Category Archives: Dharma Talks

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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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