How many of us are there? OK, I have enough. I'd like everybody to write their name on one of these slips of paper. And then fold it up, please. Just write your name. Oh, how many times? Fold it just once. And then someone, maybe Ross can collect them. I want them all here. And I'd just like to say a few things about how I'd like to do this class. I'd like it to be very participatory. This first class in particular will have, there's just some background and things that I'd like to cover. I suspect that most of you, some of you have probably studied the Heart Sutra before.

[01:04]

Is that right? And some people haven't. And even when you've studied it, I've been trying to study for a while here, and today I felt just completely awash in... in the material. So there's always a new perspective and a new way of looking at it. But today, I think that I'll probably cover some background material. But I'd like to say that a lot of my understanding of this, in some degrees, you might consider technical, and in other degrees, not. But to me, uh... my technical grasp of the material is not so deep and there's a lot that i don't know and the most important thing about the Heart Sutra uh... is and what's being said in it is experiential and sometimes I think all of us will be talking from our experience and sometimes I think we'll be talking from what maybe we know of Buddhism uh... but maybe we don't know in our bodies and minds so clearly and that's okay you know

[02:30]

You know what I'm talking about? And I just want to make it clear that that totally includes me, that there are realms of experience that are being discussed here that I don't know about. So we can sort of help ourselves, help each other to know about it. And so if you have questions as we're going on, I'd appreciate it if people would just ask them, you know, let's not wait for a time necessarily. If there's something that you would like to understand or you don't understand or is not clear, let's just kind of ask as we're going along. Sharon is going to tend a mindfulness bell this evening. Maybe that's something that many of you haven't done before. Sometimes we have it in classes and sometimes not.

[03:36]

is something I think that was introduced pretty much by Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese teacher. And so maybe every 10 or 12 minutes, Sharon will ring the bell. And for a moment, we'll just breathe. Just come back to let go of whatever was being said. Hopefully we won't be cut off in mid-sentence. But we may be cut off in mid-thought. And come back to whatever, come back to your breath and come back to your posture and take a couple breaths and then we'll bow and then just continue on. And it's a really good way to remember what your purpose is. And also in kind of more heated kind of circumstances too, it can turn the flame down just a little bit so that you can get some perspective.

[04:49]

It can just calm things down when things get intense. I don't know how intense it's going to get. And lastly, are there people who still need copies of this handout? Let's see. Is this? This one's mine. I think they are all gone at the moment, but I will make... How many are needed? Just one? I'll make a couple more tomorrow, and you'll be able to pick them up. You can call me or pick it up. I'll put them out on the porch again. Another thing that I'd like to do in the course of uh... the next couple weeks i realized that uh... four weeks is a very short time uh... there's endless discussion and mostly what i think we'll try to concentrate on on discussion not so we're not going to concentrate on and these uh... there's a lot of very technical analysis of the heart sutra that can be done particularly if you read uh... say the tibetan tradition uh... which is pretty much

[06:27]

beyond me. I mean, I'm not really that interested in it and it gets into just a very careful analysis of almost every word and of the Buddhist doctrine behind everything. But I'd like to talk among ourselves about how we can practice with the Heart Sutra and what it means to us and how it helps us to live a life that is more filled with compassion. The compassion that flows from wisdom and compassion that flows from not clinging to your thoughts, your feelings, your fears, your ideas, and the things that you think you see around you.

[07:33]

So I think we're going to try to come at that from different angles. And I'd like to come at it very much from people's experience. And so we'll have, hopefully, a lot of opportunity to talk about that. But I also would like a couple, when we get around to it, perhaps for the next class, there are some possible areas that maybe a few people could do a little bit of study and research on their own and report in. I was thinking particularly about going to a little more detail about the five skandhas, and later it comes up in the Heart Sutra, the chain of causation. And those are both pretty large topics, and rather than just presenting it, I thought it would be good for a couple different people to take that on, to maybe do some study on their own, and

[08:42]

and come back with something to offer that we can discuss among ourselves. Makes it a little easier for me. So, we'll see when we get to that, towards the end of the evening, people can think about if there are people who want to do that, that would be great. And lastly, as a As a practice for this month, I'd like people to try to practice the mantra at the end of the Heart Sutra. GATE GATE PARAGATE PARASAMGATE BODHISVAHA And I suspect everybody knows it. and we'll talk about it uh... a little this evening and it's just if people are inclined to to try to do it uh... just try to carry that mantra around with you for this month and uh... see what happens see what circumstances uh... you feel it's appropriate uh...

[10:07]

where it helps you what kind of things you feel coming up as you're practicing with it. It's just something to try. When I started doing a class in Santa Cruz, I did it, I found myself doing it just on my own, and we actually didn't do it with the class, but I just thought it was interesting and I've come back to it, that if in fact it is the utmost perfect mantra, then maybe it's useful in some way. in some way that is perhaps beyond words so uh... you don't have to do it if you're not inclined to and uh... i'm not suggesting actually you spend your time in zazen doing this mantra uh... i'm more suggesting you spend your time just as during the day you would come back to your breath and your posture at different points to uh...

[11:21]

you know, to center yourself and to remind yourself of where you are, in those moments, for this time, you can also try recalling this mantra, just saying it to yourself one or two times. Does that interest people? Good, so... Is it useful to know what the mantra means? Well, not necessarily, but we'll talk about it. And one of the things about mantras and dharanis, and it's one of the unique things about the Heart Sutra that's actually unusual in relation to the other Prajnaparamita sutras, is that it has this mantra. Most of the other sutras do not include something of this kind of magical nature. And so you can know what it means, or you can have an idea. You can know what the words literally translate to be.

[12:25]

But that doesn't necessarily make it any more useful to you. And that's one of the things around the whole sutra. We can talk about that a little more. OK. Any questions before we press on here? I thought I would say something about sutras in general and about the history of the Heart Sutra.

[13:34]

The word sutra means string or thread. And I think that the image is of the words of the Buddha strung together. The sutra is like a thread that runs through these words that are strung together like a garland of flowers. And actually, it predates Buddhism, that the earlier Hinduism and Brahmanic religious practices also had sutras. It's not just a Buddhist tradition. But reputedly, all the sutras are the actual words of the Buddha. they fall into a couple of different periods. It's said that there were 84,000 sermons.

[14:39]

And what, when the Buddha, none of these were written down, this is all an oral tradition, and when the Buddha died, you know, when he lived, they had this, just this perfect illumination and teaching to be around. When the Buddha died, the disciples said, well, what did he really say? And fortunately, in their midst, they had one of the disciples, Ananda, who remembered every word that the Buddha could say. And it seems that he remembered words that the Buddha didn't even speak directly, but that the Buddha meant to say. It's a pretty good memory. But interestingly enough, Ananda was not enlightened at the time. uh... if in the morning we chant the buddhas and ancestors and we chant the seven buddhas before buddha and then we chant shakyamuni buddha then uh... mahakasyo which is uh... maha kasyapa and then ananda so actually it wasn't until after the buddha had died that ananda

[16:05]

attained enlightenment. In fact, at the first Buddhist councils there was some controversy about whether they were going to let him in, because all the other arhats were gathered there and they were all enlightened beings and he wasn't. But he was the guy that remembered everything, so they had to let him in. from fairly early on there were these sutras and there also developed what was called the Tripitaka which means like three baskets and you had the Sutra Pitaka which was the teachings that were in the form of sutras, the direct words of the Buddha. And you had the Vinaya Pitaka, which was the rules for monastic life, which in the Southern Buddhist tradition were very numerous.

[17:10]

There were many rules that defined how you lived if you were an ordained monk. A little different than the precepts or rules that we take. The precepts or rules that we take are in a way a distillation of those, but it doesn't go into as fine a regulation of monastic life. And there are reasons for that, but there's no need to go into that right at this point. And the third basket is the Abhidharma, which is more the commentary and detailed analysis, psychological analysis of the dharmas, of the things that were laid out in the sutras and that were analyzed in very, very minute

[18:13]

fashion about how our minds and bodies and how all of reality works together so those were those were the the three baskets that uh... gradually became known as the great storehouse the great storehouse scripture uh... and let's see where uh... there A bunch of it is here, those white volumes. I forget where they are. They've sort of turned brown as they age. They're sort of over Greg's head. Yeah, a lot of it. And on those two shelves are a bunch of it. We don't have a complete set. monks and followers would study the Tripitaka and they would sort of turn the Dharma by studying and in fact in Japan it finally got down to you turn the Dharma by actually they would have a Tripitaka on this big wheel and once a year they'd go in, the monks would go in and they would just

[19:37]

turn the big wheel with all of the books on it and I suppose it saved a bunch of readings. Anyway, the oldest sutras were assembled around the first Buddhist council which followed the Buddha's death about 480 BC and That's theoretically when they all date from, but it's likely that the Heart Sutra and the Prajnaparamita Sutras, which the Heart Sutra is one version of, were composed somewhere between 100 and 350 A.D. And there were a number of different forms of these. These Prajnaparamita Sutras are sort of the central sutras in the Mahayana school of Buddhism. And they dealt a lot with the Bodhisattva ideal and the Bodhisattva way.

[20:40]

And I guess the seminal one is the The prajna paramita means wisdom and paramita is translated as perfection or from the other shore. sort of crossing over. So it's wisdom from the other shore, the perfection of wisdom. And the basic seminal Prajnaparamita Sutra is the perfection of wisdom in 8,000 lines. And from there, it blossomed up to the perfection of wisdom in a hundred thousand lines and then there were versions in twenty thousand lines, twenty five thousand lines, eight thousand, ten thousand, and then you have the Heart Sutra which is in a way the essence of the Prajnaparamita Sutras and you finally got down to where you had the perfection of wisdom in one syllable which was just

[21:48]

And I assume that there were probably groups that practiced that. But the version that we're chanting was uh... from a Chinese version uh... that was there were several versions of brought by China and earlier one was supposedly brought by Bodhidharma to China in probably about five hundred five fifty A.D. uh... from India but the version that mostly used is uh... was brought by Xuanzang, somewhere around 650 AD, during the Tang Dynasty, and he went to India and brought back many, many texts. He translated something like about 1,300, 1,400 texts into Chinese from Sanskrit.

[22:55]

I think from Sanskrit, yeah. and some of those, a lot of those texts actually haven't even been translated into English yet, and some of them are lost. But that is the version that is mostly used by us, is his version, or the translation from Chinese into Japanese and then rendered into English. Actually, there's a compendium, I think we have it in the library here, there's a Heart Sutra compendium which has some commentaries and has many different translations of the Heart Sutra, but they're all pretty close and related. So actually what I'd like to do, before we plunge into the Heart Sutra itself, in looking at things that it's about, is I'd like to chant it together.

[24:05]

I'd like to recite it together. And I think we'll do that in every class. Maha-prajna-paramita-hrdaya-sutra. Avalokiteśvara and Bodhisattva, when practicing deeply the prajna-paramita, perceive that all five skandhas in their own being are empty and were saved from all suffering. O Sariputra, form does not differ from emptiness. Emptiness does not differ from form. of all dharmas are marked with emptiness.

[25:13]

They do not appear or disappear, are not tainted nor pure, do not increase nor decrease. Therefore, in emptiness, no form, no feelings, no perceptions, no formations, no consciousness, no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind, no color, no sound, No object of mind, no realm of eyes, until no realm of mind consciousness, no ignorance no suffering, no origination, no stopping, no path, no cognition, also no attainment. With nothing to attain, the Bodhisattva depends on prajñāpāramitā, and the mind is no hindrance. Without any hindrance, no fears exist.

[26:16]

Far apart from every perverted view, one dwells in nirvana. In the three worlds, all Buddhas depend on Prajñāpāramitā and attain unsurpassed, complete, perfect enlightenment. Therefore know the Prajna Paramita is the great transcendent mantra, is the great right mantra, is the utmost mantra, is the supreme mantra, which is able to relieve all suffering and is true, not false. So proclaim the Prajna Paramita Mantra. Proclaim the mantra that says, Gathe, Gathe, Paragate, Parasamgate, Bodhisattva. Now, there is another version of the Heart Sutra. which is essentially the same, but there's a prologue and an epilogue.

[27:21]

And I just thought I would read you those parts. Thus did I hear at one time the transcendent victor, that's the Buddha, was sitting on Vulture Mountain in Rajagraha together with a great assembly of monks and a great assembly of bodhisattvas. At that time, the transcendent victor was absorbed in a samadhi on the enumerations of phenomena called the perception of the profound. Also at that time, the Bodhisattva, the Mahasattva, the superior Avalokitesvara, was contemplating the meaning of the profound perfection of wisdom, and he saw that those five aggregates, or skandhas, also are empty of inherent existence. Then by the power of the Buddha, the venerable Sariputra said this to the Bodhisattva, the Mahasattva, the superior Avalokitesvara, How should a son of the good lineage train who wishes to practice the profound perfection of wisdom?

[28:25]

And then the sutra begins. So actually, the sutra that we chant is the answer to a question that goes unsaid in this version, which is, how do you train to practice the perfection of wisdom? And then, in the end, The mantra perfection of wisdom is stated, gate gate pargate parsamgate bodhisvaha. Sariputra, bodhisattva mahasattvas should train in the profound perfection of wisdom in that way. Then the transcendent victor rose from the samadhi and said to the bodhisattva, the mahasattva, the superior Avalokitesvara, Well done, well done, well done, child of good lineage. It is just so. It is like that. The profound perfection of wisdom should be practiced just as you have taught it. Even the Tathagatas admire this. The transcendent victor having so spoken, the venerable Sariputra, the Bodhisattva, the Mahasattva, the superior Avalokitesvara, and all those surrounding and those of the world, the gods, humans, demigods, and Gandharvas, were filled with admiration and praised the words of the transcendent victor.

[29:45]

So the scene that's being set is that actually when the Buddha goes into this meditation, it's his words, his meditation is the means by which this whole sutra is presented. What I mean is that He's offering us, the Buddha's offering us this sutra and gets Shariputra to ask of Avalokiteshvara, well how do you do it? and they have this dialogue which serves the Buddha's purpose. So in that way, even though it's the words of Avalokiteshvara, it's also the words of the Buddha.

[30:47]

Now, a couple... Can I ask a question? Yeah, sure. But the thrust, the presence, The import of this is non-dualistic. I mean, it's words beyond words. So, the real wellspring of this is the Buddhist presence. That's what's embodied in these words. I draw a very rough parallel from my Christian upbringing to the blood of Christ. whose presence to me is like the blood of Christ. Do you understand what I'm saying? I understand what you're saying. I'm not sure that the wellspring, I feel that the wellspring is actually beyond the Buddha too.

[31:51]

Right, of course. That the wellspring is emptiness uh... which which just exists and the buddha well avalokiteshvara is practicing prajnaparamita in other translations it described the translation is coursing in prajnaparamita which is a really descriptive word to me that's like uh... a boat on a river or something that is just there's nothing being practiced, it's just going along with this flow that's already existing. So to me that's kind of the wellspring of it. I don't know how, kind of my skeptical side

[32:58]

doesn't always know how to deal with the formalism of sutra language, but basically I just try to accept it and not hold it to some standard of historical accuracy. I don't know how other people feel about that. Are there other people who are uncomfortable with that kind of language? It's too much like Bible stories or something. Well, like the language of the prologue, where you know you you have invariably in a sutra you have they set the scene they tell you where where the buddha was and uh... and what meditation uh... he was practicing and uh... right who was there how many bodhisattvas how many mahasattvas how many arhats and then there's always this like this well done well done child of a good lineage uh... that kind of stuff uh...

[34:18]

which I have some trouble with, with kind of the religious paraphernalia of that language. Especially against something like the Lankavatara? Yeah. That's against the Diamond Sutra. I always think of that language as being quintessentially Indian, that it needed the Chinese to put it right on the ground, and that was done. We did here, but we don't. One of the things that the characters in the Heart Sutra, Avalokiteshvara, it's actually very unusual in the Prajnaparamita literature for Avalokiteshvara. Avalokiteshvara doesn't appear hardly any place else in the Prajnaparamita literature. there are other bodhisattvas uh... and other characters who are who appear more often and i don't think that shariputra also appears very much in in that literature and shariputra was also one of the disciples and he was the one who was uh... who he was the one who was practiced whose practice was uh...

[35:46]

most the practice of Prajnaparamita, but he has somewhat the feeling, of course he was, they were both set up to it by the Buddha in this, but he has somewhat the feeling of someone who has very great powers of mind and is very, really able to understand things and to take them apart and see how they work, But that's understanding, but that's not the prajna that's being talked about here. So he has somewhat the feeling of somebody who's very smart, but doesn't quite get it. But wants to get it, which is why he'll ask the question. Isn't part of that the Greek instance that came through Gandhara, that sort of dialogue? Probably, yeah. Particularly at this point.

[36:51]

I mean, if it was actually composed between 100 and 350 AD, I'm sure that it has a lot of that influence. You might spell that out for people a little more. I don't think people know. I'm not sure everybody knows what you're talking about. Just that there was some interchange with the Greeks in Gandara. It was on the Silk Route. So there were people coming through in both directions. So the Hellenistic period is the furthest east that Alexander got.

[37:52]

So they took along... a tremendous influence on the sculpture. Yeah. Right. Yeah. The Buddha... The flowing robes, the articulated limbs, as opposed to... Well, in the Bhutsaman, this is more historical. The Buddha, there's a lot of... We don't have any right here. There are a lot of Buddhas that are from that area. The Buddha at Tassajara is a Gandharvan. It's very... It really has this much more Western kind of feel. There's some books with pictures of it. Anyway, there was a lot of interchange there. Although, I think a lot of it is what actually happened, what that interchange was, is very speculative. But I suspect that some of the dialogue, that's right, some of that came from there.

[38:59]

So the basic question that's being asked is, how do you practice Prajnaparamita? And the sutra is the answer to that question. And the basic thing that's being offered is that you don't cling to ideas and conceptions, that you don't cling to anything that boils down to form is emptiness and emptiness is form. And I think that's kind of a point of departure for us, because the difficulty is that we always want something to cling to. uh... you might want to cling to this text or you want to cling to your idea of yourself or you want to cling to your body or somebody else's and the heart sutra itself is a series of negations

[40:19]

saying we can't cling to this, can't cling to this. There's actually a series of eight negations where different aspects of your mind and body are put forth and saying these are empty. But still It's very hard to keep from clinging. It's hard to keep from clinging to a feeling. Today, last night, I was in a parking lot and got a Denver boot put on my car. It's this big metal thing. Yeah, it was clinging to my wheel. It was a private parking lot. And this is, of course, while I was at a Buddhist Peace Fellowship event. And I was in a church parking lot.

[41:21]

And I didn't pay the money. Because I thought I was in a slot that said Trinity Church. And I came out, and my car was immobilized. It's a big clamping metal device that locks on the wheel and you don't go any place with it. And it's really... annoyed. I was really upset. But I said, okay, I'm going to just let this go. I'm going to go home, because I can't deal with this now. And somebody gave me a ride home, but it was just with me when I woke up in the morning. And I said, well, I'll try to deal with this. And I went to the church and talked to the woman at the office of the church, and she was very friendly. But I couldn't tell whether she was going to... You see, if she vouched for me, then I wouldn't have to pay the $60 to get the Denver boot taken off my car. And, you know, at every stage, I kept trying to, you know, just put forward a position, a reasoned position, and actualize the possibility that I wouldn't have to pay the $60.

[42:33]

And finally, I just had to do it. And I was really angry. And I'm still angry. But I had to go and literally deal with somebody who was basically the parking lot attendant. And he was also the head of security, but he didn't make the policy for the company. And it boiled down to, so finally I gave him the money, and I was really upset about it. And I had one of those thoughts that went through my mind. Well, what do I do? How do I finish this interaction with him? Do I thank him? And just like every fiber of my body did not want to thank him. although in actuality he wasn't doing anything to me uh... he was doing he was performing his job i mean it was not evil what he was doing he was performing his job the way uh... according to the guidelines that that he had and he was actually dealing with me in in a uh... fairly respectful way even though he wasn't giving an inch and he could have you know if he wanted to he could have

[44:01]

But he might have had to answer to somebody else. And so, I didn't want to thank him. I was standing there watching him take this boot off my car and thinking, well, what am I going to do? And I realized, why not thank him? What does it cost me anything to thank him? you know in fact maybe it's a good idea to thank him because I could just feel that I wanted to hold on to this anger and what that holding on to the anger meant to me was that I wanted to make sure that he got some of it you know, I wanted it to have an effect on him. So the inclination was to be not rude necessarily, although I could imagine being rude, but just cold and not give him anything.

[45:13]

And I thought, well, why not? Do I have something to lose in this situation by just thanking him? And so I did. And I felt better for doing it. And it wasn't like the end of my clinging for that particular moment. But I think it's like a small way of not validating, not saying, well, this anger is a real thing. This feeling is a real thing. And if it's a real thing, then what I really need to be doing is paying respect to it. To saying, my anger

[46:19]

is more a real thing than this person who's doing his job and actually treating me in a respectful manner. That the anger was more real than the person who was in front of me. And I realized I didn't particularly want to do that. So in this circumstance, I didn't. I think it was maybe the first time in my life that I ever did that. It doesn't have this great transformative quality, but it felt like a little gain. And I feel like it's because I've been spending the rest of the day trying to study this stuff. It helped me. but i also could use uh... my study of the heart sutra i was also using that as a pretext for being angry uh... that was that's the other side of it uh... i kept thinking about my car and this boot and sixty dollars i can't really concentrate on this stuff now because i'm distracted by by this other these other events that are going on in my life and uh...

[47:48]

you know, boy it really pisses me off. But that's, so there's, you can cling in a lot of, in a lot of different and very subtle ways. And you can even use the Dharma to cling to. So, I'm not sure there's a point beyond beyond that, but this clinging is very subtle and very pervasive. And I think that the help of the sutra, the point of it to me is to try to find, try to look at the ways that we cling and try to find a way not to do it. What do you mean by using the Dharma? Well, I mean it in almost a very kind of mechanistic way.

[48:53]

That I was studying, I was trying to study the Dharma to prepare for the class. And so I was angry that this situation at the parking lot was keeping me from studying the Dharma. And that fed into a kind of self-righteousness you know so i'm supposed to be studying the dormant do you understand yeah it's clear now what? yeah right so we're always trying to clear things out of our way uh... you know and we can always find some uh... you know we can always find some excuse for why we don't uh...

[49:56]

practice the perfection of wisdom. Hmm. Does anyone else want to answer that? Could you say it again? Well, there's a line that says all bodhisattvas depend on the Prajnaparamita. And it just occurred to me, if I'm depending my whole self on the Prajnaparamita, am I clinging to it?

[51:01]

mentioned it in one of his lectures and as I recall what he was saying was it was sort of that the dharma was sort of the sustenance for bodhisattva practice and depending on it was kind of like we depend on the air and the food and whatnot in order to maintain ourselves so it's something that's necessary It's extra. Perverted, right, yeah. Or some way of enhancing the self, it seems like.

[52:09]

It's a non-addictive dependence. I think you have to remember also that all of the language in here, the language is just an approximation. It's non-dualistic language and it's dealing with non-dualistic concepts. So when it says depends, it doesn't have the same force of dependence that we would think of. And it's really hard because we're used to, we have idea about what words mean. uh... so to use words to get to get to uh... to questions and matters that are beyond words uh... is very difficult and in fact that's what uh... when the sutras have a life of their own that's beyond the meaning of the words uh... and when we chant them I mean every day we chant this sutra

[53:26]

And there's some people who come and they find it really difficult. I don't know, are there people here who, if you're... Will admit to. Will admit to not liking service or chanting? I find it difficult because it's kind of mechanical. A little bit mechanical at first. So, I mean, I remember when I first came to the Berkley Zen Center, which was a really long time ago, I mean, it was still, like, all in Japanese. And I didn't know what I was chanting. And at the time, nobody talked to you. And I was really... What? No, it wasn't just me. I read in the book, it wasn't just me. And... I was really uncomfortable with it. I was uncomfortable because there's a devotional, there's the devotional side of chanting.

[54:33]

And, you know, what our teachers always say, they say, you know, just chant to chant. Just do it. And what I discovered when I returned to it years later, was actually I really like to chant, that I just like the feeling of it, and the feeling of everybody's effort coming together to blend. And when you're chanting, you're not supposed to be thinking about the meaning of the words. So it is, in a sense, it's mechanical. I'm a singer. In the same sense, when I'm singing, if I'm thinking about the meaning of the words, then I'm apart from the song that I'm singing at that moment.

[55:34]

There are other times to think about the meaning of the words. If you're actually rehearsing something, if you have to figure out how to breathe it and how to you know, how to move the notes. Of course, we don't have too many notes in our chanting, but there's other times, like here, to think about the meaning, but in chanting, in the zendo, it's just chanting. Who says that? Is that written somewhere? That it should just be chanting and you shouldn't be thinking about the meaning of it? Is it written somewhere? I don't know. Is it written somewhere? I think it's been said an awful lot of times. I remember when Mel said we could be chanting peanut butter, peanut butter. In the Hindu literature there seems to be two different opinions. One is that you just repeat the magic sounds of Sanskrit. You kind of get the benefit just from the sounds. You don't have to know the meaning. And I've heard the other opinion that if you don't know the meaning of the mantra, it's called Jada Mantra, or Stone or Dead Mantra, and it doesn't have any good effect.

[56:36]

So, which of those sides do you believe? I don't know. There's a difference between intellectual understanding and meaning. And I know when I sing a song, for some odd reason, the phrase, when bombs bursting in air, when you think of that image, when you sing a song, I think of the image of those fireworks going off when I sing the song. So I do have some meaning that comes through there. What were you going to say? I don't know, I'm sorry. It demonstrates an intellectual understanding of something, just truly understanding the thing itself. And when you're chanting, the thing itself is the chanting. But I think there's an interaction between the two, because to somehow hold the meaning and go beyond the meaning and just into the rhythm and not either or, but kind of both, Otherwise, you might as well be chanting.

[57:40]

It's the difference between chanting the language you don't know and chanting the language you do know. So when there is the language there, you can't help but have some association, interpretation of it. But if you can behold the two, it balances the most effective. It's really interesting to hear people's different experience of chanting. It's like, wah. It's like, take a big breath and wah. It's more of a sound thing, kind of. Is it funny? Well, in a certain way, there's a way in which I prefer chanting in Japanese. Because it's much more the sound. It's a syllabic language that breaks down in a different way than English. And English would be neat if it were more melodic, I think.

[58:44]

English lends itself to more melody. But we just do it how we do it, and actually it changes. I mean, Mel has changed the way we chant the Heart Sutra. pretty considerably over the last five years, because we always used to do it with the Mukugyo and chant it as we would chant it to the Japanese, like, Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva, and that's actually kind of weird, because that's not the way our language is. So there is this constant effort and, you know, work to find the appropriate way to do this chanting. But it's really interesting because it is still, however you cut it, it's essentially a devotional practice. And so we have this devotional practice in the midst of our sitting practice, which we maybe don't see as a devotional practice. And in fact, a lot of people, myself included,

[59:50]

thought they were running full tilt away from devotional practices of other religions. I mean, I always thought I didn't like that. And now I find, oh, maybe I do like that. And gradually see that there's a way in which the devotional practice of chanting is just like Zazen. I mean, you just, in Zazen you're returning to your breath and your posture. When you're chanting, you really have to pay attention to your breath. And you're very aware of when, you can be very aware of when you're running out of air, when to take a breath. And if you do this every day, you learn a way to do it in a way that you have to pay attention. And you also realize, just like in Zazen, that when your mind moves, when your mind takes a thought in the middle of chanting, you're off.

[61:07]

And even if you've chanted this thousands of times, you can lose your place in just an instant. and then you return in the same way that you return when you're sitting. And so, I think these practices aren't so different. And actually, in the Chinese, Japanese tradition, in almost all of the various Buddhist traditions in those areas, they would always do They would always do this whole variety of practices. There would always be devotional practices. There would be no such thing as pure zazen, where you would just practice meditation without doing any chanting. For these next couple of weeks, I'd like to just recite the Heart Sutra so that we can actually pay attention to the words and not so much to the sound, because we're doing the sound every day.

[62:32]

I think, actually, just looking at this now, that part of the answer to why we chant instead of doing it as a chant, I don't want to do it.

[63:37]

Right, it's connected with bowing. Yeah. What I thought was interesting is when you try and memorize this and then you try and say it to yourself, it's a completely different experience than reading the chant and being able to stay on the next word and figure out when you're going to breathe versus And then you have to think, it seems to me. Then you have to be in the experience of the story. For me, at least, I thought of it as a story as I was memorizing it. And saying, well, and they got together, and, you know, and, oh, Shariputra, and remembering the different plots that were going on. So, just a totally different experience of reading the chambers and remembering. So I wasn't sure how to approach it. Now I'm sort of, now I'm toying with another idea for just a month, which is, you know, in, again, in most traditional places that I've seen in Japan, everybody takes the chant card.

[64:42]

Whether they know it or not. Right. They always, they take, I don't know what they do with the chant card, but they take the chant card. If you were busy reading yours, you wouldn't look around? Yeah, I looked around. How come you don't know what they were doing? Because I couldn't tell if they were reading it, it was in Japanese. Oh, but they were holding it up in front of their eyes. Yeah, right. So I'm wondering, Also, I remember when Laurie was doing a practice period at San Francisco, they were encouraging everybody for that practice period to take the chant card and follow it, whether you knew the chants or not. And I'm wondering if people have any interest in doing that for this month. Sure. I thought about that because I was raised in the Jewish tradition. It didn't make any difference whether you knew it or not, you held the book. The book was holy in itself and you followed the words to take it in with your eye and your heart.

[65:49]

But the thing that keeps coming to my mind, we used to have the cards that had the Japanese symbols right next to the words. Oh yeah, right. Are there any of those around? I'd love to see them. Yeah, let me look and see if I can find them. Yeah, if they're any place, they're in there actually. They should be easy to find. Is it Japanese characters? Yeah, I think it's in Japanese words. Yeah, it's Japanese characters with Japanese words. Why does that interest you? Just... Yeah, just connecting the different characters to the thing. And then, you know, the words to the way we've got them. Can you say anything more about the prologue original question that triggered off this answer, the nature of the question, what the questioner was looking for, and all of that. Well, it's kind of interesting.

[67:02]

It just says, at that time, Avalokitesvara was contemplating the meaning of the profound perfection of wisdom, and he saw that those five aggregates, the five skandhas, are also empty of inherent existence. And then it says, then by the power of the Buddha, the venerable Shariputra said this to the Bodhisattva, how should a son of good lineage train who wishes to practice the profound perfection of wisdom? Now, you know, what comes to me right off is that, how did he know what Avalokiteshvara was practicing? What do you mean? I mean, how could he know? How do I know what Yeah, if I see you sitting in the zendo, do I know what practice you're doing? I mean, do I know what's going on in your mind? And that's why through the power of the Buddha, he knew and asked a question at the right time. I'm not sure what more to say about that.

[68:09]

I'm not sure that answers your question. Yeah, I was kind of getting at whether he was asking for a way to, say, do effortless meditation and, like, get around the hindrance of the mind that they talk about in here, or whether it was just a more general question about how to get some form of truth or something. I think it's the more... I think it's the more general, I mean, because what he gets is actually a very detailed analytical answer, which I think we'll go into a little more detail about. And we haven't talked about what a paramita is. There's a lot of things just to touch on. briefly, and we can do it in the next couple weeks, that will give you an idea. But basically what Avalokiteshvara does is he analyzes the nature of reality and says that these things are empty and that

[69:17]

how you practice Prajnaparamita is by recognizing, is by seeing, directly seeing, experiencing, not just understanding intellectually. This is where, unfortunately, my experience has to part way with text. It's by seeing directly what is empty in all of these aspects of existence. and the question I was going to ask for just the last ten minutes is what are, what do people think is emptiness? What is your idea of emptiness? Seems like it's the... Well, I mean, of course anything you say is wrong, but it seems like it's the absence of any kind of ideas or believing in any of the ideas that we have.

[70:59]

To me, it's just the pure experience of listening. Is there something else there? I'll stop there. I imagine there was some trouble in the translation of emptiness and I've wondered what it translates from and anyone knows how that's made it from wherever Someone told me it also meant pregnant.

[72:08]

Right. I like that. And there's a nice quote somewhere about emptiness is the red of the flowers, the white of the snow. something like that I think it translates into it's my memory is that it actually translates the idea of this idea of emptiness translates into something like swollen or full like pregnant I know where it is Hanze's translation, which, I mean, his readings are often a little nutty. I mean, not inaccurate, but not inaccurate. Did you know him? Did you ever meet him? I heard some lectures when he was here. Let me see if I can find... Here it is.

[73:32]

I have written elsewhere about the etymological derivation of the word shunyata from the root swell and about its meaning. I can look up this other place that he wrote it. There's no need to repeat all this here. It is sufficient to briefly define emptiness from three points of view. etymologically, Shunya conveys the idea that something which looks like something much is really nothing. From outside there appears to be a lot, but there is nothing behind. A swelled head, as we know, is an empty head. That's what he says about it etymologically. So maybe it's not like pregnant. But maybe it is like pregnant. Swollen with possibility. That's the whole notion of being just... I always thought of it as being very close to creation.

[74:40]

Everything's being born all the time. It's connected with the whole concept of impermanence. Things are impermanent and continually changing. There is nothing to grasp hold of and hold on to. When you grab it, it's no longer there. I don't like the notion of absence. back here. There's also the thing, you know, the heresies one can fall into, you know, the heresy of nullism, and then that things actually do exist.

[76:17]

That's the same basic thing there. I've always thought about it in an intellectual way, but there's a point in some music where the sound actually makes the silence greater. You know, I mean, it defines the silence and the sound and the space all become interwoven. John Cage? I wasn't thinking of John Cage. I was thinking of Gabriel. Well, you can have your... Do you know what I mean? There's also the point which the silence makes the sound greater. That there's space around each note. And in fact, if there's not space around each note, then you're wasting... I mean, then you get some kind of effect, but... You have one long note that never ends.

[77:22]

I mean, it's all the same thing, you know, just silence and silence. There's... Well, I'm just thinking a lot about how we resist change so much. And it seems, I mean, it's a little bit like the question of, you know, if we are enlightened, how come we're not enlightened? I mean, we do resist change, and yet everything is always changing. It's sort of like, you know, why? I mean, why do we have so much trouble with this? And perhaps the notion of emptiness is to kind of try to counteract that. with a sense of negation, with a sense of taking away what we're always trying to hold on to. But essentially, that's not really the point. The point is that actually we're being filled up all the time. Negation is more like something you might hear from Nietzsche or something. It's that sort of very Western linear idea.

[78:22]

But it doesn't mean negation by any stretch of the imagination. But it is negation in the sense of seeing through the things that are... the thoughts, you know, the thoughts and ideas we have that are just thoughts and ideas. Seeing through those, seeing that they are just thoughts and ideas. Does that also have to do with the thoughts and ideas we have really, oftentimes, are not really clear because we don't see things clearly as they really are. We project, you know, so much, and many times our thoughts and views are erroneous. Well, Mel really helped me with this whole word of emptiness.

[79:25]

I talked to him at length about this, and also with Bob Polson, and they both said something that was very helpful to me, You know, looking at emptiness in the Western definition of emptiness is not what they're talking about here, and basically it means empty of an individual self, so it's more talking about everything being interdependent and everything being contained within this vastness. It's not, and I get very stuck in the Western translation of what emptiness is. But that was very helpful to me, was just saying that, you know, there's nothing can exist without everything else i actually i think all this stuff is right and the buddhas The Buddha's great discovery was codependent arising. It's also dependent co-arising. It was called codependent arising in another era. But, uh... Wait a minute, but it was code of man?

[80:41]

Sure. Well, actually, there's a wonderful story about that in the end of the Thich Nhat Hanh readings that were in this stuff where Thich Nhat Hanh and Mara are talking. That's right. But, uh... It's in the last part of the Thich Nhat Hanh stuff there. But I think that's right. I'd like to come back to, and we should tie up. There's one more thing, which is also in the Tiger's Cave readings in here, which is Abbot Olbora talks about, every time he talks about emptiness, he talks about it as renunciation. And that's... What? I don't like that. What? Think about it. I mean, the part that I like about it, the part that I like actually about his writing is that he's always... There's...

[81:51]

Emptiness is not like something outside of you that you are passive to, but in fact, I think what he's saying is that you have to, you always have to move to engage with what you take to be reality. So, you know, if you don't renounce it, I mean, this, we can talk about these negations, and I think that these are negations, but we have to be very careful about the language, because it's non-dualistic language, that they're not really negations. So, I think what he's saying is that, you know, the act of renunciation is the act of continual, the act of recognition of of your clinging, of your desire to hold on to something, of your desire to make something real. So in that sense, emptiness is not just the idea that these things aren't real, but it involves you too. That in other words, you have to do something to actualize that.

[82:59]

So it's not such a... It's not renunciation in the form of wearing a hair shirt, I don't think. But we can argue about this. Yeah, I mean, right. But it's interesting because as you brought it up, you had a resistance to the idea of renunciation. And all these resistances pop up in all these really subtle ways. So I'd like to finish up there. Next week I'd like to discuss a little more about the technical side and also a little more perhaps from one of the readings. Is there someone who would like to make a brief, I'm talking about like a five minute, ten minute presentation on what the Paramitas are? We have a volunteer.

[84:00]

Okay. Do we have one more volunteer we need for next week? Someone to talk briefly about the five Skandas. No, no, different household. Come on, Charlie. I'm collecting the money. I already have a job. No one knows. I could give you a book to read. I'll do it. Okay. Alright. I'll give you two books to read. One to look through and one to look at more closely. Good. Thanks. Now, one last thing. Remember those names? Oh, no. Or prizes. No. Alan, I am scared of clowns. Oh, right. Everyone take a name, and if anyone gets Joan Thompson, pick another. It just says Joan T. if you get that one. If you get one that says Joan T., take another one.

[85:31]

Don't laugh. Don't laugh. You're closer than you think. What is that hat? To keep these, by the way. You need them. You need to know the names. Are you going to tell us what we're doing? Yeah, yeah. I'm going to tell you what you're doing as soon as you all get the names. Check out CBS's name tag. Use this name for next week. Ella, are you in here? Uh, I think so.

[86:45]

I forget now. There's one left. There's one left. Did everybody get one? There's one left? Well, I didn't take one. Then let me take one. Does anyone get Joan's name? Yes. Okay, and you traded it in? No. Oh. Why don't you take that one? And that's the last one, right? Take that one. Good, well this works out then. I'm your nameless? Let's see. I guess I'm nameless. Okay, now what I want you to do next week is Valentine's Day. So I'd like everybody to write something brief, a brief poem or brief paragraph or something about the Heart Sutra, or not about the Heart Sutra, with the Heart Sutra as your point of departure, as your point of departure, and you can write anything that you want. If it's somebody, you know, if you have the name of someone that you know or have a feeling about, then you can, you know, direct it more towards that person.

[87:58]

And if not, just do whatever you want. And what I'd like to do next week is, and make them brief, they don't have to be long, but next week, So, when you've written it, fold a piece of paper, put that person's name on the outside of the piece of paper. And then, next week, that person can read your unsigned work. I have a problem. Do you have a problem? We'll deal with it. Yeah, we can do each other. Okay? Anonymously. Anyway, this is a little like fourth grade or something, but it's Valentine's Day and we're studying the Heart Sutra.

[89:03]

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