This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. It's really great for me and my family to come to Tassajara and really appreciate this chance to give a class. So I'm going to talk about emptiness and the two truths. And emptiness is one of the main subjects that's taught in the Prajnaparamita Sutras, Perfection of Wisdom Sutras. And the Heart Sutra is in that collection, the Prajnaparamita Sutras. And one of the earliest ones is the Perfection of Wisdom in 8,000 Minds. And it starts by saying... Call forth as much as you can of love, of respect, and of faith.

[01:04]

And I would also, you know, I'd add, encourage, and kindness, and energy, and openness, and wholehearted presence. So this emptiness and the two truths, it's not easy stuff. Um... but it's very deep. And so, you know, it's really, it's worth looking at. The two truths are not in the sutras so much, but they're more in the shastra, the commentaries or kind of systematic expositions of doctrine. And, you know, and so like for two truths, we start with usually with Nagarjuna. Nagarjuna is regarded as founder of the Madhyamaka school, the middle way school. And so I have an opening quote from Nagarjuna, and I'll probably come back to this.

[02:07]

So, wisdom is like a mass of fire. It cannot be entered from any side. And he also said, wisdom is like a clear, cool pool. It can be entered from any side. And so these teachings are, these emptiness and the two truths are really important to Zen. but they almost never say emptiness, they almost never say the two truths, and, you know, if I had another class, we could talk about that. But for today, I want to talk about emptiness, and then talk about the two truths, conventional truth, ultimate truth, and then third, how the two truths relate, how they're the same and different, and then, if we have time, something about how practice unfolds. in this context. So emptiness. There's many ways of talking about emptiness.

[03:09]

And so I'm going to focus mainly on some of the ways we find in Indian Buddhism. And so actually in early Buddhism, in Abhidharma, emptiness appears. Empty is shunya, emptiness is shunyata. And... But it has a different meaning than the Mahayana meaning. And so I just want to mention those like, there's a teaching of three samadhis, samadhi of emptiness, samadhi of wishlessness, and samadhi of signlessness. And, you know, like wishlessness, like this is a quality of mind. So emptiness in this context is, it has to do with a mind that's either right for awakening or a mind that's, or a mind of awakening, you know, depending on, you know, it's used in different ways. Another way you see emptiness in the Abhidharma teachings especially is, you know, there's a teaching of no self, anatman, there's no self of a person, and then things, all things are empty of belonging to a person.

[04:14]

So it's just kind of a corollary of not self. In the early Prajnaparamita teachings on emptiness, Basically, emptiness means that you can't get things. You can't apprehend the way things really are. So they say emptiness is like space. You can't grasp space. And so it's over and over again. You just can't apprehend the way things are. There's various other kinds of ways of teaching emptiness, but then skipping to Nagarjuna, he's more philosophical. So he says emptiness is a lack of sva bhava. And sva means self or own, and bhava is being or existence. So emptiness is emptiness of, you could say, inherent existence, self nature, own being.

[05:17]

And this means... This means that you and that things have their own existence, separate existence. Things exist on their own side. Everything has its own being. And this is, you know, it's hard to get, I think, you know, just from these terms. In Genjo Cohen, Dogen says, you know, to carry self forward and experience myriad things is delusion. So... you know, we're here, and then we'll leave this room, we'll go somewhere else, and we're going to be the same person. And, you know, we were somewhere else before this, we came here, we're the same person. So that's delusion. And, you know, we experience these things, those things will be those things, and, you know, they have their own existence. Awakening is that...

[06:20]

all things come forth and you could say experience themselves, experience the self, actualize the self, but that our life happens with everything. So there isn't a separate self walking around experiencing separate things. Things are all happening together. Another way you could talk about this Svabhava is substance. And so we often, One way we think about things is things have a substance, which is what they are, and then they have attributes, which are not what they really are. You know, so things change, but it's just the attributes. It's not the thing that really changes. And, you know, we change, my hair gets gray, but I'm still, but I'm actually still me. And it's the same me that I was before. And so emptiness is saying there's no substance. There's no... thing like that at the core of things or at the core of us that like all the way down to the bottom it's basically just what we think of as attributes stuff that changes so there's nothing there's nothing fixed about anything another way this gets framed emptiness gets framed in Mahayana is there's the teaching of no self of a person and then there's no self

[07:45]

to everything is emptiness. And specifically, you know, part of how this comes up and part of its significance in Buddhism and the Heart Sutra is, you know, so there's this belief in a separate self, separate from the world, and that's seen as a core condition for suffering. So that's the fundamental cause of not being fulfilled. And then gets elaborated into greed, hate and delusion, elaborated into non-virtuous action. So Buddha offers these teachings like five skandhas. Rather than see your life in terms of self and the world, see your life in terms of five skandhas. or Four Noble Truths or, you know, Twelfold Chain, these various teachings.

[08:45]

And so these were teachings to free us from this, um, uh, self-other, uh, scenario. And, um, so one way you can look at it, so we have this, we have this map of the self, self in the world and it's a kind of, um, flexible map that keeps readapting itself freely to all the situations of our life and grasping this map is the way things really are. And then these teachings come along to free us from grasping this map. But then as Buddhism goes along, these teachings, they seem so wonderful, and then they become solidified as a new map, a new way to grasp reality. So... When the Heart Sutra is going through saying no five skandhas, no four noble truths, etc., emptiness is saying there's no map we can use to get reality.

[09:50]

Maps are useful, but if we grasp the map as what is, it's a prison. So another way of talking about emptiness is relinquishing all views. So giving up, not grasping at any map. And last thing about emptiness, the realization of emptiness then is not like you see a table and then you see emptiness. It's not an object of experience. So, you know, the first sentence of the Heart Sutra, Avalokiteshvara, when practicing deeply, the Prajnaparamita realized that all five skandhas are empty. Dogen turns that just a little bit. He just adds two words.

[10:52]

Avalokiteshvara, while practicing deeply, Prajnaparamita realizes with her whole body that the five skandhas are empty. So this whole body or whole being... But we realize emptiness with everything that we are. All right. So now... I want to go on to the two truths. And the two truths, I think, are hopefully kind of a helpful way to sort of unfold emptiness. So there's conventional truth and ultimate truth. So conventional truth is our everyday common sense truth of people, things, objects, and so on. And also in this context, in Madhyamaka, in Prajnaparamita, it's how we know anything.

[11:55]

And conventional truth it has a kind of a true side and a false side. So there's a false side which is that everything that appears through conventional truth appears in a way that it doesn't actually exist. It appears to have this separate existence. So conventional truth always appears in a way that's deceptive. And then there's a true part and that's, I think there's kind of two parts that emptiness, conventional truth happens, independence, on our sensory observations and reasoning and so on. And so, um, and then also happens through conventions, through agreement, um, which is happening through, uh, language. And so, um, that, that creates, that, uh, creates a kind of truth or a, a, a form of truth. And, um, but it's mixed together with this false appearance.

[12:58]

So, um, kind of, Example of conventional truth is it's Tuesday, July 24th, 3.45 p.m. So, you know, this is based on, you know, sound observations of the sun and the moon and the earth and so on. And it's also our arbitrary agreements about what we call the days of the week and so on. And it's, so it's a map and it's a useful map. Like it gets us, to a class at the same time. But it's also important not to grasp the map as the reality. So it's not Tuesday, it's not July, it's not really 345. So our maps, road maps, are two-dimensional,

[14:00]

And the world is three-dimensional. So, you know, reality is it's thicker and it's unwieldy and it's ungraspable. You know, all we can grasp is maps. But there's this world. And then again, like the map that we have a harder time seeing is the map of our self and the world. And the self, the sense of a separate self is also, it's... it's not fixed. So it's elusive. You know, so sometimes the sense of self, we can feel separate from our body. We can feel separate from parts of our mind. But then also, you know, if someone hurts someone we love, we can feel like they're part of ourself. But then if they turn around and hurt us, then they're separate again. So, you know, it's very quick happening in each moment. But it is, you know, for most people, it's ubiquitous. pervades our experience.

[15:02]

So that's conventional truth. And so ultimate truth is emptiness, or you could say realization of emptiness. So no self nature. Things don't exist on their own. And ultimate truth is liberating. So realization of ultimate truth, a realization of emptiness, liberates us from being confined by this false appearance of conventional truth. Within conventional truth we can improve ourselves in all sorts of ways but we can never free ourselves from the false appearances of conventional truth within conventional truth. But through ultimate truth we don't really know anything. and we can't really do anything. Because we don't, in the realization of emptiness, we don't see things. We can't really talk.

[16:07]

So just to underline, emptiness is not that things don't exist. It's just that things don't exist in the way they appear, you know, through conventional truth. But the tricky thing is that, you know, again, through how we know things through conventional truth, things either exist or they don't. And so, you know, if you say things don't exist in the way they appear, well, then they don't exist. It's kind of a natural flip-flop of the mind. And so, but emptiness, actually, it's a middle way between existence and non-existence. And so that's why, you know, Madhyalmak is called middle way, and this is the middle that's, you know, based on and so it's an inconceivable middle it's not a middle that we can get there's no map there and so another thing just to point out is you know in Abhidharma the two truths are the conventional truth is basically the same the ultimate truth is you know five skandhas or dharmas and so on

[17:22]

And so there's a kind of a poor description of reality and a better description of reality, which is these dharmas or elements of existence. In Madhyamaka, the ultimate truth is not another description of reality. And so in a way it's saying the only thing we ever know, the only thing we get is these maps. So, you know, don't get rid of your maps. You need your maps. And... And you keep working in conventional truth to keep having a better map before and after realization of ultimate truth. But the ultimate truth, you know, it gives some freedom, but it doesn't fix all the problems of a conventional life. You know, and this And so it's also important not to grasp ultimate truth as a map or as a description of reality.

[18:28]

And so in Zen they get, they're very sensitive to this. So Zen teachings are really elusive because they're really hesitant. They really didn't want to give people anything to grasp. And so, you know, what is Buddha? So you can't do much with that. So how the two truths relate. So in terms of what is, or in terms of existence or being, or you could say ontologically, the two truths are the same. They're identical. There is no emptiness that's prior to or apart from things which appear through conventional truth.

[19:30]

So it's just that these conventional truth things don't exist in the way they appear. And this identity tells us where to look. So this, you know, what's happening? in our life is where we study emptiness. Stuff that's happened, stuff that's going to happen will not be the, you know, the object through which our whole being will realize emptiness. It's always going to be what's happening in our life right now without changing it, even a tiny bit. So we give up seeking. seeking for things to be different from what is so that we can be totally intimate with this. And so I want to call this non-seeking faith.

[20:35]

And you could also say this is the faith of just this is it. This is where we look. And this is where we give all of our attention. And we don't study emptiness by trying to look beyond this. So then that's how the two truths are the same in terms of how they're different or distinct is you could say in terms of realization, in terms of knowing, or epistemologically they're distinct. so you know conventional truth and ultimate truth or emptiness they can be different realizations so conventional truth sees things in terms of own being and emptiness is realizing that nothing has own being so these are different and if they weren't different

[21:47]

awakening you know wouldn't make a difference in our life. You can also say ultimate truth refutes that things really exist and conventional truth refutes that emptiness is non-existence. So conventional truth it has a kind, it's an affirmation. So through the faith of non-seeking, we become totally intimate with our life. And then we also study this. We engage with it. And you could call this doubt. So there's this. And just this is not where our study ends. You could say it stops. we need to open up this.

[22:52]

And so, you know, to realize not this, or how this is not this. In terms of the Heart Sutra, you know, the first part of the Heart Sutra says form is emptiness, emptiness is form. And so I hear this is kind of like this, the two truths are the same. And then a little further down it says in emptiness there is no form, no feelings, no perceptions and so on. And so I hear that as the realization of emptiness is distinct from form, feelings and so on. And you know it's like a contradiction but it's or you could just say it's dialectical or it's a dynamic non-duality. that the two truths are the same and different. And so I think, you know, the same and different are faith and doubt.

[24:07]

I think we need both. Faith is where we enter, and it's... Because the two truths are the same, you know, from our life, we actually, ultimate truth is accessible. Or you could say ultimate truth is imminent. And in terms of how the two truths are different, ultimate truth has a liberating function. Or... ultimate truth is transcendent. And so, you know, they're the same and so it's like a clear cool pond. You can enter from any side. You can enter with this. And then it's also a mass of fire. You know, there actually is no way for you to enter this. You know, you have to relinquish this you separate from a world.

[25:15]

and it's not something that we can do. But it can happen. And I think it can happen because it's what we are. In terms of our sitting practice, I put this faith or non-seeking or, you know, identity of the two truths as being, you know, expressed, embodied and performed by not moving. So we give ourselves to not moving away from this. And so, you know, things happen, but we try to just be with it rather than moving or adjusting. So this is non-seeking. And then doubt or non-grasping or, you know, this... Uh, going from conventional truth to ultimate truth as, uh, distinct realizations, uh, expressed, embodied, and performed through being upright.

[26:27]

Um, uh, engaging, you know. And it's, um, not moving is kind of like, um, a passive or receptive side of our practice, but then being upright is, uh, it's engaged. And it, um, it, uh, you know, we're settling with, with this, but then we also, um, we're opening to what is this and is this that we're settling with, is that how it really is or how are we grasping it? How is the mind grasping this such that this is what it is? So in terms of how practice unfolds, Nagarjuna says, without a foundation in conventional truth, the ultimate truth should not be taught. So, you know, so looking at emptiness, studying emptiness should be based on this, he calls a foundation in conventional truth.

[27:38]

And he doesn't say what that means. But, you know, so there's... Anyway, I'm just going to give you a bunch of different things. And I think they're all true. So one is, again, there's no ultimate truth apart from conventional truth. So again, so if we thought we were going to look at emptiness by looking beyond our life, that's not the path. But also looking at emptiness can be destabilizing. And again, there's this tendency to kind of seesaw, like, okay, you know, things exist, oh, here's this teaching, things are empty of this form of existence, okay, things don't exist. So nihilism or grasping a view that things really don't exist is, it's kind of, it's discussed in these texts as a major pitfall and a real problem. So having a grounding in conventional truth

[28:45]

is seen as a protection, a strong basis in ethics and just, you know, being willing to deal with all the little problems of our life in a way that's, you know, careful and kind. And so that's this basis in conventional truth. And all that continues, all that carefulness and kindness continues afterwards, after realization of ultimate truth. Also, I feel like conventional truth includes a teaching of a path. And in the case of Mahayana, this is a bodhisattva path of giving ourselves to a life of living for the benefit of all beings. And this path... is a context for a realization of ultimate truth.

[29:48]

I think there can be realizations of ultimate truth maybe outside the context of the path and then, but I think if there's no way to integrate them into your life, into a coherent vision of, you know, what you're doing and what you're aspiring to, they, you know, there can be realizations, I think, that are basically just seen as anomalies, or, you know, you don't actually have a way of integrating that realization into your life. And then, so he says, without a foundation of conventional truth, ultimate truth should not be taught. without realizing ultimate truth, liberation is not attained. So even though we need this basis in conventional truth, there's, again, ultimate truth is the only way to realize liberation.

[31:00]

And then, but then also, again, the ultimate truth has no, it has a liberating function, but it has no function in terms of activity. or, you know, talking to beings, relating to others. So conventional truth is also where ultimate truth is expressed in the world or how it's expressed, how it is manifest. And, um, you know, our realization of ultimate truth should lead to a deeper, uh, engagement and a more total presence in conventional truth. That's, that's the kind of, that's how we want to, want to have a, want to frame our realization of ultimate truth. You know, so that we, the realization of emptiness should support us to completely be, you know, in our own.

[32:12]

ordinary conventional life, working with beings and working with all the little problems that come up, and big ones too. So, you know, conventional truth is the realm where bodhisattvas function, and it's the realm where we touch each other. So I'd say ultimate truth you could kind of associate with wisdom and not abiding in samsara or the realm of believing in a separate self and all the suffering that goes with that. And conventional truth is a realm of compassion and not abiding in nirvana. All right. So do you have any questions or comments?

[33:17]

So you started out by saying in India, in the Buddhist time, it was taught in this particular way, and then later it was taught in this way. Do you believe that it's just how the Buddhist teaching was transmitted? I mean, did the Buddhist see it in this later way? Did he see the fullness of it? I don't know. That's my question. I don't know. I mean, I think one thing that I do feel... I feel like, you know, there's this realization of ultimate truth. There's no words there. And then, so that... you could say all the teachings are happening in conventional truth. And so Buddhism is a tradition that can keep evolving. Its teachings can keep changing because there isn't any teaching that's the ultimate truth.

[34:25]

There isn't a teaching that gets to be over here. This is the teaching that doesn't change and is always true. There's no teaching like that. So the so that as the tradition evolves, realizations of ultimate truth and also just working in conventional truth, I think, you know, ideally the tradition will keep evolving and improving and adapting to circumstances and adapting to the, you know, particular hang-ups of, you know, various cultural contexts. And, um, I think, um, I think there's, um, I guess I would say I feel like you can definitely find some good scriptural evidence that early Buddhism, that this realization, at least in some of the ways that Buddha talked about it, was the same as what Nagarjuna is talking about. There's certain sutras that he talks about a middle way between existence and non-existence as dependent co-arising.

[35:27]

And that dependent co-arising is inconceivable. And is the object... you know, of insight. It's what awakening awakens to. So another piece of this in the Guardian is the identification of dependent co-arising and emptiness, which, you know, anyway, it's a big topic. Yeah. So when you said that you, I'm going to misquote you here, but when you were talking about the the realm of ultimate truth is not one that you can experience. You can experience conventional truth and then you can have a realization in ultimate truth. But that there is the only way that you can get there is through conventional truth. Through experiences. So within the conventional realm there's true and false. Yeah, yeah. It's Tuesday. It's not Wednesday.

[36:29]

Yeah, yeah. Shared conventions, we have things that are true or false. I'd say conventions and also sensory experience, you know, that we can agree on too, but then also just arbitrary linguistic conventions also. So within that, there are particular conventional truths that are conducive to the ultimate, to some insight into the ultimate truth, like Buddhist teachings. Yeah. Yeah. But I would say they're not fixed. You know, what's going to be helpful for each, you know, the same teaching could be help one person and hinder another. You know, so it's, again, it's a living, it needs to be a living tradition. I didn't really hear you say this, but I think of what you said that kind of

[37:30]

got me thinking of, I've been wondering about how part of the teaching of emptiness is not to categorize the world into nouns, but rather to focus on acting more without really using verbs either, but focusing on on doing and perfect doing. Would you say that there's something in that? Yeah. I mean, I think particularly Soto Zen, we look at meditation as the performance of awakening, or you could say as the performance of all this stuff about the two truths and emptiness. And, you know, in the Heart Sutra, there's all this stuff about the mantra at the end. And, um... I don't think we practice that mantra too much here, or in this tradition, but I'd say, but you could just say all that stuff about the mantra is, it's all about performing this truth.

[38:39]

Like, this is not something, Heart Sutra's teachings and these teachings are not something to just think about. There's something to do with our body, because we realize them with our body, and, you know, with a breathing being, you know. And so, um, mantras, you know, in Vajrayana, some of these teachings, there's three mysteries. And so there's mantra, mandala, and mudra. Mudra corresponds to body, mantra corresponds to voice, and mandala corresponds to mind. And through these three practices, your body, speech, and mind become identified with the body, speech, and mind of the Buddha, of Vairochana Buddha, the cosmic Buddha, and through that with all forms, all sounds, and all minds of the universe. So you do these specific practices to realize this identity.

[39:44]

And so I would say that in Zazen, you know, we tend to, for us, it's this sitting posture. That's, and so we just, we just, um, so Dogen says, um, when even for a moment you express the Buddha's seal, so it's mudra, uh, you know, the whole universe in the ten directions, um, well, uh, when even for a moment you express the Buddha's seal in the three actions, the whole universe in the ten directions, um, what is it? Does anyone remember? Maybe. becomes the Buddhist seal to become so because so again this is identity of the whole world with the Buddhist seal which is the mudra of meditation and so it's so it's performing this performing this meditation is performing this identity or performing Prajnaparamita and so so so it's a yes

[40:50]

Anything else? You were talking about imminence, that something is within. Oh, imminent. Imminent. Imminent means, like, here. Here. And also as that, because of that, there's this, not because of it, but then there's also transcendence. Well, I think ultimate truth needs to be both, for it to be something that we can have access, like if it's just transcendent, it's like, There's nothing to do with us. It's just imminent. Why does it make a difference? So in the same way you're also relating the conventional and ultimate to faith and doubt, that these are considered opposites and sometimes considered mutually exclusive, but actually aren't. Yeah, I would say that we need both. And that they, you know, they seem like they're opposed, but, um, but actually if they're opposed, you know, it doesn't work.

[42:05]

Can you help me with doubt? I was looking on the faith. Um, so there was a leak somewhere in the middle that I thought I caught I sort of missed the leap between doubt and ethics. So I want to make sure I'm connecting the right words. So lumped together are doubt, conventional truth, sitting upright like that kind of efforting and ethics. Do those all kind of go together? What I was trying to do was put doubt with how the two truths are distinct. So one doubts that they are distinct. doubt is what, um, doubt is, you know, so, so faith is that there, I think our faith, for me, I'm putting faith in this, but their identity and that this is where we study, you know, this is what we study to study the two truths. And, but then doubt is, doubt creates a separation because doubt starts to question conventional truth and open to this realization of ultimate truth.

[43:22]

So this is a doubt that So I associate doubt with this kind of different realizations of conventional truth and ultimate truth. And, you know, there's like a, there's different kinds of doubt. So there's a doubt that keeps you from giving yourself to practice. And so that's not, this is, I'm calling very positive doubt. There's a, I don't know if it's exactly negative, but there's a doubt that you sometimes have to go through before you can give yourself to practice, which is, is this a true practice? Is this a true teacher? Is this really the way to awakening? Can I do this? So you have to go through that stuff just to be able to give yourself to practice. And then after you kind of resolve that doubt for the most part, there's this other doubt that's actually very positive. That opens to awakening. Thank you. I was wondering what you'd say about what objects are if they're not what we think they are.

[44:35]

Well, I think objects or things are maps. So we can't even say things, really. Or we can't even say world. We don't get it. We don't get to get that. We don't get to get that. We can enjoy it though, I think. It's what we are. Yeah, that's nice. Can you say more about what you mean by maps in this film text? I think you could say any conventional story or any conventional structure we use to apprehend how things are or to order the universe or to order our experience. So you know any, it could be any, any, any, any distinction or set of, set of distinctions.

[45:40]

Is that, is that a, help at all? So distinctions are matters. Yeah I would say, I would put, I would put them in there. So in attaining emptiness, a formless field of benefaction is part of that emptiness? Formless field of benefaction. I would say, you know, I guess we'd have to figure out what a formless field of benefaction is. But I guess when I... Well, yeah, I guess I would hear it as, well, it's the... Just putting on this robe benefits the world and how it happens. It happens through emptiness and it's formless and it kind of magically helps the whole world. But the other translation is feel far beyond form and emptiness.

[46:49]

Yeah, I think that's much closer to the Chinese. But what would be feel far beyond form and emptiness... Well again, you know, I would say that's, you know, in Zen, don't get caught by form and emptiness. Don't get caught by a map of the two truths. So the two truths aren't a real map either. They're not a way to grasp reality. So I would say that, you know, so it's again, it's pointing to ultimate truth again. It's another way of pointing. Because we shouldn't grasp the field far beyond them either. No. So not even grasping emptiness, so then sitting Shikantaza, what is the purpose? Well, again, performing. So we need to enact this emptiness, this truth in the world.

[47:53]

If we don't, you know, it won't help us and it won't help others. But the extent to which we can perform it, you know, it has a chance of helping us, and then I think that also has a chance of helping others. But it does need to come into action. It could come into the body. Because it's the realization of emptiness is the whole body and mind. In the back there? Oh, sorry. Well, you know, the precepts, like, do you know the precepts? They're kind of general guidelines. And then there's like, here, there's like Tassajara's monastic guidelines, you know, and then there's also just, you know, being kind, I think, to everything, to ourselves, to everything we experience, to others, and And also learning to be careful, learning to be careful about everything we do, everything we say.

[48:59]

This is kind of like, it can kind of feel kind of tedious sometimes, but it's just all, and it's just dealing with our life. But, you know, we have powerful tendencies not to deal with our life very carefully, and very powerful forces in this culture. And so... So it's a real realm of practice. And ultimate truth is liberating, but we still have to do all that careful practice afterwards. It's just that, I think it's just, it becomes a field of play rather than an endless ordeal. What does it mean to doubt in that?

[50:10]

Well, I think just to start by questioning it and maybe trying to feel how we're grasping it, how we're grasping something as what it is. Having an experience, what is there grasping? Can we find the grasping? And also, um, you can also start to feel where is the self? Where is the sense of self in this? How is it being established in this moment? And you know, this is not, um, it's, you know, part of why we need to sit and be quiet is this stuff is, it's usually not in our awareness. And so, uh, we usually need to be quiet to start attuning to it. You know, like Dogen says, think not thinking. I could see that, you know, as an expression of, like, starting to, you know, what is that?

[51:18]

What kind of thinking is that? How does that relate to the thinking I'm doing right now? But also for me, it's also just that we, that when we settle, we can totally accept what's happening in this moment. But then we don't, we also, we find an engagement also where we don't, maybe just don't believe it. So like, and just open to this is not actually what it is. Would you consider maps being just a human's way of just whatever we can explain what's in our consciousness?

[52:20]

Yeah, any explanation of what's happening? Although I think the thing is that the deepest map, again, is this one that we almost never explain, which is that we're separate from the world. It's usually, you know, we're usually not really aware of that consciously. And, you know, we can talk about not-self all day, and this map is back here just, like, happily functioning. I guess, I mean, without scaling, is that how you reach that ultimate truth? Without the... If you had, like, the experience of consciousness without scaling, like, without knowing good or bad... taste or smell, all that kind of thing. I would say, you know, it's not that we need to get rid of anything that's happening. So in the midst of discriminations and experiences, the emptiness is realized.

[53:22]

So because emptiness is how those things are happening. Technically there's states in Buddhism where you get rid of thought completely and they're seen as complete non-opportunity for awakening. A few more minutes if there's any more. Talk a little bit about what you just said with your thinking and that was the overtaking. Well, yeah, I think when there's thoughts and then, you know, if we're grasping our thinking and being pulled along by our thinking, it's hard to settle with this, you know, with the embodied experience of what's happening in this moment, including our thinking.

[54:27]

So, you know, so I think often we attend to the breath and as a way to ground, try to use our thinking to get us in touch with our body instead of getting us away from our body and get us more in touch with what's happening in this moment of experience. And, um, yeah. But so that, you know, that being caught, but, you know, I think, you know, there's still actually some being caught by thinking even, you know, when we're totally present. Can I ask another question? Because I'm so baffled by all of this. Oh, sorry. Could awareness be repetitive in life, like the mind and body falls away, and then it's that moment of not being aware of oneself and just being aware of something you're seeing? Is that a form of emptiness? Well, I think emptiness, I think it tends to be...

[55:32]

It could be with what you're seeing, with what you're hearing, with what you're feeling. But it's a, it's a, the whole frame in which that's happening is different. And that is that you don't, there's no one, nothing has separate existence. So the awakening is not just, wow, I'm awakened now. It's just, again, it's not a moment. Or just continuous? Oh, well, in the way I'm talking about it here, it could be, you know, I don't know about, you know, you don't have to put a time, a specific time span on it, but that it wouldn't, you know, a realization of ultimate truth then pervading into like active functioning would be like Buddha level of activity. And bodhisattvas can't function in ultimate truth. we need to re-enter conventional truth to function.

[56:37]

And because that's, you know, that's, we, in the realization of emptiness, there isn't a way to talk, really, that doesn't have function, except at this liberating function. that physical distinction that we're rejecting and moving from Saravada polycanon understanding of one and ultimate distinction to Mahayana understanding one and ultimate distinction because it sounds very similar when you're talking about a non-dual experience in emptiness to the experience in the bottom of the polycanon you know itself the final goal but in the polycanon emptiness isn't seen as a final goal it's just a stage you know of perception of soul So what I'm asking is, is there some sort of metaphysical assumption that you're rejecting? Well, I would say that the metaphysical assumption that I see Madhyamaka rejecting in the Abhidharma teachings is that dharma theory or a description of reality in terms of dharmas is ultimate truth.

[57:49]

I think they're rejecting that. And you could say that Buddha didn't teach that. You could say Buddha taught a mess. And then... The Abhidharma teachings want to make a system out of this mess. And in so doing, you know, they just got these dregs. And then Madhyamaka comes along and shakes it all up again. So there's no system of Abhidharma associated with Madhyamaka? Madhyamaka? There might be. You know, sometimes they say the Mahasamgika school is related to Madhyamaka teachings, but we don't have anything from the Mahasamgika school, really. descriptions in other texts of what they taught. So there might be some connections. But the two main schools of Abhidharma, we have Theravada and Sarvastavada, and then Madhyamaka is responding to Sarvastavada, really, much more than Theravada, which was kind of, you know, not in the same region of India at that time. All right.

[58:52]

It's 4.30. Feel free to ask me questions later if you like. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving.

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