Norman gives his third talk on Stephen Batchelor’s book, Verses from the Center: A Buddshisdt Vision of the Sublime which reflects the poems of 2nd century philosopher and Narlanda Master, Nagarjuna.
Book reference: Verses from the Center: A Buddhist Vision of the Sublime by Stephen Batchelor
Norman gives his second talk on Stephen Batchelor’s book, Verses from the Center: A Buddshisdt Vision of the Sublime which reflects the poems of 2nd century philosopher and Narlanda Master, Nagarjuna.
Book reference: Verses from the Center: A Buddhist Vision of the Sublime by Stephen Batchelor
Norman gives his first talk on Stephen Batchelor’s book, Verses from the Center: A Buddshisdt Vision of the Subline which reflects the poems of 2nd century philosopher and Narlanda Master, Nagarjuna.
Book reference: Verses from the Center: A Buddhist Vision of the Sublime by Stephen Batchelor
Final Dharma Seminar Talk, July 27, 2004, based on the book by Dalai Lama and Daniel Goleman, “Destructive Emotions: How Can We Overcome Them?” Bantam Books, 2003.
Chapter entitled “Encouraging Compassion.”
I suppose what I am most interested in in this question of working with emotions is not emotions per se, but rather that we live our lives completely and accurately. And the reason I am interested in that is that I know that if we don’t live completely and accurately we suffer a lot and we make other people suffer too. I don’t want to suffer, it is too difficult, and also I don’t want to make others suffer because since I can feel my own life I can also feel the lives of others and their suffering makes me suffer too. In other words, I am not so much interested in emotion for emotion’s sake. It’s just that if you look closely you find that emotion is life and life is emotion; emotion isn’t something you can choose to be concerned with or not.
Anyway, this is how I feel and so when we take up the issue of cultivating compassion I am interested not because I think compassion is good or nice or that we ought to be compassionate as a general principle, that it is noble or feels good to be compassionate (though it is noble and does feel good) but simply because it seems to me that living in a way that reduces suffering and is therefore necessarily, as I say, a complete and accurate way to live would certainly and simply bring you to compassion. This is what Dalai Lama means in our chapter when he says that compassion is to be cultivated with a self interested perspective- in other words, not so as to be good or nice, which might in the long run be a shaky motivation, but because compassion is most practical and the best way to live – for one’s self. To be narrowly self interested and self identified is simply a very dangerous and unhappy way to live- the wider your interest and the large your sense of identity, the happier and the stronger you will be. This is just logical and experientially true. In Zen the sense is that compassion is reality itself- that reality simply is, most accurately viewed, the sharing and mixing of all things, so to be for others, and to want to benefit others, is clear and in accord with the way things are. It is not an optional ornamentation. This isn’t a faith requiring belief- it is an insight and an experience we gain through our years of practice and work on the cushion and off: when we are stuck on ourselves we suffer, the world shrinks till it chokes us off; when we are broad and expansive with our hearts we are happy, even if often we suffer on behalf of others.
Last time we spoke about emotions, moods, temperaments, and we explored our personal history with them. These concepts are mentioned again in this chapter in relation to training the mind and the heart toward more compassion. Emotions, as we have been saying, arise in response to conditions in the present and are influenced strongly by experiences from the past. The arising of a particular emotion is not our fault but it is our responsibility to meet the emotion arising now, whatever it is, with mindfulness and patience. This is how we train. We engage the mind and remain as firm and as clear as we can with what is there. Depending on how we relate to an arising emotion we will extend the emotion to a mood and that mood if repeated enough will eventually harden into a temperament and we might then be known as or think of ourselves as a cheerful or an angry or depressed person. It turns out that the physiology of the brain is constantly changing in response to reactions and experiences so we are in effect changing our brains with our habitual ways of reacting emotionally with anger or happiness or depression. This means that the reverse is also true: that training is possible, and that if we will work with emotion mindfully over time we will actually develop a different temperament, our brains will be different, our spontaneous style of feeling and being will change.
In traditional Tibetan Buddhism there are said to be three stages to this emotional training, and I would say that we work on all three all the time. They are called hearing, reflecting, and meditation, but as usual in our practice we just collapse them into one thing which maybe we call, “just keep making effort in practice.” Hearing: we try to constantly introduce into our mind things like I have been saying tonight; the necessity and simplicity and advantage of compassion. Not only for ourselves, but for our world. All human beings recognize that they are part of a larger world and I think there is a human need to feel that one is doing what one can to effect that world in a positive way. So you listen to teachings that give you this sense. So this is hearing the dharma, studying the dharma, going to talks, reading, listening to tapes, and so on. It’s a form of training; we are changing our minds, our hearts, our brains through the act of actually hearing, with a focused receptivity.
Next comes reflection- we think about what we are hearing, we relate it to our own experience so that it is not just conceptual but more personal, maybe, as in our small group discussions, we talk about it, go over it many many time, test out to see how it is actually true for us, in our own way.
Then meditation maybe has two aspects- first literally meditation practice on our cushions, which will deepen these ideas and commitments. Sometimes we work directly on compassion, with techniques like loving kindness meditation or tong len practice, and sometimes we work indirectly just through the breath or mindfulness of the body until we discover spontaneously the feeling of compassion as it naturally arises in us as our own life force. That’s the first sense of meditation practice. The second sense is meditation in action, applying our reflections and thoughts about compassion in daily living, actually being compassionate, cultivating feelings of compassion, doing acts of compassion, seeing how this really works in our own lives. This meditation practice strengthens, deepens, and makes more accurate our compassion. And so in this way over and over again, we work on a grounded and insightful sense of the teachings.
Bodhisattvas are compassionate. They have a powerful experientially based sense that compassion is the boss because compassion is the way the world actually is- even though of course there is a lot of confusion and trouble; but that too, tragically and mysteriously, is also a part of what compassion is. So in the end, in the long run, compassion always wins. Bodhisattvas know this so they are never discouraged. Sad maybe yes. But never discouraged. And as bosses they know they have to serve others humbly and to keep on doing this- they know this is the best way for they themselves to be happy and to fulfill their human destiny. In fact we all have this destiny to be compassionate, it is a fruition of our human consciousness. So bodhisattvas are always trying to figure out how to spread this teaching about compassion and how to bring more peace to the hearts of others. There are an infinite number of ways, it’s always a challenge to discover what’s appropriate, and the work will never be done.
Dogen writes about the bodhisattva’s four methods for guiding others: giving, kind speech, beneficial action, and identity action, which means acting side by side in identity with others. In this chapter Dalai Lama mention another list of four actions of a bodhisattva to help others, particularly others who are already strongly conditioned toward violence and other destructive emotions and might require stronger medicine. The four methods are peaceful speech, giving teachings or gifts, asserting power or dominance to prevent further wrong doing, and, finally, the use of compassionate wrathfulness or ferocity, where this is practical, to help the person to turn things around. This list might be interesting to think about in terms of dealing with terrorism or various lesser forms of terrorism closer to home- the recognition that sometimes drastic measures are necessary, but that these are applied with the sense that they are compassionate devices, last resorts, and that as soon as possible they will be dropped.
In any case this work of compassion is really challenging, various, and interesting, and does not always go the way we might think it should go- sweetly and nicely. In Zen, in which compassion is always the primary motivation, there is the sense that compassion is sometimes best served by sternness and a swift kick in the pants. But with kicks in the pants- as with the waging of war- one better be very careful. Probably 99 per cent of the time we employ this device we are only using the idea of fierce compassion as a cover for our confusion or self interest, either cynically justifying our willfulness, or deceiving ourselves about our true motivations. It is so easy to fool one’s self! I have seen this a lot with Zen teachers and I think we are seeing it now with our current war in Iraq, which is hard to see as an act of compassion, despite what we are told.
I had a friend years ago who told me that her father taught her, “happiness is for cows.” In other words, human beings, smart enough to know the world as it really is, should give up the notion of being happy- maybe just survive as well as possible, perhaps be good or ethical, but certainly forget about being happy. And in fact, as we learn in this chapter, scientific studies show that people who consider themselves happy very often have quite unrealistic views about themselves and the world. Clearly then the happiness we seek is different than conventional notions of happiness that depend on goals being met and pleasant experiences appearing frequently while unpleasant experiences are scarce. For us, seeing the world as it really is, and letting go of limited senses of satisfaction in favor of wider views and goals – inexhaustible views and goals- is the way to happiness.
Our world of today can be quite cynical because it is so well informed. There is very little naivete left. We know that all views are partial, no one is without bias or self interest, and no person or ideology has the answers. In such a world we practice compassion not because we have a belief about it, or because we oppose some other world view or belief, but because we know through experience that this is the best way for us to live.
® 2004, Norman Fischer
Zoketsu lectures on Daniel Goleman’s Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama. – Proceedings of a dialogue between the Dalai Lama and Western philosophers and scientists. He examines the usual dichotomy of emotions v. intellect. Description of scientific studies of a Tibetan monk in a deep meditative state.
(Transcribed and abridged by Barbara Byrum)
This book is a transcript of a conference, along with other explanatory material that Daniel Goleman adds. It is not as if the book is an organized discussion of working with destructive emotions. It meanders, as any discussion does. So, I will bring out points that seem germane or interesting to me in each chapter.
Destructive emotions: what do we mean by destructive and what do we mean by emotions? On one level, destructive emotions are those that cause harm, such as a burst of anger when we lash out at someone or when someone lashes out at us. But I would like to take it further and talk not only about emotions that are directly and obviously harmful, but also about emotions that are habitual and make us unhappy.
There was a Western philosopher involved in a dialogue at the conference who gave a perspective on how words such as “emotions” are used. In the West we are taught that there is a categorical difference between the intellect and the emotions. The intellect involves such things as truth-seeking, and is seen as higher and more realistic. It is considered to be masculine. Emotion, on the other hand, is seen as irrational, more feminine, a little unruly, and trivial. There are deep roots in Western philosophy that cause that kind of thinking. The intellect is divided from the emotions. We feel that the more intellectual we are, the less emotions matter to us, and we are more in control.
There is no such distinction between the intellect and emotions in Buddhism. In the Buddhist map of the mind, there are fifty-one mental factors that shape consciousness.Of the fifty-one mental factors, some were called cognitive and some were called emotional. They were not seen as separate categories. They were seen as different factors that were always mixed in how they affected the mind. We know this is true from our experience on the cushion, when you see that every time there is an emotion, there is always a thought, and every time that you think something, there is an associated emotional quality. Intellect and emotion are mixed. There is no pure intellectual or pure emotional state. We are trying to recognize this fact in our life, and bring it into view, so that we have more awareness of the thoughts and emotions that arise in the mind.There are no words in Buddhism to distinguish the emotional and intellectual. The word citta means both mind and heart. In our practice, mind is not in charge, figuring out the emotions. Mind and emotions are one flow.
Lately I have been drawing a distinction between emotions and feelings. I am defining emotion as the whole complex of thinking, wrapped up with our history, our identity, and some object that activates our emotion. That whole complex, in which it is impossible to tease out one element, is what we call emotion. It is very personal and particular to a situation. The edifice of emotions is built on the foundation of feelings. Feelings are simpler than emotions. They are basic human responses, of which we are usually unaware. Usually we are agitated on the level of the emotion, but we are not aware of the underlying feeling. The underlying feeling is new territory; it is not about “me” anymore, it is about a deep, human phenomenon, such as fear, aversion, or desire. With meditation practice and the intentional application of awareness, we have a greater capacity to discern our actual feelings. When we can get in touch with ourselves on the level of mindfulness, our understanding of our feeling can result in more calmness.
We need meditation practice and awareness to even know what we are feeling. For example, there can be a confrontation or conflict that goes on and on, causing more and more trouble, and the root of it is fear or anger, and has nothing to do with the actual situation. When you get in touch with the root feelings, you can become free of them.
Now to the book: I have a couple of points from the first chapter which is called, “The Western Perspective.” This was largely based on a talk given by the philosopher in the group, as he was trying to define the Western perspective in relation to emotions. In Western culture compassion always has an element of guilt and self denial, because we are told to deny ourselves and take care of others. A compassionate person never thinks of himself. He feels badly when he thinks of himself. In the West what is meant by compassion is self denial. In Buddhism, this idea of compassion does not apply. In Buddhism there is no distinction between being compassionate towards yourself and being compassionate towards others. It has to do with how Buddhism and Western culture sees the self. Western culture sees the self as separate from others. There are two categories: me and everyone else, so if I am compassionate, then I only think of one category, either me or everybody else. In Buddhism there is only one category of people, so from the Buddhist perspective it would be impossible to be compassionate towards others without being compassionate towards oneself. And vice versa: it would be impossible to be compassionate toward yourself without being compassionate towards others. This is a key distinction between Western and Buddhist ideas of compassion.
Similarly, starting from Greek philosophy, there is a distinction between happiness and the good. Happiness is seen as less important than doing what is good or right.Happiness is self centered and goodness is connected to truth, to God, and so on. These things are usually in conflict, so we sacrifice our happiness to do the right or good thing. Again, this distinction is unknown in Buddhism. There is no distinction between the good and happiness. In fact, the only way to be happy is to be in tune with the good. For example, if you are having pleasure at the expense of another individual, this is not really happiness. What makes you happy is to be loving and giving towards others, and being attuned to others. Your interests cannot be teased apart from the interests of others. We come to see this through our practice.
The basis of all this is awareness, of being sensitively present with your own experience, which is promoted by the practice of zazen. This awareness is more a state of being than a state of mind or a skill. In this sphere of a pliable state of awareness, the distinction between self and others which is obviously there, and the distinction between happiness and the good which is obviously there, begin to flow into each other and do not become so hard and fast. The distinctions are held in a more subtle and complex way.
Moving to a different chapter, there are some interesting points in the chapter called, “The Lama in the Lab”. A Tibetan monk was hooked up to sensors during meditation.He distinguished six different mental states. The first state was called one pointedness, which is focusing the mind on one mental or physical object to the exclusion of all else. Another state was meditation on devotion, such as a meditation based on devotion to a guru. The third state was fearlessness, and the fourth was called the “open state”, in which the mind was alert and aware, allowing objects to come and go, without focusing on any one object. The fifth state was developing compassion, and the sixth was visualization, the holding in mind a complex visual object. These are the six modes of meditation in Tibetan Buddhism.
I thought it would be interesting to compare and contrast this with zazen. In our practice there is less emphasis on the intentional production of mental states, and more a focus on just staying present. And yet zazen does contain some of these elements, just in a softer way. For example, there is one pointedness when focusing on the breath, except it is not a tunnel vision focus. It also has qualities of the open mind, because you are aware of other things going on, even though you are focused on the breath. Through calming the mind and making it one pointed, through sitting and just listening, we practice the “open state.” In zazen that state itself is known as compassion. There is no special state beyond that which we would cultivate, although I have often said that it would be beneficial to do intentional compassion practices: starting with shikantaza, zazen practice, in the beginning of the period, introducing compassion practices, and then going back to shikantaza practice at the end of the period.
Moving to some different points, there was an expert who could identify emotions by facial expressions. It is interesting that these facial expressions are cross cultural. He was a consultant for police and undercover agents and could tell whether a person was lying or telling the truth. So this expert devised an experiment to measure empathy.Peoples’ facial expressions were shown at increasing speeds, and the more empathetic you were, the faster you could identify others’ emotions. And wouldn’t you know it, the Tibetan meditator scored extremely high on this test. I think this is true to life, because the more you become attuned to your emotions through your meditation practice, the more you can connect with others. So on the level of feelings, even though your emotions may be different than mine, we feel the same thing, because feelings are universal. The more that I understand and am comfortable with my own feelings, the more I intuitively understand other people. There is a more accurate sense of empathy.
The unprecedented thing about the monk was his startle response. Normally when one hears a loud sound, there is a certain facial expression. The test is to tell someone to suppress any facial expression when he hears a loud sound. Apparently nobody can do this because it is automatic, but the monk did it. He heard a loud sound, but he was in the open state and did not have any startle response. This blew the mind of the researcher who thought that no human being could do that. He decided to change his research and do studies on extraordinary individuals. While working with the monks, he devised four criteria for the individuals with whom he wanted to work in his experiments. The first criterion was a sense of goodness or integrity. The second was selflessness; the person was not seeking to elevate himself above others. The third was presence. The Dalai Lama and others around him had presence. The fourth was attentiveness; for example, a person could really listen to another without judgment or skepticism.
I thought that these are four great qualities to consider in one’s own life. Aren’t we all working towards qualities of goodness, selflessness, presence, and attentiveness? Psychologists, who are usually in an academic setting, have used college students in their experiments about human behavior, but I thought it was interesting that the researcher was so impressed by the monks that he wanted to study them to see what we could aim for. In studying extraordinary individuals, we can work towards ourselves becoming extraordinary. The reason for studying those people is that these monks were not born as extraordinary individuals, but through their meditation and spiritual practice became people like that. These qualities came from their own cultivation. Research has shown that the brain is in a constant state of evolution and learning new ways of being. The brain is plastic, with new neuron connections always being made. Therefore, ongoing practice would change one’s fundamental attitudes and ways of being in the world.
Now I would like to make a few points about science and Buddhism. In recent decades science has been re-introducing, through the path of materialism, the immaterial, the mystery of life. A greater humility has been re-introduced through the path of science. It is an opening to a spirit of curiosity. That is why the Dalai Lama is so loved. A group of us just went to see him in Vancouver. Thirty thousand people went to see the Dalai Lama, but if there were a stadium with fifty thousand seats, fifty thousand would have gone. He is universally loved because in his attitude, not the least of which is his attitude towards science, is an enlightened spirituality that is open and curious and evolving. He has made the famous statement, “If science were to prove something in the Buddhist teachings to be wrong, we would have to drop that.” He says that we have to understand that if science does not find something, it does not mean that it does not exist. It just means that science has not seen it. An example of this is the nature of mind itself – consciousness. Science has no idea what the nature of consciousness is. Does that mean that there is no consciousness, or that consciousness is unreal?Certainly not, but if science proves something to be non-existent, then we have to acknowledge that and change.
Finally, I am on the faculty of a training program for people working with the dying, a very illustrious group of co-faculty members, including Ram Das and other luminaries.One of the people used a new word: “transtraditional”. Now when you go to conferences and events, she said, they use the word transtraditional. The Dalai Lama is a transtradional teacher, with the recognition that every tradition is a path towards truth, and one can be comfortable with or appreciative of a number of different traditions. Meditation practice is at the heart of the transtraditional traditions. I don’t think traditions will disappear or meld into each other, but there are traditions that are transtradional and draw on many other traditions. I like to think of Everyday Zen as being a transtradional tradition. It’s a Zen tradition, but is not limited to Zen tradition.
So, I have unburdened myself of all my thoughts, and I feel much better now!
Zoketsu lectures on Daniel Goleman’s Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama. – Proceedings of a dialogue between the Dalai Lama and Western philosophers and scientists. Discussion of the transcendent vs. immanent self. A discussion of emotions and conditioning, and an examination of three methods of working with negative emotions.
Working with Emotions TwoTalk given: Summer 2004 Dharma Seminars in Mill Valley, CA.
Zoketsu lectures on Daniel Goleman's Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama. – Proceedings of a dialogue between the Dalai Lama and Western philosophers and scientists.
(Transcribed and abridged by Barbara Byrum)
I want to talk about a chapter in the book called “A Buddhist psychology,” which is a report of a talk that Mattheu Ricard gave at the conference. Goleman introduced the talk by saying that Trungpa Rinpoche once said that Buddhism will come to the West as a psychology. It is true. You wouldn’t say that about Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. It seems to be truer of Buddhism than the theistic traditions. The psychological teachings of Buddhism are not an accident; they are essential to the thrust of Buddhism.
If you think about the question, “What are we as persons?” it is complicated to be a human being. It is complicated because we have a double nature. On the one hand, we are animals, and like other animals, we have desires and needs. But we also have a consciousness that is self reflective. It gives us the capacity to imagine ourselves to be beyond what we are. We have a transcendent thirst for spirituality, religion, God, and enlightenment. We have aspirations and ideals. This double nature allows us to do tremendous acts of selflessness and creativity, and simultaneously, both as individuals and as a species, to do unprecedented acts of destruction.
So, you could say that we have both transcendent and immanent sides. Theistic religions shine the beam of their light on our transcendent side, that aspect of our heart that is beyond ourselves, almost to the exclusion of the other side. Psychology is an examination of our humanness: our desires and hopes and fears in the world. If you focus on the transcendent side, you have less to say about the emotions and psychology of the human being. In fact, so much so, that you could say that one of the down sides of theistic religions is that they focus so much on the transcendent that they tend to denigrate or even demonize the human side.
Central to the idea of Buddhism is that it doesn’t have an idea of a God. In fact, I think the Buddha felt that the idea of a self and the clinging to a self was a projected reflection of the idea of a God. He thought that it was the root of all our problems, so he was not interested in that idea. Therefore, Buddhism shines its light on the human side. Buddhism also includes the transcendent side, because what is enlightenment or Buddhahood but the transcendent? But it shines its light on the human side, on emotions, for the purpose of purifying the human up to enlightenment, instead of focusing on the transcendent and denigrating the human. So it comes from the opposite direction.
Now I am going to skip around to some points in Ricard’s discussion. When he uses the word emotion, he is talking about our conditioning. Negative or destructive emotions are all of our blocked conditioning. He is saying that even if it looks like you are calm and happy, if you have the seeds of conditioning within you, and even if the seeds have not become manifest by external conditions, the negative emotions are still within you. What makes these emotions, these conditioned responses, destructive or harmful is not just the obvious consequences of them. If you lash out at someone, there are consequences, and you can see the destructive results of emotions. But there are also, he says, our motivations and the shadows of these negative emotions. Even if they don’t seem to have bad, external consequences, there is a shadow of bad consequences within us that comes from our motivations continuing to be warped by our conditioning. We are blinded by this conditioning, so we see a world that doesn’t exist, and we begin reacting to that world.
We think that destructive emotions are not a major issue for us. But according to Ricard, and according to Buddhism, to be a normal, happy individual is to be enlightened. Anything short of that is abnormal. I think it is true that we all have a long way to go towards some fundamental healthiness. This is a totally different paradigm for human life. When you think about psychology in the West, it starts with pathology. There are pathological states and the investigation of their causes. Therefore, the thrust of psychology is the abnormal, and there is no thought of the normal. But what is normal? Look what goes on in the world. Is invading countries normal? Is killing people normal?
Buddhism does not posit the usual idea of normalcy. In Buddhism there is only awakening or destructive emotions. So our project is to go toward enlightenment. We are trying to purify our hearts and not just go toward anger management.
You can’t talk about psychology and emotion without talking about philosophy, because all psychologies imply ontology, whether they are explicit or not. Whatever your psychology is, it implies an idea of what the self is and what the world is, and how self and world relate to each other. In western psychology, which comes from medicine and empiricism, the nature of the self and the world are just assumed. What is looked at instead is the phenomenon of pathology.
Buddhism, however, is very clear about its ontology. In Buddhism the root of all negative emotions is self clinging, holding firmly to the idea of a separate, fundamentally existing self. The idea of a separate, fundamentally existing self is assumed in western psychology. In Buddhism, this is seen to be an erroneous assumption that needs to be overcome and examined. It is clear in Buddhism that this clinging to the idea of a separate self is the source of all negative emotions. If you attack me physically or verbally, my hatred or aversion will be aroused because the self is under attack. On the other hand, if you pile praise on me, then I will be happy and like you. These feelings of desire or aversion are the source of all negative emotions. Therefore, there is an emphasis in Buddhism to go beyond this conviction of a separate self.
We certainly do have the experience of being a separate person, separate from other people, but we are training ourselves in zazen through body and breath, through thinking in classes like this, and through observation of our experience to realize that the experience we have of a fundamentally existing separate self is just that: it is a human experience that doesn’t have anything to do with objective fact. This is a subtle but crucial difference. It is the difference between having a thought that comes into the mind and thinking, “Oh, I am having this thought.” Same thought, and really the same experience, but the way you hold it is very different when you know it as a thought, as opposed to a reflection of something that is solidly there in the world.
This is where our zazen practice really helps us. Our practice works on us little by little over time, and we may not be conscious of what is going on. Even if we have terrible practice, have no idea of what is going on, have terrible concentration and are always falling asleep, moving around and wiggling in our seat, we keep doing zazen and coming back to the breath, to the posture, and trying to be present. After a time, we will probably get the idea that thoughts are coming and going, and they are just that: thoughts. You see that one minute you are completely focused on something that seems like the most important thing in the universe, and the next minute it is totally gone and you don’t care! You realize that thoughts are coming and going, and nothing is fixed. Emotions are emotions. Thoughts are thoughts. The self is an experience that comes and goes. It is an aspect of consciousness. To have this understanding of your mind and self really makes a profound difference.
Another point that Ricard makes is that negative emotions are not inherent in the mind. If you believe that the idea of a separate self is a given, then you would also believe that it is a given fact that anger and hatred are inherent in the human being. Many philosophers in all cultures have said that these qualities are inherent in human nature. The point is to realize that negative emotions are not inherent. They arise according to conditions, and we make a commitment to work with them as much as we can in this lifetime. Our work with the precepts are a path to perfection, as far as we can get. We can overcome negative emotions. They are not inherent in the mind.
Zazen really helps here in the same way. In zazen we may enter into deep states of quiet. There is the feeling that you are attuned to body, breath, and mind and to the world. You feel the fundamental kindness of the world. Having experiences like that in our practice gives us a faith in the awakened nature of the mind. We feel that the fundamental nature of the mind is peaceful. Buddha mind, the basis of consciousness, is not inherently negative. There is a kind of faith in that. There is the recognition that negative emotions are distortions caused by conditioning and habit. Our faith in basic human sanity is not just a leap of faith, it is based on the confidence we can feel in the teachings, our teachers, and our own experience.
Also, if you are in an emotional state and practice clear awareness, you can investigate whether the emotion is inherently negative. By entering into the emotion fully, you can see that at the heart of the emotion, no matter how negative, there is a point of purity. You can see that anger, for example, is an energy that is obscuring the purity that is at its heart. If you can hold on long enough with the awareness of an emotion, you can feel at the bottom of the emotion this point of purity, just as the water on the surface of the ocean may be turbulent, but the water at the bottom is calm.
Another thing that Ricard says is that emotions, if not addressed can turn into moods, and moods turn into our temperament. Even though I may not be fuming with anger or lust all that often, in fact the emotion, little by little, becomes my life, because those tendencies are working within me even when they are not manifest. When we believe in a separate and fixed person, then we believe we are that kind of person. We think, “I am an angry person” or “I am a depressed person.”
Ricard talks about three methods or pathways to work with the emotions. The first is the pathway of antidotes. For example, if you are feeling hatred, focus the mind on love to overcome the hatred. If you are feeling desire, focus on the temporariness and unsatisfactory nature of that which you desire. There are many ways to overcome negative states with positive states. But it takes a lot of practice to do this, and you have to practice all the time, because if you wait until you are overcome by anger to practice loving kindness, it is pretty hopeless. The only hope is to have developed loving kindness continuously, but even then the anger may overcome you. So, although it is important to cultivate the antidotes, they may not be sufficient.
The second method is to see through the emotion and to see that it is based on a sense of self that is not fundamentally real. Throughout one’s practice, it is possible to remind oneself that anger, for example, is pointless because the emotion is arising inappropriately. So, the second method is basically seeing the empty nature of emotion.
The third method is “stepping forward.” He doesn’t say it in this passage, but what he means is tantric practice, in which you plunge into the emotion and use the energy of the emotion itself to overcome the emotion. If tantra is using the realm in which we live and using it as a tool for awakening, then our practice is completely tantric. In our practice, we are non dualistic. Things of the world are what they are, neither negative nor positive. Tantric practices in other traditions, such as Tibetan Buddhism, can involve very complicated rituals, but in our tradition, it is just embracing emotions with awareness, going completely into them, and finding a point of purity right in the middle of them. Therefore the method for us is awareness and to be fully present with whatever you are experiencing.
So in the beginning, when working with emotions, you usually think, “Oh, I did it again. I blew it again.” But when you realize what has happened, you address it, maybe five minutes later, or five hours later. Then, as you continue to practice with it, you close the gap between the emotion and the awareness of the emotion. And then there is breathing. I am really impressed with breathing. If you sit a lot, breathing becomes more than breathing; it carries the whole practice with it. If you lose it, just start breathing. You will return to yourself and figure out what just happened. Little by little, you close the gap. You can be aware of being angry, or any negative emotion that you are experiencing. Being aware of it will change it. Then, when you can clarify the causes and conditions of these emotions, you can work with the emotion even before it comes. Ricard talks about this. When the seeds of emotions that have troubled you in the past are clarified, then these habits do not arise anymore. You can actually overcome these habits and emotions.
Let’s say we fast forward to a time when we have overcome the emotions, would we become a neutral person with a half smile, with no emotions at all? No, I think we would still be conditioned people living in a conditioned world, capable of experiencing human emotion at any time. But the emotion would not be toxic. It would be just an experience that could flow through us. We could still feel hatred or jealousy, but we wouldn’t put the twist on it that we always do and it wouldn’t warp our consciousness. It would pass right through us. We would see it as an emotion that makes us a human being. We might even feel new emotions: joy, equanimity, heartfelt compassion, selfless love, courage, and contentment…things that are fairly rare for people to feel in this life.
Mostly people want to feel positive and not negative emotions and they want to feel pleasure and not pain. The problem with feeling pleasure or pain is that you are at the mercy of conditions, whether it is a traffic jam or your computer not working. The happiness in working with emotions in this way would be a kind of fulfillment and contentment, regardless of the conditions and emotions that might pass through us. Working with our emotions will automatically condition us out of seeking pleasure and that which we want and into a joy or willingness to meet every moment. Happiness is in meeting every moment and not holding out for the moments we want, and trying to escape from the moments that we don’t want. You would be happy to face every moment regardless of what it brought. Yes, I am unhappy when things go wrong, and I like it when things go well, but fundamentally it doesn’t matter that much, because I am there to meet it. That’s what I am after, and that’s what really makes me happy. There’s a sense of well being. Every day is a good day.
Zoketsu lectures on Daniel Goleman’s Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama. – Proceedings of a dialogue between the Dalai Lama and Western philosophers and scientists. The Buddhist path is the training and cultivation of the mind, which includes working with both emotion and thinking. So it is not a matter of using ethics and will to overcome and tame emotion, but rather using mindfulness of our mental states, that include both emotion and thought, to create a transformation of the emotions that arise
Working with Emotions Part ThreeTalk given: Summer 2004 Dharma Seminars in Mill Valley, CA.
Zoketsu lectures on Daniel Goleman's Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama. – Proceedings of a dialogue between the Dalai Lama and Western philosophers and scientists.
(Transcribed and abridged by Barbara Byrum)
Tonight we are continuing with our ongoing exploration of emotions. The focus of the seminar is not on learning material from the book per se, but on how we can make use of any material in the book in deepening our engagement with our own emotional life and practice.
I would like to make some points from the chapter of the book called, “The Universality of Emotions.” Mostly it was about a report from Paul Eckman, who is at the University of California at San Francisco Medical School. In Western thought there is the persistent idea that emotion is separate from thinking, morality, and willpower. Emotion is seen as automatic, visceral, and animal-like, and we cultivate our thought and morality to overcome this animal nature. There are emotions that you don’t want to look at because they are bad and out-of-bounds, so you override them with your ethics, thinking, and willpower. In Buddhism there is no fundamental distinction between our emotions and our thought. Both are arising from consciousness and naturally come up when we cognize objects. Whenever there is cognition, there is always thought and feeling. There is always a mixture of these things, and there is no way to separate them, and there is no hierarchy.
The Buddhist path is the training and cultivation of the mind, which includes working with both emotion and thinking. So it is not a matter of using ethics and will to overcome and tame emotion, but rather using mindfulness of our mental states, that include both emotion and thought, to create a transformation of the emotions that arise. For instance, it might be commonplace in Western psychology to assume that if someone crosses you, you will be angry and upset. That is just the way it is. That is how the mind works. If you are civilized and have some psychological acumen, you won’t shout at the person and stomp up and down; you will control yourself. You will take up the matter with some rationality, and if that doesn’t work, you’ll sue!
In Buddhism the possibility is presented, however far we get in realizing it, and admittedly we may not get all that far, that we might not have the feeling in the first place. We might actually transform ourselves to the extent that those emotional responses that are assumed as a given in Western thought might not arise at all.
In this chapter Eckman talks about breaking down the arising of emotion into three moments. The terms that he gives for these three different moments are “appraisal awareness”; that is, the assessment of the situation which gives rise to the emotion in the first place; the “impulse awareness”; and the third is what he calls the “action awareness”. An example of this would be when someone cuts in line in front of you at the supermarket. The appraisal awareness is the immediate awareness that this is maddening and the person is really rude. According to Eckman, this is a universal response that anyone would feel; it is just a given. Sometimes we are not entirely aware of this response in us, and when we are not aware of the existence of the emotion, we can really be pushed around by it, and we are a prisoner of that emotion. Eckman says that the more we are aware of the emotion, the less we are a prisoner of it. He calls the next moment the impulse awareness. In the example of someone cutting in front of you at the supermarket, you are aware of your anger and have the impulse to respond, such as making a rude comment or pushing the cart into the person’s back. Here is where a mature person with some acumen and presence of mind doesn’t do that, because that person knows that there is little benefit in this reaction. So this is where we can work on ourselves. We can increase our awareness early on in the situation so that we don’t react negatively. The third moment is action awareness, where now the impulse has already taken over, and we are starting to do something like pushing the cart, and we stop ourselves in the middle of the action. He is saying that it is best to control the impulse, but if we can’t do that, we can control the action, mollify it, apologize, and don’t do it again, if we are lucky.
Buddhism would say the same thing: yes don’t do the action, but if you do, apologize. Buddhism, however, also says to work more deeply with awareness, so that the original impulse does not arise in the first place. Work with the emotion with awareness so that even before the original feeling comes, there might be a different experience. Working with the underlying causes of the emotion changes the way the emotion arises and feels.
We have talked about prajna, the faculty of cognizing emptiness, and if we developed that faculty, our experience of the world would be considerably different, and therefore our emotional responses would be considerably different. Maybe working with emotions is not one sub path or genre of the path; maybe it is the whole path. Maybe what it comes down to is the awakening or development of prajna, in which the emotions in our lives appear quite different. In this chapter there is a discussion of prajna, and they say that prajna really means intelligence more than wisdom. We talk about it as a technical term, the way of experiencing emptiness, but here they are saying that maybe a better translation is intelligence, not as an intellectual achievement only, such as abstract thought, but as an all around development of consciousness, which would also include emotions. In the book, Daniel Goleman gets excited about this because emotional intelligence is his field, and he thinks that this kind of intelligence is a way of feeling and responding to the world.
Maybe that is what prajna really is, a way of feeling with and responding to the world, of being attuned to the world. This would naturally involve a difference in the way our emotional flow in relation to the world would be. Then prajna would include, as a function of those things, thinking, emotions, and ethical conduct. Thought, emotion, and morality would not be separate things, a matter of analysis, suppression, or use of the will; but rather, they would all be part of prajna – how we see and feel the world, and how we behave in the world as a consequence of how we feel the world to be. In prajna, we would connect to the world in a spontaneous and harmonious way. There would be the sense that ethical conduct is no big deal, and we would naturally be spontaneous and harmonious in the world with that kind of training. Each one of us would have a different way of manifesting this training.
People differ considerably in their emotional makeup. Some people, for example, have more anger or more love than others. We probably all have the same range of emotions, but we differ in the palette of emotions that arise. We differ in how quickly the emotion arises, in what triggers or stimulates the emotion, how long the emotion lasts, or how powerful the emotion may be. This may differ quite a bit person to person. Therefore in working with emotions and developing prajna in relation to our own karmic makeup, it is important not to impose ideas on how a practitioner should look emotionally. A wise discernment of one’s own particular emotional makeup, knowing what the path teaches us about emotions, and then massaging our particular emotional profile with that teaching may be more important. We would continue to be ourselves emotionally, but the way the emotion would appear would be softened and transformed by our approach to practice. A few weeks ago we worked with our individual emotional themes that seem present since our early life. There is a sense in which our own emotional makeup is not known to us. We may always be trying to work against rather than working with the grain of our emotional makeup, and it becomes endlessly frustrating.
An interesting point in this chapter was the quality of the Dalai Lama’s face. Eckman, whose specialty is facial expressions, was astonished that the Dalai Lama had the facial muscles of a twenty year old. He thought this was because the Dalai Lama is very emotional and expressive. His facial muscles looked young because they were used to exercising such a wide range of emotions -sorrow, sadness, amazement, happiness. He has no guardedness about expressing his emotions. He has a flowing and free use of feelings that are spontaneously expressed in his face. Conversely, for a person who is more average than the Dalai Lama, there isn’t this free flow of feeling, there is more of a repression of feeling. One so often has the experience of being ashamed or embarrassed by the unacceptability of what one is feeling; therefore, the facial muscles are not used and lose their tone.
We could take the Dalai Lama as an ideal practitioner, who is very quick to express emotion. The problem may not be that we are too emotional, but rather we do not have the freedom to express emotion, and that there is so much repression that the emotions come out twisted and cockeyed. So it is not a matter of eliminating or damping down emotions, but a matter of training ourselves to be freer in our emotional life.
In order to be like the Dalai Lama in always expressing our feelings, we would have to have a tremendous amount of trust in our own heart and emotions. You would have to have the overall sense that whatever you were feeling was all right. This implies a certain amount of cultivation of working with your emotions. Everyone will have negative or destructive emotions, but there is the awareness that we are, and have been, working with them. For example, the Dalai Lama probably has a lot of confidence that he would not run across the stage and throttle someone. He is just not going to do that, because he is familiar with his emotions and impulses. For some of us this kind of self awareness may be less true. We may have less awareness of our destructive emotions because we have never allowed ourselves to feel them. First of all you have to feel your anger or rage or envy, become familiar with them, and then begin to work with them.
Most people are embarrassed by certain emotions and do not want to work with them. We need to develop tools and support so we could engage our own emotions and the emotions of others. Our chief tool is mindfulness or awareness of what we are feeling. One can ask oneself, “What am I feeling now,” as a device for promoting greater awareness of our feelings. So the chief tool is mindfulness, and the chief support is the Three Treasure: our community, our teachers, and our teaching. Through that tool and support, we could feel our feelings with a sense of safety. And then, little be little, we could work with our actions and impulses until we got back to what Eckman calls the appraisal awareness, and the emotion that arose would be a different emotion. That is how we would develop prajna or intelligence with regard to our emotional life.
Zoketsu lectures on Daniel Goleman’s Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama. – Proceedings of a dialogue between the Dalai Lama and Western philosophers and scientists. Discussion of the spirit of working with and studying our emotional life. Rather than taking it as a given, it is something with which we are actively engaged. Description of the brahnmaviharas: loving kindness, equanimity, compassion, and sympathetic joy
Working with Emotions Part FourTalk given: Summer 2004 Dharma Seminars in Mill Valley, CA.
Zoketsu lectures on Daniel Goleman's Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama. – Proceedings of a dialogue between the Dalai Lama and Western philosophers and scientists.
(Transcribed and abridged by Barbara Byrum)
What is radical about our practice or about what Buddhism proposes is not just that we are working with emotions that come, but we are working with the underlying basis of emotions, so that the way emotions come could be different. So it is very radical. As Jeff said in his talk last week, it is being proactive, working with emotions even before they arise, so that the emotions that arise would be a result of the work that we had done.
In the conventional Western notion of the mind, it would be expected, normal, and usual that under certain conditions people would become angry, hostile, or disgusted. The question then would be how you deal with it. Could you exercise enough calm and good will to deal with it? In Buddhism, we have the faith that we would have the arising of more humane and lovely emotions. We would have negative emotions, but we would receive and experience them in a different way. Not to say that we are there or halfway there, but this is the ideal, that is different from the normative Western psychology.
I was struck by Jeff’s mentioning a practice that he received from Katagiri Roshi, something really simple, like when your mother told you, “When you get angry, count to ten.” Be mindful and reflective when an emotion arises, instead of being swept up and being overcome by an emotion, to have presence of mind. The practice of zazen definitely helps to have that presence of mind to say, “Ah ha, this is the state of mind I am in. This is what is happening. I can understand this, I can be with it, rather than immediately being overtaken by it.”
The main thing is that we have a spirit of working with and studying our emotional life. Rather than taking it as a given, it is something with which we are actively engaged. We study the flow of our emotions and feelings, and every time an afflictive emotion arises, it is always an opportunity and a chance to see something that we have not seen before. When an afflictive emotion arises, we hit the boundary of where we are able to go, and we say, “Good. Now I can stay calm. I can breathe, and I might be able to stretch the boundary a little bit.” Breathe with the feeling of my experience. Don’t take at face value what you are feeling, but ask, “What is this?”
Getting back to the book, I would like to discuss my reactions to the chapter, “Cultivating Emotional Balance.” They are again talking about the key difference between Western psychology and Buddhism in its view of the emotional life. Western psychology begins with and is founded on a medical model of pathology. Emotional pathologies occur as difficult pathologies that we want to cure without any particular vision of emotional health or beautiful emotions. It does not start with what the ideal human being would be manifesting as an emotional life. Can we overcome these difficult and destructive emotions, or at least have some moderation? But there is no tradition on how to cultivate or envision what would be a beautiful emotional life for a healthy human being, how a Buddha conducts himself or herself in the world.
I see our practice as an awakening to the flow of beautiful human feelings. Awakening is a transformation in the life of the feelings. We would not just only feel the beautiful emotions – compassion, equanimity, lovingkindness- but also, depending upon our karmic background, we would also feel the negative emotions, but without the sting, the pressure, and the obsession. Instead of that, we would sense them with the awareness “This is anger or sorrow or fear. I don’t have to become overwhelmed by this emotion. I can even appreciate it and know that it connects me with other people who feel this emotion.” There could be an element of compassion and appreciation, even for the negative emotions.
I want to return to the idea that from the Western perspective, there is thought on the one hand and emotion on the other. We are supposed to be ruled by our thought, and if there is a lot of emotion, we should just get over it. Astonishingly in the complex system of Buddhist psychology, no distinction is made between emotion and thought. There are not words to distinguish the two of them. There are moments of gestalt in the mind, and in the moment there are also elements that we would call emotional or cognitive. The mind that is arising in this moment is an interconnected network in which you cannot tease one thing apart from another. So our practice becomes using emotional intelligence, to use Goleman’s term.
I have been reading this unbelievable treatise about 800 pages long called, Upheavals of Thought, by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who is an incredibly thorough and beautiful thinker. This is as major psychological treatise on emotion, in which she argues just this, that emotion and thought are not two different things. When we separate them, we do violence to ourselves and lose the emotional side of life, and our thought becomes brittle. She argues that emotion is not just some messy animal feeling that we have that has to be reined in by our thinking. Emotion is a form or operation that occurs within thinking. Emotion is an “upheaval” of thought. It is a mountain range up in the otherwise flat plain of thought.
So when we are practicing zazen, when we are really breathing a complete breath in and a complete breath out, when we experience a flow of life, nothing disturbing the free flow of life and experience, emotion and feeling coming and going, and when mindfulness is strong, then we could say we are touching emptiness with our whole body. We are seeing things as simply what they are, not what we think they need to be, not what we project them to be, or somebody told us they were, but things that just come and go. We are able to allow that. I think that one of the beautiful things about a long retreat is that you often feel that. There is a beautiful sense of feeling life in its flow, touching emptiness, letting things be as they are. Since holding onto things as things, as objects of our desire, as objects of our projection, instead of seeing them as a flow, is actually the root of all afflictive emotions. Seeing ourselves as an object in the world is the root of all afflictive emotions, and so there is a sense that we can melt and flow and understand our feelings, and transform them in the retreat environment. When we experience reality as a flow, then our feelings flow with reality. That is the relationship between our deep experiences on the cushion and our emotional life.
Then, as we have been discussing, that is hitting at the root of emotional issues. But then we also work with emotions off the cushion in two different ways. First of all, when strong emotion arises, or what the book calls destructive emotion, we pay attention. We know the afflictive emotions for what they are. This is anger; this is greed; this is confusion. Instead of doing what we usually do, which is to deny the emotion, or leap over the emotion to action, we turn around. I like that expression because usually we are running to stay one step ahead of our emotion, but in this case, we stop, turn around and in effect embrace the emotion. “Here it is. This is what I am experiencing.” So that is one kind of practice, to be very attentive to the arising of afflictive emotion, and to turn around, right there, face the emotion, and know the emotion for what it is.
The other kind of practice off the cushion is to make a positive effort to cultivate positive emotions. In this chapter there is a description of the four brahmaviharas, the four unlimiteds, which are loving kindness, equanimity, compassion, and sympathetic joy. They are the four positive emotions to cultivate and make strong. In Buddhism it is seen as necessary to cultivate positive emotions. I would like to suggest another practice for those of you who are up for it: the practice of sympathetic joy. It is to take joy in someone else’s joy. This takes a little cultivation. It is easy to feel sympathetic joy for one’s own child; you don’t feel jealous, or angry, or dubious, wondering if he really deserves this. “Of course he deserves this! He is the best person in the world!” He is your kid. The idea is to extend that idea to everyone, so you are on the look-out for any instances in your vicinity for something positive happening to someone around you. When you see it, you pounce on it, thinking, “Ah, yes, this is my joy!” It is as if I myself had received this. So, be on the look-out for any instance when someone has any joy or happiness, and then get in on it. Take the joy and happiness for your own and really feel the delight in it. Actually, when you think about it, it is a very practical thing to do because the conditions that would cause happiness to arise in you are limited compared to everyone in the room. If there hundreds of people, you have a much bigger chance for joy and happiness. There are prizes, and big vacations, and falling in love over and over again, and having children, all the great things you could do if only you keep your eyes peeled. Smile and tell them how delighted you are in their happiness.
You can use your time on the cushion to train yourself. In other words, when you are on your cushion, you can think of someone who is having some happiness in their life, you can invoke that person’s image, and project your heart into that person’s happiness. You create a thread of this on the cushion so that during the day you will remember this because you have already worked on this on the cushion. I really recommend this practice. I worked on this for a long time and really got good at it.
Zoketsu lectures on Daniel Goleman’s Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama. – Proceedings of a dialogue between the Dalai Lama and Western philosophers and scientists. Zoketsu discuses cultivating emotional balance and how to work with emotions on and off the cushion. He advocates the cultivation of sympathetic joy.
Zoketsu lectures on Daniel Goleman’s Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama. – Proceedings of a dialogue between the Dalai Lama and Western philosophers and scientists. Zoketsu discusses emotions and the scientific approach of studying the brain. He further discusses zazen and the practice of working with thoughts.
a
Discussion of the spirit of working with and studying our emotional life. Rather than taking it as a given, it is something with which we are actively engaged. Description of the brahnmaviharas: loving kindness, equanimity, compassion, and sympathetic joyWorking with Emotions Part FourTalk given: Summer 2004 Dharma Seminars in Mill Valley, CA.
Zoketsu lectures on Daniel Goleman's Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama. – Proceedings of a dialogue between the Dalai Lama and Western philosophers and scientists.
What is radical about our practice or about what Buddhism proposes is not just that we are working with emotions that come, but we are working with the underlying basis of emotions, so that the way emotions come could be different. So it is very radical. As Jeff said in his talk last week, it is being proactive, working with emotions even before they arise, so that the emotions that arise would be a result of the work that we had done.
In the conventional Western notion of the mind, it would be expected, normal, and usual that under certain conditions people would become angry, hostile, or disgusted. The question then would be how you deal with it. Could you exercise enough calm and good will to deal with it? In Buddhism, we have the faith that we would have the arising of more humane and lovely emotions. We would have negative emotions, but we would receive and experience them in a different way. Not to say that we are there or halfway there, but this is the ideal, that is different from the normative Western psychology.
I was struck by Jeff’s mentioning a practice that he received from Katagiri Roshi, something really simple, like when your mother told you, “When you get angry, count to ten.” Be mindful and reflective when an emotion arises, instead of being swept up and being overcome by an emotion, to have presence of mind. The practice of zazen definitely helps to have that presence of mind to say, “Ah ha, this is the state of mind I am in. This is what is happening. I can understand this, I can be with it, rather than immediately being overtaken by it.”
The main thing is that we have a spirit of working with and studying our emotional life. Rather than taking it as a given, it is something with which we are actively engaged. We study the flow of our emotions and feelings, and every time an afflictive emotion arises, it is always an opportunity and a chance to see something that we have not seen before. When an afflictive emotion arises, we hit the boundary of where we are able to go, and we say, “Good. Now I can stay calm. I can breathe, and I might be able to stretch the boundary a little bit.” Breathe with the feeling of my experience. Don’t take at face value what you are feeling, but ask, “What is this?”
Getting back to the book, I would like to discuss my reactions to the chapter, “Cultivating Emotional Balance.” They are again talking about the key difference between Western psychology and Buddhism in its view of the emotional life. Western psychology begins with and is founded on a medical model of pathology. Emotional pathologies occur as difficult pathologies that we want to cure without any particular vision of emotional health or beautiful emotions. It does not start with what the ideal human being would be manifesting as an emotional life. Can we overcome these difficult and destructive emotions, or at least have some moderation? But there is no tradition on how to cultivate or envision what would be a beautiful emotional life for a healthy human being, how a Buddha conducts himself or herself in the world.
I see our practice as an awakening to the flow of beautiful human feelings. Awakening is a transformation in the life of the feelings. We would not just only feel the beautiful emotions – compassion, equanimity, lovingkindness- but also, depending upon our karmic background, we would also feel the negative emotions, but without the sting, the pressure, and the obsession. Instead of that, we would sense them with the awareness “This is anger or sorrow or fear. I don’t have to become overwhelmed by this emotion. I can even appreciate it and know that it connects me with other people who feel this emotion.” There could be an element of compassion and appreciation, even for the negative emotions.
I want to return to the idea that from the Western perspective, there is thought on the one hand and emotion on the other. We are supposed to be ruled by our thought, and if there is a lot of emotion, we should just get over it. Astonishingly in the complex system of Buddhist psychology, no distinction is made between emotion and thought. There are not words to distinguish the two of them. There are moments of gestalt in the mind, and in the moment there are also elements that we would call emotional or cognitive. The mind that is arising in this moment is an interconnected network in which you cannot tease one thing apart from another. So our practice becomes using emotional intelligence, to use Goleman’s term.
I have been reading this unbelievable treatise about 800 pages long called, Upheavals of Thought, by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who is an incredibly thorough and beautiful thinker. This is as major psychological treatise on emotion, in which she argues just this, that emotion and thought are not two different things. When we separate them, we do violence to ourselves and lose the emotional side of life, and our thought becomes brittle. She argues that emotion is not just some messy animal feeling that we have that has to be reined in by our thinking. Emotion is a form or operation that occurs within thinking. Emotion is an “upheaval” of thought. It is a mountain range up in the otherwise flat plain of thought.
So when we are practicing zazen, when we are really breathing a complete breath in and a complete breath out, when we experience a flow of life, nothing disturbing the free flow of life and experience, emotion and feeling coming and going, and when mindfulness is strong, then we could say we are touching emptiness with our whole body. We are seeing things as simply what they are, not what we think they need to be, not what we project them to be, or somebody told us they were, but things that just come and go. We are able to allow that. I think that one of the beautiful things about a long retreat is that you often feel that. There is a beautiful sense of feeling life in its flow, touching emptiness, letting things be as they are. Since holding onto things as things, as objects of our desire, as objects of our projection, instead of seeing them as a flow, is actually the root of all afflictive emotions. Seeing ourselves as an object in the world is the root of all afflictive emotions, and so there is a sense that we can melt and flow and understand our feelings, and transform them in the retreat environment. When we experience reality as a flow, then our feelings flow with reality. That is the relationship between our deep experiences on the cushion and our emotional life.
Then, as we have been discussing, that is hitting at the root of emotional issues. But then we also work with emotions off the cushion in two different ways. First of all, when strong emotion arises, or what the book calls destructive emotion, we pay attention. We know the afflictive emotions for what they are. This is anger; this is greed; this is confusion. Instead of doing what we usually do, which is to deny the emotion, or leap over the emotion to action, we turn around. I like that expression because usually we are running to stay one step ahead of our emotion, but in this case, we stop, turn around and in effect embrace the emotion. “Here it is. This is what I am experiencing.” So that is one kind of practice, to be very attentive to the arising of afflictive emotion, and to turn around, right there, face the emotion, and know the emotion for what it is.
The other kind of practice off the cushion is to make a positive effort to cultivate positive emotions. In this chapter there is a description of the four brahmaviharas, the four unlimiteds, which are loving kindness, equanimity, compassion, and sympathetic joy. They are the four positive emotions to cultivate and make strong. In Buddhism it is seen as necessary to cultivate positive emotions. I would like to suggest another practice for those of you who are up for it: the practice of sympathetic joy. It is to take joy in someone else’s joy. This takes a little cultivation. It is easy to feel sympathetic joy for one’s own child; you don’t feel jealous, or angry, or dubious, wondering if he really deserves this. “Of course he deserves this! He is the best person in the world!” He is your kid. The idea is to extend that idea to everyone, so you are on the look-out for any instances in your vicinity for something positive happening to someone around you. When you see it, you pounce on it, thinking, “Ah, yes, this is my joy!” It is as if I myself had received this. So, be on the look-out for any instance when someone has any joy or happiness, and then get in on it. Take the joy and happiness for your own and really feel the delight in it. Actually, when you think about it, it is a very practical thing to do because the conditions that would cause happiness to arise in you are limited compared to everyone in the room. If there hundreds of people, you have a much bigger chance for joy and happiness. There are prizes, and big vacations, and falling in love over and over again, and having children, all the great things you could do if only you keep your eyes peeled. Smile and tell them how delighted you are in their happiness.
You can use your time on the cushion to train yourself. In other words, when you are on your cushion, you can think of someone who is having some happiness in their life, you can invoke that person’s image, and project your heart into that person’s happiness. You create a thread of this on the cushion so that during the day you will remember this because you have already worked on this on the cushion. I really recommend this practice. I worked on this for a long time and really got good at it.
Zoketsu examines the usual dichotomy of emotions v. intellect. Description of scientific studies of a Tibetan monk in a deep meditative state.
WORKING WITH EMOTIONS TALK ONETalk given: Summer 2004 Dharma Seminars in Mill Valley, CA.
Zoketsu lectures on Daniel Goleman's Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama. – Proceedings of a dialogue between the Dalai Lama and Western philosophers and scientists.
This book is a transcript of a conference, along with other explanatory material that Daniel Goleman adds. It is not as if the book is an organized discussion of working with destructive emotions. It meanders, as any discussion does. So, I will bring out points that seem germane or interesting to me in each chapter.
Destructive emotions: what do we mean by destructive and what do we mean by emotions? On one level, destructive emotions are those that cause harm, such as a burst of anger when we lash out at someone or when someone lashes out at us. But I would like to take it further and talk not only about emotions that are directly and obviously harmful, but also about emotions that are habitual and make us unhappy.
There was a Western philosopher involved in a dialogue at the conference who gave a perspective on how words such as “emotions” are used. In the West we are taught that there is a categorical difference between the intellect and the emotions. The intellect involves such things as truth-seeking, and is seen as higher and more realistic. It is considered to be masculine. Emotion, on the other hand, is seen as irrational, more feminine, a little unruly, and trivial. There are deep roots in Western philosophy that cause that kind of thinking. The intellect is divided from the emotions. We feel that the more intellectual we are, the less emotions matter to us, and we are more in control.
There is no such distinction between the intellect and emotions in Buddhism. In the Buddhist map of the mind, there are fifty-one mental factors that shape consciousness. Of the fifty-one mental factors, some were called cognitive and some were called emotional. They were not seen as separate categories. They were seen as different factors that were always mixed in how they affected the mind. We know this is true from our experience on the cushion, when you see that every time there is an emotion, there is always a thought, and every time that you think something, there is an associated emotional quality. Intellect and emotion are mixed. There is no pure intellectual or pure emotional state. We are trying to recognize this fact in our life, and bring it into view, so that we have more awareness of the thoughts and emotions that arise in the mind. There are no words in Buddhism to distinguish the emotional and intellectual. The word citta means both mind and heart. In our practice, mind is not in charge, figuring out the emotions. Mind and emotions are one flow.
Lately I have been drawing a distinction between emotions and feelings. I am defining emotion as the whole complex of thinking, wrapped up with our history, our identity, and some object that activates our emotion. That whole complex, in which it is impossible to tease out one element, is what we call emotion. It is very personal and particular to a situation. The edifice of emotions is built on the foundation of feelings. Feelings are simpler than emotions. They are basic human responses, of which we are usually unaware. Usually we are agitated on the level of the emotion, but we are not aware of the underlying feeling. The underlying feeling is new territory; it is not about “me” anymore, it is about a deep, human phenomenon, such as fear, aversion, or desire. With meditation practice and the intentional application of awareness, we have a greater capacity to discern our actual feelings. When we can get in touch with ourselves on the level of mindfulness, our understanding of our feeling can result in more calmness.
We need meditation practice and awareness to even know what we are feeling. For example, there can be a confrontation or conflict that goes on and on, causing more and more trouble, and the root of it is fear or anger, and has nothing to do with the actual situation. When you get in touch with the root feelings, you can become free of them.
Now to the book: I have a couple of points from the first chapter which is called, “The Western Perspective.” This was largely based on a talk given by the philosopher in the group, as he was trying to define the Western perspective in relation to emotions. In Western culture compassion always has an element of guilt and self denial, because we are told to deny ourselves and take care of others. A compassionate person never thinks of himself. He feels badly when he thinks of himself. In the West what is meant by compassion is self denial. In Buddhism, this idea of compassion does not apply. In Buddhism there is no distinction between being compassionate towards yourself and being compassionate towards others. It has to do with how Buddhism and Western culture sees the self. Western culture sees the self as separate from others. There are two categories: me and everyone else, so if I am compassionate, then I only think of one category, either me or everybody else. In Buddhism there is only one category of people, so from the Buddhist perspective it would be impossible to be compassionate towards others without being compassionate towards oneself. And vice versa: it would be impossible to be compassionate toward yourself without being compassionate towards others. This is a key distinction between Western and Buddhist ideas of compassion.
Similarly, starting from Greek philosophy, there is a distinction between happiness and the good. Happiness is seen as less important than doing what is good or right. Happiness is self centered and goodness is connected to truth, to God, and so on. These things are usually in conflict, so we sacrifice our happiness to do the right or good thing. Again, this distinction is unknown in Buddhism. There is no distinction between the good and happiness. In fact, the only way to be happy is to be in tune with the good. For example, if you are having pleasure at the expense of another individual, this is not really happiness. What makes you happy is to be loving and giving towards others, and being attuned to others. Your interests cannot be teased apart from the interests of others. We come to see this through our practice.
The basis of all this is awareness, of being sensitively present with your own experience, which is promoted by the practice of zazen. This awareness is more a state of being than a state of mind or a skill. In this sphere of a pliable state of awareness, the distinction between self and others which is obviously there, and the distinction between happiness and the good which is obviously there, begin to flow into each other and do not become so hard and fast. The distinctions are held in a more subtle and complex way.
Moving to a different chapter, there are some interesting points in the chapter called, “The Lama in the Lab”. A Tibetan monk was hooked up to sensors during meditation. He distinguished six different mental states. The first state was called one pointedness, which is focusing the mind on one mental or physical object to the exclusion of all else. Another state was meditation on devotion, such as a meditation based on devotion to a guru. The third state was fearlessness, and the fourth was called the “open state”, in which the mind was alert and aware, allowing objects to come and go, without focusing on any one object. The fifth state was developing compassion, and the sixth was visualization, the holding in mind a complex visual object. These are the six modes of meditation in Tibetan Buddhism.
I thought it would be interesting to compare and contrast this with zazen. In our practice there is less emphasis on the intentional production of mental states, and more a focus on just staying present. And yet zazen does contain some of these elements, just in a softer way. For example, there is one pointedness when focusing on the breath, except it is not a tunnel vision focus. It also has qualities of the open mind, because you are aware of other things going on, even though you are focused on the breath. Through calming the mind and making it one pointed, through sitting and just listening, we practice the “open state.” In zazen that state itself is known as compassion. There is no special state beyond that which we would cultivate, although I have often said that it would be beneficial to do intentional compassion practices: starting with shikantaza, zazen practice, in the beginning of the period, introducing compassion practices, and then going back to shikantaza practice at the end of the period.
Moving to some different points, there was an expert who could identify emotions by facial expressions. It is interesting that these facial expressions are cross cultural. He was a consultant for police and undercover agents and could tell whether a person was lying or telling the truth. So this expert devised an experiment to measure empathy. Peoples’ facial expressions were shown at increasing speeds, and the more empathetic you were, the faster you could identify others’ emotions. And wouldn’t you know it, the Tibetan meditator scored extremely high on this test. I think this is true to life, because the more you become attuned to your emotions through your meditation practice, the more you can connect with others. So on the level of feelings, even though your emotions may be different than mine, we feel the same thing, because feelings are universal. The more that I understand and am comfortable with my own feelings, the more I intuitively understand other people. There is a more accurate sense of empathy.
The unprecedented thing about the monk was his startle response. Normally when one hears a loud sound, there is a certain facial expression. The test is to tell someone to suppress any facial expression when he hears a loud sound. Apparently nobody can do this because it is automatic, but the monk did it. He heard a loud sound, but he was in the open state and did not have any startle response. This blew the mind of the researcher who thought that no human being could do that. He decided to change his research and do studies on extraordinary individuals. While working with the monks, he devised four criteria for the individuals with whom he wanted to work in his experiments. The first criterion was a sense of goodness or integrity. The second was selflessness; the person was not seeking to elevate himself above others. The third was presence. The Dalai Lama and others around him had presence. The fourth was attentiveness; for example, a person could really listen to another without judgment or skepticism.
I thought that these are four great qualities to consider in one’s own life. Aren’t we all working towards qualities of goodness, selflessness, presence, and attentiveness? Psychologists, who are usually in an academic setting, have used college students in their experiments about human behavior, but I thought it was interesting that the researcher was so impressed by the monks that he wanted to study them to see what we could aim for. In studying extraordinary individuals, we can work towards ourselves becoming extraordinary. The reason for studying those people is that these monks were not born as extraordinary individuals, but through their meditation and spiritual practice became people like that. These qualities came from their own cultivation. Research has shown that the brain is in a constant state of evolution and learning new ways of being. The brain is plastic, with new neuron connections always being made. Therefore, ongoing practice would change one’s fundamental attitudes and ways of being in the world.
Now I would like to make a few points about science and Buddhism. In recent decades science has been re-introducing, through the path of materialism, the immaterial, the mystery of life. A greater humility has been re-introduced through the path of science. It is an opening to a spirit of curiosity. That is why the Dalai Lama is so loved. A group of us just went to see him in Vancouver. Thirty thousand people went to see the Dalai Lama, but if there were a stadium with fifty thousand seats, fifty thousand would have gone. He is universally loved because in his attitude, not the least of which is his attitude towards science, is an enlightened spirituality that is open and curious and evolving. He has made the famous statement, “If science were to prove something in the Buddhist teachings to be wrong, we would have to drop that.” He says that we have to understand that if science does not find something, it does not mean that it does not exist. It just means that science has not seen it. An example of this is the nature of mind itself – consciousness. Science has no idea what the nature of consciousness is. Does that mean that there is no consciousness, or that consciousness is unreal? Certainly not, but if science proves something to be non-existent, then we have to acknowledge that and change.
Finally, I am on the faculty of a training program for people working with the dying, a very illustrious group of co-faculty members, including Ram Das and other luminaries. One of the people used a new word: “transtraditional”. Now when you go to conferences and events, she said, they use the word transtraditional. The Dalai Lama is a transtradional teacher, with the recognition that every tradition is a path towards truth, and one can be comfortable with or appreciative of a number of different traditions. Meditation practice is at the heart of the transtraditional traditions. I don’t think traditions will disappear or meld into each other, but there are traditions that are transtradional and draw on many other traditions. I like to think of Everyday Zen as being a transtradional tradition. It’s a Zen tradition, but is not limited to Zen tradition.
So, I have unburdened myself of all my thoughts, and I feel much better now!
The Buddhist path is the training and cultivation of the mind, which includes working with both emotion and thinking. So it is not a matter of using ethics and will to overcome and tame emotion, but rather using mindfulness of our mental states, that include both emotion and thought, to create a transformation of the emotions that ariseWorking with Emotions Part ThreeTalk given: Summer 2004 Dharma Seminars in Mill Valley, CA.
Zoketsu lectures on Daniel Goleman's Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama. – Proceedings of a dialogue between the Dalai Lama and Western philosophers and scientists.
Tonight we are continuing with our ongoing exploration of emotions. The focus of the seminar is not on learning material from the book per se, but on how we can make use of any material in the book in deepening our engagement with our own emotional life and practice.
I would like to make some points from the chapter of the book called, “The Universality of Emotions.” Mostly it was about a report from Paul Eckman, who is at the University of California at San Francisco Medical School. In Western thought there is the persistent idea that emotion is separate from thinking, morality, and willpower. Emotion is seen as automatic, visceral, and animal-like, and we cultivate our thought and morality to overcome this animal nature. There are emotions that you don’t want to look at because they are bad and out-of-bounds, so you override them with your ethics, thinking, and willpower. In Buddhism there is no fundamental distinction between our emotions and our thought. Both are arising from consciousness and naturally come up when we cognize objects. Whenever there is cognition, there is always thought and feeling. There is always a mixture of these things, and there is no way to separate them, and there is no hierarchy.
The Buddhist path is the training and cultivation of the mind, which includes working with both emotion and thinking. So it is not a matter of using ethics and will to overcome and tame emotion, but rather using mindfulness of our mental states, that include both emotion and thought, to create a transformation of the emotions that arise. For instance, it might be commonplace in Western psychology to assume that if someone crosses you, you will be angry and upset. That is just the way it is. That is how the mind works. If you are civilized and have some psychological acumen, you won’t shout at the person and stomp up and down; you will control yourself. You will take up the matter with some rationality, and if that doesn’t work, you’ll sue!
In Buddhism the possibility is presented, however far we get in realizing it, and admittedly we may not get all that far, that we might not have the feeling in the first place. We might actually transform ourselves to the extent that those emotional responses that are assumed as a given in Western thought might not arise at all.
In this chapter Eckman talks about breaking down the arising of emotion into three moments. The terms that he gives for these three different moments are “appraisal awareness”; that is, the assessment of the situation which gives rise to the emotion in the first place; the “impulse awareness”; and the third is what he calls the “action awareness”. An example of this would be when someone cuts in line in front of you at the supermarket. The appraisal awareness is the immediate awareness that this is maddening and the person is really rude. According to Eckman, this is a universal response that anyone would feel; it is just a given. Sometimes we are not entirely aware of this response in us, and when we are not aware of the existence of the emotion, we can really be pushed around by it, and we are a prisoner of that emotion. Eckman says that the more we are aware of the emotion, the less we are a prisoner of it. He calls the next moment the impulse awareness. In the example of someone cutting in front of you at the supermarket, you are aware of your anger and have the impulse to respond, such as making a rude comment or pushing the cart into the person’s back. Here is where a mature person with some acumen and presence of mind doesn’t do that, because that person knows that there is little benefit in this reaction. So this is where we can work on ourselves. We can increase our awareness early on in the situation so that we don’t react negatively. The third moment is action awareness, where now the impulse has already taken over, and we are starting to do something like pushing the cart, and we stop ourselves in the middle of the action. He is saying that it is best to control the impulse, but if we can’t do that, we can control the action, mollify it, apologize, and don’t do it again, if we are lucky.
Buddhism would say the same thing: yes don’t do the action, but if you do, apologize. Buddhism, however, also says to work more deeply with awareness, so that the original impulse does not arise in the first place. Work with the emotion with awareness so that even before the original feeling comes, there might be a different experience. Working with the underlying causes of the emotion changes the way the emotion arises and feels.
We have talked about prajna, the faculty of cognizing emptiness, and if we developed that faculty, our experience of the world would be considerably different, and therefore our emotional responses would be considerably different. Maybe working with emotions is not one sub path or genre of the path; maybe it is the whole path. Maybe what it comes down to is the awakening or development of prajna, in which the emotions in our lives appear quite different. In this chapter there is a discussion of prajna, and they say that prajna really means intelligence more than wisdom. We talk about it as a technical term, the way of experiencing emptiness, but here they are saying that maybe a better translation is intelligence, not as an intellectual achievement only, such as abstract thought, but as an all around development of consciousness, which would also include emotions. In the book, Daniel Goleman gets excited about this because emotional intelligence is his field, and he thinks that this kind of intelligence is a way of feeling and responding to the world.
Maybe that is what prajna really is, a way of feeling with and responding to the world, of being attuned to the world. This would naturally involve a difference in the way our emotional flow in relation to the world would be. Then prajna would include, as a function of those things, thinking, emotions, and ethical conduct. Thought, emotion, and morality would not be separate things, a matter of analysis, suppression, or use of the will; but rather, they would all be part of prajna – how we see and feel the world, and how we behave in the world as a consequence of how we feel the world to be. In prajna, we would connect to the world in a spontaneous and harmonious way. There would be the sense that ethical conduct is no big deal, and we would naturally be spontaneous and harmonious in the world with that kind of training. Each one of us would have a different way of manifesting this training.
People differ considerably in their emotional makeup. Some people, for example, have more anger or more love than others. We probably all have the same range of emotions, but we differ in the palette of emotions that arise. We differ in how quickly the emotion arises, in what triggers or stimulates the emotion, how long the emotion lasts, or how powerful the emotion may be. This may differ quite a bit person to person. Therefore in working with emotions and developing prajna in relation to our own karmic makeup, it is important not to impose ideas on how a practitioner should look emotionally. A wise discernment of one’s own particular emotional makeup, knowing what the path teaches us about emotions, and then massaging our particular emotional profile with that teaching may be more important. We would continue to be ourselves emotionally, but the way the emotion would appear would be softened and transformed by our approach to practice. A few weeks ago we worked with our individual emotional themes that seem present since our early life. There is a sense in which our own emotional makeup is not known to us. We may always be trying to work against rather than working with the grain of our emotional makeup, and it becomes endlessly frustrating.
An interesting point in this chapter was the quality of the Dalai Lama’s face. Eckman, whose specialty is facial expressions, was astonished that the Dalai Lama had the facial muscles of a twenty year old. He thought this was because the Dalai Lama is very emotional and expressive. His facial muscles looked young because they were used to exercising such a wide range of emotions -sorrow, sadness, amazement, happiness. He has no guardedness about expressing his emotions. He has a flowing and free use of feelings that are spontaneously expressed in his face. Conversely, for a person who is more average than the Dalai Lama, there isn’t this free flow of feeling, there is more of a repression of feeling. One so often has the experience of being ashamed or embarrassed by the unacceptability of what one is feeling; therefore, the facial muscles are not used and lose their tone.
We could take the Dalai Lama as an ideal practitioner, who is very quick to express emotion. The problem may not be that we are too emotional, but rather we do not have the freedom to express emotion, and that there is so much repression that the emotions come out twisted and cockeyed. So it is not a matter of eliminating or damping down emotions, but a matter of training ourselves to be freer in our emotional life.
In order to be like the Dalai Lama in always expressing our feelings, we would have to have a tremendous amount of trust in our own heart and emotions. You would have to have the overall sense that whatever you were feeling was all right. This implies a certain amount of cultivation of working with your emotions. Everyone will have negative or destructive emotions, but there is the awareness that we are, and have been, working with them. For example, the Dalai Lama probably has a lot of confidence that he would not run across the stage and throttle someone. He is just not going to do that, because he is familiar with his emotions and impulses. For some of us this kind of self awareness may be less true. We may have less awareness of our destructive emotions because we have never allowed ourselves to feel them. First of all you have to feel your anger or rage or envy, become familiar with them, and then begin to work with them.
Most people are embarrassed by certain emotions and do not want to work with them. We need to develop tools and support so we could engage our own emotions and the emotions of others. Our chief tool is mindfulness or awareness of what we are feeling. One can ask oneself, “What am I feeling now,” as a device for promoting greater awareness of our feelings. So the chief tool is mindfulness, and the chief support is the Three Treasure: our community, our teachers, and our teaching. Through that tool and support, we could feel our feelings with a sense of safety. And then, little be little, we could work with our actions and impulses until we got back to what Eckman calls the appraisal awareness, and the emotion that arose would be a different emotion. That is how we would develop prajna or intelligence with regard to our emotional life.
Discussion of the transcendent vs. immanent self. A discussion of emotions and conditioning, and an examination of three methods of working with negative emotions.Working with Emotions TwoTalk given: Summer 2004 Dharma Seminars in Mill Valley, CA.
Zoketsu lectures on Daniel Goleman's Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama. – Proceedings of a dialogue between the Dalai Lama and Western philosophers and scientists.
I want to talk about a chapter in the book called “A Buddhist psychology,” which is a report of a talk that Mattheu Ricard (sp?) gave at the conference. Goleman introduced the talk by saying that Trungpa Rinpoche once said that Buddhism will come to the West as a psychology. It is true. You wouldn’t say that about Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. It seems to be truer of Buddhism than the theistic traditions. The psychological teachings of Buddhism are not an accident; they are essential to the thrust of Buddhism.
If you think about the question, “What are we as persons?” it is complicated to be a human being. It is complicated because we have a double nature. On the one hand, we are animals, and like other animals, we have desires and needs. But we also have a consciousness that is self reflective. It gives us the capacity to imagine ourselves to be beyond what we are. We have a transcendent thirst for spirituality, religion, God, and enlightenment. We have aspirations and ideals. This double nature allows us to do tremendous acts of selflessness and creativity, and simultaneously, both as individuals and as a species, to do unprecedented acts of destruction.
So, you could say that we have both transcendent and immanent sides. Theistic religions shine the beam of their light on our transcendent side, that aspect of our heart that is beyond ourselves, almost to the exclusion of the other side. Psychology is an examination of our humanness: our desires and hopes and fears in the world. If you focus on the transcendent side, you have less to say about the emotions and psychology of the human being. In fact, so much so, that you could say that one of the down sides of theistic religions is that they focus so much on the transcendent that they tend to denigrate or even demonize the human side.
Central to the idea of Buddhism is that it doesn’t have an idea of a God. In fact, I think the Buddha felt that the idea of a self and the clinging to a self was a projected reflection of the idea of a God. He thought that it was the root of all our problems, so he was not interested in that idea. Therefore, Buddhism shines its light on the human side. Buddhism also includes the transcendent side, because what is enlightenment or Buddhahood but the transcendent? But it shines its light on the human side, on emotions, for the purpose of purifying the human up to enlightenment, instead of focusing on the transcendent and denigrating the human. So it comes from the opposite direction.
Now I am going to skip around to some points in Ricard’s discussion. When he uses the word emotion, he is talking about our conditioning. Negative or destructive emotions are all of our blocked conditioning. He is saying that even if it looks like you are calm and happy, if you have the seeds of conditioning within you, and even if the seeds have not become manifest by external conditions, the negative emotions are still within you. What makes these emotions, these conditioned responses, destructive or harmful is not just the obvious consequences of them. If you lash out at someone, there are consequences, and you can see the destructive results of emotions. But there are also, he says, our motivations and the shadows of these negative emotions. Even if they don’t seem to have bad, external consequences, there is a shadow of bad consequences within us that comes from our motivations continuing to be warped by our conditioning. We are blinded by this conditioning, so we see a world that doesn’t exist, and we begin reacting to that world.
We think that destructive emotions are not a major issue for us. But according to Ricard, and according to Buddhism, to be a normal, happy individual is to be enlightened. Anything short of that is abnormal. I think it is true that we all have a long way to go towards some fundamental healthiness. This is a totally different paradigm for human life. When you think about psychology in the West, it starts with pathology. There are pathological states and the investigation of their causes. Therefore, the thrust of psychology is the abnormal, and there is no thought of the normal. But what is normal? Look what goes on in the world. Is invading countries normal? Is killing people normal?
Buddhism does not posit the usual idea of normalcy. In Buddhism there is only awakening or destructive emotions. So our project is to go toward enlightenment. We are trying to purify our hearts and not just go toward anger management.
You can’t talk about psychology and emotion without talking about philosophy, because all psychologies imply ontology, whether they are explicit or not. Whatever your psychology is, it implies an idea of what the self is and what the world is, and how self and world relate to each other. In western psychology, which comes from medicine and empiricism, the nature of the self and the world are just assumed. What is looked at instead is the phenomenon of pathology.
Buddhism, however, is very clear about its ontology. In Buddhism the root of all negative emotions is self clinging, holding firmly to the idea of a separate, fundamentally existing self. The idea of a separate, fundamentally existing self is assumed in western psychology. In Buddhism, this is seen to be an erroneous assumption that needs to be overcome and examined. It is clear in Buddhism that this clinging to the idea of a separate self is the source of all negative emotions. If you attack me physically or verbally, my hatred or aversion will be aroused because the self is under attack. On the other hand, if you pile praise on me, then I will be happy and like you. These feelings of desire or aversion are the source of all negative emotions. Therefore, there is an emphasis in Buddhism to go beyond this conviction of a separate self.
We certainly do have the experience of being a separate person, separate from other people, but we are training ourselves in zazen through body and breath, through thinking in classes like this, and through observation of our experience to realize that the experience we have of a fundamentally existing separate self is just that: it is a human experience that doesn’t have anything to do with objective fact. This is a subtle but crucial difference. It is the difference between having a thought that comes into the mind and thinking, “Oh, I am having this thought.” Same thought, and really the same experience, but the way you hold it is very different when you know it as a thought, as opposed to a reflection of something that is solidly there in the world.
This is where our zazen practice really helps us. Our practice works on us little by little over time, and we may not be conscious of what is going on. Even if we have terrible practice, have no idea of what is going on, have terrible concentration and are always falling asleep, moving around and wiggling in our seat, we keep doing zazen and coming back to the breath, to the posture, and trying to be present. After a time, we will probably get the idea that thoughts are coming and going, and they are just that: thoughts. You see that one minute you are completely focused on something that seems like the most important thing in the universe, and the next minute it is totally gone and you don’t care! You realize that thoughts are coming and going, and nothing is fixed. Emotions are emotions. Thoughts are thoughts. The self is an experience that comes and goes. It is an aspect of consciousness. To have this understanding of your mind and self really makes a profound difference.
Another point that Ricard makes is that negative emotions are not inherent in the mind. If you believe that the idea of a separate self is a given, then you would also believe that it is a given fact that anger and hatred are inherent in the human being. Many philosophers in all cultures have said that these qualities are inherent in human nature. The point is to realize that negative emotions are not inherent. They arise according to conditions, and we make a commitment to work with them as much as we can in this lifetime. Our work with the precepts are a path to perfection, as far as we can get. We can overcome negative emotions. They are not inherent in the mind.
Zazen really helps here in the same way. In zazen we may enter into deep states of quiet. There is the feeling that you are attuned to body, breath, and mind and to the world. You feel the fundamental kindness of the world. Having experiences like that in our practice gives us a faith in the awakened nature of the mind. We feel that the fundamental nature of the mind is peaceful. Buddha mind, the basis of consciousness, is not inherently negative. There is a kind of faith in that. There is the recognition that negative emotions are distortions caused by conditioning and habit. Our faith in basic human sanity is not just a leap of faith, it is based on the confidence we can feel in the teachings, our teachers, and our own experience.
Also, if you are in an emotional state and practice clear awareness, you can investigate whether the emotion is inherently negative. By entering into the emotion fully, you can see that at the heart of the emotion, no matter how negative, there is a point of purity. You can see that anger, for example, is an energy that is obscuring the purity that is at its heart. If you can hold on long enough with the awareness of an emotion, you can feel at the bottom of the emotion this point of purity, just as the water on the surface of the ocean may be turbulent, but the water at the bottom is calm.
Another thing that Ricard says is that emotions, if not addressed can turn into moods, and moods turn into our temperament. Even though I may not be fuming with anger or lust all that often, in fact the emotion, little by little, becomes my life, because those tendencies are working within me even when they are not manifest. When we believe in a separate and fixed person, then we believe we are that kind of person. We think, “I am an angry person” or “I am a depressed person.”
Ricard talks about three methods or pathways to work with the emotions. The first is the pathway of antidotes. For example, if you are feeling hatred, focus the mind on love to overcome the hatred. If you are feeling desire, focus on the temporariness and unsatisfactory nature of that which you desire. There are many ways to overcome negative states with positive states. But it takes a lot of practice to do this, and you have to practice all the time, because if you wait until you are overcome by anger to practice loving kindness, it is pretty hopeless. The only hope is to have developed loving kindness continuously, but even then the anger may overcome you. So, although it is important to cultivate the antidotes, they may not be sufficient.
The second method is to see through the emotion and to see that it is based on a sense of self that is not fundamentally real. Throughout one’s practice, it is possible to remind oneself that anger, for example, is pointless because the emotion is arising inappropriately. So, the second method is basically seeing the empty nature of emotion.
The third method is “stepping forward.” He doesn’t say it in this passage, but what he means is tantric practice, in which you plunge into the emotion and use the energy of the emotion itself to overcome the emotion. If tantra is using the realm in which we live
and using it as a tool for awakening, then our practice is completely tantric. In our practice, we are non dualistic. Things of the world are what they are, neither negative nor positive. Tantric practices in other traditions, such as Tibetan Buddhism, can involve very complicated rituals, but in our tradition, it is just embracing emotions with awareness, going completely into them, and finding a point of purity right in the middle of them. Therefore the method for us is awareness and to be fully present with whatever you are experiencing.
So in the beginning, when working with emotions, you usually think, “Oh, I did it again. I blew it again.” But when you realize what has happened, you address it, maybe five minutes later, or five hours later. Then, as you continue to practice with it, you close the gap between the emotion and the awareness of the emotion. And then there is breathing. I am really impressed with breathing. If you sit a lot, breathing becomes more than breathing; it carries the whole practice with it. If you lose it, just start breathing. You will return to yourself and figure out what just happened. Little by little, you close the gap. You can be aware of being angry, or any negative emotion that you are experiencing. Being aware of it will change it. Then, when you can clarify the causes and conditions of these emotions, you can work with the emotion even before it comes. Ricard talks about this. When the seeds of emotions that have troubled you in the past are clarified, then these habits do not arise anymore. You can actually overcome these habits and emotions.
Let’s say we fast forward to a time when we have overcome the emotions, would we become a neutral person with a half smile, with no emotions at all? No, I think we would still be conditioned people living in a conditioned world, capable of experiencing human emotion at any time. But the emotion would not be toxic. It would be just an experience that could flow through us. We could still feel hatred or jealousy, but we wouldn’t put the twist on it that we always do and it wouldn’t warp our consciousness. It would pass right through us. We would see it as an emotion that makes us a human being. We might even feel new emotions: joy, equanimity, heartfelt compassion, selfless love, courage, and contentment…things that are fairly rare for people to feel in this life.
Mostly people want to feel positive and not negative emotions and they want to feel pleasure and not pain. The problem with feeling pleasure or pain is that you are at the mercy of conditions, whether it is a traffic jam or your computer not working. The happiness in working with emotions in this way would be a kind of fulfillment and contentment, regardless of the conditions and emotions that might pass through us. Working with our emotions will automatically condition us out of seeking pleasure and that which we want and into a joy or willingness to meet every moment. Happiness is in meeting every moment and not holding out for the moments we want, and trying to escape from the moments that we don’t want. You would be happy to face every moment regardless of what it brought. Yes, I am unhappy when things go wrong, and I like it when things go well, but fundamentally it doesn’t matter that much, because I am there to meet it. That’s what I am after, and that’s what really makes me happy. There’s a sense of well being. Every day is a good day.
First in a series of five talks on this central Mahayana teaching.
The Heart Sutra
Lecture Number One – Zoketsu Norman Fischer
Abridged and transcribed by Ryusen BarbaraByrum
GREAT WISDOM BEYOND WISDOM HEART SUTRA
AVALOKITESHVARA BODHISATTVA WHEN PRACTICING DEEPLY THE PRAJNA PARAMITA PERCEIVED THAT ALL FIVE SKANDAS IN THEIR OWN BEING ARE EMPTY AND WAS SAVED FROM ALL SUFFERING O SHARIPUTRA FORM DOES NOT DIFFER FROM EMPTINESS EMPTINESS DOES NOT DIFFER FROM FORM THAT WHICH IS FORM IS EMPTINESS THAT WHICH IS EMPTINESS FORM THE SAME IS TRUE OF FEELINGS PERCEPTIONS FORMATIONS CONSCIOUSNESS O SHARIPUTRA ALL DHARMAS ARE MARKED WITH EMPTINESS THEY DO NOT APPEAR NOR DISAPPEAR ARE NOT TAINTED NOR PURE DO NOT INCREASE NOR DECREASE THEREFORE IN EMPTINESS NO FORM NO FEELINGS NO PERCEPTIONS NO FORMATIONS NO CONSCIOUSNESS NO EYES NO EARS NO NOSE NO TONGUE NO BODY NO MIND NO COLOR NO SOUND NO SMELL NO TASTE NO TOUCH NO OBJECT OF MIND NO REALM OF EYES UNTIL NO REALM OF MIND-CONSCIOUSNESS NO IGNORANCE AND ALSO NO EXTINCTION OF IT UNTIL NO OLD AGE AND DEATH AND ALSO NO EXTINCTION OF IT NO SUFFERING NO ORIGINATION NO STOPPING NO PATH NO COGNITION ALSO NO ATTAINMENT WITH NOTHING TO ATTAIN THE BODHISATTVA DEPENDS ON PRAJNA PARAMITA AND THE MIND IS NO HINDRANCE WITHOUT ANY HINDRANCE NO FEARS EXIST FAR APART FROM EVERY PERVERTED VIEW ONE DWELLS IN NIRVANA IN THE THREE WORLDS ALL BUDDHAS DEPEND ON PRAJNA PARAMITA AND ATTAIN UNSURPASSED COMPLETE PERFECT ENLIGHTENMENT THEREFORE KNOW THE PRAJNA PARAMITA IS THE GREAT TRANSCENDENT MANTRA IS THE GREAT BRIGHT MANTRA IS THE UTMOST MANTRA IS THE SUPREME MANTRA WHICH IS ABLE TO RELIEVE ALL SUFFERING AND IS TRUE NOT FALSE SO PROCLAIM THE PRAJNA PARAMITA MANTRA PROCLAIM THE MANTRA THAT SAYS GATE GATE PARAGATE PARASAMGATE! BODHI! SVAHA!
We will spend the next five weeks trying to appreciate and understand these words, which are chanted in Zen temples all over the world and in other Mahayana Buddhist schools. There is a new translation of the Heart Sutra that a committee of scholars and practitioners has done. I think the Zen Center uses the new translation, but for purposes of this class, we are going to use the old one.
When I first started practicing Zen, I had an experience that has never been repeated. I practiced in the snow in upstate New York in the middle of the winter. Around 1969, I attended a retreat with Shibayama Roshi, the author of The Gateless Barrier, who gave his comments on the Mumonkan at this retreat. During the breaks I would go out into the trackless snow and walk around and around and chant the Heart Sutra. For me, the meaning of the Heart Sutra is mixed up with a snowy landscape, where everything is covered in whiteness, as if each thing were one thing – one taste, one form, one shape. In those days when I was young, visiting my parents caused in me a state of absolute exasperation. To relieve my troubles, I would go outside and walk up and down the river chanting the Heart Sutra, and it would really cheer me up. So for me the Heart Sutra has memories and associations of great comfort and consolation, and even though on the surface of it the words of the Heart Sutra don’t seem comforting or calming, I always found them to be so. I had no idea what it meant, and I still don’t know that I do, but there was something about it that seeped in, even though the technical meaning may have escaped me.
The title in Sanskrit, which is rendered in English as the “Great Wisdom Beyond Wisdom Heart Sutra”, is Maha Prajna Parimita Hridya Sutra. The first word, maha, is translated as “great”, but in the context of the title of the Heart Sutra, it means “unsurpassingly great”. It is all extensive, with nothing outside of it; there is no boundary to this greatness. Greatness, then, is not a comparative term. It is a greatness that transcends comparisons and covers everything. One could say that the word maha is almost a synonym for emptiness itself – vast, unnamable, indefinable, limitless – the mysterious nature of being. If being itself is maha, then it is also unlimited. What we usually call being has a strict limit, and the limit of being is nonbeing, but the being of maha also includes nonbeing: life/death, not as opposites, one canceling out the other, but as inextricably bound up together in one endless and indefinable continuum. Life/death as one thing.
In our conceptions of the world, life and death are opposite. Being and nonbeing are opposites. But it is interesting that in Buddhist thought and terminology, the dichotomy is not between life and death and between being and nonbeing, the dichotomy is between wisdom and ignorance, or nirvana and samsara. Life/death, as one continuous thing, is samsara. Life/death as one continuous thing is ignorance. Life/death as one continuous thing is nirvana. Life/death as one continuous thing is wisdom. So when we embrace life/death as a limitless flow of being/ nonbeing, as great, joyful, mysterious, and pure, this is maha. It is a shout, “Maha Prajna Paramita Sutra!” – a great shout of joy and mystery.
Prajna means wisdom. The two words, prajna and paramita, are translated in our title as “Wisdom Beyond Wisdom”. In the Western tradition wisdom is a vague word. It implies a wise old man or a wise old woman with a knowing smile and a gentle way. I suppose it has the same meaning in the title of the sutra, but is also has the more technical meaning, “to see life as it really is”. In early Buddhism, the term prajna existed because to see life as it really is, rather than to see life distorted by our desire and confusion, is to live life based on that true seeing. Prajna is sometimes called, “the eye of prajna,” and is the faculty to see things clearly, as they really are, and not perverted by our conditioned views. The point of the Buddhist path is to develop this faculty until you can see things as they are and also to live your life based on that true seeing.
In older schools of Buddhism, in the first formulations of dharma, right view was seeing impermanence. Even though intellectually we know that things are impermanent, we live in a world that we think is full of permanent things, beginning with ourselves. Even though we know that our bodies and minds are not permanent, we think they are, and so it is always a shock to us in moments of illness or facing death that it is not so. It is always a shock, because no matter how much we think we know, we don’t know how impermanent mind and body are. So, seeing reality as radically impermanent, and embracing the implications of that, was in early Buddhism the notion of what prajna was seeing.
In Mahayana Buddhism this shifts a little bit. Rather than seeing impermanence, we are seeing emptiness. Prajna, then, is the eye that sees the empty nature of phenomena. But actually impermanence and the emptiness of things are not really two different things. Dogen has a fascicle that is called, “Impermanence is Buddha nature.” These are equivalent views. Reality that we think is permanent is impermanent; reality that seems substantial is empty. The reality we see as messed up, is actually Buddha nature. So these are all one thing: Buddha nature, impermanence, and emptiness. Each is a way of talking about the unnamable reality. All of our conceptions of reality, including conceptions of impermanence and emptiness, fall short of what is real.
So now paramita. The six paramitas are the six practices of bodhisattvas: giving, ethical conduct, energy, patience, concentration, and wisdom. The word paramita can be translated as “perfection”, and that is what it means: the perfection of giving, the perfection of ethical conduct, the perfection of wisdom, and so on. Perfection literally means “going beyond”; for example, going to the end of morality, and then going beyond that. Imagine walking down the road of ethical conduct until you got to the end, and then leaping off into the void. That is the implication. That is why the title is translated, “Wisdom Beyond Wisdom”. The perfection of wisdom would be wisdom beyond wisdom. This means not having an idea of wisdom or morality. For example, if you are practicing giving, and later say, “Look I am getting good at giving,” the very thought of that would be a limitation to your giving. Real giving would be giving without any thought of giving; it would be a reflex of your living. So wisdom beyond wisdom is not anything that you would be able to define or recognize, and if you did see yourself defining wisdom, you would know that it was a lack of wisdom. Wisdom beyond wisdom is beyond any designations. It is wisdom without boundary or definition. Therefore, the perfection of wisdom is the same as the perfection of giving, because if you go to the limits of each paramita and jump into the void, it is the same void. In the void there is no difference between patience and giving and wisdom.
So we come to the word hrdiya, or heart. In Sanskrit the word “heart” has a triple sense just as it has in English. It means the heart as an organ, it implies the heart as the seat of emotion, and it means, as it does in English, the heart of something or kernel of something, its essential quality. “Go right to the heart of the matter,” we say.
There is a whole literature of the Prajna Paramita. It is a great thing to read all of the literature. I have done it once and would like to do it again. There is a Prajna Paramita Sutra in one hundred thousand lines, which is a very thick book, a Prajna Paramita Sutra in twenty five thousand lines, which is a less thick book, and a Prajna Paramita Sutra in eight thousand lines, the Diamond Sutra, and the Heart Sutra. The Heart Sutra is one page long and purports to be the heart of what is included in all the other sutras. There actually is a Prajna Paramita Sutra in one letter, the letter “a”, but it probably wouldn’t take us five weeks to discuss it! So the Heart Sutra gives the essence of the teaching of Prajna Paramita.
The last word is the word sutra. A sutra is a scripture in both the Buddhist and Hindu traditions. For example, there are the Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. The word sutra is like the English word suture, which means to sew together. I think this is because the first sutras were a collection of aphorisms or scriptural sayings strung together. In Zen, sutra as scripture becomes extended further to include all phenomena, and with the eye of prajna, when you observe all phenomena, you are actually reading sutras. The world is a scripture: all thoughts, sounds, taste, mind, objects, and smells are scriptures if we have the eye to read them.
So that is the title. It is possible that we could do part of the first sentence tonight:
AVALOKITESHVARA BODHISATTVA WHEN PRACTICING DEEPLY THE PRAJNA PARAMITA PERCEIVED THAT ALL FIVE SKANDHAS IN THEIR OWN BEING ARE EMPTY AND WAS SAVED FROM ALL SUFFERING
Bodhisattva is the great hero of Mahayana Buddhism. In early Buddhism, “bodhisattva”, specifically referred only to one Buddha, the Buddha in his previous lives. The bodhisattva was a Buddha in training. So in early Buddhism the idea was to become an arhat or a Buddha, and a bodhisattva was only a preliminary stage. But in Mahayana Buddhism the bodhisattva is raised up until a bodhisattva is almost the equal of a Buddha, not in rank, but in spirit and in value, and even, to some extent, greater than the Buddha.
Western writers have described Buddhism as two different religions, but I don’t think this is true. At some point Buddhist practitioners became overcome with the spirit of compassion. My theory, and there is scholarship to back this up, is that around the same time that Buddhists were developing the powerful notion of compassion, it was becoming an obsession with Jews and early Christians – compassion as universal benefit and salvation for all. That is why giving or generosity became the first paramita in later Buddhism.
Compassion and emptiness, and this is an important point, go hand in hand. If you read the words of the Heart Sutra, they might seem cold and abstract, almost nihilistic, but when you understand what the sutra is saying, you see it is not that way at all. Earlier I said that impermanence and emptiness of phenomena were two different ways of talking about the same thing, but the difference in the way of talking is important. When you emphasize impermanence, you emphasize detachment and letting go. When you emphasize emptiness, you are emphasizing connection. Emptiness is actually saying that there isn’t any thing; there is only the connection between things. As soon as you try to grab something, you are grabbing everything else. Emptiness is connection. There are no boundaries or barriers between things. Everything is just endlessly flowing in and out of each other. So if you had the inner eye of compassion, you would see that the universe is nothing but compassion. Compassion arises in me, not because of some desire or emotion, but because that is the nature of reality itself – a flow and connection and mingling of everything. Reality is nothing but the free flow of love. Reality is compassion.
Compassion is the response to the nature of reality. So if there is compassion, you are going to find emptiness. If there is emptiness, you are going to be overwhelmed with feelings of compassion and love. Loving-kindness and compassion are the implications and content of emptiness. So bodhisattvas are beings who absolutely embrace the empty nature of phenomena and compassion.
In earlier Buddhism, there was the idea to notice suffering, to drop suffering, and to achieve nirvana, and the only thing you could do for someone else was to encourage them to do this also. Then, the rise with the Bodhisattva path the idea was that the only point of attaining nirvana was to save others. Later the teaching was not even to attain nirvana but just to help others, and when everybody achieves nirvana, you could achieve nirvana also. In fact, how could you attain nirvana if no one else had? It would be impossible. If everything is empty, how could I find peace separate from you? Only when everyone is at peace can I have peace. Only then can I have final awakening, and to do less than this is to misunderstand the nature of awakening.
So a bodhisattva is a wildly energetic, willing, endlessly practicing being. Among the myriad arrays of bodhisattvas, Avalokiteshvara, the speaker of the Heart Sutra, is the bodhisattva of compassion. Her practice is to hear the cries of the world. I think of her as the equivalent of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico. There is a large icon of her in the Mexico City zendo. She is the embracing feminine principle of universal love and compassion.
In the beginning of the sutra, Avalokiteshvara is in the very act of seeing the empty nature of phenomena. Seeing the empty nature of phenomena, she is immediately free from suffering.
It is warm in this room, and when it is warm, we begin to nod off, so we will continue with this sutra next week!
Second in a series of five talks on this central Mahayana teaching.
(Transcribed and Abridged by Barbara Byrum)
The Heart Sutra
Lecture Number Two
AVALOKITESHVARA BODHISATTVA WHEN PRACTICING DEEPLY THE PRAJNA PARAMITA PERCEIVED THAT ALL FIVE SKANDAS IN THEIR OWN BEING ARE EMPTY AND WAS SAVED FROM ALL SUFFERING
As we discussed last week, prajna, the faculty that cognizes emptiness, is a word or term that stands on the side of the subject, and emptiness is a word or term that stands on the side of the object. The etymology of the word shunyata, which is the Sanskrit word for emptiness, implies something that is very large, but empty inside. Emptiness is like a big balloon, something that is large but empty inside; something that appears weighty, but actually is light as a feather. Thich Nhat Hanh likes to point out that shunyata is not nothingness, so “emptiness” might not be a good translation for this word, because it connotes voidness or nothing there. It is not so much voidness as boundlessness, fullness, or wholeness. We could say that phenomena are empty of substantiality and separateness, but full of boundlessness and connection. We could say that things are empty of the problems of living, but are full of flow and compassion. So, prajna is not cognizing some object in the sense that cognition implies analyzing some object, it is more a felt sense of things being empty in the way that I have been describing.
Emptiness is not that different than impermanence. It may be that emptiness is another way of speaking of impermanence, because impermanence implies that there is no separable thing that is substantial, weighty, or troublesome. Conventionally, we think that something is impermanent because it is here but then later goes away. But if you look more closely at impermanence in a radical way, you could ask at what point is it impermanent? At what point is it here and then when has it gone away? In life, this moment is here, but the next moment it is gone. We are impermanent not because we die later on, but because each moment of time is passing. There is no moment that you could find as being substantial, even though we have the illusion that this is so.
Emptiness defies our capacity to conceptualize things. We can master a kind of logic about emptiness, but to know emptiness as it really is, we have to go beyond conceptualization. In Tibetan Buddhism they extensively study the logic of emptiness. Even though they may spend twenty years on the study of the logic of emptiness, even in Tibetan Buddhism they say that this study is only preparation for the actual living of emptiness. In Zen, the logic of emptiness is studied to a much lesser degree, because the focus is on lived experience. We are paying a great deal of attention to the experiences in our lives in the hope that this ripens into a real feeling for emptiness over time.
Last week we discussed that compassion is the inescapable implication of impermanence and emptiness because things are completely bound up with each other, inseparable, with no boundaries between them. Everything is connection. Emptiness really means that there is nothing but connection. Of course the implication of this vision of reality as connection is compassion. So compassion in the emptiness teachings is not an emotional feeling of pity and affection; it is recognition and merging with the flow of reality, which is why we feel the human emotions of sympathy and love.
We also discussed how a bodhisattva is a practitioner that understands that one could not be awakened unless everyone else was awakened. How could I be awakened if others were not? So bodhisattvas are constantly working for the benefit and awakening of others, without paying heed to their own awakening. They have the capacity to work enthusiastically for a goal that seems impossibly off into the future, because they know that there is no other way to live.
So the first words of the sutra are:
AVALOKITESHVARA BODHISATTVA WHEN PRACTICING DEEPLY THE PRAJNA PARAMITA PERCEIVED THAT ALL FIVE SKANDAS IN THEIR OWN BEING ARE EMPTY AND WAS SAVED FROM ALL SUFFERING
Avalokiteshvara was practicing the prajna paramita, the perfection of this faculty that cognizes emptiness. This is already important information: the faculty of prajna is to be practiced. It is not an achievement; it is an ongoing practice. In our tradition, Dogen is famous for the thought that there is no enlightenment toward which we are practicing. Practice itself and enlightenment are identical, and they arise simultaneously. In this sutra Avalokiteshvara is going to set forth the deepest understanding of emptiness that comes from his ongoing practice of emptiness.
The first thing that Avalokiteshvara notices in this practice is that all five skandas in their own being are empty. Five skandas mean the world as we know it inside and outside, subjective world and objective world as one experience. Implied in the idea of “skandas” is that the world “out there” is irrelevant, except insofar as we experience it through our sense organs and consciousness. All we can know is what the world is to us. It is interesting that the early Buddhists were not interested in the world “out there”, because all we can ever know is through our experience; therefore, let’s look at the world as a function of our experience. The only world we know is dynamic and co-created by ourselves and what is outside of us. The five skandas are a map of the co-creation between the point where perceptual organs, thinking, and consciousness meet objects in the world. The skandas are a way of organizing an analysis of our everyday experience.
What does “own being” mean? There is a long debate in Buddhist philosophy whether anything at all has any “own being” – as defined as separate, real, and substantial existence. In the early sutras, the Buddha taught that what we call a self or person does not have own being. What we conventionally know as ourselves or others does not have own being. Of course it is not an illusion that we have an experience of our self. It is not an illusion, but we mistakenly define that experience as a separately independently existing entity. So we take an experience and impute a meaning that it does not have. So the Buddha was clear that a person does not have its own being. The self is a tentative experience which is contingent on many things: perceptions, feelings, thoughts, history. All these things arise together and we call that “myself”.
Avalokiteshvara says that everything, including the five skandas and everything that is in them, are absolutely empty. None of it has separate, substantial, concrete existence at all. It is all only connection and flow and movement, with nothing that is moving. Our experience is not illusory, it is all happening, but it isn’t the way it seems. Often the analogy is given of a snake and a rope. A rope is coiled up on the path, and you are scared, thinking it is a snake. But it is not what you think it is. It is a rope. So something is there, but you completely misunderstood what it is. That is the case with human experience: something is there, but it is empty, but we don’t know that.
So the world is empty of appearance and full of inconceivability, freedom, and beauty. Since Avalokiteshvara, through her practice of prajna paramita, sees the actual nature of the world, she is naturally free from suffering, because suffering is caused by mistaking the world for something that it is not. Avalokiteshvara does not need to do the laborious work of purification, practices, and studies that was done previously. She does not need to work on her emotions and develop positive qualities, because through practicing the empty nature of phenomena, she is already free of defilements. She does not need to make a special effort to cultivate good qualities, as seems to have been the case in early Buddhism.
Avalokiteshvara is practicing seeing the world as empty, boundless, perfect. Unfortunately, we do not see the world in this way. We are convinced that the rope is really a snake. We think that one thing is separate from another. We do not know that things are empty; otherwise, why would we fear death and illness? Why would we be attached to our desires? Why would we think that the unhappiness of others does not matter to us, or that the happiness of others is not our happiness?
The reason why Avalokiteshvara is relieved from all suffering when she practices emptiness is that seeing separateness is the cause of all human problems. We have a conviction from the bottom of our souls that we are not the world and the world is not us.
In terms of the subjective self, what would our world be without food, family, culture, friends, thoughts, experiences, or events? Who would we be? What we call “my self” is a focal point around which unique set of ever-changing influences coalesces. But with the practice of emptiness, the world of matter and the world of subjectivity are seen as empty of separation or solidity. Once you practice this, and not just think it, and integrate it as a whole way of living, then you are saved from suffering.
In actual practice, this is not some “aha” moment of seeing emptiness. There may be many such “aha” moments, but this is mainly cultivated over time. There are three kinds of prajna: the prajna that comes from hearing, teaching, and studying; the prajna that comes from your own thoughts about the empty nature of things; and the prajna that comes from a deep turning inside and having an experience of emptiness. We need to practice all three, regularly, over time, like polishing a jewel until it shines.
Our troubles and suffering are the most instructive study of all. The more that we study the direct relationship between suffering and seeing the world as separate, the more we train ourselves in living and feeling the empty nature of phenomena. Little by little, we have more confidence in this and begin to live in this way. This confidence is not conceptual; it is more a feeling about living. Over time there is a lightness in our living, and it becomes possible to feel ease and joy, even when things are difficult.
O SHARIPUTRA FORM DOES NOT DIFFER FROM EMPTINESS EMPTINESS DOES NOT DIFFER FROM FORM THAT WHICH IS FORM IS EMPTINESS THAT WHICH IS EMPTINESS FORM THE SAME IS TRUE OF FEELINGS PERCEPTIONS FORMATIONS AND CONSCIOUSNESS
The rest of this sutra is a quotation in which Avalokiteshvara is speaking to Shariputra. Who is Shariputra? The Mahayana sutras are slightly satirical, and they were making fun of all these old guys going around analyzing the dharma. Shariputra is the leading expert of abhidharma. He represents the tradition of laborious analysis of dharmas that seem to have a big load of “own being”. The Heart Sutra is a kind of light hearted romp though the abhidharma. So Shariputra is the fall guy, and that is why the whole sutra is directed at him. In Buddhist psychology, there had been a shred of “own being,” as represented by Shariputra, but here Avalokiteshvara is trying to straighten him out.
Now we come to the naming of the five skandas. “Form does not differ from emptiness and emptiness does not differ from form.” Form just happens to be the first skanda named, but the same is true for the other skandas: feelings, perceptions, formations, and consciousness. The whole world, all of our experiences, can be neatly categorized into these five heaps. It is actually a practice to view your experience as forms, feelings, perceptions, formations, or consciousness, instead of in terms of “me”.
I will briefly define these five. It is interesting that form is defined as “that which can be molested” – molested as meaning “pushed out of shape.” Think about it: you can’t take a feeling and break it or bend it. A feeling cannot be grabbed and pushed out of shape. The same is true of perceptions, formations, and consciousness. But form, or stuff in the world, can be bent or broken. This definition of form especially includes the body.
Feelings are deep, unconscious, gut reactions that we have as soon as there is cognition of anything that is inside or outside. This gut reaction comes from past conditioning – positive, negative, or neutral. What do we do next? We see it, perceive it, and then call it some object. Perception is a fairly complicated operation based on a form, an organ meeting that form, a feeling arising, and then an interpretation. Perception is an interpretation, and once we make that interpretation, we put it together in our personality or field of life, resulting in formations, or samskaras. We then have impulses and strategies for dealing with these formations that are added onto the identification of what something is. Consciousness is the field of awareness in which all this is happening.
According to the Abhidharmists, this is what constituted a personality – the flow of these five kinds of experiences. It was the arising and passing away, moment by moment, of a whole concatenation of experiences, which we fail to see in their complexity. What is really going on is form, feeling, perception, and formation of impulses in the field of awareness. Our way of experiencing our lives could change if we see ourselves in terms of the five skandas.
And now we are told in this sutra that even these experiences are empty of own being. They are not what they seem to be. In early Buddhism the goal was nirvana: to let go and to find peace. But now nirvana also is a kind of emptiness. In early Buddhism the idea was that the skandas still has a shred of “own being” that we could eliminate through laborious practices and purification, and then we would finally enter nirvana. With the Heart Sutra, the fact that all these skandas are empty to begin with tells us that no laborious transformation is necessary. Since the nature of dharmas is empty, it is already nirvana. Practices still may be necessary. Maybe you still practice meditation, but what is different is the attitude you have about it. You can see that you would have a more easygoing, lighthearted spirit. It’s a much better attitude than, “Oh I am so bad, and I am trudging toward goodness, and it is a lot of hard work!” It is a more light hearted spiritual practice when you start out with the good news of Avalokiteshvara.
So then, as Dogen says, your practice becomes the unfolding of enlightenment. It is a delight and a joy, even if it is hard work. So the attitude is different, even if to the outside eye the practice appears to be the same. We know that it is all emptiness and it is all an illusion, but still, what else is there to do?
Third in a series of five talks on this central Mahayana teaching.
(Transcribed and Abridged by Barbara Byrum)
The Heart Sutra
Lecture Three
The style or method of teaching in the Heart Sutra is actually deceptive because it looks like it is logical and something that you can philosophically unpack, but in fact the whole sutra is like a mantra. It works on you mantrically and gets into your bones when you chant it. In the beginning of my practice we chanted this sutra everyday for years before we had any idea of its philosophical background. The chanting itself is probably a truer message of what the Heart Sutra is saying than any philosophical discussion. So the Heart Sutra is a mantric, magic teaching. It is good to study it, but it is much better to feel it in your bones more as dharma poetry, as something that comes out of the experience of sitting.
The Heart Sutra is all about emptiness as a lived reality of our lives, so in all my talks I have been trying to express the meaning of this term shunyata, or emptiness. It means that everything in the world – objects, persons, thoughts, feelings, outer space – is empty of what is called “own being”, which means it is empty of a separate, fixed, independent existence. To say that something is empty is not to say that it does not exist. Things do exist, but not in the way that we think. Everything is empty of separateness, fixedness, and independence, so everything is radically connected, fluid, and interdependent. Everything depends on everything else. Nothing can be ripped out of the fabric of being because everything is interdependent.
We also are empty. It is not that we look around and see all those things that are empty. We are part of that emptiness. Isn’t this great, and aren’t you happy to hear this! You are empty of own being, and so therefore the pressure is off. You don’t need to feel alone and that you are bearing the weight of responsibility of your own life, not to mention the weight of the world. We all feel this crushing weight of the responsibility to be the person we are, but the good news is that we don’t have to worry about that, because we are not that kind of person and we don’t have that kind of responsibility. But also, the pressure is really on, because the empty nature of oneself and everything else means that all our actions, thoughts, and feelings are everywhere interconnected and cannot be ripped out of being. Everything matters. Every thought and feeling, even if we don’t think they are important, matter in making the world moment after moment. So we are participating in the world, and therefore the pressure is on. So we need to work toward the good, and we are not off in our own corner. But, on the other hand, this pressure is not so bad if we recognize that we are interdependent beings, and the pressure is not fixed on us alone. There is great joy in belonging to the world. We may be responsible for everything, but we have lots of helpers and are never apart from them.
An introductory remark I would like to make concerns the translation of the Heart Sutra from Sanskrit to Chinese. In translating the word for emptiness, the Chinese used the wonderful character “sky”. So when you are reading or chanting the Heart Sutra in Chinese, you use the word “sky”. This contributes to its mantra – like and poetic quality, because you are repeating over and over the word “sky”. Everything is sky. The whole world is sky. Thoughts, feelings, perceptions, impulses, consciousness are all sky. The whole world is not nailed down, heavy, or weighty. The whole world is sky – vast, clear, transparent, open, empty. So it might be good to forget the word “emptiness” and think, “sky life, sky world”. All our troubles are sky troubles.
The final introductory remarks I would like to make concern the examination of the nature of the self in the Heart Sutra. In order to talk about this, we backed up into pre Heart Sutra Buddhist psychology against which the Heart Sutra is arguing. The Buddha was concerned with suffering in human life. He wanted to know how we could see through suffering, and he realized the most obvious thing: that it is we who cause are own suffering, not the world. For example, if your car breaks down or your bank account disappears, there is no inherent problem in that if you weren’t there! Maybe you can’t do anything about your bank account, but you can do something about you. So the Buddha thought that he would not worry so much about things in the world that cause suffering, but he would worry about the person who finds these things to be the cause of suffering. Nothing that happens is inherently good or bad; it is a matter of how we feel about it. So, since you can’t fix the world or control what is going to happen, let’s look more deeply at the self.
The Buddha saw that the problem is that we are all deeply conditioned from early life to believe that we have a self that is fixed, separate, and independent. This is a self, by its very nature, which is extremely vulnerable in the world. The Buddha wanted a way that a person could train himself to see the self in another way. That is why he taught the practice of analysis of the five skandas, because that was an alternative to the fixed identity and separate self. The skandas are a practice of mental and emotional yoga. The Buddha said that instead of having the attitude “this is good for me and I like it, and this is bad for me and I don’t like it,” be more intimate with your experience and look at what is physical, look at the feelings that arise, look at the reactions to your experience, look at your perceptions, and look at the sky-like awareness in which all these things are taking place. Train your mind and your heart to look at your experience in this way, and don’t be so fixated on yourself as a separate, independent self. And if you do that, you will have less suffering.
This is really the truth. I recommend that you consider meditating in this way on your experience in this way. When you find yourself thinking, “This is good for me. This is bad for me,” realize that you do not have to think in this way. Look more intimately at the nature of your experience, and your life will be changed. This is how the early Buddhists were trained to experience what was happening to them on a moment by moment basis. They learned that idea of a fixed self was a cause of suffering, that it was not necessarily real, and that it could be dispensed with.
So the Buddhists pre Heart Sutra thought that the self was not real but that the experiences that arose were real. They defined the tiniest, most conceivable moment of real experience, as a dharma. One could categorize every dharma that arose in one of the five “heaps”. So the self was not real, but the dharmas were real. A dharma had its “own being” and was a fixed, real independent basis for experience.
There were two problems with asserting the own being of dharmas. First, anytime that you assert that something is fundamentally real, then you have to defend it. If it is something that can be attacked and something that you can cling to, you set suffering in motion. Another problem is that the analytical approach to working with mind tends to set up a world in which you become extremely self focused. Your main focus is on your own experiences. Even though the goal is to be liberated from self, the method puts so much emphasis on watching your experience that you might just miss the fact that the world is full of other beings, and that the most important thing is love. To be sure, the early teachings of Buddhism did teach about compassion and love, but if you consider the way in which it was taught, you realize that compassion and love were taught in the service of seeing through the self. Compassion and love were seen as antidotes to self clinging, but they weren’t ends in themselves in the early teachings.
In the Mahayana schools they were inspired by compassion, and they began with compassion as the fundamental principle. You can see that if you begin with compassion and love, you eventually are going to become very disgusted with these dharmas. You see that everyone is so fixated on analyzing their experiences that they don’t really have a warm hearted feeling toward others. Eventually one comes around to the fact that all dharmas are empty of own being, and that the whole world is connected, one thing flowing freely in and out to another. So, if you start from compassion, you are going to find your way to emptiness.
On the surface the Heart Sutra seems to be analytical: no eyes, no ears, etc. It actually goes though the whole map of Buddhist psychology in list form. But in reality the Heart Sutra is enthusiastic, incantatory, and poetic. It is the poetry of sky mind. This is why many commentators have not understood why the Heart Sutra can be so analytic and then end with a mantra. If you understand the Heart Sutra in the way I have been speaking, it makes sense that the whole thing is a mantra. The whole Heart Sutra is more mantric than it is philosophic or analytical. What is the point of analyzing things that are not really there in the sense in which you are analyzing them? So the Heart Sutra is really a mantra.
The next line in the Heart Sutra is:
O SHARIPUTRA ALL DHARMAS ARE MARKED WITH EMPTINESS THEY DO NOT APPEAR NOR DISAPPEAR ARE NOT TAINTED NOR PURE DO NOT INCREASE NOR DECREASE
This brings up another important point that we have not discussed. In the system of dharmas that I discussed, there were 75 types of dharmas, but there was one fundamental division between dharmas. On the one side were “conditioned” dharmas – that is, the world, including oneself: feelings, thoughts, and so on. Most of the 75 dharmas were conditioned. On the other side were the dharmas that are “unconditioned” dharmas, called “unworldly dharmas.” These are the dharmas of the liberated and religious life. There are only three unconditioned dharmas: space and two kinds of nirvana. One kind of nirvana is what the Buddha experienced in his lifetime when he completely lets go and enters the unconditioned; except that since he is still walking around and living his life, he has a remainder of dharmas from the past that will be exhausted at the end of his life. When he ends his life he then enters the second kind of nirvana which is called the nirvana of no remainder. This is the final and complete nirvana when his entire life force enters unconditioned peace and union.
So these are the three unconditioned dharmas: space, nirvana with remainder, and nirvana without remainder. The three unconditioned dharmas are pure by definition. All the conditioned dharmas by definition are impure. The three unconditioned dharmas have the characteristic of absolute peace and are always going on; therefore, do not appear. I am talking here in the context of the Heart Sutra that indicates dharmas that do not appear or disappear, are not tainted or pure, and do not increase or decrease. If they do not increase, they are complete. Nirvana is complete and totally pure and total completion. The conditioned dharmas are impure, incomplete, and need ongoing restless energy. This explains the lines in the Heart Sutra. It says that dharmas do not appear nor disappear, are not tainted nor pure, and do not increase nor decrease. In other words, conditioned dharmas and unconditioned dharmas are not two different things. There are no conditioned dharmas as we have understood conditioned dharmas, and there are no unconditioned dharmas as we have understood unconditioned dharmas. Neither one of them as previously defined exists at all. It is all just one reality.
Nirvana is no more at rest than we are in our incompleteness and restlessness. There is rest at the heart of our seeming restlessness. Conditioned dharmas are also unconditioned, and unconditioned dharmas are also conditioned. The distinction between the two is spurious altogether. Nirvana and samsara are not two different entities. They are one.
This teaching of the Heart Sutra is the whole basis of the non dual teaching of Zen. That’s why the Heart Sutra is so important to Zen practitioners because it is the basis for the Zen approach to practice and life. There is fundamentally nothing that we can point to as enlightenment and nirvana, and there is nothing fundamentally real that we need to change as samsara. To recognize that this is so, and to live from this perspective, is the only enlightenment. And that enlightenment, of course, is not some fixed, independently existing thing.
This is important for us because we feel caught in the conditioned world, and we are longing spiritually for a respite from that conditioned world. Or maybe we like this conditioned world and wish it were improved. But the Heart Sutra teaches us that even that which is most troublesome to us in the conditioned world is itself already complete, at rest, and peaceful. Many of our Zen teachings hinge precisely on this point. When Zhaozhou says to the monk, “wash your bowls”, he is saying don’t seek some special, unconditioned world, just take care of your bowls. Nirvana is right there. All peace and all completion is right there if only you would see your bowls as they really are. It is the same thing when Nanchuan says that everyday mind is the way. He is saying don’t look for some special spiritual realm apart from the everyday. This is the fundamental basis for all Zen teachings.
Fourth in a series of five talks on this central Mahayana teaching.
The Heart Sutra
Lecture Number Four – Zoketsu Norman Fischer
Edited and transcribed by Ryusen Barbara Byrum
O SHARIPUTRA ALL DHARMAS ARE MARKED WITH EMPTINESS THEY DO NOT APPEAR NOR DISAPPEAR ARE NOT TAINTED NOR PURE DO NOT INCREASE NOR DECREASE THEREFORE IN EMPTINESS NO FORM NO FEELINGS NO PERCEPTIONS NO FORMATIONS NO CONSCIOUSNESS NO EYES NO EARS NO NOSE NO TONGUE NO BODY NO MIND NO COLOR NO SOUND NO SMELL NO TASTE NO TOUCH NO OBJECT OF MIND NO REALM OF EYES UNTIL NO REALM OF MIND-CONSCIOUSNESS NO IGNORANCE AND ALSO NO EXTINCTION OF IT UNTIL NO OLD AGE AND DEATH AND ALSO NO EXTINCTION OF IT
In this sutra dharma is a technical term that means “the smallest conceivable real entity”, which could be either physical or mental. A dharma is a moment of experience and can last the time of a finger snap. So a dharma is a building block of experience that can be either physical or non physical.
It is interesting to note that in Buddhist thought there is no fundamental distinction between mind and matter as there is in the West. It is understood, of course, that there is a difference, but the difference is not that important. Buddhism starts from the principle that the Buddha himself started with – that everything flows out of a concern for suffering. And remember that in Buddhism suffering does not mean just anguish and pain. Of course it includes that, but it goes much deeper. It means the restless, trouble generating nature of all experience that is always going on, even when you think that you are happy. Beginning with the understanding that experience is this way, and finding a way to transform this experience, is the important distinction in Buddhism. Whether an unconditioned dharma is mental or physical, it is within the realm of restless experience. So the important distinction is not between mind and matter; it is between the conditioned and the unconditioned. Conditioned dharmas are the restless trouble generating sort of experiences, and the unconditioned dharmas are peaceful, liberated, and free. There are three kinds of unconditioned dharmas: space and the two kinds of nirvana – the nirvana with remainder in which you are still living, and the nirvana without remainder in which you no longer appear to be living. The whole point of Buddhism is to move from the conditioned dharmas to the unconditioned dharmas.
The Heart Sutra denies the primary distinction between the conditioned and the unconditioned dharmas. All dharmas – both the conditioned and the unconditioned – are equally empty. There is no real entity to be found among them. And remember, to be empty means not to be fixed, independent, or separate. Nirvana or enlightenment is not fixed, independent, or separate. Samsara or suffering is not fixed, independent, or separate. So in this sense the suffering world and the possibility of quiescence are identical. Nirvana and samsara, enlightenment and suffering, are words to describe the same phenomenon. This is the incredible assertion of the Heart Sutra which flies in the face of a thousand years of Buddhist practice.
This is a radical view. If samsara is the world, and nirvana is what by definition is transcendent and beyond the world, then the Heart Sutra defies our whole way of thinking about the world. It is saying that what “is” and what “is not” are identical. The concepts that are so fundamental to our thinking and being in the world don’t hold up. The Heart Sutra tells us that what we have been projecting as ourselves and the world does not exist, and the hope for relief from the world, whether it is God or Buddhism or Zen, is just a pernicious and erroneous concept. In fact, the whole implication of the thinking in the Heart Sutra is that whatever we conceptually project is by its very nature always wrong, because every conceptualization is of a fixed, separate, and independent entity. At the same time, all of our conceptualizations are right because all phenomena, including our conceptualizations, are empty, perfect, and not different from reality and truth.
So this is a very mind bending and paradoxical notion. It is not a matter of being right or wrong about things, but being wrong about things with a more cheerful attitude! Wrongness, rightness, and anything in between are empty of any fundamental reality, which is to say that everything is fluid and perfectly interdependently mixed up.
This is the passage we are discussing.
ALL DHARMAS ARE MARKED WITH EMPTINESS THEY DO NOT APPEAR NOR DISAPPEAR ARE NOT TAINTED NOR PURE DO NOT INCREASE NOR DECREASE
That would be enough to say, and in fact the Heart Sutra from then on gives more detail and does not say further than that. The next part, with the litany of no this and no that, is saying the same thing in more thorough detail. Everything without exception is empty; there are no loop holes. To make this point, the Heart Sutra enumerates every category of reality and says that this too is empty. It gives the entire Buddhist analysis of perception and consciousness in shorthand form for the purpose of saying that each one of these elements is empty.
We have to be careful in using the word emptiness, because it is just a term, and to use the term emptiness at all implies that there could be the opposite, non emptiness. That is the problem with using the word because in fact there is no alternative to emptiness. So it would be better not to have the term emptiness, but rather to say “things are and are not just as what they are and are not”. But the concept of emptiness is propounded because it is meant to be provocative and is meant to create a contrast to our usual view which is so deeply and tragically mistaken. The point of emptiness is that it destroys all views.
Here is the Buddhist analysis of perception that is now given. It begins: THEREFORE IN EMPTINESS. The word “therefore” is a bit wrong because it sounds logical, and it is not logical. The word “in emptiness” is wrong because it implies a container and things are inside it. Understanding that caveat, we now list the five skandas, or five “heaps”. This is a way of analyzing human experience, dividing our experiences into the categories or skandas of forms, feelings, perceptions, formations or impulses, and consciousness. Instead of seeing our experiences in terms of what we like or dislike, we can understand our experience in terms of the skandas.
The Heart Sutra says that no matter how useful we may have found the five skandas, they are empty of reality other than as designations. It says that the analysis of experience that we have been practicing is not necessary. You don’t need to analyze your experience; you need only to be intimately present with your experience to know its empty nature. So the five skandas are empty.
The next item on the list of analysis is perception. How does perception work? Perception is hugely important because without it there is no world. By our act of perception we co-create the world. If we could understand how we do this, maybe we could live in a world that is less restless and troublesome.
The analysis of perception is that there are six sense organs. This is striking because there are six and not five sense organs. Here the mind is considered as a sense organ. In the same way that an eye sees an object, the mind cognizes a non-physical object, which could be a thought, feeling, or emotion. So perception has six sense organs, six appropriate objects for each of the sense organs, and then for experience to be possible in the world, there has to be a third element: the organ of perception, the object, and the particular form of consciousness that arises out of the connection between the organ and the object, and out of that contact arises an awareness specific to that kind of perception. The reference in the sutra to “realm of eyes” and “realm of mind consciousness” refers to this consciousness.
This is how the early Buddhists figured out how the world is co-created on a moment to moment basis. The human world is created as a relationship. It is not a thing sitting over there. The world comes to be when organ, object, and contact consciousness arises. That is the world. So the world is a dynamic, constant creation which requires an organ and object of perception coming together at the same time.
The next on the list of how the world is constructed is the element of causality. Laws of causality propel this consciously created world forward. The traditional discussion of causality is the twelve-fold chain. The sutra says,
CONSCIOUSNESS NO IGNORANCE AND ALSO NO EXTINCTION OF IT UNTIL NO OLD AGE AND DEATH AND ALSO NO EXTINCTION OF IT
Ignorance is the first item in the chain of causation, and old age and death are the last items, so the sutra skips all the rest. I will explain the twelve of them….briefly! It’s like eating a big meal; it takes a long time and you are probably full at the end.
The first in the twelve fold chain of causation is ignorance or misapprehension. It means that within the total perfection of reality is a tiny stirring of unbalance that is a suggestion of the possibility of fixedness, separation, and independence, which disturbs the primordial unity or perfection. The second is karmic formations. This means that the initial stirring is approaching the feeling of otherness. The third is consciousness that now arises because of that sense of separation. There is no consciousness without a sense of separation, because consciousness arises when there is something to be conscious of. The fourth is name and form. Now we have full blown mind and matter. The fifth item is beings. There are no beings until the sixth item which is the senses. Now there are beings with capacity to differentiate in detail a world.
Now we have the whole world of beings and matter and mind. The next four items –six through ten – detail the whole tragic and mistaken way in which mind interacts with the stuff of experience. The sixth one is the contact between the organ and the object. Once there is contact, there is feeling which is always in a relative state of reactivity, and once there is reactivity, there is clinging. The reaction can also take the form of flight, trying to push away, which another form of the same energy. The clinging becomes more urgent and becomes grasping, which bears fruit as becoming. The eleventh is birth, and the twelfth is sickness, old age, and death, which is the consequence of birth. Without birth there can be no death, so birth is the cause of death. I have suggested this to my doctor friends. They should not write on the death certificate that the cause of death was cancer or heart disease. They should just write that the cause of death was birth!
The twelve fold chain of causation is meant to be seen from three different perspectives. On one level, a being is born as a result of all the steps or trouble that has gone before. It is also meant to be the process by which every moment is born and dies. It is also meant to be a cosmology or description of how things arise even if there weren’t beings. It is poetic and is not meant to be taken too literally.
When the sutra says there is no ignorance and no extinction of it, it means that ignorance is the conditioned world and the extinction of it is the unconditioned world. It is saying that the conditioned and unconditioned versions of the twelve fold chain do not exist as you think that they do. They are not two real, separate entities. They are empty and existing in identity and unity. So the twelve fold chain does not arise in the way that we think it does, and it does not pass away in the way that we think it does. The arising that we imagine is happening in this world and the extinction, or the peace that we might imaginatively long for, are both equally fantasies. They are fluid, and there is no way to separate out what is arising and what is being extinguished.
To conclude, what does this mean to us on a practical day to day level? A thought or emotion that was so strong and palpable before you sat down will dissolve and become quiescent just by sitting and being present. This happens sometimes. You then realize that the thought or emotion is empty. If I just sit with the thought, and be present with the thought, and give myself up to the presence of that thought, the empty nature of that thought will heal me from the pain of it. If we are really being present when we are sitting, we are giving ourselves to the empty nature of phenomena, and letting the empty nature heal what ails us. The nature of things is not only when we are sitting. The nature of things is all the time, but when we sit, we are sitting still for it. Normally we are thrashing around, but when we sit, we allow reality to do its work.
On an everyday level, emptiness means to practice with a flexible mind and not getting stuck on your point of view. Things are never the way that you think they are. Respect that. You make effort in your practice and living to do your best, but you make that effort with joy, cheerfulness, and always with some sense of humor. How could you not have a sense of humor in this world in which things are coming and going in this troublesome way, but are all empty?
And kindness. Practice with the kindness that arises when you realize that there is no separateness. Others cannot be separate from you, and you cannot be separate from others. We are all flowing in and out of each other in the soup of emptiness.
Fifth in a series of five talks on this central Mahayana teaching.
(Transcribed and Abridged by Barbara Byrum)
The Heart Sutra
Lecture Number Five
NO SUFFERING NO ORIGINATION NO STOPPING NO PATH NO COGNITION ALSO NO ATTAINMENT WITH NOTHING TO ATTAIN THE BODHISATTVA DEPENDS ON PRAJNA PARAMITA AND THE MIND IS NO HINDRANCE WITHOUT ANY HINDRANCE NO FEARS EXIST FAR APART FROM EVERY PERVERTED VIEW ONE DWELLS IN NIRVANA IN THE THREE WORLDS ALL BUDDHAS DEPEND ON PRAJNA PARAMITA AND ATTAIN UNSURPASSED COMPLETE PERFECT ENLIGHTENMENT THEREFORE KNOW THE PRAJNA PARAMITA IS THE GREAT TRANSCENDENT MANTRA IS THE GREAT BRIGHT MANTRA IS THE UTMOST MANTRA IS THE SUPREME MANTRA WHICH IS ABLE TO RELIEVE ALL SUFFERING AND IS TRUE NOT FALSE SO PROCLAIM THE PRAJNA PARAMITA MANTRA PROCLAIM THE MANTRA THAT SAYS GATE GATE PARAGATE PARASAMGATE! BODHI! SVAHA!
Last time we mentioned that the Heart Sutra lists the fundamental Buddhist doctrines and then it says that they are not so. It denies the fundamental reality of all these things that were thought to be basic points of Buddhist thought. It says that these doctrines are not so in the way that you thought they were so. We went through the five skandas, which were seen to be empty of own being. We went through the six sense organs, the six sense objects, and the consciousness that arises. And last week we went through the twelve fold chain of causation, a kind of moral physics of the universe, all of which were denied, not only the twelve fold chain of causation, but the possibility of reversing the chain and entering the unconditioned was also denied. All of these things were said to be empty.
Again, as I have said many times, empty does not mean nothing. Things do exist but in a mode that is fundamentally and radically different from the way that we think that they exist. How do we think they exist? We are convinced in our gut that things are separate, fixed, independent, solid, weighty, and “out there”. The Heart Sutra says that things are not like that. They are all a fluid, connected, flowing reality. So, in this sense, we could say that nothing – no thing – exists. A thing is something ripped out of the fabric of the world, like me, or like you. But that thing does not exist. We are each a bright space on which everything in the world converges.
Now, in the passage that I just quoted, we have another item of Buddhist philosophy that is enumerated so that it can be denied. This item includes the Four Noble Truths, the cornerstone of Buddhist thought. The first is the truth of suffering. Suffering does not mean that everything is depressing and negative, and if we don’t think so, we are kidding ourselves. We all know through our personal experience that although we may experience a certain amount of depressing and difficult things, we also experience a certain amount of joy and delight. So the truth of suffering is not denying that we feel that joy, it is saying that because of the nature of human consciousness, we experience an underlying sense of anxiety or restlessness, even in moments of happiness, if we look closely enough, because we sense the ungraspable and temporary nature of our experience. We know that this moment of happiness, no matter how beautiful it may be, is fleeting. This bothers us existentially. This is not to mention all the unhappiness that can pile up – the loss, the death –you can make your own list. So all conditioned reality, whether it is joyful or depressing, is all called duhka, or suffering.
The second Truth is the origination or cause of suffering. In the earliest layers of the Buddhist teaching, it was said that desire is the cause of suffering, but as the discussion went on through the generations, it became more subtle, and instead of being sensual desire, it was more a question of a deeper, unconscious desire that things would be graspable and that they would last. The need for things to be other than they are is the cause of suffering. The desire is constant, and so the suffering is constant.
The third of the Nobel Truths is the stopping of suffering. That is to say, if we can discover the cause of suffering, we can suppress the suffering. So in the Heart Sutra, seeing the empty nature of phenomena, seeing the true aspect of things as they are, is to see that our desire to grasp something is ridiculous, because there is nothing to be grasped. If we see this fact completely and experientially, there is the stopping of suffering.
The fourth Truth is the truth of the path, the way of stopping the cause of suffering and finding peace. There are many ways to describe the path; one is the Threefold Path of ethical conduct, morality, meditation or insight. The earliest one was the eightfold path that we would have an understanding perfectly according to reality: viewpoint, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration. The last three have specifically to do with meditation practice. And when these last three were developed properly, they would lead to right understanding, which is the first of the eightfold path. So you are going over and over again: deeper understanding leads to deeper intention, which leads to deeper effort, and so on. There is an endless refinement until we get past the havoc of suffering.
So these Four Truths are the cornerstones of the edifice of Buddhist teaching, but the Heart Sutra says, “No suffering. No origination. No stopping. No path”, which is to say they are empty of any fixed and fundamental reality. They are simply concepts that are no different from any other concepts floating around in our minds, and they are not different from anything that we would see or hear or touch or taste, because everything flows together. There is no separate thing called the Four Noble Truths.
Since there are no Four Noble Truths, it stands to reason that there is no cognition of the Four Truths, no cognition of fixed, separate, distinguishable truths. Also there is no attainment of wisdom, as had been promised earlier: if only you penetrate these truths, then you will attain a cognition and wisdom of them, and you will achieve nirvana. But there is no attainment of these truths in the way that we thought. There is no cognition and there is no attainment of wisdom. To say that there is cognition or attainment is to say that there is a fixed, separate object to be cognized and a fixed, separate state called nirvana to be attained. But there is no separate fixed object or state to be cognized, because in emptiness all such distinctions are mere designations, provisional concepts. So we could say there is an attainment, as long as we recognize that it is a provisional designation, a conceptual statement that had no fundamental reality.
So the Boddhisattva harmonizes with things as they are: free, connected, endless, without a single obstruction anywhere. So, as the sutra says, how could there be any hindrance? Acts of perception and thought, all volition, thought and experience, whether positive, negative, or neutral are without any hindrance. Everything is unfolding in this vast framework of emptiness. So, this being the case, the sutra says, what could we ever have to fear? I find it astonishing that the Heart Sutra mentions fear. There is a long list of technical propositions and Buddhist philosophy, and then there is the line about no fears. The Heart Sutra becomes human and emotional, and says that there is nothing to fear. Reflecting on this fact over the years, I have come to appreciate the strong and necessary association of fear with the first noble truth of suffering. We live with a strong, pervasive sense of fear; it is really common. Fear seems to be endemic to human experience. We start as children with the fear that there is a vast world standing over against us. We feel that we are in a state of constant threat. There are threatening, fearful forces, but where do they come from? These forces themselves are motivated by fear. Fear produces violence and confusion. Due to our universal existential fear, there is outer danger in the world as well.
But when we depend on prajna paramita and see the true shape of things as empty, then there is nothing to fear. What is the worst thing that could happen? The world could disappear, we could feel pain, we could die, but death is only connection, so what are we afraid of? The sutra says that it does not matter what is going on; there is nothing to fear. You may ask if this is really possible, to live in the world in this way? Well, since you asked, I would say “yes and no”. Yes, because I really believe the Heart Sutra. With a full integration into our daily living, with effort over time, we could live without fear. And no, at the same time we remain conditioned people. It is natural that we do not want to feel pain; it is natural that we do not want to die or to have those whom we love die. Still, with establishment in the practice of prajna paramita we can not want to feel pain, but still not be afraid of the pain. We can not want to die, but still not be afraid to die. But even if we have the fear of pain or death, that fear would not shake us to the core of our being. We can feel fear at the surface of our mind, a true, human feeling of fear at the surface of our mind, but feel a deep calm and fearlessness underneath. I think that is possible. The Heart Sutra is not just some idealistic religious text, but I think it is a possibility for an ordinary person.
Then the sutra says,
FAR APART FROM EVERY PERVERTED VIEW ONE DWELLS IN NIRVANA
It is called a perverted view when one sees things as having a separate existence. Maybe a better translation is “inverted view.” We see the world in the mirror opposite of what it is; it is an inverted view. When we see the empty nature of the world, we turn the world right side up, and instead of restlessness and anxiety, we have peace. That is nirvana: the flame of our restless passion is burned out. We are living in the conditioned realm but with an unconditioned feeling.
It then says,
IN THE THREE WORLDS ALL BUDDHAS DEPEND ON PRAJNA PARAMITA AND ATTAIN UNSURPASSED COMPLETE PERFECT ENLIGHTENMENT
Everywhere in time and space, all the Buddhas depend on prajna paramita and attain unsurpassed, complete enlightenment, with nothing beyond this enlightenment.
Then the sutra ends with a burst of enthusiasm. I have thought that the entire Heart Sutra was not meant to be a meaningful text, but was intended to be an incantation. Many people have told me that chanting the Heart Sutra would calm them down. It can be a meaningful and powerful experience just to chant it. I recommend committing it to memory and chanting it to yourself. Let it work from the inside and not from the mind, where we are usually working things out. Minds are important, but we don’t always have to use them. We can use the heart and the voice and the emotions to practice the Heart Sutra.
Fundamentally I think the whole Heart Sutra is a magical incantation, and at the end it becomes clear. The author of the sutra gets very enthusiastic at the end and says that this is all you have to do, this is a magic thing, just chant this and all these truths will become evident to you through the chanting of this mantra. The understanding of the world propounded by the Heart Sutra is more miraculous and magical by far than it is conceptual or even a meditative experience. I think it is beyond that. We might have a flash of insight into the empty nature of phenomena in meditation practice, but that is not what the Heart Sutra is pointing toward. It is pointing toward something more wonderful and magical than that, because these enchanting and wonderful things are not just happening now and then during meditation, they are happening all the time.
My favorite saying of Suzuki Roshi is, “The world is its own magic.” The world being empty of any separate thingness is at any moment completely marvelous. The healing that you need is right there in any state of mind.
By the way, as a footnote, if you will be sitting with the dying, if your parents are headed in that direction, it is very profound to chant the mantra at the end of the Heart Sutra. I often do this with my rosary beads 108 times.
GATE GATE PARAGATE PARASAMGATE! BODHI! SVAHA
Gone, gone, utterly gone, awakening…wow! Basically, that is what “svaha” means…wow!
I would like to end with my poem on emptiness:
What a Wonderful World
What seems separate, weighty, out there is actually already dissolved because the moving into it is a giving up of everything that has already been lost anyway.
So it is easy to do.
Everything works together, even griefs.
Nothing more clever than the mind to tangle things up in without which we couldn’t ever do or even ever appear.
Several Talks on the Book of talks by Suzuki Roshi (Part Two)
Zoketsu comments on Thich Nhat Hanh’s Transformation at the Base: Fifty Verses on the Nature of Consciousness. – a readable version by Nhat Hanh of the complicated Buddhist teachings on “Mind Only” philosophy, the nature of mind and karma.
Transformation at the Base (Talk 4 of 8)
Zoketsu Norman Fischer
Transcribed by Anne Johnson. Abridged and edited by Barbara Byrum and Cynthia Schrager
Welcome to our discussion of Transformation at the Base, Fifty Verses on the Nature of Consciousness, a book by Thich Nhat Hahn.
Briefly to review some of the things we already know, the eighth consciousness is sometimes defined as all the seeds. There is no separate entity that contains the seeds. “All the seeds” means absolutely everything: the sky, the sun, the moon, the stars, all the elements of your own body and mind and heart and spirit.
The seeds of this consciousness are indeterminate, which is to say they are neither good nor bad. They’re just there. It’s the karmic spin that is put on those seeds by virtue of action that makes them either good or bad. They manifest as either good or bad, but in and of themselves the seeds are neither.
So what we can extrapolate from these basic facts about reality, about the eighth consciousness, is that we can be confident in the course of our practice that it’s not really a matter of our skill and talent and effort. I’m in cooperation with all this, with everything, so that practice doesn’t depend on just me. It’s not just about me. It’s about my releasing myself to this big picture. In a way you could say that the eighth consciousness is the big picture, a wider perspective in which we are all held.
We are now ready to talk about manas. If it weren’t for the emergence of manas, there’s nothing in the picture of the eighth consciousness that would account for the suffering that is so pervasive and endemic to life in this world. Manifested life seems to be somehow enmeshed with suffering. All we have to do is think about our personal lives and history for about two seconds to realize it’s not getting any better. We’re not solving the problems. So what accounts for this? That’s where the emergence of manas, or self, from the eighth consciousness makes sense.
Manas is a product of fear, defensiveness and clinging. Manas is the energy to grip, to hold onto, to possess, to seize and control. It reduces the bigness of the eighth consciousness to something manageable. The seed of manas is in alaya, like the seed of everything else.
So the development of manas out of alaya is part of the necessary development. Consciousness is in a constant process of evolution and transformation. The arising of manas, with all the suffering it brings, is an inevitable and necessary part of the process of transformation. Even though manas is the cause in all suffering, it’s not as if it’s the bad guy that we’re trying to excise and eliminate. What we’re trying to do is understand its nature and understand its place in the process of transformation. So it’s not a mistake. It’s part of development, part of the way consciousness operates and evolves.
This is the challenge we’re all given: how to be a self and to transform through the process of being who we are. This is a quotation from Vasubandhu’s Fifty Verses about manas: “It evolves supported by alaya, and has the nature and character of thinking. It’s always accompanied by four passions: self-delusion, self-view, self-conceit and self-love.“
This is very interesting, because this teaching acknowledges that there is a difference between thinking itself and the sense of a subject that thinks. In other words, thinking arises when there is a subject that thinks. So manas is a basis for thinking, but it is not precisely the same thing as the act of thinking. These things are very, very close to one another. In these teachings, there is the sense of teasing out the difference between the feeling of being a subject and the activity that goes along with that feeling of being a subject: the flow of subjective experiences, thoughts, emotions, and so on.
One of the most important things about this whole way of thinking is that in Western thought, from the very beginning, there has been a big gap between mind and matter. They are categorically different kinds of things. In this teaching, they are not categorically different. A sense of subject manifests out of alaya. Out of a sense of subject emerges the mind, and out of the mind emerges the world. So this is saying there is no world without a subject. There is no world without subjectivity. We could imagine the idea of some sort of world in which there were no subjects, that there would be stuff like rocks and trees. But this says that the existence of anything at all can’t exist without the simultaneous existence of a subject.
How does manas develop? If we could for a moment pretend there is such a thing as the eighth consciousness independent of manas, it would be whole, complete, unified, continuous. There would be no basis for separation or discrimination. There would be no “this” or “that.” There would only be “is.” There would only be an all-inclusive flow of reality without any sense of discrete parts. But within this flow, within this big picture, there are some seeds that are called the “perceiver” and some seeds that we could call the “perceived.” So in other words, within this flow, there are elements that could be called “subjects” and elements that could be called “objects” that those subjects perceive.
The eighth consciousness itself includes all that. It’s like a picture, like a total world in which none of these things are separate or opposed to each other, but a total world in which they’re all arrayed. They appear. They flash into existence, and then they flash out of existence. They again flash in and out, and each picture is like a movie frame that changes a little bit, so there is an appearance of an ongoing flow. But it’s really a flashing in and a flashing out of the total frame. So that’s the way the eighth consciousness appears in every moment.
So it’s interesting to think that as beings we are coming and going in time, co-created with everything that exists in the world. We can imagine a person that’s abstracted from the world, but actually there is no such person. There could not be a person such as you or I without this entire world that has co-created that person and continues to co-create that person on every moment. We continue to evolve and change moment by moment in concert with everything that appears with us throughout our whole lives.
So that means when you are looking at the sky, it really is true that at that moment the sky is creating you as a person and you are creating the sky, because that sky that you experience would not be what it is without the experience of your perception of it. I often give the example of this moment that I am speaking to you. I feel that we are co-creating this moment. You are creating my speaking. I am creating you, and you are creating me. This is not a metaphor. On a very real level we are creating each other’s lives as I’m speaking and you’re listening. So this is how it is on every moment.
However, manas gets a little greedy. Not quite satisfied with this picture, manas grabs hold of the seed of the perceiver, and its energy grips the perceiver so tightly that it is seemingly ripped out of the picture. Manas then makes a representation of it, a false perception out of it, that is called “me.” This experience of subjectivity is not a problem, but the reification of a “me,” an “I,” a person, ripped from this picture, is a falsehood, a delusion. It’s a non-real entity. Manas is clinging to a false perception, a deluded representation with a very strong grip. Then based on that grip, and based on the belief in this deluded entity, thinking arises, and out of thinking a whole world of separation arises.
The whole world that we live in, the world that seems to be made of separate people and other objects, is a world created by manas. Our acts of perception, the way we perceive the world and feel about the world, is embedded in the delusion that manas creates. Then we’re afraid of being diminished. We’re afraid of somehow losing our body, losing our mind. We have longing for completion. And yet we’re already complete; it’s impossible to be incomplete. But these longings and fears create habit energies, until the grip of manas becomes quite strong. The sense of separation from the world becomes quite convincing.
So the seeds, which initially are indeterminate, not a problem in and of themselves, become seeds of suffering by virtue of the habit energies. These energies then harden into what the texts call fetters, chains. The habit energies harden into chains. So we become beings living under compulsion, basically without freedom. We become the victims of manas and our own perceptions. Then we want to say: Where did this come from? How come this is there in the beginning? Buddhists simply say, The energy of this manas has existed from beginning-less time, from beginning-less karma.
So again, to repeat, this is about the evolution, the transformation of consciousness. Our job here, and this is the revelation in this teaching, which I think is so useful for us, as Westerners, is that the Self has built into it a very deep, long-standing delusion that can be transformed. It has to be transformed, not eliminated, but transformed. That’s our job.
So in the end, what this really means is a transformation and an evolution toward a truly loving heart. Not a loving heart that is sentimental—like, I am over here and you, darling person, are over there, and I really love you, because you are so nice. Rather there’s an absolute identification and non-distinction between the subject and the world. Therefore, life is love. It’s a much more profound sense of identity and unity and affection.
Now getting really practical here, there are two levels to the way that we work on this process. One is on a very practical mundane daily level, and the other one is the continuous effort that we make through our meditation practice to see this reality for ourselves. So on one level, we have these chains, really strong habits. We have habit energies that reify and strengthen our habit of separation and alienation and fear. Our first job is to try to see these things when they arise, understand them for what they are, understand this whole picture that we are talking about and try to practice letting go. For example: Oh, this is not about her. This is my fear! This is not about this or that. This is my loneliness!
So we begin to see that and begin to loosen up around those things in our daily living. It’s gradual; it’s a long haul. But we have to go through this. We do that every day, all the time working on our habit energies.
The second level that we work on this is on our cushions. Through our contemplation and study, we really try to understand and train our way of thinking and our way of apprehending and feeling the world. We all have an understanding of the world that is just wrong. And this misunderstanding reinforces all of our worst habits. So we work on this in our practice, in our studies, listening to dharma talks. We especially do this on our own cushions through short sittings, long sittings, daily sittings. We work on letting the view that we and the world are not separate become part of our experience, part of our very body and mind.
So in our work in the dharma, in our daily life practice, on our cushions, we’re removing the coverings from manas. We allow the experience of subjectivity to be more and more inclusive with others and with the world. The nature of that inclusion is a relaxation, a loosening, a letting go of the grip of manas that sees the perceiver as a separate abiding entity. With that relaxation, the subject can take his or her true place in this picture and enter into a constant dialogue and sharing with all that is. So manas is not the enemy; ego is not the enemy. Ego does not need to be eliminated. Ego is the path. Self is the path.
Zoketsu comments on Thich Nhat Hanh’s Transformation at the Base: Fifty Verses on the Nature of Consciousness. – a readable version by Nhat Hanh of the complicated Buddhist teachings on “Mind Only” philosophy, the nature of mind and karma.
Zoketsu comments on Thich Nhat Hanh’s Transformation at the Base: Fifty Verses on the Nature of Consciousness. – a readable version by Nhat Hanh of the complicated Buddhist teachings on “Mind Only” philosophy, the nature of mind and karma.
Transformation at the Base: Fifty Verses on the Nature of Consciousness
(Talk 3 of 8)
Zoketsu Norman Fischer
Transcribed and edited by Anne Johnson, Barbara Byrum, and Cynthia Schrager
I am going to say more about the eighth consciousness. The eighth consciousness, as you will remember, is called the alaya consciousness, the storehouse consciousness. It is also called “all the seeds”to make it clear that it is not like some big box out there that holds the seeds. The eighth consciousness is not different from the seeds. It’s the sum total of all the seeds, of all that is. Everything – physical, mental, emotional – manifests from this eighth consciousness. It is never static. That which exists as a potential is constantly manifesting according to conditions.
The seeds that make up the eighth consciousness are neutral. They will not necessarily manifest as good, not necessarily manifest as bad. They have the potential for both. The way in which they manifest depends on a word that is often translated as “perfume” or sometimes translated as “habit energy.” The habit energy comes from our actions and reactions. We have the habit of strong, conditioned responses to a particular kind of phenomena. For example, we might see a person, whom we have never met, and the person is seemingly distant or reserved. We might be conditioned to think, He doesn’t like me. He’s ignoring me. He’s got a problem with me. Why would we react that way? Because of our seeds from the past, which are already perfumed such that we react in the same way. We strengthen the habit energy.
The habit energies can be transformed, because they don’t change the nature of the seeds. The nature of the seeds is neutral. If we can begin to change the habit energies, then the seeds can manifest differently. And that is the point of our practice. Maybe we can say, to extend the metaphor, that when we sit in zazen, we’re airing out the seeds. By being present with openness, by listening, creating space and breathing mindfully, we create the possibility that we will no longer be so compelled by our habit energies.
When the seeds manifest according to conditions, there is a perception. If our habit energy is strong enough, the perception is distorted, so that we see the world not as it is, but in a distorted way. And then we’ll react to the world that we ourselves created.
The teachings of Mind Only school go into the question of perception in more detail, because it’s important to see exactly how the perception is distorted and how to reverse that. The teachings say that there are three modes of perception. The first mode is called “things as they really are“—the direct and immediate perception of things, unmediated, uncalculating, undistorted. It has been called the perception of suchness.
The second mode of perception is called “representations.” The object is not seen directly. There are, because of habit energies and karma, distortions on top of that suchness. That’s ordinary, everyday perception. When you see another person, there is already some distortion. Just by looking, even if you don’t have any thoughts, the perception is already perfumed by the habit energy.
The third mode of perception is called “mirror images.” That’s when you see a tree with your eyes closed or in a dream. It is manifested simply by images in your mind.
So of these three modes of perception, the second and the third are false. If this is so, if all of our perceptions are distorted, even before we are thinking, is it possible for us to have direct perception? Can human beings have direct perception?
The six sense organs can have direct perception, especially seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching. When there is pure sensory experience without any judging or comparing, we have an immediate experience. It’s a taste of the realm of seeing things directly as they are. I think that’s the experience of beauty. When we really experience something, all of a sudden it arrests us, and we appreciate its immense beauty, such as a flower.
I have been encouraging us all to sit and listen to sound. When you listen to sound without mediation, sometimes, if the mind is clear enough, there can be pure sensation. But then, of course, right away after you have that experience, the sixth consciousness kicks in and explains, defines, compares, complains, and then it’s no longer immediate. It’s now mediated by the mind and the mental faculties. We can have a habit of always using our mind in that way, so that we very seldom have the experience of any kind of arresting moment of beauty.
So our goal here is not to stop our mind, not to have a sixth consciousness. The human journey is to have a mind with this powerful tendency to distortion and also to have the possibility that we can experience reality as it is, with all the transcendent aspects of life.
We’re on a double edged sword. On one hand, we have to admit how dark and murky our faculties are, and at the same time, we know that it’s possible for us to live life in some pure and direct way. Each one of us has this work to do to make that shift, not only for our happiness, but for everyone else’s.
I don’t think we’re trying to have every thought be pure and every moment pristine. That’s not the point, because we have these minds that produce confusion. The point is to know the difference between the two: to know distortion as distortion and to know clarity as clarity, and not to let our self be pushed around by our distortions. In sitting, we are not trying to have a certain kind of mind. We are trying to be present, letting what comes come, and then letting it go.
When you sit and listen, sitting in the present moment with a kind of feeling of openness, allowing things to come and go, there really isn’t that much difference between a thought that arises in your mind and the sound of a bird. It’s because you take the thought personally that it seems different. But both are in your mind, right? Both are equally experiences that arise. But we think that the bird is over there, but the thought is inside our skulls. But that is not really true.
So in that sense, we can have a direct perception, even of our delusions. Do you understand? If we have a direct perception, even of our delusions, we don’t take them so personally and don’t bemoan the fact, Oh no, there I am again! We can experience them as the same, as the direct experience of something beautiful. The human mind, and all of its confusion, is also something beautiful. So we’re not trying to have direct perception all the time. We’re just trying to enjoy direct perception when we have it and to be less tied up in knots, to know that distortion is always coming, and when it comes, we’re not fooled by it. We can even learn to appreciate it and enjoy it.
So to summarize working with habit energies: first of all, you realize that mostly what goes on is distortion. What we’re seeing is not necessarily what’s going on; it’s what we are seeing. We find ourselves caught in complicated story lines that cause us suffering, especially when we notice that they are the same ones that keep coming back over and over again. We notice that that is a complicated story line based on fundamental distortion. We catch ourselves; we recognize the story line. We slow ourselves down a little bit. The first thing is to know our mind and to know our habits.
Then it really helps to label it. To say what it is: this is a habit of distortion and confusion; this is my old habit of getting slighted and angry when I don’t really need to. It’s a habit. And apply a label to it, so as to stop the ongoing energy of a train of thought that goes on every single time we are confronted with a particular kind of phenomenon. We are convinced that that’s just the way it is, but it’s not. So we notice what’s going on, we label it for what it is, and we try to prevent that endless habit energy from strengthening itself over and over and over again.
The next thing is we try to forebear from acting on those moments of perception with body, speech and mind. We extend our capacity to be aware of what’s going on in our mind and heart. And we need to cultivate the ability to be a little bit more present. So you say, Oh! That’s going on again. I don’t need to do that anymore. That’s my old habit of self-clinging. If you go to therapy, maybe you have all kinds of ideas why you have that habit. But even if you don’t have any idea why you have that habit, you know that you do have it. And then you can know the effects that it has had on your life. So you name it, forebear and be patient.
One of my favorite things to say is that you don’t have to convince anybody not to stick their hand in a flame and hold it there for a long time. They don’t stick their hand in the flame and leave it there, because they know they’re going to get burned. And yet we do exactly that emotionally. We keep putting our hand in fires, and we wonder why we’re unhappy. Then our strategy for overcoming that is to take gigantic logs and throw them on the fire. This is exactly what we do. This is our way of making the fire go out, by putting giant logs on it. It would be folly to think that even if we immediately stopped putting logs on fire, that it would go out. It already has a lot of fuel. But it will burn out if you don’t add more fuel to it. What I am talking about concerning working with these distortions is just simply not to make it worse; eventually it gets better. All of our habit energies burn up. The fire burns out eventually, if we stop making it worse.
So that’s wisdom: just stop making it worse. Stop adding logs to that fire. In order to do this, we have all these great lists of Buddhist virtues, because it takes a certain amount of faith to do that. You have to believe it’s possible; you have to have enough mindfulness to notice it in the moment; you have to have enough patience to realize that you are not perfect and will make mistakes. You keep going. Otherwise you’d give up immediately. It takes a while.
When the eighth consciousness is purified, it is no longer called the eighth consciousness. It no longer is a store house for seeds; it is called the Great Mirror Wisdom. In this sense, the arhat, the Buddha, doesn’t have an eighth consciousness. The Buddha has the Great Mirror Wisdom. Each thing that appears in front of him is reflected back upon itself perfectly and beautifully. This is complete enlightenment, human perfection.
As human beings, we have no choice but to aim for it and make that our goal. If we don’t, we’ll always be dissatisfied. The only thing that will really satisfy us is absolute perfection, complete enlightenment. So we really have to try to practice in that way, knowing that it will take a long time. Maybe it’s just a dream, a projection of our minds. But it’s a beautiful dream, and since it’s a projection of our minds it’s real. It’s what we most truly are, and so we make that effort.
Zoketsu comments on Thich Nhat Hanh’s Transformation at the Base: Fifty Verses on the Nature of Consciousness. – a readable version by Nhat Hanh of the complicated Buddhist teachings on “Mind Only” philosophy, the nature of mind and karma.
Transformation at the Base: Fifty Verses on the Nature of Consciousness (by Thich Nhat Hanh)
Zoketsu Norman Fisher
May 2003
Transcribed by Anne Johnson. Abridged and edited by Barbara Byrum and Cynthia Schrager
Yogacara philosophy is difficult philosophically. It was useful to the Buddhists who wrote it, because whole Buddhist universities were involved in ongoing debates. It was very important to them to be able to prove and refute positions based on the principles that they had established and that Buddha had established long before. The academic side seemed germane to them, but it seems less so to us today.
That’s why Thich Nhat Hanh wrote his own text, I think. He realized that commentaries on Vasubandhu’s Transformation at the Base, Fifty Verses on the Nature of Consciousness – the source of Yogacara thought – would be important in terms of our practice and what this philosophy has to do with practice. So he wrote verses to emphasize the practice side.
The Mind Only teachings say that although we see our mind and our understanding of the world as rather small by virtue of our being conscious beings, our mind and our experience are much deeper and wider than we give credit for. Our own capacity, our own understanding, our own experience, and the nature of our own mind are bigger than we experience. We all think of ourselves as small, separate, modest persons living in a big, overwhelmingly complicated world.
In fact, on one level, while this may be the true story, on another level we contain the whole world within us. When you recognize that the nature of your consciousness is rooted in consciousness itself and that consciousness itself is the whole of reality, it really makes things different. It puts your problems in a very different context, when your experience is that your mind and soul are rooted in that consciousness.
According to the Mind Only schools of Buddhism — actually they are more accurately called “Manifestation Only” – everything is just a manifestation of mind. According to these schools, there is only consciousness. Everything is consciousness, and the variety of things in this world are simply different manifestations of consciousness. There are no real distinctions. This includes the big distinction between mind and matter. According to Yogacara, mind and matter are not fundamentally different things. They are both “transformation of consciousness.” The whole world is an evolution, a transformation of consciousness. Different kinds of matter are not fundamentally different from one another. So, within the tremendous diversity of this world, there is an underlying and fundamental unity.
Unity and diversity are not really contradictions. The image often given is waves and the ocean. A wave is just a manifestation of the ocean. A wave is not actually a graspable, separable, real thing. A wave is something where causes and conditions come to bear on the ocean, and the wave is produced. The wave crests for just a moment and falls back into the ocean. While you could say ocean and wave are two different things, on another level, they are not different at all. A wave is just an expression of the ocean. There is no ocean without waves; there is no wave without ocean.
So differentiation and unity are not opposites. They are not two different conditions or two opposing forces. There can’t be unity without diversity; there can’t be diversity without unity. They can’t possibly be separated.
We are like a wave, right? We are an individual manifestation. We might all agree that a wave is quite temporary and in motion. There’s no moment in which the wave is not utterly changing its shape; it breaks and is gone. So, none of us would think that we could get a very large box and go run out to the ocean and put a wave in a box. It’s a ridiculous idea. And yet we think of ourselves as that which can be put into a box. We say, This is myself. This is how I am. This is what I am. From this point of view, we’re like a wave that can be put in a box. But actually, each one of us is just a manifestation of consciousness. We are inseparable from the whole endless stream. Consciousness is very mysterious and beyond all categories and all definitions.
In keeping with the model of oneself as a separate entity, we believe that consciousness is something going on in my brain. But in this philosophy, consciousness is not that at all. Consciousness is indefinable. It cannot be an object. So something is going on in my brain, but it’s just a manifestation of something much wider. If we really appreciated that, we would view our life quite differently than something that could be put in a box.
So we might ask ourselves: What is it, in us, that doesn’t experience this reality? How come we don’t experience this reality? And then more importantly: How could we find a way to understand the wholeness of consciousness and live in accord with it? How could we find a way to really recognize the nature of consciousness more clearly and to live it more fully?
The Thirty Verses is the most famous text of the Mind Only school. It is a poem by Vasubandhu, consisting of thirty rhymed verses in Sanskrit. Later, Mind Only pundits wrote commentaries to the Thirty Verses. Thich Nhat Hanh wrote Fifty Verses and his own commentary. I thought I would quote the very beginning of Thirty Verses.
So here is the first stanza of the thirty stanzas, as translated by Cook in the book published by the Numata Center.
The metaphor of self and dharmas evolves in various ways upon the transformation of consciousness.
That’s the first point: dharmas, which is the world, is a metaphor!
In our western psychology, we have an idea of self and an experience of self; we have a developed sense of subjectivity. So to have a teaching that denies that the self is real is more difficult for us to grasp than a teaching that says: It’s not that the sense of self is not real and you should deny your experience of it; it’s just that you should understand that experience as a metaphorical experience rather than a fundamental experience.
We really experience a sense of exile from the world. The Yogacara teaching says: We understand that you have such an experience. This is a human experience, but recognize it as a metaphorical, evolving experience. It’s not a static experience. The underlying unity and its transformation into waves and water gives rise to these very convincing experiences that are essentially metaphorical.
The stanzas continue:
The transforming of consciousness is three-fold. Retribution is the first, thought is the second, and the third is perception of the external realm.
What is the nature of that transformation that gives rise to these metaphors? It’s threefold: retribution, thought, and perception of the external realm. The transformation of consciousness specifically means the metaphors of evolving and separating into a subjectivity and an objectivity. So consciousness, which is unitary, seems to transform into two different streams of subject and object – myself and the world. This is interesting, because that means that there is no subject without an object. There can’t be a you without a medium in which you would exist. And conversely there can’t be an objective world without a subject.
The transformation of consciousness transforms into three layers, or three realms. The first one, retribution, means manifestation. Something appears on a primordial level. This primordial appearance is the unity that is the source of the first transformation into subject and object. Existence itself is consciousness: all inclusive, primordial, including the potential for all individual being. It’s also called the alaya consciousness, the eighth storehouse consciousness. It stores the seeds of all potentials and manifestations of anything, including the manifestation of individual thoughts and memories.
The second realm is called, “thought,” or “manas,” which comes from this great unity of consciousness. Manas is the subject, the thought and perception of external reality – that is, the world.
The third realm is called perception of an external realm.
I think it is interesting that in early Buddhism, there are six consciousnesses. The six are the five sense consciousnesses plus the mind. There is some recognition that the mental faculty is somewhat different from the five sense faculties, but they’re considered to be in the same realm. There is no idea of self as a consciousness. The difficulty with that thought – especially for us as western people with a very developed sense of subjectivity and psychology – is that in this teaching the self does not exist; it’s not even part of the system. It’s a fiction.
So from our point of view, given our preconceptions and our predispositions as people in the west, this teaching from early Buddhism is tough. We think, Oh, so then I don’t exist and my goal is to disappear. In the Mahayana school, however, there is a recognition inspired by compassion. Let’s recognize that there is an experience of being a self, being a person, and rather than say it’s a fiction, let’s account for it in a way that leads to healing and transcendence. Let’s talk about oneness. Let’s talk about the embracing of the world instead of nirvana – the fiction of the self.
So these things are really two different maps of the same territory. But you can see the advantages of the Mahayana map for us. If our goal in the end is belonging and compassion, then we want to see the world this way. Whereas if we see the world in terms of nirvana and the fiction of the self, this might tend to be less inspiring to us to be compassionate and to engage with others.
It should be said that these ways of experiencing consciousnesses are metaphors. There’s no sense in which these are actually things that exist. They’re descriptions and metaphors, which if we follow them, lead us to liberation; whereas, the metaphor of self and world, if we follow it to its logical conclusion, leads to pain and suffering. If we see that the self and the world are at odds with each other – a small self over here in the face of a tremendous crushingly difficult world – this is bad news.
To understand the metaphor of the eight consciousnesses and the transformation of consciousness, is to be involved in a process by which we transform the nature of the self. Instead of metaphorically ripping the self out from the unity of being, the self – seen as a metaphor – recognizes embraces the unity of being. The suffering inherent in this separation and ripping out (of the self) is replaced with a kind of embracing. This metaphorical system has potential for healing.
Zoketsu comments on Thich Nhat Hanh’s Transformation at the Base: Fifty Verses on the Nature of Consciousness. – a readable version by Nhat Hanh of the complicated Buddhist teachings on “Mind Only” philosophy, the nature of mind and karma.
Transformation at the Base Talk 5 of 8
Zoketsu Norman Fisher
Transcribed and edited by Anne Johnson, Barbara Byrum and Cynthia Schrager
Today we are talking about Thich Nhat Hanh’s Fifty Verses, verses 20 through 27.
We could call manas, the seventhconsciousness, the experience of self. Manas is turning the mind in the wrong direction, seizing on a perceiver within the sphere of the eighthconsciousness. In the eighthconsciousness, a perceiver and an object of perception exist in harmony in a field of unity. Manas takes the perceiver out of this unity and separates it. Manas could be restored to its wholeness and not see the world as separate.
The energy manas uses to create this false sense of separation is the energy of grasping and clinging that is created by action. The seeds in the 8th consciousness are in and of themselves not troublesome or bothersome, but the habit energy changes those seeds. This habit energy comes from karma and is reinforced continually by the activity of body, speech and mind.
Manas is fundamentally fictional; it is not a substantial reality the way it appears to us. Even though it is really convincing, it is not in fact reality. This is important because it shows us we are not trying to eliminate our sense of self. We need only to see through it and understand it. So in a way you could say that we don’t need to change anything or alter anything; we only need to see through the experience we are having for what it actually is. So you don’t have to destroy ego. Manas is covered over with the habit energies and the bonds. Our job is simply to remove the covering. Every act of perception, every act of thought, is in the mode of manas; therefore, every act of perception and thought is distorted by the coverings and habit energies that create the turning outward of manas that creates separation
It is tricky to work with the effort that we make in practice, because we make it on the basis of manas. We’re trying to reverse ignorance by using ignorance. So, in other words, if we are working really hard with our grasping and clinging to make it change, we’re doing that work with the energy of manas. So we are actually digging a hole deeper for ourselves. Most of the effort that we make is that of clinging and grasping and desire, but, paradoxically, in practice we have to make a different kind of effort. Dogen talks about an effortless effort, an effort that is not based in desire.
That’s why in classical Mahayana Buddhism there is an emphasis on motivation. First of all, start with your motivation, clarify your motivation. Then develop bodhichitta, because the motivation should be to save all sentient beings, to practice for the benefit of others. Somehow along the way we have recognize that the way to practice is not to force practice but to let go. To release yourself to practice rather than to press or force practice.
So our effort is returning. You can translate taking refuge as returning. We are returning, restoring the perceiver to the perceived, restoring ourselves. We are conditioned in our lives to see a kind of exile, gap or a gash between the self and the world. We’re always longing to get what we have lost. The theme in spiritual practice of longing is a deep, deep theme. The effort of returning is to restore ourselves to the wholeness of our self with the world. We’re lovers and friends with the world. We need to return, so our practice is a letting go. So we rely on life itself and consciousness itself to take care of us.
So Thich Nhat Hanh’s text speaks about four characteristics of manas, which he gets directly from the Thirty Verses. He repeats the ideas in the Thirty Verses about the four characteristics of the grasping nature of manas: self-ignorance, self-view, self-pride and self-love. These are ascending levels of confusion and suffering, beginning with self-ignorance.
Self-ignorance is the experience that body and perceptions are “me” and that other bodies and other things in the world are “not me.” This view is called self-ignorance, but it’s obvious that we all see the world that way. It’s so ingrained that the idea that this might not be so seems absurd! It seems absurd to think of it, but that is the beginning of self-ignorance. If you really think about it long enough, you will see that there really is no real reason to define the body and the perceptions as “me” and objects out in the world as “not me.” It’s just a big habit that we have, but there is no actual reason for it. Self-ignorance begins with the carving up of this flow of perception and dividing it up into “me” and “not me.”
Self-ignorance is the first stage, and then the second stage is called self-view. The self-view is that “me” is absolutely independent and eternal. We know that if you ask anybody if the self is eternal they would say, No, I know that everyone dies. Still, if you analyze the way people behave, we all behave as if self were absolutely independent and eternal and never-ending.
Based on that self-view comes self-pride. Self-pride is basically comparative mind. First, I think that there is “me” and “you.” There is no comparison; there is just this distinction. Then I think, “me” is eternal and independent. Next comes comparative thinking. We think: I am better than you, or I’m worse than you, or You make me mad. So think of all the suffering that occurs because of comparative mind. And that’s not just from comparing oneself to others, it’s also from comparing one’s self to one’s possible self: I am such a lousy person, I could be so much better. So self-pride is the comparative mind. It would be interesting to observe your mind and see how often thoughts of comparing arise in your mind and see whether they lead to pleasant states of mind or not. It would be a useful exercise. I recommend it.
So then, based on the self-pride, comes self-love. Self-love is when we have a powerful attachment to the self; it can be positive or negative. Usually in most people it is both. You know: I’m the worst person in the world. I really think I’m awful and terrible. But if someone offends me: What?! You dare to criticize me? I am going to kill you!
So in the description of these four aspects of self, we can see how the energy of manas manifests and becomes a self. All other afflictive emotions arise from this: anger, hypocrisy, greed, violence, you name it. For example, when someone hits you, and you get angry, the cause here is not, She hit me, so she made me angry. The only thing that ever makes you angry is you. If there were no you, there would be no anger. So the root cause of all these afflictive emotions is this confused, very persuasive habit of viewing the self in a particular way.
How can we work with this? There are things that we can do that we know are wholesome dharmas. You can rest assured that if you do wholesome things, the results will be wholesome, even if you don’t know exactly how or when. That is why the Buddha was so big on hammering home the point that there are actions that we can do.
The eighthconsciousness is very lofty and is always fine. The seventhconsciousness is deeply disturbed, as we’ve discovered. But it is constant and comes from the beginning-less past, so we can’t do anything about it. This is why we like the sixthconsciousness. The sixthconsciousness has a variety of modes of operation that the seventh and eighthconsciousness don’t have. It can operate with the senses. It can also operate independent of the senses, and here is the part that is important: it can be “dispersed, concentrated, stable or unstable.” The sixthconsciousness can be developed according to our activity. If it’s stable, it can be wholesome. If it is concentrated, it can be wholesome. If it is not concentrated or stable, it can be destructive. A dispersed and unstable mind is a mind that is constantly colluding with manas, encouraging the distortion. But the mind that is concentrated and stable and listening is the mind that can help us see through manas.
So the final point here is there are two fundamentally connected but different ways of working with manas. Ultimately to reverse manas perfectly would be to be a Buddha. This is our goal; we are trying to do that. The way to reverse manas completely and become a Buddha is to see through manas and understand it directly. This is like a cosmic enlightenment experience: to see the nature of self. To have true knowledge of the nature of self is what we are doing on our cushions in intensive meditation practice.
That is why when we go to sesshins. One of the things we work on in an intensive meditation practice is concentrating the mind and sitting with the experience of the self, seeing through it, reversing it. That is basically the definition of shikantaza: just sitting. We are no longer being driven by manas. Just sitting means to enter Perfect Mirror Awareness. So that is the kind of effort we are making in intense sitting in order to understand the nature of self.
That’s one thing. The other thing is that we have to work on the knots and the habit energies. We undo and let go of the bad habit energies and the seeds of distortion and confusion; we raise up and encourage the good seeds and the good habit energies. So that’s daily life practice. That’s working with our afflicted emotions, working with our thoughts, working with the precepts of right conduct and right speech. The eight-fold path is the path of untying the knots.
We need to do work on our cushions and also our daily life practice. We can’t really have one and not the other. If we think we are going to go gung-ho and only do sesshins, chances are that we are going to miss the subtle levels of habit energy and knots that are in us. If we just focus on seeing through the manas, we are going to miss the subtle distortions.
Interestingly enough, almost all maps of the path show that you can be very developed as a meditator, but still you have to be about 80% of the way before self-pride and self-clinging actually fall away. You just refine the self-pride and self-clinging to subtler forms of it, but the basic distortion is there. So if you are a good meditator, but you don’t take care of daily life practice, there is going to be a lot of subtle self-deception that goes on. And you see that all the time in the spiritual realm of people who are so profoundly awakened with their meditation practice; they fool themselves. It happens. They don’t realize that there are subtle forms of self-clinging that they haven’t attended to through working with their daily life practice, and then boom it comes up suddenly when they least expect it.
On the other hand, if we just work on our knots and our habit energies without really working hard on our cushions, we might cultivate a lot of goodness and let go of a lot of bad habits, but we might never realize that good and bad are both designations. We really need to see and to hold our daily life practice in the proper attitude. We need to see that good and bad are designations based on distorted manas. We do have to understand on our cushions the nature of manas. We have to have both of these things; in other words, both insight on our cushion and ethical conduct in our daily life..
So what this teaching is saying to us is that the practice we are doing is rooted in the nature of mind. It is based on recognition that this is how the mind works and how suffering occurs. If you are practicing this way, you are practicing based on the way mind actually works, and so the practice will be effective.
As I said in the beginning, these are all words. These are descriptions. They don’t describe hard and fast realities. But they are useful descriptions, useful words. They can point us in the direction of ways of being and practicing that are actually effective and transformative for our lives.
Zoketsu comments on Thich Nhat Hanh’s Transformation at the Base: Fifty Verses on the Nature of Consciousness. – a readable version by Nhat Hanh of the complicated Buddhist teachings on “Mind Only” philosophy, the nature of mind and karma.
Transformation at the Base: Fifty Verses on the Nature of Consciousness (by Thich Nhat Hanh)
Zoketsu Norman Fisher
May 2003
Transcribed by Anne Johnson. Abridged and edited by Barbara Byrum and Cynthia Schrager
Yogacara philosophy is difficult philosophically. It was useful to the Buddhists who wrote it, because whole Buddhist universities were involved in ongoing debates. It was very important to them to be able to prove and refute positions based on the principles that they had established and that Buddha had established long before. The academic side seemed germane to them, but it seems less so to us today.
That’s why Thich Nhat Hanh wrote his own text, I think. He realized that commentaries on Vasubandhu’s Transformation at the Base, Fifty Verses on the Nature of Consciousness – the source of Yogacara thought – would be important in terms of our practice and what this philosophy has to do with practice. So he wrote verses to emphasize the practice side.
The Mind Only teachings say that although we see our mind and our understanding of the world as rather small by virtue of our being conscious beings, our mind and our experience are much deeper and wider than we give credit for. Our own capacity, our own understanding, our own experience, and the nature of our own mind are bigger than we experience. We all think of ourselves as small, separate, modest persons living in a big, overwhelmingly complicated world.
In fact, on one level, while this may be the true story, on another level we contain the whole world within us. When you recognize that the nature of your consciousness is rooted in consciousness itself and that consciousness itself is the whole of reality, it really makes things different. It puts your problems in a very different context, when your experience is that your mind and soul are rooted in that consciousness.
According to the Mind Only schools of Buddhism — actually they are more accurately called “Manifestation Only” – everything is just a manifestation of mind. According to these schools, there is only consciousness. Everything is consciousness, and the variety of things in this world are simply different manifestations of consciousness. There are no real distinctions. This includes the big distinction between mind and matter. According to Yogacara, mind and matter are not fundamentally different things. They are both “transformation of consciousness.” The whole world is an evolution, a transformation of consciousness. Different kinds of matter are not fundamentally different from one another. So, within the tremendous diversity of this world, there is an underlying and fundamental unity.
Unity and diversity are not really contradictions. The image often given is waves and the ocean. A wave is just a manifestation of the ocean. A wave is not actually a graspable, separable, real thing. A wave is something where causes and conditions come to bear on the ocean, and the wave is produced. The wave crests for just a moment and falls back into the ocean. While you could say ocean and wave are two different things, on another level, they are not different at all. A wave is just an expression of the ocean. There is no ocean without waves; there is no wave without ocean.
So differentiation and unity are not opposites. They are not two different conditions or two opposing forces. There can’t be unity without diversity; there can’t be diversity without unity. They can’t possibly be separated.
We are like a wave, right? We are an individual manifestation. We might all agree that a wave is quite temporary and in motion. There’s no moment in which the wave is not utterly changing its shape; it breaks and is gone. So, none of us would think that we could get a very large box and go run out to the ocean and put a wave in a box. It’s a ridiculous idea. And yet we think of ourselves as that which can be put into a box. We say, This is myself. This is how I am. This is what I am. From this point of view, we’re like a wave that can be put in a box. But actually, each one of us is just a manifestation of consciousness. We are inseparable from the whole endless stream. Consciousness is very mysterious and beyond all categories and all definitions.
In keeping with the model of oneself as a separate entity, we believe that consciousness is something going on in my brain. But in this philosophy, consciousness is not that at all. Consciousness is indefinable. It cannot be an object. So something is going on in my brain, but it’s just a manifestation of something much wider. If we really appreciated that, we would view our life quite differently than something that could be put in a box.
So we might ask ourselves: What is it, in us, that doesn’t experience this reality? How come we don’t experience this reality? And then more importantly: How could we find a way to understand the wholeness of consciousness and live in accord with it? How could we find a way to really recognize the nature of consciousness more clearly and to live it more fully?
The Thirty Verses is the most famous text of the Mind Only school. It is a poem by Vasubandhu, consisting of thirty rhymed verses in Sanskrit. Later, Mind Only pundits wrote commentaries to the Thirty Verses. Thich Nhat Hanh wrote Fifty Verses and his own commentary. I thought I would quote the very beginning of Thirty Verses.
So here is the first stanza of the thirty stanzas, as translated by Cook in the book published by the Numata Center.
The metaphor of self and dharmas evolves in various ways upon the transformation of consciousness.
That’s the first point: dharmas, which is the world, is a metaphor!
In our western psychology, we have an idea of self and an experience of self; we have a developed sense of subjectivity. So to have a teaching that denies that the self is real is more difficult for us to grasp than a teaching that says: It’s not that the sense of self is not real and you should deny your experience of it; it’s just that you should understand that experience as a metaphorical experience rather than a fundamental experience.
We really experience a sense of exile from the world. The Yogacara teaching says: We understand that you have such an experience. This is a human experience, but recognize it as a metaphorical, evolving experience. It’s not a static experience. The underlying unity and its transformation into waves and water gives rise to these very convincing experiences that are essentially metaphorical.
The stanzas continue:
The transforming of consciousness is three-fold. Retribution is the first, thought is the second, and the third is perception of the external realm.
What is the nature of that transformation that gives rise to these metaphors? It’s threefold: retribution, thought, and perception of the external realm. The transformation of consciousness specifically means the metaphors of evolving and separating into a subjectivity and an objectivity. So consciousness, which is unitary, seems to transform into two different streams of subject and object – myself and the world. This is interesting, because that means that there is no subject without an object. There can’t be a you without a medium in which you would exist. And conversely there can’t be an objective world without a subject.
The transformation of consciousness transforms into three layers, or three realms. The first one, retribution, means manifestation. Something appears on a primordial level. This primordial appearance is the unity that is the source of the first transformation into subject and object. Existence itself is consciousness: all inclusive, primordial, including the potential for all individual being. It’s also called the alaya consciousness, the eighth storehouse consciousness. It stores the seeds of all potentials and manifestations of anything, including the manifestation of individual thoughts and memories.
The second realm is called, “thought,” or “manas,” which comes from this great unity of consciousness. Manas is the subject, the thought and perception of external reality – that is, the world.
The third realm is called perception of an external realm.
I think it is interesting that in early Buddhism, there are six consciousnesses. The six are the five sense consciousnesses plus the mind. There is some recognition that the mental faculty is somewhat different from the five sense faculties, but they’re considered to be in the same realm. There is no idea of self as a consciousness. The difficulty with that thought – especially for us as western people with a very developed sense of subjectivity and psychology – is that in this teaching the self does not exist; it’s not even part of the system. It’s a fiction.
So from our point of view, given our preconceptions and our predispositions as people in the west, this teaching from early Buddhism is tough. We think, Oh, so then I don’t exist and my goal is to disappear. In the Mahayana school, however, there is a recognition inspired by compassion. Let’s recognize that there is an experience of being a self, being a person, and rather than say it’s a fiction, let’s account for it in a way that leads to healing and transcendence. Let’s talk about oneness. Let’s talk about the embracing of the world instead of nirvana – the fiction of the self.
So these things are really two different maps of the same territory. But you can see the advantages of the Mahayana map for us. If our goal in the end is belonging and compassion, then we want to see the world this way. Whereas if we see the world in terms of nirvana and the fiction of the self, this might tend to be less inspiring to us to be compassionate and to engage with others.
It should be said that these ways of experiencing consciousnesses are metaphors. There’s no sense in which these are actually things that exist. They’re descriptions and metaphors, which if we follow them, lead us to liberation; whereas, the metaphor of self and world, if we follow it to its logical conclusion, leads to pain and suffering. If we see that the self and the world are at odds with each other – a small self over here in the face of a tremendous crushingly difficult world – this is bad news.
To understand the metaphor of the eight consciousnesses and the transformation of consciousness, is to be involved in a process by which we transform the nature of the self. Instead of metaphorically ripping the self out from the unity of being, the self – seen as a metaphor – recognizes embraces the unity of being. The suffering inherent in this separation and ripping out (of the self) is replaced with a kind of embracing. This metaphorical system has potential for healing.
Zoketsu comments on Thich Nhat Hanh’s Transformation at the Base: Fifty Verses on the Nature of Consciousness. – a readable version by Nhat Hanh of the complicated Buddhist teachings on “Mind Only” philosophy, the nature of mind and karma.
Transformation at the Base: Fifty Verses on the Nature of Consciousness (by Thich Nhat Hanh) Talk 2 of 8
Zoketsu Norman Fisher
May 2003
Transcribed by Anne Johnson. Abridged and edited by Barbara Byrum and Cynthia Schrager
We’re going to go into some detail on the nature of consciousness and the text. I was musing on this today, and I wondered, “What is consciousness?” I thought: it’s awareness, it’s identity, it’s attitude. According to The American Heritage Dictionary, consciousness means, “the sense of identity.” That’s interesting: the sense that we feel as a subject. Consciousness means we feel like a subject. There is an object that we are cognizing. So consciousness is, “a sense of identity, especially the complex of attitudes, beliefs, and sensitivities held by or characteristic of a group or individual.” In order to transform consciousness, we transform our attitudes, our beliefs, and our sensitivities.
Consciousness is also defined as “awareness itself or sensitivity.” Then I looked up “attitude”: “An attitude is a state of mind or a feeling, a disposition.” It’s interesting to think about that. Our life’s experiences force us into a particular state of body and mind. We have a particular attitude, which then becomes a sense of identity. And we are convinced that this is the way the world is. This is the way I am. This is how things are. And then we’re wondering, Why are things tough? So then it really becomes quite important to understand how an attitude gets built up, what it comes from, and what it takes to work on it so it can change.
The dictionary definition of mind is: “The human consciousness which is seated in the brain manifested in thought, perception, emotion, will, memory, and imagination.” This is also very interesting. You see all the different associated concepts here with the words “mind” and “consciousness.” But in all these cases, the focus is on a person’s consciousness and mind. There’s nothing here that is not included in the Buddhist idea of consciousness, except that the Buddhist idea of consciousness has a much bigger scope. All beliefs, attitudes, ideas and perceptions are transformations of this huge, beyond definition, consciousness.
In Buddhism, the word “consciousness” vijnyana, comes from the root meaning “to cut.” And that’s why consciousness is always consciousness of something, because there is always a division in consciousness; there’s always a gap in consciousness between the knower and that which is known. The knower and the known are not different things, but they’re cut in order for there to be any knowing. So the very act of what we call consciousness – cognition and perception – is the root of suffering. The exile. The gap between the seer and the seen, the listener and what’s heard. Between us, between two people. Between ourselves and the world.
Remember that the Mind Only schools divide consciousness into eight different consciousnesses, which are understood to be conceptual. They are eight ways of looking at consciousness. They are not really things that exist so much as they are explanations, so that we can understand the nature of consciousness.
The eighth consciousness is the largest consciousness. It’s called the alayavijnana[, storehouse consciousness. It holds the seeds that eventually manifest in the physical or mental world depending on whether the conditions that cause them to manifest are present. Thich Nhat Hahn uses the metaphor of a seed and water. When a seed is watered, it manifests. If it’s not watered, it’s still there as a seed. It is still there as a potential, but it doesn’t appear unless it’s watered.
As long as we have the idea of a container, which has something outside of it and something inside of it, we would not be appreciating the actual nature of alayavijnana. We have the idea of inside and outside, because we have the idea of space and time, but alayavijnana includes within it the seeds of space and time. It’s not subject to those seeds. It includes that within it.
The seventh consciousness is manas, sometimes called the selfor mind. There’s a reflex that goes on within the eighth consciousness, in which a part of the consciousness is viewed as if it were a separate thing. From beginningless time, a part of the eighth consciousness is grasped and held as separate. All senses of separateness and subjectivity come from this manas, this sense of self, which is the underlying basis for all thinking and perception.
The sixth consciousness is the mental activity that occurs because of this. It’s called a “revulsion” and the goal of practice is to turn it around. That is why a line in the Heart Sutra is translated as “inverted views.” The seventh consciousness has inverted itself and separated itself out from the real consciousness, and it needs to be turned around. So terms like “taking the backwards step” all refer to this idea of turning the mind around, so that which has been separated out can be seen as connected.
The metaphor of self and dharmas.
As we discussed last week, the self is a metaphor. There is a self. This is the beauty of this teaching: it doesn’t deny the existence of the self; it just says self is actually a metaphor. We are metaphors within the unity of reality. Our lives are beautiful metaphors, but our separation is not real.
The eighth consciousness is the karmic result of the sum total of everything that has ever occurred. That’s the first transformation of consciousness. The second one is thought or mentation, and the third one is the external world. The external world is not exactly denied as a reality; it’s just seen as a transformation of consciousness. So the fact that this is hard (Norman knocks on a wooden table) is not denied; it’s just that this experience of being hard is actually occurring within this sphere of consciousness.
The eighth consciousness is called alaya, which means “storehouse consciousness.” It is the storehouse of all “seeds.” That which it grasps and holds, its location and its perceptions are all imperceptible.You can’t say anything about it. You can’t pin it down. It’s not like the world we know.
It is always associated with mental contact, attention, feeling, conceptualization and volition.
There is something going on but it’s unperceivable; it’s not graspable.
In it the only feeling is one of indifference.
I would not translate it as that; I would say it’s more equanimity. In other words, there’s no agitation; there’s no problem; there would be no reason whatsoever for any difficulty to arise within this first transformation of consciousness.
It is undefiled and morally neutral.It always evolves like a flowing stream and is abandoned in the state of arhat.
Alaya is beyond good or bad. The same is true of awakening.It’s an ongoing, rushing stream of imperceptible reality. In the achievement of awakening, even this is abandoned.
The second transforming consciousness is called manas or self. It evolves supported by that store consciousness and with it as its object. It has the nature and character of thinking, or subjectivity or mentation. It is always associated with four passions: delusion about self, view of self, self-conceit, and love of self along with others such as contact and the rest. It is defiled.
“Defiled” means it is a problem. It’s morally neutral; it’s not creating bad karma, but its underlying foundation is the prerequisite for all kinds of trouble.
The third transforming consciousness with its six-fold distinction, its nature and character, are that of the perception of the object. It is good, bad or neither.
In the world of perception, karma comes in. The implication is that in our lives, we have the potential to tap back into reality – because we are not separate from that – and create good karma. We can water seeds, positive seeds, all the way up to the point of awakening. But we also have, because we are subjects and selves, the possibility of watering seeds of delusion, and confusion will cause those tendencies to grow stronger.
So it’s very important what ethical choices we make. These ethical choices are not only ethical choices, but they go right to the heart of reality. With our watering seeds of goodness, we are moving toward a deeper sense of reality that will be liberating. With our watering seeds of confusion and suffering, we are only increasing our ignorance and confusion. So here morality is the root of liberation.
So, a few things about seeds. (This is mostly from Thich Naht Hahn.) The seeds are nothing other than alaya, and alaya is nothing other than the seeds. It’s not like there are seeds inside the alaya. The alaya is the sum total of the seeds. So these seeds might be manifested or latent, according to the causes that are produced. When the causes that water the seeds are there, the seed sprouts; if not, the seeds remain latent.
For instance, we all have the seeds of anger in us. Something happens, and right away we get angry. Water the seeds of anger in us, and anger comes up. If we didn’t have those seeds in us, that same thing might happen to us, but anger wouldn’t arise, if the seed were not there.
Similarly, we have within us the seeds for awakening and perfect wisdom. The more we water the conditions of those seeds, the more they will sprout and will produce fruit. So this is important right? It’s really a moment-by-moment proposition. This is not about gross, large decisions, it’s the moment-by-moment decisions about how we will organize ourselves in relation to our choices.
The seeds manifest in various realms and worlds, all of which we participate in: meditative realms, hell realms, desire realms, peaceful realms. There are traditional definitions of all these different realms.
Where do the seeds come from? And are we in control? Did we produce them? There are different kinds of seeds. Some of the seeds come from the ancient primordial past—from the beginningless beginning – deeply engrained things like instincts and the whole human perceptual apparatus. You didn’t create your eye; you didn’t create the way the human eye sees. That comes from a deep, evolutionary history.
When we are born, our parents hugely imprint us with seeds. We can’t even speak, and already we have imprinting from our parents. And our parents are only products of a whole culture, right? So we have an evolutionary and cultural history by the time we utter our first word. The childhood seeds that are planted are really powerful. They’re probably more powerful than later seeds.
All the seeds are of indeterminate nature. In other words, seeds are neither good nor bad. It’s the conditions that water them that cause them to manifest as good or bad. But the seeds in and of themselves are neither good nor bad. It’s only the habit energies associated with them that take the seed in a particular direction, but the seed in and of itself is neutral. So the seeds are activated by various kinds of actions.
So, as I always say, the good news about all this is that whatever is going on is not your fault. One of the main things about karma is that we are all sitting here now in a particular situation. That situation in which we find ourselves at this moment is absolutely not our fault. Even though a great part of it was created by previous moments of ourselves, still those previous moments of ourselves no longer exist. That was another person. But beyond that, most of what motivated us in our lives up to this moment came from seeds that were watered and really had nothing to do with our volition.
So this is really the good news and the bad news. The bad news is: we are stuck with this. This is it. We didn’t choose it. We didn’t say, I wanted to be born a human being looking like this. It happened. But now what are we going to do about it? So we have ultimate responsibility but really no blame.I think that’s good news.
We are ultimately responsible. When you consider the fact that the seeds are universal, the seeds all relate to each other. The seeds are not separate seeds, like this seed has nothing to do with that seed. The seeds all mutually influence each other and are beyond concepts of time and space. So we are in this moment. This is really the profundity of this teaching. In this moment, we are absolutely responsible, not just for our own life, but for all of life. Not only here and now, but throughout the whole past and future.
So it’s an amazing thought, that through our conduct now we can redeem the past, our own past, as well as the past many generations back. We can save our parents and grandparents many years after they are gone. We can save them through our own actions, and our own actions in the present moment can have an immense influence everywhere. Every moment everything is redeemed with every action no matter how large or how small.
Zoketsu comments on Thich Nhat Hanh’s Transformation at the Base: Fifty Verses on the Nature of Consciousness. – a readable version by Nhat Hanh of the complicated Buddhist teachings on “Mind Only” philosophy, the nature of mind and karma.
¡¡Transformation at the Base (Talk 6)
Zoketsu Norman Fischer
Transcribed by Anne Johnson. Abridged and edited by Barbara Byrum and Cynthia Schrager
Today I would like to talk about the Sixth Consciousnesses, but first I would like to repeat the very helpful metaphor about the ocean and waves that are used in these teachings. Consciousness is the ocean. It’s water throughout. It’s not separable into parts. But the ocean, when conditions arise in a particular way, produces waves. We could say: There’s a wave, there’s a wave and there’s a wave. Although they are similar, the waves are all identifiably different from each other. We can know that the wave that is breaking now is not the same wave that broke a moment ago, and the wave over there is not the same as the wave over here.
There is no separate thing that is a wave. The wave is movement within the ocean at this particular time and in this particular place. The Eight Consciousnesses are waves on the ocean of consciousness. The ocean is constantly flowing, constantly tosssing up new formations, which quickly pass and then are recycled – on and on. Our life is like that from beginningless time.
The five sense consciousnesses always exist in relation to an object. There’s a seed of a sense organ and a seed of the object. (A “seed” is defined as something capable of manifesting.) A seed of the organ arises; a seed of the object arises; the organ and the object come into contact with each other. Then consciousness arises in tandem with that to produce an experience. Without the consciousness, we don’t have an experience. It’s not enough to have the organ and the object, there also has to be the consciousness.
The five sense consciousnesses can work separately or together. If we are sitting in a symphony orchestra listening to a concert, we hear the concert, we see the concert, and we might be tasting a mint while we’re watching the show. We have a total experience that may involve many senses. If we go swimming in the ocean, we can feel the touch of the water, we can smell the water, we can hear the water, and we can see the water. We don’t separate out those different experiences. Yet they are actually quite different from one another.
The good news about the five senses is that they are capable of touching things as they really are. Every experience has within it the potential reality of things as they really are, but every experience is also a distortion and a representation. Most of what we are thinking and living is a distorted representation of something that is in a pure state of things as they are.
The good news is that when we have an immediate perception, the senses can directly touch suchness, directly touch things as they are. “Immediate” means without mediation of the mind and memory and desire: all the things that are usually operating whenever we have a perception. When we see a person, we are not experiencing the immediacy of that person. The person is like a wave on the ocean of consciousness existing in time, a radically beautiful and impossible thing. We don’t see that. We see our history with the person, our wishes and desires, or possibly our whole history with every other human being we have ever met. But if we could have an immediate perception, without all of that distortion and thinking, then we would be touching things as they are. There would be a kind of wholeness and deep sense of satisfaction in that act of seeing.
Sometimes we have those experiences. I think we often have them in nature, when we hike for four or five days and finally shake off the dust of the world. We look at a tree and have such a sense of satisfaction and peace. We think to ourselves, Why doesn’t this usually happen to me? How come I never feel this way?
Martin Buber talks about this in his book I and Thou. Buber was a great stylist in German, and often some of his points turned on the particular meaning of German words. There is one passage in which he talks about the “I-thou” experience. There is true encounter; there is a subject and an object, but they merge to such an extent that they touch. There is true satisfaction; there is true meeting. So he says, “This is not an experience.” In German, the word for experience is similar to the word “tourist” in English. We go around seeing the sights. So he says that’s why this I-Thou meeting is not experience, because it’s not driving around on the surface seeing many sights.
So this is the practice of listening that I have been encouraging us to do both on and off our cushions. Listening so that we can cooperate, allowing the five senses to find their own way to things as they are, to have the experience of being quiet in our acts of perception rather than going out and grabbing something. Dogen talks about letting the 10,000 things come forward and experience the self, instead of having the self rushing out and grabbing something. This is one of the reasons why sesshin, even with all of its troublesomeness sometimes, can be so satisfying an experience. The senses do quiet, and we allow the world to come forward to us. In other words, we don’t need much, because the senses are now quiet, and we are really practicing. In effect, listening so the smallest things become tremendously inspiring and satisfying, even though we might find the same thing the next day to be annoying. We quiet the five senses, and we allow them to do their natural work of touching things as they are. When we know the world of representation as the world of representation, it doesn’t catch us.
So the mind distorts perception because of manas. Manas puts a little charge on every memory, desire and habit energy. Because of manas, we see our past and our conditioning instead of the thing itself. If we train our mind, we can see just the representation without all the extra baggage to it. And we can let go of it when it arises. Then we can have the experience of appreciating things as they really are.
In Thich Nhat Hanh’s text, as in the classical text, every time one of the categories of consciousness is brought up, the question arises: What sorts of mental formations are associated with it? In the Abhidharma, there’s a list of various mental formations, wholesome and unwholesome, an array of which, at any given moment, make up our state of mind.
With the alaya consciousness, the only mental factors that arise are the five universal ones—universal because they arise with any experience: contact, interest, feeling, perception and volition. In other words, something is manifested, and there is interest in it, an engagement with it. That’s the basic bottom line of consciousness. Consciousness is always conscious of something, and it’s always engaged. With alaya, there’s only that. There is no sense of good or bad. There is only engagement. Direct perception goes beyond preference. Direct perception is always whole.
It’s the mind, manas, that makes what we experience bad or good, and the basis of that judgment is our distorted sense of separation of self. That’s what’s behind the arising of all unwholesome or unhappy states, like anger, fear and violence. Manas is the root of all that; in other words, the projected sense of separation and exile. That’s the basic root cause of all unwholesome painful states, not the experiences that seem to give rise to them. Whatever happens is not necessarily going to produce anger or fear without the distortion of manas.
The teaching here is not saying, although it could sound like that, that self is the problem. The world already exists in the Eighth Consciousness. And for the world to exist, there’s already what appears to be a subject and an object. So that in and of itself is not a problem. What is a problem are the dharmas that are always associated with manas: self-ignorance, self-view, self-pride and self-love.
The existence of perceiver and perceived is not in itself a problem. Every experience that is arising always includes the perceiver. Although we think that I am over here and that’s over there, there is no me without that. There’s no this without a that. They come up together and they go away together. So when you see that, the self is no problem. The self is only a problem when you rip the self out of the picture and hold it separate. It’s the grasping, the self-view, the self-pride, the self-love that cause suffering. So our goal here is not to become ego-less, to make the self evaporate, but rather to restore the self to its context, to its collaboration and cooperation with everything.
So consciousness, as it’s meant in these teachings, is not an entity, not something independent within which phenomena arise. So the word storehouse, alaya, might be problematic. Consciousness always arises with an object; there’s no seeing without seeing something. There’s no thinking in the abstract without thinking of something. Thinking and thoughts co-produce each other; seeing and objects of sight co-produce each other; and a speaker and a listener co-produce each other.
So there’s no such actual thing as consciousness, as if it were a monolith in and of itself. There are only many different momentary flashes of consciousness, which come one after the another, each one arising with its object. Just two seeds in alaya producing each other in an ever changing flow. It’s like the analogy of movie film: picture, picture, picture, picture, one after the another. Each picture coming and disappearing, and giving rise to a successive picture. This looks like a flow of existing things, but in fact, it’s one picture succeeding another, flashing on and off in the dark. This a pretty good analogy to our life.
So life is actually the endless turning on and off of activity and peace—of flickering light and darkness. That is the flow of reality. Awakening and peace are actually fundamental to the shape of every moment. We don’t see that. But it’s true. That’s why you don’t have to go somewhere far away to seek peace and awakening. It’s always where you are in each moment.
Onto this flow of wholeness and beauty – which is incomprehensible and ineffable – manas projects all sort of concepts like self and other, birth and death, inside and outside, and so on. But none of these concepts hold up.
So our job is to let go of our conceptualizations, understand them as conceptualizations, and return to joining our actual experience. And all of our concepts are conceptualizations. The eight consciousnesses are conceptualizations; Buddhism is a conceptualization. If you attach the idea of eight consciousnesses as something really existing, it would be just the same as anything else. Our goal here is not to have more and improved concepts, but to go beyond our concepts and release ourselves to our actual lives. This is the only redemption and enlightenment that we really need.
Trust the nature of our life, trust the nature of mind, knowing that whatever you really need for your life will be there. If you can relax and let it be.
Zoketsu comments on Thich Nhat Hanh’s Transformation at the Base: Fifty Verses on the Nature of Consciousness. – a readable version by Nhat Hanh of the complicated Buddhist teachings on “Mind Only” philosophy, the nature of mind and karma.
¡¡Transformation at the Base (Talk 6)
Zoketsu Norman Fischer
Transcribed by Anne Johnson. Abridged and edited by Barbara Byrum and Cynthia Schrager
Today I would like to talk about the Sixth Consciousnesses, but first I would like to repeat the very helpful metaphor about the ocean and waves that are used in these teachings. Consciousness is the ocean. It’s water throughout. It’s not separable into parts. But the ocean, when conditions arise in a particular way, produces waves. We could say: There’s a wave, there’s a wave and there’s a wave. Although they are similar, the waves are all identifiably different from each other. We can know that the wave that is breaking now is not the same wave that broke a moment ago, and the wave over there is not the same as the wave over here.
There is no separate thing that is a wave. The wave is movement within the ocean at this particular time and in this particular place. The Eight Consciousnesses are waves on the ocean of consciousness. The ocean is constantly flowing, constantly tosssing up new formations, which quickly pass and then are recycled – on and on. Our life is like that from beginningless time.
The five sense consciousnesses always exist in relation to an object. There’s a seed of a sense organ and a seed of the object. (A “seed” is defined as something capable of manifesting.) A seed of the organ arises; a seed of the object arises; the organ and the object come into contact with each other. Then consciousness arises in tandem with that to produce an experience. Without the consciousness, we don’t have an experience. It’s not enough to have the organ and the object, there also has to be the consciousness.
The five sense consciousnesses can work separately or together. If we are sitting in a symphony orchestra listening to a concert, we hear the concert, we see the concert, and we might be tasting a mint while we’re watching the show. We have a total experience that may involve many senses. If we go swimming in the ocean, we can feel the touch of the water, we can smell the water, we can hear the water, and we can see the water. We don’t separate out those different experiences. Yet they are actually quite different from one another.
The good news about the five senses is that they are capable of touching things as they really are. Every experience has within it the potential reality of things as they really are, but every experience is also a distortion and a representation. Most of what we are thinking and living is a distorted representation of something that is in a pure state of things as they are.
The good news is that when we have an immediate perception, the senses can directly touch suchness, directly touch things as they are. “Immediate” means without mediation of the mind and memory and desire: all the things that are usually operating whenever we have a perception. When we see a person, we are not experiencing the immediacy of that person. The person is like a wave on the ocean of consciousness existing in time, a radically beautiful and impossible thing. We don’t see that. We see our history with the person, our wishes and desires, or possibly our whole history with every other human being we have ever met. But if we could have an immediate perception, without all of that distortion and thinking, then we would be touching things as they are. There would be a kind of wholeness and deep sense of satisfaction in that act of seeing.
Sometimes we have those experiences. I think we often have them in nature, when we hike for four or five days and finally shake off the dust of the world. We look at a tree and have such a sense of satisfaction and peace. We think to ourselves, Why doesn’t this usually happen to me? How come I never feel this way?
Martin Buber talks about this in his book I and Thou. Buber was a great stylist in German, and often some of his points turned on the particular meaning of German words. There is one passage in which he talks about the “I-thou” experience. There is true encounter; there is a subject and an object, but they merge to such an extent that they touch. There is true satisfaction; there is true meeting. So he says, “This is not an experience.” In German, the word for experience is similar to the word “tourist” in English. We go around seeing the sights. So he says that’s why this I-Thou meeting is not experience, because it’s not driving around on the surface seeing many sights.
So this is the practice of listening that I have been encouraging us to do both on and off our cushions. Listening so that we can cooperate, allowing the five senses to find their own way to things as they are, to have the experience of being quiet in our acts of perception rather than going out and grabbing something. Dogen talks about letting the 10,000 things come forward and experience the self, instead of having the self rushing out and grabbing something. This is one of the reasons why sesshin, even with all of its troublesomeness sometimes, can be so satisfying an experience. The senses do quiet, and we allow the world to come forward to us. In other words, we don’t need much, because the senses are now quiet, and we are really practicing. In effect, listening so the smallest things become tremendously inspiring and satisfying, even though we might find the same thing the next day to be annoying. We quiet the five senses, and we allow them to do their natural work of touching things as they are. When we know the world of representation as the world of representation, it doesn’t catch us.
So the mind distorts perception because of manas. Manas puts a little charge on every memory, desire and habit energy. Because of manas, we see our past and our conditioning instead of the thing itself. If we train our mind, we can see just the representation without all the extra baggage to it. And we can let go of it when it arises. Then we can have the experience of appreciating things as they really are.
In Thich Nhat Hanh’s text, as in the classical text, every time one of the categories of consciousness is brought up, the question arises: What sorts of mental formations are associated with it? In the Abhidharma, there’s a list of various mental formations, wholesome and unwholesome, an array of which, at any given moment, make up our state of mind.
With the alaya consciousness, the only mental factors that arise are the five universal ones—universal because they arise with any experience: contact, interest, feeling, perception and volition. In other words, something is manifested, and there is interest in it, an engagement with it. That’s the basic bottom line of consciousness. Consciousness is always conscious of something, and it’s always engaged. With alaya, there’s only that. There is no sense of good or bad. There is only engagement. Direct perception goes beyond preference. Direct perception is always whole.
It’s the mind, manas, that makes what we experience bad or good, and the basis of that judgment is our distorted sense of separation of self. That’s what’s behind the arising of all unwholesome or unhappy states, like anger, fear and violence. Manas is the root of all that; in other words, the projected sense of separation and exile. That’s the basic root cause of all unwholesome painful states, not the experiences that seem to give rise to them. Whatever happens is not necessarily going to produce anger or fear without the distortion of manas.
The teaching here is not saying, although it could sound like that, that self is the problem. The world already exists in the Eighth Consciousness. And for the world to exist, there’s already what appears to be a subject and an object. So that in and of itself is not a problem. What is a problem are the dharmas that are always associated with manas: self-ignorance, self-view, self-pride and self-love.
The existence of perceiver and perceived is not in itself a problem. Every experience that is arising always includes the perceiver. Although we think that I am over here and that’s over there, there is no me without that. There’s no this without a that. They come up together and they go away together. So when you see that, the self is no problem. The self is only a problem when you rip the self out of the picture and hold it separate. It’s the grasping, the self-view, the self-pride, the self-love that cause suffering. So our goal here is not to become ego-less, to make the self evaporate, but rather to restore the self to its context, to its collaboration and cooperation with everything.
So consciousness, as it’s meant in these teachings, is not an entity, not something independent within which phenomena arise. So the word storehouse, alaya, might be problematic. Consciousness always arises with an object; there’s no seeing without seeing something. There’s no thinking in the abstract without thinking of something. Thinking and thoughts co-produce each other; seeing and objects of sight co-produce each other; and a speaker and a listener co-produce each other.
So there’s no such actual thing as consciousness, as if it were a monolith in and of itself. There are only many different momentary flashes of consciousness, which come one after the another, each one arising with its object. Just two seeds in alaya producing each other in an ever changing flow. It’s like the analogy of movie film: picture, picture, picture, picture, one after the another. Each picture coming and disappearing, and giving rise to a successive picture. This looks like a flow of existing things, but in fact, it’s one picture succeeding another, flashing on and off in the dark. This a pretty good analogy to our life.
So life is actually the endless turning on and off of activity and peace—of flickering light and darkness. That is the flow of reality. Awakening and peace are actually fundamental to the shape of every moment. We don’t see that. But it’s true. That’s why you don’t have to go somewhere far away to seek peace and awakening. It’s always where you are in each moment.
Onto this flow of wholeness and beauty – which is incomprehensible and ineffable – manas projects all sort of concepts like self and other, birth and death, inside and outside, and so on. But none of these concepts hold up.
So our job is to let go of our conceptualizations, understand them as conceptualizations, and return to joining our actual experience. And all of our concepts are conceptualizations. The eight consciousnesses are conceptualizations; Buddhism is a conceptualization. If you attach the idea of eight consciousnesses as something really existing, it would be just the same as anything else. Our goal here is not to have more and improved concepts, but to go beyond our concepts and release ourselves to our actual lives. This is the only redemption and enlightenment that we really need.
Trust the nature of our life, trust the nature of mind, knowing that whatever you really need for your life will be there. If you can relax and let it be.
“When your life is ending how will you be free?” Zoketsu discusses practice in the light of our living and dying.The Case:
Tou-shuai Yue set up three barriers for his students:
First: When you hack through the underbrush searching for the truth you find your self-nature. Right now, where is your self-nature?
Second: Realizing your self-nature, you are free from birth and death. When your life is ending, how will you be free?
Third: When you are free from birth and death you will know where to go. When the four elements scatter, where will you go?
Mumon's comment:
If you can give turning words here you can be the master wherever you are; all the circumstances you encounter will be the Path. If not, the food you bolt down won't sustain you. Chew well, and you won't go hungry.
Mumon's poem:
This instant: measureless eternity
Measureless eternity: right now
Seeing this
Is seeing through the one who sees
In the last case we focussed on application, the most important thing. Applying what we come to know on our cushions to the daily events of our lives. How do we come forth in word and deed as bodhisattvas; being ourselves as we are, and yet not being caught by our fears and habits, willing and able to meet others, and to offer what help we can. I suppose you could call that practical work, or psychological work. It's quite ordinary, really. What makes it spiritual practice? The old Zen teachers felt that the only way to really be whole, to really come forth truly in our living, to really be what they liked to call "ordinary,"or "everyday," was to base our actions and sense of self on the deepest human truths. Anything less than this, they seem to be telling us, will always fall short, will always lead to suffering in the end. This case brings up those deep human truths once again, offering us three barriers, three contemplations, for encountering the question of life and death. The question of life and death is like a mirror. Long and long you stand before it, see your whole life reflected in it, and you look and look. Even when you see all the way through you're not finished. You keep coming back, and looking yet again. The deepest questions are inexhaustible.
The first barrier says: "When you hack through the underbrush searching for the truth you find your self-nature. Right now, where is your self-nature?" This barrier is, on the one hand, meditation instruction: the underbrush referred to is all the thought and emotion that swirls around in your mind when you sit in meditation. The way to work with it is to let it be, and to return again and again to body and breath as a focal point, creating an alternative to the spinning thoughts and emotions. This is not an aggressive practice, and there is no sense that we are trying to make thoughts and feelings disappear. Yet, at the same time, it is important that the mind quiets and deepens. If we don't allow thoughts and emotions to float away, but instead churn them on and on forever, driven by identity and the passion that flows from it, then we are probably wasting time on our cushions. Eventually we have to find some peace, allow it to intensify, and eventually come to see who we really are.
Broadening this teaching a bit, and applying it more widely to our whole lives off the cushion as well as on, Master Tou-shuai is telling us that the way to solve our human problems is not to indulge them, or to try to fix them, but rather to see through them: to see that on the other side of our anger or disappointment, on the other side of our fear and aggression, there is something more wondrous and inclusive. Solving our human problems by making effort to solve our human problems will never work, or will work only in a limited way. Truly solving our human problems is to see through them. Then we can be angry, aggressive, fearful, disappointed, whatever we may be, but, at the same time, we can recognize that this anger or fear isn't us, isn't all that's going on. A larger self than my small self expresses contains my emotions. Feeling this, I can go through my process of grief or longing, fear or desire, with some lightness, knowing that that is not all that's going on, and that my life is held in a wider scope. So fear doesn't need to become terror, nor desire obsession. I can enjoy my human passions, seeing that they can be tamed. When I come to appreciate my self-nature, maybe I can even have a little humor about my hang ups and stupid desires! Seeing my life as appearing and disappearing here in the present moment, and not so much caught by notions of identity, which bring with them judgment and desire, I can relax, even if something difficult is happening. I can be within whatever is going on without anguish or excess.
"Realizing your self-nature, you are free from birth and death. When your life is ending, how will you be free?" Here the Master brings up the question of death, which is always the ruling question of our lives. Death is not something for later on; death is something always for right now. I have done a lot of work with the dying, and with teaching people to care for the dying. Sometimes I worry about this, that death is too seductive, too exciting. The fact is, to be with dying people is an extremely intense and joyful experience. When death is near you feel how profound life is. I often point out to people who work with the dying that the patients are not dying, they are living. They are alive, completely alive, just as we all are, and they will remain completely alive until they stop being alive. They are only dying in the sense that we are all dying: like the rest of us, the patient we say is close to death is simply alive in this present moment that is always passing away.
Truly, death is always with us, and that's wonderful. Death reminds us how precious our life is, and how little time we have to squander. And how, when we accept this moment of our life completely, even if it is a tough moment, there is great joy.
There is only one way to be free when you are dying: and that is to let go. To recognize that nothing can be held onto and that possession, emotion, reputation, relationship – it all comes and goes, delightful when it appears, delightful when it disappears. Being free isn't optional; it is a necessity. Because when you try to hold onto what cannot be held onto you suffer a lot. To have to die when you are not willing to die, to struggle against death in a losing battle – this is the greatest anguish of all. On the other hand, to let go when it is time to let go, to willingly leap forward into the next moment, which is always unknown, is a joy, a great release. This could describe the moment of death. But it could also be the description of any moment in which we are truly alive. The third barrier goes a step further: "When you are free from birth and death you will know where to go. When the four elements scatter, where will you go?"
People often ask, "What do Buddhists say about life after death? Does the soul reincarnate? What about the subtle rainbow body and the colorful deities of the bardo realms? How true is all of this?" I don't really know. In Tibetan Buddhism, based on medieval Indian Tantra, there is certainly a lot of lore and it has its usefulness. But Zen is much more open on the question: in fact, as this third barrier shows, the answer to the question of what happens after we die is a question. I am fond of quoting the story of Kuei-shan when someone asks me if rebirth is a part of Zen doctrine. Kuei-shan told his disciples that he would be reborn as a cow pastured on the monastery grounds. "When you see the cow that has become Kuei-shan you will know it because the cow will have the characters 'Kuei-shan' calligraphed in bold strokes on its side. If you say this cow is me you will be wrong. On the other hand, if you say it is not me, you will also be wrong."
My mother, when she was dying of cancer, asked me what Zen had to say about life after death. "Well," I said, "when we practice for a long time with depth we find that the person we have always thought ourselves to be is much more limited than the person we most truly are. That true person is limitless, undefinable, without boundary. If we identify completely with the small person we are then death is really terrifying- it really is an ending, utter and complete. On the other hand, if we can also identify with the larger person that we are then death doesn't appear to be an ending. It's a big change for certain, but life goes on. The journey continues." My mother seemed bewildered by this answer and quickly changed the subject. When Issan Dorsey, one of our most illustrious Zen Center priests, a former female impersonator and the founder of an AIDS hospice, was dying, someone leaned over to him and said "We're going to miss you, Issan." Issan looked up at him and said, "Why, are you going somewhere?"
In his commentary to this third barrier Shibayama roshi quotes many Japanese Zen sources on the subject of where we go after dying.
The death poem of Daimin reads,
In coming I have no abode
In leaving I have no fixed direction
How is it ultimately?
Here I am all the time!
And Dogen's death poem is also quite famous:
For fifty three years I've hung the sky with stars
Now I crash through:
What a shattering!
Master Ryutan in his last moments struggled and cried out- very un-Zen, his students felt. When they asked him about it he told them, "Crying out in agony is the same as laughing with joy." This reminds me of my dear friend Phil Whalen who once said that he thought that when he died he'd be crying out for his mother. I think he did cry for his mother for a while, but then he became quiet. Master Bankei once told someone who asked him for good dying instructions, "When it's time to die, just die!" Very helpful. Master Ekkei said, "I will return, if not in the south, then in the north. Mountain after mountain, I just go on my long journey. Do I come to its end someday? All the green bamboos in the yard are greeting me."
Ryokan's death poem is the best:
Showing now its front side,
Now its back,
Falls the maple leaf
The point is, where we go after we die isn't, or shouldn't be, a speculative question, a question about the exotic mystery of what comes next. It is a question about what we are, how we must live, how we are to face what happens, moment after moment. I feel this especially when I do ceremonies, even if it is just the daily service. Entering ritual space, you enter the endlessness of time. There's no play acting involved. You just plunge in, with calmness, ready for whatever will happen. If we could live this way all the time, giving ourselves over to the daily endless ritual of living and dying in mystery in the middle of the moments of our lives one after the other, then we would be, as Wumen tells, us, masters of our lives, using whatever circumstances arise as our path for this moment. We won't any longer be caught in desire and preference- this is what I wanted to happen, this is what I didn't want. This is how I like it, that was a mistake and should never have been. No such thing as that. We face what is, inside and out, with full authority, with humility, with calm. The word humility comes from the word humus, which means earth. To be humble is to realize that we are not separate creatures for whom things have to go a certain way; humble, we recognize ourselves for what we are, made of earth, one with earth, before we are born and after we die. All the green bamboos in the yard are greeting us. Wumen's verse is referring to the teaching of Manifestation Only that we talked about last week. The Alaya Vijnana, the 8th consciousness, is beyond boundary and definition. All that is, was, or could ever be, is contained in it, and it contains our individual karma, from the beginningless past, as well as the previous moment. We are all of that- what has happened to us, as well as everything else. When Manas, the illusion of a fixed and limited self, arises we begin to suffer, and we go on suffering until we see through it, putting it in its proper perspective and context. This is an achievement of meditation practice, as well as a craft for our daily living. When we see the one who sees, we will see how immense are all the moments of our lives, from the first to the last. We'll never be able to draw a map of the after-death worlds, but neither will be afraid of where we're going. Chewing our lives thoroughly, working the craft of our practice again and again, trying every day to understand a little more of how life goes, and knowing that this meditation is endless, we'll be well nourished for the ongoing journey.
® 2002, Norman Fischer
© 2025 Everyday Zen Foundation. All Rights Reserved.
