Well, good evening, everyone. I'm going to begin. There might be a few more people straggling in. Can you hear me OK? And you can see me OK. Basically, all of you are muted. And I can unmute you as we go along. I want to do a little housekeeping. First of all, Since I can't see all of you on the screen at once, what I'd like to suggest is at any time, if you have a question, that's something that I'm saying, please raise your hand in your digital hand-raising mode. Do people know how to do that? Go to your, so if you click on participants at the bottom, you should, if you click on your name, you should be able to raise your hand.

[01:15]

Is that true? Blake, what are you saying? Ellen, it doesn't seem to be true for me. If you click participants at the bottom of all the names, you'll see, at least on mine, invite, mute me, or raise hand. It's all the way at the bottom. It's all the way at the bottom, right? I can't see that because I'm the host and I don't see that. Yes, so it's all the way at the bottom. If you want to ask a question, just raise your hand and then that blue window pops up and hopefully I will see it. Calls for some multitasking. I don't see any. I don't see it. Is someone, are people seeing it? If you go to those three little dots and click on the three little dots, the top thing says, raise hand.

[02:21]

Mine doesn't. If you go to participants and at the top of the list, it says, invite, mute me. And then there's three little dots. click on those three little dots and you'll see Ray's hand. I don't see it. Then you'll have to wave. Yeah. Also, if you raise your hand physically, I will try to note that. If you're on an iPad, it's different. Right. Oh, because I'm on an iPad. Yes, but you can go to the participants and click on your name and then you'll see it, like he said, original. My name, I don't see where to click on my name. You have to go to participants at the bottom. Actually, I don't know where it is on an iPad. Participants is at the top. I'm on a MacBook. Just go to where it says Margaret Watkins as your participants, and then click on it.

[03:28]

on Margaret Watkins? Yes. It says stop video, mute my audio, pin video, rename, hide self-view. Okay, then go to the more, the three dots that are next to the participants up at the top. That's what I just did, that's what I got that. Stop video, mute my audio, pin video, rename, hide self-view. So never mind, it doesn't work for me, so I'll raise my hand. That doesn't work, just physically raise your hand. It's better for me to listen than talk anyway. I'll listen. Let's move on. Thank you. I want to encourage you. This is a class by donation. If you would like to make a donation, the suggested donation is $30 for the four session class or what you can afford. And if you go to the BCC website, you will see a tab that says donations.

[04:36]

And if you click on that, it says sits and classes. And if you click on that, you can make a donation via PayPal or you can send a check to Berkeley Zen Center at our address and just notate it for my class. Anyway, don't get overwhelmed by that detail. I don't wanna spend a lot of time on that. So let's just take a breath and begin. So this class is on an approach to Yogacara Buddhism. And I must confess that when we started studying this in the BCC priest group, I had a resistance to this system because I felt that it was being presented as a description, a very accurate model of how the mind worked.

[06:00]

and I had all kinds of quibbles with that and all kinds of arguments against, well, it's not exactly this way, it's not exactly that way. At a certain point, I feel like my resistances were just my resistances and they ebbed and I began to see the utility of this. And I hope that you will see the same thing over the over the course of the four classes, where the philosophy is endlessly complicated and that is part of what my resistance was because. I'm not characterologically drawn towards the really close philosophical thinkings of Indian Buddhism or Indian spirituality. But on the other hand, what I wanna say is that this is, I see this as essential Buddhist psychology.

[07:11]

And my inclination over the years has been to really turn towards Buddhist systems, Buddhist systems for looking at mind, Buddhist systems for looking at my suffering, Buddhist systems for looking at delusion, and to find myself interpreting Western psychological modes into Buddhist modes and using them. And I know that that's not true for everybody. It's been one of the interesting things about teaching in the Upaya Zen Center's chaplaincy programs. They have all these tools and different systems and different mnemonic devices and things like that. some people really relate to them. And my feeling, my inclination is to go back to Buddhist systems that are really rooted in the past and to find the way that they seem relevant to me.

[08:29]

And in time, that's what's really come to me with the Yogacara system. So I wanna start with a quotation that I found in Ben Connolly's book. And if you, I recommended that and we're gonna touch on that from time to time. This is the book I was recommending. Let's see here. For some reason, when I go to speaker view, I'm seeing Margaret Watkins. Margaret, can you mute yourself? Or are you muted? You are muted. Okay, never mind. Anyway, this is the book, Inside Vasubandhu's Yogacara by Ben Connolly. So here's a quotation in the book.

[09:33]

It talks about, it says, when Voramai Kabelsang, who was the first fully ordained Buddhist nun in modern Thailand, was asked how she kept the 311 bhikkhuni precepts, she said, I only keep one precept. I watch my mind. This is what we do in Zazen, and this is what I'm encouraging you to do in sort of the aggregation of this practice. It's about watching your mind, and that's step one. Step two, I would relate to two two mottos. One I have on the back bumper of my car and the other I have on a button that I wear on one of my coats.

[10:45]

On the back bumper of my car, I have a bumper sticker that says, don't believe everything you think. And I have found that to be somewhat, to be essentially universally true. And the button that I have in my hand that I couldn't find it, it's downstairs someplace, button says, I'm not who I think I am. And I find that to be universally true as well. I'm not who I think I am. And the thrust of Yogacara Buddhism is about that, is about the way we think we are someone, we think there's a validity to our views and our perceptions,

[11:57]

and we don't see that that is in any discernible way strictly true. And I think this is what Carol Paul was talking about on Saturday in her excellent talk, her talk on don't know mind. She was talking about beginning with the delusions that we think we know and looking at how it is that we think we know it. In philosophical terms, that examination, looking at how we think we know things is called epistemology. And I'm not gonna go further into that because we're not really doing a philosophical investigation. But it's like, how do we know or how do we think we know what it is we think we know?

[13:04]

So what Carol was talking about and what I will talk about is that the way we see the world is clouded by our self-centeredness, our comparing mind, the extrapolation that we make from our past experience, thinking that our past experience is somehow a measure or a predictor of what our future experience will be, and in believing what we think. For the last few weeks, Lori and I have been watching a series of YouTube videos, and I will send this out, by Professor Jay Garfield of Smith College.

[14:12]

Some of you may have read Jay Garfield's translation of Nagarjuna's Jay is a wonderful person and a brilliant scholar. One thing he says is that our primal confusion, in other words, the fundamental confusion that we have in our way of thinking and seeing things is to confuse. something we made for something we found. In other words, to think that what we found outside of ourselves is true without recognizing that actually this is something that's constructed in our mind.

[15:14]

And this is, The point of Yogachara is that the things that we see are things that we co-construct in our mind. It's not a kind of idealism in the sense that everything is a product of our mind. It's not saying that there are not things outside of us. is just saying, it's saying that we can't see the things, anything in the world, without it being filtered through our consciousness, our perception, and our mind. And this is what we're going to, this is part of what we're going to examine. Jay Garfield uses the term imputation. which means that when we see things, we impute a meaning or an interpretation to it.

[16:23]

So everything that we think we're seeing, we think it's something that we're finding. And so there's an ethical dimension to that, which calls on us to take responsibility for our own actions and perceptions. That's why this is not just an abstract issue. It's really important. So in this particular historical moment, if we think about the issues of race, I would propose, I would make the proposition that there is nothing that I know about a black person, and this would go for someone of Asian or Latino background, there's nothing that I know that has to do with their skin color.

[17:28]

Except that I see their skin color, perhaps, and even that is subjective. So I've thought about this quite a bit and I've argued with myself about whether this is true. And I finally came to the conclusion that this proposition is correct. That the things that I know about someone or that I think I know about someone and I use no provisionally, comes from a collection of information, which includes external information. It also includes my experience. It includes my prejudices. It includes things that I've been brought up with, things that I don't even know.

[18:37]

For example, lately I just digitized some oral histories from my family and they were just very quick perceptions and expressions that passed in those interviews that talked about the previous generation, how they grew up 20s and talking about their experience of black people. And they made sweeping generalizations that were not particularly positive. That was passed down to me, whether I know it consciously or not. So the things that I think I know about someone are comprised of a variety of sources, external opinions, social opinions, things that were handed down from generations.

[19:52]

And they also, the things that I know about a person, like any of you, comes from what you say and what you do. And all of those things are filtered through my senses and my mind. So this is what we will study for the next four weeks in the context of looking at what Yogacara Buddhism or the mind only school of Buddhism calls the eight consciousnesses. How do I see the world? watching my mind, how do I see things arise? How do they work according to this Buddhist psychological model? And again, I remind you that this model is a rough approximation. It's not like a full-scale model of reality.

[21:01]

It's a crude map. It's not topologically correct. And it is also the way we're gonna present it, a simplification of the labyrinthine aspects of Yogacara Buddhism. And as it's expressed in all these various texts and manifestations. When I was a boy, what I really liked to do was to, I would take things apart, machines, basically. I would sit down with a pair of pliers and screwdrivers and take these mechanical devices apart. And hopefully, sometimes, I would try to put them back together so that they worked, which sometimes worked and sometimes didn't work.

[22:03]

But what I want to do is take them apart and see how each piece fit together. And I think that this really resembles quite a bit of the Buddhist practice, and it certainly resembles Yogacara. So I want to go into some background about the history of Yogacara. And I'm also, my goal for the night is to present you with, we're going to break this up into four classes, which have to do with four realms of consciousness. And I'll explain that in a couple of minutes. and I want to get you to the first level, the first level which is your sense consciousness. But before I go into history, I want to just stop and see, do you have any questions or comments?

[23:05]

You can raise your hand digitally or manually. I am not seeing anything. Going once. Ah, Ross. Hi, thank you, Hosan. I was thinking of the story attributed to the Buddha who said, I didn't find a path of practice. I discovered something that was always there. And in thinking in your introductory remarks about Garfield's thinking around this topic of, was it always there or is it something we discovered? Could you say something about how those two aspects of discovery or presence and ubiquitousness kind of come together?

[24:14]

I would say that it's always there, that basically some of the model of what we're going to present is a part that's actually hardwired into our neurological systems, and that Yogacara and Buddhism in general offers a way of looking at that. That's what I said, it's a psychological system. We're looking at here through a Buddhist lens, rather than say, a Western psychological or neurological lens. But I think they're very, there are people who've been really looking at the resonances between those two, and finding that there's a lot of resonance. So within his time, I think that the Buddha and those who are subsequently Nagarjuna, Vasubandhu, were very acute psychologists of the human condition.

[25:15]

Thank you. Linda? Got on mute. Yeah, got it. Okay. Hi. So I was wondering if we're going to be discussing, I'm sure we will, but just going to ask you to preview it, how we navigate or negotiate between the really understanding the constructive nature of everything and having to act like those things we perceive are actually out there the way we perceive them. Yes, we are going to get to that, and that actually is something that I will throw back at us as a topic for discussion, you know, because I don't feel that I have the last word on that. I would like to hear what you think as you get some of this under your belts. Okay? Okay. Okay, Bud? Yes, I'm wondering if we know anything about Yogachara practice and how it might differ from our practice.

[26:26]

Yogachara practice, I mean, I can get into this a little bit very quickly. Yogachara pretty much died out as an independent school. Except that it continues as the Hoso school in Japan. which is a very small school that exists at Kofukuji in Nara. It was part of Nara Buddhism in about the 9th or 8th century. and the temple still exists, and there's still nominally some priests. By the way, it's really interesting. Bob Scharf at Berkeley, who heads the University of California Buddhist Studies Department at Berkeley, is somehow an ordained Hoso priest. So go figure.

[27:29]

I didn't realize that until I just was studying. I want to go talk to Bob to figure out what that means. But it pretty much died out in Indian Buddhism as a school and as a set of practices. But it lives on, particularly lives on as one of the assets of Mahayana Buddhism and there's a, you know, there's a dialogue between Majamaka Middle Way Buddhism and Hoso Buddhism, and Yogacara Buddhism, but I don't want to get too far into that. But the practice, Yogacara, this gets to, this actually gets to my next part of the presentation. Yogacara, yoga, means essentially practice and what it implies is the process of connecting or joining.

[28:33]

So it's the practice, Chara, of connecting or joining and it involved meditative practices. It's really impossible, I think, to say what the practice of Yogacara was in like the 4th or 5th century CE. But it's more what its intellectual gift has been to us through Mahayana Buddhism. So I think I'm going to leave it there, Bud. Hi, Hozon. Thank you. I just have a very quick follow-up that struck me.

[29:38]

You've pointed me a few times in practice discussion towards Hui Nung's version of the Bodhisattva Vows. Sentient beings of my mind are numberless. I've got to save them. And it seems to me, I don't know the real connections, but it seems to me that's just one little glimpse into how the Yogachara teaching is really suffused in Zen understanding. So to my mind, it seems woven into it in a lot of ways and that stands out. It is. Yogachara is one of the principal threads and for anyone who's been familiar with Thich Nhat Hanh's teachings. He's been talking about this for years and years, and his book, which I've cited in the bibliography is, what is it called? Understanding Your Mind? It used to be called transformation at the base.

[30:40]

I think it's called understanding the mind. But it's really, it's also a translation of Vasubandhu's 30 verses. And he talks about this extensively. And I think, so I think it's very much in our Zen tradition. Let me take Kabir, and that'll be your last question for this section. Hi, Hozon, thank you for, this sort of reminds me of I used to hear this from the Tibetan tradition I used to practice. I still read their books. The lack of true inherent existence. That things lack true existence. So they don't really 100% exist from their own side in some way. So when you talk about that it goes through the filter of our mind, that kind of remind me of that also. It also remind me of the windshield of my car. is full of dirt. Well, I'll see the dirt first.

[31:42]

You know, so this was. Right. I think that's sort of, when I expand on this model, I think it'll be a little clearer. I think what's really important to understand is that things do not not exist either. if that makes sense. It's not that nothing exists. That's really an important point to recognize that it's not that there are things that don't exist. It's not that there aren't things outside of us. It's just that our perception of them is filtered through our minds. So I think that's a good place to proceed A little background. As I said, Yogatara is one of the major schools of Mahayana Buddhism.

[32:46]

It arose in the third century, third and fourth century, coming out of the perfection of wisdom tradition, the Heart Sutra that we chant. And that sometimes it's called the mind-only school. Some of the core tenets are found in Vasubandha's 30 Verses, which is what we're seeing in Ben Connolly's book. And you can also find them in Understanding Our Mind by Thich Nhat Hanh. And I'm not sure, it's now on the website. If you go to the website, In the class materials, I think it wasn't there before, but now there's a translation of the 30 verses that I like by Francis Cook.

[33:47]

And so if you want to look at the whole text, if you don't have Thich Nhat Hanh's book or Ben Connolly's book, you could see it all there. Um, it also was promulgated in other major texts, uh, particularly the Sundinir Mochana Sutta, which I think Reb, Reb Anderson has written a book on. Laura, what's the name of that book? Sorry, which book? Wisdom of the Buddha or something? Wisdom of Buddha? Oh, The Third Turning of the Wheel. Third Turning of the Wheel. And also we find it in the Lankavatara Sutra. So those doctrines

[34:50]

really got disseminated very widely, and there's a lot of them, and some of them are in contradiction with each other. So Yogacara focuses on the processes involved in how we see things, and that's a method to overcome the ignorance that prevents us from liberation. As I said, Yogacara is not an idealism. It sometimes has been interpreted that way, an idealism meaning that the mind alone is real. and that everything else, everything is created by the mind.

[35:53]

But the Yogacara writings themselves argue something very different. Consciousness is not the ultimate reality or solution. Actually, consciousness, as we normally see it, is the root problem. And the problem emerges in our ordinary mental operations. and can only be resolved. And this is where I have, honestly, I have some difficulty and some problems. The orthodox view is that the problem of consciousness can only be resolved by bringing its operations to an end. And So just the question that I would ask and I want to suspend this question is whether what that means in terms of the Buddha's enlightenment or any beings enlightenment is that the process of consciousness has to be in some way obliterated.

[37:13]

And I find that to some degree in conflict with what we take to be our Zen practice, which is to awaken in the moment itself. So I wanna suspend that and come back to it. I wanna read you something from Frank Cook by way of, by way of description. When Vasubandhu and other spokesmen for Buddhism are arguing, what Vasubandhu and other spokesmen for Buddhism are arguing is that the pure immediacy of any cognitive experience, anything that you think, is distorted as soon as it occurs through the superimposition of imaginary labels onto the experience. Thus, the actual experience is interpreted by the mind, and this process reinforces the tendency to interpret everything in the same manner.

[38:27]

The result is that the mind mistakes its habitual interpretations of events for the actual events. It is not that nothing exists in a world external to the mind, but rather that the unenlightened individual is trapped in a false consciousness and has no access to the real world outside the mind. The world experienced by the unenlightened mind is thus an exclusively mental imaginary world filled with unrealities such as selves, others, Buddhas, ordinary beings, good and bad, and so on. Such a world is a world of discrimination, imagination, stereotyped reaction, and responses to experience, and is consequently unreal. So, That's a very daunting interpretation of reality.

[39:33]

And I don't want to dismiss it out of hand. I want to look at how at least the Yogacara system says that it works. And then think about the degree to which that might work for me or might work for you. So I want to get into this model. And I see that John Ryder has a question. So before I present a graphic, I will, let me see what John has to. Maybe you don't want to, you wanted to. Alan, you wanted to suspend this, but I was gonna ask, which consciousness was to be extinguished? Yeah, let's suspend that. Okay, very good.

[40:35]

Because we're gonna talk about them. I think, yeah. Okay. So let me give you, let's see if I can screen share here. I'm gonna present you with one very simple model of the mind. And let's see if I can do this, if I know how to do this. Okay, can you see that? Are you seeing that? Is that a yes? Yes. Yes. Yes. I hear you. So the way we're going to work, the way Vasubandhu works is he works from the center out. And I'm going to work from the outside in.

[41:39]

So from the outside, what we have at the beginning are the vijnanas, the five conscious, the five immediate sense consciousnesses. So that is sight, hearing, taste, sound, sight, hearing, taste, touch, and I'm missing one? Smell. Smell. I can't smell. So those are the five sense consciousness. And we're going to break them down in how they work. The next ring in, so that's five sensory. The next ring in is ideation.

[42:45]

That is the sixth consciousness, which is mind consciousness. Mind consciousness is what we consider thinking. And it includes both perception, and it also includes emotion, and emotional material that gets fed into our interpretation of the five senses. The third ring, which we're calling ego consciousness, in Buddhist terms, let me just say that each of these rings, we're doing a class on. So today is the five sensory consciousnesses class. Next week, we'll talk about the mind consciousness. Following week, we'll talk about what's labeled here as ego consciousness, which is, in Yogacara terms, is called manas.

[43:54]

And manas is like a filter. It's a filter between what we think And then the center, which is the seed consciousness or this often called the storehouse consciousness, which is the alaya vijnana. And you'll get all these in another map that I have. So the alaya vijnana is the place where everything that you have ever experienced exists as a seed. So every experience is stored there in the storehouse consciousness. And when you have a sense, when you have a sense experience that is noted by the mind, then what we do is we, you know, that waters a seed which grows up through manas

[45:06]

and becomes an emotional idea, becomes something that we interpret. And manas is the, you could call manas as the, it's the I filter, I, the letter I, me, self. So the seed, the experience that one has had sprouts up through this self-constructing consciousness to become a thought. And the self-constructing consciousness is what we ordinarily, it creates the impression that I exist for you. I exist distinct from you. So I'm looking here, on my screen, I'm seeing Karen and Nancy.

[46:12]

And I'm seeing, well, there's Alan, and then there's Karen and Nancy, who are, there's Alan, who's me, and there's Karen and Nancy, who are not me, except to them, each one of them is me. And that's because we have this functioning filter that filters all of our experience. And so those are the four levels of consciousness. It's really three levels. It's the six sense consciousnesses, and the ego, the manas, and the store conscious, the alaya vijnana. So, I want to go back though to earliest Buddhism. In the Dhammapada, which is one of the earliest texts that we have, and let me stop the share if that's okay.

[47:20]

In the Dhammapada, it says, all mental, this is verse one. This is the first thought in the Dhammapada. All mental phenomena have mind as their forerunner. They have mind as their chief. They are mind made. If one speaks of or acts with an evil mind, suffering follows him just as the wheel follows the hoofprint of the ox that plows the cart. And the second verse presents the more positive side. All mental phenomena have mind as their forerunner. They have mind as their chief, they are mind made. If one speaks or acts with a pure mind, happiness follows him like a shadow that never leaves him. So right from the beginning of Buddhism, you have this proposition that mind is at the center of things that are, and it doesn't say the brain, it's saying mind in a larger sense.

[48:35]

And that carries through for 2,500 years. Now, we get to the first verse of Vasubandhu's 30 verses. And verse one says, everything conceived as self or other occurs in the transformation of consciousness. Everything conceived as self or other occurs in the transformation of consciousness. So what this is saying, it's pointing to the fact that the subtext is that self is problematic for us. That's where our suffering occurs. And that the creation of self

[49:41]

occurs in the transformation of consciousness, and we will get into that. Then the verse two says, the transformation has three aspects, the ripening of karma, the consciousness of a self, and the imagery of the three selves. Now, just to say, to go back to This screen, this diagram, let me just point out that the ripening of karma happens here in the seed consciousness. The transformation of a self happens here in manas. And the imagery of sense objects happens here in the sensory consciousness and the mind.

[50:47]

And so these things are completely connected. And let me give you another chart now, which explains this in somewhat diagrammatic form. Let's see if this is the right one. No. Okay. Can you see this? Are you seeing this? Yes? No. Yes. No. It's not full screen. I mean, it's, it's expanded. You have to stop the first share and open the other share. Okay. Thank you. I didn't realize that. Okay. Stop that share. And let me just window. This is like a slightly advanced course in zoom for me here.

[51:49]

Uh, How about that? Is that working? Yeah, it's good. Okay, so what you have here on the left are the five sense consciousnesses, and they all lead to the mind, which is the mono-vijnana. The mind is influenced It goes back and forth, it's influence, and it influences the sense of self, the manas, and that is also influencing and influenced by the storehouse consciousness, the alaya. So this is a rough map, but there's something missing.

[52:58]

And I want to explain that. So let me close this. Okay. So the way that our senses work is that The sense consciousness is an interdependent entity. The senses have three parts. That first of all, there's an organ. There's an eye, an ear, a nose, a tongue, skin. Well, no, I know, yeah. Anyway, all those.

[54:02]

Those are the, we have six organs and those organs relate to external objects. So you see a rose and you may see the rose, you may see the rose color, say it's red. and that comes in through your eye consciousness. That comes in through your eye organ and relates to the eye consciousness which is located in your mind. If there is an injury to your optic nerve or your eye has been taken out, then you are not going to see this. Then there is not going to be you're not going to be able to make the link between the object and the organ.

[55:03]

Therefore, you're not going to have a sense response to that. So those three together, you have sense objects, you have sense organs or faculties, and you have sense consciousness. Those are called the 18 Datus. which means just knowable things. And that's true for the eyes, the ears. So if you have a rose, you can see the color red. If your nose is working, you can smell the scent of the rose. If you pick it up incorrectly, you're gonna get yourself stuck on one of the thorns. And so all of those are the workings together of the senses. And the senses depend on the interaction of all three of these aspects.

[56:11]

Again, depends on the object, the organ, and the consciousness. And so, Those are the five senses and the sixth sense is mind consciousness, which is also capable of creating mental objects, thoughts, but it has two functions. One is it's processing the perceptions that are coming into the organs. And the other is, which we will talk about more next week, it's processing the, it's going back and forth to the alaya by way of the manas, and it's bringing emotional qualities to the perception.

[57:12]

So when you smell a rose, or you see it, it may trigger certain kinds of memories, perceptions, connections, resonances for you that relate to things that you have encountered in the past. And the roles that you're seeing today itself can produce a seed that is planted in the alaya. You may see it as the most beautiful rose you've ever seen and really remember it forever. Or you may taste an apple and say, I've never tasted an apple that's quite like this, that's quite as sweet, that's quite as fresh, that has quite the same snap and crispness to it.

[58:20]

And you'll remember that. All of us remember things like this. I have sense memories that I don't know, I don't pretend that they are accurate. but I have a memory of eating a donut in a donut shop in Jasper, Alberta in the summer of 1962 and thinking, wow, this is the most amazing donut I ever ate. And so that's like almost 60 years ago. And that's still there. the imagined memory, I'm not saying it's a real memory, the imagined memory is accessible to me. And all of us have that, right? We all have things like that. We all have things that we remember from sense information, sense impressions that we have from our childhood, from way back.

[59:32]

And that is what That's what is at the heart of Buddhism. The heart of Buddhism is seeing the construction of these sense impressions, seeing the construction of our ideas about the world, and recognizing that They're very mixed, that in some way, they may have something that's accurate or accurate for us, but they also may be completely mistaken. We could be imagining them. All of us, I imagine, also have memories that, I have memories that I think I did this, but I'm not really sure, and if I don't have independent verification from somebody else, I really don't know.

[60:40]

And yet it seems so vivid to me. And the purpose of the Yogacara method is to look at and map these mental functions. And to recognize that this is just a provisional view of reality. that the mind does not create the physical world. The physical world is there in some way, but we never see it. Ordinarily, we do not see it in an unmediated way. We see it according to our interpretations. And if we can understand that, that's liberative. And if we don't understand it, then we could be living our life in delusion, thinking that it is reality.

[61:47]

We mistake our interpretations for the world itself. And those interpretations are usually a projection of our anxieties and desires. because they're really powerful. Because even if we have a Muppet sticker on our car that says, don't believe everything you think, we tend to believe it. It's very compelling. And the path of practice is to remove these obstacles more and more, and the obstacles are the way we are blinded by ourself, to remove them so that we can see the world, I'll say, as it is, and again, I say that provisionally, and that nonetheless, what we're proceeding from here

[63:05]

is recognizing that when we look at the methods of the workings of the senses, that we realize that we have a subjective view of the world, that as Jay Garfield was saying, we think, that things that we are making, things that we are constructing in our minds are things that we are finding in the world. And that, as I said, that has a very broad ethical dimension in terms of how we see the world, how we act in the world, what we think the world's problems are, and we go from there. So I think I want to stop there and leave time for some questions. And when we finish, which will be in not so many minutes, just to say next week, we'll go on to the workings of the mind of, of mono visioniana, mind consciousness and how it combines both our sensory or perceptive

[64:27]

capacities with our interpretive or emotional capacities. It melds them in a very interesting, creative way. So I see, if you've raised your hand and you've had your question answered, please lower it afterwards. The only fresh hand I see right now is Ben. Thank you, Hozon. I was thinking a bit, you're describing the sense consciousnesses and those three pieces, the object, the organ, and then the consciousness in the mind. And I guess my question is, does the operating of the sense consciousnesses themselves create and sustain karma? There's a line in The Cook that you gave us that says, um, the habit energy of various actions. So that would be maybe more, um, our usual idea of karmic action of volitional action together with the habit energy of the two graspings, which I think are self and other, maybe I'm not getting the two graspings.

[65:41]

Um, in the cook, it's called retribution when I thought it was pretty interesting when prior retribution is exhausted, subsequently produces other retribution. I was, so I guess my question is, or my, thought is the very act of sort of thinking we're finding what we create, even in the perception of an object and the projection of that object as outside, that's part of the habitual training that our mind goes through that blinds us to reality. Is that correct? Yes, but it's not in the sense. It's in the sense consciousness. And we will see this, we'll see this next week because it's all of the wholesome and unwholesome dharmas come to bear, they come to fruition in mind consciousness. But not in the pure, not in the, I mean, one of the things, at least one of the interpreters says is that

[66:47]

That the consciousness this the sense. An organ is about as close as we get. To receiving a view of reality. You know, even though it may not be accurate, you know you may. Your eyes may not be 2020. They may be blurry or your hearing may be impaired, but that is. Not yet. filtered through mind. It's when we filter it through mind that it becomes, that it becomes karmic. And I just feel like I had this, I just had a strong sense of this weekend before last when we, when we sat the half day sachin. And I hadn't sat a significant amount of zazen in quite a while.

[67:50]

And we were sitting like six periods of zazen. I went outside after five periods and it's like everything was really immediate and bright and luminous. And the sense operation was pretty raw. at that material, at that moment, it was catching me before I was interpreting. And then of course, I made up a story about it, but we all have these moments. It's not so rare, but the interpretive mechanism kicks in so quickly. Thank you, Hosa. Thank you, Gary. I just wanted to say something about, you know, in some ways it seems like we're we're seeing our ability to pattern match as a real detriment to seeing reality.

[69:22]

And I wonder if you could say something about that because, you know, part of our evolution as a species has really grown because of the ability to pattern match. So it's kind of not a question, but I think you know, it's kind of the reverse of what we're looking. I'd like to hold that for a little later in the series because it's, I mean, it's really related to questions that I have. You know, I'm not, sometimes I feel like there's an idealization of doing away with conceptual thought. And I think that this is one of the things that I really love about Dogen is that he actually valorizes thinking. And so I don't, it's, if pursued fully, I mean, this is the most complicated thinking you could possibly do to understand this Yogacara stuff.

[70:32]

But sometimes it seems like the, the conclusion of it is, you know, we're doing all this thinking so that we can obliterate thinking. And I'm not convinced in that. So I don't wanna get into discussion about it now, but I'd like to hold that in abeyance. And I'm purely curious to see what you all think. Julianne. Hi, I just, I wanted to ask if you could repeat Just the last thing you said before questions, which I think you just suggested what we might talk about next week. Yes, what we're going to talk about next week is the sixth sense consciousness, mono-vijnana. And that's basically mind consciousness. So that's the mind as an organ that has its own

[71:35]

sensory base, but also as an interpretive and distributive organ that sorts out the various sense inputs that come in. So it has a dual function. If you look at, let me just open this chart again. Hang on. Is that showing? No. Is it screen sharing or no? No. No. No. OK. Let's see here. Is it now? Yes. Yes. So you see the blue section? Do people see that? Yes.

[72:37]

OK. That's all mind. And so what I put up here is this is mind functions. And it overlaps, it has a sense function here in the Venn diagram in the pink section, but it's intimately connected with manas, the self-making function and a live vision out of the store consciousness. So that's what we'll be talking about next week. Okay. Christian and then Nabeer and then we have to stop. Uh, thank you. Um, can you hear me? Yeah. Okay. So referring back to the Dhammapada, so then we may invite good luck by clear consciousness. Happiness follows the door of good deeds. Verse two. Suffering follows the evil door. Right.

[73:38]

Uh, verse one. Now is this also a gaining mind? No. or an invitation to continue to do Zazen? What I would say is that the Eightfold Path, the Eightfold Path includes Zazen, but is not, and I think some of the Zen teachers would say, Zazen includes the whole Eightfold Path, But what I would say is that the Eightfold Path is a way to live. And zazen is an element of one's way to live, but it also is, the Eightfold Path is a complete map to how you function in the world in relationship to yourself and in relation to people. So if you, karma is created by thoughts, words, and actions.

[74:41]

And in order to have a positive outcome, a wholesome life, one acts in a positive way. And if one acts in a negative way in one's relationships to oneself and others, then there are negative karmic consequences. But I don't think it boils down just to zazen. No, but Zazen helps you have clear thoughts and get rid of the harmful thoughts. I think Zazen has two aspects to it. One, it helps you settle your mind. And two, it is essentially non-karmic activity. You are not creating karma, which is basically a good thing. when you are sitting Zazen. Sojin has said this many times. Zazen is, if you're sort of coursing in Zazen, it's beyond karma.

[75:50]

Anyway, let's not get hung up on it, but that's my understanding. And Kabir, you'll have the last word. Thank you, Hasan. One question that I can't really answer when my kids ask me, what's the difference between the brain and the mind? I mean, I have a sense and I have a faith that they're sort of different, but that's the question I have struggled with. Well, I think that, you know, we know where the brain is located. Yes. don't know where the mind is located. You know, it's certainly located. The brain is part of the mind, but all of the almost all spiritual traditions, uh, locate mind. It's more widely distributed in your body. Hmm. And so your body has its own wisdom that is not identical with this kind of oatmeal consistency stuff that's up here in your head.

[77:01]

And I think that that's really important. When we locate it there in the brain, then we are falling into a kind of objectification that can be really, that can be problematic. That's then creating a brain-body split. But if you recognize that there's wisdom in all the parts of your, distributed throughout your body, and I think that some of the research on neural networks would confirm that. You know, so that's what I'd say to them. But I would also say, don't neglect your brain. Right. It's all together. OK, thank you very much. Thank you very much. Let's chant the four vows once, through, and then close.

[78:05]

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