This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Well, good evening. And for those who are watching off-site, this is one to welcome you to San Francisco's... Zen Center's Wednesday evening Dharma Talk. My name is Kyoshin Wendy Lewis, and today I will be talking about the Heart Sutra and its theme of emptiness regarding the teachings of Buddhism. So, as you all know, we chant the Heart Sutra every day, and we chanted it this morning, and I was particularly listening because of this talk. And what it basically is, it's a kind of a shorthand list that's useful for both memorizing and remembering basic teachings.

[01:09]

And some of those are the five skandhas, the ayatanas, which are the six cognitive faculties, which is the five sense organs and the mind, and the six corresponding categories of objects, Eye and sight, ear and sound, nose and smell. There's also the 12-fold chain of causation and the Four Noble Truths. And these are kind of, a lot of them are kind of abbreviated because you're supposed to know them already. And this is just a way of both honoring them and remembering them and negating them. And all of these teachings have sub-teachings. that include ethics and meditation, the Four Noble Truths. And so there's multiple doctrines embedded in this sutra. And of course, they're not just listed, but they're presented in the context and the perspective of emptiness.

[02:12]

And so this is both positively in that they're mentioned and named, and then negatively because they're all, it says, No, no, no, no. No form, no feeling. No, no, no. So what does this show us about emptiness? I think that what is happening in the Heart Sutra, Mahayana teaching, is that they're being considered in both their relative and absolute contexts. And this is in a dialectic of religion and philosophy, ideology and praxis, and compassion and wisdom, and how those pairs talk to each other and inform each other and empty each other. So this is, you know, Zen is often kind of characterized as anti-intellectual.

[03:19]

But I think that this same quality, this same type of dialectic is part of Zen saying, you know, don't be intellectual. It's saying, yeah, you should know all these things, but don't attach to them. Keep letting them work is kind of the idea. Because that's what was happening in Buddhism and actually happens in a lot of... movements and that sort of thing become attached to the ideology and then it gets rigid and static. So this is also one of the reasons I was talking about the Heart Sutra is I was asked to teach a class in a few months and I thought, oh, I'll teach the Genjo Koan again. Well, the Genjo Koan is a commentary on the Heart Sutra. So I thought, okay, I'll just think about the Heart Sutra again. And in the Genja Koan, you get that same sort of dialectic of things being sort of mirroring each other.

[04:27]

So there's various ways of understanding the concept of emptiness and considering it. And one way is to examine what it is intended to address, like what sort of made this concept part of Mahayana, this sense of emptying or emptiness. And it's partly because of the tendency, as I said, become attached to the teaching so that they no longer do their work. So what I think Mahayana teaching acknowledges is that practice is an unending effort. And that's where the concept of the bodhisattva sort of arises. Enlightenment is not final, but it keeps arising within, you know, this interdependent and non-static reality of the worlds and our lives unfolding.

[05:32]

Because when you think about it, you know, has there ever been a time when we could stop and say, okay, now we've got it? Everything's settled. We know what to do. We know what to say. We know what to think. We know what to feel. I, you know, there's occasionally kind of moments or periods when things are peaceful, but they don't last. I mean, this is kind of this strange way the human condition works. Keeps. exploding and then settling, exploding and settling. And I think some of our current situation now seems a little bit on the exploding side. And so, you know, how do we sort of negotiate that? I think that, you know, in the United States, one of the examples of this is, you know, it had its,

[06:40]

overt internal war in the 19th century, civil war, and the issues that led to that war continue, you know, locally, across the country, in both violent and subtle ways. And there's this huge resistance to things being different, and it's hard to understand exactly why you can, you know, guess and go through sociological and psychological reasons, but it's very hard to unravel what's in place or what seems real. Christopher Brown, an African-American historian and professor at Columbia, articulated it in this way. Recent events suggest the pressing need for a confrontation with the deep history of institutional failure to act in the wake of spectacular racial violence.

[07:51]

This negative impulse has a long lineage, as do its characteristic patterns of response. Eventual acknowledgement, but only after a long delay. A call for action. but later, not now, at some point when the timing is better. Reform, but in a way that advertises good intentions while protecting established interests. Hope that the most recent scandal will not be repeated so that the exclamation, this is not us, may actually possess some truth. And, you know, I feel pain, you know, thinking, Reading that and thinking about it and also thinking of how it applies also to our environmental crisis. We say, okay, well, that's happening somewhere else. Or I don't have to worry that my computer and my phone and all these things I need, my car, are depending on, you know, mineral resources that people are mining and are being harmed by.

[09:01]

And all this kind of stuff. It's... so hard to encompass, and yet this is part of what's happening. So what is it that we can do to negotiate this in terms of our practice life? So I think that the intention of the Heart Sutra is is to, as I said, to present the teachings while discouraging attachment to them so that this working is continuous and applies over time and through various cultures and contexts. So the teaching keeps moving, keeps being applicable, keeps being fresh, but it moves through all these different circumstances and cultures. wrote a commentary on the Heart Sutra, and he says, perhaps all the divergent interpretations of the Heart Sutra are somehow appropriate, since the elusive meaning of shunyata, emptiness, demands that each generation of Buddhist thinkers and practitioners in each culture comes to grips with it through the praxis of experience.

[10:27]

So what I think is interesting about this is the Heart Sutra and the other teachings don't actually offer a mechanism or an explanation connecting the interdependence of the relative and the absolute in which emptiness functions. So I have been pondering some way to articulate that connection. And I think that it's something like grief. It's this sense of poignancy that the human condition continues to unfold in the way it does. And it includes a great deal of separation and power struggles and issues and that sort of thing. I recently read a book called The Women Are Up to Something. And it was a study of four women philosophers.

[11:30]

students at Oxford around the time of World War II. And what they primarily realized because of what was happening during that time was that there was this sort of very logical fact-based form of philosophy being taught and studied, and that it didn't offer a way to respond to or reflect on what happened during World War II and what was revealed about what had happened then. And so what they, as all these four different women realized, is that there was no kind of ethical foundation to a logical fact-based philosophy. And so the underlying question for them was how ethics and a concern for general well-being can be applied more generously in this complex human-centered world.

[12:35]

So these texts that are part of our daily ceremonies are interpretations. I've said this before, but one of my favorite descriptions of theology is that it's interpretations of interpretations. And I think Buddhology, same thing. We just keep working on it to understand it. And this can be an emotional work as well as what we call intellectual work. So these interpretations keep being written to address problems, I guess you could call them, or changes in culture and religious understanding. as well as, you know, how you adapt Buddhism to different cultures. Like, how are we going to be Buddhists? So Mahayana texts derive from a 200-year period.

[13:48]

That was from 100 BC to 100 CE, and that's already a few hundred years. after the death of Shakyamuni. And then the Heart Sutra is tentatively dated to 350 CE. So that's hundreds and hundreds of years after the death of the Buddha. And now in the context of Western Buddhism, the teachings are being interpreted and taught basically from a privileged white view of the world, middle-class perspective. So I think it's actually significant and very moving that these challenging and rigorous aspects of Buddhist practice would appeal to and be taken up by, you know, people from these kind of privileged middle-class backgrounds. And I'm not saying that as a critical description of a group of people.

[14:56]

that was who really grasped onto this teaching, particularly Zen, but also many Buddhist teachings. And perhaps it was a search for meaning, freshness and empowerment. Um, there's a lot of deconstruction of, you know, religious institutions and everything during the time that Buddhism was sort of entering, uh, the Western, particularly, um, the East coast of the United States. And I think this is one of those chances of history that these Buddhism and Zen would become popular and that a cultural class with a certain amount of leisure and security would pick them up. And, you know, and then at San Francisco Zen center, this, what made, you know, offered this way of seeing things that, you know, you know, this sort of innovative ideas about how the institution could support itself.

[16:05]

These entrepreneurial things like there was Stitchery and then there was the Tassajara Bread Bakery and Greens and Tassajara Guest Season and these ways that has made this incredibly rich institution. So how did all this come together is kind of fascinating to me. And of course, you know, then the interpretations of the teachings and the interpretations of the interpretations of the teachings tend to have those sort of cultural values in both wonderful and conflicted ways, of course. I was... recently considering, you know, my background growing up basically in relative poverty and how that perspective affects my view and understanding of Buddhist practice and Zen and also how it affects my residence in a Zen community.

[17:15]

And I think there are ambiguities, you know, I... Certainly, my background is so mixed, it's kind of, I can't even decide how to describe it hardly. But it has this mix, religious mix, ethnic mix, cultural mix, richness, and also the side issues of kind of racism and economic discrimination, all that kind of stuff. So other people I know here have some of that too. But one thing I had access to was public libraries and school. And these were contexts for a much wider view of possibilities for my life and a way to understand the world.

[18:20]

And they were also places of freedom and love. I mean, I don't know. Lots of people have had teachers who have had a wonderful impact on them. And teachers, so many of them are really dedicated and concerned about their students at all different levels. And to feel that, to feel loved in that way, was really important in my life. I think, in a way, I ended up finding institution to be both places of safety and anxiety. So that is true also of my life in a, basically, if I understand things correctly, basically a sort of white, privileged, middle-class context. And it's wonderful to be... in an environment of comfort and plenty.

[19:23]

You know, to me, it's kind of magical. And yet sometimes I feel that part of my life experience is kind of not included. This is a complexity of the human condition, right? And as I've chanted and read and studied teachings like the Heart Sutra, I've come to the conclusion that Buddhism emphasizes individual enlightenment not as egotistical or antisocial, but as a practical effort. It's just practical. Each person has a context from which we began and how our lives and our preferences have unfolded. And that affects our attitudes towards and interpretations of practice.

[20:24]

Because human nature, as far as I can tell, and I don't think this pessimistic, it doesn't change very much in terms of how the world works. But on the individual level, and I think more extensively on a communal level, particularly in a community that's practicing and trying to understand and making this incredible effort that I think we all make moment by moment. I think that there, the teachings and practice can be transformative and offered to the world in an empowering and effective way. So what I think the Heart Sutra's teaching is on emptiness attempts to convey is the interactivity of these narrow points of view in the wide context of our myriad points of view and then in the greater context of all that we can't comprehend in our moment-to-moment experience but which is actually affecting us.

[21:39]

So Mu Song says, to accept that the universe is random or that uncertainty is its prime operating principle, requires a huge emotional adjustment. The Heart Sutra offers us insight into the nature of an ultimate reality through intuitive wisdom. So... The root of the word intuition means to contemplate, observe, and consider. Intuition is based not in some kind of spontaneous knowing, but in experience and consideration. And it matures through contemplating and examining the accuracy and usefulness of what seems to be our spontaneous insight.

[22:45]

The wisdom teachings of Buddhism were addressed to people who already knew a lot about Buddhist doctrine and the arguments of interpretation. So the Heart Sutra's sort of radical integration of compassion through the presence of Avalukiteshvara with wisdom through the presence of Shariputra And this is what I feel is this kind of wisdom and compassion is that sort of way that this something like grief can join our wisdom and compassion together. Because what does bring them together? You know, how do they talk to each other? So... I think understanding the unfolding of the teachings through time is an investigation through both practice, our meditation practice, our ceremonial practice, and so on, and inquiry.

[24:05]

So inquiry, you could call it study, is a discipline, and it's what a disciple does. They engage in directing, you know, our chosen ignorance and delusion. or complacency. And bridging the gap between self and other is both joyful and excruciating. So this... Okay. And the way I think this inquiry and the praxis and this bridging the gap is kind of along the lines of hope. And... It's described in a particular way that I think is useful. This is quoted in a book by Olivia Lang. I don't know if you're familiar with her. British. What is she exactly?

[25:07]

Essayist, critic, very creative thinker. Anyway, in a book called Funny Weather, Art in an Emergency. quotes the critic and queer studies pioneer Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who wrote an essay called Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading. And of course, it's very academic and everything but the essay. But this one part, I think, is a description of hope that has... in it that I am sort of trying to convey. Hope, often a fracturing, even a traumatic thing to experience, is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader, reparative meaning repair, reparatively positioned reader tries to organize the fragments and part objects

[26:17]

she encounters or creates. So this is, you know, all this stuff is coming into our lives. And when you read or study, there's all this stuff. Because the reader has room to realize that the future may be different from the present, it is also possible for her to entertain such profoundly painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities as that the past in turn could have happened differently from the way it actually did. And I think this is hopeful because it means that it's not just all mistakes. You know, we could have done it differently, so we can do it differently. And in the future, we can do it differently. Anyway, so again, negotiating the gap between self and other is part of that huge emotional adjustment that Musang referred to.

[27:27]

And I think there is something like grief in the realization of how our limited perspective, even if we don't do anything directly, you know, to cause pain or damage the environment or something, it's still... may do that. We, you know, our actions, the way we think, might be highly detrimental to the well-being of others and the world. So I think discerning, discernment of this is a result of listening to ourselves and to others and placing our... closely held ideas and beliefs in the context of emptiness where things can talk to each other. And this possibility of something like grief functions as an opening to a connection, to a kind of love that frees us into equality of purpose and value.

[28:37]

And I think of this love as a kind that's not owned or controlled or described or defined by anyone. No one can hold it. So, Abed Abora, in his essay on the Heart Sutra, the Japanese Zen, wrote, the important thing is to see right through to the reality of the illusory self. To look through to the real form is to penetrate one's reality, free from self-deception. This is the true renunciation, not trying to throw away and yet throwing away all the same. When we have penetrated to the bottom of this illusory self, not without negating, and yet not negating, there is the power of the knowledge of ultimate emptiness, and the self is thrown aside.

[29:56]

This language is so complex, but I'm sure. So how can this be seen as... a promise of freedom from suffering to have this dialectic in this conversation. I think that from, you know, the fact that there's this proliferation of teachings and talks and discussions on how to do it, that it's far from easy or direct or obvious. And yet, you know, it's worth it. somehow to continue studying emptiness and inquiring into how our attachments to our interpretations of Buddhism both help and hinder us and others. And we keep chanting the Heart Sutra and repeating its affirmation through negation.

[30:59]

And I think this becomes a continuous reconciliation of of our effort with our mistakes and our self-justification with our self-knowledge. And that this is very hopeful. And one of the most difficult things can be to be hopeful that without our attachments, we can continue to live ordinary lives, that are also illuminated by wisdom and freedom and trust and continuously reconciling what should be with what is and what is with what could be. So thank you very much.

[32:02]

For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[32:27]

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