I'm here, Tassajara, and this is the second time I've visited. The last time was nine or ten years ago, and it wasn't during the so-called guest season. So this is the first time I've been present for one of these evening teachings, both for their resident community and the guests who are here to stay at Tassajara during the summertime. Very glad to be here and to be invited to share some words with you. The spirit in which Buddhist teachings are always given is these are offered for reflection so that even if I might sound like I know exactly what I'm talking about and that you should believe what I'm saying, it's more important that rather than just... looking upon these words as something that you're supposed to believe in or go along with, to just take things in, listen, see if it weighs up with your understanding, with your own experience, and then what is helpful and useful and accords with what you know to be true and real, then take that and use that, and whatever goes against the grain or what doesn't match your own experience, then just to leave that aside.

[01:24]

So that's just a little preface. So I'll start by chanting the homage to the three refugees, to the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. Namo tasa bhagavato arahato samma sambhu tasa Namo tasa bhagavato arahato sama sambhutasa. Namo tasa bhagavato arahato sama sambhutasa. Buddhaṁ dhammaṁ saṅkhaṁ namasāmi. There are many different themes that I could talk about for this evening.

[02:38]

But one approach that came to mind was a particular teaching that there was one of the elder respected teachers in Thailand who passed away a few years ago, Ajahn Buddhadasa. He was very fond of... expanding on this and bringing this up as a significant teaching. And particularly because it was a teaching that the Buddha said actually encapsulated the entire wealth of the teachings that he gave throughout his whole life, through his entire teaching career. And Ajahn Buddha Dasa was a very prominent teacher, very creative, and he particularly liked this because he felt, well, this is the modern age, people don't have much time, they like the abbreviated version, you know, they don't have to kind of muck around, having too much extraneous padding, so he thought this would probably appeal to people in the modern age.

[03:48]

And so he'd say, did you realize that the Buddha said you could summarize the entire teaching in four words? four words. And the four words in Pali are So the Pali scholars amongst you will probably be saying, ah, yes, of course. Right, I'd forgotten that. But for those of us who are not Pali scholars, what this means is rendered most Accurately, it means don't cling to anything. All things should not be clung to. And then the Buddha emphasized this. He said, if one hears this, one has heard everything.

[04:53]

If you understand this, then you understand everything. If you know this, you know everything. If you've practiced this, then you've practiced everything. If you've realized this, then you've realized everything. That's no mean statement. So I thought also for those of you who are old-time Buddhist practitioners and those of you who just happen to be coming to Tasahara for the hot springs and this is what was happening on Wednesday night, you thought, there's a lot of action going on there, I might as well go and check it out. Nothing else going on in the valley tonight, so let's go and listen to that. Hopefully this kind of principle will be accessible and useful to those of all different stripes and experience. So even though the Buddha said this, that this one who has understood this and practiced this, then you've really practiced the entire teaching. You've encompassed the whole. spiritual path to fulfillment then the next thought that comes to mind might well be well that's all very well but how do I identify this quality of clinging and what is it that we're clinging to anyway and how do we let go and so I thought I'd talk a little bit about that also

[06:19]

This evening gathering is fairly short, just 40 minutes or so, so I thought I'd just introduce the subject and then open things up for people to ask questions and for us to explore more as a group and to see what things are unclear or people would like a bit more explanation on. When we talk about clinging, This is often identified as the key source, the root issue in life. It's not that life is bad or that it is intrinsically painful or has got anything wrong with it, but it's our habit of clinging, the way the mind clings to different things internally, externally. That's what creates the quality of disharmony. Those of you who might be familiar with Buddhist teachings might have heard of the Eightfold Path. And often when you see translations of this or renderings of this, these are the eight factors of what the Buddha described as the path to bring about this kind of non-clinging or letting go of clinging, labeled as right view, right intention, right action, right speech, right...

[07:42]

mindfulness and so on. And so that word right that's there for the factors of the path is an interesting word because the original word for it is samma, S-A-M-M-A, samma. And this comes from a musical notation. It's like a musical term that is referring to the quality of harmonization. So when something is samma, it means it's in tune. So Samaditti, right view, is like when our views, when our vision of life is in tune with things, is in tune with reality, when our intentions, when our speech, our action, our livelihood and so on are in tune with reality, then we're on the path. So that the focus of Buddhist teachings then is really learning how to discern that, it's like a musical ear, discerning when you're off pitch or you're off beat or the orchestra's doing one thing and you're three bars behind.

[08:54]

It's like, oh, there's something wrong here, there's a discord here. And so this is what I mean by clinging, is recognizing that the mind is getting caught up in something, it's getting distracted from the fundamental reality of things and that there's our... our hearts, our minds are out of accord with nature, with the patterns of all things. So in our lives we find that there's different dimensions, different things that we can cling to or get caught up in or entangled. And so just to map out the way that these appear in our teachings, just to bring this into the the group mind for reflection. So the first kind of thing that we get caught up in or we cling to is what's called the sense, the world of sense pleasure. So that means just the things that we like to hear and see and smell and taste and touch.

[09:56]

We've all had a beautiful dinner, the food here at Tassajara, you know, even though I'm a renunciate monk, you know. It's not supposed to be entangled in sense pleasures. One can't help noticing that when you put the tasahara food in your mouth, there's certain extremely pleasurable experiences are discerned. This is extremely fine, delicious, and lovingly prepared food. So that clinging to the pleasure of the sense world, it's not that we deny the fact that there are pleasant things. put some Tassajara bread and soup in your mouth, something goes, ah. So it's not the Buddhist path and certainly my experience of it and how I understand it. It's not about trying to not experience pleasure or think that somehow pleasure is evil and is out to sort of trick us and carry us off into a deluded state. But it's where the mind gets stuck, gets caught on that, where...

[10:59]

you're so entranced by the beauty of the soup of Tassajara that then you get obsessed with trying to recreate exactly the same taste, exactly the same effect. And by attaching to that one beautiful experience, you then create endless anxiety, like my soup is just not as good, you know. I just can't get it right, and I'm such a failure. What will they think of me, you know, the mysterious they... that their entire livelihood is spent judging our activities. I don't know about you, but I've never actually met them. They hide very carefully, but they're always there judging. So when we talk about the clinging to the sense world, or sense pleasure. It's that, the way the mind latches onto an experience, even a very pleasant and beautiful, innocent experience, like a mouthful of soup, and then turns it into a problem. I've got to have, you know, how many of us have had that experience where you, even when it's something that you've created yourself, and it's so good, and not just with cooking, it might be a book that you've written, or a picture you've painted, or

[12:15]

Or even just a walk in the park that you're making with a friend. Oh, this is so incredible. This is so great. I've got to tell someone. I've got to call someone. I've got to write a poem. I've got to, I've got to, I've got to, I've got to. And isn't it weird that somehow we just can't really enjoy even the simple beauties of life sometimes. That beautiful autumn leaf or that sunset, the mind is so... It can get so jittery about how marvelous it is. that we get lost. And this is a mysterious thing. So speaking about letting go of clinging to the sense world, it's like learning to, as William Blake put it, to kiss the joy as it flies. Let's see. He that binds himself to a joy doth the winged life destroy him. He that kisses a joy as it flies lives in eternity's sunrise.

[13:20]

You can tweak the language for gender bias. You can rewrite it a little bit, but that was the way it was written. So when we kiss the joy as it flies, when we're able to experience the world of our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, our body... and to not be entangled in that, to live without clinging to that. Then, as William Blake put it, we live in eternity's sunrise, a very beautiful, evocative phrase. There is that timeless delight, so that when you're there enjoying the sunset, actually, because you're down in a valley here like we are at Abayagiri, so sunsets don't really happen. You go and see little patches of color in the clouds once in a while, but... The valley is so steep that you don't get that long-lingering sunset kind of sunrise effects. But it's really that quality of being able to fully open the heart to life's qualities.

[14:29]

It doesn't have to be even sweet and beautiful things, but also just life's ordinarinesses and just the presence of this moment, even something that's painful or difficult. That when we... are able to be simply open to that and not complicating it with our habits of, I gotta have more, I gotta get away from, but there's a simple open-hearted apprehension, an apprehending of the moment, then there is that timeless beauty that Blake is talking about. So the next kind of clinging that is pegged out, in the teachings is what you can call clinging to views and opinions. This is the I'm right thing. One of the most striking things about the mind and the world of thinking is that there's this bizarre habit that we have that if we think something, we believe it's true.

[15:38]

And if other people think differently, they might be nice people, but they're wrong. When you spell it out, it seems a bit ridiculous, especially when you consider that our thoughts change. And I remember years and years ago when I first showed up at the monastery in Thailand, and I'd never, this was in the late 70s, and I'd never practiced meditation before. And I noticed that when... when I was talking with monks and novices at this monastery, they had these, as people do, they get this sort of local jargon. For sure it happens here at Tassahara, and they have their own little vernacular. Like when they were handing out the work this morning, I couldn't tell the difference between the name of the officer and the name of the work. Is that a person, or is that a job, or is that a... Who's doing what? So I noticed that they kept talking about views and opinions in this monastery, and... I'm like, what are you talking about, views and opinions? Or saying, that's just a view, that's just an opinion. I think, what are you talking about?

[16:41]

And then I get into these lengthy discussions, because of course I was trying to straighten them all out, with my profound understanding of life and the universe and everything, being 21 and totally in command of the entire philosophical understanding of the world. I needed to straighten out these deluded Buddhist monastic types. And so we got into these discussions and they'd say, well, that's your opinion. I'd say, no, no, it's not an opinion, it's a fact. And they would say, well, no, you believe it's a fact, but actually it's your own opinion. They'd say, no, no, you don't understand. As far as having to spell it out, no, no, it's not an opinion. This is true, this is a fact. And they would give me this long-suffering and this understanding look, yeah. And after a few weeks, I began to get the drift of what they were talking about because I realized that something that I had vehemently asserted to be true six weeks before, I had now changed my outlook.

[17:50]

And also having started to practice meditation, I could see that the thinking mind was extraordinarily fickle and it wouldn't sit still for three seconds. And so something that I thought was true six weeks ago, I now thought something else was true. And so the chain of logic was inexorable. Well, if I'm now thinking that this is true, then perhaps in another six weeks I will see that this is, ah, right. This is not so dependable. And it dawned on me that my entire life I just had that assumption that if I think it, it's true. I've noticed that in the Bay Area now, you actually see bumper stickers that have little statements like, just because you think it doesn't mean it's true. So the inside is spreading. But the reason why, just as with clinging to the pleasure of the sense world and the beauty of what we see and hear and smell and taste and touch, is...

[18:59]

distorted or is covered over by that habit of grasping, clinging. So similarly, it's not as though if you're trying to practice Buddhism or to be a good spiritual person, you shouldn't have any opinions. But it's to recognize that these are opinions and that this is the particular way that we see things. Or other people, if they say something that goes against them, what we feel to be true, we don't have to start a fight with them, but we can recognize, yeah, that's what she thinks. She's probably deranged, but that's what she thinks. That's her opinion. And so the way that we hold those and handle those is in a much lighter and circumspect way. So that you're not... in a sense trying to map out the world simply in some sort of conceptual form but not clinging to opinions is also a way of opening ourselves up more to the mystery of life.

[20:06]

And if you notice that what we tend to do with both our views and opinions and also our sense of control is that we narrow our view of the world to the little patch that we are actually in charge of. The illusion of control is maximized. And we don't look at the rest of the things that are not under our control, that we don't understand, and we have no sense of how they work. And because we like to have a feeling of, I know what's going on, I know who I am, I know where I'm going, I understand the game, I'm totally in charge here. Which is fine, you know, if you're trying to do surgery on someone, or you're running a corporation, or running Tassajara, or just looking after the work scene in Tassajara. there's a certain value in staying focused and sticking on your task. But also it's important to recognize that when we cling to that sense of control, that sense of understanding, that I've got the map, I know where we're going, I've got everything figured here, that when things are not under our control or we don't understand or things don't fit our opinions or our views, then

[21:20]

if we are able to let go of that habit of clinging to that, then we're not totally thrown off balance by that. We're able to live with mystery. We're able to live with not knowing. We're able to live with not being in control. All of us have probably had that experience of just, say, following the instructions of doing the right thing and then not knowing... why you've ended up where you are. I don't know how it is at Tassajara, but where we live, the area, Redwood Valley, is not very well mapped on the GPS programs. So there's a farmer who lives about four miles away, and the people who are following their GPS to go to 16201 Tonkai Road keep getting directed onto his farm. It's four or five miles away, and he's getting a bit fed up. But people are diligently following their maps and pursuing the instructions, and getting sent to the wrong destination.

[22:21]

It's like, how do we end up here? I did all the right things. This must be the monastery. He said, no, it's not the monastery. Turn around, go back. I'm not just being difficult. This is my farm. Go out onto East Road, go north, Tomkai Road, four miles, you'll get to the monastery. So this is a really helpful way to see things in a way to look at our own thoughts and our own attitudes and beliefs, because as we age or as we are subject to illness, then things naturally come about where we can't think so straight, where it's not just a matter of people having other opinions, but we lose our faculties. We can't hear so well, we can't move so well, the memory starts to crumple and People's names disappear on you. Even your own name, eventually, can disappear on us.

[23:23]

And so the more that we've learned how not to cling to views and opinions, to thought and the sense of control, the more that we're prepared. When those faculties go, we're not adrift because we haven't created that kind of dependency on having a totally predictable and orderly set of thinking faculties. and a worldview that's absolutely accurate and is not going to wobble. So living in Buddhist communities, there's always a certain amount of uncertainty, no pun intended. But also, those of you who've traveled much in foreign countries, or particularly India, our mother India is the most glorious environment for learning lack of control. If you have any need or any wish to develop a perspective on this, or you've got big control issues in your life, I highly recommend go for a long trip to India, and you will be taught.

[24:27]

One of our friends was at the airport. He was leaving Dharamsala and trying to fly back to Delhi, and he went to the airport down in the Kangara Valley. And he got to the desk and he was in really good time. His plane was due to go in a couple of hours. And he got to the desk and said, I'd like to confirm my seat for the two o'clock flight. And he said, and the fellow at the desk said, it is already departed, sir. He said, what? But it's 12 o'clock. It's a two o'clock flight. Yes, sir. It is already departed. No, you don't understand. I'm on the 2 o'clock flight. It's now 12 o'clock. It can't have gone. Oh, yes, sir. It is gone. How could it have gone? He says, your flight was pre-poned, sir. He said, pre-poned? Yes, sir.

[25:28]

You know, pre-poned. Opposite of postponed. So... This is the point where you let go. So you learn a new word, and you learn to let go. And those of us who tried to travel in India or other places, navigating our work life, or our family life, or our married life, or monastic life, we often meet with these indigestibles. encounters, and if we cling to our view, all we'll do is create more suffering. So we say, okay, well, that wasn't what I was expecting, that wasn't what I was planning, but here it is. So then the next kind of clinging is to what we can call clinging to conventions. So that's, let's say, the The protocols that you're used to, technically it means something like clinging to rules and conventions, or rules and rituals, or protocols.

[26:40]

So this would mean something like both religious conventions, like the idea that, say, if you bathe in the river Ganges, this will wash away all your bad karma, or if you write a piece of paper and you write all your... your regrets and bad actions on a piece of paper and burn it on the fire and burn it in a fire on New Year's Eve, you'll be exonerated from those things. That's where it started out from. But it also refers to attaching to the idea of things having value or the right thing. See, it's wonderful for me coming to a place like this. I don't go to Zen Center that much. So all of the protocols, a lot of them, the way things are done here are really different from my monastery. I mean, we still have the same haircut. That's cool. But where you come in the temple and how you bow and what you do with your sitting cloth, I haven't got a clue. I've got a few clues, but they're a little hazy. And so what's absolutely the right thing in my monastery is totally verboten here.

[27:43]

Almost completely verboten to us is absolutely unremarkable here in some various different dimensions. I mean, just like having dinner. Sorry, it's not an outrageous sort of thing, but in Theravada monasteries, there's no food consumed between midday and dawn of the next day, so no dinner. So that idea that we attach to right and wrong to the conventions that we have. Our teacher, Ajahn Chah, would often use the example of money. He'd say, you know, in the old days they used to use gold and silver to be tokens of exchange. And now they would say this is worth so much, this is worth this amount, this is worth that amount. He says nowadays people use money, paper money. But he says this is all just a human agreement. There's actually nothing there. It's just people making promises to each other. And he said, actually, if we wanted to, we could make chicken shit, the currency, you know.

[28:47]

so that then people would be fighting to accumulate as much chicken shit as they could, and they'd be arguing over chicken shit, and who's got the biggest pile? And there's no reason why we shouldn't do that, because why get so excited out of little rectangles of paper with green print on them? You know, one says, you know, one, the ones are kind of ordinary, not very exciting. The ones with one, zero, zero, zero, got these different shapes on, and people get very excited about those. And then if you've got five zeros on, then they get really excited. It's just pieces of paper with ink on, you know. But we just agree to say this is worth, you can buy a, you know, a chapati or a bowl of rice with this one, and you could buy a Mercedes with this one. You know, it's just our agreements. So seeing that the conventions that we have are our own fabrications. It's not that we cast out all conventions. We have a women's bathroom, men's bathroom.

[29:52]

I wouldn't walk into the women's bathroom and say, I'm beyond conventions. I'm letting go of clinging to all conventions. And they say, well, you can do what you like, but you're not going to do it in here. because it would be a wrong understanding. It's not defying conventions, but learning to not be seeing them as absolute realities. And then the last of the things that we cling to is that of the feeling of self, what's called atavad upadana, that I, me, and mine cling to the I am, I do, I want, I think, I have, I don't have, I should, I shouldn't. All of the many areas of our life are the I, me, mine, that clusters around our thoughts, our feelings, our possessions, our work, our life. And that the more dense and absolute that feeling of I is, in exact proportion will we experience that same kind of discord, disharmony, and dislocation from each other.

[30:56]

And so, just to finish on that note, Ajahn Buddha Dasa, after he would discourse for many years on this, saying you could summarize the Buddha's teaching into these four words, you know, don't cling to anything. In the last couple of years of his life, he said, I've got it down to three words. So I've managed to boil it down. You can take the whole Buddha's teaching and bring it down to three words. Don't be selfish. So that... that is the most subtle, but also in a way that the deepest, the one that brings the deepest and most profound rewards when we learn to let go of self-concern and self-centered thinking, then that brings a joyfulness and a freedom to us that is really hard to find anywhere else. So I will leave my offering there and open things up for some questions. And predictably, I've gone on a bit longer than I intended, but that's normal.

[32:01]

Yeah, please. How would you differentiate, say, the vows taken as among conventions? Are vows just conventions? Yeah. Are there traditions that you are choosing to accept as right if you will or beneficial to you and your practice? How would you, the question was, how do you relate the vows that you've taken or say taking on monastic precepts to attaching to conventions or clinging to conventions. Well it's like my teacher Ajahn Chah would sometimes he'd be like in a situation like this in a Dharma assembly and he'd say there are no monks here, there are no nuns, there aren't any women, there aren't any men here. These are just conventions that we create. These are just formations in nature. And we create man, we create woman, we create nun, we create monk. These are determinations, things that we determine into existence.

[33:05]

Certainly there's some physical and biological differences that we have between us, but that naming and labeling is what we add on to our experience. So in that respect, he And he would, oftentimes when he said that kind of thing, he said, there are no monastics here. There is really no such thing as Theravada Buddhism. It doesn't really exist. It's just all smoke and mirrors. And certain numbers of the monastic community would go, is he serious? What does he mean? How can he not be taking this seriously? But what he's pointing to is that, yeah, these are just like with money. These are just human agreements. But like money, and like which side of the road you drive on or which bathroom you go to, they have a purpose on a conventional level. They have a value. And so that it's a mysterious and wonderful dance whereby you can both be absolutely 100% sincere in your using of the convention, let's say of spiritual training, like living in a community and training in the priesthood, monastic life.

[34:19]

and yet seeing that there's nothing there. It's all completely empty. These are just patterns in nature coming and going and changing, and there's no solid thing that's absolutely there. One way that Ajahn Chah also put it, and one of our elders said this was the most important teaching he got from Ajahn Chah, who was that, usually the teaching is represented as being composed of two parts, what's called the Dhamma and the Vinaya, or the The Dhamma is the spiritual teachings, the discourses, and the Vinaya is the monastic training, or the precepts, the ethical training. He said, the Vinaya is all about holding on. The Dhamma is all about letting go. When you figure out how both of those work together, you'll be fine. So it is a mysterious balancing act because you have to both be absolutely sincere and take it 100% as a commitment, but also to recognize there is no thing absolutely there.

[35:28]

And to the rational mind that can seem, well, either it is or it isn't. Either it matters or it doesn't. Either it's important that you keep the rules or there are no rules. But in a way, it's like the deepening of the inside of how that works and how we can... It's like having two eyes. It's not just the left eye or the right eye that creates the 3D, but the two working together. And that it's through years of practice. It's like how you can both be wholeheartedly working at your job. And it's not just spiritual training or monastic life. It's just in a marriage, in a job, in living in the world, both taking it absolutely seriously on the one hand, and recognizing that none of this really matters. None of this has any absolute solidity. And both of those being completely true, even though they are paradoxical. I don't know if that's helpful, but it's something that, in a way, is the essence of spiritual training.

[36:32]

And in the Zen tradition, I know it's both a... the mixture of extraordinarily precise forms, the way everything is done, like, you know, you hold your hands together like this, not like this, and you hold them here, not here, or here. There is a way everything is done, but even though in the midst of everything being done just this way, then you have all these teachings about no form, no feeling, no perception, no mental formations, no consciousness, no, you know, all these emptiness teachings. but yet you better get the form right. So to the rational mind, he goes, ah! But when we let go of that, then we find, oh yeah, it's just like riding a bicycle. If you think too hard, you can't do it, but if you don't try at all, you can't do it. There's a way that you just suddenly find, oh, I get it, this is how you do it. It matters, and it doesn't matter. Okay, maybe one more

[37:36]

Yeah, there's a hand there. I'm referring to some of the things you said this afternoon, but I'm wondering if you could say something about bare attention and how we cultivate that practice moment to moment. The question was about the development of bare attention and how we develop that moment to moment. I think my experience is that we have to start out with where we are not barely attentive, where we get caught. And just recognizing that there's that quality of entanglement, or the mind caught up with trying to get somewhere or being preoccupied about the past or something about the future, seeing that we don't just... look at this particular task or this thing, we see our projections about it.

[38:43]

So the first thing is seeing the habits of the mind, of looking at what we like, what we dislike, our habitual judgments, preoccupations. And then the more that we see that and let ourselves really know in a sense, the discomfort or that quality of discord when we're busy getting somewhere, even when we're doing our job and following our duty, or we are engaged in some conversation, waiting for the other person to pause so we can get our next bit in. Whatever it might be, if we notice what we're doing and recognizing, oh, look at that, what does this feel like? The mind being entangled in not liking this, wanting more of that, and caught in this particular opinion, or getting upset because that person's not following the rules. And asking ourselves, what does this feel like? That caught-upness, that entanglement.

[39:48]

What does this feel like? Where is it? How is this felt in the body? How is this sensed? And then just letting that awareness, that recognition, be the thing that causes us to let go. See, yeah, this is really... I know I'm right, but beating somebody over the head with my rightness, this is really uncomfortable. Why do I want to do this to myself and to them? And the more that we develop that, the more it becomes like a natural response, so we don't have to think it through. It's just the way that we... We are accustomed. We become accustomed to relating to things in that way. And then in particular, when we let go, one of the most important things is when you notice how uncomfortable it is to be in a state of clinging, and then when we let go. Just like right now, if you just let yourself, let your body relax and just settle. How nice it is to let go.

[40:56]

Oh, right. Just a little out breath, just letting the body settle in the chair. Just noticing how good it is to be not clinging. That's it. So we're just recognizing, yeah, life is suddenly, the world is just a little bit of a better place when the mind is not caught in that entanglement. Look at that. So then by recognizing that simple quality of, all right, this is what it's like when we're in tune. when I'm on the beat. And that rightness of the Eightfold Path, it doesn't really mean right as opposed to wrong, it means right as in upright. It's like balanced and on the mark of what's in accord with the world in this present moment. So noticing that sweetness, noticing the natural delight that's there when the heart is free from clinging, that's a tremendous motivating force.

[42:07]

It's not because an authority has told us, it's not because you heard it or read it in a discourse, but it's just, oh, there's a natural beauty that's there when we are in accord with things. So just recognizing that, then that becomes a motivating force to keep remembering and to keep recollecting. Okay? I believe 20 pastors is the end point. Yes. Yes. Thank you.

[43:22]

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