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. Thank you all for coming, and thank you, Greg, for having me come. I'm going to stand if no one minds. I don't quite know how much of what I had planned we'll get through today, but just a little background. I'm going to talk about some things that I've been sort of preparing for a class that I'll be teaching at Berkeley in the fall on Buddhist meditation. So this comes out of a very much a not practice context. So it's sort of things I've prepared for a more general introduction to Buddhist meditation from a broader, not Zen per se, point of view. But I think as I was thinking about what to talk about, it occurred to me that despite not really being about Zen per se, it still might be useful to you.

[01:04]

Many of you will probably be familiar with most of the things I'm going to say. So I'm going to talk about certain kind of broader ideas in Buddhist meditation. It may, compared to the sort of Zen approach to meditation, it might at times sound a little bit... Well, I don't know if technical is the right word, but theoretical or something like that. But I do think, and this is kind of really my own take on things, the sort of the Zen anti-theory thing is kind of itself a really interesting theory. So it's the stuff, you know, the Zen presentation of meditation in many ways, actually, I think anyway, is responding and building off of... discussions about meditation approaches, different ways people have thought about meditation, practice meditation in the rest of Buddhism. So hopefully then some of this stuff you may find illuminating when thinking about the Zen approach. And I'll try to mention a few things, come back to that at the end a little bit. I have this board here in case I may write down a few terms.

[02:05]

Again, many of you are likely to be familiar with any technical terms or things like that that I talk about, but some of you perhaps are not, so I will... Write them down if that seems reasonable. So I'm going to start actually not by talking about Buddhist meditation, but about non-Buddhist meditation. So I think many of you are probably familiar with the story of the Buddha and his enlightenment. And you may all be familiar with this sort of stage he goes through when he tries out the various meditation methods that other... teachers in India were sort of propounding at that time and he sort of rejects them and then goes off to do his own thing. And actually in the canonical story there what he rejects, when he rejects them he goes off and he says that he's going to practice something that he calls dhyana which you may know is the Sanskrit word that is eventually translated into Zen. So there's a certain interest perhaps there that he rejects the non-Buddhist other Indian meditation approaches and he goes and he practices Zen.

[03:08]

So I want to start by going over a little bit what those other approaches were because that actually I think makes understanding what Buddhist approaches are a little more comprehensible. So I'm going to, I guess in the story, which to go back to that story that you may be familiar with, usually the way its main feature of these other methods of practice that you read about are that they were ascetic practices, right? The Buddha, these sort of self-mortification practices, people who thought that liberation could be achieved by hurting their bodies in some way, right? Fasting extreme lengths of time. And the Buddha rejects this. Now the question is why, not so much maybe why the Buddha rejected this, but why did those other people think that those were good things to do? Because I think that's something which, at least when I was at Zen Center, that part of the story was never explained to me, why anyone thought that by nearly fasting to death, one might actually be able to achieve liberation. So I'm going to talk just very briefly about some of those, what that's all about. because that, again, like I said, I think clarifies the Buddhist approach a little bit.

[04:11]

And I'm going to just, for those of you familiar with broader Indian religion, I'm going to summarize what is often presented as the Jain or the Jain approach to meditation. Historically, the situation is quite a bit more complicated. There's lots of other Buddhists. But Jainism, which is another Indian religion, another Indian kind of renunciatory religion, which still exists to the present day, actually. And the people associated with this are mentioned in some of the earliest Buddhist sutras and scriptures. So we know that there was kind of a lot going on between the two of them. So in order to understand the giant approach and also the Buddhist approach, we also need to talk a little bit about karma, a word which I'm sure you are all familiar with. Now, the basic understanding in India at this time was that people were enmeshed in this cycle of samsara. rebirth, endless rebirth, which was seen to be a kind of really terrible thing, suffering, and liberation was conceived of as being the escape from that cycle.

[05:14]

Now, of course, the process of rebirth and samsara and liberation from it, this all goes through many redefinitions later in the history of Buddhism, and there's other ways of understanding what liberation from samsara is apart from nearly the ending of rebirth as it's traditionally presented, but be that as it may... The thing that I want to stress right now is that for all of these groups, and the Buddha included, karma was a serious problem because karma is what caused you to get stuck in samsara. So we have to talk about what karma is. And I'm going to tell you first what karma was for the non-Buddhists, or again, for a certain group of these non-Buddhists. And for the non-Buddhists, karma was actions. So deeds, anything that you did... in some sense, was liable to cause you to become stuck in samsara. So the giants actually had a very interesting, I don't want to get too far into this now, but their understanding was that karma was actually kind of like a material substance. So if you did something, like say you stepped on an ant, there'd be this actual stuff that would kind of stick to your soul.

[06:15]

And that's actually what would sort of keep your soul stuck in samsara. So the solution to liberation, according to the giants, was you had to get rid of this stuff. It's kind of like a... some kind of purging of your body in some way. And the other important thing is that this stuff was created no matter what you did. And here is the point that I'm going to stress in terms of the contrast with the Buddhist approaches, is that karma was created, this sort of stuff which would keep you stuck in samsara, whether or not the actions you did were intentional or not. So even to this day, actually, in... In India, you see giant monks, while they're walking, sometimes they carry a little broom around with them and they sweep the ground in front of them. And the logic behind that is that while they're walking, they don't want to step on any ants or little tiny bugs because they might kill them. And killing another living being is sort of very bad karma, as it were. But the interesting thing to note, and again the contrast with the Buddhist approach, is that this happens whether or not you even notice that it's happening. So if you kill an ant not even knowing that you're killing it, not even trying to kill an ant, accidentally, you still...

[07:19]

you still suffer the consequences of that action. It actually takes a little bit of work to get our minds around this understanding because it's really totally the opposite of the way we normally approach ethics or precepts, I guess we might say. Normally, our understanding is that doing things with a wholesome mind or an unwholesome mind, these are things that you have to be aware of. If you accidentally do something, that doesn't count in some way. But again, so for these other groups, actually it did count. And sort of the mental aspect of it, the intentional aspect of it was irrelevant. So with this understanding of what karma is, this understanding of what it is that's going to cause you to get stuck in some sorrow, the ascetic meditation approaches begin to make a little more sense. Because the understanding was, well, anything you do is going to cause future suffering for you, future immersion in the cycle of rebirth, and So the only way to stop it is actually just to stop doing everything.

[08:20]

So the giants, one thing they were doing when they were sort of out there fasting or painful aesthetic practices, they would sort of, the goal was to not move. You may actually be familiar with these stories from the biographies of the Buddha where he encounters these various aesthetics. Some of them are doing things like standing on one leg for like six days and stuff like that. Part of what's going on there is the understanding that, well, to get rid, to stop producing karma, you actually have to stop producing anything. You have to stop moving. body, and you have to stop engaging sensorily with the world. There's another element of this, which is that the past karma that you had, you had to get rid of that, and that required pain in the body, but I'm not going to talk about that now. The main thing I want to stress now is that when the Buddha was formulating, if we can treat the Buddha as a single individual, which is kind of difficult to do historically, but it's not important, The other model that you have out here is this model of karma where no matter what you're thinking when you're doing something, this is going to create a sort of a future effect for you.

[09:23]

And in particular, it's going to get you stuck in samsara. So one way to understand the basis of Buddhist meditation on a whole comes with the way that the Buddhists treat karma. And what they do is they don't worry so much. Again, I'm just going to introduce some terms since why not, right? We have this board here. The Buddhist understanding was that actually what's important is not what you do physically, but what your mental attitude is or your intention while you're performing it. So if you intend to kill someone and then you kill them, that's really bad. But say you're not trying to kill them and you kill them. That, karmically speaking, doesn't matter. Whether this matters legally or in terms of the precepts is another question. But what matters is the purification of the mind in some sense. So the Buddhist understanding was that... we're sort of stuck in samsara, we're stuck in this process of rebirth because of the intentions with which we commit actions. It gets a little tricky here because the Buddhists were not really saying that, well, just by thinking you might cause karma.

[10:31]

They also felt that, well, you really actually have to, take this example again, you really actually have to kill someone or hurt them. You just think about hurting them. That's bad, but that's not as bad as thinking about it and then doing it. But the key distinction that I just want to stress again is that if you don't think about it and then do it, you're kind of off the hook. And again, this, I think, part of this seems very familiar to us, or it should seem pretty familiar in terms of our understanding of morality, in terms of our understanding of, you know, what it is we're kind of doing, right, in practice. We're trying to purify the intentions of our mind, make our mind pure, not so much our actions apart from it. How do you say that word again? Chetana. Sorry, I never actually said that. Thank you. So with this as a sort of basic redefinition of karma that takes place, really this is where, I mean, one way of explaining Buddhist meditation is to say that it's coming out of this. So Buddhist meditation now is not about sitting still for as long as you possibly can, although it does involve that.

[11:32]

It's not about hurting the body and burning off your old karma, right? It's about some kind of, well, actually meditation, right? We use that word, it has the connotation of a of a mental purification or some sort of mental activity rather than an external activity. So this is really, in some sense, where Buddhist meditation comes from, I think. Or at least it's a good way to explain it. Sorry, this is the mental intention. So this is what the Buddha said. They say, well, actually, karma, what we really mean, what the Buddha actually says in various early sutras, when we say karma, what we're talking about is chetana, is intention, something like that.

[12:35]

And when the Buddha said that, he's saying that to differentiate himself from people who said, when we talk about karma, we're talking about action, regardless of your intention. Yes? There is a kind of, you could go from the more psychological point of view, like just intending an action. In the terms of the theory of karma assets articulated, this is usually good or bad. The idea is that evil... actions lead to negative results and good actions lead to good results. So the question is, what determines that valence is the quality of your intention. So if you're intending to help someone, very loosely speaking, you're intending to help someone and you don't succeed, that's still a positive action in the Buddhist sense.

[13:35]

So is it emotional? Yeah, and when we talk about what Buddhist meditation is trying to purify, as it were, Emotion is a fine word for that. If we get technical, then various doesn't perhaps line up entirely well. But emotion works well in that Chetanaya is something which is going to cause you to do something. So emotion has that etymological root also of impulse, making you do something. It's not just a thought, like a sort of non... Is that... An unclear intention? But it's an emotional intention. It's not completely directed. For example, you know, I have road rage. I don't think that we have something against this person, but something figures in me, and I ran my car to that person. Yeah. So, no, the Buddhist would say there is actually something there, and I'm going to talk about what those things might be in a sec, right now, actually. Thank you.

[14:35]

Do you want to just leave that thing with me? Okay. Good. Thank you. So Buddhist meditation then becomes the attempt to purify and to work with and to do something about the mental side of the equation. Now, the word, I'm going to use this word which as Zen folks you're probably not going to like, but I'm going to use it anyway since I think for early Buddhism, which I'm sort of talking about right now, this is in some ways the best word, the defilements. And this word translates the... Sanskrit word klesha. So the Buddhists, when they talk, okay, so intention, mental actions, this is what causes our suffering. This is what causes our immersion in samsara. We have to somehow deal with this. Now what are these? Let's think about what are the bad ones, as it were, that we want to change in some way. And the way these are characterized is with this word klesha. And again, I think etymologically, sort of impurity or defilement is probably the best literal rendering of that.

[15:40]

And again, from a sort of later Mahayana or Zen perspective, whether that's the best way of thinking about it or not, is a different question, which we can talk about in a minute. You may be familiar with at least the most basic classification of this. The most basic classification of the klesha in Buddhism are greed, hatred, and delusion. But I'm going to talk for the moment here about two of them. And this is... So I said greed when I formulated it when I said it, because that comes off the top of my head. But I'm going to talk about them in terms of desire and ignorance. So the desire and moving towards and moving away, greed and hatred, these are kind of the flip sides of desire. But ignorance is really, at least superficially, something different, it seems. So... thinking of them in terms of these two broad groupings works pretty well. So on the one hand, you have the kinds of mental intentions or mental actions which are based on desire.

[16:45]

And then on the other hand, you have this other one which is based on ignorance. Now, how we actually distinguish between these two, if we should distinguish between these two, how these work together. In some ways, Buddhist meditation is always talking about this. And there's always a certain tension, I think, between... ways of talking about Buddhist meditation where it seems like what you're trying to do is deal with desire. You're trying to quell desire, not engage in practices that prevent desire from arising in a kind of destructive way. And then also other kinds of meditation practices or maybe the same kinds of meditation practices that are more talking about ignorance. So where what you're trying to do is have some understanding of reality. And this is, for those of you who can anticipate where we're going to go with this, this really becomes the basis of the distinction between Samatha and Vipassana, which I'll talk about in a minute. So just for the moment, let's think about what Buddhists are trying to do with meditation. We have these mental impurities, defilements that need to be changed in some way, and we're going to group them broadly into ones based on desire and ones based on ignorance.

[17:57]

Now, In early Buddhist understanding, the way to achieve liberation, the goal of meditation practice, is the elimination of these. And again, in the style of language that early Buddhists usually talk about these things, it's very, from a Zen perspective, kind of dualistic. So really, you're trying to eliminate these forever. There's no ifs, ands, or buts about it. And the idea is that if you can uproot these in such a way that they never again arise in your mind. It's a really desire. It doesn't ever occur to you. And ignorance is entirely gone, meaning your understanding of reality is perfect. We'll get back again to these a little bit later. Once those are gone, then you'll be liberated. Early Buddhist understanding of this means that you won't be reborn anymore. So from a kind of contemporary perspective, you die. So that's a little strange. From a kind of later Mahayana and Zen point of view, this means you become like a perfected bodhisattva or something, someone who can now act in the world in a way that is entirely based on wholesome intentions, wholesome motivations.

[19:08]

So that's interesting. Now, then, the problematic of Buddhist meditation, if you want to think about it, is then, well, how do we do this? How does this happen? And, again, one way to understand, well, one broad grouping which then occurs when people talk about Buddhist meditation as I said a minute ago is between meditation practices that seem to be dealing more with the arising of desires, hatreds, mental comings and goings and that kind of thing and those that are aimed more at some kind of understanding which is going to deal with ignorance and the technical terms which I'm just going to write down now. Now you may, if you're familiar, you may be familiar with this in the form of this word Vipassana meditation, which people talk about a lot.

[20:12]

I'm writing here the Sanskrit, so it's just a slightly different spelling. When Traditional Buddhist texts describe, okay, what are the sort of the ranges of meditation practice? How do the meditation practices serve to make the mind pure in some way? You get this kind of distinction, and the distinction between practices which are calming the mind. So the usual way that people translate this word shamatha over here often with calm or synonyms of calm, concentration, calming, stopping, these kinds of things. So these are meditation practices where the goal is to sort of, I'm going to use another word which you might find uncomfortable, but just bear with me here. Suppress the arising of thought. Suppress the arising of desires. Versus, and then on the other hand, okay, that may deal with this sort of problem of desire, but now what about this problem of ignorance, as it were? Because ignorance is not, seems perhaps a little different, right? To cure ignorance, as it were, requires not simply getting rid of something, but actually, you actually have to sort of have some kind of understanding.

[21:16]

Understanding of what is another question we'll talk about in a second. And practices... that are in principle aimed at that are often called the Pashina this is a word which is sometimes translated with English terms like insight really though it's actually almost synonymous with a word you're probably more familiar with or wisdom right so these are practices where actually you're trying to reach some understanding of something not how what what is reality really like now why how all these fit together as the same kind of thing is another question which I'm not sure we'll be able to discuss today. Now, when you read traditional presentations of Buddhist meditation, what they will basically all say to you is both sides of this are necessary. That either if you engage in meditation practices and if the only result of those meditation practices is a kind of calming of the mind, such that you reach a state where

[22:21]

desires or other kinds of mental impurities are not present. That is actually not the goal of Buddhist meditation, is the usual understanding. What traditional Buddhist presentations will say is, well, yes, this is a state of a very advanced calm, concentrated meditation, shamatha. You've succeeded in, for the moment, preventing desire and other mental impurities from existing. Again, I'm going to use this word because I think Now it's actually quite apt. You sort of suppress them, and they're not present. Now, what traditional Buddhists understand will say is, well, that actually is only part of the problem, because what happens is then when you stop practicing meditation, they all come back. All you've done is actually sort of calm them for the moment. So Buddhists will say, well, no matter how much of this you do, this will lead you to sort of a very pleasant... existence while you're engaged in these kinds of meditation practices.

[23:24]

Because none of these mental defilements arise, and while actually that's happening, you're not generating any unwholesome mental ideas, you're not, sort of traditional sense, you're not producing more karma. It's all good. The only problem is that when you stop, and the Buddhist understanding is, well, eventually you stop that, and then you haven't gotten anywhere because somehow underneath there's still these tendencies. You've just eliminated the surface level. And what the Buddhists will then say, what Buddhists then say is that, well, to go further from this state of very calm, you need to do something which is going to somehow, and here I'm going to be vague because how this works is not often explicated exactly. You need to do something to generate wisdom, some understanding. And that when you generate understanding, which is this more sort of positive condition, where you're not simply quelling the mind of thoughts or desires, but you're actually... taking some understanding of the world as the object of your mind. When you do that, that will somehow get out the roots of these mental impurities.

[24:29]

Now again, how this works, this is kind of maybe the magic or something, right? Somehow, when you have this wisdom, not only do you reach a state where sort of in the present moment, mental defilements are not present. Where like right now, you don't have desire. But actually, they're gone forever. They're not going to come back later in the future either. Now, one, this way of, so this two-fold way of talking about Buddhist meditation, again, it'll usually be said, because you might think, well, if this is what, if sort of having some sort of insight into reality, and again, I'll talk in a second about what that actually consists of, if having some insight into reality is what eliminates this stuff forever, why bother with this side? Well, what the Buddhist will say is, well, actually, you can't really do this. It's actually impossible to accurately perceive the nature of the world unless your mind has become calm. When you, traditional practices for reaching sort of so-called shamatha or calm meditation, usually this is what we often think of as Buddhist meditation, or not really Buddhist meditation, meditation.

[25:40]

One pointedness of mind, so you take like a particular object and you concentrate your mind on that object, say like on the breath or something like that. You direct your mind towards it and you don't allow it to sort of waver towards some other object. And the understanding is this, by sort of developing these powers of the mind, you then reach a point where when you turn your mind towards more properly speaking Buddhist truths, Buddhist understanding of the world, then you'll actually be able to get it. But if you don't do this, you just can't grasp it in some way. So while there is a... presentation is always that these two things are both necessary. I just want to point out here that there is a kind of hierarchy between them. And this is something which in Zen becomes much well one way to understand the Zen approach to meditation is it's kind of an undoing of that hierarchy or an attempt to do something different with that hierarchy but traditionally and in most Indian or non-Zen kinds of Buddhist meditation there's a hierarchy.

[26:42]

So you first have to develop some kind of powers of concentration, as it were. And only then can you sort of turn your mind towards having some insight into Buddhist understanding of the world. So it's possible, in other words, to have this without this, but it's not possible to have this without this. Does that make sense? So the fact that there's a hierarchy creates a certain... Well... It creates a certain tension, but it also allows... One thing the Buddhists do is they say, well, what about all the other kinds of meditation practices that are out there? Because Buddhists, of course, are not the only ones who meditate. The usual Buddhist response will be, well, other people, people who are not practicing Buddhist meditation, they can do this just fine. You don't have to be a Buddhist, the Buddhists will say, to concentrate your mind, to develop that power of concentration. It's only when you get to hear... that you really get into specifically Buddhist things. We'll talk in a second about what it is when you generate this sort of wisdom or insight. What is it that you're generating wisdom or insight into?

[27:42]

This is when real Buddhist stuff comes up, Buddhist understanding of the world. Here, it's just a question of concentrating your mind. You can think about it. You don't need to use any particular Buddhist understanding of the world to talk about mental concentration. You could believe in the reality of a self. an Atman, which the Buddhists presumably do not, and be perfectly content engaging in a kind of meditation practice in which you concentrate your mind fixedly on a single object. So this is one thing that comes out of this is a way for, from a Buddhist point of view, to understand the variety of kinds of meditation practice that may exist in other traditions. But again, there is a kind of implied hierarchy here in the traditional formulations. Now the other thing, which in terms of how all this gets back to Zen, which is worth pointing out, is that traditionally, so the kinds of, then what are these meditation practices that, say, allow you to calm your mind?

[28:51]

The traditional meditation practices that allow you to calm your mind in Indian Buddhism are the dhyanas. And again, this is this word dhyana, which gets translated in East Asia into Zen. So... especially prior in China, in East Asia, in Japan, before what we think of as Zen Zen, Bodhidharma, the sixth patriarch, and those folks, the word Zen sort of was used. And what it really referred to was the so-called dhyanas. So sometimes you encounter in China and East Asia, followers of Zen encountered criticism from other kinds of Buddhists. And one thing they said was, well... your style of meditation practice, what you're doing, it's just this side of things. You are engaged in a meditation which is aimed at concentrating your minds and calming them and suppressing the arising of thought. But you've totally, they said, you've ignored this side where you actually have to come to some sort of Buddhist understanding of how the world works.

[29:55]

And part of the reason it was easy to accuse Zen followers of doing this is because the word they chose... Zen, to refer to themselves, happen to be, you know, happen to be the one on the left here. So, I'm not going to go into the details of, you know, how the dhyanas, which are these sort of formal states of meditation are presented in Indian Buddhism. That would be, I guess, way out of, take too much time and not maybe so directly relevant to the larger point that I hope to convey here. But... the dhyanas do become a very sort of formal system. So how do you concentrate your mind? Well, you know, you can achieve a state where you have these mental factors present and you're like 80% concentrated. You can have these mental factors present and you're like 90% concentrated. So they go into the sequence of increasingly concentrated states of mind. They become ever more concentrated. But again, none of this sort of means anything until we apply this. Now, what then, so we said basic understanding is that the mind becomes concentrated and then at that point,

[31:01]

you can begin to have some grasp of Buddhist understanding of the world. So then what is that grasp? How does that work? And what are the things that you need to have sort of wisdom in respect to in order to achieve the goal of meditation, which is for the purposes of this class, the purification of the mind. Now here is where it again becomes quite difficult to summarize because this is something where you have a great deal of diversity in traditional Buddhism. All sorts of different things are said to be the thing that you need to have wisdom about. And what tends to happen actually is that depending on what you hold to be the kind of highest Buddhist truth, that becomes the object that you need to have insight into. So in the Zen and Mahayana formulations of meditation that you might be familiar with, usually this is understood to be something like emptiness, the truth of emptiness or non-duality or something like that. But that's not the only thing people talk about. And I'll just give you the sort of basic earlier rundown.

[32:04]

So I mentioned here that these styles of meditation where you begin by concentrating your mind on an object, say like your breath, for example. And the understanding is once you concentrate your mind on your breath, your mind becomes totally focused on your breath. You really just grasp breath as the only object of your mind. Now, at that moment, what will be said is that, well, you've got your breath. But now what you need to do is you need to understand the qualities of your breath. And in traditional or early Buddhist understanding of the world, you may have heard of something called the three marks or the four marks. So the understanding is that all things in the universe are impermanent. They don't pertain to a self. Sometimes it's they're sort of suffering in some way and that they're empty of some sort of inherent existence. So To move from here to here, you have to sort of concentrate your mind on your breath and then somehow understand that your breath, like everything else in the world, has those aspects.

[33:09]

It's not just your breath. It's actually a manifestation of impermanence in some way, or it's a manifestation of emptiness. So the traditional presentation in Buddhist Abhidharma thought is that when you move from shamatha vipassana, when you move from this concentrated meditation to this kind of insight, the object of your mind now becomes one of these more abstract in a certain way, actually. Sometimes a very normal understanding or presentation of Buddhist meditation is that the goal is to allow your mind to focus on what's present to it. Just be aware of what's in front of you, something like that. This is often called mindfulness meditation. in contemporary presentations, so that, you know, you're holding a pen and you're thinking, you know, just the pen. You're not going into some kind of elaborate theory about what the pen really is. You're just aware of the sensation of your hand on the pen and all that stuff. Now, from the standpoint of Buddhist meditation, this is actually, this is merely shamatha meditation.

[34:10]

Because if you're just aware of your pen, you're kind of concentrating your mind on your pen. You don't have to have any understanding of Buddhist notions like that all things are impermanent. right? Because you're just aware of what's in front of you, you're just aware of your pen. So the move to these prajna or vipassana style meditations involves something which actually seems a little bit strange and perhaps counterintuitive depending on the kinds of Buddhist meditation you've been exposed to because here you actually need to bring in some sort of theory or some sort of, I hesitate to use this word, but Buddhist doctrines. Emptiness, right? This is not, or that non-self. I mean, is it necessarily obvious to us when we just are aware of what's in front of us that everything is impermanent? Maybe it is, but maybe it's not. So this is a little bit different in some ways than merely being aware of what's around you. It's actually about applying a Buddhist understanding. And this is why, as I said before, you have a lot of different things which come up here. Emptiness, non-duality in a Mahayana sense.

[35:12]

But in a traditional Buddhist understanding, early Buddhist understanding, you actually have a set of categories about the world. Well, the The world is impermanent. The world is empty. The world is non-self. And we actually need to now make an effort to understand reality in those terms. And when you do that, then supposedly through that approach, all of the mental defilements will be eliminated forever. We're going until 4.30, is that right? I'm just going to say now I guess just one or two words about the purpose of introducing this stuff to you. There's a lot here and it's kind of too short a time to do that. But at least one way of thinking about the way that meditation is usually taught in the Zen tradition. You can understand that there's some sort of effort or some dissatisfaction

[36:18]

with this hierarchy. So one reason I presented this to you is so that you can see kind of maybe what Zen approaches to meditation are responding to or are not satisfied with in traditional Buddhist understanding. So some idea that, well, to make insight into the nature of reality somehow dependent on this calming of the mind, this strikes the Zen approach as a little bit dualistic, to use a word that comes up. And I just wanted to to read to you a little bit here from the, I was just thinking of this as I was preparing this talk. This is the Platform Sutra, and there's this very famous moment in the Platform Sutra where the Sixth Patriarch, he actually addresses this directly, and it may not be apparent if one is not familiar with this background, but he says here, this is... sort of somewhere towards the beginning, he says, good friends, my teaching of the Dharma takes, and I'm just going to read the way this is translated. This is the Yampolsky translation, which is the kind of one that around Zen Center people often use.

[37:19]

My teaching of the Dharma takes meditation and wisdom as its basis. So now when he's saying meditation and wisdom, this is actually what he's referring to. So meditation, I'm calling all of this meditation, right? But the word that he's translated here is meditation. This is really referring to just concentration of the mind. So something which, from a broader Buddhist point of view, we would say is really only part of meditation. So my teaching takes meditation and wisdom as its basis. And then he goes on and he says, never under any circumstances say mistakenly that meditation and wisdom are different. They are a unity, not two things. Meditation itself is the substance of wisdom. Wisdom itself is the function of meditation. At the very moment when there is wisdom, then meditation exists in wisdom. At the very moment when there is meditation, wisdom exists in meditation. Then he says, be careful not to say that meditation gives rise to wisdom. Again, I just thought of this because this, unless one is weird, this is the normal understanding.

[38:21]

Meditation gives rise to wisdom. Through the calming of the mind, you put yourself in a position where you can have some kind of insight. In the Zen approach to meditation, there's a dissatisfaction with this. some kind of understanding that to characterize the path of meditation in this way somehow violates the spirit of what Zen understands to be wisdom itself. So if we just sort of go very loosely here and say that, well, you could say in Zen, wisdom has something to do with non-duality, about emptiness. So if that's the true nature of the world in some way, then how can you have a practice of meditation which relies on this sort of hierarchy? How can you say that you can only have insight into that once you've kind of calmed your mind in this sort of very intense way. If your understanding of the principle of the world is that, well, it doesn't admit those kind of hierarchies. Now, Indian Buddhists also had the understanding that highest wisdom, Indian Mahayana Buddhists had the understanding that highest wisdom is insight into non-duality.

[39:29]

But what's actually pretty interesting is that they never really seem to have a problem with the idea that in order to have that insight, you would have to first calm your mind in some sort of regulated serious way. So from the sort of broader perspective of the different approaches to Buddhist meditation, this is definitely something unique about Zen. And this understanding that somehow the actual practice of meditation itself needs to be in harmony with the insight or the wisdom that that practice is supposed to generate. Now, why in Zen this was felt to be necessary is maybe a different question. So I don't think I'm going to say anything more now in case you have some questions. I hope I didn't try to cover too much in this short 45 minutes. Greg told me to try to not cover too much. So I tried to cover too much. Linda.

[40:30]

Linda. That's exactly what he's referring to. And this is something that in East Asia, people who asked the word Zen came to be thought of as a particular approach to Buddhism and meditation, not merely a generic word. So the school of Zen, as that became a kind of thing, this was something that they had to say over and over again. So Dogen's comment there, you know, that it's not sitting meditation, this actually goes way back and there's some famous passages much earlier where early Zen people are very concerned because, getting off topic here, but Bodhidharma, you know, his biography is listed in these early biographies of famous monks in China. And in the earliest one, the earliest record of Bodhidharma, he's put in the category of meditators. And the later Zen people are very concerned about this because they don't, Bodhidharma is not just a meditator.

[41:31]

So the Zen that Bodhidharma... Bodhidharma's understanding of Zen, in terms of at least how the Zen school sees it, is not simply meditation. And what that meditation means, yes, that's this side of things. It's not simply a method of concentration of the mind or something like that. So it gets a little tricky because this word meditation sometimes gets used for just half the thing and then sometimes it's the whole thing. But when you hear people... So this is one reason why maybe this... having some grasp of this does help to make sense of certain statements in Zen texts like this. And again, this can be interpreted many different ways, but certainly one element of it is this SU. Can I ask a follow-up question? So, Paul Bielfeldt's book on the meditation kind of sort of concludes with Dogen really never says what you do then. kind of pointing all around it. But that makes me think, so Shamatha has very specific techniques.

[42:33]

Like you do this, you have this very laid out. Is there a similar thing for the Pashna side or the wisdom side of what you do? Well, you know, so one thing I mentioned before is that what you're supposed to have insight into tends to vary a lot depending on the school of Buddhism. Because what it is you're supposed to have insight into usually ends up being whatever that particular school thinks of as the most essential thing. So in early Indian Buddhism, this notion of correct understanding of the fact that all phenomena are impermanent, suffering, non-self. This is really the central thing. So the real, the object of Vipassana is that. It's understanding this particular object is impermanent, suffering, non-self. Whereas in Zen, it's, you know, or Mahayana... It's maybe more some kind of understanding of emptiness in the broader Mahayana non-dual sense. To say what I was saying, you said this idea that Dogen never says what you're supposed to do. I think one of the things that Bielfeld points out in that book is that we can understand one thing Dogen was doing is saying, well, he's reluctant to give an instruction because an instruction implying a sort of graded sequence would now seem to sort of conflict with the

[43:47]

Zen understanding of wisdom asks, you know, often I'm not being non-dual in some way, right? So this is, you know, one of the characteristic styles of the Zen approach to instruction and meditation is not to tell you anything. This is actually quite, the Zen Center is unusual in that way. There's a very famous anecdote, really. I don't know if you've seen this book by Robert Buswell called The Zen Monastic Experience. This is Robert Buswell, an American scholar, but he lived as a monk in Korea for seven or eight years, and he came back and he wrote a book all about life in a Korean Zen monastery. And he includes things like the meditation hall and all this stuff. His book was then translated into Korean, and it became extremely popular in Korea as an explanation of just what the hell Zen meditation is all about. And there's... Well, I guess I kind of heard this secondhand, so it may now be apocryphal, but the story is that these... Korean Zen monks who read Korean translation of this book by this American person who was there and finally understood what they were supposed to be doing in meditation.

[44:52]

But, you know, this is, if you have some experience, if you've been to Japan and seen traditional Zen training, there's very much this, well, you know, we're not going to tell you anything. And part of that is, this is connected to this understanding that, well, to tell you anything would be somehow to violate the spirit of our conception of ultimate truth. Paradoxically, that means that it's very hard to instruct someone in the process of meditation itself that's supposed to lead to that understanding. It's a kind of creative tension which comes out of that. Sorry to go on. I don't know. Maybe someone else should call. Greg, go ahead. You mentioned Giannis plural and you said you didn't want to get into that because there wasn't time. There's a whole other thing, but I've always been very curious about that. You gave the example of in this jhana, maybe they have names. The first jhana, the second jhana, the third jhana, and the fourth jhana. Yeah, the numbers. And you're so concentrated and you're so whatever.

[45:55]

It seems like the implication to me is that they're quantifiable and comparable from one person's experience to another person's experience. Is that part of it? Zen's reaction to that because, I mean, my feeling about that is, how does that work? It's so subjective. How do I know what Tiana I'm in? My teacher tells me, but how does he know? Or she know? So, I mean, is that part of what Zen had a problem with? Because I sort of had a problem. Yeah. Um... Well, but I guess the other side would be that like, I mean, you know, wouldn't that also be true of anything else? Like, not just the dhyanas, but what about this side? The problem is even more pronounced here, right? How do I know if you've had insight into emptiness? So I guess, you know, so yeah, that's, I'm not, you know, the question of whether the, how does one know?

[47:04]

I mean, I guess one way to say this is one reason why in Zen the notion of Dharma transmission becomes so important. Because how else can you certify? There's an absence of objective standard for certification of awakening. Because if your understanding of the ultimate truth is that it's somehow inexpressible, then how can you express to me your understanding? It becomes a real problem. And then you get all these cool coans that talk about that and stuff. So I guess I'm saying I'm not sure that's restricted to the dhyanas, per se. Because often what happens, you know, is that the Zen people will say, well, you know, Zen is not, as Linda was saying, it's not seated meditation. So our understanding of Zen is it's more than just the dhyanas. Even though, again, Zen is a translation of dhyana in some sense. So the word becomes Zen means, you know, the whole shebang, as it were. But I think that criticism, it's pervasive and maybe not just limited to that. But I think, you know, in traditional and even now in other forms of Buddhism, there's just that kind of taboo is non-existent at times.

[48:14]

I mean, there's no problem. There's like, yes, you've got the third jhana, you've got the fourth jhana. And if you read traditional Indian meditation texts, there's precise things. Yeah, like when you have this jhana, this, this, this, and this happens. And in this jhana, this, this, this, and this happens. The understanding is, yeah, you can... But remember, we don't, you know... We don't need to because it's just shamatha. Yes? If then says that calming your mind doesn't precede profound insight, so how does Zen philosophy approach, like how those two things interrelate? the experience of that, like, you can have found insight without calming of the mind? Well, you know, I will leave it to your Zen teachers here to tell you, you know, their take on it.

[49:15]

But I'll just say that it becomes a kind of tension and problem in the sense that, you know, the whole, like, I mean, in Zen history, actually, and in modern Zen history, too, the problem of sort of, you know, Non-duality versus what in technical people call antinomian behavior, sort of like behavior that appears to transgressive behavior, violation of precepts and norms. So it's the same problem in that, well, if wisdom is non-dual, how can there be any sort of objectively outward behavior that you have to conform to? So... So there's another, you know, I didn't write it here, and this actually is a time to introduce it. So we talked about the hierarchy between shamatha and vipassana, between sort of concentration, dhyana, or sometimes samadhi, this is called, and wisdom. Over here on the other side, there's a first one, which traditional Buddhist theories of meditation put there, and that's called shila, which means precepts.

[50:18]

So the actual, the usual understanding is that before you can even calm your mind, you have to refrain from the outward display of inappropriate behavior. The hierarchy has a further thing. So first you actually cease the outward manifestations of troubled mental states. Then once you've got that under control then you can actually cease the manifestation of troubled mental states. Then when you've got that under control then you can actually direct your mind towards some kind of insight. So the Zen thing which kind of undoes that hierarchy does create a certain problem there. I think, you know, traditionally, that is solved through institution. So, you know, the Zen, if you read sort of books on Zen, you often get a lot of, well, you know, just be unattached. You don't need to follow any specific rule. And if you read, you know, various Zen stories, often these stories about Zen masters sort of do these kind of funny things and stuff like that, seeming to sort of not follow a hierarchy in some way, right?

[51:21]

Which we can, I think, interpret very broadly to mean seeming to have a kind of insight without the sort of maybe requisite concentration. I think the only way to understand that is to realize that all of those people were living within an institutional or community context that did have norms. So like here's a good, Tassajara is a fine example. Yes, you can have insight at any moment, but you still have to go to the Zendel, right? Because that's what happens at Tassajara. So that part of it, but I guess I'm saying is that part of it, you don't need to incorporate it into how you express it. because it's the baseline for where you're living. To say, it doesn't matter what you do, you can achieve enlightenment in any moment, only makes sense in a context where you know exactly what you're supposed to be doing. Because it's not what you should say. the guy on the street. That's what you say when you're at a Zen monastery and you wake up fellows coming at the same time every day.

[52:26]

That's kind of my own take on it. The last discussion is very interesting to me in studying the precepts and reading Rev's book, Being Upright. And he says right action or upright action comes from understanding our interconnectedness. Mm-hmm. And it's ignorance that causes us to lie or kill or take what isn't given, any of those things. And that awareness of our interconnectedness can come from Zazen. So this other understanding that Sheila comes first, the precepts come first, seems very, very different from our understanding of Zen practice. Did you say our understanding of Zen friends? Yeah. And living with the precepts seems to flow from our sense that we're not separate beings.

[53:37]

But each of our actions affects everyone else's experience and vice versa. Yeah. Wonderful. Thank you. Oh, I have a lot of thoughts on that one, actually. I mean, one is that, you know, I mean, to a certain extent, that's, you know, that's, well, you can see that it's expressing the kind of like prajna-centered approach or a statement of the practice that is kind of prajna-centered. And if we do have another class, I'm going to talk about Paticca Samutbada, the dependent arising, and that's a place where you really see this, the relationship between... Ignorance, which you can think of as being what progenia is supposed to overcome and desire. Which one is more primary? Should you eliminate desire? In relation to your question, do you need to first quell your desires and therefore not engage in inappropriate activity so that you can then have insight? Or is what you're supposed to do first have a kind of understanding and that from that will flow... behavior and thoughts that don't have these other problems.

[54:39]

So that's another one of these tensions. I do have to say, though, that, you know, again, this is just the only way, I can only understand this question myself from a sort of historical point of view, which is that part of what I think that statement is a general discomfort that people in, people who are interested in Buddhism in modern America have with rules and, you know, a defined code of ethics. We don't want our code of ethics to be something imposed on us from the outside. And I think that makes perfect sense. And there is a very traditional understanding that, yes, final perfection of conduct really will only come through some kind of insight. But in a non-modern American context, you get a very different presentation, usually, of... There's much less of a taboo about saying, well, actually, first, no, do this. And first stop the outer. And again, the line from improper activity being a sort of outward manifestation of diluted mental thinking.

[55:47]

And that's kind of the easier to deal with first, actually. It's easier to stop the body than it is to stop the mind. But this seems like this could be a whole series of classes on that topic. That's a good one. So you've kind of already answered a couple questions that I had, but just, and it's probably impossible to answer, especially in time we have left, but I just wonder, and this is a question I have a lot, because it's coming up a lot now, and this discussion is, so you're, you know, I'm really interested in the history of Buddhism, and now as it traveled from India to China, and you're kind of talking about they have, traditionally in Buddhism, there's this dichotomy in this hierarchy and sort of this is the way it goes in this very codified process and then in China they sort of turn that on its head in various ways so I guess my question in a really general way without getting into any of the specifics maybe of it is just how can we know first of all what caused that you know why why at this time and place why in the movement from India to China

[56:58]

And you even said there were some of the non-dual stuff in the Indian Mahayana, but then still the understanding changed a lot as it came to China. So why there and then? And how can we know that that's authentic? How can we know that this practice then, because they say, oh yeah, these lists of stuff and these hierarchies and stuff, that's not really it. This is the true Dharma. But how can I trust that? How can I know it's not just some Chinese cultural thing that came in? and maybe the hierarchy of Dianus is just some Indian cultural thing. Yeah. That's the answer to the second part, which is that if you remove the layers from the onion, you have nothing. If you're going to try to take away the cultural accretions, there won't be anything left. No doubt Indian Buddhism is full of Indian cultural things and Chinese Buddhism is full of Chinese cultural things.

[57:59]

So I'm not sure how you would judge which is more authentic. And I mean, the earliest Buddhist texts we have were written down 500 years after the death of the Buddha. So the odds that any of them contain words spoken by the Buddha are very, very small. So another way to say this would be that... Learning inauthentic Buddhism is the most authentic way to study Buddhism. That's kind of another take. In terms of the change, I didn't mean to sort of make broad brush statements about the difference. You do have expressions of similar ideas in non-Chinese forms of Buddhism. And again, this is to a certain extent, this is a very Zen thing. You've got lots of schools of Chinese Buddhism which... really they're not into that kind of attempt to eliminate the hierarchy entirely. So it's not, you know, it's not like a sort of Chinese-Indian thing, I don't think.

[59:06]

So when you say you give back all the labels, there's nothing there. That was the second part of the question, right? I mean, it's not really an answer, but I'm just saying that, you know, I'm not sure that, you know, if you're going to say, well, you know, these Indian things are closer to authentic than the Chinese thing. I don't think that's a... No, I'm certainly not trying to argue. I'm just wondering... Yeah, but I mean, you know, that's the, yeah, it's inauthentic all the way back. Yes? I'm trying to relate this to my own personal experience. Ooh. And some teachers that I've heard have stressed that there is no beginning or middle end to this whole process. But I know for myself that I experienced suffering, which was an insight, one of the portable truths.

[60:12]

And from that inspired me to practice both tranquility of mind and ethical conduct. And then those kind of mirror into each other. And I also had practiced the jhanas for a while. And it was interesting to see that actually there was these stages of consciousness or states of mind that produced more insight and fall into each other like that. So when I also find it interesting that we kind of, well, some teachers have said that they don't I would recommend that because you can get attached to it. So I wonder if that attached to certain states of mind that rapture or things that feel real good. But there are actual conditions or states of mind that we do experience when we apply the mind in this way. So I find it interesting that in Zen we don't do that.

[61:14]

I can understand the attachment part, but yeah, I don't know. Would you say that that's probably one of the main reasons, actually, the attachment part of it, that it's easy to get attached to these things of mind, and that there's really just a certain level of tranquility of mind that's conducive to the basic insights that one would need to understand the nature of their existence or condition? The first thing you said, this idea of the states of concentrated mind are very pleasant, and therefore it's easy to become attached to them. This is a criticism not just in Zen, but all schools of Buddhism warn against that very strongly, that you have to be extremely careful. I didn't mention this, but there's the four dhyanas, and then higher than the dhyanas, there's actually further levels of concentration, which are usually deemed to be

[62:18]

so concentrated that they're not suitable for Buddhist practice because your mind has become so attenuated that you can't do this at all. You can't have any kind of insight. And when you reach the top one of these, you achieve a state of consciousness called the state of neither consciousness nor not consciousness, which is not a Zen statement. Really, actually, the commentaries explain that that means that you just have very, very little bit of consciousness. And that's why they say neither consciousness nor not consciousness. So little, you know, it's like if you had a cup of water with just a drop in it, you couldn't say either that there's water in the cup or that there's not water in the cup. Because there's just a little. So you can actually achieve that state. And when you achieve that state, they say that you will die. After death, you achieve rebirth in a heaven where you live for like billions and billions and billions of years, right? Just your mind concentrated. So this is, you know, cosmologically, this is a real problem because you can't go on. So there's the danger of attachment. Traditionally, there's a danger of like, well, you can end up interesting, you know, that I think in Zen we don't really talk about this, but there's an understanding in a lot of Buddhism that actually meditation can be extremely dangerous if you don't have proper guidance.

[63:29]

And one way that manifests is because you can end up in these sort of states of mind, you know, that are very difficult to escape from. So yeah, anyway, that's all a long-winded way of saying that, you know, this criticism of the states of concentration is... old and ancient, as for why, you know, the Zen reluctance to not even say, like, don't be attached, but not even to want to talk about them. This, I mean, one way to understand that is to say, well, this really, if you think of Zen as kind of prajna-centered, you know, they're concerned that, well, even if you're not attached to them, just even really thinking about them is already a kind of misunderstanding of the true nature of reality. That would be, you know, but again, They're only going to tell you that when you're actually trying to practice them every morning. So the criticism of these states of concentration occurs in a context in which you actually are engaging in a kind of concentrated meditation on a regular basis, right?

[64:30]

Because whatever your mind is doing when you sit, you're concentrated in a certain sense, right? So that's kind of the Zen flavor. You know, and I think there are definitely people who, like, that flavor does not suit them. They really, you know, it's, they're more, they need a little more discussion of precisely what those states of conscience are. Greg is looking at his watch. I think we're passing the time here. You have to regulate the time here, right? We have to pick that before. Oh. Okay. So my question is, this division from Salazar and we've also heard is And the extension of the division was really manifested through that because if you read the Pali Canon, the descriptions of that concentration are not as drastic. Not as drastic? Drastic, yeah. I mean, first genre isn't a big deal. That's a prerequisite for that first stage of insight.

[65:31]

So, I don't know. I just kind of want to make that point first. Mm-hmm. Wondering if maybe you're interested in concentration when you're achieving insight through Zen and you don't label it as such? Or how is it possible? I mean, so outside of 1st John, I have penetrated insight in the sermon. Is that actually happening for you Zen practitioners? Or are you actually in 1st John? Not knowing? Yeah, I mean, could be, I don't know. But that's the, you know, the criticism of the Zen approach would be precisely that. It would be that, well, you know, thinking that you can have this insight, you know, without really achieving this is just, it's kind of a delusion. And the Zen response would be, well, actually, you know, and this is why I read that passage from the Platform Sutra, because he's not saying, you know, the passage is not simply saying that, well, we're going to eliminate this hierarchy.

[66:37]

There's sort of a reverse approach implication, which is that, well, actually, and this is where things get really kind of difficult, actually, you know, you really can't even concentrate your mind until you have some kind of insight. And this is, I think, coming back to what Tova was saying about this. There's a way in which Zen you like to undo the hierarchy starting from the other side, saying, well, actually, the problem is, you know, not that you need to quell your desires so that you can have some sort of understanding which will then eliminate your ignorance, but that you need to begin with right understanding. of some kind. You need to eliminate your ignorance through kind of wisdom and that will allow you to, and this is a way it's often talked about in contemporary Americans then, is that your desires themselves, they come from your misunderstandings. And I think this is a valid approach, whether you like it or whether any individual person likes it or not is of course up to them. But yeah, I'm

[67:37]

I bet that doesn't answer your question, but... Oh, that part, right. ...is much more subtle and much less dogmatic than their training. The Buddha suggests that we first start by cultivating their tranquility of awareness for someone's other than that person. You know, but it's really like if you consider the teachers that teach from the Siddha specifically, say that Vipassana, Shrengden, Samadhal, and vice versa, it's kind of a process. You said we don't have time to get into that. You mentioned that. Yeah, I mean, you know, my sort of first response is that, you know, for every teacher who says that, you know, we shouldn't listen too much to the Vasudhimagga, interpreting the Pali scriptures. There's another teacher who says we can't understand the scriptures without the Vasudhimaka. So there's many different approaches.

[68:39]

I find that the distinction is not so much an attempt to be dogmatic as it is an attempt, at least when I think about it, to elucidate the structures of what's going on and whether if your goal is simply to follow the original teachings of the Buddha, you can try to do that if you can find them, which is hard actually. Because, again, the distinction historically between the suttas and the Vasudhimaga is actually very, very small, because the earliest written copies we have of the suttas date from the same era that the Vasudhimaga does. So it's pretty difficult, just from a sort of historical point of view, to do that. Although, you know, one can attempt to do that, which is fine. I was just going to say that the... Part of the reason I wanted to talk about this was because whether it's, you know, the original teaching of the Buddha or not, it becomes a topic of discussion throughout the rest of Buddhism. So, you know, the example from the Platform Sutra was the example I gave of that, which is that you really, it's difficult to understand what's being said unless you know that this kind of system sort of exists and this way of approaching meditation, these categories, you know, did exist.

[69:51]

So that's the only reason that, you know, I find it or that I wanted to present it like that today. Thank you. It's a good place to just see how those things go into each other because within the same sutta you have the four tetrads and the last tetrad is cultivating discernment and yet it's all contained in the same flow, same progression of meditation. Anyone who hasn't asked, yes. How is Buddhism tied to the political system in India? Help, help! How is Buddhism tied to the political system in India? Yeah, I figured it would be a pretty good topic, but was it really impactful?

[70:54]

Yeah. It was both essential and totally irrelevant. Yeah. Okay, I'm getting the wind-up sign from the Tonto, so let's wind up. Is that it? I don't know. I mean, it's just one more question. Yes. One thing. So, Robert Hakey writes in his book, A Rested Mind or Trankful Mind, is the fulfillment of all Siva, which would, in a sense, from there, mean that it also includes the wisdom. It's a spontaneous expression of fulfillment. So I'm just trying to get what is happening upon the board. It's because at first I hear what you're saying, I do see it in Zen that then people say, well, first thing needs to be wisdom.

[72:00]

But then at the same time, it seems like you have a bunch of egocentric maniacs walking around talking about non-duality and wisdom, like just living that spontaneously. And then it seems like there's also Zen teachers like Robert A. came up, should you say no? There has to be a level of, like what Aaron was saying, a level of, at least in entering the first genre, a level of concentration. It could even arise a spontaneous, appropriate response, which would be . So. I mean, I'm not, I can't really pass judgment on that. I mean, but yeah, that, What I would hope is that having heard this, that might give some tools for understanding that statement a little better. I don't know.

[73:02]

Hopefully. 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 sfzc.org and click Giving.

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