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. Hello. My name is Mark Blum. You can call me Bloom or better to call me Mark. It's easier and... I teach at Berkeley, and I got my PhD at Berkeley in Buddhist studies. We have the only Buddhist studies program in the country. We own this PhD Buddhist studies program in the country. We have a particular way of doing things, and this is the way I think. So you're going to get my way of thinking, and whatever it's worth to you, I hope you've learned something from it and can be helpful. I would like this to be as dialogic as possible, meaning that we have as much dialogue as possible. But my guess is that probably most of you are not familiar too much with the topic I'm going to talk about, which is the Nirvana Sutra. So that may be difficult.

[01:02]

So what I thought I would try to do is lecture for, say, the first half, maybe 30 minutes or 20 minutes, and then we read a bit from the sutra. And this is a sutra. We have two copies of it here. So I'll just do some pages, and we'll send the book around and someone will read it out. And then I'd like to just hear your responses and we can talk about the material. The first thing I want to do is, I'm going to give you a little mini history of what it's all about, why the citrus is important, both for lots of reasons. We'll get into that in a second. But first thing I want to do is, I have a list of topics that I made up this morning, morning and afternoon. I'm going to read these out. I'm going to try to write them on the paper later. We have a minute. And the reason I'm giving you this list is because I communicated with Greg about the fact that this is a very complex amount of material.

[02:04]

I just spent five days in China teaching this for six hours a day, for five days, to students who read Chinese, and we discussed the Chinese versus the English translation, and we still didn't certainly finish by any means. So... There's a lot of material, and I would like to talk, I can talk about any of this stuff. So I have like 10, you know, 10 most favorite topics, okay, from the Nirvana Sutra, as people have talked about. And I'm not talking about 10 greatest hits in terms of American Buddhism, but 10 greatest hits in terms of Chinese Buddhism, Japanese Buddhism, and Korean Buddhism. So I'm going to read this list, and I'll give it to you later. Somehow we'll I'll get up here or somewhere so you can look at it. Maybe we can write it up and leave the board somewhere. What I'm hoping is that after what we do today, I'll choose what we do today, and then maybe people can sort of vote on things that they'd like to hear tomorrow, and then they'll choose.

[03:05]

Would you like someone to volunteer to write them up? That would be really nice, yeah. So let me just read it first, and then he can volunteer. The first one is Buddha Nature, which I'm sure everybody's interested in. Second is, what is Buddha? The Dharma body is the only true body, and the redefinition of the Four Noble Truths. Third is a topic of heresy, called Ichantiga. Fourth is Tathagatagarbha, literally the womb of the Buddha. Five is vegetarianism. Sixth is the salvation of Ajatasatru. Ajatasatru was, this is an incident that happened during the life of Shakyamuni, which we know actually happened. Ajatashatru's father was a prince born to a king named Bimbisara. Bimbisara, of all the kings in the region, as you know, the Shakyamuni traveled on foot most of his life, moving from place to place. Bimbisara was his greatest supporter. Bimbisara had only one son.

[04:06]

Bimbisara was murdered by his son. That's Ajatashatru. Ajatashatru murdered his father, even though he was destined to be the next king anyway, for very complex reasons. And... This is about a karmic, you might say, hermeneutic of what that is all about, okay? And by the way, patricide is, in Buddhist doctrine, there are five heinous crimes that are absolutely the worst. Of all the sins you can commit, if you commit one of these five, you go to aviti hell immediately, and aviti is the worst of all hells, the most painful, and you last the longest time. Now, Buddhist hells and Buddhist heavens, if you don't know, are temporary. They're not permanent. It's not a biblical thing. It's just one rebirth. And there are many hells and there are many heavens. But Avicii is the worst of the worst. Anyway, so why did Ajata start to do this and why does Shakyamuni forgive him? That's a very complex thing. Anyway, that's one of the topics. Topic 7, historical degradation of Buddhism.

[05:07]

And that's also a very important topic for understanding how Buddhism evolved. actually in all Buddhist countries, but particularly in East Asia. Non-emptiness as commensurate with emptiness as a religious absolute. Nine, monastic regulations and reform. Let's just say monastic reforms. And then ten is a little bit convoluted, but this is the paradox of the Buddha's own karma. That is, Things happen in the Nirvana Sutra that allude to the fact that the Buddha still has karmic residue from the past that is not wholly positive. In the Nirvana Sutra, the Buddha has a second son who turns out to be an asshole in simple language. That's not supposed to happen to a Buddha. So, forget my French. Anyway, so that's another topic.

[06:08]

And that is actually quite fascinating. And it shows... Well, anyway, the reason that's interesting is not only because it's kind of a conundrum, but it shows that, in fact, within the Buddhist community, karma and the understanding of karma was highly contested, highly debated. And this is true in all Indian religions. Every religion in India understands karma differently. It's not a simple black-and-white system, and there are a lot of logical problems with it, one of which is if the Buddha went through many lifetimes in order to become a Buddha, that means he must have done some bad things, he must have some bad karmic results called Karma Vipaka. And in fact, there are stories about this. So there are stories that come up in the early Theravada tradition in a later text called Apadana. And there's this very famous story about the Buddha's lousy son in the Nirvana Sutra. So those are the ten topics. And let me just, from all this, you could probably wonder, well, what is this sutra like doing? And so...

[07:10]

Let me give this to you. You can maybe do a short version of that on there. So now let me give you sort of a little history. So I know some people here have done a lot of Buddhism. Some people have told me have done almost nothing. So I'm going to start from the very beginning and go quickly. So the Buddha lived in India either in the... Well, we don't know. There's two different dating periods, but probably, I believe, in the northern tradition, which is about 482 to probably born about 460 or 480 BC. Lived 80 years. That's definite. The Buddha died. He did not name a successor to his organization. He began as a prince in a kingdom. His life story is the mere opposite of the story of Jesus, who is beloved because he's poor. The Buddha's beloved because he's rich. But his richness is redefined from material wealth to spiritual wealth.

[08:12]

And a big part of the Buddha's story, and by the way, reconstructing the Buddha's story is difficult because all the biographies of the Buddha, and there are many, were all written at the very least 400 years after he died. So there's what we call hagiography. There's a mixture of fact and myths here that makes it hard. But in any case... The famous mythic part, one of the famous mythic parts is that as soon as he's born, the father brings in a fortune teller who looks at him and calculates, Indians very much believe in this, calculates his birth date and where the moon and the sun and all this and looks at him and says, aha, this is a chakravartin. This is someone who will turn the wheel. Turning the wheel... used to be, until that time, a political term, meaning a great king, who would turn the wheel of the world and reshape the world, that is, create a massive, India at this time was not unified, it would create a massive kingdom that would unify the subcontinent. But the Buddhists themselves take this story and they turn it on its head and they say, yes, he turned the wheel and transformed the world in a religious way.

[09:15]

So the Buddha grows up, gets married, he's a brilliant student, Very good at everything he does, of course. Everyone loves him, of course. And instead of being suppressed by the political oppressors like in the Bible, he's in fact on top of things because he's the prince. And he gets married and has a child and continues to have lots of parties with his friends until he gets disgusted at this kind of indulgent lifestyle. And he sees a funeral... and sees a sadhu, sees a wandering ascetic ashramana, and says, what is that person doing? And he's told that person is seeking the truth so we can overcome suffering, which is inevitably caused by death. And then he says, that's what I'm doing the next day. He leaves and doesn't come back for about ten years. So, after six years of practicing yoga and the force under various teachers, he decides none of his teachers has the truth. And he sits alone under the bodhi tree and sends enlightenment by himself.

[10:17]

So, This story is important because the Buddha ultimately has no teacher. And, of course, what that means is that it's ideally possible for anyone to become a Buddha. However, what we see in the Euler tradition is that nobody becomes a Buddha. There are no Buddhas among his students. In fact, the goal of becoming a Buddha is suddenly written out of the entire religion. Instead, the goal is to become an Arhat, okay? after which you can attain nirvana as an arha, but no one's becoming a Buddha. So the meaning of Buddha already is undergoing evolution. Now, there is an early scripture in the early canon, pre-Mahayana, called the Mahapati Nirvana Sutra, exactly the same title as this, in fact. So this is called the Nirvana Sutra, which is the abbreviated Chinese and Japanese and Korean and Vietnamese way of referring to the longer title, which is Mahapati Nirvana Sutra. The word nirvana has three meanings. There's three kinds of nirvana. What is the attainment of nirvana? It's the kind of goal of Buddhism. That's nirvana.

[11:20]

Then there's padi nirvana, which refers to death. So when you see the term padi nirvana in the Sanskrit text, usually refers to the death of someone. And then maha padi nirvana, a great padi nirvana, is the death of a Buddha. So the maha padi nirvana sutra, we only have... We have fragments of a Sanskrit text, and we have a Pali translation of it called Mahapani Nibbanna Tsutta, and that's the one people often cite, because that's been translated from 100 years ago. And in that early text, the Buddha is 80 years old, he eats some bad food and gets dysentery and says, that's it, I'm dying. And then we have a description of his last sermon, and his ultimate description. Death and cremation and what is done with the ashes after his cremation. In which the ashes are turned into relics. Relics are very important in Buddhist culture. The relics of the Buddha, of course, are the most important. The notion of stupas and pagodas, of course, are sites of relic worship.

[12:23]

Your kaisando is, in a sense, a kind of stupa to your founder. So, now, that was the Mahapanirvana Sutra until this sutra came up. So probably about 300 years after the death of the Buddha, we had this new movement called Mahayana that springs up. In different places in India, and there's different things happening. By this time, because there's no successor, the Buddhist religion splits immediately into different schools of interpretation. The tradition refers itself to the 18 schools. But in fact, I've counted at least 21 schools. And I've heard people say there are 26 schools. So... Schools doesn't mean a building on a street corner with a name on the front. It means a tradition of scholarship, a tradition of interpretation. You might say a hermeneutic lineage. And of these 18 or 25 schools, what they did is they take the scriptures that were memorized by the early tradition and they interpret them quite differently. So suddenly Buddhism is already getting very disparate.

[13:25]

And then Mahayana starts. And Mahayana starts for lots of different reasons. It's a long, complex story, but there's sort of three... you might say three stages of Mahayana. All the Buddhism in East Asia is Mahayana. There is no non-Mahayana Buddhism. And that's because the people that happened to bring Buddhism to China were all Mahayanists. And those who were not, if they came, they were not successful. So the Mahayanas, there's something called Abhidharma, which is the sort of first layer of textual interpretation of scripture. There's lots of Abhidharma. Each school has its own Abhidharma. And then suddenly, for some reason, people that should have been writing Abhidharma are writing sutras again. A sutra is a sermon of the Buddha. The sutra should only originate from Shakyamuni himself. But in fact, if we look at the sutras we have from the early tradition, and this includes the Pali Canon. The Pali Canon, by the way, is very, very late, despite the fact that Theravada and people tell you this is the original Buddhism.

[14:28]

No offense, but that's bullshit. The Pali Canon was put together not until the 5th century. It's almost a thousand years after the time of the Buddha. And there's lots of editing and compilation you can see. Most of the major sutras are two and three sutras put together. There's lots of editing done. Lots of hagiographic miracles, mythology. It's inevitable. So, for whatever reason, people begin to write sutras that are labeled Mahayana. Mahayana meaning greater vehicle. And... the Mahayana Sutras are put into the mouth of Shakyamuni. So either there was another transmission that was suppressed and then arose again later after it somehow got out from under its suppression, or in fact these things were invented beginning around the first century before the Common Era, nobody knows. But in any case, when the Mahayana Sutras start to emerge, you start to see a kind of, again, it's a reinterpretation of the original material but in a greatly expanded form with all sorts of new tools in the toolbox to make sense of what the Buddha was talking about.

[15:32]

And the most famous ones are the doctrine of emptiness, for example. Emptiness as an absolute. Emptiness does occur in the early scriptures, but it's not focused on. We have emptiness, shunya, as an adjective in early Buddhism, but we have shunyata as a noun in Mahayana scriptures, where not only the things are empty, but there is an emptiness as a concept. And emptiness is very important for many, many reasons. So if you're serious about studying Buddhism, you must study emptiness. And why do I say that? I say that because emptiness is kind of a flag, a representative name, a label to stick on a certain process, a certain way of thinking that is very much at the core of what Buddhism is all about. And that is about deconstruction and de-identification. And that is how the whole religion works, that is. concept is put forward to explain things and then the concept is taken apart, deconstructed. And you must go through a deconstruction process to arrive at any certainty of truth in Buddhism.

[16:35]

So the first logic in the history of the world was invented by Buddhists in India and that logic already is using the same kind of deconstruction negativity. So I'm sure in your own studies and recitation, you use negative language all the time. Know this, know that, right? That kind of negation is at the heart of Buddhist affirmation. You must have a negation to have an affirmation. Without it, it's a kind of, the Buddhists consider your acceptance of something to be too facile, too simplistic. Something has to be taken apart and its component parts examined for what they are. It's a bit like atomic theory, you know. People used to think this was wood. Do we realize it was molecules and atoms and there's more space than solidity, right? Same thing with Buddhist notion. That's really the way the Buddhists approach identity. Oh, I'm me. You know, this is my little MacBook Air, except that actually what it is is a bunch of little pieces of metal and wires and God knows what. So, and get down to the ministerial level, take things apart and realize they're only put together in this form in a temporary way.

[17:41]

But nonetheless, they have meaning. This table, without this table, my computer would fall down. So I'm happy it's here, and it's real, but it's only real in a temporary sense. So in the end, the Mahayana emptiness rhetoric is about searching for lasting truths that go beyond any kind of temporary form. And when you ask what those things are, there aren't very many. One of them is Buddha, though, and one of them is emptiness. So the first stage of Mahayana... scriptures are mostly what are called perfection of wisdom sutras, and sutras about particular other Buddhas besides Shakyamuni, like Amitabha or Akshobhya. And then we get to the second phase of Mahayana Sutra development. This starts around the first century, probably, of the Common Era. And that's when we have the Lotus Sutra, and that's when, right after the Lotus Sutra, we have this sutra. Same title as the first Mahapati Nirvana Sutra, the Death of the Great

[18:42]

death, the great decease of the Buddha. But now we have the same context, the Buddha's dying. And he says to the world, this is it, I'm going out. And everyone says, oh my God, and they rush to come see him and to pay their respects. And the first chapter of the sutra is about everybody who comes and all the offerings they bring. And it's quite magnificent. And unlike the early, the original Mahapayaravana sutra, in this one, it's been mythologized in a great way. It's very expansive, very imaginative, and we have not only lay men, lay women, monastic women, monastic men, we have animals, we have gods, we have demigods, we have people from other planets, we have other Buddhas, all sorts of things. The room gets very crowded. And they all bring their offerings and the Buddha rejects all of them. He says, thank you very much. Put it to the side. And he doesn't accept it. He only accepts the offerings from one person Is Chunda up there?

[19:43]

Oh, okay, sorry, that's number 11. Here, C-U-N-D-A, okay. So, there's this, in the early sutra, Chunda is a blacksmith. In this version, it just says he's an artisan. He's a craftsman. He makes things. We don't know exactly what he makes. Anyway, all the people that bring all these things, the Buddha rejects all of them, and then suddenly Chunda comes up, this layperson, with about 15 of his friends, and he says, you know, I'm a nobody, but I brought this, I brought some food for you, and the Buddha says, you will come forward. And he accepts this, and everybody goes, whoa, you're the crowd, you can imagine the crowd, whoa, you know, Chunda, and then they start saying, Chunda, my God, look what this means, you know, the world has seen this, et cetera, et cetera, the Buddha has chosen you, et cetera, et cetera. So, one of the interesting, intriguing stories is why does a Buddha choose Chunda? And I have a theory about that, If you want, we can talk about that. But that's obviously not the main theme of the sutra.

[20:45]

But in any case, that's one of the interesting things that happens. And Chunda turns out to be very bright, very literate, and has philosophical debates with Manjushri, which are pretty impressive, okay? Even though he's just a blasphemy. But the main thing is that all these people come to here to see the Buddha. And of course, this is his last statement. It's kind of his will and testament. This is the thing I want you to remember. And what he says to them is, you're all here because I'm dying, but you don't understand anything. And that's really the beginning of the whole sutra, is that you don't understand anything. The Buddha keeps telling people what they understand is wrong. In other words, he's deconstructing their knowledge. He's deconstructing their complacency. He's taking apart their sense of security that they know that they're Buddhist and they're living a Buddhist life. And he says, no, you're not. You got it all wrong. I mean, she says, I'm not doubting your sincerity, but you don't understand anything. I am not dying. Why would you think I would die?

[21:47]

I'm a Buddha. Buddhas are not born. What is not born does not die. And so then, what is that all about? So that's all about the fact that, in fact, the Buddha has three bodies. So in different scriptures, the Buddha has one body, two bodies, four bodies, but the standard form is three bodies. What are the three bodies? But in this sutra, there are two bodies that are talked about all the time. The rupakaya or the nirmanakaya. Rupa is physical form. That's the Buddha in human form. But nirmana means transformation. So the Buddha in his nirmanakaya, or his physical body, is a transformation. And why is it there? It's in response to the needs of the world. So this is something called... Something called Loka Anuvartana. It's another very interesting, sorry, Anuvartana.

[22:50]

It's another big theme of the whole sutta. Loka is the world, our world, this world. Anuvartana means kind of turning or in response to. And what the Buddha then tells everybody is everything I've been doing is Loka Anuvartana. You have to see through the form to get to the essence. The form is I'm giving you something you can understand. You can understand me as a teacher because I'm human, but I'm not human. I'm a Buddha. What is a Buddha? It's not a physical thing. Buddha is truth, okay? So, the three bodies, the body, the two bodies, so there's the, so we say the physical body, and the other body, anyone know what the other body's called? The Dharma body, oh boy. So body is kaya in Sanskrit, dharmakaya, right? So here the Buddha's telling people, this is the real body. Now what is dharma?

[23:50]

The dharma is the teachings, right? The dharma is the truth. The real body that I am is the dharma body. The wrong body has no form. It is simply, what is it? It's sort of like gravity, you know? Does gravity have form? Well, gravity is kind of a force, right? I mean, so gravity makes things happen because it's a principle. And the Dharma body is something like that. It's a principle. It's a liberating principle. And it's a principle of power and truth. If you can access it, you can access power and truth and completely transform yourself because you can realign your existence according to that. And it supports you. It becomes a basis of who you are. And it's powerful and universal and it's beyond time and space and all these kinds of things. That's what the Buddha is saying. And in this sutra, we see various long sections where the Buddha talks about his childhood, his life. We have a biography of the Buddha, according to this sutra, in which the Buddha says, yes, my parents wanted to have a child and so they had sex and then I was born.

[24:59]

But in fact, I wasn't born. I just entered their womb so they would think that they would have a child. And I needed to do that because they needed a child so people could see that there was someone who was become a Buddha so they could hear the Buddha preach. And then he talks about it. And then I went to school and then people said, oh, you're a really good student. He says, but I wasn't a good student because I wasn't studying. Because why do I need to study anything? I'm a Buddha. And on and on, you know. Then I went to the temple and I paid respect to the gods, you know, to protect our families. He says, of course, I didn't really do that. But, you know, the gods would pay respect to me, you know, because I'm a Buddha, et cetera, et cetera. So the whole... This is just the beginning of a whole series of Buddhist truths and presumptions about how the religion functions that are deconstructed in this book, in this sutra, that are astonishing and shocking. So, in some sense, the Mahapanta Nirvana Sutra is a very disruptive text, and it is almost impossible to kind of sit comfortably with this work. And I can tell you, that it goes on and on in this kind of disruptive mode throughout the whole text.

[26:03]

But in the process of doing so, it relates a lot of astonishing teachings, a lot of astonishing stories. And the sutra is, as I said, been absolutely the bedrock of every form of development of Buddhism in East Asia. Okay, that's half an hour. Any questions about that? We're doing a little reading. I only have two hours, so I'm trying to cram it in, you know? Yeah? Why hasn't it been translated before? Okay. Good. There actually is one translation, and I saw it in the library today, but it's pretty awful. Okay, it has been translated before, and the fact that I'm doing it comes out of the same thing. My own stupidity. The reasons I'm doing it. This is an exceedingly difficult text to read in Chinese. So... And it's very long. So if you've read the Lotus Sutra, you know how long that is. This is four times the length of the Lotus Sutra. Four times. And whereas the Lotus Sutra is written in really elegant Chinese.

[27:08]

The Lotus Sutra is actually read as literature, has been read as literature in Chinese history because the language is so beautiful. The Nirvana Sutra is not read that way. And it's often very hard to read. The grammar is very odd. I've I finally got over a big hump when a friend of mine who teaches at Stanford suggested to me that I should be looking at some of these sentences as Sanskrit, not as Chinese. When I began to put Sanskrit grammatical rules to the Chinese, suddenly I could read it. Then I said, oh, so I think the translator was like half asleep, you know, or he was tired, or he was angry, or he just didn't know what to do, you know. And, you know, this... So the Lotus Sutra and the Daima Sutra, the Amida Sutra, translated by Komarajiva. Komarajiva, if you know his story, was from Kucha, Central Asia. His mother was from India. His father was local. And then he's kidnapped by a king who brings him to China.

[28:09]

And he spends like 11 years in captivity or something, and he's learning Chinese, right? And then he's released, but then he gathers all these brilliant students with him. who are literati, that is the highest education in China, and attracts all the very bright people, and together they translate these great texts, so they have really beautiful language. This translator is from India himself. The amount of Chinese he knew is questionable. He comes right after Kramanajiba, probably about 15 years after Kramanajiba dies, so some of the same people that work with Kramanajiba work with him, but he's just not as skillful. for whatever reason. And so it's hard to read. There are a lot of names, for example. There's a lot of medicine in here, for example. Huge amount of Ayurvedic medicine. And probably medicinal knowledge from Central Asia as well. And a lot of the names of the medicines are written, are transliterated, transcribed. Meaning that the Chinese characters are used only for their sound value.

[29:14]

That means you have to reconstruct the name from the 5th century Chinese pronunciation, which we don't know. So it's really, really hard to do. And so a Japanese scholar decided he would do it anyway, and he took the Japanese modern translation of it and translated that into English. And his English wasn't that good. And all these Sanskrit names, he just gave the Japanese pronunciation of them, which doesn't mean anything. So it's very hard to read. And someday he would just give the literal meaning. So I just got interested in this as a graduate student because I kept seeing the nirvana sort of popping up all over the place, not only in Zen materials, but in pure land materials and all sorts of stuff, Tendam materials. It just appears everywhere. And the other thing, it's very, very rich in parables and stories. It's full of narrative. And these narratives, some of the narratives are really remarkable and memorable immediately. And so these also show up in various kinds of literature throughout Japanese and Chinese literature. So... I just was fascinated by it, and I decided to kill myself.

[30:19]

Yeah. It is called the sutra, but it is not really a sutra. It is a sutra. But it is not authored by the Buddha. How do you know? Well, I'm not sure. You were telling me that. I'm telling you, what I'm saying to you is all the sutras that are called sutras, we don't know how many of them from the very beginning were authored by the Buddha. All of them are suspect. All of them. In any language, including Pali. So it's quite possible the Buddha did say this. I don't think so, that's my personal opinion, but I'm in no position to judge. And of course all the Theravada people would say, no, no, no, this is not Buddhism even. They wouldn't even recognize it. But if this is not a sutra, then all of East Asian Buddhism disappears. Not that all of East Asian Buddhism is founded on this one sutra, but all the main sutras, the Diamond Sutra, the Lotus Sutra, the Heart Sutra, they're all... suspect of the same criticism as this one. It does exist, and the Buddhists themselves use the term Shastra all the time.

[31:22]

What I was trying to say is that we have Abhidharmic material, and then we move into Mahayana, that's when we first start to see there were Shastra written. But it appears that some people, when writing Shastras, also wrote Sutras. Now, actually, I'm glad you brought that up. So Shastra is a kind of interpretive... exegetical writing in India. Another thing that makes the sutra quite interesting is that it is actually both a sutra and a shastra. I'm talking about the content. The format and the content, much of the content is the Buddhist giving a sermon and he wants to say specific things. But the sutra also makes commentary, shastra-like commentary, on things within the Buddhist sangha in particular that it doesn't like. There's a lot of Criticism of the way monasteries are being run. Business. A lot of business criticism. This is quite fascinating. The Buddha talks about the way the monks are making money, and he doesn't like it.

[32:22]

He says, someone gives you a big donation of melons and you take it to the marketplace and sell them? What is that? He's really critical of this kind of thing. So he says, you should be begging every day. You should not store things and then take them to sell to make money. Again, this is reflective of the Indian context. But of course, what this means is that the monasteries are quite large, and they had to sustain themselves over generations. So you understand they had ways to bring in income. But I'm saying there's this kind of material as well. It's not only the problem of slavery comes up, for example. The Buddha never gave a sermon, a sutra, about slavery. But the Buddha knows that there are monasteries that have slaves. And how do they get slaves? People donate slaves to them. You know, you can't refuse a donation. Someone gives you a piece of land, he gives you a truckload of melons, and he gives you a slave, you know. And people took all these things, of course. So now we have monasteries with slaves. And the Buddha is really upset about this. So he starts to put his foot down. So that's another part. That's a Shastra-like material.

[33:23]

So that part is quite interesting. Another thing that happens that's very Shastra-like, excuse me, is that the Buddha will say something new. And then a monk will stand up and say, wait a minute, in this other sutra you said this other thing, the opposite of what you're saying now. So by putting the answer in the Buddha's mouth that instead of the two scholars debating, now the Buddha gives the answer, which of course has more authority. One of the topics is vegetarianism. This is a locus classicus of the doctrine of vegetarianism. This is the first sutra we know where the Buddha preached vegetarianism. This had a huge impact in China. This is why Chinese Buddhism, your Buddhism, is vegetarian from this sutra. And again, when the Buddha declared, from now on, I want all of you to be vegetarian, people said, wait a minute. Before, you talked about food in this way. And they gave the categories of food that he used, and they're quoting other sutras. And then the Buddha has to then explain this.

[34:26]

This happens repeatedly. So, in that sense, the way the sutra is constructed, it is kind of Shastra. and a kind of sutra at the same time. It's very cleverly done. There's also various hints about where the sutra was written in India. Kashmir is mentioned, for example. There's a discussion about the movement of the whole Buddhist community from the south to the north because of political problems. So this looks very historically real, although it's hard to identify exactly what they're talking about. Another thing that, again, we don't hear about much in American Buddhism. I've never heard anybody talk about this, actually, but in East Asian Buddhism, it was a very big thing, as I mentioned, of course, the historical degradation of the religion, the notion of history. I'm actually writing an article for a Buddhist encyclopedia right now about notions of history. Buddhism predicted its own disappearance repeatedly.

[35:27]

This occurs over and over again. History tied to Buddhism means self-destruction. It's a natural process. The religion is expected to become corrupted and to disappear as a result. Even if it continues in name, the Buddha is very critical as to what its value might be. And he gives his complaints. He tells you what to watch out for. And if you look at the history of this prediction of decline... In the early tradition, it was always 500 years. The Dharma will last 500 years. The story about the Buddha letting women into the Sangha, remember that story. It's couched in the context of the Buddhists as well. Before we allowed women in, they would go on forever, but now it'll only last 500 years. Obviously, the Buddha didn't say that. This is another one of those kind of... This is a part of the Pali Canon as well. Another example of how everything has been somewhat corrupted, if you want to use that term. Let's just say contextualized, okay? Historicized by context.

[36:29]

Now that 500-year prediction is repeated over and over again in lots of different sutras, and then what I think happened is 500 years passed, and Buddhism didn't disappear. So then they had trouble. So the new sutras are written, say, the Buddhist religion will last 1,000 years, you know? It just gets longer as it becomes a much more vibrant phenomenon than anyone had thought. Now, why would there be predictions of this decline? In any case, though, it's always in decline. Part of this is the way Buddhist cosmology works. I don't know if you know that or you want to know that, but it's a bit far afield. But, of course, this is part of that context as well. In Buddhist cosmology, time is like a sine wave. It goes up and down and up and down. And when it's going up, by up, I mean things are getting better. When things are getting better, there are no Buddhists in the world because Buddhists aren't needed. because people are naturally kind to each other, they trust each other, they're not violent, they help each other, their lives get longer, the world gets better, more abundant, everything is beautiful.

[37:33]

Then it keeps the peak, stays there for a while, then it goes down. As it goes down, people begin to trust each other less, the world becomes more and more violent, and that's when a Buddha will appear in the world to help it, because it really needs help. But nonetheless, even after the Buddha appears in the world, You can't change what's happening. In other words, time is going in this direction. The world will get worse, and the world will come to destruction, and then come about again, and then everything will get better again. So, there's only so much the Buddha can do. And maybe this is the way people generally understand why the Buddhists predicted their own disappearance, but... This sutra is very severe in this discussion of this. And this also had a very big impact, particularly in China and Japan. I don't know about Korea. But in China and Japan, people really took this to heart. And around 600, you begin to have all sorts of dire predictions and apocryphal sutras.

[38:38]

That are sutras written in China about the disappearance of the Dharma and about what needs to be done to respond to it. So some people think that the doctrine of Buddha nature has had tremendous successful repercussions in East Asia precisely because of this prediction of decline. And what I mean by that is if Buddha nature is in all beings and accessible in all beings, then this is kind of time-resistant, you know, because it's something that you're born with. And it may be more difficult to see the Buddha nature now than, say, 100 years before or during the time of the Buddha, but it's still... they're still potentially accessible. So that's part of it. I'm talking too much. Any questions about anything? Yeah. Well, I mean, what you're saying with what the Dalai Lama is saying right now in regard to the Chinese takeover of Tibet, and it seems historically more than it's not, I don't mean theologically, but it seems appropriate he doesn't,

[39:44]

He's saying... It's inevitable. They can't appropriate Dalai Lama. Right. He's predicting his own head. Yeah, exactly. I mean, that fits perfectly. I mean, that's the way the tradition has been. He knows that, of course. You can see why. I mean, the thing is, it makes sense. Right. And so it's not some kind of extraterrestrial kind of thing. It's just happening. And it is, you know, in the terms of... Now, this is Indian Buddhist cosmology. If you accept that is... real, then it is inevitable, and there's nothing anything we can do about it, and Buddhism, that's part of the legacy of Buddhism coming from its past, right? Can't do anything about that. Now again, it gets to the bottom, then it comes up again. It's not an end time, so this kind of eschological fear is not like biblical, which is like the end of the world. It'll go up again, and go down again, and go up, and go down again. But in our, the point is that we live in a particular moment in that in that time period, and we can't do anything about it, and so we have to deal with the situation best we can. So one of the things that comes out of that, like the crisis in Tibet, and in this sutra too, it's just inundated, this pervasive sense of crisis.

[40:57]

That crisis is imminent. We can see the beginnings of this kind of degradation and breakdown already. That's why the Buddha's upset about how the monasteries are conducting themselves. And it's kind of a warning that you have to respond quickly. But there's also some very violent things in here. This text does not hold back in any way. So after working on this for on and off for 15 years, I'm astonished by it and scared by it at the same time. These are really amazing things. And it has, there's a lot of ambivalence. So one of the topics that's not on here, we could talk about women. Maybe you're interested in that. In the seminar I did in China, we spent a day talking about women's issues, you know, the things the sutra says about women, which are sometimes very positive and sometimes very negative. And this is one of the problems in Buddhism and a lot of feminists, I just sort of talked two days ago, critiquing Buddhism because even in the little sutra, when the girl becomes a Buddha, she has to become a man.

[42:02]

Women cannot become Buddhists. But Buddhists themselves don't necessarily see it that way. Asian Buddhists, you know, what they're saying is that gender is not an issue. And the way feminine and masculine is used in the sutra sometimes are merely as kind of abstract categories as opposed to having any sort of permanent significance, okay? But that's another way that the sutra functions, okay, in that way. Because all categories, in some sense, can be deconstructed. Yeah? You mentioned karma. Yeah. And I'm guessing from what you're saying, you consider it to be a central doctrine in Buddhism. Absolutely. It is. Yeah. What is exactly the most precise definition of karma, and how does it apply in the context of the world? That's a really tough question. Well, I think that if I can try to answer that best I can, I guess I would say this. There's what's called hetu and pratyaya.

[43:05]

You know those terms? Hetu is cause and pratyaya is condition. Maybe the best thing to say is that for Buddhism, causality is extremely important. All Buddha sutras, not all, but generally it's a very big theme in most sutras. Some notion of causality. And what the religion is trying to say is that things do not happen by accident. Things happen for a reason. And And the sutra is not concerned with physics, which did not exist at that time. What it's concerned with is moral accountability. After all, it's a religion. So, what is the impact of doing good? What is the impact of doing bad? How do things occur? What are the various primary and secondary causes and what conditions have to appear in order for something to come to fruition? So if you do something bad to someone and you're going to receive a bad result, I'd like to give the example of me kicking my sister. I had two lovely sisters and one that was not so lovely.

[44:08]

She didn't like me at all. So once in a while, she attacked me almost every day one way or another. And once in a while, I'd lose my patience and do something nasty to her. So when I look back up on my own karmic record, this is some of the worst things I did was to attack that nasty sister. And it doesn't matter how bad she was, I shouldn't have done that. But when do I get compensated? When do I get my karma vipaka? Who's going to kick me? Does it happen tomorrow? Does it happen next year? Does it happen next lifetime? So that's what the Buddhists are concerned with, which is, what is the degree of badness of what I did? And what other causes and conditions have to be there in order for this... to return to me. That is, I will be kicked. And when I'm kicked, however, the Buddhist notion of karma is then it's over. There's no sin. There's no lasting stain. It's a retribution, but once the retribution is finished, the karmic record is gone.

[45:10]

That's the presumption. Now, that's the way it normally works. So, It's a little bit different than sin in the sense that you don't have to go through some kind of religious authority to remove the stain of the sin. It's not permanent. All karmic action is temporary. All results are temporary as well. And yes, there should be a commensurate response to what you do. Now this is both for good and bad. So the section I was just translating refers, there's a whole section I'm doing now about kindness. The importance of kindness. And the Buddha gives a bunch of stories. And he gives various stories of people getting into very difficult circumstances that are not their cause. Sometimes it's their fault and sometimes it's not their fault. That's the interesting thing also. They're not all saints. Some of these people do bad things. But they still ask for help. And what the Buddha says is these... In each story he says this person at one time...

[46:12]

did an act of kindness to someone else, or they paid homage and brought offerings to a Buddha in a past lifetime. And so they had a good, in other words, religiously proper state of mind at some point, maybe in a past lifetime even. And then they got into trouble, and they called out my name. And he says, at that time, I was not where they were. I was in this place, and they were in that place. But I heard them. I heard them. because it aroused compassion in me. And I immediately responded by helping them out of their difficult circumstance. And then he says, the truth is, I did not go there. I did not appear before them. I did not help them out of their difficult circumstance. But they saw me appearing before them. They saw me helping them get out of their circumstance. And they did get out of their circumstance. So what's going on? Buddha is saying that this is how the mind works. When you do good things, you have the power, in other words, the karmic information is in you.

[47:17]

The Buddha enables you to see the positive result of your positive karmic action. And that gives you power to get yourself out of a difficult circumstance. All the Buddha does is kind of magically twist your mind a little bit so you can see what you have, what power you have, to get out of that circumstance, something like that. Yeah? You mentioned this approach to the idea of sin and logically the idea of missing the mark. And one interpretation of that is the idea of alienation. By sin you are alienating yourself from your Christ nature. So I wondered if there is anything equivalent in this idea of karma in its relationship to the Buddha nature. Well that's a good question. Maybe. So let's try this. There's something called kleshas in Sanskrit.

[48:21]

Bonno in Japanese, if you know the Japanese term. It's translated differently. Unfortunately, we don't have a standard translation yet. I use the word defilement. Some people use the word afflictions. Everyone who's not a Buddha or is not in Nirvana has kleshas. They're like stains on your thinking. And there's a great detailed analysis of this in Buddhist literature. There's kleshas that can be made conscious and kleshas that are, in fact, unconscious. They result from habitual behavior. And those are more difficult, but they can be rooted out as well. Ideally, in early Buddhism, in fact, the whole purpose of meditation is to identify the kleshas, find what causes them, remove the causes, and remove the kleshas. That's really what the Four Noble Truths is all about. That is religion in a nutshell. However, very few people can pull that off.

[49:21]

And there's at least 108 in the standard list. Now, the obvious ones are things like jealousy, anger, impatience, things like that. But there's lots of other more subtle things. Why is it that if we all have Buddha nature, we can't see it? And by the way, animals all have Buddha nature as well. Because animals are just another form that we have been and may be again. So we all have to share that. And beings in hell have Buddha nature also. And beings in heaven have Buddha nature as well. The fact that they're in heaven and the fact that they're in hell and the fact that they're animals and the fact that they're humans and the fact that they're demons or ghosts means that they haven't seen their Buddha nature yet, right? That is, they haven't realized their Buddha-hood. Why is that? That's because of their Klesias. The kleshas are like a cloud, like a fog, that make it impenetrable to see through it. And the kleshas can be very, very thick or they can be thin, but the point is that it's very, very hard to get rid of them. So the discussion of the sutra is frequently about this problem.

[50:26]

My Buddha nature is clouded over and I can't see it. And it's interesting that the verb to see the Buddha nature, which I guess you guys must use also, that comes right out of here. It's fascinating to me that that's the verb, that it's almost always a transitive verb with an object. I or someone sees the Buddha nature. You could think of a lot of other verbs they could use, you know, like become aware of or sense, you know, or the Buddha nature. It could be an intransitive verb. The Buddha nature manifests, you know, before me, this kind of thing. But it's rarely done like that. It's more generally a transitive verb with some form of seeing, okay? So I think that sounds similar to what you're saying. Does that make sense? You mentioned before a question of the Buddha's own karmic history. Oh, you're interested in that topic? Yeah, if you can relate it to our own Buddha nature.

[51:30]

I can't relate it to our own Buddha nature, but... If you want to go into that, maybe we can do that tomorrow. That's kind of a big topic, but just to give you a short version. So when the Buddha says, my true body is my Dharma body, that is, my essence body is really who I am. And that's not physical. And so I can be here and not be here. And one of the reasons he says that, by the way, is because he's saying that my death doesn't mean anything. In fact, he says the reason I'm dying is to get you people to realize who I really am. If I didn't die, you would think I was a person. And the only way to get you to see that I'm not a person, to see that I'm always here and will always be here, is to not be here. Does that make sense? Typical Buddhist negative logic. Anyway, so... Now when the Buddha says this, he's already a Buddha, therefore he doesn't have any negative karma, because by definition that can't be. But then we have these odd things that happen. There's two elements...

[52:32]

Two facets of this. I know three places in the canon where this comes up. One is in this sutra in fascicle 33 where the second son appears. And Sunakshatra. Sunakshatra is the name of someone in the Pali literature. He's just another disciple of the Buddha. And in all the other biographies of the Buddha, the Buddha only has one son. But here we hear he suddenly has a second son. First son is Rahula who follows the Buddha into the Sangha, you know, becomes a monk and he's, you know... And this Sutta, the Buddha often says, I look at you as if I look at Rahula. I look at you as if you were my son. And he often even says, I look at you as if you were my only child. That's the compassion I feel for you. And that's the compassion you usually feel for others. But then suddenly, in Pascal 33, this other son appears. Sunakshatra. And he also begins in the same manner. He's very good. He's very, you know... docile and sincere.

[53:34]

He follows the Buddha's teaching. He actually becomes a Buddhist assistant, like Ananda. He, you know, takes care of him and holds an umbrella over his head in the sun, etc., etc. And then something happens. There seems to be a kind of Freudian child, adolescent, parent-like resistance thing, where Sunakasatra starts pulling away from his father and says, I'm, no. How come I have to follow you? I want to follow somebody else. And then he goes to study with another teacher. And then he goes off, and then he becomes a devotee, he becomes a Tirtha, that is a giant. And then he criticizes the Buddha and the Buddha's Dharma. So that's really shocking. And then a Buddha makes some comments like, whatever you do, don't be like Sunakshatra, you know? So it's really amazing. My guess is that at that point in the Sutra, we have maybe some other authors participating that bring in that story, because that story conflicts with the other earlier material. The Buddha often says, again, you're like my only son. That's one. There's another interesting comment in another sutra written probably in Turfan called the Contemplation Sutra or the Visualization.

[54:40]

This is a Pure Land text where Ajatasattu, the same prince who killed his father, the sutra begins with Ajatasattu's mother being his father's been put in the prison and he's starving his father to death. And this is where he's finding the kudita has just happened. He hasn't killed his father yet, and he's just locked him up in a dungeon. And his mother comes to visit him. He allows his mother to visit him. And then Ajatasattu comes into the palace one day, and he says to the guard, Has my father died yet? And the guard says, No. He says, What do you mean, no? He's been in there for two weeks. And he says, Yeah, well, your mother comes in every day, and she covers her body in ghee and flour. And she has this big balls of jewelry around her neck, which she fills with grape juice. And she goes in there, and we close the door, and he feeds off her skin.

[55:42]

Okay, he licks her. And he gets nutrition that way and drinks the juice. And he's been surviving. Isn't that something, huh? He's been surviving. You're not going to see this in the Bible. Anyway, so... And he survives this way. And so Ajaxasratu gets furious. Okay, he says... whatever he says, right? And then he calls his mother aside, he pulls out his sword, and he threatens to kill her. He says, you are my enemy, you know? And he's about to stab her when the, I don't know, the kind of assistants of the king, whatever they are, his ministers or whatever, step in front and put themselves between him and his mother, and they say, sorry, you cannot kill your mother. And then they say, In our country's history, there have been numerous sons who have had to kill their father, and we can accept that. But no one has ever killed their mother. And we won't allow you to do this. If you do this, we cannot work for you any longer. We'll have to leave. This violates our dharma, okay?

[56:42]

Because dharma has another meaning in India, which is sort of the social normative behavior. So he curses and puts his sword back and says, all right, I'm going to arrest her. So he puts her in the prison also. At that point, she's miserable. And she cries out to the Buddha also. And the Buddha sends one of his disciples, and he flies through the air and comes in through the window and sees her. This is a Maya scripture. He can do that. And they talk, and she explains her grief. And she says, you know, I'm doomed to die. I know that my husband's going to die, and this is just the worst of the worst. Please, you know, set my period and help me prepare for death. And then the Buddha is aware of all this because he's omniscient. So he hears all this going on. He then appears in the room himself spontaneously. And he has this dialogue. She's actually the hero. She's the central character in the sutra. And she says to him, what did I do to deserve a son like this?

[57:46]

Meaning karmically. What karma mistake did I make that I would produce a son who's so horrible? And then she says, and what did you do to get a cousin like Devadatta? So if you know the story of Devadatta, that's the Buddha's jealous cousin who tries to kill him, okay? So in other words, she's making another allusion to the fact that the Buddha has some bad karmic residue, that he also has family trouble, that there's some, you know, the implication is any lousy person in your family you're karmically responsible for to some degree, okay? Okay? That, again, shouldn't happen if the life of the Buddha is this pristine idealized form, right? And Devadatta also appears here in all sorts of bad deeds. So that's another example. Then there's another text I discovered called an Apadana, which is a Pali text that was quite late in maybe 4th, 5th century A.D., And this is an amazing, so Abadana is a Pali version of the Sanskrit Avadana.

[58:53]

Avadanas are like Jataka stories, they're past lives of the Buddha. But in the Jataka stories, he's often an animal or some kind of cute little thing. But the Avadana stories are Buddhas as people, okay, in a previous lifetime. And they go through, and they're born into a particular circumstance, and they live their life in a certain way, and they make decisions, and has karmic consequences, etc., etc. But in this Pali-Apadana, One of the chapters is all about the Buddha's bad karmic rebirths in previous lifetimes. That the Buddha did this and got reborn in hell. And then he did that, and he had to be born as a hungry ghost. And then he went through that and came back. And there's a series of these things. And this light comes out of nowhere. So, where does that come from? I think all these things show that the community was worried about the fact. That maybe... In other words, this shows this confusion about karma. To what degree do we ever completely escape our karma?

[59:54]

Or can a person be liberated, be a saint, be an arhat, be a Buddha, and still have karmic residue from the past? And I think what they're trying to say is that they can. I think in all cases. They're not saying you are not a Buddha because you have Devadatta as a cousin. They're saying you are a Buddha and you also have karmic residue from the past. that still has yet to be completely exhausted. Okay. Which is a way of sort of freeing up everybody from worrying about all the bad karmic things that could happen to them. So that's what that is about. Okay. Any other questions? I have a short one. Sure. I'm sorry? Are you as entertaining in your writing as you are talking? I don't know. Well, you read some of this, you'll see what a lousy writer I am, or maybe if I'm readable. I will say this, though. This is very hard to do, and after I finished it, and it was all due to be published, I said, wait a minute, and I read through the whole thing again, and I read through the Chinese all again.

[61:01]

I took a year to do that, which ruined my life in many ways, and my wife is still talking to me somehow, but anyway, and I discovered that I didn't like it, the English, if it didn't read well. And I thought that I had an obligation to make it read well. In other words, under the presumption that the sutra originally always read well. I don't think it did, but maybe it did. Who am I to say? So I decided, and when it didn't read well, I went to that section of the Chinese, and I looked at it very, very carefully, and I looked at whatever else I could find that would help me, and tried to immediately, somewhat imaginatively, make it into a more plausible language. you know, discussion, to fit into what came before and what comes after, so there's some kind of narrative flow. So, I don't know, I suppose that's a mea culpa. I just got an award for this, by the way. Yeah, just two days ago, in fact. The Kensei Foundation gave me the award for the best translation of 2014, so that was very nice.

[62:03]

Congratulations. Thank you. Very unexpected, yeah. And the book is out of print, too, believe it or not, after only a year and a half, so... So, yeah, so it's somewhat been successful, but there's three more volumes to go. Okay, we're out of time. Yeah, I figure it's a life insurance policy. I can't, you know, someone will keep me alive until I do it, and then I'll drop dead. Okay, thanks very much. 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.

[62:53]

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