Tonight I would like to start by reiterating the context and the foundation for this study. Sometimes as we go through the forest of Buddhist teachings and look at the trees, the bark, and all the cells in the cambium layer, we forget where we are and say “where's the forest? I thought we were going to save the forest and now we are looking at the cell structure.” We are minutely studying self-clinging and attribution of substance, and all the outflows and influxes that happen around the surface of concepts, and we may lose track of what it is all about. So I want to reiterate that what this is about is universal enlightenment.
This study, this practice period, Vasubandhu, the schedule—it's all about this enormous project of saving the entire forest. It's about everybody's enlightenment. An aspect of enlightenment is freedom from self-clinging, so this practice period is about self-clinging. What are the origins of self-clinging,? How do you get into thinking that there is a self separate from others that you have to take care of separately? How do you see this process when it is actually happening? Through awareness of the process of self-creation and self-clinging you can be liberated from that process.
Dogen Zenji’s teacher, Rujing said, “Every time you sit zazen, before you sit you should remember that you are sitting for everyone, for all beings.” You are sitting for them before yourself, before your own enlightenment. Whenever I say this at Green Gulch, someone says “What about me? Couldn't my own enlightenment be at the same time as everyone else’s instead of after?” Actually, everybody's enlightenment is simultaneous, but as a self-transcendent strategy, it’s good to put everybody else first. Our problem is not our self-transcendence but our self-clinging. If you put others’ enlightenment first, yours will be at the same time. You have to want them to get enlightened first in order to overcome your tendency to want to get enlightened before them.
Somebody gave me a newspaper article with a speech by Vaclav Havel, the president of Czechoslovakia because they thought the way he spoke was so Buddhist. In the speech he said, “Our only real hope for people today is in a renewal of our certainty that we are rooted in the earth and at the same time in the cosmos.” Cosmos literally means harmony; it doesn't just mean universe. The harmony of the working of all things is the root of our life. All beings working together to give us life is where we are rooted.
The meaning of competition is “petition together.” That is the origin of sports. We get together and petition the gods to bless us all. That is the way we wrestle together, run together, sit together and so on. In that sense, we compete together. This awareness of the certainty that we are dependently co-arisen, from the earth and all beings endows us with the capacity for self-transcendence. We want to work for the benefit of all beings, but we cannot do it if we haven't transcended ourselves. You can't work for beings by putting yourself first and others second. It doesn't work. You have to pull yourself back and put them first. We have to transcend the self in our awareness of how our self dependently co-arises. That is what this text is about: understanding how the self dependently co-arises.
You are all very compassionate and kind, and your kindness and service to each other is only limited by your understanding of yourself. If you understand yourself completely, your kindness and compassion to each other will be unlimited. We can deepen our understanding of ourself, and therefore we can widen and deepen our compassion and kindness. Given your present understanding of yourself, you are all doing your best. Yet we can liberate our full compassion and skillful service by deepening our understanding of the workings of our own mind and thus end all outflows which destabalize and interfere with our service to each other.
Someone asked, “Does this end of all outflows mean no more emotion or passion.” No, the end of all outflows does not mean the end of all compassion. The end of outflows means the birth of total compassion. It means you join the passion of all beings. You lose your individual passion, your self-centered passion when outflows end. When you lose self-centered passion, you lose the passion for helping yourself at the exclusion of others. You are stable, serene, effective and on the job, the job of embracing the passion of all beings. Beings are excited about baseball, bridge, food, life and death. Beings are really passionate and you embrace and join all their passion when you drop your own personal passion.
Will outflows stop? Some might. You might stop hating people, you might stop hating everybody. You might forget about disharmony with others and only remember how everybody is helping you. The first meaning of emotion is agitation or stirring up of the passions. The second meaning of emotion is strong hate, strong love, strong joy or strong sorrow. You won't lose your strong joy and sorrow. You will embrace others in their hate. You won't identify with it and you won't identify with their love either. You won't identify with anything and by not identifying with emotions you can be free of suffering. You are not running away from the emotions; that would be another way to identify with them.
Will any emotions come up in you? Yes. For example enthusiasm and concentration. With concentration comes the greatest worldly happiness, so you feel lots of bliss in relationship to concentration. Concentration is a kind of emotion, it is a way to intensify your emotions whatever they are. Enthusiasm, concentration, compassion, sincerity, loyalty. You stand by the Buddha dharma and you won't move. You have energy, loyalty, emotion, feeling, generosity, bliss, joy, compassion, devotion, dedication.
Q: I don't perceive my life existing without a whole range of emotions coming up. My effort is not to identify with them, not fall for them, not leave them but I don't imagine not having them come up.
TA: You don't have to imagine them not coming up. Some people are imagining them not coming up and they are scared to death. So I am just telling you that you might lose anger, vengeance and so on, but some of these other good emotions might not be lost, so don't worry.
Q: When you say lose them do you mean they don't come up at all?
TA: I mean you don't have them. They don't come up at all.
Now we are going to study about self-transcendence, as well as self-descendence or descent into self. Transcendent, by the way, means trans—over and cendery —climb, to climb over/out of the self. So we have to study descent, focus on this center of self-descent, the center of self-defilement and the center of self-clinging—manas.
Verse 5 says: The dissipation of alaya, the cleaning up, the release, of alaya, occurs in Arhatship. Associated with this process and depending on it occurs a consciousness called manas, which is of the nature of thinking.
Associated with this process refers to the process of alaya. It also means that alaya becomes released. Manas is associated with alaya developing and becoming darker and heavier and more influential in our life. Our life is mostly determined and influenced greatly by this huge darkness around everything, by this unconscious.
You could picture your known life as a little circle of light or a little clearing in a forest where the huge dark forest is the unconscious. Another way to picture it is that every little thing, feeling and emotion that comes up is a little light and around each little light is a field of darkness. Everything that comes up, although you can't see it, is accompanied by the four afflictions and a lot of dispositions. You never get anything by itself. All you see is one object, like a hand or a pain or pleasure or enthusiasm or some concept. You always see a concept coming up, one at a time. Of course, they come up rapidly, so you put things together quite quickly. Each concept is surrounded by the four afflictions and dispositions. You can't see them because they are not the object, although they are coming up with it. They are in the dark. They really determine what happens in your life and how you behave.
Q: Didn’t you say that we should notice self-view, self-confusion and so on? It says that they are “constantly concealed and undefined.”
TA: Yes. So how are you going to notice them? By inference. By their effects, by the outflows. That is how you notice them. For example, when self-confusion is in the dark it agitates you, it causes a disturbance, it determines your actions. If you can bring self-confusion in front of you, at that moment, it is clear, it isn’t self-confusion. The more you get a chance to bring examples or inferred examples of self-clinging, self-confusion, self-love and self-view into awareness, into the light, and then try to appreciate how they dependently co-arose, the more you transform the process.
Every time anything that happens is important for you, it gets laid down in the unconscious or alaya. When things that happen aren't important for you, there is not much effect. You can have experiences where there is no you and no self involved; these don't register much. All the you-oriented experiences get registered in the unconscious. They become influential not by their number and mass but by the fact that they are in the dark and the fact that they support self-clinging. They can operate on us without our even knowing what we are working against.
Q: Isn't that also true with sense experience? I mean we can sense things and not be aware of them but they do have an effect.
TA: I think that they do have an effect but I don't think that they get laid down in alaya. Alaya apprehends sense processes. I don't think the sense process has that much to do with alaya and anyway if it does, fine, because what gets laid down is non-self-centered experience. The basic revolutionary move is to interact with what is happening in an unselfish way. Then you have a moment of an experience that is not important to you. Experiences that aren't important to you do not get laid down in the unconscious and therefore don't become your unseen boss.
Unselfish practice is helpful because it doesn’t get laid down in the unconscious. In a sense, that’s what zazen is. It is something totally useless from your point of view and therefore you don't store it away for future reference. The self wants to store all the stuff that is important to it because you never know when you may want to use it. Actually the problem is you put it away in the dark and you don't know where it is and it uses you. Zazen is a practice that is not for yourself, not for your own pleasure, not for fun. It is basically just a pure ritual enactment, a selflessness. It doesn't develop alaya.
Meanwhile, alaya is unfolding the results of quite a long time of doing things that were important for the self. That is what makes being unselfish difficult. The results of being selfish keep emerging around every experience. Such results may be “Aren't you a fool?” and “Isn't this boring, doing a practice which is not giving you something? Aren't you afraid that the Buddhas and Ancestors are just using you? Aren't you falling into some Japanese or American Dharma trap, dedicating and throwing your life down, one more body in the long lineage of Buddhas and Ancestors!” These are the kinds of dispositions that are the results of past thoughts. They come up and influence you but most of the time you don't even know that they are there. They just make you turn away from doing something selfless and do something selfish.
Let the results of past actions reign/rain, in both senses of the word, or all three senses of the word, including rein. Let them rain upon your life and let your life struggle and be tossed about by this raining of the results of past selfish thoughts. Alaya is going to unfold and you can't stop it. You don't even know where to stop it because it is coming from the dark. You don't know what direction it comes from but it does come and every moment it dumps a little bit of the results of past actions. It unfolds, it becomes mature, it influences, it drives us. It is big, it is powerful, it is basically turning our life.
We have one little thing we can do in the face of that, one little unselfish thing. Call it whatever you want. I call it being upright, it's unselfish, it's done for others, it's not done for the self. It doesn't give you anything. It doesn't take away anything. It has no effect on self. However, eventually it liberates the self and cleans up alaya. Manas lives in conjunction with alaya. It works with alaya when alaya is becoming heavier and thicker and is unfolding and exhausting itself. In arhatship, alaya is completely released. All past action just gets burned off. “Arhat” means to be burned out. All the results of past actions have burned off. Then there is just a mind that is operating and perceiving without self-clinging, without developing a new alaya, now that it has been liberated and the results of alaya have been brought forth and expressed.
If you’re an arhat who is not going to come back, and you’re going to completely clear out alaya, sometimes there is a last minute burn-out. The text says that manas is “not found in the worthy one nor in the state of cessation nor in the supramundane path.” Manas is still generating self-interest and having self-interesting experiences. It is not found in the worthy one, or in the Arhat because the unconscious gets cleared out due to manas not functioning for quite awhile.
Supramundane path means anybody who is doing Buddhist meditation. In the traditional system, there are four kinds of saints: Stream Enterer, Once Returner, Never Returner, and The Worthy One, The Burned Out One. Stream Enterer means somebody who has entered the stream of actual Buddhist meditation.
Strictly speaking, Buddhist meditation means selfless meditation, zazen. Zazen that I do is not zazen, although hopefully it is good karma. It is sort of like a warm-up to Buddhist meditation. It is still practicing meditation from the point of view of a supposed independent self. That is not actually Buddhist practice, although it is on the first two of the five paths. These first two paths are not Buddhist; they are warm-ups. The five paths are the path of preparation, the path of concerted effort, the path of vision, the path of cleaning up alaya and the path of vacation- enjoying being an Arhat or an irreversible Bodhisattva.
When you enter the supramundane path, manas is no longer functioning because you have changed from the self school to the no-self school. What is called gotrabhu occurs there. Gotra means your lineage, your self-lineage and bhu means to end. You have cut the lineage of self clinging; you don’t believe it any more. Satkaya dristi is the view, or position that self has a body. (Satkaya is the true body or self.) That view is dropped when you enter the supramundane path. This is when you start practicing zazen without you doing it anymore. Zazen does zazen. If you practice like that long enough you forget about yourself and then it is really zazen. That is the supramundane path. That is stream entering and manas is not there.
When manas is not there the unconscious starts getting eroded. It fulfills itself and expresses itself and determines your experience but every time it does it uses one of its chips and pretty soon it runs out of chips. Pretty soon your life is no longer unconsciously determined; it is just compassion for all beings who are still into doing or not doing practice and who believe in self. That is the story about verses 5 and 7.
Q: You said earlier that it is through manas that all things are known. Without the functioning of manas how would we know?
TA: Good question! The simple organ function of manas continues. The reflecting side of manas continues but the sense of self that comes up with it has been seen through by Buddhist practice. Your practice is in direct contradistinction to the belief in self. Thus by acting in this unselfish way over and over, by constantly thinking of the welfare of others first and doing practices which attest to your interest in others first, this clinging side of manas drops away. All that is left is the mind’s ability to be aware of something with the aid of manas. Manas is non-defiled then. Some people say it completely disappears but I don’t see how you are going to describe the process of perception if you take away the function entirely.
Q: How can you think of others without self, since self and other are mutually implied?
TA: Once you get on the track of practicing for that purpose, you don’t have to think that way anymore. When you practice zazen and live in this unselfish way, you realize you don’t have to think of self and other. One of the things that people are worried about is “if I forget about self/other will I still be able to feed myself?” I think you will be able to, but if you can’t, don’t worry, someone will feed you or they will send you to rehabilitation. This is your spoon, this is your hand, this is your mouth, now come on—open up wide. They will re-educate you if you need it, don’t worry.
In the process of birth and death, the twelve-fold chain of causation, there is ignorance, karmic formations, consciousness, name and form, six senses, contact, feeling, thirst, clinging, becoming, birth, old age and death. That was the content of Buddha’s enlightenment. Buddha became liberated by understanding that process, and then after enlightenment, he still hung out in that process. Some people say that Buddha didn’t go all the way around that process, that he just went up to the place where you have feeling, and stopped. He didn’t get into thirst and clinging. Clinging is what Buddha pointed to as the source of suffering. Other people say he just went as far as contact. I think that actually in explanation of the process he stopped at contact but if you are still operating at the level of contact maybe you automatically get feeling and that is enough. Maybe meditating on contact, when the feelings arise you don’t get thirst. You are still involved in the process of contact. In this process of contact, I think that there is a separation between consciousness, object, organ. So there is still some organ function of the mind, even in Buddha.
Are there any questions about this?
Q: If we practice selfless activity, eventually alaya will become purified. On the other hand, I thought manas was defiled insofar as it has karmic dispositions. When it is functioning in someone normal, does it look into alaya with some structure of karmic dispositions and pull something up and reflect it? What purifies manas? It seems that alaya can get purified but then manas......?
TA: Yes, OK, I got it.
By the way I want to refer to something that Kozan said, “What about imagination in this process?” To me this class is all about imagination. We are imagining the process of imagining the process of imagination, imagining the process of conception and the process of attributing substance to things. You are imagining now that I am responding, that I hear you and I make an imagination about what you were trying to say. I think I understood what you said. Now I’m going to say something and you are going to judge whether I got it or not and so on. We are all sitting here and imagining away, imagining the process of imagination. We want to use imagination now in a liberating fashion.
So his question is, if you have this sense of reflecting some mental object (some concept), lots of concepts are available because of past conceptualization. We have many concepts available to interpret what is going on in our life. I have a concept of Albert which I often use when I see certain things. If Albert changes a lot I may not use the Albert concept anymore but since I see him regularly, even though he does change, I keep using “Albert” for what he changes into.
In conjunction with the process of reflecting, a sense of self is born, as well as all the conceptions that are keyed into that self. Self arises with concepts, so you know they are closely related. They are dependently co-arising. Thus all those experiences not based on self but that happen in conjunction with the self get stored away and then new experiences come. Aside from the dispositions that come up with the new experiences, there is a new enactment of self and self-clinging right on the spot.
Manas offers continual examples of self-clinging, self-confusion and self-view that occur around every new experience, every new instance of the use of a concept. Manas operates in conjunction with alaya in two ways: All the things that are potentially used for concepts come up from past experience. We talk about the seed aspect of consciousness, the resource aspect of all past experiences. They all have an effect and you can use those effects to bring new concepts to life. Simultaneously, many dispositions are brought up from past experiences and co-exist with the concept you are using. Manas doesn’t have all those dispositions. Its main dispositions are the four kinds of afflictions. All this is one mind, right? We are focusing on manas as the focus of the self-defiling activity. Alaya is emphasizing the fact that mind (the brain, the unconscious), has the ability to embrace the effects of all of our past actions. Then those can be drawn upon, but usually not at will.

---talk continued outside and was not taped---