Good evening, everybody. So I'm surprised that we managed to do that, get through all six Paramitas. We haven't done it yet, but at least we're up to number six. Also, I recognize that there's a bunch of visitors in the class, and it won't be possible to summarize what we have been talking about for five weeks and catch you up to date. So just whatever you can gather from what you hear, enjoy it. So before we go into the Prasanna Paramita, the Paramita of Wisdom, I want to review, just a little bit, Jnana Paramita, the meditation

[01:06]

Paramita, and then we'll go into our discussion mode and see what we've discovered about that. And I'm always going back. Every time we discuss any one of the Paramitas, I'm always going back to contextualize it in terms of Bodhicitta. This whole thing is about developing thoroughly this limitless mind of Bodhicitta, the mind of the Bodhisattva. This mind is an unobstructed mind. It sees that reality itself is unobstructed. There are no chunks in reality. There's only a flow. And of course, the biggest chunk of all is our self. That's the one that is a huge chunk, and that causes us to live in a world in which there's nothing

[02:07]

but chunks, and they keep bumping into each other, and it's a big problem. But the Bodhicitta doesn't see that, doesn't see chunks. It sees through the self and sees all things as flowing in and out of one another. And things flow in and out of each other because things are impermanent, so they're constantly transforming. I mean, you know, we know this scientifically. It's obvious that energy is neither gained nor lost. Anything that lives dies, its molecules recombine, and new life forms come out of the same stuff that was there before, and stuff is constantly recombining. So things are flowing in and out of each other, right? And we know that when a creature dies, this happens, but it's actually happening all the time because we're always in that state of change and fluctuation, and that's the way it always is. So there's no obstructions. Therefore, we're all the same stuff. Therefore, naturally, we love one another. So the

[03:16]

Bodhisattva has a great spirit of kindness for everything because he or she understands that the way that things flow and go, impermanent, changing all the time, and so naturally you have a good wish for everything, and you want to promote everything. This is the bodhicitta we're talking about. Now, this is a nice idea. We all like this. I enjoy it. Everybody enjoys it. But our job as Bodhisattva practitioners is to go beyond, it's a nice idea, to, we know it's true in our own experience. And this is where we got involved with jnana-paramita because with jnana-paramita now we're at the stage in the development of the bodhicitta, having practiced all these other practices, now we come to jnana-paramita, settled focused meditation, in which we have some hope, realistic hope, that we can actually see firsthand that this is true. So that's, you know,

[04:26]

a little background review about jnana-paramita. Now we also talked about how, so we went into some detail about jnana. Remember we went through the nine stages of meditation and, yeah, there's seats up here. We went through the nine stages of meditation and the five obstacles and the eight antidotes to the five obstacles, and I'm not going to go through all that again, but basically what it amounts to is, just to bring it down to two factors, and these are the things that, you know, I was suggesting that we look at in our meditation for this week. Number one, how are we doing with distraction? Have we noticed distraction in zazen and have we applied some antidotes to distraction and made an effort to focus the mind on the object of meditation and not to allow it to be distracted so much? Understanding, of course, that there's some distraction in zazen, we're not going to sit there with zero distraction, but are we working on it? Are we actually, you know, bringing the

[05:31]

mind back with the rope of mindfulness over and over again and reducing the level of distraction? And if we have done that and the mind is relatively settled, are we working with the, then the issue is not that the mind is distracted, but now the issue is how are we working with the object? Are we making the object vivid enough and alive enough, you know, is it alive enough? Or is it starting to get dull because our mind is sinking? So I was asking you to consider that, you know, in your zazen practice. How's the object of meditation? If you are with the object, you aren't with it, then are you trying to come with it? If you are with it, are you developing the object and not letting it, letting your mind sink? So have you noticed that? Have you practiced with that? What are you doing to develop the object more? And with many of you, in the practice period, I was giving you an individual interview, some suggestions as to how to develop the object. And certainly

[06:31]

next week as we go into this sesheen, we'll have a chance to develop the object even more, right? That's what we'll do. We'll just be developing the object and almost nothing else for a number of days. So that's where we arrived at, at the end of last week. So now, if everybody would find a partner. And now, those of you who are visitors and are not familiar with this, we're going to have a chat now. That's going to last the first three minutes or so, three or four minutes. One person listens carefully. Then in the next three or four minutes, the other person talks. And what we're going to talk about is what I just mentioned. The homework assignment was to work on your meditation and look at your meditation in terms of distraction and developing the object. So we're going to have a conversation about that. If you're new this time and you didn't do the homework and

[07:35]

you don't know what's going on or something like that, then you can just react to what you're hearing from the review right now. Or if you're doing some other practice, say you're doing one of the other Paramitas and you decided to stay with that one for longer, you can talk about that or whatever else that you are working on in your practice so that you have something to say. And if you don't feel like saying anything, then don't say anything. You can invite your partner to talk more or you can just sort of enjoy the wonderful cacophony of 30 or 40 people talking at the same time and just sit and enjoy your breath while that's happening. Okay? So now you have to find somebody right next to you. Okay? Everybody pair up to your partner. And what did you hear your partner reporting that was of interest or useful? It occurred to me as everybody was talking that it's worth saying that, of course, it's pretty difficult to actually talk with any precision

[08:38]

or accuracy about your meditation practice. I mean, maybe you noticed this already. And in some ways, it may be better not to talk about it at all, because one only, sort of, maybe you would say something and then start believing that what you said described what actually happened in practice. It doesn't really exactly. So, however, so maybe we could say with some justification, let's not speak about our meditation experience. On the other hand, this would not be so good either, maybe, because then maybe we would feel secretive about it and also we would not be able to maybe get some other perspectives by listening to other people talk and by getting feedback when we talk. So maybe, to some extent, while it probably would not be the greatest thing in the world to be constantly, like, after every period of zazen, having long discussions about

[09:40]

what we experienced in that period of zazen, this probably would not be worth doing. Or even to have extensive discussions frequently about our zazen practice. Still, once in a while, particularly in the doksan room, I think it's worth bringing it up. So I wanted to sort of make that little disclaimer before we go on. But what was it that you heard that you want to let us know about that was of interest? I mean, now that I said that, nobody wants to... But anyway, what did you hear that was of interest? And did you hear any ways that any experiences that people have or ways that they found of working with their distraction or with developing the object? Anybody? Surely someone did. Yes. Well, my partner was somebody who was very new to the practice and who had had very little instruction and found it very, very difficult to deal with all the stuff in

[10:41]

her mind. And in fact, in the beginning, she got through the 40 minutes by inventing distractions. And then she read Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind and started paying attention to her breath, which she didn't realize was the object of meditation, but found that she was able to let distractions kind of come and go with the breath. And I was very encouraged by that. Really encouraged that somebody would take those instructions so seriously and apply them and really enjoy the result. Others? Really? My partner said that sometimes she experiences fear and she just lets it,

[11:48]

she lets herself experience it completely. And it just goes through her body and leaves the body. And I forgot what she said, but she feels quite free of it afterwards. Well, that's interesting. That might be a case of where appropriate switching the object, maybe, from the breath to fear as it arises and using fear as a meditation object rather than seeing it as a distraction. Interesting. Yeah. I have to quote that. My partner was curious about the whole phrase, refining the object of meditation, especially vis-a-vis choosing an object of meditation. For me and for a lot of us, it's the breath and the posture. We know that there are other traditions

[12:49]

and also just other kind of approaches that choose, you know, gosh, come on, or any number of things. And she expressed a curiosity about that whole topic much more. Yeah. Maybe we'll get into that in this session, talk about that a little bit more. My partner has been sitting for quite a while but hasn't sat for some years and is coming back to it. And he said that he used the techniques that Nick discussed this morning in the lecture about exhaling completely, like getting all the breath out and then inhaling again. And in that process found himself becoming very interested in his breath and counting on the exhalation. So that's what he's interested in, as I understood it,

[13:56]

interested in the process of breathing completely, the inhalation and the exhalation all at the same time. Yeah, that's a good way, you know, like in the beginning to press the air out of your diaphragm, even when you think you've already exhaled all the air out, to press more out. And then you can really feel the sensation of breathing in the lower abdomen and it deepens your breath. That's a nice way in the very beginning of each period of zazen. Breathe in through your nose but then breathe out through your mouth and press on the diaphragm. And then after that, after doing that two or three times, just breathing normally in and out the nose and you have much more awareness down here. And the breath is more easily followed and deeper. So that's a good way. Anything else? Yes, Martha. My partner spoke about having some difficulties at this point in their lives and

[15:00]

the influence of just sitting. In other words, it wasn't really a lot of conscientious kind of very focused effort to look at the problem and to dissect it or to look at the breath, but it was just sitting resulted in a kind of more generous or spacious relationship to this problem that they're working with. I think Suzuki Roku says something about the fact that sitting itself is enlightening. It's not quite what the assignment was, but just to look at an object of meditation and focus on it. It was like the mental effort was quite broad in this case. You mean that the just sitting was unfocused? You mean no object of meditation? Well, it wasn't a lot of mental activity. In other words, it was harmonizing. It was just breathing. Breathing and posture. Not a lot of mental activity.

[16:04]

Yeah, well, that's a really great point in that a lot of times if you have a life problem or something you're working on, you think that you should think about it in zazen or something. Work it through. But no, just to sit there without focusing on it is itself quite helpful and clarifying even though you never think about it. Yeah. Something else? Yeah. My partner said that, I think this is what she said, that for the last couple of years or so developing her bodhicitta hasn't been her focus and that she's been distracted by a veil of a different kind of perception that she's now trying to combat with this new awareness of developing the bodhicitta and this process of this class, if I understood it correctly, is helping her combat that, but that it's not going to happen. And it's sort of the conflict that she's working on. Yeah, it's not that easy to change direction

[17:06]

when you have a visual going a certain way. Others? No? Yeah, my partner was talking about the difficulty of in the morning meditation of staying awake, being seduced by that feeling of sleep, euphoria. It's one of the true enemies of meditation practice. And what was she doing? She had her eyes closed. No, but I mean, what was she doing to try to wake herself up? Um, she wasn't being very specific. She didn't want to give away her secrets. Seduction is very hard. Okay, well, thank you. That was pretty

[18:12]

interesting. And I want to go on to talk about wisdom now, which is not too easy to do. I don't know if any of you have read the Shantideva's text about wisdom. It's very difficult to stay with and understand. It's very tough going, but I managed to work my way through it. And I will try to find a way to talk about it. Not the way that, you know, sort of taking off from where he is, because it would be basically extremely boring and not so useful to follow along with Shantideva's argument. However, before I do that, I want to make an apology for something that I said in last week's class. You know, when you talk about the Dharma, you try to be accurate, but sometimes you get excited. And you might say something that is not so well considered. This occasionally happens. And last week, I think I did say something like that. I was thinking a lot of the conference that

[19:18]

I had been to the previous weekend, and I was very influenced by something that I heard from one of the Tibetan teachers. And I made a statement, something like, well, of course, in Tibetan Buddhism, they scarcely meditate. Fortunately for me, somebody in the class has intimate knowledge of Tibetan Buddhism. And afterward, you know, grabbed me and said, what? And pointed out that, in fact, in many, in all schools of Tibetan Buddhism, there's extensive meditation. And in some, more than others, you know, in some schools, there's quite a bit of meditation. And some schools are famous for, Tibetan schools like the Kagyus are famous for meditation and the practice of the three-year retreat and so on. So, she set me straight. And I promised her that I would let you know about that and apologize for having said something that sounded like a good idea at

[20:19]

the time and helped me to make my point. Unfortunately, it wasn't true. So, and thank you for Diana for reminding me of that. And don't hesitate in future anybody who notices these occasional slips. Very rare, very rare. But they do happen. And when you notice them, you can let me know in the class or just afterward, as Diana did. So, prajna, wisdom. Specifically, it means in Buddhism, the wisdom that cognizes reality as it actually is, rather than cognizing it as we usually do, which is in a confused way. There's a famous, one of the most sort of famous things in Zen, all of Zen religious literature

[21:21]

that kind of sets Zen apart as a school, is the saying of the sixth ancestor. And this is quoted in Aiken Rose's book, where he says, dhyana, meditation, and prajna, wisdom, are one and the same. You can't separate one from the other. He says, dhyana is like the lamp and prajna is like the light. So, that's why Zen is called the Zen school, because it's really into dhyana, which is the Sanskrit word for what comes in Japanese to be Zen. And why meditation is so important in Zen is because it's inseparable from the wisdom that cognizes things as they are. So, in Zen practice, we don't think of meditation as a tool to get at something. We think of it as actually the essence of wisdom itself. And this conflation of meditation and wisdom is carried even further by the founder of our school in Japan, Dogen Zenji, who says something like,

[22:26]

just to assume this posture, I think Suzuki Roshi says this also, going from Dogen, just to assume this posture, just to show up, just to make effort in Zazen, no matter what the mind does, is already wisdom, is already enlightenment. So, there's a kind of sense of faith in this that is part of our practice. Of course, it's my particular way of presenting Zazen to always want to encourage people to focus more and be clearer and make effort in Zazen in a particular way. But I'm aware of the fact that actually, however we make effort in Zazen, and however clear or unclear our Zazen is, just if we assume this posture, just if we take up this practice and continue to do it, it's already prajna, it's already wisdom, it's already enlightenment. And in fact, it's really true, you know, that particularly we notice that after years of practice, there's a certain sense that this is really so, almost no matter how we practice, even though I'm always saying, you know, practice more, practice more precisely and all that. Please do listen to me

[23:30]

when I say that. But even if you don't listen to me, it doesn't really matter. So, this is, you know, Zazen and prajna. Now, to relate this to the bodhicitta, and I'm trying now to kind of pull the essence out of Shantideva's chapter. And the reason why I'm not, you know, trying to follow along his chapter and discuss it with you as he writes it is because it's an extremely scholastic and complicated argument, mostly against pre-Buddhist Indian philosophical positions and other philosophical positions within Buddhism that Shantideva is arguing against. And the arguments, to my taste, are, they're sort of interesting if you like that kind of thing, but they're very scholastic. They're really not too experiential. They really don't hit on what's the real, you know, religious meat of why prajna is important. They're actually

[24:30]

basically Tibetan-Indian philosophical debates. So this has its place, but I don't think it's for our purpose to really exhaustively go into this. And it's very difficult to read it even, you know, even to follow it, because the distinctions that they make are not distinctions that we would recognize or make. So I'm trying to talk about, you know, what is the meat of this, what's really important about it. So in terms of bodhicitta, as I said earlier in talking about meditation, we want to be able to see firsthand and personally this flowing, impermanent, compassionate nature of reality. With prajna, with wisdom, it's as if we kind of look behind the veil of reality and see something further, something deeper, beyond even this aspect of impermanence that I spoke of earlier and, you know, the oneness of things. We see something

[25:38]

that stands behind those factors, and that is the emptiness of phenomena. And this is what prajna cognizes, the empty nature of phenomena. In other words, to say that things are empty, and this is the way Shantideva talks about it, to say that things are empty is to say, to use the metaphor I used earlier, is that they are not in chunks, discrete chunks that bump into one another. Nothing has any hard and fast reality. And in this sense, Shantideva says, things don't actually exist. They're empty. They don't actually exist. Now, earlier we've been working with giving, morality, patience and energy. And we've been working with those things as antidotes to afflictive emotions, because we know what

[26:43]

afflictive emotions are and we know how destructive they are to our living and to our calmness and tranquility and ultimately to our ability to see reality. So we really have to use those practices to reduce the number of our afflictive emotions. But actually, now that we're working on prajna and we've practically gotten rid of our afflictive emotions through all these practices, it now begins to dawn on us, at this point, that no matter how much we use these other practices to kind of reduce and get rid of afflictive emotions, there's still, the root of the afflictive emotions is still there. And at any time, it would be easy for us to completely be overcome by afflictive emotions, even though we've been working on all these other practices. So now we realize that we have to have something more thorough going, to go beyond the way that we've been working

[27:44]

with the afflictive emotions. Basically, we have to see that the afflictive emotions, like everything else in this universe, don't actually exist. They're not hard and fast items of reality. They're just parts of the flow of reality. They don't really exist. When we see that the afflictive emotions don't really exist, then we've really gotten to the root of the afflictive emotions and we've gone beyond tinkering and fixing and gotten to the point now where the afflictive emotions really don't give us a problem. They don't really exist for us anymore. And now at this point, let me just finish the thought. At this point, the other paramitas now become really paramitas, meaning perfections, going beyond. So giving, when there's wisdom,

[28:45]

giving really becomes giving beyond giving. I talked about this a little bit before when we talked about all these other ones, in the sense that when we see the nature of reality as being empty and not really existing, then we see that giving doesn't really exist and gifts don't really exist and givers don't really exist and recipients don't really exist. So this is giving beyond giving. We practice giving, in other words, with no thought of giving, with no thought of giver, no thought of recipient, no thought of anybody needing anything. We practice giving in a very natural way without any thought of giving. So all these practices then become the perfection of giving or giving beyond giving and patience beyond patience and energy beyond energy. So these virtues, these paramitas that are conventional paramitas with the paramita of wisdom suddenly become unconventional paramitas. They disappear. They melt into wisdom. So wisdom is the crucial paramita. Wisdom is the one that colors all the

[29:51]

other paramitas and makes the practice of them deeper and more thorough going. You said that we examine the idea that emotions don't really exist and we talk about emptiness and we use that kind of language and I wonder, does just relativity theory apply just as well? Just if we're talking in pure and simple physics, could one easily say that dharmakaya is just the theory of relativity? I guess I don't understand the theory of relativity well enough to know. It just means that not that things don't exist but relative to one another. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Exactly. That's my next point I want to make. What does that mean to say that things don't exist? I want to go into that. It describes in the beginning of the book dharmakaya, sambhogakaya and nirmanakaya and it describes dharmakaya as vast emptiness and then it goes on later and describes sambhogakaya

[30:58]

as vast emptiness. So I'm kind of confused. Well, briefly, dharmakaya is the empty nature of reality itself. Sambhogakaya is the, it's called the truth body of Buddha, dharmakaya, right? Sambhogakaya is the enjoyment body of Buddha, the way that through the eye of meditation, the way that this reality appears and nirmanakaya of Buddha is the appearance of the Buddha in this world. So those are the three bodies of Buddha, dharmakaya, sambhogakaya and nirmanakaya. He said boundless vacancy, interdependence and variety. Yeah, that sounds nice. There's lots of ways of talking about these three bodies. All right, go ahead. Sorry. That's okay. Say those three again. Well, he describes them two different ways. At first he calls them boundless vacancy, interdependence and variety and then he calls them pure and clear, empty and blissful harmony. So he's got two that he's described. Yeah, there's many,

[32:04]

many traditions of talking about. The first one I understand better and I know better. And so dharmakaya then is, in terms of what we're saying here, dharmakaya is identified with the empty nature of all things. That would be like relativity. Yeah. Why don't you say that? Well, it wouldn't be as much fun. So this understanding of prajna and its sort of rule over the other paramitras raises the question, why don't we just practice prajna? Why do we bother to go through all these other ones? Why do we have this long build-up to this discussion of prajna? And I think the reason why is because we can even wonder why we would even, well, from the other side we can even wonder why bring up prajna at all since we're actually not in a position probably right now to actually

[33:06]

produce it. We're still working on our afflictive emotions actually. So one way of looking at it is, why talk about prajna at all? Why not just talk about the others? And there's a point to that. The other way is, why talk about the others when the only one that really matters is prajna, right? And what Shantideva says about this is that you can't really cognize prajna through the practice of meditation until the afflictive emotions are calmed down sufficiently. And I think you see this in meditation. If you don't have much of a practice of patience and energy and morality and so on, you sit down in zazen and there's tremendous stuff coming up. And actually one of the things that seems to happen in the process of zazen over a period of time is that many seeds of past actions arise, come to fruit in zazen. And we

[34:08]

sometimes experience grief or torment or torture or anguish of various sorts due to past actions that we've produced. And these become tremendously distracting and we have to work through them in order to settle the mind so that we can actually see reality. So it actually, practically speaking, even though we might think, well, prajna is the only one that's important, why not just concentrate on that? In fact, we can't produce prajna. We can't really practice prajna paramita until we've practiced the others. So they actually all work together. Yes? I mean, there's something about that that sort of rubbed me the wrong way. I don't know what it is, but it's like, I can also see where these strong emotions are the kind of dharma gates to understanding or realization. In other words, they're not chunks, but they're the most powerful part of our lives that really grab us and really make us feel separate and caught

[35:08]

and those that we actually can experience through the examination of the same with them. It's a way in which, the way it's talked about here, that they're separate from or in the way of realization rather than on the path. Yes. Well, there's two responses I would make to that. One is, as we talked about the other paramitas, we were talking all the time about it, working with afflictive emotions as the path, indulging the afflictive emotions as not the path, but working with them as the path. And the other thing to say about it is that afflictive emotions, like when we had this comment over here about basically what I understood as using fear as an object of meditation. In that case, we're not indulging in afflictive emotion or working at it with energy or one of the other paramitas, we're focusing on it with meditation. I mean, this is a rather awkward way to talk because, of course, it's not as if

[36:12]

these paramitas are separate and worked with consecutively. I mean, if we're practicing meditation, we're also practicing energy, right? We're also practicing discriminative awareness. We're also practicing giving. So, it's rather, I mean, I'm talking here in terms of a system, really. You know, the system that Shantideva is setting forward. You're right. I mean, in our actual practice, things don't appear systematically in that way. And if what I'm saying might give a hint that emotions are to be avoided, which is what you're hearing, I think, this isn't what I'm trying to say. This could be. I mean, I understand that it's not always the intention. Right. I think in the earlier chapters, what's being emphasized is, because, you know, you can also imagine a point of view. Somebody would say, well, the only important thing is that I develop prajna in my sitting practice. It doesn't matter if I trash people. It doesn't matter if I'm lazy. It doesn't matter if I'm

[37:15]

stingy. These other virtues are really irrelevant. The only important thing is for me to sit strong and see nirvana. You know, somebody could have a point of view like that. And there are people who, you know, practice that way. And I think Shantideva is arguing that that's not really possible. That, in fact, we have to do all these practices. We have to work on ourselves in a lot of different ways. And in the beginning of the class, if you remember, I was talking about the gradual way and the sudden way. And I was saying that the sudden way is just seeing in meditation. And the gradual way is refining our character through the practices of these other virtues, and that we really needed to have both. Yeah? Doesn't just sitting and seeing these things more clearly make them start dropping away? Say again? Just sitting. Just sitting, uh-huh. These affective emotions and so on. The more you see what's going on, if nothing else, the more pain it causes you, the more they drop away. Yes, exactly.

[38:18]

I mean, without... Yeah, right. Yeah, but just to see, again, to apply Shantideva's system, to do that takes energy, patience, concentration. Right. But one doesn't have to, yeah, one doesn't have to tinker with them. Just, this would be the method of applying mindfulness, awareness. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So there's different approaches. Okay. So let's get into the question a little bit about what does Shantideva mean when he says, things don't really exist. And this is where he begins to make pretty acute philosophical distinctions. So he's not saying that things don't exist. He's saying things don't really exist.

[39:22]

Things don't actually exist. So this is a kind of middle way, and this is exactly called, the Madhyamaka school is actually called the school of the middle way. It's not saying that things exist, and it's not saying that things don't exist. It's saying that things exist, only they don't exist in the way that we think they exist. In the way that when we say existence, we mean something. And he's saying that what we mean is not the way things exist. So it's not that there's nothing, and it's not that there's something, in the sense that we usually see something as existing. It's neither one. And often to explain this, the example given is the example of an illusory person, like a magician, you know, creates by tricks, an illusory person. So does this illusory person exist or not exist? Well in a way the illusory person exists because we have an experience, we see a person. But in a way the illusory person doesn't exist because the illusory person is

[40:26]

actually not a physical body, it doesn't have a mind and so on. It's an illusion. So it exists as an illusion. It doesn't exist as a real entity. So it neither exists nor not exists. So that's the way that reality is in the light of emptiness. Now, the beginning of the chapter on wisdom talks about that this truth of emptiness cannot be grasped by the intellect, Shantideva says. So we can't know it in the ordinary way that we know things, but there can be an experience of it, a quality of knowing or understanding personally, though as soon as you try to analyze that or point to that or objectify such experience, it immediately disappears because that experience itself is empty and doesn't exist as anything hard and fast. It itself is a kind of illusion, although we understand it existentially. Now in Buddhist philosophy, and again I'm kind of following along or trying my best anyway to

[41:31]

follow along here with Shantideva's argument, in Buddhist philosophy they codify all this by saying that there are two truths, the famous doctrine of the two truths, the conventional truth and the ultimate truth. Conventionally, in other words, things exist. So we don't deny that things exist as we ordinarily think that they exist. We only say that this is a conventional truth, not an ultimate truth. Ultimately, things are empty of any reality. They don't actually exist, but conventionally they exist. Now, the two truths, conventional and ultimate, are not two separate realities. It's not like there's a conventional truth and then we pull back the curtain and then there's the ultimate truth that's really real. Actually, conventional truth and ultimate truth are only names to describe the one indescribable reality. So that the ultimate truth is not privileged over the conventional truth. So that's

[42:39]

why we take both those truths seriously and we work with both of them, but we understand the between them, even though the distinction is only nominal. But nominal is not a small matter because we're language creatures, right? So we have to deal with this nominal distinction, even though we understand on a deeper experiential level that it's only nominal. So, practically speaking, it doesn't, it means, you know, if we, see the problem is that if we took the empty nature of things to be real and the conventional nature of things to be separate and unreal, then, of course, the logical conclusion would be, who cares what happens? And they call this the nihilist position. Who cares what happens? It doesn't make any difference. Everything's empty. It doesn't really exist. So we could kill people, we could, you know, throw bombs on each other. It doesn't make any difference. So this is not really what Shantideva is talking about. He says, no, the conventional reality is reality. It's conventional reality, but it's still real.

[43:40]

So we're concerned about beings because we also live on the level of conventional reality. But since we understand that conventional reality is only conventional and that things are ultimately empty, we don't get stressed out about the things that we care about. You see? So there's a kind of fluidity to our concern. So we have an easygoing kind of feeling about how we're taking care of this reality. It's not, what's the word, grim. So there's a sort of sense of play and humor, even though we're taking conventional reality seriously. This is a very important point here. You can see why this is important. Because the more we open ourselves to Bodhisattva, in fact, the more things we see that we need to deal with and take care of, right? The more our mind opens up to the suffering all around us, in us, beginning with us, and in all those around us, and even in those far away from us, and we understand the patterns of

[44:42]

suffering in the conventional reality of cause and effect, the more we have to worry about, right? We have huge amounts of things to worry about as Bodhisattvas. So if we didn't understand that conventional reality was empty of any real existence, we would be constantly up 24 hours a day trying to deal with all this stuff and be very stressed out and nervous. But since we understand that, in fact, although we are responsible for all this, and we do have to tirelessly work with all this, it doesn't actually exist in the way that our conventional mind sees it existing so we can relax. So this is the philosophical position, but this is the sort of psychological reality to it. And it's very, very important. Because otherwise, how is it that you take responsibility for the world and actually act in the world compassionately and take on all that there is to take on and not end up getting mad at everybody for being suffering creatures and

[45:46]

forcing you to minister to them? Which does happen, right? Which does happen. And we also, we do get stressed out, right? We do get stressed out, we're discouraged by the state of the world and so on and so on. When we recognize the actual nature of the world, which is to say it's already quiescent, it already doesn't really exist, in the way that we think it does, then the whole picture changes. So this is the idea. But in the way we think it does doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Right, right, exactly. It exists in emptiness. It exists in interdependence, which is not real existence in terms of our own conventional point of view. So then there's an interesting objection that's raised. This whole chapter is an incredibly complicated series of objections and reputations by Shantideva, but I'm skipping almost all of them. But one that is raised I thought was interesting, where somebody said,

[46:47]

conceptions and attachment to help beings. I mean everything that I do in my desire to help beings comes out of my attachment, right? My wanting beings to like me and my wanting to help them and my thinking that they're real and my concern about their existence and so on. If I didn't have any of those things, how could I actually help them? In what way would I be helping them? And Shantideva says, it's just like a wish-fulfilling jewel or like a plant. These things also don't have desires and motivations and conceptions as we would understand them, but because of forces in them and because of forces outside of them, they naturally flower in this way. So a wish-fulfilling gem doesn't have conceptions and ideas, but it fulfills all wishes because the forces within it cause it to be that way and it responds to wishes coming from without. And a plant doesn't have conceptions and ideas and yet it grows to its fruit because of factors

[47:53]

in itself and in response to air and light and so on. So Bodhisattva is like that, like a plant or wish-fulfilling gem. It simply naturally flowers in a way that serves all beings because of the forces within itself, namely its vow, the Bodhisattva's vow to save all beings. And this is the part that I really like. It responds to the sincerity of the beings who need help, just the same way that a plant responds to light and water and soil. Bodhisattva, when seeing a sentient being in sincere suffering, can't help but very naturally unfold in that direction because of the vow in the Bodhisattva. This is a very different kind of feeling about what it means. You see in the light of this what it would be like to practice giving or what it would be like to practice energy or what it would be like to practice patience. For us these virtues feel a little bit like climbing uphill. We really have to slog it

[48:58]

out to practice these virtues. It kind of goes against the grain and we have to make a big effort to do it and we're tired out at the end of the day. But for the Bodhisattva, these things are natural outgrowths of this very natural growth in the direction of the sentient being who is asking, coming from the inside, and the power of the vow of the Bodhisattva, the aspiration to develop bodhicitta and share life with all creatures. So that's how Prasanthi Deva understands that. Yeah? I don't understand why the term emptiness, it seems to me like it's being used synonymous for interdependence, and then that seems to be used synonymous for not existing in this ultimate fashion. And I can see how since I, my body and personality and so forth, or let's get

[50:03]

a plant, it has no permanent existence, certainly. It has no separate existence, and I can see that empirically. But I don't see why that makes it empty, and I don't see why that means that we have to make this very fine distinction about it not really being there. Well, you know, there are different ways of talking. There are whole different schools for talking about the nature of phenomena as interdependent. In other words, emptiness can be emphasized as interdependence, or it can be taught and emphasized as non-existence, or not really existing. And Shanti Deva happens to emphasize it as non-existence, and I'm trying my best, you know, and I'm struggling, as you can see, to try to stick with Shanti Deva's explanation. And I think there's a good reason to do that. And the reason is, you know, I have noticed over the years that we like interdependence. We don't like

[51:06]

non-existence. See, interdependence is wonderful. All beings are one. We flow in and out of each other. You see, when we teach it in terms of interdependence, we like it because then, like, we get to have everything. We get ourself and everything else. Yeah, and it's wonderful. And that is a true, that is, you know, a fundamental aspect of the nature of reality, as explained, you know, in Buddhist philosophy. But I don't want to leave out this other part. It's a little harder to understand, and it's harder to kind of like. But also, I think it's necessary because this is the side of, like, letting go and giving up. See, interdependence has a little bit of a cast of attachment to it. It's wonderful to be interdependent with all these wonderful creatures. We love our world, right? So we want to be interdependent in our world and think about our world going on and us being part of it forever, and interdependence with all creatures, you know. And this is very true and very wonderful. But there is this other side, which is the, I mean, the ungraspable

[52:14]

non-existent aspect to this world. And this, like I say, we don't like it as much, and it's harder to even to understand the explanation of it. But I think it's necessary to bring it up. So I decided that rather than glossing over Shantideva's very difficult arguments and point of view here, even though I knew that we wouldn't like it, I just wanted to bring it up. Yeah. If we take a look at the interdependence, then that's emptiness itself right there, though. I mean, what's the difference? It's just a different way of looking at it. There's no difference. It's just a different way of looking at it, a different way of understanding it and talking about it. And the more ways that we have of looking at it and understanding it and talking about it, the fuller our understanding will be. So that's all. Yeah, I mean, it seems what Lee is saying is there is no interdependence without all things being empty. Right. He's warning the same. Yeah. Why is that? Yeah.

[53:18]

Well, if things were separate and were truly existent in the way that we think that they are, how could they move into one another and cause each other? But the other side of that is that they're interdependent. Yes. Not necessarily, it's not necessarily empty. Well, you know, the way the argument goes is that things can't influence each other unless they can touch each other. If we divide things into parts, because everything is parts, right? I mean, what's this? This is a body, but actually it's not a body. It's arms and legs and so on and so on. Everything's like that. Nothing exists. Everything can be broken up into parts. So if everything can be broken up into parts and one part is going to influence the other, somewhere there have to be two parts that

[54:19]

touch each other. So these parts have to be indivisible parts because otherwise we break them down into more parts. When we get to the indivisible part and they touch each other, they're the same part. They're the same thing. If they're the same thing, they can't have any separate existence, so they're empty. This is a kind of definition. The logic of this is that the definition of truly existent in this whole argument is that something is truly existent only if it's permanently existent and not subject to causes and conditions. If it's subject to causes and conditions, it automatically has no hard and fast reality. It's just something flowing through. If it's flowing through, it doesn't really exist. And the truth is that we see things as separate and permanently existing. It's incredible to me. That kind of thinking, which is really fast and subtle, was done 2,500 years ago. It is incredible. And Nagarjuna did

[55:28]

that. He thought that through in about the second century. Yeah, it's incredible. His arguments are very subtle and all done in elegant Sanskrit poetry and very hard to understand. But I think that's a fairly accurate description of what he's saying. But existentially, the problem here is that we do see things as permanent. And that's why the idea of interdependence is tricky for us, because I think what we often do is we just project our ideas of permanence and separateness onto the idea of interdependence. That's why non-existence is so hard for us to swallow, because it takes away what we want, which is the stuff of our life and everybody else's life. But in reality, yes, the real implication, I think this is what Lee is saying, the real implication, if there is real interdependence,

[56:30]

then things are empty. They don't exist. That's what interdependence really means. So it makes a difference how you talk about this and how you look at it, because if you emphasize interdependence, well, we go a certain way when we look at it that way. If we ever emphasize non-existence, it makes us go another way. It makes us look at things another way, and it gives a different cast to our practice. So it makes a difference, yeah. Somewhere in our readings, there was a statement made, to see things as a continuum is incorrect, that things actually in some sense are separate. There's that old Zen business about wood doesn't become ash, wood is wood, ash is ash. Yes. How does that come into all this? Well, that, you know, the three great ways that I know about, well, there's more, but the three

[57:34]

great ways that I know about that you can talk about the emptiness of phenomena is as interdependence, as non-existence, and as in the Huayen way, right, the Huayen way of worlds within worlds. And in that way, there's multiple simultaneous positions. And one position is each thing is completely separate and includes everything else. I mean, they even have a number for it, I think. Yeah. There are so many of those things that happen in our practice. Right. Well, no, that's something, you're thinking of the Abhidharmic way, which is, all these arguments are against that position. Because in that position, that's the concept that reality is, that's the indivisible atoms. You know, the Abhidharmists say there's no persons and there's no things, but there are these indivisible entities arising and passing away every moment.

[58:34]

All these arguments about emptiness are arguments against that position. Because the arguments against emptiness are saying, that little thing that you say is existing and passing away, it doesn't really exist. It's empty of any real being. There are no separate entities, even particles like that, even momentary particles like that don't exist, actually. So, out of this argument comes the idea of interdependence, things actually are one thing. All the different things are transformations of one thing and out of that comes the schools of consciousness only. And then, the other way of emphasizing it is as non-existent, things don't really exist in the way that we say they exist. They're empty, not to be grasped. And then, there's the Huayen way, where you have worlds within worlds. Each thing includes everything. Each thing is discrete and includes everything, reflects all of reality in it. So, each thing can be emphasized as everything or nothing.

[59:41]

So, that's where Dogon is coming from when he says, firewood has its own dharma position, it doesn't turn into ash. Because it doesn't, right? Firewood doesn't become ash, now there's firewood, now there's ash. It's totally separate, because there's a huge gap between everything that's infinite between each instant. And yet, each instant includes all other instances. So, it's this whole very complicated, believe me, it's really complicated. Like all the Buddhist philosophical schools, there's a sutra that's poetic to describe this, the Avatamsaka Sutra. And then, there's a philosophical school based on the sutra that makes very fine and complex philosophical distinctions based on the teachings of that sutra. And they do this in Huayen. Now, it's interesting, because in Zen, all these positions are present in Zen. Zen does not have a systematic philosophical basis,

[60:44]

like say, the Madhyamaka school, the Vijnapti Matharata school, and all these different philosophical schools. Zen sort of borrows from all of them, has elements of all of them. And different Zen people emphasize different ones more than others. The position that's being advocated here by Shantideva is called Prasangika Madhyamaka, which is a particular school of the middle path, neither existence nor non-existence path. And Shantideva is arguing from that particular school. In Zen, there's at least three different schools that are represented, and some texts and some teachers emphasize one more than the other. So, in Dogon, you find all three, pretty much, including the Abhidharma school, as a fourth. So, is Huayen part of that school? Huayen is the... yeah, in Zen, you have all of it. You have all those positions represented at different times. Because Zen is concerned, you know, not with... I mean, these other, you know,

[61:48]

a lot of the Buddhist schools were really concerned with the logical presentation and the truth, logical truth of the teachings. And Zen isn't concerned with that. Zen is concerned with the experience of awakening. So, Zen is not concerned with Huayen? I mean, no. These different positions are in Zen, but the systematic working out of the positions is not important to Zen. Those positions underlie, you know, a lot of the Zen thought. But it's not systematic. So, it's very difficult to, you know, put all this together and make it all make sense, because it's kind of complicated. And there are many contradictions and fine distinctions within it. And frankly, I'm not an expert on it, by no means. And I'm struggling to try to explain it a little bit, you know. And I sometimes think I should have not brought it up at all, you know. But I have felt, you know, obligated to follow along in Shantideva's text. And at this

[62:51]

point, this is what he's talking about. So, I'm trying to, you know, bring it up and explain it. Yeah. It seems to me, as I'm listening, that one... Gosh, the word that comes to my mind is dividend of wisdom. But is that, if you start to maybe empty things of non-existent or non-inherent existence, that as you're sitting, it almost keeps getting to be a wider path, instead of sort of this narrow struggle, so that you get this more spaciousness, I think, that he was talking about. So, even if you don't, you know, whatever it means to cognize reality as it actually is, maybe you only get a flash of it, and then you're back. But somehow the path gets a little, for better and for worse, but a little wider, where you feel more space. Yeah, I think so. And the great thing there, I mean, I think

[63:56]

the operative thing in what you're saying, and how I understand the reason why you want to emphasize the non-existence, is because of attachment. What makes it so narrow is that we're attached to things, right? We're attached to our own body, to our self, to our viewpoints. This is where, this is hell, right? Hell is when we're so attached to our body and our viewpoints, don't touch me, you know, don't say anything, you know, because what if I don't agree with it, you know? This is a big problem, and so it's because of attachment to our views and our stuff that we are confined. Would you be attached to an illusory person? See? I mean, if an illusory person insults you, I mean, you don't really care, because they're illusory. If you're an illusory person, why worry? So why be attached? Why would you be attached to an illusion? Sometimes we do. Fictional characters, whether if we're reading a book or watching a play,

[64:57]

we can get attached to them. Well, that's because we project our self onto the character, you know, then we get attached to it. But if we, you know, in other words, if we really saw things as smoke, you know, not really there, we wouldn't. All I'm trying to say is that the point of this non-existence business is to break us from attachment, which is the cause of suffering. That's the whole point of it. And if interdependence sounds good and allows our attachment to really remain, then how about non-existence? Maybe that'll help. Actually, I was agreeing with you. It's in our nature to attach value to things that may not exist. Yeah. That's our nature. Yeah. So we have to see beyond that, you know, through the actual experience of seeing things as illusory or as non-existent. And in Zen, that experience, you know, I mean, Zen is really famous for the intensive meditation which may produce such an experience where all of a sudden we understand, you know, there's no perceiver, there's no

[66:01]

perceived thing, there's only the sound of the bell. The sound of the bell. No one there to hear it. It's just the sound of the bell. With that, we drop our attachment to things and understand the sound of the bell as neither existing nor non-existent, neither here nor there, everywhere. What is it? You know, that experience shows us the actual nature of reality. And if we have that experience deeply enough and frequently enough, and we continue our practice in other ways, we open all this up and we break at least the more gross aspects of our attachment to things. Yes? Martha? You know, as I listen to you, Norman, say this, and the experience that it's not just words coming from you, it's something that comes from your practice as well, it also allows you to say something like you did when you were made abbot, that your love for your family is almost unbearable. Yeah, well that's what I meant. Where the ultimate attachment, you know, is unbearable. Yes.

[67:12]

Wow. Well, I wanted to quote something from Ekin Roshi here. This sort of, I don't know if you've read Ekin Roshi's chapter, but it's, brings it down to earth and closer to home. What page is that? I'm reading on page 112. Here is Ekin Roshi speaking about this experience of prajna, of seeing things as non-existent in a very everyday and practical way in terms of Zen practice. He says, it is a peak experience, a great relief, a great relief to see, to realize that perceptions and things perceived are without substance. In other words, not actually existent.

[68:16]

It is a peak experience and a great relief. Then the world comes back with all its ego-centered and ego-created pain and anguish. But, and he's using kanji's eye, but he means we, but we know about their causes now and we are liberated from their blind compulsions. So he's speaking very modestly here, you know, because after all, I mean, Shantideva is very lofty. He's talking about this impossible bodhisattva, you know, who says, you know, saves all sentient beings and completely lets go of all defilements and so on and so on. This is the ideal. Here Ekin Roshi is talking about, more talking about us, what actually happens to us is we have this experience, we appreciate this. It's a tremendous relief and it's great. And then the next day we go to work and we're still, our ego-centered self

[69:24]

still comes back. But knowing this now, we are not overcome by the same blind compulsions any longer. Emotions rise and fall, but the empirical self is not waiting there, sitting there, waiting to strike back. Affinity does not necessarily become lust. Betrayal does not necessarily lead to hatred. The one who has defended the self can at last acknowledge that very same self as a particular and peculiar form of the essential mystery. He or she is then freed to save the many beings, including the one who saves. The way of practice has opened out at last. That's that Krishna book right there. Yeah, so this is very simple, you know, it's very doable kind of, you know, and very realistic. And I just wanted to close with that because

[70:28]

the whole thing gets very out of control when you get into it. But there, this is in his chapter, of course, on wisdom, on prajna. So, just to sort of tie this all up at the end here, to say that this is the whole, what he's saying there is the whole purpose of our path, right? To let go of suffering, to be ourself, you know, with our particularity and our own confusion and delusions and emotions and all that, but not to be pushed around by these things to the point where our life, as Sonia says, can become very, very narrow. But rather to have enough of a sense of the actual nature of things through our meditation practice and through our daily effort, so that we're not fooled, you know, by these confusions that come up,

[71:32]

that will remain all forever, you know, coming up in our mind. They're not so compelling, not so confusing anymore. And then, through the gradual and everyday practice of these other virtues, we find a way to develop our character so that we have a way of working in the world in accord with these insights that come from our meditation practice. And then they go back and forth. Our working on things in our life deepens our sitting. Our deeper sitting gives us deeper insight, which then makes it different and easier for us to work with our mind and with others back and forth like this, getting up, sitting down, getting up, sitting down, until we see our whole life as a part of this process of an ever-deepening understanding and ever-deepening love for beings who we now no longer see so much as threats. Like he says, affinity doesn't have to become lust. If we like somebody, we don't have to

[72:32]

possess them. If we're hurt by somebody, we don't have to hate them. And whatever arises in our heart is something that's part of our path. And we just keep going like that. And it's very interesting. There's never a dull moment in the way. So this is what it's all about. The whole development of bodhicitta is to turn our life around so that we're living in that way and no longer living self-protectively in a closed way. So that's why we work on raising up the bodhicitta and practice giving, practicing giving, morality, patience, energy, concentration and wisdom. And we keep turning them over and over again. One turns into the other. They're all the same. They're all different. And so on. Well, thank you very much for six weeks of wonderful attention. Everybody showed up most of the time. I showed up every time.

[73:36]

We actually went through all the six paramitas and discussed them and practiced with them. And I think this has been a very good class. I've really enjoyed it. And everybody's been very nice to me, which is good. And I really think that we have done a great job of actually turning these paramitas. This has not been an exercise in thinking. It's been an exercise in really transformative practice. And I appreciate that. Thank you very much. And then we'll chant now. And those who would like to join us, we will go over to the Zendo and bow three times and chant the refuges for our ceremony for the end of the day.

[74:21]

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