more. And what our Sutra here is trying to impress upon us, that if we really look at it for what it is, and see the interrelatedness of all things, that we will be saved from the suffering. So when we're experiencing pain, I guess the easiest thing to talk about probably would be physical pain because we've all had moments of that when we're sitting zazen. If we're separate from the pain, And we start thinking about it, like, oh, this pain, it really hurts. And we start looking at it as an examinee, like, why am I here? What can I do to lessen this pain? This is really difficult.

[28:06]

All these things are kind of falling into conceptualization, which, according to Nagarjuna, is keeping us away from reality. And what's really reality in pain is That feeling inside, the expression, either if it's articulated, if it's just like a scream, or just that, and breathing out with, that's reality. That is a complete merging of self and reality. and so-called other, this pain in my knee, by just coming together with, however it comes together, with a scream or just that feeling. as I mentioned last week, tears are reality. Tears are an expression of wisdom and the wisdom of sorrow.

[29:09]

We're talking about wisdom and compassion, that compassion is an expression of wisdom and the wisdom of emptiness, which in one example was sorrow, that when tears well up and tears come out, it's like we don't think about, well, this is really sad I should cry, maybe, because that's probably a good thing to do. It just happens. Our self drops, and we merge between this experience and the expression of it. So be it tears, be it laughter, you know, whatever. There's no right or wrong. And that's another beauty of our practice, that there's many ways of expressing ourselves, but within certain parameters here at BCC. As long as they're true, if it's a true expression of reality and what you're experiencing, there's usually a container for it. And if there's not, there's probably some inappropriate thing that's maybe coming out from it and we'll get corrected or reminded that maybe we shouldn't scream so much or what have you.

[30:24]

I came across something actually. book which is not here now and it's talking about feelings and it said okay yeah I will go on and we'll read that when Andrea gets when Andrea she wakes up There's a story in the literature about this fellow who gets shot by an arrow. And while there's pain by being shot by an arrow, he starts asking questions like, who shot this arrow at me? What could I have done to be shot at? Is there poison in the arrow?

[31:26]

There seems to be. Where'd this poison come from? And he starts analyzing and thinking about all this stuff rather than just taking care of the arrow or the pain and just pulling the arrow out. So it's lessening suffering. There's still going to be suffering. Thank you. There's still going to be suffering through our practice. There's still going to be pain through our practice, but we don't necessarily have to suffer with it. This was in Buddhism and Zen, which is a nice little book from the 50s of Senzaki senseis. And he's quoting a 9th century Chinese master. And he says, express your feelings, but never become more expressive than your true nature. So that really hit me. It's okay to express our feelings, but what is it when we express our feelings apart from our true nature?

[32:32]

Which for me feels like theater. Yeah, good. I like that. Yeah, I was going to say something extra, but theater is more, yeah, more to the point drama. There's lots of words that describe it. So the true nature that he's referring to is this true nature of emptiness and the fundamental ground that we're all sitting on. And so if we stay connected to that, then there's less likelihood of drama coming up and we just speak our truth. we feel our truth and people feel it back. But when we lose sight of that ground and we get caught up in all the other stuff, then people get a little disoriented when you're trying to figure out, well, what are you talking about? They have to kind of sort through all the theater and the drama to get to the essence of it. So our practice is really kind of getting down right to reality. And of course, everybody's reality is a little different.

[33:33]

Some people are more emotional, some people are less. I mean, there's many different expressions. But the feeling of it is just staying connected to the ground. I like to quote... I reminisce about a story I've talked about before, for the benefit of those who haven't heard it, and those who have, please bear with me. I was in a subway in New York City some years ago, and it was blistering hot in New York, and underground was even hotter because the concrete had been holding the heat all summer long. Some of the cars are air-conditioned and some of them aren't. And when the current, when the trains pull up into the station, you can tell which one's not air conditioned. That's the one that is empty. but not fundamentally empty of people. And the other cars are sort of crammed in.

[34:35]

I'm not sure which is cooler or hotter with all those people. But anyway, those are the air-conditioned and the other ones aren't. So my friends I was visiting and I got into the empty car and we look around and it's like there's nobody there and it's kind of hot. So my friends figure, well, this is not an air-conditioned car and they go to the next car. So I sat there while they went into the other car. And while there was a taint of ego in my, well, I'm just going to sit here. I don't care. You guys can go up to the next car, and we'll just get out at the same stop. What was really awakening to me was that, and I don't like the heat. I grew up in Virginia, and I actually prefer cooler climates. I much prefer cooler climates. Sitting there in the heat, and like sweating, it reached a point where it was okay just to be here sitting down in the car sweating.

[35:37]

And as I mentioned last week, If we look at wisdom and compassion, prajna or wisdom, the circumstances, interrelatedness of what was going on in that moment was heat. And the expression of that or compassion is just sweat without any extra labels. If I start going on, geez, it's really hot in here. Gosh, why can't we fix the damn air conditioner or whatever? That's all this drama that Charlie was referring to. But just feeling heat just feeling sweat, just feeling tired, whatever it happens to be, if it's a true connection to what's going on in your inner being, then you're manifesting compassion. Oh, Shariputra form does not differ from emptiness. Now, Shariputra was one of the Buddha's 80 great disciples who was foremost in wisdom, in understanding of wisdom.

[36:48]

And the Buddha's disciples were practicing arhatship. They were practicing cultivating their through preset practice and working with their defilements and trying to purify themselves and this is a Theravada tradition and what's going on here in the Heart Sutra is a debate between Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva who Bodhisattvas of course represent the Mahayana and dispelling the belief that that this arhat ideal is the way to go. He's going to try to cut to the Buddha's main guide who understands wisdom and get to what really can be the liberation for all beings.

[37:51]

And the feeling is that Shariputra is kind of attached to emptiness. as I said earlier, that the arhats and the Theravada tradition feels that these gandhas and these dharmas are real. And what Avalokiteshvara is about to tell them is that, man, they're not real. You're stuck on this thing and you've got to let go. And this is the Mahayana revolution, the turning of the wheel. The Kanza calls this the older school of Buddhism, the Abhidharmic phase. And Abhidharma is the Buddhist psychology where the mind is looked at very closely. There's lists of things and there's a real clear study that's very helpful to our practice, I should say. But their focus was on this study.

[38:53]

And the Heart Sutra, which comes in the Prajnaparamita literature, which comes around the turn of the millennia, is four or five hundred years after the Buddha's time, is entering this second phase, which is this Mahayana phase. So we're going from one to another. And this talk form does not differ from emptiness. The form is how we see emptiness. Form is the things in the world. And when Avalokiteshvara says form does not differ from emptiness, what he's saying is that everything is level. Everything is empty. Everything is interrelated. There's nothing different. It's like so. And in the next line, he says emptiness does not differ from form. And this is the vertical, where in fact there is a hierarchy, there are differences.

[39:58]

So somehow or another we have to be able to practice both horizontal and vertical at the same time. And the matrix where these two meet is where we're practicing moment by moment. Dogen, when he came back from China, he was asked, you know, what did you learn over there after traveling all these dangerous miles? He said, eyes horizontal, nose vertical. And what the metaphor symbolizes is that things are, in one sense, the same, and at the same time, they're different. So people sometimes would, well, typically before practice, we tend to think of everything as different. You know, there's all these different things. And then when we begin to practice, and things get a little hazy, a little mushy, then we start seeing things a little bit more like the same. And with mature practice, we see things same and different at the same time, or one within the other, going back and forth.

[40:59]

Mel often uses the metaphor of a wave on an ocean, that the waves are an expression of the ocean. The wave is still connected to the water. It's not separate from the water, but it's just an expression. The waves are constantly changing. And deep down on the ocean floor, it's completely still. And that's what our practice is about. We sit, we sit perfectly still. And then what waves come up? What waves in our mind come up? What waves in our body come up? The way we hear, what we see, these are all different. These are all waves. But they're connected to something much, much deeper. And if we remember that they're connected to something deeper, then we don't get so caught by them. But typically we lose sight of that connection. And then we say, no, I see it this way. Well, you can imagine the chaos and confusion that comes up from that.

[42:07]

So we experience emptiness as form. Well, what is emptiness? Well, you know, emptiness is this book. Emptiness is the sound of a pen dropping on a carpet. So there's all these expressions. Emptiness is not something so mysterious. It's just you can't touch it. but you can experience it. And as soon as you talk about it, we're separate from it. And, you know, emptiness does not differ from form, the sixth line there. It keeps us from falling into a concept of emptiness. We say, well, form is emptiness. The forms are just kind of all blending together and everything's all kind of interrelated. Well, what that must be like, you know? You start forming some kind of concept of that thing. But the next line, Avalokiteshvara is reminding us, well, at the same time, emptiness is not different from form.

[43:10]

So we don't get attached to this sort of concept of what emptiness must be like, because we're operating in the world of form. Therefore, we have to experience the is-ness of things, the wetness of things. Like, what is water? Well, it's when hydrogen and oxygen come together, and there's this thing. You know, water is like, you know, as... There's only one way to experience water. And Mel said, like, what is a car? Well, a car isn't a car until you get in it and drive it. That's a car. But I see cars out there. Well, yeah. That's true. There's something out there. Or a motorcycle, whatever. Take a break in just a couple of minutes, I just want to finish this fifth line here.

[44:14]

Hakuin has a description of emptiness. Emptiness is a tissue of form. Form is the flesh of emptiness. That has a real palpable feel to me. That emptiness is a tissue of form, that the form is made up of or composed of, or emptiness is made up of form, the essential sort of texture of it. And at the same time, form is the flesh, the essence of emptiness, what we see. And in Zen we study Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. And Buddha represents emptiness or oneness. And Dharma represents the form or the world of particulars, things.

[45:20]

And then Sangha is a relationship of the two. And I think that's why Suzuki Roshi said that Sangha is the most important thing in our practice. We have to keep all three in mind. Some people tend to focus more on Buddha or the world of absolute or the teacher, or some people focus more on Dharma and get very involved in things and study and the world of particulars. But really for our practice to be healthy and well-balanced, we need to harmonize all three things. And there's a number of nice metaphors, stories about rocks, you know, Dharma students are like rocks polishing each other in a stream. And I can say without a doubt that I've been polished. And it really is a testament to practicing with other people and not practicing alone. that one really comes to understand this relationship between emptiness and form, or the world of particulars and the world of oneness.

[46:29]

So in line 5, Oshariputra, form does not differ from emptiness. This is seeing the world of oneness, seeing the oneness. And then in line 6, emptiness does not differ from form, is seeing the world of particulars. So we have both these worlds, oneness and particulars. Typically, when we come into dokasan, Mel is providing us the world of oneness, because we have this world of particulars that we're trying to sort out, and he often just kind of throws in something that gets right down to this oneness, or the interrelatedness of the one and the many, for us to see this other side. Can I see? Yeah. Can I ask questions? Oh, yeah. Please. I just wanted to say, I think this is true, maybe I'm making it up, that Mal, if you notice when we bow out at the end of service, first he holds his stick like this, then he turns it sideways.

[48:15]

Is it not in the back, but at the altar? Yeah. It turns around. Uh-huh. So first he has it vertical, and then he puts it horizontal, and that's horizontal. Wow. You see that? Yeah. Anyway, just a little thing. Just a little side. He used to not do that. I remember when he started doing that. Yeah. I remember when he started doing that. Yeah. I think he was attached to the windows. He was only held with those things. There's a line in the Sandokai, just to understand one is not enough. Throughout our literature there's numerous references to this world of oneness and world of particulars and not to get stuck on either side. And on line nine, the same is true of feelings, perceptions,

[49:18]

formations and consciousness. Well, the world of form is what was first discussed, but the same other four skandhas just kind of follow suit in the same way. So you could say feelings do not differ from emptiness. Emptiness does not deal from feelings. Perceptions do not differ from emptiness. Emptiness does not deal from perceptions and on and on to the end there. So at first we're getting the skandhas into view, which is us seeing them for what they are, because that's the way we take in the world. And then we're now going to get the dharmas into view, which is the world of things. Not too unlike, say, someone making furniture, where they have their and then they start working and put together a table or a chair.

[50:20]

They have to have the equipment first in order before they can make their chair. Similarly, once we get our skandhas in the view and to see that they're fundamentally empty, then we can take the world in a much more healthy way with less suffering. Before I get into this next section about the dharmas, Andrea opened up with a comment, kind of question thing, and I'm wondering if maybe someone else has something they want to bring up. I have more. Oh yeah? I'm stirring them up. Okay, yeah, it's okay. Well, I was wondering if you could say something about ignorance, because whenever I hear that, I mean, I kind of know what it is, but it's such an Sometimes I want to rewrite my whole own Buddhist language book because sometimes the terms we use don't quite cut it for me. Ignorance is one of those things. Because ignorance we often use for somebody who doesn't know something.

[51:24]

But it's not quite how we think of it, usually. Ignorance is not stupid. Ignorance in Buddhism is looked at as fundamental ignorance or blindness, and that we take that first step blindly. And by virtue of that step, we've already kind of set the wheels in motion for suffering, because we don't truly see, because we have this ignorance. So it's not stupid like, just like wisdom, Prasanna wisdom is not like smart. It's the same kind of thing, it's a different way of using these two words. ignorance and wisdom, is that famous painting of Kansen in Chitoku, the mentally retarded Zen students who smile and

[52:51]

They are very wise. They have insight, yeah. Right. See the picture Charlie's referring to? Well, I'm not satisfied with your explanation. I mean, it's a really important thing, like, that's the beginning. So where does it come from? And you said blindness, but I had some... Where does ignorance come from? I'm not trying to give you a hard time. No, it's okay to give me a hard time. We all learn from each other. I don't pretend to know all this stuff, so I learn, too. Ann's going to tell me. related to your answer. When you talk about blindness, that was what you said, the initial step in blindness. That's how you define ignorance. And so, blindness of what?

[54:05]

I mean, to me, ignorance all has to do with, ignorance equals the notion that there's a fixed self. Me, it's duality. You were talking about blindness and I was talking about blindness to what? And how does that relate to the idea of no fixed self? Right. Well, in the Wheel of Life, the first step is ignorance, and then what happens after that is the formation of skandhas, and then, as we were talking about earlier in the Heart Sutra, the sense of self through the ideas that the skandhas are real, and that we're taking the world into these five skandhas, and there's a fixed thing, and there's this thing called a cushion,

[55:06]

or watch, or whatnot, or a person here. So, what it comes from is, you know, beginningless beginning. That's just kind of where it, what the wheel, the wheel of life is. And there's good commentary on how those links, those 12 links. It's 12, 12 cause links. Right. And it starts with ignorance. Well, typically we talk about ignorance, but we can start at any point, but we tend to think literally, and we think... There's ignorance, volitional action, and then after action there's consciousness, and then name and form, and then six senses. There's contact, feeling, thirst, grasping, becoming, birth, and then old age and death.

[56:15]

And it goes around and around like that. Don't you think that the Four Noble Truths really address ignorance? In other words, that ignorance is the belief that you can find satisfaction. Yeah. But nothing can satisfy. Exactly. So ignorance is the belief that you can find satisfaction? I don't know if that's... Well, that wasn't the ignorance I was talking about. I was talking more specifically about the ignorance of the beginning of the twelfth of the chain. That's the one. Well, what forms from that ignorance is this sense of self which Grace is referring to? What sense again? What Grace just said is sort of the formation or the culmination from this ignorance. We take this step forward, we make a volitional action, either mentally or physically, and then we have this sense of self, and then we believe in this self through consciousness, and then we get fixed on it, and it's grasping and clinging, and then things

[57:23]

fall away, as if nothing is fixed, and then we long for it, and then there's death, and it kind of just keeps going around and around. So it starts from our ignorance, but the ignorance is in a sense of a fixed self. And this is sort of this complete circle. Well, thanks for spending the time, but I'm not sure I'm getting it. I'll just keep... I mean, it's fine that I don't get it, I just... There's something about it I'm not getting. But maybe I just don't think that way. I don't think like this. I think like this. So, I don't know. You think you're going to find a satisfactory answer. Yeah. The way our mind works is after a while you'll start to gravitate to one and you'll think, well, the flowers on the left are better.

[58:30]

And then after a while you'll think, oh no, the ones on the right are much better. How could I be so stupid before? Those are really great points. And I have one more question. Did you say mental formations are volitional action? So mental formations are the same as volitional action? Well, it's... Which would mean mental formations are karma? Or at least... Well... I thought volitional action was... Or maybe I just didn't hear you right. No, mental formations fall under the umbrella of volitional actions or impulses.

[59:34]

It's not quite thinking, which is more the consciousness realm. We form something in our mind and then we respond or do something as an impulse or a drive to do that. That sort of compulsion to do that is mental formation. Any other questions? You're welcome. Yes, Kelly. Going back to the line I usually listen to Jet Expansion too. And I wonder if we could talk a little bit more about consciousness and emptiness.

[60:59]

The consciousness that's referring to here is sort of the thinking and coordinating realm of things. And in the Yogacara school of Mahayana thought, they talk about the different consciousnesses and that things are simply ideas. that there's a storehouse consciousness where all the seeds of past actions are stored and there's a an ego consciousness, so there's a lya consciousness, which is the seed or sort of where all these seeds are stored, and then in the seventh consciousness there's the ego, who thinks it's the boss. but it's not the boss.

[62:06]

And in their model, these seeds are sort of put out and a new sort of life is formed from these seeds or ideas. But we have to remember that this is just a construct or an idea to explain our mind or our thinking. But the school, the consciousness only school is vast, there's lots of writings on it. But their emphasis is on thoughts and the secretion of thoughts and that's what forms the world. That's... I guess the same. The sort of analysis would be applied to consciousness, that things are arising and passing away and don't really have any... I mean, thoughts don't have any substance to them.

[63:14]

That's right. It's just a stream of... Thoughts. A stream of consciousness, so to speak. That's right. But we think they're real. You know, they're just thoughts, and what we tend to do is to think, well, what are these thoughts about? You know, we have thoughts of anger, we have thoughts of lust, we have, you know, whatever, you know, whatever they happen to be, and we attribute a certain reality to them. And they are real in the sense that we identify ourselves through our thoughts quite often, but we lose sight of that they're fundamentally empty, meaning that they're interrelated to other things in our life. And from a practice point of view, we can look at that, well, what is this relation? Yes, it's fundamentally empty, there's nothing inherent, but I feel this feeling. So what do we do with that? That's what we're all doing in Zazen. You know, we have these various feelings that arise, and we have the whole realm of psychology to study that, but that's... I really can't say anything about that because I don't know anything about that.

[64:25]

But there are books on the Yogacara school and this whole world of the consciousness-only school that was put out there for for people to study so the consciousness in the heart sutra is just the uh... thinking mind in a real in a uh... just sort of the mind and thinking and uh... the yoga chara school came uh... a few centuries after this and that's when they took this consciousness and sort of cut it up into pieces and said there were these different levels of consciousness. But for our purposes here, we just remember it just as thinking mind or the sort of coordinating factor in. Is that satisfactory for now? Okay. Yes, you're welcome. So, line 10, all dharmas are marked with emptiness.

[65:49]

So now we're getting into the actual workings of not only how our mind is and who we are, but the things of the world. And marked means characterized. So these dharmas or things are characterized by emptiness, meaning that they don't have a fixed or abiding self, and that they're standing in relation to something else. So this cup is a cup in relation to the table. The cup is not by itself. And also what I read from Thich Nhat Hanh, for those of you who were here, he gave a really eloquent explanation of how a piece of paper is composed of the whole universe.

[66:50]

And so whatever you look at does not exist by itself. It exists with everything else. They do not appear nor disappear. You think things arise and pass away and that they're here today and gone tomorrow. And in one sense, They are here today and gone tomorrow. But, you know, in the world of emptiness, which is where this sutra is coming from, a display in emptiness, no form, no feeling, no perception. In emptiness, there is no arising or passing away. It's just what is in this moment. The older school of Buddhism felt that things, in fact, did cease to exist when when the effect was present we have the world of cause and effect and uh... that uh... that one thing causes something else to happen and in the old school they felt that when you have this thing this no longer uh... exists but uh... in fact uh... they are uh... very much uh... interrelated and again from uh...

[68:15]

uh, regards you now. He didn't have his own theory. His practice was disputing or dispelling the other theories that were prevalent in his day through his dialectic. That's what the Heart Sutra is getting at by saying, no, no, no, that we have ideas about things and we're not saying it's something else, we're just negating things. The Heart Sutra is a sutra of negation. And I'm just going to read this bit, which is Lagarde's explanation of causality, which is cause and effect, which kind of undercuts what the older school felt that when effect was here, cause no longer existed. Nagarjuna states that there are only four views about causality, the theory of self-becoming, production from another, production from both itself and from another, and production without any cause, which is production by chance, which is yes, no, both yes and no, and neither yes nor no.

[69:44]

So if there's a theory of self-becoming, it means cause and effect are identical. If the effect is already present in the cause, there would be no purpose served by its reproduction if it's already there. If the theory of production from another means that cause and effect are different, and this is a view that was popular with the Therabadans, if cause and effect are different, no relation can exist between the two. And in that case, anything can produce anything. And the Therabadans believed that the production of the effect, that the cause ceased to exist after that. And since causality is a relation between two things, the premise of one thing no longer existing with something else existing becomes meaningless. And the theory that effect is both identical with and different from the cause combines the two premises that were just stated, and it contains inconsistencies of both.

[70:52]

And lastly, the theory that things are produced without a cause, by chance, falls in the realm of naturalist and skeptics, and that if no reason is assigned, then we have a perverse dogma. And if a reason is assigned, then that is accepting a cause. So what he's saying is that causality is a mere thought construct. We do have the world of cause and effect, and we talk a lot about cause and effect. And we are, as Nibiru actually says, making a mistake on purpose just by talking about it. But this is what a class is about. We talk about things, we try to make a sense or put order in the universe. And there's a book that talks about Nagarjuna and Yogacara and the Consciousness Only School, which I've never read and I probably never will read because it's really thick and it's very difficult to follow, as what I just said probably was very difficult to follow.

[71:56]

But I just wanted to put it out there just to say that this monk from centuries old, put forth the ideas that were dispelling the older school's ideas of cause and effect and saying that if you just sit and experience what is, you don't have to think about what the cause is and what the effect is, you're just experiencing for what it is. When I was preparing my notes and just reading my notes now about these theories, I'm reading Seven Buddhas Before Buddha.

[73:25]

that we recite here in our liturgy. And what that symbolizes is from time, beginningless time. And for me, that gets to Andrea's question of where does this avidya, or ignorance, come from? There's really no way of knowing where it comes from. But we say the seven Buddhas before Buddha to represent the ancient past. And when we look at our lives and see the greed, hate, and delusion in our own life, we wonder, where does that come from? and we can look at our family, we can look at our experiences currently, and then there's all these causes that we're not even aware of.

[74:28]

And it's really a tangle that's difficult to sort out. And so we just move along as best we can with that. I remember Kathy Fisher giving a talk in the Zendo and the premise of the talk was untangling the tangle. And that's what we're here trying to do. And sometimes I think that the best thing to do is just to sit and not talk. It's really difficult to convey the information, but we all have to find out ourselves what's been said. So try it on. Try it on for size. So we have a couple minutes left this evening.

[75:40]

And we'll start on line 12 next week. If there's a question or comment or concern. Well, I was just thinking, you know, when Mel bows, the next time he bows, everybody in this area will say, oh, new form. Turn your head when you bow. Ross, I was looking at, took a note on emptiness. Is oneness or what is in this moment is at least one part of that. I'm having difficulty with form. And is form what we see, perceive, and what we have labeled in our language and what our minds tell us the world is about.

[76:42]

Is that particulars? The form is a physical world or the world of particulars and it gives a form to emptiness. In Mel's commentary he talks about water and water is representing emptiness and that the cup gives it a form. So we see water as this sort of little body of water here, but we also know that form, that water comes through as moisture and fog and comes in through rivers and also comes through as fluid to wet the flour that makes bread. So those are all different expressions of emptiness as The emptiness of water is expressed through the forms of this and the rain and whatnot. And the emptiness of smell, you can look at through the five skandhas and how each one is a different expression in each moment.

[77:56]

Feelings is really good, the expression of form. The emptiness of feelings is expressed through, and then there's this whole myriad of feelings that arise, and those are the expressions. We lose contact of what the fundamental emptiness is of those feelings are. So that's my sense of it. Yes? Then could we consider us as human beings as forms and being containers for Buddha nature? That's a good way of putting it. Yeah. Whatever emptiness is, Buddha nature is not something you can touch, but we are, it is literally embodied.

[79:06]

Well, Buddha nature sort of pervades the whole universe. So it's everything, this form or that form is an expression of it. And if we remember that, that the whole universe is Buddha nature, then we can have a lot more tolerance for the individual expressions which come up into our lives. Yes. Yeah. Could you very briefly read that quote again about emptiness and tissues and form? Sure. Can you find that? Yes, Hakuen. I'd really like to hear that one more time because I've lost part of it. Hakuen Zenji from 1700s in Japan says, emptiness is a tissue of form and form is the flesh of emptiness.

[80:17]

Yeah. We're talking about human tissue though, not Kleenex, right? That's right. It didn't exist before Kleenex. It did not. Yeah. So, you're welcome. Well, thank you all for your questions and attention. especially your questions. It helps me a lot to know where I'm vague and I need to work and where you all are sharp and need clarification to

[81:12]

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