Speaker 1: Hello and welcome. This is the Zen Community of Oregon, making the teachings of the Buddhadharma accessible to support your practice. New episodes air every week. And if you'd like to take refuge with me, you're welcome to. I take refuge in the Buddha.
I take refuge in the Dharma. I take refuge in the Sangha. Welcome everyone. Those of you who have been here before, those of you who haven't been here before, it's brave. Thanks to everyone who inhabits this community of Vancouver and beyond, and those of you who came to the other shore tonight from Oregon.
The gang's all here including myself. I was not here last week. I was in the St. Louis area to see my mom and so I just want to talk about that a little bit. Everything is a teaching really if we allow it to be.
So in this, one of the things that really came up for me in my visit with her was just the insubstantiability of my identity or just the changing, ever changing insubstantial nature of that. So that was interesting. So And one of the ways that in the Zen tradition that we communicate that and in most Zen traditions, the most common sutra that we chant is called the Heart Sutra. And we didn't do it to start this particular service we may do that again at some point but it starts like this and I'll unpack this just this beginning. Avalokitesvara, when deeply practicing Prajnaparamita, clearly saw that all five aggregates are empty and thus relieved all suffering.
Okay that's the first sentence to this chant and that is dense. There's a lot going on in that one sentence. So I want to just unpack that a little bit before we proceed because I sure don't expect everyone to know even a little bit about what that first sentence just said. So Avalokitesvara is a name. Avalokitesvara is the name of the bodhisattva of compassion and a Bodhisattva is someone who is on their way to becoming a Buddha.
And in that definition that includes all of us. We're all already perfectly well equipped for that job. It's just a matter of practice and Avalokitesvara was darn close and sometimes it's said that bodhisattvas, awakened beings, they could enter nirvana and yet they hang back here on the human plane or other realms to help other beings. So here's Avalokitesvara, sometimes known as Kuan Yin, is often depicted in female form but can also be male, can be any gender. Avalokitesvara when deeply practicing Prajnaparamita.
So Prajnaparamita just means the perfection of wisdom. This bodhisattva who's practicing wisdom, the perfection of wisdom and in Buddhism is sometimes talked about that there are two wings of the of the bird and one is compassion and one is wisdom and we need both. Avalokiteshvara when deeply practicing Prajnaparamita clearly saw that all five aggregates are empty and thus relieved all suffering. So all five aggregates, five aggregates also sometimes translated as heaps, or like piles of stuff. Sometimes they're seen as rivers, five flowing rivers.
These five aggregates are what is said to compose a sentient being, what are we made of? We're made of these heaps of stuff that can kind of be smushed together and then just come apart again And those five aggregates are form is the first one form is the physical matter this body these sense organs are five senses or six when you include the mind the thinking mind. So that's one aggregate is our form and the forms that we encounter. The second aggregate is sensation and in this sense that's referring to how when we encounter form a sight, smell, a taste, a touch, we then have a sense of positive, negative, or neutral, and that's something to just practice at on your own just see if that's true. What do you notice about when you encounter anything?
Can you notice that feeling tone positive, negative, or neutral? Even amoebas can do this right you put a kind of negative stimuli at an amoeba and it's like no we're not much different than that. That's sensation. Perception is another one of the aggregates that's our recognition and our interpretation of our of the sensory information that's coming in how we differentiate between experiences, our perception. And these are also you know variably defined depending on where you look, depending on where you read.
So the fourth one is formation. I like the word volition. Formation is sometimes includes thoughts and emotions but volition is the sort of urge to do something, that urge to respond or the wherewithal to then enact and that this is where our karma arises, formation. And consciousness, this awareness of our experience, this awareness of experience, and that depends on all these other aggregates, not independent at all. So these are the five aggregates and again they can be slightly differently defined depending on who's defining them, but basically you get the gist.
And to realize that all five aggregates are empty, what does that mean? That they are all interdependent, that they are all co occurring, that they are all conditionally arising and disappearing and changing, that there's nothing solid about them at all. Is there anything solid about a river? We can point at it and say yes that's the river, but the water is never ever ever the same, it's always changing. In that sense it's conditionally a rising disappearing changing even though it appears it seems like it's a single thing.
It's not a single thing. It's not separate from the earth. It's not separate from the sky. It's not separate from anything. That's what's meant by empty And it's pointing to this experience of when we try to find a solid unchanging fixed self that we actually can't find that.
What is meant by empty these ingredients of being, these ingredients of our self, these ingredients of our identity are also not permanent and they do not exist independently of anything else. So when we try to find a self, what happens? I know who I am, here's what I'm like, how would you describe yourself? What you do, what you like, what you don't like. What if you'd been asked to find an enduring self at age eight?
Has that changed a little bit? Age 22? Yeah. What has changed about you since then? So here's a teaching about this from Thich Nhat Hanh, this is from his book The Other Shore which is all about this chant, the Heart Sutra.
Thich Nhat Hanh says Avalokitesvara found the five skandhas consciousness to be empty, but empty of what? To be empty is always to be empty of something. If I'm holding a cup of water and I ask you is this cup empty? You will say, no. It is full of water.
But if I pour out the water and ask you again, you may say, now it is empty. But empty of what? Empty means empty of something. The cup cannot be empty of nothing. Empty doesn't mean anything unless you know empty of what?
The cup is empty of water but it's not empty of air. So to be empty is to be empty of something. This is quite a discovery. Therefore, when Avalokitesvara claims that the five skandhas are equally empty, we must ask, dear Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara, empty of what? The five skandhas which may be translated into English as five heaps or aggregates are the five elements that comprise a human being.
These five elements are like five rivers constantly flowing river of form, which means our body, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. They are always flowing. So Avalokiteshvara looking deeply into the nature of these five rivers suddenly saw that all five are empty. Empty of what? We ask.
And this was the reply. They are empty of a separate self. They are empty of a separate self. So this is a fundamental teaching of the Buddha Dharma and can be subtle and elusive sometimes. If it's not landing for you right now, don't worry about it.
That is really okay. I just wanted to lay this as groundwork as I talk about some of the experiences I had last week. So the mom visit, my mom is 92 years old and she is changing. She is evidencing more forgetfulness and not being able to manage things as she once did. She was very competent in so many areas and that's changing and that means I will need to go back there more, and she is still unwilling to enter into assisted living even though I think that is a really excellent idea, she doesn't think so, and my brother is living with her on-site and I think he's against it too at least for now.
And so I've been practicing meta for both of them and for myself. Meta means loving kindness and just that being the my primary practice lately and in this situation, and that has been really powerful medicine. Sometimes my brother and I have been butting heads a little bit, and I find that when I'm really current on offering loving kindness to him and to her and to myself in this painful situation, it really blurs the line of me versus them. It really just softens everything. So that's a big part of it.
And maybe, you know, the book called Being Mortal by Atul Gawande. He's a surgeon and his father was a surgeon and he basically was walking the path of his father's mortality and both of them being accomplished physicians just felt kind of lost in some ways in that process. And what he noticed about that was that there's this inherent tension in these situations between safety and independence that the older person wants to make their own choices and their loved ones want them to be safe. And these are often contradictory wishes or values, and this is perfectly normal. This is just how it is.
There's going to be this inherent tension, and so I'm living that out as well, And it's so nice to have that articulated that this is just a natural understandable process that there's nothing we're not inherently wrong. Nobody here is Zen teacher Gico Teestail from Dharma Rain Zen Center in Portland, she is a nurse, long time nurse, long time Zen teacher and she has a book called Advice for Future Corpses and the People Who Love Them. So that's all of us. She says that when people refuse to take steps that will increase their safety then the bystanders the loved ones just have to tolerate increased risk. So that is what I am doing, tolerating increased risk.
She still goes up and down the stairs to do the laundry. It's just, and it's hard to be so far away. What if my mom did exactly what I wanted her to do? What if I could make her do what I wanted, what I wanted her to do? Do I really know that that's the best thing?
Can I be absolutely sure that a move like that moving someone who has lived in their house for fifty years will not have some negative consequences? I don't know that. She's already getting more disoriented while driving, she's getting more forgetful, and I just can't even imagine how disorienting it would be to wake up in a strange place and make all different routines and get to know all different people and let go of your home and especially against your own will. So I have to just remind myself all the time I actually don't know what's the best thing. Really don't, I don't know, I don't know And that along with loving kindness meditation has been my mantra and what a freeing truth.
I don't know. I don't know. It's freeing for me, for her, for my brother. All these rivers are continuing to flow and change all these things we think are solid. They dissolve, they change the house she moved into fifty years ago, the children she raised there, the mom and pop veterinary clinic they ran, the body, the mind, it's all changing.
So how could I know? It's completely unimaginably complicated. And when I don't know, I just let myself not know, I don't struggle to impose my will and my view and my opinion on her and her life. I can be right, which is tempting, or I can have peace with my mom. It's kind of either or at this point.
And it's always true that we may never see someone again. My teacher Chozenbei Roshi says that she has a mindfulness practice that you can do even just in your daily life just walking around with any person you encounter or maybe any difficult person or anybody and just say to yourself this person could die tonight. This person could die tonight and that's true. How does that change our experience of them? This person could die tonight.
I find it just helps me really see the sweetness and the preciousness of each person and to treat them accordingly. And it seems like for my mom 92 years old with poorly controlled blood pressure and an insistence on going up and down steep stairs she really could die tonight. It's all too real, so it's very tender and I really value that time with her and rather than try to get her to do something I just was sort of her garden lackey all week and she loved that it was way better for all of us. I'm gonna go back there in July I told her I'm not doing gardening in St. Louis in July you're on your own.
That's not really true, but being right though it always tempts me for sure. Some time ago I learned the Pali word for self making, self making from Ajahn Amaros, wonderful teacher in the Theravadin tradition. The word that means self making is ahankara, self making or making a self. Believing or yeah believing that there's a solid immovable permanent something or other there, something that's always going to be this particular way. I am this, I am this way, I am like this, I have this, you are that or you are like that and this is how it is.
That's self making. So all last week I got to pal around with her homies, the garden club ladies, and my mom is kind of the grand dame of the garden club ladies. She's the oldest one by a good ten or fifteen years, and they all take care of her and each other, and we staffed a farmer's market one of these days and then this little town called Millstot, Illinois, the VFW lets this loosely organized farmers market use their parking lot for free and basically you can just open up the back of a car or a truck bring a folding table and some chairs and then sit out and sell stuff you've either made or grown. It's great, it's really sweet. So the garden club ladies are selling like their iris bulbs that they've dug up you know and separated or daylily bulbs or house plant starts, all kinds of little plants and seed starts for way cheaper than in the garden store.
And so these ladies are also very active in other realms, there's a lot of overlap in their particular Venn diagrams, they're not just garden club ladies, they're also in the Iris Club, the Kennel Club for the ladies with dogs, the Republican ladies, you know there's all this overlap. So my mom and I and a couple of the other garden club members were hanging around the sale table and this woman who is about my age, maybe a little older, she comes up in these very cute and kind of tall wedge sandals and one of the guys at another table nearby made some remark about how difficult it must be to walk on the gravel in the parking lot and she said, oh, it was no problem, she can run-in them, but that she would only run away from a liberal if she saw one. What? I don't think I'm in Portland anymore. So I find that when I am back home with my mom, a political identity does not help me connect with her, not in the least.
And it has been my practice to mostly be able to hang that up like a jacket in the foyer closet and to find that this and all of our identities are transient and they are conditional and they are empty of a separate self. And in these moments with my mom, is way more important for me to be a daughter, to be an adult, to be a person rather than to be a Buddhist or a social worker or whatever, and whatever it is, all of it is conditional, of it is dependent on a lot of other factors, And the question is what serves? What is actually important here? What is actually needed here? What is of benefit right now in this human situation.
But when this lady came up and started saying that stuff, I noticed this feeling of energy, kind of like a defensiveness or like being challenged. Like I felt this welling up in me this like, oh yeah, and I wanted to be clever and just be like, hi, I'm the secretary of the Portland chapter of Antifa, how are you? Like It just wanted to like come out or something. I could feel this identity taking shape. I could feel this boundary and this shell of separation, this reactivity that puts you over there and me over here.
That is self making, that is a hankara, and there was no direct confrontation. I did intimate that there may in fact be liberals, you know somewhere in the vicinity and yeah she said some other stuff and it was just very interesting to watch my own feelings in this body of self making, and so my mom was like, now, now you're not supposed to get political and neither are you, she says to me, and she did just walk away, got in her car and drove off, but it was really nice to be just mostly conscious of the process of self making and to hold it pretty lightly. Like I was frankly pretty amused by my own reactivity and her and you know, wish I had time, you know, if she had hung around for us to kind of find out how we were not different. And I'm sure there were lots of ways that we were not different. But it was very interesting to see how self making seems to beget more self making that in her, you know, clear sense of her identity, this other identity wants to show up in opposition or that one makes the other.
How can you have a liberal without a non liberal or whatever, right? It's just they inter are, they can't be without each other. It's hilarious. And we label and then we think we know. If I label someone then I I see them with my projection and I lose all curiosity about who they are, who they might be.
I don't know how she may be a grandmother or a sister or a dog person or a cat person, and we don't see an ever changing person. We don't see a five rivers of ever changing flow or that this person might die tonight. We just see this Frozen cartoon and we think we know, we don't know. And in retrospect what I wish she could have known about me was that the day before, the very day before at the St. Louis Cardinals baseball game, I got all teary singing God Bless America.
I swear to God, I got all like I'm crying singing God Bless America, which I don't think that's happened before it may have been it was like children's choir and it was very sweet. They sing God Bless America and then they do the national anthem, which I think is new. I don't know if they've always done that, but singing it I just felt so full of longing and aspiration and I wasn't even able to sing the whole thing because my throat was so tight and there was just like a couple tears like I haven't had that experience before. And so it made me wonder you know what she and I held in common perhaps we share a hope that a stadium full of people could truly bless this country, could bless this country in such a way that she would be guided through the night with a light from above if only that could happen. What does it mean when we can't see beyond the labels of citizen or Republican or liberal or whatever, when we see them as solid or inherently real and not just an aggregate of stuff that our mysterious karma has washed us onto some shore.
And then I wondered what does freedom mean to her? What does that mean to her? I wonder what does it mean to a Zen practitioner? We can say a word like that freedom and then get in a fight about what freedom means. Me versus you.
And how we look determines what we see and that is up to us. Can shift how we look at things. Are we willing to widen our view? Are we willing to open our heart and see with our heart and not just our ideas? We can make these distinctions and separate into categories or we can blur and disappear distinctions and see our commonness that are in fact we're made of the same ingredients, the very same, the very same ingredients.
When we see that all five aggregates are empty, empty of separate self, Our life as we know it is nothing but transient. Every moment is new. So just think about how briefly we get to share the time on Earth together. I think about this sometimes, is a finite number of people at any given moment who will all be or in our lifetime, just in your lifetime, there's a finite number of people who will all be alive at the same time on earth. So when you were born, you joined the earth with people who were born days, months, years, decades, maybe a hundred years before, a few people probably.
And so they're part of your cohort, all those people. And then you also get to share this time on earth with all the many people who are born after you and who will be born before you die. And this is your cohort. These are all the people you've shared this life with, your cohort on Earth. And we're in that cohort.
We get to all be in this cohort together, don't we? All together. And this way we can blur or even erase all those other boundaries, all those other identities, can't we? So I want to close this talk with a story, another story from Thich Nhat Hanh from his book, The Other Shore. And this story is called The King and the Musician and then we'll open it up to comments or questions.
We have some time. There's a story of a king who upon listening to a musician playing a 16 string sitar was moved to the depths of his being. The music touched him so deeply that he wanted to discover exactly where it was coming from. When the musician departed, he left his sitar with the king and the king ordered his servant to chop the instrument into small pieces. No matter how hard they tried, they could not find the source of the beautiful sound, the essence of the music.
Just like the king looking into the sitar, the bodhisattva Avalokitesvara looked deeply into his own five skandhas and discovered that they were empty of self. No matter how wonderful something is, when we look deeply into it, we see that there is nothing in it we can identify as a separate self. We have the tendency to believe that within the five Skandhas there is something constant and un changing. Even though the five Skandhas are continually flowing, being born, growing, fading away and dying. Our feelings arise, stay for a while and then change or pass away.
Our anger may flare up, but after a while it fades and disappears. Our body ages and grows old. Yet we cling to the wrong perception that everything is constant and unchanging. We continue to believe that our five Skandhas do not change that they have a self nature and that we are a separate self. The Buddha is always telling us that such a self is not there.
The Buddha is always telling us that such a self is not there. So thank you for your kind attention this evening. I'm curious about any comments or questions. This is one of the three seals of the Buddha Dharma, the teachings of the Buddha. One is suffering.
That one's pretty easy, right? There's suffering. We got that. Another one is impermanence. Also pretty easy to see things and things change no matter what we do.
But this third one, this no self in the way that or emptiness emptiness of what, that can be a little more subtle, a little more tricky. So anybody has anything they would like to share, add similar experiences. The floor is open. Thank you for listening to the Zen Community Oregon podcast, and thank you for your practice. New episodes air every week.
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