At the beginning of the practice period I said that practice periods offer the opportunity to discover your utmost concern in life and to clarify and deepen it. Now, at the end of the practice period, there’s a question hanging in the air. How did it go? Did you discover your ultimate concern? Did you clarify it? Did it deepen?
I have been thinking about initiation and I would like to say something about its structure. The approach or evocation of initiation involves separation. Many of you left something in order to come here and a small death may have occurred. This separation, relinquishing, or death is usually a part of initiation which then puts you into another world. Initiation is the process of becoming more alive by entering this new world. There are many kinds of initiations that a person can go through, entering world after world. When you no longer believe in the substantial existence of a self, the world opens up, but there’s a tendency to camp out in the new world. The world that you enter must also be transcended. You have to get initiated out of that world; you have to separate from the world of initiation.
Another facet of the approach to initiation is that you don’t know what’s going on. In some ways you don’t know where you are. You may learn that your body doesn’t need to be the way you’ve been holding it. A characteristic of approaching another world is that you let your body start being a little different, you let your mind start being a little different, you let your world start being different, you let your friends start being different. Not being sure where you are and what’s going on anymore may show that you’re approaching an initiation.
You have to accept not knowing what the outcome will be. The Head Monk, Teah, had an initiation a couple of days ago; she didn’t know the outcome. She didn’t know where she was. She had to separate herself from that cabin and go into the zendo for the Shuso Ceremony. I’m a Cancer so I have a thick skin. Inside it’s like soft crab meat. I don’t necessarily notice that things are bothering me until I’m practically cooked. At my Shuso Ceremony, I was walking down the aisle in the old zendo and all of a sudden I thought “Oh my god, what have I got myself into? This is totally ridiculous.” You feel exposed to events, to what’s happening, to the cold, to the community. You feel exposed to the teaching, you feel exposed to the food. During this practice period something may have become broken or separated. I would like you to think about whether that happened for you.
You can also look to see whether you think you had or didn’t have "entry." In a Buddhist sense, once there is entry there is no turning back. Once you see through your belief in self, once you see that something that you thought was substantial is not substantial you never forget and you’re permanently changed, marked or scarred. You’re not the same person. You have no choice after initiation. A Buddhist initiation is to see the dependent co-arising of the ego, to see through the ego. Choice has to do with the ego. It is possible to choose even though you see through the ego because it’s a function of mind to constantly choose what to pay attention to. After initiation choice is not an issue anymore. It’s a matter of being chosen rather than choosing. You are chosen by all events. All events come forward and choose you rather than you choosing all events. That’s the reversal. You separate from the world where you choose, and enter the world where you’re chosen.
Connected with this is that the limits of your situation are set by others. We want to set the limits ourselves. We want to set the temperature of the water at the baths. If you want to be in control you’re not in an initiatory space. If you want to be initiated then you have to let somebody else be in charge, or get a new bath guru. Somebody else determines the temperature. If I choose the temperature I’ll make it too hot or too cold for someone. Of course I’ll try to make it the right temperature but it will always be not right. If I choose I’ll stay in my own ego temperature.
At Tassajara of course, we have a daily schedule. Let somebody else make the schedule. You may want to figure out the schedule but you were already doing that before you came here. In an initiatory process somebody else designs the schedule and gives it to you. You submit to someone else, and I think you have all done this. You may have had some problems with it, but at various levels you have done it .
Someone asked me to talk about the relationship between emotions and feelings. We sometimes use the word vedana, which means “to receive,” or “experience,” or “sensation” or “feeling.” This word refers to the psychic phenomenon that in every moment of experience we have a basic understanding that the object of awareness is positive, negative, or neutral. Feelings are basically of two types, there really isn’t a third type. It’s just that sometimes we’re so confused we can’t tell which one it is, so we say there are three—“I don’t like it, it’s no good, I’m in pain.” Or “I like it, it’s positive.” Or “I can’t tell which it is.” Those are feelings or sensations. “Emotions” refer to all the dispositions which ensconce the feeling and can make the feeling more intense. So for example, if you have a negative feeling and it’s in association with the belief that some person is your enemy, then the feeling of pain is much stronger. If it’s ensconced in the belief that he is your pal, that the slap on the back was an act of affection even though it was a little painful, you might feel quite good about it. In some situations you might have pain but not get angry. If you’re climbing a mountain and your muscles hurt, you don’t necessarily get angry. It depends on the situation. Emotions are the intensified feeling. “Emotion” also means agitation of the situation. So when you “enter,” there sometimes is an intensification of emotions which is why they say “if you’re excited it becomes a pitfall.” You also sometimes hesitate, which is another kind of emotion. Your imagination becomes highly activated, so whatever issues you bring into the space can get magnified. If you’re wounded archetypally you can experience the archetype of your wound. If you have power problems or feelings of inferiority, those get blown way up.
You can consider whether any of this sounds familiar and has anything to do with the process of initiation you may have gone through during this practice period or in your life. Certainly all the mothers here have been separated. When they had children they lost their girlhood. Also, the beginning of menstruation is a kind of initiation. Recently, we have had ceremonies at Zen Center for young girls at that time. Menopause is also the beginning of a new phase of life. After puberty, after motherhood, after menopause you are permanently changed; you don’t go back. It’s a little bit different from “no turning back.” “No turning back” is when you enter. After it’s over, you have actually changed, you’re a different person. There’s evidence of it, there’s proof, it can be verified. There’s inward change which you can express verbally and in that way it can be verified externally. There are external changes which people can see, and more importantly, they can hear. It’s mainly by words that you will be able to show it.
These initiations make you more alive and more in life. You may not know you have been initiated until some later time when you’re in trouble and you find yourself thinking back to something that happened during a sesshin or during your time at Tassajara or when you had a car accident. You go back to that time as a resource. You notice that it was a point of strength and wisdom in your life. It was informal, it wasn’t traditional. That’s the reason why even though war is horrible, a lot of people who have been in a war think back to that time after the war is over. There are traumatic war experiences but also there are initiatory war experiences that can be resources for the rest of your life.
You might look over your time here; do you see yourself going through this kind of process? Now we can go back to the original question: did you discover, clarify and deepen your faith? Is it hard for you to say “Yes I did discover, clarify and deepen my faith. I did discover my utmost concern in life. I clarified it and it got deeper.” Is there any way to respond to this?
Roberto Amador: For me it’s more of a process. There are mini-happenings rather than one big happening, and the process is still happening.
Tenshin Anderson: I didn’t mean to imply that you would deepen your faith and then it would stop there. It gets deeper forever. There’s no bottom to faith. Did it get any deeper? Did it become more unshakable? Are you more uncertain about what is important in your life, or more certain?
RA: Probably a little more certain, but not heavily certain.
TA: Kind of a light certainty? A flexible certainty? That’s what certainty is like. When you’re not actually certain you make it real heavy, like “I’m certain!” That shows you’re not certain. If you’re really certain you can forget about it.
Here are some more questions that people asked me to discuss:
“Is dependent co-arising a concept or is a concept dependent co-arising?”
A concept is co-arising. Do you see it? All the time concepts are co-arising. Whenever you have an experience a concept arises. Also, concepts are dependently co-arisen. They all arise by causes and effects. For any concept you pick, like “Christina,” there have to be certain causes for it to happen. You can’t have “Christina” without a whole bunch of stuff. Also, you have to have yourself. If she put on 80 pounds and came back to Tassajara and said “I’m Christina,” you might wonder. But you would have to be there to decide. Many things come together to make every single concept, so they are dependently co-arisen. Is dependent co-arising a concept? Yes, it also is a concept. Emptiness is a concept, Buddha is a concept.
Q: “What about the bajama loka?”
TA: Bajama means container. Living beings are contained in the bajama loka. Living beings are composed of tangible things, smellable things, tasteable things, touchable things, audible things and visible things. The elements, earth, air, fire and water come together to make these five types of materiality. Each of the types of materiality is dependently co-arisen. You can tell which one it is by studying their dependent co-arising. If you take away some conditions from light, it’s not a visible thing anymore, it’s not light. We saw earlier how the psyche, how our mind arises out of the interplay between these different types of dependently co-arisen materiality. Since the psyche is born of dependently co-arisen things, it thinks in terms of dependent co-arising. Its essence, its origin, its root is dependent co-arising. So the container world, the physical world gives the essential quality to the mind. That’s one of the reasons why scientists have fun—they get to see the nature of their liberated consciousness by studying materiality. That’s what’s liberating about science.
John Grimes: What is “the dependent” that Vasubandhu refers to in verse 22?
TA: He’s talking about three types of nature. One is called “the dependent,” one is called “the imagined,” or “fabricated,” and one is called “the accomplished.” They are called tri-svabhava, three kinds of own-being. It’s kind of ironic to call them own-being since own-being means self-existent, and later he shows that all three of them are empty. They are three ways to be. One way to be is the dependent way. When a concept arises by causes and conditions, it’s the dependent form of existence. Concepts are dependently co-produced in the minds of living beings. When I look over there and see the concept “Christina” I have trouble not seeing her as Christina because certain causes and conditions have come together but when I look at Lee I have no trouble not thinking of Christina. There are causes and conditions which make the concept happen. That’s the dependent situation.
If I just leave it like that, that is wisdom. But if I attribute independent existence to Christina, then that attribution which is applied to something which is dependently co-produced obscures the dependent co-arising. I may say “it’s substantial, it doesn’t depend on other things, it’s really this.” That imagining that something exists all by itself, that John acts like this because he’s an independent thing rather than understanding that I and everybody else make John be the way he is—that’s called the fabricated. That way of existence is miserable. That’s the story of how birth and death happen.
I have a thought about you, that you’re stupid. The way I imagine that the thought is real and true, that you are really the way I think you are—that’s a fabrication. There’s no evidence for it. I might think I have evidence, but all the reasons I use to point out why you’re stupid are exactly the reasons why you’re not that way. If you really were that way I wouldn’t need these excuses but without the excuses there’s no proof you’re that way. That’s why I use them. Before I used them I just thought you were that way and attributed substance to you. If you want to say someone is some way you don’t need any proof. But then if people challenge you, you bring in information to prove it and the more information you bring in, the more you show that they are not what they are unless you bring that information in. Finally you give enough information so that everyone agrees that proves the person wasn’t that way. Then you see how they are dependently co-produced. That’s what they really are.
For example—who’s a perfect person we can use for an example? Gloria? Since she’s perfect I can make a story about her being bad. If I say ‘Gloria’s not so good,’ someone else will say ‘she’s not so bad.’ Then I say ‘What about this thing about the temperature at the baths?’ ‘Well, that’s true, she does have some problems around that.’ Other people may say ‘well, that’s not really so bad.’ ‘Well, did you hear she did such and such a thing?’ ‘Oh, she did? My god!’ Pretty soon I build this really big case. But what I built is a different Gloria than we had earlier. Now everybody sees a terrible Gloria who has been conjured up by all the stories I told. It wasn’t there before I told the story and if I take the story away there’s nothing left. So the very things I used to conjure her up show that there was never anything there before. If you do this in your mind, and then take it away, there’s nothing left.
Have you ever seen Bunraku puppets? They are large and have life-like faces and fancy costumes and are operated by four puppeteers. You could think of the body of the puppet as the rupa skandha and then there are four master puppeteers in black clothes who come in and make the puppet come alive and rise up. Then they move away and it dies. It’s just like a thing called a person. These things come together and make a person. There was nothing there before and suddenly there seems to be one thing. Actually it’s not one thing, it’s a puppet with four people operating it. We call it one thing. You take Teah, Gaelyn, Meiya and Dorotea. Are they one person, one thing? No they aren’t. Suppose they take a puppet and make it stand up. Suddenly there’s one thing there. What happened? There are reasons why it looks like that. If two start pulling one way and two pull another way and they rip the puppet in half you wouldn’t see one puppet, you would see a bunch of shreds on the floor. You might call it one thing—“puppeteer disaster.” But when you see that there’s no such thing, you have a dependently co-arisen thing without any substance attributed to it and that’s called the accomplished. Something is happening but you see how it’s made. You don’t see it as an independent thing. There’s the absence of the attribution of independent existence. The only way to keep it absent is to appreciate its radiant production.
JG: What about the phrase “the absence of the one prior to it”?
TA: Vasubandhu introduces “fabrication” first, in verse 20. The next verse introduces the paratantra. He could have said “the absence of one mentioned in verse 20.” It probably chants better in Sanskrit this way.
Meg Jeffrey: How does rebirth relate to this teaching?
TA: Vasubandhu doesn’t talk about that here. But if you achieve this “serene body of release” then you will be able to go to work earlier on your meditation practice when you are reborn. According to this theory, alaya is how human beings get hung up in their psyche and in the effects from their past karma. When you revolutionize this whole process, you gradually get lighter and lighter and yet if you make certain vows, the effect of those vows is that you will be reborn. Without making those vows you would become an arhat and wouldn’t come right back. However, according to Mahayana teaching you would eventually come back. It doesn’t deny rebirth, it just emphasizes the process of liberation so that you can go through the process of rebirth with the highest possible level of attention and alertness, and not be fooled by what’s going on.
Joe Janowski: Before, I didn’t believe in reincarnation at all. Did you immediately believe in reincarnation when you encountered Buddhism or is it a belief that developed?
TA: When I first encountered Buddhism I didn’t run into the idea of reincarnation for a long time. When I did, it was mildly interesting. Mostly, I was interested in the extent to which other people were interested in it. It’s funny how people always want to talk about it, given that our society basically rejects it. I wouldn’t say exactly that I believe in it. I would say that I have the same attitude toward the story of rebirth that I have about the story of my life. The story of this guy appearing in Mississippi 51 years ago has an existential reality equal to the story of his having previous rebirths. If I take a position that I didn’t have previous births, then I’m believing that I didn’t, and then why would I believe that this birth is real? Dogen says that if you don’t believe in rebirth then you should also not believe in this life. It’s inconsistent to take a position against it but I also don’t take a position for it. I don’t think Buddha took a position for it. He just said things like “when I reviewed my past lives....” He made the decision to sit still and then during the night he attained various shamanic powers. One shamanic power is to review past lives, so he reviewed his past lives and went way back and found that there wasn’t a beginning.
Buddhism becomes interesting to cosmologists and particle physicists because you can look back through this process. The way the stories of our lives go is the way the stories of our past lives go and the way those stories go is the same as the story of the universe. If you study those stories you can get back to the big bang and inflationary universe theories. It’s all in the psyche too because the psyche arose out of the material world. The way we were created is the story of the universe. Einstein can sit there and look at his upset stomach and come up with general relativity. The principles of indigestion are produced by the history of the world.
I asked someone—“When you saw your reversal what did you see?” He said he saw some monks and nuns and things like that. The answer I was hoping for was “I saw five skandhas.” That’s what Buddha saw. When Buddha looked back, there was one thing he saw in every life. He always saw five skandhas. Some people say they saw Egyptian princesses and so on. Buddha also said he was a frog and a lion and things like that. But in every single past life he saw five skandhas. In other words, in every life there was dependent co-arising, there was an ungraspable event. In every life we map a self onto that event. The event of life is prior to the concept. In every life there is the event of life and then there is or is not a concept placed on it.
Robin Frey: Isn’t reincarnation just a concept?
TA: Did you just say “it’s just a concept?” What would Vasubandhu say about that? He would say that everything is just a concept. Not only is reincarnation a concept, but life is just a concept. Every moment of your life is just a concept, so is rebirth, so is dependent co-arising. That’s why I’m not going to say “I don’t believe in the concept called rebirth because this other concept is true!” Every element of my life, plus making up a big fat concept about all the little concepts; all those are just concepts. Rebirth, past lives, Buddha, dependent co-arising, enlightenment, Zen Center are all just concepts.
RF: If there’s no permanent self, what is it that continues or is reborn?
TA: A person. It’s the story about the rebirth of a person, the same person. If it were a different person we wouldn’t be talking about it. Nothing is created or destroyed. There’s no end to things and things aren’t endless. The way the world works is more mysterious than our little brains can get a grip on. There is a story about one person going on and on and on. You have a story about this life, and in the same way the story can go beyond this life. To make a case against it going before or beyond this life is the same as making a case for or against it now. Taking any position on the existence of something that dependently co-arises is called “no evidence for it. It’s mere fabrication.”
Do you want to get free from this whole process? Find out what it’s like to actually see how something dependently co-arises. See how things actually happen and you’ll get released from the whole thing. Then you will be able to see all your past lives, and what you will see is the five skandhas. You will see the inconceivability, the ungraspability of things. People will continue to dream up their lives, their past lives and their future lives or reject their past lives. The question is—are we going to be free and happy, or are we going to be miserable? The key to happiness is the study of dependent co-arising. That’s the key to seeing that everybody is beautiful. When you see how people dependently co-arise, every single person is beautiful. If you don’t see things as dependently co-arisen, then only some people are beautiful, and they had better stay that way. Like, Sala doesn’t like my mustache!
Meiya Wender: Is that why it’s there? To show dependent co-arising?
TA: That’s why it’s there!
MW: What a sacrifice!
TA: I sacrificed my face to science! to Sala’s scientific inquiry into causes and conditions.
JJ: So everything’s a concept. The moon is a concept, a spaceship’s a concept. We can work with those concepts. We can agree that Tassajara is a concept and we’re all leaving the day after tomorrow. We can function with those concepts; they seem to have validity. You can say that everything is a concept but some seem to have more validity than others. What if I say “We’re in Paris”?
TA: You can’t just make up concepts out of nowhere. There are reasons for them. For example, we don’t agree that we’re in Paris. You can say that, but we don’t agree because there are causes and conditions for Paris. What about the Eiffel Tower? Where is it? I have a concept of Paris, it’s a perfectly good concept. Each of us has a different version but we can communicate because our concepts are built in certain ways and I can find out how you built your concept. If for some reason you don’t have the Eiffel Tower in your concept of Paris, we can work that out. How about Montmartre? I might ask you what you think Paris is. You might say you think it’s a city in California. But I think it’s a city in France. Then you might say “Oh, that’s right, it is in France.” If you have a different idea, then maybe this is Paris. Maybe what you mean is “I feel like I’m in Paris every time I finish a practice period!” Now we know what you mean by Paris. Now I’m in Paris too! That’s why concepts are dependently co-arisen and why there’s nothing to them. Do you see how we just switched from one Paris to another? That’s why there’s no such thing as Paris. It’s just a concept.
John Landon: What about that encounter with the woman when you shouted “Don’t believe what you think......” What if she had pulled out a meat tenderizer....? The non-substantiality of things really is giving me a hard time!
TA: You’re making non-substantiality into a substantial thing! That’s what’s bothering you. You can’t be bothered by non-substantial things. Non-substantial things are beauty. When I see her over there doing her thing and I see her as a non-substantial person, then she’s a beautiful woman. It’s when she was substantial that I was having a problem with her. And if she pulled out a meat cleaver then I would have had even more of a problem with the substantiality of that. It’s when you think that the woman with a meat cleaver is substantial that you get paralyzed, freaked out, ready to kill. It was my perception of her as having substantiality that was scaring me. That’s why I was jumping up and down saying “Don’t believe, Reb, don’t believe what you think! You think that she really is that way!”
When some lady raises a meat cleaver we might think “I’m not going to meditate on this and see how the world is creating this. I’m not going to watch how it is that my mind sees this tiny lady as big and frightening, and that she’s screaming at me because she’s scared to death. I’m not going to see all that. I’m going to see her as a monster and I’m going to freak out.”
“Non-substantiality” is when you see that things are being produced by everything in the universe. It’s extremely beautiful to see creation at work before your eyes, before your nose, before your tongue, before your body, before your mind. You do not have a problem. If it’s a meat tenderizer, you just sit there and see the beauty of a meat tenderizer. And if it’s coming towards you, you see the beauty of getting out of the way.
Then you see the “unique breeze of reality.” You see creation “weaving the ancient brocade.” This beautiful story of the creation of the universe comes forward from beginingless time and we can see the latest thread that’s being put in right now. If you see it, this is revelation. It’s being shown to us all the time. That’s why we have to be quiet. Just be quiet and watch for the next appropriate response. The appropriate response and revelation come up together. When the monk asked Yunmen “What was Buddha’s teaching during his whole lifetime?” Yunmen didn’t just say “revelation.” When you’re a Buddha, everything that’s happening is revelation but it isn’t only revelation. It’s revelation and then you respond.