All right, so very quickly, we're talking about the mind king, which is the territory of the whole mind. And we're talking first about alaya vijnana as the base consciousness, which is at the center of everything. It's the storehouse consciousness is another way to put it, the storehouse of all of our experiences, and all of our thoughts, all of our perceptions. Then we have manas which is sometimes known as afflicted consciousness. It's really the consciousness that creates the sense of self that creates I and mine and it has As we'll talk about it, it has a lot of vision on as its object.

[01:02]

And so it's always. It's always drawing from a liar, and it's also depositing back into a liar. The third ring that. Russell Bonder speaks of is are the sense consciousnesses. And there are six of them. You have the. all of the organs of sense, eye, ear, nose, tongue, touch, taste, and you also have the sixth sense, which is mind consciousness. Mind consciousness has a kind of dual role. On the one hand, it has the role of sorting out the input that comes through all of these organs and so the sense perceptions are sorted out into the various sense consciousnesses.

[02:13]

So something that comes in through your eyes is sent through your optic nerve to eye consciousness. and generally those are separate and I imagine that some of us of a certain age who have experimented with consciousness expanding drugs have had this kind of interesting synesthesia where you say you see sounds or uh you feel tastes you know you have you have some some crossed wires of these senses but basically they tend to work uh the the sense consciousnesses sort out the the inputs from the sense organs and that is done in mono visioniana so it has this sorting or distributive function and it also has the function of

[03:19]

creating of having its own objects. It is also a sense organ and what it is perceiving are thoughts. They are ideas or emotional states which you might call dharmas. All of the dharmas as traditionally framed are the objects of mind consciousness. So that is the territory of the mind king and that is kind of the review I want to do before asking you, are there any questions before we launch into more speculative territory? You can raise your hand. I see Ben has a question. Thank you, Hosan.

[04:21]

I had two quick ones. Well, one's pretty quick, and the other one you might want to answer later tonight, but two things that came up for me over the past week. One is, is there manas during zazen? In Ben Connolly's book, he talks about, he interprets the line from Vasubandhu about it is not found in the meditation of cessation, and it seems like Ben Connolly He at least implies that zazen might be the meditation of cessation or something like it. I don't know. So that came up for me. And then the other thing was sort of thinking more about the alaya. Where does beneficial volition come from? Because I've had the experience, and it makes sense to me studying this system, that in the absence of intention and beneficial action, your automatic behaviors that could come from the alaya could necessarily lead you in not so good directions or repeat not so good seeds.

[05:28]

And so is the intention to not indulge those seeds and to do something else, is that coming from manas and sort of on the light side of manas, on the better side of manas or somewhere else? Okay, so let me come back to that because I think that's at the heart of what we're going to speak about. As far as your first question is concerned, I'm sorry, ask it again. I just want to be really precise. Sorry, it's the problem with offering two questions. Is there Manas during Zazen? Ah, right. Is there Manas during Zazen? I would let you guys be the judge of your own Zazen. You know, sometimes there is. But I think that Zazen creates a ground by which we can actually let go of Manas.

[06:36]

We can settle into our breath, settle into our posture, settle into a very open receptivity that is not ascribing that perception to self. And I think that that's not so unusual, but it's also true that we're, I think many of us experience moving in and out. The thing is you can't always quite distinguish because you're not keeping a logbook of what's happening during Zazen, but I think that Zazen really creates a format within which you can let go of that self-concern. It's not guaranteed that you will do that, but it's more likely than in the midst of our daily activities.

[07:38]

That's what I would say. See, Susan's hand is up. Can you hear me? Yeah. Hi. Last week when you were talking about Manas, I wrote something down that you said that I've been thinking about. You said we all have experiences of going beyond Manas. And it almost sounded like a matter of chance, but I'm not necessarily sure you meant it that way. Isn't that a function of practice or isn't that because of our intentional decisions to practice in certain ways that we uncover or that leads to what you're calling going beyond Manas? Yeah. reframe something that Aitken Roshi was wont to say.

[08:42]

He would say, he often said, enlightenment is an accident. And Zazen makes you accident prone. Say that again. I'm sorry, I didn't hear you. Enlightenment is an accident. And Zazen makes you accident prone. And I feel the same way. So if we're talking about the absence of manas, we're talking about the absence of a self-conceit, the absence of a self-creation or concern. And in a sense, that is a dimension of awakening. Whether it's an effect or a precondition, I can't say. But I think that practice makes us more susceptible to that kind of frame of mind. Again, it doesn't guarantee it, but it, but it leads that way.

[09:48]

Okay. Yeah. Thank you. Kabir. Hi Sojin, sorry for joining late. I just got back from work. I want to thank your friend for that Translation of ego in Arabic or Islam maps I missed your class last week was working. So I just happened to Listen to it on the way to work and I've been with I've been looking for a meaning of ego and [...] Dari in Islam and the one that it's very close to ego, at least in my perception was gurur, which means pride. And, but it's interesting because nafs is, now it makes sense because it's, we don't really talk about nafs or ego too much in our culture, but it's very hidden.

[10:53]

And I was, as I was driving home from work today, I, I kind of saw how everything is branching from mouse, but it's very subtle. And especially in our culture, see, and, and, and American culture and in English, ego is referred to the, like one of the first things, you know, like egoistic and all that. But in our culture, ego is, it's very, very subtle. It's almost like almost undercover. However, everything else like pride, selfishness, anger, greed, all that stuff that people point at. It stems from this, but nobody really goes, at least in my circle of friends and family, even bring as the only thing that we're always told was, you know, get a hold of your nafs or, uh, this guy has a big, you know, uh, nafs or, you know, or small or,

[11:56]

he has control over, it doesn't, but it was never really looked down upon as much as like, you know, Pride or all the other stuff, but I'm just, just blown away. Well, thank you. My, my, my understanding of course is of, of sort of mystical Islam is, is very limited. But I have spent a lot of time talking with with my friend Yasir Chadli who's a Nashbandi Sufi Sheikh and he talks about it and he talks about it in a very subtle way. I think he talks about it with all of the subtlety that we are applying to perceptions of the self in Buddhism and so it feels very resonant to me. Well, I wish that one day I can meet this person and have a conversation. One thing I can say is I'll send a link.

[12:59]

He's been giving talks every Friday afternoon. Okay. They're great. He's a really, really fine teacher. Wonderful. He's spoken at BCC twice, I think. Okay. We should do a Zoom session with him sometime. That would be wonderful. Thank you so much. Thank you. So, Heiko. Hi, yes, I just wanted to comment because working all the time with my hands and people who sew and people who do body-mind work can find, I think, a similar or a simile for what's going on when we lose or let go of manas in Zazen. And when I'm trying to get out of my mind or my thoughts or my plans in Zazen, I recognize that I'm going to carve wood. No, I'm going to breathe. And I breathe as if I'm carving wood.

[14:01]

I breathe as if I'm sewing, such that it's an activity of work. And because my experience with work is that it is one sure way to get out of my mind. And so this kind of engaged with basket weaving or anything, mind and body, canoeing is actually a great one. So if we're looking for the state of what it is, we see it probably all the time. That's my point. Yeah, we can see it all the time. And the real challenge is, I would say, not so much when relating to a canoe paddle, or a piece of wood or a basket, but when we're relating to a person because they push back in ways that are different than what we call things, even though that's also a heretical view because things also have their own life.

[15:10]

But yeah, thank you for that. So I want to move on if that's okay. I was thinking about a wonderful talk that Stephanie Solar gave this morning in the Zendo. And she was really talking about looking at her life. And at some point, it came up The idea that we have to be free from our story or free in our story and what occurred to me is that that fundamental story is the story of me. That's the trap and that's the source of the suffering. and it's exactly what Yogacara is trying to help us unpack.

[16:22]

So I want to read you the three directly relevant verses from Vasubandhu, begins with verse 3 where he talks, he's talking about the three the three territories of consciousness and he says the first of these is called the alaya store consciousness which contains all karmic seeds what it holds and its perception of location are unknown so what it's holding is our sense of body and our sense of mind and our sense of karma it's holding that the alaya is containing our physical sensations and the karmic the seeds of all of our karmic activities and so it's holding that and my reading of the phrase the perception of location

[17:38]

We don't locate this necessarily in any one part of our body. Speaking of it is in a very broad sense as what makes up our consciousness. Contemporary neuroscience is trying to find the locations of memory and what they're discovering is that it exists in multiple places. It exists in places in the brain, exists in the synapses of our nervous system and memory seems to be backed up and duplicated in many ways. So if one part of your brain is injured, you still may be able to recover memory that was located there but is also located in other places and perhaps in other places in your body.

[18:46]

Verse 4 says, it is always associated with sense contact, attention, sensation, perception, and volition, neither pleasant nor unpleasant. It is unobstructed and karmically neutral, like a river flowing, in enlightenment it is overturned at its root. So it is alaya and we've encountered these mind states before. We talked about them I think in the class on mano vijnana where we're talking about the dharmas that basically the building blocks five, contact, attention, sensation, perception and volition are what are known as the five universal factors.

[19:54]

So these five mental factors are called universal because they are operating in any thought process we have. If any of these factors is missing, then we're disconnected from a thought or a perception. So, contact is just the barest perception of something which then leads very directly to sensation. Sensation, Vedana, is in Buddhist terms, it's called feeling. And that feeling is either pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. And once we have the feeling, then we have a perception.

[20:59]

So we've spoken about this before. If I hold my hand over a candle, first there is contact, then there is the feeling sensation unpleasant, then there is the perception hot, so that begins to describe the quality of the perception that we're having. The next one is chetana, volition or intention, actually it's different order in this, it's sense contact and attention. So the immediate impulse gets your attention, it draws your mind to it and then you have the sensation, the perception and volition which means either we turn towards something or we turn away from it. If it's pleasant we tend to turn towards it, if it's unpleasant we tend to turn away from it but and if it's neutral

[22:07]

we can just stay there. So these are the five universal factors and we may notice that they're very similar to the skandhas, the five skandhas which we chant in the heart sutra twice a day which begin with form. So in order to have these any of these other dharmas, you have to have a body. But once you have a body, you have form, feeling, perception, formation, consciousness. And these are roughly parallel. I don't want to explicate that too much, but they're parallel and they are what create in traditional Buddhism, they create our sense of self. And then the fifth verse is.

[23:10]

Dependent upon store consciousness on a lie of vision, Yana. And taking it up as its object. Manas, the consciousness of self arises. Which consists of. Thinking, I would say it consists of of self centered or self created thinking. So. Manas is there in this kind of map of the mind. As I was saying, I see Manas as a filter that is filtering what is coming down from the perceptions and is being stored in the alaya vijnana and then also what's arising from the alaya-vijnana and coming up through manas into mind, into a thought. So that roughly covers those three verses very, very quickly.

[24:20]

Let me see, are there any immediate questions off of that where we sort of dig in more in detail on alaya? Ben. It's interesting that you are calling manas a filter, which definitely makes sense to me with the various notions of self that are connected with it. I think in Kamali's book, if I'm remembering correctly, he also talks about the alaya as a sort of filter. And I think you've actually spoken about that. The boundaries of how we actually meet experience are in some way defined by the alaya because of the karmic ripening. And I just didn't know whether you could say something more about that. Well, let me get into I want to talk about it. I will talk about that. But what occurs to me is to give some some background. So Yogachara doctrine seems to evolve to answer

[25:24]

several problems in earlier Buddhist thought and those problems are one about the problem of the continuity of consciousness and the other problem is about the sense of self. So the continuity in earlier In earlier maps of consciousness, particularly in the Pali suttas, what you had were six consciousnesses. You had the five senses and the mind consciousness and the problem that they ran into in a sort of doctrinal sense is that how do you account for continuity What it posited was that you're always thinking and then people were saying, scholars were asking, well, what about when you're asleep, when you're in deep sleep and you're not dreaming?

[26:42]

What about when you faint? What about when you're in a coma? And so there was a question of what creates a sense of continuity in those states of mind within this lifetime. More complicated to me is the question of continuity across lifetimes. So, we have a problem here with the question of the core Buddhist principle of non-self and the idea of rebirth.

[27:51]

I just want to tell you about this. I don't want to get too hung up on it, but to read you from Living Yogacara, it's a given the doctrine of no-self, what should we understand to be the subject that repeatedly undergoes birth and death? In ancient India it was thought that we undergo repeated reincarnation with a substantial immortal self as subject, but because Buddha categorically denied such thing as an eternal Atman, Buddhism had to locate a subject of transmigration without undermining the theory of no-self. And there were a variety of theories. The most well-thought-out resolution of this problem is that of the Alaya-Vijnana. As an answer to the non-existence of enduring self, enduring essence, they saw a latent mind that continues with the same morally indeterminate karmic quality

[28:59]

storing and accumulating the impressions of past experiences as seeds of potentiality for the production of effects. So that was what they saw as carrying through various lives. Now, I don't want to dwell on theories of rebirth here. uh even though they are really seen as essential in in many schools of buddhism and that's that's true for many of the old teachers you can think even in the zen school if you think of uh the koan of bai zhang's fox which is really wrestling with the continuation of the question of continuation of karma from birth to birth my concern in this class is about how we live and in a sense you could say it's how are we reborn from moment to moment and that depends on what we see of the activity of mind.

[30:22]

So I want to go back to the brief story that I told at the start of the first class. When Voramai Kabalseng, the first fully ordained nun in modern Thailand was asked how she kept the 311 bhikkhuni precepts, she says, ìI keep only one precept. I just watch my mind.î So thatís a very Zen response, I think. She's reducing it to watching the process of your mind. We talked about the process in our minds of imputation, which means to ascribe a value or a meaning to something that we see.

[31:25]

I think my question is, can I learn to move fluidly between this imputation and watching the very mental process by which I impute meaning to my perception based on my past experience? So for example, We've been talking off and on about questions of race. If we think about implicit bias, all of the processes that take place in this imputation, that take place in this movement from the alaya through the manas to the mind happen very, very quickly. very difficult to see them.

[32:32]

It happens before we even know it which is I think what some of you may have experienced if you've taken the Harvard Implicit Bias Test. It's really interesting because it's based on what you see before you even know that you see it. So implicit bias, which is an unconscious process, what we realize when we look at our world is that it has as its effect conscious acts and conscious thoughts, but it happens really, really quickly. So I see a person who looks a certain way I see that on the basis of their, it looks a certain way to me, on the basis of their body type or their skin color or their hair or their clothing and the unconscious process very quickly is that that perception which comes in through say my eye organ and my eye sense, my eye consciousness, it dives

[33:57]

through the manas into the alaya and then it's brought back up through the manas into the alaya with a kind of self-affirming perception of other and so very quickly I think about a person a certain way on the basis of what my past experience may have been and I act towards them in accord with that thought. This is something I've thought about a lot. We will do what we are trained to do and that's not a bad thing. That's just kind of the way it is but we can be trained to we can be trained in wholesome activity, we can be trained in unwholesome activity and we have to be able to evaluate that as it's unfolding but basically we do what we're trained to do and the gist of what we're trying to do in our practice

[35:26]

And this gets again to the alaya. We're sort of talking around it, right? We have a choice to perceive things and to do things that are wholesome or unwholesome. And those will bear fruit as in wholesome and unwholesome ways. and so what we're trying to do is to train ourself in wholesome ways which lead towards liberation, but we have to be able to evaluate that for ourself. So I want to read you some material about Alaia and then we'll have some time for discussion. So alaya-vijnana or the storehouse consciousness was a really new formulation in Buddhist doctrine.

[36:36]

The alaya is the receptacle of all experiences and they enter and are stored there until they mature and causes and conditions arise and they are sent back out as new experiences in the same way that a warehouse handles goods. Things come in, things go out. Alaya-Vijnana was also called the basic consciousness since it retains and spreads the karmic seeds that both influence and are influenced by the other seven consciousnesses. For example, and this is how it reckons with the problem of continuity, when the sixth consciousness is dormant, say in sleep or in unconsciousness, the seeds are residing there and they're held and they stay there in the eighth consciousness.

[37:51]

and when the conditions arise, say we wake up, then the seeds can be accessed and can manifest. So the eighth consciousness is largely a mechanism for storing and deploying seeds. For Yogacara, ignorance means in part that we are really ignorant, we don't know what's lying there in our alaya-vijnana. I mean really everything that ever happened to us is there in one form or another. We don't necessarily have immediate access to it. but when certain causes and conditions come together all of a sudden these memories or these feelings or these smells or these sensations arise and all of us have that happening all the time.

[38:57]

So it is the place where karma is gathered but the alaya itself is It can be positive, it can be negative or neither and each individual has his or her own storehouse consciousness and that consciousness arises from moment to moment as long as we are alive and presumably in terms of the doctrine it continues from life to life just as nothing more than a collection of ever-changing seeds. So it's continually changing so it's not a permanent self and I used to think but anyway in this assertion there is no universal collective mind in Yogacara.

[40:08]

I used to think of it as Aliyah as like sort of like collective consciousness of like a big basement area that has like my stuff here and then Marybeth's stuff would be over there and Chris's stuff would be over here and all sort of being in the same room but they'd be individual keeps. That's just my way of thinking about it. I don't think there's any orthodoxy to it. But again, I'm not so stuck on the precise details or the precise doctrine. I'm more interested in looking at how my mind works. So this term seed, bija, is a word for seed.

[41:12]

It's a metaphor for a potentiality that can become a consciousness and can become an action in the same way that a seed is a potential for the germination and existence of a plant and those seeds can be wholesome or unwholesome. They're harbored and they're stored in this consciousness and the capacity to store them is called the store consciousness. And as we also said earlier on, the transformation at the base, which is the goal of Yogacara, is basically the elimination of all these seeds Now, whether that is actually possible or not, I'm not actually sure.

[42:21]

I'm simplifying stuff that's really complicated and it's already complicated anyway. I have some questions myself about how this works. But as a tool for looking at my mind, I find it really helpful. So, Bud? Yes. One thing that's always kind of in the back of my mind is the social nature of people. We really suffer physiological effects if there's no contact with other people. I'm wondering how this might have been. I'm sorry, we're losing, we've lost the last 30 seconds of that.

[43:26]

Well, the other thing that is what Dogen referred to as Konodoko. Can you hear me okay? Not really, no. I'll try to lean closer, is that better? We'll see. And Dogen referred to Kanodoko as mystical communion or resonance which was necessary to arouse the aspirations for awakening. How might that fit into the Yogacara model? That's a really interesting question. I'm not sure that it does and I think that in part to my mind that has to do with very different mental and linguistic structures from Indian Buddhism to East Asian Buddhism.

[44:28]

What I see in this In Indian Buddhism, Indian Buddhism is extremely logical and analytical and Chinese and Japanese Buddhism is in certain ways more impressionistic and it might have to do with actually the structure of the words from a linguistic basis that that is similar to the linguistic basis that we have in although different languages in the Indian languages you have compared to Chinese and Japanese which has a basically a linguistic structure that's composed of images. So that's a very different way that I think

[45:32]

constructs the way we actually think. So, you know, if you look at the Zen tradition, you look at the Tang Dynasty, you look at Dogen, you see a much broader, more impressionistic view of the universe than you might when looking at Indian Buddhism. Indian Buddhism tends to be very precise even when it's completely psychedelic like think about the Avatamsaka Sutra or some of the really ornate sutras. It's so specific. It's talking about each image and each thing in a very particular way whereas you have a broad feeling tone that is understood in the Chinese tradition. Anyway, that's my sense of it. But I think that we have in our current understanding of social activity, in our current understanding of neuroscience, we are seeing that there is obviously a social dimension that

[47:00]

in by way which we mutually affect each other and mutually are adjusting each other's metabolism. We think about limbic resonance which is a real thing. So I think this is where I don't want to lock down on, I'm not presenting this as like this is the truth, I'm presenting this as Here's a model that's useful and let's think about how we can use it to examine our lives. Other questions? Heiko? I just wanted to bring up the thought, the guy who came to visit us and gave a wonderful simple lecture from the Soto Shu when we were in the Zendo, he talked about the one and a half person perspective. And when you're talking about limbic resonance and the different things that really go on, I can't think of a better way of putting it, honestly.

[48:10]

And if we recognize that as I go out, I'm a yellow color and you're a blue, together we make green. I'm always seeing green in my world and not able to express my individual self, right? But I think it's very important to recognize that it's just not possible. One and a half person perspective, at least. I throw that in. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. I'm looking at the chat. I'm behind, but Chris asked the question, did our co-founder, Shinryu Suzuki, say, strictly speaking, there's no enlightenment, only enlightened actions? You know, honestly, I can't remember if he said that, but that's what I say. And I've said it many times, enlightenment isn't to me. Enlightenment is not an experience.

[49:10]

It's not a state of mind. It's how we actually relate to ourselves and each other. And that's what what I value. There certainly is a sharp discourse about this in the Zen tradition. My son is in a place now with a teacher who is pushing them. He wants them to have this breakthrough enlightenment experience and that's fine. It can't hurt him. you know, but the proof is in the pudding. The proof is to me is like, okay, how do you live? And this has been, just to say, it was an argument that I used to have, I had with Akin Roshi who would distinguish between enlightenment and character development.

[50:18]

Now, I have to grant that my elder teachers may know something that I don't know. But to my mind, I don't see a gap between enlightenment and character development. And if there's a gap, then there's something missing in one or the other. And if you look at you know if this is the great conundrum and it really is a conundrum I think it goes you know if you look at the activity of so-called enlightened Zen masters in the first half of the 20th century who were encouraging Japanese troops in Manchuria and in Korea and were really encouraging them to kill and to my mind it's like okay is that and these were supposedly deeply enlightened people, I'm sure they were very deep people, but is that what I want to value of

[51:48]

as enlightenment. So, this is just my point of view, but I think it's an ethical and maybe it's a doctrinal question that is important. So, let's see. Oh, Ken, did you have your hand up? Yes, Ken Palson. Sorry, actually, Katie. Okay. I was thinking, I was struck by one of the things you said towards the end. You talk about how I might have misheard, you know, practice is in this context is perhaps about eliminating the seeds ultimately, and you weren't sure about that. And I thought that was interesting. No, I'm sure that that's what it says. Okay. Yeah. Um, and I thought that was interesting cause I didn't like it.

[52:51]

Um, I thought it was interesting that I didn't like it. And, um, I thought of, um, a retreat that I did with Thich Nhat Hanh some years ago. And he talked about how, um, when seeds are watered in the Laya consciousness, they rise up and form formations. Um, but he talked about how mindfulness was one of those formations and you could water the seeds of mindfulness and strengthen those was this kind of, you know, very much about what is wholesome, what is not wholesome, and cultivating what is wholesome versus kind of no seed. And I guess I just, because I am attracted to that, I just wonder, like, what is the, what is the other side? You know, what is the kind of the strength of not having seeds. Sorry, did that make sense?

[53:54]

Yeah. I think this is a really important question, particularly in Zen. The question is, and this is what, it would be good to study the the Fox Koan, Bai Zhang's Fox, do people know that? Let's see if I can relate it really quickly. Bai Zhang was a great teacher in the Tang Dynasty and he would give a lecture every day and he noticed an elderly monk in the back of the room who nobody recognized and one day the monk approached him and said, I used to be, 500 lifetimes ago, I used to be the abbot of this temple and a student asked me a question, is a person of complete enlightenment subject to cause and effect?

[55:05]

And I said no. and thereafter I was born as a fox for 500 generations. And he then asked Bajang the question, and is a person of complete enlightenment subject to cause and effect? And Bajang said, a person of complete enlightenment does not ignore cause and effect and with that he was greatly relieved and said, thank you, I'm released from this lifetime of bondage and there's a lot more to the story. Baizhang then tells his students the next day, we're going to have a funeral for a monk.

[56:12]

And they were all really confused because who had died. And they went out in the hillside and they poked around and they found the body of this fox. And they gave it a monk's burial. So there are a variety, there's an infinite number of interpretations of this. And I think this gets to your question. And I'm not going to posit a right answer. On the one hand, as long as we have a body, my feeling is that we're subject to cause and effect, we're subject to karma, but it's also true what Sojan Roshi says and what Suzuki Roshi says is that zazen is non-karmic activity.

[57:32]

So while we are sitting Zazen, we are not creating karma, neither positive nor negative. And that is, written small, that is a manifestation of transformation at the base. So that's a transmission the base is talking about. But it's also talking about in the interpretations that I've read, it also says that when you have this transformation of these afflicted consciousnesses and you are freed from karma, then you are freed to unleash your bodhisattva nature to help all beings.

[58:36]

So the Bodhisattva in one sense is beyond karma and yet the Bodhisattva also throws him or herself back into the realm of karma so that they can be in this world to address the needs of sentient beings. It's complex and this is where we have to make our own way and our own practice. Does that answer somewhat? It's helpful. Thank you. Yeah. Okay. I think it was another question here. Oh yeah. Chris Evans is asking about the 9th Amala Vijayana. Please repeat your summary about this consciousness. Well, I didn't talk about it and this is where you get into some of the complexities of conflicting Yogacara doctrines.

[59:51]

Basically, one of the formulations is when there's a complete transformation at the base, you manifest the ninth consciousness which is just this consciousness of Vairochana Buddha. You become sort of big mind and there's one school that thinks that and some of the earlier schools didn't talk about it. I think it's a later version of Yogacara, I don't think you'll find it in Vasubandhu or Asanga and when you get there, please come back and tell us about it, okay? Other questions?

[60:55]

Other people who have not spoken before I take the people who have spoken. I'm only seeing people who've spoken. Okay. I see a hand from Kabir, a visual hand, so I'll ask him first. Thank you, Sojourn. I mean, Hozon. Hozon. Hozon, I apologize. You mentioned something about the first five consciences are more perceived consciously or gross somewhat or something that they're more... There are five senses. There's nothing gross about them. But they're easily accessed with the seventh and the eighth.

[62:01]

Those are harder to access consciously. Yes, that's what I was... yes. So how do we train or to sort of access them and work on them and train and so forth? I think that the way, what I would suggest is that this comes back to the ground of ethical behavior. That we have a sense of what is wholesome and what is unwholesome. We have a sense of that in terms of what our intention is and if we also observe our actions we can see how our activities land or affect those around us and so we access them somewhat indirectly by creating, by acting in a wholesome way which is unself-centered rather than an unwholesome way.

[63:09]

and there's always a mix there, but at a certain point, the balance shifts and that creates the ground for transformation. So, that's what we're using. We're using an evaluative standard of what we're actually perceiving and recognizing that even that perception can be distorted by a self-centered perception but still we do our best. That is how we can transform ourselves. Nobody can see. Who can see all the stuff? I can't see all the stuff in my store consciousness and even when we're mindful, When we're cultivating mindfulness as a dharma, we can only see the tiniest bit of our action or the tiniest bit of what we remember at any given moment and there's so much that is not accessible to us and all of that is immediately accessible to our perceptions but not necessarily to our thoughts.

[64:35]

So it's kind of like the goose and a golden egg. You take care of the goose and the eggs will come. Uh, I hope so. Yeah. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Who else has got a hand up? Ben and Heiko. Thank you, Hozon. I'll try to be very concise. I know I've already talked a couple of times. Two things came up, especially as you were conversing with Katie. Hi, Katie. And I think you were touching on this with the implicit bias side of things. In the Connolly book, it seems, and in the verses that you read at the beginning, where we don't know what it holds and the location of perception is unknown, To at least according to my understanding reading through at this time. It's like you can't really consciously Know your seed bed or your alaya. So to my understanding it's like You see what you sort of have to trace the breadcrumbs a little bit you have to see what comes up and what seems to carry some karmic weight for you

[65:44]

And work with it and a lot of those seeds are deep in your psyche are not consciously accessible are created by social circumstances and other things that are really deep. And I found it helpful in thinking through this and reading the connolly book. like the alaya turns in the great mirror wisdom. So sometimes I go back to that just to see what it is when it's transformed. And that helps me think about what it is now, which is not a perfect mirror, right? It's a distorting mirror, or it's a mirror that shows, shows things through some other filter of my karma. And then Just really quickly, when Katie was talking about cultivating wholesome seeds versus no seeds or overturning the seedbed, what I really appreciate about Kamali's book, and I had not experienced this perspective before, was he really sees Vasubandhu as uniting these two threads of Buddhism and reconciling them to early Buddhist practice of cultivating beneficial mind states and removing afflictive mind states.

[66:52]

and the Mahayana practice of just overturning the self completely or seeing through the self, and I like that he sort of sees the value of both of these practices, and one is to cultivate the good and avoid the bad, and the other is to sort of see through self completely, which would be overturning the seedbed, I guess, whatever that means. Right. So we have to remember that this is a path Again, in the Zen tradition, there's a lot of talk about sudden enlightenment as if you do something and all of a sudden, boom, everything has changed. Now, that may be the case and certainly it is the case for some people, but there's also the path where we cultivate and develop step-by-step. And what you can see, which is important, you can't see what's in your alaya, but when the seed arises and manifests in mono-vijnana, in your consciousness, you have the opportunity to see it there.

[68:06]

Then it is subject to conscious mind and then you can decide Do I want to act on this or do I not want to act on this? This is, I think, the great opportunity of Buddhist karma as opposed to earlier forms of karma. The opportunity is that you are not trapped by this karma. Because this seed arose doesn't mean you have to do something. So when a seed arises and you see You see somebody who you might feel is threatening to you, you have the opportunity to dig in with perception more deeply and also to dig into your resources to prepare. There's a lot that you can do that can avoid an unwholesome action which is going to plant an unwholesome seed deeper in your life.

[69:17]

When it comes to consciousness, that's the great opportunity of Buddhist karma is that you can change what you do. You have choice about what you do and this is one of the things I just think about. Again, what Stephanie was talking about in her talk this morning that she was talking I don't agree that everything that happens to you in your life is caused by you, but everything that you do in response to whatever you experience is a choice that you make. That's where we have the choice. We have the choice about what we do. We may not even have really the choice about what we perceive. We can accumulate other forms of knowledge, other forms of analysis that help us to look at the patterns of our behavior and the patterns of perception and say, ìWait a second, this is not wholesome.î

[70:22]

Yeah, I was just thinking that really what you're saying in the end is that intention is so important that, you know, we have the seeds for everything, right? And so the important thing is to develop the intention and then just, what do you call it, process the seeds as they pop up. It's interesting because I've been reading a book where the guy really says that cause and effect is, forget about it, basically make goals and Basically, all we're doing over and over are making goals that can be negative, unwholesome, or wholesome.

[71:36]

And I think he's right, in a way. I mean, there's cause and effect, like you get hit or punched, you get knocked down. That's definitely a cause and effect. But often, we just spend all our time thinking about every little thing that happened to us, and that just brings up the Aliyah, right? I'm not sure. I would add a dimension. We talked about this earlier. I'd really add a dimension to intention. I think that there's too much weight. I think there's overbalance on intention in the way we've been taught Buddhism, which is not to say it's extremely important, but to go to What Bud's question was about the social dimension, the social dimension of our practice means we have to look as well at the effect of our intention.

[72:41]

We have to look at the impact. To me, what I've learned particularly in the last number of years and I've learned it looking at questions of diversity is to see that intention and impact are inseparable which means that you have to check out your intention by what its effect is on the world, what its effect is on others around you and those to me are inseparable. If you think of Avalokiteshvara with her thousand hands and arms and her infinite spiritual Swiss army knife in each hand, she has the tool. It's not just the intention.

[73:44]

She has the tool that can have a beneficial outcome, a beneficial impact and I would really invite us to to be inclusive in our perspective of our actions. So when a seed arises and an intention, even a wholesome intention arises, we need to test it out and explore what that effect is. I think that's all important in our society. His argument was that you're kind of creating your own reality and making, um, um, you know, often pushing away things. Um, I'm not really saying it that well. I'd, I'd have to see it, you know?

[74:45]

Yeah. But, but he's, he's kind of saying that you generate, you generate a goal even though you think you're not, that you're, you're part of the, anyway, I'll take it to the next level. You know, I don't think there's anything wrong with generating a goal. You know, what we're warned about is, you know, we're warned about self-serving ideas. We're warned about what Suzuki talked about, gaining idea. Gaining idea does not eliminate all sense of goals. It's gaining something for me. That's the problem where I'm thinking essentially about myself in a self-centered way. That's what we're trying to combat. That's a good place to end for tonight. Unconsciously, you create goals that undercut what your real aim is. like say you want to have a lot of friends, but you keep putting yourself down.

[76:00]

And even though you would like to have a lot of friends, in the end, you're really defeating yourself through your karmic history or something. Well, you could be. And in that sense, you might ask, why do you want to have a lot of friends? Yeah. You want to feel connected and you can be as connected with one person as you can with eight people so the objective, some numerical goal is not necessarily wisdom. What do we really need to be alive and to be fully functioning and giving? So let's chant the Bodhisattva vows and say good night and thank you so much for this class. I'm continuing to learn from it.

[77:00]

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