Talk Notes:
Heart Sutra 6 - Empty Marks, Empty Chains
For those just joining us on Wednesday night for the first time we've been exploring the Heart Sutra we just chanted in Wednesday Dharma Seminar. It's a central wisdom teaching in the Zen school that's recited often at pretty much all important occasions as well as at regular practice. We chanted it on Monday at Luba's funeral. And I'm sure it will be chanted at the funerals of other Zen friends who've passed.
A few remembrances before we go on. In addition to Luba a few other Zen friends have passed in the last weeks.
Luba was involved in our hiking program - the Wilderness Dharma Program. Here's her obituary:
Luba
We remember Luba as a vibrant and sharp yet humble woman, a deep thinker, and a radical independent. She was an avid hiker on the local trails in East Whatcom County, and high up in the North Cascades, and she was a diligent advocate for justice, ecological conservation and against oppressive systems. She met many of her friends on outdoor excursions, along the Mt. Baker Highway, up in the woods, on trails, in activist circles, or in Bellingham, where she would frequent the Community Food Co-op, Trader Joe's, and other local spaces, including community spiritual outlets she enthusiastically participated in such as Shir HaShalom Jewish Renewal and Red Cedar Zen Community.
Luba was a medical interpreter by profession and had a knack for languages and cultures. Born in Astrakhan, Russia, she immigrated to the United States with her mother as a teenager. She was fluent in both Russian and English, and liked learning words and ideas from various traditions, near and far, and was well-versed and well-read in mythology, history, and current events from around the globe.
She graduated from Portland State University with an Arts degree and continued to make art throughout her life.
Luba found nature to be meditative and healing and believed in simple living, lived a vegan lifestyle, and often critiqued materialistic culture and wasteful practices. She stood up to protect trees from being cut down for financial or political gain and loved the natural landscapes of the pacific northwest. She did not go anywhere without her hiking backpack, and she used to go on backpacking trips, which she loved. In her own words, "the act of moving through nature quietly, attentively, propelling yourself forward by your breath and muscles, has a way of balancing and quieting down the mind, opening it to a sense of contentment and awe..."
Shortly before she entered hospice care, Luba said she still had a lot left to do in life. There were places she had hoped to be able to hike during her lifetime.
In honor of Luba, you may want to plant or protect a tree or go on a hike in a beautiful place.
We will always remember how Luba loved her cats with such tenderness, found refuge in nature, held strong values and advocated for them, and participated with us in events, hikes, and gatherings. She is leaving behind a legacy of activism, kindness, and simplicity.
Luba is survived by her mother, Galina Pekisheva.
A second Zen friend who passed a few weeks ago was David Chadwick. I met David a couple of times - I remember him visiting Bellingham once on what was probably a book tour. David was an early student of Suzuki Roshi in California, coming to SF Zen Center as a young college drop out in 1966 - he was 21 - just in time for the opening of Tassajara Zen Monastery in 1967 which he and his new friend Ed Brown were an intimate part of.
One of the interesting sociological phenomena of the early days of Zen in America was the (mostly young) Zen students taking it very, very seriously. Eyes down, sour expressions, trying really really hard to be excellent Zen students and a lot of imitation of their Japanese teachers - sometimes even falling into imitative Japanese accents and using little Japanese linguistic customs like adding the honorific "san" after everyone's name.
And it's hard to fully get how completely they were all throwing themselves into this. Many of the new members of the community were, like David, in their early 20's. And they they really really jumping into the deep end of the pool. Not "I'll take a quarter off and try out a practice period at Tassajara, or I'll get leave from work to do that and then come back to my job and my friends and family." No, the mode was a one way ticket with no plan beyond that. They saw themselves not just as going off to study something but as building a whole new world in America based in an ancient wisdom tradition - countercultural pioneers who were rejecting the dominant system. And together they set up a situation where that actually was possible for the first 10-20 years of SF Zen Center you could live there and work there full time - fully immersed. Zen Center aquired buildings for housing, you worked for Zen Center, or in a business Zen Center created, you got up early every day for zazen, you were living the life. And it was a serious and thrilling and immersive things.
But David was kind of unique in that social environment. He too was immersed and all in but somehow he never took it quite that seriously. He retained a sense of humor. He was sometimes a bit of a goof off. He'd go off sometimes to do his own thing, breaking the rules, but also coming back. Like one time some visiting guests at Tassajara invited him to join them for steak and whisky and he was pretty much "sure!" - he was from Texas - and then the next morning there was a meeting of team leads or something with Suzuki Roshi which he dragged himself into late and obviously hung over. The more rule abiding students were outraged and complained to Suzuki Roshi about him. But the Roshi just said something along the lines of, "let David be David."
David loved Suzuki roshi, like they all did, but didn't put him up on quite as high of a pedestal. And that afforded him a certain degree of perspective on what was going on. And as things went along he surprised everyone, including himself I think, by being a very good writer. He ended up devoting the rest of his life to being the chronicler and historian of the incredible thing he was a part of. So he wrote several books about it all and about his own journey in it. The most important one is his biography of Suzuki Roshi called Crooked Cucumber. And just before he passed he published another book called Tassajara Stories - which is the story of that first year at Tassajara in incredible detail - I actually listened to him reading it as an audiobook which was wonderful and quirky and fun. He'd just finished a follow up of Tassajara Stories that covers 1968 through Suzuki Roshi's death in 1971 which I'm very much looking forward to. And I still have in mind a sangha trip to Tassajara - next year or so. This year is all about settling into this place.
David passed, also from cancer, at the age of 81 in his late-in-life adopted home of Bali on February 23rd.
And the first person I want to memorialize briefly is a Dharma brother of mine: Anka Rick Spencer who passed away just past midnight early Monday morning with his dear student Argelia at his side in Mexico City. Rick was originally from one of the Dakotas. He fled the US to Canada to avoid the draft for the Vietnam War and made a live in Vancouver, BC. He did some kind of technology work for Environment Canada. He connected with a Rinzai teacher in Vancouver in 1982 and then in the last 80's hooked up with a group called the Karuna Meditation Society which had just started inviting a mid-40's Norman Fischer to come for teaching visits which is where I met him. And after Kate McCandless and Michael Newton returned from Japan to join Karuna and then found Mountain Rain Zen Community Rick was right there - a central part - and we became a four-some. Norman ordaining each of the four of us, pretty much one year after the next from 2000 to 2004 - this during the peak of his Pacific Northwest travels when he was doing weekend retreats and sesshin with Mountain Rain and Red Cedar six times a year - Norman would alternate coming to Bellingham and Vancouver. In those early days it was more one sangha with two locations in two countries and we'd all go back and forth across the border to each retreat with Norman. So I saw Rick a lot. Later on, Norman gave all four of us Dharma Transmission and we prepared for that together and Rick and I were transmitted in the same week at Norman's house in 2011 - a very intimate week together.
Rick was quite tall, a little awkward to be honest - a bit of a geek to be sure, and so sincere. Like heart-breakingly sincere if you got out of your own head and tuned into him. Wanting to so so deeply to understand the Dharma, to live it, to be able to share it. I only just found out that his Dharma name Anka Burai means Dancing Thunderbolt, Peaceful Transformation. A nice celebration of his energy and encouragment towards peacefulness.
Anyway in that period, Norman was also going to a center near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, created by a doctor down there with SF Zen Center connections named Laura del Valle. Norman and his wife Kathie were close to Laura and had actually hosted Laura's daughter Angelica for a year when she was in high school. Like I was saying with David Chadwick, the early SF Zen Center people were tightly tightly connected. Anyway every year for the December rohatsu sesshin Norman would go down to her center called Mar de Jade. Sometimes for a second trip too.
Rick started going to those and he fell in love with the Mexican sangha, and culture and the Spanish language. And so in his late 50's he turned his big brain to learning Spanish, retired early from his job, and moved to Puerto Vallarta. Within a year or so he was fully fluent - amazing and inspiring to me - although I think with a bit of an odd accent and cadence, which was somehow very much Rick. He started a sitting group, helped out at Laura's place when Norman would visit and made a Dharma life in Mexico. Eventually the sitting group ran out of steam and he moved with his close student Argelia to an apartment in Mexico City which he called Ermita Zen México - "Mexican Zen Hermitage" where he lived out the rest of his days. Cancer again: in his lungs.
So goodbye dear Rick. Thank you for your beautiful Dharma life. I'm sorry we didn't stay closer (as siblings growing up together we had some sibling stuff with each other - it happens). I did meant to come visit you in Mexico City and I'm sorry I didn't prioritize that more.
Thank you David for sharing your love and story-telling so we can all be closer to Suzuki Roshi. And for being so fully yourself always.
And thank you Luba for sharing your Dharma. At the funeral we all learned more about your many facets and unique way of being yourself. You were definitely taken from us far too soon.
Wow, that took a minute and telling these stories of departed Dharma friends to you reminds me of my own teacher. He'd do that when someone had passed and I guess now I'm old enough to start having my Dharma friends and mentors passing away and I'm in the position of giving talks to a community. Somehow even though probably few of you knew Luba or David or Rick it feels important in this space to honor them.
Someone asked me if the initial exploration of the emptiness of the five skandhas at the start of the Heart Sutra is the whole point and the rest is just filler.
It's about time we made some progress in the text. After the big deal news that the five aggregates which compromise what we think of as ourselves are empty, Avalokitesvara, bodhisattva of compassion, goes on - no surprise - to share with Shariputra and thus with us, that everything else is empty of a separate enduring self. And that this is really good news.
The heart sutra
Shariputra, all dharmas are marked by emptiness; they neither arise nor cease, are neither defiled nor pure, neither increase nor decrease.
Part of how we think things to be is that they coming into being, they have certain characteristics and then eventually they're gone again. We do get it, sort of, that things come and go - arise and cease - even if at the same time we seem to think they have a certain kind of solidity and that they are sort of permanent-for-now. It's here, it's real. This is why I know this is true: I can see it, feel it, name it, and so on.
But actually everything's radically more fluid than that.
But you would think then the language would be something like "there is constant arising and ceasing, incessant increasing and decreasing" but these great teachers of emptiness must have felt that the problem with that kind of talk is you assume there's a specific kind of something that's doing the arising and ceasing.
So in Luba's funeral to offer her the infinite spaciousness of emptiness we told her, "In the Dharma world these is no coming and going" and even that there is, "no birth and death" - to help us feel the true openness of the empty nature of all. Or the boundless nature of if you prefer that word. My current fave is the spacious nature of all. But really emptiness, as challenging of a term to our thinking minds as it is, is the most accurate - the most clear - there is no messing around when you are in accord with emptiness.
The word "marked" in this line is also significant because a core teaching of early Buddhism is that every moment of experience - every dharma - is marked by three things: impermanence, not-self, and dukkha or suffering. This is a very helpful teaching so let's unpack it briefly and then we can appreciate it all the more since the very dharmas that seems to be marked are empty, as are the marks themselves. Everything empty, everything free.
The first mark of impermanence doesn't need a lot of discussion but appreciating it is a lifetime of practice. Mostly you just notice the suffering that comes from wishing things weren't so completely impermanent and unsubstantial. A similar process to studying emptiness. Impermanance.
The second mark that all experiences are not-self or non-self is essentially the same as studying the five aggregates. We think that the wall is not me but that my great new idea is me, or my fear is me. How healing to release from that. And also pretty threatening to the usual way we maintain our self. If that great idea isn't me or mine I feel like I'm losing something important, right. The ego is losing itself.
The third mark sounds horrible. All moments of experience are marked with suffering.
So it's helpful unpack the use of the English word "suffering" - it's not a great fit to the Sanskrit term dukkha which is more nuanced. Dukkha is about the difficult feelings that we have when we try to get lasting satisfaction about things that won't us that satisfaction. Change is dukkha when we want things to stay the same but: impermanence! The whole process of constantly being "me" is dukkha in all kinds of ways, right? Non-self. And when there is something that happens that's just painful dukkha is the complex flood of reactivity, which we think perfectly normal and justified, that such-and-so shouldn't have happened, isn't fair, they should know better.
So it's not that all experience is suffering. It's that all experience when viewed with ignorance and conditioned views can lead straight to suffering pretty darn quick. And we can train in freedom but studying these core teachings and we can super charge the whole process with emptiness.
So that's all about all dharma are marked with emptiness.
The next part is pretty straight forward I think given all we've looked at together:
Heart sutra
Therefore, given emptiness, there is no form, no sensation, no perception, no formation, no consciousness; no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; no sight, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no object of mind; no realm of sight ... no realm of mind consciousness.
They make a weird us of negation here is the only thing we have to get our minds around. no this, no that. What must people think chanting this cold? You're looking at the chant book with your eyes, processing the visual information into sight, all of this happening within the realm of sight which is sight consciousness and it says, nope: no eyes, no sight, no realm of sight. What the heck!
There's a famous story about one
So what's meant here with all of this negation is to remember that none of these are what we think they are. The eyes are not the eyes we assume them to be because we assume a separate lasting separate eye-ness that's not there. So no eyes isn't there are no eyes but that eyes are also emptiness and emptiness is the eyes.
It's fun to look at the translations a little finally.
In Sanskrit the primary negation particle is na. Sometimes that's repeated just like "no" is repeated in English. After the equivalent of "therefor given emptiness" we have na rūpaṃ na vedanā na saṃjñā na saṃskārā na vijñānam no form, no feeling-tone, no perception, no mental formations, no consciousness.
Then the next one na cakṣuḥ-śrotra-ghrāṇa-jihvā-kāya-manāṃsi is na once then all five sensory organs and mind in one compound phrase. no eyes-ears-nose-tongue-body-mind
In the Chinese the second of those two patterns repeats there's a single no "wu" - which the Japanese pronounce "mu" - the character that looks like a little barred gate - at the start of each set of things. So we have Mu gen ni bi ze shin ni for no eyes-ears-nose-tongue-body-mind in Sino-Japanese.
So anyway all that translation geekery aside. "No" isn't saying there is no reality, but that we're mistaking the appearance of reality with the true reality which is empty, boundless, and radically spacious and interpenetrated with everything else.
And since we perceive reality with our senses and our mind this section drills into that using the Buddhist way of thinking of a sensory experience being a coming together of a sensory object, a sense organ, and sense consciousness.
The dot-dot-dot between "no realm of sight" and "no realm of mind consciousness" just means to mentally add no realm of sounds, no realm of smells, no realm of tastes, and no realm of touch to save a few words in this compact sutra.
The next section up to the semicolon in that paragraph:
Heart sutra
There is neither ignorance nor extinction of ignorance... neither old age and death, nor extinction of old age and death;
brings up and deconstructs a really core teaching in Buddhism called the Twelve Nidanas which describes the process of our experiencing reality through the senses and the mind. How it's all sort up built up in a flash moment after moment.
But you have to recognize this teaching with 12 components is all there when they just list two of them the first step, ignorance, dot-dot-dot and the last step "old age and death." Cheerful sounding list isn't it? Along with negating each of them to point out their emptiness.
That is a really fascinating and important teaching which we could and should spend some serious time with, but just for a little familiarization here the 12 steps in the chain co-orgination which is another name for this process of experiencing a moment:
- Ignorance (Avidyā): Misunderstanding the nature of reality/self.
leads to
- Karmic Formations (Saṅkhāra): mental formations - also the 4th skandha - are generated,
which leads to
- Consciousness (Viññāṇa): something starts emerging in consciousness,
which leads to
- Name and Form (Nāmarūpa): we feel it the mind starts working on naming it,
which is made "real" by
- Six Sense Fields (Saḷāyatana): the sense and thinking mind flip on,
when then we start to take personally with
- Contact (Phassa): a coming together of senses, objects, and consciousness
and then here's our second skanda again, we like it or we don't...
- Feeling (Vedanā): that leaning of the mind as pleasant, unpleasant, neutral
and then things get sticky fast with
- Craving (Taṇhā): Desire and thirst for pleasure/aversion to pain
and
- Clinging/Grasping (Upādāna): Attachment to desire.
and that primes the pump for grabbing onto the next moment, or the next lifetime wtih
- Becoming/Existence (Bhava): The process of investing in a new moment or life
and then a moment, or a lifetime comes into reality with
- Birth (Jāti):
and we know what birth leads to:
- Aging and Death (Jarāmaraṇa):
and then go back to #1 and repeat.
And remember that i'm posting these notes along with the talk if you want to come to something like this.
Then we point of the emptiness of the famous four noble truths
Heart sutra
no suffering, no cause, no cessation, no path;
and finally just to make sure you've let of striving by now
Heart sutra
no knowledge and no attainment.
Yay! 6 talks in and we finished the first page.
What do you think of all of this?
