Hello. So nice to be here. I know some of you... are employed. Oh, you're all employed. You're employed in listening to me talk right now. But I know that some of you have said, oh, I have to go and do some kind of a job, so that's fine. I'm not going to wonder why you're leaving. You can just go off and do the thing. So, my name is Ben Connelly, and I'm visiting here from Minnesota. I am a teacher at the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center in the Katagiri Lineage.

[01:02]

I left just a couple of days ago. It was 80 degrees, and the lake in front of our Zen Center near my home was half covered in ice. Thick sheet of ice. It was very windy, and the ice was blowing up onto the shore because it was melting very fast because it's 80 degrees. I think it's very windy, so there was mountains of slabs of ice accruing on the north side of the lake. They're about this tall. There are little chunks of the retaining wall caught up in it, so much love to the people who have to maintain that. But wherever you go, it seems like the earth is doing something rather dynamic. When I got here, it seems to be true, too. Wow. What an amazing place to be. My teacher attended the first practice parade here, Tim Burkett.

[02:04]

And so he's talked about this, told so many stories about the transformative experiences he had here when he was a young man. So now that I'm here, it's like I've just arrived at Shangri-La. LAUGHTER And everyone knows that when you arrive at Shangri-La, you'll be surrounded by radiant bodhisattvas. True again. True again. So I appreciate your radiance, and I hope to do my best while I'm here to just allow it to not just penetrate me, but pass completely through me. So you can just see out the other side. So anyway... The illustrious Greg Fane asked me to come here to talk about Vasubandhu's Yogacara. So that's my plan. I'll be doing this for about five days. Today I'm going to give a very general talk.

[03:08]

Basically this is what one might call a book talk because I have a book called Inside Vasubandhu's Yogacara. So this will be kind of a general overview. I'll do a couple readings out of here. And then, I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to do for the next few days, but I'm hoping that I can hear from you a little bit and that will help me refine what would be most beneficial to do. So, first up, I've got to say, inside Vasubandhu is Yogacara. So, my buddy Busho was talking to his friend who's a Christian clergy. They teach meditation retreats together. And he said, oh, my friend Ben's got this book coming out. It's cool. And she said, oh, neat. What's it called? He said it's called Inside Vasubandhu's Yogachara. And she said, I only know one of those words. So that's why my next book is called Mindfulness and Intimacy.

[04:10]

Anyway, I recognize that... I recognize that some people here may have been studying Yogacara. I know Vasubandhu really well. I've talked to a couple of people who've done practice periods studying this stuff. But then some people, I have no idea. So I'm just going to give you a little introduction. First, I want to start with the first word. I guess everybody knows the word inside. Vasubandhu may be unfamiliar to you. So Vasubandhu is a probably about 5th century Indian Buddhist monk, I think were widely regarded to be one of the most influential teachers in the history of Buddhism. So, I don't know if this is done at all, Soto Zen places, but when we chant the name of the ancestors, Vasubandhu is something like the 22nd ancestor, and the doshi does full bows at the names of about six ancestors.

[05:15]

Shakyamuni Buddha, Nagarjuna, Vasubandhu, Bodhidharma, Dogenzenji, and Hoi Nang. So Vasubandhu, just within our lineage, has this elevated place. But if you start looking at different schools of Buddhism, you see he's kind of a major dude. So he's considered one of the six ornaments of Tibetan Buddhism. That's something we can all aspire to. being an ornament. Anyway, so how did he end up being here? He was an enormously prolific writer. He wrote lots of different texts, some of them very long, some of them very compendious, and he's known distinctly for moving from being associated with not exactly a Theravadan school of Buddhism, but to make it simple, kind of like a Theravadan school, so early Buddhist stuff, not the Mahayana, non-dual game that we're playing here, or art that we are enacting, if you prefer.

[06:26]

And so he wrote, early on in his writing career, he wrote a text called the Abhidharma Kosha. The Abhidharma Kosha is a massive thing. It's hundreds of pages. It's unbelievably detailed. And it is intended to be a summation of... all the teachings of the Pali Canon. So the Pali Canon is massive, takes up about this much space in a book rack, and it's inconsistent because you have 40 years of teachings by the Buddha, and you have all these teachings by other people, and they were teaching to different audiences. So it's like, well, this part doesn't make sense with this. So Abhidharma was about trying to make it make sense. And so he was this Abhidharma scholar. He wrote the Abhidharma Kosha, which compiled all these teachings and puts it to make sort of a summation so it could all hold together. And after he had written the Abhidharma Kosha pretty rapidly around northern India and up into what's happening now, Afghanistan, people all over the place went, wow, this guy nailed it.

[07:28]

This is the most comprehensive and accurate assessment of what Buddhism is that has ever been created. Because people were like, wow, Fasubandhu. Cool. So then... A few years later, he came out with another book, we'll call it a book, text, called, I think, my memory's a little loose here, the Abhidharma Kosha. There's like a, it's like Shastra. Sorry, the name is escaping me. But anyway, Abhidharma Kosha, Shastra, or something like that. So this was a commentary on the Abhidharma Kosha. So in case you're following and you're not asleep, he wrote a book and then he wrote a commentary on his own book. And what's really interesting about the commentary he wrote is that it's critique. It's all interjections into his original text where he says, this doesn't really make sense. This is logically incoherent. This isn't beneficial. This would be a better way to look at this. So I just, first off, this is an early gesture in Vasumandhu's writing career.

[08:34]

Everyone's like, you nailed it. Wow, you're the man. And he's like, no. No. I don't think so. I think we need to keep looking. We need to keep looking. And this is something that I really admire and want to take to heart. Not to arrive at some understanding that's like, I've got it down, but to continually be investigating what liberation can be. So, unfortunately, all the people who had said, you got it exactly right, were not entirely happy when he said no. That's wrong. So it wasn't like a disaster. One of the great things is that Basu Bandhu's tone is not mean. And you may think, well, of course it's not mean. He's a Buddhist monk. But sadly, or maybe for some reasons that I'm not smart enough to understand, many Buddhist texts are kind of mean.

[09:35]

If you read Mahayana texts, they're often quite derogatory to of people who are practicing in the early buddhist polycanon derived charabotten schools and vice versa and you know dogen are you love it dogen talking about the shaved painted mongrels running around china so people do this maybe it's extremely helpful uh to me it's not something i want to emulate and it is a tone that basubandhu does not take up so even though he critiquing all this stuff He doesn't do it in a way that's all that harsh. So there was kind of a fracture. People were like, oh, we thought you were a guy. Now you're not really our guy because you're saying this other stuff. But it's not like he got excommunicated and chased out of town by a horde of people on horseback. Like that Hoinang himself. Anyway, so he went on.

[10:37]

And basically, his thought continually evolved. His half-brother was named Asanga, who's generally considered to be the other great master of Yogacara Buddhism. I'll get to that other word in a minute. Supposedly, Asanga converted his brother Vasubandhu to Mahayana thought and to the Yogacara school. But if you look at the career of Vasubandhu, what you actually see is his thought evolving slowly. from this Abhidharma position to this Yogacara position. And eventually what you end up with, he's writing texts that are about how to integrate early Buddhist thought with Mahayana thought to demonstrate that they're logically coherent. And you may think, oh, I thought Buddhism all made sense. Well, read more and you'll find out that probably isn't all true. Some of it's quite distinct. But he wanted to show how the different schools of thought all had particular... medicinal or healing or liberative power and they could all be integrated and made sense in a single system so generally speaking the tone of vasubandhu's work is of harmonizing but i have to admit i tend to think of like i just listen if you know nagarjuna he's like an older brother he's like

[11:59]

And Vasubandhu's like, hey, everybody, can we get in a circle? Maybe that's just me and my big brother. Anyway, all these ways are good. All these ways are good. But I'm a younger brother, so I resonate with this naturally, and then I want to wander around and talk about Vasubandhu all the time. So, Yogacara means... yoga practice, or you could say yoga practitioner. So, we're not talking about yoga asana here, postural practice, yoga being a word that means joining or union, like yoke, to yoke the self to the infinite. So, Yogachara is a school that begins to originate actually with the Samdhanir Machana Sutra in the first century, the common era, so several hundred years before Vasubandhu and Asanga get to it.

[13:01]

But Vasubandhu and Asanga are the ones who really were like, oh, we can systematize this, we can really write about it accurately, and they become known as kind of the progenitors of the tradition. So, Yogacharya, the distinct feature is that it's integrating early Buddhist thought with Mahayana thought. In particular, my argument is that what they see is that early Buddhist Pali canon mindfulness practice is very effective at liberating us from afflictive emotional habits, and that is the emphasis. It would take a little while to make this argument here. I'm not going to do it. But if you look at the literature, you see a lot of emphasis on overcoming anger, desire, more so than overcoming delusion. That's in there, but this emphasis on the emotional healing. of meditative practices so when you get into Mahayana literature actually you don't see this much language and the emphasis becomes radically placed on wisdom and cutting through delusion Prajnaparamita so we all got up in the morning and chanted the Heart Sutra and we talked about how our emotions are empty that's enough but Yogacara suggests that maybe just seeing that your emotions are empty will not be enough

[14:19]

you may need to have some other healing capacities available to you to shed the emotional habits that cause suffering in the world. So, he tells us one of the distinct features of Yogacara is it's closely associated with what's called mind-only Buddhism or consciousness-only Buddhism, which is a name which could be very and often is profoundly misinterpreted. But mind only is a huge influence on Zen. If you read early Zen texts, we have a mind-to-mind transmission. Over and over again, you'll see this reference to one mind, realizing the true mind, realizing mind, mind transformation. Wow, mind. I'll talk about this more as we go along, but I just got to say, mind includes everything. So this is Actually, body is mind. In this system.

[15:23]

So this isn't like retreating into some super mental space. It's actually realizing that we're having experience of a body with our mind. So, because we've got this mind-only thing going on... Basically, Yogacara... distinctly pulls everything that Buddhism can be, all the non-dual thinking, and all the liberative, emotional healing power of mindfulness into a psychological framework. Because it's all happening within the context of mind, which is what psychology means. So, this is important to me because, I don't know if you've noticed this, but mindfulness is big. It's big. It's like, wow. I had people pay me to go talk about mindfulness. I don't know, do they pay me to talk about non-dual awareness? Everyone wants to talk about mindfulness, mindfulness, and mindfulness.

[16:25]

And it's like I have people in my family who have the faintest interest in what I do with my life, but they have mindful coloring books. So it's cool. I think mindful coloring books are cool. However... There are many critiques of the mindfulness movement, but I think the most distinct one is that it extracts a particular set of practices from the Buddhist tradition for the purpose of making a self-improvement tool, which arguably could just be used to get people to be compliant and effective within a system. The system we have, in case you're not aware, is massively violent and harmful. So we have systemic racism. We have systemic inequality by gender, sexism. We have massive environmental degradation and all this stuff.

[17:27]

So if we just get them, just go to your job and you'd be mindful and then you'd be a little less stressed and you could just be a better productive unit. This is not cool. Mindful coloring books may be cool, but this is not cool. So The Mahayana is about liberating all beings. None of us are free until we all are free. So Yogacara puts what Mahayana can be into a psychological framework, and so it allows for the capacity to draw what it is more effectively into a secular mindfulness movement. You may be like, I don't care about that. I'm at a Zen temple. Well, too late. I'm the one talking. Okay. Um... I do my bows. I do my bows. So, I think maybe... Wow. Oh! Wow, you have one of those things.

[18:28]

Those are cool. One of my friends is a teacher. She said she had elementary school students who couldn't read a clock with a rotary dial. Sad. Wow! Things change! And people are like... There are people who don't know how to figure out how to eat all the plants down Tassajara Creek. Things change. Things are lost. Things are gained. Okay. So I'm going to read some passages out of this book to give you a sense of what I'm doing with this book. This book is a commentary on Vasa Gbandu's 30 verses on consciousness only, which is a seminal text, referred to extensively by Thich Nhat Hanh, who talks very beautifully about memorizing it when he was a young monk and how it was required within their lineage.

[19:33]

Anyway, I'll read you the first... line as i've translated with uh weijan tang my partner uh from china everything conceived as self or other occurs in the transformation of consciousness i'll just read that again everything conceived as self or other occurs in the transformation of consciousness I invite you to take a moment to investigate what you are experiencing right now. In all likelihood, you have a sense of being in a location, perhaps in a chair or a bed. There are sensations in a body that you think of as yours. There is a visual field that can be scanned from left to right. That is to say, from what you probably think of as your left and right. There are things behind you that you cannot see, but you can feel. the soft back of a chair, perhaps.

[20:38]

There are words in front of you that you conceive to be my words that you would likely say that you are reading. We can divide everything in this moment of experience into things that we conceive to be ourselves and things that we conceive to be other than ourselves with ourselves unconsciously placed in the center. Whether we know it or not, this division and this self-centering is constantly occurring and this division and the problems it causes, and the possibility of transcending them through intimacy with them, is the principal subject of the Thirty Verses. A brief investigation of our consciousness like the one above is likely to lead us to the idea that we have a consciousness that experiences things. Consciousness is the self, and the world around us is other. At the start of this work, Vasubandhu points towards another view. Everything conceived as self or other occurs in the transformation of consciousness. Neither the self nor the other is consciousness.

[21:42]

They are merely conceptions occurring within a process of consciousness. The transformation of consciousness is a constant flow. If you look at experience, there are not fixed elements or even moments. There is simply a process of transformation. The first thing these verses give us is an opportunity to experience a sense of wonder about what we are experiencing right now. A sense that our most basic understanding of where and what we are in the world is not quite right. That we are instead involved in a mysterious flowing unfolding. We see this teaching reflected in the Tibetan classic The 37 Practices of the Bodhisattva by Takumi Sangho. Quote, Whatever arises in experience is your own mind. Mind itself is free of any conceptual limitations. Know that, and don't generate self-other fixations. This is the practice of a bodhisattva."

[22:49]

Consciousness only puts forth the split between subject and object as the ultimate aspect of our consciousness we must see through. if we want to realize our capacity to appear in the world in a purely kind and joyful way. As we will see at the end of the 30 verses, letting go of the sense that we are self-experiencing things is the way to enter this mysterious flowing unfolding so that whatever is here that we may call ourselves is just a natural, generous, joyful, compassionate occurrence. The Buddha called himself Tathagata, or that which is thus coming and going. He described himself as merely a flowing occurrence, and the outward form that took was constant, calm, compassionate availability to people who came to him for help. This is the way of being these verses offer to you.

[23:57]

To say briefly, the emphasis on the non-duality of self and other, you may be like, oh, well, that's just Buddhism 101. It actually is not. Yogacara thought is so embedded in Buddhist thought now that we think that it is, that actually early Buddhist literature does not talk about this almost at all. It talks about something similar to it, but not quite. And likewise, Mediomic or Middle Way literature has a different flavor, just to be technically clear. But more importantly, well, I don't know, you guys, see, I'm often giving this talk like I'm going around little Zen centers in the middle of cities. People frantically run from their jobs and they get there and they're like. Which may be the case for you, because no matter where you are, you can be pretty frantic, which you probably already know. Anyway, you know, people will say, well, I don't think this is... What are we just going to emphasize?

[25:03]

Just focusing on our mind? There's all this stuff going on in the world that really matters. I hear this a lot. A lot of people, you know, basically I spend most of my time with my students going, yes, it's okay. If you practice meditation for a half an hour a day, you can still do other things. Really. Um... That may sound funny, but people, they feel desperate. They turn on the news and they go, I can't stop even for a minute. Wow. Wow. But this emphasis on mind itself and the process of mind, I believe to be profoundly liberative for everyone. Some of you may recall... This dictum from the second wave of feminism, the personal is political. Does this ring a bell to anyone? The personal is political. This is cool. This is cool. So this is a little phrase that reminds us that the smallest things about our daily lives have to do with big systems.

[26:07]

So, for example, if I hang out at my house and I'm like, you know, I'll just let my wife do the laundry and clean the house and do the kitchen stuff. That's just a personal choice. That's not true. Those choices I make are connected to the fact that we have, you know, there are more... Oh, this is really good. There are more CEOs named John in the Fortune 500 than women. More CEOs whose first name is John in the Fortune 500 than women. Now, who cares about rich people? Well, they're kind of influential. Likewise, you look at Congress, you look at all kinds of things. So, personal and political seeing that the small things we do that we could think, oh, this is just my little deal, they're connected to something bigger. And if we want liberation, this is part of the work.

[27:09]

Bell Hooks wrote, I don't know if you guys are familiar with Bell Hooks, the African-American feminist scholar. And she should be called like a wizard or something because she's so awesome. Anyway, Bell Hooks once wrote, there must exist a practical model for social change that includes ways to transform consciousness that are linked to ways to transform structures. And I was reading that and I said, transform consciousness. I feel like I've seen that somewhere before. So... Although this appears to be a gesture that is all about turning inward, ultimately it is in the service of the Mahayana vow to liberate everyone, and I see it as part of that process. So, the 30 verses is basically divided in two halves, and

[28:12]

to elucidate the two most central teachings of Yogacara thought. One is called the Eight Consciousness Model, and the other is called the Three Natures Model. The Eight Consciousness Model is closely related to early Buddhist thought, which is about investigating and categorizing moments of experience for the purpose of liberating us from afflictive emotional habits. The three natures is much more similar to the two truths doctrine, you know, like the absolute and the relative or the product of paramita and not like real life. Oh, I am going to get thrown out of this place. So I'm just going to talk a little bit about this, or I'm going to read a little section that has to do with with this eight consciousness model. Then I'll talk about, I probably will talk about the eight consciousness model for the next couple of days. But in simplest terms, this is, if you've ever heard like the idea that you're like planting beneficial seeds or planting harmful seeds or harmful seeds, produce harmful fruit, that all comes out of the Yogachara model of eight consciousnesses.

[29:24]

That's where that language comes from. And the idea is that we have a capacity to do things moment to moment It allows to shed harmful emotional habits and cultivate beneficial ones. So, let's see. Now there's some nice chapters in here. There's the verse about beneficial emotions, and it's really nice, and we have equanimity and tranquility and joy. But I'm going to read you the chapter called Taking Care of Suffering. Because my guess is we all have some. And if you don't, I'm confident someone else does. I'll read you the verse. Actually, it elides from the previous verse. The afflictions are desire, aversion, delusion, pride, wrong view, and doubt. The secondary afflictions are anger, hatred, hypocrisy, malice, envy, deceitfulness, guile, arrogance, harmfulness, lack of conscience and humility, sluggishness, restlessness, lack of faith,

[30:34]

laziness, carelessness, forgetfulness, distraction, and unawareness. Are you paying attention? Anyway, so we have some lists in here. Like some modern psychological methods, Buddhist practice sometimes encourages us to consciously draw difficult emotions into our mind and body. By allowing ourselves to experience afflictions in the way of mindfulness, and our commitment to the alleviation of suffering, we can directly experience the fruits of afflictive karma and let it go. Even including this list of afflictions in this text is an example of this approach. When one reads the list, it probably takes the mind to a darker place than it was before. The list is here to help us face the difficult things that we'd like to avoid or blame on someone else. Stories actually serve, in part, this purpose of bringing afflictions into our mind.

[31:37]

In most cultures, stories include challenges or difficulties, and when we hear them, we may experience fear, anxiety, or anger, as well as joy, tranquility, and laughter. Just look at the anxious faces of young children being told the story of Little Red Riding Hood as she sits on the bedside with the malicious and deceitful predator. How many tissues have been soaked during viewings of the movie Brokeback Mountain? We have these stories in some part because we need to know that we are not alone with our pain, that someone else is crying as the aged, fading King Lear rages at his loving, devoted daughter. Many stories from the Buddhist canon, particularly those from the Terragata, the record of the first order of nuns, tell of terrible sufferings. I vividly recall one retreat in the steep, lush hills of southern Minnesota, where my teacher Tim Burkitt told the story of the unbelievably bereft Patachara.

[32:40]

She lost her children and entire family in a series of shocking tragedies, and she eventually made a commitment to practice and became one of the great teachers of her time. I wept copiously. My heart cracked wide by hours of meditation, the power of the story, and my teacher's gift for storytelling. I tasted the raw pain of her loss as my own. I saw it in my own consciousness. I left that retreat with an opened heart, a newfound knowledge of my capacity to be with my own suffering, and a deepened sense of the vastness of my connection to all of life through the bond of shared grief. Stories, of course, only go so far in helping us be well. Although they allow us to sense, generally unconsciously, that we are not alone with our pain, most of us don't attend too closely to the experience of the affliction that arises.

[33:42]

We tend to focus on the story. In order to see the ultimate benefits of drawing into mind the difficulties of life, we need to do it in the context of our vow to end suffering, and with our attention focused on actually seeing the painful states as they arise in our mind and body. We need to practice right mindfulness. So, anybody ever been to a session where it wasn't always awesome? I don't think it's an accident. I don't think it's an accident. So this book lays out simple practices from early Buddhism that are elucidated in the Pali Canon and then upheld by Yogacara of identifying afflictive emotions, bringing mindfulness to them, and in so doing, dissolving their habit energy.

[34:46]

So they plant a seed of mindfulness and you don't plant another seed of that suffering. And they're really, they're cool. I invite you to do them. But you may not, which is just fine, too. So, because I mostly speak at Zen centers, I am going to talk about what this looks like in the process of Zazen. So, this is where the teachers who are radically emphasized non-dual awareness will try and knock me off my seat. But I'm already here, so... see what I can do. So, you know, when you're sitting, everything happens. When you're sitting, Zaza, everything happens. There's the sensations in the body. There's a... Around here, there's a creek. The sound of valley streams. There's birds.

[35:48]

Drones. Pain, comfort, laughter. You ever have that thing happen where everyone in the Zendo starts wanting to laugh? And you're just trying to, okay, never mind. I don't want to put that idea in your mind. All kinds of things happen, right? But the thing is, early Buddhism's genius, one of the geniuses of the practice is to give us things that allow us to see parts of ourselves that we're not seeing. What Jung, Carl Jung, Sip once said, until the unconscious becomes conscious, you will call it fate, and it will rule you. This is basically like he just might have understood how karma works in Yogacharya 4. So the thing is, you could be sitting in that Zen when everything's happening, and you hear the sounds, and you hear the thoughts, but you really don't know how you feel.

[36:53]

Very possible. So when you don't do zazen, the creep might happen, you don't even know, right? Or the bird, there's a bird. You don't hear the bird. You just hear your thoughts. So you don't have to suddenly be like, now I'm practicing mindfulness and emotional states. You can. It's cool. I recommend it. But you don't have to. The thing is, just as you open your awareness to sound, You open your awareness to your body. You open your awareness to the visual field, the white wall that sometimes is like Looney Tunes. Open your awareness to how you feel. And continually do that. Continually do that. It's not like, oh, I heard the creed yesterday. I know what it sounds like. That's not Zen! Like, oh, yeah, I'm irritated. I know what that sounds like. That's not sin.

[37:56]

The degree to which you can be sensitive to the field of sound or the body or your emotional states, which is what I'm focusing on now, is profound beyond any limit I've ever encountered. Here's the comparison I'll make. I used to play, like, in orchestras. Playing orchestras, yeah? And so, you know, if you ever listen to an orchestra, you're like, sounds good, right? If you're really smart, you're like, I like when the woodwinds came in, right? You feel like you're really smart. Then you went to college about music, and you're like, well, when they brought in the B theme, I really enjoyed the modulation. So your awareness begins to be more discerning. But I've been standing in the back with my bass, and the conductor gets up, and we play 16 bars, and he goes, okay, second flute. You need to come up and pitch. You're flat. Second violins, in measure 17 through 18, I want you to just make that articulation just a little bit tighter.

[39:01]

And then the bass is just, can you just bring it down there, right in the middle of that fray so it doesn't swell so much? Subtle awareness. You can have this kind of subtle awareness with emotional states. And it does not end. It's not something like, now I got it all figured out. Keep looking. Like I say, you don't have to make it like now. Here? See? Thoughts? Feelings? Open up to it all. Open up to it all. I'm going to read one more section here pertaining to the second half of the 30 verses called the three this is on the three natures so the three natures this is when you get into Mahayana stuff which is the stuff that makes you uh what I don't know never read Nagarjuna so what I'd like to say is if this doesn't make any sense you're alright don't worry the thing is

[40:18]

even if it starts to make conceptual sense, and you begin to penetrate the intellectual meaning of it, that's where the barrier really is raised. Because these teachings are about radically challenging everything about what you think is. So, good times. Mirabhasubandhu begins his teaching on the Yogacara model for understanding phenomena as having three natures. The imaginary nature, the underdependent nature, and the complete realized nature. This model of understanding is designed to enable us to realize the depth of our delusion, the completeness of our connection to all the things, and the dynamism, unknowability, and liberation possible when we realize this delusion and intimacy with everything. The imaginary nature of things is our projections and beliefs.

[41:19]

The undependent nature of things is their merely being manifestations of infinite conditions. The complete realized nature is beyond all dualistic views. This doctrine of the three natures has a close kinship with the more commonly known Mahayana teachings on the idea of absolute and relative natures, or the two truths doctrine. When you look at an object or a person or an emotion, you can see the three natures in each of these things. Using the example of a tree, for instance, we would say that a tree has many characteristics that you can know and understand. It is itself distinct and separate from other things. This is its imaginary nature. The conceptual habits of your consciousness construct it. Of course, many people would agree about its nature and characteristics, for we have extremely similar conceptual conditioning. The tree also has utter dependent nature. It is sunshine, seeds, air, earth, rain, and tick not high.

[42:25]

That's not actually in the book. The elements upon which it depends are infinite, including every drop of rain that has ever fallen on earth, which are all connected, and your gaze as you look at it, without which it would not be the thing you perceive, and all the infinite conditions that came to create that gaze, and we have not even begun to scratch the surface of the tree's dependence on other things. The complete realized nature is beyond any conceptions, although it excludes nothing. It is not the imaginary, and it is not the other dependent, and it is not other than them either. In the Song of the Grasp of Hermitage, Shirto says, the vast, inconceivable source can't be faced or turned away from. The complete realized nature is vast, inconceivable. We can provisionally call it a source, provisionally call it a source, because without it, we could not experience the imaginary nature of things that we take to be reality.

[43:31]

It can't be faced or turned away from. It is both beyond grasping and always right here. and now. Perhaps this all seems rather heady. I mean, really, it's a tree! Just look at it! Actually, just stopping and looking at a tree is a good way to allow the mind time and space to soften and open up to a sense of these three natures. To stop and look at a tree allows the mind to touch something in an intimate way and to relax the pace of trying to figure things out. This can plant a seed of presence and someday you may see a tree in complete realization beyond and intimate with all your ideas about it and your total connection to and interdependence with it. So you guys probably all know you're just living in a dream like a bubble, a phantom, a ripple in a stream, or not.

[44:36]

A lot of people, when they hear this imaginary nature stuff, they're like, not a good idea. Not a good idea to talk about things this way. And there are contexts where it would not be a good idea to talk about it this way. But here we are at its end center. So, it's cool. Imaginary nature is here to remind us that we are involved or Yeah, we're involved in the process of creating what we think is a hard and fast external reality. All the time. So, you know, just imagine yourself walking down the creek. Walking down the creek. And you look back and there's a mountain lion. Whoa!

[45:37]

And you're scared. You're not like, whoa, majestic. You're like scared. And then the mountain lion actually starts coming at you. And you just start running. You're bucking it. This mountain lion's coming at you. And you're like, I don't know if I can make it. I've got to tie my shoe. And he can't move. And the lion's coming. And then all your fellow students are sitting around in bleachers laughing at you and pointing. And you're like, ah, the mountain lion. And you're like, wait a minute. This isn't real. This is a dream. And you wake up. You wake up. And you realize all that intensity and trauma and pain. We experience pain when we're asleep. It was not real. It was of an imaginary nature. So when we begin to see this, we realize that we are co-creating.

[46:41]

We are imagining our lives. This is about power. Empowerment. It's not like it's a dream and you can't do anything about it. It's imaginary. What are you going to imagine? Alice Walker once wrote, Look closely at the present you are constructing... It should look like the future you are dreaming. We are co-creators with agency. This is the fundamental teaching of Buddhism. I don't care what anyone else says. Pick up the four noble truths that says there's suffering and you can do something about it. It's the whole point. Not someone else will do something about it. Not it's later. Always now. You guys probably heard people talk about the value of thinking of the other dependent nature of things. So I'll be brief.

[47:42]

It's transformative to realize connection. Dr. Martin Luther King was sitting in a jail cell. Everyone was like, oh, he's on stamps and stuff. People hated that guy. Lots of people. Someone killed him. He was sitting in a jail cell and he said, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states and I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. What happens when we really realize the totality of our connections? Complete realized nature is one of those hard to talk about things. So everything, complete realized nature is here.

[48:47]

Let's be clear. It's here. We don't see it because we're just seeing and believing our imagination. But it's here. And what happens when we begin to trust this? What happens when you are looking at yourself instead of judging yourself again in the same old way you realize this phenomenon is the complete realized nature? It's Buddha. What happens when the person you're working with in the kitchen won't stop humming to themselves when you're trying to be quiet? Or the person in this endo breathes like they're a steam train? Or... God knows what we see. And we actually realize this phenomena right now is the complete realized nature. This is Buddha. What happens? I'm going to end this talking thing with, I think this pertains, I went to a talk by a Dakota elder, the Dakota or the indigenous people

[50:02]

that lived in the area where I live now, and still do, still do live there, many of them. But they were the caretakers of the land for a long time. And I went to talk about a Dakota elder, and they're like many Native American people, they're like, this place where we live is the origin of the universe. And so towards the end of his talk, he said, I choose to believe the story of my people. That this place is the origin of the world. That I live in the land of Genesis. That I live in Eden. And this being the case, shouldn't I act like it? Thank you. I can use and share equally and spend to every happy place. Where is it true? [...]

[51:04]

Where is it true? [...] Where ... ... ... ... I just want to say, this was just like a torrent of verbiage from me, but the next few days it will be more like this. So, more time for dialogue, questions, and stuff like that.

[52:08]

So, I hope to see you all again, and thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you. You guys can help me. I think we'll put that chance once we go. Thank you. Thank you. Are you looking to Bryant Connelly? No. So, the thing is, actually, the funny thing about me is I have the name Connelly. I got it from my grandfather. It disappeared from my family. See, there's like... In my family that I know, there are three boys. Okay. So... Yeah. It's like a snap dance. You know, he's a classical parent. He was one of my teachers, so I was like... Well, could be, but I wouldn't know. Yeah. Well, thanks a lot. I need to email it.

[53:08]

I need to know. I don't know if I... Yeah. Well, hopefully I'll catch you for real. Sure. Yeah, I'll hear you.

[53:17]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_71.02