Ben Connelly shares teachings from his new book, which shows the power of integrating early Buddhist psychology with the Mahayana emphasis on collective liberation.

Ben Connelly is a Soto Zen teacher and Dharma heir in the Katagiri lineage. He also teaches mindfulness in a wide variety of secular contexts including police training and addiction recovery groups, and works with multi-faith groups focused on intersectional liberation, racial justice, and climate justice. Ben is based at Minnesota Zen Meditation Center, travels to teach across the United States, has written for Tricycle and Lion’s Roar magazines, and is author of Vasubandhu's "Three Natures", Inside the Grass Hut, Inside Vasubandhu's Yogacara, and Mindfulness and Intimacy.

Full Transcript

Three natures. That's all right. I'm gonna have to remember not say anything wrong. Three natures. So the idea is that each thing is of three natures, or you could say all things have three natures. Technically, we would say it is useful to view each thing as having three natures, or we could say each thing has three characteristics. Sometimes we use the term Lakshana characteristics, sometimes natures, in this literature. So we're saying everything, we can apply this lens to everything. Anything you hear, see, smell, think, any emotion, anything you taste, anything you feel with the body, all of it.

The three natures are the imaginary nature, the dependent nature, and the complete realized nature. The imaginary nature of things is what you think they are. The dependent nature is that they appear as they do, dependent on other things. And the complete realized nature is that they are not what you think they are. So pretty simple. If you have had understanding of this, you might find this pretty shocking. It is a radical, shocking, and enormously challenging worldview. We are saying that everything that you think is a thing is of an imaginary nature, and its complete realized nature is that it isn't what you think it is. And it is dependent on other things.

The implications of this are often the opposite of what people think they are. So what it definitely does not do is say that what matters to you doesn't matter, or that what you are perceiving doesn't matter. It definitely is not saying that. This will be a teaching, the teachings on the imaginary nature in large part are designed to remind us that what we do always has impact. And the dependent nature kind of reminds us that everything is always collective. And the complete realized nature, well, the implications are many. But right now I'll say, you don't have to wait for liberation. Don't wait. You're alive.

Okay, so three natures, imaginary, dependent, and complete realized natures. I'm going to read a passage from the book that just kind of outlines these at the introduction to try and develop inside easily. My plan here is to talk for a while, three or four hours, and then make some time to hear from other people, questions or reflections.

So here we go. Every aspect of what we would conventionally call experience is of these three natures. Your sights, sounds, smells, tastes, physical sensations, thoughts, emotions, and our sense of being a self. For example, the cobalt blue car that I can see outside my window is of an imaginary nature. Whatever I'm experiencing it to be right now, a memory is I'm currently looking at letters on the screen. Or now, as I turn my head to look at it again, whatever I think it to be is a construction of habits of consciousness and imagination. I suspect it will take some time for you to consider this a reasonable or useful claim. And so dear reader, that's why I'm writing this book.

That car is also of a dependent nature. Countless conditions that are not the car create the appearance of a car. Reflected sunlight, ocular nerves, supply chain software, oil refineries, the desire for wealth, and so on. This car is also a complete realized nature. It isn't what I think it is. Recognizing that things aren't what you think they are can radically disarm the patterns of your mind that cause you to suffer and to cause suffering. For example, in order to see the car in my normal way, I am usually ignorant of or ignore a vast array of conditions on which the appearance of the car depends conditions that cause suffering in this time of climate crisis. These teachings are to help us move beyond this kind of ignorance.

The so-called knowledge that white people are inherently superior to black people, and the purported fact that race exists as a biological phenomenon, were confirmed by 19th century scientific experiments, which have since been disproven. This caused and causes incalculable harm. This so-called knowledge is imaginary. It arises from conditions, and its complete realized nature is that it is not real. And yet millions of people thought and still think it is true. Although many of us do not, the impacts of this view are pervasive. It affects where people live, the jobs we have, the wealth we inherit, our access to education, and so much more. They are alive in how I experienced the world. This teaching is here so we may continually grow in our capacity to end and transform harmful patterns of which we are often unaware. By learning to see the three natures of the ideas that maintain harmful systems, we open the way for liberation.

The three natures can be misapplied and easily misunderstood. Understanding the imaginary nature invites humility, not grandiosity. It affirms agency, it does not deny experiences. Understanding the dependent nature affirms kinship with all things. It does not deny difference or boundary. Understanding the complete realized nature brings faith, compassion and joy. It does not deny suffering. The three natures provide medicine for our ongoing daily sufferings, no matter how small.

In teaching this material, and in fact, in teaching in any Mahayana context where the basic understanding is that all things are empty of independent existence, one of the challenges is talking about why things matter, why you should practice, why liberation is possible. So these teachings are specifically designed to emphasize why the existence of things is important. They are designed to emphasize why things are possible and why practice matters, given that things do not have absolute separate existence.

When you hear this, it's very easy over and over again to fall into this kind of idea that we're saying that things don't matter. But if you think of the examples I gave, we don't say the car doesn't matter. We say that because we view the car through utility, through the lens of this is just something that gets me what I want or doesn't get me what I want. We end up ignoring the vast array of conditions that have massive downstream impacts. That's true for every single thing. When you drink a cup of water, when you say a word to someone, when you have an attitude towards your internal state, always.

Likewise, with the idea of race, although race is not a real thing, it clearly has impacts. And in fact, in many kinds of people who are doing anti-racism work, often the first thing you do is you explain and look at how race is not a real thing. You can analyze it, see how it was constructed in the last four or 500 years, how the boundaries of it are all completely murky, and how it has constantly been reconstructed. And then you say, well, now that we know race is not a real thing, let us spend our effort dismantling the harmful impacts that it has. So basically, the methodology that the three natures presents for practice is very similar to that particular methodology that many people are using these days to try and make a better world.

I'm going to shift to talking about each nature in order of imaginary, dependent, and complete realized nature. So the imaginary nature of things is what you think they are. From a yogachara perspective, one of the principal ways you can tell you're imagining something is if you think it's an object that you're viewing, it's imaginary. Because the distinction between subject and object is just a tendency of mind, not an absolutely real thing. Likewise, if you think anything exists or doesn't exist. Also, those are categories mind creates what I didn't make this up. But anyway, really shattering every possible category, duration, space, all these things are the way we perceive them is only the way we perceive them based on our conditioning as people, individual people. Of course, animals have different ones. Sometimes I wish I could have some dog conditioning. I probably have a little bit of dog conditioning, but I wish I could just like jump into a dog Why is that like for other people, right?

When we talk about the imaginary nature, the implications are many. One of the most obvious ways that Buddhist literature throughout Buddhist traditions from the earliest layers to the latest, consistently will use the idea that things are like a dream or imaginary or not ultimately real as a way a medicine that allows us to sometimes just cut through our afflictions. So I'm sure many people have the experience of being really upset about something. You have an argument with someone you're just mad as heck. And then like a week later, you're just like, what the what was that? Why was I so worried about that? So the thing is, you see from that gap that the experience of the anguish was created by the way you are perceiving that as they imagining the situation. And this language can sometimes help us to be like, wait a minute, I'm just not doing that. You start to have the same argument you've had with someone in your family for the 87,000 time and you just go, I'm not making the same thing up again. It's possible.

That's one of the most common ways the medicine of the idea that things are imaginary is used throughout Buddhist literature. But in the yogachara, it has a particular and distinct implication in that in yogachara, we emphasize that the imagination is produced by conditions that we are participating in. So the basic idea is our moment of experience or imagination is the product or the fruit of seeds. So any act of thinking, any emotional act, like feeling an emotion, any action of body, including speech. So sometimes you hear this formulated as body speech in mind, just dividing it up a little bit differently. Any act in this way plants a seed that will produce a similar fruit at a later date. And so in any moment, what you're experiencing is the seed, the fruit of a lot of seeds from Lord knows when. And in every moment, you are planting seeds, lots of them that will produce what will be experienced.

So this is in Buddhist terms called karma. But in yogachara, they tend to very frequently use the metaphor of seeds and fruit. So the basic idea here is so just that's not maybe very abstract. So like, if I look at someone and go, why are you such a jerk? I don't like you and you're wrong headed and you've never done that. Someone might. In that moment, what happens there seeds of alienation, because you see the person is an object, your seeds of judgment, because you see them as being wrong. There's generally seeds of affliction, because even if you're not aware of the emotional state, which you're probably not because you're focused on the object, seeds of anger, frustration, or churning and being planted, this creates a world where people think of each other are jerks. That's how we get a world like that.

Conversely, you're gonna have a moment where you're like, you go, wait a minute, there's a person. I feel a little frustration. I feel a little frustration with this person. I mean, don't take this person. In that moment, there are seeds of connection, of openness, of compassion for your own feeling state that has arisen. This creates a world where people are have openness and compassion is possible. You know, this may, it's like, doesn't this ring true to your experience, you've seen this happen, right?

So we have choice. We're each always involved in creating what the world would be any sentient being in any circumstance, always has the capacity to plant seeds that are conducive to well being and liberation, without exception. Wow, no pressure. Because I'm telling you, it's always true, you get up in the morning, what are you doing? Normally, most of us are kind of just operating unconsciously, just like some karma comes up, we just kind of do the same stuff. Well, maybe it's not that bad. It might be really bad. I'm a recovering addict and alcoholic, I can tell you, I know to have how to have waking up be bad. I can do that. Probably not alone. We can transform the world we live in. That's the point. Liberation is possible. And what you do always matters.

That's why when you know, you're training at Zen temple, it's like we have verses for when we brush our teeth, when we brush our teeth for universal liberation, wash behind our ears for universal liberation, take food for universal liberation, because it plants seeds of aspiration, openness, compassion. You can do this in your house. You might, it might, you know, your kids might think you're weird, or whatever. But you can just do it quietly. Like, oh, I'm listening to you, because I want everyone to be free from suffering. It changes things.

So the dependent nature. Everything is dependent nature, it appears as it does dependent on other conditions. Usually we're kind of ignore either ignoring or unaware. So those are both terms for the Avidya, basic karmic driver of suffering ignorance, ignoring whether it's active or passive. Either way, plant seeds. So yeah, we usually kind of not noticing. So one thing that you'll see mentioned in yogachara texts sometimes is a conceptualizing interdependence. Let's just thinking Thich Nhat Hanh style about how something depends on other things. So you know, you just, you're gonna have a glass of water instead of being like, my glass of water. You go, oh, wow. Think about all that had to happen for this to come here. Rain, a whole aquifer system, people who run water treatment plants, taxation. Wow, I better pay my taxes. I'm gonna quit complaining about taxes, because I like drinking water. It changes how we are.

So we can think about the dependent nature of things. And that's a way to begin to access or be more aware of the dependent nature. I think it is also true that practicing zazen and the more simple forms of Buddhist meditation in particular, maybe all of them, I don't know, ends to naturally produce awareness of or immediate knowingness of the dependent nature. So generally speaking, a lot of people when they come to practice, they're like, geez, I just realized most of the time, I'm just going through my life. And it's like, I'm not seeing almost anything. And there's this little narrator, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you start to practice, you're like, what if I walked down the street there, I hear the birds. And I see trees in ways I've never seen. My spouse asked me for something. And I, I turned to them, and I actually listened. That's a good idea.

So this tendency to feel less alienated, and more open and connected and porous. It's a very natural aspect that comes through zazen in particular, it's actually basically all we're doing, right? You just sit and I don't know, I never know how to say this, you just sit and, you know, the universe universes is cool. First thing, and it's not like, I gotta figure something out here. Well, we do that, too. That's okay. That's part of it, too. So anyway, there can be this very natural kind of opening and for instance, a connection that is an opening to how things are dependent, they're not so alienated and separate. Feels usually, for most people, this is something that feels really good. So it's great.

Becoming aware of the dependent nature also can be quite painful. Quite painful. Because we really are aware of the dependent nature in the most ultimate sense, you realize you can't be separate from any suffering anywhere. It doesn't mean you should like go home and try and feel all this suffering in the world. I don't recommend that. Not a good idea. You probably that's not going to work with your current system. My guess is, I don't know how you want. But yeah, we get closer to suffering. Because normally we're pretending, as we look through the lens of like, oh, I just want to get the world into a shape that I can kind of organize and feel good about like I'm getting what I want and not getting what I want. We ignore so much.

And so, you know, through practice, maybe you get closer to a community of people who suffer a lot, like my friends who work on unhoused people. It's painful. Like my work with addicts and recovery, you know, it's painful sometimes. Sometimes it's really inspiring. Well, that's pretty painful. You know, when you do anti-racism work, you know, it doesn't really work unless you get closer to the actual pain of the experience, you can't see what you're working against. And yeah, it's hard to just go into space where people are just mad as hell. Because they've been traumatized by a system that brutalizes people just because of the apparent race which they've been born into. Or climate change work. Anybody here get a little burned down on climate change work? I've tried that a few times. It's hard. That's why Joanna Macy's work on climate change is starts. Exactly. She says you have to look at the pain and let it in. You can't. It's hard, but then you go, oh, I can move through that veil. I can tolerate it. Now that's pretty good.

So it may be hard. And you know, you may be like, "I'm not even there. I just tried to sit zazen and it's freaking me out. Anguish coming up." That's my initial practice was just sitting in the zendo crying all the time. It was great. It was completely liberating. Because it was room to see what was real. All the dependent nature of things moving through.

So it is my conviction, although it may be hard. You might be like, "This is hard. I don't want to do this." How free do you want to be? I think Monica's heard me say that 87,000 times. Well, I still am curious. You can really get free if we'll get honest with the whole thing. Yeah. There's something really wondrous that can open up within ourselves and within relationship with others.

Oh, I want to do a little reading on this. Yeah. Little reading on the dependent nature. So one of the real fun things about this for you Mahayana Buddhists is that, you know, the texts basically said the imaginary is like this, the dependent nature is like this, the complete realized nature is like this. They're distinct in these ways. And by the way, they're all non-dual and identical. You may find as you listen to this, you'll be like, which one is this? And so in some ways, they blur in particular, well, no, all of them blur across each other. That's just the way it is.

I have got the wrong page. Okay. We don't passively receive the reality of the world through our senses and then respond to it. The world we experience is created. It is the active cognition of seer and seen. That's from the text, the active cognition of seer and seen. Our life is created by our karma and we create karma in every moment. We have the power to plant seeds that will create a better world. This body of teachings emphasizes the impact of each moment of intentionality. Our power lies in the quality of heart and mind we offer to the moment.

Why do I think this worldview is more effective than materialism for healing our suffering and freeing us from collective modes of violence, oppression and destruction? I will answer with some lines from a Chinese Chan nun named Baochi. She wrote, "The vastness of karmic consciousness is hard to prove. But when Mr. Zhang drinks, then Mr. Li gets drunk."

Sometimes I get a call where I see an obituary telling me that another friend of mine has died from addiction. I've lost a dozen friends so far and I can never know what my part, what part my enabling of their intoxication play, or the impact their deaths and addictions will have on future generations of their families. The web is too complex to map with materialist tools. I can never know the impact of the thousands of hours I've spent working with addicts in recovery either. I have witnessed the awakening of so much freedom.

One of Baochi's inspirations, the great Chan nun Miaozong wrote, "When outside the diamond door, he glowered. Inside the stable, the wooden horse's face turned red." In the verse above, there is no physical connection between the man's glower and the wooden horse's face. And yet there is reaction and connection. We cannot ultimately know when or where the results of any karmic seed will manifest, but manifest they will.

Miaozong wrote her lines in a Chan compilation she created in the 12th century. But could she have known that in the 17th century, Baochi and her Dharma sister, Zoukui, looking to revive the rarely recorded teachings of a female master of Chan, would pull them from obscurity and write their own commentaries? Or that Beata Grant in the 21st century would again revive them in English?

I believe that buying a chunk of an animal killed a thousand miles away, or offering a caring smile for a person on the street, as well as each tiny moment of anxiety, desire or compassion you cultivate has an impact on every living being. I can't measure it. Miaozong says the wooden horse's face turns red. A wooden horse is a classic Buddhist metaphor for something that has no reality or causal agency, like the horns of a rabbit, a wooden man or a stone woman. Miaozong invites us into a worldview of mystery, where we don't know or see what is ultimately real, but where an angry glare causes suffering we can't calculate, where a smile has radiance beyond the limits of our knowing, where our actions really matter. All of this isn't real, but it's as real as it gets. So it's real, because it's complete, realized nature right now.

Cool. What does that mean? Well, things that we imagine are things are not things. So they don't actually, in an absolute sense, have the capacity to cause anything to happen to us. We can't be impinged on them because they're not real things. Now I'm not saying it doesn't seem like they do, and that doesn't matter. I'm just saying in the ultimate sense, what a Buddha sees or what makes a Buddha a Buddha in the simple formulation would be to say a Buddha is a being who does not suffer, and that is what makes a Buddha a Buddha. So what makes a Buddha a Buddha is he does not suffer, does not cause suffering, and sees what is real. Does not suffer does not cause suffering and sees what is real. And the seeing is what is real is the basis on which they don't suffer, and they don't cause suffering.

Now the thing is the Buddha doesn't go to another place to have this happen where everything is awesome. In fact, all the literature we have about Buddhas is they're sitting around like this with a bunch in the same kind of place we all live in, seeing clearly with the result, according to the tradition, that they don't suffer and they don't cause suffering. So the complete realized nature is what Buddhas see. And the seeing of the complete realized nature is what makes a Buddha a Buddha.

So the thing is, you can practice, and you can go from just being caught by the imaginary nature, to being aware of the dependent nature and seeing the complete realized nature. Pretty cool. In the text, it says, for the purpose of growth and understanding, these natures are often understood in stages, from the point of view of conventions and insight into them. However, guess what? It's already a complete realized nature. You don't have to wait and like fix yourself or fix something else is here.

You might think sounds good, pal. I want some of that. Well, you already have it. But I know it doesn't feel like we have I know that. So one of the most important things is to remember that we're not saying the complete realized nature destroys the imaginary nature. They're all always here. Both true. This is why, like the literature of Buddhism shows a Buddha who shows up for people who are suffering, because he knows they're suffering, because people are caught in this imaginary nature.

So this all may seem a little improbable or not. I don't know. Maybe you're like, sweet, I already knew I was in the complete realized nature. I'm not worried about it. That's great. Enjoy. So oftentimes, the complete realized nature will be talked about in terms of the complete realized nature of the phenomena conventionally understood to be the self. I know that's a long sentence, or the complete realized nature of the phenomenal phenomena that would be conventionally understood to be other. But I'm not saying self another because those aren't real things. Anyway, but they won't talk about it this way.

So at the end of Vasubandhu's 30 verses, and consciousness only, the last verse says, "This is the inconceivable, wholesome, unstained, constant realm, the blissful body of liberation, the Dharma body of the great sage." So I'm waving my hands around because this is my realm, and this is my body. But you can wave your hands around too, if you want to, and say the same thing. And the same thing is true, according to this teaching. Now in the text, he's saying this is what you see when you have attained realization. But it's also how things already are. Both those things are true.

Now Hakuin Zenji puts this a little more simply at the end of the Song of Zazen where he says this, he uses the same, he basically paraphrases, he said "This very place is the Lotus Land, this very body the Buddha." Nice.

When Dogen Zenji decided to write a text explaining why you should do zazen and how to do zazen, he opens it thus, Fukanzazengi. "The way is originally perfect and all-pervading. How can it be contingent on practice and realization? The true vehicle is self-sufficient. What need is there ever special effort? The whole body is free from dust. Who can believe in a means to brush it clean? It's never apart from this very place. What is the use of traveling around to practice?" It's the same thing. The body is realization. Everything perceived as realization.

So this is why Dogen says you should practice zazen. Because you're Buddha in Buddhaland. What do Buddhas do? They practice zazen. Yeah, so it's not like, oh let's practice zazen and then we'll finally be a little less terrible. In my case that might sort of be true also. I do dwell on the imaginary nature.

I'm going to read two very short passages related to the complete realized nature of the phenomena conventionally understood to be the self and then of the phenomena conventionally understood to be our environment. This is from a chapter called "Already Buddha."

When I came to Buddhist practice I was seeking something else. I sought an escape from the anguish I experienced. My therapist told me it was the anguish of trauma from the past reproducing itself. My psychiatrist told me my brain didn't process serotonin properly. My addiction recovery friends called it defects of character, self-will, run riot. My Buddhist studies called it afflictive karma. All these ways of looking at it have their utility and I am deeply grateful for all who have supported me in finding the wondrous joyful existence of today. When we suffer, when we see the suffering of others, it is right to seek wellness, to seek something else. However, it is also true that there is not something else, that you and I are not and cannot be broken. Or if there is brokenness, there must be a wholeness that is elsewhere. This is a duality and duality is just a habit of mind. And ah the complete realized nature of where we're at.

Can you get to that? Recently I heard a talk by a Dakota elder named Bob Klanderoode. He spoke of the total kinship of all life. He told us that the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers near my home on U.S. occupied Dakota land is called Bdote. For the Dakota, Bdote is the origin of the universe. The land of Genesis. In his words, it is Eden. He asked us, now that you know you live in Eden, how will you choose to live?

Well thanks for your kind attention folks. Thanks to share some words. I think it's really nice to hear other voices. It's really wonderful to hear many voices and voices can do many things. So questions are welcome and reflections are welcome. It's nice to be somewhat terse so there's room for many people. And I just want to say like questions can be really really particular. Like how do you relate Dogen's theory of time with the Yogachara you know whatever that kind of thing. Or you can just be like jeez every time I go to work I want to smash the coffee pot against the wall. How does this help? So just anything that's on your heart.

Can you say that reality is contextual? Like for instance you know like in a dream like it certainly was real at the time but you know looking back it no longer seems real or a horrible argument.