This podcast is offered by San Francisco's Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Well, good morning and welcome everyone. Joy to be with you all and I'm zooming in from the Inner's Mind Temple here in San Francisco and it's an honor and a joy to be with you all again through the grace of this virtual dormer field. And I'd like to begin by expressing my gratitude to Jiu-Jiu, the Green Gulch Head of Practice, for the kind invitation to share the dormer with you today, as well as to the Abbasid Green Gulch, Fu, and to Kogetsu, who is serving as the Zoom host. Thank you all very much. As I was preparing for this talk, I I recalled a particular detail about my father that I thought I would share with you as a lead into my topic, which is about the nature of perception.

[01:06]

It so happens that this month marks the 30th anniversary of my father's death at the age of 50 of cancer. And my father's pending death was, in fact, one of the reasons that I found myself 30 years ago coming to the Doors of Zen Center. Actually, it's a city center where I currently serve as Sabbath. And I came with the idea that learning about Zen and meditation might aid me in healing my relationship with my father before he died, as well as to help me navigate my life in general with more presence and equanimity. And around the age of 30... My father was blinded in his right eye due to a construction accident that happened while he was helping his brother-in-law to remodel a barn. And he was pulling up and hammering old nails without protective glasses, everything we know we shouldn't do.

[02:10]

But he was doing that, and one of the nails broke off, and it entered his eye at the edge of his pupil. And what I remember about his eye, after he no longer needed an eye patch, was how the pupil looked like a black sunnyside egg yolk that had broken on one side and how the bulky blackness of the pupil leaped out into the brown of his iris. My father told me that he could see light and some faint colorless shadows with his blind eye, but that was about it. And over the years, my father's blindness It came from the metaphor of his limited ability to truly see and acknowledge his children and his wives and others around him. And I'm sure that for many of us, this feeling of not being seen by one's parents is a familiar issue.

[03:13]

And it's one that we might carry, you know, we might carry the sense of not being seen as a deep wound around which we constellate our desires to be accepted and loved. However, over my 30 years of Zen practice, I've come to recognize my own proverbial blindness and how it affects the way in which I see and engage with others in the world. Like my father, I too often knew the world with a limited, compromised, and somewhat myopic perspective. And to flesh out this metaphor, through my one eye, you could say my proverbial dharma eye, my vision is clear, direct, vibrant and inclusive. And through my other eye, the eye of self, I see the world through an endless stream of shadows, murky movements, and often

[04:23]

dualistic or black and white contrast. The black ink leaking from my father's pupil is analogous for me to the way in which we all, due to karmic consciousness, leak our distorted, limited, and conditioned views onto the screen of the world. The rusty nail in our eye is the sharp but unreliable sense of a fixed and permanent separate self, which clouds and distorts our ability to see reality. So we need to learn the ways in which we are blind, the ways in which we don't see and don't want to see what is true in our lives. While our blindness may be conditioned, we can find another way to see, to meet life with a perception that is clearer, inclusive, compassionate, and direct.

[05:38]

This is the promise and power of Dharmakar. a quote by the Dalai Lama I once saw on the front cover of Buddha Dharma magazine. He said, the suffering and happiness each of us experiences is a reflection of the distortion or clarity with which we view ourselves and the world. Again, the suffering and happiness each of us experiences is a reflection of the distortion or clarity with which we view ourselves and the world. Our experience of life is a matter of perspective. And as the Dalai Lama points out, we suffer in due proportion to the extent that we either hold either a clouded or clear view of ourselves and the world.

[06:45]

The greater the disparity of our perceptions and acceptance of reality, the greater is our mental and emotional pain and the closer we are to being able to clearly perceive and socially engage with the way things are, the more harmony, happiness, and ease we will experience in our lives. Buddhism teaches that what distorts or clouds our perceptual lens is usually our preconceptions. That is, the concepts, ideas, or beliefs that together act as a a viewing glass of our minds. And when we're able to clear our minds of these distortions, when we're able to see things as they are without a filter of thoughts or preconceptions, then our vision is unstained. And the clarity and the brilliance of our true nature and the true nature of all phenomena becomes fully evident.

[07:53]

Enlightenment has been described as a matter of perspective. It's not about having far-out spiritual visions or attaining special absorption states or becoming some stoic, unfeeling, blissed-out being. A Buddha, an awakened person, it's just someone who clearly sees. That is, someone who does not confuse conception with perception. What most distinguishes the Buddha from an ordinary person has to do with the matter of just seeing. There's no difference between the perception of a Buddha and the rest of us. The difference lies in how a Buddha deals with concepts that naturally arise. A Buddha doesn't confuse thinking with seeing.

[09:00]

And neither does a Buddha let a thought or concept override perception. This summer, San Francisco Zen Center has been offering a three-month study of the three turnings of the wheel. And the model of the three turnings of the Dharma wheel is an attempt to, you could say, categorize the content, the philosophical view, and the practical application of a whole array of Buddhist realization teachings. During June and July, we explored the teachings of the first and second turnings. And now during August, we're taking up the third turning, which serves as an effort to clarify and integrate the essential aspects of the first and second turning. And as part of our exploration, Abbas Fu Schrader is offering a four-week class on Vasubandhu's 30 verses. And these 30 verses were written by the fourth and fifth century Indian Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu.

[10:08]

And they're considered a summary of the primary teachings of the third turning sutras or texts. And they became the basis for what is known as Yogacara. or the mind-only school of Buddhism. I'm not going to delve today into an exposition of Theraturing. You guys are doing an excellent job of doing that in your class. But I do want to briefly say something about the nature of perception according to Yogacara before I continue. The radical teaching at the heart of the Yogacara is that we never truly experienced things as they are. We only ever experience things as we imagine them to be. Yogacara is known as the mind-only or consciousness-only school because it tells us we don't know anything that is not mediated by consciousness itself.

[11:12]

Yogacara had said that vijnana, or it's a Sanskrit word for consciousness or awareness, is real, but the objects of awareness are not. Now, this doesn't mean that nothing exists, but nothing exists as we proceed it. Our perceptions of reality are the creation of Vishnana, in particular what is known as Alaya Vishnana, like the storehouse of base consciousness, one of what Yoga Chora calls the eight interactive modes or processes of consciousness. Therefore, no matter what we experience, our ideas, our feelings, our memories, what we see and hear, plants, animals, people, our emotions, compassion and rage, everything, everything is a construct of consciousness.

[12:18]

As the Zen teacher Ben Connolly notes in his wonderful book, Inside Vasubhamda's Yogacara, he says, we do not see the world. We see a projection of the interaction of our six senses, our mental conditioning, and perhaps some ultimately unnormal external conditions. In short, all we really know is that we are seeing projection. projection only. However, our consciousness is deeply conditioned or distorted by karma, by the coloring or ripening seeds of previous experiences, thoughts, actions, and conceptualizations. Everything we see, hear, smell, taste, touch, everything that's known through our five senses, and what we generally believe to be the raw, inarguable facts of existence are, in fact, distorted by karmic conditioning or by past impressions stored in the alive vijana.

[13:33]

And furthermore, through the distorting mechanisms of manas, what's known as the self-emotive consciousness, we tend to reify and solidify our experiences into discrete things that we perceive as permanent and separate from us or as other. As a result, our modes of perception are inherently biased. We habitually reduce everything to subject-object, to duality. to salt and darmas, me and others, leading to all kinds of false narratives that become ingrained within us and in which we act out, often over and over.

[14:34]

Buddhism repeatedly reminds us that at the root of our suffering, you could say on both a personal and a collective level, lies our a powerful but mistaken clinging and attachment to an I, to a sense of a separate and inherently real self. Master Bandhu teaches that grasping self and other is a fundamental problem to overcome. When we cling to the perception of an independent and autonomous self, we create a profound sense of separation in which we make a stark distinction between ourselves and others. And then it's in this space of our perceived separation that emotions such as desire and aversion arise.

[15:35]

Out of our mistaken, deluded, clouded, perceptive, perspective, we see a world apart, a world out there, a world either for or against us. So Yogacara, again, tells us that ultimately we construct through our way of looking what we experience. Any experience we have depends on our way of looking or proceeding at any particular time. It depends on how we are looking. And again, most of the time, our way of looking at any moment is constructed, fabricated, from a total mix of assumptions and conceptions and reactions and opinions and inclinations, either on a very gross level or on a very subtle level, both conscious and unconscious.

[16:42]

These are present in our minds at the time. And it's these assumptions and biases and reactions combined with and are formed by the three poisons of greed, hate, and delusion that then give rise to all manner of individual and collective disease and suffering. I'm sure you can name them all. Violence, war, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia. classism, and so on. Crucially, at any moment, we're either engaging a way of looking at experience, self, and the world that is creating, perpetuating, or compounding suffering, dukkha to some degree, or we are looking in a way that to some degree frees us. liberates us.

[17:45]

And by extension, supports the liberation and happiness of others. You could say that in this way, the world and others become our emotional canvas or our Rorschach test. If we see with hate, we will experience hate. If we see with greed, we will experience greed. If we see separation, we will experience and act from a place of separation. If we see connection, we will experience connection. If we see virtue, we will experience virtue. If we see love, we are love. and they said, we don't see things as they are.

[18:50]

We see them as we are. We don't see things as they are. We see them as we are. My own preconceived ideas affect who I see in front of me. If I have a desire to see someone in a particular way, am I seeing them or phantom of my projections? Who am I seeing? Who is it that is before me without my cloud of delusions? Of course, we will always have personal biases, our particular desires or irritations, but we don't need to make them the truth. We will hold others responsible for fulfilling them in some way I recognize this and not believe what I think I see in another.

[19:54]

During my, during most of my eight years at Tassajar, Tassajar Zen Mountain Center, it's our monastery in the Bentana Wilderness. there was the particular individual in the community with whom I had a lot of difficulty. And while I had initially had a good relationship with this person, in time, unfortunately, I became troubled to the point that just the sight of them would set off all kinds of dis-ease and alarms in me. I noticed I became constantly alert to where this person was in relationship to me in the room or the valley. And often, felt that I needed to be on guard for any sign of threat for them. I would often feel varying degrees of anxiety, aversion, and even fear at just the sight of this person. However, during one sashin, one extended retreat, I had a very interesting experience.

[21:13]

I came out of the Zendo and I was walking on the gravel path towards the stone office. And suddenly, ahead of me, there arose a series of shapes, color, and motion. I didn't perceive at first more than just this. I didn't even quite distinguish the colors and the shapes. It was just a kaleidoscopic swirl of energy. After a moment or two, I recognized this of colors, shapes, and motion as a person walking. I could actually observe as my mind suddenly quickened and then applied the concept of person onto the squirrel. It was like in the early animation where an image and scene is built up through a process of laying one film plate on top of another, each with a different element. And then a moment later, another layer got added, that of the concepts of woman, along with other label characteristics such as hair, height, clothes.

[22:29]

To this layer was then added the thought that this was a particular person with a particular name in relationship to me. And just like that, With this additional layer, there arose a feeling of separation and then dread. Suddenly, I recognized this aggregate of color, shapes, and motion as something unpleasant, as someone I didn't like. And with this recognition came a strong feeling thought of, I am other than that. But what was starting for me to recognize was that what I initially saw, a composite of color, shapes, and motion, was without any feeling. It was totally neutral. It wasn't until I, or more specifically my conditioned egoic self, Manas, pulled a memory from my storehouse consciousness that this constellation of shape and color was similar to

[23:43]

to a constellation of shape and color that I had experienced in the past as something unpleasant, without a negative connotation, and thus to be feared and avoided. I was no longer seeing a current, real image, but an imputation and a projection. I have become blind to this person, not seeing them or empathizing with him as a complex, ever-changing human being who, like me, only desire to be happy and wish to be free of suffering. I only saw the past pain I felt and still carried and for which I blamed her. In fact, I turned away from her as I was walking out in the past. so I didn't have to encounter her father in that moment.

[24:46]

I recognized much later that by turning away from seeing her for who she really was, free of my karmic amputations, I also turned away from seeing myself. The moment that I experienced the visual sense field before me as a separate thing, something solid and other than mere perception of color shape. In that moment, a conditioned response of aversion arose in me, and my suffering began. Before that, it was just a sense of perception. It was just seeing. So what are we to do with these distorted thoughts and concepts when they arise in our consciousness, an unseen phenomenon, and particularly in this case, another human being?

[25:59]

Suzuki Roshi said in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, I have discovered that it is necessary, absolutely necessary, to believe in nothing. That is, we have to believe in something which has no form, and no color. Something which exists before all forms and colors appear. This is the very important point he has. And this is Suzuki Roshi's way of encouraging us to see what he called things as it is. To see reality with a mind free of preconceptions and ideas. To have a spacious mind. A mind like a open, clear sky in which thoughts merely constantly arise and shift and pass like clouds without substantiality. Suzuki Roshi's things as it is, is another way of saying that form is emptiness.

[27:02]

The things in things as it is, is duality. The many phenomena in each particular expression of existence. And the it of seeing things as it is, is non-duality. The emptiness that is not non-existence, but rather complete, full, boundlessness. But it's a great challenge for us to see things as it is. Our fundamental blindness is due to our ignorance. Not so much an ignorance that's about not having knowledge. but more of an ignorance in the sense of ignoring or not seeing with a deeper knowing that comes from letting go of concepts and agendas and desires and allowing the world to come forward on its own accord and seeing our place in the midst of this coming forth, of this totality of blossoming and arising the whole universe simultaneously.

[28:12]

So to be free of this ignorance, we need to learn to see in a new way. You could say we need to go back to basics, to a perception that is pre-thought, pre-concept. We need to develop a knowing that comes from actual direct experience. To develop a seeing that's not based on a mistaken sense of separation. How do we learn to see and know as a full-bodied experience rather than a bio or mental process to own. The Buddha gave a very simple yet not so easy instruction for how to perceive the world through direct engagement of our six senses. In a well-known sutra, the layman, Ayya, persistently asked the Buddha for instructions on the quickest way to become enlightened because that's what we all want, right? You know, we want to be enlightened just like that.

[29:16]

So, Bahiya, you know, basically pursued the Buddha until the Buddha would tell him, and finally the Buddha relents and teaches him the most direct form of practice. What the Buddha said to Bahiya is, in the scene, let there be only the scene. In the herd, let there be only the herd. In the sensed, let there only be the sensed. In the cognized, let there only be the cognized. Thus you should see that indeed there is no thing there. That is how you should train yourself, Ahiya. So in other words, can we let colors and shapes just be colors and shapes without adding a layer of labels on them? Concepts. Can we let sounds just be sounds? Receiving the base experience of sounding and not make the sounds into either good or bad sounds, right?

[30:27]

Not to add our judgments or preferences. Can we let sensations just be sensations without squirming, particularly if they're unpleasant? Can we let thoughts be thoughts without clinging to them or reifying them? When we can do this, we will see the insubstantiality of phenomena and ourselves. And the Buddha continued, When for you there is only the seen in the seen, only the heard in the heard, only the sensed in the sensed, only the cognized in the cognized, you see that there is no thing here, and then you will not be reckoned, meaning not defined or measured. by it. When you are not reckoned or measured by it, you will not be in it. When you are not in it, you will be neither here nor there, nor between the two.

[31:31]

This, just this, is the end of suffering. What does the Buddha mean that if one practices in this way, that one will see that there is no thing there. He's talking about the realm of the object. It implies that we recognize that the scene is merely the scene. That's it. There are forms, shapes, colors, and so forth. But there is no thing there. There's no real substance, no solidity, and no self-existent reality. All there is is the quality of experience itself. No more, no less. There's just seeing, hearing, feeling, sensing, cognizing. And the mind naming it all is also just another experience. We simply experience the arising of phenomena as a funeral.

[32:38]

For example, the computer screen before us. It is a voice. Maybe now the thought, am I understanding this? Now another thought, what do I want for lunch? This is what is seen, heard, tasted, and so on. But there's no thinness, no solid, independent entity that this experience refers to. And as this insight deepens, not only did we realize, that there's no thing out there, we also realize there's no thing in here, no independent and fixed entity that is the experiencer. And this is talking about the realm of the subjective. This is talking about us. At some point in our practice, we may actually, eventually, experience that we are not the solid, substantial inherent thing that we think we are.

[33:41]

We're just a field of changing, flowing energy experiences. Almost like the flickering of insubstantial light molecules through empty space that when we give them a surface to land on, such as a screen, become a movie. A movie we call our life, my life. Suzuki Roshi suggests that our everyday life is like a movie playing on a white screen. What we take to be reality is like a movie, but we're generally unaware that there's a screen, what Yoga Chara calls a live vishyana, the storehouse of the base consciousness, the real consciousness. So Suzuki Roshi says that if you want to enjoy the movie and, of course, your life, you should know that it is the combination of film and light,

[34:48]

in white screen. That is, you should know that our life, our experiences, and all phenomena or a combination of causes and conditions and perception. And Suzuki Roshi adds, however, to have a pure, plain white screen is most important. If your screen or your consciousness is smudged, then the movie will be say, stained as well. This white screen is not something that you can actually attain, says Suzuki Roshi. It is something you always have. The reason you don't feel you have it is because your mind is too busy. Once in a while, you should stop all your activities and make your screen white. That is Zauzen. Ben Connolly, in making a link between Suzuki Roshi's use of the metaphor of a movie screen, Ayo Gachara writes that the path laid forth by Vasubandhu is one where the karmic processes in the storehouse are overturned at their root, where they create no obscurations, where the root consciousness is made into a clean, white screen.

[36:09]

An important step is knowing that there is the screen to begin with. So are you aware of the screen? Or another way to frame this, are you aware of being aware? Sometimes when I'm in a movie theater watching a film in which I'm finding myself uncomfortably caught up in what's happening on the screen, particularly if it's a disturbing scene, I will deliberately, break the spell. If I get too unsettled or emotionally caught up, I'll turn away from the screen. And I'll look at the audience and around the theater in order to step out of the fabricated drama that's in front of me and to see what's actually real in this moment. This way, the anxiety or the fear of whatever emotion that I'm caught up in suddenly is broken free of. And I regain my

[37:13]

equanimity. My heart rate slows down, my stomach unclenches, and my body-mind relaxes and softens and reopens. And this is similar to what we do in Zasa. We break the spell of our internal movies and drama and dialogue. We stop for a moment. We turn our gaze inward and drop the the drama, the preconceptions, as we attend to just bare sensation, bare experience, for example, out of the breath. We clear our minds by shifting our perspective from the stories we've got going on in our mind screen and instead explore what's actually happening in the wider realm of our six senses. We attend to the senses and non-dual world of the scene in the scene, the herd in the herd, the sense in the sense, the cognized in the cognized.

[38:21]

However, in Zasana, our objective isn't so much to turn away or move out of the artist's tongue, but rather to stay present and still, to see through the projections and the light show, to the bare screen in which it all appears. Of course, it takes great strength and courage and compassion to watch our internal movies, particularly when they're disturbing, right? Without turning away or getting caught. Knowing that it's only a movie, only a projection, only a fabrication, only a play of emotions and thoughts. It's only an emotion apparent reality. So what we want to cultivate is a readiness of mind in perceiving. In other words, what Suzuki Roshi called beginner's mind.

[39:26]

A beginner's mind is a screen ready to receive the world without adding anything extra. And, you know, of course, as conditioned beings, we start with a screen that's already, in many cases, somewhat compromised. Each of our personal screens have their own texture and tone and flaws and wrinkles and blemishes, you know, karmically conditioned. And these are the conditioned karmic stuff. The point is to do away with these or pretend that we have a pretty blank or white screen when we don't. As long as you are in the theater, being human. The movie of the self is always playing in the house. And we might as well try to enjoy the show from our particular seat and with our particular screen. But we don't need to let ourselves be fooled by the light show that's in front of us.

[40:27]

We can see the movie for what it is. We can let the movie play without reify or grabbing for the images on the screen. can simply let the lights and the images come forward in the scene, let there just be the scene. We can also internally study our minds and our sense of ourself to understand how we get caught in believing the story of an inherent self. And then think that we are really like the person we see projected on the screen. but that they really like the way that we perceive them. As we know, life is somewhat descriptive stories that we see in the movies. When we act as if it is, we're deeply disappointed. And this disappointment is dukkha. It's the realm of suffering. And when we project our particular movies

[41:38]

or distorted, limited views onto others, then we're creating the conditions for their suffering as well. We are blinded by our own distorted views and we fail to see who it is that is before us. Someone who is in fact not separate from us, not other than us. are all just the same, say, insubstantial light molecules of awareness appearing in the vast, spacious, quantumist realm of Buddha and Mai. So when we drop believing or grasping our concepts of self and another, what remains is just seeing, just direct experience, just awareness. we are in this fun little way, just awareness seeing, you could say another aspect of awareness, or rather awareness seeing itself.

[42:50]

Or you could simply just say aware-ing, because awareness is not a thing, an object. This continuous flow of aware-ing, is the intimacy with others that we deeply sense and yearn to recognize. That we are together and undivided, simple, indirectly present awareness. Again, this is not awareness that is, this is an awareness that is not dependent on our eyes or whether we are blind or not. This is an awareness that comes from our hearts. my wish for you is that each of us is able to regain our clear seeing. To see the movie or our life for what it is and to enjoy the show.

[43:55]

Okay. So I want to end there and just thank you all for your kind attention and presence this morning. And Perhaps we will continue the conversation after the break. Please take good care of yourselves. 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, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[44:39]

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