Good morning. I have got a number of questions from the bell. In the Buddhist tradition, there is a practice of listening. That method of listening is the method of not clinging to views that have been acquired. When we listen, we practice non-attachment to views in order to have a chance to get new seeds. Because we already have seeds of our point of views concerning problems. And every time we hear something, we have the tendency to bring these kinds of things up

[01:10]

in order to compare with what we are listening. And we have a reaction right away. If the thing that is said corresponds to the things we have here, then we say, Yes, I agree. And if the thing that is said does not correspond with what you have within yourself, you say, No, I don't agree. And in both these cases, we don't learn anything at all. That is why in the Zen tradition, students learn the art of listening. They try to empty themselves in order to give the new idea a chance.

[02:12]

In the language of Zen, very often what is said contradicts your point of views. Zen masters very often say things that are hard to accept. And if you react right away, you miss the chance. Like when a student came to a Ch'iu Chau master, he asked a question as whether a dog has a Buddha nature or not. The master said, Yes. And then a few days later, another student came to him and asked the same kind of question. The master asked, Does a dog have a Buddha nature? He said, No. So the Yes and the No may not be a concept,

[03:16]

but a way in order to undo something within the student. In the second case, for instance, the student was asking in order to show that he has some kind of understanding of Mahayana Buddhism. Everyone has the seeds of Buddhahood. And because the master saw that, he knew that his student should be challenged in order to get out of that kind of conceptual thinking. So he said, No. So it is the No that helps. But if the student did not get it, he would be very unhappy. He has to receive the No, to bury the No as a seed in his alaya vishnana and live with it for a few days. And then if he is lucky, he can make a breakthrough.

[04:19]

So, not to react right away. Practice the emptiness of mind at that moment and give a chance to what is being said. Even if it is shocking you, if it contradicts your point of view, let it come. Give it a chance. And maybe three days after, you will see it differently. There is a story told by the Buddha that I like very much about non-attachment to views. There was one young father. His wife was already dead. He lived with a very young boy. And one day he was away. He was a merchant. And during that time,

[05:25]

the thieves came and burned the whole village and kidnapped the children. And his child was kidnapped by the pirates. So, when the merchant came home, he panicked. He saw his home burned. And then he was looking in that state of mind for his little son. And in that state of mind, he saw a charred body of a child lying very close to what had been his house. So he believed that it was his son, already dead. So he threw himself to the ground and he cried, cried. He pulled his hair, he beat his chest. And after a few hours, he stood up

[06:28]

and tried to organize a cremation ceremony for his little boy. And after that, he put the ash into a very beautiful velvet bag. And he carried it with him all the time, day and night, working or eating. For him, his little boy is the raison d'etre of his life. And he is very unhappy now. He thinks that he has no joy to live any longer. But three months after, we don't know why the little boy was able to escape from the pirates and found his way back to the village. And he arrived at midnight and he knocked at the door of his new house. His father was holding the ash bag and crying silently.

[07:33]

He asked, who is there? It's me, your son. And the man thought that some naughty child was trying to make fun of him. So he shouted at his own son and said, go away, don't disturb me, you naughty boy. And his son continued to plead, but he already believed that his son is here in the velvet bag. So he refused to open the door. And the son had to go away. And father and son lost each other forever. After telling the story, the Buddha said, well, sometimes, somewhere you get something, you think to be the absolute truth. And because of that, you are closed. And even if the truth comes to your door, and knocks at your door, you refuse to open. And attachment to views is an obstacle for understanding in Buddhism.

[08:35]

And therefore, the practice of non-attachment to views is a very important practice within the Buddhist circle. I would like to talk to you a little bit more about the self, because a lot of your questions concern themselves with the problem of the self. Before we go to another topic. Well, many have been talking about dissolving the self as the practice of Buddhism. I don't think so. I don't think that the practice of meditation is to dissolve the self. You cannot dissolve something that is not there. Right? If the self is not there, why do you have to dissolve it? I think it is a wrong, a false problem. And the false problem has become a problem itself. What has to be dissolved is our wrong views concerning the self.

[09:48]

And this is the practice of not only the Buddhists, but also Western psychotherapists. And the insight of non-self is found not only in Buddhism, but it can be found in Western psychotherapy also, to some degree. Well, a number of us used to think that Western psychotherapy deals with issues concerning the self. And Buddhist practitioners are trying to dissolve the self. And that is why there is a difference between the two. And some of us say that, well, before we can dissolve the self, we have to get a healthy self. All of that comes from the misunderstanding of the teaching on no-self.

[10:52]

To me, the attachment to no-self is worse than the attachment to self. In a sutra called Radhakuta Sutra, the Buddha said something very similar. He was talking about emptiness. He said, well, if you are attached to being, it is much better than if you are attached to emptiness. People who are attached to being can be saved easily, but people who are caught by emptiness, it is very hard to be saved, to be helped. So I would like to ask Buddhists not to think that Western psychotherapists

[12:01]

are looking at the self only on the issues concerning the self to make it healthy, true. And Buddhists are working in order to dissolve the self. And I would ask therapists to think the same. But Buddhists are not trying to dissolve the self. Yesterday I already said that a school of Buddhism was founded in India just as a reaction to the belief of non-self. Bodhgala Vada. Bodhgala is the human person, the soul, the self. And this school of Buddhism quoted intensively from the sutras. The most favorite quotation is this one.

[13:01]

There is someone that has appeared in this world for the sake of many, for the benefit of many. Who is that someone? The Tathagata, the Buddha. That means that there is a self called the Buddha, a teacher that is helping us. So why do you say that there is no self? And there are Bodhisattvas with names. I think that is reasonable enough. The thing is that, what is important is that when we look at the person, at the person, at the Bodhgala, we have to know that the person cannot exist by himself or herself alone. She has to be, to inter-be with everything else, with other people, with other non-elements.

[14:04]

And if we can see the nature of interconnectedness in the person, well, to call that person a self is all right. That is why non-self should be understood as self, as inter-being. What is not correct is the view that there is an absolute self, a separate self that can exist independently from other beings. And to me, Buddhists in their practice are working for a healthy self also, a self that is called true self, a self with the understanding that the self is made only of non-self elements. Yes. And there are those who say that in Buddhism,

[15:08]

people who practice do not deal with questions, issues, like those issues dealt with in Western psychotherapy, like the problem of low self-esteem. To me, Buddhism does not deal with that. That's not true. In fact, Buddhism deals with low self-esteem and also high self-esteem also. When the meditator looks deeply into things, she will see that if she is there, it is thanks to the pebble, the grass, the dust, the flower, the sky, the air.

[16:17]

And without a blade of grass, she cannot be there. And therefore, she looks at a tiny flower, a pebble, and a blade of grass with utmost respect. She can bow to a pebble, she can bow to a piece of dust, because she can see the wonderful nature of a piece of dust, of a pebble. I think nuclear physicists look at a piece of dust with much reverence. They know that they don't understand really the nature of a piece of dust. And there is much mystery in a piece of dust to discover, to learn. And therefore, they have that kind of respect. I think Buddhist meditators have the same kind of attitude, looking at everything, a piece of dust, a pebble, a tiny flower.

[17:22]

If they see something, the nature of these things, they should have deep respect and they should bow to everything. That does not mean that they don't have self-esteem. While they can bow to a pebble, they realize that they are a Buddha. There is the capacity of understanding, of loving in them. And they do not have the complex that they are a nobody. They know that they are a Buddha to be. And therefore, they are free from low self-esteem and high self-esteem at the same time. We know that developing a sense of healthy self, not in that spirit,

[18:26]

we can harm ourselves and we can become maladaptive to society. Of course, self-affirming thinking is more helpful because you get more confidence and you are less depressed. If you have a tendency of self-affirming thinking. But it is also dangerous. Because sometimes self-affirming will bring about a self-serving bias. And it will break relationships with other people and other living beings. And therefore, practicing looking deeply in order to know what you are, what you are not. What you are not is the illusion of what you are.

[19:35]

Yesterday, I presented to you very briefly the way of Alaya-Vijnana. There are eight consciousnesses. And I did not tell you that there are 51 mental formations that work together with the eight consciousnesses. There are too many of them. There are mental formations that are universal. Savadraga, Kaitas, so many words. But there are mental formations that are only specific to some of the consciousnesses. Working together with Manas, the seventh consciousness, there are nine mental formations. There are five universal mental formations,

[20:44]

but there are four special mental formations that are characteristic to Manas. The first one is self-ignorance. Atma-moha. Self-ignorance or self-delusion means that you believe that there is an absolute separate entity that you call self that can exist by itself alone. And if we can overcome that kind of delusion, then we got liberation.

[21:48]

And I think in western psychology, that insight is there, but it should be explored and deepened. Because we know also that the self is made of non-self elements, exactly like in Buddhism. But because in Buddhism specific techniques of meditation have been offered during 2,500 years, that is why Buddhists have deepened very much that kind of insight. And then the second is Atma-drishti. It means wrong views concerning the self. There are many wrong views concerning the self, but there are two basic wrong views.

[22:52]

One is that we believe that after death, we continue to be exactly like we have been during our lifetime. And that is the belief of permanence. There is a soul in me. After I die, that soul will get out of my body and get into another body to continue. That is the first wrong view. And the second wrong view is that after I die, there is nothing left. That is called self. Just briefly, because we don't have the time to go more in detail. One minute more. And then there is the third, Atma-mana.

[23:54]

Atma-mana is a kind of self-arrogance, inflation, inflated self. The sense that you are more important than everything else around you, and you are the best. You have a sense of self-righteousness. You are always right. And then the last one is Atma-sneha. Translated by self-addiction, self-love. Love in the bad sense of it. When you are based on this kind of wrong views of self, these two are born. And all your activities, all your thinking, all your words,

[25:09]

are to serve yourself. And because you don't think of anything as important, you think only of your so-called self as important. That is why everything you do, everything you don't do, are only for serving that kind of self. And the insight that you get during meditation is to transform these kinds of dujas, kinds of tendencies, kinds of mental formations within yourself. And when one is enlightened, one is liberated, manas become a kind of wisdom called the wisdom of equanimity. That means the wisdom that can realize that everyone is equal

[26:14]

and one is made of every other thing. The fruit of meditation The highest fruit of meditation is insight. But insight is understanding.

[27:16]

The Sanskrit word is prajna, means understanding, wisdom. And practicing meditation is to plant the seeds of insight in yourself. The seed of insight can help the seeds of joy and peace to be born and to grow. But the seed of insight is considered to be the highest fruit of Buddhist meditation. I think the same thing is true in Western psychotherapy. When we hear the word social cognitive therapy, we know that people have to try to look and to understand, and understanding will lead to the relief of the misery that we have. I think if there is a difference between psychotherapy and Buddhism,

[28:28]

and I think the basic difference is that in Buddhism, we believe that the practice of meditation can do much better, many, many more things than in psychotherapy. Like when Freud spoke about history, for instance, to the Jewish ladies that he was trying to help, he said that the maximum I can do is to exchange your neurotic misery to plant the seeds of joy and peace, enlightenment, and make the person free, utterly free and happy.

[29:29]

So I wrote down a sentence that is very typical of the concern of many therapists who have been practicing Buddhist meditation. In Western psychotherapy, much emphasis is on dealing with ego issues, the importance of differentiating our true self from the false self. It sounds very much like Buddhism. Does Buddhism agree that one must have a sense of self before one can give it up? You mean dissolving the self? But just as I thought that if the wrong self is not there, you don't have to dissolve it. Your wrong idea concerning self is to be dealt with.

[30:48]

You don't have anything to dissolve except your wrong views. And in order to dissolve your wrong views, meditation is important, because to meditate is to look deeply into the nature of things in order to eliminate wrong views. Suppose we have a flower in front of us, the flower as a true thing in itself,

[31:52]

and then our wrong view concerning the flower. The problem here is not to dissolve the flower, but to dissolve the wrong view concerning the flower. So the self is the same, the self is a flower, it may be very beautiful. But maybe we have not seen the self, we have not really experienced the self. We have only been living with our false self, wrong views concerning the self. What we have to dissolve is our wrong views, and that can be done by planting the seed of understanding. In the teaching of Vijnana, Vada, Vijnana is consciousness, Vada means the teaching, the theory, the doctrine. Vada is equal to Ism in the West. Vijnana means consciousness,

[32:59]

and you add Vada, Vijnana, Vada. According to the teaching of Vijnana, Vada, there are two kinds of seeds. One is planted, the second kind is the kind of seed that you planted by your life, during your lifetime. You planted in it. The society and your parents helped to plant them in your alaya, Vijnana. And the first kind of seed is the seed transmitted from your former lives. Your former lives may be your parents. Because I always consider my parents and ancestors as my former lives.

[34:01]

And they were transmitted not by the way of education, they are just transmitted together with your body. There is a lot of seeds in your body when you first receive it. The seeds of understanding, the seeds of Buddhahood, the seeds of anger, the seeds of frustration, all kinds of seeds have been transmitted to you by your parents. When your body begins to appear in the womb of your mother, it's like a grain of corn. Well, if we look more carefully at the grain of corn, we see that in the grain of corn there is a lot of consciousness and know-how. It's wonderful.

[35:06]

You just entrust the seed of corn to the soil and you see it knows everything. It knows how to sprout, to make roots, to make leaves, to make flowers, to make a year of corn. The farmer does not do much. It is the grain of corn that has a treasure of wisdom in it. And that treasure of wisdom has been transmitted by the parents, the grandparents of the grain of corn. So when we receive our body, we receive also our mind, our heart, our spirit, with a lot of seeds already there. And many of the seeds we do not plant during our lifetime, but they have been transmitted by our own parents.

[36:10]

That is the teaching of Buddhism. Meditation Maybe because you have observed some forms of practice, of meditation, and you have the feeling that Buddhism does not address issues like low self-esteem and so on, but in fact, throughout 2,600 years, Buddhism has developed quite a few techniques of meditation. The first and most popular form of practice

[37:15]

is to be aware of what is going on in the present moment. It still is a very important method. Well, you observe things in the present moment, and there are four areas of observation. The first is your body. You get in touch with your body and know what is happening in the present moment concerning your body. We will go back to this sometime. And then, second, you observe what is going on in your feelings. Every kind of feeling. In some of your questions, you sound as if I said that we should suppress our feelings. Not at all. I did not want to say that at all.

[38:15]

I only wanted to say that sometimes we don't need to bring these seeds into the upper level of our consciousness. We can still transform them. That's what I said. And I also said that sometimes, by expressing your anger, you rehearse it, you practice it, and you make it more important. That's what I said. I did not say that we have to suppress our anger. But I will go back to the problem of anger later because I have not said much about anger. I hope that sometime in the future we have one month or two months of retreat in order to have enough time. I feel a little bit uncomfortable with a retreat of five days. So the second domain of observation is the domain of feelings.

[39:19]

There is a river of feelings flowing day and night in us. And sitting on the bank of the river and observe, breathing, recognizing the feelings, looking at them in order to see their own nature. That is part of the practice. We do not practice repressing feelings. Not at all. And then the third domain of practice is to observe mental formations. A feeling is a mental formation also. But because feelings are a very important species of mental formations, that is why we have to separate them as a stream of consciousness. And then all the other mental formations like perceptions, and so on, we qualify them as mental formations, mind.

[40:26]

Mental formations and consciousness, mind. And then the fourth domain of observation is the object of our mind. It means the world inside and outside of us. Practically everything. Because in Buddhism we describe the world as the object of our mind. This is very important. Our body is also an object of our mind. Society, mountain, river, galaxies are also objects of our mind. And Buddhists learn to look at the grain of corn as a psychological phenomenon. And look at the mountain as consciousness. Consciousness. There is the thinking going on in the blue sky. When we eat a piece of tofu,

[41:39]

we pick it up and look at it and recognize it as a piece of tofu. And if we call the piece of tofu by its name, tofu, it is only a way to focus our attention to that, to really see it. And if we put the piece of tofu in our mouth and chew it, we come into real contact with the piece of tofu. And if some of us say, chewing, chewing, it means we want to draw our attention into the fact that I am chewing my piece of tofu. And there are many other ways of doing things, but we can be easily caught in the form of the practice. There are Buddhists who practice calling the names of Buddha, like people practicing Pure Land Buddhism. In China, in Japan, and also in Korea, in Vietnam,

[42:45]

we practice calling the name of Shakyamuni Buddha, or Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, or Amitabha Buddha. Namo Ajitabha, Namo Amitabha, Namo Amitabhusu. And when they practice invoking the name of Buddha like that, they want to concentrate on the virtue, on the nature of enlightenment, of love and understanding of that Buddha. So that by invoking the name of a Buddha, we plant a seed, a Buddha seed, into our alaya-vijnana. But many times people just practice like a machine, and they don't plant any seed in their alaya-vijnana. I told this story somewhere.

[43:48]

A lady in Vietnam, who was very fond of invoking the names of Amitabha Buddha, but after ten years of practice, she did not change at all. She still remained the same person. Grouchy, difficult to deal with. So one day another friend was trying to help, and at the time when she began her chanting, he came to the front door and yelled her name. And first she tried to control, and then she tried to invoke the name of the Buddha more loudly in order to show that I am practicing. You should not yell at me like that. But the friend ignored that. So he continued to yell her name more and more loudly. Finally she could not bear it. She threw away the bell and the drum, and she came out and he shouted at her very angrily. Are you deaf? Didn't you hear me chanting?

[44:53]

Invoking the Buddha's name. And the friend was standing there laughing. I just called your name only thirty times, and you got angry like that. The Buddha should be very angry at you, because you called his name a lot of times. So the same mistake may be done by other forms of practice. Walking meditation, sitting meditation, chanting, because we chant the Heart Sutra. We might chant exactly like that lady, and the good seeds are not planted when we practice like that. And I think the same thing may be true in psychotherapy also. If we are caught up into a point of view, a doctrine,

[45:55]

we might do things like that, and we believe we are doing it right, and meanwhile there is no effect to the practice. Bell Bell There is the story of the grain of corn that happened in a mental hospital in Vietnam. That is a very special hospital, because it encompasses areas where there are rice fields, ponds, ducks, chickens, and fruit trees. And there was a person who seemed very normal to the nurses. He ate like other people, he spoke like other people,

[46:57]

he also practiced jogging and things like that, quite normal. And they found out that his only abnormality is that he is afraid of chickens. He believes that he eats a grain of corn. That is why every time he sees a chicken, he just runs away. And the nurses cannot catch him because he was running for his life. But the nurses were not afraid of chickens, so they could not run as quickly. So that was reported to the doctor, and the doctor came and gave him something like a sermon. And you know, my friend, you are not a grain of corn. You are a human being, look, you have hair, you have eyes, you have nose, you have arms.

[48:10]

Do you agree? Yes, yes, I agree. So you must agree with me that you are a human being, you are not a grain of corn. So the doctor and the patient agreed completely on that. I mean the analysis, they agreed on the analysis. And the prescription is that the person has to repeat several times a day that famous sentence, I am a human being, I am not a grain of corn. And he asked the man to practice that every day, a lot of times, maybe 300 or 400 times. Looks like a Buddhist, they practice chanting, bowing, things like that. And in order to be sure, he asked him to write that down on sheets of paper.

[49:15]

So he gave him 100 sheets of paper, blank sheets, and he asked him to write that famous sentence. So the person was very eager to be healed, and so he stayed indoor and practiced there. And a few months after, the doctor came and asked. And the nurse said, well, he seems to do very well. He practiced very intensively what you had given him. So I think it's all right now. So when they met the patient, the doctor smiled and said, how are things going? Please tell me something. And then the man smiled at the doctor and said, doctor, I know very well that I am a human being, I am not a grain of corn. The doctor was delighted. He said, well, I think that we can let you go home in a few days.

[50:16]

So please come to the office with me. And they went to the office, but on the way, they met a chicken. And the man just was running like that. The doctor was very disappointed, of course, and so was the nurse. And one hour later, the nurse brought him back to the office. And the doctor looked at him, blamingly, and did not say anything. And finally he said, well, you told me that you know very well that you are a human being, not a grain of corn. Why did you run when you see the chicken? And the gentleman answered like this, well, I know very well that I am not a grain of corn, I am a human being,

[51:16]

but how could the chicken know? I think if the doctor is intelligent, he should change his way of practice. I would like to say a few words about pruning.

[52:21]

In Plum Village, we have 1,250 plum trees. We do not intend to plant that number. You know, the Buddhist community, the monk community at the time of the Buddha was 1,250 kind of classical number. But we learned how to prune the plum trees because there are branches that are not useful and harmful also. If we let them, then they will create a kind of imbalance and then they will break. The branches will be broken when they bear fruits. And there are branches that do not offer fruits. They call it in French, wok mang. So we learned how to prune the plum trees. And the first year, it was difficult for us to do that

[53:24]

because to cut a healthy branch like that is somehow hurting. But we learned after that that it is very helpful to the tree if you can prune like that. In the tradition of Buddhism as well as Christianity and I believe Western psychotherapy, there are branches that are to be pruned in order to let the chance to healthy development to take place. The practice of meditation, the practice of healing, the practice in the other religious and spiritual traditions have to be reexamined. And something should be done in order to prevent the unhealthy things to grow in order to make a chance for developments

[54:25]

that can answer to the real needs of our time. And that has something to do with the practice of meditation, the practice of therapy and so on. The word vasana is very important in the practice of Buddhism, vasana, it means V-A-S-A-N-A. That is the practice of planting of seeds, healthy seeds, good seeds in yourself. The Sanskrit word means to perfume, to fumigate. It's like if you want to have a jasmine tea, you pick up jasmine flowers and you put together with the tea and you put it in a box tightly closed for a number of days. And after that you can throw out the dried jasmine flowers

[55:31]

and now the tea has the jasmine flavor. So the tea is our alaya vijnana and the jasmine flowers are the good seeds that you want to plant in our alaya vijnana in order to have a transformation. Because the seed of suffering, the seed of pain has been transplanted in us in the same way. And that is why we have to transplant the seeds of the opposite nature in order to counterbalance and then to transform the other kind of seeds. The most powerful seeds that you can transplant is the seed of understanding. Because the seed of understanding will dissolve, transform the seeds of delusion in us. We have a lot of delusions concerning self, concerning society, concerning anger, concerning hatred and so on.

[56:36]

And in order to transplant, to plant that kind of seeds we have to practice looking and looking deeply in order to see the real roots of things. And when you have seen the roots of things, you see the nature. And in the Zen circle they talk about seeing one's own nature and becoming a Buddha. You can see the nature of anything and you can become a Buddha. If you can see the true nature of a pebble, the true nature of a leaf, then you can become a Buddha also. Because the true nature of a leaf is the true nature of yourself. Because you are, you interact with the leaf and with the pebble. You don't need to taste all the water in the ocean. You need only to taste one drop of it in order to know what it tastes like, the water in the ocean.

[57:44]

The first kind of practice is that we pay attention to our breathing in order to pacify our body and our mind. Breathing in, breathing out, making the breathing peaceful and quiet, we realize rest and peace in our body and our mind. And then the next thing, because of our breathing, we can look more deeply into things. First, we are there. We are really there because of our conscious breathing. And because we are really there, we can see what is going on in four domains of life. Body, feelings, mind, and objects of mind. First, we recognize things as they happen and as they go. And that is the practice of mere attention. But the practice of mere attention is already very important.

[58:54]

Because if you don't practice that, things inside yourself and around you will come and go like phantoms, like a ghost. They are not real. So when you practice drinking a cup of tea, you breathe, you bring the cup of tea up, you smile at it, and you say something like, the cup of tea in my two hands, my fullness is whole perfectly, my mind and my body dwell in the very here and now. You do that in order to make the tea appear as something real. You do that to help the tea recuperate its highest position in the cosmos. And when the tea has become real, you, the drinker of the tea, become real also. This is because that is. This is because that is.

[59:56]

This is not because that is not. You become real and alive when the tea becomes real. That is why when I pick up my piece of tofu, I have to make it real in order for myself to be real. So that is the practice of mindfulness. You practice mindfulness in order to make things real to you, and in order for you to be real, and you let the encounter to be possible. And life can only be possible with that kind of real encounter. So the practice of me-attention mindfulness is already a lot. But first of all, the first time you encounter a flower in that way, the flower is much more real to you already. But if you continue to live in mindfulness like that, the deeper, the more deeply, you will see into the nature of the cup of tea or of the flower.

[60:59]

And if you live mindfully like that, one day you will understand the true nature of the flower, the very roots of the flower. It means the non-flower element within the flower. And then you can be at peace with the flower, and you can help the flower. Otherwise, you cannot help the flower. The client that you are trying to help should also be looked at in the same way, in order for you to understand deeply his or her roots. And that kind of insight will help you, will show you what to do and what not to do in order to help that person. So meditation is quite important for a therapist.

[61:53]

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