Alleluia! Last week, last Saturday, I spoke about the six paramitas of the Bodhisattva. Six paramitas. I'll talk a little bit about what they are again. There's the Mahayana, parallel to the Buddhist Eightfold Path, you might say.

[01:02]

And the paramitas came into being somewhere between the first century and the fourth century. And paramita means something like high point or highest point. and usually it's translated as perfection. But I think we have to be careful here because perfection is more of a process than a fixed point. We tend to think of perfection as the end of a goal or when something is exactly itself. I think in terms of exactly itself, is what we mean here. When you are you, that's perfection.

[02:04]

But it doesn't mean that you may be some super person. Just you yourself, as you are. When you are completely you, that's perfect. And tomorrow just like the path to realization is itself the goal. So as long as we're practicing wholeheartedly, we're not apart from what it is that we're seeking. So, the first six paramitas are giving, dana paramita, sila paramita, which is conduct, right conduct or morality, and kshanti, which is patience or forbearance, and virya, the word virility, meaning

[03:34]

zeal or enthusiastic effort, and dhyana, which is meditation in all of its forms, and prajna, which is wisdom. And these are the first six paramitas, the first six practices, which came before the ten paramitas. So there are six paramitas and ten paramitas. And the last four paramitas were added at some point to the first six. And I talked about the first six last time. So today I'm going to talk about the last four of the ten paramitas. These are practices of the Bodhisattva, the various practices of perfection, but not in the sense of a fixed perfection.

[04:49]

So, the seventh paramita, which is our first today, is called upaya. Upaya usually means skillful means, or it can mean compassionate means. But it has to do with how one helps people, how one brings people to the knowledge of truth and helps people to practice and helps bring one to practice and helps to in any way to help people on the path. So there are many, many skillful means and in the Lotus Sutra there are seven parables

[05:58]

which illustrate skillful means, one of which is the parable of the prodigal daughter, which also appears in the Bible, I believe, prodigal son or daughter. And the father, the son decides to leave his home and wanders around the world for a long time and can't really find what he's looking for. And so in his wanderings, after about 20 years, he comes back to his father's place. But he doesn't know that that's where he is. But his father recognizes him. and sends him. He doesn't want the child, his son, to know who he is.

[07:04]

So he sends some workmen out to bring him back and puts him to work cleaning the toilets and the stables. And he works for 20 years doing this. and finally he inherits his father's estate. So it's kind of the skillful means of the father is like the Buddha and the son is like his student or aspirant. And this is kind of his skillful means. to bring him back. Also, there's a story about the magic city where people are on a long journey and the leader conjures up a magic city and he says, this is where we're headed for.

[08:12]

Don't give up. And then when they enter the magic city, they take a rest and they renew themselves. And then the guy says, but this is really not it. Now that you've had your rest, let's continue. Can you speak a little louder? What? Speak a little louder? Yeah. So, this is... These are kind of deceptions, in a way. There's also a story about the father and the burning house. The children are in the burning house and the father's trying to get them out. So he promises them all kinds of wonderful things if they'll come out of the house. And finally the children come out of the house and the father gives them what they need. But he gives them all these promises.

[09:16]

And so practice is sort of like this. There's a certain kind of deception. In certain religions, they say, well, if you're very good, you'll go to heaven. That may be so. But it's a kind of skillful means, I think, the way things are presented. not the end, but the way things are presented. And some things, some means are presented to children in a way that children will pick up on it. For instance, one is a teacher who practices skillful means, doesn't necessarily talk about the doctrine of emptiness to beginners. But I talk to them about the benefits of practice and so forth.

[10:23]

It saves the real stuff for people who can take it. A monk asked a teacher, And then another monk later said, what is Buddha? And he said, no mind, no Buddha. He said, well, how come you said to the other guy, mind is Buddha? Sometimes we give people, children, wonderful, colorful leaves to play with. and saying this is money. So skillful means takes many different forms. Deception is only one of them.

[11:27]

But anything can be a means to open someone's mind, actually. So a skillful teacher should be able to use whatever is at hand in order to teach. Because there's nothing in the world that's not preaching the Dharma. We say all beings, all sentient beings are preaching the Dharma. Insentient beings are also preaching the Dharma. Rocks, rivers, birds, sky, trees, everything is preaching the Dharma incessantly. So whatever situation is at hand can be used as a way to teach or to open someone's mind to the truth or reality.

[12:33]

And a good teacher should be able to use whatever is at hand. But skillful means also means to the aspect of prajna or non-duality means that the teacher is not doing something for their own sake, but is always doing something to help people. Whatever the teacher does is done to help other people. And in helping other people is the best way to help yourself. So if we really want to help ourself, we feel that we need something. People feel that they need something, and so we're always looking for something to help ourself.

[13:39]

But actually, the only way to really help ourself is to forget ourself. and to put ourselves into the service of helping others. When we can do that, then everything is opened up to us. But it has to be done in a selfless way. So, good advice to somebody who is having a difficult time is, could be, why don't you go out and help somebody? So then the eighth paramita is called pranidhana or aspiration.

[15:16]

Aspiration has to do with what is my goal? What am I after? What is it that keeps me doing what I'm doing? So for Bodhisattva, it's the thought of enlightenment or the four vows of the Bodhisattva. It's important to have the thought of enlightenment, but if we seek enlightenment too much, then we lose our way. We stumble past it. So, in a way, the thought of enlightenment is good, but the pursuit of enlightenment can be a kind of trap.

[16:19]

So there are two aspects. One is enlightenment, and the other is practice. Dogen Zenji keeps telling us, practice itself is enlightenment. So, if we know how to practice, enlightenment is within our practice. And we don't have to worry about pursuing enlightenment. All we have to do is pursue practice. So if you pursue enlightenment, it's like jumping over, trying to get something by not going through the process. So we have a kind of aspiration for enlightenment over here. And we may think, well, we're over here in delusion. And how do we get from delusion to enlightenment?

[17:28]

Well, in order to get from delusion to enlightenment, we have to practice. But practice is not a means to get from delusion to enlightenment. As soon as you enter into practice, enlightenment and delusion become the same thing. So our practice is where delusion and enlightenment meet. And enlightenment is enlightenment about delusion. And delusion is delusion about enlightenment. And delusion is contained within enlightenment. And enlightenment is contained within delusion. So We can forget about it and just practice.

[18:37]

All we have to do is just practice. It's all right there. So Bodhisattva doesn't vow to attain enlightenment. The Bodhisattva vows to bring all beings to enlightenment. Or we say save all beings or awaken with all beings. So this is very close to skillful means. The skillful means of your own practice is without letting go of the thought of enlightenment to forget about it. To not be attached to it and just do what you have to do in the realm of sentient beings and insentient beings.

[19:47]

So we have the four bodhisattva vows which correspond to the four noble truths. The first noble truth is the fact of suffering or the fact of dissatisfaction with life. Life is not quite satisfying. There's some problem. And so the bodhisattva's response to that is, I vow to save... I guess save is okay, but... There's something wrong with the word, a little bit, because it... People say, well, who am I to save all sentient beings, right? This is an impossible vow. But we say it anyway. We also say, to awaken with. That's a little softer, more inclusive. We vow to awaken with all sentient beings.

[20:52]

It's the same thing as to say, we vow to save them. And then the reason for suffering is the second noble truth, desire or delusion, inordinate desire, which doesn't mean the desire to eat and sleep and function naturally as a human being. We all have desire to function as a human being, and without it, we don't function. So when we say, get rid of desire, It means that which is not, that desire which is captivating, not the desire which is helpful, but the desire which is called inordinate, more than we need, that which we get trapped by and deluded by. That's the basis of our suffering.

[21:53]

And so, Bodhisattva vows to let go of that suffering, or let go of that desire, or those delusions, in order to help all beings, actually. There always has to be this selflessness in each activity. This is how Paramita has become Prajnaparamita. because each one has prajna or selflessness as its basis. And the third truth is that there is actually a way to get out of this bondage. And the bodhisattva vow responds to study all the ways that there are, the numerous ways, the unlimited ways of release or freedom.

[23:13]

And then the fourth truth is the Eightfold Path, or you could say the Six Paramitas or Ten Paramitas. And the response to that is the Eightfold Path and the formula. And the response is to become one with the Way. So that's the fourth aspiration. So these four aspirations correspond to the Four Noble Truths. One has to have some aspiration in order to continue to practice. And the aspiration to save all beings and to understand fully the four truths is an act of selflessness.

[24:19]

So the aspiration for enlightenment is the aspiration for selflessness. So sometimes people feel thwarted because we see enlightenment as a kind of egotistical venture. When people think about, well, I want to be enlightened, we really think about it mostly as an egotistical venture. We want something for our own benefit, something that will help us in this world for our own benefit. And it's only when we become mature in our practice that we realize that Enlightenment means selflessness.

[25:24]

And if we keep pursuing it, we keep losing ourself. So that can also be very scary. We lose our ego, which we value very highly. So be careful. And I never tire of quoting Suzuki Roshi, who says, be careful about enlightenment, because when you get it, you may not like it. It may not be what you want. So the third, the ninth paramita is the Bala paramita. Bala means power. spiritual power. Spiritual power is a great subject because people really want spiritual power and it's the most dangerous thing there is.

[26:36]

So we don't usually talk about power. We don't usually talk about spiritual power because it's quite dangerous and a lot of people practice in order to have powers and in the past it was magic powers were what people were after and in the Buddhist texts you find there are a lot of means to find or to develop magical powers and when Buddhism came from India to China the monks, a lot of the monks were exercising spiritual or magical powers. And the Chinese were very impressed by this. And that's one of the ways that the Chinese kind of accepted Buddhism, because they were fascinated by the magical powers that some of the monks developed.

[27:45]

And in India, a lot of the monks develop magical powers. And magical powers is a very Indian thing. It's not just limited to Buddhists at all. Most of the spiritual teachings in India included magical powers. But at some point, And the purest teachers will say, don't develop magic powers. Forget magic powers are something that are actually lower than true spiritual powers. Anybody can have magical powers. It has nothing to do with spirituality. The arhats were supposed to have the six special powers, powers to fly from one place to another and to see into your past lives and clairvoyance and all these things.

[29:08]

Suzuki Roshi commented on this one time and he said, the power of the bodhisattva is not a special power. Buddha's power is not some special magical power. Everyone has this one power, and it's the power of not being caught by karma. The power to be free from karma, which is what Buddhadharma is about. Buddha's practice is about having the ability to be free from creating karma. And karma simply means volitional action, right? And every volitional action that we perform has a result. That's called the result of karma. We call it karma.

[30:12]

We call anything that happens around karma. But strictly speaking, it's the result. And then there's the fruit. which matures according to what our actions are, the result matures and bears fruit. So there's good karma, good actions bear good fruit, bad actions bear bad fruit. But the ability to be free from creating harmful karma or negative karma or attachment karma is possible. Otherwise, we live in a fatalistic world. If we can't get beyond our karma, then life is just fate. Nothing we can do about it. But we actually can do something about our life. Our life is self-creating. According to Buddhism, each one of us creates our own life through our actions.

[31:20]

and the way we think. So whatever we do, we're continually creating endless scenarios for ourself. Painful or pleasurable. But we get little pleasures and much pain. And sometimes the pleasure turns into pain. So, how to deal with karma and how to be free from bondage to karma is the Buddha's power. It's called Buddha's power. The power of the Buddha. There are also many lists of powers. There are the ten powers, and the five powers, and the six powers, and the four powers. Buddhists have lots of lists of powers, but the five powers are very common.

[32:27]

You know, they're faith, zeal or effort, the power of faith, the power of effort, and the power of mindfulness or recollection, and the power of concentration or absorption, which is meditation and the power of wisdom, which is prajna. The power of wisdom is the power to be free from duality. The power of absorption is to be free from attachments. And the power of recollection is to be able to know from past experience which way to go. And the power of zeal is to have all of your energy in the right place.

[33:33]

And the power of faith is to have confidence. Confidence through experience. Faith in Buddhism is not blind, although blind faith has its point. The reason why blind faith is not such a bad thing is because it goes beyond your ability to go back and forth in your confused mind You know, the smarter we are, the easier it is to talk ourselves out of something. Or talk ourselves into something. But faith, our confidence is beyond, or should be beyond our thinking.

[34:38]

And it's the result of intuition. But the problem with it being blind is that it easily attaches to the wrong thing. So we have doubt. And doubt, there's a power of doubt. The power of doubt is important because the power of doubt is a guide for the power of faith. It's a counterbalance. So doubt says, No, no, no, not over there. Put it over here. Put your effort over here. And it's a kind of balance. A facelift to itself can easily attach to anything. And so we have a lot of fanatical people spouting all kinds of things that they have blind faith about.

[35:45]

So in some way, doubt is the eyes of faith. And it's necessary. But when it becomes skepticism, then we can't do anything. Then skepticism stops. It stops faith. So it's important to have confidence. Confidence is another word for faith. And faith is actually enlightenment itself. When we have the right understanding through experience and have confidence in dharma and our own practice, then that's enlightenment itself. Enlightenment means

[36:50]

seeing things or seeing as it is, seeing what is as it is. So the power of enlightenment is the power to see everything as it is, in truth, in reality. So if there's something about the Dharma that's not truthful or not real, then we should let, discard it. It's not good to have faith in something that's not right. So, dharma is always being tested by life. And our practice is always being tested. And what's correct is what we should follow, and that which is not, even though it seems Buddhist. You know, in the course of 2,500 years, There's been a lot of attachment to Buddhism of various doctrines and attitudes.

[38:02]

And those things should be discarded if they're not right. So I think at this point in time, Buddhism is going through a kind of test of the 20th century, almost 21st. And everything about it is being tested in this kind of new space. So that's good. And only what's truthful should remain. So we shouldn't try to seek power. But if we, when we become selfless, We have power. It comes to us, but we don't use it as power. As soon as you use it as power, as soon as you use your power as power, it's no longer power, true power.

[39:04]

So power should only be given to someone who has no selfish need for it. And then the last one is jnana, or knowledge, which is different from wisdom. Wisdom is the sixth. But as far as knowledge goes, in Zen, as you know, Bodhidharma, an emperor, When the emperor asked Bodhidharma, who are you? He said, I don't know. And so we say, not knowing is the highest knowledge. If we always know that we don't know, then we have great knowledge, actually.

[40:14]

Just like enlightenment is enlightenment about delusion. Knowledge is enlightenment about not knowing. On the other hand, we should have knowledge about many things. The Buddha was supposed to have knowledge about science and art and music and all of the arts and sciences. But actually, if you know yourself, That's the highest knowledge. And if you know yourself, you know that you don't know much. So, the emperor asked Bodhidharma, who are you?

[41:18]

Don't know. Not knowing. No knowing. So, those are the last four Paramitas. Briefly. We could talk about each one of them for a long time. Do you have any questions? Aspiration is desire. So when we say get rid of desire, one way of looking at that is put desire into aspiration.

[42:27]

In other words, put desire into the place where it does the most good rather than dissipating your energies on small desires or on desires that will create bondage for you and others. So put desire into the activity that will release you. You can't really get rid of desire. It's wrong to say that. Find the right channel for desire. Because without desire, you're limp, right? So desire is not a bad thing. Desire is actually a good thing. It's not good or bad, but put it in the right place. Find the right place for desire so that it will be beneficial rather than harmful.

[43:31]

Karen? You said the way to help yourself is to help everybody else? Help others, yeah. Huh? Yeah, I did say that. What about the idea that the way to help everybody else is to take care of yourself? Yes, that's the other side. Taking care of yourself really helps others, but not selfish taking care of yourself. Not a self-centered taking care of yourself, but as a Zen student, each one of us should make an example of ourselves by taking care of ourselves. How is it or what does it mean that when if I sit and body and mind drop away then the body and mind of everyone else in the whole universe drops away? It's already dropped. What does that mean? Well, it means that you're in unity with everyone else.

[44:41]

When body and mind drop away, it means that you feel the unity with everyone. What do you mean when you say that the highest knowledge is to know yourself? I know you've talked about that, and then you said it at the end. I always think it's easy to take like a very... that it's to isolate yourself and say, know myself so I'm going to know what I like in this world. And I'm sure you don't mean that. No. I know you talk about We'll make it just expand a little bit. Knowing ourself, this is one of the oldest statements, you know, for every religious practice.

[45:46]

It means knowing what you are. What is this person? Ultimately, what am I? You know, we do well, you know, fingers, We can explore the body. We can explore the mind. Is that who I am? If I say, who are you? Point to yourself. What would you point to? Go ahead. I mean, is it the body? Are you the body? Are you the mind? Are you consciousness? What are you, really? So, I'm not asking you to give me an explanation. I just want to point out that knowing ourself is more than just knowing our appetites, although everything is included.

[46:57]

But when you start taking it apart, What is it? And yet, on any moment you can say, it's me. Right? So both, we have all this stuff to work with. Rather than having an explanation of, you know, who am I, I'd rather have a demonstration. So that's knowing ourself. It's really important. That's what Zen practice is about. How would you advise someone who was having trouble with Well, the fact that one is practicing means that there is some faith there.

[48:21]

And the thing that most, the biggest impediment to having faith in practice is wanting something. As soon as we give up wanting something, it's easy. As long as we want something, it's really hard. Because we have faith in what we want. We think, as soon as I get what I want, then I'll have something. And so we divert faith from accepting ourselves just as we are, to wanting something. And that wanting something is where we put our faith. There may be a little doubt there, but if we have some doubt, the doubt will say, hey man, what are you doing looking for that? Look at this. Of course we can't have faith in something that, you know, in ourself until we give up ourself.

[49:35]

That's exactly it. That's what faith is. Faith in nothing. As soon as you have faith in something, how can you have faith in something? Because the something will disappear. But how can you have faith in nothing if it was never there in the first place? Was never there in the first place? Yeah, in other words, faith with no But there is something that you can aspire to. The way you can aspire to is pure presence. Pure being completely, totally, wholeheartedly present in this activity right now.

[51:07]

I don't understand what you're saying. You don't understand what I'm saying. To me, that seems very drab. Sure, it seems very drab. You know, when you are used to eating steak and vegetables, the steak is the main thing, you know, and the vegetables are kind of condiments.

[52:08]

But when you take the steak out, what have you got left? Except that if you're not thinking about this, and you don't use that, then these become kind of gems. But you don't see that. You don't see the gems that you already have because of the big thing in your mind about what you want and what you like. And that obscures everything. See, if I put my hand in front of my face, my hand's real small. But if I put it in front of my face, I can't see anything. And only when I take it out can I see what's going on. And when you say, you know, that doesn't mean anything to me, you know, it doesn't excite me, that's because you have something else in your mind that you think is going to make you really happy. As soon as you can accomplish that thing that you have in your mind that you think is going to make you very happy, everything else becomes dismal.

[53:19]

You know, if you have a lover, you know, the world becomes roses. You see everything through the rosy glasses. And then as soon as she leaves, you know, the world's gray. Nothing will satisfy you. That's the way it is, you know. That's called being caught by desire. And it allows you not to see things as it is. And then you become despondent and so forth. So people let things come and go and not pursue something. I know that sounds funny. Just allow what's here in your life to fill your life. It will. Phenomena are just the scenery of your life. But we get caught by the scenery.

[54:20]

And it's time to stop. I'm sorry. It is time. We're having Sashin today. Three days Sashin. And we have to be on time. We have to do everything on time because the cooks have to get the meal out and we have to get that on time. We're sitting for three days during this period.

[54:51]

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