Transcript of Dharma Talk by

Bhikkhu Phap An in

Hong Kong

29 May 2008

(Participation by Brother Phap An in Q&A session)

 

Transcribed by Terence Chan

 

When we practice, it is very important to return to ourselves and take good care of ourselves. That is the key to helping others. Even with willingness, if we are not able to embrace our own suffering, it would be difficult for us to help others. We need to take refuge in ourselves first, and practice walking meditation and sitting meditation. Recognise our block of suffering. Embrace it. When our mind is empty, we can go to others and listen without judging. We know that he/she suffers, but that person does not want to open up to us. The beginning is when he/she is willing to share her suffering with u. That happens only when you have the capacity to listen deeply. Your face and the movements of your hands and your body will give out the energy of love. The other people will then trust you and begin to share with you. But when he/she does, he/she is watering the seed of suffering within us. Then our suffering surfaces, and we react.  Although we have good intentions, we react and say: it is a tiny thing like that and you suffer. We judge. But the reality is that he/she suffers. Learn to respect his/her feeling even very small things. For example, there was this very tidy woman who, when she leaves the toilet, always closes the lid. But then her husband would just put it back up and never closes it. She was really frustrated. In Beginning Anew, she said to him: I don’t understand why you leave the toilet open and let it smell. The husband says: I thought it was normal to open the toilet for the air to circulate. So both wanted the smell to go away. They had the same intention, but different approaches. That’s how your wife feels about it. Learn to respect his/her feelings. Don’t say: why don’t you get over it; it is such a small thing. We humans are very complex. We each feel very differently. Maybe the way she closes the toilet is the way she has been trained since she was a kid. When I was a novice (first year as a monk), in Upper Hamlet there was an orphan that Thay brought from the refugee camp. [He] had problems urinating so the urine was spread around the toilet. It was annoying because he did not clean up. To make it worse, the seat was down when he urinated. So you would get wet when have your bowel movements. I did not know who did that, but I wiped it down, practicing breathing in, breathing out; I know I am breathing out, but I m very angry. I said: what a bastard; he should clean up the toilet. I did it a few times. I was not very happy. So I complained to community in Beginning Anew, saying that if you use the toilet, use it properly and then clean up so other brothers can use it. After a few Beginning Anew sessions, the situation was the same. Plum Village was small at that time. There were only 4 monks, this kid and a few guests. The kid was very playful. He knew I was angry, and so he made it worse. He peed around the toilet, trying to escalate my anger. One night I said I have to watch him. The toilet was clean before he went in. Afterwards it was wet. I pulled him in all the way to the toilet and said: look what you have done; you have to clean it now. He was crying and tried his best to clean up. I stood over him like a policeman to make sure. As a practitioner, I knew I was not doing right because I got angry. How to make the choice? We teach him to clean. But how? When I came back I was sad because I was not a good practitioner. Even though he did that to water my seeds of anger, my practice was to go back to myself and embrace my anger. Few days later I went to him, asked him to sit on a chair and I practiced Beginning Anew with him, bowing and touching the earth. I said I was angry, and I was not right. Later he said he just wanted to test how good my practice was. Looking deeply I wanted to find out why people pee around the toilet. Then I realized that some people do have problems when they pee, but they don’t have the habit to sit down. There years later I went out to lead a retreat for the first time. I went with this brother and we stayed with a lay family. I knew his habit and I didn’t want the lay people to say that we teach mindfulness, but did not clean up. So every time after he had been in there, it was my practice to clean up for him throughout the trip. I don’t know if he knows. It is ok to clean the toilet for my brother. When you have true love in you, you can accept all the people. If you do have that deep love, it does not matter anymore if he pees inside or outside the toilet. You can still clean the mess up. When you want to help another person who is suffering, perhaps for the rest of his/her life that person will never change. The key point is you can listen to him/her and that can relieve some of his/her suffering. That is already good. If he/she sees the way you practice, see how you radiate love and peace, and it inspires him/her to practice, it is lucky for you. He/she will try her best, but with this big block of suffering, it will take a long time to transform. There are brothers and sisters who have been practicing for 10 years or 15 years, and still couldn’t transform their difficult habit energy. We need a lot of work, persistence and courage for the transformation. It is not easy. Don’t have the wrong idea that when a teacher is giving a dharma talk, he is very good. He is trying his best to transform his habit energy. We all have difficult habit energy. It takes time to transform them, even though we have seen the path, the way out; and we know how to take care of it. We say the Buddha is human. There is a reason for that. He attained  enlightenment six years after he left home. The Pali canon and other sources say that in the year after his enlightenment, many times Mara came with his daughter in the form of desire and anger to tempt him. And the Buddha just smiled and said: I know you, Mara, you cannot do a thing to me. Then Mara disappeared. What does that mean? That means his block of suffering, desire and confusion was still there, but he knew the way out. Throughout his life people occasionally tempted him with different things. The Pali canon represents them as Mara, saying that Mara appear many times during the last 45 years of the His life. And who is Mara? Mara is the block of suffering within Him. When his block of suffering manifests, he just smiled. He has a deep wish to transform, a great desire to end this block suffering and good determination to have peace, to be free. Because of that, His experience of understanding the block of suffering is so great, that next time it manifests he des not follow it. It is because he has the deep wish to transform suffering, to have peace that He found the way out. We do not have that deep wish. That is why even though we have seen the way, we still hang around with the suffering. That is the problem. If we have that great desire to live peacefully, to love, love will happen. In Christianity there is a saying that you knock and the door will be open. That is a very deep sentence.  If you really love, if you really want to love, love will manifest. If you really want suffering to end, then suffering will end. That is the key. It is not because you practice that suffering never manifests again. No. Life is impermanent and suffering is conditional. When conditions are sufficient, suffering happen. That is what the Buddha said. When conditions are not sufficient suffering cease to be. He said that in many suttas. Our practice is to watch the conditions, to know what conditions maintain our well-being, and what conditions maintain our ill-being. Our practice is to water the conditions that maintain our well-being and remove those that lead to ill-being. The Buddha is even more concrete about that. He says that human beings and all beings in the three realms survive because of food. So does our suffering, and our joy and happiness. Suffering has its source of food, and joy and happiness have their source of food. As human beings, what do we consume? We consume edible food, air, water, and all the physical elements that maintain our health. The other kind of food is sense impressions. We look at beautiful pictures and to good music. All that belong to the realm of sense impressions. We go to the internet to see different pictures and they water different seeds in us. If a monk goes to the internet and sees lovely lady, it can be dangerous. If the monk allows himself on the internet all the time, that is dangerous because his seeds of attachment and craving will be watered. You need to watch your senses. These days in malls or other places they use women [in advertisements] to water our seeds of craving. With the eyes of a practitioner, you look carefully and see that the woman has nothing to do with the product. They just stick a woman to the product. Collectively we create a world for ourselves. We will talk more about that later. The third kind of food is our will, our volition. If we really want to have peace, peace will be. If we really want to have joy, joy will be. Our volition is very strong and it is the major source of our conditioning. Among our five skandhas, rupa (matter) is our physical formation, and the others are feeling, perception, sanhkara (mental formation, volition) and consciousness. So sankhara is very important.

 

There is a Pali sutta called Being Devout (number 386, Samyutta Nikaya). In Chinese, samyutta is translated as responding. In this sutta the Buddha says,

"And why do you call it 'form'? Because it is afflicted, thus it is called 'form.' Afflicted with what? With cold & heat & hunger & thirst, with the touch of flies, mosquitoes, wind, sun, & reptiles. Because it is afflicted, it is called form.

"And why do you call it 'feeling'? Because it feels, thus it is called 'feeling.' What does it feel? It feels pleasure, it feels pain, it feels neither-pleasure-nor-pain. Because it feels, it is called feeling.

"And why do you call it 'perception'? Because it perceives, thus it is called 'perception.' What does it perceive? It perceives blue, it perceives yellow, it perceives red, it perceives white. Because it perceives, it is called perception.

"And why do you call them 'fabrications' (volitions, mental formations, sankhara)? Because they fabricate fabricated things, thus they are called 'fabrications.' What do they fabricate as a fabricated thing? For the sake of form-ness, they fabricate form as a fabricated thing. For the sake of feeling-ness, they fabricate feeling as a fabricated thing. For the sake of perception-hood... For the sake of fabrication-hood... For the sake of consciousness-hood, they fabricate consciousness as a fabricated thing. Because they fabricate fabricated things, they are called fabrications.

"And why do you call it 'consciousness'? Because it cognizes, thus it is called consciousness. What does it cognize? It cognizes what is sour, bitter, pungent, sweet, alkaline, non-alkaline, salty, & unsalty. Because it cognizes, it is called consciousness.”

(Khajjaniya Sutta, SN 22.79, accesstoinsight.org)

The passage on sankhara is very important. All the ideas of Buddhist psychology in the 30 Verses are already there. For consciousness, the Buddha uses tongue consciousness to describe it. It turns out that when we die, tongue consciousness is the last consciousness to leave the body. It is very deep. The Buddha is amazing. Sankhara is our past experience. Sankhara constructs conditioned form as form. That is what the Six Patriarch Huineng says: there is nothing to start with. The way of our physical being is a thing constructed by sankhara. Sankhara is past, embodied conditioning. Through thousands of lifetimes of our ancestors to our lifetime, all the conditioning by society has entered their lives, and that has been passed onto us as sankhara. How can we learn a language, for example, the Chinese language? For many thousands of years, your ancestors have cultivated that. It becomes a habit within you. When you are born in this lifetime, you see the world through the Chinese language because within the Chinese language, a full culture is embedded. Through the language you see the world in a different way. You will have a different sense of beauty, of peace, of what it means to be kind and to be nice. An American or a Frenchman has different sankhara, different past conditioning; and he will see the world differently. In China, a house like this would be considered beautiful. But in America, an architect would design a house differently because there is with him different embedded conditioning. The house you see is form. In the sutta, the Buddha talks about the form of our being, but the physical world is also form. [In this sense] our past conditioning constructs our environment. It is right that we create the world. It is the sankhara here. Our sankhara has been perfumed or impregnated or watered for thousand of years and we are just repeating. Sometimes we think we have lots of freedom, we have the right to choose; we have our choice. But believe or not your sankhara is controlling it underneath. When we see a dress in a shopping mall, we say: how beautiful, I want to buy it. In fact the dress chooses you. It has been designed in a way that reflects your consciousness. When you see it, you consciousness projects on to it and you think it is something outside and you take it. Our consciousness is funny. It constructs the world and it says the world is outside us. We construct an image of our beloved and we believe our beloved is like that. We only love an image of our beloved. We construct [an image of] our beloved, but he/she can be completely different. After 30 or 40 years of marriage people say: do I know this person. [The image] is a complete projection of our mind. That is our sankhara; it plays a magical role; it constructs the world. All of our experiences: form, feeling, perception, sankhara itself and consciousness - all these are constructed by sankhara. That is why the Buddha on the night of enlightenment he sees that namarupa conditions consiuousness, and consciousness conditions namarupa. We cannot go beyond consciousness. That is the meaning behind it. Sankhara constructs our experience completely. This sankhara is very important, giving us a sense of what to choose and what not to choose. How do we make a choice? Our choice has been decided by sankhara. We think we have a lot of freedom. No. As a human being we repeat ourselves a lot.

 

Yesterday I said in the first watch of the night is from 9pm to 12am, the second watch from 12am to 3am, and the third watch from 3am to 6am. Someone asked me how I knew it so precisely. I said it was my interpolation. Roughly that was the time. In ancient India there were three watches. The Buddha went to bed at 8 or 9 o’clock because it was getting dark. If he stayed up he went to bed at 10 to 11 o’clock. This is a rough interpolation. We are living in a world of magical show and I am doing my magical show. Don't believe it all. Anyway in the first two watches of the night the Buddha discovered his subconscious. That is the sankhara underneath him. Why do we see things like that? Why do we feel things like that? Why do we experience things like that? Our subconscious mind has decided everything. It has been accumulating experience for thousands of years. According to our survival needs, we know that if we behave in such a way we survive. It has had a positive influence on us. In Buddhism the calculus is simple. If it is a pleasant feeling, we are caught in it and we reinforce it. If it is an unpleasant feeling we try to avoid and remove it. This simple calculus has been feeding and building our sankhara for thousand of years. For thousand of lives, we have made choices according to this principle. That is how we make choices. So in the first two watches of the night, He discovered that His subconscious is like a cassette tape. Everything that has been recorded on the tape is now being played back. Throughout our lives, there are two parts to our consciousness. The playback part of it is our past experience. It will repeat the experience in the present moment. At this moment, my sankhara is acting. I am pulling information from my subconscious: my past research, my past experience, my past practice and my past contemplations. My subconscious is working hard, doing the work of a cassette player, repeating what it has learnt in the past. I have picked up something from this and I like it. It is in accordance with my thinking, my liking and I record it and accept it as the truth. If it is something I don’t like, I consider it as false. Truth and falsehood are dependent on our feeling. The Buddha says: what one sees, one perceives. We construct our world through our feelings; and once we have constructed it, we comeback to reinforce our feeling. We continue to be in that loop. The subconscious is like a cassette tape player and it does not stop.

 

Having discovered His subconscious, the Buddha did not stop. His great discovery was in the third watch because if the cassette tape just plays back and he could not go through to the third discovery, we as human beings would be very sad. It is because that means we are under strict determinism. That means our lives have been fixed. What has been done has been done. There is no way of changing it, of liberation, no way out of things we have done. But the Buddha went beyond and in the third watch of the night He found out the conscious part. The conscious part is the mechanism that brings the subconscious into the present, maintains it and brings it to the future. If we know how to take care of the conscious part, we can change the direction of the tape when it plays back. Without the conscious part it just manifests and it stops. That night the Buddha discovers the 10 links. Later on after a few years of practice and teaching, the 10 links became the 12 links, adding ignorance and sankhara, whereby sankhara conditions consciousness. So sankhara connects the past to the present. Even though it is only one link out of 12, it is very important. The Abhidharma school concentrated on studying the conscious part, and all the dharma theory about citta (conscious mind) is about this part. For 400 years after the Buddha had passed away, they neglected the subconscious because the Buddha concentrated on the conscious part. The ideal at that time was to be an arahat. They did not want to go to the enxt rebirth; they wanted this life to be last because repeated death is painful. But besides [the arahat ideal], there is the bodhisattva ideal because life is full of suffering and we need to serve and to help people. So later on there was a need for a second look at the subconscious part. From this need, the Yogacara school came about. They wanted to study the subconscious more deeply. With this [study of] the subconscious comes the concept of store consciousness. They combine sankhara and consciousness of the five-skandha model to give store consciousness. This conscious part is the key. If we are able to understand this mechanism, we can learn to stop the manifestation of sankhara completely in the present moment to avoid rebirth or to divert its direction towards the bodhisattva ideal.

 

Let’s go back to the four kinds of food, just to be complete. Volitional form, sankhara [as the third kind of food] is important. The Buddha gives an image of sankhara. He says there is a young man with a strong will to live. Then two big, strong men like wrestlers with big arms drag him to a pit of hot charcoal and throw him in there. This is a very strong image of determinism. The young man has a strong will to live, but the two wrestlers have taken hold of him. That is our volitional food, our sankhara. What we want in our life, we can change it. The fourth kind of food is consciousness is food. Our thoughts turn all the time and we consume our own thoughts and ideas like it is a kind of food.

 

How to help a person who seems so attached to his own suffering? To summarise you need to understand yourself deeply, your block of suffering deeply, your subconscious mind and conscious mind – how they operate. If you are able to transform yourself, you have the chance to transform the other person. Thank you for listening.

 

One sound of bell