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. Hi, so it's really a pleasure to be here. Thanks to Greg for inviting me. I started out when I was much younger as a real gung-ho practitioner, and I became a scholar for various different reasons. But the questions that I tend to think about are still ones that actually preoccupied me when I was a kid. So what makes a sentient thing sentient? In other words, how do you differentiate between a sentient meaning it has feelings, experiences, it experiences the world? Is there something in sentient things that is non-physical? Is that what makes them sentient?

[01:01]

In other words, how do we distinguish between a sentient object and insentient objects? This is something that philosophers have been thinking about for a few thousand years. Buddhists thought about a lot, and there's absolutely no consensus on it. Just to give you really roughly the lay of the land, there are dualists, and I'll talk quickly today, for a short time, that early Buddhists were dualists. They believed that there's physical dharmas. Dharmas are like the constituents of reality. And the early Buddhists believed there were two kinds. There were physical ones and mental ones. The technical term is Nama Rupa. There's these two kinds of things. There are philosophers who are... And there's a contemporary version of that. Well, there's many contemporary versions of it. One is called panpsychism. that really consciousness must be just some thing that there's no way that we can account for conscious experience through an understanding of physical reality alone and therefore there must be a kind of other kind of stuff, consciousness stuff, and it must pre-exist the arising of life on earth because it's real and therefore it must permeate the universe.

[02:12]

That's called panpsychism and believe it or not there are a number of very serious philosophers who hold to that. There are idealists, and those are people who believe there's only mind, and that our perception of the world is not a crazy idea. The colors that you see, the sounds that you hear right now are being produced by, I mean, you're all meditators, you should have all thought about this, right? They're produced by your mind. They don't exist out there in the world. There may be, if you're a physicalist, you believe that there's electromagnetic... stuff out there that there's compression waves running, but there's no sounds. There's no colors. All of the central world that we live in is mind-produced, so idealists believe there's only mind. There's dual aspect monists. They believe there's one kind of stuff. It's not physical stuff. It's not mental stuff, but it's one kind of stuff, but it appears in two different forms, mental forms and physical forms. There are physicalists, most philosophers, not all of them, but probably the majority of philosophers today are physicalists of some varieties.

[03:12]

There's lots of varieties. There's reductionists. They believe that ultimately it's just physical stuff, and if you had a robust enough account of how the physical stuff is interacting, you could account for your experiences here and now. There are emergentists. They believe there's just physical stuff, but when you put it in certain configurations, something that is greater than the sum of its parts emerges from it and creates... They have something called top-down causation, so that the mind is real, even though ultimately it's sitting on a bed of physical stuff, but it's created this new configuration. There's complex systems analysis to try to account for that. There are limitivists... They believe that consciousness is not even something that we need to account for. It's really just a confusion we have about the world. And believe it or not, all of these positions are found within the Buddhist tradition for 2,000 years. The Yogacarans, or the mind-only people, were idealists.

[04:13]

The early Buddhists were dualists. The Madhyamikans, if you've heard of Madhyamikans or emptiness philosophy, they were eliminativists of a sort. They don't think there's anything there that needs an account of it. So, well, what does this have to do with anything? When philosophers today deal with these issues, they often use what are called, even though they don't agree on anything, they all hone in together on certain thought experiments that really allow them to focus in on the existential issue that they're trying to get a hold of. So, for example, all I have to do is say brain transplant. And you get the idea. Imagine your brain transplanted into somebody else's body, and immediately the mind-body issue becomes very, very somehow tractable, that you can kind of feel the kind of existential confusion. No one's saying that a brain transplant is possible to do, but as a thought experiment, it hones in on a certain kind of mind-body problem and its relationship to personal identity.

[05:25]

It's interesting because the Buddhists have a version, I won't get a chance to talk today, but maybe tomorrow, they have a version in a 5th century text of a kind of brain transplant problem. But their assumptions, their underlying assumptions are such that their intuitions about how it works are very different than ours. There's also the brain in a vat. Hillary Putnam came up with the brain in the vat. The movie Matrix is based on that whole... bringing that idea that the entire world that we're constructing could be constructed with a robust enough that so that it's really a kind of illusion. There's another one which will become important in this talk today, if I get to it today, maybe tomorrow, and they're called philosophical zombies. And those are people who look and think and act just like us, except they have no insides. They're just zombies. They're on autopilot, as it were. And the question is, are we zombies?

[06:27]

And we just think we're here. And we'll see there's one position that becomes a very important position, especially in East Asia, that says, yeah, we're zombies. And the Buddha is someone who has fully realized his zombiness. And the term for that in the contemporary jargon is a robo-Buddha. So this, I'm not making this stuff up. These are all topics of hot debate among Buddhist scholars these days, but they're actually continuing a tradition that's some 2,000 years old. So my point of departure here is to look at some traditional Buddhist ideas that the Buddhists really believed in. At least there's evidence that they took them seriously, but I think the way they were functioning is more as a thought experiment. And so what's really important is what was the underlying existential issue that they were grappling with. And there's three that I'll try to get to. One of them is a state called Naroda Samapati, which is a meditative state which is akin to a vegetative coma in which there's no mental activity at all.

[07:33]

One is the heaven of mindless gods, and that's an entire heaven that is filled with these creatures that have... only... You know that there's five aggregates? Are people familiar with that? These are called one-aggregate beings. They only have the rupa, or the physical aggregate. They have no minds at all. And the third one is a debate that turns out to be very important in early Chan, or Zen Buddhism, and that's whether in-sentient objects have Buddha nature. Let me just stop for a second and say, interrupt any time, throw stuff at me. If I find that I'm getting too sidetracked, I'll just say... Hold off for a minute and let me try to finish this. But it will be very useful if you just jump in. Yeah. Some people have a phobia towards philosophy in general. So I'm wondering, what would you say to somebody who asks, why should this matter? My job over the next two days is to try to convince maybe some of you that if you're serious about practice, this matters.

[08:40]

Or at least this is an option. Put it this way, that it's not irrelevant. And so it's a great question. That's, to me, the challenge of coming and talking to an audience like this. You know, I was 19. I went off to India. I was on the other side. You know, scholars showed up. They were clueless. They were people who had no idea what real Buddhism was. I was young and full of myself. But I really viscerally remember what that feels like. So I'm trying to respond to myself as a, you know. I'm convincing that this, not only, actually the truth is, I'll even go farther and say that this is really important. Particularly if Buddhism is to survive in America and wants to not just drift off and become its own thing, but to somehow actually be plugged into a tradition that what it, the transcendent in Buddhism is the the Dharma and the Sangha.

[09:41]

And that means the world that is larger than us here now. But anyways, I'll get there. That's what's fun about this. Okay, so a few things to know before going into this. First, I mentioned early Buddhists are dualists. They believe there's two kinds of stuff, mental stuff and physical stuff. Also, again, I'm not sure how much background you have, but you all know the Eightfold Path. And you all know a three-fold division of the path into shila, samadhi, and prajna, so there's morality, meditation, wisdom. Here's a quick answer to your question. Samadhi, or meditation, or dhyana, or chan, is in the traditional understanding, it is necessary for the emergence of insight, but it in and of itself doesn't liberate you. And the early tradition is very clear about this. What liberates you is vipassana, is insight, prajña. Insight and prajña nowadays in the contemporary vipassana community coming out of Burma, they have turned that into a practice.

[10:50]

So they talk about sati-bhathana. I don't know if anybody knows this stuff, but sati-bhathana or the practice of sati or mindfulness as being somehow the developing insight. But traditionally, there's no question, this is non-controversial, sati... is grouped under the Samadhi section of that Eightfold Path. So it was all seen as a way to develop insight. And insight is an understanding of, in the early tradition, all changes, but in the early tradition, insight is an understanding of the world that accords with how the world really is. It's not, in other words, simply some state of a kind of unthinking experience. You know, that's all under the Samadhi section. or insight with something else. It's a hard time figuring out what it is, and Mahayana will change it. So going into it with that, on the samadhi section, there were initially... Well, let's go back to nirvana. The point of early Buddhism is nirvana.

[11:50]

Nirvana meant extinction. Extinction meant the end of the five aggregates. So nirvana, in short, for the early tradition... meant very much what, if you are a modern atheist that doesn't believe in rebirth, when you die, you hit nirvana. That was nirvana. Now, a lot of people, they go, what? That's not Buddhism. Buddhism can't be just about dying. But there's a lot of evidence that that's what it was in the very early strata. And it's hard to get your minds around a culture that, first of all, believed in rebirth not as an article of belief, but it was just a fact. You grow up in a world where rebirth is the only plausible story that accounts for the world around you. So rebirth is real and dukkha, or suffering, is real. And it's real and in your face in a way that is just as real today, particularly if you're serious about Buddhism, but it's not in your face when you grow up the same way it would have been 2,500 years ago.

[12:53]

When leprosy, when you broke a limb, you were crippled for life. People died in childbirth all the time. Leprosy was all around you. All sorts of nasty stuff was all around you. So it's right in your face. So there was a group of very radical and by our accounts ascetic shamanas or yogis and they aspired to get off this path. And by the way, this notion that nirvana is simple extinction, that's what the Mahayana thought too. And they reject that. In other words, we're not making it up that the early tradition felt that way. However, the Buddha came under attack very early on for this very negative understanding of nirvana. And we know this because there's a number of scriptures in which various yogis, the non-Buddhists, would say to the Buddha, oh, you're just teaching nihilism. It's all kind of negative. And they'd say, no, no, no, that's a mistake. We're actually neither hedonists nor nihilists. We're not eternalists or so on.

[13:54]

We're at the middle path. And then they come up with this idea of the unanswerable questions. And one of the unanswerable questions, or four in the traditional counting, is what happens to a Buddha after he dies? So this is, from a historian's point of view, what they were doing was backing off from an early, very radical conception of nirvana that was quite different from the other groups around. The other groups were teaching a moksha or liberation that was much happier. You merge with the Godhead or its eternal bliss and so on. It's the sort of happy picture. You become one with the universe. The Buddhists were just now. They want out. And if you go to Burma today or you look at traditional Theravada practitioners in Thailand and Sri Lanka, they still want out. So this is still very much a living tradition among some Theravadan Buddhists. So you have this problem, you now have this nirvana, you don't quite know what to make of it.

[14:58]

Well, what they did is they developed something that looked a lot like nirvana but that really was extinction in order to contrast that with nirvana. And initially, in the path of samadhi, there were eight stages of concentration. Do people do any of this here? Shamata. Yeah, jhanas. So there's... Jhana is the Pali jhana. And in the Pali system, they talk about four material jhanas and then four immaterial jhanas, which are also called samapathis, or the higher attainments. And they get really esoteric. What's actually happening in that succession of series is consciousness is becoming smaller and [...] smaller. And then they added a ninth, which is called nirodha, and in that particular stage consciousness ceases altogether. Just, it's gone. Then what they say is what those other yogis down the block are teaching is nirodha.

[16:03]

And in fact, if you look at Patanjali, that was, the rhoda is the term that Patanjali uses for moksha, for the ultimate. And it is a kind of cessation. And the Buddhists are saying, yeah, we can do cessation too, but really it doesn't lead to ultimate liberation. It's a mistake. So if your understanding of the path is refining consciousness down to nothing, that's a mistake. And that's not what nirvana is. Well, that's fine, but it creates a whole bunch of problems. And those problems, for hundreds of years, the Buddhists tried to work out. Because if consciousness stops, how does it get going again? You have this notion of cause and effect in early Buddhism. And once something ceases, once it's eliminated, it can't get going again. And there are lots of interesting scholastic, and this does get quite scholastic, not necessarily relevant to your practice.

[17:03]

The answers just give you an idea. The Sotrantikas think that the seeds of consciousness are somehow impregnated into your physical body. And that's where they reside. And this seed notion becomes very important if you know the notion of Aliyavijjnana. Aliyavijjnana came about, this kind of storehouse consciousness, in order to account for how... consciousness could get going again once it ceases in Niroda Simapati. There's a problem of... Yeah? Can you just... This division between nirvana and you're calling it... Niroda, or cessation. And like that happened in 400 BC? Can you put like a rough time frame on when that evolved? Yeah, so the simple answer is no. And the reason is a lot of this business of trying to figure out the texts that we have, the polycanon, for example, we don't know when the Buddha lived.

[18:07]

Was it 6th century or 5th century? Some people even say 4th century now. The earliest examples we have of any reference to Buddhism in the texts are the Edicts of Ashoka, which are about 250 BC, That's already 100 to 200 years after the Buddha died. The Pali canon was not committed down to writing until like the second century. Now they claim that there was a continuous oral tradition, but that's obviously not true because we have more and more texts which we're finding that date back to the first century BC, second century BC, and they already differ quite dramatically from the Pali tradition. So the story that I'm telling you is in part based on what we call a relative chronology. It's an attempt to stratify the earliest texts that we have into a kind of conceptual layers. So in other words, we already have Nirodha by the time we have the Pali canon. But we know that it was a problem. And so Buddhagosa, who was a very important 5th century commentator on the Pali tradition, is already struggling to make sense of Nirodha.

[19:16]

So, in other words, when I tell you that they created Narod in order to differentiate themselves from the non-Buddhists, it's hypothetical. There's a lot of evidence for it, but we don't... All this stuff is really early. This stuff is really, really early. The arising of the Ali Vijnana, that's much later. Now you're talking four centuries or so. But that's after many centuries of trying to grapple with how to handle states like Narodha where mind ceases. What happens if you die in Narodha? You can't be reborn if you die in Narodha because there's no final moment of consciousness. So you become an Arhat or a Buddha. But that would be cheating because that would mean that non-Buddhists who do have Narodha could kind of... So Buddhaghosa's answer to that is you can't die in Nuro. Your body becomes absolutely impregnable.

[20:18]

Yeah? Yeah? I hear, wait a minute. I just hear, wait a second. Yeah. Because you're saying that would mean that non-Buddhists can have this. Oh yeah. Yes they can. Why is that a problem? Oh, if you're an early Buddhist, because Buddha's teaching is right and Patanjali's is wrong. Can I... I'm going to come around to this at the end, but just to tease you a little bit and hopefully get you thinking about things. One of the things that is most emblematic about Buddhist modernism, particularly Buddhism in the West, is a kind of confidence that Buddhism is ecumenical, that... that there's one truth, right? That Buddhism, there are many different ways to that one truth and all different Buddhist, you know, different Buddhist teachings are different ways to the singular truth. That's just, I mean, I get it.

[21:24]

I understand that. What you should know is from an academic point of view, that is so orientalist. Because... Buddhists never thought that way until the 19th century. What Buddhists did is they not only thought that their teaching was right and everybody else is wrong, but those Zen guys down the road. That's not just a different method to the same goal, but they're profoundly deluded. And if they practice that way, they're really going to screw up their karma. So you look, and example number one, doge. when Dogen is attacking Dahwe, he's not saying Dahwe's method is not as good as mine. He's saying if you do what Dahwe, Dahwe fundamentally misunderstands what the point is. So I'm trying to get to what were those underlying issues that really galvanized particularly the early Chan community to engage in these really interesting debates and questions.

[22:31]

And my own position, just to tell you where I'm coming from, is that it's the questions that they were struggling with that are really relevant to practitioners today. Not necessarily the answers that came up. You can pick whatever answer you want. But that there was a series of things, questions that they took really seriously. One of the questions, I'm going to have to move quickly if I get there today. But one of the questions is, when you meditate, what are you trying to do? At the end of the day, are you trying to stop your thoughts? And what happens if your thoughts stop? Now, this is important to understand the second example. We'll come back to Naroda later on, but you'll see that it's connected to the second example, which are the heaven of the gods, the mindless gods. These are gods that have no minds at all. And they're born there. They're there for 500 eons. An eon is a culpa. It's a very, very long time. It's not a good place to be born.

[23:34]

It's not quite clear why it's not a good place to be born. But here's the thing. Only non-Buddhists are born there. And they are non-Buddhists who are practicing a particular kind of meditation where they believe that the object of meditation is to stop discriminating mind. This is one which is... So there's two messages I want you to at least think about, not agree with me. One is that the idea, this ecumenical Buddhism, where it's all one and it's all okay, and non-Buddhists have it too, that that's fine, but it's not a Buddhism that would have been recognizable prior to a couple centuries ago. It's really a very new phenomenon. And secondly... There is a position which is very popular today that says, when I quiet my mind, if I can stop thinking, if I can stop discriminating, then the natural luminosity of mind, consciousness, just pure presence, that's where I'll be.

[24:43]

You'll just be kind of basking in pure being, where there's no separation between me and other and so on and so forth. Sometimes people call it a witness consciousness. It's this kind of quiet consciousness behind thought. That is not an early Buddhist position. It is a position that comes up. And when it comes up, it becomes very controversial and remains controversial right down to the present day. But people understand what I mean by the position. Does anyone know this very famous book or TED Talk by Judith Bolte-Taylor? If you don't know about it, I won't get into it. It really captures this particular understanding. She was a brain technician, and she had a stroke, and she has this very powerful narrative of what happened to her in her stroke, that the stroke happened in her left hemisphere, and it shut down her discriminating mind, and suddenly she kind of attained nirvana.

[25:46]

She calls it nirvana. She said it was just like pure being, and so on. It's what people in my business call the filter theory. It comes out of Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary and this idea that the senses are actually filtering, they're not letting the world in, they're filtering the world out. If we could just quiet the mind and stop being attached, then we would find ourselves in pure being. That, in early Buddhism, was precisely the non-Buddhist heterodox position. One of the five aggregates, sanya, or perception, involves discrimination. It involves, in other words, there is no perception of the world without the ability to pull figure out from ground. When you stop doing that, if you want to quiet that element, that's why they have Naroda. They say, oh, you're trying, that's Naroda, it's not going to get you anywhere, that's just like a vegetative coma. Or you end up born in the heaven of the mindless gods.

[26:50]

The heaven of the mindless gods is very specifically for non-Buddhist serious yogis who think that if they can cease discriminative awareness, they're going to achieve some wonderful thing. And what do they achieve? They achieve mindlessness. So, now, again, all these... I'm not saying this is the true position or this is the Buddhist position. I'm saying this was the dominant early... Yeah, yeah. Does this mean that non-Buddhist serious yogis I'm just saying this is what the early Buddhists thought the guys down the block you know the story about how the Buddha the Buddha before he became enlightened he studied with these two very famous yogins and the first yogin taught him seven of these stages and the second taught him the eighth that's very polemical what that's saying is that all these other traditions the Buddha tried them and rejected them Have you ever run across anything that told you why the Buddha had an idea that there was something other than those things?

[28:00]

I've never seen anything. He didn't say why he knew there was something else. I think I understand what you're saying. I think what the text actually says is that he didn't know there was something. Actually, that's an interesting one. How does he know there's something else? But what he says is it didn't satisfy his craving. And so he's still searching. The traditional answer is he's a bodhisattva. He's planted the seeds in an infinite number of prior lifetimes. So that would be the doctrinal answer. But I've never come across anything in the narrative that tells you how he knew there must be... But I always assumed that it was other traditions around that suggested something more than a state. He had the idea that maybe he would find this... Buddhism grows up in an environment in which there was tremendous competition among different teachers. There's Mahavira of the Jains, there was the Ajivakas, there was Buddhism and so on.

[29:03]

Yeah, but my assumption is that Upanishad was around at that time. It's interesting, this gets into technical stuff, we can talk about it. Yes, everybody assumes that. But why are the Upanishads never mentioned in any early Buddhist scriptures? It's a mystery. The Jains are mentioned. The Shamanic movement is mentioned, but not the Brahmanical tradition that we associate with the Upanishads. So if they're saying this Neruda is not the goal, what were they positing was the goal? Nirvana. But what is that? That's not Neruda. There's not a clear... So, in other words, in the earliest tradition, nirvana was clearly, it was the extinction of all the aggregates. And what they were saying is nirode doesn't lead to the extinction of all the aggregates because nirode is temporary. Rebirth in the realm of the mindless gods is temporary. That's the problem with it. What these non-Buddhists are doing, it leads to something that they think is salvation.

[30:08]

But it's really, they're going to end up reborn. So the initial thing is it's not, but when they start to back off, that's when Buddhism gets sort of interesting. Because they start to get deeper and deeper and deeper into things. And in other words, the idea of nirvana as simple cessation, rebirth for a secular atheist, or at least death for a secular atheist, that Mahayama and Chan and Zen have a lot to say about why that is an unsatisfactory answer. But at this stage, It's pretty clear. There's niroda and there's nirvana. And niroda is okay for Buddhists. It's a temporary glimpse of nirvana because consciousness stops. By the way, that's something that makes it very clear that in nirvana there's no consciousness because niroda is clearly no consciousness. They say that there's only two factors. There's heat which keeps the body alive and there's this other life force thing that they need something to keep the body alive.

[31:11]

And then how do you become conscious again? That's interesting, how you become conscious again. There's all sorts of theories about that. But let's not go there. Because I think I'll run out of time. Would you associate nirvana with liberation? Nirvana is, by definition, liberation. Nirvana is... Actually, the definition of nirvana is dukkha-nirode. It's the cessation of... dukkha or suffering and it means the cessation of all five aggregates so nirvana is would you say beyond being and non-being? it's not the language that they use in the early tradition I mean as soon as you get you know Madhyamika starts to bring Madhyamika is going to say all this stuff is kind of cockamamie they got stuck in these they got stuck in certain ruts but Again, the reason I'm interested in talking about this stuff is that in order to tease out some underlying assumptions that you may have when you're sitting, one of those underlying assumptions is, is sitting trying to still thought?

[32:25]

And if it's trying to still thought, what would happen when thought is really stilled? And is that the direction you want to go into? And that leads to China. In China, this issue of the distinction between nirvana and naroda, it's all there in China in the technical texts. They knew this stuff. And in fact, many of the texts that we now use, the later scholastic texts, which are much later, they're avidharma texts, fourth, fifth, sixth centuries, they only exist in Chinese. And in those texts, you have these very elaborate discussions about nirvana and naroda and the heavens without gods. But for the most part, the Chinese... This didn't... It had very little purchase in China because of an oddity of translation. When they translate nirvana, well, they often transliterate, niepa, a transliteration of nirvana. It means they represent the sounds. When they translate it, they use the term nie in Chinese, and that means cessation.

[33:30]

And when they translate niroda, they use nie. See, it's the same for both... And it just became, you know, they didn't worry. It just seemed like whatever. So, in other words, at a very sophisticated elite level, they were aware of all these debates, but at the more kind of just common level, it didn't have much purchase. And besides, they weren't that much, they weren't interested in Abhidharma, this kind of scholastic thought in China. But they did get very interested in to the point of shouting at each other and calling each other names in the debate about whether insentient things have put in nature. And the reason I think this is so is that was their way of getting at the same underlying problem, which is, if we stop thinking, do we somehow become insentient? And is that really what we're after? So a little bit of background on this. the debate actually goes back to the Nirvana Sutra, the Mahayana.

[34:32]

There's two Nirvana Sutras. There's a... You can call it a Hinayana Nirvana Sutra, early one, and Mahayana Nirvana Sutra. The Mahayana Nirvana Sutra, one of the issues that is in there is do all beings have the capacity to attain Buddhahood or not? Now again, you probably think, well, of course Buddhists believe that everybody can become a Buddha or everybody can become enlightened. But in fact... mainstream scholastic tradition at the time was there is a class of beings, they're called Ichantika, and they're beings who are never, ever, ever going to become enlightened. It has to do with Gautra theory. Has to do with what? Gautra theory. It's that different people have different Basically, there are different classes of beings and it's just who you are. It's their version of genetics, right? And some people are just too screwed up. They will never become enlightened. By the way, there's a really interesting twist on this.

[35:33]

This is an aside. In later Yogacaratha, because the Yogacarans still to this day believe in Ichaktika. They believe that there are these beings who will never become enlightened, but they flip it. They say these are the really advanced Bodhisattans. In other words, they will never become enlightened because they take their vows seriously. Who are the names of these teachers espousing this idea? The Ishantika idea? Oh, it's all through... If you want a sutra, which is absolutely seminal in the evolution of Chan, look at the Lankavatara. The Lankavatara Sutra is one of the scriptural sources... for the Achantika idea. But in terms of individual teachers, anybody in the Hoso lineage, Vasubandhu, Asanga, Sthiramati, I... This was why, this was just part of the landscape, right?

[36:36]

Apparently, Xuanzang was terrified that he was an Achantika and didn't know it. Yeah, Xuanzang took the Achantika. He was somebody who believed in Achantika. The Yogacara, this was mainstream Buddhism actually until the rise of Chan and some other developments in China. Yeah? It's going to be a very off topic, but it sounds similar almost to like Christian Calvinist thinking about how some people were like blessed with grace from God and some just were not. It's actually very similar to that. And why they developed actually... This is going to go beyond my expertise very quickly. The Ajantika gets very technical and I just don't know the materials that well. So I don't even know if there's theories about why specifically they needed such a category. It may be a byproduct of some other things that they were doing. But Gautra theory is not that different from caste. And we know that even though Buddhists officially reject caste...

[37:41]

We know social historians who work on Buddhism know that caste still operated within Buddhist monastic, the Buddhist monastic world. I mean, there were certain, depending on what kind of family you came from, you know, there were certain positions open to you or not open to you. So some people just say, well, this is a very scholastic version of the caste theory for Buddhists. But anyway, this is all an aside. We're talking about enlightenment now, but I thought we were talking about nirvana. Well, we were talking about nirvana and niroda. So how does that translate into enlightenment? Because that's kind of just like a Western... I shouldn't... You're right. Let me... I'll be very careful and not use the term enlightenment. When you were saying enlightenment before, you were talking about nirvana? Well, I'm doing a shift. Again, I'm trying to compress a lot. The niroda, nirvana... issue, the way I was talking about it was within a non-Mahayana framework.

[38:41]

By the time, now I'm jumping to China, huge jump, many centuries, different issues, but what I'm going to argue is the same underlying issue, way down there, the deep issue was the same one. But now we're not talking about nirvana, arhat nirvana, but we're talking about Buddhahood, because the framework is Mahayana. So the Mahayana Parinirvana Sutra, the framework is really Buddhahood. So they say these people will not achieve Buddha. But that doesn't mean that they can achieve arhatship. That's why I was using the term enlightenment as a kind of cover term. They're just destined to roam samsata forever. I just want to say that in the Mahayana Parinirvana Sutra, they come out and say the original sutra didn't, We have a new version a hundred years later and suddenly it says in no uncertain terms all beings have Buddha nature. This becomes the seminal text in China that makes it orthodox that all beings have Buddha nature.

[39:43]

So if that makes you feel better about Buddhism. Yeah. I just wondered if the meditation question was still in there. It's all there lurking in the background. I'm going to try to get around to it. So... so now all beings have Buddha nature it says all beings have Buddha nature all sentient what it says is all sentient beings have Buddha nature and then the question comes up in the sutra well what is a sentient being? and it says well sentient beings are not non-sentient beings and non-sentient things are it's a very interesting list it says grass and trees and walls grass and trees and rocks and roof tiles windows Windows in there too. I think the roof tiles are very important. What they're saying is it's not just like natural objects, but even objects of human artifice. This will become important because when they say that all, later on in Japan, they turn this into a kind of, you know, it's all about nature.

[40:46]

But no, they meant like toxic waste dumps have Buddha nature. Well, we'll get there in a minute. So the Nirvana Sutra says clearly there's a distinction between sentient and insentient objects. And all sentient creatures, worms and hungry ghosts and so on, all have Buddha nature. They all have the capacity to attain Buddha. But then the Madhyamikans get in there and they say, what is this? This is a conventional distinction you're making between sentient and inesentient. Let me, can I segue again? for a minute. One of the things, when I was talking about sentient and insentient at the beginning, here's a little interesting thing. Philosophers don't agree on the sentient and insentient distinction or kind of where that lies. No one's figured out. Are prions or viruses, are they sentient or insentient? Are they like animal or vegetable?

[41:47]

But in... Cognitive neuroscience, we now know that there is a module, some people just call it the kind of animacy detection module, but there's a set of circuitry in the brain that is genetically programmed from birth to recognize animate things. And in fact, it is some deficiency in that mechanism that some people think is responsible for autism spectrum disorders. So we know that babies a few days old already things that have faces or things that move as if they're intentional objects, they don't seem to move mechanically, they will capture an infant's attention in ways and the brains light up in certain ways that inanimate objects don't do. So we're actually programmed to recognize animate things. And there's an easy evolutionary account for this, right? If you... The human beings, or the Neanderthals, or whatever, or the Australopithecus, whatever they were, who could recognize the tiger in the bushes faster than some other guy, he was the one who was going to survive.

[42:56]

And not only that, is if you were going to err, the people who erred in terms of false positives rather than false negatives were going to survive faster. There's a whole theory of religion now, that religion has to do with the fact that evolution... by chance, gave us this agency detection module, and now human beings go around projecting supernatural agency on all kinds of natural objects. This is not a theory that... I don't know of any scholar of Buddhism who subscribes to this theory, because if you study Buddhism, you don't think that ultimately religion is about projecting supernatural agency on things. But it's still a very powerful theory. Now, the reason this is relevant is... you might think that the evolutionary advantage that one has by having this agency detection module is because you are recognizing something that really exists in the world. But it might not work that way at all. It might be that our sense that there is a distinction between agency and non-agency is something that we are programmed to project on the world in the same way we project color on the world.

[44:08]

that our minds, in other words, create colors and they create the distinction between sentient and insentient. That was what the Madhyamikans were saying. They said, hey, wait a minute, ultimately this distinction between sentient and insentient is what they call a conventional or utilitarian distinction. It doesn't actually describe the way the world really is. So they begin to question Maidiamecans didn't have problems questioning the sutras. They began to question this statement. Yeah? In some of this thinking, what is the, you know, today when you're talking about this, you're sort of using evolution to explain how these things came about. How did these thinkers back then, you know, what's their thinking on why this? Yeah, so Maidiamecans, that is, for other talk, happy to talk, but basically they were logicians. And their understanding is that the world that we live in is a conceptually constructed world and that anything that is conceptually constructed cannot accurately reflect the world as it is, sort of observer independent.

[45:24]

What was there for why it was being constructed? Why do we construct? That's ignorance from ages past. That's karma. It was way, way back. what they were interested in convincing you that it is conceptually constructed much more than trying to give you like where it came from. That just wasn't their thing. Yogacata tried to explain that with their seed theory and so on, but the Madyamikins weren't, wasn't their thing. Yeah? So according to that one theory, autistics could never attain Buddhahood. No, I don't think they, I don't think they intersect. Um... Because actually you might say that autistics are good Madhyamikans because they're not making a distinction that we make that's a conventional distinction. That they're closer to their robo-Buddhaness, as it were. But anyway, so long story, really shortening it now. There was this big debate that came out of the Nirvana Sutra, eventually, okay, all beings have Buddha nature, but then the question is, what's the distinction between sentient and insentient?

[46:32]

Then we begin to have, within the earliest Chan texts available to us, these are texts that date early 8th century. They were found at Dunhuang. One of them, which is one of the early texts that traces Buddhism back to Bodhidharma, it says, when you are sitting in the forest, or when you're sitting in the monastery, in the forest, so they're talking about a forest retreat, Aren't all the mountains and the trees sitting with you also? So they are... It begins to talk about... Philosophically we'd say it's a phenomenological term. It's beginning to talk about experience in such a way that doesn't make the subject-object distinction. And says what you are fundamentally realizing in meditation... is that the distinction between you and the world around you is a constructed one.

[47:36]

If that's the case, then this most fundamental distinction between sentient and insentient is something that we are constructing on a day-to-day basis, but in meditation we're dissolving, or we're denaturalizing it. And we have quite a few different texts that talk this way. they're associated, for those of you who are really gung-ho on Chan history, they're associated with the Eastern Mountain tradition. This is the tradition where Hui Nung goes to the Fifth Patriarch. The Fifth Patriarch is associated with this Eastern Mountain school. And it's texts that are associated with that school begin to talk this way. And this is the origins within the Chan world. People know Chan is just the Chinese precursor. It's the... precursor of this notion that insentient objects have Buddha nature. What they say is if you're going to grant Buddha nature to sentient things, you have to grant them to insentient things.

[48:36]

And when you become Buddha, the entire world becomes Buddha with you. You may recognize this, Dogen talks about it. So you might think, very happy end to the story, but no. Shen Hui, who was the major kind of conceptual architect for Huino, thought this was a completely idiotic notion. He thought it was pernicious. The terms that he uses for the people who espouse this particular point of view are really, they're almost as bad as the terms that Dogen uses when he's railing on. And it's a little bit, first of all, he says, it's just stupid. Who ever heard of a spoon or a plate becoming a Buddha and preaching a Dharma? So he just says, this is silly. But what was really worrying him, and this gets into the sudden gradual thing, is he thought this is a non-Buddhist idea. This is Hinduism.

[49:38]

This is this notion of a quiet space in which subject and object disappear, in which there's kind of pure luminosity, pure consciousness, and If you take that idea seriously, there are all sorts of problems with it. One is he's not Buddhist. It's not taught in the Prajnaparamita literature, which he was very concerned about. And it ultimately mitigates serious practice. Serious practice is about radically transforming your understanding of the world. And this notion of quietly sitting such that there's no space between you and the mountains Again, I'm skipping a lot of steps in the story, but later on, this isn't Shen Hui's language, but the language in the Song Dynasty will be language like falling into emptiness or Zen sickness. Do people here talk about Zen sickness at all? Not enough.

[50:40]

So it's difficult to get a hold. Zen sickness, you could... In some ways, one might cynically say that they use Zen sickness for whatever the teacher that they disagree with is doing. They say that leads to Zen sickness. But in general, it seems to be used for a set of practices that were what we would think of as leading to a kind of self-absorption. And the reason I think this is so important, particularly in contemporary, not just Zen, but contemporary Buddhist practice, is this fight over to what extent should practice be an active engagement in the world that embraces a certain kind of conceptual understanding and debate, and to what extent is all of that somehow... contrary to practice and what you should be doing is running away from that and finding some inner stillness, that that was a debate that early Chan tradition was founded on that debate.

[51:49]

If you look at the Platform Sutra, many of you may know, you probably, people familiar with the Platform Sutra? Look, if you look at the Dunhuang text of the Platform Sutra, at the back of the text there are a series of transmission verses People are familiar with those? Look at those transmission verses now that I have told you that the central theme is the Buddha nature of insentient objects. The transmission verse, Hwaynam's transmission verse, and this is not the competition verse, but the transmission verse is about how without, you plant seeds in the soil and you get these flowers that grow. Without the soil of mind, there can be no growth of Buddha wisdom. I forget the exact, I have it in here, but I won't look it up. In other words, he's saying, incendiary things don't grow Buddha nature. Now, who put that there? Shen Hui put it there, because Shen Hui probably wrote the text. And Shen Hui, ironically, is the person who everybody, well, they don't actually trace themselves through Shen Hui, but they trace themselves through Hui Nong.

[52:57]

And Hui Nong, throughout the Platform Sutra, there are a number of references, some veiled, some not so veiled, to the idiocy of this particular understanding of Buddhism. The idea that this kind of quietistic perception, and think of Hui Nung himself, of course, how much meditation did Hui Nung do before he was enlightened? Anybody? Zero. None. This was very radical. What that text was saying, this gets back to your question, is if you think Buddhism is about meditation, forget it. Here's a guy who received transmission and did zero meditation. In that lifetime. In that lifetime. And it's more complicated than that because when Huynang... I have another talk. I could give it tomorrow. I'm trying to figure out what to do tomorrow. But I have a whole talk on what early meditation actually was. But in Huynang's community, we know they were sitting. Because Huynang, even though he always says, sitting's not it, don't be attached to sitting, blah, blah, blah.

[54:01]

When he's about to die, he says, keep on sitting as you've been, you know, as you have been doing all along. So we know that there's some kind of gap between the rhetoric and what they were actually doing on the ground. It's kind of complicated. Anyways, that, you know, I want to stop here because there's five minutes left and I prefer just to open it up to questions. But I've kind of laid the land a little bit. I'll come back to pick up some of these things tomorrow. This is the way, okay, these two contrasting ideas, I should say, this is not me. This really is running through the tradition and where you see it in contemporary Japan is in something called the Hihang Bukkyo, do you know, critical Buddhism, do people know this? No. At Komazawa University, which is the home university of the Soto school, there were two scholars, Hakamaya and Matsumoto.

[55:08]

And it's probably 30 years, 40 years ago. They were actually, even though they're teaching at a Soto college, and they're Soto priests themselves, they were students of Indo-Tibetan Madhyamika Buddhism. And they were also very concerned about the complicity of Buddhists in Japan during the war years, in particular the complicity of the Soto school. And they believed that the reason that the Soto school was in bed with the military was because of a lack of critical moral engagement. And this comes because of their belief in Buddha nature theory. That Buddha nature theory is un-Buddhist. They say this explicitly. They say Buddha nature theory is Hinduism. It's Hinduism having crept into Buddhism. And it's undermined a certain kind of what they call critical. I mean, the term is hihan. It means criticism. And they looked at the Indo-Tibetan tradition, you know, with their debate and the Madhyamika kind of discourse and Yogacara.

[56:15]

And it's a very, very intellectually alive tradition. They believe that that intellectual aliveness was killed off when Buddha nature theory became dominant in East Asia. And so they're trying to... I mean, it's a movement of two people. But it got a lot of people kind of very excited because what they were saying was this particular... So what I'm calling the Buddha nature strand, you can also call it... It's... scholars call Tathagatagarbha Buddhism. Tathagatagarbha means the womb of Buddhahood, is that we're all carrying a Buddha around within us already. By the way, they don't believe that Dogen was a Buddha nature theorist. And I personally agree with that. I mean, I can show you things where Dogen is extremely critical of that particular understanding. But they do think that Soto Zen in Japan ruled, I mean, it just became... everything got sucked up by Buddha nature theory and that Buddha nature theory says we're all Buddhas and therefore everything is fine and it leads to a certain kind of approach to meditation which is very kind of, it's all into, you know, personal absorption rather than a kind of active engagement in the world.

[57:32]

So one would be a theory that believes that if you quiet the mind, your innate luminous Buddha nature shines through. The other is, if you quiet the mind and instill the mind, you just become a rock. Or that's neroda, or whatever. And then there's this odd position that is in the middle that, yes, you become a rock, but you want to be a rock. And that you get all the time. You know, when you ask the Zen master a question, he says, ask it to my stick. So, it's... And by the way, does a dog have Buddha Ninja? It's all coming right out of this debate. Yes. It comes out of the debate about does, are, that would be a whole long talk. But there's no question about it because we know where that koan came from and its history and it's tied into the notion of do insentient objects have Buddha nature?

[58:35]

And what you have in Mu is his resolution of this particular conundrum. But later on in the debate, all that background gets lost in the tradition. Especially by the time you have the tradition. And so they say, okay, just repeat Mu. Mu's emptiness is fine, just repeat Mu. And they forget what was actually going on. There was a debate there, and this was meant to be an intervention in the debate. Yeah. Going back a little ways, I'm kind of I'm clear about how samadhi leads to prajna. It's almost like development of... It might be because of Buddha nature creeping in, but it almost seems like some people I've talked to seem to think that development of wisdom is almost like an emergent property of doing a lot of meditation.

[59:37]

Yeah. In the contemporary Burmese... It's 4.30. Okay. Very quick compression of a really complex story. In Burma, the Theravada tradition of meditation had basically died completely by the end of the 19th century. A number of major figures revived the tradition. Lady Saida, who was actually the kind of grand-teacher, grandfather-teacher to Mahasi Sayada, who's the grandfather-teacher to the whole mindfulness movement in America. One of the things they were interested in doing was making meditation available to lay people. To do that, they kind of argued that prajna, which traditionally was understood in Burma and throughout the Theravada world as requiring the knowledge of scripture and the study of Abhidharma and all sorts of...

[60:38]

you know, all sorts of that kind of thing. They said, you don't have to do all that. If you just do sati, it is enough. And they call their tradition the Vipassana tradition, and they say that Satipatthana is the foundation of Vipassana, and then they interpret Satipatthana in this very kind of strange way. What Satipatthana was about is aligning our categories with the world. Read the Satipatthana citruses, when you breathe in long, know that you're breathing in long. It doesn't say... just be with the breath. Know that it's a long breath. Breathing out, know that it's a short breath. This is where the whole labeling is coming, Mahasi. That's a whole other story. But I think what they're doing is it comes from trying to make the tradition available to lay people. And therefore, they say, well, you don't really need to engage in the kind of critical work that traditionally would have been understood as the foundation of prajna. Now that's within the kind of Theravada world, but I think it's been quite influential in America.

[61:41]

The Chan people, they do something else. Now we're back to Mahayana again, and we have six paramita or ten paramita, one of which is Chan or Dhyana, meditation, and one of which is prajna. And what do you get in Kuinang, in the Platform Sutra? It says the two are the same. What do they mean by that? That's the koan of the platform sutra. But it doesn't mean, it can't mean that prajna emerges naturally from meditation. It can't mean that because, of course, they're saying you don't need to meditate. What prajna becomes more and more esoteric or... You know, it's sort of like what happens to prajna is what happens to nirvana. In the early tradition, when they back off of nirvana being simple extinction, and they say, well, it's not just simple extinction. And you want to know, well, what else could it be? And they say, well, we don't know. We just know it's not Naroda. The same thing sort of happens with prajna.

[62:43]

It's used in more and more kind of esoteric fashion in East Asia. But I still think that they do believe there is, for lack of a better word, a discursive component to it. In other words, it's not just rocking the world mindlessly. They're very critical, or at least the Southern tradition is very critical of what they call mindlessness. But can I... Just read you one more thing. When I was working on this stuff, I was really interested in, does the... the mindlessness of the Zen folks ever come into contact with Naroda and the mindless gods? And I found it in one text. In the 8th century, there was this supposedly very famous debate, probably somewhat mythical, in Tibet. It's called the Lhasa debate, where a representative of northern Chan, this would be East Mountain, what we call like East Mountain Chan, is defending the Chan position in Tibet, and Kamala Shila, who is a great...

[63:50]

Abhi Dharmas is defending the Indian position. And... Anyway, I won't read the whole poem. But what Kamala Sheila says... Kamala Sheila says, look, it takes eons and eons and eons to become a Buddha. Mahayana, the monk Mahayana, that was his name, who's defending the child position, he says, no, that's just a thought. Just put that thought down. And it's right in front of you. And Kamala Sheila says... you can't put that thought, you think you can put that thought down, but it takes eons and eons and eons to be able to put that thought down. Mahayana says, no, you don't get it, right? Just stop it. And Kamala Shila says, if you just stop it, you are like the mindless, you're like the beings in the realm of the mindless gods. He's saying, if that's your understanding of Buddhism, You're one of these heterodox yogis who think that what it's about is not thinking.

[64:54]

Thank you. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma Talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving.

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