I've heard that the Buddha Shakyamuni once addressed a group of five yogis, yogis that he had practiced with himself earlier in his career, and he gave them some teaching, and this teaching has been called the Setting the Wheel of Dharma Rolling scripture, and there's agreement, general agreement, that that's the first, his first teaching, or it's the first teaching anyway that people heard. And the teaching which he gave, as I remember

[01:14]

it, and please correct me if you remember differently, it starts out basically saying, he starts out basically saying that there's two extremes in the world. One is devotion to, an indulgence in sense pleasure, and he said that this is vulgar, low, painful, and a waste of time, something like that. Then he said the other extreme is devotion to

[02:14]

self-mortification. He didn't say that that was vulgar because it's not so common, but he said also it's painful and really no good. Then he said, I teach a middle way, avoiding these extremes, which is really great. Now the people he was talking to were yogis. They already had realized, I think all of them, profound states of samadhi, samadhi number two, samadhis which were not united with the wisdom which the Buddha realized, and also because of that, although these people

[03:26]

were good at samadhis, they had a tendency towards the extreme of self-mortification. But you could even maybe accuse them perhaps of having some tendency towards the extreme of indulgence in sense pleasure, because in those yogic states there's great pleasure. But anyway, the Buddha taught them the middle way, which was avoiding these extremes. And then he went on to teach them the Four Noble Truths in this same talk. And it just struck me today that his first teaching was really a wisdom teaching. He didn't teach them about samadhi, and he didn't teach them about precepts. Went right to wisdom for these people, partly because they already were

[04:29]

accomplished yogis, they already knew about samadhi practice. But I also thought he didn't mention anything about compassion. But although he didn't mention anything about compassion, he was demonstrating it because he was actually giving them teachings on wisdom, which was the main gift out of his compassion that he wished to give, because it's the gift that they needed in order to be released. He didn't teach them in this first scripture the path to becoming a Buddha. He didn't say, you guys want to be Buddhas like me? Well then we got to work on compassion. And also, after I make that clear, we can start working on wisdom. You're already working on samadhi, but you need to work on giving precepts, more than just the precepts of training in samadhi,

[05:30]

and you need to work on patience and diligence and continue to work on samadhi. In the Buddha's Bodhisattva path towards Buddhahood, we mentioned compassion at the beginning, but the Buddha's first teaching to his first students, he didn't say anything about compassion, and actually he didn't say anything about it in a lot of other scriptures too. He went right to wisdom teachings. But again, he was often talking to people who already knew how to practice the samadhis. He was teaching accomplished yogis often, so he just offered them the wisdom teachings, they listened, they contemplated, and then they united what they learned in that process with their samadhis, and as a result, these five people, actually one of them at the end

[06:39]

of that first talk understood, woke up, and the other two woke up after I think two weeks, and after about a month, all of them had attained arhatship, full personal liberation. Now today, we look back over the Buddhist tradition, or I do, and I say stuff like, that the Buddha, the teaching of the Buddha is that we human beings innately and ignorantly imagine ourselves and other persons and things to be more real than they actually nicely are.

[07:41]

The first meaning of nicely is pleasant or pleasing, but the last meaning of nicely is precisely or exactly, like a nicely demonstrated proof or a nicely done verification of a theory or something. Anyway, we don't imagine things very nicely, in a way. They're somewhat pleasant the way we do it, but not very accurate. We imagine things, generally we have this tendency to imagine things as more real than they actually are, and we're fairly democratic about it in a sense. We give more reality to almost everything that we see, more reality to good that we see, and more reality to harm that we see. This is called, as a basic position in life, it's called naive realism.

[08:50]

We're actually like born philosophers of a school of realism that we're born with. That's what I understand the Buddha taught. This naive realism, this innate tendency to reify things, is a deeply self-destructive habit, a deeply person-destructive pattern. As a result of this faulty philosophy that we're born with, as a result of imagining things more real than they are, we suffer, and we feel the suffering, it hurts, and as a result we try to do something about it,

[09:52]

and what we often do is, what do we do? Well, we create more suffering, but what do we do to create more suffering? We distract ourselves, yeah. What else? We try to make ourselves feel better. In other words, we do various things, right? We do karma to try to fix the situation. And what kind of karma do we usually do? We usually indulge in sense pleasure. We're devoted to sense pleasure as an attempt to deal with this suffering which is coming from this innate realism, or we mortify ourselves. So now, during sasheen, some of you are wondering if you're mortifying yourself. So here, how do you find the middle way between mortifying your body and indulging in pleasure here?

[10:56]

You're struggling to find that. It's hard to find it while we're imagining things to be more real than they are, because we're in pain and we want to find the middle way, we're struggling to find the middle way. So anyway, the first kind of thing he pointed out to us is the way people act when they misconceive things. But he didn't mention the misconception when he first talked about it. He just talked sort of as a by-product of this devotion to sense pleasure or devotion to self-mortification. Now, all the different schools of Buddhist philosophy agree that the deepest and most subtle form of ignorance must be the root of all misery.

[12:04]

But they don't agree about how deep the root goes. Some feel the root goes deeper than others. But they all agree that whatever the subtlest form of ignorance… Now, most of us have a variety of ignorances. Like I often mention, I used to have an ignorance with regard to Italians. I grew up in Minnesota, there's like three Italians in Minnesota. Most of them stopped at Chicago or went to San Francisco after they left New York. They said, it's too cold up here. But anyway, a few made it up there and almost all of them that I knew, you know, what do you think they did for a living? Yeah, they had some restaurants. But still, even though that was the case, generally speaking, I sort of thought when I was a kid that Italians had greasy hair…

[13:23]

And, you know, and not very intelligent gangsters. I didn't think of gangsters as being very smart. Anyway, that was my ignorant view of Italians. Somehow, in my ignorance, I overlooked the Roman Empire and the Renaissance and Maseratis and what's the other one? Ferraris, I overlooked Ferraris. In my ignorance, I didn't understand that an Italian could make a Ferrari. And I overlooked cloth, you know, and shoes. I overlooked all those paintings and all that music and all that architecture. Somehow, I just forgot about that and thought, well, Italians are greasy, you know, greasy gangster tendencies and they like to fight.

[14:29]

And this is ignorance. This is the kind of ignorance I had, which, you know, it's mostly been overcome. Ignorances can be overcome by education. Now I think, now I have this view that Italians can be extremely brilliant and skillful and etc. It's just a view too. But anyway, my old ignorance has been overcome. And that ignorance is not a subtle ignorance. That's a gross, stupid ignorance with, you know, heavy-duty learned ignorance. I wasn't born thinking this about Italians. I had to watch a few movies first, because I never met any Italians except in the restaurants, mostly from movies. But I had no suffering in my life, basically, from my ignorance about Italians. It didn't really bother me. The root of the suffering is more subtle.

[15:38]

It's like this thing that's there all the time, hurting us, gouging at our lovely little personhood, throwing everything we see off. It's the root of all of our misery, and it's very deep and subtle, and it's okay when you hear about this to frown and make your face go into funny shapes. All these different schools think of themselves as middle-way schools, as schools which teach how to avoid the extremes, the extreme views, which are basically the extreme view,

[16:39]

first of all, of trying to act out in extreme ways, but then, philosophically, the basis of that acting out is that we think things really exist or really don't exist. In other words, we have views, extreme views, of permanence or eternalism and annihilationism. So each of these schools teach a way, teach us how to avoid these extremes. So in the Katyayana Sutra, the Buddha taught that in the world, generally speaking, people are inclined towards the extremes, extremes of existence and non-existence, of eternalism, impermanence, or annihilationism. Annihilationism doesn't mean impermanence, it means things are completely destroyed. Each of these schools of Buddhist philosophy is trying to cure our tendency to grasp these extremes and find the middle way.

[17:53]

The teachings of how to avoid the extremes and walk the middle are teachings of wisdom, which when we understand them, then hopefully we can unite them in Samadhi, so that these teachings of the middle, which we understand, become us or we become them. So after we understand them, we're not just thinking about these teachings, we're being these teachings. We become the middle way by joining the wisdom of the middle with Samadhi. I hesitate to, you know, I hesitate to bring up systems. Systems have drawbacks.

[19:07]

One time here at Zen Center, actually more than once, we invited, I think it was when I was Abbot, we invited a Tibetan teacher named Taratulku Rinpoche, and he came here and gave teachings on the Bodhisattva path. And then one time we invited him and Kadagiri Roshi to come and give lectures, alternating, and after the seminar, the retreat was over, I gave Kadagiri Roshi a ride to the airport. I said to him that I really enjoyed Taratulku's talks because after studying for many years the Abhidharmakosha myself, when I heard him talk, I could hear him, although he wasn't saying Abhidharmakosha, I could hear him, almost everything he said I heard coming from the Abhidharmakosha.

[20:19]

So it was lots of fun for me to hear how he used the teaching and how the teaching came through him, and so I knew the source of where he was coming from. And Kadagiri Roshi said something like, Dogen Zenji was very cautious about systems, something like cautious. That's about all I said, I think, but I thought about it afterwards, and I think systems, you know, they're dangerous because they're powerful, you know, schools are dangerous because they've got a building, you know, and a front door and stuff like that. So the schools and the systems, they have their dangerous side, and to avoid systems is, you know, maybe too much, but to be careful of them, I think, is a good side of Zen, that we're kind of unsystematic.

[21:21]

And since we're unsystematic, we also, since we're unsystematic, we don't have a system that stops me from presenting a system. So in Zen, you know, you have this guy come in here and he can lay like piles of systems at your feet, because Zen doesn't have a system. However, in Rinzai now, Rinzai Zen in Japan, they have a system, a koan system, and Soto Zen doesn't really have a koan system. So Rinzai is more systematic at this time in history, has been for about a couple hundred years, been more systematic in the presentation of wisdom teachings through their koan system, and Soto Zen is less systematic. But anyway, I'm bringing before you systems, but with a caveat to watch out, be careful, and yet I hope they're useful to you.

[22:24]

So with that warning, then I even also feel a little bit uncomfortable about giving you like a system of systems, but in fact that's what I'm about to do. I'm not just going to tell you the systems, but I'm going to give you an overview of the systems. All these systems are in a way are Abhidharma systems. And Abhidharma literally means, I don't know, one etymology is Abhi means higher or highest, but it also means an approach, and Dharma means, of course, the truth. But some people translate Abhidharma kosha, kosha means storehouse or treasury, they translate it as treasury of manifest knowledge, or treasury of knowledge, or you could say treasury of higher Dharma, or highest Dharma, but also treasury of approach to the Dharma.

[23:31]

But anyway, Abhidharma, and each school in a sense, each of these schools has an Abhidharma, and all the Abhidharmas are basically a systematized version of Buddha's critique on naive realism. So the Buddha, you know, like in the first scripture, you don't see him critiquing naive realism so literally, he's critiquing an effect of naive realism. One of the effects of naive realism is devotion to sense pleasure, or devotion to asceticism, as recourses to the misery which arises based on naive realism. So we don't usually know that our suffering is coming from this misconception, this inappropriate imputation of reality on things.

[24:39]

All we know is vaguely that we're uncomfortable and pleasure is kind of like feels good because it's a distraction from it, it's a break from all this anxiety and fear, right? So the Buddha was not systematic, which I think is part of the reason why we should be careful of being systematic. So after you learn all these systems, it's very good to forget them. I mean, not forget them, but don't hold on to them. Don't be systematic yourself, be like Buddha. But Buddha also knew all these systems, just that he didn't think it was appropriate to let people know about them right away. So as I say, if you look at Buddha's teachings, you won't see a systematic presentation, but you'll see here and there he goes, peck, peck.

[25:40]

He pecks at this naive realism and he kind of shows a way to let go of the ignorance. Ignorance means ignoring true realism. True realism is knowing what's real and what's not, or knowing how real things are. We don't call that realism, we call that wisdom. Realism is a name for too much reality being given to things, which is really quite generous of us. Don't you think? In that way we're quite generous as human beings. Oh, you're real, you're real, you're real, and you're really that way, and you're really that way, and you're really that way. And you're really that way, and you're really that way, and you are really that way. And all that, you know, is very nice of us, in a way. It's just that it hurts everybody. So, Buddhists tried to get us to stop ignoring the way things actually are, to try to start

[26:55]

turning towards the middle way that things are, rather than the extreme way that things are. But as I say, he just said it here and there, according to circumstances, when people were ready. He kind of go, you know, he just said various things like, and then suddenly, boom, a little bit of, a little dart would go in there and say, there it is, or stop ignoring that, look over here. He didn't just turn it on, because that wasn't, you know, it doesn't work. It's hard to give wisdom teachings because they're reorienting, and reorienting means disorienting from your previous orientation. So people got to be like ready for wisdom teachings. These five guys at the beginning were ready. They were like happy yogis, said, okay, now I'm going to turn you upside down, you ready? And they woke up. So, here's a system of systems.

[28:04]

There's basically four systems of Buddhist philosophy, four systems of learning wisdom in the Buddhist tradition. Four systems about what the deepest kind of ignorance is, four systems about what the deepest misconception of what the self is. The first system is called, you know, Vaibhashika, now in the southern part of India they also had Abhidharma, but the southern part of India is whatever, I don't know what, it's like

[29:07]

the weather is better, and the people down there are not so philosophically oriented, so the four schools didn't seem to live in southern India, they just had one school of Abhidharma, and just happily lived forever after. But in the north, people are very feisty and critical, and so the schools kept, you know, growing, and they finally wound up with four major types in the Sanskrit literature. So the first type is called Vaibhashika, and it comes from the word, Vaibhashika means those of the Vibhasha, and the Vibhasha means basically exposition, and there's a text called the Mahavibhasha, which is the basis of this big school, the great, the Maha, the great

[30:10]

exposition of Abhidharma, the great exposition of wisdom. Now this Mahavibhasha is a commentary, it's a commentary on the largest of the basic Abhidharma texts. So originally, in the Sanskrit literature, as the Buddhist disciples systematized the Buddhist teaching on wisdom, they had five volumes in the Sanskrit tradition, seven, and I often think of it as an insect, because there was one huge text, which is like the body of the insect, and six legs, so six small treatises on Abhidharma, and one huge one, and the huge one is called the Dhyanaprasthana, which means the establishment or the ground

[31:15]

of knowledge. And the Mahavibhasha is a commentary on the largest of the Abhidharma works, and the people who studied this commentary on the largest of the Sanskrit Abhidharma works are called the Vibhashikas. Okay? That's the first school. That first school has 18 sub-schools. So maybe you can get a feeling for the level of philosophical brilliance that was going on in India in those days. Well, when were those days? Well, we're not sure exactly, but maybe from a couple hundred years after Buddha until the 12th century. So that school was an early Abhidharma school, and it lasted all the way until the Muslims

[32:24]

came in and tested the Buddhists to see if they would die without a fight, and they did. Fortunately, they had already spread all over the rest of Asia, so it was okay. And because of the way that the Buddhists died, the Muslims turned into Sufis. As the Buddhists were dying at the hands of these invaders, they looked in their eyes with love, and that they were transformed, and their tradition developed a more peaceful version of itself, which made great contributions to the world, and still is.

[33:29]

Anyway, that's the Vibhashikas, okay? That's the most sophisticated philosophical program of Buddhism, and it's the first. The second one is called the Satrāntika, so the first one is called Vibhashika, or I will call them the Expositionists, which, not to be confused with you-know-what, although when they're doing their thing, it seems like they are. Do you understand, Sridhar? Exhibitionists. They're not Exhibitionists, although they sometimes are. Anyway, the Expositionists are the Vibhashikas, and one of the sub-schools is called the Sarvāstivādin. Now the next school is called the Satrāntika, and that comes from the word sutra. Sutra means scripture.

[34:32]

And so Satrāntika means those of the scriptures, just like if you take sutra, it goes to sautra, that means of the sutra, just like you have Buddha and Bauddha. So we're Bauddhikas, we're those of the Buddha, and those of the scripture are called the Satrāntikas, okay? Now that school, its main thing was also that it wanted to show a middle way, but the way it showed the middle way was by looking at the way the Vibhashikas presented the middle way and criticizing them, noticing and demonstrating how the Vibhashikas kind of veered away from the middle way, and they were fairly successful in their demonstration. They were, in some sense, their level of understanding was in some ways more sophisticated than the

[35:45]

earlier and yet great philosophical system. Now, both of these schools, in both of these schools, or maybe I'll, before I talk about them more, I'll just go on and finish the list, the next group, the next school, is called the citta-mātras, or citta-mātras, citta means mind, and mātra means only. So, citta-mātra means mind only, and citta-mātriṇa are those of the mind only school. This is also sometimes called Yogacara. And this school has two main branches, those following scriptures and those following critical examination or reasoning. There's also two branches of Sautrāntika, those following scriptures and those following

[36:49]

reasoning. And then comes the fourth school, which is called Madhyamaka, or middle way school, although all the schools are middle way schools, the fourth school calls itself a middle way school, or has been called, got that name. And it has two main subdivisions, the Sautrāntika Madhyamaka and the Prasangika Madhyamaka. Svatantrika means, Svatantra means like autonomous, so it's the autonomous, and Prasangika means consequentialists, or people who are the consequential or consequent school. So those are the four schools with, let's see, two, four, six, twenty-four sub-schools.

[37:52]

Now in general, the last two schools, which are the Mahāyāna schools, and they're Mahāyāna in a sense, the reason why they're called Mahāyāna is because they're pitched at the level of practice which is devoted to realizing Buddhahood. And they're the teachings which are set up in such a way as to realize the knowledge, the wisdom and knowledge of a Buddha. And the first two schools are sometimes called lesser vehicle, because they're pitched at a level of enlightenment, you know, not that of a Buddha, but that of an Arhat. So, the two great vehicle schools are said to be distinguished from the two lesser vehicle schools in that the higher schools or the Mahāyāna schools teach the emptiness or

[39:02]

the selflessness of all phenomena, while the lower schools teach the emptiness or selflessness of persons. Is that clear? And the reason why the Mahāyāna schools teach the emptiness of both things and persons is because you need both levels of wisdom in order to achieve the omniscience of a Buddha. And omniscience of a Buddha means that you're maxed out on the ability to help people. If you have less than that, you're less than maximally skilled to help beings. The wisdom which understands the selflessness of persons is sufficient for liberating the meditator who has this wisdom. And in the lesser vehicle schools, that was their goal, to liberate the individual practitioner.

[40:06]

And even in the individual schools, though, you see the word, you see there is some discussion of the Bodhisattva path. But the point of view generally seems to be that they feel like, and this is not untrue, they feel like there is a Bodhisattva path for some very few and rare beings. So they're mostly concerned with this enlightenment of the individual. All these schools agree that sentient beings are trapped in birth and death by certain misconceptions about the type of self that a person has. So the misconceptions about the type of self a person has is what keeps you trapped in

[41:20]

birth and death, in the misery of birth and death. But misconception about the self that things have limits your skillfulness as a helper. So towards the end of liberating a being or beings from birth and death, the Vaibhashika system, the expositionist system, recommended these three wisdoms to meditate on the non-existence of a certain kind of a self. They saw a certain kind of self as the self that we should find that we should understand the non-existence of, and the self that they were trying to find the non-existence of,

[42:23]

first of all, was a permanent, partless, independent self. Okay? That's the kind of self that they felt was the root of all misery, and if you would understand the non-existence of that, you would be free from birth and death. So, still, within this system, I've heard that 13 of the 18 schools said that still that this level or this type of self is actually a coarser ignorance, and that it was a more subtle ignorance, which was the belief in a substantially existing self.

[43:24]

So that's a little bit more subtle, a little less gross. So some of those schools within that group, all of them agreed that certainly we should realize the non-existence of a permanent, partless, independent self, but most of them also said you actually need to go further than that and realize that even if you don't have a permanent, partless, independent self, if you have a substantial self of the person, you need to realize the non-existence of that also. Okay? So, that's a little bit scratching the surface here, but that's already quite a bit. So you and I now know what it is that the wisdom needs to see doesn't exist according

[44:31]

to this first school of Buddhism. So we had all four schools understand that all things are selfless, but the earliest school only requires us to realize the selflessness of persons and also a certain type of selflessness, namely that the self of the person is that a substantial self and also that a partless, permanent, independent self, that there is no such thing as that. There is a self, however, they don't say there's not a self, because there is a self. In the world, there's a self, but there's not a permanent, partless, independent one and there's not a substantial one, okay? Now, I'm sorry, the kitchen has to go, because I was going to say something, but they're going. Bye, kitchen. Maybe I'll, remind me to say the next little part again the next time for them when they

[45:38]

come back, but before I call on Eleanor, I want to say a little bit more, okay? It seems to me that ignorance, various kinds of ignorance, the gross kind like prejudices about Italians and Palestinians and Israelis, and you know when I say Israelis, I say Israelis rather than Jews, because, you know, there are Arab Israelis, right? There are Israeli citizens who are Arabs and I was very happy to hear that there are Arabs, that there are Muslims in the Israeli government, in the Israeli legislature, there are Arabs and they disagree with what their government is doing now with the Palestinians.

[46:40]

And I feel like, well, that's something good for Israel, that an Arab can be in their government and can disagree with their government and it's a democracy, in other words, that a person can do that. So anyway, Israelis can have preconceptions, ignorance about what an Israeli is, what a Palestinian is, what an Italian is, these are gross ones, okay? And those are psychological phenomena, does that make sense? Those are psychological phenomena, do you understand? But it might not be clear, and even after I say this, you might not agree with me, but to me, the subtlest form, the gross forms, and the medium gross forms, and the subtle form, and the subtlest form of ignorance is a psychological effect, is a psychological event. So there it is, the subtlest, I said it, and you can talk to me about it if you have any

[47:49]

problems, the subtlest form of ignorance, the deepest form of ignorance, the root of suffering is a psychological phenomena. Therefore, the issue of wisdom, which sees and knows the truths about things the way things actually are, beyond our over-realizing them, is often presented in psychological terms, in Buddhism. So actually, the truth is, we're over-realizing things, the truth is, things are really like this, but actually to understand it, we have to get into the psychology of ignorance and the psychology of wisdom. Therefore, the presentation of the process to be able to see the truth, and also to see ignorance and see that it's ignorance, to be able to see the way things actually are, the way people actually are in this case, in this system, to learn how to see how kind

[48:55]

of self people really have, and to learn how to refute this exaggerated sense that we have, we have to study the mind and what it knows. So the presentation of the wisdom practice for rectifying our ignorance in this first system, and in the later ones too, is actually a psychological education program. It's a philosophical program that uses psychology, psychological meditations, and most meditations also are psychological. So, that's enough probably. Now, the problem is, you probably can't remember from today to tomorrow everything I said, but still, even though you can't, I'll probably just start here tomorrow with the presentation of this thing called minds and objects, or subjects and objects, and how the first school

[50:01]

presents that. Okay? And again, this is like wisdom teaching in psychological terms, because wisdom is about refuting our misconceptions, our faulty minds, our consciousnesses, which are innately wacko. What is it? We come by it honestly. It's your parents' fault. That's an expression I often hear around certain people's house. She comes by it honestly. I got that from my dad. Okay? So is that enough for today in terms of new stuff? So I hope you've got your feet on the ground now, and if you can remember this context, tomorrow we'll launch into the examination of mind and object, and how to learn to see

[51:08]

objects in this new way, and understand subjects in a new way, because baby, we are subject-object creatures, right? Okay. So, Eleanor? Yeah? Yeah. Well, well, can you see that you might imagine that there's a substantial self? Huh? Yeah, that you take the body as substantial, and that you think yourself is substantially

[52:09]

the body, for example. Okay? But that would be one level of view of the self, that maybe that would contribute to your sense that you have a substantial self. Okay? Let's just say that's the way you do it. All right? And that would be less gross than to add on to that, that that self is permanent, and doesn't have parts, and is independent. That's even grosser. Can you see that? So a more subtle version would be, okay, I can't find, and I admit that there's no such thing as a partless, permanent, independent self. I've understood the non-existence of that. Okay? And we can look at how you find that. But the next step would be, isn't there still something there? Isn't there still some self?

[53:10]

And the answer is, yes, there is still some self. There is a self. So none of the schools say that there isn't a self, because that would be like an extreme. To say that there isn't a self would be very similar to saying there isn't a sun, or there isn't a moon, or there aren't children, or people. Right? But Buddhism doesn't say that there aren't those things. Okay? In the world, there are those things. But even in the world, okay, there aren't these substantial selves. I see all these furrowed brows. Is there another word you can use besides substantial? I'll try to think of another word besides substantial.

[54:15]

But can you get a feeling like that considering the self to be partless, permanent, and independent is a heavier duty self than just one that you feel is like really there substantially? Can you feel that? Well, no, you don't have to make it forever. You can make it impermanent, because again, if you have a self which is impermanent, you're more in line with the Buddhist tenets, right? The Buddhist positions. We say everything, all compounded things are impermanent, right? So if you say that the self is permanent, you're saying the self is not compounded. That's really gross, right?

[55:18]

Isn't that gross? It's a gross affront to the Buddhist position, which says, well, it's not actually an affront to the Buddhist position, because if the self is partless and uncompounded, then it would be permanent. But to say that the self is partless and uncompounded is going a bit far. But to say that after admitting it is compounded, okay, I agree it's compounded, it is put together, and it is impermanent, okay, I admit that. But there's still some substance there. But not that it goes on forever. The naive realism is that actually you're born with a sense that the self is permanent. That's the grossest one, and now we've got that one. Most people have that one. Now there's a subtler version of it, which comes up right away after that one's refuted, and the subtler version is, well, there's still some substance there.

[56:20]

Okay, let's see if you can find the substance. But I guess first of all, what do you mean by that, and can you identify some sense of a substantial self, and that would be part of the work maybe to discuss tomorrow, is can you find some sense of substance there. Okay? Jim? Questioner 2 Would the realization of this mean the elimination of the felt sense of I? No, there still might be a felt sense of I. That's a perfectly good phenomenon. Okay? It doesn't mean that phenomena are eliminated. All right? So you have a felt sense of I. That's a psychological phenomena. Now if you say that's all the self you've got, then what is that? The system would say, well, that's a felt sense. It's either a concept or a feeling. If you give me the empirical description of what it is, and I'll feed back to you what

[57:29]

it is in terms of things. I mentioned yesterday that this system presents objects, so we'll get into that. It presents objects and subjects, and the objects are things, the things that perform a function. So the felt sense of I performs a function. But that's not a self. It's a feeling, or it's an idea, which performs a function. Like, does anybody know where Jim Hare is? And you say, I'm over here. You know? It serves a function. But that's not a self. That's a thing. It's an identification tag. It's an idea, or it's a feeling, or it's a smell. Maybe you can just go, he's over here. You know? But that's not a self. That's a smell, an identifying. Or somebody else might say, he's over here. Yeah, Rosdy would say, right here.

[58:30]

Say, where's Jim? Rosdy goes, and points. But that's not an independent, permanent, partless self. That's a sense data. And that's one of the things that the system would recognize. To confuse that, and to make that more real than that, is what you get over. But you don't eliminate the phenomena which you just told us about. That's still a thing which has a function. Now, if it has no function, it's not even a thing. And some selves are not even a thing. And those, like the independent self, is not a thing. There's no such thing as an independent self. The independent self has no function. There's no function for an independent self in this world. There's no function for a permanent self. It has no function, there's no such thing. And we can find that out. However, the idea that there is a permanent self, that idea is not a self. That's an idea, that's a misconception.

[59:32]

That has a function, and its function is what? Misery. Its function is the root of misery. It has a big function. And we would like to, like, retire that function. We would like to retire that thing, by just carefully putting it over on the shelf and saying, this is a misconception which we're not involved in anymore. It has been, like, retired. It never was a self, it was just a misconception. We don't eliminate the selves, we eliminate their misconceptions. Okay? But it doesn't mean that the misconceptions still wouldn't arise. But even that felt sense is not a misconception until you think that's a self. It's just a felt sense. That's not a misconception. You're actually accurate if you have a felt sense. I think Stuart, did you have a hand raised, Stuart? Yes. Sometimes I think of the idea of a substantial self as an essentially existing self, the essence of a self.

[60:34]

Yeah. So I'm trying to be careful not to get into the way the later schools start talking. I'd like to, without invoking their way of talking, see if we can get a feeling for substantial self without veering into the next category, which you sort of did there. It's okay. But there's other... You see, when you have the grosser sense of self, like partless, permanent, independent, if you take that away, then you notice that inside of that was hiding a substantial self. Okay? Then if you take away the substantial self, you'll find another one in there, a more subtle one there. You take that one away, you find a more subtle... So I want to be careful not to use the next level of subtlety yet. The next school is subtle. There's another subtlety in between

[61:36]

switching to the next school. So within the first school, you have two levels. The second level refutes the first level, and then refutes the second level, too. But after they refute the second level, what they wind up with, excepting, the next school refutes that, too. Does that make sense? So in the first school, they did their own work on the first type of self. They refuted that one. And then they refuted a second one. But then they wound up with one that they said, this is a reasonable self. The next school came up and said, nope, but this is a reasonable self. And the next school comes up and says, nope, but this is a reasonable self. And the next one comes up with, nope, but this is a reasonable self. Until finally, although they didn't actually deny any phenomena, they really self-lifed, selfless-nized, emptied all the possible versions, more and more subtle versions.

[62:36]

And the earlier schools still might agree that that happened, but they might say, it's not necessary to do that for the work we're concerned with. And I saw Anil. What? It was similar to that. Stephen and Cedar. I appreciate your interest, but this is like lunchtime pretty soon. Stephen? Huh? No, I mean, if I answer these questions, it's lunchtime. And I kind of hesitate to do that, but it may happen, but I'm just warning you that we're heading towards lunchtime. Stephen? Reality is like a dream? The dream is not substantial.

[63:45]

Most of the time. Is there a point where you would see waking reality like the dream? I mean, there is the dream, but it's not substantial. Yeah, right, so that would be part of it, is that there would be this, well, like you would have a dream of something, like you'd have a dream of what Italians are like, and then you would just see that's a dream, that's not what Italians are like. And even my dreams of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance are not what Italians are like. They're just, you know... But as you get educated, you realize more and more that there's a kind of dreaming going on here, and we should be careful about attributing too much reality to our dreams. But there are dreams, and they do happen. And there's other kinds of objects of awareness too, besides dreams. But all of them now will be subject to some kind of critique as to whether they're being over-realized or not.

[64:50]

How much reality do they actually deserve? And dreams deserve some reality, right? But not the same type of reality as daytime images. What's the difference? There's a way to discuss that. Okay? Did I deal with it, or was there some other point that you were bringing up? Well, I was wondering if there was a level of looking that saw waking everyday reality like a dream. Yes, there is, right. And as you may know, in the Diamond Sutra it says, look at all phenomena as though they were dreams, as though they were bubbles, as though they were phantoms. It's an instruction to learn to see phenomena as dreamlike, because in fact, all phenomena do have a dreamlike quality,

[65:57]

because they depend on mind. So to some extent there's a dreaming upside of all things that appear to us. And as we understand the dreamlike contribution to all things, we start to understand more what they're actually like, as we learn to see things separate from our imputations. Okay? So, anyway, was there more questions over on this side before? But there's a little cluster here, this little triangle here. What's your question? I was thinking about the substantial, which I have... Anyway, I was wondering if the substantial self might be one that, say, lasted for 80 years, or, you know, some of the substantialness Yeah, that could be a duration of 80 years,

[67:00]

that could be a substantial thing. But that's also similar to permanent. That's the same self for 80 years. So that would be something on the gross level, that you think is the same self all the way through. It's the same person, but not the same self, according to the first refutation. So, can you get in touch with any kind of substantial self during this session? It seems like you do. It seems like people are kind of concerned about the self here, worried about what this... It's as though they're talking about something substantial, that's suffering here. Rather than just the suffering, it's like, well, it's not just suffering, I'm suffering, and there's actually something to that I that's suffering. So maybe you can get a sense that you actually do kind of think that there's a substantial self, but also maybe you think there's a permanent self that lasts for like 80 years or 50 years,

[68:02]

or that's been lasting up till now. Maybe you feel that. Well, then maybe you're getting in touch with that conception that you have a self that's like a permanent self. And maybe it's partless. So check it out. See what level of ignorance you've got on your hands here. Yes? Well, I had an incongruency about mental objects like dharmas as being impermanent. All dharmas that we experience in our mind, all mental objects are impermanent. No, not all mental objects are impermanent. Just the compounded ones are impermanent. You can actually see things that are permanent sometimes. But the experience of the dharma is impermanent. The experience of the dharma is impermanent. The consciousness is impermanent. So that's part of the... This is a philosophical fruit tree,

[69:09]

which is how can a consciousness know, how can an impermanent consciousness know a permanent thing? Because if they're saying that some things are permanent, the Buddha didn't say everything was impermanent. So an impermanent consciousness knowing an impermanent thing, that seems to be not so difficult. But how can an impermanent thing know a permanent thing? And we're saying that these are objects of knowledge, in the first school, the two types of cessation and space in the first school. Okay? How can that happen? There's kind of a conflict there. But that's why we're saying some objects are permanent and most objects are impermanent, but the consciousness which knows them, being a living being's consciousness, which arises in dependence on these objects, it's impermanent. You're right.

[70:11]

That's what I was curious about. And I just... Would you continue to explain that with the light of there's no separation between subject and object, that the perceiver and the perceived is one phenomenon? Right, and so there you go, you see. So an impermanent thing, like you and me, which impermanent feelings, impermanent emotions, impermanent body, impermanent consciousness, impermanent thing like this, can know something permanent? But as he pointed out, if another school points out that these are not really separate, then is the impermanent thing getting kind of contaminated by a permanent thing? And can the impermanent thing get contaminated by the permanent thing without thinking that things that aren't permanent are permanent? Well, usually not. So in a sense, you could say maybe the reason why we come up with permanence inappropriately is because we're somewhat infected

[71:15]

by inappropriate permanence. Because in fact, if an impermanent consciousness knew a permanent thing, then it would be one with and inseparable from an impermanent thing. So it's kind of like that consciousness in a sense is cozy with immortality, which is part of what this was all about, you know, for some people it's like defeating death, overcoming birth and death. You see, that's part of the trick that may be involved here, is that this is all a self-denial of the fact of death. But your point is that, you know, a kind of ingredient there that if you really not just think about and understand permanent things and understand impermanent things, but in samadhi, that understanding becomes your being. So you're actually being the understanding of a permanent phenomena, like space or cessation, that you're actually becoming cessation.

[72:16]

In other words, you're becoming nirvana. Nirvana is not the cessation. Nirvana is when somebody realizes it. So this is... you struck on a little thing there, see? It's like quite a thing, that by becoming... understanding a cessation, which you will understand tomorrow, probably. And some of you will understand cessation tomorrow. Some of you already understand it. Some of you understood it last week. But by having that understanding of cessation and understanding that this is a permanent thing, and understanding that most of the things which you usually think are permanent are not permanent, so you don't waste your time on those as permanent, and you're not misconceived about them. You say, my body is impermanent, but space is permanent. Maybe you can achieve personal liberation if you bring that into samadhi

[73:19]

and become that understanding. This is a possibility of this early school. Okay? Yeah, I know. You're part of the triangle, right? So you don't have to keep raising your hand up several times. You've already been designated. But if you want to raise your hand a few more times, go ahead. Just go ahead. It's not necessary, though, because I know that you've already been specified, right? I think I've raised it two times unnecessarily. That's enough. Okay. You want to raise your hand any more? Me? No. Yeah. Have you been taken care of? Did you get the substantial thing? That was your thing? Yeah. Okay, and now, the last of the three. How does the substantial self relate to self-employing and receiving samadhi? We talked about coming into the room with the self. Okay, so she says, how does the substantial self relate to the self-receiving and employing samadhi?

[74:22]

Yeah. Can you have self-receiving and employing samadhi and still be a substantial one? Or does that mean you've got rid of your substantial self? What did you say? You've talked about coming into the room with the self. Coming into the room with the self. Coming into the room with the self, like you come into this zendo with the self, and then you come to noon service. And at noon service, you hear about the self-receiving and employing samadhi, but you brought yourself in. So you're sitting there holding yourself, so you can't even pick up the sutra card. But you can listen to the other people. You people chant, I've got to take care of myself, which I brought in here. And then you hear about this self that's resonating off everything and so on and so forth. But it's hard for you to let this teaching in because you're holding the self all the time. And you're worried about what would happen if you set the self down and listened to the teaching. But in fact, that's the case.

[75:24]

It's hard to listen to that teaching when you still have the self that you brought into the room that was out in the hall before you came in and then came in with you and then stood there with you while you were chanting. It's hard to hear that teaching. Like, what are they talking about? Now, if you would, like, let go of that thing that you brought in the room. Okay? Now, this is not necessarily a permanent self. You might feel like, well, I brought it in the room, but it changed a little bit. But I still found another one. And I still have another one, and I have another one. So I always... It's kind of like almost permanent, but I got over that. But it's sort of like... It's not permanent, but it's before the sutra started. Before the sutra started being chanted. Something like that. That will make it harder to understand the teaching. But as you start to understand the teaching, you start to think, well, maybe... Maybe I don't have to hold this. As you enter that samadhi,

[76:27]

maybe you're not holding that self anymore, that substantial self. But there is a self that you get. The sutra says you do get a self. A self is given to you. And then it's used. And when the self that you've got is not a self that's substantial, but a self that's given to you, and then given away. It's a very fluid, flexible, interrelated thing. It's not a substantial thing. And yet it's like there's a felt sense, and then somebody calls your name, and there's various whiffs of it here and there. But it's this kind of self you can receive. This kind of self you don't have to bring in the room. Because when you get in the room, since you're trusting the samadhi, you know you'll get a self eventually. And if you don't get one, you will get one. If you're standing in the middle of a room, Nick will come over to you and say, tell you where to sit. Because he always has one to give you.

[77:31]

Because he's just ready to give you the one that he just got. Which is, he got the one of being the ino, so now he gives you your self by telling you where to sit. Which is giving away his inoship, by telling you. So in this way, when you're in that samadhi, there's the fact you're not holding to a substantial self. Or, put it the other way, if you catch your substantial self, and look at it, and understand that it's elusive and unreal, and basically you get over it, and you enter into samadhi with that, then you enter this, pretty much you enter this samadhi. Now maybe you're in the lower echelons of this samadhi because you haven't realized the most subtle versions yet, but... Okay? Yeah. Alright, is that enough for today? So tomorrow I'll start with the with the way this Abhidharman school

[78:37]

helps attempt to refute our misconceptions of our self by presenting certain objects for us to look at in discussions of consciousnesses which know these objects. Which teaches us how to see the truths of the way things are. Okay? So if I say that, can I just start on that tomorrow? Will you be ready for that, kind of? Well, you'll try. You have a lot to go through in the next several hours, I know. But I hope you can remember that we're going to start tomorrow. And so tomorrow I'll actually start with this Abhidharmakosha. Did you want to say something? I said don't forget the kitchen. Don't forget the kitchen, what about that? What about the kitchen? We're going to back up a little bit for the presentation. Oh yeah, I was going to tell the kitchen about the thing about the psychology. That's kind of a transition from our philosophical discussion

[79:40]

to getting into the psychological presentations which help us understand these truths. I'm glad you're enjoying something. This is the self-receiving and... This is a self-enjoyment samadhi. May our intention be free.

[80:10]

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