This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Recently, I was listening to news commentator Anderson Cooper, who was talking about current political events involving our outgoing president. And he kept repeating this phrase, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It just doesn't matter anymore. And then later in the day, as I sat down to think about this talk, I typed in the word Sunday talk, the top of the page, and then I followed by the date, today's date, November 22nd, at which time that phrase, it doesn't matter. appeared in my mind, followed by a very old and very deep pain.

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But I couldn't quite remember why, what that date commemorated. And so I looked it up, and there on my computer was a photograph of a young John F. Kennedy at Dallas Airport, standing beside his wife, who was wearing what was then a fashionable pink suit with a pink hat. And then I remembered. On November 22nd of 1963, at 12.30 p.m., I was a freshman in high school. It was the week before Thanksgiving, just like now. An announcement came over the loudspeaker, saying that the President of the United States had been shot. And then we were all told to go home. 1963 is over half a century ago now. And in between then and now, so many things have happened in our world, some of them personal and some of them seeming to have happened to us all.

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By the time I was a sophomore in college, April of 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. In June, Robert Kennedy was shot. And by the end of the year, a part of my own life had died. The part that believed deeply. and felt deeply that some things really mattered, some things that I could count on, like God, America, and the history of Western civilization, as I had been taught. So there followed a number of years in which I spent looking for a way to live that didn't require things to matter. Ski resorts are nice, so I moved to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. And so is travel. And so is casual sex. And yet those wounds didn't go away. They just remained as holes in my view of the world and of my place in it.

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A vacancy. As my therapist years later would often say to me, so what's a girl to do? You know, really, what's a girl to do? That question was a puzzle. Or as they say in Zen, it was a koan. But before undertaking to solve the puzzle, there was a deeper question that needed to be answered. What does matter? Does anything matter? Well, according to our wise and ancient teachings, what matters to us above all else is our self. The one who is in pain is seeking relief and yet doesn't have a clue where in this world to find it. which reminds me of the Zen story about that little boy who is sent from the monastery to buy some pickles. He dashes in, having gotten distracted by a circus poster, and then he runs out and back in again to the pickle shop, yelling at the shopkeeper, give it to me, give it to me.

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And to which she yells back, what, what? My hat, my hat, he cries. And then with a wry smile, she responds, your hat is on your head. And so it is, you know, what matters to each of us has been bred into us since the earliest signs of life on earth. The survival and the replication of me. So what's a girl to do? So one young human, several thousands of years ago, took this question into the forest, found a tree. and sat there silently in an upright posture, gazing with rapt attention at the world that appeared before his eyes for seven long days and nights, until and at which time he recognized that the world was the very thing he was looking for, the very thing that truly mattered.

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Being seen for what it truly is, the world gave him a song, a beautiful song. just like the one that Louis Armstrong gave to us many centuries later. I see trees of green, red roses too. I see them bloom for me and for you. And I think to myself, what a wonderful world. I see skies of blue, clouds of white. the bright blessed day and the dark sacred night. And I think to myself, what a wonderful world. And so it is. And so it isn't. And how is that possible? You know, how can this wonderful world become so dark and so frightening to us, so dangerous and so cruel?

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It's due to that very fact that many of us found ourselves here at the last resort, one of my nicknames for the Zen Center. This tradition has even come to recognize itself in that way as a last resort, or what it more commonly calls itself a refuge. We come here to take refuge in the wise Buddha, in the teachings of the Buddha, and in the community that forms when three or more of us show up to be taught. This is called taking refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, the triple treasure. So today I want to talk with you about the Dharma treasure, those things that the Buddha said about this world, about suffering, about how we might find relief. In fact, I once read that the Buddha said of himself, I only teach two things. I teach suffering, and I teach the cessation of suffering. the many centuries that followed his time here on the earth it was the sangha that carried those teachings to others through the deserts you know over the waters in our in our own lifetimes through the air on jet planes and now on the airways themselves you know airplanes are no longer needed one of those teachings we're studying this month in our november intensive which is being led by senior dharma teacher linda ruth cuts and myself

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the great wisdom beyond wisdom heart sutra and so i thought i would share some of what we have been saying about the heart sutra with those of you who are here this morning the heart sutra features two important words that translated into english are no and emptiness the word no can't really be explained or broken into parts, and yet I think we all have a gut feeling about what that word means, particularly when it's directed at us. No. Which is one reason this word is likened to the ritual sword that Prajnatara, the goddess of wisdom, wields in her assault on our delusional thinking. No. No. Really no. No greed. No hate. No delusion. The other big word, emptiness, I often hesitate to say much about because in truth it means a great many things.

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And that's because it applies to a great many things. To each person, to each place, and to each thing. And it also applies to whatever it is we think about each person, each place, and each thing. Meaning that whatever is there before our eyes and in our minds is empty of being separate. In particular, being separate from our eyes and our minds. And how could that be? How could our experience be separate from us? Which isn't to say that there aren't things and persons to be seen, but rather to say that they are not what we think. In fact, they are completely free of what we think, of our imputations, our accusations, our judgments and our interpretations, as are we. Emptiness is really the opposite of what it sounds. It really means fullness and completeness and inclusivity, like the universe itself, or like what Suzuki Roshi called our big mind.

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In Sanskrit, the word for emptiness is shunyata, and in our tradition of Buddhism, it's best understood as the absence of any falsely imagined type of independent existence, such as thingness or personhood in which the person or thing is truly outside of myself or inside of myself or somewhere in between. So as we begin winding down at the end of this intensive, our ever so brief study of the Heart Sutra, I want to give a short summary of what the Sutra is doing to us and how. So first of all, in answer to the question, what is this sutra doing to us, Karl Brunholtz says in his rather marvelous book called The Heart Attack Sutra, that the Heart Sutra cuts through, deconstructs, and demolishes all of our usual conceptual frameworks, all of our rigid ideas, all of our belief systems, all of our reference points, including any with regard to our spiritual path.

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In other words, just about everything that we hold dear, and most especially ourselves, or rather the notion that we have about ourselves. So the way this teaching goes about its radical mission is first and foremost at the level of language, language being the primary tool with which we humans distort reality. And how do we do that? Well, we do it. by means of those very categories that Brunholtz has just named for us, rigid ideas, belief systems, and reference points. Reference points refers to such commonly held and used notions as time, place, direction, age, nationality, gender, and most significantly to this day and every day, race. So try to imagine if you can, what might be left of you once all the reference points have vanished, vanished in the blinding light of no.

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And that is precisely what the Heart Sutra has set out to do, to demolish the mind-made prisons in which we have incarcerated ourselves, made solid by our beliefs, by our fears, and by our sensitivities. The second level of attack, on our basic assumptions about reality is even more fundamental and more intimate than the attack on human language. And that is the attack on our experience of reality itself through the medium of our senses, our nose and our eyes, our ears and our tongues, our bodies and our minds. Those six elements connecting us to life and to the world. Eyes that see, ears that hear, nose that smells, were seen by the Buddha to be greatly distorted by the belief that the self, the perceiving subject, was separate from the world that it perceived, that the seer is separate from what's seen, and the hearer is separate from what's heard, and the thinker is separate from its thoughts.

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And from that belief in a separate and isolated self, there arises all of the conditions for our suffering. So what we call a self or a person, the Buddha called five aggregates, or in Sanskrit, skandhas. So if we look back at the opening lines of the Heart Sutra, we can see how the penetrating insight the Buddha had into these five aggregates played a terribly important part in his liberation from suffering. And this is what he taught to others, such as the Bodhisattva of compassion. So here's the first lines of the Heart Sutra. Avalokiteshvara, bodhisattva, when deeply practicing prajnaparamita, wisdom beyond wisdom, clearly saw that all five aggregates are empty and thus relieved all suffering. So this is the very thing the Buddha had realized as he was sitting there quietly under a tree for days on end, watching how his own mind was

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in combination with his feelings and his sense perceptions, created the illusion of a single, solid, independent entity called myself. His freedom from the illusion of the self is dramatically recounted in the story of his confrontation with his tormentor, Mara, the evil one, also known as the master of illusions. So this story, which I've often told... is taken from a book called The Lady of the Lotus, which, unlike most of the stories of the Buddha's journey to awakening, is from the point of view of his young wife and childhood playmate, Yasudhara. Although a new mother of a baby boy, they named Little Fetter, Yasudhara willingly encouraged her melancholy husband to leave home in order to engage with his terrible suffering. suffering that had come upon him when he learned that his seemingly perfect world and perfect body were destined to decay.

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And this he later called the first noble truth, the truth of suffering. In this story, the Buddha-to-be, after six long years, has arrived under the Bodhi tree, where he meets face-to-face with the evil one, who has just threatened to kill him if he doesn't get up from his seat. Mara had already conjured up an army of haters and a troop of dancing nymphs in hopes of unraveling Siddhartha's resolve to remain seated no matter what. Having failed to unseat him, he then says to the young prince, Now I will kill you. Buddha says, No, you won't. And Mara hisses, Yes, I will. I will kill you. And Buddha says, No, you won't because I know who you are. And Mara says, oh no, you don't. And Buddha says, oh yes, I do. You are myself. And with that, Mara vanishes. So Mara, the evil one, personified for the Buddha as he does for us, the resistance we have to staying at our seats, to finding our sanctuaries, our refuge, and to meeting with the true dragon, reality itself.

[16:56]

where in the confrontation with the illusion of something outside of ourself, not only congeals, but in the light of a steady gaze, it begins to melt away, along with that very notion of a lonely, isolated self. And it was in just this way that our young prince became a Buddha, as Mara vanished. Another story that I often tell is about myself. When I first arrived at Green Gulch Farm and was met by Paul Disco, the master builder of our guest house and many other wonderful buildings around many places in the world, when he said to me and those sitting at the table with me, it's not what you're going to get, it's what you're going to lose. I remember it so well and I remember getting kind of chill when he said that. What will be left after all has been lost? loss to impermanence and transiency, to aging, sickness, and death, the most inviolable laws of the universe.

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When the Buddha added impermanence onto no self and suffering, he gave us what we might call the facts of life, the very facts that we are all facing right now. No self, impermanent suffering. And that we are always facing right now, along with some wishful thinking. Ironically, therein, within those facts of life, also lies the relief of suffering. Just this is it. Just this right now. All of it. This all-inclusive universe, as far as the eye of practice can see. Just this beautiful earth, with her trees of green, red roses too, stone walls and blue tiles and shiny gray pebbles. with her emergency rooms, angry unemployed workers, exhausted nurses and doctors, our sick and dying elders. It's so easy to say, isn't it?

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That saying always is, and it's so much more difficult to remember. Just this is it. In the traditional teachings about the five aggregates, they are usually depicted as a boat, representing our bodily form. which is, I like to use my hand, which is riding along on the ocean of awareness. And it has three passengers inside the boat. And these passengers are feelings, perceptions, and impulses. The Buddha in his early teaching added the word clinging to the five skandhas, the five clinging skandhas, pancha upadana skandhas. Clinging is not a good thing. the Buddhist teaching in fact it is the primary cause of our suffering noble truth number two clinging and desire are a result of our feelings and particularly feelings of wanting not wanting or being confused about whether we want it or not also known as greed hate and delusion so these three

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are called the pathological emotions by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. They're also known as bandits and thieves and poisons. Basically meaning that the notion of a separate self invariably leads us to try our best to get things for the self, or to get rid of things that the self doesn't like, or simply to hide the self until it all blows over. The most obvious tool in the Heart Sutra toolbox for uprooting the three poisons is that single syllable word, no. No to our thinking and concepts and no to our hearing and seeing, our tasting, our smelling, our touching and feeling. No to our sense of a separate self. No to our belief in any kind of solidity whatsoever. So no functions to not only pull the rug, so to speak, out from under our feet, no feet, but then it pulls the floor out from under us as well, no floor.

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And interestingly, however, without the concept of a self or a feet or a floor, we seem to remain standing all the same, as if the entire show is being done by magic. And so it is. So what really changes for us when we stop our chattering mind, even if just for a little while? Not much, really. The world goes on nearly the same as always, absent the suffering brought about by self-centered clinging, grasping, theorizing, fantasizing, and strategizing, at least for a while. The Heart Sutra has been notoriously frustrating through the centuries. Ever since it landed in the Buddha's Sangha, as Buddhist teacher Sangha Rakshita says about this sutra. If we insist that the requirements of the logical mind be satisfied, we are missing the point. What the Prajnaparamita sutras are actually delivering is not a systematic treatise, but a series of sledgehammer blows attacking from this side and that to try and break through our fundamental delusion.

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It's not going to make things easy for the logical mind by putting things in a logical form. If it were put forth neatly and clearly, leaving no loose ends, we might be in danger of thinking we had grasped perfection of wisdom. So along with its primary mission of deconstructing the familiar world or nests that we inhabit, the Heart Sutra is also an excellent meditation manual. It begins with naming the parts of our world and of ourselves that we have perhaps truly not looked at closely before. You know, looked at in the way that we think of when we use the word meditate. I mean, how many of you have really spent time lately looking at your hands or at the color green or the swaying of the trees in the wind? or that steam that rises up from your morning cup of coffee, and so on, and so on, and so on, all day long, as a flow of non-repeating, impermanent, selfless, and miraculous appearances.

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We can all come to see this very truth for ourselves when we take on this text as a meditation instruction, or as a series of koans, as the many facets of the truth of emptiness. sprouting up like those tiny green grasses after our winter rains. Emptiness, meaning that things, eyes, ears, noses, grasses, and trees do not exist as they seem, but are like illusions, magic tricks, fantasies, stories, fabrications, nightmares, and dreams. Emptiness is the primary teaching of perfect wisdom, Prajnaparamita. And yet this perfect Perfect wisdom, as we know, is being taught by the epitome of compassion itself, Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva, the Bodhisattva of compassion. Without the element of compassion at the forefront, this sutra would have no value for us at all. In fact, it would merely be dangerous for those with a partial understanding of emptiness.

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It's often said that emptiness is the heart of the Mahayana tradition, but that the heart of emptiness is compassion. Without developing a soft and compassionate heart, the Heart Sutra and the teachings of emptiness can actually harden a practitioner. As Nagarjuna, known as the second Buddha, wrote in his famous treatise on emptiness, he said, a misuse of the emptiness teachings is like a badly handled snake or like a spell, a magic spell wrongly cast. and yet not to use the Prajnaparamita teaching of emptiness at all, will deny the spiritual pilgrim that very realization that they so ardently seek. For example, here's a definition of Prajnaparamita from the Princeton Dictionary Buddhism. Prajnaparamita, wisdom, Prajnaparamita, beyond wisdom, paramita, refers to a level of understanding beyond that of ordinary wisdom, associated with and required wisdom.

[25:49]

for the achievement of Buddhahood. Although this type of wisdom has a variety of interpretations, it is often said to be the wisdom that does not conceive of a self or an object or an action as being ultimately real. So just what would that be like? You might wonder, I wonder, seeing the world without conceiving of a self or of an object or an action as being ultimately real. Here's what the Buddha had to say about that. Where water, earth, fire, and wind have no footing. There the stars don't shine. The sun is invisible. There the moon doesn't appear. Their darkness is not found. And when a sage, a Brahmin, through sagacity, has realized this for themselves, then from form and formlessness, from bliss and pain,

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They are freed. So I think what the Buddha is talking about here in this teaching that he gave to a monk named Bahiya is the experience of awakening itself in which the mind is no longer seen as separate from the body. This place is no longer seen as separate from that place or from any other place. But most importantly, that your suffering is no longer seen as separate from mine. So once again, this is so simple and easy, and yet, what is it that's happening inside of us that makes such teaching so difficult to practice or even to understand? The answer that the Buddha gave us has to do with those very things that he saw inside of himself. Stories. Narratives. Daydreams. Projections. Mental elaborations. And in the most tragic of cases, the extremes of pathological thinking. greed, hate, and delusion.

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The image of the human mind that's common in the Buddhist tradition is of clouds covering the moon. The clouds being our delusional thinking, and the moon being a clear light of awakening. In the scene, just the scene. In the moon, just the moon. And in the clouds, the focus of our study. Although directing our attention to the mind itself will not create a world according to our desires or our preferences, it may be the only way to create a kinder, safer, and just maybe more loving world for us all. A world such as the one that the Buddha saw, the one that sang to him those many days ago and years ago, and of course that you are all welcome to also sing along i see trees of green red roses i see them blue for me and i think to myself

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What a wonderful world. I see skies of blue and clouds of white. The bright blessed day and dark sacred night. And I think to myself, what a wonderful world. The colors of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky, are also on the faces of people going by. I see friends shaking hands, saying, how will you do? They're really saying, I love you.

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I hear babies growl. I watch them grow They learn much more Than I'll never know And I think to myself What I wonder about more Yes, I think to myself What a wonderful... Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize

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and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

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