This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. Such a pleasure to see so many of you out here taking care of your lives by coming to hear Dharma Talk. Lovely. So thank you, first of all, again, David, for inviting me and for everyone who makes that possible here, including Abbot Ed. So I was asked to say a little bit about my path of practice and how I came to be a Theravada nun in addition to being a Dharma teacher

[01:01]

Dharma air in Zen, Soto Zen lineage. So, one way to think about this is that Over a long period of time, I had been practicing Zen. And you think that you're doing a pure practice of Zen, but what that means is that you're really meeting the Dharma that comes forth. And some of the Dharma that comes forth, particularly here at San Francisco Zen Center, is the Dharma of the early Buddhist teachings. So my teacher, Shosham Victoria Austin, suggested many years ago that I do a practice of metta, of loving-kindness meditation.

[02:14]

And I never stopped. I just kept doing that because I found it to be such a helpful practice, such a heart-opening practice. Or I went to Tassajara and then Abbott... Paul Haller was leading a practice period based on the Satipatthana in a book by Venerable Anaglio, who is a Theravada monk. So as the practice went along and I encountered these various threads, then I began to follow them back historically, follow the threads of the teachings. reaching all the way back, all the way back through the lineage to the original teacher, Shakyamuni Buddha. So in that way, this is a sort of integration.

[03:22]

This is a bringing in, bringing together. these various aspects of the Dharma. And what I found is that it's a very wholesome practice for me. It's very helpful. It allows me to have a series of perspectives, a variety of perspectives on the teachings. And so what it does... having encountered these various ways and still very much learning and encountering teachings, practice, what it does is put the question back to this one. How is this a practice? How is this encounter practice?

[04:26]

How is this thing practice? How is this way of understanding, this view, a practice? So I feel very fortunate, very grateful to be living the life following the Vinaya, or the Vinaya, as it's pronounced in Pali. You'll excuse me, I hope if I... tend to bounce back and forth between the Sanskrit and the Pali terms. Those are the old languages of Buddhism. And so, that's this particular expression of this particular being, to bring those together. And I hope to do that a little bit today. So today I would like to talk about a framework, if you will, for the human life.

[05:37]

If we look at the records that we have, we have some records from the Pali text called the Nikayas. We have some records from the Chinese texts called the Agamas. We have records from the Tibetan Sanskrit texts and Tibetan texts. And when we look at those records and try to discern what it was that the historical Buddha himself taught, one thing that we find is that he taught Many, many different ways of meditating, many, many different frameworks for understanding a human life, for practicing with the things that come up in a human life. And one of those frameworks is called the five khandhas, khandhas or skhandhas in Sanskrit, khandhas in Pali.

[06:47]

And usually that word is translated as aggregates, quite literally means heaps, piles of stuff. And the Buddha used these five perspectives on a human being, if you will, in some of the earliest teachings that he gave, at least as we understand them through the record, even in his first discourse. he spoke about the five aggregates. That's the Dhamma Chaka Pavatana Sutta, the turning of the wheel sutta, in which he spoke about the Four Noble Truths. I'll get back to that in just a bit. But just to say, this framework was very important. He spoke about it over and over again from the beginning of his teaching career all the way till the end, 45 years later. So much so that he said, without directly knowing and fully understanding the five khandhas, it is impossible to bring an end to the fundamental dissatisfaction of life.

[08:07]

Possible. So what are the five khandas? There's rupa. Again, I'm gonna use the Pali terms. Rupa, which is form. Form is understood to be the four elements, earth, air, fire, water, and that which derives from form. So that's this material body. and the things that derive from the material body. And then there's vedana, something like feeling tone, is perhaps the best way to describe this, feeling tone.

[09:17]

And it's basically three different things settings, three different senses that we have, even pre-verbal, about a thing or an experience or some kind of perception that comes into our field of awareness. So it's either pleasant or it's unpleasant or it's somewhat confused, indeterminate. And so you might notice already that these khandhas, these words are bringing together a multiplicity of phenomena under one category. So that we might be able to study them, what's similar about them, and how they relate to the other categories.

[10:21]

So the third one is sanya. Perception. And this is labeling, like noticing that a thing is blue or hearing a sound and thinking the word car. Or seeing your friend's face and thinking Josefina. That's the thing, the label that you understand. be associated with that thing, that perception. And then sankara. Sankara is probably the largest of these categories. It's typically translated as mental formations. So there's a lot of things included in there, but particularly importantly, intentional thought.

[11:26]

Sometimes it's described as the kind of constructive way of thought, baking a cake as you bake a cake. That's a mental formation. And then consciousness, vijnana, consciousness. Consciousness is described in a lot of different ways. in the early Buddhist teachings. But in this case, it means two things, actually, relative to the khandas. It means bare attention, that bare awareness, if you will, that which is aware of the other aspects. And it also has a sense of like a stream, stream of consciousness. some continuity to it.

[12:29]

So these teachings were very important to the Buddhist teachings, but they also, we see them echoed again and again. Centuries later, four, five, six centuries later, we see the Khandas mentioned in the Heart Sutra. The very first line of the Heart Sutra says, Avalokitasvara Bodhisattva, when deeply coursing in Prajnaparamita and the wisdom beyond wisdom, clearly saw that all five aggregates, those are the skandhas or the kandhas, are empty and thus relieved all suffering. Empty of what? Empty of permanent, independent arising. So to say that they're empty means that they're conditional, momentary, fleeting, because of this way in which they are dependent on each other.

[13:54]

And to help us get a handle on that kind of emptiness, the Buddha gave some similes for each one of the khandhas. He gave us some metaphors that we might be able to understand a bit better. So he said, form is like a lump of foam. You know that thing on the top of your latte? That's... The human body, like that. You can't pick it up with your fingers. It doesn't last very long. Or maybe the bubble bath that you put your kids in at night. Or the bubbles in the dishwater. Like that, a little lump of foam. It's insubstantial. So to the extent that we are very strongly identified, clinging to the physical body, then there's going to be some suffering because it's by its nature changing.

[15:23]

It's by its nature insubstantial. And then he said that... With another feeling is like bubbles, like the bubbles that form on a puddle when it's raining. They're there for an instant, and then they're gone. Sanya, like a mirage. So maybe if you've lived in a very hot place, you know you can look down the road and see that kind of shimmering, almost as if there was water there. but there's not. And then for sankara, for mental formations, Buddha said, like a plantain tree.

[16:29]

So I spent a lot of my childhood down in Florida, and there were plantain trees there, banana trees. At one point, Maybe I was 11 or 12 years old. My dad tried to plant one in the front of the house. And the plantain tree is used as an example because it doesn't have any kind of heartwood at all. There's no core to it. It's just leaves wrapped around each other. So when the banana tree started to not do so well, it just falls right over. It doesn't have any strength to it. Or you might imagine you just peel it back and peel it back and then there's nothing there. And finally he said that consciousness is like a magician's illusion.

[17:36]

So notice that these examples that the Buddha gives us are based in the material world and yet... They're not what they seem. They're not what they look like. So the Buddha didn't say that the five skandhas, that the body and mind of a human being are like space or like the thing that's left in the vessel when you pour the oil out. He's saying that there is... this kind of material and energetic activity that's happening, and yet we get fooled into thinking that it's something that it's not. These are the kinds of similes that the Buddha gave in the lump of foam, sutta.

[18:45]

And so another aspect of this that we might notice is that it's not all that reliable. So there's a lovely old story, you may have heard this before, some of you, about a person walking along the trail and they're walking along a fairly narrow trail and they look ahead and they see something on the ground and it looks kind of round and it looks kind of curved. And it looks kind of like maybe brown with some gray markings. And this person thinks, oh my gosh, there's a snake, this huge snake across the trail right there. And this person happens to be fearful of snakes, so there's a whole physical reaction that happens, right? The heart starts pounding and the thoughts start flying. How am I... Am I going to be able to go, you know, get past this thing?

[19:54]

Or is it a poisonous snake? Or am I going to have to try to kill it? Or what's going to happen here? And then this person musters up their courage and gets a little bit closer and finds out that it's a stick. It's not a snake. It's just a branch on the ground. Whew! Right? All of that feeling, all of that. So what was going on the first time, right? Negative veda, not unpleasant. This is a scary thing. And perception, snake, right? Think that it's a snake. And then the mental formations, all those stories and ideas about what that means. And some awareness, right? This is happening in your conscious. This person was conscious of it Aware of it enough to respond by approaching the snake, so-called snake.

[20:56]

And then all of that goes away. New perception. And if this person was looking for firewood, it could have swung all the way over to the other side. Oh, cool. Great. Here's a nice dry piece of wood for me to burn tonight. So these things are unreliable. They're not as substantial as we think they are. And yet there is this tendency to hold onto them, to identify with them, to think that this is myself. I think, therefore, I am. Hmm? So when we begin to study the khandhas and perceive more clearly the different aspects of them, there are other things that we might learn from that as well.

[22:27]

Because one has to ask oneself, what does compassion have to do with it? Why do the khandhas come up in Avalokiteshvara's mind? Because that's who Avalokiteshvara is. You might say the face or the body, the embodiment, the legend that we put on the energy and the activity of compassion in the world. So where is the compassionate part of this teaching? So one thing that we might notice is going back to the emptiness of them, the conditionality, it implies a certain kind of connectedness as well. It implies this kind of interactivity between us and the world that we live in, between what we think is us and the world that we live in.

[23:31]

That's called contact, right? Seeing, that stick on the ground. And it's through contact that they arise. So, for example, if you walk outside at night... depending on what time of year it is and how much fog there might be around and where you might be, you might look up at the sky and see a star. So the light of that star has traveled billions of miles as a wave or as a particle, whichever one you like to think of it as. And then it arrives

[24:35]

at your eye, and your eye senses that little bit of light. Contact. So now if you think about it, as a person in this body and in this mind, chances are pretty good that you could not get to that star. We don't yet have the technology for that. And yet, in that moment of contact with the light, then there is an actual physical connection between you and that star. In body and in mind. And not only that, but because of the amount of time that it took for that light to come,

[25:37]

across whatever part of the galaxies and universe that it has crossed, because of that time, that star might not even be there anymore. Or that planet. And so you're also connected across time. In this body and in this mind. Not in any kind of mystical way. In a very physical, bodied way. A way that is apparent right here and right now. Dogen said it this way in Ehe Koroku in his...

[26:37]

extended record, Dogen said, just this seeing and hearing goes beyond seeing and hearing, and there are no other colors or sounds to offer you. Having deeply settled within this, you are genuinely beyond concern. Just this seeing and hearing goes beyond the seeing and hearing. You think that your limitation is that you can't get to that star. Perhaps. And there are no other colors or sounds to offer you because they are all connected right here, right now. missing nothing extra so when we encounter another person we might realize that we have this mechanism in common that we are all experiencing

[28:09]

these five skandhas, we are all experiencing the magician's illusion. And we are all experiencing those connections, those connections that are already completely baked in, completely a part of this human experience. And yet, and yet, each one of us is having a different experience than the other. If you've noticed, sanya, perception, is something that's based oftentimes on memory. We pull a word or an association out of our past.

[29:10]

And we all have our own history, our own experiences, our own sense of this body and mind. Your own particular five skandhas. What Suzuki Roshi called the universe in the form of you. So these two things don't live side by side. They are completely the one thing, the one life, the universe in the form of you. And when we encounter the world, when we encounter each other with these things in mind, then there can be a bit more harmony. There can be less harmony. Difficulty, less suffering.

[30:19]

For lots of reasons. One, because, as I keep saying, it's changing all the time. And to the extent that we can, you can, I can, live from the place that it's changing all the time, then I can be more responsive. I can be more present for what is. Sometimes I think about the tendency of identifying or of clinging to something or of wanting something to stay the way it is when it's actually changing as being like rope burn. If you've been playing with your dog or maybe as a child you played tug of war or maybe you like to sail and when the rope is passing through your hands, you don't let go, then you get injured. It hurts.

[31:24]

So this is what it's like to live a life where we are constantly resisting impermanence, resisting the emptiness, the conditionality of things. It's like rope burn. So to see instead or to see in addition this connectedness, this way in which we cannot possibly be separate, is a very compassionate view. doesn't even occur to you to harm something which is actually intimately part of you.

[32:37]

So this is the kind of learning that we might have. And one more step, one more step might be to remember that even at its most basic level even at the pre-verbal level, even at the gut level, that there isn't an intrinsic good or bad about anything or anyone. That arises out of the mechanism, but it's actually not intrinsic to the thing. So I'll give you another example. You...

[33:54]

are sitting at the library. Sitting at the library with your friends, Shinikwa and Ling Xiao. And there you are. And so, you know, it's the library. It's a quiet place. And Ling Xiao starts tapping her pencil on the table. If there's anyone named Ling Xiao in here, I apologize ahead of time because we're about to get irritated. Tapping the pencil on the table in the library. You're trying to get something done. It's a quiet place. Doesn't this person know the rules? How thoughtless? And off you go to the races, huh? Because maybe you think that the tapping sound on the table is inherently unpleasant. But actually there isn't such a thing as an inherently unpleasant sound.

[35:03]

Think about, for example, maybe some of you have experienced this, that you might go to a place where you would hear a sound so loud that it would harm your ears. You might go to a concert where the sound is so loud that it's harmful. Or maybe you did this in your youth. Or maybe you do this now. Maybe you go out to Burning Man and there's some loud music playing somewhere. And even so, it has, you think it's pleasant. Right? So to remember, to leave room for that kind of difference. To remember that even at this very, very basic level of just the feeling tone of a thing, before we've even started to talk about it, there is oftentimes this assessment of whether this thing is okay for me.

[36:05]

So when we study the khandas, we can see, oh, it's phenomena. It's phenomena and it has this kind of feeling for this person and that kind of feeling for that person. It doesn't mean that we can't make judgments or have consequences for things that are harmful, but it does mean that we need to do that in a compassionate way, in a way that understands that we're all subject to this mechanism. So I hope that you have the opportunity to really study this, to really have a look at it. When the Buddha, going back to the quote by the Buddha, when the Buddha says directly knowing a thing, directly knowing the five khandhas, usually that's understood to mean two things.

[37:30]

It means understanding, their impermanence which seems like it should be obvious but sometimes we need to learn that lesson again and again on the cushion especially we sit and watch things come and things go so directly knowing in part means understanding the fleeting nature of life. And it means understanding also this kind of, going back to what I was saying, fundamental dissatisfaction, this word dukkha that the Buddha used to describe the Four Noble Truths. that because things are like this, because we can't hold on to them, we can't identify with them in any kind of lasting way, they must slip through our hands, whether in life or in death, then we have difficulty

[38:58]

So to come to directly know what's present, to come to directly know how this works is to find its harmony. Not a harmony like a feel-good harmony, that everything's okay and hunky-dory, that there's no conflict ever. But a harmony like the way that things fit together. All things as phenomena, all things as condition, resolving themselves in each moment. My ordination teacher in Japan, Harada Roshi, used to say, each moment is like a drop of water on a hot skillet. Psst! Completely resolve. So this kind of direct knowing, this kind of studying the body and the mind in a way that leaves room for both its inevitable change and its connection to all things.

[40:28]

This is the study that I hope that you'll undertake. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[41:07]

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