What was the teaching of the whole lifetime of Buddha, and Young Man said, an appropriate statement. Literally what the characters say is, each meets each, or one meets one, in other words when the student asks a question, the teacher meets that question appropriately. So, that was a problem to know, even though I want to talk about something, the question is, am I meeting you, is this a proper response to you?

[01:08]

And there's a bunch of you, it's pretty complicated, how each meets each. I want to continue to talk about mind, but before I do I want to again remind you that all these phenomena, all these pictures which I will be offering to you, each individually and all together, and all the Dharma ever offered by anybody to anybody, is empty, it's all empty, there's nothing really to any of it. It's just pecking on an egg, chicken and egg, chicken and chick, pecking on an egg, there's

[02:30]

nothing to it except to help break the egg and say hello, and melt the glue, knock out the blocks. The first picture I have is a picture of one of the monks here, Drew, which I'll post on the bulletin board out here, so you can look at it more closely. You can see the ball there on the swift flowing water, and there's a little Buddha inside the ball, looking pretty happy, an immovable happy Buddha sitting in the ball on swift flowing water.

[03:30]

This is Jogjo's response to, does a baby have the sixth consciousness? He didn't say it had it or didn't have it, he said, it's like a ball on swift flowing water. That's the sixth consciousness. But before the sixth consciousness, fundamentally, there is what we call in Yogacara or Mind-Owned school, a storehouse consciousness. And this is the storehouse which is the same size as the universe. It plays, in the words of D.T. Suzuki, the chief and silent role in the evolution of

[04:54]

consciousness. It's a huge background that surrounds all experience. Everything arises in that context of this alive jnana. So, in this huge consciousness, which all of our life, all of our living, has access to this consciousness, or is living in this huge ocean of consciousness. In that ocean are all the good and evil roots. In there, in that storehouse, are the effects of all good and past karma from all time of

[06:02]

all living creatures. This is where we live. This is where we sit. In this huge ocean are everything that anybody ever thought of or did, and the effects of those actions and thoughts and feelings. In this

[07:15]

ocean you can find subject and object, but in the ocean subject and object are not two originally. The source of subject and object is there, but fundamentally they are not separate. When we say mind only, we mean this pure, complete storehouse consciousness. And the Chinese character that is used to translate alaya is pronounced

[08:26]

tan, and in Japanese it's pronounced zo. It can also be read as womb. The Shobogenzo of Dogenzenji is the storehouse of all the clear dharma eyes. All the dharma eyes are in this storehouse, and all phenomena in this storehouse can be dharma eyes. This storehouse consciousness is also called sometimes Tathagatagarbha, the storehouse

[09:28]

or the womb of the Tathagata. We all live in the storehouse or the womb of all Tathagatas, but generally speaking we sit there wrapped up so thoroughly in coverings that we don't let ourselves be matured by this enlightening soup which is swirling around us constantly. So our job is primarily to sit until the coverings drop away, and therefore we wake up to the

[10:29]

nature of this pure ocean. All the lessons are right there already. All we need to do is open up to them, and we have a very simple and difficult method which is nicely pictured in this drawing by Jim. Then because of beginningless karma in this great ocean, because of past karma there comes the arising of a function of mind which is called Manas, the mind organ, the ability

[11:40]

of mind to split itself in two, and Manas comes in there and divides the ocean, and when it hits the ocean it makes a wave, and that wave never stops. It splits this ocean of non-duality which includes everything and everybody into two, and then magically one part of it can look over at another part of it. Then one part of life can look at another part of life and say, I don't like life,

[12:45]

even though the life that the one part's looking at is not life, but it's only a small part of life, and actually it's good not to like that life because that's not life. It's just a puny little version of it which has now been made into an object, of a subject, all of which is going on in this great ocean. So Manas serves a function of making consciousness available to itself, but also it defiles the ocean and causes waves. And as I talked about in the Abhidharma class, not only that but when it hits, the energy of past karma manifested through Manas hits the water and creates a wave,

[13:55]

that energy of that past action is transmitted into a wave, and the wave comes up and goes down, another wave comes up and goes down, and we even imagine that this wave, which is caused by the separation of the ocean, we even imagine that this wave is one thing going on, we can imagine a person or something moving across the ocean, whereas actually the apparent person is just the transmission of the energy of past karma, causing wave after wave up and down across the ocean. So Manas is the root of intellection, the root of the intellect,

[15:02]

and the root of intellect, the root as a western word is composed of inter and negere, which means to choose between. Manas splits and makes possible two, splits the one into two and makes possible to choose between, this is intellection. So, we have converted over the last few thousand years, the act of choosing in between into what we call brilliance, now we call intelligence or defilement brilliance, if a person is intelligent it means fundamentally that they can defile oneness, that they're choosing between

[16:10]

subject and object, and we now have elevated that activity of defilement and delusion to mean brilliance. Well, fine, but let's honor this thing, this brilliance for what it is, namely a defiling function. In the whole system of alaya, in the whole system of the defiled alaya, which is the ocean plus the fact that the ocean's been split, in totality of the cause and effect there, which then gives rise to discriminating

[17:17]

consciousness, which then discriminates between these alternatives that are set up, all of that in its totality is altogether pure. That's why you can't just look at part of it, you have to see the whole picture. If you can't see the whole picture with your eyes, the eye won't look up there, you have to see the whole picture with your whole body. Your whole body has to sit still, because you have to see in 10 directions at once. So,

[18:34]

past karma splits alaya into two. Once manas splits alaya, then there's also the possibility of further karma. So, manas sets up the splitting, the ability to choose in between, and also sets up the possibility of impulse and action. So, we look at one little part of it at a time. We make alaya into an object, or I shouldn't say we make it into, but manas, the defiling organ of consciousness, makes part of alaya into an object of awareness. And once we start looking at part of it,

[19:36]

because we look at part of it, the effect of looking at part of it is to continue to look at part of it. And we, each of us, get into ruts of looking at tiny little sections of the ocean. And many of us spend most of our time, strangely enough, looking at the good parts of the ocean, or what we think is good. And many of us get to look at a tiny little section of the grid, forgetting about all the evil. And then if we become a priest or a therapist, and people come and tell us,

[20:45]

people stumble upon, somehow, an awareness of evil, either in their action or in their thinking, in their voice or their posture or their thoughts. They run to us because, my God, they've stumbled upon something a little bit bigger than they usually look at. My God, evil! I'd better go tell somebody. And they come and they tell the priest, and the priest goes, The therapist goes, Get out of here! Don't tell me that stuff. Because the priest and the therapist are also looking at little tiny sections. The shock to hear about what the patient has discovered, or what the confessor has discovered. So, I can understand why Martin Luther wore out so many confessors, because he really sailed around in a laya vijnana,

[21:50]

coming up with all kinds of stuff which most people don't dare to look at, because they're wrapped up in a ball, looking at a tiny section of the mind. So, moral authority is not moral superiority. If you think you're morally superior to somebody, you don't have much moral authority. If you think some evil deed that someone does or tells you about that they did or thought or said, if you think you're not capable of that, if you think you're better than them, you don't know your own mind.

[22:54]

But who knows their mind well enough, so that no matter what monster comes to see them, they'll say, Oh, hi, I know about that. I live there too. My name is Buster Brown. Well, maybe nobody knows their mind that well. But this is what we can work towards, is knowing our mind so well that nobody will tell us anything that we don't already say, Oh, yeah. All right, that happens, doesn't it? I remember I did that 47 billion cultures ago myself. I was into that. It's all storage. Everything that everybody ever did is stored in the wire. And you and I

[24:08]

live in the middle of that. And there's nothing separating us from that stuff except our own past karma and the monist, which puts us on one side of a bridge from that thing or which puts it behind our back, but we can't see it. So, part of awakening to alaya is awakening to our own

[25:11]

not our own, but the fact that we're not separate from all evil. So that when somebody comes to see us and tells us a story, I did that and [...] I feel this way and I think that way, that everything they say, we can say. Just like a mirror. So alaya is this huge ocean which reflects all the images of the cosmos or contains all of them.

[26:38]

And when you stop cutting it in half and you move out to the full size of the mirror, you can say yes to everything and then you are Vairochana Buddha. And when I see someone, you know, who refuses to be Vairochana Buddha, he says, I'm not going to say yes to that one. And I have to say, I know about that one. I know about not wanting to be Vairochana Buddha. Yeah, I don't want to do either. I want to say yes to that. I don't want to say yes to resisting Zen students. But alaya, I already contain that resistance.

[27:49]

All the different kinds of resistances to all the different kinds of resistances to all the kinds of teachings I offer, I've got those resistances too. So I should be able to say, you don't like my teaching? No. This isn't useful to you? And really, okay, I mentioned this before, you know, I was taking this counseling course at Zen Center and taught by this guy from the school where my wife goes. This is a real new age school, you know. So this guy gives this class, you know, and he explains some things to us and then people say what they say and while they're talking he goes, uh-huh, yeah, uh-huh, uh-huh. And then we started doing these exercises, you know, and people,

[29:01]

we're supposed to listen to these people and they tell us how they're feeling and so on and so forth. And I thought beforehand, I'm not going to start going, uh-huh, uh-huh. But anyway, I was sitting there listening to this person, all of a sudden I felt my head going. But, you know, I didn't mind it because it wasn't me going, uh-huh, uh-huh, it was actually my head, my head did it, you know, it was a true agreement. I actually, I was kind of like, yeah, I know, I know what you mean. It was really coming from my body, from the back, from my back. I wasn't trying to be new age, but I was. So, anyway, I listened and a couple more times during the conversation I just found myself going.

[30:18]

And then I saw the videotape of Carl Rogers and the tape was shot over his shoulder, so you saw the back of his head and the plant was up in front. And she was talking about various things and he was going, his head was nodding very rapidly. It didn't look unnatural, it didn't look, you know, tense or like, but it actually was nodding almost every single thing she did, his head nodded. It was like he was just in total, with her, you know, her face was quivering, everything was.

[31:24]

It's sort of, he had over the years had, this is when he's 65 or 70, over the years he had trained his body to be just like a mirror. So, this is why we're trying to do it. And we can do that with everything that happens, even people who bring us, you know, stuff that they're afraid of, which they just go. Ha! We can actually, we can actually do that. The yes comes up through our spine and makes our head go forward and our voice goes, because we have a lie of truth. Everything they're telling us we already know, we're already living in that. So really we can say yes, because we share that, we share the universal karma.

[32:30]

Of all being, and we have access to that mind. If we just don't split it and get over on this side and say, okay that's what I'm aware of and all the stuff over here is, this is subject or whatever and I can't be aware of that. But it takes a lot of years maybe of nodding, to be able to nod so rapidly when inquiry and response come up together. Also, it responds to the inquiring impulse. Literally it says, it responds to the arrival of energy. So the Vairagyana Buddha, if energy comes up, Vairagyana Buddha reflects it. Whatever the dance is, whatever the manifestation, my Vairagyana Buddha goes, the response to the arrival of some human energy or any kind of energy, it's all there.

[33:37]

Not even just as far as I know, not even just the karma of human beings, but the karma of animals too, so we can nod to animals when they tell us their story. We can even nod when we see animals killing each other. We can say, yep, you know about that. We don't get judgmental of anything because we can say yes to everything, but not better than anything. Now we're a little afraid of that, we're a little afraid of not being better than Adolf Hitler or Blue Jays. That's going too far, you know. It's got to be better than somebody.

[34:42]

There must be some limit to this. There is a limit to it, but that's it, that's just a limit we set. And most of us have set limits so that we're better than quite a few people. But it's just a limit that you set. And if you set that limit, you cut your own moral authority. Because then there's somebody or something that you can't help, because you can't say, uh-huh. You can't be Bhairatana Buddha for that moment by reflecting. The cosmos at that point. But of course, of course I can say yes to that. I understand that limit. So someone was saying to me, so you watch discriminating consciousness

[35:47]

and you notice the trouble it causes, and then of course you say, oh that's not good the way it works. But at some point, and then isn't it always that you just, when you notice how discriminating consciousness causes trouble, isn't it always that you say it isn't good? But there comes a time when you stop saying it isn't good and you just see how it works. And that's subtle discriminating wisdom. When one, you just say no-no one last time and you watch the no-no and you see the no-no and you see that this no-no is exactly non-discriminating wisdom. It's not that there's non-discriminating wisdom over here and discriminating consciousness over here, or that there's wisdom of sameness over here and there's

[36:52]

defiling manas over here, or there's mirror-like wisdom over here and then there's alaya over there. The change from these kinds of consciousness into their wisdoms is changing names, not essences. They are non-dual. All these eight types of karmic consciousness, all these defiling agents, all these disturbed alaya-vijnana, all this stuff is the contents of and identical with non-discriminating wisdom. It's just a question of living in the middle of this stuff without moving. Without getting pushed around. Without coverings. And if we can sit still in the middle of all this stuff, the coverings drop away.

[37:59]

It's the whole system that lets us say yes. Part of the system won't let us say yes to some things. So again, excuse me, but I bring up the term the whole works. The whole works. Everything. And it works. And it works through everything. So the commentator of the Buddha's record says, Earth is the whole works. Death is the whole works. The black cave of demons is the whole works. The whole works is everything that includes everything, and also it's that everything, the totality, works through everything.

[39:12]

Buddha nature reaches everywhere, into the most miserable and the most happy person, into the best deed and the worst deed, because it's all connected. So and I say this with some emphasis because it has to do with faith, that you live or you don't live with the faith of Bhairavacana Buddha. So and again, I don't think, I say I don't want,

[40:21]

I'm not going to get up there and start being new age and go uh-huh. But if when someone says, you know, I poked my sister's eyes out or something like that, if I don't feel the uh-huh, I don't feel the uh-huh. But I notice I don't feel the uh-huh, and I don't try to feel the uh-huh, because I don't. And Buddha nature is working through my not nodding too. But it's also okay to say uh-huh when somebody tells you some terrible thing. So

[41:25]

your body can say yes to anything. So if you have the courage to be what you are at that moment, which is somebody who's not saying yes, if that's what you are, or somebody who is saying yes. And I would suggest that if you just watch, just sit and watch, does the head go uh-huh or does it not go uh-huh? If you just watch that day after day, month after month, year after year, pretty soon you'll notice that actually you are Bhairavacana Buddha and you do say yes to everything. And you start by saying yes to the fact that you're not saying yes. You start by saying yes to, yes I'm horrified by that and I won't accept that, I can't say yes to

[42:28]

that, I can't identify with that. That's saying yes to you, what you're doing. Bhairavacana Buddha is letting you be somebody who's resisting identifying with some criminal. Some part of you is looking and reflecting all your actions and saying yes to each thing. Bhairavacana Buddha is there all the time. All the squirming that we're doing, all the comparisons of our practice to something else, all this stuff. So, somebody's saying uh-huh, yeah, that's it too. So, this is the pure alive jnana, this is the great mirror-like wisdom, this is Bhairavacana

[43:46]

Buddha. It's also the universe. One of the documents relating to dharma transmission there's a term which is called the one phrase, the unique phrase, the one word. I thought, hey, I wonder if universe means one verse. Well, I think it does, but actually what it means is unique, one, and verse means to turn. The universe turns everything into one. The universe turns into one. Bhairavacana Buddha, the great mirror-like wisdom, turns everything into one. This thing that can turn everything into one is called sitting still too.

[44:48]

So, no matter what happens to you, no matter what you say or what you call it, sitting still turns that into one. This is sitting still. Can you turn that into sitting still? Can you say this is included in sitting still? Not say even, but can you do that? Can you have this be sitting still? Like this. Buddha sitting in the ball, swift flowing water. You can't tell the difference between this and this. So, you say yes to both.

[45:50]

And again, there is that function in our mind which says, but not that. This is this. I can't say yes to this. Again, somebody says yes to that. Of course you can't say yes to this, dear. Of course you can't. It makes sense. I know what that's like. Of course that's just too much. This is carrying something a bit too far. Not this. And acceptance is good to a point, right? But as Vanya says, something worth doing is worth overdoing. As someone said about me, too much is not enough.

[47:21]

I'm not sure if it was my wife or Yvonne Rand. I'm not sure. Bhairavachana Buddha. Dharmakaya, by which I'm a Buddha, yes to everything, seeing the Buddha nature go into where it probably shouldn't be going. Even into your practice, moment by moment, even into your whole body, without any hindrance.

[48:39]

I vow to make the Buddha as great as I'm surpassable, I vow to be kind.

[50:22]

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