Bill Powell continues leading SBZC in examination and discussion of:

Red Pine, The Platform Sutra, The Zen Teaching of Hui-neng, Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2006;

Taigen Dan Leighton, Just This is It, Dongshan and the Practice of Suchness, Boston: Shambala, 2015 ; and

William Powell (trans.), The Record of Tung-shan, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1986. https://terebess.hu/zen/Tung-shanPowe... Powell is a retired professor of Chinese religions, having spent his 30-year professional career at the University of California Santa Barbara. He earned a B.A. in Philosophy at the University of the Pacific, an M.A. in Chinese language at the University of Hawaii and his PhD in Buddhist Studies at the University of California Berkeley. He spent three years affiliated with Kyoto University as a research scholar, studying early Chan Buddhism and Song period discourse records under the generous and infinitely patient tutelage of Professor Seizan Yanagida. He began Zen practice in 1965 at the Diamond Sangha in Honolulu under Robert Aitken, Katsuki Sekida and Yasutani Roshi.

Full Transcript

So good morning. Is my voice coming through this time? I got so worried about it, I began to get a little bit of a throat ache and it was getting raspy, so I went over to Santa Ynez and had a COVID test to see if something was going on and the results came back yesterday negative. So I just have a raspy throat, that's all it is. I hope, maybe something else.

It's been ages since we have last convened on this topic, actually only three weeks I guess, but it seems like a long time. What I want to do today is get as much of you involved as possible and the itinerary, as you saw on the handout, is to start with a little bit of background on where we've been and what the simplified statement of the last of the previous two meetings can be spoken to some extent and a review of what I think were the primary points over the last two meetings, so that we then move into the main body of the text. And as I point out, I think chapter 17, it starts with 13, but 17, if you read that and come to terms with that, I think it makes it much easier to handle the rest of the things that Huineng has to say. That's where he kind of makes clear exactly what he means when he's talking about formulas. So that's the way we'll go.

I'll talk briefly first about some of the background to what Huineng is dealing with, what he's coming from, and the problem that we started with, which was principle and practice. What's right practice and how does that relate to principle and how do we work within the context of the prajnaparamita, which as you know is the primary document for Huineng, he mentions it frequently, and the understanding of non-duality. And those are the background questions.

So a brief summation of the early tradition in India. I mentioned this in the previous meeting. It consists of two components, shamatha or samadhi, which is the calming, and bringing the mind into focus, into a state of concentration, using a variety of techniques, means to produce that. Watching the breath, doing objects, visualizing the Buddha, various modes of calming. They in themselves do not lead to nirvana or enlightenment. Second phase is vipassana, insight, which is to see into, and usually it meant seeing into one of the primary doctrines of the early teachings of the Buddha, namely emptiness of self and so on, and to understand that, to understand that beyond the level of words, to make sense of that in some kind of profound transcendental sense.

Now from the very beginning, the Buddha taught that nirvana can't be caused by anything, so neither vipassana nor shamatha can be the cause of nirvana. That was the way the early teaching put it. So it's an unconditioned state, nirvana. That's a staged process, and that's what Huineng will look back on as a dualistic process. You can do something to cause something else to happen. Some people would say, no, it merely creates the necessary conditions and not the result, but it's still staged, not staged in the sense of performed, but different levels of attainment that one arrives at.

When a monk in India decided, when a young person or any person decided to become a monk in India, it was a three-stage process. The process always began with Shila, practice of morality, the vows, and that's where we're going today later on, understanding right behavior, not just right views, right behavior. And these were all basically conditions on which a community of monks could come together and live together. Monasticism was an Indian product as far as Asia is concerned. It didn't exist in China. It was totally non-existent in China. It was a new thing when it arrived in China, something the Chinese had to come to terms with and figure out, and they did so in many ways. In many cases, in terms of their own traditional values. So I'll mention a few of those and the way those intersect with what becomes Chinese Buddhism and Chan Buddhism.

So the origins are India and it comes into China. Shila is the first practice. Shila is what a young person in India will be taught. I remember traveling with this friend of mine who turned out to be the abbot of the entire mountain I was studying with, and I didn't know it at the time I was chatting with him about this, but he said in his monastery he took in a lot of young people who'd run into trouble during the Cultural Revolution or had lost their parents or were just wanting to come in for their own reasons. And I said, how much can you teach young people meditation? And these are teenagers primarily. And that's what he said, no these are teenagers. I can't even begin to teach them meditation. We're just starting with Shila. That's all we do. And we give them a general education as well. This was in the communist era, so they're learning language and math and those things. But as far as monastic training, Shila, that's it. And I saw no evidence of meditation at the monastery when I was there. A lot of very happy young kids, but no, and some of them somewhat unhappy. They had hard lives. But no, nothing else.

So the next phase is meditation. Samadhi. And this seems to be true of all Buddhist monastic systems. And the third phase is prajna, or insight. So it's understood very clearly within the traditional monastic system as a three-stage process and can be broken down even further. A lot of this begins to happen simultaneously depending on the preparedness of the people who come into the monastery, their levels they go through. And this was described in the Indian texts as cultivating the seed of enlightenment or nirvana. It was a seed. This is a tradition that's still maintained in most Chinese, most Asian Buddhist traditions. The seed of enlightenment or of nirvana exists in ideally all beings. There's always that caveat for the icchantika, those who, and in fact, it's described that way. They burned their seeds. They've destroyed them through bad karmic activity. They're incapable of being taught. Even at the end of the text that we're reading, if you've gone all the way through, you said there are some people, it's just it's better not to try and talk to them about this. He doesn't say they're incorrigible, but he says hold your breath. It's not time to talk to those folks yet. So be sure you know where you're transmitting this.

And so this understanding was that everyone could be enlightened, but they're not. So when it came into China, that was the understanding of a monastic life. Chinese had no experience in monastic training. They had no texts that told them how to practice in a monastery, and they relied entirely on their Central Asian teachers who were trained monks coming from India and Central Asia, primarily from Central Asia, into Northern China. And they relied entirely on them. They didn't understand them in many cases. The languages were separate, and the technical language of Sanskrit and Buddhism was very alien to China. So in most cases, they simply imitated and did what they were told. Sit, sweep the grounds, do whatever. They had no basis on which to read and try and understand what they were expected to do, or even memorize. They relied entirely on their pilgrim teachers.

So that was the first thing the Chinese wanted more than anything else. They didn't want texts on truth so much. At least I can't say that, but I know that the pilgrims who first went to India were looking for texts on practice. So the first approach was to find what the right practice was. And so in the third and fourth century, it took two centuries for them to get texts on practice. And they were finally able to get the Vinaya into China. There were four translations within 23 years of four different Vinaya texts. They're all mainstream Buddhist texts, which we would call, which they called Hinayana texts. There were no Mahayana Vinayas, and there never have been. The Mahayana Vinaya depends, the Mahayana practitioners simply adopted the previous Vinayas coming from the early, the mainstream tradition.

So those were translated, and they were vital because the Chinese were becoming monastics for the first time in their cultural history. And what did it mean to live in a monastery and work with other people within that context on a particular spiritual goal, path, way? There were academies where groups of people would assemble and study, but no monastics until the foreigners arrived from Southeast Asia, from Central Asia. So they saw the practice also in terms of stages. They started with the Vinaya. They began to develop texts on meditation and eventually on prajna.

A very popular text was the Prajna Paramita when it came into China. Kumarajiva, the first translator, that was his tradition, Prajna Paramita, not the first translator, one of the most popular and successful translators. And when he first taught the Prajna Paramita, no one understood what he was talking about with emptiness. It's kind of like when you're reading the sixth page, what does he mean, formless teaching? It doesn't make any sense. And so Kumarajiva realized, they don't know the Chinese, don't know the Abhidharma, so I have to teach them the early teaching as well. And they liked it so much they kept it. And said, we don't need to go on into Prajna Paramita. This is enough. This is a lot. We'll do this, much to Kumarajiva's dismay. It's the whole reason of teaching that was so he could get them into the Prajna Paramita.

Well, in fact, the Prajna Paramita did become very popular within the first three or four, four or five centuries, and was used extensively. In that tradition, including the growing into Huayan, Kegon, and into Madhyamaka, the Prajna Paramita, grew into schools in China. And schools in China were primarily based on sutra texts. So the Huayan was one basic training manual for the Kegon sect in Japan today, still is. Tendai or Tiantai in Japanese, was the other major one. These all, they had to understand why they were getting so many different teachings, all the word of the Buddha. It always starts with the Buddha said, or I heard the Buddha say, and then it's recited. So how's he saying all these different things? So the idea of upaya came up? Well, he's using methods that teach people at different levels. And when they're ready, he moves them to the next, or he provides information that allows them to go on to the next.

So this developed the Chinese being obsessive organizers and thinkers organized it into stages. And so the Huayan Sutra contains a whole section called the Ten Bhumi, the ten stages of the Bodhisattva. Huineng even cites this. Actually, it's Shenhui who cites this, the ten bhumis. He said, when you finally see the Dharma, you've surpassed the tenth bhumi. It doesn't take you through the first nine, but he said you get to ten pretty quickly and you go through it. But they were stages. It was assumed that you would go through those stages. So there were 10 stages in some of these teachings. The Huayan Sutra also went to 53 stages, which is Sudhana's travel, travels through various paths, to various teachers to learn from them. So this is what Huineng and the Chan Buddhists are looking at when they begin to practice the way they practice. They have these stages.

Some of the Chinese background, how much of this was new to the Chinese monasticism was new. The Chinese, to an extent, I think that exceeds India and many other cultures, had a very positive idea of human nature. The idea was that human nature is basically pure. And it's the Taoists say the only problem was it was corrupted as soon as you started going to school. But otherwise it was, it was pretty pure. It was pure, not pretty pure. It was simply pure. The uncarved block is an image often they use in Taoism for the personality before it's mucked with by Confucians in society. But anyway, the Confucians also agreed human nature is pure. Confucius very cogently said all beings have the potential to become sages. All beings, not just intellectuals or members of the elite or aristocratic class. All beings can become a sage. And that was the highest level one could attain as a Confucian in China. But it was a positive idea. Everyone could do it.

Mencius, one of his later proponents, taught that all, and he spelled out what Confucius was saying. He said all, all beings have innately within them, born within them, the heart. Sometimes it's translated germs like seed of compassion. He said every being has the heart of compassion born into them as soon as they appear in the world. And Mencius often offers a very strong persuasive argument for that. And this is one that many of you have probably already heard, but I'll just repeat it. So this is the argument for the heart of compassion. He said if a stranger is going through a village where he knows none of the people, and there's a well in the village, and there's a young infant crawling towards the well and up to the edge of the well and about to fall in, the immediate instinct of that person, whether he knows the people or not, whether he likes them or not, is to pull the baby back. He says it doesn't mean he'll act on that. But he said that there's an immediate, Mencius argues, there's immediate reflex response. Even if you hate these people, there's a little unformed child going towards the well. That heart will emerge. He said that can be destroyed. That heart can be destroyed by as you grow older. And this is one of the duties of a Confucianist, to try and preserve that heart, not only in themselves, but in their culture. It was a cultural activity. It wasn't an individual activity. You can't be compassionate alone. You need other people out there, right? And so that's in fact what the highest quality of Confucian can aspire to, which is co-humanity is called co-humanity. Humanism doesn't exist alone.

So the Chinese are also very this-worldly. All of these virtues, any virtue that arises will come from human beings. There's a wonderful statement that I don't know some of you may have seen if you've gone ahead where, or maybe we've already read this, where Huineng says the sutras are written by people, for people. They didn't just drop out of the sky. And even though the Buddha was considered a fully enlightened being, it was his teachings that were written down by his disciples and followers. And it should be seen as such and nothing more. This is very radical, right? I mean, think of a lot of other religious traditions. This is inviolable ultimate truths being passed down in text. This is not what Huineng is saying. And it seems to me what Chan is saying as well.

So Mencius also said that I like this in Confucianism. There's the germ of compassion, of shame, and therefore the desire to not shame your family and your people. So there's a very strong instinct in Confucianism to preserve the virtue of a family, of courtesy, namely ritual, the rituals of respect. And guess where we get all these Japanese bowing rituals? It came in through Confucianism to Japan in the 14th century. 15th century, the Japanese Buddhists adopted, they brought back Confucianism from China. And they had ritual traditions well before that. But they brought a lot of Confucian rituals back into Japan. And Japan, as they do with everything, preserve it much better than China does. So they're still there in Japan, as are many of the artifacts of older culture. When we study first century BCE material culture, most of it's found in Nara, in a museum where things were brought back from China. They've been preserved there for 2000 plus years. So they preserve these rituals too. That's a lot of our inheritance in American Buddhism, a lot of Confucian ritual. Is there a place for that? I think there is, but that's an argument perhaps.

And also there's a germ of right and wrong. And this begins by what? In China, you take the child, and it's called setting things in place. You arrange things in the proper spatial relationship to each other, senior to junior, grandfather to grandson, granddaughter to grandmother, and so on. You put them all in arrangement physically. When you perform a ritual, a family ritual that takes place on a regular basis, everyone has a place, a physical place to occupy that signifies their relationship and allows them to make sense out of their social space, who they are in relationship to everyone else, and their mutual responsibilities based on that. So what Mencius was arguing was that human beings want that. They want that sense of where they are in space. So it's very formal. It strikes us as very formal, I think, in the West.

So the only final question is how do we bring out these germs or these hearts that Mencius talks about, or how do we bring about Prajna in the Buddhist case? And it's in nurture and cultivation. Confucians had a very replete system of cultivation and nurture. And that seemed to be the practice of Buddhists in China as well, and in India, I would suspect.

Incidentally, I listened to a lecture by Karma Lekshe on a site that is a Tibetan site that had something to do with Buddha nature. And she was quite clear. She said, "I don't like to use the concept of Buddha nature. I prefer the concept of seed of enlightenment." She said, "If we are Buddhas, I don't see it. Where are the Buddhas? If we are already Buddhas, we have the germ, we all have the potential, but we have to train in it." She very gently expressed that. She says, "No, well, I prefer to see it in terms of the seed of Buddhahood." And these are, after all, metaphors that people practice with.

Oh, and this is the point that came up talking to Joel at one point. I said there are assumptions that underline our practice as in the practices of Zen Buddhism and Chan Buddhism. Namely, we accept the idea or the metaphor that all beings have Buddha nature. We accept that. We have confidence in that as a perspective on what we do, because everything flows out of that. Once you accept that, many of the practices in Huineng's teachings flow out of the acceptance. He doesn't argue for it, simply says it is. And it is because it came in, if he doesn't rely on sutras that much, but it did come in through the Nirvana Sutra in the fourth century as a teaching in the Sutra, a teaching of the Buddha. That was probably an Apocryphal Sutra, a Chinese written sutra, purporting to be an Indian sutra. So it may be connected to some of these Chinese ideas that I've just mentioned. All beings have the potential to be sages. All beings have Buddha nature. It's a good place to start. And that's where we start really with Huineng, is the acceptance of that as a teaching.

So accepting that as a teaching, we now have to deal with the question of practice and principle. Principle is we have Buddha nature. What is Buddha nature? It's the emptiness of all things, the awareness of the emptiness of all, the complete realization of the emptiness, not simply the conception of emptiness, the experience. And that's what we'll get into in the vows. That's exactly what the vows are pointing to. It's not pointing to the traditional Shila tradition at all, not at all. It's pointing towards this concept of original enlightenment and the self-nature that all beings have.

So let's look at the earlier teachings, the earlier parts of this text, and go through them in some detail. So we're going to start with section 14. And I intentionally gave you the early pages for that because it will be easier just to go directly through that. Maybe your notes aren't there, but you may want to use your own later version of it. You know, it's repeated once. There are two times the sutra appears in translation. First time is straight through, no commentary. Second time, lots of commentary. So I was pointing you towards the first, but use whichever is more convenient for you.

And I see my role not as a Dharma teacher, but as a student of language and history of Buddhism. And what I can provide, and I will try and stick to that, is an attempt to understand the language and the way it was used and the context in which it was used and how it functioned at the time it was being used. So that we're not always seeing something simply in our own terms, in our own modern interpretation of it, but what it might have meant to Chinese in the 8th century and 9th century. Because this is an assumption that I have. I think we learn a lot by looking at what another culture had at another time, even though we may not need to practice that. Often we learn things that we don't see because we're so accustomed to doing it in our modern way or in our 20th century, 21st century way. So that's why I look back to the past.

So the first term that's going to come up is the straightforward teaching. And there's not much to say about that other than it was originally and most commonly translated as not sudden, not straightforward or not direct and indirect. Red Pine, I think, wisely translates it as direct. I think that's a really good translation for the Chinese word dun. But it also means and meant to many people complete and total awareness of truth in one instant. The total truth in one instant. That was often what a commentary suggested. But I think Red Pine's right. I think Huineng uses it more in the sense of a direct teaching, a single teaching, because that's where he goes. A single teaching that takes you directly to the point of the practice.

And gradual. And that he calls indirect, but what I attempted to show in the beginning was that there was the staged process of becoming enlightened was pretty basic in Buddhist practice. And once you get to the Prajnaparamita, where there's a lot of talk about form is emptiness and non-duality. As Huineng says, it's fine to say that with your mouth, but if you don't practice it, it ain't true. So how do you make that true in your practice? Non-duality, form is emptiness, and not just talk about it and chant the Heart Sutra every week. And on how I've done it, I chanted my bit. But this guy is hard-nosed. You've got to really be there. Well, he is kind of hard-nosed. There's another side to him that's also part of the construction of the sutra. We don't need to deal with that that much.

So there's a term that comes up and that's used in two different ways. And the same term is translated in two different ways in these two chapter sections I asked you to read. And it's the word in Chinese pronounced xiang, and that's the first one I gave you on the second one on the vocabulary list. The first time it's translated in section 12, it's translated as attributes. When it's translated in section 17, it's translated as form, as in no form. That's the same word, and it means the same thing. He's just given it two different translations. I tend towards attributes because the Sanskrit term was lakshana, and lakshana means mark, and it was based on yoga theory, Indian Vedic theory, and so on, that there is a substance, an atman, on which marks can be found. So the self possesses marks. Everything possesses marks. We know things because of the marks on them, their characteristics, and their attributes. It's the way we perceive the world.

So in a sense, form is an accurate translation because form is what we perceive. Form as rupa opposed to chaitiya, mentals and materials. It's the perceptions that human beings have of the world, the attributes and the marks, which could also be said, called forms. So they're also determinant. It's the way you distinguish good from bad, blue from yellow, tall from short. That's what marks are. So they immediately separate you from the world because you begin to distinguish between one thing and another thing, one quality and another quality.

So if you see a blue sky, if you experience a blue sky, but you take away the characteristic marks of a blue sky, the argument seems to be you're only experiencing the blue, but it's not blue anymore because there's nothing to compare it to. It's just what it is. And so it's not that it's not blue. It's just that you experience the characteristic as a dharma where there are no dharmas, but when you talk about it, it becomes a dharma. But when you experience it, it's not a dharma. It's only what it is. And so that's where we're going with no thought. And that's why I like the use of attributes and determinative characteristics. Form is a nice summation of all of those denotations. But I think it clarifies what he's getting at when he's talking about a direct teaching, a direct experience of blue is not in contrast to anything else. It's just blue. And it's not it. There's no it there either. It's blue.

OK, so this word form in that we're getting in two different translations of in Red Pine also exists in other texts, Buddhist texts. It's a major technical term. Form is emptiness. It's not xiang. It's not the same word that we're talking about now with characteristics. Form is rupa, not laksana. So when the Chinese were translating laksana, they translated it as xiang. When they translated rupa, they translated it as form. Totally different word. So is the way they translated so means color. Interesting because I use the word blue. Form is the generic term for all colors. And that's also what becomes in Chinese, the generic term for form as opposed to thoughts and mentals. And so colors, but it takes on a much broader significance. It's a single word that represents an entire set of perceptions and so on. So don't confuse this with the form of form is emptiness.

The next word that he uses is thought. And this is a word that occurs in many different forms and in many different translations. So this is a big term to make some distinctions in the text to be aware of. And the word is nian, nian fo. When you're chanting the Buddha's name, nian fo, you chant the Buddha's name. It means chant, but the chanting is simply a mechanism for bringing it into one's mind. So it's mentally holding, grasping, taking awareness, making awareness of something. And we say when Buddhists chant the Kannon Emyo Sutra, they say nen nen every morning, every evening I chant the name of Avalokitesvara. That's nen nen. That's calling to mind. And that's chanting. So that's what that word means. And that's a positive word in Huineng's teaching. You nian without nianing. You call to mind without calling, holding in mind.

Well, incidentally, there's another conversation, full-fledged conversation. I mentioned the conversation on Platonism. There's another one going on right now on the Buddhist scholars website over the meaning of how do you express something without using words and how to translate the four-word expression. They're not arguing about it. They're going through all the various possibilities. That's an unending discussion. What does it mean to discuss something without discussing, to teach without teaching? So they've taken four words that became very popular, and they're all going into Yogachara texts, and so on, and trying to find out how this could make sense, how you could do that. Sounds contradictory. So how do you think without thinking? How do you nian without nianing?

So that's thought. There's another word that's used for thought and think, and it's a completely different character. It's su. The reason I put the character in there is so you can see that visually it would mean something different to a Chinese person who reads characters. They would know immediately this isn't the same as nian. This is something else. You're doing something else. It's pronounced differently. It's written differently. The character, the image is different. It's related to nian, but it's a more intellectual and conscious process of knowing things. And so he says in one line, don't think about nothing at all. Sounds like improper grammar, but he really means that. Don't think about nothing at all. That's in the passage we read. And then he goes on to say thought after thought not to become, and this is the next word, attached. And that phrase reads nian nian thought after thought. Don't become attached. So attached in this case means to dwell on or to rely on or to attach. So don't dwell in a dharma or a thought. Simply let the thoughts flow. No attachment. True. To rely on.

Finally, the last comment on words I'll use here is reality. He says somewhere in this text, reality is the body of thought. Thought is the function of reality. That's an important phrase. That's an important Chinese concept. It was not part of the Indian tradition. I'll repeat that. Reality, meaning dharma or truth, the dharma as truth, is the body, which could also mean substance or essence. Those terms are a little bit shaky in the Buddhist context. It's the body of thought. The nian nian that we experience comes from the dharmic nature of truth, which is the Buddha nature. Our nature is the body of thought. Our natures are thought. Our nature is the essence, the body of thoughts. They're not separate because he goes on to the second one to say, and thought is the function of our Buddha nature or reality. That's the way the Chinese deal with, attempt to deal with the problem of dualism. They're simply two sides of the same thing. This opens the gate wide to all kinds of speculation. That's what happens to Chan and Zen Buddhism for the next 1200 years. It opens the door so wide to the possibilities and the ways you can think about this, what's going on, that was not there in this way before. It offers an opportunity.

So let's, with this in mind, what is, well let's read through chapter section 14. I want to watch the time so we get to the rest of the things. We don't have a lot of time. We're already at 10 o'clock. How did we get to 10 o'clock? So let's, maybe we won't be able to go, but let's put number one up, Temulun. And I invite you to jump in anywhere as we go through this and in fact, maybe ask you to read it because it helps my voice. Yeah, that's where we want to go. Let's go to number two. I already did that one. I didn't give you that in advance. I meant to do that. Okay, this is a review of where we were. I put the, go back the other way a little bit.

So Bodhidharma's entrance by principle. I've summarized that in two of the passages that I quoted. If one discards the faults and takes refuge in the true, and here he uses not Dharma, but Jn or real or true. One resides frozen in wall contemplation. One resides frozen in wall contemplation. Think of that in terms of what Huineng says, in which the self and other ordinary person and sage are one and the same. Second quotation, to be mysteriously identified with the true principle. Again, truth. Truth. To be without discrimination, serene and inactive. This is called the entrance of principle. The principle is not what Bodhidharma understood as Buddha nature. So he's really talking about the Buddha nature. But he argued, he tends to suggest, although he did, Bodhidharma doesn't clarify any of this. How do you do this? He doesn't talk about the practice to get there for this in the entrance of principle.

Then he goes on to the four practices. Practice the retribution of enmity. That's karma. That's internal. You're suffering where you are now. Whatever has happened should be experienced without complaint, because it's the result of past ethical behavior. It's karma. So it means to accept that, rather than to fight it. This is an internal problem. This is an ethical problem in a way. So he's not talking about a religious practice. He's talking about a recognition that you are where you are because of what you've done in the past. But he also adds a caveat in the second stage, which is an external notion of causation. Both of these are notions of causation, karma. Practice the acceptance of circumstances, good fortune and bad fortune. They are evanescent and they will be what they are. So both of those must be gone through in sequential order. This is what Bodhidharma seems to be suggesting. You first work with internal karma, then go on to circumstances outside.

The third practice is the absence of craving. This is ongoing future karmic behavior or non-karmic behavior. And this is an ethical introduction of ethics. First, acceptance of recognizing where you are, how you got there, and then what you do. Ethical practice. The fourth practice, practice in accordance with the dharma, to eradicate wrong thoughts and practice the six perfections without having any practice. So this is where it gets confusing. I asked the question, what's principle and what's practice? One, two and three are practice for me. Four sounds like the entrance of principle. He's gone back to the principle. And that principle is to sit facing the wall, residing in wall contemplation, still sitting over long periods of time. Bodhidharma did it for 12 years or 9 years. I think it was shown. Success is a suggestion of inactive quietude. This is one of the issues to which Huineng responds. He'll take this up. So principle, yes. Practice, yes. Principle makes it in the dharma, but it's also practice. The practice is obviously takes place in steps.

You go through shila, you go through self-examination, which are what the vows are, examining one's past faults and repenting of those. Moving on to ethical behavior, shila for the future, but jumps immediately to prajna, to insight into the insight and experience of the future. Experience of the final stage. So meditation is there also. That's up in the principle section.

So when I ask, is it principle or practice, both or neither? It's both, but he denies that they're either. This is beautiful the way he puts this, it sets this up. Says you're going to practice sitting or identifying, no, no, I can't say that in the upper one. It's pretty said on the prajna side. The other one is to practice without practicing. So yeah, you practice, but you're not practicing. So he denies that it's practice and yet he provides the practice.

Okay, let's go to Hongren's concentration on obstructions to seeing Buddha nature. This is the only other pre-exam, this is a summary, summarization actually of what we've talked about in the first, or actually the second session. This is Huineng's teacher with whom he spent along eight months. This is his training. This is his monastic training, eight months. He never took vows under Hongren according to his autobiography. He only received transmission. And as a look ahead to our study of the precepts, that's what the precepts are. They're transmission. Taking the precepts is an act of transmission at the time of Huineng and much later as well. To take the precepts is not simply promising to renounce evil and so on. It's actually to receive transmission and that's what Huineng was saying. To actually receive transmission and that's what Huineng received from Hongren. Received transmission, the wordless, without words, wordless teaching. And that was transmitted to him through the teaching of the Diamond Sutra. Right, the Prajnaparamita, but it was the Diamond Sutra probably.

So when you read the precepts, notice the position of this entire ritual, the ritual of the Platform Sutra also incorporates his commentary on the Diamond Sutra, Huineng's commentary on the Diamond Sutra. That's what's transmitted. The teaching on the Diamond Sutra, which isn't a teaching. If you read what he says about the Diamond Sutra, he's not really telling you what's in it. He's not commenting on it at all. Interesting thing going on there.

So this is Huineng's teaching, his teacher's teaching. And as I said before, Hongren taught only meditation. He did not teach prajna, he did not teach ethics. He assumed that the monks coming to him had already gone through that. And most of his trainees were coming from other monasteries and other Buddhist traditions. We're coming from other monasteries and other Buddhist traditions. So this is an advanced class in meditation.

View your own consciousness tranquilly and attentively so that you can see how it is always moving. Like flowing water or a glittering mirage. Sounds familiar. After you have perceived this consciousness, simply continue to view it gently and naturally. I like that. Without assuming any fixed position inside or outside of yourself. This is an important line. Do this tranquilly and attentively until fluctuations dissolve into peaceful stability. This flowing consciousness will disappear like a gust of wind.

This I think is where Hongren also takes his stance with regard to what his own teacher taught him. By the way, when we get to Dongshan, someone asked Dongshan, do you agree with your teacher on this particular teaching? And he said, no, I don't. He said, well, he's your teacher. How could you not disagree with him? He said, it's because he was my teacher. I agree with half of what he said and not with half and half, not half of what he said because he was my teacher. That's why I do that. So Huineng, I think even departs from Hongren on this particular point and takes us to another level. And that's where we need to go now.

Let's go to the next. Any questions, any ideas, any comments on this so far? Oh, yeah, we've already done this. We need to go to three. Any comments? Oh, no, let's stay here. Let's look at number 14. Is this it, Dil? Or do you want me to go to the next? It's not all. You'd have to look in your book. Okay. From pages 11 and 12.

I had one comment on that section before, if I may. Is that all right? Say that again. I couldn't hear. I had one observation about the section before. Well, I had a million observations about the section before. But one of them is that the stages reminded very much of what Bodhidharma was speaking about. It reminded me of the ox herding pictures that you come back in a new way. And that is that at this insight level, that's one thing. And the other thing that I'm rather obsessed with in my life is point of view right now. And so I'm really, I was really loving this discussion about point of view. This is very practical stuff.

But I noticed, I talked to Monica about this the other day, that one minute I could be in the garden just completely in heaven, watering the plants, noticing everything coming through me. And 10 minutes later, I can be in the house feeling really victimized by life. And this experience made me realize, oh, there is no point of view. Like, there is no point of view. My whole life I thought there would change your point of view, you know, 1%. But I realized, oh, there is no point of view. Of course, there are points of view. But there is also no point of view. And for me, this is like my practice that these points of view exist in my, through this body. But it's just moving. It's just moving. And his teaching is very, I'm kind of in love with this because he's kind of a affirming this sense that let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go. Because it's not going to stick around and I don't get to hold on to it anyway. It's going to be pure joy and tears, pure joy and tears and everything in between all the time.

So are you saying every, your experience in the garden elsewhere is nyan nyan, nyan, nyan, nyan, nyan? It's letting all that nyan nyan, nyan nyan come and go. Just, you know- But the thought after thought, the perspective after perspective appears and becomes no perspective because it immediately disappears and the next one arises. Right. And there is no blue sky. It's just the experience. Yeah.

I mean, I think we go back to the idea is reality a stopping of that flow in serenity, which the earlier teachers suggest is what Hong Ren suggested to some extent. And the wind will blow away that flow of thoughts and it won't be there anymore. Is that part of the practice? Maybe it is a part of the practice, but it's not what you're experiencing, Kamala. It's not what it seems to me we were saying in the section 12. Is there another way to see this? That's a question for everybody.

I would say my response is that the reality is going to blow away too. How does it blow away? Well, what would that mean? This Buddha will blow away. And you'll be left in an absolute trance like Samadhi? Well, I don't know, but I don't know what will happen, but that is my experience that the continual movement. I think I see what you're saying. Any other responses? I think I see what you're saying, Kamala. Any other reactions?

Yeah, Tim? Yeah, I'm trying to follow up on what Kamala said. You mentioned that Queen Ang was hard-nosed. And there was this aspect of, was it chop wood, carry water? But there's also, he's talking, there's mention of Vimala Kirti. Yes. And Vimala Kirti is in a 10 by 10 foot room with nine million bodhisattvas who forgot their throne and then they bring the thrones in. So, I mean, there's these, if you would call that point of view or these coinciding aspects of consciousness in the Zen. Just a minute, I'm trying to figure out where I was going with this. What happens to thought? So, it was mentioned the stream, you know, the image of, you know, a cork in the stream. And it seems that I used to think I was the cork, but now I feel like I'm the stream. And it does seem to be better to be the stream, right?

I think that sounds good to me. I like stream better. But anyway, go ahead. Well, but at the same time, you know, there is this streaming and then you have the hard nose aspect of this and then you have the Vimakirti with the nine million bodhisattvas. I mean, that's sort of an amazing breadth of experience. Which, you know, with the. I don't know, it's hard to read that in the maybe I'm not picking up the Nyen Nyen part of this.

The Nyen Nyen is embracing all of those diversity. I don't think it might. My reading is that it's not simultaneous, except unless you can experience a totality all at once. But one that's in which the forms or the characteristics and attributes appear in the mind of this massive people. Forget that it's only 10 by 10. This massive people you experience that. That's an experience of a totality. So with the stream imagery, you know, light falling on the water can take on many different textures and aspects. Yes.

OK. I have some reservation. I think I understand what Pamela is saying and what you're saying, but I have some reservation about seeing that the Nyen's ever stop. Not that they exist because they don't exist. There is no thought. But that's because there is no blue. There's only the experience of blue. There's only the experience of a thought and that human nature, as the Chinese understood it, is always moving on. So it changed. The Book of Changes is based on the assumption that there is constant change. And so whether I don't think the Nyen ever stops. It's just that we don't experience it as Nyen. We experience it as no Nyen.

And so I see the Chinese or the Chan position in China as being much more dynamic than simply a state of passive stillness. And I think that's what Huynh Nguyen is going with, right? Not mentioning meditation. Of course, it exists in meditation, but we've always thought that's the only place it exists. We keep saying if you're just talking about it and so on, if you're not standing, lying down, sitting where this isn't happening, then you're not there yet. So for me, it's a very dynamic state. It's a very it's not dead. You're very much alive. The Nyen go on, but you don't experience them as Nyen. I'm now experiencing a cat. And it will go on. And I don't see it. It's wonderful. If you can just turn that, let the flow flow, right?

And we can discuss this as we as we go further with this and actually for the rest of our lives, probably. But how much I put this to you. Does as long as you're alive. Is there an absence, ever an absence of Nyen? And am I wrong in thinking it's always there until I die? That's, incidentally, this is what I see in Huenam. I just realized that yesterday. No, actually took a while. Anyone? Yeah, good. Tova, help me. Help you. Oh boy. Help us all. I'm not going to help us.

Well, thought this week, I've had some very serious family and friend situations and decisions. So I'm bringing us out of or into or out of Nyen Nyen to look at some of the practical issues. We're not sitting by the fountain in the garden. Or maybe we are when the phone call comes. So it really was a question of pulling the plug. And actually, when did thought stop? What is Nyen Nyen when a person is found in a coma at home? And how long do you and who put the put the Drake in? Who decided to keep to keep this person going literally in the hospital? And who decided to pull the plug? How do these decisions get made?

So I'm looking at our wonderful conversation today, but I am in between another dear friend whose cancer has returned and what are the decisions there? And then this death in the family also. And how is that flow? Where's the stream going? And who stands in the stream and or steps out of the stream and why? And so I'm you know, this is maybe a little hard one to throw in the last few minutes of our conversation. But I think it's absolutely essential, certainly essential for me this week to be sitting, to be doing meta in a very formal way with beautiful papers in my hands, because I need so much to have clarity. And this tradition can help us with those decisions. And it did this week.

So this tradition, by this tradition, you mean the thoughts of wellness and the. What I mean by this tradition is what I have taken on as my daily practice. And and whatever those are, these these wonderful ideas that you bring us to and to help us with the tremendous gift that we have to be together in Sangha and to do this together. And where does that go when we have decisions like this and family experiences like this? And you know, we all do. We all have this. I'm very grateful. I just put it out there that way.

John. Oh, OK. Well, I had my stuff, which I can get to, but I was really bowing for. Oh, OK. I bet you were raising your hand. Well, I have that, too. Could you speak closer? How's that? That's good. OK. Actually. I was like just what's been on my what's on my mind right now is what Susan was telling us. Like you say, as I recall, where does it go? And I would say maybe it doesn't go anywhere. This is what it is right now. There's something like that. Is. You know, kind of. Well, it's ourselves. It's not separate. But let's say the source of the strength to make those decisions, to know what the decision is appropriate action is precisely. What our practice kind of all about. And so it sounds like being immersed in the practice, pickled with the practice. That you, your family. Make these decisions. In. Appropriate way. Or something like that. I don't know if that helps or not. But anyway, that's what came up in my mind. That it has gone no place. It's here all the time. It's not going to go anywhere. And being there for you. It is. You are. All the words are wrong. Your support. In appropriate action somehow. So maybe that helps. Maybe it doesn't at all.

And so, Bill, what the question I was going to ask is sort of maybe mundane. Like, it's I don't understand body and function. It's very strange. It reminds me of what Pamela was saying then. About this Buddha and then there's a new Buddha and it goes away. Because sometimes when you talk about it, I say, oh yeah, now I get it. And then I look back at it and I don't get it at all. So the last one that what is body and function and what is the relation of body and function to practice and principle. I get all confused in there. It comes up again and again. He uses that those comparisons all the way through. I think it's important to understand that concept, body and function.

Well, how does body and function relate to practice and principle? Body is the principle. Oh, body is principle and practice is function. Yes. Oh, OK. That helps. And they're the same thing. OK, that helps. And that makes sense. OK, maybe it wasn't so off after all. I think I got confused. They were in a different order. You know, I think you can look at all of his dualities. In fact, most of the Chan dualities and immediately separated into body and function. Prajna is the body of form. Form is the function of Prajna. The manifestation. The active appearance.

Say that again, Bill. I'll say it the opposite way this time, I'm sure. Prajna, wisdom, is the substance. Practice is the manifestation. Some people, one doesn't come before the other. They occur simultaneously. OK, so simultaneously. So when Dogen says and many teachers say you sit on your cushion and there's no need to think of principle, because just sitting, in fact, that's what they're. Principle is just sitting. It's a manifestation of principle.

Well, before we go further and just say, you know, in terms of practice enlightenment, that there's just. That's what. Yeah. If we get to the vows, that's exactly what the three vows do. OK, they related to experience and manifestation and the reality. They make it into three pieces. OK, that throws the subject and function off a little bit, but OK, so all of these are floating metaphors. Yes. And one of the things you see with Huynh Nguyen is he'll use the ocean and rivers. And as a different metaphor to mean something completely different, sometimes the ocean is ignorance.

Sometimes it's the total body of the mind. He's inconsistent, but maybe intentionally. Yes, like many Chan teachers. When you think you've got it, he'll switch it. Exactly. I love it. And that's the way you don't rely on metaphors. You use metaphors without relying on them. And as soon as somebody switches the metaphor to something else, that's what goes on in the Chan dialogues. They shift the metaphor. If you're not alert enough to figure out, hey, he just shifted on me. He's now in Prasana. OK. You're attached to the original metaphor. Now I've got it. No, you don't have it because we can do it the other way, too. We could think about it in all these ways.

I'm getting beyond myself right now. I think it's great. It's really helpful. It feels very accurate. OK, well, then maybe I should say something else, as Koan would say. That's exactly what I was going to say. That's why they mix it up constantly. The minute you have it, you have to understand you don't have it. It has you. Yeah.

I'm mindful of the time and I want to know if that's all right with Bill and everyone else to continue. Let me suggest if anyone wants to continue this topic, we not move on to the vows and precepts until next time. That's an important section. And we don't want to short-shift it. So we'll just do vows and precepts next time. I'd like to stay as long as I can, but I'm going to have to leave at some point because I have a master class of composers on Zoom starting at 11. And I got to make sure that Zoom doesn't mess up. So I'll stay as long as I can. I'll stay if anyone wants to stay, as long as anyone wants to stay. But otherwise, feel free. I don't have any investment. I'm going to let you know when I disappear. It's not because I don't think it's amazing.

I was thinking of Tova's question. And I think whether things are going well for me, the thoughts are still there moment to moment. And when there's something serious going on, as in your case, I don't think you can turn off the thoughts. They're going to be there. But I'm not where you are. So you have to speak from your own experience on that. I'm looking at this as an outsider, not as someone who's experiencing that or as a Dharma teacher, simply as a scholar of this text. Because I understand the text, what Hui Neng is saying. And this is why I think he's very this-worldly and very much a realist. This is the way human beings are. Our nature is to think. The problem comes when we attach to the thoughts. Now, that's what I think he's saying. I don't know if that helps or not. And if not, there are plenty of other resources in the tradition that do help, like the four unlimited. He kind of gets to that in a way, too. He talks in the later chapters, he mentions those briefly. Hui Neng does. So, I'm not the person to deal with that question directly, other than to say this is what I think Hui Neng is saying.

Well, thank you. I had two thoughts. One was a response to the idea about the metaphors. I love that idea of switching the metaphors. So this was a comment on that, because there's so many times that the sentence will pop in, "Have a cup of tea." And I finally realized that's just a way of switching it out, getting on with it. As far as my statement before, the challenge for me, as usual, is not so much getting caught in the thought. But there's also that longing to be beyond thought or to be in the flow. And when big decisions need to be made, how do you choose the thought? How do you step back, face it, and have discernment? So that's what I was speaking of. And also just that realization for me is that when they intubate someone, what is the determination of their state of being? And what finally made the determination to cease treatment was some technical scan, which determined there was no more brain activity, which we could probably say was then nyan nyan, no thought. And that came up with such clarity as we were discussing today. So thank you all.

That's very interesting that that becomes the determining factor. And isn't that what Hui Neng is saying when he talks about when you finally cut off all thoughts, you're dead? And it's human nature, it's Buddha nature, for thoughts to occur, not to be attached to, but to occur. And that's as far as I can take it with what you say about that. No continuation of thoughts. Watch that little blip on the screen going up and then you see it stop. That's it. Now he's not talking about death per se, saying, I don't want you to do that. This is what we're involved in, is living. And I find him very Chinese in this respect. The highest value is to live. And that's done through a flow, attention to a flow. And then he has in the vows, we'll see he details how that's not independent, it just doesn't happen on its own. One has to be part of the process in some way and step back from the process. But that's all vague and abstract. Wait until we get to his words on this.

When I read Hui Neng way back, I said, this is not what I thought meditation was. What's he talking about? It really blew me away because I had probably a general misconception that it was a semi-trance state in which one was transported into the Pure Land. Hui Neng is pretty definite about what the Pure Land is and so is Vimalakirti. Your own body is the Pure Land. Sure, you can go a thousand miles, you'll never get there. A lot of Chinese were going to the east, not to the west. Because that's where the Buddha was born. That's India. That's where the sacred sites are. And Hui Neng says, screw that. It's right here in your body.

It's interesting, the one Pure Land temple that I visited, it was coming back into existence outside of Beijing. This must have been 15 years ago, 16 years ago. It was a very lonely, beautiful, lonely place. It had lost most of its monks and was being reconstructed. But there was a wonderful old abbot there, just a delightful old man. Very clear, very direct. And I was so moved by this place, I said, "Do you ever consider taking residents to come, someone like me who might practice here?" The place was utterly peaceful and in the woods. And this is a Pure Land monastery. It's not the Pure Land, it's a Pure Land monastery. But in a way it was the Pure Land for me. So I said this to him. And you know what he said to me? He said, just what Vimalakirti said, "You don't have to come here. You can practice anywhere you want, in your own home, if you want." And I said, oh, I mean, I can't, in other words, I'm not going to come. And then they have Hui Neng say that.

I think this is one of the great contributions of Chinese culture to the Buddhist tradition, is the this-worldliness of the process. That's why Vimalakirti was so popular in China. He's a layman. Incidentally, this text was aimed at lay people, not at monks, the one we're reading. Because China was opening to lay people. It was beginning to see that in Chinese, a lot of them were married and involved in ordinary lives. And Mahayana opened it to them. So these vows are aimed at lay people. The sermon is aimed at lay people. Monks can use it too, obviously. But this was a platform sutra. It was a public meeting of thousands or 8,000 people, so the text says, in which all of those people could take the precepts simply by reciting them three times. It will go into more of that later on, but it brought it into the everyday life of Chinese people in a way that I think is happening in the US now and in the West. It has to come in and fit into a new world without losing some bit of itself. And I think that was the perspicacity of the Chinese. They had this. I don't think they thought about it. I think it was just part of their assumptions of the way the world worked. And we're waiting for it to be expressed as clearly as Hui Neng does. Hui Neng is not, but that's also Buddhist. It's not just Chinese. So it's a wonderful amalgamation, I think.

Tim, have you read Vimalakirti, the text itself?

Just recently I read Vimalakirti, and it seems like he really changed up the whole game. I mean, what, a thousand years of ritual? He just kind of threw that up in the air and said that, yeah, it starts with you. But I was curious as I don't want to get ahead of things, but when you talk about the refuges, the three refuges, I was wondering if that speaks to kind of what Susan was talking about. You know, when thought has stopped in a loved one, you're there. Are the refuges, is that a process that you can go to to contend with loss? I mean, it seemed pretty complicated. I'm glad I got a chance to read it again between the transformation body, the realization body, and these things. It kind of blew me away when I was reading it. It seemed very deep, a deep place to go in an internal way.

Yeah, we need to go back and read those again. That was a standard part of all transmit, not transmission. What's it called? What's the ritual called? The word is out of my mind right now. When people come to join the Sangha, what's that called?

Are you talking about Jukai?

Well, Jukai is a formal, we actually become a, well, a semi-monastic. In the original tradition, it would have been a monastic. But anyway, yeah, that's Vimalakirti maintains rituals without maintaining them. It maintains, well, some of the later chapters you see him get into some of these other ideas as well. We would need, sometime we should read the Vimalakirti together. Yes, it's, the parts of it are hilarious. It's wonderful. It's about as light and deep at the same time as you can get any sutra hybrid.

Yeah, when he says that he's sick, but he's not really sick, he says we're all sick. So I'm glad to have a chance to read this, the refuges again. That was, we can come to that next time.

Yeah, it's his, our critical, a radical reassembly of the refuges and the repentances. Compared to what had been happening in China up until that time. This, that when these vows and repentance came into China, they were already 800 years old and they didn't make a lot of sense in a lot of cases. It was a new culture and it was very old. So the Chinese amended them immensely, but Hui Neng, I think goes about as far as anyone. I'm interested in those of you who've done the rituals in the Soto tradition. To what extent his ritual carries over into the modern Jukai and the other rituals that Soto and people do. I've never been a part of any of those rituals. I've only read Hui Neng and that's how I assume they are, but I doubt it. So those of you who've done it, I'd love to hear what it's about, how it compares actually.

I don't know if there was any terribly enlightening words I can add to what's already been said. To be continued. Oh, here's one thought. Let me leave you with this. This will kind of set up the discussion of the precepts. Originally in China, they came up with two forms of precepts. The precepts of phenomena and the precepts of principle. Precepts of phenomena and repentances were actual individual instances of transgressions. Repentance of principle was remittent failures. Failures of principle having nothing to do with your individual failures in life and so-called sins. Failures in practice, failures in action. So you don't talk about yourself. The question is so much. And this happened in Soto Zen monasteries as a ritual process in the 12th century. The repentances of one's understanding of practice. And I would suggest to you that's what Hui Neng's repentances are about. Not about individual transgressions. Read them carefully. He's talking about transgressions in wisdom and knowledge and the mind. And if you read it that way, it's a little different than our full moon ceremony. We understand our full moon ceremonies about thinking about ourselves. But actually the full moon ceremony in a standard Soto monastery in the 12th century was usually focused on principle. The individual repentances were done probably on a separate occasion. They do them. But the actual ritual on full moon was principle. And I think that probably came from Hui Neng. You already have it in you. Why aren't you doing it? How have I failed in that way?

I had one question, Bill, because that reminds me that Dogen had some difficulty with Hui Neng, right? And yet I feel that there is this deep connection as well. And really around that point to me.

Yes, absolutely. Much of the later Dogen had problems with him. In fact, during that period of which was really the golden period, the 11th and 12th century, not the earlier period, Hui Neng was rarely mentioned. It was only after that period that he comes back in as an important part. People still are in the 11th and 12th century. And by the way, here's something that you may find interesting. Because of this text, for 200 years no one talked about meditation. It doesn't appear in the text. It comes back in the 11th century, in that golden period, and they begin to talk about meditation. But that's the question I wanted to ask you. What does this tell you about meditation? What is he telling you about meditation and your everyday life? And what's the relationship between those two? And I think it's pretty radical. And the reason that people didn't mention meditation in the next 200 years was not because they weren't doing it. It became cancel culture. You don't want to talk about it because it became so defamed in the poetry, on the walls, and so on, that it was just better not to talk about it. And yet the monasteries were fully active. The mainstream monasteries were still practicing meditation and Sheila and all the rest. So yeah, Dogen and actually who's the later Rinzai monk makes a great use of him. He does all the paintings of Bodhidharma in the 17th century. Can't think of his name right now. In any case, it's a really radical statement that doesn't always get picked up by later Chan Buddhists. So I like this text better every time I read it.

Yeah, he's become our friend. If that's good, I'm good. If it's only good thoughts, then you're a Bodhi. Thinking good thoughts, you're an ordinary person who thinks good thoughts is a Buddha. The Buddha who thinks bad thoughts is an ordinary person. So think good thoughts, folks.

Yeah, I need to leave too. And I just wanted to thank you. I haven't jumped in because there's so much going on, you know, floating through my mind. But it's been such a wonderful discussion with everybody. So I want to thank you all and thank you, Bill. And I'm going to sign off.

Very good. Good to see you every time. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, Bill. Thank you. That was great.