Hi, a special welcome to you. Suzuki Roshi had a great respect for beginner's mind, that's why the temple is so named, for the mind that is open and questioning and curious and hasn't already decided it knows everything. So a particular welcome to you who are beginners or still have their beginner's mind. I hope that's all of you. We're in the midst of a six-week training period. That is, we're not in the midst of it, actually. We're in the sixth week of a six-week training period, which is focused on what are called the six paramitas, the six trainings or six perfections or six transcendental qualities of a bodhisattva, an awakening being, one who has aroused what's called bodhicitta, the mind that vows to free all beings from suffering and therefore aspires to

[01:30]

wake up to reality so that they will know how to help free all beings from suffering. And so there are these six particular trainings, and we've talked about the first one, dhana, or generosity, or giving, which overcomes the affliction of greed, And the second one, the practice or training in patience or forbearance. No, the second one is, excuse me, training in discipline or shila in Sanskrit. The careful attention to action and their consequences. The avoidance of the actions which create harm and suffering, and the cultivation of actions which create happiness.

[02:41]

And the third is forbearance or patience, kshanti, which helps overcome the affliction of anger or aversion. And the fourth one, joyful effort which helps to overcome the affliction of sloth and torpor. And the fifth one, concentration which helps us to keep our mind focused on our intention. and to really explore what is the wisdom that will actually help beings, help relieve their suffering.

[03:45]

So this sixth one is called Prajnaparamita, the training or the perfection or the cultivation of the wisdom. Sometimes it's called the wisdom which goes beyond. The Paramita sometimes means going beyond. And we are familiar, those of us who practice here, with the term Prajnaparamita because we chant the Prajnaparamita Sutra every morning in Zen temples all over the world. This teaching on the perfection of wisdom, the wisdom which is truly liberating ourselves, The wisdom which sees the emptiness of all conditioned things, the wisdom which sees the codependent arising, which the Buddha discovered on the night of his awakening.

[04:49]

He understood this very liberating wisdom that all things arise on the causes and conditions of this moment. All things are interdependent and interpenetrating and don't exist intrinsically in some fixed independent form, but arise according to the causes and conditions of the moment. I'm going to draw heavily on a book which I've been appreciating a great deal. It's the Dalai Lama's teaching on the essence of the Heart Sutra. You see, I have a lot of little tabs here. I don't suppose I'm going to have an opportunity to call them all to your attention. But I will probably use quite a few of them.

[05:53]

But he says here, according to Buddhism, Compassion is an aspiration, a state of mind, wanting others to be free from suffering. It's not passive, it's not empathy alone, but rather an empathetic altruism that actively strives to free others from suffering. Genuine compassion must have both wisdom and loving kindness. That is to say one must understand the nature of suffering from which we wish to free others. This is wisdom. And one must experience deep intimacy and empathy with other sentient beings. This is loving kindness. And then he goes on in this chapter to say let us examine these two things. So This compassion, we think of the mind of Buddha as having these two very fully developed aspects of wisdom and compassion.

[07:07]

And we aspire, in fact, a bodhisattva. Bodhisattva means awakening being, and in particular, one who aspires to cultivate the mind of Buddha the wisdom and compassion of the Buddha. Because we want to help free beings from suffering, and we know that we can't do it unless we cultivate that wisdom and compassion. So then he's looking at the text of the... Heart Sutra as it's chanted in Tibetan. And when it brings up the Bodhisattva, he says, this passage in the text then refers to practitioners who have deep admiration for the spiritual practices as embodied in the six perfections, which I've just mentioned to you, which are the key trainings of the Bodhisattva,

[08:23]

whose mind is gripped by the powerful compassion that aspires to liberate all sentient beings from suffering. Such powerful compassion moistens the heart and awakens the inclination to enter the bodhisattva path. So he's referring to the noble sons and daughters in the opening to the... Tibetan version, there is the question brought by Shariputra to Avalokitesvara, how should noble sons and daughters practice the perfection of wisdom? And so he's saying this noble sons and daughters is talking about practitioners who have deep aspiration for the spiritual practices embedded in the six paramitas.

[09:29]

That is, those who have really taken up the aspiration to free all beings from suffering. And the essence of this perfection of wisdom, as I say, is the Buddha discovering in his awakening that all things arise in dependence on causes and conditions. Another way of saying this, which actually came later in the development of Buddhist teaching, is the teaching that all conditioned things are empty of intrinsic existence. independent existence, because they arise dependent on causes and conditions, all conditioned things are empty of inherent fixed existence.

[10:39]

And this is sort of a new idea and a little bit hard to understand And in pointing out how this emptiness is related to dependent arising, the Dalai Nama says, fundamentally the four noble truths are driven by the principle of causality. They manifest the law of cause and effect. The Buddha elaborates on the causal nature of the four truths with explanations of the twelve lengths of dependent origination. At the root of these teachings on the 12th length is the assertion that all phenomena, our experience, things, and events, come into being as a result merely of the aggregation of causes and conditions. It is essential to clearly comprehend this teaching because, as we shall see, it forms the foundation for the Buddha's teaching on emptiness.

[11:47]

The core of the Heart Sutra. And he says, Thus it is said that anything that is dependently originated must also, in fact, be empty. And he says, why is this important? He says, it matters, Buddha teaches, because one who clearly understands the true nature of this emptiness will be liberated, released completely from all suffering. So, clearly, if we want to release people from suffering, we have to understand something about emptiness.

[13:02]

So this is the essence of the wisdom which goes beyond, the wisdom which liberates. But we have this very strong attachment to a notion of a self which is intrinsically existent. He offers a couple of, Dalai Lama offers a couple of thought experiments toward the end of the book here. Let's see, where are they? I'm having a little trouble finding the thought experiment.

[14:27]

What he says is that what the text means by perfection of wisdom is a direct, unmediated realization of emptiness that is also called ultimate bodhicitta, the ultimate aspiration. This is not a direct realization of emptiness alone, rather it is the direct realization in union with bodhicitta, the aspiration to become a Buddha in order to free all beings. This union of wisdom and method constitutes the first level of bodhisattva attainment. So he's talking about the sense of me, the sense of the self that we have.

[15:34]

He said we may think that the self is identical with the body. For example, if there is a pain in one's hand, one has the instinctive thought, I am in pain. Although one's hand is not one's self, one instinctively identifies with that experience, and in this way the sense of self arises naturally. in relation to the body. At the same time, however, the sense of me is not completely identifiable with the body. Consider the following thought experiment. If someone were to offer us the opportunity to exchange our old, infirm body... Well, some of you are young, and this may not accredit you, but I can identify with this. For a more youthful, healthy body, we would most likely be willing from the very depths of our heart to make this exchange. This suggests that we believe, at least on some level, that there is someone, some non-bodily self, who would benefit from this exchange of bodies.

[16:45]

And we can extend this thought experiment into the mental realm by considering how we would respond if we were given the opportunity to exchange our ignorant, deluded mind for the Buddha's fully enlightened mind. Surely we would be willing to enter into this exchange imagining again that there is someone, some non-mental self, who would benefit. This suggests that we identify the self neither entirely with the body nor entirely with the mind. But we do one of the great practices in Buddhism is, well, okay, so you think you have a self. Where is it? What is it? And there are many meditations on exploring what is the self? Where can you find it? And the conclusion of Buddhism is there is no separate self.

[17:50]

There are just these Five aggregates or five heaps, which we are referred to in the Heart Sutra, form as physicalness, feeling, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. And so there are many meditations that are intended to show you that you can account for all all of your experiences of self through these five elements of these five aggregates without ever having to have an intrinsic something else that's called a self, that we simply consist of physicality, feelings, perceptions, impulses, and consciousness. The physicality includes the senses, the sense organs.

[18:52]

And so there are all kinds of specified meditations on trying to find a self, and you can't find it. Which doesn't mean to say there isn't a sense of self. But this wisdom which is liberating is one which sees the emptiness of the notion of a separate self. And if you want to free beings from suffering, One of the things you begin to notice is that our main suffering comes from mental afflictions.

[19:55]

There is certainly some bodily pain that happens in illness or injury. But that's not nearly as distressing to us as the mental afflictions of anger or longing or grasping. And so, as part of the study of how to free beings, we look at how we can relinquish these mental afflictions, how we can work with the arising of anger. And that's a lot of the work of cultivating the paramita of patience or forbearance is to study anger and how it arises and one of the things that I loved when I was first studying this and reading the text on a guide to the bodhisattva's way of life which talks about these six perfections in

[21:19]

practicing patience, one of the things that Shantideva, the teacher who wrote the Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life, says is, you should be very grateful to an enemy. A good enemy is hard to find. How in the world can you practice the perfection of patience without a good enemy? So you need to be grateful to them for giving you the opportunity to study patience by arousing your aversion so that you can see how you can work with aversion and put it to rest so that it doesn't cause you to stress and suffering. But this teaching of emptiness is... is fundamental to understanding the Buddha way and the realization that, you know, it's not that to say that something doesn't have an intrinsic existence, to say that form is emptiness, doesn't mean that form is non-existent.

[22:50]

It just means it doesn't have this fixed quality that we associate with sort of a permanent entity. Suzuki Roshi, in talking about the Heart Sutra, was saying, fortunately, in the Heart Sutra it says, form is emptiness and emptiness is form. that which is formed is completely emptiness, that which is emptiness is completely formed. But Sutra says, fortunately, the Sutra goes on to say, form is form and emptiness is emptiness. To say that form is emptiness doesn't mean to say form is non-existent. It simply means that it doesn't have a fixed intrinsic quality to it, but it arises in response to causes and conditions. This teaching is about this bodhicitta, this heartfelt desire to become a Buddha in order to alleviate the suffering of all beings, is based on the Buddha's understanding that all of us have the capacity.

[24:44]

to be Buddha. All of us have the capacity to awaken to this wisdom, to this liberating wisdom of freeing all beings from suffering. Each one of us, I mean, it's said that the Buddha said on his awakening, I now see that all beings without exception, all beings without exception, that includes you and me. You know, that's the... That's the remarkable thing about it. The first time I heard Suzuki Roshi say, you're perfect just as you are, I thought, well, he doesn't know me. I'm new here. But, you know, the Buddha says, all beings, without exception, have the wisdom and compassion of the awakened ones. Only because of their delusions and self-clinging, they don't realize it. They don't. To realize means to within to it, but also it means to make it real.

[25:52]

So overcoming our delusions, our delusion in a separate, intrinsic self, is the way we have to go in order to be able to actually realize the wisdom and compassion of the Buddhas right here, right now, in this body and mind. But the teaching of Buddhism always is based on the completeness of each one of us. There's nothing missing in you or me that would hinder us completely awakening reality in the way that the Buddha did. But we have to train. So when Shariputra asks Avalokitesvara in the Heart Sutra, how should a noble son or daughter train in order to realize the mind of the Buddha?

[27:13]

Chariputra says, Avila Kitasvara says, seeing, we train by seeing that all the five aggregates are empty. Form, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness are none of them fixed. and separate entities, but they're all arising in response to causes and conditions. So as we train ourselves to relinquish those afflictions which cause us and others harm, And to cultivate those qualities that bring happiness and compassion and loving kindness to the fore.

[28:26]

As we train ourselves to see the emptiness of all conditioned things, as we train ourselves to notice how we are grasping and holding on a sense of self, then we can begin to loosen up these old habitual states of mind which keep us from seeing that we are already free. We are already, we already have all of the qualities of a Buddha, but we need to realize them. We need to make them real. And this requires deep and intense intention and training. And this is what we've been... This is what we study all... This is what we've been studying this past six weeks in the Practice Spirit.

[29:34]

This is what we study all the time. How do we get stuck in old habits of mind? How do we open the hand of thought and let them go? How do we see that causes and conditions bring about everything that arises? And how do we choose then actions which bring about the arising of qualities that we appreciate? And how do we choose to avoid actions that bring about the arising of states of mind or actions that cause harm and suffering. We have to study our mind and see how we make these unfortunate decisions that create suffering.

[30:42]

and how we can spot them when they first begin to arise and say, oops, don't want to go there. That takes me right to hell. I might have done better just to keep quoting the Dalai Lama. Well, you know, he's got such a nice turn of praise all the time. So he talks about afflictions, and he talks about physical pain, but he says, however, experiences of unhappiness and happiness at the level of mental consciousness are far more acute.

[31:42]

If we look carefully, we see that much of our unhappiness and suffering is caused by disturbances in our thoughts and emotions. These are the result of the mental afflictions, the kleshas. Examples of these afflictions include attachment or greed, reversion or hatred, anger, pride, jealousy. The whole range of negative states of the human being can experience. All these afflictions, as soon as they arise, immediately disturb our hearts and minds. Buddhist texts list many classes of afflictions, such as the six primary afflictions and the 20 derivative afflictions. Well, let's see. So the six primary afflictions, I've already mentioned some, greed, hate.

[32:51]

Let's see. Attachment, anger, pride, ignorance, afflicted views, and afflictive doubt. The 20 derivative afflictions are wrath, vengeance, spite, envy, and malice, which are derived from anger. Miserliness, self-satisfaction, and mental excitement, which are derived from attachment. Concealment, mental wellness, faithlessness, procrastination, forgetfulness, and unattentiveness, which are derived from ignorance. Pretension, dishonesty, lack of shame, inconsideration of others, unconscientiousness, and distraction, which are derived from both attachment and ignorance. Anyhow, these mental afflictions are the ones that we really... have to deal with the most if we're going to liberate beings. But he says, if we closely examine feelings of strong desire or strong anger, we will find that at the root of these emotions lies our grasping at the object of these emotions.

[34:04]

And if we take it still further, we discover that at the root of all of this lies our grasping at a sense of self or ego. Not recognizing the emptiness of self and other, we mistakenly grasp at both as autonomous, objectively real, and independently existent. And then Chandrakirti says, first you have a sense of I, then you grasp at things as mine. I recently read someone... who talked about this sense of mine as setting up a minefield. And I really like that image because this sense of me and mine exactly sets up this field where all kinds of conflict can arise and all kinds of harm and misery. So I love that minefield. And I don't know if any of you have ever been... how much you've been around kids when they're two or three.

[35:09]

First they get a sense of I, and then the next thing you hear is mine. If you work at a nursery school where you've got a bunch of two or three-year-olds, you hear this anguished mine all the time. And when we see how much anguish that causes, it's a good time to study the emptiness of me and mine. so that we don't get so entangled in it and don't believe it. You know, there's this great bumper sticker that says, don't believe everything you think. And that's very good advice. Suzuki Roshi said it a different way. He said, you don't have to invite every thought to sit down and have a cup of tea. But it's the same thing. We have that same expression. You don't have to entertain every thought that arises, right? You see a thought, and if it leads to misery, you say, I don't want to pick that up and run with it.

[36:11]

I want to leave that behind. And there is that moment when a thought first arises where you can choose to pick it up and make it into the whole story or to see this is going to lead to misery. I'm going to let this one lie. We can actually do that. And it is a great freedom to realize that we don't have to be enslaved by our thoughts, that we act like and choose which thoughts to entertain and which thoughts are going to lead to misery, and we don't want to deal with them. We just don't need to. It's just a thought. We can pick it up or leave it lie. It's up to us. So he says, the first stage in spiritual practice is to restrain oneself from gross negative actions of body, speech, and minds, such as the ten unwholesome actions.

[37:23]

These are the ten unwholesome actions, you know, like killing, stealing, lying, misuse of sexuality, slander, misuse or using intoxicants, and so forth. You know, the ten precepts. In the second stage, one has gained a certain degree of restraint regarding these actions. One challenges the afflictions directly by means of applying antidotes. For example, to counter anger, one cultivates loving kindness, and to counter attachment, one contemplates impermanence. These antidotes help to reduce the intensity of negative emotions. However, the most direct method for overcoming the mental afflictions is to cultivate insight into emptiness. In this final stage, one tries to eliminate not only the afflictions but also the propensities that are their residue so that no trace remains that can bring about future occurrence of these afflictions.

[38:32]

In summary, ignorance lies at the root of all the afflictions and the afflictions are inevitably at the root of suffering. Ignorance and afflictions are known as the true origins of suffering and their effects are known as true suffering. Insight into emptiness is the true path. And finally, the freedom that we attain through cultivation of this wisdom is true cessation. So, this is the... teaching which should encourage us to cultivate the understanding of the emptiness of all conditioned things. And I recommend that we take that opportunity seriously

[39:42]

for the benefit of ourselves and all sentient beings. We undertake this practice out of concern for suffering. Not just our own, but all the suffering we see around us. And when we see the power of understanding that this thing we think of as self is not separate, that self and other are not two, that we're all intimately connected, that we all affect one another, that each of us, through loving kindness and compassion, can make a real change in the world we live in, then we will be motivated

[40:45]

to study this teaching of the emptiness of all conditioned things and to cultivate and train in the perfection of wisdom. Thank you all very much.

[41:09]

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