Good morning. Discussing prajnaparamita literature is a little bit like trying to catch the wind in a paper sack or blowing bubbles and hanging them on your wall. I'll start with an anecdote. It might have some bearing on the prajnaparamita. Sometime in the, this is from How to Raise an Ox.

[01:03]

It's a wonderful book. Translated by Cook. There's a well-known magistrate whose name was Tsu Dung Po. Tsu Dung Po. He was a Confucian scholar. a celebrated poet, calligrapher, and magistrate appointed by the emperor to govern at least four provinces. So he was a big shot. This was in the Sun dynasty. And at some point he took interest in studying Buddhism as well. He thought he'd also become an accomplished Buddhist. And so because he had a photographic memory, he memorized, like the Diamond Sutra. from end to end.

[02:04]

And then he would go around to the various monasteries and question the monks on the sutras, Diamond Sutra, Heart Sutra, and so on, and say, you know, what is the beginning of the fourth passage? How does that go again? And of course the monk would go, huh? And he would point a finger and ridicule the monks. You call yourself Zen students or you call yourself Dharma students and you haven't memorized this material. So he got the reputation to be called Mr. Scales. So as he would inspect his official duties in the provinces, as the story goes anyway, he would go and visit the various monks and do this in monasteries. So this kind of notorious reputation preceded him. But after a while he got kind of bored by doing this and began to lose interest in studying the Buddha Dharma.

[03:08]

And somebody mentioned there was this Zen priest, monk, that he might go visit and maybe he could learn something new. So he did, but when he went there in his usual rather arrogant manner, instead of stopping at the gate, you know, to stop outside the gate, hit the Han three times. The sheikah comes and asks what you want, and you make your request, you go in, respectfully sit facing the Buddha and wait for an audience with the roshi. But he just rode his horse right into the courtyard. Didn't bother stopping, got off the horse, stomped into the... into the Buddha Hall with his shoes on, maybe even, I don't know. Sat down with his back to the Buddha and waited for the teacher to come. Figured this would be an interesting encounter. The teacher, who is said to be not very small, seven feet tall, actually, was crouched over in a very humble and receptive manner because, after all, these magistrates had incredible power.

[04:26]

He said, do what? Do we owe this great honor, sir? The magistrate said, well, you know who I am? I'm called Mr. Scales. He said, no, I didn't know that. He said, you know who I'm called, Mr. Scales? He said, no, please inform me. He said, because I go around weighing the understanding of the various teachers as to what the Buddha Dharma meant. And the roshi went, ah! He said, how much is that way? At that moment, of course, Thu Dung Po woke up. That is to say, he was startled out of his usual projected idea of what Buddhism was about. It had broken up that little game of his, and he decided maybe he should take on the practice of the Buddha Dharma, which he did. It eventually became... a disciple of one of the famous teachers, I forget whom.

[05:28]

Does anybody remember that, who it was? Anyway, he did progress in it with some humility. I think it's an interesting story in the light of what we're studying because of our propensity to pick up a book or hear a teaching and reify it. kind of what we used to say, laminate it and put it in your wallet and refer to it as something you can hang on to. But as we know in the Prajnaparamita teachings, that's a big mistake. And so when we study something like the Genjo Koan, which begins with the same teaching that the Diamond Sutra and the Heart Sutra illustrate, As all things are the Buddha Dharma, there is birth and death, there are teachers, there are enlightened and ascension beings and so forth. And as all things, as the myriad things have no abiding self, there is no Buddha, no Dharma, no birth and death and so forth.

[06:41]

But The Buddha Dharma is jumping clear therefore the many and the one therefore again thus in attachment Flowers fall in the version we'd spread another translation is although we love the flowers they die although we hate them the weeds grow and so we're back where we started from in the conventional world of this and that self another and Myself, maybe I'll tell you a story. I'd like to make this a little more personal, and then maybe we can have some discussion about this, but a few years ago I had, I can remember exactly the place where the kind of understanding or kind of, I won't go so far as to call it a realization, but a kind of shout like that struck me and I was walking out here in the fields taking a break in the afternoon and it came to me a very obvious notion and at the same time a very surprising one because it seemed to fly in the face of everything I've been studying that I have always always been here and the thing about always always having been here is that I

[08:05]

always and here, none of those three things could be finally posited in any way whatsoever, in any finally solid way. And yet, the experience of being, when you get down right to the ontological basis of your life, is that you cannot remember a time you weren't here. even though the hearer or the person that I remember is constantly changing. The other day I looked at a picture that somebody gave me of myself graduating from high school. I didn't recognize who that person was. Of course, I knew it was my picture. But if you had shown me that picture of somebody who 50 years ago had graduated from high school, I would say, I don't know who that person is. Yet the subjective feeling at that time of who I was is no different from the subjective feeling of being that I have at this moment or at this time. So I began to play a game with myself. And the game with myself is, who am I apart from everything else that I can? Let's say there is a self and an other.

[09:09]

Let's play this game. And let's see if I can find a self that does not include or has anything to do with otherness. Of course, the first thing I realized is that even as I'm saying this, I'm taking a breath and that every breath I take comes from that side. This is the near side. That's the far side, let's say, for the moment. I was taking a breath. The sun that falls on the earth and illuminates everything is seemingly out there. And yet, I can't see without it. I can't live without it. I can't grow without it. And most importantly, every description, every verbal convention and description had been given to me. I wasn't born with a language. somebody described, began to describe what the world was, beginning with mommy and daddy and hot, cold, and so forth.

[10:15]

In a very early period we began to differentiate self from other in terms of concepts. So the very description that I was making about this to myself was also dependently co-arisen, as we say. There was something that was provided from out there to something that I thought was over here. The long and short of that process of eliminating everything that I thought that was other was that when I reach for myself, I come up with handfuls of you. Or when I reach for what I call this side, all I come up with is that side. And so I could see very clearly, anybody can see this, we all know this to some extent, I think, that there is no self that you can hold on to that is not co-arisen with everything else from moment to moment. And the interesting thing is, although we have, because of... I won't talk about the process of thinking at this moment, but anyway, we have something called memory.

[11:29]

And that memory is something that is constantly arising in the present, even reaching for the present moment, even reaching for this moment. Where is it? I can't get hold of this moment. As soon as I think that this moment is such a thing as a present, I can't find it. I can't find the past other than in memory, which is a kind of mindset based on linguistic conventions, feelings that arose with those linguistic conventions. And the future, of course, is something that in the present moment I think about, plan for, taking all this that has been given to me from the past, project it out into the so-called future, and make my plans around that. But this experience, this existential experience of being, being now, which is a question of time, that experience as a subjective feeling has not changed. From the time I can remember being alive, quote, for all the changes, bodily changes, and for all the mindsets that I've gone through and so on, that has not changed.

[12:40]

So this feeling that suddenly I have never been anywhere else but here, even though I can't find a me or a here, that experience abides. And that experience is not apart from the objects of my consciousness. So what does that mean? Does that mean that consciousness is a continual modification? from moment to moment? Is there such a thing called consciousness over and apart from your experience of consciousness? And has not somebody or something always been experiencing what they call self and other in the world? Even though that person, that self, is a convention called David, you know. Here I am, I'm called David, you know. I used to be called Dave. Then I became Diagon, you see, at... There is the world of the separate self in the conventional sense, and that's the world in which we operate.

[13:41]

But I can't, aside from those conventions, I can't find a self that persists, except for this feeling that I've always been here. The feeling that I've always been here then led to the feeling that what makes you think you won't always have this experience? You won't be you, maybe. You may find yourself under what you call you, under some other being. But you, what you call you, is the consciousness that is always self-aware, that is always here, is always now, and is always being the self. That's a self-fulfilling awareness. Self-fulfilling samadhi is, I think, that realization. That realization is no different than Buddha's realization, I believe. As long as I don't call that realization a specific, something specifically that I can hang onto and around which I can form an identity. Now take the question of death at the same time. You might have noticed that although everything objectively seems to grow

[14:47]

wither and die, that is always, always, always an object to consciousness. It is not a subjective realization. The death itself, dying is an experience. Death itself, we don't know. You don't know. All you know is the being of being here and this being now. Whether you wake up from deep sleep at night when we know there's consciousness, after all the heart is going, you're breathing and so on, but you come out of deep sleep without any dreams, all you remember is before you went into that state. Suppose since time, you can even use this expression, since time out of mind, from what we call lifetime to lifetime, from breath, this has been our experience. There's never been such a thing, therefore, as the past or the future. There's always just now and this happening that we call, and then reify into various substantial states of being, of consciousness, and so forth, of the world. Anyway, that was my feeling at that time and it became a kind of modus operandi for my practice because even that event, that opening, that kind of a sudden flash, I couldn't hold onto.

[16:03]

It wasn't that by which I could live, you see. I'd forget that. So when I began to read the Prajnaparamita, that there is no self other than the conventional self, and that in fact it says in the Heart Sutra or in the Prajnaparamita literature something about this convention of language. Well, if I can find it, maybe not, but I thought I had it marked. There's a place in here, in this translation at least, where he says all of these, the Buddha, the Dharma, the Self, the other, are just linguistic conventions.

[17:03]

Now, we know from the study of Nargajuna, many of you know all of this, but the early Buddhist philosopher Nargajuna, wrote a very important work called the or the fundamental wisdom of the middle way. We think of the middle way sometimes as avoiding extremes of nihilism or eternalism or of self-degrading ascetic practices. self-indulgence. But actually, a more complicated and a more subtle version of that is by Nargajuna, the understanding that emptiness and the middle way and conventional reality are exactly the same thing. Not exactly the same thing, but that they co-arise together.

[18:05]

And the most famous karika from that is, if I recall it, one of the translations correctly, goes like this. He said, whatever arises is codependently arisen. Whatever codependently arises is said to be emptiness. That, meaning that which I just stated, that statement, being a conventional or being a... You can say conventional. That being a... well, let's say conventional designation, is itself the middle way. Is that clear? That's very easy. This is very difficult. Yeah. Whatever arises, and whatever arises said to co-arise. That's understood. You can't have one thing that's co-arisen, that's dependently co-arisen, and something else that isn't.

[19:07]

Everything is dependently co-arisen. except maybe nirvana, well, anyway, we won't talk. Anything is conditioned. Almost all things are conditioned. And whatever is conditioned or dependently co-arisen is said to be empty of any self. That, which I have just stated, that statement, being a conventional designation, that is a linguistic convention, is itself the middle way. In other words, how would you know See, the thing is that we take this idea of language, we hear something, we write it down, we understand it that way, and then we put it out in front of us and grasp it and try to hang on. Take that understanding and project it onto phenomena, and by the force of that projection, respond to it accordingly. So we take something named, for example, I hear there's such a story called Buddhism. There's a story called Marxism. There's a story called Freudianism.

[20:09]

I study this particular idea about what the world is, and I react according to my understanding of that, which is a linguistic convention. But what the Prajnaparamita was essentially set up to help monks to become aware of is don't reify these teachings. What we've done from the moment that we were born is to take the understanding of what we think the world is, to break it up into discrete entities, and then by responding to those entities with like and dislike, with emotional reactivity, set up patterns of action in our life, and we really get trapped by that. The same thing happens when we study religion. It just is a more subtle form of bondage and suffering that we engage in. So the interesting thing about Buddha's practice is that it self-obviates itself in time when you see through the fact that there is no such thing as the Buddha Dharma if we turn it into a thing and set it out in front of it and grasp it like anything else.

[21:17]

However, we have no choice but to tell stories about it and make it into conventions. And to understand that flow as the way to practice our life, that's what human beings do. That is the beauty of our life. That is the joy of our life. That is the joy of our practice, is that when we understand this, that it is ungraspable, that in any final and absolute way it is ineffable, that we cannot get hold of it and make it into something, any more than we get hold of this feeling that I've mentioned about my life and make it into something, other than conventions. But we don't remember that they're conventions. We think, as we say, that they're built out of solid stone, you see. And so this teaching is to alert us to the fact that what is called the golden chain, to chain ourself with the golden chain of...

[22:21]

religious practice of some sort, to free us from our bondage to conventional ideas that we reify or that we substantiate as absolute. Anyway, that's a story now. That's a story that at this moment I'm telling you. I might tell you and you might tell me a different story tomorrow and see, but that ability to do that that flexibility of our mind, of the evolution of human consciousness to evolve and split, the vijnana, to split thought, to set up a self and other, and then to find conventions of a language around which we can explain that to one another, constantly telling each other stories. What else do we ever do but tell each other stories? personal little stories that we really get involved in, and that's what most of our dharmic practice is about, our own little personal stories. But then we see that our personal stories can be transposed into a larger picture and so on, and that's what we hunger for.

[23:28]

How do we fit into this thing? But my experience, you see, that I'm trying to get at, and which cannot be got at, which cannot be understood other than by pointing to it with these words, is that I am the world-honored one. You are. Who else could be the world-honored one but you and me, each of us? How could it ever be different? If I have always been here, this feeling that I've always been here, that everything comes forward to confirm that fact, and that I is nothing else but everything else coming up, each one of us have that feeling that is given to each one of us. We make stories around that. What a beautiful thing to do as human beings. to have all this conflict, all these problems. It's no longer a problem then, you see. It's a dance that we can perform, play with one another, set up ceremonies around rituals and so forth. The whole idea, I think, of Soto practice is to have rituals whereby we can see that our whole life is nothing but rituals.

[24:35]

And then take those rituals that we do, the bowing and so on, and offer the merit, you know, the big question of merit in here. But the merit that we offer out to the world is the merit of the appreciation that we have for the ineffable mystery, if you want to call it, of our being, of our life, and the joy, actually, that that evokes. Another way I would think of talking about this is a realization that I think any one of us have had at some time is that we've always, always, always been happy. And it doesn't have anything to do with being happy. Getting something you like for a little while, that wears out, then the next thing comes along and you're happy with that. No, this being happy is the fact that everything that is coming forward to understand itself as me, as you, which is a really egotistical thing to say in a sense.

[25:42]

But everything coming forward to confirm the self, the big self that way, is happiness. I think we realize then that this is a gift and that we're always in the midst of this gift. And at one time we wanted to get out of this dilemma that we're always here. As I said many times, beam me up, Captain Kirk. I've had enough of this world. I want to stop it. I want to get off. I want to get to Nirvana. I want to get to a place where I don't have all this stuff to deal with. Until the moment we realize we've always been dealing with this stuff, what makes me think I won't always be doing it? Well, because this person is gone, that person is gone, this thing is gone. It's going to end for me. Oh, is it? How come you can't remember a time you weren't here? By here, I don't mean necessarily in this. Any dimension you can remember. Maybe you're out there with three heads or something floating around in some other dimension. Millions of dimensions. This just happens to be one of them that we're focused in on. Obviously, this world does not look the same to a chameleon than it looks to us or even to a cat.

[26:48]

This quantum swarm that is out here that we're making some sense of. So I think that's the great gift of the Prajnaparamita is the realization of our life from that point that we can't get hold of it and yet here it is always and subjectively it always feels the same no matter how old you are or how you feel. Something is going through this. What is that something? I can't tell you. It's always going through it. There is a poem. that I like to quote that I picked up from someone. I think it was during a practice period. I think Reb brought it up, in fact, or somebody brought it to Reb a few years ago in Tassajara. Wallace, I'll quote it for you if I can remember it correctly. It's a Wallace Stevens poem, and it's called Snowman. You know that poem, Snowman? It's a wonderful poem. And it talks about the kind of mind we have to develop in which to deal with this phenomenon and as a phenomenon of subjectivity.

[27:56]

And it goes something like, one must have a mind of winter. One must have a mind of winter to regard the frost and the boughs of the pine trees crusted with snow and have been cold a long time and have been cold a long time. to behold the junipers shagged with ice, the spruces rough in the distant glitter of the January sun, and not to think, and not to think of any misery in the sound of the wind. In the sound of a few leaves, that is the sound of the land full of the same wind, which is blowing in the same bare place for the listener who listens in the snow and nothing himself beholds nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. The listener in the snow who beholds nothing that is not there. All the phenomena we can see here and the nothing that is. have to develop the mind of winter, the practice in which, in the sound of the wind, in the feeling of the cold, we don't project out, this is miserable, this is wonderful.

[29:11]

It was particularly appropriate in the middle of winter at Pasahara to have that poem, especially in those days when there was no heat. To develop the mind of winter became a bit of a joke, but I... And I happened to jot down, because as I was thinking of this yesterday, I heard a poem that David White was reciting. I was listening to some David White. And TSL, it has a situation of, to reach a kind of simplicity in our life, you know, to practice so that we finally can drop away the The superfluous things that we think we need, that a poet needs or that a practitioner in our lineage might need, is a situation of complete simplicity costing not less than everything. A situation of complete simplicity costing nothing less than everything. Now,

[30:17]

It seems, you know, by reading especially the Zen literature, that the question of how to practice with a kind of dual vision, that is to see the co-arising of everything, the emptiness of things in the sense that they are free of our descriptions of them. That we are absolutely separate at the same time. That I can't be you, you cannot be me. And yet without you, there's not a me and so forth. And to see that at the same time, to try to see the picture of the two faces in the wine goblet, the space between the which turns into that equivocal space where you see the two faces. To see those two things at the same time is almost impossible. But the practice, it seems, that we have to do is to develop a kind of dual vision at the moment that these things are arising and that we feel the mind going out and grasping the world in concept, trying to hold on to some secure place in the karmic flow of things.

[31:29]

that we have to remind us to remember this mind of winter and take a breath at that moment, just wait. This is what is arising, this is what is happening, but feel yourself contracting. We talked yesterday, we could feel when anger comes up, this sense of, I call it the sense of contraction. You can feel everything going, just densifying, becoming very sensitive to that physicality of experience. that our practice is to be very much in tune with our bodies and our minds so that as soon as we feel ourselves projecting an idea onto phenomena, onto other people, onto places and things, and then reacting to the force of that experience in some positive or negative way, reifying it, substantiating it, that we become really hip to the fact that we're doing that. in the midst of it. And we can't usually do that without lots of practice. And even with lots of practice, we can't do it very well.

[32:32]

I'm trying to remember that story that... I wrote it down here somewhere. Oh, yeah. I think it's case 32 of the Blue Cliff record. No, of the... Shoku Roku, the Book of Serenity. Guishan asked Yangshan, if someone suddenly said, all sentient beings have active consciousness, boundless and unclear, with no fundamental to rely on, how would you prove this inexperience? If someone suddenly said to you, all sentient beings have active consciousness, boundless and unclear, with no fundamental to rely on, how would you prove that in experience? Yangshan said, if a monk comes, I say, hey, you!

[33:37]

And if he turns his head, or her head, I say, what is it? And if they hesitate, I say, not only is their active consciousness boundless and unclear, They have no, no fundamental to rely on. So we have nothing but conscious, karmic consciousness. That's really all we have to work with. We have to realize that fact. It's not that karmic consciousness itself is so-called Buddha mind, but we have to realize that karmic consciousness and the descriptions of the world and our predispositions with which we seemingly have come into the world as our physical propensities to think and feel in a certain way, where somebody said to come out of the world as we're born, to work with that and to see that language itself is a karmic activity. And then not to get stuck by it.

[34:42]

And then there's another from the Flower Ornament Sutra, the fundamental affliction of ignorance itself is the immutable knowledge of the Buddhas. The fundamental affliction of ignorance itself is the immutable knowledge of the Buddhas to become hip, to become aware, to become knowledgeable about how we really act in terms of our karmic reactivity is to become familiar with with the Buddha Dharma. The last one? I can't remember the whole, I can only remember that, I can't remember the whole case, but the monk asked, don't you remember that in the Avatamsaka Sutra they say the fundamental affliction of ignorance itself is the immutable knowledge of all the Buddhas? the unchanging knowledge about the Ambulance, the fundamental affliction of ignorance.

[35:46]

I don't know what a single thing is or how it came to be, except as you describe it to me, and that's only partial. There's such a thing as ignorance thinking you understand what the world is, and there's such a thing as called divine ignorance realizing you don't know what a damn thing is, ultimately. Those are not the same kind of ignorance. When we finally admit we do not know, we say that is the most intimate place that we begin to work from. I don't know. It's different from just shrugging off, I don't know. I don't care to know. I don't want to know. Don't ask me. It's not the same thing. You know, I'm running a lot of things together here. I just wrote down... As it occurred to me, you know, how are we going to talk about the Protestant Pyramid? How are we going to talk about, as I say, we can go over this sentence by sentence and discuss it, and I think we'll open this up in a minute, but I just wanted to throw out a few things to stimulate some conversation.

[36:54]

And maybe I have a few more notes that I wrote to myself that I could share with you. Oh, yeah. It's not so much that the separate self-sense and the sense of others and so on is delusion. That's an illusion. What is delusion is to take that illusion for truth, for the absolute. That's the delusion. People think, well, there is no other, there is no self. No, that's not what we understand. The teachings are saying there is self and other. We understand it conventionally and they come up together. When the world is created, you're created. When you're not here, where's the world? But to take any aspect of that as something absolute, that is the delusion. Oh yeah, and then the question of merit.

[38:02]

I wanted to get back to that. In Indian philosophy, in the early Indian view of things, there had to be a path, there had to be a way and a method that was very, very important, and that by virtue of studying one's life, And by virtue of the fact that one realized that all of that which comes up in one's phenomenal existence certainly could not have simply arisen, I feel, out of what, quote, is called one lifetime or one span, it followed that if you're going to be here forever, lifetime after lifetime, and that this is a world of suffering, then whatever way that you can kind of grow through this process of suffering is to accumulate merits, a little bit like accumulating green stamps.

[39:07]

When you get enough of them, you can hand them in and you can reach nirvana. You can have a place where you're not going to come back and you're not going to suffer in this particular dimension anymore. So the idea of accumulating merit by doing good works It was very big in the Indian tradition and it was carried over into the Buddhist canon. In the Prajnaparamita literature, the merit that is accumulated, as we know from the beginning of Bodhidharma now, is not the kind of merit necessarily so much. It's fine to do good deeds. It's not to build monasteries and train monks and do good works, follow the precepts. But the merit that is accumulated is the merit of realizing that there is nothing intrinsic in the world that is and to pass on to others, to awaken others to the fact that their suffering arises or is derived from their clinging to some aspect of substantiating concepts.

[40:14]

of right and wrong, good and bad, by dividing the world up in such a way. And to throw light onto that particular response that we have developed through evolution of dividing the world and to become aware of how we do that. and to share that with other people, to examine that together, to study that together. There's merit in that, in that it frees us. The whole point of all of this teaching is soteriological in the sense that it's to free us from suffering. What's the good of studying all of this if there isn't some aspect of salvation? We call it salvation in Christianity, but we call it enlightenment or freedom in the Buddhist tradition from suffering. So the merit comes not so much from doing good works. When Emperor Wu talked to Bodhidharma, he said, I've set up all these monasteries and I've had teachers ordained and so on.

[41:23]

What merit is in there? And Bodhidharma said, no merit. And he was taken aback by that because that was the way people did things. I would accumulate merit and the next lifetime I'd get a little better birth. And each lifetime I'd get closer to the opportunity to become a Buddha. But the aspect of the bodhisattva teaching, you know, was not that we had to become bodhisattvas first to become Buddhas or not even that we have Buddha nature but that we already are Buddha. That was an enormous change. Enormous jump in the teaching. something that we can attain, that there's a self that's going to attain it in some other lifetime. But if we wake up to the fact that right now, what is this, Dan? What is this arising right now? What is this? Is it going to be something different from this in some other lifetime? What are we waiting for? You know, this is the gravy train. Get on it. You can't get off it anyway. Christ, you will. So you might as well make the best of it.

[42:26]

But again, again, you know, here are words. These are, you know, some vibrations are going out here. You know, you hear these vibrations, you respond to them, you write them down, you put them. But remember, this is just a story, another story we're telling each other. It's a good story. It's a beautiful story. It has no absolute substance whatsoever. The wondrous part is that we get together to talk about it. Put on robes and do that. That's the wondrous aspect. And here we are on a rainy day talking about this instead of figuring out how to get one up on somebody else. We are after all called unsui, aren't we? Monks are unsui, clouds and water. So that's a good day to see that. All the water gets sucked up into the heavens and then it flows down over the world. Clouds we just float and dissipate and like water we flow through the world and then even if that water that gets trapped in the You know the back reaches and doesn't reach the ocean.

[43:36]

That's where the lotuses grow now that mud so We are unsweet Cloud water people you can't get hold of it. It just flows consciousness just flows. I Well, I've managed now to get by 15 minutes by flapping my lips, so we have another 40 for some discussion that might be possible around this. And as we have the discussion, let's also be sensitive to the teaching that it is just a discussion. Anybody have any questions? We could even go back to yesterday's topic if you want, but anything that you want to bring up about the Prajnaparamita literature? Yes, Fred. Just a basic question. What is the seven gifts referred to? Well, the seven precious jewels, I think they're talking about, isn't that?

[44:40]

There's gold, silver, agates, cornelia, lapis... Rubies, I think, is another one. Gold, silver, lapis lazuli, coral, gems, and pearls. Pearls. But maybe it's the seven ages of human beings. How about that? That's a good one. Shakespeare's seven ages. Yes. Well, the first age is what? The infant that pukes in its, you know, first year, the infant mewing and puking in the nurse's arms, right? Huh? And then, what is it? It's the schoolboy that unwillingly with his satchel goes off like snail to school. And then the lover, huh?

[45:42]

Like a furnace, sign like a furnace, writing an ode to his mistress's eyebrow. I like that. And then the soldier, you know, full of something and seeking the bubble reputation even in the cannon's mouth. And then the wise old judge, you know, full of wise saws, he says, you know, and so forth. And then the older person, you know, no longer fills out his pantaloons. And with childish treble. I actually believe that the content of this heard that it doesn't matter what the body is, that enlightenment is not dependent on a particular thought, a particular .

[46:45]

But I still believe that it's more helpful to be here, listening to you, than listening to another story. It's more helpful, potentially, for me to be able to see that the story is . Are you saying that one story we tell each, one story is more important than another story? Well, conventionally that's true. Absolutely, it would be hard to make a case for that, but in the conventional sense, which is the sense in which we live in society with one another, I would agree with you, but it's a matter of preference. It's a matter of what feels right for you to overcome something that you feel is a problem and you go to somebody else and something arises to help you with the problem.

[47:48]

That seems natural. That's when it has some content to it. So yeah, I think this is, I would rather be doing this right now than I think, than somebody else that might simply keep spinning my wheels in Sanskrit, in samsara, so to speak. But I don't know that that is different from what we're talking about. I think what we're talking about is that there is, in the conventional world, a self, an other, and a way of doing gradations of values, value systems. As long as we see that, that's just what they are. But what's more important is to see that again. Yeah, at the same time. if we can see it at the same time that they're empty. That way we can really deal with the world without trying to hang on. That way we can take care of the environment, we can take care of one another without expecting, without expectation.

[48:49]

Maybe it's harmful if the story is really interesting. You know, that's the other side of that. If it's a really interesting story, like Buddha, then maybe it's here to let go of, or it's more likely that. It's more likely that if it feels good, we'll hang on to it. Well, that's right. If something feels good, we pull it in. If we don't like it, we push it away, right? Yeah, well, that is tricky. It's a tricky business we're dealing with. Very slippery. I'm chewing on something which is very tricky too. While you were talking I saw these beautiful trees and I was thinking again, these trees, I thought they are so much themselves, they are just a tree. I mean, we know whether that is true or not, but... So, just thinking they are just a tree, they are,

[49:53]

the way they are. There seems to be no question they are, there was one word in my mind, they're so natural. And then, listening to what we were talking about, it doesn't, it feels like, are we natural? Sometimes it seems to be so difficult to just believe. So, are we natural? Is it natural the way we are? Or why are we the way we are? It seems like there's a difference between us as humans and that tree. Or isn't there a difference? Are we the same? Are we all natural? There's something for me I'm chewing on it, and again and again I encounter that question. Does that make sense for anyone? Yeah, of course. It makes sense. Well, we have consciousness. I mean, at some point in evolution, right, there was the division that took place in consciousness between self and other, the kind of vijnana.

[51:04]

Vijnana means division, two things happening. And the early teachings divided the kind of primordial All the functions of consciousness in the primordial sense was called citta. And then there was the sense of separation at some point. Nobody actually can know when, but at some point there's a sense of unconsciousness of self and other, particularly human evolution. And that division, which we call manas, actually, in tradition, and then projecting an object, there's a kind of gap there in consciousness. So that sense of not quite being at home in a world that we have divided is what's called the human dilemma.

[52:06]

It's a feeling of dis-ease, that's basic suffering actually, dissatisfaction, stress, anxiety, call it what you will. I don't know what a tree feels. We don't know what trees feel. They don't apparently have consciousness in the same sense that we do. And they seem natural. But it is natural that we have, as for human beings, that we have this sense of dis-ease. That's a natural part of our phenomena, I think. And to have to deal with that is to be a human being. But we have to accept that. What we try to do is get through our disease and either ignore it or our unease and ignore it and find some way of hiding from it through the senses. through trying to delight the senses in some way, trying to fulfill, self-fulfilling, to fulfill ourselves in some way, until we finally just give up the sense of self-fulfillment in that sense, in the way of gratifying our senses, whether it's intellectual or sensual.

[53:21]

Take a deep breath, let it out, sit down and look at a wall. and finally go, what is this dissatisfaction? What is this anxiety I am feeling? Look at the trees. Flowers in the field they reap not, neither do they sow, yet your father feedeth them. How come that happens and I don't feel that way? So that is the motive which has brought us to this place in time to try to understand that. That's natural in human development. That's the Buddha. That's the bodhicitta. That's the start of the desire to understand, to get to the bottom, the root of our stress, our anxieties. Martha. I think. I mean, this is my explanation. I hear myself up here waxing this way, but you know, I don't know any more than you do. I mean, this is just... Martha. It's so interesting for me at this point in my life, in practice, because I'm finding that there's a kind of discouragement

[54:31]

And I can feel it when I listen to you, that sort of edge of meaninglessness of meaning. And I read a book over the holidays called The Gifts of the Jews, Pride of No Mass That Changed the Way People Think. And there's this extraordinary description of Abraham going into the desert and hearing the voice of God. And there's centuries of them hearing the voice of God. And I thought, yes, I'll read the book. I want to hear the voice of God. And I'm almost afraid to read the next book by this man, which is about Jesus. There's that longing, you know, somewhere for something that isn't empty of all existence. And yet I also feel, as we talk, that sort of same yes. So it's such an interesting internal... Yeah. Same for me. I've been reading about Frusa of Aquila, and she has this relationship with God that is just, you know, amazing.

[55:43]

And I wonder, you know, I've been wondering about this emotional flatness that comes from me, from looking at edging up to emptiness. And then I thought, maybe It's how many aspects of equanimity. Maybe it isn't flat. Maybe it's got potential. It's got to be equanimity and not just air it. But it's really tough. You don't want to jump in there with those passionate, I know it's empty. I know it's empty, but I think I'm just going to go back to my roots here. And yet, as Norman says, the same thing is as well. It is the greatest expression of love. I wish Brother David was sitting here right now. I really, I mean, I think your question, you know, there's a couple things that come up in my mind when I hear that.

[57:02]

One is that, yes, in this practice that we have, in a sense, imported as Christians and Jews, that we reach a place where we've been conditioned, willy-nilly, whether we believed in it or not, traditionally in our families, about the ecstatic tradition of being fulfilled and to sound like Rumi for a change in our life, to realize that the world is the gift of God and that we as human beings have the responsibility of living in the sight of God and having dominion over all things and so forth. And I don't know that we've really come to grips with our psychological reality as Christians and Jews, for the most part, and the Buddha Dharma. And I think at some point in our practice, we're turned on in the beginning by it, but at some point it flattens out for us. is because we're not getting something out of it in the way we'd hoped to, in the way that people in our, maybe in our past, in our family seem to get from the traditional religions that we avoided, or at least many of us did.

[58:14]

But also in practice, And there does come a point where, I don't mean the honeymoon period, that ends fairly early, but I mean that you go through this kind of increments of inspiration and plateaus, and there comes a place where it just seems to be flat. There's not much new, nothing that, you know, you've read it, you've heard it, you know it, but the same stuff keeps coming up. How do I, so I go and sit. And I remember what Trungpa Rinpoche said about that. He said, not until we really experience boredom and disappointment in our practice do we really begin to practice at some point. I wonder if other people who have read the same book and haven't been practicing in another book tradition for a long time were able to feel that same, yes, Martha felt, you know, at hearing the proposal. That's wonderful if you, yeah, I mean, do study it and do read the next book and do become a good Christian, too.

[59:22]

I don't think there would, you would become Christians in some sense, I think, you know. It's a follow-up book, I think. The book is called One God Platonic. It's a biography written by Rabbi Lute. He, of course, he's practiced it. It's a hard work. He went to Norbert and immersed himself in Zen Buddhism. And then found Judaism again and went to a medical school in New York City and is now the rabbi of New York. but he talks about those two things. The extraordinary foundations laid for him to actually reconnect with God. He still holds them both. It's been a good anecdote. Yeah. Yeah, I've come full circle with this issue about... But 16 years ago, I was sitting with a group. I helped start a group. It was a meditation group in Methodist church. And then we started reading Buddhist books.

[60:24]

And I took off and became a Zen Buddhist. ditched them, so to speak. But they kept praying for me. And I still have the ties with that church. And my husband keeps going to that church. And I decided that I wanted to go back. I go back to this small group. I pray with five women every Wednesday afternoon. And it's a weird experience, and it's good. I don't take communion. That feels, it's not for me. But it's interesting that I've gone back, but after a very long absence. Well, one of the things that, you know... I realized it was that, you know, I came up in a family that was kind of divided there between Protestants and Catholics.

[61:30]

And so the women went to church, Catholic women went to church. The husbands were kind of agnostics, stay home, played cards, watched ballgames and so on. And I used to feel that going to church was a kind of way of just gaining consolation, because life is painful. And there was a place where you could socialize, gain some consolation and so forth. But I couldn't gain much consolation from Christianity when I tried to practice it. And what I liked about going into Buddhism is that from the beginning I dropped any idea. of gaining some kind of consolation for my life out of it. I was willing finally to give up some consoling aspect of being. But I realize now that, at least as I was talking this morning, kind of the ecstatic sense of being here, now that there is a consolation in that, of always being here. And I don't feel like the Indian mind felt that the world is a terrible place and I want to get out of it. That's probably, even though it is a terrible place, and gosh knows we all go through the hell realms in the world, still, it is very much endemic to the Eastern mind, particularly in the subcontinent, that the world was, you know, with their immense suffering over the millennia that they had suffered, even by Buddhists, that the world was a place that we wanted to get out of.

[62:50]

But to find out that the world that I want to get out of is the very world that I'm in, and that that very world is also heaven, you know, Heaven and Earth are the same place. Nirvana and Samsara become co-extensive. Not only was it kind of consoling, but when I really experienced that in some sense in myself, I felt that I was at home at last. And that didn't matter what I called it, Christian or Jew or Buddhist. I was at home in this world, in this body, in this time. And I could be just myself, the crabby old guy that I am. It was just fine. We all have our own differences. So whatever brings us to that place, I think, and brings us into a place where we have some kind of loving heart, open heart to the world, that's what we want. Isn't it? I mean, it doesn't matter how much I understand intellectually about this stuff. By loving heart, I mean an accepting heart that accepts things as they are. And accepting things as they are, there's things they can't accept.

[63:51]

That's as they are. That's also as it is. I feel that way when I read poetry sometimes. When I'm really moved by a deep poem, like I was with Wallace Stevens when I first heard it, it just knocks me over. It's like language, although it is a convention. It is the most wonderful convention that we've come up with as human beings. To give, as Shakespeare says, to airy nothingness a local habitation and a name. Just that phrase alone. Wow! Somebody said it that way. What a wonderful way to say it. To give the airy nothingness a local habitation and a name. I mean, my heart goes. We all feel that. Sign me up. Yeah, sign me up. The price we pay for applying a name is this bondage to value. That's right. At the same time. At the same time. Yeah, that's right. And that area nothing is just another name. But it points to something that we all know in our heart.

[64:55]

But you can't finally put it into words. Poets come closest, don't they? Poets come closest. Oh, painters too. Yes. Art, art, art, art, art. Art and religion. I once asked Mel, I said to Mel, I said, you know, I love art. Art has always been kind of my religion in life. He said, well, it's very helpful. You feel kind of a spiritual dimension with it. But everyone noticed artists can't take care of themselves at all. He knew because he was an artist at that time, at one time. So they had to practice. I don't know if that's true, but at the time it seemed true. I didn't think about that one. But the point is we can't think of ourselves as just artists or just Buddhists. And so that's what we're trying to, don't get stuck in being an artist or being a Buddhist. Those are functions that, somebody had their hand up, yes. Sway. Thinking about the feeling, this feeling that arises in me when I practice jihadi and then often the physical feeling that arises in me sitting and trying to figure out if there's, you know, knowing

[66:06]

Trying to figure out if there's a difference between the feeling of deep love and the feeling of abiding in emptiness. And of course, everyone has a different definition of what love is, and I'm not really talking about romantic love or self-cleaning love or the love of God. Is there really any difference? Well, if anything can take away that love, then there's a difference. If that love is just consciousness itself, is love, the world is nothing but love, everything that arises is the divine event, and that divine event cannot be pinned down, then what's the difference? I don't see it. Yes, sir. It reminds me of the koan I'm so fond of, but I can't remember the exact words, you probably can, but the punchline is, every day is a good day, no matter what sequence.

[67:09]

Is that Yunmin? I think it's Yunmin. Don't call it the... Somebody else can probably remember the preamble, but that's the punchline. Yeah, every day is a good day. But, and we have to be careful of getting stuck in good versus bad day. Well, those are the chicken questions. What happens if your friend is shut down? Is there a good day? I'd like to ask Fu and Michael Friedman from yesterday's story that Fu gave about the slapping, and that the angry person slapped the flower person the second time, and then Michael said, oh, so the flower person had a lot of control.

[68:16]

Was it control? Where was it? I forget what it was. I think he used the word egress. So my question in regard to this is, did the angry person, was there a change? Unless this is the one who died. Was the one who died. So you really don't know? I imagine he died of anger. But that's my imagination. And what about the flower person? How was that? I imagine he's computer programming. He sat down and spoke. I just saw this, right?

[69:18]

I just saw something and I interpreted it. I never asked either of them their experience of it. Or maybe I did and I don't remember because what I remember is my take on it and what I interpreted. Well, the question comes from if she had the opportunity to see the two parties involved in this through time, Did the experience have any lasting effect, or was it gone? On them or on who? All three parties. Could she observe, was there any time, was there another practice period, another year, another five years, to see if that dramatic of experience, whether it's a story or not, changed? The anger and the sweetness. Just to clarify, these are students here, is that?

[70:19]

It was Tassajara. Jamesburg, actually. Somebody smacked somebody at Tassajara? Oh, okay. Separate. You know what else they're doing, right? Yeah. I don't know. It's just a story, but it's not as dramatic. But there's the story of, you know, the guy chasing the six-page arc, right? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Where it turns also, you know, and this guy was like a general or something. He's come to take the ball. Get in the rope. And the six-page arc is like, do what you want. And it totally changes the guy's response. He couldn't pick up the rope, right? He couldn't do it. He couldn't lift the rope. And he asked him a question at that moment. What's that question he asked? The sixth patriarch asked. He said, without thinking good or evil.

[71:22]

Without thinking good or evil. What's your original face? What's your original face? At that moment, without thinking good or evil. It's like, stand in the corner and don't think of a white bear. Without thinking, without thinking. Without thinking? How am I going to do that? I purposely didn't bring in any of the koans or anything. There's several koans that deal with the material, the Diamond Cutter Sutra that we're reading, but I think Norman is going to take those up. So I want to avoid bringing those into my discussion. I had something else I wanted to say, but I think I forgot what it is. Yeah. How did the tradition of picking out a passage at random and reading it and chanting it in unison, you know, I mean, with everyone chanting a different page, is that an old tradition?

[72:33]

Yeah. I don't know here. I think they're trying to make it up. I mean, I think in Japan, what I've heard is that they do this kind of thing with the sutra books. Uh-huh. Like they're... Pages are attached to each other. So they turn the sutras, like they read them all in a sense by going like this. Exposing them. Yeah, I think somebody decided that reading The Diamonds Who Drove Randomly was kind of like that, and we started doing it so it was as in a tradition. Oh, cool. And then I heard later that that was just us, and so you'd never find that somewhere else, but we kind of like it. Yeah, it reminded me of Glenn Gould's idea of North, which is a thing that he did that was this contrapuntal conversation, making it like music. You know, but all these different things that he recorded and that's what it reminded me of. It's really... If you visit a Tibetan monastery, I did in Nepal, they do that once a week.

[73:38]

It's usually the private party and they're all... You can't forget them. The bells ring occasionally and they stop and they start up again. It is in that version. So do you have it on a timer? How do you determine when to stop? The dawn. The dawn has a timer? The dawn looks at the evening. It says, I'm going to go to bed. So anyway, to look at the world as a description, as explanation, as more description and more explanation, and then to see that those explanations and descriptions are just that. Except they're not just that, because they don't come without being loaded with emotional content, descriptions and explanations and discussion. But for me, once again, I just wanted to reiterate that the realization that language is a conventional designation, and that from the beginning, since the time before we can remember, the world has been a description to us, something told to us.

[74:51]

that those people that, although two people, I'm told that cognitive scientists say that if two individuals were to be raised somehow without any other language, they would develop their own language, but one would not. They would find a way to communicate and would develop a sound system of designations, conventional designations by which to, according to the circumstances and conditions in which they're raised. I do remember an article published several years ago in the New Yorker about somebody who had been blind. Remember that one? Very interesting, and how that person, at the behest of his wife, I believe, it was found out that he could get his sight back, but he had spent, he had apparently seen before the commission of designations, before language had become formed in in his mind uh and the world uh he became blind and he functioned very well as a masseur and uh married and had you know loved sports to listen to sports and so on so he understood language and so on but once he got his sight back he could not correlate at all the words with what was going on he'd walk into a restaurant and bump into i mean he could not

[76:12]

He could not, unless he shut his eyes, manipulate in the world, turn on the TV set of the football game, he could not understand what that was at all. Could not see it. Could not put the concepts together with the sounds. Would have to shut his eyes and just listen to it. I think eventually he died. In fact, it was a very tragic kind of situation. He just kind of went off his top. Yeah. Which is interesting because we think there is a ready-made world, you see, of the five skandhas, you know, that all we have to do is, there it is for us, and all we need to do is plug in. But in fact, it is a co-arising event. When this arises, that arises. When the world arises, language arises, then the world would begin to make sense of it. I did want to say one thing yesterday vis-à-vis the discussion about... anger and so on. It was interesting before Jonas Salk died, he said that You know, he said that the limbic system, the flight or fight response in us no longer serves us very well.

[77:22]

It served us very well, the anger and so on that we felt and the fear that came up in the face of, you know, animals that were predators, that we were a good meal for predators and so on. But, of course, some of that has been transposed into our aggression in the business world and the world of competition to some extent, civilized to some degree. Sports. But the next step in evolution would be wisdom. It was very interesting. He said the next step would be wisdom. I don't remember how he defined wisdom, but it was a knowledge of a more, you know, of an inward turning of understanding the nature of thought and the nature of how we build a world together in common. And that would be the next, that in the process of evolution, that is definitely in the cards. So maybe our coming together here, sitting here, doing this is part of that whole process. I was thinking about that very thing when Mikael was talking about the tree and how it's natural and are we also.

[78:25]

It seems like we've evolved into ever more acutely self-conscious beings. If you look at just Darwinian evolution and you think, well, where is it going to go from here? you hope that it's going to go somewhere that isn't going to just make us more and more and more self-conscious as we evolve. And evolving into wisdom, what a great idea. I hope it's true. But it's not like we maybe evolve, it's that wisdom itself is already evolving. Yes? I just want to say how much I appreciate your talking about language and the social phenomenon of language because I feel like it's not very cautious. Yes. And I would say growing up, I had no idea. Everything was very, you know, the word was the thing. And there's no teaching in our culture that helps us. I just thought of sticks and stones can break my bones. Probably the only teaching.

[79:26]

Right. about language that I forgot. And then I'm thinking also about as we teach the children language, how vivid, how profound it feels for a child to learn a word and how we believe in that. And we wait for that as the ultimate. And this is the human delusion. The name of the game is the game of the name. So we have to remember that. Laminate it. Put it in your wallet and leave it there. But thank you, Emily. Yes, I have the same feeling of that. So we only have about two minutes to go, and maybe we can close with any final question and then put our hands together and do our closing words, verse. Maybe Norman will address this at some point, but until he does, I keep reading the words son and daughter of good family.

[80:28]

What does good family mean? Well, one that obviously helped him to get in touch with the Buddha Dharma. But I don't know that it has any social implications. I don't know the exact translation. Ask Norman that when he comes. That's it. There is footnote to that in one of the translations. You can look up the one that has the Diamond Sutra together with who he means, the Platform Sutra. It's in the library. There's a footnote on that in there. Did Buddha welcome untouchables? Yeah. There was no class distinction. That's one of the reasons that he was considered a heretic. Thank you very much.

[81:15]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_87.27