Good morning, yesterday I got a number of wonderful questions, here is one, from Skye. After the Buddha passed away, the Buddhist monks and nuns gathered and they repeated it, they recalled what he had taught during his 45 years of teaching, and all his teachings

[01:12]

were put in a basket, called Pitaka, Sutra Pitaka, Pitaka means a basket, but this is kind of a basket that you cannot see, because at that time the sutras were handed down only by the oral tradition, they were not written down yet, so that basket is in here, so the Buddha gave so many lessons on the Dharma, and each lesson like that is called Sutra, and there was a basket of sutras, and there were many monks who had the art of reciting the sutras, they learned

[02:18]

by heart, and they recited the sutras every three days, or five days, or seven days, and they were very important in the community, and then the monks also recited the Vinaya, it means the precepts, there are precepts for monks, precepts for nuns, for lay people, and also how these precepts come to be adopted by the Buddhist communities, and each precept has a story behind it, in the beginning the community of the Buddha did not have any precepts, but since the numbers of monks and nuns increased, some mistakes were made by individuals in the community, and that is why precepts were

[03:18]

proposed, in order for the community to enjoy more the harmony living, and the second basket is called Vinaya Vinaya Pitaka, and then not long after that, we have the third basket, which is the Abhidharma Abhidharma Pitaka, Abhidharmas are work done by monks and nuns and lay people in order to systemize the teaching of the Buddha, in order to offer commentaries on the teachings of the Buddha in the Sutra Pitaka, and that kind of literature was becoming very important

[04:28]

a few hundred years after the death of the Buddha and there were so many works on the Abhidharma Pitaka and finally around the 5th century of our area there were so many eminent pastors who summarized all the work in the Abhidharmas in just a few volumes for the sake of the people who do not have much time to study all the Abhidharma works, and now many of these works are still available in in Sri Lanka, where the Pali Canon is still maintained

[05:30]

and Visuddhimagga is the most famous work summarizing the teaching of the Abhidharma the English translation of that work is the path of purity it has been translated into English it is available now at the same time with the Visuddhimagga there is another work called Vimuttimagga this was also written in Pali but the Pali version is lost but fortunately we have a translation in Chinese and

[06:32]

therefore we also have a translation of this work into English, we are very lucky this is the path of liberation, this is a path of purity, Visuddhi, purity, and Vimutti, liberation at this about the same time there was a man whose name is Vasubandhu who lived in North India, he spent some time in Kashmir also, he learned the Abhidharma

[07:44]

of all other schools because there were so many schools of Buddhism by that time and each school has its own Sutra Pitaka, Vinaya Pitaka and Abhidharma Pitaka so this gentleman he spent time learning the Abhidharma and the Sutras of many traditions and finally he summed up his understanding about the teaching of Abhidharma in a wonderful work called Trimshika Vishnapti Matrata Karika well it's long like this but

[08:45]

Trimshika it means 30, Karika means verses, Gatha, something like Gatha Vishnapti Matrata it means only consciousness exists, it means everything you see, everything you feel is consciousness and this work consists only of 30 verses but it's a very wonderful work 10 teachers who came after him gave wonderful commentaries on that work we can translate this by the teaching of the teaching of Vishnana Vada

[09:50]

Vishnana Vada, a word that you know already Vishnana means consciousness in 30 verses I had the opportunity to learn this work when I was 19 and it has helped me quite a lot and what I present to you in the first Dharma talk concerning Alaya Vishnana, Mano Vishnana Mano Vishnana and Manas and also the 51 mental formations are all from that work it was written in Sanskrit and the Sanskrit was rediscovered by a French professor when he visited Nepal but when I studied it I started in the Chinese version

[11:00]

and I have made comparative studies of the two texts and it was a wonderful translation it was translated by the famous Chinese pilgrim during the 7th century so if you like to know more about the teaching of Vishnana Vada concerning the unconscious concerning the visas, mental formations and the way the mind works please approach Simshika Vishnati Matata Karika, it is available in English but first of all I would like to draw attention to the few basic texts of Buddhist meditation

[12:03]

if you belong to the Vajrayana tradition or Zen tradition or Vipassana tradition and even if you are not a Buddhist yet you you should try to learn because this is a very precious thing handed down from from our ancestors I think Buddhism is just part of our heritage and if you don't know how to make use of it to profit from it that would be a pity first is the sutra on mindful breathing the title of the sutra written in Pali is

[13:09]

Anapanasati Sutra anapana means breathing in breathing out, sati means mindfulness, sutra means the text and in this sutra the Buddha proposed 16 exercises on breathing and our gatha is not deep slow we just extract some elements from these 16 exercises and if you now want to know more about that gatha and then the study of this sutra is very important

[14:22]

the exercise have to do with the body have to do with the feelings how to do with the mental formations and how to do with the objects of the mind which is the world so everything is deal with in that sutra the sutra was taught by the Buddha on a full moon night in open air for many many monks and nuns at the end of the three-month retreat and I have translated it into English and written commentaries on it and it is available and I wrote commentaries for people of our time not only for monks who live in the forest the sutra on mindful breathing that is the title and I don't think that anyone who would like to

[15:37]

practice Buddhist meditation could ignore that sutra in fact the monks in the time of the Buddha they learn they memorize it they know by heart and I think a deep thorough study of the sutra and effort to put them into practice now daily life is very important the second text that is equally important is Satipatthana Sutra I wrote down the title of these sutras in Pali because we don't have the original Sanskrit

[16:40]

we only have the original Pali and when I was a novice I studied them in the Chinese version Satipatthana Sutra means mindfulness like in here Satipatthana Sutra is translated by the foundations of mindfulness the sutra on the foundations of mindfulness in fact there are four foundations that is why we translate the sutra on the four foundations of mindfulness the first foundation being the body the second foundation being the feelings the third being the mind and the fourth being the object of the mind which means everything and these two sutras they go together perfectly no detail in these two you cannot see a single detail in this sutra that contradict other details

[17:48]

and monks and nuns have learned by heart these two sutras from generation to generations and that is why during my studies I noticed that foreign elements have not penetrated into these two texts they are still very pure and that is why these two texts are so precious so important that if you want really to practice and or to try Buddhist meditation you just cannot ignore them whether you are you belong to the Buddhist tradition of the north or the south the four areas of meditation as you know four foundations of meditation is body

[18:51]

feeling mind and object of mind and everything is included in these four foundations means if you read the satipatthana sutra you will see you will see things like this the practicer contemplate the body in the body contemplate the feeling in the feeling contemplate the mind in the mind and contemplate the objects of mind in the object of mind well the idea is that while you practice contemplation you do not remain a separate subject of contemplation

[20:01]

you are not only an observer you have to penetrate deeply into the object of your contemplation and become one with it in order to really understand so if we think that we we can contemplate something and remain only someone standing outside well and we can still understand the nature of the object of our contemplation we are wrong we have to go into it to be one with it in order to really understand it like in the french word comprendre comprehend there is the prefix com and the verb pram means to take to pick it up and com means to be one with it

[21:13]

so understanding something is to pick it up and to become one with it the idea is like that in india they like to use the example of a drop a grain of salt who would like to know how salty is the ocean water and the best way according to the story is that the grain of salt jump into the ocean and then the understanding will be perfect but for many westerners that is a dangerous thing you lose yourself you lose your identity i remember that when i was talking at the united nation church center

[22:15]

a lady who came to see me told me a thing like this i asked my friend to come along but she refused to go i asked why she said well i may be persuaded by him to oppose the war in vietnam she was afraid of being of understanding of losing her point of view herself when people love each other because they are just doing that they become the other person if but they don't become the other person they they cannot be one with the other person love is not really there

[23:22]

so when you love you heat yourself up somehow in order to interbe with the one you love otherwise love would not be possible in the circle of uh scientists uh nuclear physicists they have already already started talking in that kind of language they said that if you want to to understand a elementary particle and then you have to become a participant if you want to to continue to be an observer a mere observer you cannot understand and the particle is what first of all your mind your concept about the particle so the buddha stressed very much on this aspect contemplating something

[24:31]

as a mere observer outside of it you can never understand really the nature of that something and therefore when you contemplate a flower we have to look in a way that we can be the flower so that we can understand the true nature of a flower the non-flower elements within the flower and that is called insight that is why insight is different from the kind of knowledge we we have in scientific research or other kind of research because insight has the capacity of liberating you but knowledge may not have that capacity so even if you learn a lot of the buddhist teaching and sutras and abhidharmas that is not insight

[25:40]

and that cannot liberate you the insight is a fruit of meditation by penetrating deeply into the object of your contemplation you become one with it and you see the true nature of it and by that kind of comprehension that kind of understanding the kind of insight you are liberated one of you asked the question as whether insight is enough we should have good behavior does insight lead to correct adaptive behavior or we need both if we understand that insight is the direct experience of the true nature of things and then insight would be enough but if you understand insight as

[26:48]

some knowledge especially conceptual knowledge of things and that would not be enough and sometimes you feel that you have the insight but that's not certain that you have the insight you have to go into the world and test whether that is insight or not and this is very tricky sometimes during our meditation we feel that we can be in peace with that person now we can we are able not to hate him we be kind with him well we feel like that but when we stand up and go to that person and listen to something she says we know that that's not insight yet maybe tomorrow we shall have time to speak

[28:05]

a little bit on contemplation on the part of the body in the body but today i would like to answer a number of your questions we know from the dharma talk yesterday that in each of us in each one of us there is a river of feeling flowing day and night and contemplating feelings means to sit on the bank of the river and just observe we observe acknowledge each feeling look into each feeling as deep as as deeply as we can in order to see their nature and each feeling is a drop of water in that river of feelings but we know that

[29:11]

from the first dharma talk that the feelings sometimes exist in the form of seeds and they are not there on the surface of the river so what we are practically observing are feelings that are being manifested on the surface of the river so and also each feeling manifested like that on the surface has a root or several roots underneath at the bottom of the river so when we look at the feeling we look deeply in order to see at the same time

[30:15]

the roots of that feeling who are in form of bija seeds and from the second sutra that i just quoted to you satipatthana sutra the sutra on the four foundations of mindfulness there is a word that is worth our attention sanyo jhāna it means uh or sometimes internal formation

[31:34]

so where someone said something cruel to you or did something unpleasant to you well you have a way to to take it to receive if you don't do not practice if you do not have to deal with these words or with these deeds and then a formation takes place in you a sanyo jhāna is formed and it will be one of the sources of your suffering but if you are you are trained if you have enough insight wisdom

[32:39]

and then that these words or this act won't be able to become a sanyo jhāna in yourself so it depends on your way of receiving your state of being your wisdom your power to understand the roots of things and if you are not uh uh strong enough and then these words and it will create a formation in yourself but that formation what you receive might not be might might might be unpleasant but might not be unpleasant it means something quite pleasant and also

[33:42]

can also give you a sanyo jhāna that could be the cause of your suffering it's like love when you fall in love and if you are not if you you love someone who does not want to respond to your love you have a formation you have a sanyo jhāna and you you have lovesick lovesick is a is the internal formation so first the feeling is pleasant not like the feeling you get when someone shouted at you it's pleasant but it can give you a seed of suffering in yourself and you become addicted to it and you lose your peace and your joy

[34:46]

so unpleasant feeling may cause a sanyo jhāna but pleasant feelings also can cause sanyo jhāna in you and this not only applies to your feelings your your mind but also to your body like many people who become who who become alcoholic because they got a formation from alcohol they just have a good taste of alcohol and they are addicted to it so it is applies also to the body not not only to the mind

[35:47]

so the practice of mindful living according to the sutra of mindfulness is that you do not let you prevent sanyo jhāna to be planted in you and when it has been planted in you you meditate in order to neutralize them and to transform them the first case is like this someone tell me something very unpleasant i'm wise enough i'm smiling enough i am tolerant enough in order not to get hurt because of these words so there is no formation in me like a mother hearing her son saying something not polite but she knows that because of her fault she has exposed her son to other children who are not very polite

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so she understands that she did not blame she did not get hurt so there is no sanyo jhāna in her a child that is not happy she might have some headache or something like that and something the child say may be not pleasant may not be pleasant but the mommy or the daddy won't mind because they know that the child has a headache so there is no no inner formation internal formations because we have a lot of seeds of delusion of ignorance of anger in us that is why things can easily cause formations to take place in us

[38:08]

they say something they did something and then we have formations and we got formations every day suppose a couple who is just married one one morning during a reception the young husband said something that did not inspire much respect in the wife in the heart of the wife he was boasting he was saying something not really true and during that reception is not convenient for the young lady to to ask him but she feels that he she has lost some kind a little bit of esteem because her

[39:12]

husband was not telling the truth so she got a formation internal formation but if she is a practicing person she will say that well i cannot let it go like that now i should not talk about it because there are guests but tonight i must remember to talk to my husband about it otherwise it will be a seed that will last in me so after the guests are gone she cleaned the house she arranged everything and she found an opportunity to sit down with her husband and she asked darling this morning you such you said such or such thing please explain plain to me well if the husband was also is also a practicing person he would say that i'm sorry

[40:13]

really i did not tell the truth i was boasting a little bit i was trying to impress people a little bit and i made you suffer well please forgive me i shall not do anything like that anymore in the future so with that kind of commitment the internal formation in the lady is transformed but if she did not do that so it continued to be there and for the second time he would do something like that and then the formation will grow up grow up and living not mindful like that for three years five years there will be blocks of formations in her and in him and that will lead to to a divorce and that will not be a good present for the children but we do not need to get married now to get internal formations

[41:42]

as a little boy or little girl you can get a lot of information especially when you are from one to four years old to four years old uh even if you are just born and if we don't know the language yet and if between daddy and mommy there is a problem we know because the atmosphere is so heavy so suffocating and although we don't know what they are talking about but that atmosphere already can already kill us so as a baby three months old i got formation from my parents they may think that i am a baby i don't know anything yet so they they let it be like that

[42:48]

but they are wrong i feel very well the atmosphere around them and when they i touch them i know i know in some way that they are suffering and that their suffering penetrate into me penetrating me and when i grow up five or six years old i understand the language i don't want to be in that atmosphere i want to go to the the toilet and lock the door in order to avoid that kind of atmosphere but still i cannot avoid because the atmosphere the air still try to penetrate and alone in the bathroom i cried i want to explode or even i before i was born i could also got the formations

[43:53]

because my mommy everything she drink everything she eat every anger she undergoes every joy she experienced will penetrate in in in me therefore i began to get formations already when i was in the womb of my mommy that week that is why future future mothers should know that during the time they bear a child they have to practice smiling breathing being happy otherwise she will start making her child unhappy already so the practice of mindful living is to avoid the internal formations to take place

[44:57]

in us and in our children even before they are born and this is not a practice only for the buddhist the non-buddhist have to practice well and the teaching might be termed non-buddhist it's not important but that is the principle we have to practice whether we are buddhist or not of course that evening the young lady sitting with her husband invited the internal formations from the depth of her consciousness to come to the upper level of consciousness yes she know that it's easy to talk about it it is possible that she can talk with her husband and

[46:06]

neutralize it that is why she invited the seat up and had a talk and contemplated sometimes you do it by yourself sometimes you do it with another person and meditation is also like that sometimes you do it alone sometimes you do it with your teacher sometimes you do it with your sangha only it is just like in psychotherapy you you have to do it with another person suppose you are practicing meta meditation meditation on loving kindness and you are sitting there contemplating and nourishing your compassion your loving kindness and you may have the feeling that now you have compassion loving kindness everything is all

[47:11]

but it's not certain because when you come to people you get angry it means you have to practice with people in order to shake the fruit of your your work during your sitting or practicing alone so practicing with the sangha practicing with the teacher is what is going on in buddhism for 2000 500 years and if you say that the buddhist practice of meditation differ from the practice of therapy in which the buddhist practice alone that's not correct even the buddha he practiced with other monks he practiced with the children so there are times where we have to invite

[48:14]

the internal formations up in order to have a conversation with them and to transform them right there in the upper level of our consciousness sometimes we can do it alone sometimes we do it with a friend with a teacher and with the sangha but sometimes we don't have to deal with them we just plant new seeds seeds of healing seeds of understanding seeds that are refreshing and they will be able to take care of these seeds there are many ways so the other night i was suggesting that you have if you have a seed of pain

[49:17]

of suffering that is too important that alone you don't have the capacity to to deal with it because once you invite it up it will make you suffer a lot it will crush you i said that in that instance don't invite them don't invite it up try to practice in order to to plant new new seeds healing seeds but if you find it difficult and then go to another person a brother a sister a friend a sangha therefore the practice should be with other people also from time to time i was not telling that we should not invite internal formations up to have a conversation

[50:26]

and to transform them from from from there from up there i only said that there are times you can do that do that alone or do that with another person or many other persons and sometimes we don't have to do that if they consent to be at the bottom of our consciousness and then we have a chance to to work in order to transplant to plant new seeds and it can have the kind the same kind of effect sometime later these will be transformed vipaka is a important term in buddhist psychology i don't know how to translate professor levy translated as concoction

[51:36]

is it english yeah mean the the seeds in yourself when they become ripe and together with other seeds to become a concoction karma fruit first uh the seeds do not write at the same time some seeds would need more time to to write and then different time time the second principle is that there are different kind of seeds

[52:40]

seeds of sorrow seed of peace seed of joy different species and when they arrive they are not the same they are transformed like an orange fruit an orange when it was young it's sour it's green but when it is ripe it's it's red and it is sweet so different different taste or something like that so that is the way uh the the seeds in within our alaya vishnana operate then they are of different species they are they they take a different length of time to write and when they

[53:44]

they become different and when they are look as as a totality they are called vipaka kind of concoction suppose i draw a line i imagine a line and i say that if i go into that direction i will happier if i go into that direction i will suffer more so if i stay here so i don't suffer a lot but i'm not very happy now suppose i i i don't know how to practice living in mindfulness

[54:46]

mindfulness understanding and you give me an internal formation a seed and that seed is a seed of suffering but intensity of that seed is represented by the length of the line i draw for instance like this or this if i suffer more the line will be longer so i would call that it's s1 of course that seed determine my faith i suffer because of that existence of the existence of that seed and tomorrow someone gave me another seed of suffering

[55:49]

uh let's say not a seed of happiness to make it easier someone uh took me out show me the blue sky and teach me how to be in touch with the blue sky so he was he has given me another seed in this direction suppose this much number two so i have a lot of seeds in me but now i just want to to show the way the seeds are operating in concoction and i know that at that state of being my condition of happiness is something like this so

[57:01]

and if tomorrow you are my good friend you saw that i suffer less by this kind of help she will make another effort and gave me a seed tree so i will have this so now i am a much happier person well that is the way and some seeds would need more time to ripe and they influence each other's they modify each other's they transform each other's so looking at the concoction of my alaya vishna i know my value as a human being happy or less happy unhappy or happy and that is called a vipaka

[58:07]

to me a therapist the practice of the therapist should be directed to himself or herself first because if she is not very happy she cannot help many people and we practice it on our on ourselves we practice joy peace happiness the capacity of enjoying the positive elements in life in order to nourish the part of the flower in us and also we practice in order to transform the seeds of suffering to bring them back to flowers and that is the basic work of the psychotherapist i think without that you cannot succeed very much in your work helping other people if i am someone that needs therapy i could look for a therapist who is happy

[59:32]

happy in his family in her family with her children that is my criterion i could look for a therapist who is really happy i will tell my friends to do so also and i know that so many people are suffering i talk with peace activists they are doing their best in order to help but they know that the is immense i also told them the same thing if you are not yourself if you are not happy enough healthy enough you cannot continue therefore go back to yourself because helping yourself is helping all of us be yourself being peace being joy and

[60:35]

uh all of us who have practiced looking at the state of the world we have the feeling that each of us should become a peace worker a therapist because so much suffering is going on and i also believe that therapists should be also peace workers because the destruction of our environment the corruption of our society have led to an a tremendous amount of people who are mentally sick if you only deal with the sick people if you do not make effort to prevent the destruction of our planet and our society well we are not dealing with the roots of the problems

[61:36]

that is why i believe that therapists should also engage deeply in the work to protect our environment and to prevent the destruction of our society by the way people actually alcohol sex abuse and so on we have to attack the problems of their roots you cannot spend all your time with your patients you have to save some time for yours in order to give us a helping hand

[62:11]

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