Full Transcript

Hi everyone. Great to be here as always. Welcome.

Last time I gave a talk about the Heart Sutra and we didn't get very far, which is the nature of the Heart Sutra because it's very dense. People seem to go for it and ask me to keep going and go through more of the Heart Sutra. So that's what we'll do today.

Before I start, I want to emphasize that the Heart Sutra, although it can seem very intellectual, is actually about loving-kindness. It's the equivalent of loving-kindness from a very different and later perspective of Buddhism. The sutra we chant is what is said by Avalokitesvara, the one who hears the cries of the world, the bodhisattva of compassion. And what we chant is in response to the question, how do I practice? How do I train? How do I practice in this tradition?

Some of you weren't here for the first talk and it has been a while. So I want to make sure we're sort of at the same place. The essence of the Heart Sutra, you might say, is the words, "form is no other than emptiness. Emptiness is no other than form. Form is exactly emptiness. Emptiness exactly form." So what the hell does that mean? I'm curious. It'll help me to see what you come up with about what that might mean for you and then I'll know better where to go from there. So any volunteers? Anyone who was here last time? Anyone else?

[Audience member]: I'm going to quote Einstein. E equals mc squared. m is mass, that's form. E is energy. Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. So that's the Western, that's my interpretation of the Western equivalent of form is emptiness, emptiness is form.

That's fantastic. I mean, physics is so great. I don't understand any of it because I don't know enough math. But interesting, because as I was studying to give these talks, reading Thich Nhat Hanh's book about the Heart Sutra, I came across an article in the New York Times. It was about the relationship between general relativity, which very accurately accounts for large things, galaxies, the creation of the universe, as opposed to quantum mechanics, which very accurately describes things on the very small level within the atom, within the nucleus of the atom. And so it's the chain reactions that will happen at the detailed level in the Big Bang.

My understanding has been these two theories are utterly irreconcilable in their mathematical bases. And the article was saying, no, that actually now they're coming upon commonalities. And so they feel that this is very exciting, because they feel that quantum mechanics is no other than relativity, relativity is no other than quantum mechanics. So I love it. Anything else?

[Audience member]: The other thing that Einstein said is make things as simple as possible. And that's pretty simple equation. And then he said, make them as simple as possible, but no simpler.

Well, in terms of words, but in terms of understanding what it might conceivably mean, it's a little more complicated.

[Audience member]: I'm not sure, but I think in the end, it's about there being no fundamental distinction or something like that. Fundamentally forms, if you reduce them or see in some way past them, they don't last. And so in some way, that brings us back to the oneness or the emptiness or infinite quality in all things. But there are forms because we do encounter them in various ways, right? So we cannot deny them, but the not one, not two, it's a paradox and I think we can only live it. It's hard to intellectualize it sometimes. I mean, you can, I guess paradoxes have been intellectualized, like being a particle in a way.

Great. Terrific. Tovr, you had some ideas about this.

[Tovr]: That was certainly looking at that emptiness concept. As we sat today, I was thinking about both of the gatas that we did. We did the Heart Sutra, which I decided beforehand I was going to use a lot of metta in my 40 minutes today. But then when we did the relative and the absolute, we had both hands going and I started to think about Hakuin and his phrase of, "Is that so?" And I got myself into a big quandary because I saw that my metta had to do with a longing. It had to do with my own input. It wasn't just so, it was what I wished for. It was what I was longing for. And so it was highly subjective, not at all, but it was highly relative. I was not tapping into my ability to really look at the situation.

Interesting. The metta is in the relative world. The four brahma viharas are about the relative world and they're about how we act in the relative world. What our aspirations are, like the metta phrases, "may I be happy?" That's about me. It's only when you get to equanimity, I think, is it about others? "All beings own their own karma." It's also about us, but it is in the relative world. We live in the relative world. So in the relative world, we aspire to manifest loving kindness to ourselves and to others.

What you mentioned, the identity of relative and absolute is precisely about form and emptiness. The relative you could say is form and the absolute is emptiness. And so that's precisely what that is about. And walking that line. It's quite a trick. And they're both there at the same time. Always. Constantly. There's no different. Well, there's a different perspective about the same thing.

Okay. So you guys understand the Heart Sutra. You're just great. For those maybe not here last time, I want to review, and I'll get at it through a joke, which maybe a lot of you know: What did the Zen master say to the hot dog vendor? He said, "Make me one with everything."

It's a kind of commonplace Zen that we say we aspire in a sense to be one with everything. And what we might find out is we've always been one with everything and we didn't realize it. And maybe we are practicing towards realizing what has been true all along. So that's okay. But something bothers me about that formulation. But anyway, it's good enough for now.

We say "one with everything" can only be one with everything if we're not separate from anything. So, I have notes for this talk on this piece of paper, right? And we say this is form, that's a thing. We all see it. I feel it. But if you look at that, if you look into what a paper is, it's made from a tree. People log trees for what better or worse with global warming. And the tree is taken, chopped up in a factory and the bark is taken off. Various things happen in the factory. The factory was made by people, was conceived of by people. Other people made the factory. Other people work in the factory and all those people had parents. And the tree is dependent on the sun to exist on the nutrients in the soil, on water from the clouds. And then we only get this paper by someone taking a truck and taking it to the place that makes paper, et cetera.

So if you look at all of this, it's in here, all of this is not separate from all of that. And so when you look at it, ultimately there's nothing in the universe that is not in this paper. And we say, and all form is like that. All form is not separate from the whole universe. And that is the, and Thich Nhat Hanh has this marvelous word for it: "Inter-are." All things inter-are, and the technical term would be dependent co-arising. Everything arises together.

When we look at the perspective of everything is in this piece of paper, we're talking about the suchness of the piece of paper. The piece of paper has everything in it, except a separate self. There's no such thing as a separate self for the piece of paper. Piece of paper is empty of a separate self and that's emptiness. That's what they mean. The form is empty of a separate self. And then we're one with everything.

And that's very nice intellectually, but to experience the world in that way is quite a trick. And that's, I mean, to say that's what we're trying to do is to introduce a gaining idea and we're not here with a gaining idea, but maybe sitting utterly still and just being aware of the whole universe, which is happening all around us, is kind of maybe embodying that. I don't know. Anyway, has something to do with that.

One thing is very important: emptiness is not non-existence. This exists. We exist. The chairs exist. It has nothing to do with that. It's about empty of a separate self, but there is a thing that is empty of a separate self.

So I'll read, if I can find it, the same thing as I read before with the next line. So it says "form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other than form. Form is exactly emptiness, emptiness exactly form. Feelings, perceptions, mental formations, consciousness are also like this." Now, some of you might notice I am using different words than when we chant the Heart Sutra. Of course, these words were originally Sanskrit and there are various translations. These are ones that my teacher uses. And for me, at least they make sense.

These put together - form, feelings, perception, mental formation, consciousness - are called the five skandhas and the five skandhas. The word is aggregate or heap of stuff. And people say it's the river that makes us up. And none of that is very helpful for me personally. I've heard it said that roughly speaking, the skandhas are everything that make us up. So it's the whole mess of ourselves. And the Sutra says all of these are empty of self being, they're empty of a separate self, all of these. And when the Sutra says form is emptiness, form stands for all the five skandhas. That's what it's really saying.

So we'll take a look at the five skandhas. First is form, in Sanskrit rupa. And it's the paper, it's our own bodies. It's the chair. It's everything we encounter in the outside world. The other four are all happening within our own mind.

Feelings, vedana. That is when we encounter something like the paper or the chair, we have, I think what they're saying is that we have this instinct, like it's an unconscious, we're not, it happens so instantaneously. Either we say, oh, I like that. I want to go towards it. I want to grab it. Or we say, I don't like that. I'm going to push it away. Or maybe occasionally say, eh, yeah, it's okay. But I don't have any strong feeling about it one way or another. And so that's the first thing that happens unconsciously, instantaneously, when we encounter anything, any form that is out there.

Perceptions, samjna. This is our sense organs perceiving what's out there. We use our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind to perceive sights, sounds, taste, touch, and thoughts, actually. And our bodies are the feeling in our bodies, the feeling of the robes against my arm. And that is our perception through the sense organs. And that happens. I mean, we don't say, oh, there's a process. First, I decide whether I have a kind of positive or negative reaction to that chair. The first thing we're sort of conscious of is, oh, I see something. There's some visual thing. Photons are coming towards me, but we probably don't say it like that.

And then we name it, we say chair. I was not sure. I had to ask my teachers whether I think it more and more, I think it's moving into the next of the skandhas: mental formations. Chair is a mental formation comes in our minds, renaming it. Mental formations are thoughts, basically thoughts and names.

And this is moving into mental formations, the fourth of the Skandhas. I didn't get my act together to put the Sanskrit, but you can find it somewhere.

Now if we have a name chair, we then have the possibility of forming a thought about the chair. "Oh, I'm tired. I want to sit in the chair." When we see a dog, we might have the mental formation, "I like dogs," and having that, we might have a reaction of petting the dog. We might choose to pet the dog if presumably we asked the owner of the dog and they say it's okay. So we have an action now, and this is where action starts.

Action is karma in Buddhism. What karma means is action, which is different than what we usually understand by karma, like sort of in the way we usually use it. Any volitional action is karma. And what we call karma is actually the fruits of karma. Every action has a result as a fruit, which will manifest at some time or another. And that's what we call karma. It's part of the whole understanding of what karma is. So this fourth Skanda of mental formations is where karma begins. Before then, there's no action. There's no karma happening. It's a kind of, you might say a pure place, although I don't like that formulation because it sets a pure and impure. We'll get to pure and impure.

Now one thing that can happen having mental formations is that they can chase each other. You know, "I like dogs. I want to pet the dog and I really support the ASPCA and my dog is wonderful. And the first dog I had is wonderful. And the second dog I have is wonderful. And my dog right now is 14 years old and she has these health problems." And this is called consciousness. This is what we see when we sit down and meditate - one thought after another coming on top of each other. And this is where we live. We live in the midst of our own consciousness.

This can seem a little abstract, but what the sutra says is all of this is empty of separate self. And in a sense it all contains everything just like the paper. And what I've found in terms of the heart sutra and practice is that it's very helpful for me in understanding practice to go backwards from consciousness all the way back to form.

What we do in practice is we are living in consciousness. We sit straight back and all of that. And we try when we notice thought to return to our posture and breath. And then as we all know, thought comes back. And I think we all know that it's our experience when we sit down and thoughts follow each other. We often find ourselves after 30 seconds or a minute or 10 minutes or by the end of the period that we've been just thinking about something one thought to another, to another, to another, the whole period. And we have an aspiration to notice that and return to our posture and breath.

Noticing that is a little bit breaking that cycle of consciousness. And one thing we might find is we might get to the point, there's one thought, "I like dogs" and then it's nothing. That's all. Okay. And then we've moved into the fourth skanda of simply the mental formation without the consciousness in terms of the connection of one to another. And that's actually quite a deep stage of meditation right there.

We might have a situation where we're walking outside and "flower" and stop right there. And then there'd be nothing. And then we have the mental formation "teary eyed" and stop right there. And that is pretty good. That's going deeper in meditation. So it's going back in the skandas or deepening and deepening our meditation. And for most of us, you know, it's decades as we go back and deepen our meditation. And however much we deepen it, we're going to find ourselves, I think, mostly in consciousness.

Anyway, and if some of you have done long retreat sessions, you get deeper. And then it's neat when you "flower" "teary eyed." I mean, that's really classy in Zen terms, you know, and so we can stop there right now and look back to that stage. Thank you. Questions, comments?