This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. I just want to thank our guest teacher this morning. Send you Earth and Manuel. So good to have you here. I also thought maybe we could spend a minute together just feeling the grief, I think, that may be in this room right now about the children in Florida, about the elders everywhere, the animals, our humanity. Maybe we just sit quietly for a moment. A Vietnamese Zen Master once said, when we understand how our mind works, our practice becomes easy.

[01:46]

When we understand how our mind works, our practice becomes easy. So this week, we began the spring practice period here at Green Gulch Farm. And the students who are participating in the practice period are most likely here in the room right now. So my talk today is intended to welcome them and all of you to a study of our mind. So I know that what I'm going to say next is obvious to all of us, and that is that our mind and our body are simply two aspects of the very same thing. This is a simple truth that we often overlook, along with a great deal, many other simple truths. For example, that there's another false distinction we make about the various elements of our body, like I call it my hands as though it were possession of my legs, my aching back, my aching heart.

[02:52]

And when we add to those the various other elements in our lives that we look at as our objects or possessions, my family, my husband, my car, my children, my country. Pretty soon we have the complete set of what we casually refer to as myself. Myself. So our language not only allows us, but it requires us to talk about ourselves as if we were assemblages of parts, rather than an inconceivable and boundaryless whole. that mystery we call reality. Or as the Buddha famously said of himself at the moment of his own awakening, the entire universe in the Ten Directions is the true human body, is the true human mind. The entire universe in the Ten Directions is the true human body, the true human mind.

[04:04]

So if that's what enlightenment looks like to a Buddha, then how do we get there from here? I think all of the Buddha's teaching and practice is designed to help us to do just that, to get there from here. Beginning with another of the Buddha's famous teachings, and that is that there and here are also mere aspects of the one great thing, reality itself. There's a lovely teaching from the Old Wisdom Sutras in which the Buddha gives a very simple instruction to a monk by the name of Bahiya, of the bark cloth. And in this teaching, the Buddha is offering the monk a simple remedy for not only reconnecting his body and his mind, but also his seemingly small life to the entire universe. So here's a little back story about Bahia. Bahia was greatly revered as a teacher in the town where he lived.

[05:13]

And then one day a woman of great understanding visited the town and candidly said to him regarding his claim to liberation that he was not. Now being an honorable man, Bahia dropped what he was doing and set off to find the Buddha who he had been told was truly liberated and taught a path leading to liberation. When he arrived at the place where the Buddha was staying, Bahiya was told that the Buddha had just gone into town to collect alms, so he raced into town to find him. And sure enough, there he was, serene and inspiring confidence, calm, his mind at peace, having attained the utmost tranquility and poise, tamed, guarded, his senses restrained, a blessed one. So Bahiya threw himself on the ground, begging the Buddha to teach him. The Buddha replied kindly, This is not the time, Bahiya.

[06:15]

We have entered the town for alms. A second and then a third time the monk begged for the teaching, saying, But blessed one, it's hard to know for sure what dangers there may be for the blessed one's life, or what dangers there may be for mine. Teach me the Dharma, O blessed one, for my long-term welfare and happiness. So the Buddha then said, Bahiya, you should train yourself thus. In the seen, there will be just the seen. In the heard, just the heard. In the imagined, just the imagined. In the cognized, just the cognized. That is how you should train yourself. And when for you there will be just the seen, just the heard, just the imagined, and just the cognized, then Bahiya, you, in connection with that, will not exist.

[07:18]

You will not be found in this world or in another world or someplace in between. This, just this, Bahiya, is the end of suffering. Through hearing this teaching from the Blessed One, the mind of Bahiya was, right then and there, released from the toxic belief in a separate self. And once having exhorted Bahiya of the bark cloth with this brief explanation of the Dharma, the Blessed One left. The next day, Bahiya was attacked and killed by a cow with her young calf. When the Blessed One returned and heard the news of Bahiya's death, the monk said to the Buddha, Bahiya's body has been cremated, Lord, and his memorial has been built. But what is his destination? Where is his future state? Where has he gone? To which the Buddha replied, Monks, Bahiya of the bark cloth was wise.

[08:23]

He practiced the Dharma in accordance with the Dharma. and did not pester me with issues related to the Dharma. Bahiya of the bark cloth is totally unbound. And then on realizing the significance of that, the Blessed One further exclaimed, Where water, earth, fire and wind have no footing, there the stars don't shine, the sun isn't visible, there the moon doesn't appear, there darkness is not found. And when a sage, a Brahmin, through sagacity has realized this for themselves, then from form and formlessness, from bliss and pain, they are freed. So what the Buddha is talking about here in his teaching to Bahiya is the experience of awakening itself. in which the mind is no longer seen as separate from the body, or this place is no longer seen as separate from that place or from any other place.

[09:29]

And most importantly, your suffering is no longer seen as separate from my own. And although the teaching sounds simple enough to say, as I'm sure you all suspect, it's not so easy to accomplish. In this scene, just the seen. In the heard, just the heard. In the imagined, just the imagined. It's so simple. And yet, what is happening within us that makes such a teaching so difficult to practice or even to understand? So the answer, which we'll be studying in the next few weeks, has to do with what the Buddha called mental elaborations. also known as fantasies, stories, narrative, daydreams, and in the most tragic of cases, the extremes of paranoid or delusional thinking, much too often in the news these days.

[10:31]

The image of the human mind, common in Buddhist tradition, is of clouds covering the moon, the clouds being our delusional thinking, and the moon being the clear light. of awareness, of awakening. In the scene, just the scene. In the moon, just the moon. In the clouds, just the clouds. So, speaking of delusional thinking, our species, the Homo sapiens, are both gifted and cursed by the result of our invention of complex, abstract language. There's an author by the name of Yuval Harari. Some of you may have read his amazing book called Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind. And in it, he tells us that something extraordinary happened here on planet Earth a mere 70,000 years ago called the cognitive revolution, when a species of primates developed the capacity to think and speak about things that don't truly exist.

[11:47]

and to think and to speak of fiction. So most primates, along with other animals, can use language to express a specific warning, such as, Lion, watch out! Only Homo sapiens can declare that the lion is the guardian spirit of our tribe. So I want to acknowledge that what I'm talking about today is rather challenging and elusive teaching, you know, the teaching about enlightenment, about awakening. There are those who would say that enlightenment itself is merely a fruitful fiction, and others who would declare, oh, no, you can attain enlightenment, you know, for example, by sitting for long hours in a dark room on a black cushion, or by the sound of one hand clapping. the shattering of a cup, or by a reference to a cypress tree in the garden.

[12:52]

All of these are common examples in the Zen tradition of instances of humans awakening. But no matter what people say, we're left hoping that there is a path for the relief of our suffering. There is a way of living that brings happiness and joy to not only our own species, but to all the living things. on this earth. And we're also hoping that such a way will be fast enough. So as I said at the beginning of this talk, according to the Zen tradition, by understanding how the mind works, our practice becomes easy. And meaning, I believe, that living becomes easy. And friendship becomes easy. And even dying becomes easy. Suzuki Roshi said to his disciples in the last moments of his life, don't worry about me. I know who I am.

[13:53]

So do we all know who we are? Or do we truly wonder what are we outside of the labels and the proficiencies, our bank accounts and our wardrobes? Who's really in here? Who am I? When the emperor of China asked Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen, who are you facing me? Bodhidharma replied, don't know. I don't think there are many people with the courage or the wisdom to respond with don't know when asked by the emperor of China who they are. But would that don't know be the same as Bodhidharma's don't know? And still, as we all know, neurobiologists, brain trainers, and mental health professionals, along with those who market commodities, are also intently concerned with understanding the workings of the human mind, are intently concerned with knowing who we are, some for healing and others for profit.

[15:10]

And centuries before the advent of both science and capitalism, members of our species spent long hours devoted to this very same project, knowing who we are, with only their own bodies and minds as the subjects for observation. And yet there came a myriad of theories and speculations and assertions, all of which are well known to this very day. Gods and angels, zombies and aliens, prophets and seers. The lion is the guardian of our tribe. So the Buddhist tradition itself began with a courageous young prince sitting alone under a tree, studying the workings of his mind. He was patient, determined, energetic, and yet he wasn't easily contented with simple-minded answers. Nor was he distracted, from the seated position by the arrival of a demon army, dancing maidens, or the master of illusion himself, also known as Mara the Evil One.

[16:20]

At that point in my favorite telling of the story, the young man directly confronts the shadowy figure facing him across the meadow who has just threatened to destroy him. "'You won't destroy me, deceiver,' says the prince." I now know who I am, and I know who you are. You don't know who I am, hisses the evil one. Oh, yes, I do, replies the prince. You are myself. And with that, Mara vanishes. In other words, once the clouds of delusion have lifted, the light of awakening shines clear. A young man, now sitting alone under a tree, was from then on known as a Buddha. one who is awakened from sleep, from the dream of a separate self. This narrative of the Buddha's own awakening may help to clarify some of the teachings he gave in his later years, such as the one to Bahiya.

[17:23]

Train yourself thus, Bahiya, right here and right now. In the scene, just the scene. In the herd, just the herd. In the imagined, just the imagined. in the cognized, just the cognized, with little or no need to add any further elaborations, unless in doing so you can be of help to someone else. Lion, watch out! When the Buddha spoke, he did so in response to the suffering of those around him. The words he spoke are called the Dharma, offered as a pathway to freedom. When we understand how our mind works, practice becomes easy. So many centuries have passed since these stories were first recounted among the wandering mendicants of ancient India. They traveled to China, to Tibet, throughout Southeast Asia, across the ocean, to the Americas, to Europe and Africa, and back around again.

[18:29]

Thousands and thousands of monks and nuns, lay people and scholars, studying and elaborating with their own inspired understanding of what was meant by the simple teachings the Buddha gave to his disciples. So no one will ever achieve complete mastery of the vast corpus of work that has followed in the Buddha's wake. And yet some of those efforts have crystallized into systems of teaching that have had a tremendous historic influence over centuries of time. It's through one of these systems, called the Yogacara, or the mind-only teaching, that during this practice period we are going to endeavor to explore and apply the Buddha's insights to our own lived experience. So I would like to share with you a little bit of that system this morning, hopefully to pique your curiosity into finding out a bit more. So in brief, the Yogacara teaching provides a map of the human mind.

[19:34]

including how our unconscious conditioning formed into habits, preferences, prejudices, and customs is carried out, not only throughout our own lifetime, but from generation to generation. How systems of racism, nationalism, homophobia, misogyny, and so on are so difficult to dismantle, even if each of us here in this room today believes ourselves free of such toxic beliefs and behaviors. Ignorance of how the mind works, of our unconscious conditioning, is at the beginning of the repeated cycle of suffering. This is what the Buddha saw and this is what he taught to the end of his life. In the Yogacara teaching, the concept of the unconscious has had a great influence on the Zen tradition in particular by aiding us in discerning what is and isn't so. When the founder of Zen, Bodhidharma, came to China from India, he reportedly said that the Lankavatara Sutra, a Yogacara text, was the only sutra, explaining why early Zen texts are loaded with Yogacara teachings.

[20:54]

When Bodhidharma, in turn, chose Hueco as his successor, he reportedly handed him a copy of the Lankavatara Sutra saying, everything you need to know is in this text. So here's a quote from the introduction to the Lankavatara Sutra by Red Pine, who's a well-known translator of Buddhist texts. The Lankavatara Sutra is the holy grail of Zen. Passed down from teacher to student, it covers all the major teachings of Mahayana Buddhism and yet contains but two teachings. One, that everything we perceive as being real is nothing but the perceptions of our own mind. And two, that understanding of this is something to be realized and experienced for oneself and cannot be expressed in mere words. And yet, in the words of Chinese Zen masters, these two teachings became known as have a cup of tea.

[21:59]

And now, please taste the tea. Years ago, when my own teacher, Reb Anderson, introduced his students to the Yogachara tradition through a painstaking reading of another of its seminal texts called the Samadhi Nirmachana Sutra, subtitled Essential Questions and Direct Answers for Realizing Enlightenment. I remember walking up to my house with Reb several months ago after our first torturous readings, and saying to him, I think this sutra has ignited an interest in me toward the workings of my own mind. And he smiled. So the method developed by the Yogacara school for studying our minds was first charted in the minds of our Buddhist ancestors, minds, as it turns out, that are not one bit different than our own. So the first lesson I'm going to share with you today has some very familiar vocabulary by which the Yogacara tradition has mapped the human mind.

[23:06]

So even though this vocabulary is not so difficult, it may take a few repetitions to remember to what this teaching is pointing, and that is to the experience of having a mind, which I assume all of you here today indeed have a human mind. Don't you? Anybody not? So we're in this together. We really are. This mapping is called the eight consciousness model of the mind. Eight consciousness. The first five of the eight we all learned in the first few years of our life. corresponding to our five senses. Eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and touch. So that's five of the eight. These are also known as gateways to awareness through the body to the mind and then through the mind to the body.

[24:16]

So I thought I would do a little experiment if you don't mind. if you wouldn't mind trying it, to make these five gateways more clear. And in order to do this experiment, you're going to have to make use of the sixth sense consciousness. So you've got the five senses, and now you have number six, which is awareness itself, where you place your attention. So first of all, beginning with your eyes, with your seeing. Turn your attention, your awareness, using your sixth consciousness to whatever it is you're seeing right now. You can move your head if you like. You can look up. It's kind of amazing. The walls. The people next to you don't mind. You can look at them. Your own. Something close at hand, like your hand. Maybe something further away.

[25:20]

like me. So that's seeing. That's your consciousness that sees. So now I think the next ones would be easier to do if you close your eyes, shut down your seeing, because that often takes most of our attention. So now place your awareness on what you're hearing, on the different sounds. Now, still with your eyes closed, place your attention on what you're smelling.

[26:24]

You may want to smell your hand or something if you don't have a very distinct odor that's already available to you, or your clothing, you know. And how about what you're tasting? Any residue from this morning's breakfast, perhaps? finally on the sensations in your body, feeling around your face, on your skin, maybe around your eyes or down your back, the weight of your feet on the floor. Although that exercise was only possible because of your sixth sense consciousness, your awareness, which, as you saw, can be rapidly redirected from one sensory experience to another, from seeing to hearing to tasting to touching to feeling, easy.

[27:47]

But that's not its best trick. The best trick of our awareness is that it can focus on what we're thinking, the messenger within. I don't think it was very long after, for example, you heard a sound, that the sixth consciousness redirected its attention to some words, giving names to the sound, like ceiling creaking. Did you all hear that one? Or perhaps the wind? So very quickly, we connect our sensory awareness with words, this magical creation of ours, language. So again, if you just close your eyes for a moment and focus your attention, your sixth consciousness, on your thinking.

[28:49]

What are you thinking? You know, I know all of this is deeply familiar to you. It's so familiar that pretty much we pay no attention to it at all. To the actual workings of our mind all day long. Our attention is moving around from our five senses to the ideas we're having about them or simply to ideas themselves. You know, the seemingly endless stream of thought, the stream of consciousness.

[29:50]

Or as the Zen saying goes, clouds and an empty sky. It's kind of hard to get a hold of those sides. Do you notice how hard it is to get a hold of things? What are you thinking? It's kind of elusive. That's why I write things down. Okay, so, so far, so good. Okay, we only have six of our five plus awareness, senses and awareness. There's only two more to go. So these six all work together as a set. And they're commonly what we call our experience. That's experience. You all had an experience of something that you were aware of. Being aware of thoughts or feelings or sounds is what we call experience. I just had an experience. And then you'll say something about what you're thinking or what you heard. So those events and activities and thought processes throughout our daily lives

[30:53]

of which we are aware and to which we say something like, I know. I know who I am. I can show you my driver's license. I know who I am. I know where I am. This is Green Gulch Farm. And I know what I'm doing right now, kind of. I know. And yet, as the Yogacara teaching masters observed, theorizing Therefore, in adding to our understanding of our experience, they said, there's something missing. We need two more consciousnesses. So they added two that are more or less theoretical, called the seventh and eighth consciousness, thereby completed the mapping of the human mind. So even though they're theoretical and not in our field of awareness, they help to explain a lot about what goes wrong in our human life. The seventh consciousness, known as both the thinker and the lover, mistakes the eighth consciousness, called the storehouse, for a self.

[32:03]

The storehouse, our unconscious processes, produce the seventh consciousness, the lover, the thinker, and it turns around and falls in love with its maker. I love you. I love me. We all have this particular... affection. So the self, the famous self, the Buddha said, is a pure fantasy. And yet, as we all know, it exerts tremendous power over our lives, both for good and for ill. So if you can stay with me just a little longer. I feel like I should have a PowerPoint or something. Anyway, maybe next time. The storehouse consciousness, this unconscious, aspect of our lives, it's called the alaya in Sanskrit, carries within each of us all of our unconscious conditioning in the form of habits, preferences, prejudices, learned skills, and so on.

[33:07]

And we call on those in our conscious moments to determine what to do, where to go, and who or what we do and don't like. I hate the color green. I love tomatoes, I speak Chinese, I play the flute, and so on. And where do we keep all of that knowledge and all of those preferences? In the storehouse consciousness. Much like the Library of Congress or the iCloud, to be summoned as needed. If I asked you to sing a song, where are you keeping that song? How do you pull the song up, you know? without your iPhone. Somewhere in there, it's being stored. All of your history and your parents' history and the history of our species, we are the outcome of this storage system.

[34:11]

So why does it matter? What difference does it make? Well, it matters because we can change our unconscious conditioning. How do we do that? Well, through the conscious choices we make in each and every day, and that's the teaching. We're not stuck in the same old habits of mind, but unless we know how the mind works, we won't know that there's a way out. So one way I really like to understand how these changes take place is to imagine that our conscious life is a gardener. Our conscious life is the gardener tending the garden and planting the seeds that will sprout and grow in the future. If the gardener plants wholesome seeds, such as kindness, generosity, patience, and so on, then that's what comes up in the garden. If the gardener plants seeds of anger, jealousy, greed, and prejudice, the garden fills with the brambles and the fruits of hatred. So I think that's probably enough about the eight consciousnesses model of the human mind.

[35:25]

I'm going to be reviewing this material during the practice period. But for those of you who come on Sundays, you've actually been hearing these teachings for a long time in the form of various stories, Zen stories. And I'm going to tell you a little short one right now that actually I think it's made it around because a lot of people, when I tell them, say, oh, I heard that one. You know, the Internet just says... So anyway, it's a good example of what I think you'll understand is the Yogacara teaching. And this one has been attributed, whether true or not, to the Native American tradition. So grandfather said to his granddaughter, there are two wolves fighting inside of me. One is cruel and selfish, violent and angry. The other is kind and gentle, generous and caring. The granddaughter asks, Grandfather, which of them will win? The grandfather replies, The one that I feed. So this idea of feeding the kind and gentle wolf is precisely what the Yogacara teaching is all about.

[36:31]

But it's not only a method, that each of us can apply to ourselves as individuals, it also needs to be applied to our communities as a whole. Last year, after the presidential election results, there were a number of shocking expressions of hateful speech and behavior, including, maybe you heard, I don't know, the report of a bomb threat at Road of Shalom, the synagogue in San Rafael, Marin County, California. How shocking is that So the rabbi at Rodolf Shalom is a friend of mine, and I called her and I said, what can we do? How can we help? She recommended a convening of our neighbors here in Marin. So two Fridays ago, that convening, which we called One Marin 2.0, met at the Marin County Office of Education and was attended by leadership of many of the institutions that care for the people of this county.

[37:36]

the superintendents of public instruction, the health department, the county supervisors, the Marin Interfaith Council, the sheriff's department, and the Marin Community Foundation. It was quite heartwarming to be in a room full of people committed to not only feeding the gentle wolf, but also to understanding how, as educators, parents, religious and civic leaders, we could work skillfully with hateful speech and behaviors that have been emerging in our county and in our country and all around the world. And we all know that these thoughts and behaviors are nothing new, which is why the Buddha taught the antidote to hatred during his lifetime over 2,500 years ago. It's nothing new. And yet we are the living inheritors of structural racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, misogyny, Islamophobia, and more recently, the upswing of hostility toward undocumented workers.

[38:40]

We are the ones who must, as people of conscience, respond to the cries of the world, respond to hating by not hating. Responder to the cries of the world is the very name, given to the goddess of compassion herself. There she is. One of her forms, Tara. Avalokitesvara is in Sanskrit, kanon in Japanese, kuanyin in Chinese. She is the bodhisattva devoted to the welfare of others. And in one of her manifestations, she's equipped with a number of heads and a thousand arms to assist in her mission. I once had this idea that Kuan Yin is really the community itself. Thousand arms, many heads, made up of any and all who are brave enough to turn toward those in our families, in our county, our towns, our nation, the world, who are suffering from injustice, inequity, and physical brutality of any kind.

[39:52]

but also to those who out of the extremes of pain, anger, and ignorance have turned their self-hatred onto others. One of the main reasons we held the convening to the local leadership here in Marin was to form personal relationships to one another so that we could relay, if there were any acts of hatred or violence in our businesses or in our schools, and we could coordinate our response, an appropriate response. Together, one Marin, 2.0. I don't think it should come as a surprise to any of us that the people in our county who have been long subjected to the many forms of bigotry and prejudice tell a very different story of life in Marin than those who have lived here oblivious to those inequities. But in case it is surprising to you I hope you'll take on the responsibility to learn more and to study our history.

[40:57]

As I was told by one of our guest lecturers here this last summer, a person of color willing to say some very difficult things to a room full of mostly white people. Mel Weitzman, the abbot of the Berkley Zen Center, once said to us, who told you enlightenment was something you were going to like? I think he was talking about this very time and place where we are now. There really is no more time to wait or to go back to sleep. We only have today and we only have each other. So please take a few minutes to introduce yourselves to people in the tea area that you don't already know. Please assume that all of us here are strangers and would be very grateful to see a welcoming face. Thank you very much.

[42:21]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_96.87