Category Archives: Dharma Talks

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The final talk around the theme of The Heart of the Matter was given as the sesshin talk in our closing 3-day sesshin with me and Norman Fischer.

As seems to be usual for me lately I didn’t stick too close to the notes, looks like I started out “on script” so that’s below in case helpful.

“The Myth of Me”

Gaia creation myth as retold by Donna Jo Napoli (The Treasury of Greek Mythology) – my own additions in [brackets]

	How do you get something from nothing?

	Not easily it would seem.

	From empty Chaos, somehow sea and earth and air appeared. They drifted around, pieces of each getting lost in the other. No water was swimmable, no land was walkable, no gas was breathable. Anything hot could quickly turn cold. Anything cold could burst into flames.

	Shapes shifted, textures shifted. Objects merged one into the other effortlessly, then suddenly-slam! One or both turned inexplicably hard. What was heavy became weightless. What was weightless crashed through earth and sea and air, shattering and splattering and scattering bits of everything and nothing.

	Rules of nature? They didn't operate. Indeed, there was no nature. There was nothing reliable in this turmoil expect lack of order. And lack is the essence of need.

	Out of that original need came the mother force, Gaia. All on her own. Need can do that.

	Gaia sucked up heat and stored it in her heart. She wrapped herself round and round with anything solid she could reach, growing firmer with each layering. She pulled together her glassy sands, lifting them, grain by grain - free of air, to form deserts; free of water, to form beaches. She pushed together gigantic plates of rock until her mountains rose high, so far from her scalding heart that snow settled on their peaks.

	As Gaia disentangled herself from the waters and the gases, the seas fell together in giant puddles, the heavens arches over it all. In this way the emergence of Gaia led to both the wholeness of the seas and the wholeness of the heavens.

	But Gaia was generous, as a mother should be. She opened her veins so water could rush through rivers and creeks, and pool together in large low lakes and small hidden ponds. She yielded here and there to the gases, allowing crevices to cradle them.

	One crevice in particular was huge and gaping: the waiting hole for the dead. But at this point she didn't know that. She knew things only as they happened, like a child encountering everything for the first time. She created the hole almost as though she understood instinctively all the gain and loss that would follow from her generosity.

	The seas learned from Gaia and welcomed islands. The skies learned from Gaia and welcomed stars. And then the seas and skies went further and worked together to cycle water from the salty seas to the skies, then fresh and sweet to the lands, who returned it once more to the seas.

	But Gaia was not the only child of the enormous original need that came from Chaos; there were two others. One was Tartarus, the Underworld. The other was Eros, Love. 

	Then Chaos gave a giant yawn and out flowed the total darkness of night as well as Erebus. Erebus, like Gaia, was a place as well as a force, seeking to fill crannies. Erebus settled into the hole for the dead and became the upper part of the Underworld.

	Eros was beautiful, but not ordinary beautiful. Eros' beauty made the others quiver. It made them dream of being enveloped in warm caresses. Of getting drunk on thick creamy honey. Of swooning from ambrosia. Of whirling to tinkling music. Of being dazzled by sparkles in this lightless world. [ For it was still so dark.]

	So Night and Erebus fell in love, and Night gave birth to Day. And with light, in the lushness of fresh and salty water and in the expansiveness of air, life on Earth began. Grasses and vines wound their way around the globe. Bushes gently bloomed. [The Earth had become and everything to come, good and bad, was soon to follow.]

That’s a retelling of the ancient Greek myth of creation, beautifully retold by a children’s author named Donna Jo Napoli, that I found in a book of Walker’s the other day when I was casting around the house for something to read to him to help him wake up. He loves stories so much that reading him a story is the only reliable way to get him to wake up at 7am for school. He wants to wake up so he can hear the story. So this is a story of awakening in that way.

But it’s a tale for us too of how we create the world isn’t it? The world we perceive appears to be orderly but only because of the quick work of the mind to make sense of the jumble of perceptions and thoughts that emerge each moment, and each of us does this in our own way, and out of this wrapping of our arms around the drifting forms and the opening of our heart to the heat of life each of us creates our world. Each world unique. No two of us quite the same. And each of us in the center of the world we’ve created believing it to be the real world. With our heavens and our hole into the underworld. We our dark thoughts and pain and our poetry and joy and amazement at it all.

Sesshin is such a wonderful opportunity to watch it all happen. To watch our own mythology arising and expressing itself. Norman used to say “everyone’s a philosopher” and we could also say “everyone has a mythology” – everyone has a creation myth of their own life, a creation myth of their self. And we carry that myth forward constantly editing and adding and embellishing, and at times feeling really stuck with. It’s so heavy sometimes isn’t it to be stuck with yourself. Couldn’t I be someone else today?

Sesshin a real opportunity though to slow down the myth making and watch the myth arising and doing it’s thing.

Sometimes we misunderstand sesshin as a time to improve. As a time to get some understanding or some peace. We’re starting to understand that it’s not that – it’s not a process of manipulation and control in that way. The American Zen understanding of the word sesshin itself belies this- at first we were told by our dharma leaders that sesshin means to gather up the mind. To take all these pieces of chaos and gather them with the arms of Gaia into a new whole in accord with the teachings. Deep and subtle work but nonetheless a great work of improvement and refinement. But then someone looked up the world , I think it might have actually been Kate McCandless so this is a teaching local to our Pacific Northwest practice life, someone looked up the word “sesshin” and we learned that it means to “touch” the heart-mind. To touch, to hold, to experience. A very different thing than to gather.

We gather things with a closed hand. And we expect to pull the hand back to the body with something. To capture and hold something. To finally find some way of bringing the swirling chaos to a stop. At last to a stop.

But we touch things with open hand. And when we bring our hand back we expect to have only an impression – a feeling – a sense of the texture and nature of what we touched. And that which we touched is allowed it’s own function. The chaos is allowed to be chaos.

And so here this weekend to touch the heart, to touch the mind. Just to touch it. Gently. With care. With kindness. With so much patience. And to feel the warmth of our life through the palms of our hands.

This retreat is the closing of our Winter practice period this year and we’ve been exploring what we’ve been calling the Heart of the Matter using the Heart Sutra and the emptiness teachings of our school as a jumping off point.

The Heart Sutra is such an odd little text though, isn’t it? We usually say that it’s a summary of a broader set of literature about wisdom – the Prajna Paramita literature – but it’s not the kind of summary any of us would write really as it’s totally different in style from the longer sutras. Some scholars think that it might have been composed in China actually which was apparently quite a shocking notion to many. Maybe it’s more of a blast of enthusiasm and wonder about the practicing of Prajna Paramita. And as we’ve been studying it we’ve been realizing that it might not be the worlds of text itself that matter so much as the transmission of those words and the actual practice of reciting the Heart Sutra.

One of the things that’s come up in conversations about the Heart Sutra are people’s memories of where they first encountered it. I’ve heard some really interesting stories! For me it was at Santa Cruz Zen Center in about 1985 or so. It turned out later that this was in the middle of a several year transitional time for that center – the founding teacher and most of students gone, the new teacher not arrived. Just a few long time Zen students quietly minding the store. A couple named Jerry who was an aikido teacher and I can’t remember his partner’s name. It was usually just me and the two of them, sometimes this other younger man. One period of zazen maybe around 6am and then we chanted the Heart Sutra and said goodbye. I was a bit shy so I always resisted chatting or having tea or anything, I would hop back on my bike and continue up to campus getting there in the quiet of the morning with some time to study before my first class. I didn’t pull this off every day but for a while I was pretty regular.

Anyway one time Jerry and his sweetie were away on a trip and they left it to the other young man to take care of the zendo and I remember he didn’t want to chant the Heart Sutra. I was really surprised by how appalled I was – it just didn’t feel right at all. I don’t know now if it’s just the way we habituate to what we’re used to or something about the sutra itself. I remember that translation had a lot more Sanskrit in it. Especially I remember that it had annutara samyak sambodhi – complete perfect enlightenment. And I think some other phrases. It’s power is somehow beyond it’s words though isn’t it.

That it’s more a piece of a much bigger unfolding of something. That although it’s packed with meaning and references so deeply that in 5 lectures I’m sorry to say I only got a few lines into the text, maybe we should just continue on later in the year and see if we can finish it. Or maybe that doesn’t matter so much. But the deeper meaning might not be in the words. There’s a Zen poem that says “the meaning is not in the words, but it responds to the inquiring impulse.” Perhaps the way it is for us is this: from warm hands in the past we’ve been handed forward a feeling of that inquiring impulse and we chant the Heart Sutra in celebration and recognition of that. Another way to look at the Heart Sutra is that it’s not a short explanatory text ending with a mantra but actually the whole text is a mantra. A mantra of wisdom, of compassion, of connection. It seems to work that way.

And so it’s wonderful and strange for me to be sitting here in my 46th year, 28 years after I first set foot in a zendo, wearing a version of Tang Dynasty Chinese robes with the color coding of a lineage holder sitting across the altar from my own teacher who is more or less in the same position. Oddly sitting here through the courtesy of many karmic twists and turns as are each of us. I often reflect on how strange it is that all this could have happened. I really don’t take it for granted. And I really don’t think there’s anything extra special about me, or just that every one of us is extra special – each a jewel reflecting the other jewels of the universe. And those jewels end up in different roles somehow. And we honor that and work with it as best we can. But thank you. Thank you for your support all of these years. I know it isn’t always so easy.

So I want to read a few lines from the Perfection of Wisdom In Eight Thousand Lines which is one of several prajna paramita texts. I read these lines briefly the other night in seminar more as a kind of impressionistic example of the literature but let’s spend a little longer with them this morning. The bookmark I have here is a folded up piece of paper that’s been in this book a while – it’s a syllabus that Norman gave out in the Winter of 1988 at Green Gulch when he led a class on this text. It’s been sitting there all this time I guess, waiting for this moment.

It starts like all good myths do, by setting the stage. And it’s a big stage full of worthy beings. Listen…
[p. 82-84, emphasize the freedom from despair that the Bodhisattvas experience by completely letting go of being bodhisattvas.]

So my myth of the world involves a pretty rich material world. Well very rich really in all sense of the world. This talk written on a very powerful computer – although from my point of view it’s just my crummy old laptop, getting close to time to replace it. But because of our connections to Kenya I’m little by little broadening my sense of the material world. And I found out recently that one of the thing I very much take for granted is access to electric light. Without electric light you can’t work or study in the evening. And if you can’t study you can’t get a very good education especially because there are probably many important tasks to do during the day, even if you are child who is lucky enough to go to school. After school there is work to do to help your family survive and then if you live near the equator its getting dark around 6pm every day, year round. So you can’t really study and you can’t do well in your education and nothing much changes.

Janet’s family likes to give us little gifts for Christmas and they us this toy solar light. For us it’s a toy, it sits around mostly. Walker and his friend used it inside the fort they made of pillows and sheets last weekend.

But I read an article that reminded me that in another circumstance this light is the difference between poverty and not for some child somewhere, for some family somewhere living in a village or a shanty town in all kinds of places all over the world. A fifth of the world’s popular doesn’t have reliable access to electricity it turns out and so their houses are dark at night. Not only at night but many of these houses, or shelters really, don’t have windows either so they’re dark during the day too.

The technology is the easy part of solving problems.  There are zillions of cool ideas.   Plenty of college students have come up with a great new technology for the poor.

The bigger challenge comes from the questions around any new device:  How do you build a market for a technology focused on people with no money?   How do you physically get it to where it needs to be?  How do poor people acquire it?   How can it be adopted on a wide scale?   How do you make it last?

If you look at the market for solar lighting in Africa, you’ll be excused for thinking that you’re looking at the mobile phone market some 15 years ago.   Both are leapfrog technologies — neither land lines nor the electrical grid is going to reach much of the continent, so let’s just skip that generation of technology and move to the next one.   Like cellphones, solar lamps are getting cheaper, smaller, better.    Both are life-changing, indispensable.  And the market is enormous.  Today, about 1.5 million people in Africa use solar lamps.  That’s a huge number — but it’s less than 1 percent of the potential market.   A fifth of the world’s population lives without electricity. Another large group of people do have access to electricity, but need an alternative because it is too expensive and power outages are daily events.

People without electric light usually rely on kerosene, a terrible alternative.   It gives poor light — really, not enough to study by — produces noxious fumes, and is a major hazard for burns and fires.  Indoor air pollution kills 2 million people each year and kerosene is a major source.  Kerosene itself is also expensive; the very poor typically spend 10 percent of their income or more on kerosene.   Its users pay 600 times more per unit of light than people who use electrical-powered incandescent lamps.

The unsolved problem for lighting Africa isn’t designing a great lamp.  Great lamps are out there.  It’s designing a great business model.

The solar light business in Africa is enormous.    Many companies make solar lights — d.light and Barefoot Power are two of the best-known.  These companies are growing exponentially; Barefoot Power reached 1.5 million people by the end of last year, and is on target to reach 5 million this year.  Stewart Craine of Barefoot believes the market will serve half of all unelectrified households in the world by 2020.

These commercial solar lamps vary from $10 desk lamps to five-lamp systems that sell for more than $100.   The manufacturers say the lamps pay for themselves through savings on kerosene in two to six months.  But this is still far too much money for many people.

“We currently don’t target the poorest people in the community, as we sell products for cash, and $25 is still hard to find at one time for many villagers,” Craine wrote in an e-mail.
Barefoot and d.light do try to reach poorer customers, both physically and financially.   Joyce DeMucci of Barefoot said that the company often sells in bulk to nongovernmental groups that run camps for internally displaced people.  These groups give away the lamps or subsidize their sale.  The solar companies also work with local women’s groups or microfinance groups that can provide distribution and financing.

Sam Goldman, the co-founder of d.light, said that the major challenge for selling to villagers was supply chain and logistics — “how do we sustainably deliver products and provide after-sales and warranty services?”  The company sometimes distributes lamps through businesses already designed to reach the rural poor — sellers of dried frozen fish, for example, or a kind of low-cost roofing, and d.light is starting to work with a multinational company that distributes products in rural Africa.  In Guatemala, d.light sells its lamps in mountain villages through the microconsignment system that I wrote about last year.

These programs are small, in part because the potential market for full-price sales is so big.  But the price of solar lighting is likely to drop substantially.  Gaurav Gupta, who heads the energy and environment practice at the consulting firm Dalberg,  makes the point that the demand for portability and energy efficiency is being driven by rich consumers, who want smaller and smaller mobile phones and better solar lights.  But those improvements will end up bringing down the cost of solar lighting for the poor. If it gets cheap enough, then there just may be a simple business model that can serve almost everyone — the market.

[http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/02/innovations-in-light/ ]

So this little solar battery powered light is one thing here, another thing there. Any concept we might have about this little light or anything really becomes more fluid and dynamic the more we learn. The Heart Sutra is teaching us this, our hearts are teaching us this, the world is teaching us this.

Dizang said to Xiushan, “Where do you come from?”
Xiushan said, “From the South.”
Dizang said, “How is Buddhism in the south these days?”
Xiushan said, “There’s extensive discussion.”
Dizang said, “How can that compare to me here planting the fields and making rice to eat?’
Xiushan said, “Don’t you care about the world?”
Dizhang said, “What do you call ‘the world’?”

[book of Serenity, case 12]

Avalokitesvara saw the emptiness of our experience and she knew there was space there to help even more as all fear and distress lifted.

Let’s use our time skillfully during this sesshin. Touching the heart. Just touching it. Opening to the mystery of this mythical life. Remembering the broad context of this world. What do you call the world? What do you call me? What is the myth of this moment. This breath. Just this.

This.

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As usual in this series of talks my notes seem to just be a rough starting place and then we go where we go in our studies of emptiness so listening to the talk is probably more useful than reading the notes but in case they are useful to you see below. -Tim

* excerpts from Prajna Paramita in 8000 lines (some from the opening and the hymn).

• More stories of transmission of the Heart Sutra – two of the key books in English are connected to people we know:

○ Norman was there for the teachings given by the Dalai Lama in his book Essence of the Heart Sutra

○ Peter Levitt was there for the teachings given by Thich Naht Hahn collected in The Heart of Understanding and the edited the book

• The story of Edward Conze from the introduction to the new edition of his book Buddhist Wisdom: The Diamon Sutra and the Heart Sutra one of the first reliable translations and commentaries on those sutras in English by a German independent scholar who just loved the Prajna Paramita literature for mysterious reasons.

In our studies of emptiness we see how readily the mind wants to fix things into position so we can get what we want from life. We were studying last week how the skandas themselves – our own experience as it really is – are non-different from emptiness. We took the standard formula of “form is emptiness, emptiness is form” and changes skandas and the translation of emptiness to come up with variations that spoke to us more intimately like: “thought is boundless, boundlessness is thought.” And then we think – oh great I am freed from having some special mystical experience later, I can just enter deeply into the flow of regular old thinking – my ordinary experience itself is the path. But then we notice that we always want the path to have a destination. Just to rest in the boundless nature of this moment isn’t what the mind is grasping for – it’s grasping for some state, some outcome, and so we instantly impute some fixed state of happy enlightenment that we can get to by changing our relationship to our thinking in some way.

This is not wrong exactly, it does deeply shift our experience of our living if we learn how to take a fresh look at thinking and emotion and all the other aspects of experience. To see it as boundless, as less fixed, as radically open and interpenetrated with everything else. This is really a deep and important teaching.

And yet the jaws of limitation snap shut around it so quickly. We think oh, ok if I practice the right way I will be happy. “I” becomes fixed again, “happy” becomes fixed. Which is of course the exactly opposite of what these teachings on emptiness are saying. Nothing is fixed, there is no “I” in that way. There is experience, stuff happens but it’s flows and swirls are continuous and we ourselves are continuously changing and being reinvented by some strange combination of circumstances, history, everything beyond measure that’s co-arising right here, right in this moment, right in this spot on the planet. It’s a miracle really. Every second we breathe and this enormous miracle occurs and we are produced again out of the void. We just tend to kind of…miss…the miracle part of that. Just plain old me, here again darn it, same me as last time. Meditation really helps us to see how not so that is.

And the not-so-ness of being a person is really liberating. We don’t have to worry about being “me” so much anymore. We can more and more just be. Just respond to the situation as best we can and really understand fully that it was the best we could do and it’s okay. It’s complete. Norman says in one of his talks on this stuff that real problem with being a person is that we are there. If we weren’t there those aspects of experience we call “problems” would need to be in that category. Experience would just be experience. Each moment coming and going according to conditions. And once we get our of the way our problems are gone. So there’s freedom in these teachings of boundless emptiness. They are really practical and day to day.

And there’s great responsibility here too because we see the non-separation between ourself and the world more clearly so we understand deep in our gut that what we do really matters. It really matters. The smallest thought or word or deed has unimaginable results throughout the universe. So we practice paying attention to that. We do practical helpful things and we also take impractical vows to save all beings like we will soon do after this talk. We are the world, the world is us, there is no us and there is no world. All of these things are true (and they are not the opposite of false either right?!). It’s really wild stuff if you think about it.

So on to the next section of the Heart Sutra, which Conze calls “the Second Stage in the Dialectics of Emptiness”
Shariputra, all dharmas are marked by emptiness; they neither arise nor cease, are neither defiled nor pure, neithIn Western thought the big distinction being between mind and matter. Matter real, measurable, important, logical, and mind subjective ephemeral and for the most part unimportant.
Shariputra, all dharmas are marked by emptiness; they neither arise nor cease, are neither defiled nor pure, neither increase nor decrease.

This feels like just the next bit to us but it’s a big extension of Avolokitsesvara’s original insight into the five skandas. Now she applies these teachings of emptiness to rest of the dharmas. To all experience, to everything.

And an interesting side note here is that in Western thought we make a big distinction between mind and matter. We think of these two as fundamentally different things. Matter is good, measurable, predictable if you apply science to it. Stuff we can produce and build with. We love matter in our culture. But mind is subjective, slippery, not really measurable, messy. Mind is emotional and all of that. Of course now maybe congnitive psychology and neuroscience are not seeing mind and matter in quite the same way, or maybe they are trying to sort of fix mind as matter but saying it’s all just electrical circuits in the brain that can be measured and so on. So we have this big distinction that we take for granted.

In Buddhist thought the big distinction being between conditioned and unconditioned dharmas. There is no mind/matter distinction. Matter is just one of many types of these dharmas – these units of experienced reality. Many Buddhist schools are suspicious of there being any kind of objective reality that is experienced too. There’s just the experience of the dharmas. There are 75 or so dharmas – these different types of experience – and most of them are conditioned, meaning one is always caused by others they co-arise in complicated patterns according to karma. But 3 of these 75 or so are unconditioned. These are a kind of pure peaceful reality. The 3 unconditioned dharmas are space – space, the absence of anything, can’t really be influenced by other things arising, it’s just there. And the other two are different types of nirvana – the pure experience of Buddhas who are completely not caught by anything.

Our ignorance of the nature of conditioned dharmas – where any one thing is always conditioned by the arising of other dharmas leading to our suffering. Trying to find satisfaction in that which is inherently fleeting, impermanent, and without a real identity.

And in earlier Buddhism the idea being through progressively deep meditation and study to become experientially aware of the unconditioned dharmas and be able to rest in them more and more until being nirvana permanently and dropping out of further rebirth and trouble.

In the teachings here it’s suggestion that we go beyond even these deep and subtle categories. There are no conditioned and unconditioned dharmas – nothing is pure, nothing is defiled, nothing comes and goes. It’s all just this.

The word marked is a key word too. This refers to a really fundamental teaching the conditioned dharmas, pretty much everything we experience, are said to have three marks in early Buddhism. We should really study this in our own experience. What are the qualities of experience really? Early Buddhism says these three fundamental aspects of all experience are that is it impermanent, without identity, and can’t be grasped. The Pali triplet for this is worth learning because something gets obscured by translating this into English. The three marks are
anica – impermanence
annata – not-self
dukkha – not-satisfying (“suffering”)

So anica, annata, and dukkha. It would be wonderful to have a retreat where we really took each of these up one by one. How we want things to be fixed and unchanging and graspable and satisfying. We want things the we think are separate objects to satisfy this person whom we think is more or less fixed too. It’s crazy isn’t it! But that’s ignorance and this whole text is telling us that liberation from this ignorance is really possible.

Another time we’ll talk about the 4 noble truths in details but I want to make one final point here in the hopes that we really hear it. The Buddha did not say that all life is suffering. Okay, I hope not to be at your talks and hear you say, “well of course it’s hard because the Buddha says life is suffering, that’s the first noble truth.” That’s really a narrowing down of a useful and broad teaching into something quite negative and limiting. So don’t say that. The point of the teachings that later were called the four noble truths is that if we want to release from suffering we need to deeply study how things go. Study our grasping, study the way we think about ourselves and others, notice the deepest qualities of things based on our actual experience of them, not our ideas and opinions. That gets narrowed down to “life is suffering” is the Buddha bringing up these three marks in various ways. That every moment of existence is marked with dukkha – it can’t be grasped and held in a way that will satisfy us. Life isn’t suffering. A life based on false premises is suffering. But we can learn, we can study, we can train, and we can ultimately see though even the categories and trainings and teachings into the vast boundless nature of our real life. Where everything is okay, even death, even our parents and loved ones dying, we love them and we will miss them and those who love us will miss us, sure those experiences will arise, but it’s not a problem. It’s a problem because we make it into one with our limited views. Okay so that’s a little from the high horse maybe but please let’s take a fresh look at these teachings around suffering and the end of suffering as they are really fundamental. We don’t have to suffer. Joy and satisfaction can increase as we let go into the boundless empty nature of all that is.

Discussion
• How do you work with and study emptiness / boundlessness in your own life and practice.

After discussion read from Freeman Dyson interview (see this post)

Home Practice
• Some kind of writing – writing our own Heart Sutra? poetry of emptiness?
• Do something that’s difficult for you to do and try to keep the body relaxed and study what comes and goes in the mind (example of drum class).

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As seems to be usual for me lately I didn’t stick too close to the script but the notes, which are a refined version of what I posted earlier are here for your enjoyment. Probably the talk is better, but who knows? What does “better” mean anyway? I seem to be getting a bad case of emptiness! -Tim

[opened the talk by reading Dalai Lama's Essence of the Heart Sutra p. 35-39 - anyone feel like typing that up?].

I had a dream last night about meeting a man by coincidence. I was at the side of the road trying to fix a flat tire on my bike but the hole was too big. And the man I met was saying hello and that he had the same kind of bike – what a coincidence! And we got to talking in the dream and it was clear he held many similar attitudes about life as well. There was a wonderful sense of connection and affinity. The man mentioned that he had recently been able to purchase a vacation house on Samish Island for instance but when I asked him about it he expressed great regret that somehow in the purchase of that place he’d upset a friend he cared deeply about. And so we had much in common – gender, attitudes, possessions, values about friendship.

But the feeling of affinity in the dream was so much deeper than just a sum of similarities. There was a sense of belonging together in a certain way. That affinity for others is more than just the sum of the overlaps in our personal Venn diagrams of interests and passions.

In his essays Robert Aitken roshi says the Japanese word for this kind of deep affinity is “nen” which is the feeling expressed in our short Sino-Japanese chant Enmei Jukku Kannon Gyo. We chant “cho nen kan ze on, bo nen Kanzeon, nen en ju shin ki, nen ne fu ri shin” In the morning I feel affinity with Kanzeon, in the evening I feel affinity with with Kanzeon, my thoughts and attentions  are always with this affinity with compassion and connection.

The character nen is 念which has the heart-mind radical and means attention, desire, thought, feeling, idea, and wish. It’s used in the ordinary word for thought but I think in our sutra we can assume a deeper meaning. So rolling all of those English concepts together maybe we have something like “deep yearning for connection” and this is a beautiful thing but letting go of it is also beautiful.

When I was looking the character up in the dictionary I learned that the absence of nen, unen (無念) is a Buddhist term for freedom from obstructive thoughts.  And this is what the Heart Sutra is all about. So we connect through our affinity and our thinking and our concepts but when we let them go we are truly connected. Unen maybe could be translated as “going beyond affinity.”

(Nen in the online dictionary: http://jisho.org/kanji/details/%E5%BF%B5 )

And so in my dream the vehicle to connection with my new friend were some of the concepts we see as solid and divided from other concepts. He liked this bike, not that bike. He cared about friends’ feelings. He was this gender, not that gender. And yet the feeling of affinity was so much deeper than these flimsy concepts.

When Avalokitesvara looks deeply into her moment by moment experience she sees that everything that’s arising is empty. The implication is “empty of own-being” two technical Buddhist terms together.  Empty meaning not bound, not limited to, own-being meaning separate and divided. So all experience – every thing, every concept, every thought, every feeling is boundless. It’s an entry point and it’s own release.

When Avalokitesvara goes on to elaborate further that “form is emptiness, emptiness is form” we see this dynamic especially once we realize that the sutra is abbreviating here. This entire pattern needs to be repeated:

Form does not differ from emptiness, emptiness does not differ from form. Form itself is emptiness, emptiness itself form.

It says so more clearly in our current translation than the previous one actually:

Sensations, perceptions, formations, and consciousness are also like this.

That’s saying “repeat this process of investigation with the other skandhas” although our current translation has an unusual translation for the second skandha of vedanā as “sensations” which is maybe better than “feelings” but still not quite right.

After I awoke from my dream it occurred to me that “leanings” might be a better translation for vedanā because it’s the sense of how the mind leans into the pleasant and away from the unpleasant, but it really might be one where we just learn a Sanskrit term. Our practice is a bit of a pastiche of language because we are in the middle of a great turning of the Way right here in North America in the 21st century so naturally it’s a bit jumbled up as we try to understand it all.

So:

Vedanā does not differ from emptiness, emptiness does not differ from vedanā. Vedanā itself is emptiness, emptiness itself vedanā.

Or maybe if we use “preferences” for vedanā  which is combining vedanā  with the way we elaborate on that sense of pleasant/unpleasant with our thinking and actions :

Preferences do not differ from emptiness, emptiness does not differ from preferences. Preferences themselves are emptiness, emptiness itself is preferences.

That’s surprising isn’t it? We know that our preferences cause suffering very experientially every day if we study our experience honestly. This endless trying to get what we want on gross and subtle levels all the time has us stuck and bound up. And so there’s a part of us that wants to get rid of our preferences and enter some kind of pure liberated state that’s free of preferences. And at the same time there’s part of us who is totally committed to our preferences and cursing at that ascetic impulse to be free of them.

The Heart Sutra seems to be saying that neither is helpful. That we can enter into emptiness through our preferences and if we open our eyes we can see emptiness expressed right in the middle of our preferences.

This sutra is a deep expression of the non-dual teachings that Zen explores. Right in the middle of the trouble there is peace.  One does not preclude the other. This is the non-separation of samsara and nirvana. The teaching here is that preference and concepts are vehicles not problems. Not to be ignored but not to be taken too seriously or reified either. Entering into experience deeply on every breath is the sense here. Experience with it’s full content – the peaceful breath with the judgmental thought – both co-arising just as conditions call for.

The idea here is that the path it truly right in front of us all the time. That we are stepping into that which is arising now – that this is our way. That we can’t push our way into some idea of a beautiful spiritual reality that’s different from what’s right here, right now. And that strangely peaceful liberation is in this entering into, this willingness to fully feel what really is happening. The non-separation of suffering and peace is the root of this teaching.

And since emptiness has this sense of no-boundaries, or the fluidity of separation, we can also translate it as boundless or boundlessness.

So let’s play with the Heart Sutra’s phrase using boundlessness as our translation of shunyata, which is usually emptiness, and the fourth skandha of samskāra which is a kind of catch all for all kinds of thinking and volitional impulses and memories and ideas that we put together to create concepts about the world. Of the five it’s the most technical and complicated of the skandhas.  The usual translation into English is “mental formations” – the thoughts and thought-assemblies which we put together and take to be reality in a certain way. In Cognitive Psychology they are really interested in that process of putting thoughts together and the way we attach new learning to existing structures that we already have.  But let’s simplify into something that has more resonance. Let’s just say translate samskāra  as thought. And a powerful tool we have here is that after we’ve practiced for a while we can start to identify thoughts coming and going in the mind.

So those two changes give us:

Thinking is boundless, boundlessness is thinking. Thought does not differ from boundlessness, boundlessness does not differ from thought. Boundlessness itself is thought, thought itself is boundless.

So when we see and practice with thought as thought the sutra encourages us to notice thinking with a different attitude. To explore the boundless nature of thinking itself – these thoughts which seem to have a discrete quality – if it’s this it’s not that – a kind of dualistic, separating nature, actually are not that way at all. Actually they are an expression of the boundless nature of reality and that this collection of experienced I call me is that way too. Boundless, limitless, vast. Containing everything and not separate from anything.

And in Buddhist psychology they don’t separate emotion from thought particularly so you could take your favorite emotion and pop it in there too:

Sorrow is boundless, boundlessness is sorrow. Sorrow does not differ from boundlessness, boundlessness does not differ from sorrow. Boundlessness itself is sorrow, sorrow itself is boundless.

That puts a bit of space and perspective around the thought or emotion doesn’t it? Less of a sense of being bound by our thinking, our sorrow, our emotion. That these things are a kind of messenger from beyond as Rumi says:

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

~ Rumi ~
(The Essential Rumi, versions by Coleman Barks)

And then we return to this sense of separation from each other. And that wonderful sense of connection and affinity that arises sometimes.  When we feel some affinity with someone we may assume it to be based on common interests or some separate discrete something – gender, ideology, preferences, whatever it is, we can practice exploring the way that’s just a kind of mental short cut for our total affinity and connection with everyone and everything.

It’s like Walt Whitman felt in writing  Song of Myself, which actually a long poem – we should read the whole thing sometimes not just grab little quotes out of the work to make a point and in my notes to this talk online I include a link to it:

http://www.daypoems.net/plainpoems/1900.html

It would be great to read the whole poem out loud to yourself. Go for it as a kind of practice in American Dharma – takes 10 minutes or so.

Here’s section 51 towards the end of the poem which interestingly uses “emptied” as a verb. And Walt Whitman is part of what is sometimes called the American Enlightenment right? So these teachings of the Heart Sutra are not something Asian and special, they are part of our human birthright. They are a kind of pointing to the Heart of the Matter that is deeply universal and yet so easily forgotten.

The past and present wilt--I have fill'd them, emptied them.
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.
Who has done his day's work? who will soonest be through with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?

Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?

Home practice ideas:

1) chant the mantra 21 times during home practice after making offerings

2) journaling on feeling your way into troublesome patterns of thought and emotion as the path, what does that feel like? how does that arise during the day? what does it feel like when you turn away from these things vs. entering into them?

3) Just keep practicing – it’s practice period!