Maybe we need two weeks, one week of Sashin and one week of teaching. But even though I've actually considered that, I think it's pretty hard for you all to get off from work and everything. In the early days when Sukershi, I think, felt somewhat the same way, he would give two lectures a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Then we have a very short work period, which Frank wouldn't like. Though you'd probably accept it. I want to say something about bathing because I think some of you are beginning to feel by the fourth day of Sesshin you smell or stink too much to come into the Zendo.

[01:29]

Or you think your neighbor stinks too much to come down to his head. Now, Harold and I don't have to worry about washing our hair too much. But those of you with more beautiful hair, I think, would like to wash your hair. Anyway, there is this general rule that you don't wash during Sashin. Don't take a full bath. But you can wash, you know, with some kind of washcloth or some kind of body wash or a kind of a bath.

[02:47]

It's all right. I remember I didn't really know about the rule. Fikirsi didn't tell us about rules too much. She expected us to figure them out. I didn't know about the rule about not bathing in the early days of Sashin. I had no idea about it in the early days when we did Seishin. Suzuki Roshi didn't give us a lot of rules. He just expected us to figure it all out ourselves. There was this funny old bath, bathing room in the bottom of this old synagogue where the first Zen Center was. And after Sashin, each night I'd go down and draw a big tub in the bath, which turned out to be his private bath. And I always tried to, I knew he used to use it too, so I tried to get out of there before he came. But one night I was about 11 o'clock, was forgot myself and was soaking and luxuriating in the water.

[04:06]

Because when you give a lecture or teach, you're supposed to wash every day, and you're supposed to wash before you lecture, I think. So Sukhirashi, even though he had us not bathe, he shaved every day his head and washed. So I was in the tub and I suddenly heard the door opening, looked in and... I found out later he was quite angry at me. One of the few times he was actually angry at me. But I understood the, so I didn't do it again. Someone in Doksan mentioned that they feel a space around their actions and their activity.

[05:37]

And then they asked about the mudras of these Buddha figures. This person wanted to know more about them. But the space, when you start to feel space around your actions, around your gestures, this is mudra. That's how these mudras arise. Okay, tomorrow... Oh, by the way, again, another small thing. In the nighttime sitting after the hot drink, I forgot to announce, I guess it's not in the regular instructions, that when you sit at night, when you finish sitting, wherever you're sitting at your place, you bow toward the altar three times.

[07:10]

Usually just on the floor in the aisle. And if you happen to sit outside or in your own room before going to bed, then before you go to bed, you bow three times toward the Zendo altar from wherever your room is. If you're sitting out on one of the peninsulas in the lake, I would suggest you just do standing bows. Tomorrow, I think we'll start chanting, we'll start at lunch, the Heart Sutra in German, right?

[08:20]

Can we do it tomorrow? The Heart Sutra. And can we make 50 copies or so? Good. So I'd like to give you a little feeling of the Heart Sutra, the teaching and practice of the Heart Sutra. It's by far and away the most popular sutra in the Mahayana world. And there have been many, about eight, I think, Chinese, main Chinese translations, and there have been, I mean, I don't know, thousands of commentaries written on it.

[09:27]

So I can't say too much in just this one period this afternoon. But maybe I can give you a feel for the situation of the Heart Sutra. And I talk about it now and then, so every time I'll try to enter from a little different angle. Okay, the idea in Buddhism, the basic idea of Buddhism is that everything changes. Now, that was expressed after a little while as codependent arising.

[10:40]

But since, at least in English nowadays, that's a fashionable psychological term, codependency, let's call it dependent co-arising. Now I'm moving toward the Heart Sutra in this way because I just want to illustrate how what you name something affects what happens. Okay. Now, to go, step back for another moment, and say one of the purposes of Sashin is for you to accumulate power. To gather energy.

[11:52]

Or to move energy from being tied up in your personality and representational thinking into another mode of being. Now, sometimes when you guys bring up the pain of zazen and how difficult it is and so forth, And when I come in here and I can feel all of you sort of... My heart goes out to you, I think, what am I doing to all these people? I wouldn't be surprised if I opened the door and you were all standing there with clubs.

[13:14]

You all said, we've had enough of this power to the people. I used to, just as a little anecdote, the founder of the Black Panthers used to be a friend of mine, Huey Newton, and he always said, more power to the people. And a friend of mine said to Huey once, how come when you say power to the people, I feel left out? Anyway, I feel, geez, this makes sense to have you all suffering so much.

[14:28]

And I think maybe I should make 10-minute periods or something like that. Yeah, with music and dancing and things like that. Why not? See what I mean? And I'm supposed to grow my hair too. Next year I'll be a different man. Okay. But you know, the truth of it is that if you want to really find a really deep stability in yourself that can go through anything.

[15:34]

The ability to sit through the kind of difficulty of a sashin and really sit through is the fastest way to create that. Sukhiroshi used to say, sit like a stone or like a stump, tree stump. And, you know, I've been doing lots of sashins and still it's hard for me. Every sashin can be quite difficult sometimes. And I have to kind of... And then finally it's okay. Because you get out of the habit of being able to sit when you feel what seems like a lot of pain.

[16:47]

So Sushin is to develop the power to sit still. Sashin means something like gather the mind, but it means more really to gather the energy that allows you to be still and unperturbable. And we have so many channels in us that control the flow of who we are to our attention. That we really don't know ourselves most of the time.

[17:57]

Somehow this pain and restlessness and discomfort of sitting breaks through those channels. And at first you feel your knee deep in, you know, what? At first you know your knee deep in... Schmerz. Schmerz. Zuerst stellt man fest, dass man buchstäblich knietief im Schmerz steckt. But really afterwards you feel purified. And cleaned out inside, like the channels are cleaned out.

[19:00]

And one part of practice that's embodied in this is this, one basic part of Buddhist practice is purification. And one of the ways it's embodied in Zen practice is this sashin practice. And it sort of cleans out your tubes, your channels. Now, this takes quite a bit of energy to do this. And it takes energy to have yourself revealed to yourself. And it takes energy to accept yourself. And it also takes energy to shift out of your usual channels of perception into other ways of perceiving.

[20:24]

Now, Buddhism sometimes distinguishes between two kinds of mind, and I will call them generic mind and precise mind. Now, generic mind tends to see things in big categories, in generalities, in generalizations. Generic in the sense of original? No, generic in the sense of general, generalities. Like Albuquerque is a generic American city. Of the genus, you know. Yeah? OK. And precise mind. Now, precise mind takes more energy at first to see things precisely.

[22:07]

Later, after you get shift over into it, you're not pushing through to it, but you're now coming from precise mind, it takes less energy. Because the Activity of living, of perceiving, nourishes you. So you don't get tired out from seeing people or doing things. You get nourished by seeing people or doing things. And one of the things you try to do in... that's an advantage in monastic life, is you try to limit your life to that which nourishes you, and you don't expand it beyond what continues to nourish you.

[23:18]

Mm-hmm. Yeah, but that's pretty hard to do if you have a job. You know, you go tell your employer, today I'm only going to do what nourishes me. In a monastery you can do that, but not somewhere else. Until you come to the point where mostly everything nourishes you. And it's in simple things too, like using the Oryoki. One of the points of using the Oryoki is to learn the physical pace of the phenomenal world in terms of the physicality itself.

[24:21]

That was a test. Did she pass it? More or less. More or less. Okay. So you actually, if you deal with the world in generalities, you don't feel the physical pace of the world speaking to you. You're always trying to force things a little. Now, the most probably definitive Zen master of all times was Matsu or Basso. Now, one of the things he tried to communicate is that every action is a function of Buddha nature.

[25:26]

For those of you who know the koans, he's the guy who is sitting to become a Buddha and his teacher starts rubbing a tile. And he hears this. He looks around. He says, what are you doing? He says, I'm trying to make this tile into a jewel. And Matsu says, how can you make a tile into a jewel? You can't do that. Matsu says, how can you make a tile into a jewel? It's impossible. And so Nanyue says, well, how by sitting, zazen, can you turn yourself into a Buddha?

[26:54]

That was kind of a blow to Matsu. Doing a lot of sitting those days. This was Suzuki Yoshi's favorite Zen story. But behind all this stuff and these great stories are some really fundamental ideas and one is that every action is a function of Buddha nature. Now, I've been working on recently how to give you a background at teaching about Buddha Nature. And I don't know if I'll get to it in the Sesshin at all.

[27:57]

It's rather a big task, but we'll see. Okay, now, to say that each action is a function of Buddha nature is not to say that each action is an expression of Buddha nature. I mean, what can I use as an example? If you're driving a car, everything you do in the car is a function of the car. But that doesn't mean you may know how to drive. So it may not be an expression of the car. Do you see what I mean? Okay. In other words, if you drive a car, I mean, even if a child of four years old gets in a car and releases the brake and it goes down the hill into the lake here, it's a function of the car, which he's done.

[29:24]

He's in the haunt now, thinking, because he got in the car and released the brake. But he didn't know how, because he didn't know how to drive, it was an expression of the car's real function. So one of the technical terms in Zen Buddhism is great function, which means when your actions express Buddha nature. So the sense of it here is that Buddha-nature is just the way the world is, and so you can't escape from being a function of it, but you may not express it.

[30:35]

And since everything in the world has Buddha-nature, you can't escape from this Buddha-nature. But mostly what you do is just a function of this Buddha-nature and not really its expression. So let me try to give you another kind of example from our talks of the previous three days. Which is, if this world is inherently non-dual, if the duality is only a temporary dimension of it, Then how do your actions express duality or non-duality? As I was saying yesterday... When you do each thing, you have a sense of each aspect of something you do is complete.

[31:49]

So if I change my posture right now, I... I have to raise, lift my robe up a little bit, that's complete. And I have to change this a little bit, and I do that, and then it's complete. And I actually do each thing as a little tiny step. And that would be a step. I mean, I'm sorry to sound like a kindergarten teacher. That would be a step. She's a good translator. Just to give you all permission to move if you want.

[33:01]

Okay, so each step, when you start doing that, it's just for me natural now, you have a feeling of being at rest all the time or closer to being at rest. And I don't know if I can go into it fully enough to make it clear, but when you begin to do things like that, you're changing the basis of how you exist. So this is the fundamental mode of psychological healing in Western terms that's used by Buddhism. is not to change the elements of your personality so much, or even the basis, or even the structure of your personality,

[34:06]

but change the very basis of how you perceive and act in the world which then changes the structure of your personality. So if you if you each thing you do you get in the habit of making each thing that's identifiable complete you begin to feel complete. If everything I do recognizes the wholeness, the non-duality, then I begin to feel whole. I less and less feel, oh, there's so many things I've got to do, there's so many things I've left undone, because I feel complete and whole right now.

[35:30]

Even though I have many things to do and so forth. In the sense, it's a kind of pulse you... You, on the one hand, have many things to do, but on the other hand, at the same time, you have a feeling of resting in the middle of that where you feel stopped and complete. I'm using the word stop, not in the sense of blocked, but more in the sense of resting or in Castaneda's sense of stopping the world. So, and if you practice with each action being complete and recognizing wholeness, or recognizing non-duality,

[36:54]

then you're closer to recognizing compassion. Because compassion arises the more you perceive each thing as inseparable from you. Now there's another koan of Dao Wu that I've been... thinking of presenting to you for the last few days. Now, I've given you two koans of Dao Wu, you know, is the one who's not busy, alive or dead. Those are the two. Now this, that would be another koan entirely, wouldn't it?

[38:09]

The one who's not busy, alive or dead. But that's actually what this third koan's about. It was a kind of serious joke. To say, is the one who's not busy, alive or dead, It's kind of a joke of putting the koans together, but it's actually what this third koan is about. What a good sport you are. Do you have that expression in German? Similar. An English expression earlier. Okay, Dao Wu went to Guishan, another famous Zen master, at this time was younger, said to Dao Wu, where have you been?

[39:14]

Dao Wu went to Guishan, another famous Zen master, who is younger in this case, and he asked him, where have you been? He said, I've been tending the sick. And Guishan says, so how many were there? How many people were sick? So Dawu said, there were the sick and the not sick. So Guishan says, hmm, ascetic bay, I think Daowu's, one of his names was ascetic bay or mystic bay. He says, yeah, he says, ascetic bay, you're the one who's not sick, isn't it? He's just, that's just another name for Daowu. And Dawu says, it is not a matter of sick or not sick, or it doesn't fall into the category of sick or not sick. Or the distinction sick and not sick doesn't apply.

[40:32]

Speak quickly. Speak quickly, he said to Guishan. And Guishan said, even if I'd said something, it wouldn't have any relationship. Now, he could have said, if in the earlier case about the... I'm trying to teach you a little bit of Zen language, which is a kind of meta-language that floats in and through your regular language. Much the way dreams do. Okay, now in the too busy, you should know there's one who's not busy. He could have said in a similar way, you should know there's one who is not sick.

[41:36]

But in the first, or in the first koan, he could have said, you know, the distinctions busy and not busy don't apply. Okay, that's all fairly clear, isn't it? All right. But each of these, this isn't a game in logic, it's that each of these approaches this mystery of being in a little different way. Each one is a little different entrance. The first koan emphasizes you're practicing with the sense in your daily life that no matter how much you've got to do, etc., simultaneously there's one who's not busy. So even if we're quite busy and we're in a hurry and we have to pass out the cards, if you still have the time to pass the cards and turn them to the other person,

[43:02]

In a sense, you're at that moment reflecting the presence of the one who's not busy. And in that sense, your actions are actions of great function. So the challenge of, let me just sum up what I've said so far, the challenge of Zen practice and Buddhist practice as it evolves into Zen, is to take your cosmological vision, whether it's personal or Buddhist, and your vision of existence, and if you're a Buddhist, your vision of emptiness, and compassion, and manifest them in every action.

[44:21]

So it's not something you believe or somewhere else. You keep finding in your practice the way to find it in your hand. So this flower appears from your fingertips. Okay. Well, it's already ten after almost five, and I think probably for most of you this is enough for now, and we didn't really get to the Heart Sutra. Well, I guess that Eric Eno ended the controversy about the stick.

[45:37]

He broke the controversy, you could say. I thought it was a pretty good practice. Everyone was having so much trouble with it. You put your mind on the end of the stick and reach into the other person. Eric is He came to me and apologized, which was nice of him to do. And volunteered to pay for another one being made or something. And I said, geez, in a monastery you've got about 20 extras, backup ones. So you could break two or three a day on Neil if you used that.

[46:43]

Old iron shoulders over there. Maybe we can get them. Crestone to manufacture a few for the next session. When you go back, can you make that a task to get someone to make some sticks? Maybe we get the grain running the right way. Flexible, strong wood. We could have a special one with reinforcement marked Eric's. And in this coming session, let's see,

[47:58]

Some of you are sewing or trying to sew raksus, which are the small version of Buddha's robe. And the first weekend in Heidelberg, first weekend in October in Heidelberg, isn't that right? We'll have a Friday, Saturday, Sunday seminar for those people who are taking the precepts So during those days we'll just concentrate on the precepts and practices related to them. And then probably Sunday afternoon we'll finish with the ceremony of doing the precepts together. Now, I know that a lot of you are having trouble sewing your raksu.

[49:02]

It makes assembling an automobile look simple. It's quite complicated to sew all these little things. So maybe what we'll do is Gerald and Gisela are going to come for that seminar and maybe during that time we can use some of the time to sew Roxas at that time. And I mention it because I may forget, but by the time we end Sashin Sunday, some of you have to leave early to mention it to those of you to whom it pertains. And Gerard and Gisela will also come to the September Sashin.

[50:22]

Just before that I'll have gone to Japan with a few of you and come back, then we do the September Sashin. And just for some news about Crestown, we bought a tough shed, which is a storage shed made of wood. You can just order them. They come in and they set them up in about two hours. And then we put in windows, big tall windows that open and everything and a porch and a roof that overhangs. And we insulated it with six-inch insulation, walls, ceiling, and floor.

[51:37]

So the house cost, the building cost $2,000, and the additions cost another $2,000 or $3,000. And what? Yeah, $5,000. All together, yeah. And Gerald and Gisela moved in. So they live in this little house now. And now we're trying to build another one for Steve to move in. And the way the land is, they sit down a little off the main kind of open area and they sit right in the trees. They're sort of like tree houses. All the windows look out in the trees and this big valley in the mountains. Okay, that's just a little news report. A lot of you, you know, are pretty, not so old, you're young people.

[52:38]

But a surprising number of you are rather distinguished middle-aged types. I was professionally important and all that stuff. And I was struck yesterday by if you tried to explain what we're doing to people And you said, well, you know, we eat on the floor and the waiters come in on their hands and knees and try to serve us. And usually the waiter's bottom is in your dishes or in your face, depending on... Anyway, I'm sort of struck by how humorous it is that we all sit here eating on the floor, and particularly Norbert, who gets his spot twice as big as I am, sitting in between these little dishes, you know.

[54:14]

We should send a photograph to your mother. You haven't once stepped in the middle of anybody's orioke yet. Okay, the Heart Sutra. It was, I thought, good having this translation and chanting it today at lunch. Okay, so I'd like to talk today about the Heart Sutra, and it may require talking tomorrow about it too, but we'll see. This is the, there's three days, the day and two more days, right?

[55:18]

Okay. So let's start by chanting it in German. Okay. What? Oh yes, always. Poor thing. Okay. Let's see. The Mahakanyaharamita. No, that's the wrong one. Mahaprajnaparamitahertsutra. pavalo kiteshvara bodhisattva indirti fenu asnaya paramita erkante dhathale vissandhas desinmukhi saivam uvadasa vaheslaivam o sariputra formoy shesheti dhismiti kundalaya

[56:40]

It is empty, it [...] is empty. I do not touch, I do not imagine, I do not see, I do not know, [...] You know, in the Chinese Sanskrit, the note that you have, how do you pronounce it?

[59:08]

N-I-C-H-T? Nicht. Nicht. In this is mu, which is the word for emptiness. So it actually is... is emptiness knows, emptiness ears, emptiness, etc. But because emptiness, the word for emptiness also means no. And that's in the koan, does a dog have a Buddha nature? Chow Chow says, no, no. But you can't make it perfect. Okay, now... we could say that this sutra the heart sutra is this posture and this it's this posture or practice in particular with the insight understanding that form is emptiness and emptiness is form

[60:37]

Now, this version of the Heart Sutra arises out of a practice of re-contemplating the text. And so really when you translate it, when we translate it, the ultimate authority for this translation into German is not the Sanskrit or the Chinese or the not teaching, but your experience of this sutra.

[61:40]

So, Particularly this is true of the Zen lineage. And so there's the Zen school in China, which was the definitive school, you could say, overall in China. emphasized the... was a move away from doctrinal authority to the authority of the individual. And the authority of the individual manifested through his or her realization and meditation.

[62:42]

Right. Yeah. And this emphasis on the individual was also an emphasis on the supra or meta individual of the lineage. Der Schwerpunkt auf dem Individuum bedeutet auch ein Schwerpunkt auf dem Supra- oder Meta-Individuum der Lehrlinie. I want to emphasize or point out this lineage thing is real and it's quite personal actually, quite intimate. I mean, you, there's 50 people here, as I've often said, 50 people here, and just 40 more of you link you to Buddha.

[63:49]

So in my lineage, I'm the 90th and you're the 91st. That's not many people. That's quite a close connection to the historical Buddha. So within this sort of supra-individual or meta-individual, which we are in practicing together, we realize through our own experience the Heart Sutra. Now, let me start with the title. It should actually be not just Herz Sutra, but Maha Prajnaparamita Herz, Hidraya Sutra or Herz Sutra.

[64:51]

And because the Maha Prajnaparamita is a very important part of it, and it's probably the single most important idea in Mahayana Buddhism. So this is Maha is great, and it's great in the sense that it, not that it's important, but that it covers everything. it touches everything and paramita means it's sometimes mistranslated as gone beyond because down below you have parasamgate gone beyond but I believe in the Sanskrit it's not gone beyond it's perfection so if you divide it paramita it means one thing and paramita it means another

[66:14]

And basically it's been used as both, and in fact Buddhists like to take two interpretations, sometimes differing, of the same term, and vibrate between the two definitions, never saying which one is the right one. But I think technically this means perfection. Okay, and prajna means wisdom. Wisdom is also a very elusive term in Buddhism. Illusive, hard to get hold of. It eludes you.

[67:31]

So here's the most important single term in Buddhism, and it's very hard to know what it means. It's typical of Buddhism. It's totally logical to get right to the end, and then it slips away, you know. Prajna means emptiness. Wisdom means emptiness. Wisdom means to see things as emptiness. To see things through emptiness. To always see things marked by emptiness. And it means to be able to practically... Well, okay, it's also an experience. an experience of bliss I think I'll get back I think I'll come I think I'll come back to defining prajna a little more in a moment okay so now I'd like to go back to that what I said yesterday starting out with the re

[69:09]

starting out with the fact that everything changes. And Buddhism's recognition that everything changes. Okay. And again, this means everything changes. Okay. Now, then the term arose of dependent, well, let's say first, the early Buddhism emphasizes karma and causation, cause and effect, the law of cause and effect. The Four Noble Truths start out with there is suffering, And then the second is there's a cause of suffering. And because there's a cause of suffering, you can be free of suffering.

[70:27]

And then the fourth noble truth is the Eightfold Path, the path which teaches you how to be free of the cause of suffering. Okay, so in the early Buddhism, the emphasis is on change as cause and effect. And this is a sequential thing, cause, effect. But already we've changed everything changing to two words, cause, effect. so now you have two things not just change you have cause and effect which is actually looking at change a little more closely you're looking at how change is linked together

[71:38]

And you can spend quite a bit of time in your meditation following your thoughts to the source, seeing the arising of your own karma and so forth. Did you stop there? Didn't feel like you finished. Now there's a two phrases, this is a little aside, but there's two phrases from computer technology that I think are useful. And I referred to one of them yesterday when I used the word orphan. And I'm a little wary of using computer analogies because they're a little too easy.

[73:12]

But one that I find kind of fascinating is that when you have in your computer a hard disk or a big floppy, You have what are called orphans, which are, you know, when you put information in your computer, your computer can only find it if there's a directory reference to it, if it's named in some way, so the computer can find this information. Can you explain that? Yeah, I can explain, but I don't know the equivalent expressions in German for directory. Yeah, we can discuss these things.

[74:14]

You can be as imperfect as me. So what happens is some information gets cut loose from its directory and it floats sort of in effect in electronic space and there's no way to get hold of it because it doesn't have any handle. And your disk also gets fragmented with the information that's not very well organized. And anyway, you can buy software which unfragments your hard disk and also finds the orphans and either gets rid of them or brings them back into the directory.

[75:28]

What? Compress, he says. You're trying to look for a word to translate? I don't know what you mean. Oh, it's called compressed? Oh, I see. Yeah. And it's not called that in the States. There is software where you can pick up these diskettes, this fragmentation, and then these lost information is found and thrown out, so to speak. Well, this sense of orphans is actually an experience you, I'm sure, have in Sashin. Things float up into your consciousness that you thought, was that me? Did I ever have that experience? You don't remember. Or associations and connections that you'd never made before come up. So as I've often said, you already have the history of a Buddha in you.

[76:32]

And you already have enlightenment experiences but they float out there like orphans and you don't know how to integrate them in your own experience. Okay. Okay, so going back to this term of change and then cause and effect. And then the sense came up with the observation that things are linked through a chain of cause and effect. That everything is interdependent. And everything being interdependent, then the idea came up that things didn't just arise sequentially, they also rose simultaneously. So then you got a more subtle idea of cause and effect, which was sequential.

[78:15]

You got a sense of an interrelationship that was arising simultaneously. So this sense of things arising simultaneously in relationship to each other was called interdependence, but also called dependent co-arising. So at first it was thought of as more of an ecological idea that because this is here, that this is here. Then it became more that mind arose on the object arising.

[79:16]

That mind arose on the object. When an object of perception, at the same time, mind arose. Okay, so the stick is here and as I see it, my mind arises, the object, the stick and the seeing and the object of seeing and what sees all arises simultaneously. Now you can see that in this sutra here there's no eyes, no ears, etc. and no object of mind, no object of sight, no object of... So that's where that idea comes from here. And you can see that everything is getting emptier.

[80:41]

Because when you start saying these things arise simultaneously, it gets harder to grasp them because they're dependent on each other. So Nagarjuna basically said, if everything is dependent on each other, then it's empty. If this depends on this, then in a simple ecological sense, then nothing has a permanent or inherent identity. So then Nagarjuna took this insight and applied it to everything and he removed the idea of permanence in every item he touched, looked at, analyzed. So then this idea through Nagarjuna became not just that mind arises on the object of perception,

[81:50]

Because mind and the object of perception are form. All right, is that okay? Mind and the object of perception are both in the category of form. I'm sorry to keep getting you to repeating these simple things. So, here we go again. If mind and the object of mind, which are form, arise simultaneously, and in their arising also they are empty, so emptiness arises simultaneously. So co-dependent arising or dependent co-arising which started out in an ecological sense of this arises then this arises and it started out from simple cause and effect

[83:25]

developed to being mind arising when the world appears, when form appears, and then shifts to being emptiness arises when form appears. That's okay, whatever way you said it. Okay. Now, this is a you know if you follow this it's a pretty simple idea you know when Rinzai Linji was enlightened he was one of the most

[84:38]

definitive, like Matsu, of the Zen masters. Founder of the Linji Rinzai school. His teacher, Obaku, Wong Bo, when he was enlightened, his enlightenment statement was, Obaku's teaching isn't so complicated after all. He said, oh, there's not much to my teacher's teaching after all. So this stuff is pretty simple actually. But, you know, it takes, as I, you know, look how long it took about 30 years before they padded dashboards in automobiles. Thousands of relatives of very nice people had to have their heads bashed open on dashboards before someone thought of padding the dashboard.

[85:56]

I mean, really, we human beings are quite stupid. I mean, thousands of people are getting their heads bashed in, and someone says, oh, pad the dashboard. Now, form and emptiness are not hitting you that hard. So the significance of form and emptiness take maybe centuries before you say, oh yeah, form and emptiness. Okay. Okay. So what was happening here in this development of this teaching is not just that Buddhism is developing in a development internal to Buddhism itself.

[87:19]

But the sense of the world that people lived in was changing, the cosmology was changing. And Buddhism One of the geniuses or territories of Buddhism is to make the view you have of the world your identity and your practice. If you study Western philosophy, Mills and Hobbes, for instance, were concerned with is the person born inherently good or is the person born evil and things like that. I mean, these philosophies are quite simple when you get down to the base where they turn. So here you have in Buddhism this idea which Nagarjuna brought in with real force into Buddhism that there's a simultaneous arising of form and emptiness.

[88:34]

Okay. Now, let's say right now, I'll say there's three senses of the word form here. One sense of the word form is everything is form. And just used to mean you, the world, the planets, plants, so forth. Okay. Form is also used in Buddhism to include emptiness. Mm-hmm. So you don't have, with this emphasis on form, and form including emptiness and the spiritual life, you don't have the denigration or putting down or dismissal of the body in physical things.

[89:59]

The formula form is emptiness also means your physical body, the physical world is also the spiritual world. Now, again, the genius of the Chinese in putting this sutra together and in Nagarjuna is to really see the importance of this phrase form is emptiness. Now, the Heart Sutra gives this phrase, form is emptiness, a power that Nagarjuna didn't give it, actually. They selected this phrase out and emphasized it as the mantra of this whole sutra. Okay.

[91:05]

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