So at the beginning is, what's the beginning? The beginning is our practice, our Zazen practice is the beginning, right? And what is our Zazen practice? It is just to be ourselves, right? Is that right? At the beginning, how are we starting here? At the beginning. And just to be ourselves means, of course, to practice Zazen with no gaining idea. Charlie? Okay. This is a... It's all a matter of lineage, right?

[01:01]

This is conveyed to us, this simple teaching. And it made sense to us, and we've devoted our lives to it. And this is not a dig, but someone who said he wants to study our lineage said he wasn't so interested in studying 30 verses. That was me. But the reason why I'm studying 30 verses with you is so that you will understand our lineage. When Suzuki Roshi says, our practice is just to be ourselves, you may not know that that's exactly the same thing as the 30 verses. The 30 verses are the way Vasubandhu elucidated in an extremely brilliant way why and how it makes sense that just to be yourself is complete, perfect enlightenment.

[02:05]

It's not just our practice. It just so happens our practice is complete, perfect enlightenment. And he explained how that's so in these 30 verses. He explained how just to be yourself with no gaining idea is what we call dependently co-arisen suchness or dependently co-arisen awakening. Now, also, I'm going to erase this board. And when I erase this board, another lineage will happen. Watch the lineage. You know what lineage this is? Recognize this? Huh? What's this lineage? Huh? Realism. Realism? Nihilism. Nihilism. Where is the nihilism? Where does it reside? Where does it reside? Yeah, where is it functioning? It's functioning in the erasure of everything. Where is the erasure of everything existing right now?

[03:08]

Where is it perceived? Right. What other lineage do you see here, folks? Great! Where is he? You finally understood something. See? Sorry I didn't come to classes before. That's right, this is a lineage of schoolteachers who have a white board. There's a lot of compassion in their lives too, right? OK, so whatever indeed is the variety of ideas of self and elements that prevail in this world, it occurs in the transformation and is born in the transformations of consciousness.

[04:14]

These varieties of solvent elements which occur, which occur, when they occur, something is born with them. That something is a sense of self. The sense of self then, as we talked about in detail, gets projected all over the place, and we find ourselves living in a world which is infected by this belief in self and elements. And that's sort of where we got to last time, is the situation where the mind has been bifurcated.

[05:22]

And at that bifurcation, the sense of self is born. And also what happened at that time was the idea of objects was born. And from there, misery develops. Now, this threefold transformation of consciousness can be also put in relationship to the 12 links of causation. So dependent co-arising in terms of 12 links. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. First one's called ignorance. Second one's called karmic formation.

[06:26]

Third one's called consciousness, jnana. Just name and form. Actually, literally, Nama Rupa. There's no N in there. That'd be name, form. And then six sense doors. And then contact. Feeling. And then thirst or craving. And then becoming. And then birth.

[07:38]

Old, excuse me. And then clinging. And then becoming. And then birth. And then old age. Sickness. Lamentation. Misery. And finally, relief in the form of death. And then ignorance, karmic formations, consciousness, name and form, six sense doors, and so on. Round and round. This is the dependent co-arising of birth and death. what Shakyamuni observed in his enlightenment.

[08:48]

And he also realized, this cycle he realized, and looking at this cycle as an existent thing, like an existent consciousness, being caused by existent karmic formations, being caused by ignorance. Or ignorance, an existent thing, causing real karmic formations, causing an existent siddha-jnana, cognition, consciousness, and so on, which cause an existent name and form, with name and form being mind and body, which cause the sentient. And then also seeing these existent things, these causing each other, and also causing an existent chain, that makes birth and death. Going back to threefold transformations, when the mind bifurcates and the mind also acquires the concept that part of this bifurcation, half of this bifurcation is the object outside,

[10:14]

And therefore, the other half is the subject on the inside. That transformation, then with that transformation, with those three transformations, and particularly with the second one, which bifurcates the mind, a sense of self is born with self-ignorance and so on. And the sense of self then gets projected onto, first of all, the consciousness, second of all, the bifurcated consciousness. and so on. So with this bifurcation of consciousness into this, and the bifurcation of this consciousness into this duality of name and form of subject and object, occurs because of these karmic formations. These karmic formations are because this has happened innumerable times before. In past lives it happened. And therefore, out of ignorance, we are born again. karmic formations, consciousness, bifurcation, objects, contact, feeling, and so on.

[11:21]

Because of this bifurcation, first we believe that consciousness existed, now we believe that the subject and object exist, and then we believe everything else that comes out of this exists. So because we believe that each one of these elements exists, that we believe the whole thing, the whole chain exists, and therefore we're totally sold to the reality of birth and death. And so we're totally sold into misery. Okay? That's what Buddha saw. But he also saw that because of this, you have this. Because of this, you have this. If you don't have this, you don't have this. If you don't have this, you don't have this. If you don't have this, you don't have this. In other words, none of these things exist inherently by themselves. They all depend on other things. Therefore, every single element in this process is actually empty, does not exist.

[12:24]

And therefore, the whole chain doesn't exist. And therefore, birth and death do not exist. Misery does not exist. Birth does not exist. Death does not exist. Consciousness does not exist. The whole thing doesn't exist. And then he realized simultaneously, simultaneously with his dependently coalescing phenomena, he realized dependently coalescing suchness, a dependently coalescing awakening. We are, in our story, We have gone basically around, how far have we gone? Have we gone this far? Yes, we have. Have we gone this far? Yes, we have. Have we gone this far?

[13:26]

Yes, we have. We've done the whole thing in our discussion so far. Also, we pointed out when we talked about alaya, when a sentient being is born into the realm of sentientness, whether it's, you know, womb or whatever, egg or whatever, they're born, when they're born, this consciousness, which is called sometimes alaya, sometimes adana, sometimes citta, this consciousness starts to grow. And this consciousness grows in relationship to two clings. So this consciousness is born with a kind of clinging. Now, this level of clinging has not happened yet. But there is a basic clinging that comes with the ignorance, and also which comes from karmic formation. Namely, this clinging is to the seeds that are in this consciousness, which are due to karmic formation, and also to a body because this consciousness comes with a body and ignorance.

[14:29]

And so we have a consciousness. But the consciousness originally, when it's first born, isn't vibratated yet. There are objects in this consciousness because the objects are the seeds which are due to karmic formations. This consciousness holds these objects, receives these objects, holds them, and is hooked to them. But there are no external objects yet. Therefore, name and form hasn't happened. Actually, I take it back. Name and form has happened, but it hasn't been bifurcated. All the elements of, excuse me, name and form has happened, but not name and form. So before Alaya is split by mana, you're up to four, because all the stuff that makes up names, that makes up body and mind, are present in alaya, in seed form, as objects, as possible objects, but none of them have been considered to be external yet.

[15:32]

We don't have the concept for external objects yet, and also nothing has been separated out from the consciousness. There is just consciousness. However, this consciousness, because of the way it came into birth, it has this holding quality. due to ignorance and karmic formations in this life and due to past lives while we went through all this. OK? Now, when manas arises, then you split the name or you split the name. Anyway, the consciousness is split into two parts, subject and object, that which is aware and that which is aware of. And also, that which is aware of is called external. And then the sense of self is born. Where does the sense of self fit in here? I can't exactly say exactly where it influenced.

[16:39]

It starts to get heavier and heavier in right in here. OK. Now, without, yes? What is becoming living simply self? What is becoming living? It's hot in here. Are you also hot? No. Well, it's OK if you're not hot. Let me open this one. Let's see. What's going to happen if I get into that? I don't know. I'll wave it. So from past discussions, can you see that depending on how you look at this process, this is the description of dependent core rising for the debt or the dependent core rising of suchness, depending on the way you look at it?

[17:46]

that there is this thing called dependent co-arising. And that can be converted into defilement. Defilement means you can make it into a thing and therefore misery, or you can not make it into a thing and then convert it into awakening. Part of the discussion, by the way, about alaya is, is alaya pure or impure originally? And they're actually, in Chinese Buddhism, there's two schools, a northern and southern school. One school considered a lie to be originally pure, the other considered to be impure. But no matter what school you're from, there is a question that everyone, I think, is concerned with. And that is, is it possible that, well, first of all, everyone admits that there is the appearance of defilement in this world. No one's denying that fact. There is the appearance of misery. There is the appearance of attachment, and so on.

[18:48]

The question is, can something impure come from something pure? Or vice versa. Or vice versa, yeah. That's the kind of question. And I think that this school is saying that there is something... there is something which is neither pure nor impure, which is dependent co-arising. But before dependent co-arising, before dependent co-arising, there is awakening. And then, After awakening, there's dependent co-arising. And then from dependent co-arising, there can be dependently co-arisen birth and death, or there can be dependently co-arisen suchness, which then goes very nicely with the awakening.

[20:03]

It was there before the dependent co-arising. It was there. It was not there. which is not there before. What? Okay, now, another way to put this is that dependent co-arising is the content of and inseparable from non-discriminating wisdom. Dependent co-arising is the content of and inseparable from non-discriminating wisdom. Also, I guess everybody knows that dependent co-arising is the content of and inseparable from

[21:14]

discriminating wisdom or discriminating stupidity, right? The pendent core arising is the content of and inseparable from the pendent core is in birth and death, right? The pendent core arising is the content of both non-discriminating wisdom and total and perfect ignorance. All right? But anyway, the karmically created, the karmically created is the contents of and inseparable from non-discriminating wisdom. So the story which we've told now which goes up to the splitting of a lie into two parts by reflecting highly of it and then calling it objective.

[22:30]

And the sense of self is born at that time. With this activity of splitting the mind comes the birth of the sense of self. And then this whole process starts, which is dependently co-arisen phenomena. dependently co-arisen being and dependently co-arisen karmic creations. This stuff, which is the basis upon which the life of worldly misery adheres and develops from, congeals and inflames from, this same stuff is exactly the one and only place where suchness is realized. So we have followed the story of the development of something, some kind of being. And then we've also started to follow the story of how this being developed to its full human potential.

[23:38]

I mean, human in the sense of unenlightened human. And from there, It can go off towards misery, but in this 30 verses, he doesn't elaborate on it going off towards misery. He right away starts turning around to how you can see this material in such a way that you can just be yourself. He gives you a fairly full development of how karmic creation happens. And then he pretty soon starts to show you how you can drop away any accretions to this dependently co-arisen being. Now, at this time, I could... I think I'm going to just say something that Bodhidharma said, and then I'm going to say something that William James said.

[24:55]

And then, see if it's time to... And then go to the Caracas. Or I could go to the Caracas first. Maybe I'll go to the Caracas first, go deeper into the text, and then do this other stuff. Okay? So are you capable of going into the text now? Do you feel up to it? And I'm going to parenthetically mention that, again, the devolvement of alaya, the devolvement of this basic consciousness through which we're born, in other words, the devolvement of it from having hooked on to things and therefore being hooked into birth and death, it occurs in arhatship. And also that the manas, which splits the consciousness and therefore gives birth to this sense of self, it also ceases in arhatship.

[26:02]

However, my understanding of that is that it doesn't mean that amanas completely stops functioning. I think it still keeps functioning by splitting the consciousness and thereby making possible, functionally, the mind being able to be aware of objects and know them. But the arhat understands well enough that this is only a functional splitting and therefore when a sense of self arises the arhat is not fooled by that sense of a personal self. And therefore the arhat becomes an arhat. And this awareness then gradually suppresses all the... Well, actually, before one was an arhat, this realization I just spoke of happened.

[27:07]

And then by using the realization that this self that arises in conjunction with the splitting of consciousness functionally into subject and object, that insight then is applied to all the dispositions that exist in a life. And they're all suppressed. so that alaya loses its hooking or grabbing ability, and therefore rebirth does not occur. One is not then thrown back into the passions. One is burned out. These people are more enlightened in a way than bodhisattvas. These people are not trying to become Buddha and are not doing what is necessary to become Buddha. They are on a non-Buddha-becoming path. They are not trying to become Buddha. The arhat goal is for people who are not trying to be Buddha.

[28:11]

They are trying to be an arhat. They are trying to be a saint. Buddhas can be saints, but saints are not Buddhas. Buddha is not a saint. Buddha is a saint. Buddha is not a saint. But, if I said it, I'm saying it again. Buddha is not a saint. And saints are not Buddhas. However, the Buddha, Shakyamuni Buddha, was a saint. Okay? There's a contradiction there. You see it? Got the contradiction. Looking for the way out. It's like if you were a Buddha, you know, I would say, Buddha is not a man. This man is a Buddha. I'd also say this Buddha is a man, but Buddha is not man. Buddha is not man, man is not Buddha, but Buddha is this man and this man is a Buddha.

[29:16]

Part of the confusion in Buddhist history One of the confusions in Buddha's history is that Shakyamuni Buddha was an arhat. He did that. And he showed people how to do arhatship, and some went for it. That's why that's one of the confusions in this text, is he's mentioning that the devolvement of a laya happens in arhatship. But the bodhisattva does not necessarily devolve a lie because the bodhisattva is going to keep being reborn and demonstrating the 30 verses until everybody gets it. The bodhisattva is not just going to check out. Okay? Devolve? Well, sort of like... Devolved means become less evolved in a sense of not having these seeds, these potential passions functioning anymore to suppress and annihilate, to put into destruction these potentials for rebirth.

[30:25]

Progress? Is it progress? What? Is it progress? I'm not sure. Yeah, it's progress in the sense that the arhats then become saints. You become a saint. A saint's a wonderful thing. I mean, it's fantastic. I look at the stories of the arhats. I mean, they're wonderful beings. For example, Shariputra and his, actually kind of his childhood friend, Magalana. Magalana and Shariputra grew up together. They were Buddha's two main disciples. They were fantastic saints. Right? Right. But I might mention to you that in the pictures, again, I'm not saying this is to criticize the Arhats, but in the pictures of Shakyamuni Buddha's death, the Arhats are crying. The Bodhisattvas are not crying, and the Buddha's not crying. The Arhats are not causing trouble. They're saints. They're not going to harm anybody or themselves anymore.

[31:29]

But they're still shaken up by the death of the great Buddha. They still have not understood that nothing happened. The bodhisattvas have understood this. And because the bodhisattva has understood that nothing's happened or will happen, they're perfectly happy to keep cycling through birth and death until everybody gets that message. Shariputra asked Buddha if he could die before Buddha. He said, I've heard that it's a kind of a style for the disciple to die before their master. So could I do it? And Buddha said, no. He asked three times. He said, I won't be able to stand it to see you go. Please let me go before you. He asked three times. The third time, Buddha said, okay. Shariputra died first. Makalalana without traveling, and he was kind of a... He had a tendency to refute and unseat various religious figures in the countryside, converting lots of religious leaders, students to disciples of Shakyamuni.

[32:40]

He found himself in trouble and got beaten up. And a lot of bones broke, and so he went back to Buddha and also asked if he could precede the Buddha. He got permission to enter nirvana, and he did, too. And when they entered nirvana, the idea was that that was it. They weren't going to come back anymore and do any more worship people. This is a different style. These are saints, wonderful saints, but not bodhisattvas. Bodhisattvas are those who actually think that they have what it takes to be a Buddha. And there are three, in a sense, you can say there's three types of Buddhist practitioners, maybe four, but three that I'm concerned with. One is that people want to be saints. And some of them make it. I went back to the beginning for you. I went back to the beginning for you.

[33:42]

Take your jacket off and I'll go outside in a bit. And some people think they want to be bodhisattvas. They want to create the mind of Buddha and become Buddha. Those are bodhisattvas. And then there's some people who love Buddha, who praise Buddha, who think Buddha is the most wonderful thing, who dedicate their whole life to be Buddha. And not to be Buddha, but to work for Buddhism. But they don't think that they... have what it takes to be a Buddha. And they know from Buddha's stories that Shakyamuni Buddha was predicted to be a Buddha by Dipankara Buddha. And as far as they know, they don't have a prediction to be a Buddha, so they don't have any kind of external reason to think they're going to be Buddha. And in their own hearts, they don't think they've got what it takes, so they're not bodhisattvas. Although they're complete supporters of Buddhas and bodhisattvas who are working to be Buddhas, but they don't think that they're that way. Bodhisattvas are these outrageous creatures. actually think that they've got what it takes to be a Buddha.

[34:50]

And the teaching of Mahayana Buddhism is for these weird people. It actually says to them, guess what it takes to be a Buddha? Non-discriminating wisdom is what it takes. Guess what the contents of non-discriminating wisdom is? Ordinary human delusion you've got what it takes all you got to do is be yourself all you got to do is be that karmically created stuff just that stuff and not any more than that stuff and if you can be just as you are if you can be the karmically created being that you are and just that that is inseparable from and the contents of non-discriminating wisdom. And if you can be just that, that is non-discriminating wisdom.

[35:56]

If you cannot stand to be just that, then that stuff is still the contents of and inseparable from non-discriminating wisdom. But by being more than that, by being more than what you are, by not willing to just die and just sit and be yourself, you imagine something more than that. And therefore, you're involved independently, coerced in birth and death. If you would just drop all your imaginations, for example, drop the imagination that the self actually exists, if you just would drop that and let what's happening be just that, then nondiscriminating wisdom would be manifest. But this is very hard for us to do That's what this text is about. This text is about how to just be the dependently co-arisen consciousness.

[37:00]

And this is not the arhat path. The arhat path would be how to work with this dependently co-arisen consciousness in such a way as to suppress these vasana, these bijas, these dispositions, to suppress them and become a saint so that we would not produce an alaya which would then produce another birth. In the meantime, we would be saints until that time came. Okay. Now, paragraph 15. Yeah. Okay. 14. Distractive inattentiveness, sloth, worry, reflection, investigative. These are the secondary defilements, the last two being twofold, defiled and unfold. The arising of the five forms of consciousness together and separately within the foundational consciousness is like waves on the water. The arising of the five forms of consciousness together or separately within the foundational consciousness is like waves in the water.

[38:07]

The manifestation of mental consciousness takes place always except in the sphere of non-perception, the two attainments, in a state of torture occasioned by insensibility and the absence of thought. Thus, thought evolves this transformation of consciousness. Thus thought involves this transformation of consciousness. For that reason, what has just been thought does not exist. Therefore, all is mere concept. Any questions? OK. Now this is sort of the end.

[39:12]

Well, maybe I can do one more. 17, I did. OK. Three characters. Now we can have some questions. OK. Jordan. My question is pretty broad. OK. Kerry. Kalupahana thinks it's manas. Usually in Yogacara material, the foundational consciousness, the mula-vijnana, is considered to be a laya. However, I'm of the mind to think of not being bothered too much by which one you're talking about. It can be either, okay? Because, of course, it's true. You can make a case that the mano-vijnana-dattu, the mind consciousness, is foundational in the sense that it always accompanies the other ones in any time that they're known, because you must have this acquisition of the object in order to know them, too. So you could say that the foundational consciousness is the mula, I mean, is the mind consciousness, or is the acquisition of this concept.

[40:23]

that in the acquisition of the concept, these five consciousnesses arise in conjunction with this. But you could also, but alaya is there too. So they also arise in conjunction with the alaya. And in the Avatamsaka Sutra, I mean in the Lankavatara Sutra, they use the image of alaya being the ocean and the waves coming up out of alaya. Right? But as I said, I see, I think of alaya as like the consciousness. Manas is like the organ. And the mind consciousness is like his concept, right? So where are these five happening? Are they happening? It's all one thing. So I don't feel like we have to worry about that too much.

[41:29]

But what's your question? . Yeah, that's why he's not telling you. So I think that Kalukpahana thinks that it's this third transformation is the foundational consciousness, he thinks. Or what used to be in early Buddhism, the sixth consciousness. No, the sixth consciousness is a consciousness. It is. And in early Buddhism, the sixth consciousness got credit for two abilities. It got credit for the ability to embrace, and it got credit for the ability to make the object. It got the ability of the awareness of that which was aware of something. It got that ability. And it also got the ability to make the object.

[42:34]

And then manas was considered to be the organ. It wasn't considered to be a consciousness. Okay? In this situation now, we're considering the sixth consciousness to be the third transformation. And alaya has this basic work of being conscious. However, at the level when things come into knowledge, then it is the sixth consciousness or mano-vijnana-dhatu, mind-consciousness element, that it's that one that gets called the awareness of objects, which are then the subjects, or the objects of knowledge. I think it's inseparable. You don't have the sixth consciousness without a lie of being. Yes, but you do have a lie without the sixth. So in states where you don't have knowledge going on, a lie is still going on. So it says that these things occur within, doesn't it, within the foundational consciousness.

[43:38]

In the root consciousness, the arising of the other five take place according to conditions, either altogether or not, just like waves on the water. So alaya must always be there, right? So they also occur within alaya. So, alaya is always there and then sometimes, most of the time, almost all the time, there's also this other consciousness which makes objects and is aware. That's the one that gets the job of being aware of the objects and also acquiring the objects. Acquiring the objects and being aware of the objects is a similar function. Acquiring the objects, you could understand acquiring them means bringing them into contact with awareness. Okay? That's the job of the third transformation. That's the job of the sixth consciousness. And that job of the sixth consciousness was the job of the sixth consciousness in early Buddhism, too. Pre-Yogacara Buddhism, the sixth consciousness in the mind consciousness.

[44:41]

I think that the reason why they're saying this may be to make clear that the occurrence of the five sense consciousnesses occurs in conjunction or within the functioning of the sixth consciousness. Because you might not know that. They want you to know that. You would know, I think, that they occur within the range of alaya because alaya is always going on. Right? So what you're being told now, the reason why I think it's justifiable to call this Sixth consciousness, the root consciousness, is because Vatubandha is trying to tell you that not only does Alaya contain everything, but also the sixth consciousness contains the functioning of the first five. But Alaya contains the first six. Okay?

[45:45]

So that's why I think it would make sense that Valsubandhu would make this point, because up until this time you might not know the embracing quality of the sixth consciousness. But the sixth consciousness has that embracing quality that it accompanies the first five. But the first five don't necessarily accompany, in the realm of knowledge, the functioning of the sixth. Okay, and just one more thing about the 50th karaka. The one translation says, the arising of the five forms of consciousness together or separately within the foundational consciousness is like the waves in the water. Another translation is, in the root consciousness, the arising of the other five takes place according to conditions. The Krupa Hanas translation doesn't say according to conditions.

[46:46]

Yeah. Okay, so you should maybe have the other translation in mind. The root consciousness... In the root consciousness, the arising of the other five takes place according to conditions. Now, you all know that, don't you? But... It's good to always remember that, that that's happening here, too. It didn't stop happening. Yes? I have one of those conditions. If there's some object outside of the mind, everything in the mind, in other words, one of the such consequences arises between the organ and the object. Yes. Is there an object outside of the mind? Is it outside of mind? Yeah. The yoga chart, I would say, there is a realm of direct experience where physical entities interact and create consciousness.

[47:52]

Okay? What sense is there in saying that you have sense field, sense organ consciousness arising and that the sense field is outside the consciousness? You can say the sense field is separated from the consciousness by the organ. This is in the realm prior to conceptual knowledge. In that realm, the sense field is separate from the sense consciousness. All right? So in the realm of direct experience, in a sense, the sense field, like color, is separated from the mind. OK? From the realm of direct experience, there is a physical world which is separated from the mind. However, the mind is born in conjunction with the organ touching that sense field.

[48:56]

So they're very close. They're touching in a sense. There's contact, right? But we're not saying that that physical field is inside the consciousness which arises in conjunction with that field interacting with the sensitivity. Okay? This is the realm of drift experience. All right? Yes. Is this transformation of consciousness always precipitated by direct experience of that sort, direct experience with an object outside of... Is which transformation of consciousness precipitated by direct experience? People's transformation of consciousness. The character is always invariably precipitated by... Did you hear his question? He said, is a threefold transformation of consciousness precipitated by direct sensory experience? Is it always? The threefold transformation of consciousness is dependently co-arisen.

[50:03]

Not only between the three do they dependently co-arise together, but they dependently co-arise with direct sensory experience. And there is always direct sensory experience going on, so they always co-arise. There's never like a wiping away of direct experience. That's true, but the particular transformation, it seems... In any given moment we're responding to, the consciousness is responding to some limited part of our direct experience. Okay, he's saying, in any... in any situation of the threefold transformation of consciousness, and the threefold transformation of consciousness gives rise to conceptual experience. Okay? He's saying that in any situation where the transformation of consciousness is happening in this way, producing conceptual knowledge, it must be happening in relationship in some way to direct sensory experience.

[51:06]

No. That's my question. That's your question. What I'm saying is that as a predicate to that, that in any situation where it's happening, we're not... You say that we're always having a direct experience. We're not always allowing that direct experience to... to be the focal point of our consciousness, to just screen a bunch of it out. It doesn't come to consciousness. We never allow it into conceptual consciousness. It never comes into conceptual consciousness. That's what Tarka 17 is saying. For that reason, what has thus been thought does not exist. I'm sorry, I was speaking in exact. It does, however... in some way. Let me just tell you how it is, and then you can ask your question. The threefold transformations of consciousness are going on, okay?

[52:08]

They're going on right now for most of us. We're producing conceptual knowledge, and therefore we know, we have some knowledgeable experience. This is because of the threefold transformation of consciousness. Also because of the threefold transformation of consciousness, we have these concepts and a sense of self going on. This is going on right now for us, okay? We're doing that. Simultaneously with that, there's a realm of direct experience that's going on that we don't know anything about. That's going on right now with this conceptual world in which we have a self. Okay? We do not know anything about that. We never will. And that's never even, that's not the point of the bodhisattva path or the arhat path to know that. It is impossible to know it. What's the relationship between direct experience and this realm? Well, one relationship is they are in perfect harmony. which is the content of and inseparable from non-discriminating wisdom.

[53:11]

What's the causal relationship? Number one, they coexist. Direct experience and the realm of dependent co-arising, dependently co-arisen conceptual knowledge, they coexist. Another thing is that previous direct experience has been converted into what we now know. What is the process of conversion? The process of conversion is that direct experience is bifurcated and made into an object and therefore known. That which you know does not exist. It's gone. Bye-bye. And plus, it wasn't that way anyway. But first of all, it's gone. What you now have is a story about it.

[54:16]

And the story isn't it either, because you're not consulting it, you're consulting a liar for some near version of it. So direct sensory experience does stimulate us to make up some version of it, which we do. So a direct sensory experience comes along and happens right now. So then my mind sort of says, now, what could that be? Oh, I think it's this. And then that's what I think. And as I go to Alaya, split it in half, come up with something, say, that's what I think just happened. Then I know it. And then myself lives with that stuff. That stuff does not exist. It doesn't exist. First, doubly does not exist. It doesn't exist because it's gone. And it doesn't exist because what I'm using to represent it is a concept rather than direct experience. I'm going to a liar and getting one of these little seeds, converting it into a concept by reflecting it and saying it's outside. That's not what happened. And also, I'm not even saying that's what's happened. I'm saying that's what's happening. So it's doubly wrong.

[55:18]

I think something that's already gone is now existing, and also I think that my concept of what was already gone is actually happening now. That's what Caritas 17 is saying. Therefore, all this is mere concept. Simultaneously, with all this which is mere concept is direct experience. And direct experience with all this which is mere concept That is what it means to be yourself. And if you can just die and be that and not think there's anything more than that, that is the content of and acceptable from nondiscriminating wisdom. And Vastu Bandhan will go into this more later. Yes? Do you think you got the floor? Okay, you got a question now. Oh, I thought I was going to tell you the way it was, and you're going to ask a question now.

[56:22]

Yeah, it's just a little piece of what... Yeah, okay. We're talking about little pieces here. Yeah, at one point you said, direct experience, which we cannot know, nonetheless stimulates this process of transformation of consciousness. Right. Always forward, though. Never right now in terms of producing its own. Okay, go ahead. All that I was asking, trying to be clear about it, is, is this transformation always... stimulated by direct experience, or does it sometimes happen as a result of some stimulation other than sense and sense of yield? Okay. It sounds like you're... I almost hear you saying, is it primarily or only affected by that? Yeah.

[57:22]

It's set off by that. Oh. And what else? Mostly this. Mostly this. But also, very importantly, the sensory world. Mostly, it's past karma that sets it off. It's been set off, this process has been being set off, and you can almost, you know, Anyway, there's never an end to direct experience, so it's always stimulating, but the karmic past is equally important. And no one can measure which one has the most points on the causation scale. Because sensory experience, direct sensory experience is zillions of causes, and karmic effects are zillions of causes. So it's like zillions of causes meet zillions of causes, and who's the predominant one? When you're enlightened, I'll send you over.

[58:28]

Any way you want, Tom. I'm referring to the bifurcation. And I keep wondering, is there a particular agent? Is there an outside agent which... precipitates this bifurcation, or is it an organic process? Is it something that automatically happens? I've heard it before. It is an organic process. I know. And the agent of it is manas. The agent? That's an active agent. It's an active agent, and manas is one of the transformations of consciousness. Consciousness has the ability to act for itself as a bifurcator. And Manas got its idea, by the way, from... Where did it get its idea? Where did the idea of Manas come from? No. Close. You're in the right neighborhood. It came from the sense organs. The mind got the idea for Alaya, for Manas, from the sense organs.

[59:30]

You know? You've got the sense organ interacting with the sense field, creating consciousness. That went away. Then mind thought, hmm, now how can I do that? You've got consciousness now, right? Moment of consciousness produces, tends to cause another moment of consciousness. It gets the idea, oh, well, in the realm of direct experience I could do that. So gradually a storehouse of effects started to accrue and this subtle consciousness started to develop. to cause these rebirths and accumulated all kinds of seed from past actions, past moments of birth of consciousness. And each time there was this bifurcating function, a function which bifurcated the physical world from consciousness. So then consciousness gradually got the idea of being its own agent. I think I'll now do the same thing to my own setup, my own, you know, reservoir of concepts. I'm going to do the same thing. So mine went, wham! And then Papo, hey, I can do that too, just like the... I think I'll call that outside.

[60:33]

Okay, now I... Well, can I be a self now? Okay? Is that good enough? I think so. That's quite a feat, don't you think? That's the theory of evolution of consciousness. Now you get to ask your question. That's direct experience. Direct experience is direct sensory experience. But not yet known. Don't know this stuff. Yes. No, no. There is consciousness, but it's not a consciousness that knows. It doesn't know. The only way to know it is to... Yeah, the only way to know it. Not even cut in half. It already is cut in half. But it's cut in half in a realm, okay, that doesn't yet have concepts of objects.

[61:40]

Therefore, it can't be known. But in the realm of mind, which is not the realm of direct experience, in the realm of alaya, which is not the realm of direct experience, there, if you bifurcate it, you also have this transformation of consciousness called making an object, then you can know it. The seeds which you pull out of alaya, and you take a seed from alaya, okay? Take a seed from alaya and separate it from the rest of alaya by reflecting it. And then say, that's outside. Now you know something. In direct sensory experience, you have the field interacting with the object producing the consciousness. The consciousness knows the object, but it doesn't know it the way we know it up in conceptual knowledge. It knows it in this dark way. I told the story of the myth of amor and psyche many times. The myth of amor and psyche is about this. Amor, love, unites with the psyche. in the dark.

[62:43]

They're in bliss. Okay? This is the realm of direct sensory experience. And if you have love interacting with consciousness long enough, this subtle consciousness called laya occurs, which also shares this bliss, but no knowledge, no conceptual knowledge. It is part of the myth of the human race that there was a drive in us to know what love is. Therefore, we turn the light on. But when we turn the light on love, we lost love. So when you turn the light, when you reflect laya up and say it's outside, then you know it, but then you lose the laya and you lose direct experience. Lose it means it's still up there with its mom, right?

[63:45]

Eros went up to Venus, was hanging around Aphrodite, but the psyche doesn't know it anymore, and the psyche yearns for reunion. Now can I read to William James, or do you want more questions? Chris, in the back today, it's 49 days, so you can talk to me about such and such thing. He was reading William James today, and I'm reading it to you partly because it's another way of saying it, but also because I'm proud to be an American. Before I read William James, I'm going to read Dogen. This is my Dogen response to Karaka 15. The arising of the five forms of consciousness, according to conditions, together or separately within the foundational consciousness, is like waves in the water.

[64:52]

Here's Dogen. The moon settling in the clear mind water. Waves, being broken, become bright light. The moon is setting in clear, mind water. Waves, being broken, become bright light. That's a name that's called . The ocean of Alaya, and of course the sixth consciousness is there too, and the other five are like waves there. When they happen, when they happen in direct experience, they're like bright light, but we don't know that light.

[65:55]

It's bright light. It's sparkling down there all the time. Sparkling, sparkling, sparkling. but we don't know it. We want to know it. So we turn, we transform the knowledge, we transform consciousness in such a way that we know it, but as soon as we know it, we can't see the sparkle anymore. However, when alaya is split, at the moment it's split, and this reflection comes up and it's made into object, there too alaya is broken. And if you see that just for what it is and don't imagine it as anything more than that, it's bright light right there. And that separation which splits alaya into two, into most of alaya and that one seed which is now becoming an object of consciousness, that separation is exactly the place where the wisdom of sameness is realized.

[66:58]

It's right on that line. Right in that separation. So all of these transformations of consciousness are the places where different types of wisdom arise. Some, in total, they're called non-discriminating wisdom. But each function which causes these transformations, when turned around, produces a certain type of wisdom. So the direct sensory experience And also the evolutionary transformations of consciousness, each one is an opportunity for awakening. So here's what William James said in a book, in an essay called, in a book actually called Essays in Radical Empiricism. This one's called Does Consciousness Exist? Are you tired?

[68:07]

Would it help if you stood up, you think? You okay? As subjective, we say that experience represents. As objective, it is represented. And then I put the helper right down. Yangshan said, in case 32 of the Book of Serenity, the ability to think is the mind, or what we call mind. That which is thought of is the environment. So there, too, this is what's called the whole world is just mind, right? This is Yongshan's version of this Yogacara thing.

[69:14]

I'm writing in Chinese because I think it's neat when Chinese work. This means think. This character means think. This means active thinking or the ability to think. The ability to think is mind. This is a passive marker.

[70:19]

It means the passive marker in front of thinking. In other words, that which is thought of is the environment. But what's going on here is thinking, right? This is thinking. You take thinking and you split it into active and passive parts. You put it into that which thinks of and that which is thought of. That which thinks of is what we consider to be mind or subject, that which represents. That which is thought of is what is represented. In other words, the entire objective universe. But the objective universe, the environment, and the subjective universe, the mind, are two different ways of thinking. Yongshan, what's his name?

[71:22]

James. Yongshan James. Exactly the same thing. And also I said before, too, that Eliah is considered to be, you can think of Eliah as two ways. The word for containing or holding or wound. Eliah is that which can contain. that which can hold, that which can grasp, and that which is grasped. The lie is the ability to grasp, and it is that which is grasped. OK, James goes on to say, what represents and what is represented is here numerically the same. But we must remember that no dualism of being represented and representing resides in experience per se. But we must remember that no dualism of being represented and representing resides in experience per se.

[72:33]

So here too, you don't have an experience over here. This is not an experience, right? Mind is not experience. It's always experience of something. And this environment can be internal. This can be feelings, fears, and birds and trees, right? So, in the experience per se, which is this whole thing, there's no dualism in the experience per se. In its pure state, there is not a self-splitting into consciousness and what is consciousness of. Its subjectivity and objectivity are functional attributes solely. He looks like this, functional attributes solely. Recognize only, and this is difficult.

[73:35]

I don't know if you can do this at this point. I'd like to just say something, and that is, it's great to be at Tassajara because I can talk like this, and you can just about get it. It's great. You might even be able to get what I'm reading here. But this is hard. This is hard. Do you get it? Do I? Yes. Are you being respectful? I am. I am. What's your question? I get it. Do you really want to know that? Yes, I do. Is that really what you want to know? No. I don't think so. I don't believe it. Think about it. recognized... Okay, so subjectivity and objectivity are functional attributes solely, recognized only when the experience is taken, that is talked of, twice. Isn't that neat?

[74:38]

He didn't have to say that part. He didn't have to say that part, but he did, and that was really good. That's something which Vasubandhu didn't even quite say. However... It is said in the Abhidharma Kosha, and I just said it before too, that what you're thinking about in terms of subject and object is about an experience that's over. You get into subject and object when you're talking about something that's already happened before, when you take it twice. in the experience per se, just by itself, there's no subject and object. And also, a direct experience is not a second time in direct experience. There's no repeats. And there, there's no subject and object. Isn't that neat that he said that? The subjectivity and objectivity are functional attributes solely recognized only when the experience is taken, in quotes, that is talked of, talked of twice. considered, now this is hard too, considered along with its two differing contexts, in other words, subject and object, respectively, by a new retrospective experience of which the whole past complication is now forms a fresh content.

[76:00]

Could you follow that? Isn't that neat? You've got Vastu Bandhu and Abhidharma Kosha. Of course, Vastu Bandhu wrote both of them, didn't he? He got both Abhidharma Kosha and the 30 verses. Now, here's the next part, if you can take it. Want a little bit more? No? What? Just one more paragraph. The instant field of the present... Sound familiar? The instant field of the present... is at all times what I call pure experience. It is only virtually or potentially either subject or object. And then, for the time being, in other words, not potentially or virtually or later, for the time being,

[77:07]

It is plain, unqualified actuality. A simple that. In its naive immediacy, it is, of course, valid. It is there. We act upon it. And the doubling of it in retrospection into a state of mind and a reality intended thereby, is just one of its acts. Anyway, there's some really neat stuff coming up next. These next cards are really neat. I can hardly wait. What? As soon as possible. But remember, just be yourself with no gaining idea.

[78:15]

That's what this is about.

[78:16]

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