I love to teach the truth and love to take notice of it. Good evening. It's nice to be back again. It feels very natural. We had a good sashay and breakfast, and that rain the whole time. And it was over Saturday. So I had one day, and then I came down yesterday. So this is a little bit like an extension. It feels okay to me. I want to continue talking about the Heart Sutra to finish it up. So I don't want this to have a feeling of a class. So I try not to be too emotional.

[01:12]

We left off at the Four Truths. No suffering, no origination of suffering, no stopping, no path. As we know, the Four Noble Truths, this is Buddha's first sermon. After he was enlightened and his friends asked him to do some teaching, he gave this talk, which included the Four Noble Truths. That's been the central doctrine of Buddhism ever since. The first truth is that separate beings are subject to suffering, or ill, or dis-ease, and unsatisfactoriness, many different words you can use.

[02:51]

And the cause is delusion, desire, craving, and there is a way out. And the way out is by a decrease of craving, desire, delusion. And the way to deal with that, or the way to manifest it, is by practicing the Eightfold Path. That's the fourth one. So the first two state the problem. And the second two state the cure. There's a problem and a cure.

[03:54]

So the problem is, the problem and its cause. The problem is that even though we have good times and bad times, even though we experience suffering and joy, no matter what world we're in or what our present disposition is, within it is the seed of suffering. Because even if we're in one of the wonderful heavens, where we never think of anything bad happening. Still, because we're in that particular realm through desire, eventually it comes to an end.

[05:07]

And when it comes to an end, it changes. then the seed of suffering sprouts. So even good realms, joyful realms, have the seed of suffering within them, even though they're not manifest at the time. So according to Buddhadharma, Suffering is not just when you're not feeling good, or not just when things are not going well, but it's underlying the whole thing, because everything changes. So we used to say, We always said, in our four vows, we always said, desires are inexhaustible.

[06:18]

I vowed to end them. And now we say delusions, which I always thought was a pretty good idea, because I didn't like to think of desires as necessarily always being so bad. And so I asked Suzuki Roshi about it in the lecture. I said, why can't we say delusions? Doesn't that seem more appropriate than desires? He said, no, desires. That's right. He was really stuck on that. But we've changed it to delusions. Delusions seems to cover more territory. So I don't know. That's right. So we have the symptom and the cause. We have the disease, the dis-ease, and the cause.

[07:18]

Desire, delusion, craving. Craving is pretty good because actually desire has several levels. There's desire to eat, desire to sleep, desire to have reasonable things. So there's the realm of reasonable desire, which we can't really do without. And then there's the realm of inordinate desire, which is called craving, or grasping, or grasping and then craving. And then obsession and all of its ramifications, which lead to attachment. And attachment, of course, is where pain comes in. So then he says, in order to get out of that, in order to get free of that, we need to cut off the root of inordinate desire and follow the Eightfold Path.

[08:42]

And so the Heart Seeker comes along and says, there's no Suffering. In emptiness. In emptiness there's no suffering. No cause of suffering. No release from suffering. And no path. That's pretty radical. Pretty radical thing to say, especially when you feel a lot of suffering in your life. and say there's no suffering. But it doesn't mean that there's no suffering, even though Sutra says no suffering. It doesn't mean that you don't suffer. It means that the suffering that you suffer has no inherent nature. and the passions that you have have no inherent nature.

[09:51]

And the release, because the suffering has no... because the passion has no inherent nature, neither does the release. They're just two sides of the coin. And the Mahayana said that although the Eightfold Path is very helpful in our mundane life to keep us out of trouble, it doesn't address the question of emptiness. doesn't address the higher understanding. So, the Mahayanists kind of abandoned the Eightfold Path as the leading path, and there became a whole chronology of Mahayana paths

[11:14]

to liberation. So the Eightfold Path is kind of left as an archaic, wonderful but archaic, you know, like the Buddhism. And the Mahayana developed all kinds of super mundane paths. But it's not to say that this is not correct Buddhism or the right way. It's not being criticized as something wrong, but the authors of this sutra are taking a radical approach from the point of view of emptiness. and nothing in Buddhism stands up under it.

[12:19]

So, the first of the Eightfold Path, the first path of the Eightfold Path is Right Understanding, the Right View. And the old sense of Right View was the fact of suffering. To have right understanding and right view means that you understood the fact of suffering, that everything is subject to suffering, all beings. And right view, from the Mahayana point of view, from the Sutra's point of view, is that all things are emptiness. So suffering, emptiness, takes the place of suffering. According to the commentaries, the Four Noble Truths was the practice of the Shravakas, the Arhats.

[13:48]

And their view was because desire, their de-suffering, that the thing to do was to eliminate desire. Logically. What you do is eliminate the cause of suffering. Now, if you want to eliminate the cause of suffering, you eliminate desire. So what the Shavakas did was to deny life. It was a kind of radical reductionism. If you reduce life down to nothing, breathing, eating, and never getting the passions up below a certain decibel, that you wouldn't create the conditions for suffering.

[15:12]

But the problem with that kind of reductionism is that it's not the way people really like to live their lives. In other words, some people can do that. Whether or not it's worth it is questionable. But if that's the way people are supposed to live their lives, What is all this passion and desire and human feeling and what we call, you know, what we actually experience of ourself? What does all that mean? Where does it come from? And what's it about? So, the Mahayanaists were a little suspicious of the Arhat's extreme way of reducing life to a kind of very rarefied existence.

[16:38]

Their understanding in this sutra is that Life is subject to suffering, but suffering has no real root, even though karma causes suffering, which we actually feel and experience, and it's pretty hard to get out of the conditioning of karma. but in its real sense it has no root. And instead of trying to eliminate passions or to eliminate desire, to actually realize that

[18:11]

desire being empty in its own self. Desire itself was emptiness. Desires are empty. Rather than eliminating them, to see them as empty, to see them and in their true nature. And Japanese have developed this kind of understanding. Japanese Buddhism, Japanese Zen, has developed this understanding of emptiness of desire.

[19:15]

You know, Japanese people are different. We see each other differently than Americans see each other. We're very puritanical people. And when we see somebody doing something wrong, we say, you did something wrong. You're bad. But when they see somebody doing something wrong, we say, That's what you're like. That's his nature. It's like that. I don't know why exactly, but... So, where we would get rid of somebody that we feel is troublesome, they would just move them around to some place where it makes sense for them to be.

[20:16]

So we're very judgmental because we have a sense of right and wrong, a strong sense of right and wrong, whereas Now, I'm not saying this for all Japanese people. When I say this, please don't quote me as covering everybody in the world in Japan, but there's this tendency to see people as they are and not to judge so much. It's not that there's nothing right or wrong, good and bad, but in the end, Not to try to change somebody so much as to understand them and accept the way people really are. And not to try to make people aesthetic or get rid of something that they can't get rid of.

[21:27]

Each person realizing what their makeup is, can offer their passions to emptiness. You know, if you are someone who... In our practice, you know, we have a lot of problems because we're not... we don't expect that people will become passionless or without desire. It's an interesting thing about Zinssiner.

[22:31]

It's a Buddhist practice place. But we don't try to make people conform to some certain standard of desire. There's some feeling that because of the Dharma, because we're all practicing Dharma, that we respect each other and ourselves. And we try to do our best to not make a problem for others. And that helps us to look at ourself. It helps us to see ourself and what the problems that our desire gives us are. Because mostly it's a problem for ourself. You know, the Japanese people, the Japanese Buddhist community, think that Zentsen is a very libertarian place.

[23:52]

They criticize us because We don't have very much control over ourselves. But they don't criticize us for who we are. Which I think is pretty interesting. They don't say, oh, you're bad people, or something like that. But they're very concerned that we don't have more... not that we're not ascetic, but that we don't have some kind of control over ourselves, that we don't have some standards for behavior. But I think sometimes what they don't see is that people are really struggling with themselves through practice.

[25:01]

We all try to practice, do good practice, but when we try to do good practice we come up against ourselves, some obstacle which is caused by our desire and our passions and our karma. And facing that, the problems that we have, is actually a... We're not trying to get rid of something, but just dealing with what we have. is how we practice no suffering.

[26:13]

Even though there's suffering, we're not trying to get rid of the cause of suffering. Or we're not trying to reduce it to something. because the reason why we don't try to get rid of it is because we can't. Each one of us is not stuck, but each one of us has what we have. So, What rises out of that is compassion, because we each see our own problem, our own suffering, and we can see it in each other. And the suffering that we see in each other helps us to forget our own suffering.

[27:29]

You know, we see people who are just into their own suffering, very much attached to their own suffering. But when we can see other people suffering and make some effort to help other people's suffering, not trying to get rid of it, but just somehow being there for other people. We can forget a lot of our own suffering. Our own suffering kind of disappears in the sharing with other people. When we try to eliminate all the causes of suffering, it becomes kind of cold.

[28:48]

We become very cold. But just going along with our own, dealing with our own passionate problems, and seeing the same in everyone, compassion just rises naturally. And somehow our own problems get taken care of in the process. Sometimes we think that we're suffering more than anybody else. And sometimes we are.

[29:52]

Sometimes we are. But the more we mature in our practice, the more we can let go of our own Not to be so attached to our own problem. Take on someone else's problem. Listen to other people. Somehow our problem becomes less. So, this is kind of how we turn it over. turn over our difficulties, turn over our problems to emptiness, because we can drop it, actually. A lot of things we can just not dwell on so much, because they really have no root. We take our lives pretty seriously.

[31:00]

And life is serious. But it's also playful. I was thinking about in Seching last week. It was the last day of Seching, and I realized that on the last day, everybody starts thinking, well, pretty soon it's going to be over. Pretty soon it's going to be over. And so people start talking, and their mind shifts. So I have to remind people and say, even though you think that she's going to be over pretty soon, it's not over yet.

[32:07]

And it's just like our life. You think, well, pretty soon my life's going to be over. Same thing. What are you going to do? Well, sometimes we have to be very serious. Sometimes it will be very light. Sometimes it will be kind of light about it. If, you know, you said in 10 minutes we're all going to die, how do you feel? So, you might as well feel relieved now.

[33:23]

And then, just think about all the wonderful days you'll have left. But Eightfold Path is quite wonderful teaching. And even though Sutra says no suffering, no origination of suffering, no stopping in the path, that should not stop us from appreciating the form of the Truth. It's the basis of Buddhism.

[34:39]

And not only Buddhism, it's an ancient teaching in India which was realized by many people before Buddhism. I think that in the Heart Sutra, when the Heart Sutra talks about know this and know that, negates everything. I think the hardest thing, the most difficult thing to negate is the Four Noble Truths.

[35:41]

Nobody talks about it. If you read any of the commentaries, anybody skips over that one. Most people skip over them, or they describe it in such intellectual terms that it's hard to understand. It doesn't make too much sense. So, Four Noble Truths stands up even against the criticism of the Heart Sutra. Even though it says suffering is just empty, that maybe it is true. But what we feel is also true.

[36:49]

Suzuki Roshi said, if you practice Zazen, you will understand the nature of suffering. So we can talk about Four Noble Truths forever, but right here in Zazen is where we come to understand it in its true sense. We know that attachment to pain causes suffering, and that pain and suffering are not the same. Pain is pain, and suffering is attachment. So, and the proof of emptiness is through non-attachment.

[38:46]

So, and this says she, please let's recall, and find some ease. It sounds contradictory, but work hard and find some ease. Let things come and go. Don't grasp anything. Let everything come and go freely. Don't be angry. Don't allow yourself to get angry. If you get angry, realize how much suffering your anger is causing you. I'm not telling you to get rid of your anger, but just see it for what it is.

[39:54]

Just a useless burden. So please don't get caught by anything. Don't get caught by the pleasant feelings and unpleasant feelings.

[40:50]

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