Good morning. I'm happy to introduce today's speaker, Ron Nestor. I can't remember who came to BCC first, Ron or Sojin. Ron's been here for a long time. He was a Shuso sometime in the 90s, I think. And then he received lay recognition a few years ago. I want you to know about Ron as he's been here for a long time and he's planning to continue. I look forward to hearing what he has to tell you. We're in the middle of aspects of practice and the theme is the life of the forms that are a part of Zen practice. We're working out of a book called Living by Vow by Shihaka Okamura.

[01:02]

And he has one chapter on the Heart Sutra. So that was just so juicy that I couldn't resist. So I wanted to make that my subject today. And we had a good lesson in the Heart Sutra getting here this morning. I won't say it's my worst nightmare, but I've had a nightmare in the past of having to give a lecture at BZC. I only give maybe one or two a year. And something goes wrong with the car, and I can't make it. Well, that happened this morning. And I had a flat tire. It was interesting because I was out getting ready to drive away, and a neighbor came walking by and pointed at my right tire. I didn't even know it was flat. So he just came up right at the right time. Otherwise, it would have been halfway down the street, you know, the tires wobbling and all. And then I was supposed to pick up Ann Livingston and bring her over here. this morning and said to call her and then I called a taxi and picked up Ann and eventually got here.

[02:07]

But, you know, I wanted to have everything be perfect for giving a talk and sort of settled and organized and then it doesn't work. These things happen. There's the emptiness of tiredness, All the own being flowed out of the tire and it was flat. It was unusable. And in a relationship, you know, the fellow from India picked me up in a taxi cab and went over to Ann's place and used the telephone to make contact and was able to get here, but couldn't do it independently. It was totally dependent upon a number of different factors. So the Heart Sutra, it's also a little difficult because some of you have been practicing for like decades and decades and some of you are new. So I mostly aim it towards the people who have been here for longer, but not totally.

[03:14]

So I'll say a little introduction to the Heart Sutra. The Heart Sutra is a fundamental text for Zen Buddhism for more than a thousand years. long time, Zen temples in many countries, or all countries, chant the Heart Sutra. And it's short, and we do it every day. And I was thinking, you know, if you took everybody in this room, and you added up, this is a specific number here, if you added up all the number of times that everybody in this room has repeated the Heart Sutra, and you came up with a total number, it would be astronomical, it would be unbelievable. Because people have been chanting the Heart Sutra for 30, 40 years. You add all those people together. So, in this room, that Heart Sutra has been chanted lots and lots and lots of times. So, the gist of what I want to talk about, after a little introduction, is how do we actually not so much understand

[04:26]

How do we live what we're chanting? Rather than just have a conception of it, but how do we actually live what we're chanting? The Heart Sutra, I also think it's good to have some context. When you just come in and we have the Heart Sutra to chant and it's just handed to us, we don't necessarily just do some reading and research know the context of the Heart Teacher, what is it, where did it come from, why did it evolve? Just briefly, it's part of the Prajnaparamita literature, which was put together maybe 100 BCE to 600 or so CE, and to a certain extent, Prajnaparamita literature was a response to Abhidharma, which was a kind of started pretty soon after Buddha died, maybe a hundred years after he died.

[05:28]

Amidharma was a study, an analysis of Buddha's sutras, but going into infinite detail about how everything works. And they, as Buddha taught, they agreed that there is no ego, that we have no self. A person has no self that you can identify as this is the self exactly. But they did feel like the dharmas that make up our personality are independent, that in a sense they do have a self, even if they only come into being briefly, that the dharmas themselves are elements, and I'm talking about mostly mental dharmas, although it includes the body as a dharma too. So the Prajnaparamita literature was didn't agree and wanted to point out that even the dharmas are empty. Everything is empty. The whole universe is empty of anything that you can call a self. And so the Heart Sutra and the Diamond Sutra are the heart of the Prajnaparamita literature.

[06:36]

And Buddha actually said everything is empty, but he didn't say it a lot. He was more focusing on humans and our human life and our personalities. That's where he pointed out no-self, anatta. He didn't talk about the dharmas outside of that so much, but he did mention it. It's just more emphasis on our constituents of our personality. So, you know, the Heart Sutra begins, in our translation that we used, Avalokita Sivara, when practicing deeply Prajnaparamita, perceived that all five skandhas, which are the elements of our mental makeup in our body, in their own being, are empty.

[07:59]

So I have to think about this phrase, in their own being. all five skandhas in their own being, that this is a qualifier for emptiness. If we just say emptiness without saying what we're talking about, it's a kind of abstract emptiness which suggests a void, nothingness, or nothing's there but it's like a vacuum. But if we say something in particular is empty, then we know We have a reference point. Without a reference point, emptiness has a different connotation. It's somewhat abstract. Emptiness of what? So, the actual Heart Sutra as I understand it, originally does not say, empty of all being in this part of the sutra. There's an introduction to the sutra which says, avalokiteshvara

[09:05]

looked down and saw that all five times in their own being, but the actual Heart Sutra doesn't actually say that. Assuming that you've read the introduction. Excuse me, Brahm. I think that we might turn the volume up a little bit. The folks in the back are having a little trouble hearing you. How can you tell because you're looking this way? So we talk about emptiness a lot. We don't always say emptiness of own being. And so we're assuming that we know that we're talking about that. So if you say the glass is empty, from a Buddhist perspective, that could mean the glass has no independent existence, no self, no inherent self apart from other things that support it.

[10:15]

But if we say in our everyday language the glass is empty, we assume that it's empty of water. So it's really how we use the word emptiness in terms of communicating with people I like to say emptiness of own being when people aren't familiar with Buddhist practice so much. And even then I still like to say it. Emptiness itself is such a powerful word. It could describe, for instance, feeling depressed. You say, oh I feel empty. And something is missing. But it's not like emptiness of the own being. And so, I'll just briefly mention the two most important aspects of the heart sutra are no-self, or anatta, which I just mentioned, and the other one is the non-duality.

[11:28]

which is that it doesn't mean that because there's no own being that, as I said, that there's a vacuum or there's nothing there. It means that there's phenomena. And we tend to think, well, gee, if it's empty, then it's flimsy or it doesn't really exist. But it does exist. But it just doesn't exist independently. And it probably doesn't exist just like we think it exists, either. Nevertheless, there's something there. So there's a tendency, when we start thinking about emptiness, to think that there's a separation. This is empty, and that's phenomena. But there is emptiness and there is phenomena, but they go together, they're the same, they're I don't have any trouble understanding that, and I wonder sometimes why we make such a big deal about form and emptiness.

[12:36]

It just seems to make great sense, it's just very rational, it's sensible, that everything is a composite, everything is an amalgamation that our personality is composed of aggregates that everything is an amalgamation of innumerable elements that we can never identify totally. That just seems to make great sense to me. And the fact that there's no particular independent core that you can identify seems fine too. But it's necessary to keep saying form is emptiness and emptiness is form. That they're two aspects, but they're not something separate. So even though we may understand form and emptiness, we may understand no-own-being, we may understand that

[13:57]

there's really in that sense there's nothing to since there's no particular since our ego is a kind of concoction and you know Chogyam Trungpa used to call the ego headquarters you know that we have some sense that there's headquarters directing things which is true we have to have some volition but this volitional source is constantly changing. So it's not headquarters that you can rely on, oh yeah, this is headquarters. Headquarters are always changing. So even if we know all this, and we have a really good sense of this, at least conceptually, at least intellectually, what if we totally understood all this intellectually and conceptually, why would there be a problem? When we just see how the world works, the universe works, what's the problem?

[15:04]

The problem is that still we're attached, we gravitate towards pleasure, we gravitate towards rest and sleep. and we avert pain and suffering, and that's incredibly powerful if you haven't noticed. No matter how reasonable we are about how we understand the universe and how it works and Buddhism and so forth, just the sheer pull of wanting to have pleasure which could include feeling secure, Like this morning, when everything went wrong and the car went, I couldn't use the car, I was just stressed. I don't like that feeling. I knew I should be calm. Outwardly I could be calm, but inwardly I was irritated. Why is this happening to me?

[16:05]

So even though we may have a great understanding of form and emptiness, and no own being and interdependence still we cling to a lot of stuff. And that's the real problem. So to really be able to see that there's no own being is more than just an idea or I can't tell you what that's like, because I haven't experienced that. But people can. I have absolute faith that people can actually embody and see that from their guts, from their bones. And in that case, the ego, what we call our headquarters, our ego, starts to not be such a big deal.

[17:13]

We still like pleasure, we don't like pain, but the me that's doing the liking or the not liking is much more insubstantial. But we need to be able to actually experience this, not just know that that's so. One thing about chanting the Heart Sutra every day is that we can be kind of complacent, just sort of fall into a habit, and it's kind of comforting. Here's the Heart Sutra, the familiar Heart Sutra that we hear every day, we chant every day.

[18:15]

How do we actually be open to that on a daily basis, not to mention the rest of our lives? But in something that we do habitually every day, how do we let that be alive and not some kind of a dead habit, or a comforting habit? You know, the cadence of it, the harmony of it, the power of it, can be very enjoyable. I was thinking that one way that we could ... the chanting part of it, that we could make it more lively, is that when we come to all the no section, no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, then we can go off into a 30 second segment where we can say no whatever we want. Everybody can say something different. So for 30 seconds, and every day you could say something different, you know, no okra, no eggplant, no big black SUVs, whatever you wanted, and everybody could say that, and after 30 seconds we'd all come back to no eyes, no mirrors, no nose protection.

[19:57]

So that way every day would be new. Just as suggested, and I will bring it up at the conference. You all support me. What about the other way? Like we say form is emptiness, but then we also say emptiness is form, so then do we have to come back and say, yes, eggplant, yes. Well, we have to do this in stages. Linda doesn't like the negative side of it. I just wanted to read something from Suzuki Roshi about the difference between our ability to think about something and our ability to really be in it. And I'm going to read, this is from a transcript

[20:59]

of a talk that I believe is in not always so. I like the transcripts because they're although they're not as clear and easy to track they also give you, to me, they give me a closer feeling of Suzuki Roshi's personality. It's not quite, everything is not edited and neat. Recently my thought has concentrated on the idea of emptiness. Whatever I say, I'm actually talking about what is emptiness, because this emptiness is something which we must understand literally and completely through experience. But if it is difficult to experience it through experience, you can tentatively understand it as a kind of idea in comparison to your way of thinking or in comparison to the idea you have or the various ideas you have. And we classify our idea in two. One is idea of emptiness, Another is idea of being. So that's form and emptiness.

[22:04]

And when we say, usually idea is an idea of being. And the idea of your way of thinking belongs to the idea of being. And idea of emptiness makes a pair of opposites with your idea that you have. So whatever the idea may be, you can say that that idea is an idea of being. So we should know that. So even if we're thinking about emptiness, we're still hooked into the being aspect of it. We're still, actually without realizing it, hanging on to the being aspect of it. Beside the idea about things you have, there is another idea which is not the same, this is a little bit tricky, not the same as the idea you have and which is not brought about in your concept. Actually, that is why we practice Zazen, you know. You cannot reach the idea of emptiness with your thinking mind or with your feelings as a conception.

[23:07]

And to practice, to actualize the emptiness is Shikantaza. And then he says something nice. But when we say empty cup or empty water does not mean to drink it up. It means that keeping the water in it, still we do not think there is water. That is to empty the water. When we have no idea of water, even though we see that it's there, that is to empty a cup. So emptying our idea, emptiness of our idea of water, even though this phenomena is in front of us. So, I'm thinking about what kind of effort that we would make in the Heart Sutra, as we're chanting the Heart Sutra or considering the Heart Sutra, What kind of effort to get beyond just the thinking of it or the thought of it to the actual experience of it? What effort would we put into that? And is there a right way to chant?

[24:16]

Is there a wrong way to chant? The thing that's very safe to say and very true is that putting our whole body and mind into chanting is the way to chant the Heart Sutra. Along with that, I would say being completely open, which is really the same thing, but not exactly. Being really open chanting the Heart Sutra is a good way to chant the Heart Sutra. Being open when we're chanting the Heart Sutra means that if we don't like the Heart Sutra, we know we don't like the Heart Sutra. And if we're feeling spaced out, we know we're feeling spaced out. And if we're tired of chanting it, we know that that's true.

[25:18]

And that's the way we're chanting that morning or that afternoon. So when we're open, anything can happen. You don't know what's going to happen. This is Beginner's Month. We like to be competent and be expert, generally speaking, but openness is not depending upon being an expert or even being competent. So just in terms of effort in general, I'd say some effort, this practice is required, is necessary to actually be in emptiness, to understand emptiness of our own being, actually.

[26:30]

So here's just a short quote from Suzuki Roshi. Actually, it's not quite so short. We say to make our effort means to push. The idea of self is to achieve something. That is actually what you are doing when you make some effort. But we make our effort to get rid of this kind of self-centered effort or self-centered activity. Our effort is to get rid of this self-centered effort. And that's kind of the column. How do you make an effort to get rid of self-centered effort without being self-centered? You know, for instance, if you're writing or reading something, somebody may say, your wife or your husband may say something like, why don't you have a cup of tea? And you may say, oh, I am busy. Be quiet. That is not, when you are reading in that way, I think you should be careful. You should be ready to say, yes, that may be wonderful.

[27:36]

Give me a cup of tea. And having a cup of tea, or stop reading, and after having a cup of tea, you should continue your reading. That kind of attitude is more like our attitude. Now I am very busy. I shouldn't say so, you know, but I always say, I am busy now. Right now, I am busy. But that's not so good, because my mind is not actually in full function. A part of my mind is working hard, But the other part may not be working so hard. In any way, I may be losing my balance in my activity. If you're doing calligraphy, you should express yourself completely. But if your mind is not in a state of emptiness, your work will tell you, I am not in a state of emptiness. So you should stop. If you are a Zen student, you should be ashamed of making such calligraphy. is to practice zazen, actually.

[28:36]

Your practice should be there. So when you are working on calligraphy, if somebody says, please have a cup of tea, and you say, no, I am making calligraphy, then your calligraphy will say, no, no, no. You cannot fool yourself. That's our practice. That's an open-minded effort he's talking about. We're making an effort. The first effort is a very closed-minded effort. I'm focusing on this. I'm working on this. Don't interrupt me. And the second kind of effort is he opens his mind and just is responding to whatever's happening. That kind of effort. And, you know, interestingly, as I heard, thus I've heard, although I don't know directly. His oksana, Suzuki Roshi's wife, used to feel disappointed because he would get up right after dinner, get up from the table and go into his room to study because he was saving all sentient beings basically, but he wasn't going to sit at the table and talk to his wife too much, just not very much, and so she was disappointed with him.

[30:01]

And so I think he sees that tendency in himself, and that's why he's talking like this. My father was the same way, especially as he got into his 50s and 60s. We were not kids anymore, if we happened to be coming over for dinner to the parents' house. And after dinner, and there was just sort of chatting, he would be uncomfortable. at his desk and work on a project. Then he felt more comfortable because that's where he was at home, he was organizing things, he was in control, and he had something that he could really intellectually work with. But just chatting about anything, he felt uncomfortable with that. And he's actually still like that today. Getting back to a little bit what Linda was mentioning about the knownness of the Heart Sutra, that we're negating basically all of our fixation on how we see things, or that the solidity of how we see things, the know, is to help us to dissolve the solidity of how we view things.

[31:37]

and also to see their relationship of things as well. But Zen practice itself can have it. Some people can think that the Heart Sutra is no-sutra, no this, no that. And sometimes Zen practice can feel like that, like it's a negation. Where is there room for sexuality? And we have a precept for that, about wholesome sexuality, but we don't, you know, Zen practice doesn't talk about sex very much. We do like to talk about food a lot. Yeah, food that's good. But there's a tendency to feel, and also Zazen is just such a quiet, although we're all sitting together, there's not the social social interrelationship that we're used to.

[32:42]

Like a tea, tea and cookies, you know, it's a lot of energy in tea and cookies, you know, but we just sitting still looking at the white wall, particularly if we do a lot of it, it can feel like we're missing our whole central side of ourselves. could feel like that. I'm not saying that's true, just that we could feel like that. So the question is, how can we understand emptiness of own being, really, and yet find a kind of nutritious or juicy aspect of our life? I don't want to give some facile answer to that. I think we have to find that each person finds that for themselves. But Zen is not a dour, it's not necessarily quirky, it's not necessarily dour, austere practice.

[33:57]

It can just seem like that on the surface. Basically it's just us being ourselves. So, I'll stop in just a minute. I wanted just to end with the fact that when we keep mentioning emptiness, there's this sense of void. Even though we know better, you just keep using the word emptiness over and over, particularly people who are newer to practice, and it feels like a voidness. There's a poem that Dogen's teacher Mu Jing put together. It's just four lines. Most of you, or a lot of you know it. The Wind Bell poem. This poem describes prajna, wisdom.

[35:00]

It also describes emptiness. The whole body, like a mouth, hanging in emptiness, not asking whether the breeze be from south or north, east or west. For all alike it preaches prajna, ting-ting-tong, ting-ting-tong. The whole body, it's like everything, it's like us, like a mouth, which is open and can receive what's ever coming in, hanging in emptiness, which is not holding on to something in particular and identifying with it, not asking whether the breeze be from South or North, East or West, however certain chances

[36:10]

evolve. Whatever happens, flat tire happens, it just happens. You just respond. For all the like, it preaches prajna. Just by participating in being open and letting go, the wisdom is there. We don't have to work on gaining wisdom. actually doing it without making it into a cloth. So it's a little bit distorted talk, but I'm sorry. So if you have a few minutes of questions or comments. Bill, did you want to? Charlie? Well, you touched on it there at the end. So in the end, there's not much difference between your wife asking you to have a cup of tea and you Fix your flat tire.

[37:14]

Is that right? It feels different, but no. It feels different, though. But no, you're right. Well, it depends what level you want me to get to. You get a little vacation from both, right? You get a vacation from both? Yeah. Or an interruption, depending on how you look at it. Oh, I see what you're saying. If you have something in mind that you intend to be doing, and you're interrupted, it's the same. That's right. Those two aren't the same. It's just that, in terms of, if you want to go into the more psychological aspect or emotional aspect of it, with my wife, I have a kind of a choice. With a flat tire, I have no choice. I've got to do something.

[38:15]

My wife is actually even more difficult in a certain way because there's a choice. I'm not saying my wife is more difficult than a flat tire. I'm just saying that when we have a choice like that, it's the small things that are so important. It's the small little things that we sort of, the dramatic things actually we can take care of pretty well. It's the small, you know, to a certain extent, it's the small things that really reflect on that kind of attitude. I think Patti Page did that, the title of the song is Little Things Mean A Lot. Peter? Speaking of little things, it just occurred to me that the perception of interruption actually signals attachment. That's right.

[39:26]

But when we concentrate on something, most of us are attached to what we're concentrating on. Is there a way to be concentrated on something? I don't think so. I don't know. I don't know. I'm not there yet where I could say that I could be really concentrated on something and not attached to that feeling of concentration. Would your concentration be enhanced by something? By the what? By flexibility? Yes, absolutely. Maile Scott came to my mind. It was that year when she broke her foot. And I called her up one day and said, I'd be happy to shop if there's anything you need. And she said, oh, yes. And she gave me a list of five or six things she needed, and I went to the store. And when I got to her house and opened the front door, she was upstairs, and she yelled down, to put the things in the kitchen and come upstairs. So when I went into the kitchen with a bag of groceries, there were like six bags lined up on the floor of all basically the same stuff.

[40:37]

And I stood there and I realized, oh, she really understands that people want help. And she didn't need any of that stuff. I don't really remember, but they were an odd collection of five or six things that didn't really go together. But it was really touching, because she got that people wanted to help. She didn't say, oh, no, don't bother. I'm fine. And so then when I proceeded upstairs to visit her, we just chatted. And I had this image of, well, that's what she did with those. five or six people who brought those bags. There was no interruption. I mean, maybe she was interrupted, but it didn't really matter. Well, I think maybe she was engaging everybody. I think so. She was engaged.

[41:41]

I mean, isn't that what you're saying about the Heart Center? and openness and flexibility? Yeah, it doesn't appear like that on the surface. Well, it doesn't appear like that so much on the surface, although in the end it looks better. One dwells in Nirvana, that's not bad. So how do we become, I guess with this mentality, not lazy in a broader sense. Flexibility seems great. It's important. But I'm always worried that if I'm overly flexible and overly lackadaisical in making up plans for broader future plans and that sort of thing, that I'm avoiding to some extent what I need to do.

[42:42]

So you're saying, how can you be focused and have intent without getting carried away with an effort that's just too exclusive or that blinds you to everything else? Yeah, right. It seems like when I'm planning, there gets to be a certain point where the ego just sort of clouds what I'm planning. Well, I think just to pay attention to that when it's happening. You just have to pay attention to that and be aware of that when it's happening. That's like having faith or confidence in your ability to make sense of what you're all about. sense in the deepest sense.

[43:48]

In other words, by paying attention to that when it's arising, that feeling of what you're talking about, because you're expressing it right now, that you're aware that that happens. So obviously you're aware of that. And being aware of that, and it'll happen over and over and over again, each time you're aware of it. That's what practice is. It's just simply being aware of all the stuff that comes up on ourselves over and over again. And you can have all the formulas in the world about I should do this or I shouldn't do that, and you can have a focus for directing a practice, but basically it's simply letting your own behavior inform you about It's too fancy a word, but the wisdom within it is simply taking your own ability to be aware seriously.

[44:54]

The fact that you can be aware like that should not be taken for granted. Should not be taken for granted. It's really valuable. I just wanted to comment on that. Sometimes, if I have a big, hairy project, it's not an immediate thing, but I can have an awareness of the need to do this in my life, and that awareness can drive me to sometimes say, no, I can't have tea right now, thank you. That's the other side of it. That's right. And it's not necessarily being overly Yeah, so I think it's mostly a matter of seeing the big picture. You don't always have to see the big picture, but most of the times you don't see the big picture.

[45:57]

So you're talking about seeing a bigger picture, that you see different aspects coming together. Okay, thank you very much.

[46:09]

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