This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Zen Center. My name is Wendy Lewis, and this morning I'm going to be talking about the perfection of wisdom. Prajnaparamita. This talk is a continuation of a talk I gave at the beginning of this practice period that ends tomorrow. And I gave this talk in May. And in that talk, I addressed the irony of the contradiction between how we assume the world is and what reality is and what's really happening. So during this practice period, we've been studying the six perfections, and that's Buddhist teaching on cultivating the thought of enlightenment, or the bodhisattva vow.

[01:14]

And the bodhisattva vow is a vow to put off one's own enlightenment until everyone is enlightened. But as I said in that earlier talk, that's the only way it can happen. It's not like... You can go somewhere else where everything is different. Your enlightenment is dependent on your relationships and on the enlightenment of everyone. So that's the vow is to participate. And this is how I interpret. Dogen is one of the founding teachers of Soto Zen. And he says, enlightenment does not divide you. So it's not like you remove yourself from something and everything before that is over. You're not divided. So many Buddhist teachings are practical like bowing or how to walk, how to hold your hands and many

[02:30]

are very abstract. Wisdom is one of the most abstract, but I think along with meditation, it's also one of the most hopeful of the teachings. So usually our thought of enlightenment is pretty egocentric. It's a hero's journey, like the Buddha saying, okay, I'm going to do this, you know, and I'm doing this for myself. I'm going to renounce my worldly life and find another way, greater meaning, deeper purpose. But the Bodhisattva vow, which when you read Buddhist history, you don't actually so much know that the Buddha... said something like the Bodhisattva vow, but in the text that we have inherited, when he touches the earth at the time of his enlightenment, he says, I and all beings have attained the way.

[03:44]

So we can extrapolate from that this Bodhisattva vow. And that it's participatory, that it's a giving as well as an insight to our own path, our own journey, our own hope. So the basic task of wisdom is to provide a context for questioning our sort of arrogant notion of ourselves as separate, different from others, and as tied to our habit patterns and our views. So arrogance is basically the assumption of non-accountability. Somehow our life is happening to us, or we're making it happen in a certain way. So in the text we were using for the class,

[04:54]

it described that wisdom offers freedom from the ideas of pleasant and unpleasant. And that is basically freedom from our preferences. And the wisdom view is rare, partly because we don't really want to be free of our preferences. We even want our Buddhist practice to follow our preferences. And they support our identity. and allow us to justify our views, our beliefs, and our actions. So in order to cultivate wisdom as a foundation of freedom, I'll say again, Buddhism advocates something called critical thinking. So the process of the cultivation through critical thinking is daunting and it's slow and it's often embarrassing.

[05:57]

But meditation plays a crucial role in developing self-awareness through this deconstructive or critical view of the self. And those of you who know Duggan's writings are familiar with, to study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. And I think staying within that description or instruction allows us to remain humble. So we return again and again to questions of our existence and meaning, but without sort of succumbing to despair or nihilism or becoming defiant. and having a sort of a negative attitude based in dissatisfaction or impatience. Because why would we want to forget ourself?

[07:02]

Why would we want to do that? I mean, most of the time we're sort of trying to strengthen a self, trying to define a self, improve a self. But usually those wishes are based in a kind of desire for a payoff, that this effort will give us something we want or help us get rid of something we don't want about ourselves, about our lives, about our views, anything that seems to be hindering us from it. satisfaction of some sort. But the deconstructive study of the self doesn't negate that self-striving it just disentangles the patterns that convince us that our preferences define us and that they're the way things are.

[08:06]

The perfection of wisdom provokes the understanding of emptiness which is described as the way things really are. So an understanding of emptiness is both intellectual and experiential. This was one of the teachings of the Six Perfections. Intellectually, through working with a Buddhist teaching like the Six Perfections, which are generosity, morality, patience, energy, meditation, and wisdom, our thinking becomes more flexible and can include increasing amounts of nuance and uncertainty. And experientially, particularly with generosity, morality, and patience, we learn about our relationships, how they unfold, what

[09:15]

we sort of project or surround them with, what kind of expectations we have. And one way this has been articulated is a very sort of academic way, but I think it's helpful. So I'm going to read it a couple of times. One must be led toward a gradual realization of emptiness solely by means of a critique of directed against one's own prejudices and presuppositions about so-called empirical experience and the arguments either consciously or unconsciously posited to support these preconceived ideas. So I'll read that again. One must be led toward a gradual realization of emptiness solely by means of a critique directed against one's own prejudices and presuppositions about so-called empirical experience and the arguments either consciously or unconsciously posited to support these preconceived ideas.

[10:26]

And this is reminding me of something that came up in class. Rosalie invited me to speak about the story of Job when we were studying patience. What happens is, most of you know that story, but what happens is that towards the end, God actually speaks to Job. And what he does is he puts the context of Job's life in the greater context of the universe or eternity. So as you look all the way back to the beginning of the creation of the universe, where do you find your preferences? Where do you find how you relate to the world? Who started this? What started this? I mean, everything that we are was existent at that moment. And so we can see ourselves in that sense of eternity, and that gives us a little more freedom, or at least it gives me a sense of more freedom, and that there's no one, essentially, as you keep going back, to be blamed.

[11:42]

or praised, even. This is it. So Buddhism, though, it's described as a non-dogmatic soteriological tradition. So it doesn't mean that Buddhism is not filled with sort of beliefs and doctrines and specific teachings. But what's meant by this non-dogmatic, by non-dogmatic, is that Buddhist wisdom advocates this continuous questioning, not only of those assumptions and beliefs, but of our and others' interpretations of them. So the soteriological aspect, the salvation aspect, is that this continuous questioning Almost, they're not, you can't quite find a description of exactly why this happens.

[12:49]

It leads to tranquility and peace of body and mind, which is the goal of the Buddhist teachings. So, we ask, you know, where do our belief systems begin on both the conscious and unconscious levels? And what do we add to them? What do we interpret and sort of add? And are we actually hopeful for tranquility? Or do we prefer our egotistical view and our stress and anxiety, which sort of gives us that identity? And that's why the target of critical thinking is the ego. And it's our clinging to this ego as a method of survival and success. And that this clinging undermines our ease and our happiness is really almost impossible to deconstruct.

[14:01]

And that's why insight and enlightenment are rare. They're described as only a few will understand this. And this difficulty, I think, should be something that moves us, both for ourselves and for everyone else. One of the earliest teachings of Buddhism is the Four Noble Truths. Many of you have studied them and know them. And the first two are kind of the most important. The first one is suffering, and the second is our clinging or desire. And I think of... that practice or Buddhist understanding is an unending conversation between those two, between our suffering and our clinging, and how they're related, how they support each other and undermine each other and just working towards some kind of negotiation between them.

[15:08]

And I think as that conversation deepens, when we get a clearer and clearer idea about how suffering and clinging are related, they start to lead to some understanding and a sense of reconciliation between them. When we investigate them through wisdom, or the concept of emptiness, which includes... impermanence, dependent arising, and no self, which I'll explain a little bit, we can start to realize that there's no experience or concept or being that stands alone or unrelated to all the innumerable conditions of reality, most of which are beyond our conscious awareness. So impermanence points to our contingency. It's the inevitability of old age, sickness and death, for instance, and to the indifferent quality of reality.

[16:20]

This kind of indifference is not about not caring or non-caring, but it's essentially that the world's going to go on with us or without us. That's just the way it is. And this is a bit frightening. When you think of how self-referencing our lives are, we think, you know, we're just here and we're here and we're here. So someone asked the Buddha about this kind of frightening piece of the bodhisattva path. And he said, bodhisattvas who have newly set out on the quest for wisdom will be apprehensive, regretful, They will tremble, be frightened, be terrified. So that might not be comforting, but in a certain way, you know, it's a confession. He's saying, this is how it was for me. That's how I know how it is for you. So as we, you know, this identification with his own path and how he describes it as being frightening,

[17:35]

it can encourage us to keep asking challenging questions of ourselves. One of my first questions that I still haven't answered is, who am I and what am I doing? And there's another question, how should I live my life? And that's the question that was posed by our text. So another aspect, though, to this indifference and impermanence is that it can free us or release us from trying to please or defy some deity or ideal or ideology. Since everything is impermanent, including us, we can sort of be released from having this something outside ourselves. We're trying to emulate or be not ourselves. in relationship to.

[18:35]

And this ideal is sometimes the bodhisattva, who we see as someone who is a fulfillment of our preferential views. So they're the ideal of what we think is great in the world. And we can also do this with the Buddha or a teacher like Suzuki Roshi. One of the problems with Suzuki Roshi is that he was a wonderful teacher and had wonderful students. And yet, if we put him too far away from us, he becomes sort of untouchable and beyond judgment. And we can even kind of hold him a little too precious, which means we can't learn from his difficulties. And his life was very complicated. And we used to have these huge memorial services every December, Suzuki Roshi Memorial, and people would be invited from Green Gulch and Tassajara, and his old students would come, the Buddha Hall would be full.

[19:45]

And his wife lived here still. And at one of these ceremonies, when she made her statement, she looked at his picture and she said, good teacher, bad husband. And I thought... She was trying to tell us something, you know, and it was very sweetly said, very lovingly said. So to see Suzuki Roshi and the Buddha in this kind of a nuanced way rather than an idealized way is hopeful. It allows us to keep our critical thinking alive and vital. So another aspect of emptiness is dependent arising. And it extends that sort of impermanence into our relational reality. It's described as a bodhisattva certainly does not see anything that is being produced without a cause.

[20:53]

So there's no thing that is standing alone. Another way it's said is When this is, that is. This arising, that arises. When this is not, that is not. This ceasing, that ceases. So, basically, I see this as you can't go back and change anything. You know, there's no place where you can, like, return to, and this is one of the problems I have with the idea of time travel. that there's a place to go. I mean, where would such a place be? I mean, it's fine with me that physicists sort of think this through in a certain way on a mathematical level. But I don't understand the place. There'd be so many things arising, like in this moment. So we're just sitting in this Buddha hall, but everyone, you know, people are driving around there.

[21:56]

The whole world is arising in such a complex way. So this is what dependent arising means, partly for me. And you also can't go forward and sort of prepare everything for your arrival. There's not a place. So at the same time, this concept of dependent arising keeps us in relationship with everything and the sort of arising and ceasing moments as our life unfolds. So even though we can't go back to the past or project into the future, we can see the past moving through the present and into the future and see how those things

[22:58]

inform each other. So our past is information for us, even if it's just five minutes ago or what I was thinking when I was standing upstairs waiting to come down here, my thoughts about myself, my thoughts about I had this dream this morning. And it was a strange, complicated dream. And later I thought, was that a movie? It was so detailed, you know. But the atmosphere of it was full of compassion. My compassion and some compassion that was holding me. And so I was thinking about that before I came down. And how does that affect my sitting up here? I don't know. But all this is part of dependent arising. But emptiness, in general, defines how things exist. And one of the hows is no self, the third aspect of emptiness.

[24:00]

This is, you know, complicated by the fact we can only perceive reality from this location. There's, you know, how we see it is the limit of our perception. So without our preferences, though, how do we define a self? when we look at impermanence and dependent arising, and, you know, what do our preferences mean anymore? And then, without our preferences, how do we find this self? And what I think can happen through studying these abstract Buddhist is that, once again, our assumptions become more permeable, and they're flexible and less certain, and they allow us to consider no-self as how we exist and not a negation of our existence.

[25:14]

So meditation is the context for... observation and awareness, reflection, contemplation. And it allows the experience of letting what is seen be just what is seen, and what is heard be just what is heard. And this isn't quite the peace we hope for, which is the satisfaction of all our desires, but it's the peace that's described as surpassing understanding. And it depends on our self-knowledge, which depends on our realization of emptiness, that what is true of all other beings, things, is also true of our self. From self-knowledge that we develop through meditation,

[26:21]

To study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. Transformation, which is the idea, not changing ourselves into something else, but transforming exactly what we are, can be imagined in a constructive way through this activity of conscious doubt or critical thinking. And wisdom sort of chips away at our egotistical view so that we can realize the participatory, inclusive level of our effort. So abstract Buddhist concepts are often presented

[27:23]

poetically, and those of you who are familiar with Dogen's works, they're presented in this poetic way to try to evoke, you know, through images, through just rhythm of language, which is how we communicate with each other, some relationship to these abstract concepts. And as we were studying the six perfections, or paramitas, I was reminded of the 6th century poem, Zen poem, called the Xin Xin Ming, or the Verses on the Faith Mind. And this is a part of it. The great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When love and hate are both absent, everything becomes clear and undisguised. To set up what you like against what you dislike is the dis-ease of the mind. When the deep meaning of things is not understood, the mind's essential peace is disturbed to no avail.

[28:28]

Live neither in the entanglements of outer things nor in inner feelings of emptiness. Be serene in the oneness of things. So, according to Buddhism, One moment of serenity is worth the required effort. So thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dormon.

[29:23]

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