And I warmly welcome all of you who are here for the first time and all of you who are part of the practice period and are attending these lectures on an ongoing basis. So thank you all very much for coming this evening. I'd like to thank David Abbott David Zimmerman for the invitation to teach this practice period. And also tonight, I'd like to thank Reverend Arlene Luke, who supports me always. She always, always comes when I call, when I ask for her support. And she is the person who so generously ordained me. So thank you very much, Arlene. So tonight, we're going to talk about slogans two through seven, two, three, through 10, which are the absolute and relative bodhicitta slogans.

[01:04]

So I thought this evening I'd talk about these concepts in a more general way. And then in one of the classes later on, we'll talk about very specific points about these things. But first, what I wanted to do is tell you a short story. When I was 13, my father decided to move to a farm from the city. And we moved out to this farm and we were city kids. And so this was deeply interesting, deeply interesting to me as a 13 year old. And my father and mother proceeded to set up a farm and they got many animals, they had two cows to start and two sheep and two pigs and some chickens.

[02:09]

And my father took a very active role in raising these animals, including spending a lot of time with the pigs and training them. And we had a pig named Prudence. Prudence grew up to be 300 pounds. So she was She was large and she was pink and she was allowed to run because pigs are incredibly smart. And when they have the opportunity, they don't get lost. They go and forage and then they come back because they know who's feeding them. And they had this great relationship with my father. So this relationship between my father and the pig developed over many months. In the meantime, we started to school and we rode a school bus. So we would take the school bus to school and that was like a 45 minute ride. And then we take the bus home. And as I said, we were city kids and we didn't actually fit in that well in this school, this country school.

[03:13]

People thought of us as the outsiders. They thought of us as those people from the city. They had lots of ideas about us. And as a 13-year-old, for me, it felt very important to try to fit in and to try to find a place with these people. That, for me, was a really important goal. So one day, some months after all this started, we were taking the school bus home. I had at that point of, there were four of us siblings. We got off the bus together and out from the bush jumps this huge pig waving her tail and coming up to us and kind of poking us. She was so excited to see us. She was just like so excited. And then we were kind of surprised and all of us kind of looked in the bus and looked at the pig and pretended that wasn't happening.

[04:19]

And then we walked up the alleyway, our lane, and Prudence was running beside us and really happy, kind of jumping up and down and super excited about this. And I was horrified. I was just horrified because I was trying to fit in with all these farm kids. They did not have trained pigs. They did not have pigs that met them in the school bus. They did not have relationships with their animals. And we had this... this pig who thought it was the greatest thing in the world. And she kept doing it. So she would meet us at the school bus. And I remember begging my father, like, just don't let Prudence out at that time. I don't want that experience. I don't want that experience. So this is kind of like our lives. Prudence was available to love me. She was available to love us.

[05:20]

She was available for a relationship. She was expressing her affection. And I was not available for that because I was so fixated on this other thing. And I think many of us go through this in our lives. This whole world is open for us. It's an amazing world. Of course, there are always difficulties because that's part of our lives. If we're able to just pay attention in each moment, these amazing experiences happen and we miss them. And we miss them over and over and over again. When I think of prudence now, I feel regret. I feel sad that I wasn't available at that time to... see what was happening, to appreciate how wonderful an experience that was for me, to really take in that moment of her meeting us at the bus and her being excited and exuberant and thinking, wow, this is this amazing gift.

[06:29]

But I did not think that. I thought, oh, my God, what are the other kids thinking? How will I ever fit in? I think about this often when I think of this idea of bodhicitta, which translates to awakened heart. My heart was not awake at that point. My heart was only open to things that I was pursuing, I think, that I wanted to be invited into this community And I wanted to be invited into a particular set of circumstances that I imagined or I thought of. Instead of settling into my own being and embodying who I was and seeing what would happen.

[07:30]

So I tried quite hard. So this again is a... something that I believe happens over and over and over again in our lives. As I said, I think we miss a lot of opportunity. We miss a lot of engagement. We miss a lot of love that exists in the world and belonging simply because we're not available to it because of the training of our minds or... because we have these shells around us that prevent us from being available. So what I have experienced over and over with regard to these Lojong teachings is that they are working on me in such a way that I'm training my mind.

[08:33]

I'm retraining my mind. I think that's what's happening. And this retraining involves some opening. It's some acceptance. It's belief that I'm enough. It's belief that the world actually will take care of me. There's a faith component in there. Um, and that my awakened heart is, um, wonderful. There's no reservations there. There's no point that I have to tighten. So as I said, bodhicitta means awakened heart. Sometimes you can translate it as awakened heart or awakened mind because the word citta translates as heart

[09:37]

or mind, there is no distinction in that word of these two things. So this is an artificial creation that we've imposed on ourselves by thinking that this mind is different from this heart. So this idea of awakened heart-mind. And absolute bodhicitta, and there are two components of this idea of bodhicitta. There's absolute bodhicitta and relative bodhicitta. So slogans two to six are really designed to get us thinking about absolute bodhicitta. And slogans seven to ten are designed to get us thinking or practicing the relative bodhicitta. So in those seven to 10, we have the practice of Tonglen, which is a contemplative practice that many of you have heard of, I'm sure.

[10:45]

Pema talks about it. I know Christina is talking to her students about it these days. So this is a very common practice. And what I've decided to do is I'll wait. to talk about that particular practice during the three-day sashin at the end of this practice period. And in that sashin, we'll do guided meditations, and I'll really explore with you the practice of Tonglen. And I'm doing this this way because through experience, I've come to realize that if I do it too quickly, or if people don't have a... means to check back with practice leaders about this. This practice can be very disturbing for people. It can also actually cause them harm if they get really tense about the practice.

[11:48]

So for those of you that know about Tonglen and already practiced this, please incorporate this in your studies over the next week. And for those of you that have never experienced Tonglen or have been guided through meditations in order to do that, we'll be doing that during the three-day session. So that's a little snapshot of what mostly this session will be focused on is those guided meditations around Tonglen. So first I'd like to say a little bit about the idea of absolute bodhicitta, and then I'm going to say a little bit about the idea of relative bodhicitta, and then we'll talk about a couple of the specific slogans as a way of introduction. So absolute bodhicitta for me has been sort of elusive.

[12:51]

I understand... I think I understand the language that I read when I read about it, when I study. I believe that I've explored this. I've read many, many commentaries on absolute bodhicitta. And I can say that I only feel that I'm gaining a very, very small understanding of what absolute bodhicitta is. But I can try to share a little bit of that with you this evening. And what I mostly am hoping is to invite you to do reading and to explore what this idea is, both in your study and also through your Zazen practice.

[13:58]

within all of us and around all of us that is always accessible to us. There is no end to this concept of awakened heart. If we could relax and open, there would be no bottom to our ability to access absolute bodhicitta, absolute awakened heart. One of the visualizations that I have come to think about when I think of Absolute Bodhicitta is being out in a large field or in Canada, I think of the prairies, here it's the plains or maybe on the top of a mountain and looking up at the night sky and seeing those billions upon billions of stars, the idea that the universe is expanding all the time, that there is no end to the universe, and that we, our minds, even when we're thinking about this expansive universe, cannot grasp at the edges of that universe.

[15:26]

And if we can close our eyes and think about that, Think about that feeling of standing under a starry sky that has no limits. And that feeling is the feeling or that experience is our own experience of ultimate, absolute bodhicitta. There... This possibility for us to have an awakened heart has no limits. There are no boundaries there. This is bright and luminous. It's never-ending. Its possibilities are expanding all the time. And this provides a ground for us when we're practicing. It can provide a confidence.

[16:28]

It can provide a feeling of ease because that limitless compassion, that limitless awakening is there all the time. And as we practice with these slogans, the point of this is that it opens up our access to that unlimited love so that the aperture gets wider and wider and wider. And then we experience this awakened heart more strongly. And that is a... It's a feedback loop in a way. So we start thinking about this expansive...

[17:28]

awakened heart and we start training our minds to rely on it to have faith in it and then that expands more and then we keep training it it opens more and it opens more and it opens more so this is um this is the the the reliance on this practice that this awakened heart exists it's part of who we are And we, through the teachings, want to train to become more open or vastly open, if possible, to reality, to interconnectedness, to the love in the world. I think Norman talks a lot about absolute bodhicitta as beings. He compares it and discusses it in the framework of love.

[18:31]

So this amazing possibility where love is not, there are no boundaries there. It exists. And this is this idea of awakened heart. And the slogans help us to experience this idea this awakened heart, by pointing out that our minds or our habitual ways actually have limited us. So, for example, slogan number two, regard all dharmas as dreams. We have this idea that our experiences are real. And we fixate on those experiences.

[19:35]

And many of you have had the experience where you're sitting in Zazen and you have a thought. Let's say that thought is, well, dinner was burned. And instead of that kind of passing along and through us and regarding it sort of like an open feeling, oh, the dinner was burnt, we start thinking, wow, that dinner was really burnt. I didn't enjoy that. I wish this would have happened. I'm kind of upset about that dinner. And so we fixate on this, and it loses that dreamlike quality. We make it more real. We put energy onto it. We kind of feed this idea that we had about our dinner. So in our bodies and minds, we have this experience of it, which is that it becomes more and more solidified. That solidity in Buddhist language, I think, means we make it more real.

[20:41]

It becomes a concept that we're reifying over and over and over again. So this idea of slogan number two, regard all dharmas as dreams, is in the middle of that thought, wow, dinner was burnt, I'm really upset about that. This slogan pops up in our mind, regard all dharmas as dreams. So we can back off of that feeling like, oh, oh, the dinner was burnt. Okay, well, let's get back to something that actually is important, like zazen. It's taking these experiences that we have over and over again and allowing us to have a cohesive experience without adding fuel or fixation to that experience. And the memorization of the slogan, or through memorization of the slogan, the point is, or the hope is, is that in the middle of

[21:50]

us thinking the dinner was burnt, we then have this, oh, regard all dharmas as dreams. So it's available, it's in the front of our mind or it's somewhere very close to the surface. It comes and it adds to the thought and it allows us to pull back from that thought and go back to what's actually happening in our lives. The dinner happened a long time ago. It's over. And so what's the next thing that happens? So it makes us more available to our experience. And this hope is that that happens over and over and over again. So through this particular slogan, we're not saying that our experiences aren't valid for us. We're not saying that they're not our experiences. What we're saying is that they can change. that we don't have to fixate on them, that we can move with our lives rather than thinking about something that happened in the past or something that is going to happen in the future.

[23:02]

So that's slogan number two. Slogan number three is examine the nature of unborn awareness. And this takes us again to the idea of absolute dorichitta. It takes us to the idea that the ground of all our being is this luminous, bright, expansive, open place. And we can look at it to try to find those fixed points, and they don't exist. And to... look into that over and over and over again to kind of prove to ourselves to lessen our doubt about the practice. So these slogans help us to tailor our thinking around absolute bodhicitta and to redirect us.

[24:07]

And they're a guide for... exploring this idea of absolute bodhicitta, absolute awakened heart, and they're a guide, actually. Relative bodhicitta is this awakened heart that is happening on the moment-by-moment experience, which is supported by the absolute bodhicitta experience. So if you can imagine the, I'm thinking of a stream. So you have a current that's running through the stream, and then you have a log that's in the stream. And the log is... on top of the stream, it's being pulled along by the stream, supported by the stream, and it's having a different experience than what the current is.

[25:11]

They're not exactly different, but they're not exactly the same. And I would say that's similar to our experience in our lives of relative bodhicitta, as opposed to absolute bodhicitta. So the absolute always exists. It's always available to us. It's always... this bright, amazing thing. And through the relative experiences of bodhicitta, we attempt to access that expansive, bright place more and more in our lives. So I'm going to skip ahead to slogan seven. and 10, and just say that those two slogans, sending and taking, should be practiced alternatively.

[26:14]

These two should ride the breath, which is seven. And 10, begin the sequence of sending and taking with yourself. Those are both directly pointing to the practice of Tonglen. And just as slogan one was like a whole world, of practice in those four elements. Slogan seven and 10 are this whole world of practice in these two slogans. And as I said earlier in the talk, we'll be focusing on those two slogans primarily during the Sishin. They'll be guided meditations and we'll talk about those extensively. Slogan Number nine, it is in all activities trained with slogans. So what this is reminding us to do is that over and over and over, we want to go back to these slogans.

[27:16]

And this opens up the rest of the slogans from 11 to 59, which are relative bodhicitta slogans. really are a way to start thinking like a bodhisattva. In Zen, we say, beings are numberless, I vow to save them. And we say that over and over again. This is one of these things that's impossible. Beings are numberless, I vow to save them. And these slogans, The relative bodhicitta slogans are designed to help us open so we can move towards this vow, which is to save all beings. It's providing guidance.

[28:20]

They're providing training. This is this training of the mind to start thinking in a different way. So in our culture, we are born and we are trained from a very early age to be independent thinkers, to think that we can find a right answer, to think that we can do anything we want, to think that we exist independently of other people. And this idea of the mind training slogans is actually retraining us to think that what I'm doing, what my goals are, are not the most important thing. The most important thing is for me to develop this compassionate mind

[29:23]

that actually thinks about the other before it thinks about myself. So this is a radical retraining. It doesn't mean we forget about ourselves. It doesn't mean we become completely unselfaware. It actually demands that we become completely self-aware. And we do that by... switching our focus over and over and over again to the welfare of others. And because of interdependence, the welfare of others also affects my welfare. I once heard a teacher say, nobody can be in heaven when somebody's in hell. So this is this idea of the bodhicitta slogans and the idea of the vow of saving all beings.

[30:33]

We do not act independently. And how do we start training our mind so that that is something that comes from us rather than I think a better way of saying that is we start thinking like a bodhisattva. So we're not imposing something on our minds. This retraining allows us to start thinking in a different way. And I think this is a worthy project. So I think with that, I should stop and open it up for a few questions. Kodo, do you want to assist me with that, please?

[31:37]

Sure. Hi. Just a word of instruction for how to participate in Q&A. You can open the participants window, and that should reveal a button to raise your hands. And then our Zoom host for the night can help you mute and unmute. And we'll go from there. Go ahead. Okay. Marsha? I guess. Okay. Hi. Sorry, I wasn't unmuted. That's okay.

[32:41]

It's interesting. I just was working with somebody today who has had a powerful and traumatic history and has very little sense of self-worth and has been trained to to be of service to everybody else first and to the point where there's almost nobody asking what would she like. Yeah. So how, what, she's got the other problem. So in terms of, and she's very interested, she's very deeply in the inquiry and very interested in opening up her heart and realizing So what do you suggest? What should I do? Well, I think this is where the contemplation of the first slogan, train in the preliminaries, is so important. So the first one is the preciousness of human birth.

[33:43]

So I think in her life, what I would suggest is that she say to herself a million times, I am precious. I am precious. That's great. That's perfect. And I think there's no, there's no, there's not enough of that for us. And it is, I think it's really difficult to move on in this practice. If, if you really have such low self-worth, because then you mistake what it is to be compassionate. for actually hurting yourself. Yes. Yes. That's what we're working on is notice how much pain she's already in that she has been trained not to acknowledge. Yeah. So anyway, that I, I thank you. That is so perfect. I love it. Thank you very much.

[34:44]

Great. Thank you very much, Marcia. Nice to see you. Nice to see you. I think Terry had a question. Oh, maybe I should turn on my video. When you were talking about the relationship between absolute and relative bodhicitta with the current, I didn't really understand it. And it came to my mind, the idea of somebody making the decision to sacrifice their life for somebody else. Let's say you decide you're going to run in front of the bus or whatever and save the baby. Where is absolute and relative bodhicitta in that situation? Well, I think it might be that it isn't there because the whole basis for relative and ultimate bodhicitta is the idea of wisdom.

[35:50]

So it is... So I also read, and I've read this many times, absolute bodhicitta is the wisdom aspect. Relative bodhicitta is the compassionate aspect. You cannot do one without the other. So I think in your scenario of somebody like running in front of the bus to save the baby, we have no idea where they fall in any of those things. I see. from the outside, we wouldn't know. When we're practicing this thing, I think that the support of becoming compassionate is wisdom, and you can't really become very compassionate if you're not developing your wisdom, because then you're just cold.

[36:51]

you can be, there's this, there's this phrase called idiot compassion. So you can be compassionate without being wise. And that's just kind of stupid, you know, or very it's not helpful actually. So I think that they, they, they're, it's impossible to separate them. this idea of absolute and relative bodhicitta. But what you said initially is that you don't really get it from my analogy. Welcome to the club. What I would encourage you to do is, if you're interested, start doing some reading. Go online and type in absolute bodhicitta and see what they say. Because different analogies... different people explaining this will hit you in different ways. And so what I'm saying tonight is mostly just an introduction.

[37:55]

And if you're not really getting it tonight, in a way I'm like, oh, thank goodness, you know, because I think it's a very, this is so fundamental to the practice and yet it's not an easy concept. So I would really encourage you to start doing some more exploration around that. Thank you, Terry. Tim. Hi. Thank you, Mary. If you touched on this last Wednesday, forgive me for asking you to repeat it, but it seems at the risk of sounding sectarian, These are Tibetan teachings, and we think of Zazen as sort of a non-objective meditation practice where we are not focusing specifically on something.

[39:08]

This, to me, would be very much objective. We have specific slogans that we're working with. Could you say something about that right there? I realize you're going to talk more about Tang Lin during the session, but Shikentaza is, you know, central to our Zen practice. And that is the antithesis of things in some ways to actually focusing on something. So could you say something about that? Thank you for the question, because I suspect there are a number of people that have this same question. So what I'm proposing for these next six weeks is that we're doing this training on Lojang, and it hasn't been widely adopted in the Zen world.

[40:12]

It is not the same as Sheik and Taza. when we are doing contemplative practices during the sashin, it won't be the same as pure zazen, if you'd like to call it that. I'll be doing guided meditations, and this is a cultivation practice, just like zazen is a practice. So I don't think that... I'm trying to say that while we're doing the contemplations that I suggested on Saturday, that that is the same thing as doing zazen. Because in zazen, there's no object of meditation. I understand that. And I'm saying that at this time, Or in my life, I've found that doing the Lojong training has been very helpful for me.

[41:21]

And that it's... It has opened my heart in a way that has been supportive for me. And... It's not that I think it replaces zazen, but for me, it's been in addition to the practice of zazen, this other thing has coexisted in my life. So I'm sharing it with people. How does that sound? That sounds pretty good. I hope that we will... able to touch on it a little bit more as the practice period goes on because it's very important to me and I'm thrilled that we're doing this and I can see they've helped you and the little practice that I've had has helped me a great deal as well. So thank you very much. Thanks Tim.

[42:26]

We have time for one more question. Yeah, Mary, we had a We had a question posed in the chat of someone who doesn't have a microphone. Okay. Named Quinn asked if you could comment a little bit more about this term in slogan number five, alaya. Yes. So my understanding of alaya is this ground, is this luminous, expansive, very... rich place of practice, and out of that arises all of our experience. So the alaya is like the ground. It's a...

[43:28]

So I think of it, the analogy I gave earlier was if we are looking up into the stars and we understand that the universe is expanding and that it has no limits and that it is, you know, rich with stars. And I think the aliyah, in my understanding, is kind of like that. It's this expanding, very open, from which our experience can arise. And we have a habit of putting limits on that ground, and we look at it certain ways and we relate to it in certain ways, and yet that ground is always there and it's always accessible to us and is always very... It's...

[44:33]

So that's my stab, Quinn. And again, I invite you to start doing some research if this is something that's really interesting to you and you want to have other people talk about it so it opens this word up to you in different ways. So thank you all very much. And I think we'll do the closing chant. Yes. May our intention equally extend to our reading and place with the true merit of Buddha's way. The ends are numberless.

[45:34]

I vow to save them. Delusions are inexhaustible. I vow to enter them. Dharma creates our boundless. I vow to enter them. Buddha's way is unsurpassable. Good night, everyone. Gentlemen.

[46:11]

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