Good evening. Welcome to our Sunday Evening Sangha. I've been thinking of it like that. So we'll start with a few minutes of sitting. If you all just make yourselves comfortable wherever you are, whatever posture you're in. And I will ring the bell. We'll sit for maybe five or eight minutes, something like that. So I was noticing just now while I was sitting that I've been sitting a lot today.

[19:39]

We had a half day sitting. We do every other week. And so we sat in the morning and up to the talk. We gave a talk and then we had some more sitting. And I would really like to recommend that you all do some sitting if you get a chance. Particularly, you know, like a half a day is really nice. Then you have the rest of the day. to notice how it feels to have your body settled and a little bit calmer, a little less, a little less of all that stuff. So we will be entering into our practice season, you know, always in the fall, both Tassarar here, City Center, we have practice periods and although it's all modified because of the COVID and we're sheltering in place, we are offering online programs throughout the fall and also turning of the new year. We're planning a number of shorter intensives.

[20:40]

In January, Reb will be doing his three-week intensive, and then we have some others that are planned later in the spring. So I hope you'll check online the website to see what's happening. So we're going to try to do our best to bring things to you that you can do with us since we're all home. we can do things together from home um so i had i this week uh someone recommended to me a book that i just received and have read the whole thing already it's poems and they're so wonderful uh my partner and i were reading these and we just would start to cry some of them were so extraordinary it's called the first free women and these are poems written by the earliest Buddhist nuns, you know, free in the sense of many of them had literally been slaves. They were either prostitutes or they belonged.

[21:40]

There were servants and they were enslaved people, many of them in poverty, some of them very wealthy, but also given by their families in marriage. So they had no options. A few of them, you know, snuck out at night, cut off their hair and ran away from home. And the main The main punchline of every one of these poems is this experience they have in their practice. So there's the freedom of actually leaving the house and running away from your parents, and so that's one kind of freedom. But the freedom that they're talking about in these poems is the freedom they find in the core of themselves, that it's not about a place, it's about this experience. So I just thought I'd read you one short poem. Here's the book. The First Free Women, poems of the early Buddhist nuns. This is a poem by Chitta, or means heart. Somehow I kept climbing, though tired, hungry and weak, old too.

[22:44]

At the top of the mountain, I spread my outer robe on a rock to dry, set down my staff and bowl, took a deep breath and looked around. It was windy up there. And as I was leaning back against a large gray rock, the darkness I had carried up and down a million mountains slipped off my shoulders and swept itself away on the wind. So anyway, this is just a, I can't say enough about how lovely this book is, and I think you'll appreciate it. I was also thinking particularly about men, I thought, How often, what a privilege I felt to me to hear inside these women's stories, you know, which are not so often available. I've heard many, many stories of male ancestors and Zen ancestors and so on. So to have these inside stories of the awakening of women and the really different circumstances, for them, it was a really amazing, freedom was an amazing experience that they had no possibility of even imagining.

[23:55]

you know, when they were young girls. So anyway, I think it's quite transformative and a real privilege to be able to see inside the minds and the hearts of these lovely human beings. So what we've been talking about or started talking about these last few weeks is this text called The Transmission of Light. So for those of you who perhaps haven't come before, to one of these meetings. We've been looking at this text by Keizan Jokin, who along with Dogen Zenji is viewed in Japan as one of the two founding ancestors of Soto Zen. So he's a very important character in terms of the institution itself, Soto Zen. So Keizan lived and he taught between 1264 and 1325. So a little bit after Dogen. Dogen died in 1260. And this transmission of light is probably his most important of his writings.

[25:00]

It's basically 53 stories of enlightened teachers starting with Shakyamuni Buddha. So we talked about Mahakashapa and then Ananda and so on and so on. And I've skipped ahead to chapter 15, which is Nagarjuna. I was thinking about Nagarjuna. I thought, oh, you know, it's a little bit like... Ocean swimming, when you kind of go into the deep end, you know, after you get away from the shelf and then you go out where it's really, really deep. Nagarjuna has the teachings that he has basically brought forward for us, literally. Have that feeling of coming from way down deep. You know, when we really try to find underneath our basic common sense and our basic way of carrying ourselves in the world, there's this kind of call from these depths. And that's where I always feel like Nagarjuna is calling from the depths. So this chapter 15 doesn't talk too much about Nagarjuna's teaching.

[26:03]

It really covers two points about Nagarjuna's transmission, his enlightenment. One is the discussion he's having with his teacher about the nature and the location of what they're calling the wish-granting jewel, which has been Is it a real jewel? Is it an imaginary jewel? What is this jewel? And basically the jewel is our Buddha nature, our actual true self, that identity that many of us have a very hard time imagining ourselves to be. Of course, the whole point of the Buddha Dharma is for us to come to realize that we're already enlightened, we already have the Buddha nature, and now we just have to act like it. That's the hard part. Okay, let's act like it. We're already Buddha, so now what? How do we behave? The other point of this story is that Zen students, according to Seizan and the tradition, not Seizan, excuse me, Keizan, should not practice by themselves, that we should always practice in community, face to face with one another.

[27:07]

So this meeting of self and other is right where our understanding takes place. know the realization that there's no really separate there's no boundary there there's no separate self that everything is connected to us exquisitely so and so And Nagarjuna himself, it isn't very much known about him. And you can imagine he's second century of the common era. So there isn't much left of what might have been facts of his life. And also he was a monk. So, I mean, what is there to say? He had some robes, he had a bowl, and he lived in a single cell. And he thought a lot about things. And he wrote amazing, amazing, helpful verses. For us, centuries and centuries later, I had a friend who was a writer and she said, it's like scratching in the cave walls.

[28:08]

You know, you're leaving a trace of yourself for later generations to find. And in his case, a tremendous impact. Scholars do believe that he was from southern India and that he lived about 400 years after the Buddha's party nirvana. And what's really interesting and something that I think you'll begin to appreciate about Buddhist teaching is the way stories are told and then told in such a way that time becomes kind of a little bit fluid. Like you can move time sense around. You can say, well, this actually happened then, and then you tell a story about it, but then you make it happen even earlier and so on. I think it's called retroactive attribution. So I tell stories about something in the past that then – make that past change. I changed the past by how I tell this story. And that's what history really is about, right? Retroactive attribution. Things tend to glow and get bigger the further in history, further back in history they are.

[29:13]

So Nagarjuna's own birth is prophesied in the Lankavatara Sutra. So Nagarjuna is born in the second century. The Lankavatara Sutra is produced in the fourth century. And it says he's going to be born. 20 years ago so this is kind of an example of this prophecy happening after the fact so that way you can sort of you look at the lack of a tar sutra and if you don't understand that this was written later you think oh the guardian is birth is going to be is is prophecy now i don't know if that's making any sense but but that's okay i'm going to keep going uh So this practice of retroactive attribution plays a major role in much of Zen history, as a matter of fact. Something which when I first, you know, found out about this a couple of decades ago, maybe now, I was really disappointed because when I came to Zen Center, I thought everything we chanted and everything that was taught was, you know, historic.

[30:13]

It wasn't mythic. You know, I figure all the names of the Buddhist ancestors. they all knew each other, and then they pass their Dharma on to the next one, and so on and so forth from Shakyamuni Buddha up until Suzuki Roshi and so on. So of course, that's not even practically possible that any of that could have happened. But it's a wonderful story. And so I wanted to recommend another book, which I found to be really delightful to read. It's by John McRae. It's called seeing through Zen, seeing through Zen. And seeing through Zen has this double meaning. It's like seeing the world through Zen is one meaning. And the other one is seeing through Zen, you know, like seeing the tricks that they're being played and creating Zen history. And Dr. McCray does a really wonderful job of explaining all of that. And that's where I first heard this term, retroactive attribution was in in this book. So we'll look at that some more.

[31:16]

when in in you know further on in the transmission of light we get to the chinese and ancestors um in particularly bodhidharma and the sixth ancestor you know uh this is basically the the era called the tang dynasty the golden age of zen which was said to be tang dynasty was 750 to 1000 of the common era and that was the golden age of zen that's when the greatest of the zen masters lived and taught and all of their stories are well known by all of us. But in fact, the Golden Age of Zen was written in the Song Dynasty, which was 750 to 1300. So many centuries later, the literati of the Song Dynasty wrote these amazing stories about the Tang, making the teachers of the Tang very famous. And of course, in the The Song Dynasty teachers were the inheritors of these famous people. So that's kind of how it works.

[32:17]

My teacher was so famous, and how do you know? Because I wrote all about him. I told everybody how great he was. So this is part of the mechanism of mythologizing our Zen ancestors, of enlarging them. Maybe there's just a little trace of someone named Bodhidharma. you know, some little writing somewhere, but actually we have many, many, actually we have many, many texts attributed to him that were written centuries later. So, you know, kind of an important point, but as John McRae himself says, he loves Zen. It doesn't change his affection for the stories to know that they're just stories, you know, that they're not historic. So I feel that way myself. You know, they're just they're wonderful stories. So whoever told them. So perhaps one of the most important mythical roles in Zen history is actually attributed to the Garjuna himself. You know, having to do with these teachings of the Buddha that were said to be given long, long ago to the Buddha's most senior students.

[33:24]

So there's a story that I've read and you can read about how the Buddha took his senior students up to a place called Vulture Peak. And on Vulture Peak, he lectured to them these very special and very advanced teachings. And they were so startling and so radical that the Buddha said they needed to be hidden away for hundreds of years, that most people wouldn't be ready for these teachings. So that story is told in a book I mentioned to you earlier when we were studying the Heart Sutra called the Heart Attack Sutra. And that has to do with the startling teachings that the Buddha gave on Vulture Peak, that some of his older monks were very disturbed to have their belief systems flipped over, these emptiness teachings. So according to legend, after the Buddha had given these teachings to his senior monks, he then gave them to the Nagas.

[34:25]

the snake people, I mentioned them last week. The Nagas are half human, half snake, and Nagarjuna was the sage of the Nagas. So he taught the Nagas. He was a teacher of the snake people. And when he converted to Buddhism, so did they. So they also became disciples of the Buddha. So for hundreds of years, the Nagas held these under the sea. And then when Nagarjuna came along, as predicted in the Lankavatara Sutra, they gave these Sutras to him. So I have a picture of that very moment when the Nagas are giving the sutras to the Buddha. See, I think I got to share my, how do I do that? It's up here somewhere. Share my screen. Okay. Okay. Can you all see that? Yeah?

[35:28]

Okay. Good. So there's Nagarjuna, and he's holding these sutras, those long sheets or sutras, and that's the naga, a snake person who's brought them up from the water, and he's handed the Prajnaparamita sutras to Nagarjuna. And Nagarjuna is also, I don't know if you can see, but he has all these snakes. He's snake people, so he has oftentimes depicted with these snake people, coming up around his head this is an interesting book too it's not it's not the classic teaching that we're going to be talking about the middle way teaching but it's another text that Nagarjuna wrote I love I like the cover so so So these are texts. These texts that are being handed to Nagarjuna by the snake people are the Prajnaparamita, you know, the Heart Sutra, the 8,000-line Prajnaparamita, Wisdom Beyond Wisdom, the Diamond Sutra.

[36:37]

So these are our emptiness teachings. And, you know, we rely on these texts. This is the foundational text for Zen understanding and for this really fairly radical turn in the road that became what's known as the Mahayana. or the great vehicle in which everybody is on their way to Buddhahood. There's no such thing as, you know, just ending and being done, as in the idea of an arhat who doesn't have to come back. They're finished. In fact, the poetry by these nuns, as beautiful as they are, all of them terminate in freedom. So what each of them has found for herself is freedom. And the kind of amazement of that doesn't follow they don't follow with and then i'm going to go teach this freedom to others there's not that feeling as you'll hear in a in a in a mahayana poem or uh someone bodhisattva would be saying well now i'm going to dedicate my my my liberation to the welfare of all i think that language is something that was

[37:44]

emblematic of the Mahayana, it's not that it's missing that these women weren't compassionate or they didn't have, it just wasn't part of the tradition to add on this return to the marketplace with gift bestowing hands. As we say, you know, routinely in our rituals, we're always reminding ourselves that whatever merit comes from our own freedom is to be given for the benefit of others. You know, it's nothing. It's fine. I mean, it's nice that you become free. That's a good thing. But then that's the point of it, is to help other beings, to help free them. So this would be, without exception, you're on your way to Buddhahood. That's the Mahayana, the great vehicle. Everyone's going to be a Buddha without exception. That's what we're doing here. And that's the purpose of our life, is to... wake up and then to help others to do so as well. So in looking at Nagarjuna and his role in explicating the perfection of wisdom sutras, as I said last week, we are now placed solidly in the middle way teachings.

[38:55]

The middle way is the very first thing the Buddha taught. When he gave his first sermon, he said, monks, avoid the extremes. and follow the middle way. So Nagarjuna's famous text, his masterwork is called the fundamental teaching of the middle way. So this is, I've said several times before, this is a really important, kind of like a pivotal structure for our practice and for our understanding of what it is to be. relating to the teaching as a non-dual teaching. Duel would be that there are two things. Non-dual would be that they're not separate. There are no two things. Self and other are not separate. Just looks like that. That's the tricky part. Things are not exactly the way they look. You have to go deep down into that deep water to find out what is actually so. So this is using language to take those

[40:00]

deep dives. So I'm going to try my best in the next few weeks to make these teachings, Nagarjuna's teachings accessible to you. And yet, you know, it takes years and much repetition to even have some familiarity with, you know, what it's like to give up reference points, you know, to swim without the aid of direction or time or person, you know, that basically to just be. we just be this is like the ultimate realization is just being itself without any mental elaborations without the storytelling and yet we use stories in order to help ourselves understand you know the guardian is telling stories to help us to take that dive down below where stories no longer can be found um so i'm going to try and he does an amazing job but it's really tricky to read very challenging I do think if you have a wish to study this yourself, as I've mentioned, this is the fundamental wisdom of the middle way.

[41:08]

And Jake Garfield is the professor who does commentary about this is Nagarjuna's masterwork, fundamental wisdom of the middle way. And as you can see, I've been trying for years to get a hold of it. I've got all these little post-its. They're helpful. It's like, oh yeah, that's right. So, and the fact is that they're actually difficult to grasp by design. It's not an accident that we can't get a hold of this. You know, getting a hold of something is the cause of suffering. Second noble truth, grasping is the cause of suffering. So if you think you've got it, you got it, you know, I got it. Then, you know, you're actually reifying a concept. You're making it into a thing. You're making it a substance like you do with yourself. I, I'm here. Get out of my way. You know, that way of reifying ourselves is the cause of our suffering. And reifying concepts is the source of our suffering. So these teachings basically are offered kind of like ocean swimming, right?

[42:13]

You just keep swimming. And there's a teaching. There's another one. But just keep swimming. You can't get a hold of them. You can't swim if you try to get a hold of these teachings. So you have to just be in the water with them. Kind of move through them and allow them to have an impact on you, which they will, you know, little by little. You kind of get it, you know, you get how to swim. Begin to become familiar with deep water. So the work of taking us... you know, whatever it is that we think we've gotten a hold of, you know, that's actually the real work of most Zen stories is like if you got something, they take it. If you don't have something, they give it to you. So either way, you know, it's all personal. It's all about what is it? Where are you right now sticking? What's your sticking place? And how can we help to oil that spot? How can we help each other to notice it's stuck? And then if you will, to get some help in loosening, knocking out the pegs, as they say.

[43:14]

and loosening the nails, pulling out the nails. I think I mentioned to you before that I often like to say to the new students, as was said to me, Zen is not about what you're going to get. It's about what you're going to lose, you know, whatever it is you're holding on to. And what a relief. Like this beautiful nun when her worries just blew away. That moment of, you know, just, whoa, what happened? They're gone. Never to return. So before even attempting to look at Nagarjuna's text on the middle way, which I'm going to do next week, I wanted to say again that none of this perfection of wisdom teaching makes any sense until we have some familiarity with the teaching of the two truths. And this is what Nagarjuna specializes in. He specializes in teaching the two truths. There's a very famous chapter.

[44:15]

If none of the other chapters are accessible to you, I think the one I'm going to read next week, and this is a little bit of it, chapter 24 is the most famous, and also it has a verse called verse 18, which has probably been commented upon more than any other verse in the Mahayana philosophical tradition. This is kind of the pivot of Nagarjuna's insight. into the two truths. So here's a little bit of a sample. This is from chapter 24. The Buddha's teaching of the Dharma is based on two truths. A truth of worldly conventions, the ones we know, and an ultimate truth, a deep water. Those who do not understand the distinction drawn between these two truths do not understand the Buddha's profound truth. Without a foundation in the conventional or worldly truth, the significance of the ultimate cannot be taught.

[45:22]

Without understanding the significance of the ultimate, liberation is not achieved. So here's these two truths. The conventional truth, you know by heart, that's how you live. We live in the conventional truth or the worldly truth. It's just what I'm doing right now. I'm just... running around in worldly truths. I've been taught to do it. I know how to do it. I'm using the language I was taught as a child and making, I think, making sentences and paragraphs and doing all of this stuff that I've been trained to do. It's our worldly truth and we can do it together. And we do it all the time. And that's how we live with our worldly truth. So the ultimate truth is the one that basically you know, is elusive, is the one that keeps kind of slipping away, is a little bit, you know, over here, can't quite grab it, no matter how fast I turn my head, it's sort of lurking in the shade, you know, it's like the source, the inexpressible, the inconceivable, that which can't be said, that which can't be known by concepts, by language, where language drops off, ultimate truth kicks in.

[46:34]

And, you know, so when we're quiet, one of the nice things about sitting meditation is there are moments of time when that conventional worldly chatter slows down and even pauses briefly. And then there's this amazing context for our life, you know, here's the content is all the stories we tell and then there's the context for the stories, which has no boundary is unbounded. beyond what we can imagine. And we know, we kind of know that it's there. You know, we use words like universe, you know, otherworldly, we have a sense of that grand, grand scheme of things, the universe. And yet we kind of snap back into our personal space so quickly, kind of like, you know, gerbils jumping back into their into their holes. You know, it's scary out there. This is this great big

[47:35]

as Suzuki Roshi called, great big mind can be quite terrifying. And yet there it is, omnipresent, the universe, we are born of it. And then it's a little much. So we just do worldly truth and make habits of it and drive around in our cars and do all kinds of stuff, lots of rules, lots of ways to go. We can distract ourselves from having to have this glimpse of vastness, the vastness. And yet, you know, it calls, it calls to us all the time when we're quiet or when we're out in nature, you know, all day long, there's little whispers of this great truth. So there's a lens that I have found helpful in coming to understand the way that the Buddha taught the two truths. I mean, there's a reason he went up to Vulture Peak later on. He didn't start there. He started with his early disciples. teaching them some very basic things about worldly truth, as if the things he was teaching them were real.

[48:42]

You know, good is real, bad is real. And the way you behave will have real effects. So he taught cause and effect. He taught manners. He taught etiquette. He taught them how to live a wholesome life. You know, really, no, really, you do these things and it will go better. He taught them to not indulge, you know. not to indulge in sensual pleasures, not to get carried away with food, certainly with sex, that was a big one. There was a lot of proscription against any kind of sensual indulgences. So the monks became rather contained and quieted. They were able to move through the world very peacefully and people fed them and were happy to see them come. So this is one of the good outcomes of this. It's really important that you behave like this. So this is the first stage. The way we, you know, maybe the way we work with our own children. You know, we start telling them all kinds of things.

[49:45]

You know, lots of myths, lots of stories. All children's stories are great, but there's messages in there that kind of slip in these little moral lessons every chance we get, you know, about what happens to good little girls and boys. The Buddha taught the nature of reality, which is the major insight upon which you wake up, is when you understand the true nature of reality, that's the, aha, I get it. Understanding the true nature of reality is considered to be awakening. Because you not only understand it, but you also, I get it, you actually know it. You see it in that, not with the eyes, but you see it with your whole being. So he taught in several stages to his disciples. And for the beginners, he taught the first stage, as I was just saying. The stage we can think of as no analysis. We're not going to analyze things. You know, we're just going to keep it real simple. And he didn't say anything about the nature of phenomena.

[50:48]

So this is the first turning of the wheel. He taught the Four Noble Truths, you know. Grasping desire is the cause of your suffering. If you stop grasping and stop trying to get things that you don't already have, you'll be free of suffering. How do you practice? The Eightfold Path. It's very grounded, very basic, and still to this day, that's where we start with the students. The Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path. Right view, right intention, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right concentration, right mindfulness. A very wholesome and very effective way of practicing. So this is the stage in which he teaches the students that positive actions lead to positive results. Negative actions lead to negative results. And he said these things are real. This is true. And in this way, he instilled in them a desire to escape from samsara, the cycle of suffering, and to become fully liberated in nirvana.

[51:55]

blown out, never to return. So this is stage number one, no analysis. And stage number two, oh, one other thing. This stage, it was important for the students to believe in a self, that there was a self. And the self was defined as the doer of deeds, the one who's doing things, and the recipient of the results of those actions. So yeah, you're not a self in like the way you think of yourself. all these characteristics. I'm tall and smart and I run fast and all that. Not like that. It's more like there is a self, but it's really stripped down to being the one who does things and then the one who receives the results of what they do. That was the self in this first turning. And the one who wanders from lifetime to lifetime as a result of those choices. So you make good choices, you a better lifetime you make bad choices you come back and not so good so there's some motive there to behave yourself so the second stage so that's the first stage no analysis the second stage is called slight analysis and in this teaching phenomena do not truly exist so this is the flipping it over this is what happened on vulture peak first he told them that it does exist

[53:20]

And then they worked really hard to be good. And then he said, well, actually, phenomena don't exist. And it's like, what? So this is the second turning of the wheel. And this is Nagarjuna. Nagarjuna comes in here when these teachings are being given on Vulture Peak. So now that the students had gained confidence in the law of cause and effect, and they had renounced their worldly karmic existence, The Buddha reversed his teachings in order to detach them from clinging to themselves and to those phenomena as being truly existent. So I don't know how much sense that makes of you, but imagine if you really are good and you really accomplish all of these amazing yogic feats, you know, sitting long hours and eating very little and, you know, being very quiet and so on, you might actually free yourself from yourself. You've got to know self now. There's no self.

[54:21]

You're not selfish. You have dropped the self. The Buddha said there's no self. So he said, you know, that thing that does deeds and receives the consequences, it's not a thing. It's not a substance. It's just a flow of action and reaction. So there's really nobody there to be attached to. The problem with that is you can be attached to no self. You know, this is called the trace of no self, selfless. And another name for that is the golden chain. So the iron chain is samsara, you know, worldly existence locked into cause and effect and people aren't very nice and they're really troubling. We read the news and we feel awful and kind of like the way we're all kind of, you know, concerned right now all the time about how terrible everything is, which it does seem to be. And that all wrapped up in that is the iron chain of samsara, of the wheel of birth and death is grinding us, you know, painful consequences.

[55:27]

So you've escaped from the wheel of birth and death, but now you're trapped on the golden chain where things are great. You are free. You are done. You know, I'm sorry about you, but I'm okay. You know, and I'm kind of floating through it all. So this was a problem. This is another kind of attachment. Attachment, not to worldly attachment, to the otherworldly. Attachment to the otherworldly. So, you know, the no self self problem. So clinging and grasping to their identity as liberated was preventing his students from actually becoming liberated. For example, in the Heart Sutra, where it says, the second turning teaching, it says, there's no eyes, there's no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind, no knowledge, and no attainment. There's nothing to attain. What did you get for all your trouble? A heart attack. That's what they got.

[56:29]

Like, what? So, you know, this emptiness teaching basically dispels, it's dispelling. Like, what's the title of this book I showed you? The Dispeller of Disputes. The Dispeller of Illusions. Whatever you've got there, don't hold it. It's just open ocean swimming. You just keep swimming. There's nothing there. There's nothing to be. There's nothing to do. Just keep swimming. Say hi to all the other swimmers. No attainment. Nothing to carry with you. What do you want to carry with you while you're swimming? That would be an impediment or a hindrance. So at this stage, the Buddha teaches that phenomena are empty of inherent existence. They don't have any substance. There's nothing there. There's no there there. So then there's the third stage. So that's the second stage, emptiness teaching. The third stage is called thorough analysis.

[57:29]

Now you're really going down deep. And in this way of study, this stage of understanding, in which the true nature of reality transcends both notions of existence and notions of non-existence. So this is kind of a subtle variation on the emptiness teachings. Transcending, but there is something and transcending that there isn't something. You know, it's getting more, it's thinner. You're getting a little bit thinner in terms of what you might attach to. So in some versions of the teachings says the true reality is emptiness. And others assert that emptiness is nothing at all. There's nothing. You can read both of those interpretations. There's nothing at all, or there's this thing that's dependently co-arising. There is something. It does seem like there's something. It doesn't seem like there's nothing. But what is that something that we seem to be experiencing?

[58:30]

So Nagarjuna does not fall on the side of there's nothing. He says, yeah, there is experience of this thing that isn't like you think. Something is happening, but you don't know what it is. It's just arising, appearing. And then we name it. We give it names. It's our baby. We call it. We call the names. We've named everything. We're always going around pointing and naming things in more and more and more words all the time. I think I was saying to you, there's another million words going to be added to the... So it won't end, you know, we're not going to give up. It's just, you know, the language is just like, you know, maybe we won't be able to speak, there'll be so many words. So the primary objective in any case is to free human beings from all conceptual elaborations. The primary objective of all of these teachings is to free human beings, to free us, from all conceptual fabrications, storytelling, fantasies, make-believe.

[59:42]

It's just a story. It's a good story. It's a great story. We like stories. It's just a story. And then the end. Let me tell another one. These conceptual fabrications are the very factors that obscure realization of the true nature of reality. So it's like the clouds covering the moon. That's the image. Or seeing the moon through ivy. We can't quite see it because we have all these ideas that are blocking the light. So certain teachings are directed at freeing the mind from clinging to things as real, material, objects and other teachings are directed at freeing the mind from clinging to views or concepts or ideas as real so you have freeing the mind from clinging to things objects our toys stuff we own including our own bodies things and then the other types of teachings are to free our minds from clinging to ideas or views non-material immaterial but yet powerful

[61:00]

Our stories are powerful. Our ideas of things are powerful. So in order to help us to understand how reality is actually beyond all of our concepts of what it might be, words can't reach it. That's a kind of familiar Zen saying. Words can't reach reality itself. Nor can it bother reality. Nor can it dissuade reality. Nor can it discourage reality. It's just... Tell reality to stop. Well, you can't. So you are reality. So we're just like waves in the water. That's another image for us. We just come out of the water of reality, and we kind of make a little shape, and then we just go back in again. And then a couple of us come out, and we talk to each other, and then we go back in again. So this is the understanding of non-separation, non-dual. It's just water. It's just water making waves. That's all. So what is it that actually exists?

[62:03]

So I think there's a very helpful metaphor called the moon reflected in the water. So all inner and all outer phenomena, phenomena are things that we experience with our senses, things we smell, taste, see, touch, hear, feel. Those are phenomena. So each, all inner thoughts are phenomena, all inner, and all outer phenomena that compose both samsara and the circling, iron chain, and nirvana, golden chain, exist as dependently arisen mirror appearances. It's just an appearance. It's just, yeah, it's there. Do you see it? I see it. Do you see it? I do. I see it. That's all. So like the moon reflected in the water. Okay, so the moon reflected in the water. So get an image of that for yourself.

[63:05]

There's the moon reflected in a nice quiet pond. Okay, so that's the scene. Without a cloud-free sky or a radiant moon and without a clear body of water and without a perceiver, the one who's looking, if we miss any one of these conditions, There will be no moon reflected in the water. And none of the factors of our existence are independent of all the others. So that's what dependent core rising means. The moon reflected in the water depends on the moon, no clouds, the water, and me. And all things are like that. That's just a simple example. But everything's like that. You need the observer and the observed and the things that aren't obstructing my observations. All of that comes up together, and that's an appearance. That's what an appearance is. And then it goes away. I don't just stand there looking at the moon for a year.

[64:05]

I kind of drive to the parking area, look at the moon, and then I go home. So it's all very transient. There's not a permanent scene that I just want to stay with all the time. I just want to look at this thing. So I'm moving around. The pentacorn rising depends a lot on me. And what I'm looking at and what I'm willing to stay with and what I'm willing to focus on. So if I'm not focusing on it, might as well not be there. Gone. I don't even know if Whole Foods is still there. I haven't seen it for a while. So as far as I know, gone. So it's all dependent on the observer, the observed, the conditions and so on. That's what reality is. And yet... still the moon in the water is a mere appearance because it is empty of inherent existence there's not the slightest shred of a moon that can be found in the water that is it's not really there so that's getting a little deeper that's going a little bit deeper down in the water that's going under the reflection of the moon now we're going whoa it's not there

[65:19]

It's not there. You put your hand in the water and what happened in the moon? And that's not there either. It's all just appearances, dependently co-arisen. That's what emptiness means. It means it's empty of being there in the way we think, of being static or being set. So this is true of all phenomena which appear due to causes and conditions. And at the same time as they appear, wisdom analyzes that their true nature cannot find the slightest trace of their actual existence. No matter how hard we look for ourself, our actual self, no matter how, you know, introspective or, you know, open-hearted surgery, whatever you want to do to find yourself, nobody's ever found it. It's not in there. It's not out there. It's not... you know it's not the whole thing it's not there it's just an appearance and we're so attached to it we're so caught by it you know so much suffering comes of our our fear about this you know little substance little man that isn't there it wasn't there again today oh i wish he'd go away

[66:38]

So in the teaching of the middle way, of the second turning, dependent core rising is explained as the union of appearance and emptiness, thereby freeing the middle way from the two extremes of there is nothing and there really is something. So on one side, emptiness, dependent core rising, and on the other side, you can't find it, you know? outside of those conditions arising there's no thing there so but there are the conditions arising there is an appearance so there's not nothing but then when you look for it it's just appearance there's there's no thing there's no thing but it's not nothing so this is where the this is where it gets you know like this is where the part where it's really hard to hold on to this stuff because it's like wow wait a minute do that again you know it's like a sleight of hand And it feels like magic. They're working magic on our way of understanding reality.

[67:41]

So here's a poem by Milarepa, the Tibetan lord of yogis. While we look with our eyes, and it seems that things come and go, when we analyze with our intelligence, we cannot find any coming or going at all. So upon analysis. Therefore, know that coming and going are like dreams and water moons. When we look with our eyes and it seems that things come and go, when we analyze with our intelligence, we cannot find any coming or going at all. Therefore know that coming and going are like dreams and water moons. And then what about compassion? I think that's one of the problems with the emptiness teachings. It's like, well, what do you care about? If it's just all like a water moon, why should I care? Why should I get in a sweat about all the terrible things that are going on November 3rd?

[68:47]

Why should I worry about that? It's empty. It's too easy. It's too easy. So we have the bodhisattva vow. Although I see this life as but a dream, and I cultivate compassion for sentient beings who do not realize this. Although I see this life as but a dream, I cultivate compassion for sentient beings who do not realize this. So the true nature of reality transcends all conceptual fabrications. It's open and spacious, and best of all, it's relaxed, utterly content. You know, so basically Nagarjuna will deny in his masterwork, chapter after chapter, that it is possible to assert anything from the ultimate standpoint. From the ultimate standpoint, you can't assert, you can't make any assertions. This is like that, and that's like that, and this is that. Those are all, he just tears anything anyone asserts, he pulls apart.

[69:51]

He reduces it down to absurdity. So that's his main method. And he will urge that all truth is relative and conventional. There's only worldly truth. As soon as you look for it, it vanishes, like the moon in water. So it has no substance, but that's all we've got. There's this insubstantial appearances. And if we try to attach to them, they simply float away. So this helps us to learn how to treat things. How do we treat things that are insubstantial? Maybe just more casually, a little more relaxed, a little happier. I don't know, there's different ways. Encouragement is to be more joyful, and more friendly, and more kind. You know, it's like, well, why not? You know, why not? Why not be kind? The Dalai Lama says that my religion is kindness. So the author of this text on the Middle Way teachings of Nagarjuna, Jake Garfield, who I mentioned, says that Nagarjuna's teaching is not an incoherent mysticism, but it's rather a logical tightrope at the very limits of language and metaphysics.

[71:13]

So Nagarjuna has got all of us up there on this logical tightrope, you know. And it's so... It feels like that when you read it. It's like, wait a minute, I think I got it. No, no, no, I don't. I don't got it. I don't got it. I don't got it. Yeah, but there you are. You're still on the logical tightrope. So next week, I'm going to read through the most famous chapter of his work, Chapter 24, Examination of the Four Noble Truths, which I think is pretty accessible, actually. I was reading some of the other chapters, and I thought, nope, I don't think so. But Chapter 24, I think we can all understand. in the light of the two truths. And it's pretty clear. I mean, he's making a very clear case. And there's this verse 18 that I mentioned, which is the most extensively quoted and commented upon of all verses in Mahayana philosophy. So kind of a key. I once asked my teacher to calligraph it for me. It's just four lines. And I was like, holy cow, that's really important. You know, that's really important.

[72:17]

It's and I hope I can express to you why I think that's so. So we have, it's now six o'clock, boy. And I see a raised hand, and if any of the rest of you would like to stay a little longer, I'm more than happy to stay with you and answer questions or hear your comments or requests. Is it Montaigne? Is that right? There you are. I think I unmuted you.

[72:58]

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