Hello again. So having spent the morning looking at the mind only teachings and reading some of these amazing books about the mind only teachings and I kind of made myself nervous. I thought, whoa, this is quite a complex system of explaining what is a very simple thing, you know, for us, it's just the mind where we all are the mind the mind that you know has experiences in the world the mind that thinks it knows what it is and where it is and and so on it has a history so you know in some ways it's the deepest familiarity we have is with this word mind you know my mind and at the same time in trying to understand how we might look inside the workings of the mind in order to help ourselves to deal with our suffering. I mean, the whole point of the Buddha's life and teaching was to eliminate or alleviate, not eliminate, but to alleviate human suffering.

[01:16]

He was called the Great Physician. So by keeping in mind the idea that these teachings are to benefit us and to help us to untie or unwrap some of these ways that we have contracted in our thinking, in our minds, around certain ideas and certain beliefs and certain self-images and so on, is really what we're about here. Getting at the technology, the methodology is a little bit like unscrewing the back of what used to be, I was thinking of the television, but you can't do that anymore. Anyway, the old style television, you see all these tubes and wires and so on and so forth. It doesn't really help explain what's going on in the screen. But that's the approach we're going to need to take, for a little while anyway, is looking at the mechanism of thinking. which is what the mind only teachings are basically designed to do. And this study wasn't done by neurologists or biologists. It was done by meditators. So what they had to work with was their own experience of their own minds while seated in silent meditation and perhaps taking notes every now and then on something they observed and then sharing those notes with each other and finding patterns.

[02:33]

that they could describe, and particularly patterns that seem to be in the direction of healing, healing suffering. So I just want to do a little more review of where this mind-only teaching or the Yogacara teaching comes, how it appeared, where it grew out of in Buddhist history. So as I've said, there are two major schools. of the Mahayana, they're a great vehicle tradition that underpins Zen. So Zen comes from this great vehicle teaching. And the two schools that make up, primarily make up the Mahayana are the school of the middle way, primarily focused on the emptiness teachings, like the Heart Sutra, which most of us are familiar with, one of the Prajnaparamita sutras. Prajnaparamita means wisdom beyond wisdom. So the wisdom beyond wisdom teachings are what have been articulated primarily by the ancestor called Nagarjuna, who was referred to as the second Buddha.

[03:43]

So that's one school, the middle way school, the middle way. Think emptiness teachings. And then the other major school is the one we're going to be looking at for probably quite a while now, which is this Mind Only or Yogacara school. So both of these schools originated in India, in ancient India, and there were these major massive universities in particularly northern India, one called Nalanda University, and a lot of these ancestors philosophical thinkers and practitioners and so on the yogis who practice these teachings they live together in these monasteries and so they weren't like these separate schools i mean maybe there were maybe they had classrooms for this emphasis and another one for that like we do in our modern universities but they also all practice together so they shared freely their various ideas really wasn't until they exported some of these teachings by you know the

[04:44]

via the silk route. And so they took certain teachings into China and Tibet and Japan and so on. They took them one book at a time. So if there was a book on Yogacara, that went kind of by itself on a camel and ended up in China. And then Chinese took it, translated it, and made a school. So they had a Yogacara school. Where back in India, it was just one of the many ways of thinking and studying that the monks were doing together. Another book on the Middle Way teachings made its way on a camel to China, and that became a school. So there was a way in which what happened in China is interesting to look at too, because they made schools out of these doctrines that originally were not separate. They weren't divided up in quite that way. So we've inherited something that's been kind of sliced into pieces, and now we're kind of putting the puzzles back together, which I think is very exciting. and are in our so-called modern era we can look at all of these puzzle pieces and see how they fit you know i had this image the other day of the teaching of the buddha you know there he is under the tree and then his inspiration and what he said is kind of like a big piece of taffy you know and then that taffy just got stretched over time as more and more

[06:02]

ideas, more and more reflections were added and pulled, you know, all the way up till now. So we have this long taffy pole that basically includes all the different inheritances from Shakyamuni Buddha's enlightened vision, which is primary. The idea of awakening is the primary point. And, you know, all of us have this great urge, I think, to just sit under a tree and have that very same realization, you know, just like that. So that's one way. That's one approach. And then the other approach is to kind of really try to understand what's going on in this taffy pole, which is what I'm doing with all of you. So the ideas that are set forth in the Yogacara school had a very big impact on the development of Buddhist thought. And not only in India, where it originated, but also in all other parts of Asia. And as I said, in China, when these books arrived in China. And then in Japan, because the Japanese got their material from China.

[07:02]

And in Tibet, one of the trade routes went into Tibet and so on. So these are the northern Mahayana tradition, moving north into East Asian countries and creating Buddhist cultures there. And now they've arrived in this kind of obscurely defined part of the world that we call the West. Here they are in the West, which is the boundaries of that have become pretty obscure. So along with this highly influential depiction of the stages of awakening in the great vehicle, there's steps and stages you can take to wake up, do this, and then you do that, and you do that, and so on, Kind of nice to read, but maybe a little harder to do. So that's the pathway to liberation. That's one of the things people are very interested in reading about and trying for themselves. Yoga Chara also developed a number of kind of theoretical doctrines.

[08:03]

Sort of the underpinnings of experience are these ideas. So you have these ideas about something, and then you try it out. have an idea about how to ride a bicycle but then you got to ride the bicycle so there's a kind of a difference between the theoretical teachings and the application of those teachings which is what we really care about is how do we apply these to our lives you know how does this why does it matter you know so what what is what is the matter here and i i think personally I can testify that the Yogacara has been very helpful in answering the question about itself. You know, why does it matter? And I think it matters a lot. And I think it's been extremely helpful to me and others of my friends who studied it together to sort through some of the confusions around what the Buddha taught, what the Buddha taught, how to understand what the Buddha taught. So there are a number of doctrines, and they have these names. We're going to look at all of these along the way in the next few months.

[09:05]

But there's this mind-only theory. That's one of the doctrines of the Yogacara school. There's a theory of the three natures, which we're going to see when we look at Ben Conley's book starting next week. And then there's the eightfold classification of consciousness, also in Ben Conley's book. So all of these things are going to be carefully looked at as we turn the pages of of Ben Conley's book, the 30 verses of Vasubandhu, which is our primary text for the next few months. But they also, Yogacara, also introduced a description of something called the defiled mind. There's a defiled mind, klishtamanas, and that's the troublemaker. That's the part of us that... looks at our unconscious life the parts of ourselves that we carry along that we're not aware of and thinks of that unconscious self as as who it is that's who I am is all the things I've ever done all the things I've ever learned and I have a defiled it's called defiled mind that's in love with itself it's kind of

[10:10]

primal narcissism. You know, I, geez, I love me and all my ways, you know, and there's a little bit of a problem with that. And so we'll, we'll look at that too. But this is the troublemaker is called the manas, or klist, klistamanas, the troublemaker, the defiled mind. And they also came up with this idea of the storehouse consciousness, the alaya vijnana. And the storehouse is where all of the things that the klistamanas is in love with. That's all that's stored within our unconscious minds and we carry with us throughout our lives. All of the conditionings we've had since we were children and conditionings our parents had and our culture had and our history and our evolution and everything that makes you what you are is being carried along in your unconscious. And that stuff is constantly kind of coming up into our conscious lives as memories, as tendencies, as beliefs, as identity, you know, all of the stuff that we think and think we are and where we are in the world and what is the world is being held in this unconscious, this big bag of tricks that we carry around called the alaya, alaya vijjnana, the storehouse consciousness.

[11:24]

So again, we'll look at all these parts. There's an easy little diagram we can make that will help to kind of at least see the categories of how they divided our process of thinking into these parts and these components. So through this very painstaking analysis of these mind-centered doctrines, Yogacara made a very significant contribution to the study of human consciousness, which is still being admired. right now there's a very good book that i mentioned to you last week and i just got it and i'm very happy to have it by william waldron on why the yoke making sense of mind only making sense of mind only and william waldron is a wonderful scholar and teacher and professor of buddhist studies is making a real big case for why these yogachara teachings are useful to us now and how they complement whatever has been going on in neurobiology and in psychology and so on, and trying to help human beings understand their suffering.

[12:30]

All of these different traditions are really about helping us to lessen our suffering. The suffering that comes from how we think. So the mechanism of thinking, and most importantly, the mechanism of how it is that we come to believe what we're thinking. And don't we? Don't most of us believe what we're thinking is true? You know, I think it was a big shock when I started to, and actually it was during my earlier studies of Yogacara, I started to think, is it true? Is what I'm thinking true? You know, I forget the name of the teacher, but that's part of her inquiry, is to just ask yourself, is it true what I'm thinking? What would it be like if I didn't believe that? How would it be if I let that go? Can I let it go? Can I lighten up? These are good questions for us in regard to suffering. So an example of questioning how we think is in this very simple exchange between a student and her teacher, which I've told you before, but here it is again.

[13:36]

So the student points to a furry animal in the corner of the room and says, I call that a cat. What do you call it, teacher? I call it a cat. What do you call it? The teacher replies, you call it a cat. Pointing to the student's mind, the student is calling it a cat. Is it a cat? Well, the student calls it a cat. That's true. And beyond that, we have to inquire. We have to look more deeply. So there's some other examples of how we think and what we believe that what we think is true that I was coming up with when I was kind of reviewing this particular example of you call it a cat. You know, we call things stupid. We call people stupid. We call, we say people are ugly or inferior. We say that, you know, dogs, some dog is the best in show. You know, we've made up all these categories of judgment about ourselves and about each other.

[14:37]

You know, we call it ugly, we call it the best, we call it the worst, and so on. So these are the questions we're being called on to really challenge, you know, really? So there's another story I like, and I've also told you before about John Cage, you know, someone I greatly admire, the musician, and he's passed away now, but he did some amazing things, and he was also a Zen student, very serious Zen student, and I see him as his Zen teacher. he asked himself a question about something that he thought was ugly. And he said, when I see something I think is ugly, I ask myself, why do I think it's ugly? And then I, he keeps, he looks at it for quite a while. And then he said, after a while, I realize there is no reason. There is no reason. So these are practices that we can all do very simple practice next time you have a real conviction about something that you don't like in particular or you really like in particular like ask yourself do some inquiry you know but what makes me think that's beautiful what makes me think that's ugly you know just keep looking at it and maybe that overlay of your view of it will start to melt away and there's just the object you know that doesn't carry a label

[15:59]

It doesn't come with the label ugly or beautiful. It's just what our minds are doing when we encounter objects. And that's the point of the Yogacara is to help us to realize, oh, I think it. I call it a cat. I call it ugly. So the sutras that underlie the Yogacara teachings that were prized by the founders of this tradition, The names are Vasubandhu, whose text we're going to be looking at, and his half-brother, whose name was Asanga. And these were the two big Indian thinkers and teachers and practitioners who came up with all of the basic ideas that we call Yogacara, or mind-only teaching. And the sutras that influenced their thinking, that gave them the support for their thinking, Certainly the Prajnaparamita Sutras, the emptiness teachings, were extremely important, as we'll see. Sutras like the Heart Sutra. And then there is also a sutra that's a little hard to pronounce, but in English it just means discourse on unraveling the intent, Buddhist intent and teaching.

[17:08]

And it's called the Samdi Nirmocana Sutra. There's a nice English translation of that that you may or may not want to discuss. to acquire, but it's really a wonderful text. It takes a little while to work through it, but it's certainly worth studying. And then there's the Lankavatara Sutra, which I mentioned last time, which means the discourse on the descent into Lanka. So Sri Lanka is referring to the island Sri Lanka. Discourse on the descent by the Buddha into Lanka. So that's that story. I'm going to mention a little bit about the Lankavatara in a minute. So along with these sutras, these teachings that are attributed to the Buddha, so one of the important things to keep in mind is when you hear the word sutra in the Buddhist tradition, there's a claim being made that this is a teaching of the Buddha. And a sutra traditionally starts with the words, thus have I heard, thus have I heard.

[18:11]

So if you see thus have I heard at the beginning of a text, that's a sutra. in almost all cases. And the person speaking, saying, thus have I heard, is the Buddha's attendant, Ananda. who was the one who memorized all of the teachings the Buddha gave and then after the Buddha died and the council met to try and collect the teachings and to memorize them and hold them for the future. They didn't have writing then so they were these specialists who could memorize things. Ananda was one such person and he memorized. He had memorized what the Buddha taught and then he recited those things he'd memorized to the first council and he began each of those teachings with thus have i heard the buddha at one time was in such and such a place and he said such and such a thing okay so thus have i heard so there's the prajnaparamita sutras beginning with thus have i heard there's the sandi namarjana sutra begins with us have i heard and the lankapatara sutra also begins with thus have i heard

[19:18]

So there's another very important, not a sujure, but a treatise called the Yoga Charabhumi that I'm not going to talk about, but just so you know, there is another very significant treatise that has influenced the development of this particular tradition. So together, these Indian foundational teachings are the primary sources for the origins and the development of these key Yogacara documents. So if you like that kind of thing, look back at the source, where'd that come from, where'd they get that? Those are the places where you would look. But you don't have to do that. We've got a lot of help skipping ahead to the doctrines themselves. So one of the key doctrines that we can recognize in the name of the tradition itself, Yogacara, is this word yoga. a very familiar word for all of us, I think, which indicated to the practitioners of this school that transforming the mind and gaining insight into the nature of reality was going to take place through a sustained meditative practice called yoga.

[20:28]

So you do yoga, you meditate, and then these practices will then help you to understand or realize what these teachings are trying to help you understand. The teachings are a kind of little directional, it's almost like a compass or a map, a mind map. The mind map is not the mind. The mind map is just giving you some kind of help with understanding the mind itself. The map is not the territory, as they say. So this word yoga shares its Sanskrit roots with the English word to yoke, like yoking oxen or yoking horses to draw a carriage or a plow. So to yoke in turn refers to a union between two seemingly separate entities and they're being yoked together for a single purpose. So in the case of humans practicing yoga, basically you're forming a union. between your breath, your mind, and your senses.

[21:32]

That's kind of one of the standard meditation instructions, you know, breath, mind, and senses, you know, to be aware, to be present in your body and having the experiences that you're having during that period of meditation. As a spiritual practice, you could say that you're yoking, in some cases, the belief was that you were yoking the human being with the divine. So the idea of the practice of an intense engagement in meditation, eventually you could come into union with Brahma, with the divine principle, and vanish by. So you've got to merge with the light of the universe, which would be an end of suffering. Another way of ending your suffering is if you disappear into the divine light, which is also kind of appealing. And it was appealing to the young prince when he went off into the woods after he left the palace. He began by studying this kind of yoga.

[22:35]

So this word in the West has come to really refer to kind of, I guess, I did a lot of it, kind of stretching exercises conducive to good health. physical and mental well-being, which it is. I liked yoga. I liked going to yoga classes and felt very good about how it was affecting my body and so on. And so this way of practicing was already present in India among the darker-skinned indigenous people long before the arrival of the Aryan invaders from the north. So this word Aryan, which we all heard of that word, you know, that's kind of made its way into our present day. The word Aryan means the noble ones. Aryans are the noble ones. And they were the lighter-skinned people from the Caucasus of Central Asia. So they're in the word Caucasians. So we have these light-skinned Caucasians invading India, which was primarily darker-skinned people, and referring to themselves as Aryans.

[23:43]

So as an kind of interesting side note, the word for the caste system that developed in India after the invasion by the Aryans is vana. Vana, V-A-N-N-A. And vana means color. So it referred to the color of the skin of the indigenous people of India who were assigned lower caste by the higher caste, light-skinned people who had come in and created the caste system in the first place. Sounds kind of normal human behavior, you know? We're here, we're the ones, we dominate, we win, and the way you can tell is that we're light-skinned and you're not. So this is kind of familiar, isn't it? And it's something that's bled through history and still has an insidious way of affecting our lives. So in the modern era, There are still a number of light-skinned people who infamously refer to themselves as Aryans with this presumed entitlement of being of a higher caste or higher value than people who have darker skin.

[24:48]

I think there's a wonderful book, Williamson, one of you know her name. I'm sorry, I'm forgetting it. Called Caste. Isabel Wilkinson. is a book on caste which is all about this assignment throughout world history of this, you know, the status being given by things like skin color and so on. So, but yoga originally, as it was practiced in ancient India and before the Aryan invasion, was a series of postures called asanas that prepared the practitioner for raja yoga, king yoga. And Raja Yoga was the practice of long, motionless sitting that gave the practitioner this hope of reuniting with the gods by controlling the activities of the body, and especially of the mind. So you still the mind, you quiet the mind, and this luminosity, which it does. There is a way in which we, with a quieted mind, we can find ourselves in a sort of blissful or luminous state.

[25:56]

It seems like things are finally worked out, you know, it's like, Finally, all of that niggly little bothersome stuff, all those mind flies have gone to sleep. And there are those times when you feel like, ah, this is it, this is the best. So this idea of permanently residing in the lap of the gods was a very compelling, very interesting one. And the intent of this practice was to bring an end to suffering by some permanent reunion with the divine. It's still an idea that's not unfamiliar in conversations humans have world-round. So when the Buddha left home in search of salvation to begin his spiritual quest practicing Raja Yoga, he did master the teachings of the two major schools of yoga that were present in India at the time. And he got into these very high states of consciousness where there's hardly anything at all being perceived.

[26:58]

There's a kind of space, spaciousness, and so on, he describes. But then he said at the time, partly because, or majorly because, these states of mind don't last. I think the longest you can stay in a particular samadhi, concentrated state, is something like three days. You know, that's it. And then you come out. You can't really stay in these exalted states of consciousness. You know, they wear out just like everything. They're impermanent. So for the young prince who was to become the Buddha, he recognized that the states don't last. As nice as they are, they're not permanent. They're impermanent. Everything's impermanent. Everything that we know, you know, everything we call a thing is impermanent. And so then he said, this is not the way. he left each one of these major teachers this is not the way and this is not the way and so he went on his own not knowing what the way was and so when he finally sat down under the bodhi tree he didn't know what was going to happen he didn't have a plan you know and then we have the story of his awakening and what did happen and then what he said afterward and that's the important part is how he understood this awakening

[28:18]

experience that he'd had and how he tried to help us to find that for ourselves that's what these teachings are and that's what the yogachara is intending to do as well so you know the what the way truly is continues to be a matter of debate you know like As we all know, I think we all know from different schools of Buddhism, all the religions are after the same kind of thing, a salvation of one sort or another. So this is absolutely a matter of debate and argumentation, and sadly also of some warfare that's going on about who's got the right idea and whose god is whose, and so on. And we do know, and among the many pointers the Buddha gave following his awakening, there was a division of the perception we have of reality. The Buddhist said there actually are two truths about this one reality. And he taught these two truths. And I'm planning to be talking about that in a class I'll be starting on April 1st.

[29:21]

Of course, you're all welcome. It's a class for the Zen Center. So I'm actually starting to think quite a bit about these two truths and how important the teaching of the two truths is to our understanding of the Buddhist teaching. I'll say some bit about that as we go along, too, because it's embedded. The two truths are embedded in every single thing that has to do with understanding the Dharma, understanding the Buddha. So in this book I mentioned to you by Dr. Waldron, he spends a lot of time in his book challenging what he thinks is a misunderstanding about the Yogacara teachings as a form of idealism. So I looked that up. I always look these things up and say, I'll get what that about. So idealism is kind of a Western philosophical school in which, you know, it's basically an idea that the world is nothing but ideas and that there really isn't anything out there other than our idea about it. It's just what we think is so.

[30:22]

In the extreme, it says only the mind or ideas exist and that external reality does not, you know, other than what we happen to think of it. So there's no proof that there's an external reality. There's just ideas about it. And this is a long standing, you know, many different philosophers, Western philosophers have gone in and out of their relationship to idealism and refuting it or supporting it or whatever. So it's an interesting read all in of itself. But the point being that Yogacara got accused of being idealism, and Waldron is saying, but that's a mistake. And the mistake is that we've lost the value of the Yogacara teachings by dismissing it as a kind of merely idealism. And so I think that happened within the Buddhist tradition itself. They kind of categorized it as a kind of lesser understanding than the Prajnaparamita, than the emptiness teaching. So you get emptiness on top and then you get mind only after that. So it's kind of been, you know, put down in a little lower level of value within the tradition itself and certainly for Western.

[31:32]

philosophers, it would be, oh, idealism, well, we don't need to worry about that, because that's not a really, you know, that's not a hot ticket at this time in history. So as best I can understand, and I'm trying to understand all of this myself, it's kind of complicated, and there's lots of threads running through it, but the mental act, you know, in Oh, I know. This is what I was going to say. In this Western philosophical tradition, idealism is this position in the extreme that it's only the mind that exists. So in other words, that the mental act of relating to an object, like my hand, the mental act of relating to an object, such as thinking about it or having a feeling about it, experiencing it or knowing it, is a necessary condition for the existence of that object. So without my thinking, knowing, experiencing, or feeling, there would be no hand.

[32:38]

You know, that's probably true. But this particular point of view is no longer very popular. You know, it seems that what's popular is something called more like a neutral view between the idea of materialism, things really are existing, there are real things out there, this is actually really is a glass of water, and so on, and that is my hand. You know, behind falling into a kind of materialism, like things are real, material, or they're just ideas, you know, the fact that we can't really prove either way is interesting. We're kind of stuck in speculating. But this neutral view is that neither the mind, ideas, over matter, or matter over mind is the primary. That actually... what one philosopher says is, anything is okay. You can say anything you want about the nature of reality unless, here's the kicker, unless what you have to say conflicts with the currently favored ideas of the modern day scientists and philosophers.

[33:46]

So you've got to get in the club of how thinking is going now. It's like with physics or... all of these other disciplines who have evolved over many, many decades and now centuries of thinkers. The same thing with philosophy. If you want to get in the club, you just have to be able to bring up something that they don't say, that doesn't work, that doesn't fit. Keep trying. Go back to the drawing board. So you can do whatever you want. You can try whatever you want, and people do. But it needs to get accepted. It needs to be accepted by those who are already working in the field. I think that's a lot of what's going on in science and in the universities. You're trying to get your paper accepted in a school where a lot of material has already been refuted or held up as kind of, you know, more like truth. Here's the truth. Here's as far as we've gotten, anyway. So, meaning that if you can be taken seriously by your contemporaries, then your ideas may find a place in the ongoing process of trying to understand this reality that we all share.

[34:52]

We got it, but do we understand it? Probably not. Probably not. Does anybody? Probably not. But there's a lot of effort being made to understand this reality that we all share and that we are. So that's what the Buddha did. That's what we all are here. I don't know if we're here to do that, but we can. You know, we can spend time trying to understand what we are, where we are, and what we're supposed to do now that we're here. What value do we have in this world? So I think that we'll find as we look at the Yogacara teachings, very good support for seeing these mind only teachings as a kind of neutral view. in which the classical Buddhist tradition of the middle way fits very nicely. It's not trying to take an extreme position of its only matter or its only mind. It's basically just helping us to look at the mechanism of mind, of thought, and of the creation of worlds by how we think.

[35:54]

So it's really not taking position on either extreme of there is something or there isn't something. It's kind of finding that middle way. which is the call, that's the Buddha's first sentence of his first sermon. It's the middle way between the extremes that is the path. That's the path we're looking for. So by finding the middle way between two dualistic propositions, you know, there is something, there isn't something, right, wrong, light, dark, me, you, all these dualistic propositions, dual means two, two things that are supposedly different, you know, we are basically relieved of our attachment to one side or the other side, by the one we happen to favor. And, you know, the most common example of this is on this side, there's a view, and that view is that I'm right. This is the most famous one. And then on the other side is a view, which is a different view, and that's the one that's wrong.

[36:57]

So my view is right, and your view, if different, is wrong. So that's classic. This is the most common forms that we produce of holding views. You know, I'm right and you're wrong. And then we fight. It's just the sad part. So attachment to views, when accompanied by our feelings, after all, is what the Buddha called the cause of our suffering. Second noble truth, the cause of suffering, is ignorance and desire. Ignorance and desire. Ignorance is attachment to views, which are products of the mind. What I think. Ignorance is one cause of our suffering. And desire is a product of our body, of our feelings. and I'm attached to my feelings. I like it, I don't like it, I'm not sure if I like it yet. So these ideas attach to ideas and we attach to feelings.

[37:59]

And those two together, ignorance, our ideas are mostly ignorant. They're not Dharma. Most of my ideas people don't refer to as Dharma or truth. So my ideas, I attach to my views. That's one cause of suffering and attachment to the feelings I have about my views. They usually come up together. is the other cause of suffering. And together, this little ball of my views and how I feel about them is why I suffer, how I suffer. First and second, noble truth. Yeah. So the cure, as Dogen famously instructs in his essay on seated meditation, is his example, which is in this essay called the Fukanzazengi, means the instructions for seated meditation, or for zazen, fukan zazen gi, is to find, again, to find the middle way. As he says in his famous verse, how do you find the middle way?

[39:03]

What is the middle way? He says, this is about meditation. Think, not thinking. It's an instruction. You can try it. Think, not thinking. And then the monk says, how do you think not thinking? Very good question. How do you think not thinking? It kind of feels like you're on the horns of a dilemma. I can't think not thinking. Well, that's the setup. So Dogen's setting us up. And then he answers, non-thinking. Non-thinking. This is the essential art of Zazen. Think not thinking. These are dualistic. To think. To not think. How do you think not thinking? Non-thinking. It's neither thinking or not thinking. It's not attached to thinking and it's not attached to not thinking. It's free of either extreme.

[40:04]

It's free of the mandate to think or to not think. How do I do that? Non-thinking. Stop worrying about it. Stop making a big deal out of it. Just bring these two extremes together. They're never really separate. You don't have the idea of thinking or not thinking. They belong together, like light and dark. What meaning would there be to light if there weren't dark? It would mean nothing. We wouldn't even have a word for light if there was no dark. You know, we would have no word for wrong if there wasn't the idea of right. So our dualisms are all based on, you know, some contrast, some idea of there's this and there's not this. So think not thinking. How do you do that? Give up the dualistic idea and just bring them together. Are you thinking? Fine. You're not thinking? Fine. Just sit there quietly and let the mind do what it does. You know? It's okay.

[41:05]

It's okay. It's just very hard to do. It's very hard to stop messing around with thinking or not thinking. Trying to not think is, you know, I tried to not think. It's not something I've ever managed to do. There's a lot of reasons for that, but that's not the topic right now. So the cure, okay, that's the cure. Think not thinking. And non-thinking is the middle way between views you know, thinking are views, and no views, not thinking. So thinking and not thinking, thinking are views, holding on to views, and not thinking are not having views, right? The middle way is between those two. Views are fine, just don't hold them, you know? I often use the example of having a butterfly in your hand. If a view is like a butterfly, you know, you want to see my butterfly? Do you want to hear my view of this? I can show it to you. But if I want to give you my view like this, probably it doesn't go so well.

[42:11]

Maybe you don't want to see it. And maybe you can't because I've already destroyed it by smashing it in my hand. So our teaching, our practice, our tradition is about a gentleness in offering our views, not a contraction, not an insistence or a stridency. We know that. We prefer gentleness. Butterfly in the hand. If somebody wants to tell us something, please just open your hand. Let me see. Let me choose to see what you have. So you may also remember this rather well-known exchange about holding on to views between the Buddha, this takes place in the old text, the Palikyana, who meets with a skeptic by the name of Diganaka. It's a story I like a lot because I thought, oh, that's really helpful. So Diganaka approaches the Buddha and he says, my theory and my view is this, Master Gautama.

[43:13]

I have no liking for theories or views. And then the Buddha says to him, this view of yours, you have no liking for views. Have you no liking for that as well? So, you know, the Buddha's always trying to help people let go. You know, let go. Just let go. It doesn't go away just because you let go of it. You know, it'll still be there. You can still have your thought or your idea or your butterfly, whatever it was. It's still there buzzing around. It was never yours to begin with. But when you freely give or when you release from holding views, there's a tremendous relief. for yourself. Hopefully Diganaka got some relief. I have some doubts he did. But one would hope that he would have realized that whatever view he was holding, including I have no liking for views, was the problem was the holding.

[44:16]

That was the problem. So then Dr. Waldman states that he's really offering us a kind of fresh view of this mind-only teaching. that does not land on this mistaken idea or view of the Yogacara as idealism, but rather as an extension of the very early Buddhist teachings of dependent core rising, that the mind and objects arise dependent on one another, not as separate entities, not the subject and then here comes an object, but subject and object depend on one another to be, to exist. know i just consciousness without an object is has is inconceivable my my awareness without something aware of i have no i can't conceive of something like that if i did it would just be another object i would oh i got it i'm conceiving now of an object that you know is is there somehow for me to think in order to think i need some kind of object so they they come up together dependent core rising is the primary teaching

[45:25]

of the Buddha. And it's the one, you should probably just write that down. Dependent core rising. The initial is DCA. This is really the core of what the Buddha saw, what he taught, and how to understand ourselves and the world. As dependently core rising. It all comes up together. We are produced by all of these causes and conditions. And if they went away, we go away. We know that. We know the fragility of our life is based on our dependence on things like water and air and each other and safety and roads and all of the things that we very busily do to keep ourselves alive. We depend on those things for our existence. So, Yogacara teaches us to recognize how our attachments to false ideas about ourselves and about the world is what leads to us creating man-made sorrows.

[46:27]

You know, we're very good at creating man-made sorrows. It's sad. It's really, truly sad. Just reading that I do read the news every day and it's very sad. It's painful. And I'm sure it is for you as well. And sorrows that dependently arise from the inborn human toxicities of greed, hate, and delusion. The three poisons. I want it. I don't want it. And I'm not sure yet if I want it or not. These are the big three motivators. We'll see this in the Yogacara teachings. You want something, you go toward it. You don't want it. You try to get rid of it and you're not sure. You're just confused. You're kind of waiting for some inspiration of whether to move or to move forward or to run. You don't yet know, but that, if you look at those three in terms of your own daily life, you'll see how you move toward and away from things all day long. That's our primary mechanism of how we organize ourselves and organize our lives, mostly unconsciously.

[47:35]

Like, you know, John Cage said, I look at something, I think it's ugly, I move away. Yeah, but how about if I wait and look longer and I keep looking and I keep looking? Maybe I don't move away. Maybe I come to some deeper understanding of what it is that I'm seeing. So the good news is that by studying the mind and its relationship to the world, we may come to free ourselves of this illusory view we have of ourselves as independent creatures. That the world's out there, and we're in here, and we're separate. The world is something separate from myself, even though it kind of looks like that. I think one of the things I really appreciate about coming to understand the teachings is that it's not hard to say any of these things. They're not hard to explain, but they're counterintuitive because it's not how it looks to us. It really looks like things are outside.

[48:37]

So we have to kind of work it. We have to work it inside of our own... skepticism. You know, that doesn't, that's not, that's not really me. That's not really what I'm made of. You know, we have to keep going back into this, these teachings and check it out for ourselves. So we may then come to know ourselves as we truly are, which is free of some separate isolated existence, and that we are in a harmonious relationship, not only to each other, but to this entire universe from which we have emerged. and continuously emerge. And if we see the harmony, we see the belonging, and we see the connections to things, we're much less likely to cause harm or to wish harm on that which is creating us in each and every moment. All of these wonderful things that make me what I am. So as Dr. Waldron states in his introduction, most of Indian Buddhists thought has been drawn out by this insight

[49:41]

that phenomena, meaning things, here's the thing, things come about and persist in dependence on other things. Simple things depend on other things. So he then points out that we will be most benefited by asking questions about how those things come into being, you know, such as under what conditions do illusions occur? And how can we learn to see through them? How can we learn to see through the illusions of separation? You know, the illusions that cause suffering. That's what we're after. We're kind of on a snipe hunt here. What are the causes? How do these things happen to us? You know, there is a mechanism. And Yogacara has been very good at showing us the mechanism of the mind lost in confusion, as Dogen says. So to understand how this question you know, the question of how we've become deluded and how we can see through those delusions is what our study of Yogacara hopefully will reveal, you know, to us.

[50:53]

So when the Indian Buddhist monk Bodhidharma arrived in China in the sixth century, A.C.E. So I read a little bit of Bodhidharma's blood sermon last week. He gave his successor, whose name was Hueco, a copy of the Lankavatara Sutra, which is a Yogacara text. And he said to Hueco, this is everything that you will ever need to know is in this book. The first Zen ancestor in China passed the Lankavatara Sutra, Yogacara text, to his disciple as everything he needed to know. And that was true of Zen for the first five generations. that it was the mind-only teachings. Zen was the school of the mind-only teachings for the good part of its history in China. And then things changed and we're not going to go off to those things because that's when we shift to the sixth ancestor and the Heart Sutra, the Prajnaparamita Sutra, and those teachings of the wisdom teachings, where a big shift happened.

[51:59]

But the yoga chart didn't go away. It's still there in the background of Zen and the origins of Zen as primary. So, let's see, what was I gonna tell you? Oh, so the story of Bodhidharma is what links the beginnings of Zen to this teaching of the mind-only school, you know, embodied by Bodhidharma. And to this very day, it points directly at the mind, pointing directly at the mind is the hallmark of the Zen school. Turn the light around, look at your mind. study your mind what's going on do you do you have you spent that time focusing on what's going on from this direction rather than you looking outside at the world and trying to understand yourself by looking at objects or looking at others so as it says again in the there's i'm going to turn a little bit toward a little tension toward the lanka vatara sutra which i just mentioned

[53:02]

this text that Bodhidharma gave to his disciple. And there's a copy that I have that was translated by Red Pine, a well-known westerner who's done a lot of Chinese translations of texts. He says that whereas the Diamond Sutra, which is a Prajnaparamita Sutra, emptiness teaching, teaches detachment from dharmas, dharmas, think of atomic theory, dharmas were these little tiny elements of existence in the early teachings that were believed to be real and to be independent of each other. They had their own being. That term may be familiar to you, own being. They existed separately from everything else. It was kind of like the way we used to think about atoms. You know, atoms make up the universe and they each are unique and they have their own characteristics and so on i don't think atomic theory is really holding holding itself up very well anymore so we know that from science and then from from philosophy this idea that these tiny elements of existence are real are actually real and are exist by themselves and then they make up everything else the diamond sutra teaches the detachment from those dharmas don't fall for it don't believe it you know and then

[54:18]

The Heart Sutra teaches the emptiness of those dharmas. They don't exist separately. They're dependently co-arisen. Nothing exists separately, not even those tiny elements of existence. So you have to be detached from them in one of the wisdom teachings, and then you have this idea that they're empty of inherent existence of own being in the other of the major teachings from the wisdom teachings. And then the Lankavatara Sutra, now we've got our Yogacara teaching coming up, teaches that there wouldn't be any dharmas, there couldn't be any dharmas to be empty or to be detached from if we weren't projecting them as existing or not existing in the first place. So if we weren't making up ideas of things and elements of existence and these tiny little dots and atoms and dharmas and all that, there would be nothing to be detached from because we wouldn't have come up with those ideas in the first place so that's basically what the mind only is doing is like you gotta look at your mind for how the world is being created if you want to understand what you're doing and how you're doing it take you gotta take a look in in here so red pine also helps us with our approach to this yoga chart teaching by using the example of the teacher offering his student a cup of tea okay so he he says first you

[55:35]

Take the cup of tea, and the cup of tea represents the teachings. So the teacher gives some teachings. Here's a cup of tea. But that's not enough. The student has to drink the tea. You have to absorb the teachings. You have to take them into your own body, into your own thoughts. So first you try to understand the truth of these teachings, which come in the form of words, sentences, paragraphs, and so on. And then if you accept those words, if you find them interesting and enlivening for you, then you see how they can be experienced in your everyday life. So what does this have to do with me? And I think the nice job that Ben Conley does in the book that we're going to be looking at on the inside Vasubandhu's Yogacara is using very worldly experiences that we all know quite well of expressing this understanding of how it's the mind. It's how your relationship with your mind that's creating your suffering and how you see the world. So I wanted to finish up this evening with a brief reading from the Lankaptara Sutra in which the king of Lanka, whose name is Ravana,

[56:46]

has beseeched the Buddha to come to his kingdom to teach. This is the story of the Lankavatar. So having accepted this teaching, the Buddha stands without speaking. Then he mounts the king's chariot of flowers and he descends into Lankha. So that's the title of the sutra. The Buddha's descent onto the island of Lankha, Sri Lanka. So Lankavatar, that's what it literally means. So I'll just give you the short reading and then... Open the floor. I see that it's already 6 o'clock. I can't believe it. Okay. So the Buddha, having arrived in the island of Lanka, conjures mountains and peaks covered with jewels and beautiful scenes of every sort, adorned with countless gems. And on each jewel-covered peak, the Buddha can also be seen. On top of each peak that he's conjured, there's a Buddha. And standing at his side, as Ravana, the king. So now you have all these peaks with all these little Buddhas and all these little kings standing side by side.

[57:51]

This is a vision. And then the entire assembly is visible on each assembly, on each summit as well, and in every land another Buddha is present. So you've got this kind of amazing thing that the Buddha is doing, like producing this incredible vision. And then together the residents all appear inside their conjured sittings and they're all gazing out at each other. Other things also appear as products of the Buddha's power. There's groves of trees and sunlit forests, and nothing in any way is different. And then Mahatma, who's asking questions of the Buddha, he also appears and is asking on behalf of the king for a teaching of self-realization. You know, help me, enlighten me. They're asking the Buddha, please wake us up. And which the Buddha speaks in a countless number of voices. All these Buddhas on top of all these mountains answer the question. And after they've spoken, all of these Buddhas and these Bodhisattvas vanish.

[58:51]

Only Ravana, the king, remains standing inside of his palace. And he wonders what just happened. Who spoke just now? And who listened? Who saw? What was seen? Where did all those cities and buildings and mountains go? Where did they go? And where did the radiant Buddhas go? Was it a dream or an illusion? Or were they the work of the devils, of the Gandharvas? Were they the result of some cataract in my eye? Or was it a mirage or dream, like the child of a barren woman? Or is it just smoke and flames from a wheel of fire? You spin a wheel, it looks like a circle if you spin a firebrand, but there's really no circle, it's just a fire. Such is the nature of things, the realm of nothing but mind. This is something the foolish don't know, bewildered by false projections. There is no seer or anything seen.

[59:55]

There's no speaker or anything spoken. The appearance of Buddhas and also their teachings are merely what we imagine. Those who view such things as real, they don't see the Buddha. nor do those who imagine nothing, only those who transform their existence. So with this, the Lord of Lanka felt an awakening and a transformation of his consciousness. And he realized what appeared was nothing but the perceptions of his own mind. And he found himself in a realm that was free of such projections." Dada. So that's... That's the mind only teaching. And now, if you all would be so kind as to offer whatever comments or questions you'd like to, I would be very grateful. First, I'm going to go on the gallery. I'm on gallery. And just say good evening to you. Welcome you.

[60:55]

And thank you for being here. Hello, Musho. Good to see you. And Griffin, Chris, Amer, Jifu. Lisa. Hello, Lisa and Steven. Back home, I guess. Not quite. Okay. Melissa, welcome back. Close on. There's Jerry and Drew. Millicent. Aaliyah. Hello, Aaliyah. Welcome. Did I say that right? Aaliyah. Yeah, close enough. Thank you. Jaqueline. Welcome. Sozan. Carmina and Mary Ann. Paul and Kate and Carol. Hello, Carol. Dean, Senko, and then Abby, Adrian, Meredith, Alice, Tom, Kate, Michael, and CJ. Welcome, everyone. Please, you're more than welcome to bring forward your questions. Kosan, please. Good evening.

[61:59]

Excuse me. Good evening, Sanga. Good evening, Fu-sensei. This question stuck like... claw in my throat almost the whole lecture. I'm so sorry. And it is, are there no absolute truths? I mean, there's the absolute truth, but are there no absolute truths in the sense of, you know, I'm thinking about the first time we said a Yogacara and I, yeah, I'm like, yeah. Right on, yeah, hold everything lightly. Cool, cool, cool. And then Trump got elected again. And then my whole life fell apart, as you know. And then I started thinking, well, aren't there absolute truths? Like, I and all beings deserve life. Like, I and all beings deserve safety.

[63:04]

Is that not an absolute truth? Because I'm finding that what is happening now, this moment we are in, is so far past post-truth. It's really the age of fabrication, right? And so I sense this part of the chaos as being constantly misled, constantly misled. And I'm wondering... if I can take refuge in some absolute truths? Well, I'd love to say yes. But you're not. I'm not gonna. Actually, I find the word ultimate truth to be a little more in line with the contrast. You know, somehow absolute truth feels kind of absolute solid. I think the one teaching I've heard is the ultimate truth is there is no ultimate truth.

[64:08]

That really there are relative truths. And what we have access to is basically relative truths by virtue of the reality of ourselves as these species that uses language to understand itself. So, you know, language is a pointer. You know, all those words you were saying are pointers to things that are hurting us or disturbing us or creating anxiety, we think. We think what's out there is causing our suffering. And what's out there isn't much different. now than it was in the Buddhist time. The weaponry is a little more sophisticated and there are more people, but people were starving and being hurt and punished and tortured and thrown into slavery and all kinds of stuff. World round, for as long as we've been on the earth, we have not been doing very well and creating, I think, what you'd like to know as an ultimate realization of maybe our divine value

[65:17]

as living beings, of all living things. So there is some great respect. There is compassion. Maybe the ultimate truth is compassion. This idea that the bird has two wings. The bird of the Buddha's teaching has the wing of compassion and the wing of wisdom. And they need to be equally strong. So these teachings that we're talking about right now are wisdom teachings. But they are... always at the service of compassion you know wisdom without compassion can be very cruel very just logos intellectual yeah kind of worthless in a lot of ways but when when they're at the service of compassion then perhaps we can find our way to what you're pointing at which is a much kinder and gentler and and more more thoughtful and helpful as a species to one another into all other living things And we certainly aren't there.

[66:18]

We know we're not there. But we have an idea and many of us wish to bring that idea into the world. The one that I think you're hurting from and the one we're all hurting from is why isn't it happening? What's wrong here? And I think the Buddha understood what was wrong and it kind of broke his heart too. You know, he said, I can't I can't make you understand what I saw. I can't force you to open your eyes and to stop blaming others and to stop thinking so highly of yourself and to stop, you know, I can't make you do that. I can tell you what I saw, and how I went about it. And you have to do your own, you have to make it yourself, you have to find your own way out of that box, where that you're trapped in. And maybe that's the truth, you know, the truth of the path. There is a path. The Buddha taught the path. And it's how you live your life. You know, it's not a one-off. So I wish it was a simple, yeah, yeah, there is a truth.

[67:25]

And I can tell you what it is, but maybe somebody has an idea about something like that. They'd be happy to hear it, but not in my understanding. And I'm really sorry. I wish there were. Thank you. Chris. Hi, Chris. Yes, please. Did you have your hand up? I did. Good to see you. Good to see everyone here. Still trying to formulate my mind. This has been a really insightful thought or really insightful talk. I'm really grateful for it. It's putting some pieces together for me and a few things that I'm just connecting to it with the language of the Paramita Sutras and A and silence and the pointing towards the ineffable to the silence that's within.

[68:26]

And it seems to me that the words that the mind only teachings is almost the opposite. Instead of pointing to the silence and to the stillness, it's pointing to the words to help us understand and put a framework perhaps around reality. And I'm wondering, part of that for me, and I apologize for my thoughts not being very clear here, but I'm wondering, Is the intent of this similar to what you were saying earlier when you're sitting and you're being aware of what's happening in your mind, is the process of these teachings that we'll be going through, is it to just notice these patterns that arise as we go almost to understand

[69:33]

um like what is what is happening to recognize the inherent emptiness of that uh i i know that's not clear um i'm just um i don't know i'm just trying to connect the dots but really really enjoying this process of growing and it's also reminding me of my favorite um uh play, which is The Tempest and the epilogue in that world disappears at the end with Prospero. And it just seems like there's so much really great work that's happening here, and that this has set the stage for this adventure into Lanka, and I'm really excited about it. Yeah, we can have you read that poem as we go along here. That's a wonderful, the very line. Yeah. the dream that such stuff as dreams are made of. Yeah, well, that's yoga chart, very much. And I've used that I've read that that little section, when I've given classes, because it's so to the point. You know, it's all very tricky, because as you talk about what you're doing in meditation, anyone talks about it.

[70:41]

There's often the the little added bit of well, when I I drop my thoughts, And I notice my thoughts and I, you know, it's kind of like, well, there's actually this agent of control is non-existent. And I think that's the hardest part, you know. It's just thoughts arise. Thoughts drop. More thoughts arise. Thoughts drop. You know, our job as meditators, I don't job as meditators, but anyway, Our time in silent spaces is merely an invitation to simply pay attention. Pay attention. They ask the Zen master, what's the secret of Zen? And he says, attention. No, no, I know that. But what's the real secret? And he says, attention. He said, yes, I understand. Could you tell me the actual secret? He says, attention.

[71:43]

If we bring our attention, it's not even our attention. Again, I'm falling into the trap of language. But bringing attention to what's there, what seems to be there is what the mind only is inviting us to do. What do you think you're seeing? And who do you think is seeing it? These are all very good mind only questions. Is there a separation between the subject and the object? Can you point to that separation between the sound and the hearing? Where's that little boundary, or between the seen and what's the seer? Is there a line there? Can you point it out for us? Well, of course not. So we begin to dissolve some of our presumptions, the things we've learned as children about the world, they begin to become untenable as you put the light of these teachings very strongly on them. And it's a little disconcerting. I don't think it's like there's a kind of yikes that goes along with that as you begin to dissolve your very solid sense of yourself and how you are an agent of change and action in the world.

[72:51]

As that begins to become under question, I think that can be very disturbing and I think we should be very gentle with the process and not just kind of like blast our way into emptiness or understanding of emptiness. I think there's any hurry. And plenty of opportunity, like all day long. We can, you know, tune in. So thank you, Chris. I continue to welcome your questions and whatever it is that you're finding that you want to explore, please bring them, bring them on. Thank you for joining, really good to see you. And Musho. Thank you, Fu. Thank you, Sangha. I think, Fu, you just gave about eight Dharma talks that I've worked on in the past over the years.

[73:52]

And it was really great to go over so many of these things and so much new things for me. I don't know much about Vasubandhu's Yogacara, but it's so interesting. I wanted to say, though, one of the things that's so frustrating, after you've been practicing for a while, is that you start to know that this practice does work. It's not that hard to sit down and take a look at your mind. And I've been teaching this and I do beginning instruction quite a bit to people who walk into the Zen circle. But then when you look at the outer world at this incredible delusion that's going on, it's so frustrating because the answers actually are out there and they're not that hard. Do you know what I mean? It's not that hard to sit down and take a look at your mind and think about, as you were saying, is this right and is this wrong or is it something else?

[74:55]

Just like you were saying. It's really, I don't think it's that difficult. And when I start trying to explain this to my students, I just get mixed i mix them up i mean they're they want something that's more that must be more complicated because we live in such a complicated world you know it's like it's like you know destruction everywhere i mean that's like the worst thing you can do you know and meanwhile i'm telling them sit in a seat in a nice quiet room and stare at the wall And this is going to help. And you know what? It really does. It would eliminate the destruction. But it's so hard to get to and to explain. And I hope we can all, as practitioners, we have to be patient and just look at the simplicity, as you always bring it back to. That's all I have to say.

[75:57]

So simple. So simple. i mentioned to you one of our students had this amazing moment i tell you guys last week that he was looking at the wall and he had this image of these leaves blowing and then this piece of paper showed up and it said so simple and I just saw him the other day, he's still riding that. And you know, I miss this guy's been practicing for many, many, many years. And then for him, it was like a revelation that just that those words, you know, so simple. We've been doing we've been practicing with another couple two words, my partner and I, when we get in our little, you know, tight spots, it's like, so what? So what? I mean, how big a deal is this, you know? Yeah. So what? It's a huge deal. It's a huge deal for some people. I know. I know. Terrifying what they think. I know.

[76:58]

And, you know, and their condition, the conditioning is in favor of all of that. We've been, we all come from there. We've all been conditioned in the world of patriotism, you know, pledge of allegiance and all that stuff you know we all grew up in a world where we were taught to believe certain things and and there's an effort to deconstruct what we've learned isn't so about all those things we were taught to to adore and worship you know so there's this kind of there is a kind of battle around truth i mean in the kosan brought up you know it's like so what is true Yeah, what is true? And, and I feel like the Buddha Dharma has been about that since the Buddha sat under the tree and said, Oh, I know it's true. This is me. This is myself. I'm, I'm the source of, of this kind of confusion. And I'm the one who can basically straighten that, you know, I'm the one who can clarify my mind, and then bring something quite different to the world.

[78:00]

something softer i i'm really looking forward to sharing uh ben conley's book i was just reading in fact for next time let's all read the introduction norman's norman's introduction and ben's talk about his own book and then maybe the first first chapter which is quite good and he he uses very everyday examples of how the difference between going to the post office because you're going to be late to work and there's a line and you're really irritated and those people are just wasting your life nothing but evil thoughts about them and then all of a sudden if you notice your mind and realize they're all wanting to get to work too and you can make some nice little comments of friendliness you know and you'll still be late to work It's not like it solved your problem, but it changed your life. Yeah. You know, how you do these small things is your life, is how your life goes. So it is simple. So simple. So simple. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Phu. Sure. Thank you, Mushma.

[79:00]

Millicent. Hello, Phu. Hello, everyone. Going back to when you were talking about John Cage and his experience of looking at anything, whether it's beautiful or ugly, if you look at it long enough, it simply becomes itself. I think that's what you said. I didn't want to accept that. Excuse me one moment. Alexa, stop. Sorry. I don't know who she is, but she's in that little round box on my desk. She's part of the deal. Yes, I didn't like John Cage's experience.

[80:08]

And that led me on, I thought, no, no, there is, I mean, beauty is beauty. And I realised that that's a human, I mean, animals don't go around saying, gosh, that's beautiful. So this is a human construction. It is an idea. So I think, okay, yeah. Sit lightly with anything that's beautiful and be prepared to let it go. But then, Fu, this is my real question. This sort of puts our thinking as absolutely primary. But my experience of beauty is before thought, surely. It's a response of awe or... or just a breath, like, ah, ah, and then thinking comes.

[81:16]

Oh, that's beautiful. Yeah. So, I mean, where does, in our teaching, where do we put the ah before we think? Well, you reminded me of the time I spent living in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, And every day after work, I worked in a law office, I would come around the corner to where I lived, which was in full view of the Tetons. And every day, there they were. Sometimes cloud cover, sometimes snow covered, sometimes light shining through, like God speaking. Every day, there it was. And at some point I thought, I'm trapped in a postcard. I couldn't see it. I had lost that awe that is so obvious, right? Isn't it obvious what's awesome?

[82:18]

But without my engagement, without my ability to connect with the awesome feeling that's being generated from me toward objects, I was like a dead person. I died to the beauty of the mountains, and I had to get out of there. I had to go recover my capacity for awe. And this is when I came to Zen Center. It was after that time in the mountains looking for the beauty, capturing the beauty, going to the most beautiful place I could find on the planet and living there and so on. It's mine, mine. But it wasn't mine. And there's something much more beautiful, I gotta say, about transiency And John Cage saying, well, look again. Look again at that thing that you assume is not beautiful. You know, look closer.

[83:20]

Just get closer. I was walking with a student last year at Tosahara, and they were saying, well, I don't get the, I don't see what's beautiful. I don't know what, they were kind of complaining about something. I said, come here. And we went over to this plant that was right next to us. I said, put your face right in. into those leaves, just get really close to those leaves. And they were like, oh my God, right? They've been walking by that plant, you know, for a month. And all of a sudden it was like, there it was, they had just let themselves open their eyes, open their awesomeness, right? But there's also, there's awe, awesome and awful. And they're both awe. And a lot of what was being talked about earlier is the awful. And we're just in awe as in awe of the disasters that are going on there. I'm awestruck by the cruelty and I'm awestruck by the beauty.

[84:24]

So, you know, those, that quality that you're pointing to is extremely important for realization, you know, and of, of a call to action or a call to, to, for compassion. So I think it's a very important idea, this awe, the idea of awe. I once thought we should have a bumper sticker that said, if you're not in awe, you're distracted. Yes, I agree with you, but and, I'm not allowed to say but, and. Good for you, Millicent. I was already. Okay, go ahead. Say but. And it's still my primary question of that, you know, in your example where you, where once you put an idea of the mountain view as beautiful, it died to you.

[85:32]

But that first primary surprise, that gasp of either awesome or full, that before a thinking reaction, oh, this goes back to the first person who spoke, is that true? No. Thank you for sure. It's not true. it's not bad but yeah true we should save true for i don't know for dharma we just use that for the dharma and um it's a good question you know i will i will ponder your your question um because it's important and i think we all know and wish i remember my therapist saying to me because i said you know i I really have this big reaction to the sun coming through the clouds.

[86:39]

I mean, I think that a lot of Christian iconography is like God speaking through the sunbeams coming through the clouds. And I'm very moved by that. And he said, well, that's kind of a clue to who you are. It's a kind of spiritual longing, you know, not so much about finding my human partner or finding this or finding my right job or whatever, but responding with awe. at the beauty of the world. It's kind of a clue to who you are, Millicent. Okay. Yes, as a human, I realize time's going on. If I can very quickly tell you a story, which very quickly, where this came to me, I was in the middle of a session in... God, I can't even remember the name. It was somewhere in Texas, Amarillo, Texas, and it was winter. Very new experience for me.

[87:41]

I had no experience of snow. So I was in the middle of Sesshin, so things were very quiet anyway, and I went for a walk and I was listening to Mozart as I was walking along. And a wholly new experience. the houses where I was walking, the wind blew the snow off the roofs into a circle. And the next day I went for the same walk, listening to Mozart, and the wind blew and it blew the snow off the roofs into a circle. And I thought, that is so beautiful. And literally... It darkened. So, I mean, this was, gosh, 30 years ago, but I've never forgotten that to those two experiences, the one before language, but it was a real experience.

[88:54]

It was real until I smeared it with my comment. That's a good opening for a discussion that we won't have right now about it was real. Anyway, I think something happened for you that was meaningful. That you know. Whether it was real or not real or, you know, like that moment in time, that doesn't really matter. Something inspired you and you still remember it. And those are important things for us. So I just keep turning that. I think meaning is a big part of what we're looking at here. What's our meaning? And that word has its roots in, what's your moaning? What are you moaning? What's your sorrow? So beauty and sorrow have a lot, they touch each other because of transiency.

[89:59]

So anyway, very good. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. And Senko, and then we'll close. Hello, Senko. Welcome. Hi, Fu. Just quickly, some comments about an innocent question. So before my practice in Buddhism and Zen, I always, like, gave a lot of weight to my reaction to things. Like, I have a feeling about things. I implicitly feel there must be some meaning deep down in me. That's why I'm reacting. Or this thing has a... But I think what's really helpful from my practice is I tend to, I mean, it's helpful for me to realize those feeling and reactions are my karmic reactions. They're like something I don't know, but it's millions. I mean, all those implicit, I mean, like neuroscience, right? Some of the memories goes into transforming to the implicit memory. You don't know, but when you have a reaction, it just comes up. It's not that they're particularly meaningful. It's just, I don't know my conscious mind. wouldn't be able to know why they're here.

[91:02]

So I found mysterious. So it's really helpful for me. So I'm now, like, I can look at my reaction and my feeling about things in the less, I guess, less attached way, right? I still have those reactions, but it's really helpful to be like, oh, I don't have to find meaning in that. I don't have to like do something about it. Yeah. So for me, that's really helpful. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that too. Thanks. And thank all of you. And wonderful to be here with you. And let's plan on next time. We're going to look at Dear Ben Conley. And as you can get up through the first chapter, that would be good. And then there's good juicy stuff in there we can talk about. So maybe if you all could make a few notes if you have time on some questions you might have or comments you might have. We can maybe read this together. It might be a nice way to do that so we have some common ground for talking about the mind only. categories which are wonderful.

[92:02]

And I'm going to ask you all to make a little drawing of the mind according to the Yogacara, which I think is, I showed you mine, so you get a chance to show me your drawings of what's going on in this school of Buddhist thought. Okay, if you'd like to unmute. You're welcome to do that and say good night or goodbye or good morning, whatever's happening where you are. Thank you. Namaste. Thank you, Fu. Thank you, everyone. Have a good night. Thank you, Fu. Take care. Bye. Bye-bye. Thank you. Bye-bye. Take care, everyone. Bye-bye Jacqueline.

[92:58]

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