A man walked into the vet's office carrying his dog. He put the dog on the table and he told the vet it had been sick. The vet looked at the dog and said, Your dog is dead. The man was stunned. He said, That can't be right. He was okay just a few minutes ago. I want a second opinion. The vet looked at him and he shrugged and turned around and he walked out of the office. A couple minutes later, the door opened and a cat came in, jumped up on the table, walked around the dog, checked it out, jumped down from the table, and walked out of the room. After the cat left, a dog came in, looked at the dog on the table, walked around, barked, and walked out of the room. Then the vet came back in and he said to the man,

[01:03]

Your dog is definitely dead. And the man said to him, All right. How much do I owe you? The vet said, Five hundred dollars. The man said, Five hundred dollars? You didn't do anything. I didn't give a look at him. Yes, the vet said, For me it would have been less, but you're not taking into account the cat scan or the report. Here's another story, which was terrible to me. We have lots of stories today. This is another story, which was told to me by a friend who's a psychiatrist at the local

[02:08]

mental health clinic. Several weeks ago, she saw a young woman who had two broken kneecaps. Her boyfriend had broken both of her kneecaps. She came to the clinic because she was depressed, and the woman's shelter she was at thought it would be a good idea. She had some feeling that her boyfriend was okay now and he was not going to abuse her anymore. The clinic staff were unable, after repeated tries, to impress upon her that her boyfriend was likely to do it again. She planned to leave the shelter and go back to him. Ta Wu and Chen Wan went to a house to make a condolence call. Wan hit the coffin and said, alive or dead. Wu said, I won't say. I won't say alive, and I won't say dead. Wan said,

[03:08]

why won't you say? Wu said, I won't say. I won't say. Halfway back, as they were returning, Wan said, tell me right away, teacher. If you don't tell me, I'll hit you. Wu said, you may hit me, but I won't say. Wan hit him. All of these stories, so dissimilar in their tales, have the same theme, delusion. What's with the people in these stories? How can they not believe what's right in front of them? Death is a state that's pretty hard to mistake. If someone breaks your bones on purpose, what's the state of mind that thinks, oh, he was just fooling around. He really loves me. As for the monk who hit his teacher, what terrible desperation came from his feeling that someone had the answer and was withholding it.

[04:10]

What is the nature of delusion? To delude, to lead from the truth into error, to mistake reality for something else, and to be unaware that delusion is a false and harmful idea which is mistaken for the real. It's not just a minor mistaking of something, like looking at a can of peas and thinking it's beans. There's a major misapprehension. When I asked what's with the people, it was a rhetorical question. We can see that not only is there a mistake, but they're suffering. They're hurting about what they think. And every attempt to point it out to them comes to nothing. No mind is changed. They believe what they think, and they act as though it's true. We begin to get some sense of why Buddha specifically mentions delusion as one of the major ways we're diverted from the path. About 800 years after Buddha lived,

[05:17]

various texts were written, giving descriptions so that the teacher could figure out what the student's type of mentality was and provide the proper focus to correct it. Here's part of the quotation. In one of deluded temperament, there is frequent occurrence of such states as stiffness, torpor, agitation, worry, uncertainty, and holding on tenaciously with a refusal to relinquish. So it's a picture of someone who's unbending, refusing to let go of his ideas, someone who's scared and anxious, ignorant of self and what produces self. And back to the quotation. One who is ignorant hankers and hankering clings. And with his clinging as condition, there is becoming. Well, once ignorance happens in this particular sense, a self is created, an idea of self. And once created, it's clung to. Through ignorance, you lead yourself away from the real thing.

[06:20]

Your real self, the Buddha mind. Bhuvadosa, who is the author of this book, goes on with this diagnostic. How can the deluded person be further distinguished? Well, by the way he eats, works, even the way he walks. Of course, you realize I'm saying he, her, here just for convention. Women are just as deluded as men are. So we don't get out of it. So one of deluded temperament grasps his broom loosely and sweeps neither cleanly nor evenly, mixing up the dirt and turning it over. While working, the deluded one acts unskillfully, as if muddled, unevenly and indecisively. He wears his clothes loosely and looks not quite together. When he eats, it's whatever food comes to hand. He makes all of his food into one lump in his bowl. And as he eats, he drops bits of food here and there, smearing his face with his mind astray, thinking of this and that.

[07:23]

And his thought is copycat. When he hears others praise, he praises. He copies what the world does and thinks. But actually, he feels a kind of equanimity of not knowing. He doesn't know who he is. He just follows along. There's a certain passivity. Now, I think this is a broad, almost cartoon-like picture of a deluded person. Let's refine it a bit and bring it closer to something that's familiar. How about someone in this situation? Here is a man whose house is on fire. It's burning merrily, but he's distracted by the things in the house. With the smoke around him and the fire in front of him, he sees the TV. He turns it on. He gets some potato chips and sits down to eat them, wiping crumbs all over himself and all over the couch as he watches the TV. Let's say he's watching the evening news. No, better yet, let's say he's watching X-Files.

[08:26]

X-Files, the truth is out there, right? And as the conspiracy theory gets larger and larger, the man, furiously dropping potato chips and slurping Coke, says, yes, I always knew the government was doing things behind our backs. It's on the TV. It must be true. Look at that pair, Mulder and Scully. How can you not believe what they say? I certainly would feel better if people like them were running things. Then I wouldn't have to worry about what to do. Then his wife comes in, and she says, oh, you slob. Look at the couch. Look at the rug. Clean it up. So he gets the vacuum, and he gives one run at the rug, missing most of the crumbs on the rug, and he just ignores the couch. Meanwhile, the house is on fire. His good friend, the neighbor, is outside yelling, fire, fire.

[09:27]

No response. The guy's over there collapsed on the couch, but the neighbor knows this guy. To save him in spite of himself, the neighbor yells, fire, fire, and the man opens the door. And then he sees the fire, and he says, whoops, and the neighbor grabs him by the scruff of the neck and pulls him out. Well, this is the modern version. Do we recognize this? Do we know folks like this? Could we be like this ourselves sometimes? Who would you say is the most deluded in the three stories I just told? The man who wouldn't believe his dog was dead. The woman who wouldn't believe that her boyfriend could break another bone. The monk who wanted to know if the corpse was alive or dead. What do you think? Are these folks holding on tenaciously to what they think? What keeps them from seeing what's obvious to us? They believe what they think.

[10:33]

What they think is real for them, it's become concrete and has force. They act as if their ideas are real, and this is a delusion because their ideas are not real. Now it's one thing to hear stories and quite another thing to try and grasp our own states of mind. How can you tell when you're being deluded? After all, the nature of delusion is that you believe it, this false and harmful idea which is mistaken for the real. In psychiatry, reality testing is the term used to define whether or not the person being examined is acting on his beliefs or is able to distinguish between his thoughts and the environment and his thoughts. So if he mixes up the environment and his thoughts thus, the FBI is listening to me. They've been bugging my apartment for years. We say, this is delusional. We make this judgment.

[11:35]

But, and this is a big but, how are we so different from him? Don't we believe that our minds, our thoughts, memories, emotions have solidity, that they make up ourself? Oh yes, you're thinking, but I don't get into this stuff about the FBI. In Buddha's teaching, delusion is delusion, and ignorance is ignorance. There's not different levels of delusion. There's only one delusion. Anything that falsely leads us to believe that there's reality to this shifting, changing world is delusion. Our mental illness is looking around and thinking that it and we are going to be here forever. What is the force of delusion in your life? Actually, I mean the impact. What's the impact or the effect of being deluded? Why would you want to be free from delusion?

[12:39]

Well yes, we say that's a good idea, but what does it mean? In the first place, delusion hurts. It hurts at some deep level, and often it's the kind of hurt that we're not consciously aware of. Delusion is not right at the top of your mind. Instead, it's the whole structure of your reality, and it contorts and twists you in ways that you don't even know. Hatred and greed kind of whack you upside the head, but delusion is a master of the art of misdirection. It misdirects you into intellect, memory, physical presence, sight and sound, sensation, and it seems to lead you back to a central place that you call I. I, yes. In Tassajara, I met a monk who had a massive brain bleed.

[13:41]

A blood vessel burst in his head. When he woke up after the surgery, he had forgotten everything. He didn't know his name. He didn't know his family. He didn't know his language. He had to be completely retaught. He didn't remember his parents. They were strangers to him. He was told and he believed that prior to the surgery, he had been an intense, driving, not-so-nice guy who was demanding and maybe a little snotty. After the surgery, his whole personality changed. He was softer and he got along with people better. But forgetting this thing that happened to him had a major impact on his life. His family couldn't get over his not remembering them. They tried, but they were very attached to the old version. So after he went to the monastery and returned home,

[14:46]

he was there only a short while before his father, and I quote him here, threw him away, asked him to leave. I asked him if this hurt his feelings, and he said no. He didn't know these people well enough to really be involved. What happened to his eye? Where did the old eye go? Even though he didn't remember how he was before, he was very clear that things had changed and it caused him to throw himself into practice. He thought about actually as being reborn, having a whole new life. It was a new chance, and he was so grateful that he hadn't died. He went to the monastery and practiced very hard. What we're deluded about, Buddhistically anyway, is the sense of the idea of self-permanence.

[15:49]

There is no permanent self, but our delusion is comforting to us. We cling to it, we compare, we trade ideas, we hope it isn't true. Even when we die, we hope that some personal element goes on with our karma. It does not. The hardest thing I've had to teach in classes here was the concept that karmic fruits are void of personality. When you die, it all goes. You're just gone. People argued about that, and with me, endlessly. Arguing about the way things are is one of the marks of delusion. If you notice, all the people in these stories are arguing with reality. They want it to go their way. It's very easy to give us lip service to the idea of being free from greed, hate and delusion.

[16:50]

It's not so easy to look at yourself and say, I'm wrong. There's a reality that I don't know. And the more I argue, the farther away I get. What's our job? How do we get undeluded? How do we move from error into truth? Recently, I began to draw after a whole lifetime of not drawing. When I was a little girl, probably around six or seven, I drew a picture that had the sky at the top, you know, like a blue line, the way kids do. The teacher came around and told me I was all wrong. The sky didn't look like that. I felt very bad about my picture because, like all kids, I wanted to get it right and be praised. I never drew again. She told me I did it wrong, so obviously I couldn't draw. Something happened here.

[17:52]

I got an idea about myself that I accepted as real. And that idea certainly twisted my reality. Obviously, since this is one of my clearest and most painful memories, it was certainly incorporated into my ideas about who I was. And that was the beginning. Then much later, oh, 55 years or so later, I started to doodle, and then I thought it might be okay to actually try drawing. Now, I want to say that I'm not Mary Cassatt here. Nevertheless, I could draw an apple that looked like an apple. Yes. Well, that changed my reality again. And then I seriously got down to it, and I started drawing tables and chairs and actual objects on the bureau. Well, things look funny in my drawings. They didn't look the way they looked on the bureau. So I applied to a friend who's an artist,

[18:54]

and I asked her about it. And she said something very interesting to me, which I'm going to pass on to you. She said, We don't draw what we see. We draw what we think we see. We have images in our minds of what things look like, and we don't realize what the image is until we learn or train ourselves to look at things as they really are. And as soon as she said this, I knew it was true. I was not seeing what was directly in front of me. I had to train myself to look and look and look again, not imposing my views, not imposing my ascetic perceptions, not naming and judging, just seeing. And at the same time, I recognized my delusion, at least that particular delusion, which is that at the time, I thought I was seeing things clearly, and I did not know that I was not.

[19:57]

All my apples, all my pears, my cones, my squares, my bowls were passing through the filter of self and coming out distorted right there on the paper. And if I did it there where it was obvious, where else was it happening that it was not so obvious? Where was I saying alive, not dead? Where was I seeing my idea of a person instead of directly perceiving him? Where was I focusing on alive or dead and missing the essence? In short, what my friend said threw me right back into practice. How could I tell I was deluded? I thought about this question quite a lot while I was working on this talk. I could believe it by faith, by accepting intellectually that I have a deluded mind. I could believe it through my experience of life and how often I found out that the way I saw it, whatever it was, was simply not the way things were. I could believe it in meditation

[21:01]

simply by watching events come and go and recognizing that nothing has inherent self. As I was pondering all this more and more, I remembered a short story I read a long time ago. A man is put into a room by himself without any other contact. He is given a book on psychiatric diagnosis and asked this question, How do you know you are sane? He is left alone with this book for a week or two. This is supposed to be a torture, right? Well, he agonizes over whether he is sane or not. He reads the book. He thinks about it. He tries to apply all these different diagnoses to himself. But in the end, when they come to him, he is very calm. And they ask him again. And he says to them, I don't know. I don't know if I am sane or not.

[22:02]

When I am deluded, I can't actually know it. This is the nature of delusion. But I have learned to be suspicious of what I think, to check things out, and to not always take my emotions and thoughts for granted. This practice, this thing we do, Buddha's way, is all about letting go of delusion. It is rigorous. It is exact. It is demanding. And you can do it on the bus. You can just look. You can just hear. You can just smell. You can just have sensation. And you can just taste. When you just do, even for a moment, you are free. Oh, this is a hard thing to do. I won't fool you here. It's not so much about sitting still,

[23:11]

although that's hard. It's not so much about robes and how to do things, though doing the forms is not easy. It's not so much about getting up at 3.30 and going out in the cold to the zendo. It's about this feeling within you that forces its way even through delusion, a wanting to be free, a sudden hit that your thoughts and feelings are bars and you can't get through them. But you want to. You want to. You want to be free of this prison, of this self, of the deluded thoughts you don't even know you have. This is the fuel of practice. Can you do this? Can you practice? Certainly. Every person in this room can do this. Can you focus on something?

[24:15]

When you wake up in the morning, do you focus on coffee? Or I should say, do you focus on your desire for coffee? Does that lead you where lattes are sold? It's the same principle. Everybody bring their focus inside for a minute. Let's just sit for a second. Okay. This desire for peace and freedom

[25:30]

from restless striving is not always so obvious as wanting a cup of coffee. But keep looking. Look without anticipation, without any thoughts of how it should be. Just feel it arise from as deep as you can go. This is a subtle thing, not so easy to stay with, so this is why we train in the path. What is this training? How to look, hear, smell, taste, touch? Not how to return to reality, but to be in reality, to swim in it and breathe it as a fish swims and breathes in the ocean, not apart from it, but always aware.

[26:34]

Don't be concerned about enlightenment or understanding. Don't fuss about koans. Don't worry about suppressing your thoughts. All of these expectations lead to more duality. Letting go of your ideas, prejudices, anger, wanting, this is the real work, the hardest work. Every time you let go, remain undistracted and the undual comes forth. What is before discrimination? When it comes to practice, there's a Japanese proverb that says, fall down seven times, get up eight. When the Master,

[27:38]

who was Bankei, was staying at the temple, a lay acquaintance came and remained for some time. He had been following along with the Master for some years. Once when the Master was receiving a group of new arrivals in the abbot's quarters, this layman came forward and said, my home is such and such a village. Originally, I was a masterless samurai and taking what savings I had in silver and gold, I lent out money and grain to the people of the area and with the interest on these loans, made my living. However, a little over ten years ago, I left my business to my son and building a retreat in my garden, devoted myself to performing zazen and reciting sutras. I also went to study with various Zen masters, practicing single-mindedly. However, last night in a dream, I found myself back at home reading sutras at the household shrine. Just then, a customer who had borrowed some rice

[28:41]

came in to pay his interest and together with my son set about calculating the amount. In the midst of reading the sutras, I realized that there was an error in their calculations and just as I was telling them of it, I suddenly awoke from my dream. Thinking over this, I realized just how deep and difficult to destroy are the roots of karmic nature. What kind of practice can I do to destroy my basic sinfulness? The Master said, Was this a good dream or a bad dream? The layman said, A bad dream. It was for all this, it was for this that more than twenty years ago, I abandoned all mercenary affairs to dwell in oneness with Buddha Dharma in circumstances of purity and tranquility far from the tumult of worldly life. This is the sort of thing I would expect to see in my dreams. Yet I'm afraid the fact that what came to me were my old concerns of twenty years ago

[29:44]

shows that these things have permeated my innermost mind, my Buddha nature. And that distresses me. The Master said, This is what's known as being had by a dream. We all have these dreams. Just insert your version here. Much as you may want to see, without your thoughts or judgments interfering, if they arise, just let them be. If you refuse to follow them, nothing can happen. There is always a place you stand in, whether you know it or not, a place called the unborn mind, Buddha nature, the place of freedom. We create our own chains. Our delusion is as simple as believing what we think or dream. The man in the burning house

[30:45]

was dreaming of TV and potato chips. When he woke up, was he surprised? When he knew the house was on fire, he saw the fire for what it was and he didn't run back into it. TV and potato chips weren't of interest anymore. He was enjoying real freedom for the first time. So can we. Thank you.

[31:42]

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