It's a lot of people outside. People outside from different areas. And actually there's a lot of people. And it's a good desire to be more accepted again. So rather, after using things in the future, a small point of living in the future and expanding on them. and after the fact that he decided to read the future and now he could dramatically discuss it. And before giving up this method and returning to the investigation of topics which are raised in the future, whether topics I'd like to continue, not continue, but continue in the sense of not being expected in this week.

[01:26]

I'm just going to look at the process and see what happens. Particularly last week we read, I believe that's about page 50. And we were reading instructions about the instructions about the truth. Super cool, you got to go on. There are two paragraphs of the heading.

[06:12]

One is called the Truth of Illusionation. That is the Truth of Illusionation of Ill. Any comments about what's going on? What's going on in Facebook? What's going on in Facebook? The first definition of how to do a day

[07:14]

So, they also could be able to form, to clean the form from the feelings from the substance. So that means eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind. And there's the sight objects, the combined objects, the sight objects, sound objects, sight, sound, face, touch, smell, and mental objects.

[09:28]

And then eye elements, sight elements, high consciousness elements, and then clear elements, sound elements, and clear consciousness elements, and so on. So the 18 Datsus, the coming 18 Datsus, the coming 12 high optimum, they also could be said to be equal, roughly. And then here even It's in this, it's, [...]

[10:36]

called Jones. What the Bodhisattva must do is develop an emotional relationship with the instructions that they're being given.

[11:40]

They're coming in to you to interact with the subject between the intellectuals, but you have to develop an emotional relationship with these instructions. In other words, you have to get your body body into that kind of thought. What kind of thought? To yoke yourself with the emptiness of form. To learn new generalist body, to learn new emotions into the emptiness of form. When you first hear about this, you have a perceptual, a conceptual, of emotion. It comes in as an idea. The intimates of form, the intimates of feeling, the intimates of perception, the intimates with various other emotions, the intimates of consciousness, the intimates of awe, the intimates of fear, the intimates of noise, the intimates of song, sight.

[12:41]

Now how can you yoke yourself, join your body with this intimates of the intimates? To base up it can do it. get involved, physically get involved, fully get involved in this issue. First of all, you have to learn these structures. These structures are so simple. You learn these structures in the power, and then make sure you understand the word. Understand the word. the word feeling, the word perception, the word impulse, the word eye consciousness, the word eye organism, the word eye object. And if you've got those words straight, then how can you meditate on them? I mentioned it before, but there are three levels of mental health levels. bringing into the physical, physically united, physically centered, physically dynamic centered, and bringing clarified and memorized terms and instructions into the vital centers, thereby yoking

[15:56]

That's the kind of relationship to emptiness, to yourself. That is the emotional relationship to emptiness. And that's what yokes you feel. If you just hear these words, even though you believe in them, as Buddha has said them to you, that's pretty good. That is the kind of pragmat, that is the kind of wisdom, just to hear them. That's the kind of wisdom. Just to have that in your repertoire of ideas, What is the kind of movement? Wanting it? Yeah, wanting it or enjoying it.

[17:03]

In other words, you have a cold body. sense of how to do these practices. And you can exercise yourself on them. You can feel that you exercise in your body with these practices. You don't feel like it's harshly, screaming. But you first feel that you're feeling it's not complete. And as a result, you miss part of their power. As you keep more involved with them, they work more on you. By just hearing them, already you've added another kind of philosophy or another alternative way of thinking to you for sexual and cognitive activity. Then, reflecting on them, you become even more fluent with them. You can say something about them in addition to what you first heard. You can clarify terms. You can throw out false understandings of the things that you've learned.

[18:04]

But the next stage is the part where you literally touch it with your body. It comes home from your physical body. And then you move up to your system. If you don't do the first two stages, you can only do a third step. At least not your system. In fact, you can do the third phase all by itself with a non-teaching. You can do the third phase, the governance phase, the meditative phase, the yoga phase. You don't have to do it with a teaching. You can do the meditation, physical practice with... These teachings come through the senses, you see. This teaching comes through the eye and through the ear, primarily.

[19:08]

So they come through the... So most people come with the eye and the ear. In the old days they came through the ear. Now there's a lot of them come through the eye. In the old days they [...] come through the eye. to give these teachings to the snare. Now, these teachings come through the same means of all meditative objects in the five senses that they first come. But meditative objects aren't really teachings, they're just colors or something like that. But you do the same thing with the basic meditative objects, like a color or a sound as you do with these, but these are teachings. You have to hear who does the teaching, but you don't have to reflect on it anymore.

[20:30]

You have to think about it. You have to think about it. All teachers will have to come in with that. If you would rule the section here, and you would pick all the terminology straight, and you sit with it, and eventually, the stuff that's come alive, and the material will start to become meaningful, but you live there. And if you can keep it in mind and keep working with it, the only way you keep it in mind and keep working with it is if you make it meaningful to you and you can't keep working with it unless you've been able to do that. Unless you can develop a So in the first phase, you yoke yourself to the emptiness of these things. So you have to understand, what is the emptiness?

[21:30]

And you yoke yourself to that. I think you are starting to understand what it is, and if you don't understand what it is, to clarify your understanding, your intellectual understanding of emptiness. But then the next part is it's important to develop a physical relationship, an emotional interest, an emptiness, and then take that emptiness and have it do the emptiness of each one of these things, and thereby you work yourself to the emptiness of the things from which suffering comes. And this is how the Bodhisattva meditate on the faith and all the truth. This is instructions on how to study the first meditation. I'm going to stop. to say who or what, what is being, to be able to have a sustained relationship with that kind of question.

[33:33]

This is what you call emotional relationship identity. You can't sustain a question like that. In other words, koan is another, you could say a koan, practice koan with lots of energy, all emotional relationships, if you practice the poem. So, for example, the first poem is he uses the poem to move. That would be a non-empty relationship.

[36:11]

When you develop an empty relationship, and you don't get at it, and you learn how to carry it around without holding it, then nobody can hurt you. If a stick hits you, it's just another form. And that form doesn't exist, doesn't now exist, doesn't both exist, and doesn't either exist. It hurts, but that's not common. The problem is, if you think that that hurt exists, If the hurt exists, the existence of the hurt is not the hurt. When you have pain, you don't take the size that exists, it's just pain. But if you take the philosophical position that exists on top of the fact that you're feeling it, then you've got no problem. If you're in prison, you have the philosophical position that you're in prison. But if you're just in prison, without any position, you're not in prison anymore.

[37:12]

If you're in prison, and you have the philosophical position that you're not in prison, you've also got it bad. And you've got it too. In one case, you're miserably in prison. In another case, you're miserably in the same. Same with pain. You get hit with a stick, and you bring it aside that doesn't exist. That's also true. But if you just simply have pain, So we go to the then-teacher and to the empty relationship with the womb, or with any koan, any form.

[38:26]

This is a form. A form, a provocative form. A form that will provoke you to take a philosophical position there. You think they're particularly provocative. And I suspect you'll sort of take this position or that position, and these are both. And if you do fall for it, then when you get a hit, you're supposed to get hit, what you're supposed to hit, what's the hit? If you're supposed to get hit, if [...] you're supposed to get and your perception, then you're untouched.

[39:28]

If you still hold on to some particular relationship, that's not yoking yourself to emptiness. Emptiness is yoking yourself to the fortality of all the situations. That's not a position. If you go at things like that, and you can sustain a relationship with that kind of healing, then you don't know Go into the form, go into the form, go into whatever we're going into the form, be accepted in the way, and not the way, and [...] the way. You don't have philosophical bias because it means you're doing it. It's like a coin in your philosophical thing.

[40:29]

So you go out and you just don't apprehend it. In other words, that's when you go out with a whole, with a whole, it's when you bring everything to it, and your awareness of everything. You can't grasp that. You bring an ungraspable, unheld presence The machinery is there, though. You're always thinking about it when you see it, too.

[41:38]

But what you're talking about is anxiety. What you're talking about is emotion. And that's why I was saying you have to develop an emotional relationship. Because unless you do, you won't be able to look at things this way. You'll get bored. And you start trying to, as you say, you want some risks. You'll try to get something out of that. You can't just keep looking at that unless your whole body is involved with things. your whole body can be involved in it for a little while. When you're looking at it for a while there, it's not a partial experience. You are totally doing it. But then when emotions arise, can you get those involved in watching the thing too? And then I'll say, yes, you can. You can get involved with this stuff without holding to some position. You can bring everything you want. You can bring all kinds of thinking, all kinds of emotions to looking at these things. And if you don't, and you will become distracted from it. And then you'll get distracted into emotional dealings either with them or in the neighborhood. That's why the meditation on emptiness has to include that stuff, otherwise you won't be able to keep it up.

[42:43]

So what you're saying is that in meditation on emptiness, like examining the Does that mean that our meditation on such things should include all possible philosophical relationships? Try them and reject them? Because the mind does look like that? I don't understand. I'll say yes. or in the hole in the hole top of the position to understand what comes to the next half of the truth.

[44:07]

Being built with anything means that you can't believe in that field of consciousness because you're aware of the power of the event. You're willing to stay with that kind of awareness. That kind of awareness is so big that you can't get a hold of it. But I'll say, We said qin-so-xi attachment with emotions, but there's more than one kind of attachment.

[46:33]

You can have intellectual, there's two kinds of attachment, two kinds of coverings. One kind is called Kletia. Kletia algorithm. But the Kletia covering, another one called Nyeya. Nyeya. but the one that you associate with emotion, with ideas, with all the things. Now, talk about form, talk about feeling, and the Paisanya. You go to those, but you join with emptiness of feelings. join with emptiness of feeling, join with emptiness of form.

[47:45]

That's what it means to be guilty. It means to be perfectly guilty. If you go to any of the five gondas, you have to join to the emptiness of one of those five gondas. She's saying, is it that you go to them without putting anything on top of them? Well, whenever you go to And one of the philosophies you have now is your meditation instruction, your meditation theme, which is the teaching of anything. You bring that philosophical, which is with you in a sense. But what is that philosophical position? That the following philosophical position. That philosophical position that you can't apprehend. That leaves you un-entrenched. But it is a way of being there. If you don't, if you just do that as part of your body and mind, namely just with your head, so to speak, or with your emotions, you won't believe in it. You won't like it. You won't like the meditation. You feel like you're playing.

[48:47]

You want to feel like you're living somebody on the board. Like you're doing pretend meditation. You have to get your whole body in the book. All your emotions. But also, you have to get all your philosophical positions in there, too. In other words, at that moment, you may not be able to think of all your philosophical positions. But in a sense, you're aware that all could be there. In other words, you're not getting rid of any. If you got rid of one, or rid of two, you could maybe scale down to some little sculpture of a smaller set of philosophical views. All philosophical views are there, because that's part of emptiness. Emptiness is that any philosophical view depends on all the rest. That's the kind of philosophical meaning you bring. You bring a philosophical meaning. You bring an emotional meaning. You bring everything. Because you know, if you meditate on emptiness, you know that all this stuff is connected. You can't separate anything without it. Therefore, you can't grasp anything. You bring everything to it. And everything in particular is all the things you need to stay with and not being attached to whatever you consider.

[49:56]

So the sufficient amount of awareness is the amount of awareness that keeps you from having to cop out. There's two ways that you cop out. One way is to give up the meditation, and the other is to grasp, to attain something, to grasp. There's two ways to entertain yourself. To yoke emptiness, you can stay with the object in an unattached way, leaving it alone as it is, and yet not give it up because you get bored. Yoke with emptiness, you can stay with the object without, you can sustain and you can tolerate non-apprehension. You can stay with emptiness. Emptiness is toleration without. Yoke yourself with emptiness is tolerating non-apprehension of the object. But unless you have the right attitude or the right feeling for that practice, you lose interest in it. Unless you have your whole life there, you can't keep it up, because after there's only a certain amount of time you can do something like that without doubting it, as you say, without this other stuff coming up.

[51:13]

But the time you were doing it, you were doing it. Actually. As long as you did it, you did it, and you were totally there when you were doing it. But now, in this next new moment, you say, and, hey, it's living. And at that moment, something's crossed out. You crossed something out. You no longer are yoked to emptiness. You've now squished emptiness down and crossed something out. That's not emptiness anymore. In fact, the very thing that keeps you interested in being in emptiness, which you're yoked to, is to keep your idea of emptiness clear. It's when you cut out part of the meaning of emptiness that you get bored. So in one sense, it seems like you have to keep bringing everything to the situation in order to keep yourself interested, to feel like you're not starving your life force, or starving your practice. But that's emptiness.

[52:15]

And as long as you're doing it, you're doing it. You're satisfied, and that's emptiness. And as soon as you start to say, hey, wait a minute, this is fake. I don't trust this. It's because you discriminated something, you have a partial, you have some idea of emptiness now, which is now true emptiness. You've cut something out. That thing is cut out. By doing that, you now have two things. One is inside and one is outside. The two of them together are those emptiness, plus their relationship. So, in a sense, at that moment, you feel like, you think, I'm still practicing emptiness over here, but I don't like it. But actually, you've forgotten it. Now, from that point of view, if you didn't tell yourself, this isn't really emptiness, it's practically zero, but you grab your stuff and throw it back in. Right. That's right.

[53:18]

People say, well, what about this? And they say, well, that's not Buddhism. They say something that's not Buddhism, right? They find something that must be outside of Buddhism. And when you find a thing that's outside of Buddhism, then the thing that's left, if you go like this, and say, this is outside of Buddhism, This is outside of Buddhism. This is Buddhism. And this is not Buddhism. This part here is not Buddhism. Anything, anytime you find anything outside of Buddhism, then what you say is Buddhism is not Buddhism anymore. As soon as you find something outside Buddhism, that's Buddhism. Same with emptiness. Emptiness is the very reason if you could do this. This is emptiness. You could do this and say, this is my meditation on emptiness, and something in my life left off, and this thing here is not emptiness. If this is something left off, then this is emptiness.

[54:21]

So as soon as emptiness doesn't satisfy you anymore, it doesn't fill your whole body and mind and satisfy you, then you not think of emptiness anymore. As soon as you first think of emptiness properly, that moment somehow Buddhism has encouraged you to think of that. At that moment, when you think of it properly, at that moment, you think of the whole thing. Somehow you've allowed yourself to comprehend emptiness. To comprehend emptiness means to not apprehend anything. You've allowed yourself to do that for one split second. Somehow you've allowed yourself to be exposed to Buddha's teaching, and you've thought of emptiness. For a moment you were apprehending, for a moment you saw a full picture, anything out of it. It wasn't fun versus not fun. It wasn't pure versus injury. It didn't come. It didn't do anything. It was all those things. So what? In the next moment, you revert your way and you go, and you say, hey, wait a minute.

[55:25]

This is left out. The very moment you did that, you violated one of the characteristics of emptiness inside, outside. Increased emptiness. Pure or impure. Something like that happened as soon as you did that, and therefore it wasn't emptiness. But you said, oh, I'm still looking at emptiness. And now I found something that wasn't there, and therefore I'm giving up on it. But that shows you why it's emptiness. There are two reasons. One is it doesn't have the characteristics of emptiness, because now it has some characteristics of emptiness it doesn't have. Second of all, it has the characteristics that you want to give up on. Actually, emptiness is what you like to look at. But unless you consciously develop an emotional, intimate, and married relationship with emptiness, unless it becomes a very satisfying thing, then that's not intimate. I'll put it in another way.

[56:26]

Unless you do that, you don't believe it. You have to make yourself feel that way. And that's the key of bodhisattva's practice. Bodhisattva's practice has all this interesting stuff in it. We can do anything. We can drive cars, we can go to movies, we can go to mitzvah brunches, sunglasses, anything. But we do this stuff, this fancy thing called the yoga to emptiness. This awesomely complete practice. So the first, this is the noble truth of pain, okay?

[57:28]

Of ill. Yes? This section would be the cause of relationships. You've learned that. Condition of origination. Yes. So that's one of the ways you can check to make sure that emptiness you're watching is by this stage. See, in the first stage, you just learn the teaching. Learn this instruction. Any part of it doesn't have a part of the primary section anymore. Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form. Yoke yourself to emptiness and consider the form of your existence. that cause pain, which are pain, okay?

[58:28]

That's the instruction that you just read. Then here you learn things like, then you learn here, what do you learn? You learn, with the reflecting part of it, you can take other parts of the sutra and bring them to bear. Like in the next page it says, neither produced nor stopped, neither defiled nor pure, does not increase, does not decrease. It is not past, present, and future, and so on. In a reflecting part, you can reflect other parts of the sutra, other parts of your thinking brought to bear to check out whether you understand the emptiness is correct. When you find some discrimination happening and you find emptiness fragmented and something outside of it, that'd be another thing that you learned. That's something funny there. So this can also protect you. This you check to make sure you got the words straight. This can make sure that you understand the process. And here, it's going to get your body into it. This part is where you simply, very simply, you make the practice physically satisfied.

[59:40]

And you get good enough at this, so this is satisfying this food, sleep, or sex. You can't meditate in such a way that you feel good while you're meditating, and you do the most activity than you, and you can do this practice. Some people learn this, some people learn this, but if they don't both yoke these understandings and these teachings with that kind of a body, that kind of a meditation process, they can't do it. Human beings will naturally go from these practices to something which is satisfying. So not only do you have to yoke it to a meditation practice, but your meditation practice has to be strong enough to be satisfied. You can't give up sexual activity until your meditation is interesting and rewarding the activity itself. You can't give up eating too much or too little until that thrill from eating too much or too little isn't warped by each other in meditation.

[60:46]

And then, even if you're good in meditating, you still have to develop the teaching to the meditation. If you just meditate without teaching, that's not good. And if you just do the teaching without the meditation, So in this section, this would be talking about the section in which you would, this section is not going to kind of conceptually clarify whether you're talking to. This is a section that will catch you if you make some intellectual trick to discourage yourself. If you abuse this grade and enter into this, you're not going to waver anymore. Because you're actually enamored with and intoxicated, not intoxicated, but enthralled with a meditation object. Then you're not going to waver anymore. But if you have the wrong understanding, then by definition your energies can be broken up into pieces because your understanding is broken up into pieces.

[61:52]

Well, it's primarily that kind of concentration I'm talking about. Once you yoke yourself to it through this meditation, it doesn't go away just because you come out of Zendo. In other words, you get a physical take for it, and the take, I mean, it's not really physical. It's just that what you're finding out is actually you completely verify this insufferability of body and mind in a very satisfying way. but easiest place to catch on to it is cross-legged.

[63:02]

Because you see, it says here, what the bodhisattva does is the bodhisattva goes to feelings, the emptiness of feelings. Emptiness, you can't find emptiness aside from feeling formed and so on. That's the only place that emptiness has any meaning. There's no emptiness floating out there aside from feeling. from the phenomenal world. There is no such thing. Yes. Why would you? Just to show people as possible. To encourage people that are married, what? The marriage of our testimony. Sometimes you are married to emptiness, but you're not married perfectly. And if you get married to somebody who's not named emptiness, or even somebody who is named emptiness, but has another name too, and a social security member, you may find out that you still can improve, your practice can improve even more.

[64:30]

Although you are married to emptiness, You are married to emptiness through certain modes. And there's other modes that you aren't married to emptiness through. Yes, that's the Buddhist spirit of marriage. Did you marry somebody? for marrying everybody. And not to care who it is, but at the same time, given the present circumstances, you marry someone that you're pretty sure that you can stay married to for a while. In case you, if you have any doubt that you could be married to anybody, then you should marry somebody that you think you'll be able to live with. But your spirit is like that. In fact, I've observed, I mean, you know, there are these marriages like that.

[65:48]

And there are people like that, they just seem to love everybody equally. And they're sometimes married to somebody in particular. Okay, now let's talk about the one of origination. Do you see any comment on that one? This is the origination of suffering. So first one is, suffering is clinging to these forms, to these skandhas or whatever. And what's the origination of this clinging to form? That's in here. What is it?

[66:51]

So could you expand upon that a bit? Thank you. That's the cause of the attachment. That's the origin of the attachment. That's the origin of attachment. See, suffering is clinging to these things. So what we want to find is, what's the origin of this Upadana? And he's saying to yourself over and over again that they're produced, or they're stopped, or they're pure, or they're impure. This gives rise to suffering. into attachment, to cling. And when you cling to a changing entity, then that is suffering, that is frustration.

[68:01]

form is really there if a form comes up and a form goes away, then a form is really there. In other words, whenever you grasp something, then you think that it came up. You think it's one of the things that has arisen. You don't think — I guess you could think it's something that's always been there, too. So if you grab for something that you think is permanent, or you grab for something anyway that you think has been born, You really think it's been born, and you really grab it. Or you really grab it something you think is pure, or really grab it something you think is impure. Yes? Yes, that's another one that says it, doesn't it? Down below, I guess. Yes, you also can't really make karma work unless you think of past, present, and future.

[69:21]

So you need to have that too, the karmic accumulation. What else is here that would help the origin or the building up of attachment? What else is here to do that? So seeing that they're connected, connecting things, is the other way that you build clinging. You connect the feeling with the perceptions, the perceptions with the feelings, the perception with the impulses, the impulses with the consciousness, the consciousness with the perceptions, the consciousness with the feelings. These connections, another way you can make clinging. And you can cling to them individually, you can cling to them as a group.

[70:21]

When you cling to them as a group, that's called what? Self. That's called self. So the bodhisattva does not review the connecting. And not reviewing the connecting does not mean that they don't see that the connecting is possible, but rather that they see that the connecting is a causal agent to the arising of the clinging. So, in other words, you see the connecting as not a connecting as a real thing in itself, but as a connecting only in the sense that it's the basis for suffering, the basis for clinging. That's the way you would view it. They aren't connected.

[71:33]

You see, if they were connected, if these dharmas were connected, then they wouldn't be what they are anymore. They're discrete events because they aren't connected. If they're connected then, in fact, they would be mixed. They wouldn't do things unto themselves. But they aren't connected. But in fact, even though they aren't connected, people connect them. They violate the very rule of their own thinking. And they think they're not connected, and they act like they are connected. And that acting like they are connected is not really that they're connected, but it's another thing. So, we say, this is X, and this is Y, and X and Y are connected, but that X, Y and connected is really Z. X, this is Y, and this is the idea that X and Y are connected. This is Z, which is really the connection between X and Y. But this Z, which is called a connection between X and Y, is not the connection between X and Y. It's another thing.

[72:47]

But you think that X and Y are connected. Therefore, there's X and there's Y, and you think they're connected, but they're not really connected. You can't discriminate between X, Y, and the fact that you think they're connected. That's confusing. When you have that kind of confusion, then when you have these other things, you can imagine that you think something like that. But actually, there's just, what is there? There's this, there's this, and there's this. Is this Is this? No. Is this, [...] this, and this? If I say yes, then you think I'm violating the sutra. If I say no, I'm being sued. I said, if I say no, it's not connected, I'm being silly because there is some connection.

[74:08]

But that connection is not, what is that connection? That connection is not really a connection, it's just an idea. My answer is not caused only by his question. My answer is such as one minor thing. I can't deny that that's part of the causal situation. But it's no more important than anything else. And yet you single it out. You single it out just because of convention. Now, for me to say that it isn't connected, it would be to say that it's not one of the causes, but it is. But all the causes, there's millions of other causes. What we're talking about here, and so, okay. You can also say that by way of saying that you just don't review the partial.

[75:29]

That's all. You don't see the partial. So by not seeing the partial, you don't see the partial. You just don't apprehend that this is connected to that. You don't grab onto that one. That particular bond you don't grab onto. As a matter of fact, that grabbing onto that is just not a possibility. That doesn't happen. There's always, those two things in association is actually always a very complex event, and the grabbing is also another complex event. So you don't get involved in that or this. And in particular, you don't get involved in apprehending that particular bond there. You just don't do that. You see, but you don't go. It doesn't say you're denying anything. But you're trying to maintain, what, a way that's, you know, not so restricted. Not so fixed.

[76:33]

You don't want to zero your practice in on a small little segment. Because if you do, then you have no flexibility. And then, when this thing goes, you get tossed out in the street. So your practice is a way to try to see what's going on in such a way that you don't polarize or crystallize yourself in some relationship that you can't get out of quickly. So, once again, you know these things as well as you possibly can up to that point when it will be deleterious to you and you'll be fixing on something. And certainly, you know, to get into... specific dharmas like that is connected, it's rather specific and leaves you very little flexibility. The problem is not that we see one thing as a cause, but that we think that's the only cause.

[77:57]

That's a problem. There's no such thing in Buddhism, we never allow one thing to be caused by a particular thing. That's God, right? No, it could just be people who are caused by another thing, but in particular it's caused by a multitude of events. If it's caused by one thing, we call that one thing God. In Buddhism we don't have a particular, you know, one unifying thing that causes stuff. We don't find that helpful. If it was helpful, that'd be fine, but it seems to be kind of a way of thinking that's, I don't know, that it's really too flexible. So we say that every event is due to a multitude of causes in the Abhidharma. And Mahayana would say even these causes our unreal new selves, an illusory and dreamed up.

[78:59]

Not to mention just one of them. And that way of looking at it, you find to be the ultimate liberative way of seeing things. If you can remember to see things that way, in fact, you keep that in mind, and you keep it in mind in such a way that it works for you, and you feel good while you're doing it, and continue it, you will develop a very flexible and free relationship with the events of your life, with these five skandas and everything else like that. Your life will be very creative and vital. And you will understand the four normal truths. In fact, this is where real creativity comes from, constantly justifying and reiterating emptiness. source of creativity. This will make it work each time, you see, because the situation keeps changing and you have to keep fixing it up so that it works.

[80:03]

Fixing it up so it works means not crossing out or discriminating against these new elements, the new situation. So you want to sort of take what works and bring that along with you and recreate it the next moment and not have to go to all the work of sort of testing everything out all fresh and new again. Well, that's fine. That's the way the nervous system works. But that's habit formation. And that's nice, but that limits you. And things get hard. Yes. I'm a little confused. Maybe, maybe the problem that I don't understand is that we can actually find value. But when we're saying the point on the number three, and at least on one level, you know, the number three, Well, is there a difference between cause and production?

[82:01]

Well, the twelve links of causation, for example, in the Heart Sutra it says, There is no ignorance. And then he goes around to, there is no old age and death. Okay? So what that means is, what? What does that mean, folks? What does the character mean in the Heart Sutra? What does this character mean in this text? What does it mean? It doesn't mean emptiness, but how do you understand this? This is about emptiness. This is an emptiness sutra. Okay? What does it know? mean in Amgena Sutra? That's right. No, no, no yes. No, no. No, yes. No both, no neither. That's what no means. So when you say, in the heart, when you say, there's no ignorance that it was up to no old age and death, that means that it isn't existing.

[83:07]

But also, it doesn't mean, it means it isn't existent, that definitely means that, but it also doesn't mean that when we say it isn't existent, that it means it's non-existent. So in Prajnaparamita literature, when you say something doesn't exist, it means it doesn't exist in any of the possible ways of existence, not just in, not that it's operative existence, but that's another form of existence, called non-existent. So that's what we mean when we say No causation in that sense. Because all the causes would be the same thing. The causal things are multiple, but each one of the multiple causes don't exist either as existing or as non-existent. But still there are these multiple causes. In fact, if there is this event, this phenomenal event called form, that form is due to a whole bunch of causes. But the form doesn't exist. in this emptiness kind of mind.

[84:11]

And the cause is also going to exist in the same way. Obviously we're there. The form is there. There must be these other ones. But it's not there, and they're not there in the same way that it's not there. That's what we mean. It doesn't deny this stuff at all. When you're talking about the machinery and how the machinery works, Abhidharma way of explaining it is exactly how it works. That's how illusion works. But this is talking about emptiness. What emptiness? Emptiness is what we mean by liberation from illusion. So emptiness doesn't go in there and wreck the machinery of illusion. Emptiness leaves the machinery of illusion untouched because it doesn't push it in the closet and doesn't put it up in an altar. That's how that stuff works, right? But that stuff doesn't exist. But how do we mean that? Not existing is just shorthand for this all these different possibilities for none of those possibilities.

[85:15]

But the machinery is just a beautiful machinery. As a matter of fact, all beauty follows that rule, except for the ultimate beauty with the emptiness. Emptiness is more beautiful than any real stuff. I mean, I like it better, don't you? You're at Zen Center, you're not at an avidharma school. The most As I said before, the Bodhisattva is more attractive than the Arha. The Buddha is more attractive than a Bodhisattva. Why is the Buddha so attractive? Because of skill and means. The Buddha has methods of attraction. On one side, Buddha has skill and means, the other side, Prajna. Prajna is insight, is knowledge, developed by these methods. On the other side, the Buddha and the Bodhisattva have skill and means, which are basically Basically, they're good looks. That's what they are. And good looks means not just good looks in terms of how your face looks and how your clothes look, but how you use your hands, how you walk, how you wash dishes, what you do with your money, how you drive your car, whether you're patient or not, whether you're concentrated or not, whether you have vigor or not.

[86:29]

This is what people are attracted to. They like vigor. They like concentration. They like generosity. They like patience. They like that stuff. And they like it in the way that a Buddha does it. That's what we mean by more beautiful. A Buddha does these things based on emptiness, which is what the Buddhist prajna is always looking at. Buddhist prajna is always tuned into emptiness, ultimate liberative force. And then uses these skill and means called the other five paramitas, giving, morality, patience, these are the means of the Buddha. These are compassion. So wisdom looks at emptiness, which is developed by these methods, and then teaches through these means. And these means also make it possible to attain the wisdom. But then the wisdom uses those means again to express itself. And these are very attractive.

[87:34]

And the, of course, Someone who's meditating on, what, 12 lengths of causation, will also be quite attractive. But they aren't as attractive as the Buddha's. Because they don't see this this side. They have this side. They see those things as leading to their penetration into the teaching, but they don't see those things as making themselves attractive to spread the teaching. So they don't want to be good looking. So they aren't. The most beautiful is that sense, that we find it most beautiful. It's been made beautiful for us. Suzuki Roshi was very attractive, in fact, to us. He was a genius at looking good. He also seemed to have a good understanding, but the point is just how it looked. It looked like he had a good understanding. The only way we know whether he did or not is if we had good understanding. He looked really good.

[88:36]

Everybody liked the way he looked. So we think that his teaching is better than other people's teaching. Isn't that the way you do it? And once you get hooked, then you have to sort of work with what it looks like and what it doesn't quite like. And then you do. And you have to remember that the target doesn't have any marks. Okay, so that's the origination. Okay, now the stopping. Yes? Well, somebody, you have to say this sometime. I mean, you don't have to say this.

[89:38]

You don't have to say this. But once in a while, one might say so, you know. Obviously, form is not emptiness, right? You want me to call Kay up on the telephone and ask her, is form emptiness? She might say yes, but she might say no. And if she said no, you wouldn't think she was crazy, would you? You just think she was uneducated. So most people know that form is an emptiness. So once in a while you hear that kind of thing. The main teaching, of course, is a thing that people might not have guessed. That what? That form is emptiness. What does that mean? It means this thing right here is the ultimate liberative event in the cosmos. This is it right here. Don't look someplace else for a better watch.

[90:39]

Okay? That's it. That's what it means. I think that's what it means, doesn't it? It means that's emptiness. And also, emptiness is this. But also, this is obviously not emptiness. Because that's truth too. That's mundane truth. Once in a while in this sutra you see mundane truth, don't you? And also maybe it's a mis-translation. But, anyways, whether it is or not, you know that they're not the same. They even sound different. But what do you say? What do you want it to mean? Try another one.

[91:41]

You just want to not know what it means? That's fine. A little mystery. Okay, anything else before we go on to the next one? The next one is the instructions that are stopping. Could someone read the instructions? how the truth is stopping. If there's anybody who doesn't know what these abbreviations mean, this is a particular easy set of abbreviations.

[93:51]

Some of the other ones are, like when it says, vladi-blah, up to the 18 special buddhidharmas. I don't expect you to know about those at this point. But this kind of list you should know. So the first one is, there is no form in it, there's no feeling, and so on. That's five skandhas. You should know the other one. No eye and so on to no mind. So that's eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind. No form and so on to no mind objects. So that's form, sound, smell, taste, touch, and mind objects. No eye element and so on to no mind consciousness. So eye element, ear element, so on to no mind consciousness element. Ignorance stopping it. No ignorance, no stopping of ignorance, and so on. That's the Four Noble Truths we're studying right now. No decay, death, stopping of decay, death. Those are the four marks of conditioned dharma.

[94:52]

No suffering, no comprehension of suffering. The rest of the way of meditating on the Four Noble Truths. And then no attainment, no reunion. And here's the stream winners. the once-returners, the never-returners, the harhats, the bodhisattvas, and the buddhas. This is the instruction about how the bodhisattva understands the truth of stopping. So if you meditate on this section, you'll understand how a bodhisattva understands the noble truth about nirodha, about nirvana, which simply, is not produced nor stopped. Therefore, there is no nirvana in that sense. And that emptiness, that is neither produced nor stopped, is neither defiled nor purified.

[95:53]

What does that mean? Does that mean there's no nirvana? No. It means there's no... Emptiness is not no produced, no stopped. Emptiness is not defiled or purified. Emptiness does not increase or decrease. Okay? In the Heart Citra it says, in emptiness there is no form, no fumes, no perception, no impulses, no consciousness. There is no eyes, no ears, no noise, no increase, no decrease, no purification, no defilement, no birth, no death. In emptiness, so here it says, that emptiness, that is neither produced and so on. So this is just the Heart Sutra. Now that which does not produce or stop, does not defile nor cure, does not increase or decrease, that is not past, present or future. So there there's no form, no feelings and so on.

[96:56]

There can't be any form or feelings if there's no stopping or starting. So I hope when we're doing meditations, form foundations of mindfulness, on feelings, perhaps, and on thought, to see how the bodhisattva sees there's no arising, no stopping, no starting, no increase, no decrease. You can't have anything done. Think about that. Meditate on that. And you see the key here about the instruction on is that an emptiness there is neither production nor stopping, neither defilement nor purification, neither increase nor decrease. That's the instruction on neroda. If there's none of those, then these dharmas don't come up. If these dharmas don't come up, it doesn't say there's no neroda, it just says, what is neroda?

[98:01]

How does neroda happen? Iroda is the central, original nature of these things in the first place. They don't even come up. So it's not that these things actually get stopped. It's that in emptiness, they never came up in the first place, and they had no characteristics. That's the way the Bodhisattva understands the teaching of And the bodhisattva, what does the bodhisattva do with his teaching about stopping? What would you do with his teaching about stopping? Anybody have any ideas, any uses they could put his teaching to? Yes?

[99:03]

Succession? Yes, a little of that would be good. Anything else? That has nothing to do with what I just said. Anything else? Why don't you have something to say? Anything to do with this? Yeah? Anything else? What's that called? Left on the Blackbird? Oh. What's that called, what he just said? Shrutamaya Prajna. And what else could you do? Yes, that's right.

[100:08]

I still didn't answer what I asked. What would you do with this teacher? I guess you give this to people who have believed in karma, and then how would they use it? and then meditate on it. That's what you do with this teaching. This teaching will help you understand. This is rather important, you'll see, because what you just learned, and then there's the next one, we don't have time to do that. In each one of these teachings, and then the next one, in Buddhist practice, The Buddha taught those Four Noble Truths, okay?

[101:08]

And those Four Noble Truths, you're actually supposed to use those as a meditation. They're not just something he's told you just have for you to know so you can answer a multiple choice test. They're actually his first instruction to the world is his Four Noble Truths. His Four Noble Truths should be memorized, learned, heard, written down, recited, memorized, and they should be reflected upon and meditated upon. And if you look at Buddhist practices, practice books, you'll see again and again the Four Noble Truths are cornerstone in mindfulness practices. Cornerstone in the Dharma, Shmityupasthana, cornerstone in. They are what you're usually meditating on. Just prior to entering the path the first time, you're meditating on the First Noble Truth of pain, in the Kama Dattu. Now, that's a basic fundamental Buddhist practice of Four Noble Truths.

[102:13]

First meditation we gave. Now here we have how the Bodhisattva does it. If you just meditate on those from the Arhat point of view, you will enter the Buddhist path to the Arhat route. Now this is how the Bodhisattva does these practices. This is the instructions to the Bodhisattva of how to do these meditations on the Four Noble Truths. And then these meditations also will be heard, listened, heard, recited, memorized, reflected upon, and meditated upon. And they will be for beings that still believe in karma, which is all beings. All beings believe in karma, except, well, believe in karma means all beings are karma, And then there's a subset among those beings of those who believe in karma. By believe in karma, I mean actually you should have faith in karma. Karma is the truth. It's the truth about the way your mind works, the way your body and mind works.

[103:16]

You think that way, you act that way. You should believe in the story of karma. And then also, now that you believe it, see it as an illusion. that's also who this teaching is for, or this teaching is a way to see that it's an illusion, because if you see that things are going to rise and fall, then you see kindness and illusion. So if you just study this whole section here, you have these three pages, spread out of the three pages, you have, you know, full, full Buddhist teaching. You can see the point of the truth and see how the Bodhisattva practices And then you see also that there would be no, see down below here, you see there would be no stream winners, no once-returners, no never-returners, no ahas, no bodhisattvas, and no Buddhists. If you understand the third novel truth this way.

[104:26]

So, not only are there no beings which the Buddhists and bodhisattvas lead to nirvana, but there's no need for any Buddhists and bodhisattvas. The bodhisattva does what's hard because the bodhisattva does take the vow, does put out the armor and vow to lead all sentient beings to nirvana without grasping the idea of sentient beings or nirvana. So in this whole section you see these headings in here have been put on here. You might not have been able to see that these three headings were teaching the Four Noble Truth. if this heading went on there. You might not have thought that, right? Those headings went in there. Now, in fact, what if we move those headings around a little bit? What if we squash them down a few lines or move them up a few lines, or move the sections around?

[105:29]

Would it work? How did it happen that the Four Noble Truths go one, two, three, four, and the sutra just goes round? And then they took these one, two, three, four, and they put them on, one, two, three, four, right on top of the sutra, and I go, how did it work like that? The sutra wasn't written for them to plop those Four Noble Truths down on top of it. How did it work out so nicely? Did they find a certain place in the sutra where it would fit in just right, and they put it there? Like you notice, the next thing comes in the instructions about the Sangha. Could they take the sangha part and put it here and move the foreign old truth over there? No? Yeah, it says, it wouldn't work as well. I asked you that question, and he said his answer is okay.

[106:42]

And I agree with him, but I also think that it's okay to stretch. That's what bodhisattvas do for a living, is stretch. We stretch all the time. That's basically what we do, we stretch. Stretch and bend and stretch and squeeze. extend ourselves in the various situations, extend our practice, stretch it. Now, is it that, which way does it go? Is it that these parts here explain the Four Noble Truths, or does the Four Noble Truths explain these parts? Now, the sutra was sitting here first, and then they came and they plopped on these Four Noble Truths on top of it. They put them down there. The Yogacara teachers.

[107:43]

The Yogacara teachers wrote this heading called the Abhisamayalaankara. Asanga, Vasubhanda's brother. And an inspiration of Maitreya Buddha. He put the stuff in here. Now, did he put the stuff in there to explain, like, saw the sutras sitting there, you know? He takes some of his teachings and says, oh, I'll put a little Four Noble Truth in there, that'll explain this part of the sutra. Or did he say, here's the sutra. If I put the Four Noble Truth in there, the sutra will explain what the Four Noble Truth is. That's right. Depends on which move. You can do it either way. So in a sense, what Jeff says, he looks ahead at the part about the song and he thought, well, it seems like it would be hard to put the Four Noble Truths down there.

[108:53]

And I think in some parts of the sutra, you can kind of see, well, yeah, that would really fit there. That really fits there. You can easily see it. But in other parts, it's not so easy to see. And I'm just suggesting to you this. There's this wonderful interplay here between, it's not so clear whether the, whether if you drop Buddhist gems, if you have an ocean of Buddhist teaching, if you take gems and you put them in, does the ocean explain the gems or does the gem explain the ocean? Say, well, if you put the gem there, then the ocean explains the gem, but if you put the gem over here, the gem explains the ocean. Put the gem over there, it's a little of each. But in fact, That's the nature of gems and oceans of gems, is that gems thrown in oceans of gems explain the oceans of gems, and the oceans of gems explain the gems. But that's, you know, when a Buddhist sword goes flying through Buddhist teachings, somehow the teachings explain the sword, and the swords explain the teachings.

[110:00]

And I think this is a good example here. I really can't tell which is being explained, whether the heading is explained what's underneath, or whether what's underneath explains the heading. I've been putting the emphasis on what's underneath explains the heading. In other words, what you have underneath here tells you how to do the Noble Truth Meditation, gives you instructions on how to do the Noble Truth Meditation from the point of view of Bodhisattva. But where did I get that idea? If the heading was there, would I have said that? Didn't the heading tell me what the meaning of this section was? So that I could see what the whole point of this was? And I don't want to, you know, be smart about this, but it's possible that we could pull those four headings out and put four other things in there. And those four other things would explain what's in the sutra, and the sutra would explain the meaning of how to do those four other things.

[111:02]

but maybe in the next section it's more difficult. It's some parts, some parts it would lean on one side rather than the other. Because some parts are so specific, you know, and you just, your mind goes, no, I can't do that. That's too much, like, I couldn't believe that that was explaining, that kind of thing. But this part, I think, since the teaching is the way it is, and you see, he's the one who was able to see that in the section of guilt, he actually saw how you really could find something here to justify that heading. But I certainly could put the Truth of the Path over the same heading, because this is obviously the Buddhist path here. And this is obviously telling you how to do the Buddhist path. Yes? Yes. And notice within each one of these sections, we haven't been trying to push this point, but notice within each one of these sections, you have the Four Noble Truths in the first section, you have the Four Noble Truths in the third section.

[112:27]

So the Buddhist and the Four Noble Truths is the whole path, too. So you could switch any of these things around, I would suggest. as I say, I don't want to do gymnastics, but you could pull these headings out and put other headings in, and you'd find out that the sutra was explaining those, and those were telling you what's in the sutra. But in fact, this is the point of the gym, of the big gym, is that it's all these different aspects and modes of coming at it. You look at it, come around here, look at it from this one, and that's true, that's right, that's the way you could look at it. Come around here and look, oh yeah, that's right. Many ways of looking at the same thing, you know. Take, we have four normal truths over here and say, oh yeah, come over here. Oh, the five aspects of the path, oh yeah, come over here. Oh, there's four applications of mindfulness. And you switch the whole thing around and leave the labels the same, you know, put the labels on a plastic casing over it and rotate the globe underneath and they work that way too.

[113:31]

It's all one thing now, it's just, it follows the rules of the Ava Tamsaka Sutra. That's what the Buddha first said, right? The first thing he said was, each gem reflects all the others. And in each one of that, each one of all the others reflects all the others. So each one is not only the reflection of all the others, but the reflection of each one of the other ones reflecting all the other ones. That's the way he talked when he first was enlightened. And he said, who? He said, what do you mean? He said, oh, okay. First, there's something. So, if you remember the avatamsakha sutra, you can remember we can juggle it all we want because it's all reflecting, all of it, everything's reflecting, every word here reflects the whole teaching. Those little bottom halves of the semicolons. And yet, even that's true, we can also show how the heading is reflected in the paragraph.

[114:34]

You should be able to do the heading in the paragraph, too, because this dewdrop reflects the one right next to it. and the one right next to it reflects this one. That's also true. But inside this dude drop is not only this one, but the reflection of this one reflects all the other ones. It's in this one. So inside of this one, you can take the labels from all those other world systems which are reflected in the neighbor and which are now in the subset of this little sub-part of this particle, and all his teachings are right in there. So we should keep track. That's also part of emptiness. This is another way to talk about emptiness. But you're always grasping infinite world systems in the slightest sense. But then that's another secret. Okay, so what I've heard from people is that, and maybe I'll hear something different next week, but that they were wishing to go back to a little bit more

[115:37]

maybe doing some topics again, like the Five Aspects of the Past, the Six Paramitas, the Three Concentrations, and so on. So if I can think of a way to do that next time and start doing that, otherwise, as I said before, make some comment to me if you wish. Otherwise, just read the sutra. It's very good medicine. Just one more word, and that is, if you haven't read a lot of the sutra, I think the more you read the sutra, the more you get used to it.

[116:49]

So if you've read the sutra and you're having trouble reading it, just read more. Just somehow it'll catch you. It's a little dangerous, but it'll get used to it. But it takes a while to get into it, because it is It is a very lofty event, so sometimes it takes half an hour or an hour to calm down, enough to sort of be able to appreciate it.

[117:22]

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