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This talk was given during the opening retreat for the 2012 Winter Practice Period which has the theme of “The Heart of the Matter” and includes study of the Heart Sutra.
In this talk which was largely spontaneous I opened with this powerful poem from Derek Walcott:
Dark August So much rain, so much life like the swollen sky of this black August. My sister, the sun, broods in her yellow room and won't come out. Everything goes to hell; the mountains fume like a kettle, rivers overrun; still, she will not rise and turn off the rain. She is in her room, fondling old things, my poems, turning her album. Even if thunder falls like a crash of plates from the sky, she does not come out. Don't you know I love you but am hopeless at fixing the rain ? But I am learning slowly to love the dark days, the steaming hills, the air with gossiping mosquitoes, and to sip the medicine of bitterness, so that when you emerge, my sister, parting the beads of the rain, with your forehead of flowers and eyes of forgiveness, all with not be as it was, but it will be true (you see they will not let me love as I want), because, my sister, then I would have learnt to love black days like bright ones, The black rain, the white hills, when once I loved only my happiness and you. by Derek Walcott
And I also quoted from Thanissaro Bhikkhu about the meaning of “wisdom” in Buddhism from a Theravadin perspective – and where I do appreciate his bit of criticism of the Mahayana use of wisdom and emptiness which can indeed get a bit abstract and philosophical and yet I do of course think it has very deep value (which perhaps from his persepective he isn’t seeing?)
What’s striking about [the Buddha's] standard for wisdom is how direct and down to earth it is. This might come as a surprise, for most of us don’t think of Buddhist wisdom as so commonsensical and straightforward. Instead, the phrase “Buddhist wisdom” conjures up teachings more abstract and paradoxical, flying in the face of common sense — emptiness being a prime example. Emptiness, we’re told, means that nothing has any inherent existence. In other words, on an ultimate level, things aren’t what we conventionally think of as “things.” They’re processes that are in no way separate from all the other processes on which they depend. This is a philosophically sophisticated idea that’s fascinating to ponder, but it doesn’t provide much obvious help in getting you up early on a cold morning to meditate nor in convincing you to give up a destructive addiction.
For example, if you’re addicted to alcohol, it’s not because you feel that the alcohol has any inherent existence. It’s because, in your calculation, the immediate pleasure derived from the alcohol outweighs the long-term damage it’s doing to your life. This is a general principle: attachment and addiction are not metaphysical problems. They’re tactical ones. We’re attached to things and actions, not because of what we think they are, but because of what we think they can do for our happiness. If we keep overestimating the pleasure and underestimating the pain they bring, we stay attached to them regardless of what, in an ultimate sense, we understand them to be.
Because the problem is tactical, the solution has to be tactical as well. The cure for addiction and attachment lies in retraining your imagination and your intentions through expanding your sense of the power of your actions and the possible happiness you can achieve. This means learning to become more honest and sensitive to your actions and their consequences, at the same time allowing yourself to imagine and master alternative routes to greater happiness with fewer drawbacks. Metaphysical views may sometimes enter into the equation, but at most they’re only secondary. Many times they’re irrelevant. Even if you were to see the alcohol and its pleasure as lacking inherent existence, you’d still go for the pleasure as long as you saw it as outweighing the damage. Sometimes ideas of metaphysical emptiness can actually be harmful. If you start focusing on how the damage of drinking — and the people damaged by your drinking — are empty of inherent existence, you could develop a rationale for continuing to drink. So the teaching on metaphysical emptiness wouldn’t seem to pass the Buddha’s own test for wisdom.
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Emptiness as an approach to meditation is the most basic of the three kinds of emptiness. In the context of this approach, emptiness means “empty of disturbance” — or, to put it in other terms, empty of stress. You bring the mind to concentration and then examine your state of concentration in order to detect the presence or absence of subtle disturbance or stress still inherent within that state. When you find a disturbance, you follow it back to the perception — the mental label or act of recognition — on which the concentration is based. Then, you drop that perception in favor of a more refined one, one leading to a state of concentration with less inherent disturbance.
by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
(It’s worth reading the entire article online at:
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/integrityofemptiness.html)
And I also spoke about the Mahayana idea of the prajnaparamita – the perfect wisdom of the wisdom beyond wisdom, but most usefully to use one derivation of “paramita” is “that which brings to the further shore.” So prajna paramita for us is actions of though, word, or deed that help to bring us across to the other shore of awakening. To conditions with less suffering and more happiness.
And to set the stage for our study of the Heart Sutra in the upcoming seminar I read a translation of the longer version of the Heart Sutra which is recited in the Tibetan traditions where there’s more of a “frame story” about the shorter version which we chant. The context here is helpful.
I was quoting from the translation done by Donald Lopez, Jr., in his scholarly book on The Heart Sutra Explained. I can’t find that online and will type it up later.
And in all of this we are interested in the study of the Heart Sutra as a support to our own study of the heart of our own lives. What is the Heart of the Matter right now? Today? What is the most important thing?
In closing the talk we returned to Derek Walcott – a poem oft quoted in Dharma Talks for appreciation of the way he approaches the problem of identity.
Love after Love The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other's welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life. by Derek Walcott
