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. Our last dance. Well, maybe not. Lee, the mountain recluse, stays the night on our boat, by Chinese poet Po Zhiyi, 722 to 846. It's dusk. My boat, such tranquil silence, mist rising over waters deep and still. And to welcome a guest for the night, there's evening wine, an autumn qian. A master at the gate of way, my visitor arrives from exalted mountain peaks. lofty cloud-swept face raised all delight heart all sage clarity spacious and free our thoughts begin where words end refining dark enigma depths we gaze quiet mystery into each other and smile sharing the mind that's forgotten mind

[01:24]

Suzuki Roshi said to his students that receiving the precepts helps us to understand what it means to just sit. Just sit is the Buddha's ultimate pure teaching. Just sit is beyond doing or not doing, thinking or not thinking, sitting or lying down. Just sit is face-to-face transmission, the quiet mystery, from Shakyamuni Buddha to each and every one of us. The mind that has forgotten mind. And yet, unless we are grounded in the relative teachings and in the daily activities of the self-serving self, we won't understand what it means to just sit. We won't see the workings of mind creating karma. Things will just seem normal. And we will think, as always, that what we think is correct. no matter how wild or strange.

[02:29]

By studying the self, as Dogen recommends, we can begin to see how it all works. By understanding the workings of our mind, we can break the iron chain of karmic conditioning. And once broken, we can realize the pure teaching of face-to-face transmission. Just as the Buddha did when he came face-to-face with Mara, the evil one, master of illusions. I know who you are. You are myself. And with that, Mara vanishes. The Bodhisattva precepts are a map of Buddha's world offered to those of us who are still bound up in karmic conditioning, who are still falling for Mara's evil tricks. The greatest mystery of the universe that is so hard for us to see is that we are the universe, and Mara is too. It's hard to see that the universe is complete, that this is Buddha's world, and that this is not too.

[03:33]

And yet we human beings have imagined a great divide between the universe and ourselves, which has been conjured from out of the dark spell of our self-clinging. Just as Buddha saw when the spell on him had broken. And then he said, suffering is caused by imagining independent existence. the cessation of suffering is caused by ceasing to imagine independent existence. So Buddha's insight into the dependent core rising of suffering and of the cessation of suffering is his entire teaching in a nutshell. And therefore, because all things are born and died together with the complete support of everything, whenever we deny our basic connection to the world, the precepts broken promises are broken and tender human hearts are broken so yesterday I talked about the three pure precepts avoid evil do good and purify the mind but how do we do that most things are easier said than done which is why we do so much talking however thinking about doing good and wanting to do good isn't good enough we have to actually do something

[04:56]

So today I'm going to be talking about how to our practice of getting through these 10 grave or prohibitory precepts, the doing of not doing. But first of all, I wanted to talk about something I'd mentioned in class, which is the mind only teachings. And this is called the third turning of the wheel, which was given to us not only as a roadmap, of the bodhisattva highway, but also as a way to see what kind of a vehicle we're driving and who's behind the wheel. So in support of our sincere intention to undertake practice of the bodhisattva precepts, I want to give you a brief explanation of the Yogacara or mind-only teachings, which together with the emptiness teachings, Mu, for many centuries has been a tremendous influence on the Buddhist tradition. The mind-only teachings are designed to help us explore and apply the Buddha's insight to our own lived experience.

[06:01]

And so in brief, Yoga Traya teachings provide this map of the mind. And it also names a number of features on the map to help us orient to where we are. Those features include both our conscious awareness, what we're aware of, subjects aware of objects, and our unconscious processes. which are mostly we are not aware of, and that's why they're called unconscious. So this map of the mind shows us how our unconscious conditioning, formed into habits and preferences, prejudices, and customs, is carried, not only throughout our lifetimes, but from generation to generation. In the worst cases, it helps us understand how systems of racism and nationalism, homophobia, misogyny, and so on, are silently stored within our minds and therefore supremely difficult to dismantle. Most of us here in this room today, I think, probably believe ourselves free of such toxic beliefs and behaviors.

[07:08]

And it comes as a great surprise when we find out that we are not. Ignorance of how the mind works, and in particular of our unconscious conditioning, is the beginning of the repeated cycles of suffering called samsara. This is what the Buddha taught to the end of his life, and he also taught us how to end it. Which is how these traditions of the mind-only school and the emptiness teachings of the middle way school evolved over centuries into the two most beneficial means for altering the course of our karmic life, thereby earning the names of the second turning and third turning of the wheel of the Dharma. In the mind-only teaching, which served as a corrective to misuses of the emptiness teaching, the concept of the unconscious had a great influence, particularly on the Zen tradition, aiding us in discerning just what is and isn't so. So questions one can ask about relative truths, about not ignoring cause and effect, and why it matters when we do.

[08:15]

When the founder of Zen, Bodhidharma, came to China from India, he reportedly said that the Lankavatara Sutra, a mind-only text, was the only sutra, explaining why the early Zen stories are so loaded with mind-only teachings. So there's a quote from the introduction to the Lankavatara Sutra that was translated by Red Pine. The Lankavatara Sutra is the holy grail of Zen. Passed down from teacher to student, it covers all the major teachings of Mahayana Buddhism, and yet it contains only two teachings. Number one, that everything we perceive as being real is nothing but a perception of our own mind. And number two, that understanding this is something to be realized and experienced for oneself and cannot be expressed in mere words. In the words of a Chinese Zen master, these two teachings came to be known as have a cup of tea and now please taste the tea.

[09:20]

So the method developed by the mind-only school for studying our minds was first charted in the minds of our Buddhist ancestors. Minds, as it turns out, were no different from our own. So from their meditative studies, they produced a map of the mind for reflecting on what seems to be happening in here. This map is called the eight consciousnesses model of the mind. So try to bear with me. I know it gets to sound a little bit abstract, but this isn't as hard as it sounds. So the first five of the eight, so there's eight consciousnesses, the first five you learned in the first few years of your life. Eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and body. These five are known as the gateways to awareness. And any signal that arrives at the gateway goes right up into our conscious mind. Like kerplop. The conscious mind is called the sixth.

[10:27]

consciousness okay so we have the five senses and now we have number six called a sense consciousness conscious mind is a sense conscious it's awareness itself and which is functioning quite actively all the time and particularly right now for all of you the sixth sense consciousness is aware of what is being seen heard tasted touched or smelled like right now you're probably hearing something and seeing somebody that's your conscious your sixth sense consciousness is aware the sixth sense consciousness awareness itself has many talents it can be rapidly redirected from one sensory experience to another from seeing to hearing to smelling to tasting them back to seeing again just like our eyes are constantly moving from one object to another making us giving us the impression that everything's in focus Maybe you know about that trick. But the best trick is not that it can do that shift from sensory awareness to sensory awareness.

[11:33]

Its best trick is its ability to focus its attention on thinking, the messenger within. So what are you thinking right now? That's your sixth sense of consciousness, and that's the one that knows what you're thinking. So after a sound occurs, that awareness redirects its attention from the sound to words that might apply to that sound, like coughing or clapping or rain on the roof or the lunch bell or, oh, that's a frog jumping into the pond. And it's all happening really, really fast. So sometimes you can try allowing yourself to just hear and just taste, as in the instructions the Buddha gave to bahiya of the bar cloth, without jumping into naming your sensations or inventing some explanation for what it is that you've heard or seen.

[12:40]

So all of this is deeply familiar to us, and it's so familiar that pretty much we pay no attention to it at all. day long our attention is moving from about from our five senses to the ideas we are having about them or simply to the ideas themselves skipping the sensory impressions altogether in a seemingly endless stream of thought a stream of consciousness like clouds through an empty sky so these six sense consciousnesses working together as a set or what is commonly called our experience those events and activities and thought processes throughout our daily lives of which we are aware, to which we say, I know. And in fact, they are all that we know. It's what we don't know that is causing us all the trouble. So as the mind-only teaching masters observed, theorized, and added to an understanding of their own mental experience, they recognized a necessity to include in their model of the mind two more aspects,

[13:48]

which they call the seventh and eighth consciousness. Now we're going underwater. In many ways, these two are purely theoretical, and yet as theories, they help to explain an awful lot about what's going wrong in our human lives. So the seventh and eighth consciousnesses are the most important aspects of our habitual life, and yet they are completely hidden from our awareness. They are in fact unconscious and yet determine almost all that we are and all that we will continue to be unless and until we have awakened. So the seventh consciousness is called Manas. Its nickname is the lover. Manas is the lover. And the eighth consciousness, the Alaya, is the storehouse for all of the unconscious aspects of our life. kind of like a giant blob in the basement of the house that's filled with everything we have ever learned, suffered, and believed.

[14:53]

The lover, who's also our thinking function, mistakes the eighth consciousness for a self. That's what it's in love with, the blob. The self, this famous self that the Buddha said is a pure fantasy, and yet, as we all know, exerts tremendous power over our lives for good and for ill. So it's the storehouse consciousness that the lover calls on in each and every conscious moment to determine what to do, where to go, and who we do and don't like. I hate the color green. I love tomatoes. I can speak Chinese, play the flute, and that's the truth. So where do we imagine you are keeping all of that knowledge and all of those preferences? Buddha says that you're keeping it in the storehouse consciousness, kind of like the Library of Congress or the iCloud, to be summoned as needed or, more often than not, to come without being called.

[15:56]

So why does this matter? It matters because we can change our unconscious conditioning. How? Through the conscious choices that we make in each and every day. And that's the teaching. We are not stuck in the same old habits of mind, but unless we know how the mind works, we won't know that there is a way out. So one way for understanding how those changes take place is to imagine that our conscious life is like our Zen center gardeners and our farmers who tend the land and plant seeds that will sprout and grow in the future. If what they plant are wholesome seeds such as kindness and generosity, patience, and so on, that's what appears at the beginning of spring. If they plant seeds of anger, jealousy, greed, and prejudice, then the land will fill with brambles and bitter fruit of hatred. There's a story that I think has gotten around quite a bit because most people seem to have heard it, but I think it's a very good summary of the mind-only teachings and how they work.

[17:02]

This story was attributed to the indigenous people of this land, whose karma is so tightly woven into ours. A tribal elder says to his granddaughter, there are two wolves hiding inside of me. One is cruel and selfish, violent and angry. The other is kind and gentle, generous and caring. Startled, the granddaughter asks, grandfather, which of them will win? The grandfather replies, the one that I feed. So the idea of feeding the kind and gentle wolf is precisely what the mind-only teaching is all about. But it's not only a method that each of us can apply to ourselves as individuals, it can also be applied to our community as a whole. It's hard not to imagine that the bodhisattva of compassion, with her thousands of hands and eyes, is not actually the community itself. The eyes and arms of the sangha, made up of any and all who are brave enough

[18:03]

to turn toward those in our families, our nation, and this world who are suffering from injustice, from inequity, from physical brutality of any kind. And also to turn toward those who out of the extremes of pain, anger, and ignorance have turned their self-hatred onto others, as we ourselves may at times have done. As the Buddha said in the Dhammapada, hate is not conquered by hate. Hate is conquered by not hating. So learning not to hate is precisely what the prohibitory precepts are helping us to do, or rather not do. And so that's where I'm going to turn my attention right now. As I said yesterday, although the ten prohibitory precepts are traditionally couched in negative terms, you know, don't do this, and don't do that, and really don't do any of those, Dogen tells us in the Fukanza Zengi that once we succeed, the lineage of the ancestors' samadhi, and constantly perform in such a manner as they, we are assured of being a person just like them.

[19:12]

Our treasure store will open up itself, and we will use it at will. So the manner that Dogen is referring to, in which the ancestors performed their lives, was in alignment with the Bodhisattva precepts. And when it wasn't, they confessed, repented, took refuge in the triple treasure, and started over again. right from where they left off, doing good, avoiding evil, and living for the benefit of all beings, thereby opening their hearts to the world. Opening our hearts to the world is really what we are offering when we ask to receive the precepts, when we sow a Raksu and when we participate in a ceremony in front of our family and our Dharma friends at our home temple. When I received the 16 Bodhisattva precepts for the first time, over 40 years ago, the way I opened my heart was by making solemn promises in the form of the Ten Great Precepts, promises which I may not have known at the time I was making to each and every one of you.

[20:17]

I promised not to kill you, to steal from you. I promised not to sexualize you or lie to you, to intoxicate you or slander you. to brag about myself at your expense, to withhold my love or my possessions from you, to hold grudges against you or disparage the profound and ultimate truth of our relationship, that you and I are Buddha and that that is for real. Just as it says in the Lotus Sutra, Chapter 2, Skillful Means, only a Buddha together with another Buddha can fathom the reality of all existence. So I see you and you see me. And we do our best to make this universe whole once again. Precept practices are really not mysterious to us. They are very simple. The words are very simple. But as Birdnest Roshi yelled down from his tree, yes, a child of three can understand these precepts, but even a person of 80 years will find it difficult to follow them.

[21:24]

And since most of us are still under 80 and quite a bit older than three, we still have an opportunity to reflect on and enter into the practices that have been given to us in support of our wish to be liberated for the sake of all beings, such as these ten grave or prohibitory precepts. So these ten precepts are really only one precept, the precept of non-duality, the ultimate truth that the Buddha saw, at the moment of his awakening. When nothing is outside of ourselves, then there is nothing to crave or to hate. And yet until we can see in the same way as the Buddha, we are offered the support of these specific prohibitions. And all of them are familiar to us by virtue of the daily news. Killing, yes. Stealing, yes. Lying, yes. Sexualizing, yes. Poisoning, yes. Slandering, bragging. possessiveness, hating, yes. Among the ten prohibitions that I am convinced the most important one of them all is the prohibitory precept number four, a disciple of Buddha does not lie.

[22:38]

So I'm going to spend most of my time this morning talking about this one. Since the main topic of our practice period is truth in Sanskrit, Dharma, not lying is therefore a commitment to the Buddha's truth. Telling the truth is not so easy. And yet, telling the truth, for a disciple of Buddha, is a pivotal element in our effort to practice. In fact, the whole structure of our practice depends on our capacity to be honest to ourselves, about ourselves, and with each other. Without honesty, we have no basis for living an ethical or a moral life. I was pretty disappointed, I think as most children are, to find out that grown-ups lie. Mom and dad lie to their children and to each other. Baseball players, priests, presidents, bankers, and teachers, including Zen teachers, all lie. And that adults have always lied to their children by telling them stories that make this society appear particularly heroic and good.

[23:47]

All the people of the world do that. And yet for many of us, by the time we were teenagers, the covers on those stories have blown off, thereby leaving us with no role models and no foundation for trust or confidence in other people. On November 22nd of 1963, when I was a sophomore in high school, the president of the United States was assassinated. And on that same day, my view of the world changed forever. We were sent home early that morning and I walked into the house where my mother was standing at the ironing board crying as she was watching the news coming in from Dallas where our handsome young president had just been declared dead. And then in what seemed like rapid succession, Martin Luther King Jr., Bobby Kennedy were also assassinated. Malcolm X was assassinated just as the napalm fires in Vietnam were being set. By the time I arrived in college, the presumed innocence of my childhood, along with most of my generation, was gone forever.

[24:58]

I think the outcome of the emotional assault on a young child such as myself has a lot to do with lies. Layers and layers of lies. So by the time I finished college, lying no longer surprised me. In fact, I assumed it. It was a long time that that assumption solidified into cynicism, sarcasm, political rage, and finally, indifference. But then that, too, was a lie. I wasn't indifferent, I was just so deeply hurt and deeply afraid for humanity, of which I am a member of. And yet I suspected that living a life based in honesty, both about myself and towards others, was going to be very scary and also take a lot of hard work. Work for which I had little moral guidance. Not until I encountered and came to accept the Buddha's ethical teachings. If the Buddha's teachings, we are encouraged and invited to study ourselves.

[26:04]

That is to study how we think, how we act, and especially the consequences of our actions, and to do so honestly and continuously, with no time off for either good or bad behavior. And that's because there is no time off. How could we take time off from our own conscience? No matter what we're doing, even if there's no one else in the room, or wasn't even there, you know what you did, and whether or not it felt good or not. In fact, the entirety of Buddhist practice and study is never about anyone else's behavior. It's always about your own. And yet I find it so much easier to speak honestly about the faults of others, which fortunately is also prohibited by the Bodhisattva precepts. A disciple of the Buddha does not praise self at the expense of others, a behavior we instinctively don't like called bragging. In fact, there aren't too many things that humans might imagine doing to one another or saying to one another which haven't already been proscribed for over 2,500 years by the Buddha's enlightened view of how we truly ought to care for one another and thereby care for this world.

[27:22]

The other nine prohibitory precepts all circle around this commitment to truth, the both kinds of truth, the relative truth and the ultimate truth. providing additional angles from which to see what we have been imagining to be reality. In our imagined reality, there are such things as killing and stealing, sexualizing, lying, intoxicating, slandering, bragging, hoarding, hating, and disparaging the enlightened nature of reality. These nine precepts address the three primary elements of our Zen training program, our body, our speech, and our mind. The tenth prohibitory precept is a failure to respect the Buddha's wisdom, his compassion, and the community of those who do. Three of the precepts address the effects of harmful behavior on our mind, those being the prohibitions against intoxication, possessiveness, and harboring ill will. Three others, not lying, slandering, or bragging, address the effects that the harmful behaviors have on our speech, and thereby impact others.

[28:32]

The last three of the nine address the harmful effects of intentional actions done by our bodies, the gravest of the grave precepts, abusing sexuality, stealing, and killing. In terms of the karmic consequences for violating prohibitory precepts, hateful thought is understandably the least consequential, especially if we keep it to ourselves. Speech is much more consequential. and taking action with our bodies brings about the most severe consequences of all. When we take an even deeper look, we can begin to see how our actions are connected to the suffering of the world. If there is no separate self, as the Buddha taught, then there is no separate I who is free from the responsibility of all the killing, stealing, lying, sexual abuse, and intoxication that is in any way protecting us, housing us, or feeding us right now.

[29:33]

Feeling the pain of our shared responsibility for the monstrosity of human cruelty is what brings us here in an effort to find the wellspring of compassion. Compassion for everyone in the face of what's happening everywhere. Awakening compassion lights up the darkness and the forgetfulness of the three poisons and allows us to sit in the center of that terrible pain. be tender and to be patient and to carefully touch the places in ourselves where it hurts protecting life is not accomplished by restraining inborn impulses for greed hate and delusion but by bringing those impulses out into the light where they can be seen for what they truly are the fearful products of our collective human imagination by holding them in front And by observing our karmic conditioning, we will come to realize the mind, the true mind, that always refrains from taking such actions in the world, the very mind of Buddha.

[30:38]

Buddha's mind is not killing, not stealing, not lying, not sexualizing, and not intoxicating. Buddha's mind is the one precept, no self separate from you. Buddha's mind is also no self separate, from the one who kills. And for that reason, we must never turn our back on Buddha's mind, as if we could. And so we offer to ourselves opportunities for repentance and confession, for commitments of faith and of bravery, and we say such things as this at the beginning of the Bodhisattva Precept Initiation Ceremony. Invoking the presence and compassion of our ancestors in faith that we are Buddha, we enter Buddha's way. So in closing today, I want to share with you a poem about truth, since that's what we've been studying these 90 days together, by an old-time poet who I happen to adore by the name of Wallace Stevens.

[31:44]

Wallace Stevens punched Ernest Hemingway in the face, and Ernest Hemingway knocked him down. They argued about poetry. Don't figure. Anyway. On the Road Home. It was when I said there is no such thing as the truth, that the grapes seemed fatter and the fox ran out of his hole. You, you said there are many truths, but they are not parts of a truth. Then the tree at night began to change, smoking through green and smoking blue. We were two figures in a wood. We said we stood alone. It was when I said, words are not forms of a single word. In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts. The world must be measured by eye. It was when you said, the idols have seen lots of poverty, snakes and gold and lice, but not the truth.

[32:50]

It was at that time, that the silence was largest and longest, the night was roundest, the fragrance of the autumn warmest, closest, and strongest. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[33:26]

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