And I felt pretty good in this session because of the, forgive me the word, the progress I think you guys are making. And also I enjoyed talking about some things that happened for a while, in particular that are just now the six paramitas. And though I happened on it sort of by chance through this koan, I also was trying to find koans that were clearly based on the five skandhas in the Heart Sutra. As we talked in the seminar about the lingis, the man of no rank, true man of no rank, going in and out of the portals of the face and the five aggregates, So this one, a group of records, 25, is also based on the sense of the middle way of the Mahayana and of the Heart Sutra.

[01:12]

I'll try to give you more of a feeling why that's the case. So although in some senses it was by chance and because of the seminar, also I'm speaking about it because this is the first time, I would say since I've been at Santa Fe and Colorado, that enough of you have been practicing long enough for me to talk about something. And at Santa Fe there hasn't been enough continuity of enough people, and here we're just starting and developing some continuity. And now I think Crestone is a place for sashins and sometimes coming up when you can on weekends. Santa Fe is working to give some basis for development of practice, both in Santa Fe and here. At least that's my view. Now Robert's going to be ordained.

[02:15]

We're going to be in trouble. A good kind of trouble. Next Sunday, is that right? A week from today? Well, you'll find many men and women throwing themselves at your feet between now and then saying, don't do it, take me with you. You know, it always happens. It's some sort of a psychic event in the minds of the people who try to rescue you. And maybe you'll be sending out little signals, rescue me, rescue me. I hope as many of you as possible can come down for this. Is it all right for me to invite people?

[03:16]

To witness the shunning and slaughter of the sheep. Now the shorning is only now. The slaughter comes when you do shusosem. That's really when you feel like you're leading this poor person to the slaughter. Shusosem is when you have to face, well, tasar, it was 65 people's questions to test your understanding. That lasted several hours. Usually most people did pretty well in the first hour or so, but then like a boxer, about the 15th round, you know... I'm so exhausted from one question after another. Somebody stands up and shouts, what do you think about such and such? I really don't care. But that'll come later. That's the second stage of initiation. When the monks ordain you through this ceremony. Hmm.

[04:23]

And while I think of it, I'll be doing a seminar Tuesday in Santa Fe, isn't that correct? And maybe you and Russell and Tom could think of what you might ask me at that time, if there's anything from Sasheen that you think would be pertinent. Because some of what we talked about here relates to the seminar. So if there's some aspect you'd like to see me talk about again or go into more, it would help me to think about what, from the sashin, can be brought into the seminar. Anyway, Kent is up. Okay, now, talking about the six paramitas, and yesterday I introduced it only.

[05:33]

I introduced it in the sense of just telling you sort of what it's about, some of it. And there are pretty long studies, meditations on the six paramitas, some of it's available in English. in which you can get a feeling for the many dimensions of it. But just telling you about these six parameters, which are so important, it sounds sort of like morality, you know, just an attack onto your life, because it's good to do so. But I'd like to see if I could... give you more of a sense of the vision of it, dynamic of it, as it arises in Mahayana Buddhism. So let me go back to the ribbons of the form skandha for a moment.

[06:38]

I asked you to imagine the form skandha as representing emptiness, and originally in the Abhidharma sense. But you don't need to know these distinctions, but I'll just put them in. Originally in the Abhidharma sense, and then later in the Madhyamaka sense is what I was speaking of emptiness. And we've talked about two kinds of emptiness now. One is emptiness as inherent existence, as no inherent existence, which is a kind of functional way of saying, a more subtle way of saying everything's relative or interdependent. And emptiness as space. And there are actually quite a few kinds of emptiness. think there can be one kind of emptiness if it's empty, but actually there's quite a few kinds of emptiness. But it's as I pointed out to you some of this mathematician friend of mine in Belgium, he gave you 26 kinds of zero.

[07:49]

There's only one kind of zero, it's actually the absence of something, I think, one plus Zero is one. Nothing's there. I think when you say two times zero is zero, that's doing something. It's no longer just the absence. It's doing something. So that's an emptiness doing something. So there's, although the 20, I think the 26 kinds of zeros, she's only found one. All 25 of them do something. And emptiness is right. One sense of emptiness is space. This emptiness of no inherent existence is actually in its realization is a kind of bath, cleansing process. You're sort of bathing yourself in it. It's actually a purification process. So it's doing something.

[08:59]

Okay. Okay. So I look at the form skanda in terms of no inherent existence in a particular way. The other day, talking about it in terms of chakras, acupuncture points, and ma, and the sense of space-time and continuity of events, the phenomenal world. OK. Now I want to speak about it from the point of view of how the six paramitas arrive as a basic practice of morality and the practice of compassion, loving-kindness, and as really the way in which we express and strengthen our vow to realize Buddhahood with each person.

[10:02]

Now, we almost have two religions here in Buddhism, one in which Buddha is the center and another which emptiness is the center. And in most of our practice, I mean, the historical Buddha and Zen could virtually be ignored. And Buddha, per se, could almost be ignored in one way, looking at that, in which what fills the spot of Buddha is emptiness or the absolute, and the absolute as something that in itself is not absolute but does things. OK. So maybe next Sesshin in December I'll have to bring Buddha in. So this could be the emptiness Sesshin. December Sesshin could be the Buddha Sesshin. But the Sesshin, there's several weeks between now and then, so who knows? But the Buddha will appear in December. But this Buddha's enlightenment day, practice, so maybe it will be again.

[11:10]

Okay. So how we get to this point is that, as I've said, these Indian folks in the centuries before our so-called Common Era, sort of Livermore Lab, Max Planck Institute kind of way, got all the smartest people together and over some centuries tried to find the building blocks of reality. inside rather than outside. Instead of using cyclotrons, they used meditation. And it really was an effort, like our scientific establishment has said, to find what reality is. Okay, so what happened is they got, the Abhidharma got kind of stuck in its own mud, but it's the basis of it, and the first sort of rule of working the emptiness was but they get it down to some kind of discrete dharmas or moments, which all they were, they were just flashings.

[12:29]

They each had a mark, each had an own being. And so what the Heart Sutra comes along and does, both as Prajnaparamita teaching and as Tantric teaching, The Heart Sutra comes along and says, and the whole question part being literature comes along and says, there's no mark and there's no own being. So that's why the Heart Sutra says, the five skandhas in their own being, which I think is pa-pa-pa, there's no own being to the five skandhas. An own being means no inherent existence. Okay, are you with me on that? So what Nagarjuna showed is that logically, now this sounds awfully philosophical maybe to you, but it's really important and really allows you to practice with much more directness if you get it. But what Nagarjuna basically said is you cannot grasp any of these so-called discrete elements at any level of simplicity or organization

[13:42]

etymologically, linguistically, or logically. You can't get hold of them. You can't grasp them through your experience. You can't grasp them through meditation. In fact, they are empty. They're empty, empty even of emptiness. So what you got? You get a lot of no bubbles, bubbles of emptiness. And you can't determine they don't exist in the past, they don't exist in the present, and in the present you can't grasp. This is the Diamond Sutra, the Heart Sutra, etc. Okay, so what's this mean? Doesn't mean the world doesn't exist. It obviously exists. We exist, the world exists. It means you can't grasp it with language, logic, or a usual experience. Now the middle way is often understood in some kind of philosophical sense, the avoidance of extremes.

[14:48]

But really the middle way means suchness and emptiness. The middle way means you can't grasp it in yes, you can't grasp it in no, you can't grasp it in negation, you can't grasp it in establishing it as something permanent. You can't grasp it as existence. You can't grasp it as non-existence. So the Heart Sutra says no existence, no non-existence, etc. You simply can't grasp it in those categories. I think Western logic is based on the excluded middle. It's either this or that. Mahayana is the included middle. You can't get hold of anything in yes or no or existence or non-existence. Okay, it means that reality is essentially indeterminate. So your first practice, you know, is like peeling the names off it.

[15:50]

And that takes a little while to do, see, because normally we, as someone mentioned, you immediately associate a name with things. And after a while you can get to, you don't name it, but you still associate a kind of object with, you associate some kind of reality with that. Now, what kind of reality? So now this koan starts out the Blue Cliff Records number 25 with, if you stick to a fixed position, you fall into a poison sea. Remember that one? A fixed position means to give these dharma bubbles a mark, to say they have some inherent reality. If you take away the mark, you've got nothing but, you know, kind of bubbles. Maybe we should have a big hot tub. Cafe Latte.

[16:57]

See, this is a bit cranky. Okay. So, it's a little bit like you are faced on each moment with a blank canvas. Except that this blank canvas has a lot sketched in. Because as Benjamin Warsh and many others have shown, as soon as you think, your language is already telling you. As soon as you perceive anything that has gone through your system, it's already late. It's already in the past. By the time I see Mark, my mind is going to get all kinds of associations going and say, oh yeah, Mark with shiny glasses. But that's already in the past because Mark's moved ahead of that. Or whatever Mark is without Mark. Mark's working on it.

[18:02]

Mark my words. But don't give up Mark until we like Mark. So. So on this canvas, there's already quite a bit sketched in. Your language sketches and your habits of thinking sketched in. The culture we are in has sketched in this room. But still, a lot more of it's blank than we think. And probably some of you have had the experience of when I talk about something or when you read a poem You don't get it logically. You don't remember quite what's said, but you have a feeling of understanding. I mean, I can ask some of you what I said, I can actually... But I felt I understood.

[19:15]

That feeling is probably quite true. That feeling is the middle way. In other words, you've understood something that your eyes and logical thinking and ordinary senses haven't caught, but you feel in the so-called excluded middle, something's been included. Okay, now what you're doing when you practice Zen is you're more and more getting your understanding in this way rather than in this other way. And you begin to trust it. And if I'm a good teacher sometimes, I'll be talking to the excluded middle. I won't be talking to either end point. I may start out talking to this end point and switch to this end point. Basically, I'm trying to talk to the middle. And the middle doesn't mean in between. The middle means the indeterminate reality that's being captured each moment can't really be grasped, captured and not go up.

[20:19]

So you've got a blank canvas with some sort of sketch on it. It's not entirely filled in. And as I understand the way the brain works, which, you know, I don't know too much about it, but that I think while the brain has lots of pathways, synaptic connections that are already to the world, et cetera, it is a very fluid thing, the brain. And I think that brain research indicates that a simple conversation between two people can actually change the way the brain is configured. It will create new synaptical connections and strengthen others. So this is dangerous, this stuff we're doing here. You're changing each other's brains. No, and I think it's true. Not only if you practice zazen and you bring the five skandhas and keep them in view into the way you perceive, you start changing synaptical connections all over the place. You're actually changing the way you're configuring.

[21:29]

And any strong, I think some of you may have the experience that at certain points in a lecture, somehow you almost fall asleep at certain points. It's almost always points where if you stayed awake, you'd be jolted by what you've heard. You kind of tune out a little bit for a moment. And it's a kind of sleepiness that both protects you, protects the way the structure is, and also allows it to get in past the structure. So the sleepiness works both ways. Or the moments you sort of tune out. So a good koan or a sutra allows you to read it and freely understand it. But a lot of it you tune out. You come back six months later, you find all kinds of other things to slip by.

[22:34]

So we can say in this canvas, that there's what's sketched in on the surface, which isn't complete. Then we could say if we took Jung's idea that there's a collective unconscious, which I'm not sure I agree with, but to some extent it's true, a collective unconscious under the repressed unconscious. Freud says we've got our conscious mind, and there's repressed material. that you that you was once conscious or once went through the conscious system and Freud Jung says there's stuff in the unconscious enfolded and encoded in the unconscious which has never been conscious for you it's never gone through your system it's kind of built into you through your culture and your life and to some extent that's true but in any case whether you look at it that way or you look at it in the sense of the laya vishnaya of the

[23:46]

like the Tara Sutra. There are other pictures on the canvas which are quite faint, or you barely see. Ever noticed how you, on a page of paper, if you looked up at the print, you could see rivers of space running through the type, all kinds of rivers of space. Okay, so you've got this canvas with several, the main sketch and other sketches real faint. The question is, what do you bring to? If you're practicing Buddhism, you're trying to deconstruct your ordinary self and put it back together again. You need a strong self. but you're also beginning to have experiences of no-self and non-self.

[24:49]

No-self, the absence of self. Non-self is a way of functioning which isn't through the self, but is a way of functioning that is a kind of non-self functioning. No-self would be not functioning. Absence or samyate, samadhi. These are all territories you've tasted in Zazen, and most often you don't know you've tasted, but you've tasted. More practice just makes it clearer. Some of these things, maybe no-self or non-self, are real faintly drawn on the canvas. And if you practice, you begin to see them. Oh, yeah. You begin to see, that's the word I like to use a lot, another topography. You start out with a map based on automobiles. And then you find a map based on walking. That's a different map than a car map.

[25:51]

Then you begin to find out a map of just sitting, where the whole landscape is moving through you. OK. So what do you bring to this canvas? You don't want to bring ordinary self. But of course, you're always bringing ordinary self. Nagarjuna says there's two worlds or two truths. One is relative truths or provisional reality and one is the absolute reality. Provisional reality is acting as if things exist and the other is acting knowing they don't exist in any usual way. Now, You learn to switch back and forth between those two. That's the relative and the absolute, and that's the teaching of the five ranks in our lineage, of Tosat's, Dungsan's five ranks, which are taught to you particularly at transmission time.

[27:03]

Okay, now Zen usually or often proposes a third world or reality, an imaginary reality, a relative reality, and an absolute reality. The imaginary reality is just really when you believe the relative is true. And that's different than when you see the relative as relative. In other words, when you see reality as provisionally true, you act in it differently when you see provisionally reality as true. It's, you know, sometimes it's also called misplaced concreteness. You make concrete what isn't. Are you with me, more or less? Sorry. Okay. Also, maybe how is that different from... delusion and imagining would be the same, is that you understand there's the relative world and the absolute world.

[28:13]

But the relative world is understood as relative, provisionally true. When you think that provisional true is actually true, it's called imaginary. So the imaginary world is you don't know about the absolute. The relative world knows about the absolute. So there's three worlds that you're always actually playing. Sometimes you're caught in the imaginary world, as you well know in Zaza. Sometimes you can feel you think it's all quite real and you're upset and reacting to it. And sometimes it's your calmer and you can see it's provisional and relative and you have a different kind of sense of letting it in. And once you see it as relative, you can let much more of your previously imaginary world in. Because in the imaginary, then you're into repression and protecting and getting rid of some stuff. But as soon as you see it's relative... And you can sit without moving so you know you don't have to act on whatever comes up.

[29:17]

The whole history of humankind can come up. You know, everything human beings have done from the worst to the best is there. So you're imagining reality is much narrower. Okay. Should we have a pause or a regression? Is that right? That's nothing I've said. It's complicated. At least I tried to make it simple. What about diluting it? But there's a lot of stuff. But basically we're just talking about bubbles, right? This is the bubble bath lecture. Purifying bubble bath lecture. Dharma boom boom. Okay. So, now, how do you know this gate between the relative and the absolute?

[30:29]

How do you work this gate? Okay? Sometimes you see the world as provisional and relative. Sometimes you see it as absolute. What is the great formula in Buddhism for that? One of the great formulas is form and emptiness, right? The other great formula is compassion and wisdom. And the unity of compassion and wisdom is at this gate between relative and absolute. And the five ranks again are just a complicated version of this gate. A more subtle version of this gate. Okay, now you want to see it as relative Because that's the realm in which most people live, and that's compassion to see it as relative. Because most of us live in that realm. So what all Buddhism is based on, not the idea of self, that that's a provisional and necessary reality, but it's based on the vow to benefit all sentient beings. That's the basis of all practice.

[31:32]

The vow to enlighten each person in me. The vow to give the dharma to each person in me. The vow to make clear this magical world we live in to every person in me. That's where Buddha is at, really. How is that expressed? How do you create that in yourself? Well, this is kind of like simple teaching, but it's based on a lot of practice. The next step in activating this Bao is to develop, there's the Eightfold Path and all that stuff, the Five Scandals, but it's to develop, in this particular sense I'm speaking now, the four boundless abidings. They are friendliness, compassion, equanimity, sympathetic joy.

[32:38]

That means you attempt to develop loving kindness. And there's practices for developing loving kindness or friendliness. You just practice friendliness. And it doesn't mean friendliness with each other. That's the hardest part. You start out with babies. Friendliness with babies is easy. Then you imagine each person, that they were once a baby, and maybe I can. It's actually, it's actually that. And you practice for me this with dogs. Plants and stones and caterpillars you'd find on the stairs. I found a caterpillar on my stair. First time that was dead, right? It wouldn't move. And then I came back upstairs later and I found it come down three steps. Still looked dead, but it didn't come down three steps with my help. So I picked it up and took it outdoors. Practiced a little friendliness. Okay. Loving, kindness, and friendliness. You start practicing.

[33:40]

Again, this on our friend sitting up there on the altar was a great living example of friendliness. Synthetic Jewelry. So you take joy, sympathetic, empathetic joy, in other people's successes. You're not into comparison. This is not good, isn't she? But we do that sometimes. Basically, you're trying to develop sympathetic joy. And as Christiana brought up, what is compassion? You're trying to develop compassion, which means to feel with others as if they were yourself. And the Heart Sutra is also teaching not emptiness, but compassion. It's the Heart Sutra. It's to relieve suffering. So it's about emptiness and compassion. So the Heart Sutra is this unity of compassion and emptiness. And equanimity.

[34:45]

Equanimity means to be able to see things evenly without preference. As the teaching of the Third Patriarch starts out, If you discriminate, enlightenment is easy, but if you discriminate the tiniest bit, you're in suffering. Yeah? The great way is not difficult. Just avoid picking and choosing. That's the usual translation. The great way is not difficult. Just avoid picking and choosing. When you can avoid picking and choosing, you begin, little by little, to develop equanimity. And you can practice that in simple ways. Go to any movie. Really. And then after the movie, don't sit there. Just sit up. Oh, yeah. Try to, when you do things to people, just for one year, say.

[35:51]

There's always a good length of time. Try not to criticize anything for one year. And most of the criticism we do is in our mind. No one even knows about it. All we see is little furrows on your brow and heat coming out. So certain stiffness in your shoulders. So you practice these four boundless, and they're called boundless abiding. Boundless because there's no end to it. You can get in this and you start out a little bit, and there's no end to these four boundless abidings, and you can abide in them. The rest realm of sympathetic joy, this realm of equanimity. this realm, loving-kindness or friendliness, this compassion, this practice of seeing each thing as part of you.

[37:01]

Okay. The six paramitas really come out of the vow and these four boundless abidings. So you have this blank canvas with a few things sketched in. And so you have each moment, each of your moments, whatever there is, each moment for you that comes up. You give it away. You give it emptiness. And it means, and you carry out, you're free with giving things, you're friendly, you give friendliness, you give the Dharma, whatever. But the basic thing for you is this flashing of reality into existence, out of utter darkness, as the Krishna says. This momentary flashing of reality into existence, you give it away.

[38:09]

You give your breath away. You give yourself away in your breath. When you bow, our practice in bowing is you plunge into the bow and just give yourself away in the bow. You have that feeling. Second one, manners or conduct, also means everything can draw out of manners and conduct, but the level which I'm talking about is you give each one of these bubbles form. Give it form. Like when you're chanting, you say each syllable precisely to just give this moment of chanting form. Or each thing you do, you get off the cushion, stand up, you stand, you come to stand. You stand for it. then you go to pass out the sutra cards.

[39:13]

When you pass out the sutra cards, you're giving the dharma, you're giving form for a moment. So the first one is giving emptiness, the second one is giving form. And you can explore on your own how to do this. You can explore on your own how when you give form, you give it with equanimity. You give it with loving-kindness. You give it with friendliness, sympathetic joy. You can actually begin to slow your perceptual world down enough that you can feel a little taste of sympathetic joy as you give some of this. Now, none of us are perfect at this. Some of us, most of us have barely started. But that's why it's called boundless. Just keep doing it. And it's the further strengthening and development, expression of the vow to realize emptiness and enlightenment with each person.

[40:20]

With each thing, with each birdsong, each look at the mountain, with each making of a salad. You're giving emptiness, you're giving form. And the third is patience, which I would say in the context I'm speaking now means acceptance. You accept and you listen. This is particularly important because if you want to listen to my lecture or listen to a koan or the teaching or the teaching of Insentient Being, you have to listen at a speed other than the speed of logic in my mind. With the speed of logic and language, you'll catch things like you see the landscape from a car. But you want to see the landscape from walking or sitting. And that's the middle of suchness or thusness. And here we're back to Sukhiroshi's scroll. Thusness, suchness is the body of the whole world. This is the middle way.

[41:23]

It's neither yes, no, it's not existence, it's not anything. And that's one reason why that calligraphy is so great, because it's barely there. And it's light in one part, dark in another. And you're giving it reality. You're giving this unpainted canvas reality on each moment. What reality are you giving it? Buddhism says, out of compassion, you give it these forms of joy, friendliness, and so forth, and emptiness. This is a good practice for you. You can do this anytime. This is basic Buddhist practice that comes out of zazen, but is found on each moment. So acceptance also means endurance. One of the great ways to learn endurance, two main ways are, sorry to tell you, pain, E-A-I-N, and having a real enemy who makes you see that there's little justice in the world.

[42:34]

You have to wait for justice. And in the Buddhist world, it doesn't help to kill and eliminate people. So you just have to accept you can't kill all the unjust people. That's not, humankind is not by elimination. Well, that's the view of totalitarian government. They're based on humankind, but a part of humankind, and eliminating the parts that aren't human enough. All modern forms of government are based on the idea of humankind. sometimes in a horrible way. So Buddhism, we have to accept that the world, for some reason this world, this relative world, absolutely. So you have to develop patience to endure this. You should be idealistic maybe, and practical. It requires endurance. And you really only learn true patience through having a terrible enemy.

[43:38]

So there's lots of teachings on you're very lucky if you have a terrible enemy. Nemesis. Anyway, it's a hard lesson. OK. So the third is, first is you give emptiness, second is you give form, the third is you accept. This is where karma comes in, the realm of karma. So on each moment, you accept and listen and wait. You don't rush into it. It's this way, it's that way, etc. Give emptiness. Give form. Accept. Listen. This is on a big scale. As your practice gets more intuitive, it's on a tinier and tinier scale.

[44:41]

A more powerful scale. Fourth, It's out of your compassion you give energy to each thing. It's not just form, you give energy. You find ways to do things with energy. And that really characterizes Zen practice. Everything you do with energy. Even if we chant softly, there's a feeling of energy and power. You do things with energy. And this energy is mainly seen to come from point of view of sashin is to really get yourself at the edge, past the edge of energy. Your second, third, fifty-seventh wing of energy. Okay. Energy. That's a gift to you. Do each thing with energy. It's a gift to others.

[45:42]

Now, As you've seen in most of these lists, like the Eightfold Path, they always end with meditation and wisdom. Now they end in meditation and wisdom because the main gift is the gift of Dharma and the only way you can give Dharma is to realize it yourself. You can't give the Dharma to anybody if you don't realize the Dharma. So all these lists, whether it's aimed at helping people, it's really aimed at helping you realize the mind. So the six paramitas end with meditation and wisdom. So you're doing these things, but you're really creating a basis in that, giving form, giving it, enduring, waiting, listening. You're creating the ground for your own realizations. And each of these things, it's quite subtle, these things, as usual in Buddhist lists, exist independently and also exist in relationship to each other.

[46:50]

So... Manners or conduct or giving form depends on first generosity, the spirit of generosity and giving emptiness. And accepting, enduring, really depends on energy, which is the next one. So each one anticipates the next one and needs the next one on both sides. So when you practice number three, you can see you really can't practice until you do number four. You can't do number four until you do number three. When you do number four, you see that you need number five. And so it's a very powerful... These guys are really great to think about and to practice. I mean, I'm really... I can't tell you how grateful I am. I mean, it took a lot of people a long time to come up with this. And out of deep love for us here, like that altar table, they knew we were coming.

[47:56]

So I'm out. And Dogen specifically wrote down his teachings because he said, in this age, I won't find many people who understand it. And we're always in practice trying to find someone we can share this with. Okay. So, energy. And then the next is meditative stabilization or meditation practice. but really probably more meditation as one pointedness or the arising of mind. Now, what am I saying here? All of these depend on meditative stabilization because you can't see movement if you're moving. or you see much less movement if you're moving. It's like if you're in a train yard. Maybe in Europe and Japan, you have more experience with trains. In America, we're almost never on trains. If we're on a train, there aren't 30 trains beside, but if you come into Tokyo Station,

[49:00]

There are trains all over the joint, above you and below you and around you, and they're all moving at different speeds. And some of them you can't tell if they're moving or not because they're just moving just like you. You don't see all the movement because so many of the trains are moving. You can't figure out whether you're moving or they're moving. What's happening? The more you come to a still mind... the more you're able to see and participate in this moving bubble world. So basic meditative stabilization is required for this enactment of the vow. So the ground of the vow and this doorway gate of compassion, wisdom, is meditative stabilization, which then allows you to do something like this practice of the six paramitas. So this paramita of meditation is a little different than basic meditative stabilization.

[50:06]

Does that make sense? Because it's based on meditative stabilization. So this is to bring one-pointedness to each dharma or each maha. Or more precisely, we could say to bring a stopped quality. to bring silence, palpable silence. Now, I don't know if you've noticed that there is, when we're doing chanting and we're about ready to start the service, ceremony, there will be a moment like it is really still in this room. There's a kind of thing, and things quiet down. And if you let that moment go by, then, I don't know, what happens? Birds start to sing. There's always a moment really still. And even to notice those moments partly depends on meditation. And you can begin to notice those moments more and more.

[51:09]

Yes? He said, You could... Sure. Another taste of emptiness. Silence is a kind of emptiness. Okay. So also, we can say meditation is a rising mind. In other words, you can feel suchness as mind arising on each. So at this point, your gift of the six paramitas that you're bringing to this unpainted canvas that you're bringing to each of your perceptual moments, that you're bringing to each person that you're with, and bringing to yourself, is, you know, you're giving emptiness, you're giving form, you're accepting, enduring, waiting, listening. All this is going on at once. Sometimes more emphasis, isn't it?

[52:10]

Accepting, enduring, waiting, listening. Bringing energy to it, bringing a stopped all. The rising of mind is there. And then the next is wisdom or discriminating awareness. The ability to take all of this and see precisely into it. It means suddenly you're able, because of the meditation, because of these attitudes, because of your vow, because of the absolute relative compassion-wisdom gate, you can now bring this to how you act and exist with each person. And that also means when you can do that, you've culminated in a wisdom. And the person or the moment you're involved is culminated in wisdom. So the six paramitas are an essential practice of Mahayana Buddhism based on emptiness and such.

[53:15]

Okay, finished. Is that okay? Does that make sense? I mean, I tried to present it so you could practice it. So you can have something to do with your time when you're bored. Or when you wonder, am I a Buddhist or not? Oh, yeah. So you can begin to sense. You know, every time you don't sleep like a baby, you can wonder, why didn't I sleep like a baby? Every time you're standing somewhere doing something, you have a little minute of anxiety. What's that? Unlimited joy. Sympathetic joy. Being friendly with yourself. Be friendly with the moment you're in. Waiting for the moment, not deciding what it is. Waiting. Giving emptiness to it. Giving to it. Being there with energy.

[54:23]

Being there with a stopped quality. being there with discriminating awareness. These are the practices of six paramitas which bring the vow, compassion, and emptiness together in your activity. Now there's other things I could say, but and I'd really dearly hope you could practice it. May our intention equally penetrate the real sense. May I talk with us this way.

[55:26]

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