Category Archives: Practice Period 2012

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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!

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In this talk I gave a summary of our discussions so far about Buddhist wisdom (prajna paramita) and we started the first key line of the sutra where Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva was deeply practicing prajna paramita and realized that all five aggregates (skandhas) are empty and was saved from all suffering.

This required a full lecture just to start to unpack. We talked about bodhisattvas, about Avalokitesvara  the Bodhisattva of compassion, about the five aggregates and about emptiness.

I closed with a love song by Tracy Chapman because the more you think about what they mean by “emptiness” the more you realize it’s about love and connection, but a deep love and connection unbound by personality and concept. It sounds cold and well, empty, at first but it’s a problem in translation that it seems that way.

I’ll add some notes later, but mostly this talk was unscripted so I don’t know how much help my notes will be but I’ll paste some in soon.

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I somehow really over-prepared for this talk so the notes below will be given in different pieces over the first two talks most likely. If I have time I’ll edit this down to closer to what I said but listening to the talk is probably the most interesting thing to do. –Tim

Welcome everyone. Our topic for this practice period seminar is a big one, and I hope a central one for all of us. What is the heart of the matter? What is the most important thing? What is truly central to our lives?

As the center of this exploration we’ll take up a study of the Heart Sutra – a short Buddhist text chanted daily in thousands of centers all around the world. We chant it here a few times a week. But I hope this seminar can be more for us than an academic inquiry into this odd little text from the Buddhist tradition. We are practicing in a tradition and I do think knowing something about that tradition is helpful but there is a bigger dimension to this question of the sutra at the heart of our lives than just learning more about this aspect of the Zen and Mahayana Buddhist tradition.

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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

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