Good morning. Today I'm going to talk about a passage from a sutra called the Bhimalakirti Sutra. Do any of you know this text? Two hands. Well, you'll know it better after today's lecture. Vimalakirti was, according to the sutra, a householder at the time of the Buddha. who turns out to be wiser than all the Buddha's great disciples." So the sutra is a kind of peon to the efficacy and primacy of householder life.

[01:04]

In our own sitting group, the Vimalasanga, we chant this sutra in addition to the Heart Sutra. It's a very interesting sutra. It was very popular in China and Japan, particularly among lay practitioners of Zen teachers at that time, because it extolled the notion that you could live in the world as a householder with a family and a job. Actually, it seems like Vimalakirti was independently wealthy. He was kind of an investment banker or something. and still be a transcendentally wise person. The Vimalakirti is in the same family of sutras as the Heart Sutra, the so-called Prajnaparamita or transcendental wisdom school. And so even though the characters are particularly vivid, the basic teaching is not dissimilar from the Heart Sutra.

[02:11]

However, the passage I'm going to read today I find unusually interesting because it attempts to address and answer one of the biggest core questions of Buddhism and of Zen, which is if, as the Heart Sutra and other sutras teach, the nature of the self, the nature of other beings, the nature of all reality is insubstantial, impermanent, illusory, then why should we love each other? This is a passage that addresses that question directly, and I think it's very interesting, particularly as we in the West are acclimating to the Dharma. if we hear certain teachings in the Dharma, it may be somewhat misleading. It may make us feel as though somehow Buddhism is very detached or unworldly or apart from the world.

[03:15]

And the speaker, the teacher in this passage that I'm going to read is Vimalakirti himself. And the person asking him the questions is Manjushri who is, they call him the prince. in this text, he's considered the most talented of all the Buddha's disciples. And he represents, that's his statue up there, he represents wisdom. in Buddhism. So wisdom is coming to, in the personification of Manjushri, is coming to Bhimalakirti and asking him things. So the passage is a little bit long, but I'm going to read it entire, and then I'm going to talk about some of the salient points of it. What I'd like you to do, there's various kinds of sutras and texts in Buddhism, and we have to read them in different ways. Sometimes sutras are evocative or inspirational, and they paint pictures of vast celestial realms and various imaginative things that are going on as a way of teaching the Dharma in a world that was preliterate.

[04:27]

So the imagery is very, very strong. It's like a painting. So it helps people to understand things who can't read. Other sutras are explicit practice sutras. So, for example, there are sutras that teach you mindfulness of breathing. This sutra, particularly this passage, is more of a transmission sutra in the sense that to really understand it. You can't understand it exactly intellectually. It's talking about something from inside practice. So the more practice experience you have, the more you can inhabit the sutra from the inside. I'm just looking around. How many people here are, live here, are residents here? A few. Okay. Well, anyway, I'm going to read the sutra passage. Thereupon Manjushri, the crown prince, addressed the lechavi, the householder, Vimalakirti, and said, Sir, how should a bodhisattva regard all living beings?

[05:48]

Vimalakirti replied, Manjushri, a bodhisattva should regard all living beings as a wise man regards the reflection of the moon in water or as magicians regard things created by magic. He should regard them as being like a face in a mirror, like the water of a mirage, like the sound of an echo. like a mass of clouds in the sky, like the previous moment of a ball of foam, like the appearance and disappearance of a bubble of water, like the fun of games for one who wishes to die, like the perception of color in one blind from birth, like a fire burning without fuel." It goes on in this vein, as you might imagine. I'm not reading all the similes, but you get the idea. Precisely thus, Manjushri, does a bodhisattva who realizes ultimate selflessness consider all beings." Now, Manjushri in this sutra is you, essentially.

[06:53]

So, part of inhabiting the sutra is to put yourself in the questioning mode of Manjushri, the embodiment of wisdom. Now, you as Manjushri, when you hear this passage, there should be a question arising in your mind, a serious question. If you just accept this at face value, your practice is a little passive. This doesn't exactly make a whole lot of sense. So immediately, if your practice is alive and vivid, you should ask, as Manjushri asks, Manjushri then asked further, Noble Sir, if a Bodhisattva considers all living beings in such a way, how does he generate the great love toward them? You see, the question is very, very vivid because if it's really true, as the Heart Sutra and other key sutras say, that all that we envisage, all that we experience, in particular other people, are

[08:02]

like the sound of an echo, like a mass of clouds in the sky, like the appearance and disappearance of a bubble of water, you might think, well, those things are quite insignificant. I shouldn't have any particular feeling about it at all. It's all just insubstantial. But Manjushri understands that must not be the right understanding. So he says, well, how can we love beings? And then Vimalakirti begins to reply, Manjushri, when Bodhisattva considers all living beings in such a way, he thinks, I'll stop there. So, the Bodhisattva considers living beings and thinks, just as I have realized the Dharma, so should I teach it to living beings. Thereby he generates the love that is truly a refuge for all living beings." The passage goes on extensively from there, but I want to stop again and say, if you're alert, you notice a tremendous shift in the quality of the discourse

[09:17]

Vimalakirti has just finished explaining how insubstantial and evanescent beings are, and yet when Manjushri asks him how we should generate great love for them, for those of you who are scholars, the word is maha-maitri, maitri and metta. You familiar with the word metta? You've heard the word metta. Maha means great, so great love, maitri or metta, maha-maitri. How does he generate the great love for them? And Vimalakirti immediately begins to speak as though the living beings are exactly real and we should love them. So there's a great shift here. First of all, we've just heard that beings are completely insubstantial. But when Manjushri queries further, suddenly living beings are back, so to speak. Manjushri, when a bodhisattva considers all living beings in such a way, he thinks, just as I have realized the Dharma, so should I teach it to living beings.

[10:19]

Thereby he generates the love that is truly a refuge for all beings, the love that is peaceful because free of grasping, the love that is not feverish because free of passions, the love that accords with reality because it is equanimous in all three times." The love that is without conflict because free of the violence of the passions. The love that is non-dual because it is involved neither with external nor internal. The love that is imperturbable because totally ultimate. There's more of it I'm going to read, but I'll stop again. Living beings are insubstantial like a ball of foam and yet... we love them and treat them as though they are completely real. The footnote, this has been translated by various great Buddhist translators, and some of you may have heard of Kumarajiva.

[11:21]

Kumarajiva's comment is that Living beings have the living being feeling. So inside being a living being, they feel completely real. And so as bodhisattvas, we inhabit that realm. We generate the most positive emotion imaginable. What this passage is really talking about is the stage of practice which we might call emotional transformation or emotional alchemy. And as the passage goes on, it becomes more and more evocative and descriptive, not just what is the understanding of a Buddha, but what is the emotional feeling tone of a Buddha. So this is a clue for us. It's a clue that a very important terrain of practice has to do with our emotional life and generating a purified... sense of openness, radical openness and compassion that's very much like passionate love, but it's purified in some unusual way.

[12:33]

So the next passage is going to evoke for us the feeling of how a person mature in Dharma actually feels rather than thinks. So this is a shift from Manjushri, who is the embodiment of wisdom, of understanding, to the bodhisattva's love, which is much more of a feeling or emotional quality. I go on. Thereby he generates the love that is firm, its high resolve unbreakable like a diamond, the love that is pure, purified in its intrinsic nature, the love that is even, its aspirations being equal, the Tathagata's love, Tathagata means the Buddha, the Tathagata's love that understands reality, the Buddha's love that causes living beings to awaken from their sleep, the love that is spontaneous because it is fully enlightened spontaneously."

[13:37]

the love that is enlightenment because it is unity of experience, the love that has no presumption because it has eliminated attachment and aversion, the love that is great compassion because it infuses the Mahayana with radiance, the love that is never exhausted because it acknowledges voidness and selflessness, the love that is giving because it bestows the gift of Dharma free of the tight fist of a bad teacher. That's a strange passage. We'll come back to that. The love that is effort because it takes responsibility for all living beings. The love that is wisdom because it causes attainment at the proper time. The love that is without formality because it is pure in motivation. Now, I haven't read you everything here for reasons of time, but I've read you the ones that I think are the most important. This kind of passage... is the sort of passage where every sentence is a kind of shimmering con.

[14:41]

You can't quite understand it intellectually, and yet it's talking about something quite real and quite precious for those who practice. There are various mythological understandings about how this and similar sutras were created, but the reality is they were created by human beings like us. The whole Mahayana literature is the creation of a body, we don't know who, of anonymous realized yogans in ancient India, mostly, who committed into words the innermost quality of their experience. And so each of these phrases represents some commentary or teaching about the emotional transformation of the emotional quality or affect of a realized person. So these are all clues, actually, not only for ourselves to look at our own life and see what is the quality of our emotional life, what is the quality of our feeling for people, but also a way to recognize in others, in a potential teacher, what quality we are looking for.

[15:59]

Somewhere embedded in here are the six paramitas. I won't go into detail in a scholarly sense, but there's a little commentary on each one of them. For example, the love that is giving because it bestows the gift of Dharma free of the tight fist of a bad teacher is dana-paramita. The love that is effort is virya-paramita and so forth. I'm speaking technically for those of you who are familiar with these things. But the commentary is rather unusual. They could just say the love that is giving because it bestows gifts freely, but it has a little teaching inside of it that says the gift of Dharma free of the tight fist of a bad teacher. So all of this is meant to provide some clues or some guideline about the way in which our whole energy or energy of encountering the world and other people is transformed through practice.

[17:04]

And in particular, it's turning the conventional notion of the insubstantiality of things and beings and the notion of emptiness around. What it's basically saying is a realization of emptiness actually opens you up emotionally. you might think somehow it detaches you or distances you from beings. Actually, it opens you up and makes you completely intimate with them. The passage that acknowledges this specifically, there's a couple here, it says, the love that has no presumptions because it has eliminated attachment and aversion Attachment and aversion are defilements in ordinary people's minds. And when these are cleared up, there's no sense of separation emotionally between ourselves and other people.

[18:05]

We, in a sense, are in love with them. And on that note, I found a passage in one of the lectures of Suzuki Roshi that specifically addresses this point. He says, In the monastery, the most important teaching is, this is Japanese, bear with me, dojo, daishini, ichini. Dojo means activity and stillness. So basically it means the work of the monastery and zazen. Daishini means everybody and ichini means one. So he translates it, our activity should be with people. The true meaning of it, he says, is selflessness. Then he talks about Dogen. He said, Dogen, early in the spring, would watch the plum coming out in cold winter. He gazed at it, appreciating its beauty. This is upeksha, detachment.

[19:06]

Detachment, this is the key point. Detachment, he says, means to live with people with the beauty of the plum. If you want to appreciate the living flower or the living being, you cannot be selfish. Your mind should be instead in a state of selflessness. So detachment means to live with people, So often I'm asked, well, what is this detachment thing in Buddhism? It sounds detached. It sounds cool or apart. Actually, detachment in Buddhism means just the opposite. He goes on to talk about the plum. Basically, the idea is the plum flower in winter is opening very slowly and constantly at the same time it's dying. And to fully appreciate, essentially love, the plum blossom, you need to give up your sense of wanting the flower to be beautiful or wanting it to stay or wanting it to be some particular way, which is all involved in your self-image of things, and just appreciate the way the flower actually is.

[20:31]

So the attachment actually means love in its true sense. Love, as the sutra says, which has eliminated attachment and aversion. So in the case of the plum blossom, which is beautiful, we have an attachment to its beauty. Or let's say the plum blossom is a person. We have an attachment to that person being a particular way. In the opening that comes with seeing the insubstantiality of things, actually, we become emotionally intimate with everything. Like the plum blossom, we're able to... You know, tears come to our eyes. It's just so beautiful. And it's dying, and we can't stop it. There's nothing we can do. So... Usually love is thought of as being something passionate, something we have to struggle against in Dharma. But somehow the love is transformed through the realization of Dharma, the realization of emptiness.

[21:37]

And it becomes the love, this is another important point, that is great compassion because it infuses the Mahayana with radiance. Radiance means just what it says, you radiate. And a teacher, mature in Dharma, radiates. And you can feel it, you can see it, you can sense it. It's very much like the radiance of falling in love, but it's not the ordinary falling in love where we're still involved in attachment and aversion. It's a radiance that is imperturbable because totally ultimate. So in this radiance then we have the love that is giving because it bestows the gift of Dharma free of the tight fist of a bad teacher.

[22:42]

I don't know about you, but for me this little passage kind of jumps out. Here we are talking about very abstract, wonderful things, and suddenly we hear about the tight fist of a bad teacher. This is what, to me anyway, is a clue that there are real human beings behind the authorship of this sutra. They're talking about something that they surely must have experienced not once but many times. What does it mean, the tight fist of a bad teacher? It's a little clue about, first of all, it implies that there are bad teachers, bad teachers and good teachers. And bad teachers seem to have some kind of tight fist. So it's talking about the paramita of giving or dana paramita in the context of teaching the Dharma. And Again, Manjushri is coming to Vimalakirti as a kind of student and saying, Vimalakirti, open me up about this intractable problem I have, which is that my great wisdom, which sees through things, doesn't understand how I can shift to loving beings, because as far as I can see, beings aren't exactly there at all.

[23:54]

And immediately Vimalakirti starts to talk about beings just as though they're completely there. Not only that, but he evokes this quality of loving them. So Vimalakirti is modeling what it means not to be... He doesn't have the tight fist of a bad teacher. The tight fist of a bad teacher is referring to teachers other than Vimalakirti. Vimalakirti is this completely open-minded teacher who in this other parts in the sutra it explains that what distinguishes him from other kinds of teachers is he can go anywhere he goes to to racetracks actually it says he goes to to enlighten gamblers he goes to bars to enlightened drunkards. And he's a businessman among businessmen. He goes to schools to elucidate and educate the children. He goes to hospitals to care for the sick. He goes everywhere. So Vimalakirti embodies that level of practice where not only are you unhindered in where you can go and what you can do, but there's a kind of radiance that comes off of you.

[25:08]

So that radiance itself it infuses the Mahayana with radiance. Without the radiance, the Mahayana is something rather dry. It's kind of implying here that Manjushri is a little dry in his understanding. He's not opened up emotionally. He doesn't radiate in the way that Vimalakirti clearly does. So there's something about this radiance, about opening the tight fist and opening yourself up. Essentially what it means is that your emotional life, which for most of us is involved with history, with childhood, with trauma, with likes and dislikes, with fears, with all sorts of things that we live with, that all gets alchemically turned around. And it's still there, but it's... imperturbable and completely radiant and open. So this passage in the sutra is trying to describe something that's very difficult to put into words.

[26:16]

It's a kind of poem. It's like a love sonnet of Shakespeare or something, you know. You read it, the language is beautiful, But you realize he's in love with someone. And what he's really trying to talk about is this indescribable feeling that he has. So this whole passage is to explain the Bodhisattva's love in the way that Shakespeare explains his love for whoever it might be. He seemed to be in love with a lot of people. So there's different sonnets for that. There's a couple of other passages that I think are very interesting. The love that is effort because it takes responsibility for all living beings. It's not just a matter of being a radiant being and wandering around radiating. There's a responsibility that comes with this. You know, you're in love with beings. And just like being in love with anyone, when you're in love with someone, you want to take care of them. You want to support them. You want to be there for them.

[27:16]

So it's a responsibility. And so part of the quality of this love is it turns into effort. You have a sense that you can't relax, that there's some way you have to be out there in the world taking care of the people you love, who essentially is everybody. So, you know, those of you who are familiar with Christian theology will get a sense that what's being talked about here is the difference between eros and agape. You know, eros is sensual love. Agape is a kind of purified spiritual love. And this is very roughly something like that. except that here the agape or the purified love is emanating from the basic understanding of insubstantiality, which is the fundamental teaching of the Buddha, that our self is evanescent, impermanent like the plum blossom, and so is everyone else's. In the commentary that Kumarajiva has here, he says that,

[28:21]

in this quite interesting, shocking moment where Vimalakirti turns and begins to talk, after he's essentially dismissed beings as like balls of foam, they're all balls of foam, he immediately turns around and begins to speak about how much he loves beings, as though they're completely solid. Kumarajiva says, what living beings means here, where he talks about loving living beings, is that Living beings have the living being feeling. That's what he says. We all have the living being feeling. We have the sense of being alive. And the bodhisattva re-enters that space for the benefit of beings because we think we really exist. Vimalakirti is willing to go along with that. He says, okay, fine. You really exist and I love you completely and I want to teach you about the Dharma. I want to open you up like I'm opened up. So...

[29:24]

it's still a little unclear what the tight fist of a bad teacher is, but maybe it's referring to Manjushri a little bit in a very subtle way, that Manjushri is a little bit tight-fisted in his feeling. He's a little bit too much involved with the emptiness side and not opened up like... In another passage in the Vimalakirti, another monk who always tends to be the butt of the joke in the Mahayana, Shariputra, is sitting there with Vimalakirti and a goddess rains flowers down from heaven. And the flowers stick to Shariputra's monk's robe. And he's upset about it. He tries to get them off. And Vimalakirti, the flowers just bounce right off at him. And Shariputra says, Vimalakirti, these flowers are sticking to my robe. Why? They don't stick to you. So this is kind of that feeling that Shariputra is still involved in some sense of being a monk, maybe a little tight-fisted.

[30:34]

He has a sense of boundary about where he feels his practice is. Vimalakirti has no boundary. To his practice at all so he can go anywhere do anything the flowers don't stick to him So if you read the sutra from the outside you think this is about some people being like here demon juice re shariputra If you read it from the inside, these are all about you. These are all about me these characters are like puppet shows inside our mind. They each evoke different aspects or potentialities or qualities of the human being. This is reading the sutra from the inside. And why I say that this is a kind of transmission sutra, because to really understand it you have to be inside of it, you have to inhabit the characters, you have to inhabit the drama completely. The love that is without formality because it is pure in motivation.

[31:38]

It was interesting being a student of Suzuki Roshi. So much of his way of teaching was spontaneous and in the situation. he wasn't a brilliant scholar or his English wasn't so good, pretty good, as good as it needed to be. But the love that is wisdom because it causes attainment at the proper time." This proper time is a very important point. The literature and oral tradition of Zen is full of descriptions of the, quote, proper time.

[32:47]

Suzuki Roshi would often just be with us and watch us for a long time and suddenly when you least expected it, he would do a little something. And if you were alert, you'd realize he was trying to teach us something. I'll tell you a somewhat embarrassing story about myself. It's been 30 years, so I've gotten over my embarrassment. I was the attendant when Suzuki Roshi met a very important figure in Zen Center, another Roshi from Japan who was kind of being difficult, shall we say. And so it was him, the two Roshis and me in a cabin. So I was, you know, very, I didn't want to make a mistake. I wanted to be really on for this great, huge moment. They were very relaxed. In fact, most of the time they talked about the weather, which amazed me. It's one of the ways I realized that Japanese don't talk about anything important using words.

[33:55]

They don't communicate important things with words. It's all done nonverbally. So the weather stuff was a way to just pass the time while the real communication was happening. But I didn't know that at the time. So they were sitting there saying, cold. Yes, very cold. Colder than last year. And... In addition to the tea, I had served them olives, nice olives. And we all ate our olives, and I ate some olives too. And in the middle of the conversation, Suzuki Roshi was talking to this other Roshi about the weather. He reached out without looking, picked up one of my olives, and put it in his mouth. And I suddenly realized that I hadn't eaten the whole olive. There was some olive meat left on the olive. And he noticed it. And in the midst of this supposedly very important thing, he was kind enough, he cared about me enough to want to

[34:56]

point out something to me. I have a kind of careless temperament. It's always been my way, and he knew that. He just, you know, after 30 years, I still remember the feeling. It's like having an iron ball stuck down your throat. You know, he's eating my olive, and I'm thinking, oh, I just had the flu. I'm going to kill him, you know. And he was very calm, and he would do stuff like that all the time. And this, you know, you can't say about him, and I don't mean to idealize him too much, he was just my teacher, so I'm telling you a story, but he was always on the alert for things like that, and he would do things that people remember. They tell me after years and years and years they remember some little thing. This is the open hand, not the tight fist. The open hand is always interested in the living beings. You're walking through time and space, and living beings are like plum blossoms that open and close in time and space.

[35:59]

And you see them, you watch them. And he says, I didn't quote it, but he says later on in his teaching, you should be prepared for the disappointment when the plum blossom falls. We should have that quality. there is in the midst of this love a real strictness, too. We can't be casual about this. This is a very serious business. But if we take it too seriously, then we become tight-fisted. And we lose that sense of radiance, which is critical to the transformation of the realization of insubstantiality to the living out of insubstantiality. We live it out in a kind of... without formality, you know. It was not as though I came in formal dokusan and did my three bows and sat down in full lotus and faced my teacher and then he ate my olive, you know. That wouldn't actually have worked.

[37:00]

If he'd said, I'm now going to eat your olive, which you were careless about, it would have been a much less potent teaching. You follow what I'm saying? The whole quality that made it valuable was that he was with me in a situation where I wasn't even with him. I was all involved with making the tea. Ed Brown, who I know teaches here from time to time, tells a story in one of his books about a there was a beautiful rock at Tassajara in front of the office. Everybody loved it. It was a great rock, and people sat on it and all that. And Ed didn't have a stepping stone for his cabin, so it was kind of awkward to get into his cabin. And one day he went to his cabin, and the beautiful office stone that everybody loved was right there as a stepping stone for his cabin. And he found out that Suzuki Roshi had ordered it moved there.

[38:03]

And when he talked to him about it, he said, oh, well, I saw you needed a stone. And Ed was embarrassed. He said, well, that's the office stone. Everybody loves that stone. And Suzuki Roshi said, oh, we'll get another stone. I wanted you to have this stone. So it's that quality of even noticing. Think how cared for, how loved Ed, and he expressed it in the book, how cared for he felt at that moment, that the thing that mattered was was taking care of Ed, was being there for Ed, not the stone, which everybody was attached to and wanted it to be at the office. We'll get another stone, another plum blossom, you know. The plum blossom of Ed was right in front of the teacher, and so the teacher moved without formality. It wasn't as though there was a big ceremony to move the rock with lots of bows. It just moved the rock. So this quality of... I'm coming back to the text now.

[39:08]

The love that is wisdom because it causes attainment at the proper time. What does this mean? Attainment at the proper time, as though there's some proper time for attainment? Well, to some extent it's true. The Zen stories that you read, the enlightenment stories, the koan stories, are proper time stories. And unless you understand the context, you can miss the importance of that. These stories are remembered because they are the culmination of maybe 20 years of a relationship. One of the famous ones is about Hyakujo and the wild geese. Basso and Hyakujo, I'm sorry. If I get the characters wrong, forgive me, my memory's going, but I believe it was Hyakujo, the student of Basso, and they were standing there and some geese flew over. And Basso said, what are they? And Hyakujo said, they're wild geese. Basso said, where have they gone?

[40:13]

And Hyakujo said, they've flown away. And Basso reached out and grabbed his nose, pushed it at He said, they've been here from the very first. And this is Hyakujo's enlightenment story. Well, it all sounds very wonderful, you know, but actually it's like two people that have been married for a long time. And Basso knows Hyakujo, Hyakujo knows Basso. And there's some moment where there's an opportune time. The teacher and student know each other very well, and something can happen in that moment. But the commentary says it causes attainment at the proper time because it is always opportune. It is always opportune. Every moment is the proper time. But sometimes we can't see it. That's the only point. Trungpa Rinpoche, whom many of you may know as one of the founding, he was in the Tibetan tradition, one of the founding teachers, very close to Suzuki Roshi, had a wonderful way with language.

[41:27]

And one of his terms was self-secret. Dharma is a self-secret. There aren't actually any secrets, except for the tight fist of a bad teacher who evokes a quality that he has something that you don't have. Nothing is a secret. It's all completely open to you right now. The problem is we create the secret through our attachment, through our lack of being able to see through things, our inability to open up. So, practically speaking, The Dharma is a secret. But it's not a secret because it's a secret. It's because it's a secret because you make it a secret. It's a self-secret. It's a very interesting turn of phrase. I don't know if it's a technical term in Tibetan Buddhism that he translated or if he made it up, but it's, I think, a very accurate term to describe what's going on, particularly in this sutra.

[42:33]

In a sense, the love of a bodhisattva is kind of a self-secret to Manjushri in this passage. Manjushri doesn't quite get it because it's not something you can get. It's something you have to open up to, to feel. And... There was one other passage I wanted to point out. The love that is spontaneous because it is fully enlightened spontaneously. This is again this quality of it's always available. The geese fly over every day. but it's only at the moment that the story recounts that it opens up for Hyakujo. These stories are always about us, so Hyakujo in this case is you or me. The point at which it opens up is the opportune moment, which is always there.

[43:35]

Every day there are geese. Every day they are flying by. But when do we see it? When do we notice it? When we notice it, we realize, as Basso says, they've always been there. Where have we been? So I think the key point, just to summarize and pick it up, the key point of this sutra passage is to help us remember that in the end, practice really isn't about us. if we own practice or think that it's something... This is the real meaning of, as it says in the Heart Sutra, no attainment. The notion of attainment means there's something we're going to get. We're going to be different. We're going to be enlightened or something. This is a narrow understanding.

[44:37]

It's not the understanding that Vimalakirti is talking about. There's nothing to get It's a self-secret. There's no secret. It's just a self-secret. You know, kids of a certain age like to play a game where they put something over their head and think they're invisible. Those of you with kids know this. You know, they put something over their head and they say, you can't see me. You can't see me. Well, actually, of course you can see them. It's just they can't see you. So it's something like that. You know, we walk around with a bag on our head and we think that there's somebody out there who can see. And we were desperate to find that out. Sometimes we are desperate. And, you know, all it's really required is to take the thing off of our head. And you realize you can see perfectly well. You just had a bag over your head, you know. Children, in a sense, are very wise, but they're not mature.

[45:41]

So their wisdom doesn't necessarily go anywhere. This is the unfortunate thing. When we're old enough for it to go somewhere, we forget how easy it is, really. There are some modern Zen teachers. There's one in particular that I read. It's one of the commentaries in the Mumonkan. He keeps talking about the child samadhi, the samadhi of a child. Children are naturally radiant. Children, in a sense, have a lot of these qualities. But it can't be called wisdom because children are not fully apprised of how things are. Children don't suffer in the way that we do. So I suppose one rough way you could talk about what dharma is, is dharma is a way to become a child in an adult's body with an adult's mind. And you're opened up with the love that

[46:45]

is without conflict because free of the violence of the passions. The love that is non-dual because it is involved neither with the external nor the internal. You probably read a lot about the non-dual. It's the new buzzword in Dharma, non-dual, non-dual. It sounds like some kind of car term, you know, like non-dual carburetor or something. Non-dual. It doesn't mean anything. until you're inside it, and then it doesn't mean anything. So it doesn't mean anything completely. It's not something that can help you. But if we hear that it's not involved with the external or the internal, it's more of a clue. In our ordinary state of consciousness we think that And so my love for you is channeled through this quality that there's an internal and an external. So there's some conditioned quality to my love.

[47:50]

If I don't like the way it goes, I might take it away. The love that is non-dual isn't involved anymore in a sense that I'm here and you're there. So instead of... And this is my final point. Instead of all of this... a text about beings are a moon in the water or a magic show, face in the mirror, the water of a mirage, et cetera, et cetera. Instead of thinking of that as a kind of sadness or a kind of put down of living beings, it's the opposite. It's an embracement of living beings in their true quality of how we actually exist together. In the end, I think the main point of this passage is that Manjushri's wisdom is good, but until it's opened up emotionally with the Mahamaitri, the great love of the bodhisattva that Bhimala Kirti evokes, there's something incomplete about it.

[48:58]

There's something not quite finished. And it's only when you have this kind of sparkling care for beings that you can seize the opportune moment in your relationships with other people. And then the Dharma becomes alive not as something to understand but as something to live. And you live it wherever you go. And the radiance that it speaks of isn't something that you put on or something that you turn on, it's something that you are. And you yourself may not even notice it. Dogen says, don't think that you'll always notice your own enlightenment. The best kind of radiance, the kind that is most effective at helping beings is one that just is there like a candle or like a lamp. It just shines of its own nature.

[50:00]

There's no need for any effort. So I realize that this lecturing on the sutra this way in one hour is maybe a little bit of a push. I hope I've managed to bring out the essence of it without being too technical. This kind of sutra is pretty technical, and to really understand it in detail, you have to go through sentence by sentence, passage by passage. But at the same time, you know, Zen in particular has the teaching that we don't rely on the scriptures. So the best way to understand what's said here is to practice, is to sit. And then it all comes from inside. So these are the mumblings of people trying to share something about their practice. we shouldn't think that somehow by scrupulously studying this over and over, we're going to get it.

[51:02]

It's best to get it first and then read it. And then it becomes more clear. So, you know, Dogen was asked early in his career, should we study koans, should we study the sutras? And he said, well, I used to do that. That's good. But in the end, it doesn't help. And Suzuki Roshi said the same thing. He used to come up and give lecture. And he'd start out by saying, well, whatever I say, it's not going to help you. But I know I'm supposed to give a lecture now, so I will. And of course, it was very helpful. But typically, when he would talk about a text like this, he wasn't as disciplined as I'm trying to be. He would read the first sentence Manjushri the Crown Prince, and then he put it down. The whole lecture would be about birds or something. And he said that he would study very hard before each lecture.

[52:10]

His teacher told him that was very important to make that effort. But his lectures weren't ever about the text. They were about practice itself. And he was always pointing us back to the reality that in Zen, unlike other Buddhist schools, we tell the sutras from inside our own body and mind. We don't read the sutras from the outside. This is the key point. Because if we read the sutra from the outside, it's a self-secret. The bag's over our head, so actually we can't really see anything. The best way is to set the sutra aside. It's good to study and it's good to be inspired, particularly if we pay close attention to the precise way that the sutra is being told. But in the end, it's somebody else's wisdom, not your own. And the best way is to study it, respect it, put it down and go back to your cushion where the real work happens and the real penetration and the real opening

[53:13]

that will make you realize that you are a Buddha, you've always been a Buddha, you always will be a Buddha, just like a plum blossom opening up and closing down and falling off. This is the Zen way to understand this kind of text. So I apologize if I've been a little bit too technical, using too many technical terms. But I think now most of you know the term maitri or netta. So this is actually very specifically about the relationship between shunya or emptiness and netta or love. And it's clear that the two are not just closely related. They really amount to the same thing in the end. So thank you for your attention. I'll be happy to answer your questions later on when the time comes. Thanks.

[54:09]

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