Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Hare Hare, [...] Hare Rama, Hare Hare, Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Hare Hare, [...] Hare Rama So I'm going to continue talking about the Heart Sutra today. Yesterday I talked about the two first sections. There are actually five, there are more, but there's a system usually used by the Tibetans which are called the five paths, which are related to the five sections of the Heart Sutra.

[01:09]

So I talked about the first two paths yesterday, although I didn't talk about them as paths. It's just interesting that the first one is called the path of accumulation, which is zeroing in on the path. It reminds me actually of one way of thinking about Tozan's five ranks. These are all related. And the second one is called the path of preparation, which is like how you actually entering into preparing for the practice. And then the next part is called the path of seeing. And then there's the path of meditation.

[02:16]

And then there's the path of enlightenment. So it's kind of like a sequential training, which is very Tibetan, but you can also see it that each one of these five paths contains the other four in a non-sequential way. When Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva, practicing deeply the Prajnaparamita, perceived that all skandhas in their own being are empty and were safe from all suffering, this is called the path of accumulation, or getting zeroing in on the subject, getting the introduction.

[03:27]

And the path of preparation is, O Shariputra, form does not differ from emptiness. Emptiness does not differ from form. That which is form is emptiness. That which is emptiness, form. The same is true of feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. So I talked about that yesterday. Those are called the four profundities. So today, I'm going to talk about the path of seeing, which is how form and emptiness are perceived. So, Avalokiteshvara, of course, is talking to Sariputra, and he says,

[04:31]

O Shariputra, all dharmas are marked with emptiness. They do not appear nor disappear, are not tainted nor pure, do not increase nor decrease. Dharmas, first of all, dharmas are with a small d and a capital D. Capital D Dharma means Buddhist teaching or the truth or reality. The Dharma is the teaching, the reality, the truth. What we practice, Small dharmas, with a D, means things, basically.

[05:35]

In the very general, large sense, everything is a dharma, a thing, a something. And in a very technical sense, the various schools had a list of dharmas. which are all the wholesome and unwholesome psychophysical constituents of our being. So the dharmas are the elements of the skandhas. The skandhas are form, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. And the dharmas are the breakdown of what constitutes the skandhas. the elements of the skandhas, like the form is the bodily dharmas, and feelings are the feeling dharmas, the various constituents that appear through feelings, and perceptions, the dharmas of perception, which are the elements that come up through perception,

[07:00]

And the mental formations are the dharmas, which come up through thinking. And then there are the dharmas of consciousness, which are the elements of consciousness. So the dharma is the dharma about the dharmas, the truth of the dharmas. Dharma with a capital D is the reality of the dharmas with a small d. Do you have any question about that? So in Abhidhamma, the study of dharma is all the dharmas. You study all the dharmas to see what the truth of those dharmas is.

[08:02]

And in the Heart Sutra, the truth of the small dharmas with a small d, the dharma of the small dharmas is emptiness. So the dharmas with a small d are form, even though they're mental form asians. All the mental form asians are dharmas with a small d, and the dharma or the truth or the reality of emptiness. So, all Shariputra, all dharmas, with a small d, are marked with emptiness. In other words, the mark is a characteristic. The main characteristic of something is its mark. The mark of fire is heat. The mark of water is wet, and so forth. The mark of all dharmas is emptiness.

[09:04]

The main characteristic of everything in the universe is emptiness. So, what is the true form of things? If the true mark of all dharmas is emptiness, what does that mean? It means that nothing exists In emptiness, nothing exists on its own. So what is the meaning of the term emptiness? Emptiness has 20 or 21 different meanings. But for us, in this case, it means interdependence. Things only exist interdependently. or as we say, interbeingly. Nothing exists. And as it was stated before, yesterday, that things don't exist on their own.

[10:12]

There's no own being to anything. All five skandhas have no own being. Means everything exists only dependently on something else. So if you take a grain of sand Out of the universe, the whole universe will collapse. Nobody's tried to do that yet, because there's no way to do that. So I remember Suzuki Roshi saying, if you throw a rock as far as you can, you still can't throw it out of the universe. You can't get rid of it. It may disintegrate into other elements, but it still exists as the universe. The whole universe exists within that stone. And if you break the stone down and pulverize it, then the universe exists in every one of the small pulverizations.

[11:20]

It's like when you water the lawn Or in the morning, the lawn is full of dew, and on each one of those blades of grass is a little dew drop. And in each one of those dew drops, the whole universe is reflected, as Dogen says in Genjo Koans. The whole universe is reflected in a drop of dew on the grass. So in every one of those drops of dew, the whole universe is reflected. So there's no way that you can get rid of anything. So even when we so-called die, what does that mean? Even though we pulverize, you know, somebody gets blown up, where did they go? We used to say, even though you chop up the earwig into a thousand pieces, you can't kill it.

[12:30]

So that brings the question, well, what is the true form of things? We say, there's the earwig, and that's the earwig, the form of the earwig is a long little brown creature with legs and pinchers. And even if you chop it up, it's still, you still can't get rid of it. So what is the true form of the earwig? What is the true form of anything? The true form is no special form. There's no special form. And no special form is the reality of specific forms. So to say all dharmas are empty means the dharma has to have a specific form. That's why we call it a dharma.

[13:46]

If it didn't have a specific form, we couldn't call it anything. So specific forms are empty. That's why we talk about myself. We say, well, there's no self, but there is the self. You can't tell me there's no self because I feel that there is a self. I am myself. But my I am myself is a no self. It's not that there's nobody there. It's just that the self that is a self is not a self. If we say that it's not a self, and that there's nothing there, that's not, you couldn't even talk about it, because there would be nothing to talk about. But the fact that there is this self means that you can realize that this self is not a self. It's an imputed self, which means we give it a reality as a self.

[14:54]

As we said before, the five skandhas are form, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. But within those five streams, you can't really find a self. But we impute a self to the five streams. We assign a self. you are assigned to inhabit these five skies as Mary. So we give names, you know, and then we attach meanings to the names. And then we create a world around the names, and we believe in it. which is okay, we have to do that, otherwise we wouldn't be doing it.

[15:59]

But you can't really find a substantial self in the five skandhas, even though we act as if there were. So this is called the two truths understanding. One truth, the absolute truth is, that within the self, there is no self. But the second truth is, in the dualistic world, there's right and wrong, there's you and me, there are all these existences, and they have to be taken care of. And what creates a person is the non-person. What creates the self is the non-self. Without a non-self, there wouldn't be a self. Because everything that's created has the opposite. Without a birth, there's no death.

[17:06]

Without a death, there's no birth. As soon as one rises up as a baby, you're already looking at somebody who's going to die. so to speak, in the relative sense. Because the mark of birth is death. The mark of death is birth. So what is birth and death? This brings up these wonderful questions. So the true form is no special form, otherwise nothing could come up at all. Nothing could exist except through no special form, because if there was a special form then everything that existed would be existing right now without changing.

[18:18]

No special form means everything is changing. The form of five minutes ago has characteristics of this form, or this form has characteristics of the form of five minutes ago, but it's already changed. So when we speak to each other tomorrow, it will seem like the same, you know, it'll have characteristics of today, but it will be a different situation. So everything is going somewhere, and yet, at the same time, going nowhere. So it's important to understand that the true form is no special form. Otherwise, nothing could change.

[19:25]

And we'd only have a solidity. So Dogen talks about the mountains are walking. The blue mountains are walking. Means everything that looks solid and permanent is walking. So the mark, the true mark of everything is, well, impermanence, emptiness, no special form, even though it looks, we impute all those things to our existences, all those qualities. So we say an imputed body is not an inherent body.

[20:33]

In other words, what we call something is not the thing in itself, because the thing in itself is only a part of, a piece of the whole. So then the sutra says, all dharmas are marked with emptiness. They do not appear or disappear. Well, things do appear and disappear in a dualistic sense. Something is here today, gone tomorrow, right? But what is it that comes and what is it that goes? So in, A dualistic sense, things do seem to appear and disappear. But in an emptiness, in shunya, since there's no inherent existence or shape in things, there's not a thing that comes up or a thing that disappears.

[21:50]

It's like waves on the water. when the wind blows, the wave comes up. And then the wave goes back into the water. And in that sense, the wave appears and disappears. But the wave is simply a ripple on the water. It's a movement of the water. So, in the absolute sense, there's simply movement of the water. movement of the nature, buddha nature, movement of buddha nature, but there's not something inherently solid that appears or something inherently solid that disappears. So we talk about just endless life, you know, endless becomeings.

[23:17]

And this is where, you know, Dogen talks about, in Genjo Koan, he talks about firewood and ash. It looks like firewood, when you burn it, turns into ash. But there's a sense of firewood turning into ash, an imputed sense of firewood turning into ash. But he said firewood is in the state of being firewood, and it has its before and after. Ash is in the state of being ash, and it has its before and after. So there's continuous time and discontinuous time, continuous movement and discontinuous movement. from the point of view of discontinuous movement, there's only discrete moments. And something doesn't turn into something else.

[24:22]

He says, we don't say that spring turns into summer or that fall turns into winter. Fall is fall. Winter is winter. Spring is spring. Summer is summer. Even though There's the appearance of one thing turning into another. Winter has its before and after and is a total world of time. So, each thing, each entity has its own eternal moment, so to speak. which is not carried over. It doesn't come from someplace and it's not carried over. It's simply momentary and complete.

[25:26]

What does it mean to say it has its own before and after? It has its own history and its own, in other words, before and after are contained within it, within its existence. Rather than being a container, you don't say fall is before winter, you say winter has something before it and after it. Winter contains, has its before and after, but we don't say it turns into. So winter contains fall and spring. Right. So something doesn't turn into something else. even though it has that appearance, even though we're talking about transformation, each transformation is discrete in itself, even though there are causes and conditions for it. Everything arises through causes and conditions.

[26:33]

The causes and conditions for winter are those of fall. But fall is fall, and winter is winter. Nishyari, when he talks about bhokasan, when he talks about the Heart Sutra and about Genjo Koan, uses the example of beans and tofu. He says, you know, In order to get tofu, you have to boil the beans and press them and so forth and go through this process and out comes tofu. But tofu is tofu and beans are beans. Beans is not tofu. If you said to tofu, do you know that in a past life you were beans?

[27:37]

the tofu would laugh at you, say, are you kidding? Beans, what are they? We also have the concept of steers and meat. I don't wanna say cows because we don't really eat cows, we eat steers mostly, people do. But, you know, when we eat a hamburger, we don't say, I'm eating a steer. We say, I'm eating hamburger. Hamburger is hamburger. Steer is a steer. Steer is a condition, a cause for hamburger. But the steer and meat is meat. As soon as you start eating it, it's no longer a steer. It's meat. So it's related to, you know, there's a condition, a cause and conditions that created meat, but meat is meat.

[28:46]

That's the way. We don't say, I'm now eating steer, because steer was something that was running around doing some activity. So the life of the steer is over, and the life of the hamburger is present. But both are totally empty. Is it human beings' unfortunate plight to be able to remember that, you know, if I could personify being tofu, then would I be nostalgic for being a bean? If I were a hamburger, would I be nostalgic for being a steer? I'm wondering if that's our difference between being a bean and being tofu. Well, the thing is, you can't remember being a bean. We can't?

[29:50]

No. This is one of our saving graces, is that we don't know where we came from. so that we can just live our life as it is. That's the secret of practice, is to just live your life with what is right here, right now, totally. That's exactly what practice is. You described two ways of seeing things. One is discontinuous and one is continuous. Right. If you understand that both of those ways of looking at things exist, is one more real than another? Well, they're both, one is as real as the other if you see that they're not two.

[30:55]

But if you see them as divided, then you see emptiness and form without seeing that the emptiness is the form and the form is the emptiness. When you see that the form is emptiness and emptiness is form, that's seeing the real nature. So they're both reality. So if you see the discontinuousness in the continuousness and you see the continuousness in the discontinuousness, that's reality. So a discrete moment, a discontinuous moment, is actually a continuous moment, because the discontinuous moment is based on continuous moment. So there's only now. So now is what we say any time.

[32:02]

You said it yesterday, and you'll say it tomorrow. This now is always just presence, just continuous moment of now, which seems like it's going somewhere, but it's not. It's always just right here. So it's like we have the idea that time goes somewhere, but you can also see that time is just right here. It doesn't go anywhere, and there's just the activity that's like spinning wheels on time. And the changing forms, forms are just continually changing and it's on this treadmill of time. Rather than going someplace, where is it going? Wherever you are is it. Alan? I mean, it seems like what you're saying is we're trying to do both things.

[33:18]

On the one hand, we see in Zazen, my mind is running, and I'm seeing it continuously like a movie, which is made up of frames. Discrete. Dorma moments. So, is it that our focus is also continuously shifting from the, it can shift from the wide continuous stream to the dharma moment and just freely go back and forth? Yes, when there's no thinking, no discursive thinking, then there's just a continuous moment. And when there's, thinking is discrimination, and discrimination means dividing. To discriminate is to divide. So, when there's no discrimination, the mind is like a black screen. So there's no activity. And so it's only one moment.

[34:20]

What makes the discontinuous activity is our thinking, our discriminating mind is what creates the activity. No, that's because discrimination is form. When we talk about form, it's discrimination. And when we talk about emptiness, it's non-discrimination. So it's the discrimination of non-discrimination. As long as your discriminating mind is contained within the non-discriminating mind, aspect of mind, then it's one piece. That's why we say, don't start judging your judgmental mind.

[35:21]

Don't start judging your discriminating mind. In Zazen, don't try to stop thinking. People think, I should stop thinking. You can't help doing that somehow. But as long as you're not judging and discriminating the discriminating mind, whatever comes up in Zazen is the subject of meditation. Some random thought will come up, and then you accept that random thought. If you try to chase it away, that's discrimination. That's delusion. Just let the thought come up, but stay in a non-discriminating mind. When Buddha was sitting under the bow tree, all these demons came up to him and started whatever they were doing.

[36:27]

But he didn't chase them away. He just maintained his composure, which means non-discriminating mind. Didn't say he took his sword out and started battling the demons. He didn't do that. He just sat in satse. So the demons or whatever it is comes up in your mind, that's what we're doing. We're doing exactly what Shakyamuni did under the bow tree. Whatever comes up, just comes up. And you don't take it up and you don't let it dominate you. And you just let it all go by. Let it come up. And then it's like shining the light on to demons. You know, when we're pursued by demons, the demons are in the dark. And then you turn around and you shine the light on them and they disappear, for the most part. Because the demons are just the demons of our own mind.

[37:32]

And we can allow them to do something or we can not allow them to dominate. It's all in our mind. So when our mind is open, non-discriminating, we're settled in Zazen, settled mind, without allowing anything to move us. And the more open we become, and the more accepting we become, as soon as you start to push stuff away, then you start to suffer. And as soon as you hold on to it, you start to suffer. So you just let everything go by. And you're sitting in nirvana. Just let everything go by, but not without noting it.

[38:41]

Not pushing it away. We say, return to Zazen. Return to Zazen, right? When your mind gets filled with stuff, don't try to push it away. Just let go. Bye, come back. Goodbye, come back. But if our habit is to hold on, that letting go requires a discriminating effort. Well, not necessarily. If your habit is to hang on, the effort is to, what would you say the effort would be? The effort would be to let go. Yeah, but letting go is not an effort. If you're in the habit of holding on, it is. No, it isn't. I'll tell you why. If you want to stop smoking, You can make a big effort to stop smoking.

[39:46]

You never smoked, but... You've done everything else. No, but... But, you know, you can fight, you can make a big effort to let go of smoking, but it's really tough, you know. Best way to let go of smoking is just get, put yourself into a state of mind where you really don't want to smoke. And then you just walk away and you just don't smoke again. That's really letting go. But you may have to struggle, you know, that's okay too. I've done both. When I was, you know, I remember kind of struggling, you know, to let go of smoking, but I'd always start again, you know, after a year or something. But the last time, which was 1973, I just said, I don't want to smoke anymore. And I never did. And I never had a withdrawal symptom or a craving or anything.

[40:51]

Just let it go. So that's possible. That's the easy way. But you have to be ready to do that. You can't do it unless you really want to do it. So making an effort to want to do it, I think is, Getting yourself in a position where you really want to let go of something, then you can let go. And I remember Suzuki Roshi talking about that too. He said, when you people are ready to stop smoking, you will. He never said, I want to get a sauce borger. When you're ready to stop. So he put the idea in our mind that it's a good idea to not want to smoke. And then the rest is up to us. Well, I think you sort of covered it and you came together, because I think there often is an effort to getting to. Yeah, of course.

[41:54]

But I also wanted to say that I think for some of us, we let go too easily sometimes also, and sort of jump to emptiness too fast before we actually have, say, let go of something. I don't know how you do that. Well, one of my favorites is that if somebody close to you died and you didn't grieve them or mourn them, say you just said, oh well, nothing really dies and it's all just empty and it doesn't matter to me, you know, and then for the next six months or whatever, every time somebody goes, you go ballistic. And you don't ever know why, but... That's fooling yourself. Right, exactly. Yeah, so... But that's a good point, because even though everything is empty, we still have to cry. You know?

[42:57]

Even though you know that there's nothing you can do about this situation, that it's inevitable, that this is the way everything goes, and it's totally normal and natural, you still cry. You should still cry because form is form. So form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Emptiness is emptiness and form is form. So we have to acknowledge our human nature, our human form nature and not deny that. I'm confused about thought causation. And, you know, normally I think A causes B. That's right.

[44:25]

The Buddhist understanding of how the world arises is that this is because that is. That is because this is. This is not because that is not. That is not because this is not. And this is the way the whole world arises. That sounds like. That's right, it sounds like. Exactly, that's it. That's it. I'm stuck. Well, that's good. Something arises out of confusion. So the confusion is very important, very important.

[45:28]

If you don't have confusion, you should be careful to think, well, what's missing? Because confusion is the catalyst for clarity. So treasure your confusion. Pain is the catalyst for pleasure. Pleasure is the catalyst for pain. Clarity is the catalyst for confusion. It just keeps going on and on. A causes B, B causes A. Peace causes war. War causes peace. Justice causes injustice. Good causes bad. Bad causes good. There's no way you can get around it. The only way you can get around it is to realize that there is a non-duality within all the dualities.

[46:34]

And that's exactly what the Heart Sutra is talking about. Well, that's why the five skandhas, they're in play in everything then, you know, and they are that ball. you know, I was at the beginning and I was thinking, what's the difference between perception, thought forms, and consciousness? And then I pulled in form and feelings. Right, they're all working together. That's why I guess they're so primed, those five skandhas, as an explanation. Yes. They couldn't exist without emptiness. The ball would drop dead. Maybe that's taking it too far. Yeah, but that's true. The five skandhas all work together in emptiness, as emptiness. Because if their basic nature was not emptiness, they couldn't move at all.

[47:42]

The emptiness is the space in which everything moves. So that space doesn't have any special shape or form. But all those shapes and forms are the expression of emptiness. That's how emptiness is expressed. So if you want to study emptiness, you have to study it through forms. So we're studying emptiness all the time. That's why when we serve, when we pick up something, how do you pick something up? You pick it up in emptiness. How do you put something down? How do you relate one thing to another? How do we walk? What kind of feeling do we have? How do we move in this space with harmony? Because the five skandhas are, to harmonize the five skandhas is to live an enlightened life.

[48:49]

healthy. When all of the skandhas are not working and dharmas are not working harmoniously with each other, things get sick. People get sick. The world gets sick. So how do we, you know, the harmony within our own five skandhas is extended out to whatever we relate to. and we create our world that way, and we influence the world that way. Well, I just wanted to say something about causality. Maybe the way the unconditioned expresses itself through causality is that the cause is in the effect, as the effect, not as the cause. Say it again.

[50:02]

The cause is in the effect as the effect, not as the cause. The cause and effect relationship. Yeah. They're both independent. Yeah, they're both independent. Well, the teacher is in the student as the student, not as the teacher. That's like being Tantoku. Oh, yeah. That's right. The teacher is in the student as the student, not as the teacher. So the student is the student and the teacher is the teacher. So sometimes the teacher is the student, sometimes the student is the teacher, but at the same time the teacher is always the student, the student is always the teacher. It's true, but it's also useful to have the word empty.

[51:23]

Emptiness means the totality. Within the totality, Emptiness doesn't mean nothing. Emptiness means within the totality, everything is interdependent. In emptiness, all of the elements are interdependent. So interdependence is the activity of emptiness, is the activity within emptiness. I think James is saying, why do you even want to use this word, why do you, and of course this comes from Sanskrit, but why do you use this word emptiness, which suggests a lack of something? Because it does suggest a lack of something. It suggests a lack of own being. I think it's because human nature is to want to have something there that's fixed and always core.

[52:36]

And because we have such a strong sense of that, we have to use the word empty to dislodge that. Empty just takes away everything. So we have a number of terms that are used. And each term, the terms all have pretty similar meaning, but we use the different terms in different contexts in order to express the meaning according to the context. So you may say, well, why not use interdependence instead of emptiness? Well, it depends on the context. So it's like looking at something from the point of emptiness, looking at something, the same thing from the point of view of interdependence, looking at something from the point of view of absolute or relative.

[53:45]

And so you use these different terms depending on how, on what side you're looking at it from. But the actual thing cannot be named. So these terms are all They're just all expedients. Even Buddha is an expedient term. So when we say Buddha, it's a big mistake. But we use it, making mistakes anyway, on purpose. But we know that we're making a mistake. say, oh, Buddha, you know, Buddha said, blah, blah, blah. Buddha this, Buddha that. But it's just a term that we use to talk about something that you can't really talk about. But at the same time, we have great respect for the words, because they point to something.

[54:51]

So there's something called in Buddhism the signless. A sign means we attach a name to something and then we believe in the name. And then we say, oh, I know what that is. That's blah, blah, blah. Well, that's Buddha. Or that's a pillar. Oh, I know what that is. It's a pillar. So we just stop with our understanding what a pillar is. And we don't really see the true nature of the pillar because we assign a name to it. So there's something called the signless, which means not getting caught in signs. not getting caught in assigning names to things and sticking to the name. Do it all done. But we do it and we know that things have to have names, designations, right? So it's the same with the self, you know?

[55:55]

See, there's no self, but we talk about myself and yourself anyway, because there's no other way to deal with it.

[56:02]

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