Transcript of Dharma Talk by

Brother Phap An in

Hong Kong

30 May 2008

 

Transcribed by Terence Chan

Dear brothers and sisters,

 

We will enjoy our breaths for a few moments before we begin.

 

Breathing in, I know I am breathing in.

Breathing out, I know I am breathing out.

In

Out

 

Breathing in, I am in touch with my brothers and sisters in the community

Breathing out, I feel very happy to be among them

In touch with my brothers and sisters

Happy among my brothers and sisters

 

 

Breathing in. I am in touch with the peacefulness in this room

Breathing out, I feel so fortunate

Being in touch with the peaceful energy in this environment

Feeling grateful, feeling fortunate

 

Dear respected brothers and sisters in the community,

 

Today is our last dharma talk together in this retreat on the Buddha’s enlightenment. Everyone is hopefully enlightened by this time. There is a Zen story I like very much. I read it a long time ago. So I do not remember the names of the masters. Anyway a master came to study with another master. The disciple asked something like: what is the essential meaning of Buddhism. The master said: this mind, Buddha mind. The disciple got enlightened right away. He was very happy because he knew that if he were able to understand his own mind, he was a Buddha already. So he took this as his practice, looked deeply into his mind, and put aside other teachings. He went into retreat in Plum Village. Ahem, no, it was a plum forest. The master later became known by the name of the forest as Master Wang Mei (Yellow Plum). I think that was the case. His master was Mazu. Other students heard that and they just repeated the saying without understanding the deep meaning, without spending time on practice to understand their own mind. When people asked them what is Buddhism, they just said “this mind, the Buddha mind” like a machine, without any realization or deep practice to understand it. So Master Ma Duo saw that his teaching had become a dogma, and stopped being the way to liberation. So when people asked him again what is the essential teaching of Buddhism, he just: “no mind, no Buddha, nothing.” This is like what Master Huineng said, “There is nothing to start with,” meaning there is nothing to grasp. Students were confused because just a few months ago he said the exact opposite to Master Wang Mei, and they could not repeat it to people like a machine anymore. When asked why he said that, Master Ma Duo said: I don’t know; go ask Wang Mei. So the students went to ask Wang Mei, who then said: “Don’t let the old monk confuse me. I only know ‘This mind, Buddha mind’. Go back!” Students went back to Master Ma Duo and said Master Wang Mei only knew “This mind, Buddha mind,” and he did not care about “no mind, no Buddha”. Master Ma Duo said that is why Wang Mei is a Zen master.

 

The point of any teaching is that it helps us to be transformed. It is like a tool, a stick. When we are drowning in the ocean someone throws us this stick, so we can grasp onto it and get out of suffering. That is the purpose of all the teachings. The teaching is given to the one who needs it. One teaching is not applicable to everyone. Everyone needs a different teaching because everyone has a different mentality. One teaching is good for some people, but it not suitable for someone else. For that other person, the teacher needs to device other means of expression in order that the student understands it and put it into practice. The most difficult part of spiritual practice is to inspire students to get into practice. To inspire people to begin is the most difficult task. Human beings like to listen, enjoy and then leave. We don’t like to put it into practice. Many generations of teachers have tried to create different means and tools to help us. The purpose is to help us touch the source of love and understanding within us. If we cannot do that, no transformation is possible. The deeper we touch, deeper the transformation we have, and the better we are able to help others. The essential part of the teaching is like that, but its manifestation can be different, with all kinds of paths and patterns. When you have learnt some teaching, like invoking the name of Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, touching the earth everyday or reciting the name of Amitabha Buddha, and you are happy with that practice, and with that you are able to transform the block of suffering and the difficulties within you, you continue with it, just like Wang Mei did. Once he had received the teaching, he practiced it and found it useful and so he continued. Don’t worry about other things because other things also lead us to same source of energy. The Buddha helped us to transform our difficulties and tried his best to explain to people how to do it and to explain the nature of mind. He had limited means, with no written language, no writing paper. Now we have computers, projectors, microphones, paper pads, white boards. So our teaching can be different from the Buddha’s. The way of expression will not be the same, but the message is the same. All the time we are doing interpolation. The Buddha gives us three frames and we try to construct the other 22 frames to make it applicable to our time. This is what generations of teachers have done. The Buddhist teaching is the same. Many teachers, according to their capacity to understand and the level of their practice, have interpolated the teachings in order to bring out the message of the Buddha so that people of our time can receive it.

 

One of the characteristics of Buddhism is that it is adaptable and changeable so long as it serves the purpose and people can receive it. When Buddhism came to Tibet it became Tibetan Buddhism. Many elements of it have nothing to do with Buddhism originally. To adapt to the Tibetan people, teachers have used skilful means. Before Buddhism came to Tibet, there was a form of shamanism called Bon, a god-worship system like the Vedas system. In a severe environment like Tibet the force of nature seems very powerful, magnificent and strong. Humans feel very small and humble under such a vast force. There is a tendency to think that under the natural phenomena there are living gods with strong power controlling these phenomena. In the Bon religion there are all kinds of gods, which they have imported into Buddhism. It was the same in China. Before Buddhism came, there were already Taoism, Confucianism and other philosophies. In order to adapt to the mind of the Chinese people, Buddhism had to change to survive. Learning from the past, [we should know that] the most important thing is today. If we understand and practice Buddhism, and we are able to transform our own suffering, we have to ask ourselves what is the essential element of Buddhism and how can we, with skilful means, bring the message to the people of our time so they can understand and practice it. That is our work today. Buddhism needs a lot of creativity in order to attract the people of our generation. The young today are in touch with advanced technology. Their mind is very different. The way they understand is very different. We cannot use the ways of expressions 2500 yrs ago or even the old form of Chinese Buddhism. We have to turn the teaching into a form people can receive to day. That is the job that Thay encourages us to do. We have to take out the elements from many lands and cultures that have entered Buddhism over the last 2500 yrs. There have been cultural, political and technological influences. We have to remove these layers, find the core teachings of the Buddha and put new clothes on it so people can take it and use it.

 

One sound of bell

 

In the process of renewing Buddhism, we have to be intelligent, skilful and creative. What is the foundation of our renewal? It is very import to base it on our practice or we might go astray. If your practice can transform your block of suffering and your difficulties, and you understand your mind in that process, you can then find the expression to describe the transformation in you. That is the base. How to make that transformation? We need to learn the core teachings of the Buddha and from that you will be able to transform your suffering, and base on that you begin to express yourself. You then continue the work of interpolation, the work of make-up. It is important to know the difference between interpolation and make-up. Make-up is where you have no foundation; where you just create from your imagination and way of perception. Interpolation is where you base your work on the Buddha’s work. Today we continue with our job of interpolation.

 

Yesterday we said that from 9pm to 12am, the Buddha went through Retro-cognition; from 12am to 3am, He went through Clairvoyance; and from 3am to 6am, He went through Discovery, the understanding of ending of influx of knowledge, understanding the problem of suffering. Some of our friends asked how we know so precisely the time? I said it was just my interpolation because the Buddha just mentioned the watches of the night, without specifying the time. A friend in the sangha informed me that in ancient India, the hours were scientifically based. The yogis noticed that our breath has an interesting feature. When we breathe in, we do it with only one nostril. So one nostril is active for 1.5 hour; and then the other nostril will take over for another 1.5 hour. The Indians divide the day into eight watches, with each watch lasting 3 hours. In half of the watch, one nostril is active, and in the other half, the other nostril is active. One thing made the hour very precise. During 3am to 6am both nostrils are active. At that time our body is at the most balanced state, like the yin and yang [balance]. Thanks to that balance, we can go very deep in meditation. The yogis knew that time between 3am and 6am, and from that base they work out the rest of the hours. The Buddha knew this very well because he was an excellent yogi. During his enlightenment night he said he saw the rise of the morning star, which is normally at about 6 o’clock in Asia. This is for your information. Now we go back to the loop.

 

The Discourse on Honeyball I have found to be very important, but it has not been explored well in our time, but it contains all the information necessary for Buddhist psychology. Buddha says that depending on the visual organ and the visual object, my brothers, there arises visual consciousness. The coming of these 3 is contat. Depending on contact there arisse feeling. What one feels one perceives. The buddha goes thru this for each of our senses: eyes, ear, smell, tongue, body and mano. Mano is translated as mind in English. There are three terms for mind in Pali: citta, mano, vinnana (Skt: vijnana). In English there are two terms for mind: mind and consciousness. That is the limitation of English language. In Vietnam there are also three terms. The object for the ears is sound, giving rise to auditory consciousness. The object of mano is dharma, object of mind, giving rise to mind consciousness. Now I will explain. The Discourse enables us to draw a pyramid for each organ. The most important organ is mano, with dharma as its objects. Dharma can be called concepts. With mano and dharma, there arises mind consciousness, and the coming of these three gives rise to contact. Contact gives rise to feeling, and what one feels one perceives.

 

Each of our senses operates independently. The eye cannot see sound. Only the ear can listen to sound. Each organ has its own perceptual field. Question: how can we interpret information at this particular moment, like how do we listen to Thay Phap An and feel the mosquitoes biting us at the same time in the room? How? Where is the central place that gathers all the information. It was a question raised by a Brahmin called Unnabha. The reference [of this sutta] is number 42, section 48, Samyutta Nikaya, and it is called The Discourse of Brahmin Unnabha.

 

This Brahmin says,” Master Gotama, these five faculties, the eye, ear, nose, tongue and body have different domains, different resorts. (That means they have different perceptual fields and experience different objects.) They do not experience each other’s domain and resorts. What is it that they take recourse in? What is it that experience their resort and domain? (What is the central unit that processes all the information. These provide raw information. We need to make sense of the information.)”

 

The Buddha answers like this, “They take recourse in mano, the mind. Mano experiences their resort and domain.” (So data from other organs come to mano, which is the central unit that processes all the information.)

 

“But Master Gotama, what is it that the mind takes recourse in?”

 

“The mind takes recourse in mindfulness.” (Remember I said originally that the mind is full. That means it is balanced, not getting into any perceptual field.)

 

“What does mindfulness take recourse in?”

 

“Mindfulness takes recourse in liberation.”

 

“What does liberation take recourse in?”

 

“Liberation, Brahmin, takes recourse in nibbana.” (Mindfulness is the source of liberation. When the mind is full, it is in liberation. We will explain more later. When our mind is full and liberated, that is nibbana.)

 

“But what does nibbana take recourse in?” (Please listen carefully to this.)

 

“You have gone beyond the realm of questioning, Brahmin. You were not able to grasp the limit to questioning, for the holy life is lived with nibbana as its ground, with nibbana as destination, nibbana as final goal.”

 

The Brahmin was trying to go deeper and deeper into the ontological ground [to see] whether underneath [nibbana] the Buddha would confirm a self, the ontological ground. The Buddha said no and to stop at nibbana. I will explain the three layers of self later. The Buddha said that the final destination is nibbana and you cannot go beyond nibbana. Any speculation beyond that is not useful for liberation. For one enlightened nibbana is the goal. We do not need to have an ontological ground for our happiness.

 

There is a discourse called the Nibbana (Sanskrit: nirvana) Elements (number 44, Itthivutaka), depending on the index. In this sutta, the Buddha answers the question of a bhikkhu (monk), “Bhikkhu, there are two nibbana elements, nibbana element with residue left and nibbana element with no residue left. What, Bhikkhu, is nibbana element with residue left? Here, a bhikkhu is an arahat, one whose stains are destroyed, the holy life fulfilled, who has done what had to be done, laid down the burden, attained the goal, destroyed the fetter of being, completely released through final knowledge. However this five sense faculties remain by which he still experiences what is agreeable and disagreeable and feel pleasure and pain. It is the extinction of attachment, hate and delusion in him that is that nibbana element without residue”. So the idea is that nibbana is the moment when you can free yourself from attachment, from hate and delusion. Let’s remain with that for the moment. This is all I want to read and now I would like to explain.

 

As a human being, we are limited in our capacity to perceive things. The way we are constructed is that since life is impermanent, we cannot experience that the one speaking right now is not the same as the one speaking the next moment. It is the same with you. You are listening to me. In reality the moment that you listen to me, you are a different person already. Same with air we are breathing. It continues to change all the time. Reality is in a flux. But as human beings, we perceive that Thay Phap An is like that; he remains the same throughout the lecture. We think the Thay Phap An remains the same person throughout the talk. The fact is that the Thay Phap An that comes through the door and the one who goes out are two different persons, but we don’t see that. When we interact with our surrounding, consciousness continues to arise. Let’s say, when visual organ interacts with visual object, visual consciousness arises. The three gives rise to contact; and contact gives rise to feeling, and feeling gives rise to perception. This perception is continuously being created, and it impinges [on us]. Nowadays we know when our eyes are in contact with the object, the information comes into our optical nerves, which passes the information into our brains. In the old days, people believed that when we are born, our brains are fixed and so for the rest of our lives they remain the same. That was the theory a long time ago. Later on people believed that the brain is fixed a few months after we are born. It is because in their experiments, when a child has been left in a room after he is born, and he does not go out to see objects like the sky, his visual organ and the network in his brain do not develop properly and he becomes visually impaired. It is because for the first few months after a child is born, the network in his brain continues to build. The latest research shows that our brains continue to change and be modified. This quality is called plasticity. There were people who had accidents, and then had to remove half of their brains. We used to believe that different parts of the brain correspond with different functions, for example, a certain part of the brain has to do with the visual capacity, another part with the auditory capacity, and another part with our different emotions, and so on. Amazingly there has been such an accident [happening to a woman]. According to the old theory, certain [of her] functions would have been impaired. But the woman behaved normally after the recovery period, just as before the accident. It was a miracle and because could not believe it. What happened was that one half of the brain began to change itself so it creates [new and] different neuron networks to correspond with different functions so she behaves the same. The Buddha says namarupa conditions consciousness; and consciousness corresponds namarupa. When conditions are sufficient, consciousness manifests or arises. During the visual process, we continue to generate these perceptions. In order for us to function, these perceptions go into mano and turn themselves into concepts. That’s why the Buddha says these objects of senses take recourse in mano. The moment we generate perceptions, they become concepts and objects of our mind. We can only function through concepts, which are fixed. When Thay Phap An comes in you see Thay Phap An, a label. In reality we only see a concept. We see the object coming in, and we label it right away. We do not interact directly with the object in its true reality. We only interact through a concept. The interesting thing is that depending on mano and depending on concepts, there arises mind consciousness. The coming of these three is called contact; that is mind contact. Due to contact, there arises mind feeling. What one feels, one perceives. This perception gives rise to another concept, which is fed back as another object for mano. This is the most dangerous loop. We continue to build concepts after concepts. This process of building concepts has been going on for thousand and thousands of years. We have been building what I call the virtual world for thousand of years. This virtual world is what we experience. This first layer [of the process] we rarely experience anymore. Because of that, we have 3 levels of experience.

 

There are three levels people talk about. The first level is the ontological ground. This gives rise to an idea of an ontological self, and that is what the Buddha denies. He says underneath us there is no set of ontological self from which things arise, from which we exist, and we manifest. The second level is the empirical ground. This gives rise to the empirical self. The empirical ground is at this layer, giving rise to the feeling of one[self]. Let’s go back to the visual process. As human we see this platform as a platform. That is human. We have learnt for thousand of years to construct for ourselves that this is a table. But to a termite, which has a different perceptual field, this is a store of food. They do not see it as a table. The one[self] here [is] our individuation. Depending on the species to which we belong, human, termite or dog, different species experience things differently. This is the empirical ground, giving rise to the empirical self. This is something that cannot be denied because how can we function without this background. For thousands of years, we have had different experiences, and they have been embodied in our physical being, under what the Buddha calls sankhara, which I explained yesterday. The Buddha says, “Why is it called volitional formation? It is called volitional formation because it constructs conditioned form as form, it constructs conditioned feelings as feelings, it constructs conditioned perception as perception, it constructs conditional volitional form as volitional form, and it constructs conditioned consciousness as consciousness.” Everything has been conditioned. In all of our existence, our five aggregates, we are conditioned. There is nothing that is [not] conditioned. Everything we know has been learnt over thousands of years. Our ancestors have learnt them for many thousands of years. Our hand movements are now so skilful and we can stand straight, thanks to thousands of [years of] evolution of our ancestors. Without the millions of years of evolution and training, we cannot be what we are nowadays. This is called our empirical self, the one here. What one feels, one perceives. This “one” belongs to the empirical self. We cannot deny that. If we deny sankhara we become a stone, a vegetable. We cannot experience anything. Without past conditioning and empirical learning we have recorded in our existence, we cannot function. That is something we cannot avoid. That is why the Buddha set a limit for nibbana. Nibbana is something we experience in our empirical self. It does not go beyond the empirical self. To go beyond is to look for some ontological self that does not exist.

 

The next level is the psychological ground. This gives rise to the psychological self. How does the psychological ground occur? From this level of interaction, the mind passes the experience to mano and turns it into a concept. All kinds of experience get turned into concepts within a few moments. And this concept gets fed into the loop. We have created this loop. We humans have been creative with this loop. We have constructed the world around us. We have created buildings and computers; we have gone into space, thanks to this loop. This loop is the psychological ground. Perhaps we can call it the conceptualized ground, rather than the psychological ground. This conceptualized ground is useful. Thanks to this process of creating ideas and feeding into mano, we humans have been creative, having built many things and created culture, art and language and all kinds of study fields. So it is very useful, this conceptualised ground, but this gives rise to the psychological self. That is the big problem. Once the loop begins to operate, then what one feels, one perceives. Feeling is fed by our sankhara, by our past conditioning. That is where sankhara affects us. It affects our feeling. In the past I have done something like this and I like it. That’s why I continue now. If in the past I did something and I don’t like it, I don’t like to continue now. So the source of feeling comes from this past experience, which is fed into our feeling. Once it is fed into our feeling, then there is the thing that begins to create a psychological self, that is the false illusion of self. If our mind is deep into the feeling, [and] if the base of our feeling is greed, hatred and confusion, we feel there is a self, there is an “I” and [it is separate from] the world around [,which] we experience. That is the psychological self and it occurs when fed with the energies of  greed, of hatred and of confusion. The Buddha says nibbana is the absence of these three sources of energy. There is nothing wrong with conceptualization because we have to conceptualise in order to exist and operate. But that process of conceptualization gives rise to a perception of a self, the psychological self, based on greed, hatred and confusion. If in our daily life we can practice in such a way that these sources of energy do not operate, we are free to do things. We can write poems; we can create buildings; we can do anything we like. It is the power of man. We become creative. But we are not bound to our creation. We don’t get attached to our creations. If someone takes away our creation, we get angry, we get confused. That is the problem. Nibbana is the moment we are able get rid of this and everything operates normally.

 

In the old days, the teaching is very clear in different sutras. We just need to pick them up and bring them together. The confusion arises when people say that when the Buddha teaches no self or non-self, they try to deny everything [in existence]. During the time of developing abhidharma school (Buddhist philosophy), people became very dogmatic. They said the Buddha teaches no self. So in their practice, they train themselves to see everything as a bundle of things. When a Bhikkhu sees a woman, they ask him, “What do you see?” The Bhikkhu would say, “A bundle of mucous, flesh, flame and skin moving around.” “Do you see a woman?” “No, I don’t see a woman.”  They are dogmatic. They didn’t see that the Buddha did not deny the empirical self. A woman is a woman, and a man is a man. That is an empirical fact. Humans are born that way. A dog is born another way. We cannot deny a dog [is a dog]. We cannot deny a women [is a human]. That is why there was a school called the Puggalavadin. They got frustrated with this kind of dogmatic practice. They said the Buddha talks about a self. They take excerpts from sutra, which say the enlightened one is born into this world. So if He talks about an enlightened one, there must be a self [that is born]. [When] he says, “Oh Ananda let’s go to Vulture Peak.” or “Don’t you see Rajagaha. It is a beautiful city. Oh, let’s go”, he uses terms like I and you. So there must be a self that you can’t deny. But the Buddha did teach nonself? [To that] they answered that this self is not within the five skandhas or outside them. Here they become dogmatic themselves, and got confused. But the Buddha said clearly that there is an empirical self. We cannot get away from that, but we can get away from the source that gives rise to the psychological self. By the time the Yogacara School came about, they saw that the whole issue was to do with the psychological self. The 30-verses are a description of how the psychological self comes to be, how we create it and how we can remove it. It is concerned with the virtual aspect.

 

One sound of bell

 

Exercise

 

In the sutta on Nibbana Elements (number 44, Ittivuthaka), when asked about the nibbana element, the Buddha says clearly that His five sense faculties remain unimpaired. When you reach nibbana you do not have to destroy the empirical self. It is still there. It is not that you become someone with superpower or you transform yourself into someone miraculous. His five faculties remained unimpaired, by which He still experienced what is agreeable and disagreeable. He is talking about this level of experience. He still has this feeling: what is agreeable or disagreeable. The feeling at this level is still there. There is nothing wrong with it. He feels pleasure and pain. An arahat continues to feel pleasure and pain. It is not that after you have become an arahat you do not experience pleasure and pain anymore. This is very clear. The Buddha is human and he continues to experience pleasure and pain. He is talking about humans here. After you become an arahat you don’t become someone different from a human, that you don’t experience pleasure or pain, that you are completely different. No. The Buddha says clearly that His five sense faculties remain unimpaired, by which He still experiences what is agreeable and disagreeable, and feels pleasure and pain, just like all the human beings. It is the extinction of attachment, hatred and delusion in Him that is called the nibbana element with residue left. The only thing with that nibbana is that our body is still there. You do not get a complete extinction of pain and pleasure because we still have the empirical self, the empirical ground for all our experiences. That is why when the Brahmin Unabbha asked: what does nibbana recourse to, He answered, “You have gone beyond the limit of questioning. That means the Buddha does not accept an ontological self. It is the ontological self that the Buddha denies, not the empirical self where we as human beings experience things. Came the Yogacara School and people saw clearly that the problem of suffering is right here, in the process of conceptualization. If we look into the Buddha’s enlightenment, we see that from 9pm-12am, He discovered His subconscious mind, the content of his sankhara. In the last phase of his enlightenment, he was able to understand the process of conceptualization, which gives rise to the psychological self. So throughout his forty-five years of teaching, this [psychological self] is his main concern because this domain we have the power to transform. This [sankhara] is a result of the past. We can transform the past by cultivating what is good now. To transform the past, we need to modify conditions of the present. In the past we have done acts that brought fruits. Now we can change the course by cultivating new acts. I said before that the practice of Buddhism consists of stopping the blocking of suffering and looking deeply. Looking deeply is the last phase of his enlightenment. I said [by] cultivating the good energy, the good seeds and looking deeply, we train a new perception. That is the dharma talk. It follows the same model of the Buddha’s enlightenment.

 

There are two sorts of suffering we need to contemplate on. What is suffering? By definition suffering is an unpleasant feeling. One thing happens and we do not feel pleasant about it and then we suffer; it causes a disagreeable feeling. Some people translate it as dis-ease, ill-being or unsatisfactoriness. So suffering firstly is an unpleasant feeling, in the past we have done some acts. Anything we have done will bear its fruits because of the loop. Our sankhara feeds into feeling. Whatever we have done or cultivated, our consciousness has stored that information. When something happens it feeds back into feeling and that thing will manifest by itself. That is the result of the past. Because of that, this phase of suffering we can call pain and pain is unavoidable. Why unavoidable? It is because this is a result of the past. The only way to transform it is to cultivate new seeds. We have to do good acts, good thinking and good speech to get good fruits later on. What we will experience ten years from now depends on what we do today. What we experience today is the result of what we did ten years ago. That is one way of transforming suffering.

 

This one here is the process of our mind, of our mano, of our mind consciousness, the construction of the psychological self. This is what we can transform and so this kind of suffering is the kind that we can choose to suffer or not. In this phase of enlightenment, suffering is optional. That means this loop is not necessarily here. We can break the process of conceptualization, the process of creating an illusion of psychological self. I say briefly here. In my research I found that the Abhidharma school was concerned mainly with this [last] phase of the Buddha’s enlightenment because, as I said before, the arahat ideal is to enter into nibbana in this life time, not to go on with life, not to go through repeated death, which is painful. So they don’t bother to transform this [subconscious mind]. Whatever happens, they just let it happen. They don’t even want to practice active transformation to cultivate the good energy because there is no need. Life is going to end anyway. The way they deal with this [subconscious] is through concentration. But they put their energy into this [conscious mind]. In the Abhidharman school the term that links the subconscious mind to the conscious mind is cetana (translated as volition), which replaced sankhara in Abhidharma literature. This is the only thing that links the subconscious to the conscious mind. Later on came the bodhisattva ideal, another interpolation of the Buddha’s teaching, like the arahat ideal. Today we know that all of the Mahayana scriptures are, for sure, interpolations of the Buddha’s teachings. They are not words spoken directly by the Buddha. And don’t believe that all of the Pali Canon are words of the Buddha. About 75% of it is interpolation. They (i.e. the disciples) received bits of information here and there, and they constructed the whole canon out of it. It is the work of later disciples. You can see this clearly from The Digha Nikaya. The stories and discourses are very long. They were compiled to bring out the life of the Buddha and many things. For sure they were not what the Buddha spoke. They had been interpolated. The disciples collected information here and there and put them together. With the bodhisattva ideal, they have a new interpolation. And they say we have to do something about our subconscious. We cannot leave it there. We have to take care of it.

 

Q:        Does the Buddha accept the existence of a soul?

A:        The Buddha does not accept the existence of a soul. The soul is the essence of consciousness that does not change. When our body disintegrates, the soul transmigrates from one life to the next. In the discourse given to Sati (Maha-tanha-sankhaya Sutta, number 38, Majjhima Nikaya) the Buddha scolds the son of this fisherman called Sati. This man misunderstands the teaching of the Buddha, and he says that after we die our consciousness will transmigrate to another body, and he regards consciousness as the soul. The Buddha says that is not what I teach. Consciousness is conditionally arisen; it cannot exist by itself. This sutta on the night of the Buddha’s enlightenment (number 26, Majjhima Nikaya) is important. In another sutta in Anguttara Nikaya, the reference for which I have given before [Mahanidana Sutta, number 15, Majjhima Nikaya], the Buddha says this, “Where there is consciousness, name and form (namarupa) come to be. Name and form have consciousness as their condition. … Where there is namarupa, consciousness comes to be, consciousness has name and form as its conditions.” So it loops back and forth. Namarupa conditions consciousness, and consciousness conditions namarupa. You cannot go further than that. “Then, bhikkhu, it occurred to me that this consciousness turns back. It folds on itself. It does not go further than name and form (namarupa).” That is it. That is the end of the ontological ground. It cannot go further than name and form. So there cannot be a soul. By a soul we mean an eternal, permanent self, existing under our existence, under our being. The Buddha says there cannot be a soul. When we die (something that I don’t know yet, and I will tell you when I do), according to a Pali sutta on the death process, at the moment of death, our consciousness ends. There is a woman and a man having interaction, and that consciousness, together with the condition of the other namarupa, will form a new being. Consciousness of the dead person will, due to greed, hatred and anger, get confused and try to look for the next namarupa, and it grasps onto the man and woman having affair together.

 

Q: [audio recording not clear]

A: You can show me the book. I didn’t prepare the book. Thank you for pointing out the error in the book. We will check and get back.

 

The bodhisattva ideal is that we will move on to serve others. So we need to cultivate the good energy, to practice on the subconscious. With this ideal, they need a new [theory of] psychology and they created the Yogacara school, in which they treat  to the subconscious a little bit more. They try to take care of the subconscious mind. Later on when things continued to develop …

 

There are three layers. The first layer is the ontological ground, to which the Buddha says: no, don’t worry about it. Then there is the empirical ground. The third layer is the conceptualized ground, giving rise to the psychological self that is the main problem. It is like we are living in a virtual reality. To give the teaching, the Buddha had to use the five skandhas as a model [for the empirical ground] to help his students transform suffering. Remember that the whole purpose of the Buddha’s teachings is to help us transform suffering, to generate love and joy within us. The Yogacara school is mainly concerned with this loop. Now you can understand the 30-verses. They are not based on the ontological ground. It is the way we look [at things], the epistemological approach because it is the way we construct our virtual reality, and that is the main problem. To help us understand how mind constructs this reality, people began to have a different model. They name the model Vijnapti-matra (Conceptualization-Only), where vijnapti can be translated as conceptualization and matra as only. In the past people translated this as the Mind-Only or Manifestation-Only school. Master Xuanzang used the word manifestation. Manifestation-Only is the term used by Thich Nhat Hanh. It was an attempt he made 30 years ago, and it was good. But right now I think the term close to Vijnapti-matra is Conceptualization-Only. That makes things very clear. It brings out the approach of epistemology, and does not give a sense that from the mind, everything arises. Mind-Only means everything manifests from the mind; the mind is the base for everything to happen. It gets trapped into the ontological ground. While manifestation is good; it removes the sense of the ontological a bit, but it still has a sense of the mystic. In western culture the word “manifestation” is used especially for mystical expression. So it is still a part of the mystical presentation. So in order I think to be in accord with the Buddha’s teachings, we can translate it as Conceptualisation-Only or Concept-Only. Some people try to translate this as Consciousness-Only, but consciousness is here [in the cognition process]. So it can be confusing. If we say Concept-Only, we are talking this loop alone, and it [brings] out the teaching. And this is actually what Vijnapti means. It is a concept, a linguistic shorthand. Like I said yesterday, Sister Hanh-ngiem is a wonderful reality. She has her parents, her culture, her monastic brothers sisters, culture, her blood family. But we don’t see all of that. When we get in touch with Sister Hanh-ngiem, we only get in touch with a concept, a linguistic shorthand notion because that is how we humans operate. If we go into all the conditions that come to create Sister Hanh-ngiem, our system gets overwhelmed; our CPU gets overloaded. We don’t have enough RAM memory to work out. It is not usual. We only use “good Sister Hanh-ngiem”. We only need a few labels to operate. That is the way it works. Let’s read together. Now you understand the first verse. We go far for five days. That is very good.

 

Verse One:

 

“The metaphors of self and dharmas, which function in so many different ways, take place in the transformation of consciousness. And this transformation is of three kinds.”

 

You see clearly the metaphor is upacara [in Sanskrit], meaning a linguistic shortland, a linguistic representation for some reality. Because of the delusion, the confusion [that arises] when this loops begins to run and underneath there is the empirical self, when our feeling is fed with greed, hatred and confusion, then it seems that we have a psychological self built up on the empirical self. Because of that illusion of self, we integrate everything around us as dharmas, as external phenomena. The interaction between them gives rise to more confusion, and the three kinds of transformation. Our consciousness turns itself into three kinds of transformation.

 

In the old days we used the five skandhas as a model for a representation of the human being. The model of Conceptualization-Only school has close links [with the five skandha model]. The five skandha model has rupa, feeling, perception, sankhara (mental formation) and consciousness. The Buddha used this to explain the namarupa reality. Yogacara came along. As I said, our problem is suffering which comes from confusion with the psychological self. That is the key problem, the main problem, the root problem. We don’t need so much talk here [about rupa]. We need a way to present the virtual reality. We need a new model at this level [of conceptualized self]. We need a new model to represent this virtual reality, and this virtual reality only concerns our suffering. The whole purpose of the teaching is to transform suffering. We need a model to bring out this feature of suffering more dominantly so we can understand it more easily. They did something close to the five skandhas model.

 

The feeling that is important for suffering is that feeling [which is] caused by attachment, the feeling about a self: this I am; this is mine; this is my self. That feeling is dominant. Remember that what one feels perceive. Feeling comes before perception. So feeling is base for the psychological self when it is fed with greed, hatred and confusion. Feeling is manas, the base on which our wrong conception begins to be formed. Perception is born of feeling. It creates concept and feeds the concept into manas. It [the concept] becomes an object of manas. Perception here plays the role of mind consciousness. [Audience: can you please repeat that?] I said feeling is the base for perception. Perception in a moment turns into a concept, which we feed into manas, as the object for manas, and the loop begins. Perception in the Buddha’s model ... Feeling can be pleasant, unpleasant and neutral. In the model of Yogacara they are concerned with the feeling that gives rise to manas, the perception of a self. [?] Perception is part of namarupa, but the moment after we perceive something, that perception turns into concept. In this [Yogacara] model, we don’t need to talk about perception. We only need to talk about concept, and that is mind consciousness. And they combine together consciousness and sankhara as store consciousness, in which sankhara affects the subconscious mind and is embedded in the store consciousness, and it plays the role of the empirical self, the one. All of the past conditioning we have learnt over millions of lifetimes is embedded in sankhara and sankhara goes into store consciousness.  Consciousness here [in the five skandha model] is combined with sankhara together as a place to preserve the seeds and to perfume the seeds and so on.

 

What happens to rupa? Why does the Yogacara model leave rupa out? It is because rupa is the base on which we project our image, our joy, our happiness, likes, dislikes. It is like a film or a screen. It plays no important role; it is a place to project our virtual reality. Say we like someone. We have that liking. We are attached to this block of greed, hatred and confusion within us, and we project our greed, hatred and confusion to that person. That person can be very different from what we actually see. So rupa does not play an important role. Remember that the Yogacara model is concerned with this virtual reality, with how suffering is produced, rather than the empirical ground. We need to practice qigong and eat brown rice to maintain our rupa. Be careful. If you continue to follow this and forget about the empirical self and forget about your rupa because it is mind-only, and you only take care of your mind and not worry about your body, it is the wrong practice. The Buddha says body and mind are one: namarupa. But the function of the Yogacara model stresses the importance of suffering, of that virtual reality.

 

Now you can understand the first verse. Because of the idea of self and dharma, [which is] the illusion of the psychological self and dharma, consciousness is transformed into three things: store consciousness, manas and mind-consciousness. That is good enough for the modeling. Let’s go quickly to the verse, like TGV.

 

Verse Two:

 

“Maturation, mentation and the perception of sense-objects. Among these Maturation is the consciousness called Store which has all the seeds.”

 

The transformation is of three kinds: maturation is store consciousness, mentation is manas, and the perception of sense-objects is mind-consciousness. Store consciousness has all the seeds. To take into account of the subconscious mind, the Yogacara school brings in the concept of seed. All the potential in sankhara, all the past learning experience in sankhara has turned itself into seeds, [a concept that is] easy to remember and to talk about. All the potential in past learning condition has become seeds. There are all kinds of seeds in the subconscious mind. In Cheng-wei-shih-lun, they talk about how seeds are perfumed or impregnated, watered, and it turns itself into habit energy. That’s why we have a problem.

 

Verse Three:

 

“Its appropriations and its manifestation of locality cannot be known intellectually. It is always associated with Contact, Mental Attention, Feeling, Perception and Volition.”

 

It means that the process of conceptualisation is very quick; it happens instantaneously, which is very difficult for us to perceive on a human scale. When we see an object, that first perception turns into concept very quickly. Some people in meditation can see the process. In meditation they can slow down their mind. But the one drawback is that in meditation all of their senses do not operate much. So it is difficult to see that process [beginning from sense contact].  The arising of this consciousness, the location of manas and mind-consciousness … It happens very fast, and we cannot comprehend it as human. [With] anything [that] we perceive, there are five mental formations going together.

 

In the five skandha model, we use the term sankhara [for mental formation]. But now all the potential in sankhara has turned into seeds, the thing that manifests out [of seeds] is called mental formation. So the term “mental formation” more or less belongs to the domain of mind-consciousness. Here there are five universal mental formations: contact, feeling, perception, volition and manaskara (attention). So our virtual reality always begins with these five mental formations.

 

Contact always happen if consciousness is to arise. When the visual faculty gets in touch with visual object, visual consciousness arises, and contact is when the three come together. For human to experience, we must have this contact. So contact is the mental formation that exists in all of our experience. Any experience has to have contact. When the Buddha is asked what is rupa, he says it is contact with resistance. He reduces rupa to contact with resistance. In order to feel this board, there is resistance to the perceptual field of touching. When I look at the wall, there is resistance to my perceptual field [of sight]. I cannot go outside the wall. My visual field has been clocked by the wall. So the wall resists. There is resistance. When he is asked what is nama, he says it is contact with a concept. That is how nama operates. So contact is something that we must have in any experience.

 

As human beings, we need attention to comprehend a reality. Why? Let’s say I cast my eyes on the mountain range out there. At this moment I put my attention on the mountain rage and I see it. The mountain is there. But in the last two hours I  concentrated on the talk. Even when I turned around, perhaps my eyes, the visual field, saw that, but it didn’t capture [the mountain range]. There is a process of selection among all the information entering our consciousness. Which information is retained in this particular moment for us to experience? So the whole field of experience, with the five senses, and including manas it would be the six senses, are reduced into a particular event. That restriction, that limitation is attention. We put our attention into a particular object. Along with that, feeling comes. We talked about feeling already. Feeling is the base for everything.

 

Volition is our past experience coming from past conditioning. That is a form of sankhara. But sankhara now has become seeds. Volition is mental formation. The seed has turned itself into a concept. Let’s say we look at the mountain range. Within us for many thousands of lifetimes, our ancestors have experienced them as a mountain and we call it a mountains. Within us, there is a seed, a sankhara of the name of a mountain. But now it manifests in my consciousness as a concept called a mountain. It is a word, a linguistic [shorthand]. Volition here is something that has turned into a mental formation, something that happens in our mind-consciousness.

 

The same thing is with perception. Perception is a concept. Volition here is like the thing [with which] we construct the world, like the conditioning that ... Volition here can have more meaning like this. Perception is mainly the mountain is labeled that way. Volition is like in the past perhaps I had some interest in climbing the mountain; I enjoy hiking. Looking at the mountain, I might say it’s so beautiful; let’s go there and hike next weekend. So volition is our intention towards repeating experience of the past, pleasant or unpleasant feeling.

 

Enough time for one more verse before lunch.

 

Verse Four:

 

“Its feelings are neutral. It is unobstructed and indeterminate. The same is true of its Contact, etc.. It functions like the stream of a river.”

 

The five universal mental formations happen in all consciousness, in store consciousness, in manas, in mind-consciousness, in everywhere. But for store consciousness, the feeling is neutral. Interesting. Why? It just does the work of playback, like a cassette tape. It just manifests like that. Whatever we have learnt in the past, it just plays back. So the feeling of store consciousness is neutral. People have also used the image of a warehouse. They call it the warehouse consciousness. Let’s say the store consciousness is like a warehouse. People bring into the warehouse material that is good, and material that is bad.  The warehouse does not mind. It is not spoiled by the good material coming into it, and not spoiled by the bad material coming into it. It is a neutral, just a storing place. You can store anything, and that is why the feeling is neutral. It is indeterminate. That means it is not defiled, not completely defiled. It is unobstructed because of the same idea as a warehouse … There are two kinds of obstructions I have talked about: klesa-varana and jeja-varana. Store consciousness just does its own work of playback. Because of this quality, I said a while ago that suffering is a problem of our consciousness. Pain is unavoidable because it just plays back whatever that has been recorded. When the tapes plays back, it just plays what is recorded. By itself, it does not suffer or suffer. It is unobstructed because the two varanas do not obstruct store consciousness because it just does the work of a warehouse. It just plays back. People come in and take the goods out. Others come in and put the goods in. It does not defile store consciousness. What it tries to say is that the base of store consciousness is this empirical ground. It is just a base on which we put things. It does not suffer or not suffer. Suffering is created by our concepts. And because store consciousness is like that, all the five [universal] mental formations that go with it have the same quality: unobstructed, indeterminate and neutral.

 

We have no time to go further, but I have given a brief outline of the 30 verses:

 

Verse 1. Definition of problem. We conceptualise and create linguistic shorthand. And in the interaction with the linguistic shorthand, we create problems.

 

Verse 2-16. They import teachings from the abhidharma school into this model, [that is] all the work done by the abhidharma school concerning our mind and its conscious part. Remember during the Buddha’s night of enlightenment, the last part is about the conscious part. All the analysis and results of that [abhidharma] teaching is embedded in here. In particular from verses [5] to 7, they talk about manas, whose nature is being deluded with idea of a self: self view, self confusion, self pride and self love. From verse 8 to 9 they talk about mano vijanana. It is this mind-consciousness, which has three types of mental formation: wholesome, unwholesome and indeterminate. There are a total of 51 such mental formations, all listed within the list of 100 dharmas at the back. Simple and straight forward if you read them. So let’s play chess. It is mainly a listing of all the mental factors.

 

Verse 15. The five sense consciousness.

 

Verses 17-19.  The ground for the epistemological description of the problem

 

Let’s end it here. Our brothers and sisters are a bit tired. You can play chess while reading it. Sorry I have gone on for a bit long.

 

To conclude, I would like to say we have learnt a bit of practice

-        The awareness of breathing

-        Some practice to take care of your body

-        Some practice to take care of the way you eat your food

-        Bring back some Kung-fu sheet

-        Embracing yourself to transform your suffering

-        There was a lot joy and happiness in dharma discussion sharing in Be-in yesterday.

 

All of that has entered into your consciousness and become a part of your sankhara. When you go back, try your best to maintain this loop intelligently. There are some negative and unwholesome energies and you learn to transform them. Do not allow them to continue. So break the loop. But [where] there are some wholesome mental formations, make that loop run forever.  So … comeback. And practice. Enjoy the practice. That is the key. You might remember or not remember all of this consciousness [stuff], it is not important. The important thing is to practice walking meditation, sitting meditation, and learn to love yourself. Somehow there is love within your heart. You will be able to listen to your loved one deeply, in a very deep way, to understand their suffering. Taking good care of yourself. That is the key.

 

Thanks very much for being here and allowing me to share with you.

 

Three sounds of bell.