Last time I was up here, there's a lot to this sitting down business. It's a lot to remember. Well, it's nice to see you all here this morning. I just wanted to, I told, we're having the three-day session this weekend. It goes today, tomorrow, and Monday. And so I mentioned earlier, Sajid Roshi has a bad cold, and he thought it was the better part of wisdom to stay home and nurse the cold and hopefully be able to be with us rest of the weekend, but he asked me to just step in this morning, so that's what I'm doing. Often, because of my job, which is I'm director of Buddhist Peace Fellowship, I get called on

[01:13]

and my own mind calls me in the direction of talking about Buddhism and social engagement, or socially engaged Buddhism. And I wanted to actually talk about another level of engagement I don't really feel that I want to be sort of in this box where that's the only thing that I'm supposed to talk about because that's my job or that's what I'm supposed to know about. But actually, I don't know that I know any more about it than in actual practice than some of you who are just making your lives. So I wanted to talk about engagement with ourselves from another angle, from an angle of basic Buddhism.

[02:28]

which I also have been trying to study. For those of you who may not know it, Zen is Buddhism. Sometimes the various forms of Buddhism in this country seem to go quite a distance away from wanting to be seen as Buddhism, even though, in fact, there is no such thing as Buddhism. The Buddha didn't invent Buddhism. The Buddha just practiced Dharma. So Zen is just, this is just our style of practicing Dharma. But still it helps to study and think and discuss and find out for ourselves where our understanding is, what has been said and practiced in the past that may still make sense.

[03:44]

and what may not feel like such a good fit. And if it doesn't feel like such a good fit, then the options are to pursue it further and think about, is there something that I need to understand more deeply? Or is there something that actually doesn't fit? But in order to know what doesn't fit, it behooves us to have some sense of what was presented. So I thought I would talk a little today about dependent origination or paticca-samuppada, which is one of the Buddha's core discoveries.

[04:46]

And the material I've been studying comes from different sources. Most of it actually, what I find most interesting, comes from a relatively recent and radical Thai Buddhist teacher, Achan Buddhadasa. And I feel that his perspective is very close to what we learn directly or indirectly about dependent origination in this practice. But maybe we'll have, I hope I will leave some time that we can talk about this. So in the third watch, this is in the early Buddhist sutras, in the third watch of the evening of his enlightenment, just before morning, the Buddha had insight into the nature of suffering and the end of suffering.

[06:00]

He saw in sort of a large way, and also in quite a detailed way, the four noble truths, that is, the truth of suffering, the cause of suffering, that there is an end to suffering, and how one comes to the end of suffering. And he also saw the process of what we call dependent origination. Dependent origination is, if any of you have seen The Wheel of Life, I think we have a painting of it in the community room, and it's a very widely distributed Buddhist image.

[07:08]

rim of this wheel are these 12 images and they go around, usually they go around from ignorance and through these various links, which I'll lay out for you, to old age and death and then birth. that is the diagrammatic form of dependent origination. So the word, the Pali word, or words, are paticca-samupada. That's what we translate as dependent arising or dependent origination or dependent co-arising. concerning, or because, or grounded on.

[08:17]

And sambhupada means coming to be, or production, or arising. So dependent arising is a pretty good functional translation, at least in English. That is what Buddha offered as a detailed analysis of how suffering arises and how suffering ceases. And as he put it, the way it's been conventionally understood is to be something like gravity, you know, it's not just a good idea, it's the law, or it's the way things work. And yet it's really, it's hard. It's a challenge.

[09:21]

For me, it's a challenge of practice to be able to come to some understanding of it and to find, you know, is this useful? How do I use it? How does it help me actually free myself from suffering? And you could also think of it as an explication or an expansion on the first two noble truths. The first noble truth is that there is suffering, and the second noble truth being that the cause of suffering is clinging or attachment. And the wheel of life, or the wheel of dependent origination, shows how this works. It shows the mechanism of suffering, and it also shows the way that process can be reversed or it can be interrupted at any point along the wheel by the application of the wisdom of liberation or mindfulness.

[10:40]

So at any point you can stop this chain. We chanted, some of you have just recently finished a course in the Heart Sutra. And in the Heart Sutra, which we chant at least every day, today we probably chanted, I don't know, three times in two languages, there are the lines that we construe in English as, no ignorance and also no extinction of it. until no old age and death, and also no extinction of it. In the early, I was looking through a book on the Heart Sutra that I had, and in the early San Francisco Zen Center, what they used to chant was, no ignorance and also no extinction of it, and so forth.

[11:45]

until no old age and death and also no extinction of, and so forth, were all the other links in between ignorance and old age and death. So it's a very condensed expression of dependent origination. So it's part of, even when we're not exactly thinking of it, it's part of what we're invoking each day. And hopefully it's something that works on us. But again, it behooves us to have some understanding of this process. Now another way to see this, The short formula that Buddha offered in one of his other very early sutras goes like this.

[12:51]

When this is, that is. This arising, that arises. When this is not, that is not. And this ceasing, that ceases. So that's an expression also in a fairly condensed form of how things interact and how they're mutually creating or co-creating each other. it makes a little more sense. Let me tell you what the links are, and I'm not going to have time to go into them all, but it gives you an idea of how when this arises, that arises, and that's pretty much the language. It's basically

[13:57]

The first link is ignorance, and ignorance is the condition for the arising of what they call karma formations or just mental activity. Mental activity provides the condition for the arising of consciousness, and what they call consciousness we also chant in its negative form in the Heart Sutra. It's consciousness, sense consciousness, eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and then mind consciousness. Mind consciousness creates conditions for the arising of mental and physical formations. Mental and physical formations create the arising for the six senses themselves, for kind of fixing a notion of what we're perceiving.

[15:12]

The six senses create the condition for the arising of contact. Contact with things that are external to what we might call ourselves. Contact creates the arising for, the condition for the arising of feeling, or feelings. And these are not emotions. as such, their feelings, which are essentially just pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral. Then feelings create the condition for the arising of craving or desire. Craving creates the condition for the arising of attachment And attachment, there are traditionally four forms of attachment that are stipulated.

[16:19]

Attachment to sensuous attachment, attachment to views, attachment to rules and rituals, Just kind of interesting one. And then kind of the more overreaching attachment, which is attachment to the notion of I or me and mine. Attachment creates a condition for the arising of becoming. Becoming creates the condition for the arising of birth. Birth then creates the condition for the arising of old age and death. and then you go round again. So there are several. This is pretty complicated and I can't pretend to understand all the interactions and I don't feel like I have this master.

[17:21]

I feel like I'm just really beginning to try to study this. But there are there's sort of a conventional way that this has been posited which doesn't make a lot of sense to me. And fortunately, Buddhadasa is, and this is why Buddhadasa, this book Practical Dependent Origination appeals to me because the way it's conventionally construed in some of the early Buddhist commentaries is, well, this spreads out over three lifetimes. that the first two links are in the past and then the next four or five links are your present life and then they create the conditions for your future life and then you go around again. I'm afraid that's a little farther ahead and behind the game than I can really work with because it's outside my experience.

[18:25]

But what Buddhadasa says is that birth, that this whole cycle takes place moment after moment. That you can go through this chain in an instant and in that instant you are you are born in that instant, not you, in that instant is born a new being. And let me read you an example. The idea that he talks about, and the way I want to put it is that this is practical dependent origination, which means it's not something theoretical, and it's not an abstract idea, but it's hopefully something that's useful.

[19:28]

And if it's not useful, forget it. And that's what Buddhadasa says all the time. If it's not about suffering and the end of suffering, if you can't apply it that way, don't hold on to it. As a doctrine, it's worthless. But if it's useful, then we can find some way of practicing with it. So let's see here. For my last example, I don't want to talk about a particular case or individual, but I'd like to talk about people in general when they are chewing some very tasty food. This is something we do in here all the time. Most people become unmindful when they are eating delicious food. They are forgetful and ignorance is in control. Let this be a given. When eating something delicious, mindfulness is absent because of the delicious taste, and so ignorance is present.

[20:34]

thoughts of the person experiencing in this way something very delicious are a complete manifestation of dependent origination already. In the same sort of way as in the previous examples, there were some more examples, when the tongue and one of its objects, in this case taste, come into contact, tongue consciousness arises which creates a new mentality or materiality in the sense of changing ordinary mentality or materiality into the kind of mentality that is capable of experiencing suffering. There then arises the sense bases capable of having contact and feeling which can experience unpleasantness or pleasantness from the present situation. If the experience is one of good taste, then the average run-of-the-mill person calls it a pleasurable feeling. But as soon as the good taste is clung to, there is attachment, which then transforms the feeling into one prone to suffering because of the tendency to want to sustain that good taste and make it last.

[21:43]

People cling to and grasp after it and begin to worry and become anxious about it. they become attached to it. And so, in this way, the good taste or pleasant feeling instantly becomes a manifestation of suffering. This is delicious. I am happy. I'm really happy. But the mind is a slave of pleasure because it is aflame with attachment to the pleasure. This is a trick of dependent origination that shows its depth and profundity. If the average person were to give an opinion, he would say that there was pleasure. If dependent origination speaks, that pleasure becomes unsatisfactory. When anyone thinks delicious, dependent origination has already arisen in its entirety. Now, there's more to all this. When someone thinks, this is so delicious that I think I'll go steal some more tomorrow so I can have some more of this to eat, that person is born as a thief at that moment. When a person thinks he will steal something or has thief-like thoughts, that person has become a thief.

[22:50]

So someone goes and steals some food from a neighboring farm and having eaten it and found it to his delight, thinks to go and steal another one the next day. of being a thief or of becoming a thief is the arising of one state of becoming. Similarly, if someone eats some meat and thinks that he will go hunting the next day for some more, that person has been born a hunter. Even if it's simply a matter of getting lost in the great taste of some food, such a one is born into heavenly realms of good taste. Or if it's a matter of something tasting so good that the person can't eat fast enough, that person is born a hungry ghost who can never get enough to eat fast enough to satisfy his great hunger. So take a look at all this and you will see that in just the space of chewing some delicious food, many kinds of dependent origination may arise. So that's one example.

[23:53]

What's the way that this can work? What is your other option in this situation? Suffering in the operation of dependent origination must always depend on attachment. Take a farmer who works out in the open, exposed to wind and sun, transplanting the young rice plants. He thinks, oh, I'm so hot. If no clinging arises in the sense of, I'm so hot, there is merely suffering of a natural kind. And I would say not suffering, there's just pain or discomfort. But he calls it suffering of a natural kind and not of the kind associated with dependent origination. Suffering according to the law of dependent origination must have clinging to the point of agitation about the I concept. So it happens that the farmer becomes irritated and dissatisfied with being born a farmer.

[25:01]

He thinks it's his fate, his karma, that he must bathe in his own sweat. When one thinks this way, suffering according to the law of dependent origination arises. If one is hot and has a backache but nothing more, if one simply feels and knows that he is hot without any clinging to the I-concept as above, then the suffering of dependent origination has not arisen. So please observe this carefully and make clear the distinction between these two kinds of suffering. If there is clinging, it is suffering according to dependent origination. Suppose you cut your hand with a sharp knife or razor blade and the blood gushes out. If you simply feel the pain but don't cling to anything, then your suffering is natural and not according to dependent origination. So he's making a clear distinction. It's not that there isn't pain, not that there isn't suffering that arises from just the condition of being alive, from the condition of being in a body.

[26:14]

But what one does with one's mind is the critical element. So every time there is sense contact without wisdom concerning liberation, there'll become birth. Something will be born, some conception, something that for that moment is the story that you have, that you carry about yourself, and for that moment you may believe in really totally. and the wheel of dependent origination is put into motion. Now, the practice that we have allows us some options. And it's also true that the law of dependent origination, because it is describing how each state and each being is dependent upon other elements,

[27:24]

means that nothing is fixed, that things can change, that you can use tools at your disposal for actually changing the mental conditions and also changing the physical conditions of your life. You have to take that step. And I think we practice here together, that gives us, I think, another kind of strength in that we're supporting each other to take those steps for ourselves. It's something that in a sense, the collectivity of Sangha, the collectivity of practice, can lend us a kind of strength that, as individuals out in a world that is terribly alienating and oppressive, in that world, we're not always given that strength or we're not able to draw it.

[28:44]

So I've been thinking about this a lot because I'm trying to figure out how I practice with just with that clinging or what I do when that clinging arises. And this is like how Am I, in the context of practice, what choices do I have about how I engage with myself? And how I engage with myself has everything to do with how I might engage with another. So there are, in this 12-fold chain, the tool that one has is a tool of mindfulness. And that's kind of a primary tool that allows you to break this chain at different places.

[29:55]

So the places, they tend to fall into a band on this chain. The band would be the senses, six senses, then contact, feeling, craving, attachment. And actually, the tool of mindfulness can be applied anywhere along that chain to see where one is and to take a step back. you know, when something, when you make contact, when something comes just into your view or into your hearing, you can let it, you can if you apply mindfulness right there, you're able to see, oh, it's a sound, or it's a taste, or it's a feeling.

[31:01]

And so that lends it a kind of what I think of as a kind of transparency. But the tendency, kind of the program tendency, is to let it go to feeling and make some judgment about, well, this is pleasant, or unpleasant, or neutral. So right at that point, one is able to say, okay, pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. You know, that's my sense of this. And you can leave it there. With the tool of mindfulness, you can leave it right there. But if you don't, then it advances to the stage of craving, which is basically the state where you'd say, I like this, I don't like this. And again, there's a space there to interject a tool of mindfulness

[32:10]

before you get to the next stage, which is the stage of attachment, where you say, I like this and I tried to grasp it, you know, I tried to hold on to it, you know, because it tastes good or it feels really good. And, you know, I want it, I don't want it ever to end. Or, you know, you push it away thinking, this is horrible, this is terrible, I can't deal with this. And, you know, I don't want it, let it even, you know, anywhere near my vicinity. And so you push it away with a kind of desperation. So clinging or attachment also includes aversion and pushing away. So in those different places, you have an option to apply mindfulness. Actually, I think you have an option to apply mindfulness anywhere along the chain.

[33:15]

anywhere along the chain, if you are mindful of the creation of self and your habit of creating self, then you can just stop. It stops and the wheel stops turning. and then you have another opportunity. And this is what Buddhadasa is saying, is that you have opportunity after opportunity, unlike the more conventional readings of this, where it's like, well, if you do something in this one life, then it's kind of like definitely gonna roll over to your present life, and that's gonna roll over to your past. It seems terribly deterministic. But here, as we see it in our practice, we have the opportunity moment after moment. And I think, again, as we say often, this is the opportunity of Zen practice.

[34:22]

You have an opportunity, moment after moment, just sitting and facing the wall. And particularly, for those people who are sitting for three days now, we'll have lots of opportunities. You know, and we'll see like our mind is going to want to go in some direction and each moment we have the opportunity to not connect with, not allow ourselves to be pulled into craving, not allow ourselves to be pulled into attachment, and if we are, by the application of mindfulness, to set it aside, to do what Suzuki Roshi said, which is off-quoted in here, you know, if a craving arises, I mean, if a craving arises, the words he used were something like, you know, you can meet it at the door, but don't invite it in for tea, you know, very politely.

[35:32]

that food smells good, and I know that lunch will be coming soon, but now my task is to sit upright. That's my intention. And to do that without judgment. And you do it without judgment because there's no... At root, there's no I to judge from. There's just this cycle of becoming. And if you can feel the impact or the truth of that cycle or that circle, that wheel, then you can begin to see that that judging is unnecessary. And for me, I feel like the freedom from judging is one of the great freedoms.

[36:36]

I mean, I feel this is not an abstract thing, this is a personal thing, that if I can just acknowledge a feeling or a feeling that is turning into or has turned into a craving, if I just acknowledge that as kind of the working of dependent origination, something that works in all of us, then I don't have to judge. And if I don't judge myself, then I'm a lot less likely to judge others, which means that I can meet, I can try to meet a situation or meet a person without a lot of other stuff in the way without certain kinds of confusion, without layers of story, of judgment, of opinion, but really experience more directly what's going on.

[37:49]

And then that means I can relate more directly, more from the heart, and hopefully act in any given situation more effectively. And sometimes that means going back and really trying to figure out what the situation is, not acting impulsively, but studying it, trying to study what the causes are, which are usually pretty complex, but not being pushed by my judgment, not being pushed by my opinion. So I think I will stop there. And there's a lot more to say and probably over a period of time I may, I think I'll touch this again because I have a lot more to learn about it. But I think we have time for a few questions or comments.

[38:50]

Teresa. So I have a couple of questions. One, why there? Why not at ignorance? What would that look like, stopping it at ignorance? Isn't there ignorance at each? Isn't that the choice at each of the 12 steps, that there is ignorance or not? Well, ignorance is a condition. It conditions, it sort of colors all of those. I'm not sure. I mean, I actually don't know. I think it's very difficult. Ignorance is kind of abstract to me. Well, judgment is not one of the links.

[39:58]

Judgment is just an expression. Judgment is a being. You're the judge. You know, that's the being that you've become. When you go through these links and you get from, you know, a craving to attachment to becoming to birth, well, the person that who has been given, the being that's been given birth to is the judger. And so, it breaks its sense contact, I think, because sense contact is It's probably the first place that you can actually come to awareness of something that's being generated by the interaction of your senses. I mean, what other medium do we have to do that in? It's a start, anyway.

[41:01]

So, it is better to say, it is time to eat, rather than, I feel hungry. Well, I'm a little wary of that. Then we have this whole school of group process in psychology where we're told to make I statements, right? We have to own, we have to take responsibility and I'm sort of working about how is this integrated. I don't think, I think if you could honestly say, if you honestly feel just hunger, that's really good. If you're just changing your language and eliminating the I, then that's a ploy. And the mind is very wily.

[42:06]

It's easy to eliminate all those I's. Or you can be like, you know, E.E. Cummings and put everything in lowercase, you know, but that doesn't necessarily eliminate the workings of ego. I'd like to hear you talk about the distinction between celebrating or relishing life and attachment. Okay. Well, I think that's a whole other long talk. What I've been presenting here is, shall we say, Theravada. There's an earlier Buddhism approach to this, and I think that's the place that we have to start from.

[43:09]

the Mahayana or Zen later or Northern Buddhism approach would find liberation right within that celebration. So this is something I'm thinking about because the life we do like our enjoyments, and we can also see, we can use them as a vehicle. They can become transparent also. And there is much to celebrate. The opportunity of being alive is the opportunity of liberation, and that might be worth celebrating. But I think it's a really good question.

[44:12]

I really feel like I need to do more study and have more conversation about it. Buddhadasa is pretty explicit in a number of points in this book. You know, when he talks about dependent origination, he's talking about something from a fairly absolute and not a relative position. You know, the absolute position that he takes is that, well, there's not really that much difference between you know, what we might call good karma or bad karma. You know, what he's talking about is ending karmic activities. So that's, it's a very, it's a difficult place to really examine. So we can come back to it. About craving.

[45:13]

Like, what about craving to be positive? Craving for knowledge? Craving to be half loving? Well, what our teacher says about those, that those are positive things, that those kinds of desires, say, also traditionally seen, maybe not quite in the way you put it, but they're traditionally seen as factors of enlightenment, that energy, compassion, all of those qualities are things to be cultivated. So I think we talk about them a lot. And you have to distinguish between what is craving that creates ego.

[46:19]

Now you can create ego on the head of a pin. And you can create ego even in the context of something that is an activity that's otherwise wholesome. So, if you're talking about those desires in a large selfless sense, that's good, but then when you start building self on it and building something that's me and mine, then you get into trouble. Does that make some sense? Yeah, it is definitely possible. One more, right? Well, what I'm caught by is just that the life of a weed is completely precious to that weed.

[49:15]

And we're the ones who are making the decision about what you say, what's in or out of favor, but it's not from the perspective of the weed. So to me the question is how you allow everything, each being, to have its ground and create a space for that that is apart from judgment. And it's also true that that is, that's an incredible challenge. There's no way that we can get around making choices and that other beings get around making choices.

[50:18]

And yet, there must be some way to grant each being the space of as much respect as possible. I don't know if that speaks to what you were saying. But I think it's, to me, that's kind of the fundamental challenge. of being alive. And it also means, how do you grant that same respect to each of, and I think this is the Mahayana view, how do you grant that same respect to each feeling that may arise in oneself? whether pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, whether it gets to the point of craving, even so, that is an expression. Dogen would call it, that's every manifestation of it.

[51:23]

Even the attachment is Buddha nature. It's just, you know, it is the incredibly marvelous and complex arising and ceasing of life. So that's a grand place to end, perhaps. Thank you very much.

[51:52]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ