Pamela Nenzen Brown gave a dharma talk this past Sunday at Santa Barbara Zen Center Hospice.

In 2017, Pamela met Sensei Gary Koan Janka and has been sitting with Santa Barbara Zen Center ever since. Koan Sensei introduced Pamela and SBZC to Jikoji Zen Center, Pamela was ordained in Kobun Chino Ottogawa Roshi's lineage by Shoho Michael Newhall in 2020. She received dharma transmission from Jakko Eso Vanja Palmers at Felsentor, Switzerland in 2022.

Full Transcript

Driving over the mountain I live on in Los Olivos this morning, I found myself swooning over the swaths of wildflowers. Even though there was a little thread running through me that I was going to be really close on time, even though I gave myself an hour, you know, life... The tagline for Zen should be "Zen: surprise," because it's always moving and you never know what's happening. There were all these periods in which I had to slow to 40 miles per hour. In any event, I made it. But all along the way I heard myself saying aloud to these wildflowers, "Good morning, good morning," and not just noticing the flowers, of course.

There is this experience when you notice something, it seems to be greeting you while you're greeting it, this interpenetration of this moment. It's incredibly profound and infinitely subtle. As we were sitting this morning, I had this feeling that we were all those flowers sitting upright in those fields. I just thought we were blooming together. This was really lovely, and I hope it was a Dharma gate of joy and ease for you as well. This experience of noticing and being noticed at the same time always feels like a relief to me. Actually, a relief from carrying around this person. Like, I don't have to do that all the time.

One of the messages of the Heart Sutra which we chanted this morning - thank you, Bob, for your flexibility. I went way off course this morning and said we're going to do it this way. As usual, he is fluid. And one of the teachings of the Heart Sutra is that this relief of carrying ourselves around is always available. It's always available.

Over the last three weeks up in the little Los Olivos Sangha, we've been studying this sutra. We spent one week just looking at the title. We spent the next... Want me to do it? Yeah. Use your host now. I can't do it. Okay. Why don't you make me co-host. Good morning, Nora.

So the first week we spent some time on just the title. And now three weeks later, four weeks this Thursday, we're going to be covering the Gatha at the end. Which you chanted this morning. As you chanted this morning, this sutra has something to say about emptiness or boundlessness. And we've spent a lot of time in the valley sangha kind of exploring that.

After the last talk, which concerned the major portion where there's all this negation, no I know you, no hands, you know, that stuff, no taste, no touch, no smell, all of those. A 13-year-old son of one of our regular practitioners was present. And I had said that empty is even empty of emptiness. And afterwards this 13-year-old young man came up to me and gave me his teaching. Ready? It's quite a teaching. This is what he said. "If you take the Y out of empty, it will still be empty. If you take out the E in empty, it will still be empty. If you take out the P and the E and the Y, it will still be empty." He said there's no way that empty can be empty. That was pretty good. I wanted but did not add that if you took out the E-M-P-T-Y, empty is empty. And then what's left? It's not nothing. And this is what the Heart Sutra speaks to.

And because we've been diving into the Heart Sutra, I've been noticing its teachings in everything. This tendency is called frequency illusion. It's a bias. It's a cognitive bias. Sometimes it's called phenomenon. Instead of frequency illusion, it's sometimes called frequency bias. And I know everyone here is familiar with this and maybe not in terms of the Dharma. I'm seeing the Dharma everywhere, which is my predilection. But noticing, for example, when you get a new car, that everyone's driving this car. Everybody on the road seems to be driving your car and you suddenly notice it. It's our tendency to notice something and then lead to a belief that there's an increased frequency of its occurring in the world. We go through a lot of that in life.

So last week, I was sitting to wait to have Dokusan with a student and I was standing on the street in Little Los Olivos outside the tax store. You know, in Los Olivos, if you've been there, there's a job up there. I was standing there. And in the window of this tax store was a big sign. It said, "Help wanted, apply inside." Come on. Is it just me? It strikes me that, you know, this is basically our practice. For me in that moment, this was the Heart Sutra kind of hit me over the head. And these signs are everywhere, of course, all the time. Some of the signs, of course, are not signs. They're not on the highway. As you know, I'm fond of those signs too. They're not in shop windows. They're in the trees or the birds or the shakuhachi or the hawn or people's faces or the ground that we're sitting upon right now. It's everything everywhere all the time, all over again.

We have these moments regularly where these teachings like pop out like some kind of strange relief. They just pop right out at us like a flower bursting open, just bursting open. We might see this in the trees, in the wind, in yourself. In the smile on someone else's face without any words, without any understanding or label or distinction about it.

So the 13-year-old's teaching about emptiness and the sign suggesting that help is wanted, apply inside, returned me to this not-nothingness. The zero-ness at the heart of the Heart Sutra. So how did I get from the Heart Sutra to a window sign to the Heart Sutra to zero? Well, like everything else, we get by with a little help from our friends. And last Sunday, I went to Monica's teacher and Burkett gave a talk at Jikoji online. And he ever so briefly touched down on the Heart Sutra. He wasn't giving a talk about the Heart Sutra, but he did say the Heart Sutra is the ultimate exercise in this expression that he called skin shedding. I kind of love this skin shedding. In recognizing emptiness, we move towards and live without a skin some of the time. And this skinlessness is freedom.

Empty is empty as something. In Sanskrit, the thing that is empty, the word in Sanskrit is sva-bhava, which translates as inherent existence or an essence or a soul or intrinsic nature, something has an intrinsic nature or not. In the Heart Sutra, the Bodhisattva, an imagined being, Avalokiteshvara is her name, his name, its name, depending upon which version you're reading. Avalokiteshvara sees that all five streams through which we perceive reality, all of those forms, all of those ways, those streams, they all are empty. These are the five skandhas, the five heaps, the five aggregates. These are all the words that were used to describe how we experience reality. And she said, he said, they said, they're all empty of inherent existence. They're all empty of sva-bhava. So hard for me to say that.

So these streams, as you chanted this morning, form feeling, perceptions, impulses, and consciousness. Each are empty of a separate self, a separate essence or existence, which is to say that none of these ways in which we receive reality exist by themselves. And you know this, you know that all of these senses in which we experience things don't happen by themselves. That's impossible. They only coexist and co-arise in relationship with everything else. This is not nothingness. It's rather the absence of any kind of distinction between something as if it were its own thing, including me and you, including me in the trees and me and you and me in the blossoms and me and you and me and the birds and me and you. No distinctions. This is to say that none of these ways that we experience reality can exist by itself alone. Each exists, co-exists only in relationship with all the others.

Some of you have heard me talk about relationship a lot. I will not harp on this too much, but really it's everything still and it's not going to go away that way. This not nothingness is the removal of the illusion of distinction between one thought and another. Maybe in your shikantaza this morning you may have experienced some thoughts and did you? No. No thoughts came up in this room. I could feel that. When we're sitting, you know that you can't pull out that thought and think it's separate from anything. There's this endless, vast, fertile void giving you thoughts and thoughts and thoughts. You can't separate those thoughts. You cannot tell me that that thought comes from its own little source and you can pull it out like a thread and it's not connected to anything else. You have experienced this all the time. This fabric is that relationship and it is the activity of our connection to everything everywhere all the time.

It serves as a pointer to something infinite and expansive and that something is the thing that we refer to as emptiness. Emptiness is a word sometimes it's called boundlessness. It's a descriptor really, a process of the description of the process of undifferentiated reality. Reality without projections. A reality without a subject and an object. In fact, in the sutra, we're talking about prajnaparamita. Prajna means pra is like our prefix. Pre means before. Jna means knowledge. So before you give something a name and distinguish it from something else, there's an infinite awareness of its interconnection with everything and it is not separate from you and your experience and everything else.

This undifferentiated reality which we can step into whenever we want, whenever we notice, is by definition a state of interconnection. If things don't have edges, they are necessarily in seamless connection and we know that things don't have edges because how can you separate anything from something else? How is the person who's sitting here disconnected from all of you and everything and all of time that brought me here right now?

So the Sanskrit term for emptiness is shunyata. You've probably heard this before. Shunyata. It's sometimes defined as hollowness. Think of a sphere that's empty or emptiness or nothingness or non-reality or non-substantiality and zero-ness. Shunyata is sometimes described zero-ness. This zero-ness is the way of expressing non-separation. That no one or nothing can be alone ever. That that's a delusion and this is a basic teaching of Mahayana Buddhism. Everything is always in the context of connection and relationship from this body all the way down to elementary particles. Everything, all of us, everything that you can receive through this content is reaching out for connection. The flowers on the highway.

So that sign in the window, help wanted, apply inside was a sign to me, a reminder. Come back. Come back to that quiet awareness. A reminder to return again and again to this moment. This. It's all there is. This. Right now. To the fact that I'm here. I'm here. I'm here. To the fact that the object of our consciousness, the thing that we're perceiving that we observe is embedded. It's not separable from the observing consciousness. The one who observes is fused by Shunyata with the observation. We all emerge or co-emerge together. So if help is wanted, the sign told us where to go. Inside. To bear witness to that. That one.

So most of the time in our day-to-day experience, we relate to the world and to each other as if we and other things have a self-enclosed separate kind of definable, discrete reality. We tend to think of things as distinct. I know the source of all of my suffering is this very persistent idea that arises from my clinging to my skin that I call I. Or me. Or mine.

So Tim Burkett's pointing last week about skin shedding in the Heart of the Heart Sutra is that the sutra is telling us we cannot grow while we're clinging to this skin. And the Heart Sutra is skin shedding because Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva tells us in no uncertain terms, forget about it. Let it go. Let it go. Let it go. Let it go. In fact, let go of everything. The eye, the ear, the nose, the tongue, the body, the mind. And through all of our senses, taste, touch, smell. Let it go.

Avalokiteshvara offers us this radical proposition. She's really talking to Shariputra, of whom I'm a great fan. Avalokiteshvara offers this proposition that we let go of everything, including our ideas about suffering, the origin of suffering, the cessation of suffering, and this path. Now you might recognize what Avalokiteshvara is referring to there. Those are the four noble truths. The first turning of the wheel. The first teaching the Dharma, the Buddhadharma. Those are the four noble truths that Avalokiteshvara is saying, forget about it. Let go of this too. Yeah. Let go of everything. Because they don't exist of their own nature. They have no intrinsic self. Emptying of an individual substance, just like us.

So everything to which our mind wants to cling, each of our skins, our barriers that we create to keep ourselves separate. And this keeps us from seeing reality the way it is. This is a characteristic of emptiness. Everything to which we cling, lacking in substance, and it's also not nothing. It's everything, but also no thing. No things which are separable.

So in my view, in my own personal experience and in talking to you and others, everyone who comes to practice has seen that sign. Help wanted. And they have a pretty strong feeling that they have to apply inside. Something in each of us calls us to observe our own skins. And this requires us to apply inside, to go inside, to see what we've created that keeps us separate. This is how we begin to be skin shedders.

In Tim's talk last week, he also just very briefly mentioned Nagarjuna. Nagarjuna, he called him the master of skin shedding. And you may not know about Nagarjuna, but he was very famous philosopher. And you actually do know about him in your practice, because he expanded this notion of the middle way.

So here's a little background on our 14th Zen ancestor, the great skin shedder, Nagarjuna. He came from the southern part of Italy, but we know Italy. Of Italy? Not Italy. India. If only Italy. He came from the southern part of India, but we know almost nothing else about him before he became a teacher. He was said to have come from a Brahmin family. And it was also said that he lived 600 years. I'm pretty sure that part's a legend, but who knows. When he became a Dharma teacher, he was a Buddhist monk and kind of this renegade scholar. And part of the reason he was a renegade is because he taught everybody, not just the monks, he would teach anybody. Kind of love that. That was probably unusual in his time.

He was an adherent of the Mahayana school, of which we are apart. And he was very kind of protective of the school, which emphasizes compassion and wisdom as the path towards awakening. He defended this because in that time, Mahayana was considered not the real thing. He expounded, expanded on the middle path. Madhyamaka is the name of this philosophy.

The legend is that the Prajnaparamita Sutra, which the Heart Sutra is apart, there's a lot of them, that they were actually given from the Buddha to these sea serpents called the Nagas, N-A-G-A, the Nagas. The Buddha gave these teachings to the sea serpent to hold them, because the world was probably not ready for them. And the sea serpents were going to instruct it to deliver them when the time was right. Well, the time was right with Nagarjuna. Nagarjuna's name, Naga, Naga, serpent. Nagarjuna, his name means noble, noble Naga, noble serpent. That whole story was made up because back then the teachings were all presumed to have necessarily had to come from the Buddha's mouth. So this is a way for them to come to the Buddha's mouth, go be held in the sea serpent region underneath the sea, and then be delivered through Nagarjuna's expression several hundred years later.

He founded this philosophical school called the Madhyamaka, or middle way. The theme of his teaching is that the Bodhisattva journey, this cultivation of compassion and wisdom to attain enlightenment. The method of awareness that he uses, the method of unveiling this, is to negate everything. He negates all the concepts that we have about this basic idea about reality, which we receive through our skandhas, right? This is how this ties back in to the Heart Sutra. He uses logic to show us that what we experience at reality is incomplete, in error, completely inaccurate, and in fact blocks our experience of things as they really are.

So he takes opposites, Nagarjuna, such as real and unreal, or

He goes on to four negations. Things can either be not real, they could be not unreal, they could be both real and unreal, or they could be neither real nor unreal. Nagarjuna uses these four negations to negate all viewpoints about everything. So there's nothing to which we can cling. He denies the existence of any separate reality, including an ultimate reality.

It's easy for us to grasp these first two negations. Something is true, something is or something is false. Your eyes are brown or they're not brown. That's easy for us. But how about three, both real and unreal? That gets a little trickier. An example could be, is my shoulder part of the arm? Well, yes and no, right? It depends on how you look at this question.

How about number four, neither real nor unreal? Well, something is neither real nor unreal when, I'll give you an example like, is a dog's bark blue or red? A dog's bark doesn't have a color. So it's neither blue nor red. A question that doesn't make sense takes us to something that is neither real nor unreal.

So these are the four negations of Nagarjuna. He classifies all of the distinctions that we would make between us, between things, between the entire fabric of everything in an effort to get us to see that reality is not what we think. He uses this middle way to identify our entire existence as a middle way between real and imagined, between permanence and oblivion.

By the way, the Buddha did teach the middle way. Of course he did. Between his ascetic practice, which he was pretty familiar with, six years of denying his body's existence in a way. So he knew that extreme. He knew the other extreme, which was indulgence, the first 29 years of his life were pretty cushy. So he did advocate the middle path. But Nagarjuna uses this as a form of logic to expand that teaching.

And he tells us that we should dwell in emptiness. Drink some empty water. We should live in intuitive understanding, prajna, wisdom, before knowledge, intuitive understanding of the non-duality, the non-separateness, the non-distinction between everything. This is how we can wake up to what's actually going on.

Nagarjuna wrote, "For whom emptiness is possible, everything is possible." So those of you who know Suzuki Roshi's famous phrase can see how he's riffing, making a beautiful statement. Suzuki Roshi said in the beginner's mind, there are infinite or many possibilities, but in the expert's view, there's only so few. When you know what's going on, you're missing half the, maybe more than half, maybe all of the scene, except for the one little view that you're holding onto.

So what Nagarjuna is asking us to do is make a cognitive shift. Boom, shift in how we engage with this now all the time. So here's a little game we're going to play to allow you to take a cognitive shift. Okay, ready? We're going to play. Thank you. I'm going to hold up these lines and I don't want you to try to be all zenny and give me the right answer. Okay. I want you to give me the truth. Do these lines appear to be equal in length? This middle line. How many people think they're equal in length? Now don't think, but look at this and by its appearance. Oh, let me hold it up for you guys. How many of you think this middle line is equal in length? These two lines. Anybody think they're equal in length? By appearance? Don't be a smarty pants. No extra points.

Okay. I'm going to send this around. So that thing is called the Müller-Lyer illusion, by the way. If you want to look it up, you can. They do not appear to be of equal length. You can look at them all you like. No matter how long you, and even after you measure them and you find out they are of equal length, they will not appear to be of equal length. To your eye, to all of our eyes, they do not appear to be of equal length. Did you see it, Tim? Tim and I both like these optical illusions. Yes.

So what does that mean? That our mind keeps telling us that those are not the same length? I think it means our perception deceives us. They are equal. And that's kind of weird, isn't it? That our perception deceives us. And it's a persistent delusion, too. Even when we know, I measure, even when I measured them, I kept looking at them like, why can't my mind make the shift? Like in those other cognitive shift exercises, your mind can make that shift, go back and forth and back and forth. This one, not so much. They continue to appear as if they are not equally long.

We hold to our views of this reality. And by the way, by analogy, all reality we stick to our views, that they're the way we think they are, that everything is the way we think they are. When we have this little cognitive shift, we get a chance to shed this view, shedding our skin.

So each of us has these delusions all the time, and they take the form of our beliefs, right? About ourselves and each other and the whole world and our thoughts, our repetitive thoughts like that, persistent delusion, and our behaviors, which hold our sense of identity together, the sense of self together. These are skins, they are skins, they are a veil. And Nagarjuna is here to tell us, as was Avalokiteshvara, as was the Buddha, that we can shed our skins.

Someone here knows that these skins are constraining us. They are confining our growth. That's why we see the sign somewhere in our lives that says, help wanted, apply inside, because we know we're feeling constrained. We know how it feels to be constrained. In a moment of anger, you know how you feel yucky? You're constrained. In a moment of, you can feel yucky, you're constrained. It really does feel like a limit, like you're not comfortable in your own skin. That's because these skins, these persistent delusions, get old and stiff, and they're not comfortable anymore. We can't move when we're stuck in a perfect view that's keeping us tight and small. It keeps us from being here now.

When my younger son was a preteen, he had a collection of snakes and lizards and all sorts of creatures in his bedroom. At one point, there were like 30 of them. It smelled to high heaven in there. All living in this small bedroom. Some of these things he would catch and then observe and feed and figure out, you know, how to take care of them and then release. Some of them were permanent residents and some of them were given to him. They just kind of appeared in our lives because he was like the reptilian kid in our little small town.

Well, one time someone stood up with a one-eyed snake. No joke, a one-eyed snake. This snake was really quite beautiful, but it looked like it was always winking like this. Always had one eye closed. And from time to time it would shed its skin. And just if you don't know when snakes shed their skin, they shed the eye too. The whole thing comes off and there was this winking eye. And the question is, are your eyes open? Can you, are we keeping one eye closed all the time? We can shed our skins and have our eyes be open.

And we start by recognizing that help is wanted. And then we apply here. In other words, we follow the counsel of Avalokiteshvara to the Buddhist great student, Shariputra. And by the way, I said earlier that Shariputra is like, I consider him a good friend. I'm a fan. He's the guy who shows up in multiple sutras. I'll tell you another one that the Vimalakirti, which I was happy not to study with this guy a few years ago. In the Vimalakirti Sutra, Shariputra is there. And he's asking, at the very beginning he asked the Buddha, you keep talking about the Pure Land. We're free and everything's great. And we're in the Pure Land. And at this life, this ordinary life that we're in, right here, right now is the Pure Land. Shariputra says, well, wait, it's not looking like the Pure Land to me. I can relate to this, right? Because it doesn't really look like the Pure Land some of the time. It looks like suffering. It looks like messy. It looks difficult and nuanced and confusing. And the Buddha says, no, this is the Pure Land. And he gets up and he puts his feet in the sand and he wiggles his toes. And suddenly, he doesn't change the world, mind you, but suddenly Shariputra can see it's the Pure Land. So I really love Shariputra because he's like us. He moves in and out of seeing the world as a mess. So we'll talk about them like here to another day.

But in the Heart Sutra, Avalokiteshvara is telling this same guy, Shariputra, that the way out of our suffering is in. And to in means to let go. To let go means to understand first that we're clinging. And it requires us to look at or apply ourselves to our insides to inspect. And once we notice what's happening, our grasping for this being, this I that is separate from everything else, we can start to shed the skin. We can release the layers. And by the way, when you get rid of some of these layers, when you let them go, so do your ideas about those layers, which means separation. So do your beliefs, so your concepts, and so do your behaviors of feeling alone.

So how exactly do we shed the skin? That's our practice. It's nothing special. It's just sitting down, realizing each moment, returning to this now, whether we're sitting or walking, standing or lying down as the Satipatthana says, wherever we find ourselves all the time, we can return to this now.

Like many people, probably all of you, I had some early experiences in my life that caused me to be unsure about my own safety. Those were real experiences. I imagine that everyone here had something like that. And those experiences have stayed with me. They've been a great teacher. They have taught me that that's the Dharma gate for my practice all the time. This is where I can actively engage with my core belief about who this is. But I have behaviors that have arisen from those core beliefs. And that's the bleeding edge for me, always the bleeding edge of my practice. And I don't think this is anything special about me. Each of us developed ideas about who we are and how to protect this little self as we were growing up. And that one felt at risk when we were young. But over time, as we mature, we begin to see that those beliefs aren't really quite accurate. And it starts to feel a little tight. And that's the skin. And we feel it limiting our growth.

When we feel the tightness of these skins, when we see that our beliefs, these old beliefs don't really work anymore, we enter inside. We start to examine the terrain of our own skin and how it is limiting our growth. We enter this practice because it is about freedom. How can we lose the skins? How can we not waste this precious life? How can we let go of all of the skins, layer after layer after layer? How can we be responsible for this life?

And the key here, the way to work with what's inside is that we have to risk. Scary. It's scary. We have to risk everything. We have to enter the land of not knowing what this is. Over and over and over again. And that's what practice is. Just being with this, whatever it is, whatever shows up is this. Without any ideas about what it is or who we should be in relationship to it. Just no ideas about it all. That can be scary. But when you do that, the skin falls off.

In the process of not knowing, we can feel skinless. Now, that doesn't sound good in some ways. It's like, oh, I'm completely exposed. But the truth is the experience of it is porousness. Like everything is moving through you. And it feels like freedom to just be okay with whatever is arising, even if it's sickness, old age and death. It's coming to a theater near you.

So when these internal barriers come down, this thing we call I, feels like it belongs to everything, everywhere, all the time. The Heart Sutra teaches us that we have this opportunity to come to know that our own heart and mind is inseparable from that of all beings everywhere. Inseparable from all of life.

For me, this experience is like falling in love. That's what it feels like. I feel like I'm in love with life. That does not mean to suggest for a moment that you put me on some kind of pedestal and that I'm living in bliss land. Please don't do that. There's only one way off a pedestal and it doesn't feel good. But the truth is, is that the more you look inside, the byproduct of this looking inside, this ongoing never-ending process of looking inside is that we deeply love life. Messy, nuanced, complicated. We love it just the way it is over and over and over again. And that does kind of feel like bliss, even when it's miserable. It's just life. It's nothing personal.

So what I hear when I talk to you and everybody and listen to me is that this is our innermost request to feel this deep abiding connection with all of life so that we can respond to this moment, each moment with freshness and spontaneity without any ideas about how we're supposed to be. A good student, a good teacher, a good girl, a bad boy, whatever it is, let it go. This is a radical acceptance of yourself in the context of everything and everything else too. And to do this help is needed. And to do this, we must apply inside. That means that we have to feel the feelings. We have to be with what arises. And then we must kind of open our hands and let go. Have any ideas about what it all means. That's hard for us. We have to let go about the ideas we have about our own. It's hard.

But sometimes rather suddenly everything emerges like flowers on the side of the road. Not as a pretty thing separate from the person who is observing them, but as a ravishing system of relationship everywhere, a kind of silent symphony of interconnected resilience. And this is our ordinary life. Nothing special, just how it is. And this is the message of the Heart Sutra, which is why I wanted us to chant it this morning. We can be free. We are already free. This is the message of that help wanted apply inside sign in the window of the tax store in Los Olivos.

So I offer all of this to encourage you to keep practicing, to keep applying inside. And I thank you for your practice. I'm gonna end today with a poem that I think returns us to the flowers that we are, that are everywhere. This blooming, which is happening on the hillsides and as to whether we see it or not. And I hope everything that you could hear today or sit and experience today helps you understand the precious weight of the bloom that you are, that everybody is and help you appreciate the transient beauty of this bloom. Cause you are, we are, everything is in the miraculous impermanent force that has endured all manner of weather, all sorts of life keeps coming at us and it won't stop. And after all that, we keep on blooming.

So this is a poem by Emily Dickinson called "Bloom is Result to Meet a Flower":

Bloom is result to meet a flower

And casually glance

Would scarcely cause one to suspect

The minor circumstance

Assisting in the bright affair

So intricately done

Then offered as a butterfly

To the meridian

To pack the bud, oppose the worm,

Obtain its right of dew,

Adjust the heat, elude the wind,

Escape the prowling bee,

Great nature not to disappoint

Awaiting her that day,

To be a flower is profound

Responsibility.

Thank you.