good evening everyone welcome welcome to our sunday online sangha so let's start with our few minutes of sitting first and then go back to our study of the heart sutra Welcome back.

[08:35]

So when I say we, I mean those of you who've been attending this online sangha for the last few weeks. What we've been doing is chanting the Heart Sutra. So I think that you already have a copy on your desktop, I hope. I'm going to chant it, and if you'll all remain muted, but chant along. It looks like maybe they're putting... Jenny's putting it in there for you. There it is. So if you need a copy, it's in the chat. I'm going to use them. I have this little Mukugyo that I have for home use. And so I'll be beating the rhythm of the Heart Sutra as we chant together. And that, by the way, was Prajna Paramita, figure Prajna Paramita on the screen while we were sitting. figuring out how to do these things little by little.

[09:53]

Okay. Mahaprajna Paramita Sutra Paramita clearly saw that all five aggregates are empty and thus freely all suffering. Udra form does not differ from emptiness. Emptiness does not differ from form. Self is emptiness. Emptiness itself forms sensations, perceptions, formations. This is no sensation, no perception.

[10:59]

suffering no cause no cessation hath no and no attainment with nothing to attain a bodhisattva relies on thus the mind is without hindrance without hindrance no fear for Pajnaparamita and thereby attain and surpass complete perfect enlightenment. Pajnaparamita has the great miraculous mantra, right mantra, the supreme mantra, the incomparable mantra, which removes all suffering and is true not. For we proclaim the Pajnaparamita For those of you who have practiced Zen Center in any of the temples, maybe you've seen the Big Mukugyo

[12:57]

at the city center. It's really giants. And one of the nice things about chanting the Heart Sutra and being what's called the Doan, the person who hits the Mukugyo, there's a striker, but it's about, you know, 10 times as big as this one. And the Mukugyo is huge. And you get to use two hands and boom, boom, boom. It's quite a dramatic and wonderful thing to chant along with that Mukugyo. I wanted to go back to looking at the heart suture with you and saying some things. I wonder if you're welcome, by the way, anytime you'd like to add a question into the chat room, I'll do my best to notice what's in there and respond to you. So maybe I'll just go ahead and start on some of the things I wanted to share with you this evening and then I'll stop with enough time for us to talk together. So last week I... began by describing the Heart Sutra, this very beginnings of the Heart Sutra, like Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, while deeply practicing Prajnaparamita, clearly saw that all five skandhas.

[14:10]

So this first sentence is about the relative truth, the truth about our relationship. So each of us is a set of relationships called the five skandhas. And the relationships... that make us up are the relationships, the two big ones are our mind and our body. And then I think I told you that one image is of a boat with two passengers. So the boat is the body, the mind is the sky and the ocean, so the surround of the boat. And then inside the boat are these three passengers. Form, so form is the body, feeling, perception, impulses. Those are the three passengers in the boat of the body. So that's the five skandhas. So there's the form, feeling, perception, impulse, and consciousness. So that's basically what the Buddha meant when he said self. You are a self, and the self is exactly that. It's parts, made up of parts. So part of the intention of that teaching is to break up this sense we have, and partly because of our language, you know, I talk about, I talk about, as I just did, I talk about I and me and my things.

[15:18]

And I presume a singularity when I talk that way. And the Buddha in doing the meditation practices and the Bodhi tree had this major realization that there was no singularity. There was no self abiding as a kind of little homunculus inside of the shell of a body that was kind of running the show and had its own agendas and so on. And although we talk like that. So the two truths initially came from the Buddha talking just like I did, just like I'm doing now and saying, he would say, I'm going to town to get alms, to feed myself this evening. And then the monks would say, but you said there's no singularity called an I. And he said, well, that's true. When I say I like that, I'm talking about the relative truth. It's a provisional truth. It's not the actual truth. The ultimate truth is, There is no entity-ness here called an I. There's just this amazing swarm of causes and conditions that creating this moment, they don't last, they're transient, they pass away.

[16:28]

The ultimate truth is that, beyond words, beyond descriptions. And so we have this dual citizenship as existent in the relative sense of how we talk about things, how we think about things, which tends to dominate. our sense of reality is like, I tend to talk about myself and the things I'm doing, and that is the dominant way that I relate to myself and to the world. And the Buddhist said, well, try this other way of looking, where you begin to disrupt that pattern of thinking, you begin to look beyond the veil of language and words. And I think, as I said to you all, it was in another class, but one way to look at these two truths, the relative truth and the ultimate truth, It's a very personal experience. It's just simply to look around the space where you are right now. And the relative truths are the things that are in your space that you have a relationship to. And you might say, well, that's my couch and that's my lamp and that's my friend over there and that's my kitchen.

[17:34]

And you can do that for quite a while. You won't run out of nouns to name the things that are related to you. Probably even you would say belong to you. So that's the relative truth. At the same time, you could look around, just as you did now, at these phenomena around you without naming them. Just grazing on the colors and the textures and the shapes. Are they disconnected? Are they all of a piece? What does reality itself look like when you're not dividing it up into particularities, particular names of things? If you just let the sweep of your awareness pass over the surface of what you experience, including sounds, including textures and so on, that's the ultimate truth. It's beyond language. It's beyond naming. And so that's the truth that coexists at all times. These two truths are like little two sides of an ice cream sandwich, you know.

[18:35]

They're just one side is when you see the one side, the naming side, the relative truth, you don't see the ultimate side. And when you're looking at the ultimate side, you don't see the naming side. So when one is Zen saying, when one side is visible, the other side is dark. One side is illuminated, the other side is dark. So we're kind of bivalves in a sense. We can't really see these two truths simultaneously. It's said in the sutras that the Buddha sees both truths simultaneously. So that's what it means to be awake is you not fooled by the names of things swarming around in your head. You basically are able to recall and to actually recognize that there's no thing there. There's no things. There are simply transient appearances and there's nothing and therefore there's nothing really to get all too excited about. And a part of this is medicinal. You know, part of what causes our suffering is our attachment to these named objects, including me, very attached to me.

[19:38]

And that's a named object. You know, we have names and I'm very attached to my things. So me and mine are considered to be the sticky part of suffering. It's this attachment to these, basically to the words, to the names of things, the things themselves. They don't have handles. You can't attach to them. All those things in your house, if you tried to carry them around all day, you'd have a really hard time. So we actually don't have pockets. We don't carry things around. But we think that way. We think as though things belong to us, as though we could actually, you know, have them with us at all times. I guess some people do that, you know. But it's not our usual experience through the day. We leave our things behind and walk on. So this is a really important, these two truths are very important to decoding all of the Buddhist teaching. I would say, you know, and I was saying to a friend, thank goodness there's only two of them. I mean, we don't have to remember a huge number of truths.

[20:40]

There are two truths. There's the relative truth and there's the ultimate truth. And they are actually, as the Heart Sutra is telling us, they are not separate. They don't exist separately. They always exist together and they exist in the form of phenomena or objects that we perceive with our senses. So you are never separate from the ultimate truth. It's right there in your coffee cup. It's right there in my little Makugyo that I showed you. It's right there in my glasses. So each object is both ultimate and relative truth at the same time. So this is hard. This is slippery. I would say it's slippery rather than hard to understand. I don't think it's It's hard to understand, but it's hard to recall in terms of our experience of the world. We forget very quickly the ultimate truth. We are very much inclined and trained and conditioned to simply relate to the world through relative truth, through stories we have about things, about people and things.

[21:46]

So Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva, while deeply practicing Prajnaparamita, Wisdom Beyond Wisdom. clearly saw that all these five skandhas. So this first sentence is practicing with the relative truth, the truth of you are merely five skandhas. You can actually do this practice. Your mind allows you to turn its awareness toward various aspects of your experience. You can turn your mind toward what you're perceiving. And that would mean, you know, both with your auditory perceptions, your visual perceptions, your tact. You know, I just ate something, so I have a little bit of taste in my mouth. So my five senses are perceiving the phenomena in the world. So you can do that. You can just roam around in your sense organs. That's a meditation. And it's very, very helpful to do these practices when you're seated. You know, like if you're just sitting doing some seated meditation, it's a very nice time to explore the five skandhas.

[22:54]

You can explore the form, the shape of your body, the feeling of your body, the outline of your body, the internal organs of your body. How are they doing? So you can explore form. You can explore feelings. Feelings come in three flavors. A positive feeling, you might have a negative feeling, or you might have a neutral feeling. You're not quite sure how you're feeling. So that's a meditation. Form, feeling, perception, the third skandha. What am I perceiving? Right now, you're probably perceiving the sound of my voice and perhaps the weight of your body and whatever you're sitting on. You're probably perceiving the temperature in the room and so on. So you can spend some time navigating around perceptions. Form, feeling, perceptions, impulses. Is there something you'd like to be doing right now? You know, maybe adjusting your seat or getting some water or, you know, I don't know. All kinds of impulses come up throughout the day. And a lot of times we don't even notice the impulse. We just give into it.

[23:56]

So we have an impulse to turn the lights up. So we turn the lights up. One of the nice things about living at the monastery for a while, which I did for about three years down at Tassajar, there weren't any lights to turn up. So you basically had to deal with the fact that... Later in the day, there wasn't much light. It got dark. And if the temperature in the room would change and there wasn't a thermostat, so you just had to put on a sweater. And there was all kinds of ways that you needed to really simply adapt your own body and your own needs to what was going on. It wasn't this simple thing of changing the environment to suit you. For those of you who've done outdoor camping or enjoy doing that kind of more like away from the city experience, you really begin to understand something about impulses when you can't satisfy them. You can't do just what you want to do at the moment that you want to do it. So that's a practice.

[24:56]

So you've got the passengers of boat and then you have the mind itself, this kind of... Sometimes I think of the mind as like a bubble of awareness in all directions, a 360, giant bubble of awareness. And that bubble basically is with you all day long. As long as you're awake, from the minute you get up in the morning, the bubble completely fills the space you're in. If you're in a square bedroom, it looks like a square bedroom. If you go outside, it looks like the sky. So this awareness, which surrounds you, is the fifth skanda so these are meditations and they are um you know they're they're very i find them very comforting at times when maybe i'm feeling negative feelings if i start shifting to awareness of my body or to the bubble or to my impulses it begins to to pull away from that whatever's got occupied my my emotions at the moment

[26:01]

And I begin to feel a little larger, a little more large-bodied than just this kind of tiny preoccupation I might be having about something that's bothering me. So that's the practice of the relative truth. And it's called, it's the second kind of prajna. I went over the kinds of prajna. The first kind of knowing is basically mundane knowing, which is not much knowing at all. It's just worldly knowledge. It's also... fundamentally delusional. Most of the worldly knowledge that we course in is not valid. And that's another complex way of thinking. But understanding that what you're thinking about things is rarely accurate. It's kind of a best guess situation. So that's the first kind of knowing, which we don't spend a lot of time with in our Buddhist studies. The second kind of knowing is prajna is the kind I'm talking about now, where you're beginning to relate to your experience through the teaching. So the Buddha said in the Heart Sutra, deeply practice the wisdom beyond wisdom.

[27:05]

Clearly see five skandhas. This is a Buddhist practice. Now you're engaging in the path of practice. So that's an intention that you have is to study and follow the Buddhist teaching. So I'm doing that now. I'm engaging in a super mundane knowing through which this darkness of delusion, of mundane knowing, of delusional knowing is brought to light. So now you're turning up the lights of wisdom by looking at what's actually there rather than what you've assumed to be there just because someone told you so a long time ago. So by studying the mundane self, by studying the mind of delusion, and by studying what we call the self, this little self, practicing deeply, then we clearly see all five skandhas. We get this clear view of the skandhas. And this is the first step on the Eightfold Path. It's called right view. Right view. I'm getting a very clear picture of what's going on here. I think I said to you last week that this is kind of an initiatory process on the path.

[28:09]

It's called like a psychological realism. We're still treating objects as if they're there, as if there is something going on here. We're not dismissing reality as the mere dream that later on it's shown to be when the veil of illusions are pulled aside and it's like silence. There's no more name calling going on. We're still in the world of name calling, of identifying, of using language. So this is still a kind of first step on the path and it's right view, psychological realism. And this is the kind of knowing and study that many of us probably went through if we did psychological work, if we had a therapist or something like that, which I did for many years and I found it to be extremely valuable to do this sort of searching into my stories. So studying the conventional reality, the existent self, we keep doing that until we see that this conventionally existing self is not much of a self at all.

[29:18]

It's the five skandhas. They're impermanent. They are basically suffering, partly because they don't last. You can't have any permanent experiences of pleasure. And so they, you know, no matter how nice it is, you have to let it go. You know, the sun goes down, the clouds come in, your friend has to go home. Whatever it is that you're enjoying, you know, that last sip of tea, it ends. You know, so this is part of the grasping. Like, if it just wouldn't end, just a little longer, a little more of this or that. But always, everything ends. That's the law, the law of impermanence. So as a result of impermanence, It's fundamentally dissatisfactory. And the first noble truth is the truth of suffering is also called the truth of dissatisfaction. You know, it doesn't have to be huge suffering, like loss of a loved one or breaking your leg. It's enough that you ran out of coffee. You know, we suffer in the most minor ways, but it's still, these are the types of suffering that we're so familiar with, you know, like, oh no, not that.

[30:25]

Oh, not that. So... One of the advantages of realizing that the five skandhas are empty and you really can't get what you want, you begin to see that suffering is real. It's really happening. And as a result of coming to, meaning relating to the facts of life, the Buddha called the facts of life, that there is suffering, that there's no self, and that everything's impermanent. And he said, and that's true. And I hate to tell you, but that's true. And for a lot of us, that's the truth that the entire, as far as I can tell, commercial enterprise is about helping us to deny that truth, you know? I mean, those cruises look like they've gone forever. You can stay on that ship and they've got five restaurants and it's, you know, so on and so forth and eight ports of call. And, you know, you'll never come home, but of course you do come home. And so the idea that we try to mask behind these various,

[31:28]

long-term promises of eternal pleasure or whatever it is, is part of the masquerading we're doing around not wanting to see the facts of life. And the Buddha said, actually, you'll be a lot happier, ultimately, if you'll just relate to the facts of life. Stop running from them. Just, okay, that was nice. We got to go. See you later. Thank you very much. I have no complaints. You know, the very kind of... kind of not simple-minded, but simple sense of the relationship that you have to things that you're doing, to the things that you enjoy. You know, it's time to put it away now. You've done enough of that particular thing that you like to do. Now put it down, fold it up, and it's time to do this next thing. One of the nice things about monastic practice, I think that many of us discover by doing some of that for a while, is everything is done based on sound. I didn't wear a watch for three years.

[32:28]

You don't need a watch because there are signals that call you. So you get up in the morning, there's a bell that wakes you up in the morning. And there's another bell that tells you it's time to go to the Zendel. And then there's another bell that starts service. And then there's another kind of bell that begins the work meeting. And then there's another sound. And so all day long, you just hear something. what it is and you know it you know it in your body oh yeah and you so you just start moving that way you know which way to go and how long you have how long it takes to get from your room to the zendo and so there's some great relief and not having to figure all of that out not having to manipulate your day you have enough time everything enough time for sitting you have enough time for food you have enough time for rest you have enough time for writing letters to friends you have enough time you know to take a break you have a day off oh my god that seems really eternal but then you know even that ends the day off comes to an end uh so there's something really comforting about accepting the limitations throughout the day the time is up you start it 40 minutes later

[33:38]

studies over, you close your book, you put it back on the shelf, you get your tea, you go back to your room, you go back to the Zendo. So training yourself to just let go, just let go, let go. Don't try to hold on to, don't be late for everything, you know. They did a study once that I read that people who are late for everything, I'm sure you have friends like this, or you may be one of those friends, are always late the same amount of time. You know, it's like, And there's a couple of students here that every meeting they come in about five minutes late. You know, that's amazing. How do you do that? How do you always arrive five minutes late? And the studies basically, not true for everyone, but basically the people do not factor in how long it takes to get there. So they know they're supposed to be there at five, but then five o'clock comes and they head to the meeting. So then they're always, the transit time is the late times. I thought that was kind of interesting. But even if you tell folks that, it doesn't really change anything.

[34:40]

So it's just like, okay, now we know. And we'll expect you then. So suffering is real. And the desire to get out of suffering is an impulse we have. I would rather this ends. I would really rather this isn't happening to me. So the relative truth, the big advantage of it is motivating. You know, we really do want to end our suffering. We do want to find relief. We do want to find whatever this thing nirvana is we'd really like. Sounds good. We'd really like to have an escape hatch from the repeated cycle of habits that just keep going around and around. The name of those habits, for all of you who know the Four Noble Truths, there is suffering, First Noble Truth. There's a cause of your suffering, and the cause of your suffering is desire. wanting things to be different than they are. And because they can't be, because they end, you know, you say, well, that didn't work. I'll try it again. I'll try it again. So the first and second noble truth, the word for those two is samsara, samsara, which means literally endless circling around and around, you know, a hamster in a wheel.

[35:53]

And it feels like that, you know, oh my gosh, I'm doing it again. And I'm doing it again. And I'm doing it again. So these are our habits, mostly habits of mind. But then the mind, of course, leads our behavior. So we tend to repeat behaviorally what is running through our minds as habits. So this practice is basically an effort to break habits, to break ourselves out of cyclical habits of suffering, just doing it again and again and again. So you're motivated by samsara. Samsara itself motivates you to want to escape, to become free. So this is a, you know, arousing compassion for the suffering of your own suffering, for the suffering of the world. It arouses a desire to get out of here for extinction. It's called nirvana or blown out. Nirvana means blown out, whatever that means to you. And it arouses a desire to practice, you know, to how do I do this? I get it. I want to do this. There is a way out of suffering. And that's what Buddhism is all about.

[36:55]

The teaching that there is an end to suffering. That's noble truth number three and four. There is a cessation of suffering. And the cessation of suffering is, number four, the way you live your life. It's a practice. It's a praxis. It's a way. It's not a one-off. It's not like, you know, someplace you go for the weekend. It's basically, you have basically transformed your life somewhat away of the lines I was saying where... You see that things are time-limited. You don't tend to try to hold on to them longer than you can. You don't try to extend this whatever it is. You don't overdo whatever it is. You find a very steady pace to how you're living your life. Kind of a middle way between extremes of pleasure-seeking and between having no pleasure at all. You know, that's called asceticism. Buddha said, avoid the two extremes.

[37:57]

You're going too far. You go too far if you just do indulgence all the time. And we know that. We see the outcome of that when people are caught in addictions, some very tragic. And we see the outcome of people who just refuse to say yes or to enjoy anything. For what? Because it won't last. It's kind of nihilism. Why would I bother? You know, why bother? And so on. So we're motivated to get out of the relative world, of the mundane world. So that's the setup that's going on here in this text is clearly seeing all five skandhas. We practice. We practice with that. Clearly seeing. Clearly seeing is a practice. Look carefully. Pay attention. What are you doing? How did that happen? What are the causes and conditions for what you're doing right now? Study the causes and conditions. Study your actions. You become a student of your own life. Why not? We have a little bit of time here. So to become a real student of your own life and your own habits.

[39:01]

So that's called practice. And there's no time set for practice. It's not like, oh, you have four years and you get your degree. There's no place where you get to say, I've practiced. I'm there. There's no there there. You basically are becoming... way of life it's a way of life and it has to do with the eightfold path and as i said the first one being right view you clearly see all five skandhas are empty you see dependent core rising you see the middle middle way between the extremes you you believe you don't yet see non-duality what the buddha saw the morning of his awakening was that the star morning star was not separate from himself it was not It was coextensive with his own mind. His bubble of awareness, the star was in it. So the star and his awareness were not separate. Everything that you are aware of is not separate from you. In fact, everything you are aware of is exactly what you are. You take away the bubble of awareness and pretty much that's it.

[40:05]

You pop the bubble. There's nothing there. If there's no objects of awareness, then awareness has no job to do. So it's kind of like a blank sheet, you know. So that's unimaginable. We can imagine that, but that is like imagining probably something like death. I'm done. I'm gone. There's nothing there. There's no I'm. There's no sensory experience. So, you know, allowing this non-dual nature of reality to, first of all, think about it, and then to allow yourself to have an experience of that, as the Buddha did when he saw the star was not outside of himself. So this is waking up. it's not some extreme exotic experience it's right there all the time in your very room right now is the relative and the ultimate truth the ultimate truth is side by side at all times with everything you're experiencing the ultimate truth is there you know we just either don't believe it or we think we don't get it or we're not we think it's something gotta be more than that you know so then we keep overlooking

[41:12]

We keep overlooking, we reach too far. There's a saying in Zen about the arrow shoots past Korea, you know, you're trying to get to Korea and you just, you fly right over it. So we're actually, you know, we're doing this in a way that actually allows us to recognize it when we land on the truth, you know, to go like, oh, it's not, it's actually this that's happening right now. This is truth. This is truth. I was talking to a friend, we were talking about that. And I suggested, because we get so abstract, right? I suggested, well, just put your hand on the, and he was sitting in front of his fireplace. I said, just put your hand on the stones of that fireplace. That's it. You know, just do that right now. You feel that under your hand. You might all try that. Just put your hand on something. Like if you're near a table or your couch or whatever, you know, don't make a computer, you might mess up something. But anyway, You just put your hand on something nearby. I just put my hand on some paper. You know, this is truth.

[42:14]

That's truth. This is the ultimate truth. Right in your hand, right in your eyes. So we're so used to it. I mean, that's really our problem. We're so used to everything that we're basically, it's like someone was asking me about, you know, it's like, it's not something you know, it's what you are. It's something you are. And it's very hard for something like the eye can't see the eye. The ultimate reality, reality itself, has a hard time recognizing itself. So we reflect each other. Our gift to each other is that I see you. I see you. I confirm your reality. You confirm my reality. There's a saying in the Lotus Sutra, only a Buddha and a Buddha can know the full reality. range of reality because my my awareness includes you and your awareness includes me otherwise I'm kind of left out you know this one doesn't see itself so I need you to include me in reality and all that's behind me I can't see that and I do that same thing for you so only a Buddha and a Buddha only awakening and awakening sees the totality of existence so

[43:35]

This is awakening, right? The second turning of the wheel. So relative truth was the first turning of the wheel where this realistic psychological realism. Things are so, as we say, you study there, you know that world already. So you begin your studies where you already, how you already think, you know, just very basic, very simple. And then you awaken to the ultimate truth. And that is still in the first line of Heart Sutra. Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva, when practicing deeply, Prajnaparamita, clearly saw, clearly saw that all five skandhas are empty. Ultimate truth. And was relieved of all suffering. So, probably there's not a more important line in all of Buddhist, all of Buddhist teaching. You know, it's kind of a summary of the whole thing, of the whole path is right there in this... First sentence of the Heart Sutra. The relative truth and the ultimate truth.

[44:38]

The skandhas are empty. Not something else out there was empty. The five skandhas are empty. And then we'll talk about that. What emptiness means. So this is Buddha's knowing. That all five skandhas are empty is the Prajnaparamita. The Buddha's knowing. When one comes to realize that both persons and phenomena are selfless. They have no... They're not thing. We're not things. We're not nouns. We're verbs. We're action verbs. We're action figures. You know, we actually are a series of gestures and movements and changes that go on all day long. So there's nothing. There's not no thing there. There's nothing there that you can grab a hold of. It's like a river. You know, you can't grab a hold of the flow of the river. But you can flow down it. And that's what we're doing. We are basically riding the flow of things. And we're going the same speed as the rivers, like a leaf on the river. So that's one of the metaphors for meditation is that you allow your mind to go with the flow of experience rather than trying to swim against it or trying to get up on the shore or whatever.

[45:48]

You're actually coming right along, riding right along with your experience. So realizing that both persons and phenomena are selfless means that there's no sign. You can't... You can name them, but that doesn't, what does that do? My parents named me Nancy, but what does that do for me? Not much. Wasn't much of a clue. When Bodhidharma was asked by the emperor of China, who are you facing me? Bodhidharma says, don't know. Don't know. And he's not lying to the emperor. He's telling him the truth. Don't know. What can I tell you about this? It wouldn't be just, you know, I don't know, words. My name is Bodhidharma. You know, my name is Fu. That's about as far as I can get. And then after that, I'm into the five skandhas. I'm starting to give, you know, these all kinds of these, the verbal identifiers, you know, just to be polite to the emperor, I suppose.

[46:55]

He might do some of that. But Bodhidharma was a pretty brave guy to say something like that to the emperor. And the emperor knew who he was. I'm the emperor of China. You know, he had an ego. He had an identity. And it was coextensive with the entire nation. You know, we know about that. So, you know, this is a kind of fantasy, a total fantasy that I'm the emperor of China. You kind of want to... You want to laugh, but that wouldn't be a good idea because emperors usually don't think that's funny. Bodhidharma wasn't kidding. He was serious. I don't know. And he didn't say, I don't know. He said, don't know. Don't know. So this is Buddha's knowing when you realize the emptiness of inherent existence, that there's no thing there. There are causes and conditions. There are things that are being created. out of all the causes and conditions. I think I, yeah, I did. I told you all about the cup. You know, the cup is empty in the relative world means there's nothing in it, just language or talking.

[47:57]

I said, can I have some more coffee? It's fine. My cup is empty. No problem. You get some more coffee and we live that way. And if I say, well, what does it mean? The cup is empty in terms of Buddhist teaching, then you'd have to tell me, you'd have to analyze and you'd have to think and you'd have to remember what I told you. I told you, but the Buddha said, and that is that the cup is empty because it's made of parts. Without its parts, you don't have a cup. If I smash it on the ground, where's the cup? Now it's garbage. So there's no permanent entity-ness there. It's made of causes and conditions, of the potter and the salesperson and the money it took to buy it and so on. And it's made of language. I call it a cup. You call it a cup. In other languages, if I say cup to someone, if I ask for a cup in another country, like, you know, Vietnam, they'll just, I guess, unless they happen to speak English, they'll just look at me like, what, you know, and I won't know that they're saying what, you know, I'm saying cup.

[49:02]

And then we can't talk because it's language-based as well as being these other two ways that it's dependent core arising. So meaning, again, emptiness means... It doesn't have separate existence. It doesn't exist all by itself. It is dependent on all these other forces. And where that's most significant is it's nice that it's true of cups, but it's also true of people. It's true of us. We are dependently co-arisen. We don't exist independently. Independence Day is not true. It's interdependence day. We belong together. We have risen up together. We are the same... substances all other living things and we have this identity of being alive that gives us a great responsibility we are alive and what are we going to do with this precious life you know and one thing not to do is get lost in conceptual storylines you know about yourself or about anybody else about getting lost and likes and dislikes and so on which is you know that's how we make stories about ourselves and other people

[50:10]

Unless they're really healthy and accurate, they're not so helpful. So this entityhood is something that we are imposing on this ever-changing world and ourselves, and it's not something that's actually there. And this is called this realization that that thing is not actually there has a name, a technical name. I'll just throw it out. You don't have to remember. It's non-imaginative wisdom. It means you're not imagining things. The magic show, imagine, magic, the imagining show has shut off temporarily. You are not making up stories about what's there. Non-imagination is the wisdom that stopped imagining what's not there. Like the emperor did not have any clothes on. People stopped imagining, although they actually could see he didn't have clothes on. They were imagining for some crazy reason. that at least telling him that they thought he had clothes on but you know we imagine all kinds of things that aren't there so non-imaginative wisdom is the apex of understanding in the heart sutra wisdom beyond wisdom so which you you no longer imagine things to be real which in truth are seen to be arising and passing away and on an even closer look they're not even doing that you know you see the suffering the patterns are also illusions

[51:36]

Like a smoke ring, Suzuki Roshi, I think. I remember hearing some pencil here. He would take his little whisk and he would go like that. And he said, do you see the circle? Do you see the circle? No circle. But we have this way of making patterns where there are no patterns. You know, this is one of the things that Zen masters sometimes will do. They'll just draw a circle in the air, you know, and write rhino, rhinoceros in it. Here's the rhino. Here's the rhino. You see the rhino? So this is awakening, awakening to how the imagination forms its imagery and creates an illusion, which then blocks our view of what's actually so. So suffering is an illusion, you know, but it's not like a joke. It's not a magic show for kids. It's a magic show for kids. for grownups, it makes us very sad and it makes us very angry and it creates a terrible world of suffering, what we imagine to be so.

[52:41]

We just did a two-day workshop on racism and, you know, race is an imagination. Humans don't have races. You know, it's just like some crazy idea that we came up with as a species not so long ago for the sake of profit. You know, commodities is kind of handy to have a way of thinking about certain people so that they could, you know, you could buy them. You know, you could sell them and you could tell who was who because of, oh, yeah, but how about because of their color? It was a good idea. So, you know, we've done this crazy stuff and we've done it for so long that we actually started to believe our stories, our imagination. And how are we going to dispel that? How are we going to get rid of those stories? That we are so, you know, we've been, the illusion has been so thickly laid on and it's been institutionalized into our physical world. So it's like, it looks like it's true. It looks like these things are true, you know, but it's an illusion and it's a very sad and a powerful illusion. So the next step in our practice is to find a way to escape from our dreaming, you know, to escape from the world of illusions.

[53:46]

And That's what we're going to talk about next week is how to escape from the world of illusions, the how-to, the practices of waking up from the dream. So I'm going to put a marker right there. And I'll open up our conversation. Any of you who would like to ask a question or make a comment or anything else, this is time for you. to speak if you like. So there was a question from Bill Kelly. Bill. Okay, Bill, where are you? Let's see. There you are. There's Bill. Hi, Bill. My question was, I had chatted it, but I can go ahead and read it.

[54:47]

So the ultimate truth, could it be described as a field of energy of which we are just a part of? That's tempting. And I think a lot of people go there. They think of it as something in between your fingers rather than your fingers. But actually it's your fingers. And the space between your fingers too. You know, it's the whole set. So everything is ultimately the truth. And, you know, we really want to try to figure out how to divide it into parts, you know, how to cut the cat in half, divide and, you know, separate. And separation is the cause of our suffering. Dualistic thinking is the cause of our suffering. So I find it most helpful to think in terms of the ultimate nature of reality appears in the form of phenomenon like this is ultimate truth.

[55:56]

And I mean, not just, this isn't the only one. Every, every single thing is every phenomenon is the ultimate truth because it has no inherent existence. And the ultimate truth is the absence of inherent existence. So there's nothing you can point to that isn't, free of inherent existence, including you. So it's the good news. You're not stuck with being a thing, or you're not stuck with being locked out of the ultimate truth. So yes, that energy is you, and the thing that maybe doesn't think is perceiving the energy, that's you, and imagining it's the energy is you, and all of that is true. There's nothing that doesn't qualify. And I don't know if that's comforting or if that's disturbing. I think that's really for each of us to decide, you know, well, that's a relief. Or, oh, no. Now what? I don't know, Bill, what do you think?

[57:00]

Trying to comfort you? I was thinking that we're all part of this soup of energy. And in fact, that soup is inside my brain. For example, when anger comes up, I can sit and look at it as just this energy. And it doesn't have to come out as anger. It could become something else. Yes. And I think that's, you're now looking at basically your feelings. So you've done one of your skandhas, you're describing the skandha that is about feelings. I'm feeling negative energy. So that's one of the parts of yourself. But that feeling is in your body. So it's not separate from your body, right? So the energy and the body and the awareness of the energy and the body is another skanda. So all of your skandhas are operating together. None of them are independent. Feelings are not independent of the other four. So again, that's just saying again that there's no separate thing called feelings or called energy.

[58:08]

It's all of a piece. So you can find comfort in exactly the way you said. It's just my skandhas are acting up. You know, I don't have to take it so personally. It's just like it'll calm down. It'll all calm down, but just don't move. Just hold still. Just wait. Everything's impermanent, including feelings. Take a breath. Take five. I usually recommend taking five. And everything changes. And you can say energy. I think that's fine. It's a nice way to think about it. But I think we really are looking for practicums. Like, okay, I want to deal with my anger. So how do I do that? Well, I think looking at it as energy and counting to five is a really good way. That's what I do. And sometimes.

[59:10]

Unless I'm really mad. And then I go get them. I'll show you, cut me off. Anyway, thanks for your question, Bill. Thank you for breaking this down for us. You're welcome. Anyone else? We have one minute of our usual one hour, and then I often... I'm happy to stay on a little bit later if you'd like to bring up a question. Oh, Anne, please. There you go. You're unmuted. Okay. Can you hear me? Yeah. Okay. So I've been hearing you talk now for several weeks, and this time it's kind of giving me hope because I thought, like, I kind of understood something for... the first time, but at least it was fleeting.

[60:14]

It was impermanent. That's right. But I was just wondering, because I've been listening to audiobooks a lot, and it seems like if I hear this stuff repeated over and over, because it's so amorphous, but I do start to kind of get it a bit. But is there a book that is really clear about you know, for Westerners, I don't know, just like that you could recommend. Yes. Okay. I think I might've mentioned last week. It's called the heart attack sutra. A heart attack. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Okay. And it's Carl Brunholtz and he's the scholar, but he also is very funny. And he, he wrote the heart attack sutra about the heart sutra and he does break it down and it's quite readable. It's for lay people. It's not a scholarly work. And he basically walks you through it.

[61:17]

And I think in way, you see metaphors and images that I've found to be very helpful. And it takes forever to get this stuff. And I don't, you know, I would not ever be discouraged if you feel like, oh, gee, I didn't get it. It's only been two weeks. I mean, I'm on my 40th year and I still have to go, wait a minute, you know, which hand is the, you know. It's because there's two levels that we're trying to understand. The one is the intellectual level. In some ways, that's easy. You know, little by little, you can take notes and you can read them over and you can read the book and you can go like, I think I get it. You know, I think I get it. The harder one is experientially. When you actually see that all five skandhas are empty. That there's nothing to get a hold of. It's a shimara. It's a magic show. It's a trick that's being played on you. And the trick doesn't stop just because you get it's a trick. There's a very good story from a sutra called the Untying the Knots in the Sandi Nirmocana Sutra.

[62:20]

And there's a magician. So it's really good. I mean, they know we're talking about magic. So this is an old text. And it's a magician standing at the crossroads of a town. And he's made out of magic, out of sticks and twigs, he's made elephants and giraffes. So when the people are walking into the town, come to this crossroads, they see elephants and giraffes. And they're like, wow. And then the question in the text is, well, the people see elephants and giraffes. What does the magician see? The guy who's making the tricks. And what do you think? You want to guess what he sees? Sticks? I don't know. No. i know but that's what you think right he made the tricks you think he knew he sees elephant okay it's his trick and but still he's like just as memorized by his own magic as the rest of us and that's like us we are making the trick but we are just as as is susceptible to it as our is everybody all of us are in the same boat here it's not like all of a sudden i don't see that stuff anymore

[63:32]

I still see the illusion my mind is making of things in the world and of myself. That hasn't gone away. But I actually know that it's a trick. And so I can at least remind myself, you know what? You're falling for it. You're believing what you're thinking. And it's never true. Never. I've been testing this for a long time. And I've discovered it is never true what I'm thinking. is sometimes it's okay it's neutral like i'd like to get some tea that doesn't very harmful you know it's okay but you know do i have to have tea maybe we're out of tea am i gonna get tea i don't know it's just a story and i'm running along on my stories and they're mostly harmful and that it's the ones that are harmful that we have to watch out like this whole thing i was saying about racism it's so harmful that that story people being less important than other people and so on that we bought it you know that we got fed it and we drank it and we're poisoned by it so you know those are the ones we have to realize are just just not true even though my brain is saying it and my body's going to you know crossing the street because I feel fear you know I gotta tell this brain of mine you know you gotta stop it you have to stop it so

[65:02]

Some of these illusions really matter to our well-being and the well-being of others. And others of them, it's okay. Not so bad. Okay, thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. Hi, Guy. There you are again. Okay, now I think I'm unmuted. Can you hear me? Did you want to say something? Yes. Can you hear me? I think you're unmuted. Okay. Great. Thank you so much for the talk today. I think slowly but surely... Oh, yeah? I don't know. The internet's been a little troublesome. I was going to say slowly but surely it gets a little bit clearer. I did have a question that came up, but I think it might be answered next week, which is the how-to, because I feel the more that I... try to to be mindful in what I'm doing I relate all of it to myself so it's oh I'm doing this or I'm doing or I'm feeling and I'm noticing it's almost like I notice more and more of how much I live in this sort of the relative the relative world so that that'll probably be the how-to will maybe be next week because even when I'm sitting I'm thinking oh

[66:25]

let me bring awareness to my shoulder and I name it and suddenly it becomes, I notice myself doing exactly what not seeing clearly, if that makes sense. So maybe that's the first step. But I had another question that I guess I would ask now is that's coming up for me more in meditation where I feel like I kind of meditate in sort of these four stages where either I'm completely lost in delusion where I have no awareness of my breath, where it's easier for me to sort of awaken from that and bring myself back. There's a part where I kind of stay in this state where the counting or the awareness becomes in the background and it's like it slowly starts the thinking slowly starts to take over which i can also wake myself up from in a way and bring it back but i find myself most constantly in this state where where the the awareness on the breathing might be at the front but there's still a lingering sort of thought just trying to trying to grab at me and i'm and i'm wondering where how to approach that do we sort of

[67:40]

sort of try to focus in harder or is it take it away and and give it the space that it's asking for if that makes sense because sometimes they're the great moments that last for a few seconds where i'm fully aware on the breath but most of the time i find myself in that state where it seems like it's most difficult to to realize if i'm even fully paying attention it almost feels like my mind is split so i'm wondering your thoughts on that well um Well, I can only speak from my mind, which is probably as much of a circus as anybody else's. You know, I really have come to enjoy my mind, and I must say that's a hard one. You know, that you actually enjoy what your mind is doing rather than like either falling for it or... being bothered by it or whatever. It's kind of like, whoa, look what she's doing now. You know, look at this little show that's going on.

[68:41]

Or whoa, you know, I just landed back in third grade. That's amazing. So, you know, there's an amazement if you allow your mind, first of all, to be spacious. Now, one definition of nirvana is spaciousness, mind like space. So if you allow for the spaciousness that is the surround of nirvana, of your thought, your experience, you know, right now, we'll have space, right? So when you allow for spaciousness, especially when you're sitting, the mind is vast, like mind like the sky. And then you just watch what shoots through it. And without being bothered by it, without getting involved in it, you know? Right. Don't mess with it. It's fine. It doesn't need you. It doesn't need anything. Just doing its thing. And like snails make slime, humans make thoughts. And it's just kind of the thing that we're doing, riding along on our thinking.

[69:46]

And if you pay attention to it, it becomes, you know, it's like rocks under the slime. It gets really, you know, challenging. But if you just let it go... You just kind of leave it to its devices. It kind of thrives on you paying attention to it. You know, like attention seeking. So you're just like, uh-uh. No, thank you. No, I won't. You know, the Buddha had an army come at him and he just sat there. He had dancing girls and boys come at him and he just sat there. I felt that. I think it's Mara or something where it almost feels like... constantly like oh come I'm right here just you know yeah just give me a chance right there yeah well yeah but Mara is the last one that came so first the Buddha had the army Buddha had the dancing girls and then Mara came and said now I'm gonna kill you I'm gonna kill you because I did all my tricks and you Mara is the master of illusions there's a clue

[70:49]

So I've done all my tricks, all my magic, my elephants, my everything, my army. I've done everything and you refuse to get up. So now I'm going to kill you. I'm going to destroy you. This is in the sutras. And the Buddha says, no, you won't. He smiles. And he says, you will not destroy me because I know who you are. Mara says, you don't know who I am. No, no, I do know who you are. You are myself. And with that, Mara vanishes, is reabsorbed. It was Buddha's imagination that he was being afraid of. His own dreams, his own nightmare. We call them nightmares, right? Where is it coming from? Under the bed? No, it's coming from inside our own imagination. So as we begin to realize where those things are coming from, you know, in Zen we face a white wall. And I tell the students, you know, I promise you that stuff that you're going through during Zazen is not on the wall. So where is it? So we begin to recognize, oh, I'm amazing.

[71:50]

I'm the magician. I have this capacity to create the most vivid, amazing dreams. And they turn into nightmares. They hurt me. And then I make nightmares up about other people, and I hurt them. So we're captive by illusions. And the more we begin to understand the nature of illusions, the freer and freer we become. They won't go away. It's not like we're trying to stop thinking or dreaming. We can't. We don't have no such power. But they don't have to be so powerful. They don't have to control us. We don't have to move. Just smile. I see you, Mauro. Doing what you do best. Do your worst. Yeah, exactly. Not quite at the beginning. Right. To break in here. This is the journey. It's really a journey that we're all taking.

[72:50]

And it's amazing. Yeah, it really is. One quick question. When we're chanting, do we chant in gaso? Or is there a specific when we do? No, you don't. If you're sitting, you can just be in a seated position. Okay, great. Thank you. Yeah, if you need to chant, you probably have to be looking at the chant unless you know it by heart. If you know it by heart, you can just have your hands in the cosmic mudra. That's how we would be chanting in the zendo. Great. Thank you so much. You're welcome. See you again. See you soon. Yeah. Thank you everyone. I appreciate it having you come and I will return on next Sunday. I will be on vacation, but you won't know that because I'll be, I just have a different background. Taking the computer with me. So I look forward to continuing on the second sentence of the Heart Syndrome.

[73:51]

Yes. Thank you. You want to unmute and say goodbye to each other? One of the nice things about Zoom. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. Thank you, Fu. Thank you. Thank you, Fu. Take care, all of you, please. Goodbye. Thank you. Have a nice vacation. Yeah, thanks. Very exciting. Thank you, Fu. Thank you. See you next week. Good, good, good. See you then. Look forward to it. Hey! It's the mammoth twins. Okay. Good night. Thank you.

[74:52]

Thank you. Starting to see familiar faces now. Night, Lisa. We'll have to have another tea party soon.

[75:12]

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