I vow to face the truth at the last day. Today I'd like to speak a little bit about the Lankavatara Sutra.

[01:04]

And I'll be doing some readings from D.T. Suzuki's essays on the Lankavatara Sutra, which Mel has said that it's almost as good as the sutra itself. makes it a little bit more accessible for Westerners, and yet keeping the same spirit. You know, this sutra is the only sutra that's... I don't know if I would say only, but it's a sutra that's closely associated with Zen. Although, even though Zen is a was known as a transmission outside scripture. And yet Bodhidharma brought this sutra with him from India into China and it is said that he passed it on to his only disciple, Hui Ke.

[02:17]

And it's connected to Zen because It stresses inner realization as the source of understanding and virtue. And this inner realization is described as a direct seeing into reality. You're all familiar with that, where reality is said to be unconditioned. And because it's unconditioned, it cannot be described in words or rationally or conceptually. because reason and words are always based on, are describing causes and conditions.

[03:32]

And the unconditioned is not based on causes and conditions. So this is stemming, this is the teaching in the sutra, and it's very much to the essence Zen school of Buddhism. So this realization, it's a perception, a pure perception, and cannot be described discursively. So we just have to live it and practice it. And that's why the emphasis on practice in Zen, Zazen, the practice of Zazen, and not the, let's say, putting so much emphasis into the practice of studying or reading sutras.

[04:38]

We spent most of our time sitting rather than studying. And it's on the basis of this understanding. So the Buddha in the sutra says that there is no mind object called truth. There is no object, nothing that we can point to and say, this is truth. So anything we say about truth, is going to be a half-truth, no matter what we say. Even the words I'm saying right now are half-truth. So any statement about truth is a dualistic statement. And it can make our mind spin, can throw.

[05:49]

our mind into a spin. This last week I was at work, I work in a mental health clinic and I was talking to someone about something that Freud had said about Moses and Maltheism and somebody came in and was listening. And all of a sudden he said, well, all that stuff, Freud and psychoanalysis is just for white males. So that's the objective truth, truth as a mind object. Is it this or is it that? And my mind, I noticed that my mind was set into a spin in that moment.

[07:01]

And by spin I mean that you can become, there's this kind of trembling, this kind of emotional trembling that starts going through your body, which is based on this attachment to some idea, some object about truth, which then becomes a subject of argumentation. So, I think I made a mistake because I got into the argumentation this time, and later I felt bad about it, and thought better that at that moment the thing to do when a situation is set up where there are these objects about truth, then we're far away from the truth at that moment.

[08:05]

So I thought afterwards that the best thing you know, the sixth ancestor in the Platform Sutras says something like, don't submit the Dharma to the bitterness of ordinary existence. And what he meant by that was, don't get into arguments about the Dharma, or what the Dharma is, or is not, or what Buddhism is or is not, or Don't be so identified with some idea of Buddhism, or what Buddhism is or not is, or whether you are this or that, or you believe in this or you believe in that. Because then, our mind then is set into this spin, and there's no harmony that comes out of that, neither for self nor others.

[09:17]

So his view was that you only discuss dharma with people who are interested in the dharma, and you stop short of getting into any kind of argument about it. And with people who don't, who oppose the dharma, who are antagonistic to Buddhism, or who were critical of it, he said, well, just be polite and listen, but don't say anything. Which I'm not sure it's true for every circumstance, but it felt true that echoed afterwards, after this past week in this situation. It echoed for me.

[10:28]

So it was a good lesson. A good lesson also about what the Buddha is saying in the Lankavatara Sutra. And the reason that truth cannot be described by words or thoughts or thinking or reasoning is that both words and reasoning are discriminative. It's discrimination. This or that. And then that, whatever meaning is being conveyed is meaning based on words. So it's a meaning that goes from words to other words. rather than going from words to something that's outside words. Language is a binary code and reason is always in terms of opposites and dualities and affirmation and negation and truth and false and so on.

[11:49]

So you're always within that sphere of the relative. So in order to live within this realm of practice, we have to break out of this relative sphere. And I want to read you something from here. As long as we are what we are, tied up to the exigencies of material existence and to the inherent needs of logical thinking, language is inevitable. And if we do not use words, we have to resort to gestures and movements of some parts of the body in one way or another. Lankavatara remarks that words are not necessarily used all over the world for the communication of ideas or feelings.

[12:57]

For in some other Buddha lands, the Buddha teaching is carried out by mere gazing, or by the contraction of the facial muscles, or by the raising of the eyebrows, by frowning or smiling, by clearing the throat, by a twinkling of an eye, by merely thinking, or by emotion of some kind." We can hear a lot of echoes of different koans in this from the Articulate speech is not an absolute necessity for human intercourse. Near gazing is said to be sufficient in the world of Samantabhadra to make one realize the highest state of enlightenment. Even in this world, says the sutra, the ordinary business of life is carried on most successfully among the bees or ants that never use words. So, it's possible not to use words at all, or then we have to learn how to use words to point to something that's beyond words, whereas the meaning is not in the words themselves.

[14:21]

It's interesting what it says about the ordinary business life of bees. how do bees communicate what their ordinary life is? You know that bees live in collectivities of bees, or at least a lot of them do. And then you have the queen bee and the workers bee, the bees that are workers, and then you have the male bees. And so the queen bee is The workers work, and the males are used just for reproduction. And then once they have done what they're supposed to do, they're killed by the workers. And that's all they live for. So that's what the bees do.

[15:24]

So how do they communicate this outside without language? this reality of reproduction, work, and death. It doesn't sound that different from our life. Or, you know, the other ones that's used is the lion's roar. What is the lion's roar? What kind of sign is it? How do the animals understand it? How is it communicating something to other animals? Then it says, the Lankavatara here makes a distinction between words and meaning and advises us not to understand meaning by merely depending upon words

[16:31]

to do which is quite ruinous to the comprehension of reality. A word is the combination of sound and syllable subject to our logical or intellectual understanding. For example, the words Dharma and Buddha When they're used in the koans, they're not used as words that you could go to a dictionary and find the meaning of it, which would be meaning based on words, words referring to other words. So there the meaning is given by other words, whereas Dharma and Buddha refer to something that's outside words. refer to an experience.

[17:39]

What is Buddha? What is Dharma? So there the word is being used non-dualistically. You know, sometimes people say, Well, there's no absolute. There's nothing absolute. Why does Buddhism talk so much about the absolute? Where is it? Show it to me. Well, they'll say something like, well, there's nothing. That's everything. Everything is different. So there's nothing that's in everything. Nothing is everything. So you could say, well, nothing is everything.

[18:44]

That's what it is. So what is it? And then we go back to the koan. But you can't demonstrate the koan discursively. So people can say, well, nothing is absolute. because it can't be encountered at that level. Or like the statement, nobody for president. Heard that anarchist phrase, nobody for president. So you can say, well, nobody for president. So who is nobody? So that's no-self.

[19:45]

And no-self actually is a principle that organizes the universe, but you can't name it. In the practice of psychotherapy, you also have to use words to point to something that's not in the words that are being said. So for example, this one person came to a And he was very, you know, a lot of conflict about having to... He had written a letter to his parents letting them know about his sexual orientation.

[21:07]

And understanding so, this was a very difficult thing to do. But he couldn't get himself to do it, so he was going back and forth and procrastinating and so on. So he said, I cannot mail it. So I said, not mail. So I can't even explain that to you. This other person was coming to sessions twice a week and he had a lot of issues with anger

[22:14]

and authority and his father and me. And he didn't want to come twice a week. So he was saying about he wanted to stop coming twice a week and had a lot of resistance about coming twice a week but didn't know why and couldn't say why and couldn't talk about it. So that was the end of that session, and then the next session, the beginning, he comes in and he says, your waiting room is too weak. So I said, too weak is too weak. So I think that's also an example of using words non-realistically to express a meaning that's not in the actual words that are being said.

[23:30]

Now, the sutra says that discrimination, language, and reasoning is based on memory. and that this memory has been accumulated since our endless, our beginningless, our unknown past. So this is known as the alaya, our consciousness, in Buddhism. And so this is one of the other teachings in the Bhagavatara Sutra. It's a teaching of the eight consciousnesses, so that there's eight consciousnesses. But usually it's talked about in Buddhism and Islam because in the laya, in this sutra, the ninth consciousness, which is Buddha nature or Buddha consciousness,

[24:38]

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