I'll go through the rest of the box. If you're one of the people that has a tape out that's on a topic of basic Buddhism, please return it. There are a few tapes that are missing. And the other announcement is, you'll be asked to fill out an evaluation of the class at the end. And so, just kind of keep that in mind. And if you have comments or feedback you want to give me before that, please feel free. Okay, let's take a few minutes to sit. Kind of take a deep breath and let go of whatever you brought with you that's extra. And let your breathing settle. And for this five minutes, just pay attention to the breath and notice the length of your breath.

[01:24]

Where do you feel it? Where is it in your body? Is the in-breath longer than the out-breath?

[02:44]

Or is the out-breath longer than in-breath? Good evening.

[04:56]

I don't mean to be provisorial up here. When I was home with the flu, feeling badly about what I wasn't getting done, I took it in my head to move the furniture and did something to my back. And my doctor doesn't want me sitting on the floor. It feels much better at the time, but the next day, odd things happen. So if you're in the same condition, please don't hesitate to move around or go find yourself a chair or whatever you need to do. This is not an ascetic practice. Tonight I'm going to talk about, first, about the three treasures. three or four times randomly.

[06:12]

Don't worry about interrupting me. Sure. Last time we talked about the life of the Buddha, who was born at Lumbini. Aristocratic family. He left home when he was 29. attained enlightenment at Bodh Gaya when he was 35, and died at Kusinagara at the age of 80. And during his lifetime, his teachings spread through the kingdoms of Magadha and Kosala, which are about where Bihar and other Pradesh are now. His disciples came from all classes of society, Orthodox Brahmins, outcasts, untouchables, naked ascetics, and women.

[07:17]

According to the ancient records, the women was a big deal. Women of all castes. There were women of all castes, and it was a big deal for the Buddha to accept people from all classes. And he made quite a lot of trouble about it. His father had been concerned because of the prophecies, not just that he was going to be a holy man who was going to not carry on the family business of being an aristocrat, feudal lord, but that he was going to be a revolutionary. And he was a revolutionary. To take in, to accept as equals people of all social classes in India, 2,500 years ago, was an incredibly revolutionary thing to do.

[08:25]

And he just didn't even consider not doing it. He did have to be pressured to accept women. And one of his chief disciples, Ananda, was the one who was said to have talked him into it. And there were some extra rules put on women, and women were put at the bottom of the hierarchy. And there's been a lot of controversy about that in recent years. But I think you have to put that in the perspective of India. of almost 3,000 years ago, even today in that part of the world, the status of women is not very high. And the whole concept of women

[09:28]

in order to practice, to leave the household life, was very threatening to the fabric of society. We take it for granted that most of our children will survive and that there's a population that's aboriginal. We don't need women to be home-making babies. But this was not the case two or three thousand years ago. They needed women home-making the babies so that there would be more people, and not so many. of the women and children survived. So it was really a threat to the whole fabric of society to allow, much less encourage, women into the ordained sangha. And we may talk about that more at some point. The ancient records paint a picture of Buddha as having had a unique combination of dignity affability, wisdom, kindness, a kind of majesty that impressed even kings, and a confidence that just couldn't be shaken.

[10:38]

He faced opposition and hostility and even personal danger with this calm, compassionate smile that we see on all the statues. The legends of him, of which there are so many, Sankara Sita, who's one of the main historians of Buddha, an Englishman who became a monk and a scholar, who's written lots and lots and lots of very good books on the history of Buddhism and the basic texts, commentaries on all the texts, says that in his view that the legends Some of them are based on things that probably happened, that have been kind of embellished. And he feels that some of them represent altered states of consciousness, or visions, or things that happen to people.

[11:44]

representations of the profound effect that Buddha had on people's consciousness and maybe are hard to relate to as, you know, from a scientific, logical point of view. It's not the way we should relate to them. They're maybe more poetic expressions of something. So that's the Buddha. Buddha's the teacher, the specific teacher of the historical Buddha, but Buddha's also our teacher, and Buddha's also the teacher inside each of us. Buddha means awake, and Buddha's anybody who's fully awake, and the awakened part of all of us. And that's the first of the three treasures. Dharma and Sangha are the other two jewels of the crown. And I was amazed.

[12:48]

I talked about this, I guess, Sunday at my house, and there were a couple of people who had been practicing for a long, long time. One man who had been sitting for 20 years, read a lot, and he'd never heard of the Three Treasures. Part of what I want to do in this class is to kind of pull together with the text. Some of the things we used to do in the Introduction to Practice class, we'll try and bring in those things. Dharma is of course the teaching, and there's Dharma with a capital D, and that's what we're talking about right now. Dharma with a capital D means law, but it's not law like you have to obey the law. It's not a kind of law that you have to enforce. it's more like natural law, more like the law of gravity, the kind of law that you observe by watching carefully, by studying things as they are.

[13:59]

So Buddha's personal explanations of things as they are his teachings about the nature and cause of suffering, the path of liberation, are the main body of the Dharma that we're studying here. Someone asked me last week how we know what the Buddha taught, and the answer is that actually we don't, except by studying what seems to be consistent with the basic teachings that are repeated over and over again. And the Buddha never wrote anything down. And his teaching was recited by his disciples over and over for somewhere between one and five hundred years before any of it was written down. Nothing was written down in the first century or two after the death of Buddha, and some of it wasn't written down until much later.

[15:05]

Buddha apparently spoke in the vernacular dialect of whoever's listeners were. So when he was in Magadha, he spoke that dialect. And when he was at home, he spoke that dialect. And the Brahmins were opposed to having a holy, the Brahmins who joined him were used to having things in the holy Sanskrit language of the Vedas, and they thought that that should be the language of the teaching. And only the aristocrats knew it, only a few people knew how to read and write. And the Buddha said, no way. He spoke in a language that anybody could understand, and he encouraged his disciples to memorize and recite and propagate his teachings in their own dialects. And that was also a very revolutionary and democratic kind of thing to do.

[16:16]

So somewhere by the first century BC, written versions of the teachings were readily available to lay people. The teachings, many of them are in verse form, many of them have lots and lots of repetitions, and we think that that has something to do with the Buddha having given the same talk, essentially, many, many times, and it's having taken on a sort of formula after a while. As you know from listening to people on the lecture circuit, for instance, you write a book, you have a good idea, you give a lecture, you go hear the guy give a lecture, he gives the same lecture over and over again, and Buddha did that too. He had various versions of it, depending on who he was talking to.

[17:25]

And it had various slants, depending on who he was talking to. And the dialogues and the questions and answers are particularly interesting and show his teaching method. But the main body of the teachings, many of the sutras and sermons, are in verse form. And with refrains, kind of like ballads, that made it easy for people to remember. And of course, in the days, you know, we're very dependent on the written word because that's the age we live in. But in those days, people could remember large amounts of stuff. So there was a huge oral tradition, which gradually got written down. And which, of course, there were lots of controversies about who remembered it correctly. written teachings are their three main written bunches of teachings called the Tripitaka, meaning three baskets.

[18:33]

So the first basket The first basket is the Vinaya, which is the monastic code. The second basket is the Sutras. And the third basket is the Abhidhamma. The monastic rules of Vinaya was what was written down first. And probably they had monastic rules for the same reason that we had monastic rules. Buddha didn't have a lot of rules. He had some basic precepts. But you know how it is living with a lot of people together in the rainy season, close quarters, it's sticky.

[19:45]

Somebody comes to the boss with a problem. So-and-so did such and such. So the boss makes a rule, we're not going to do that anymore. It gets to be really big. They accumulated all of them, forever. That's in the first basket. We tend to study the basic rules. Don't kill, don't steal, that kind of stuff. And next week, when we talk about the Eightfold Path, we'll talk about the precepts that are common to lay people and monks everywhere. The second basket is the Sutras. That's usually what we think of as scripture. There's the Lotus Sutra, Prajnaparamita Sutras, and there's lots and lots of sutras, early ones, late ones. These are the stuff of what we call Buddhism.

[20:55]

It's important to note that at this point, and I'm not going to go into this a lot, but just enough so that you can sort of have a framework for knowing where Zen came from when you take the next class. There are two main schools of Buddhism today, Theravada or Hinayana and Mahayana. Theravada or Hinayana, is the old school. And for our purposes here, and there's a whole lot more to it than this, but you will hear in our main text these two main schools referred to

[22:01]

And that's why I think it's important to understand them. They're kind of like the literal interpretation and the broad interpretation of the Constitution or something. The Theravada, the old school, is more literal. And the Mahayana is more broad. Theravada tends to emphasize the word of the Buddha, the letter of the law. Mahayana tends to emphasize more the spirit. of the teaching, and to include in scripture anything that is well said, anything the Buddha might have said, if he had thought to say it, anything that seems to accord with the teaching. So in that sense, that's what we call our Dharma talks in the Bendo, Dharma with a capital and they're mostly given by teachers.

[23:04]

The idea is that they're teaching that's in accord with the teaching of Buddha, that the mind of the Buddha, the way the Buddha thought and taught, is continuously being taught. Strictly speaking, in Theravada sense, the Dharma is what the Buddha said, the historical Buddha. That's the Dharma, The third of the three treasures is Sangha. Sangha means community. Originally, from the beginning, there was a lay Sangha and an ordained or monastic Sangha, celibate monastic Sangha. And from the Theravada point of view, and Theravada Buddhism is still practiced in Southeast Asia, and right down the street here, there are some Theravada monks.

[24:11]

You see them in their orange robes. Strictly speaking, from their point of view, the Sangha is the ordained Sangha, the monks and nuns. From a Mahayana point of view, the Sangha is, at the very least, everyone. who is interested in the teaching, everyone who aspires to practice. And often we think of Sangha as being everyone, whether they know it or not, whether they're interested in Buddhism or not. Sangha is the community of all sentient beings. Even in the Buddha's time, there was a sizable Sangha, both lay and ordained. And even in the Buddha's time, there was tension between the lay and ordained Sangha. And it's a dichotomy that we're still struggling with. So the main body of what we're supposed to be talking about today is the Four Noble Truths, which I'm sure everybody's studied in this particular version.

[25:34]

And the first noble truth is the truth of suffering, dukkha. And I especially like the way This author explains dukkha. Now, a lot of traditional teachers and I think our author is one of them, think that it's important to learn the ancient, the Pali words, because there's no real good translation form in Western languages.

[26:42]

I think the point here is that there's no real good way to talk about the Dharma, the experience of the Buddha, the experience of how it is in words, in any language. So we'll do the best we can with the words we've got, and we're going to use a lot of synonyms. Dukkha is suffering. And on page 16 in your book, He says, the first noble truth, dukkha, is generally translated as the noble truth of suffering. And it's interpreted to mean that life according to Buddhism is nothing but suffering and pain. And it's because of this limited, he calls it free and easy translation, that many people have been misled into regarding Buddhism as pessimistic.

[28:33]

And he reminds us that Buddhism is neither pessimistic nor optimistic. That Buddhism is about things as they are. Without that judgment, they're good, they're bad. So he goes on on page 17 in the middle to say, it's true that the Pali word dukkha in ordinary usage means suffering, pain, sorrow, or misery, as opposed to sukha, meaning happiness, comfort, or ease. But the term dukkha in the First Noble Truth contains the ordinary meaning of suffering, but in addition it also includes deeper ideas such as imperfection, impermanence, emptiness and insubstantiality.

[29:44]

And in fact, Everything is dukkha, because everything is impermanent. Now, he also distinguishes here three types of suffering. Ordinary suffering, dukkha as ordinary suffering, dukkha as produced by change, and dukkha as conditioned states. Now I think these are pretty fine distinctions for most of us. But basically what we understand is that things change and we may not like it. If we're comfortable right now, and pretty soon it starts to rain on us in here, we're going to be probably unhappy about that.

[31:13]

And that is a kind of suffering that's produced by change. And it happens to us a thousand times a day. The suffering of being with someone that you don't want to be with is dukkha. The suffering of being separated from someone that you want to be with is dukkha. Attraction to something, wanting something, is dukkha. And not getting it is dukkha. Getting it is also dukkha, because you can lose it. Thank you. Now, the third form of dukkha, as condition states, is, I think, the really important concept here.

[32:25]

And this is, his explanation is really the core of our whole understanding of impermanence and what the Heart Sutra calls emptiness. This is a real, real big chunk here. So I'm gonna I'm going to read his version and talk about it in some detail, because we're going to keep coming back to these ideas. They're going to keep coming back in different forms, in different words, over and over again. Dukkha as condition states, what we call being, or individual, or I, is only a combination of ever-changing physical and mental forces or energies which may be divided into five groups or aggregates or heaps, or the Heart Sutra calls them skandhas.

[33:41]

So everything is made up of five piles of stuff, and the five piles are matter, which is what we call stuff, solid, fluid, heat, motion, the elements. The second pile is sensations, pleasant, unpleasant, neutral, The third pile is feelings. How does he do it? The way he does it. Sensations. matter, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness.

[35:07]

Everything's made up of those things. And they just are all arranged differently in different things. So this table is solid. and it's put together like this. And it could be put together a lot of other ways and we'd still recognize it as a table. But you and I are made up of lots of liquids and lots of solids and lots of feelings and lots of history and experience. And if we rearrange the physical part, and we put my head on your body, we're going to be very confused.

[36:12]

When I die, you're not going to call my ashes Fran. So, what is it? that you're going to call yourself. The basic cause of suffering, according to Buddhism, is that what we perceive with our senses and what we organize with our perceptual tools, we identify with we get attached to, and we get fooled into thinking that's real. And then it changes, and then our whole sense of what's real gets shook up, and then our life is confused.

[37:17]

It has no foundation. And if we can understand that what's real with a capital R, is bigger than what we can see or perceive, then we're not going to suffer quite as much. But that's getting ahead of the story. Let me tell you a story about suffering. Fundamental suffering. This is the story of Kisa Gotami. Kisa Gotami came from a poor family. She was called Kisa because that means thin.

[38:21]

And she was probably thin because she was so poor. Her mother's brother was Buddha's father. So Buddha was her cousin. So that's why she had the same last name, Gotami. Kisa Gotami met the Buddha when they were both still living with their families. It happened on the day that Siddhartha's son Rahula was born. And that's where our author took his name as a souvenir. The new father, having learned of the birth, was on route home. And noticing Siddhartha's radiance, Kisagatami commented that the mother and father of such a son as Siddhartha and the wife of such a husband must surely be happy.

[39:22]

Sometime later, Kisagatami was married to a banker's son. As a young wife, she was mistreated by her in-laws as new brides who moved into their husband's home sometimes were. When she gave birth to a son, she finally received an honorable place among her husband's relatives. But her child died while still a toddler, and Kisagatami, who had never seen death before, went mad. In her state of insanity, Kisagatami took up the dead child and carried him on her hip from house to house, begging for medicine. One kind old man directed her to the Buddha. The Buddha said, go and bring a white mustard seed from a house where no one has died. Hearing his words, she immediately rushed off in the innocent face that if she brought a white mustard seed to this enlightened sage, it would be the medicine that could miraculously bring her child back to life.

[40:32]

Kisagatami went from house to house, at each house asking, and at each house learning, that thereto someone had died. The truth struck home. Her sanity returned. Little son, she said, I thought that death had happened to you alone, but it is not to you alone. It is common to all people." Then, still holding the body of her child in her arms, she carried him gently to the forest and left him there. Fundamentally, dukkha is impermanent.

[41:43]

And anything that's impermanent is dukkha. This is where it gets tricky. The second noble truth is tanha, thirst, craving. The cause of suffering is thirst or craving. And thirst or craving has as its center a false idea of the self. So because I think that I am this person. And it is tempting to think.

[42:54]

You know, we grow up, we spend a lot of our life developing a concept of who we are, you know, from when we're small children, you know, where we begin, where we end, what's us, what's not us, what's ours, what's not ours, and by the time you're You know, grown up, you say, oh, yeah, I kind of have a sense of who I am. And then you spend a lot of time figuring out who you are in the world. And you live in such and such a place, and you do such and such a thing for a living. And you have such and such a need. You have some thirst for water. thirst for being, thirst for experience, thirst for becoming, thirst, desire, craving to continue being who we think we are and being comfortable with that.

[44:08]

And we get particularly uncomfortable when we forget about impermanence. As long as there is this thirst to be and to become The cycle of continuity, samsara, goes on. It can only stop when its driving force, this thirst, is cut off through wisdom which sees reality, truth, nirvana. So the other key word here we need Samsara is the cycle of birth and death, of being and becoming.

[46:02]

In a sense, every time we wake up and see things clearly, just as they are, without our preferences and prejudices and wants and aversions, we're born. And every time we forget, we die. And then we're reborn. And then we die. Every time you come back to your breath in Zazen, you're reborn. That's samsara. And there's nothing wrong with that. But the pain of it, that suffering, the pain of not being able to see the big picture, that's what Buddha wanted to help us get out of.

[47:16]

He didn't want to help us get out of life. He wanted to help us suffer less because of our confusion. And he saw from his own practice that there was a way out of suffering. And that's the Third Noble Truth. Yeah. So let me tell you a story about desire and craving.

[49:02]

This is a modern story. A couple of years ago, my daughter was about 10, and she embarked upon a very intensive study of desire. She had a fascination, a real craving that centered around bathing suits. She loved swimsuits. She always loved the water. She always loved to swim. But at the age of 10 and a half, she developed this thing for swimsuits. And she watched all the other little girls at the swimming pool. And every time we passed a store, she wanted to see if they had any swimsuits. And she wanted to try them on.

[50:06]

And it became a kind of obsession with her. She wanted to try them on. She wanted to compare them, the feel, the color, the style, and she would try them on, and she would look at herself in the mirror, and she would, well, this one wasn't quite right in this way, and this one wasn't quite comfortable in that way, and this one she thought made her look fat, and, um, occasionally there would be one that seemed like it was the one. It was just the one, and, um, And she would want it. And sometimes she would get it. And she would wear it. And she would momentarily be thrilled.

[51:09]

And then something would happen. She would see another little girl with a swimsuit that she liked even better. Or it didn't swim right. Or it turned out that it pinched somewhere, as they mostly do. Or when it got wet, you could see through it or it fell off. The many things that we know happened with swimsuits, that something was wrong always with the swimsuit. She was at the age at where mostly it wasn't what was wrong with her body, she was only 10, but she was just at the edge of it because she would look at the swimsuits that were in the very small sizes with the little ruffles and she would remember the one that she had when she was that big and she thought fondly about that time.

[52:15]

And then she looked at the slinky ones that were worn by the older girls. And she tried some of them on and she didn't quite fill them up in the right places. And she had some, the first taste of dissatisfaction with her body, with the stage of life that she was in. And all this time, I was in hot... I spent a summer with a lot of time in a lot of hot, stuffy dressing rooms. This is also suffering. And I wanted to help her. I wanted her to understand what was happening to her. And so this was suffering for both of us.

[53:23]

It was very painful for me to see my beautiful child look at herself and say, this one makes me look fat. To see her struggling with this clearly unquenchable thirst there was no, it wasn't going to be, she could buy every swimsuit in all the stores, in all the lands, and it wouldn't be quenched, it was so clear. And how could I help her to see this? Only by being with her in the hot, stuffy dressing room, breathing, and being with her for as what periods I could be with her, and observing, naming what's happening here.

[54:27]

How do you feel about this one? What is it that you like about this one? What do you think will happen? Saying no. No, we won't go shopping today. No, we won't buy this one. At one point, we decided, or she decided, to see what would happen if she found one that seemed like it might be just the one, but she let it get away. She didn't buy it. We called those the ones that got away. And sometimes the ones that got away would stay in her mind for weeks and weeks. And as she was wearing the swimsuit that she was wearing today, she would wonder, oh, gee, maybe if I'd gotten that.

[55:33]

As she was struggling with whatever was uncomfortable or not quite right about today's swimsuit, she would wonder if maybe that was the solution that had gotten away. And this went on. It went on for a whole summer, a good deal of a winter, and part of the next summer. And one day she said, you know, I think that part of the problem is that wanting the swimsuit is more fun than getting it. And that was a big, big awareness. She had noticed that it was the desire that had her, and that the satisfaction of the desire wasn't satisfactory.

[56:33]

As she noticed that, over and over again, she noticed that that happened with other things too. She remembered things in the past that had been that way with, things she'd wanted for her birthday or for Christmas, that she had wanted for a long time, that when she got, weren't such a big deal, or were in fact very disappointing, that there was something fundamental that she wanted, and she couldn't get it. She couldn't get her hands on it. And that's the way it is, isn't it? That's the way our life is. We keep reaching for it. We keep seeing it. It's right there. It's just within our grasp. And we can't quite get it. And rarely, unless you have the opportunity to participate with a witness in this struggle, as my daughter and I were witnesses for each other in this struggle, do you really see how the process works?

[57:51]

And that's how we practice together, to understand how suffering works, and how desire and craving lead to suffering, and lead to this vicious cycle which is called samsara, and how there is a way out of it. And the way out of it for Jessica was awareness, it was paying attention, very close attention to her actual experience, to her moment-by-moment experience of the swimsuit. and remembering over time what her experience was, noticing it come back, noticing the cyclic-ness of it, the similarities, classifying it. And it went away.

[58:54]

And it wasn't just with swimsuits. She gets it. She's 13. She's at the most materialistic age that you can be at. She wants everything there is. She wants every color of nail polish there is. But she knows. She knows. She knows she'll get an idea that she's got to have it. She's got to have it today. whatever it is, a certain color pencil, a certain color nail polish, a certain shirt, a certain assignment done a certain way. It takes her about a minute, five minutes sometimes, to remind herself. I seldom have to remind her anymore. It will pass.

[59:58]

So those are the clues that there is an end of suffering. The rest of it is commentary, the Eightfold Path, and all of the practices are commentary about individual stories. and suggestions for how each of us can end our own personal version of the quest for the perfect whatever it is. So now it's your turn. Questions, comments, letter ideas.

[61:23]

Did Buddha read it? Did he read it? He was educated, yeah. And the verbal tradition, was it originally done in Pali? No, it was... The Buddhist tradition or what the Buddha learned? What he transmitted to his disciples. What he transmitted to his disciples was in the dialect of Magadha. Whatever that dialect is, Magadhis, is some dialect of Northern India. And how did things get translated to Pali? Well, that was much later. That was, you know, two, three, five hundred years later. They got written down in Pali, which was the language that things were written down in, in that part of the world at that time. The Sanskrit got lost. I think it was written in Sanskrit and it got lost. Pali was later. Yeah. I was going to say, why do you think that it wasn't written down, if it was so impactful for these people?

[62:28]

Do you think it just got lost? I think because it was... I'm not sure, you know, I don't know, but the oral tradition was very, very important, and very few people were literate, and this was a mass movement. But they were also on the move all the time, right? They just camped out, so they couldn't lug around libraries. Yeah, books weren't, you know, they didn't have paperbacks, you know. So writing things down, carrying things about would have been pretty tough. There is another link in there that one of the reasons Nanda was so important was that he remembered everything. He traveled around a lot. He traveled around, I'm not sure about the distances, but there were at least

[63:30]

three major provinces that he traveled around in his lifetime. Were there formal, like, religious sects or groups? It was like a separate... Well, in a sense, you know, the established religion of the time was Hinduism. And there were Brahmin priests and Vedic scriptures that were very old. And that was what he was brought up as. That was his education. So he was, in some sense, maybe a reformer analogous to the way Jesus was a reformer of Judaism of the time. Was he felt to be a threat? Well, the Brahmins sure thought he was a threat. and he was, because, you know, they were the upper class, they were educated, they had the word, nobody else could read it, and they had it all sewed up, you know, they did the rituals, and nobody, they had the power, you know, they had the power to deal with the gods, and ordinary people didn't.

[64:54]

So, and the whole notion of that anybody, that your experience, your personal experience, is as valid as the teacher's experience, the priest's experience, that's pretty radical. You know, the Brahmins, they had the teaching, they had the word, and the rest of us were, you know, you just better behave. The Muslims killed them all. It's the book of the sword. They took the sword. I found the author's explanation of what is self in the Buddhist philosophy.

[66:02]

his soul, those things a bit confused. Can you expand on that? Well, we're going to be talking about that a lot. Where are you? Let's see if we can decipher it. Well, page 21 says a word about what is meant by the term mind. In Buddhist philosophy, it may be useful here, it should clearly be understood that mind is not spirit as opposed to matter. It should always be remembered that Buddhism does not recognize a spirit as opposed to matter. as is accepted by most other philosophies and religions. And then he goes on on page 33 to say, now another question arises, if there is no permanent, unchanging entity or substance like self or soul, what is it that can re-exist and be reborn after death? And anyway, he goes on into more detail with that. The thing that I guess is of interest to me, he does say that Mind can be shaped or controlled. In other words, one can choose. It doesn't seem to be a deterministic philosophy.

[67:04]

It's a free will philosophy. I can choose to meditate, or I can choose to go for a walk, or whatever else I want to do. What is that driving, what is that entity that makes choice? What makes choice? There's a flow of Dhaka happening, a river he draws an analogy to. In my mind, I visualize a river of junk, and it feels like that sometimes, thought after thought, and things going along. But there's a swimmer keeping afloat in the river, in a sense. I mean, yeah, the report of someone on the bank watching it go by, and there's a choice about where you cast your gaze or how you experience that experience. And what is the chooser? There's another absent piece to this at this point, too. which it may not answer at all, but most religions do, and that's one of ultimate purpose and ultimate source, which is the question that's begged, which is fine with me, but I'm curious whether it really is begged or if that's something that ultimately is dealt with.

[68:11]

Actually, it's dealt with in a way that you might consider begging, but if you It's actually one of my favorite parts. It's the sutra on getting rid of all cares and troubles, on page 99. In the Sutra on Getting Rid of Cares and Troubles, the Buddha talks about there are cares and troubles which can be got rid of by insight, there are cares and troubles to be got rid of by restraint, cares and troubles which are to be got rid of by use, and so on.

[70:05]

And he talks about which things we should reflect on and which things we shouldn't reflect on. Because we should reflect on things that decrease attachment and increase freedom. And we should refrain from reflecting on things which increase suffering and attachment. And these are some of the things that he says we should not reflect on. And by not reflecting on things that should not be reflected on ... Anyway, these are unwise reflections. Did I exist in the past? Did I not exist in the past? What was I in the past? How was I in the past? Having been what? Did I become what in the past? Shall I exist in future? Shall I not exist in future?

[71:08]

What shall I be in future? How shall I be in future? Having been what, shall I become what in future? Or now, at the present time, he is doubtful about himself. Am I? Am I not? What am I? How am I? Whence came this person? Whither will he go? When he reflects unwisely in this way, one of the six false views arises in him. I have a self. This view arises in him as true and real. I have no self. This view arises in him as true and real. By self, I perceive self. This view arises in him as true and real. By self, I perceive non-self. This view arises in him as true and real. by non-self, by perceived self. This view arises in him as true and real. Or a wrong view arises in him as follows. This is my self, which speaks and feels, which experiences the fruits of good and bad actions here and now and there.

[72:14]

This self is permanent, stable, everlasting, unchanging, remaining the same forever and ever." There were certain things Buddha refused to deal with. And things like the origin and where we came from and where we're going were among the things that he felt it just wasn't helpful to get into. The Buddha was attributed to have been saying, to say, one cannot find refuge. What's different about Sangha Hope? Taking refuge in Sangha, what's the problem?

[73:18]

It's the world, isn't it? Well, it's the world or it's the community of people, community of seekers, community of students. What seems positive about taking refuge in Buddha and Dharma that seems different about Sangha? It's harder for me to see the body of students, of community, of seekers in oneself. In myself. Where do you see it? So, all the more reason to take refuge.

[74:27]

No? Where do you see Buddha and Dharma? Are they out there? Are they in here? Good questions. But I think we can't do it by our so-called self, alone. And I think that's another big change that Buddha made in the sort of spiritual seeking practices of the time, was that it was more common for people to seekers to practice alone in caves. And that's still done. It's a legitimate Buddhist practice to do solo retreat, but practicing together with other people

[75:47]

seeing other people as not different from ourselves, seeing other things as not different from ourselves, because we're all made of the same stuff, same piles of stuff just rearranged, is a real important part, and it's hard to get that real clear without having all these mirrors around. So people are real important. The other concept that I think we probably missed here that's real important is karma. And I think karma is a term that we use real loosely and probably should be careful about.

[76:57]

Rahula is wonderful because he's so precise. I mean, occasionally, you know, he gets wrapped up in it, in the details, but... Karma has to do with cause and effect, and it has to do with direction. It's like a vector. You start something going in one direction, it tends to keep going in that direction. So bad things tend to produce bad results. Good things tend to produce good results. And we tend to think of karma as the fruit of our thoughts or the fruit of our actions. But actually, strictly speaking, that's not the case.

[77:57]

Karma is just the direction that we sort of threw the ball in. It's not the broken window that resulted. Right, I mean, karma is, you let it fly, and the fruit of karma is all the flippers and the bumpers, the lights, the buzzers, the reflex. Right, you get a reflex. That's a great image. Could you talk a little bit about, there's suffering and the cause of suffering, and What I heard was that there's an ending of suffering when you become aware of what's going on, and then when you're not aware of it, it's death.

[79:30]

Does that have anything to do with the end of suffering? Or is that the beginning of suffering again? Well, the way I see it is that it's I wouldn't say there's an end to suffering. I don't know what the words are. I don't know Pali or Sanskrit or any of those languages. I think I would say that suffering is transformed by the flame of attention. I think, at least because of the way I tend to think and the way Western logic goes, when you say there's an end to suffering, it makes it sound like, you know, if you master this path, you follow this path, you'll get to the end.

[80:40]

It sounds very linear. And you won't suffer anymore. what my mind, and I think your mind, and most of our minds does to that is, well, my back hurts today, I must... not have mastered it yet. I made a mistake today, so, you know, I'm not there on the path, there's this map in our mind, you know, here we are, and there's... it's suffering. and delusion, and there's a way to go, and there's the map. We're going to follow the path, and we're going to get there. And if you follow the map, and you want to go to New York, you can get there. And maybe you'll take a few wrong turns here and there, but you follow the map, you will get to New York. I don't think it's quite like that.

[81:43]

That's not my experience. Now, I don't know what the Buddha's experience was, you know? I don't claim to have the same experience as the Buddha. But what the Buddha taught was, trust your experience. And, you know, what is your experience? Is it your experience that you arrive? and you get to stay there? Or do you have some other experience? Is it your experience that you're always arriving and leaving and arriving and leaving and somewhere in between? And if that's your experience, then is maybe the notion that you haven't that you're not doing it right, or that you haven't found the end of suffering, is that maybe a judgment?

[82:52]

Is that maybe something extra, rather than just an observation? Here I am, here I am, here I am. It's like this now. It's like this now. It's like this now. It's just experience, moment after moment. And it just is the way it is. It always is the way it is. Buddha didn't invent anything, and that's why there's nothing to believe here. What we're being presented with is really a kind of like a scientific method, and it's a way to observe and see how it is. And there's how it is in capital letters, a great scheme, And then there's how it is for you right now, and how it is for you right now. And each of us lives in a different body, and the causes and conditions that are operating on us are, you know, they're the same set of things, but for each of us it's different.

[84:03]

And that's why we each have to do it ourselves. So our individual experience is unique, So I'm going to pass out the handouts for next week, and then we'll have our closing meditation. For next week, there's a chapter to read, I believe, in our text, and then there's some handouts. on the Four Noble Truths. You get somebody else's take on the Four Noble Truths. And this one is the Noble Eightfold Path, which is what the reading

[85:11]

And let me remind you that if you are taking the class and you've not yet paid our friend Ross, please do that. And if you need a book. And if you need a book, we have lots of books. These are both from the experience of insight. It should have two papers, one called Four Noble Truths and one called...

[86:40]

quite a different, what seemed to be a really different translation of the Eightfold Path. And the first was right view, which I can understand as being analogous to right understanding. But the second was, I think it was correct instead of right, but correct intention rather than thought. Why don't you bring it... I've been sort of... And the rest were exactly the same, but really the difference between thought and intention... Well, you might want to re-read what he says about thought and volition. I thought about thought and volition. Is that because... I think that's the way he sees it. So intention and volition. Yeah. So for these few minutes, please notice the physical sensations in your body as you breathe.

[88:27]

And just notice them.

[88:34]

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