The Exalted One,

the Lady of Conquest, 

the Sutra on the Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom

[Tibetan translatorʹs note: The name of this sutra in Sanskrit is Arya Bhagavati Prajnya Paramita Hirdaya. In Tibetan this is Pakpa Chomden Dema Sherabkyi Parultu Chinpay Nyingpo. (In English this is The Lady of Conquest, the Exalted Sutra on the Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom.) This work is completed in a single sheaf. I bow first to all the enlightened beings, and to every warrior saint.]

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[Tib] dike dakki tupay du chik na

[Sk] Evam maya shrutam

[Eng] Once I heard this teaching.

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[Tib] chomden de gyalpoy kapna jagu pungpoy rila gelong gi gendun chenpo dang jangchup sempay gendun chenpo dang tap chiktu shukte

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[Sk] Ekasmin samaye bhagavan rajagirhe. Viharati sma girdhrakute parvate mahata bhikshu sanghena sardham mahata cha bodhisattva saghena.

[Eng] The Conqueror was staying on Vultureʹs Peak, in the Keep of the King. With him was a great gathering of monks, and a great gathering of warrior saints.

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[Tib] dey tse chomden de zabmo nangwa shejaway chukyi namdrang kyi tingendzin la nyompar shukso. yang dey tse jangchup sempa sempa chenpo pakpa chenresik wangchuk sherab kyi paroltu chinpa zabmo chupar nampar ta shing. pungpo ngapo dedak layang ngowo nyi kyi tongpar nampar ta‑o.

[Sk] Tena khalu samayena bhagavan gambhirava sambodha nama samadhim samapannah. Tena cha samayena‑arya‑avalokiteshvaro bodhisattvo mahasattvo gambhirayam prajnya paramitayam charyam charamana evam vyavalokayati sma. Pancha skandhas tansh cha svabhava shunyam vyavalokayati.

[Eng] At a certain moment the Conqueror went into deep meditation on the part of the teaching known as the ʺawareness of the profound.ʺ At that moment too did the realized being, the great warrior, the lord of power, Loving Eyes, see into this one deep practice, the practice of the perfection of wisdom. And he saw perfectly that the five heaps—the five parts of a person—were empty of any nature of their own.

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[Tib] Dene sangye kyi tu tse dang denpa sharadvatipu jangchup sempa sempa chenpo pakpa chenresik wangchuk la dike che me so. Rikki puam rikki pumo kang la la sherab kyi paroltu chinpa sabmoy chupa chepar dupa de jitar lappa ja

[Sk] Atha‑ayushmach chariputro buddha‑anubhavena‑arya‑avalokiteshvaram bodhisattvam mahasattvam etad avochat. Yah kashchit kulaputro gambhirayam prajnya paramitayam charyam chartu kamah katham shikshitavyah.

[Eng] And then, by the power of the Enlightened One, the junior monk named Shari Putra turned and asked this question of the great warrior, Loving Eyes, the realized one, the lord of power: ʺIf any son or daughter of noble family hoped to follow the deep practice of the perfection of wisdom, what would they have to do?ʺ

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[Tib] Deke che mepa dang jangchup sempa sempa chenpo pakpa chenresik wangchuk gi tse dang denpa sharipu la dike che me so.

[Sk] Evam ukta arya‑avalokiteshvaro bodhisattvo mahasattva ayushmantam shariputram etad avochat.

[Eng] This then is the answer that the lord of power, the realized one, the great warrior Loving Eyes gave to the junior monk named Shari Putra:

[End of page 3 of printed material]

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[Tib] Sharipu rikkyi puam rikkyi pumo gang la la sherab kyi paroltu chinpa sabmoy chupa chepar dupa de, ditar nampar tawar ja te.

[Sk] Yah kashchich‑chariputra kulaputro va kuladuhita va gambhirayam prajnya paramitayam charyam chartu kamas tenaivam vyavalokayitavyam.

[Eng] ʺHere, Shari Putra, is what any son or daughter of noble family should see who hopes to follow the deep practice of the perfection of wisdom.

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[Tib] Pungpo ngapo dedak kyang ngowo nyi kyi tongpar nampar jesu ta‑o. Suk tongpa‑o. Tongpa nyi suk so. Suk le tongpa nyi shen ma yin. Tongpa nyi le suk shen mayin no.

[Sk] Pancha skandhas tansh cha svabhava shunyan samanupashyati sma. Rupam shunyata shunyataiva rupam. Rupanna pirthak shunyata shunyataya na pirthak rupam. Yad rupam sa shunyata ya shunyata tad rupam.

[Eng] ʺSee first all five heaps—all five parts to a person—as being empty of any essence of their own. Your body is empty; emptiness is your body. Emptiness is nothing but your body, and your body is nothing but emptiness.

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[Tib] Deshin du tsorwa dang, dushe dang, duje nam dang, namshepa nam tongpa‑o.

[Sk] Evam vedana sanjnya sanskara vijnyanani cha shunyata.

[Eng] ʺThe same is true of your feeling, and your ability to discriminate between things, and the other factors that make you up, and all the different kinds of awareness that you possess: all of them are empty.

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[Tib] Sharipu, detaway na, chu tamche tongpa‑nyi de, tsennyi mepa, ma kyepa, ma gakpa, drima mepa, drima dang drelwa mepa, driwa mepa gangway mepa‑o.

[Sk] Evam shariputra sarva dharma shunyata lakshana anutpanna aniruddha amala vimala anuna asampurnah.

[Eng] ʺAnd thus we can say, Shari Putra, that every existing thing is emptiness. Nothing has any characteristic of its own. Nothing ever begins. Nothing ever ends. Nothing is ever impure. Nothing ever becomes pure. Nothing ever gets less, and nothing ever becomes more.

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[Tib] Sharipu, detaway na tongpa‑nyi la suk me, tsorwa me, dushe me, duje nam me, nampar shepa me,

[Sk] Tasmat tarhi shariputra shunyatayam na rupam na vedana na sanjnya na sanskara na vijnyanam.

[Eng] ʺAnd thus can we say, Shari Putra, that with emptiness there is no body. There are no feelings. There is no ability to discriminate. There are none of the other factors that make you up, and there is no awareness.

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[Tib] Mikme, nawa me, na me, che me, lu me, yi me, suk me, dra me, tri me, ro me, rekja me, chu me do.

[Sk] Na chakshur na shrotram na ghranam na jihva na kayo na mano. Na rupam na shabdo na gandho na raso na sprashtavyam na dharmah.

[Eng] ʺThere are no eyes; no ears; no nose; no tongue; no body; no mind; nothing to see; nothing to hear; nothing to smell; nothing to taste; nothing to touch; and nothing to think of.

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[Tib] Mikki kam me ching, mikki nampar shepay kam mepa ne yi kyi kam me ching, yi kyi nampar shepay kam kyi bardu yang me do.

[Sk] Na chakshur dhatur yavan na mano dhatur na dharma dhatur na mano vijnyana dhatuh.

[Eng] ʺThere is no part of you that sees. There is no part of you that is aware of what you see; and this is true all the way up to the part of you that thinks, and the part of you that is aware that you are thinking.

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[Tib] Marikpa me, ma rikpa sepa mepa ne, gashi me, gashi sepay bardu yang me do.

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[Sk] Na vidya na‑avidya na kshayo yavan na jara maranam na jara marana kshayah.

[Eng] ʺThere is no misunderstanding your world. There is no stopping this misunderstanding, and the same is true all the way up to your old age and your death, and to stopping your old age and your death.

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[Tib] Duk‑ngelwa dang, kunjungwa dang, gokpa dang, lam me.

[Sk] Na dukha samudaya nirodha marga.

[Eng] ʺThere is no suffering. There is no source of this suffering. There is no stopping this suffering. There is no path to stop this suffering.

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[Tib] Yeshe me, toppa me, ma toppa yang me do.

[Sk] Na jnyanam na praptir na‑apraptih.

[Eng] ʺThere is no knowledge. There is nothing to reach. And there is nothing not to reach.

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[Tib]  Sharipu. De taway na, jangchub sempa nam toppa mepay chir sherab kyi paroltu chinpa la tenne nete sem la drippa mepay jikpa me de. Chin chi lok le shintu dene nya ngen le depay tarchin to.

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[Sk] Tasmach‑chariputra apraptitvena bodhisattvanam prajnya paramitam ashritya viharati chitta‑avaranah. Chitta‑avarana‑anastitvad atrasto viparyasa atikranto nishta nirvanah.

[Eng] ʺThus it is, Shari Putra, that warrior saints have nothing to reach; and because of this, they are able to practice the perfection of wisdom, and stay in this perfection of wisdom. This frees them of every obstacle in their minds, and this frees them from all fear. They go beyond all wrong ways of thinking, and reach to the ultimate end of nirvana.

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[Tib] Du sum du nampar shukpay sangye tamche kyang sherab kyi paroltu chinpa la ten te lana mepa yangdakpar dzokpay jangchup ngunpar dzokpar sangye so.

[Sk] Tryadhva vyasthita sarva buddhah prajnya paramitam ashritya‑anuttaram samyak sambodhim abhisambuddhah.

[Eng] ʺAll the Enlightened Beings of the past, and present, and the future too follow this same perfection of wisdom, and thus bring themselves to perfect enlightenment; to the matchless state of a totally enlightened Buddha.

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[Tib] de taway na. sherab kyi paroltu chinpay ngak. rigpa chenpay ngak. lanamepay ngak. mi nyampa dang nyampay ngak. dukngel tamche rabtu shiwar jepay ngak. mi dzunpay na. den par shepar ja te. sherab kyi paroltu chinpay ngak mepa.

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[Sk] Tasmaj jynatavyah prajnya paramita maha mantro maha vidya mantronuttara mantro sama sama mantrah sarva dukha prashamana mantrah satyam amithyatvat prajnya paramitayam ukto mantrah.

[Eng] ʺThus are they the sacred words of the perfection of wisdom; the sacred words of great knowledge; sacred words of the unsurpassable; sacred words that are equal to the One beyond all equal; sacred words that put a final end to every form of pain; sacred words you should know are true, for false they cannot be; sacred words of the perfection of wisdom, which here I speak for you:

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Tadyatha. Gate gate paragate parasangate bodhi svaha.

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[Tib] Sharipu jangchup sempa sempa chenpo sherab kyi paroltu chinpa sabmo la detar lappar ja-o

[Sk] Evam shariputra gambhirayam prajnya paramitayam charyayam shikshitavyam bodhisatteva.

[Eng] And thus it is, Shari Putra, that great warrior saints must train themselves in the profound perfection of wisdom."

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[Tib] De ne chomdende tingenzin de le sheng te. Jang chub sempa sempa chenpo pakpa chenresik wang chuk la lekso she jawa jine lekso lekso

[Sk] Atha kalu bhagavan Tasmat samadher vyutthaya-arya-avalokiteshvarasya bodhisattvasya mahasattvasya sadhu karamdat.

[Eng] With this, the Conqueror stirred himself from his deep state of meditation. He turned to the great warrior, to the realized one, Loving Eyes, the lord of power, and blessed his words, saying, "True." "True," he said, and "True" again.

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[Tib] Rikipu, de deshin no, de deshin te. Jitar kyu kyi tenpa de shin du sherab kyi parol tu chinpa sabmo la chepar ja te. De shin shekpa nam kyang je su yi rang ngo. 

[Sk] Evam etad gambhirayam prajnya paramitayam charyam chartavyam yatha tvaya nirdishtam anumodyaye sarva tathagatair arhadbhih samyak sambuddhaih.

[Eng] Thus it is, o son of noble family; and thus is it. One should follow the profound perfection of wisdom just as you have taught it. Every one of Those Gone Thus rejoice in your words as I do."

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[Tib] chomdende kyi de ke che ka tsel ne, tse dang denpa sharibu dang, chang chub sempa pakpa chenresik kyi wang chuk dang, tamche dang denpay kor de dak hla dang mi dang hla mayin dang   drisar chepay jikten yi rang te. Chomdende kyi sung pa la ngunpar tu do.

[Sk] Idam avochad bhagavan ananda mana ayushmach chariputra arya-avalokiteshvaresh cha bodhisattva mahasattvah sa cha sarvavati parshatsa deva manush asura gandharvash cha loko bhagvato bhashitam abhyanandanniti.

[Eng] And when the Conqueror had spoken thus, the junior monk Shari Putra took joy; and the warrior, the realized one, Loving Eyes, the lord of power, took joy as well. And all the assembled disciples took joy, and so did the entire world - with its gods, and its men, and near-gods and spirits too - take joy. All sang their praises of what the Conqueror had spoken.

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This ends the sutra of the greater way known as the Lady of Conquest, the Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom. It was first translated from Sanskrit by the Indian abbot Vimala Mitra together with a master Tibetan translator, the venerable Rinchen De. It was later checked and standardized by the master translators and editors Gelo and Namka, among others. The translation into English was completed by the American geshe Lobsang Chunzin, Michael Roach, with the assistance of the American woman with lifetime vows, Christie McNally.]

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Welcome back. We are Monday-Friday study group studying Heart Sutra. This is class 2 out of 8 on December 16th, 2024. 

Let's gather our minds here as we usually do.

Please bring your attention to your breath until you hear from me again. 

[General Class Opening]

Please allow me to read to you the Heart Sutra once again. 

If you're know it, you're welcome to recite along with me. Otherwise just listen to the words.

The Exhalted One

The Lady of Conquest

The Sutra on the Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom

The name of this sutra in Sanskrit is Arya Bhagavati Prajnya Paramita Hirdaya.

In Tibetan this is Pakpa Chomden Dema Sherabkyi Parultu Chinpay Nyingpo.

I bow first to all enlightened beings, and to every warrior saint. Once I heard this teaching.

The Conqueror was staying on Vulture’s Peak in the Keep of the King. With him was a great gathering of monks and a great gathering of warrior saints. At a certain moment, the Conqueror went into deep meditation on the part of the teachings known as the “awareness of the profound”. At that moment too did the realized being, the great warrior, the lord of power, Loving Eyes, see into this one deep practice, the practice of the perfection of wisdom. He saw perfectly that the five heaps – the five parts of a person – were empty of any nature of their own.

Then, by the power of the Enlightened One, the junior monk named Shari Putra, turned and asked this question of the great warrior, Loving Eyes, the realized one, the lord of power: “If any son or daughter of noble family hoped to follow the deep practice of the perfection of wisdom, what would they have to do?”

This then is the answer that the lord of power, the realized one, the great warrior, Loving Eyes, gave to the junior monk named Shari Putra: “Here, Shari Putra, is what any son or daughter of noble family should see who hopes to follow the deep practice of the perfection of wisdom.”

“See first all five heaps – all five parts of a person – are free of any essence of their own. Your body is empty, emptiness is your body. Emptiness is nothing but your body and your body is nothing but emptiness.”

“The same is true of your feelings, and your ability to discriminate between things, and the other factors that make you up, and all the different kinds of awareness that you possess: all of them are empty.”

“And thus we can say, Shari Putra, that every existing thing is emptiness. Nothing has any characteristic of its own. Nothing ever begins. Nothing ever ends. Nothing is ever impure. Nothing ever becomes pure. Nothing ever gets less, and nothing ever becomes more.”

“And thus we can say, Shari Putra, that with emptiness there is no body. There are no feelings. There is no ability to discriminate. There are none of the other factors that make you up and there is no awareness.”

“There are no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; nothing to see, nothing to hear, nothing to smell, nothing to taste, nothing to touch and nothing to think of. There is no part of you that sees, there is no part of you that is aware that you are seein; and this is true all the way to the part of you that thinks, and the part of you that is aware that you are thinking.”

“There is no misunderstanding your world. There is no stopping this misunderstanding, and the same is true all the way up to your old age and death, and to stopping your old age and death.”

“There is no suffering. There is no source of suffering. There is no stopping this suffering. There is no path to stopping this suffering.”

“There is no knowledge, there is nothing to reach, and there is nothing not to reach.”

“Thus it is, Shari Putra, that warrior saints have nothing to reach, and because of this, they are able to practice the perfection of wisdom, and stay in this perfection of wisdom. This frees them from every obstacle in their minds, and this frees them from all fear. They go beyond all wrong ways of thinking, and reach to the ultimate end of nirvana.”

“All the Enlightened Beings of the past, the present and the future too, follow this same perfection of wisdom, and thus bring themselves to perfect enlightenment: to the matchless state of a totally enlightened Buddha.”

“Thus are they the sacred words of the perfection of wisdom; the sacred words of great knowledge; sacred words of the unsurpassable; sacred words that are equal to the One beyond all equal, sacred words that put a final end to every form of pain; sacred words you should know are true, for false they cannot be; sacred words of the perfection of wisdom, which here I speak for you:

Tadya ta, ga-te ga-te, para ga-te, para sang ga-te, bodhi so ha

“And thus it is, Shari Putra, that great warrior saints must train themselves the profound perfection of Wisdom.”

With this, the Conqueror stirred himself from his deep state of meditation. He turned to the great warrior, the realized one, Loving Eyes, the Lord of Power, and blessed his words saying, “True”. “True”, he said. And “true” again.

“Thus it is O son of noble family, and thus is it. One should follow the profound perfection of Wisdom just as you have taught it. Every one of Those Gone Thus rejoice in your words as I do.”

And when the Conqueror had spoken thus, the junior monk Shari Putra took joy, and the warrior, the realized one, Loving Eyes, the lord of power took joy as well. And all the assembled disciples took joy and so did the entire world – with its gods and its men, and near gods and spirits too take joy. All sang their praises of what the Conqueror had spoken.

(16:00) Last class we left off still in the middle of Choney Lama's commentary selling us on the benefits of learning, studying, practicing what the Heart Sutra teaches. 

We had already said, he quoted from that Smadhiraja sutra. 

If you're able to analyze what emptiness means and you are eventually able to see emptiness directly, then this is the only way to reach Nirvana and enlightenment. There is no other way. 

He goes on to quote from Arya Nagarjuna whose nickname is second Buddha, meaning Buddha come again. Like the Shakyamuni Buddha‘s second coming. Not that he did right in a literal way, but Nagarjuna picked up on Shakyamuni Buddha's second turning of the wheel, the Prajna Paramita teachings, and I want to say revived them. Because Buddha did teach them, but that wasn't what was being emphasized or practiced mostly from Buddha‘s time 550 BC to Arya Nagarjuna 280.

That's a long period of time when it was mainly Vinaya. Geshela says the Abhidharma, the accountants were in charge, but meaning the first level understanding, making the effort to avoid harming others in order to reach one's own Nirvana—was the emphasis of Buddhism for all that time.

And along comes Nagarjuna, who we know as this great wisdom being, and he's teaching love. He's connecting the dot between behavior and reality, and bringing that to the forefront for practitioners.

He's called ‘Buddha, had to come again and teach again‘, and that's Nagarjuna.

He says, 

Anyone who doesn't get to see emptiness in this life, they will never get any kind of freedom. They will just continue to live like this. 

Meaning our samsaric world, trying to find our happiness in all the wrong places.

Nagarjuna‘s like m.o. [method of operations] is, everything Buddha ever taught was really about no self nature. Maybe wasn't saying it directly, but everything he taught was to lead us to this realization of the no self nature nature of all appearing things, all existing things.

Choney Lama says that Nagarjuna is pointing out that all of Lord Buddhist teachings are like how all rivers flow to an ocean. Different oceans, but in this case they all lead to the ocean of that ultimate happiness that we're calling total enlightenment.

Sooner or later we reach this place where we are meeting up with teachings and practices through which we will reveal to our own selves what's meant by the empty nature of all existing things.

Choney Lama goes again into Diamond Cutter Sutra and in Diamond Cutter Sutra, there's this recurring theme in that sutra where Buddha is talking about how much merit you make if you were able to take all the billion planets and cover them with the seven kinds of precious jewels, and take all of that and offer it to the Buddha. That would be a lot of good karma, right? Right.

Then he says stuff like, Yeah, but if somebody were to, they call it hold, but they mean learn and memorize just four lines of the Diamond Cutter Sutra, and share it with somebody else and help that somebody else understand those four lines in the correct way. That person would make more goodness, incomparably more goodness than the one who offered all those jewels to the Buddha. You can't even compare the goodness. 

Choney Lama says, but he doesn't just mean memorize four lines. He means memorize them and live by them. But he's connecting understanding this idea of emptiness to our behavior.  Because to learn that nothing has any nature of its own as an idea, as a philosophical idea, it's just interesting, fascinating actually. Maybe it would lead you to be able to figure out quantum physics.

But if it doesn't lead us to the, oh my gosh. The reason I see things the way I do. Because they're empty, there must be a reason I see things the way that I do, dah dah dah. Because the logic goes, it takes a long time to get there.

The end result is I see things the way I do, the results of some cause I made, because I'm experiencing it unique to me. I had to have made the causes unique to me. How do I make causes for experiences?

The punchline is see yourself doing something, saying something, thinking something towards another. It takes that connection between my experiences and my behavior for emptiness to have the significance that Lord Buddha is trying to teach. 

Diamond Cutter sutra is going through that whole thing again and again and again and it's kind of crazy. He seems like he just changes subjects in the middle of it. His poor disciple is the fall guy for all of it. But it is on purpose trying to show us this connection. 

Heart Sutra is different. Heart Sutra is going to show us the connection between emptiness and those five stages. We haven't finished talking about quite yet. The five realizations through which we transform ourselves from suffering human to totally enlightened being. We need to connect that dot.

Geshela skillfully has called it the marriage of karma and emptiness. 

It's a great idea and we can get it in our head. We're trying to get it in our heart so that we become so skillfully aware that my every moment is planting the causes, the seeds for my future experience. To be able to live in that, whereas our ordinary state of mind is living in results, results, results. I want more of this and less of that and et cetera. 

Heart Sutra is a teaching that is showing us the true nature of our reality. Then our job with our teacher is to connect that to our behavior.

(25:50) His next selling point, advertisement for Heart Sutra is he quotes from Lord Manjushri in wisdom, Buddha manifesting as specialist in wisdom when he takes the form of Manjushri in Diamond Way level, high level Bodhisattva, who I guess has already reached that stage where he said, when I'm a Buddha, I'm going to specialize in teaching people wisdom. 

So either way, Sutra or Diamond Way, he's an authority figure on wisdom. 

Choney Lama shares that at one point Manjushri said to his, whoever he was talking to, he said, look, when you're hearing Diamond Cutter Sutra, any of the Prajna Paramita sutras, perfection of wisdom sutras, and you hear the verses and you're here in the class, and there's a part of you that's going, I don't think so, I don't know about that. It just doesn't maybe make sense the first 50 times through it.

But something in your mind, in your heart goes, but maybe, maybe there's something to this. To just have that doubt about your doubt about the truth of the Perfection of Wisdom Sutras, that's enough to rattle all your karmic seeds that have been made with ordinary selfish belief in things to have their own nature. To just have doubt that they might be empty, have a little bit.

Do you see what I'm trying to say? You don't have to hear the Heart Sutra and go, Wow, that's truth. I'm going to study it in order for it to impact us.

All we have to do is hear and then go, Well that's interesting. Maybe there's something to it, and you've already put yourself close to the conveyor belt.

I like that argument for studying heart suture the best.

Because it feels so real, just a little bit of ‚Maybe this is true‘. 

It points out that there have in history been people who have heard this Heart Sutra, maybe even memorized it and recited it, but didn't have the seeds to receive a teaching on it, or didn't have the seeds to believe it.

I put myself maybe long time ago as an Asian kid and my parents made me memorize the Heart Sutra and say it. Then what I saw in my world was nobody lived according to it. Then as a teen, I'd reject it, wouldn‘t I? It's like they teach me this, but they act like that. I mean, I'm really talking to myself as a Christian kid and it's like phew, reject. 

Then you bring those seeds forward, multiple lifetimes and you hear the Heart Sutra again, and maybe those seeds ripen and reject.

There could be many, many people who've heard of the Heart Sutra but don't have the seeds to relate to it. Then there are those that maybe that same kid dutifully using the Heart Sutra thinking, Nah, but maybe. Then those little ‚But maybe‘ seeds are doing their thing. And then here we are, studying the dharma in a way that's so accessible to non monastics. I mean that's just extraordinary and it's all coming out of our good seeds, is what I'm trying to say.

There's no reason to behave morally unless we understand this thing about planting seeds. Once we do understand this thing about how our behavior imprints our minds such that that creates the circumstances of our own experiences, then it's like, Oh my gosh, my morality is the most important thing. And it isn't like a morality that somebody says it has to be like this. It's a morality based on when I see myself do this to another, it's going to come back to me bigger. So I get to be my own authority on what morality really means. 

If I'm smart, I'll go to somebody who's been there, done that and said, You know, might want to look at these 10 different aspects of behavior, if you want to make it easier on yourself. But even still, how those come forth out of our behavior are unique to each of us, aren't they? There's no right or wrong, even within the 10 non virtues, there's no bottom line to what's good and what's bad. Because it's all based on how it comes back to us.

You know that.

(31:55) So sooner or later we ourselves will come to the realization that this thing we're calling marriage of karma and emptiness is in fact the explanation for all of existence. 

The words Geshela always uses is that we'll understand that that's true.

But again, when I hear myself say that, I also feel myself hear it true as something in it from it, which means I'm not really understanding it.

We will come to see that it is the explanation for reality. 

If it's true that everybody just wants happiness, now I have a tool where I can actually be the agent of that happiness, because I know where it really comes from.

That's the purpose of studying, learning, using the heart sutra and Kedrup Je‘s meditation that he teaches us about it.

That's why we're here. 

Choney Lama‘s Commentary Analyzed Word for Word

Let‘s actually start in.

You know what I'll do for next class. I'll get a sutra and we'll put it up so that we can look at it. Sorry, I didn't think of that before. I'll do that next time.

(33:35) Let's actually start in to Choney Lama's description word for word of this Heart Sutra. 

He starts with the title. 

The Title

(33:35) The title, in Sanskrit is Aria Arya Bhagavati Prajnya Paramita Hirdaya.

In Tibetan PAKPA CHOMDEN DEMA SHERABKYI PARULTU CHINPAY NYINPO. 

Let's start backwards.

Hirdaya, in Tibetan NYINPO, it means heart, the heart—in the sense of the essence of something, is the heart of something.

The heart of the artichoke.

Sumati used to make his waffles and extra syrup, and I always cut calories. So my little waffles were pretty dry and his were special. He would take the centerpiece, he had a stack and this big centerpiece of waffle that was just full of butter. He would stab his fork and he'd give it to me. He'd give me his heart of his waffle.

That's what we mean by NYINPO.

SHERABKYI PARULTU CHINPAY is the Prajna Paramita in Sanskrit.

Prajna means wisdom, it's SHERAB in Tibetan.

Paramita, we call it perfection. 

Prajna Paramita means the perfection of wisdom.

There is various connotations that we will study. It seems like it means you finally know something that we didn't know before, and we know it so perfectly that we can finally use it. It does mean that. But Paramita, when the Tibetans translated it to PARULTU CHINPAY, they saw in it this connotation of ‘gone to the other side‘. 

Paramita literally means ‚gone to the other shore‘ or ‘gone to the other side‘. How do you get perfection out of that? That's kind of a long story. The Tibetans didn't want to just use whatever their word is for perfection. They wanted the ’gone to the other side‘ aspect of it. ‚gone to the other side‘ sounds like it means you live in California and you decide you're going to go to Japan, for the Kyoto teachings. So you got to go across the ocean to the other shore. And it does literally mean that.

But when we're talking about ‘gone to the other side‘ in terms of referring to the Buddha and the wisdom of a Buddha, which is what we are referring to, what's the other side that we are trying to go to? 

I love how simple Geshe Michael came up with the mudra for wisdom. We are are this siders. We experience ourself as here and others as out there, and the others are coming at us. Their identity is coming at us, their activity is coming at us, we see things as coming at us. 

And somewhere along the way we will have the direct experience that, oh my gosh, my own seeds ripening are making me see things come at me like that. But in fact they really exist as things coming from me. Technically, an other sider, someone who's gone to the other side, means they've gone to this side of experiencing themselves in their world as ripening projections and nothing but.  

They've gone from this wrong side—seeing things come at us—to a being, this isn't quite adequate to say a being seeing things come from them because that leaves them separate from it and they're not.

The other sider means they're very aware that they and their world is being created moment by moment, results of their past behaviors, which means current behavior is critical for what's going to come in future.

Someone who's fully other sider, they're directly experiencing that appearing nature and the empty nature of all things at all times.

Then you can't really talk about a past, present and future because it's all happening at once. But it is still happening as past, present, and future. 

So other sider, PARULTU CHINPAY, the perfection of wisdom is this being who is now identifying as this coming out, coming from their own behavior. Words fail. I can't get it right to get what other side really means. 

It's in English Perfection of Wisdom. Do you see how inadequate the English is?

Which is why we're doing word for word so that we can really understand as we are using it for ourselves, let alone sharing it with somebody else.

Sherabkyi Parultu Chinpay Nyinpo—the heart, Nyinpo, of the perfection of wisdom. Which is how it got its term ‚Heart‘ Sutra. 

(41:08) Then 

Arya Bhagavati—PAKPA CHOMDEN DEMA

Bhagavati is the female version of Bhagavan. 

Baghavan means conqueror.

But the word Baghavan, when you break it down into its root and blah, blah, blah, it's long. It has all these different connotations with it that again, the English word ‚conqueror‘ is too limited for us to get the full meaning. 

Typically, when we say ‚conqueror‘, I think of Dschingis Khan, Mongolian who conquered the worry is right world, but my picture of him is that he was a cruel, authoritative dictator and everybody was afraid of him. Because if you do one thing wrong off with your head kind of thing, I don't know. Hopefully he wasn't really like that.

But when we think ’conqueror‘, we have a tendency to think of oppressive, and so we don't tend to admire and aspire to be conquerors, do we?

No. 

But this conqueror, the Buddha called the conqueror, they're supposed to be someone that we hear and it's like, Oh, I want to be like that. I want to be that kind of conqueror.

The word Bhagavan holds these different meanings that yes, they have conquered over something significant, and they possess something special and they've gone beyond.

Here, in this word Bhagavan, is also this idea of having gone somewhere, which just doesn't mean literally. But they have transformed themselves so significantly that you can't say they still are where they were before, because there is no where they were before. It was also mistaken and now it's done, gone.

So conquered does mean conqueror. They've conquered something. What they have conquered is all their mental afflictions, right down to the very last one, which is the ignorance, which is the misunderstanding of the connection between behavior and experience. 

They have conquered their ignorance, and along the way they had to have conquered all their selfishness. Because that's how you overcome your ignorance.

If, in the process of overcoming our ignorance, so let me go back. A totally enlightened being is a being who experiences, they call it ultimate bliss. Let's call it that being who is a being made of ultimate love, ultimate compassion, ultimate wisdom.

Their personal experience is happiness, happiness and more happiness. They call it bliss. 

As aspiring Buddhas, our goal would be ‘I want to be a being who's just happy, like this ultimately happy being, and that's my all time goal‘. 

Maybe we even get enough understanding that we'll determine, and I'm going to do it before this thing wears out too much to use it for that. 

Then some part of us thinks, yeah, but how selfish is that?

If my goal is just my own happiness, it doesn't feel right at some level of our own ignorance. It keeps us from really getting on board for a lot of reasons.

But then, how is it that we're actually going to be successful in creating that state of our own being as ultimately happy?

When we understand the marriage of karma and emptiness, the only place our own happiness comes from is trying to help somebody else have a little bit of healthy moral happiness and pleasure. 

We can be, I'm going to reach my ultimate happiness. The way I do that is try so hard to give you a little bit, just a little bit.

It‘s like, Oh.

As we start to get the picture, the pendulum swings from I'm on my own path. I'm going to really get this done for everybody. Get out of my way because I'm being a Buddhist—to: Wait, wait, everybody, come. How can I help you? Can I do your dishes? Can I mow your lawn? Can I, can I? Can I, can I? 

Then you get happier, karmically happier.

It's this beautiful upward spiral that we get going on that we already had the seeds for at some point. Because here we are inspired and we've already been, the type of person is like, what can I do for you? How can I help you? 

But maybe we didn't quite connect the dots.

Back to that Manjushri saying, even if you have just a little bit of ‚maybe this is true‘ in your heart seeds, you are so close to the conveyor belt. All of us are so close to stepping onto that conveyor belt, that if there's doubt in your mind that you can do it, kick that doubt out right now. Because here we are.

Conqueror has conquered their own mental afflictions right down to their obstacles to omniscience.

(48:35) Dem means possesses something. 

What they possess of course is the goodness, the merit from all the kindness that they did through which they grew their wisdom, through which they grew, their kindness through which they grew their wisdom. You can't ever stop saying it. 

Then the ‘gone beyond‘ part of the Bhagavan Tibetan, it's the word Chomden Dey.

That's ‘gone beyond the misunderstanding‘, ‚gone beyond the selfishness‘. It's the idea that we were talking about going to the other shore. 

The Tibetan’s Chomden Dey pack in all three of these conqueror by way of possessing the goodness, by way of having gotten to that other shore of understanding things look like they're coming at us, but in fact they look that way from us. Our seeds make things look like they're coming at us.

But then it's Bahagavati, not Bhagavan.

The Bhagavati means the lady conqueror who possesses her share, who's gone beyond.

In this Buddhist tradition we have the two wings of the bird: method and wisdom.

Those method and wisdom have all these different correlations through which we can understand them more and more subtly.

The method side is correlated to our right channel. It's correlated to our daytime. It's correlated to our activities, obviously. It's correlated to our masculinity.

All people have masculinity and femininity, this duality. For some of us are female energy predominate, and that's makes us ladies. For some, the male energy dominates and that makes us men. For more and more it's not so clear. For more and more beings in my world, it's not so clear that there's a predominance.

We all have both is the point. 

The right side, the male side, the method side is the love and compassion side, emptiness acting. When we're acting from emptiness, our state of mind, our state of heart is love and compassion.

Compassion means: I see suffering. I can't stand it. I wish I can do something about it.

Love is: There's a being who wants to be happy. I want to contribute to their happiness in some way or at least not contribute to their suffering.

Love, compassion. It's our active side.

The wisdom side is correlated with our left side channel. It's correlated with nighttime, the dark, the hidden, the secret, the inside, the focant side, the potential side, the female energies of each of us.

Wisdom is this absence of self nature of whatever we're considering at the moment, which is not something that can be an appearing thing. It's an absence of something that we thought was there that actually wasn't. The whole concept ’wisdom‘ is a left side thing. It's a female energy thing. Because those female energies have to do with this, that which is unseen, but focant.

So all these different correlations, cogitate them, think about them, and it will bring more and more meaning to what you mean when you use for yourself or others the word ‘wisdom‘ versus ‘method‘, and how those two work together. They must work together for them to have any significance at all.

(54:08) The title is The Conquering Woman of Wisdom, the Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom. The conquering woman, the heart of the Perfection of wisdom.

That perfection of wisdom, we already said, is referring to the wisdom in the mind of a Buddha, which means they've already gone to the other side.

But we use the term ‘perfection of wisdom‘ also for that growing state of mind that understands the marriage of karma and emptiness, all the way up to our direct perception of the seeds ripening, followed by the seeing emptiness directly, that puts us on the path of habituation, where we're using what we now know to be true but can't see again directly, to guide our behavior even more subtly than we were using it before.

That perfection of wisdom is a perfection of wisdom that we're using to grow our perfection of wisdom. We'll hear it. They call it a perfectionizer. We practice our perfections as perfectionizers until we reach Buddhahood, and then we do our perfections as perfections. But not actually until we reach total Buddhahood.

But it doesn't mean they're not perfections.

However, Choney Lama points out, that until we have the perfection of wisdom, meaning the direct perception of emptiness perfection of wisdom, we can have spent lifetimes practicing the six perfections and we'll have not made anything more than good karma. Meaning Samsaric pleasure that wears out. Until we have the actual perfection of wisdom, meaning seeing emptiness directly, because of the influence on all our seeds, that after that we are finally planting seeds that will ripen as our actual perfection of wisdom—which is our state of mind of Buddha.

Heart Sutra is, we can say, it's teaching about the perfection of wisdom that we're developing. Or we can say it's teaching about the perfection of wisdom as it will be when we are Buddhas. 

Choney Lama says, don't make that distinction. It's teaching us about both.

When we hear Prajna Paramita, Sherabkyi Parultu Chinpay, somehow in the context that you hear it, it's like, oh, are we talking about the one I'm developing, or are we talking about the one I've already got?

It's like, well, I know I don't have that one, the already got one. But so we make the distinction. Commonly, I've seen myself work with this a little bit, and it's like when you're reading something and they use this term ‘perfection of wisdom‘, if you stop and you go, what are they talking about? You'll be able to see whatever they're talking about, a different meaning in whatever's being written, depending on whether you're reading it as talking to me about how I develop my perfection of wisdom, or talking to me about a Buddha's perfection of wisdom. You'll see it in the same paragraph. It's really fun to get a glimpse into the emptiness of the words that we're reading, and see that son of a gun. There's different meanings inside here. You all have the seeds for that, I promise you, because here are.

It‘s already time for a break. Let's get refreshed. 

(Break)

The Opening

(59:35) Next comes DIKE DAKKI TUPAY DU CHIK NA.

It means 

Once I heard this teaching

and it has three meanings hidden inside there.

I think we understand that Lord Buddha did not write down any of his teachings.

He didn't have teaching notes. He got asked a question and he spoke the answers. He had disciples there, people listening, and then different ones went to different teachings and heard different things. 

50 years later, I don't know the actual circumstances, but they say he went to a party and ate poisoned mushrooms and got sick and then said, okay, this is my last teaching. Goodbye. He laid down and withdrew his emanation. 

We would say he died. His physical body died and his disciples couldn't do anything about it. 

Imagine being one of those disciples where you just think your teacher's going to live forever. I mean they've got such goodness, wouldn‘t they live forever?

Of course they would live forever.

And then they're gone all of a sudden and you don't have anything written down from what they said.

I don't know when it happened. But eventually they apparently got together and said, We've got to write down what we remember. 

Somebody said, well, I remember being at this particular teaching.

The ones who say I remember, they really did remember as in word for word remember.

It's his students, his disciples, that are the ones who actually wrote the sutras.

But wait a minute, the sutures are the words of a Buddha, and now they're not because it's his students that wrote them down? 

Maybe they changed the words a little bit, or one, we hear Buddha spoke in Sanskrit, but the beings there heard their own language. So I don't know, did some of those beings say, I heard Pali, so I'm going to write it in Pali—because that's what they heard.

I don't really know how it came down, but we have sutras. They are written down. 

Buddha didn't do it. Somebody had to have done it.

1. Meaning: It’s the Word of Buddha

So here this verse, 

Once I heard this teaching.

One meaning is it's referring to this council, they call it, where these different disciples got together and said, well, I remember this one. I'll write it down. You remember that one? You write that one down. In doing so, they compiled, I guess, as many teachings as got compiled.

So this ‚Once I heard this teaching.‘ has that inside it. For it to be meaningful, we need to know this history.

Apparently somehow Buddha gave his permission for that to happen in that way. 

Again, I don't know if as he's dying, he said, You guys better write this stuff down. Or how that went. But it's accepted that these sutras that are called the words of a Buddha were actually written by somebody else. Buddha gave the permission, and in some way you could say Buddha was influencing that person to be able to write it down in that way. So yes, they are the words of a Buddha, mostly.

Sometimes Sutra, the word sutra means a short book. That's not words of a Buddha, but mostly it is.

2. Meaning: The Person who speaks was in the Audience when it was taught

(64:45) Then the second meaning of

Once I heard this teaching

means that the person who wrote that, he is telling us he was actually there.

So he didn't say, 

Once I heard of this teaching. 

Once I heard about that teaching in Barcelona.

It's like I was there. Katya was there. She can say, This is what happened—to at least Katya while she was there.

So ‘Once I heard this teaching‘ is telling us that whoever wrote this down was in the audience. That's going to be significant when we learn about who was in the audience, which is coming up soon.

3. Meaning: They heard it Once

Then the third meaning of

Once I heard this teaching

 the person is saying, I heard this teaching one time. 

They heard it and we would say memorized it. But it isn't that they heard it and then memorized it. It's that they heard it and then they could repeat it.

Like having a photogenic memory. Some people can read something and then Their seeds are such that they can repeat it, they could rewrite it. Because they know it just having read it once. 

If that's a pleasant thing, karmically it would be some kind of goodness, wouldn't it?

I suppose that that in some ways could be not a pleasant thing.

These people apparently had auto photographic memory, autogenic memory. You hear it once and then you could repeat it instantly.

We think, oh, as humans, modern technology, we can fly, we have computers, we're so smart. 

But there were beings back then 550 BC that had this capability of hearing something once and being able to repeat it word for word. It would take a pretty clear, undistracted, open state of concentration awareness, concentration hearing it. 

I don't know what it would take.

My rejoicing festivals‘ is meditative concentration. It's like, Ooh, I think I have an extra rejoicable about those beings who can hear, and they're still so concentrated that their imprint is made so purely that it can come right back out whenever they need it.

Imagine.

I get this sense of my imprints being so jam packed with crap from just eons of life that no wonder, I can't remember what I said 10 minutes ago.

It is all karmically driven.

So this person heard it in person, they heard it only once and they were able to be the one who would write it down later.

It's permissible for us to accept the sutra as words of a Buddha given in this way. These three different meanings of ‘Once I heard this teaching‘. 

This is still not the teaching happening yet, it's all the setup. 

We've had the title. We've had the intro telling us how it came to us, and we finally get to the sutra itself.

The Setup

CHOMDEN DEY, we already learned that.

BHAGAVAN, the conqueror, the one who possesses his share of goodness, meaning beyond goodness. The one who's gone beyond—that conqueror.

CHOMDEN DE GYALPOY KAPNA JAGU

This is saying, it's the setup.

The conqueror was staying on vulture's peak in the keep of the king—is the English.

Choney Lama says, look, this is included so that we won't misunderstand who's actually giving this teaching.

It's interesting, because in the Chinese Heart Sutra, it starts right out with the Bodhisattva Alokiteshvara answering a question. It doesn't have the setup.

One might misunderstand and think that the Heart Sutra was actually being taught by Avaloketishvara.

The impact could be equally great, but it is not quite precise.

A debater would go, Well then the Heart Sutra is not word of the Buddha because Sutra teaching Avalokiteshvara is a Bodhisattva but not a Buddha.

Choney Lama is pointing out that Heart Sutra does start out telling us that it is Lord Buddha that's gathered there with his disciples.

CHOMDEN DE GYALPOY KAPNA JAGU PUNGPOY

GYALPOY means the king

GYALPOY KAP means the king's place, a place the king resides. Maybe not full time, but Geshehla poetically calls it ‘in the keep of the king‘. Meaning there's this place in India that's owned by the king. 

Wait, all of the places are owned by the king. But it's his special gardener, special mountain or something. 

He's allowed Buddha and his disciples to gather there to give a teaching.

So this is setting up saying, the conqueror was in this particular place in India when this teaching was given.

We've already heard that whoever wrote this down was there, and the place that we're talking about is Rajgriha in India.

In that particular place, owned by the king, where the king would stay, there's this mountain. Like a pile of rocks kind of mountain, like Texas canyon in Arizona. 

The pile of rocks apparently looks like a vulture. It's not quite clear if the mountain looks like a vulture, or if it's a big pile of rocks where a lot of vultures hang out so there's always vultures there.

It's not quite clear to me which one it is. But it's called vultures‘ peak. JAGU PUNGPOY

JAGU means wild bird in Tibetan, and specifically vulture.

Vultures have that funny way of looking. Apparently this big rock mountain looks like this vulture. 

Some scriptures say that when our world is destroyed, vultures‘ peak will be the last to go.

So if you want to be the last to go, go live at vultures‘ peak.

It's a really specific place, and so this is where this one disciple was with all the rest when he heard this teaching, and Lord Buddha was there. That's why it's included, so that we can now know that Buddha was the one that was giving this teaching on vultures‘ peak, this land where the king would stay.

CHOMDEN DE GYALPOY KAPNA JAGU PUNGPOY

RILA GELONG GI GENDUN CHENPO DANG

JANGCHUB SEMPAY GENDUN CHENPO DANG

TAP CHUKTU SHUKTE

All of that is telling us who was there with the Buddha at Vultures‘ Peak, in the keep of the king. There's two different groups of disciples. 

GENDUN Tibetan is the word for monks.

It does just say monk. But later on in the sutra it's going to specifically be talking about men and women.

It's not clear whether there were any nuns there or not. In the early early Buddha‘s days, there were no nuns.

You know that story? Where he didn't allow women to take ordination because… I don't know why. 

His stepmom and wife came to him repeatedly, We want to ordain. We want to ordain. No, no, no, no, no.

I don't know what happened. But finally they went to one of the disciples and convinced the disciple that it would be a good thing for women to ordain, and finally Buddha agreed.

So maybe it hadn't happened yet. Maybe there weren't any ordained women at the time of the Heart Sutra. But they're not mentioned here. But men and women practitioners will be, which will be significant later.

(76:40) GELONG GI GENDUN CHENPO means there was this great gathering of monks. Monks meaning ordained men. Ordained meaning they've taken those vows to very specifically declare themselves on their path of avoiding harming others to very, very significantly subtle degrees.

Their goal in taking those vows is to reach their own personal Nirvana.

So here's a great gathering of ordained men come for this teaching. 

Ordinarily we would think great means there are many of them. But Choney Lama points out that the great is not referring to the number necessarily here, but rather it's referring to the spiritual qualities of those monks.

It's telling us that those who have the ripening to have gathered there at Vultures‘ Peak with the Buddha who's about to be asked a question that's going to become a perfection of wisdom introduction. Those people there, they were not beginners.

They had to have significant goodness already made in order for these seeds to be coming out of them. Do you see? 

The ‚great‘ is talking about the quality of the practitioners that are there. They've been monks for a while perhaps, or they're monks that have kept their vows really well. Just to have the vows isn't necessarily keep the vows.

This is pointing out that here with Buddha is this great gathering of ordained people, high spiritual qualities.

However, they are motivated for their own Nirvana, not. Not meaning that underneath they are selfish slobs. But meaning that what they believe is the highest attainable thing is Nirvana.

They don't have the seeds for the, Oh my gosh, what about everybody else?

It's hard to imagine that we could have high spiritual qualities and not have compassion and love included in that. But apparently there is this phase in which we are believing that the highest goal is Nirvana. 

There they are, ready to hear the Heart Sutra teaching. 

That's the first half of who was there with Lord Buddha. 

The sentence says, GENDUN CHENPO DANG.

DANG means ‚and‘.

JANGCHUP SEMPAY GENDUN CHENPO meaning there's another group there.

The JANGCHUP SEMPAY, we know that word.

JANGCHUP means Buddhahood

SEM means mind

JANGCHUP SEMKAY is the wish for total enlightenment, for the sake of all sentient beings.

JANGCHUP SEMPA means somebody with that wish. 

Geshela said it means warrior, spiritual warrior—SEMPA.

JANGCHUP SEMPA means spiritual warrior. But here meaning those who see that the ultimate state is achievable as total Buddhahood for everybody, not just my own Nirvana.

Gathered also with Buddha on Vultures‘ peak are these beings, doesn't say only men, whose motivation is their Bodhichitta. They already have Bodhichitta.

They have the wish to become a being who can help everyone become beings, who can help everyone become beings. Can't stop saying it—to reach ultimate happiness.

Also, the term great does not necessarily mean there were a lot of them there. It means that they already had this strong motivation of compassion, this strong motivation of love, this higher—I don't want to say higher—, this different goal that they were shooting for.

Great ordained people, and great—ordained or not—but who already have Bodhichitta arising. The wish to reach total enlightenment for the sake of everyone. For the sake of everyone being the key factor here. Got it?

That's who's gathered around Lord Buddha.

I need to stop because we get to learn the first part of the meditation and do our preliminaries. I haven't quite finished about the great Bodhisattvas. I'm going to make a note.

Those great Bodhisattvas have seven qualities that I want to tell you about, but it's going to take too long. So I'm putting my mark here and so let's spend the rest of class doing a meditation together. 

Meditation with Kedrup Je‘s 1st Step of the Four Part Meditation

(83:45) If you need to stand up and stretch and wiggle to get ready, take your time to do so.

We'll do our preliminaries and then learn the first step of Kedrup Je's Four Part meditation. We'll do the first step only. 

Set your posture first. Feel your sit bones pushing down into your chair, into your cushion. Pull your lower tummy in and up a little bit. Send that prana rising. Feel it rise. Raising the crown of your head towards heaven.

Your physical body is tethered strongly.

Your spiritual being is rising but not rising up and away.

Bring your attention up and to your breath somewhere at your nostrils. Find a spot with a sensation that you can follow.

With each Exhale, your physical body relaxes.

We each inhale your intellect, your awareness becomes more alert, more keen, more interested.

Recall that person you want to be able to help.

Feel how real their distress is and how it's a result of a big mistake. 

Feel how much you wish you could help them. Really help them.

We would need to know exactly what they need to take up and what they need to give up.

And so we turn our minds back to that precious being, our own personal guide.

We know they know. We know they love us. We know that if they could just make us into an enlightened being, they would do so.

We know they are helping us make ourselves into that. And so recall your refuge and that holy being, think of one of their good qualities and admire them for it.

Tell them about this other person who's suffering you can't bear.

Offer to your guide your wish to become one who can help that other stop that distress forever someday.

Offer yourself to that guide. Give them permission to help you.

See how happy they are with your offering. 

And so you feel safe to confess to them some seeds that you don't want to ever ripen. Tell them the facts. Tell them of your regret.

Tell them of your refuge in karma and emptiness.

Establish this meditation as your antidote force—so that when we're done, you know those seeds have been damaged.

Then establish a power of restraint.

Then fill that space with some rejoicing.

Think of some specific kindness you've done, maybe the opposite of what you just purified.

Even feel happy that you've done that.

Find a few more rejoices to share with that being.

Then ask them to please stay close to you.

Ask them to continue to guide you, to inspire you.

Ask them to help you be aware of them teaching, even when they appear as someone else perhaps.

Ask them to help you stay amongst others who inspire you.

And dedicate just what we've done so far to seeing that others‘ distress melt away.

Bring your attention back to your breath.

If you need to shift or wiggle, now's the time.

To start this part of Kedrup Je’s meditation, we will learn to experience, simply experience.

We will be exploring the heaps, starting with heap number one, called the heap of form. But it means our physical experience.

Most of it is visual for sighted beings.

But we will explore experience of all five senses. All of it is included in what's called our heap of form, our physical being.

To begin, open your eyes and look around your room. See the objects there. Notice the colors, the shapes. Come all the way around everything in your visual.

And when you have a sense of it, close your eyes, come back to your breath and then listen and follow along.

One part of our physical nature is all the experiences of all the things we see. 

In your mind's eye, look at the objects first in front of you, and then go around the room. The first time around, notice your mind identifying those objects. No analysis, just the experience.

Oh, there's that and that.

Now, start again. This time be aware of simply the colors and shapes.

It takes increased subtlety to be aware of that raw experience.

You can imagine you are an infant with no names for things, yet experiencing your physical experience of color and shape.

This time as you go around your room, come back to seeing yourself, your body as if you're looking down at your arms or hands. But in that same way, colors and shapes. 

Simply raw experience if you can. All of it a part of you.

Now shift from the experience of color and shape to the experience of sound.

Focus on hearing. Not what you hear. Hearing.

Outer sounds, inner sounds, they all make up a part of you.

Now switch to the sense of smell. Are there fragrances or odors?

No need to identify their source, simply the experience we're looking for.

Then tastes. Notice the taste in your mouth. 

And lastly, your tactile awareness. Sensation of the air on your skin, your clothing, your weight on your chair.

Try to find the raw experience.

Shift back to the taste.

Shift back to the odor.

Shift back to the sounds. 

Shift back to the visual.

Nice. 

Now let that all go.

Bring to mind that person we just did this all for.

It was our antidote, for our own purification and motivated to become one who could help that other in that deep and ultimate way.

And so we have done a great goodness.

Think of this goodness like a beautiful glowing gemstone that you can hold in your hands.

Recall your own precious, holy guide. See how happy they are with you.

Feel your gratitude to them, your reliance upon them.

Ask them to please stay close, to continue to guide you and inspire you.

And then offer them this gemstone of goodness.

See them accept it and bless it, and they carry it with them right back into your heart. 

See them there. Feel them there. Their love, their compassion, their wisdom inside of you.

It feels so good we want to keep it forever, and so we know to share it:

By the power of the goodness that we've just done

May all beings complete the collection of merit and wisdom

And thus gain the two ultimate bodies 

That merit and wisdom make.

So use those three long exhales to share this goodness with that one person.

To share it with everyone you love.

To share it with every existing being everywhere.

See them all filled with happiness, filled with loving kindness, filled with wisdom.

And may it be so. 

Thank you everyone.

For the recording, welcome back. We are Heart Sutra class three, it's December 20th, 2024. 

Let's gather our minds here as we usually do. 

Please bring your attention to your breath until you hear from me again.

[General Class Opening]

Again, let's start with the Heart Sutra. 

If you'd like to read it along, you're welcome to, but please stay muted otherwise just listen. 

The Exhalted One

The Lady of Conquest

The Sutra on the Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom

The name of this sutra in Sanskrit is Arya Bhagavati Prajnya Paramita Hirdaya.

In Tibetan this is Pakpa Chomden Dema Sherabkyi Parultu Chinpay Nyingpo.

I bow first to all enlightened beings, and to every warrior saint. Once I heard this teaching.

The Conqueror was staying on Vulture’s Peak in the Keep of the King. With him was a great gathering of monks and a great gathering of warrior saints. At a certain moment, the Conqueror went into deep meditation on the part of the teachings known as the “awareness of the profound”. At that moment too did the realized being, the great warrior, the lord of power, Loving Eyes, see into this one deep practice, the practice of the perfection of wisdom. He saw perfectly that the five heaps – the five parts of a person – were empty of any nature of their own.

Then, by the power of the Enlightened One, the junior monk named Shari Putra, turned and asked this question of the great warrior, Loving Eyes, the realized one, the lord of power: “If any son or daughter of noble family hoped to follow the deep practice of the perfection of wisdom, what would they have to do?”

This then is the answer that the lord of power, the realized one, the great warrior, Loving Eyes, gave to the junior monk named Shari Putra: “Here, Shari Putra, is what any son or daughter of noble family should see who hopes to follow the deep practice of the perfection of wisdom.”

“See first all five heaps – all five parts of a person – are free of any essence of their own. Your body is empty, emptiness is your body. Emptiness is nothing but your body and your body is nothing but emptiness.”

“The same is true of your feelings, and your ability to discriminate between things, and the other factors that make you up, and all the different kinds of awareness that you possess: all of them are empty.”

“And thus we can say, Shari Putra, that every existing thing is emptiness. Nothing has any characteristic of its own. Nothing ever begins. Nothing ever ends. Nothing is ever impure. Nothing ever becomes pure. Nothing ever gets less, and nothing ever becomes more.”

“And thus we can say, Shari Putra, that with emptiness there is no body. There are no feelings. There is no ability to discriminate. There are none of the other factors that make you up and there is no awareness.”

“There are no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; nothing to see, nothing to hear, nothing to smell, nothing to taste, nothing to touch and nothing to think of. There is no part of you that sees, there is no part of you that is aware that you are seein; and this is true all the way to the part of you that thinks, and the part of you that is aware that you are thinking.”

“There is no misunderstanding your world. There is no stopping this misunderstanding, and the same is true all the way up to your old age and death, and to stopping your old age and death.”

“There is no suffering. There is no source of suffering. There is no stopping this suffering. There is no path to stopping this suffering.”

“There is no knowledge, there is nothing to reach, and there is nothing not to reach.”

“Thus it is, Shari Putra, that warrior saints have nothing to reach, and because of this, they are able to practice the perfection of wisdom, and stay in this perfection of wisdom. This frees them from every obstacle in their minds, and this frees them from all fear. They go beyond all wrong ways of thinking, and reach to the ultimate end of nirvana.”

“All the Enlightened Beings of the past, the present and the future too, follow this same perfection of wisdom, and thus bring themselves to perfect enlightenment: to the matchless state of a totally enlightened Buddha.”

“Thus are they the sacred words of the perfection of wisdom; the sacred words of great knowledge; sacred words of the unsurpassable; sacred words that are equal to the One beyond all equal, sacred words that put a final end to every form of pain; sacred words you should know are true, for false they cannot be; sacred words of the perfection of wisdom, which here I speak for you:

Tadya ta, ga-te ga-te, para ga-te, para sang ga-te, bodhi so ha

“And thus it is, Shari Putra, that great warrior saints must train themselves the profound perfection of Wisdom.”

With this, the Conqueror stirred himself from his deep state of meditation. He turned to the great warrior, the realized one, Loving Eyes, the Lord of Power, and blessed his words saying, “True”. “True”, he said. And “true” again.

“Thus it is O son of noble family, and thus is it. One should follow the profound perfection of Wisdom just as you have taught it. Every one of Those Gone Thus rejoice in your words as I do.”

And when the Conqueror had spoken thus, the junior monk Shari Putra took joy, and the warrior, the realized one, Loving Eyes, the lord of power took joy as well. And all the assembled disciples took joy and so did the entire world – with its gods and its men, and near gods and spirits too take joy. All sang their praises of what the Conqueror had spoken.

Meditation With Kedrup Je’s 1st+2nd Step of the Four Part Meditation

(14:27) Let's start with a meditation. We'll do our preliminaries quickly and then settle in to repeat the first step of Kedrup Je's practice, and we'll learn the second step of Kedrup Je’s practice. 

So get yourself settled in.

Get that physical body firm in your chair.

Energy body rising, not out, lifting you.

Bring your attention to your breath.

With each outbreath, the physical body relaxes.

With each inbreath, your awareness gets more alert, keen, curious. 

If your mind wanders, catch it. Bring it back to the breath. 

Now take your refuge in Buddha, Dharma, Sangha, and how learning this Heart Sutra, learning Kedrup Je‘s meditation is going to help you choose your behavior in wiser ways.

Tell yourself why that's important to you.

Then again, bring to mind that person who is suffering, and find that feeling within you that aspires to reaching your own total enlightenment in order to be able to help them.

Your own being of ultimate love, ultimate compassion, ultimate wisdom, feel your willingness to do what you have to do to become that for them.

Then bring to mind that being who for you is already ultimate love, ultimate compassion, ultimate wisdom. See them there with you. 

Think about the good qualities you see in them.

Even think about good qualities they must have that we don't yet see directly.

Know that they're doing everything they can to help you grow those good qualities too. 

Feel your aspiration, your admiration. Make a mental prostration to them. 

Make them an offering. What they like best is to hear you hear yourself telling them about some kindness that you did because of something that they taught you. See how happy they are with you.

Next, clean your heart of some negativity, something recent, action speech, thought that made seeds that when those ripened will be unpleasant for you and others. Tell them, admit them. 

Share that you realize now it was mistaken, an old selfish pattern. Tell them you understand about mental imprints being made that will perpetuate distress for everybody. And feel your regret. 

Offer this meditation in this class as your antidote power, and then establish some power of restraint, something specific and know that by the end of this class, those seeds will be damaged. 

When you actually carry out your power of restraint, they will be destroyed. So feel happy about that, eager even for this situation where you get to do the restraint.

Offer to that holy being another kindness that you've done.

Offer them a kindness you saw someone else do.

See them so happy to hear you rejoicing in these goodness.

Ask that holy being to continue to teach you and guide you.

Ask them to help you recognize their efforts, even coming through to you from other beings, other situations that don't look like them. 

Ask them to stay close to you, that they live a long and healthy and happy life, continuing to guide beings.

Ask that all the people that help uplift you, stay close, happy and healthy and then ask them to help you with this short meditation session.

They happily agree and so their wisdom, light glows even brighter. 

Last, dedicate just what we've done so far, the preliminaries to help that other stop their suffering forever, someday.

Then if you need to adjust your body, you do it now,

Then settle back in.

Get that sense of the physical body tethered down, your energy body, tethered but rising.

Coming again to your breath. Clear, bright focus.

(30:18) Kedrup Je‘s first step was simply experiencing.

Simply experiencing, becoming aware of simply experiencing. 

We're using the heap of form to learn this meditation.

So this first step, you scan your physical environment, your outer physical environment, what we call ‚outer physical environment‘, including our physical body.

But our task is to simply experience color and shape, decibels, fragrances without the story that goes along with them.

For this session, I'm going to ask you to open your eyes to do it, as the practice you don't do it with open eyes.

But for this one, this session, open your eyes and start from the left of your room. 

See you can actually just experience colors and shapes.

I find it extraordinarily difficult, but try. Not really analyzing. Pretend you're an infant and none of those things have names. 

Even look down at your own body, you can see hands, a bit of torso, but just see color, shape.

Last time we shifted to sounds and smells and tastes. For now we're going to stay on our physical part of ourselves from the visual aspect because it's so much of our world if we are sighted people. 

(34:00) Now let's move to the second step of Kedrup Je‘s meditation. 

In this step, land on one of those combinations of colors and shapes. I have a potted ficus tree in front of me.

This second step is to get in touch with your automatic and natural experience of that object as having its identity in it, out there coming at you. Not physically moving, but its identity in it.

We've studied enough to know that this is wrong view. But the idea here is to get our wrong view very strong so that we can use it for the rest of the meditation that we'll learn later. 

Again, start with your eyes open just for this session and find one object that you will investigate.

We've already seen it as just colors and shapes. Now, as you look at it, become aware of that deep experience, obvious experience, its identity is in it. Use all the different kinds of arguments that you would to confirm that belief.

I can reach out and touch it.

It's there every time I come back.

If I said that ficus tree in my room, other people would know what I'm talking about.

Confirm all those beliefs, feel them.

I'm going to give us five minutes and you get to do that exploration. 

Be tenacious in keeping your wrong view, so that it becomes so clear and obvious.

What would happen if somebody broke it or stole it?

You get the idea. 

Once you have your object clear in mind, you can close your eyes to explore your feeling about it, that it has its own identity. Of course it does.

Maybe three minutes, five is too long.

If you've gotten off track, come back.

The object object's identity in it.

Why you're so convinced that's true? Feel it.

This step is identifying the GAKCHA, isn't it?

The self existence of that physical object.

We can't know what to correct until we know what we're doing mistakenly. And so this is a powerful and necessary step in Kedrup Je‘s four step. Step two, experiencing the mistake. 

Dedicate this meditation so far to that other person's suffering, coming to be recognized for its big mistake so that it can finally be corrected.

Thank that holy guide, ask them to still stay with you for class.

Bring your awareness back to your body in your room, your physical body in your chair.

When you're ready, open your eyes. Take a stretch, have some water.

Review

(44:26) Where did we leave off? We left off where Choney Lama was describing to us this setup.

We've already heard that the person telling this was actually there at the teachings. They heard this teaching one time and they remembered it. They were able to quote it from that one time experience. 

‘Once I heard this teaching‘ does not mean once upon a time. Like in the stories that we tell our kids. It means ‘I was there‘, not me. But whoever is giving us this written form.

Then, what they tell us is, when I was there, this was the setup.

CHOMDEN DE GYALPOY KAPNA JAGU PUNGPOY RILA

The conqueror was there at Vultures Peak, which was an area where the king would stay. The king let the Buddha and his disciples come and gather at this area.

GELONG GI GENDUN CHENPO

was telling us that there in that gathering was this great group of ordained people.

He explained to us that the CHENPO, the great, was not necessarily referring to the number of them, but rather is referring to their qualities. He's making the distinction that those there who were ordained, there were some of them whose focus was reaching Nirvana, their own personal freedom from all suffering. And that along their path to that, they were very, very skilled, high level practitioners. So the CHENPO refers to the qualities of those beings that were there. If we think about it, in order to hear a Buddha teaching, we have to have high qualities. Then, to hear a teaching on the perfection of wisdom in a timeframe where most of the teachings had been about all existing things and how it's all suffering, you would have to have high good qualities. If not from that life, from the ones before.

Then JANGCHUB SEMPAY GENDUN CHENPO

is saying that there were also a bunch of people there who had already developed their Bodhichitta. They recognized that if I can reach my own Nirvana, well that means everybody can and maybe I need to have a higher goal, higher aspiration to become a being who can help everybody stop all their suffering, not just my own.

That group is called JANGCHUB SEMPAY, which is the Bodhisattvas.

Now you can have ordination and be a Bodhisattva, and you can have ordination and not yet be Bodhisattva, and you can be Bodhisattva and not be ordained. It's all what's motivating, what your belief in what your highest capacity is.

Choney Lama points out that the CHENPO for the Bodhisattvas, it refers to these seven high qualities and that's where I left off last class. I didn't have time to tell you the seven. 

As I study the seven, it's a little confusing to me because it's like, wait, if these Bodhisattvas already have these seven qualities, they're already so close to Buddhahood, and yet Buddha hasn't even taught the perfection of wisdom yet?

Where'd they learn it? How'd they find it? 

That opens a whole different discussion. That's not for a beginning class, but if it occurs to you, investigate that. 

Choney Lama’s Commentary—Analysis Part 2

The 7 High Qualities of a Bodhisattva

(49:57) Here are the seven grates held in the CHENPO that's related to the Bodhisattvas, the JANGCHUB SEMPAs that are there. 

1. They have big eyes

The first great is they have big eyes, they say. Meaning they have their eyes turned towards big goals.

The big goal of a Bodhisattva is: I want to reach my total enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings. 

There's nothing bigger than that, and that's what makes Bodhichitta Bodhichitta, because it's so big. The seeds planted of anything that we do with Bodhichitta in mind are so powerful that when they grow and ripen, they must ripen as causes for Buddhahood.

They have this high goal.

2. They have 2 goals in mind

Second is they have two goals in mind, which is what I just described. They want to help themselves become the best person in the world, like the kindest, the most thoughtful, the most compassionate, the most loving being because it feels so good to be that way. Your own personal happiness is those qualities. 

Then they don't want to do it just for their own personal happiness. They want to reach that state because in the process of doing so, they help others gain a little worldly happiness and they come to that state of mind that knows directly what others need to take up and give up so that we can finally, as we're serving them a cup of tea, we are also influencing them in a way that will help them along their path to their own becoming of being who can help others in that deep and ultimate way. 

So they have the two goals: reaching their own goals and providing the goals of all others.

That's what the big eyes are looking towards. 

3. They have a high state of wisdom

Wisdom usually means understanding of emptiness.

We're learning ‘perfection of wisdom‘ means understanding the marriage of karma and emptiness, not just emptiness alone.

I don't know if they're saying these are all beings who have seen emptiness directly already or not. 

4. They take joy in doing good things

It's the outcome of the first three, is the joyous effort perfection. They take joy in doing good things, whether the circumstances around them seem pleasant or not.

5. They have this ability to find unusual ways to help others

The skillful means.

6. They've achieved the 10 powers

The 10 powers, the Sanskrit word Siddhi. It means these, I don't know, personal powers sounds like, oh, I have the ability to…

But the personal powers is like you can travel distances fast, you can hear, clear audience comes, clairvoyance comes. Things like that.

They come along the way as results of deep meditation and all the kindnesses. They aren't really goals, but those 10, there's also a 10 called the 10 extraordinary powers and those are 10 powers of a Buddha. 

The Bodhisattvas along the way and have these powers and they use those powers only in circumstances where they can propel themselves and others along the path to Buddha with the Buddhas 10 extraordinary powers.

Liberation in the Palm of your Hand, Day four. In that book it lists the 10 powers. I didn't go get it in the interest of time. I mean I looked at it, but I'm not going to share. 

7. The scope of their life and their activities is huge

I mean that's not a separate power, that's like the outcome of all of this, of course. 

This is telling us the qualities of the beings who were there, one of which is the person who's telling us this. So in one way, the person telling us this is giving us a clue that we can trust what they've done. Because they're either great ordained or they're great Bodhisattvas. I'm going to vote for the great Bodhisattva‘s side because of the photogenic, auditory, whatever that this person must have had.

We've got this set up. Let's take our break now.

(Break)

What‘s Happening at the Scene

(57:27) Next comes DEY TSE CHOMDEN DE ZABMO NANGWA SHEJAWAY CHUKYI NAMDRANG KYI TINGENDZIN LA NYOMPAR SHUKSO

DEY TSE means ‚At a certain moment‘, like at that time.

CHOMDEN DE — the conquer, the Buddha.

Choney Lama points out that the speaker here is telling us it's part of the setup and he's saying the Buddha does this next.

Included in that is telling us that actually the Buddha is teaching this whole program. Without a commentary from someone who's been taught the Heart Sutra from someone who's been taught it, et cetera. We would just go, of course the Buddha was there and everybody's around waiting for him to say or do something.

But hidden within this is that the Buddha is teaching this whole sutra, although what comes next makes it seem to us that the Buddha is not doing anything. You'll see why in a moment. 

So at a certain moment, CHOMDEN DE—the conqueror

ZABMO NANGWA SHEJAWAY

ZABMO NANGWA is this beautiful term that means the appearance of the profound.

NANGWA means appearance

ZABMO is the word for profound.

Profound, that word always is indicating emptiness. It's not the word for emptiness, but the profound always is talking about or are implying that we're talking about the profound side of things.  Between method and wisdom, wisdom is the profound side, meaning deep. The deep side of things is their no self nature.

NANGWA is the appearing side, which in the two wings of the bird is the method side. 

ZABMO NANGWA is when those two come together.

Well now, those two are coming together always. They're never separate. But what this is going to be pointing out is that there is something that Buddha is going to demonstrate to us.

The word SHEJAWAY means ‘so-called‘.

So-called profound appearance.

Which is funny. What do you mean so-called? So-called means not really, right? How do we use so-called in English? I can't think of an example.

It kind of means not really, but here it is just telling us we can't see what the Buddha is doing. We can just see his physical body. Me, ordinary being can just see his physical body.

But the author or the writer is telling us, no, no, this is what he's doing. The so-called appearance of the profound

CHUKYI NAMDRANG 

CHU means dharma. 

CHUKYI is of the dharma

But sometimes dharma means all existing things and sometimes dharma the teachings of the Buddha. If you look at it deeply, you can see why they use that word in that way.

Here the CHUKYI is meaning something about all existing things. 

Oh, you know what? I just got something that I didn't get out of the teachings. The SHEJAWAY is talking about the all existing things, not the ZABMO. Ha. Okay, so delete what I said about the ZABMO NANGWA being so-called.

It's the so-called all existing things.

SHEJAWAY CHUKYI NAMDRANG

NAMDRANG means synonym. Like all these different names for things.

SHEJAWAY CHUKYI NAMDRANG means all existing things that aren't really what they look like. They're just different names for something.

What? ZABMO NANGWA, the appearance of the profound.

We'll get there.

SHEJAWAY CHUKYI NAMDRANG

What's happening? We don't have it all yet. 

TINGENDZIN, what's TINGENDZIN?

We know it if we've studied ACI3, single pointed concentration.

LA NYOMPAR SHUKSO

I don't know how it breaks out, but LA NYOMPAR SHUKSO means in deep meditation on the part of the teaching.

So this whole first sentence comes out to be:

At a certain moment the conqueror—bhagawan—went into deep meditation—TINGENDZIN—on the part of the teaching known as the awareness of the profound.

So Buddha comes to Vultures Peak, all these practitioners gather with him there. They're all done their prayers and sat down and waiting for Buddha to do something, and he goes into deep meditation. I think that's so funny.

It would be like everybody gets to Diamond Mountain, Geshe, Michael gets on stage, he sits down, we're all waiting for his brilliance and he goes into meditation and doesn't say a thing.

What would we do? It seems to me we'd all sit down and go into meditation too and try to ride with his mind up.

But apparently that's not what you do.

Anyway, in Diamond Cutter Sutra, one brave soul gets up and interrupts his meditation. I always think that's pretty funny as well. 

Here nobody interrupts Lord Buddha. But Choney Lama says from this state that Lord Buddha is in this awareness of the profound, through that he is influencing these two special beings of all the special beings who are there, Avalokiteshvara and Shariputra, inspiring them to carry on a conversation that becomes the Heart Sutra.

At the end of the Heart Sutra, we hear ‘Buddha comes out of his meditation‘. He says, yeah, right, right, right. Well done. Everyone should practice the perfection of wisdom just as you have taught it. 

So we get confirmation that the conversation between Avalokiteshvara and Shariputra is valid and correct and it's considered then Buddha's words.

Buddha doesn't say anything until LEKSO, LEKSO, LEKSO.

But this whole sutra is called Buddha's words because the one who was there writing it down has been given permission to do so.

Here, because Lord Buddha is in this meditation called the awareness of the profound, he is orchestrating the whole teaching through these other beings.

It seems funny. Why would Buddha go into a meditation on the emptiness of appearing things?

Doesn't Buddha experience directly the emptiness of all appearing things all the time?

Why would he need to go into meditation on it?

Choney Lama points out that actually Buddhas are always doing stuff that they don't actually need to do. But they're doing it as a demonstration of what their disciples need to do, need to be able to do.

Our Buddha Shakyamuni, the story is he wasn't Buddha yet. He was born as a prince. He gets his renunciation, he ditches his home life, he makes mistaken spiritual practices and then he gets it right and he gets enlightened in that lifetime. Scripture describes that in fact that being had reached their total enlightenment lifetimes before, eons of lifetimes before.

And that the world we call earth and the beings on that world had the karmic virtue goodness to have a fully enlightened being appear on the world to demonstrate what those humans could do in order to reach that state themselves. So that being pretends to take a birth. They really took a birth. But right. Do do you see what I'm saying? The being that took that birth was already enlightened, pretending to not be enlightened yet, and then showing us what renunciation is like, showing us what wrong practice does, showing us what right practice does, showing us what getting enlightened in a final lifetime—which will happen to all of us. We'll—will be like. 

So here again, he doesn't need to go into a deep state of meditation on the awareness of the profound. But he does to show his disciples, I guess that it's something we need to do. Of course they know that already.

The ‚awareness of the profound‘ term has two factors.

One is it's telling us that Lord Buddha has set his mind single pointedly on the emptiness of these so-called existing things. 

That's the profound, the awareness of the profound means that that empty nature of all existing things, the state of mind that's appearing for that to happen. 

It's one of those concepts to work with and meditate on because we know the empty nature of things as an absence. Yet that absence needs to appear in some way. But if we think of it, appearance in the ordinary way, then we can't be understanding emptiness accurately.

It's an oxymoron to say an appearance of an absence, but it's not. It's like that's how you reach emptiness directly, is being able to have an appearance of an absence, a state of mind that can hold the appearance of an absence.

That's why it's so hard, it's so slippery. It's created only by good karma, virtue.

Appearance of the profound.

All of that one sentence.

Chenrezig and the Emptiness of the 5 Heaps

(72:20) YANG DEY TSE

There's DEY TSE again.

YANG DEY TSE is repeating. So again at a certain moment, like next.

JANGCHUP SEMPA SEMPA CHENPO PAKPA CHENRESIK WANGCHUK

All of that, anytime we mention Chenrezig, Avalokiteshvara, it's with all of these words.

JANGCHUP SEMPA, we learned, Buddhahood warrior.

JANGCHUP SEMPA  means Bodhisattva, warrior

CHENPO, great

Great warrior, not just a Bodhisattva. He's a great warrior Bodhisattva

PAKPA = he's seen emptiness directly already. 

He's somewhere along his path of habituation. 

WANGCHUK means power guy, powerful one.

We always hear: the Bodhisattva, the great warrior, the Arya, Chenrezig, powerful being.

Like this would be all hyphenated. You just don't say Chenrezig.

At the same time that Lord Buddha is sitting in his single pointed concentration on the awareness of the profound, Chenrezig, also SHERAB KYI PAROLTU CHINPA, perfection of wisdom.

ZABMO—awareness or deep, profound

CHUPAR NAMPAR TA SHING.

NAMPAR TA SHING means he's looking at it. 

Chenrezig is also turning his mind looking at the perfection of wisdom. ZABMO, the profound.

Chenrezig is also looking at the profound nature of something we don't know yet what.

PUNGPO NGAPO DEDAK LAYANG NGOWO NYI KYI TONGPARNAMPAR TA-O.

This is what Chenrezig is looking at the emptiness of. 

Lord Buddha is in the emptiness directly of all existing things, and he inspires Chenrezig to sit down into meditation and look at the nature, the true nature of our PUNGPO NGAPO.

PUNGPO = our heaps

NGAPO = the five heaps.

The five heaps. 

PUNGPO NGAPO DEDAK LAYANG

TONGPAR is that he's looking at the empty nature of the five heaps. Chenrezig is going through Kedrup Je‘s four step meditation. He does it fast. We're going to learn all four steps and we'll end up having the tools that we would be able to do this same practice that Avalokiteshvara is doing while Lord Buddha is in the deep state of awareness of the profound. 

Let's see how that gets translated. 

At a certain moment, the conqueror went into deep meditation on the part of the teaching known as the awareness of the profound.

At that moment too did the realized being pba—PAKPA, the great warrior—SEMPA CHENPO, the Lord of power—WANGCHUK, Loving eyes—Chenrezig see into this one deep practice the practice of the perfection of wisdom. And he saw perfectly that the five heaps, the five parts of a person were empty of any nature of their own.

All in that one paragraph. 

Let's talk about the five heaps a bit.

The Five Heaps

(77:54) SUK, TSORWA, DUSHE, DUJE, NAMPAR SHEPA

1. Heap: SUK—the Heap of Form

SUK means physical form. Physical form means our physical experiences, our physical body, our physical world. Mostly we could say our material world.

We make a distinction, me and my body and my outer world. As we use this meditation that that boundary of identity will start to blur and it can be damaging. Or if we get it right, it can be truly expanding in our identity. So don't push it too fast, but we will explore our physical being.

Now they call it SUK, form, for the first heap because for sighted people, which is most of us, thank goodness, like so much, I don't know, 95, 98% of our experience is through our vision. Of course we have lots of sound, smell, taste, touch. But when we think of our physical world, automatically we think of the things that appear as physical things and their color shape, they're through our visual sense.

If we were blind, especially born blind, it would be completely different. But it's intended to not limit our understanding of our physical form, but to indicate that we really do relate mostly through our vision.

Form.

PUNGPO means heaps.

A heap means a whole pile of stuff that fits in a given category. Like you sweep up the autumn leaves that have fallen and you make this great big pile. You've seen that video of that Labrador dog running out of the house and flying into this big pile of leaves. That's what a PUNGPO is, a heap.

Our physical nature is a big heap of stuff. Gross physical body, parts of the physical body right, down to the really tiny pieces, our tiny cells, et cetera. 

Our outer world, the same, colors and shapes, but also decibels that become sounds that become things that make the sound that become… And odors, tastes and the tactile sensation, which is different than form—tactile.

All of that and all the things that are within all of that is inside this first heap called the heap of form.

2. Heap: TSORWA—The Heap of Feeling

Second heap is called the heap of feeling. Often they say feelings, multiple, plural. I find that if I use the word feeling for the second heap, it helps me not make the mistake where when I hear the word feelings, I automatically go to emotions and states of mind. That's not the second heap.

The second heap, the second pile of stuff in our experience is the automatic feeling, positive or negative about what's going on at the moment. There's thumbs up, there's thumbs neutral, there's thumbs down.

Physical, there's thumbs up, thumbs down, neutral.

Every instant, every karmic ripening, which is 65 per instant, we have the experience and we have a (showing thumbs up, thumbs neutral, thumbs down). It is happening so fast, but it's with every ripening, which is why it makes into a heap. It happens so fast, we're not even aware of it.

We won't learn in this class how to zero in on our heap of feeling and apply the four Kedrup Je steps to it. But once you know the four steps, you can have somebody who was at the retreat help you understand how to do that if you want.

It's a subtle but important awareness to develop. It's a second heap on purpose. Because it comes so instantly with our awareness of our me and my world—first heap. Feeling.

Positive feeling means we're attracted to. Negative feeling means we are this (thumbs down). Neutral means, I don't know that there's really ever neutral, just some kind of vague, too vague to decide state. 

Feeling is just this towards or away from.

3. Heap—The Hep of Dicrimination

DUCHE means discriminate.

Discrimination has a bad connotation. This discrimination is not that one. This discrimination—DUCHE—means telling things apart, to be able to distinguish between ficus tree and altar.

Geshe Michael calls it the capacity to discriminate. But to me a capacity means you use it or you don't use it.

This heap is the discriminating that we're doing constantly. We have to be able to determine between ficus tree and floor lamp and window in order to experience them that way. Don‘t we?

We have to know what they are, what they look like to be able to identify them that way. 

We do it so automatically that that's why it's so hard to scan the things in your room like an infant with no words, identities, nothing, to just experience the raw data. It's so impossible because we have the seeds for my room to be wall, ficus tree. Ficus tree, thumbs up, separate from window.

It's happened so fast that that's me and my life, me and my world. 

When we break these down with high level awareness in meditation, we can actually come to experience these fractions of instances that are happening moment by moment in which we find our attraction to push away from, in which we find our actual establishing what things are. 

That's the discriminating happening: establishing things, determining what they are, giving them their names and labels.

65 per instant it's happening.

In that discrimination, with that discrimination comes mine from yours, me from you. This I want that. I don't. You can see where this step we're building momentum from form, feeling, discriminating between things, to reacting and that's DUJE, all the other stuff that makes us up. 

That word in English—feelings. Feelings can mean emotions. I'm feeling so angry right now. I'm feeling so loving right now. Feeling. 

Feeling can also mean, oh, that feels good. Oh, that feels bad.

It's such a vague word. I'm sorry, we don't have a better one in English. 

Then we had feeling just in terms of the DUCHE, positive, negative, nothing more specific than that. 

Here the heap of form is this heap of anything that doesn't fit into the other for heaps. 

Let me come back to it because we need to know what the fifth heap is so we can tell what's in the fourth heap.

5. Heap: NAMPAR SHEPA—The Heap of Awareness

The fifth heap is NAMPAR SHEPA, which means awareness, our raw awareness. Also a very, very slippery thing because to be aware of our awareness, it gets confusing.

Our awareness is basically our subject side, subject-object-interaction between.

What makes me subject side is this awareness from its side. Once we try to become aware of that awareness, the awareness itself becomes the object of our awareness. And that's not quite it.

We learn how to do that in Lobsang Chukyi Gyeltsen‘s Mahamudra training, which I actually just decided I'm going to share on Tuesday morning, 7:00 AM to 9:00 AM starting the end of January. It'll show up somewhere in advertising what I'm sharing. But it has 33 x 2 hour classes that are part meditation, part class. It's going to take six months or a year to get through the whole thing. It's a meditation practice that leads us to awareness of awareness.

I find it fascinating and I need to study it again, which is why I'm sharing it. Because I won't make myself do it if I don't do it for somebody else and I need it. Anyway, advertisement. 

Awareness is still a heap because there's awareness of visual object, visual. The eye awareness, the ear awareness, the smell awareness, the taste awareness, the tactile awareness, the awareness of thought.

Awareness is also a heap of stuff. There's no single thing ‚awareness‘ that's being aware. It is changing, changing, changing, changing. 

So we have physical. 

We have feeling—thumbs up, thumbs down. 

We have discriminating between things. 

And then we have awareness.

4. Heap: DUJE—The Heap of All the Other Things That Make Us Up

Heap number four is all the other things that make us up—DUJE. 

It's usually translated ‘compositional factors‘.

Geshe Michael gets so exasperated with that translation, because it's so meaningless, it's so limited. Compositional factors means here's my friend the pen. If I were to, oh, I thought I could take it apart easily. You unscrew it and it's got that long narrow thing in the spring. It's got all these different pieces, parts to it and you put them all together and you compose it into a pen.

But it's like that. That's not only what our DUJE, our heap number four is.

Our heap number four is our experiences, our reactions to what's happening to heap one, heap two, heap three, and heap five.

Here we are, and then we interact with something or somebody, we have the thumbs up, this that, and then our ‚I want‘ or ‘I don't want‘ and ‘I like it‘ or ‘I don't like it‘. That's the discriminating.

But then it's like, oh, I love that. Oh, I don't like that. Oh that sounds beautiful. Oh right. It's all our other factors. So in that is our mental afflictions. All those others are mental afflictions as well. But here's in heap number four is where all our mental afflictions come into play. Our wrong view, our jealousy, our love, our joy, our compassion, our anger, our frustration, our irritation.

It's like those are all the pile of leaves in our heap number four. It's a big one. 

Again, when we know our four steps of Kedrup Je, we can dig into stuff that's in our heap number four. You kind of can't do it with the heap overall, but stuff that's in heap number four. Identify the raw data, identify the misunderstanding of its true nature, actually experience it the way we do and then remove that and see what's left. We'll learn how to do it. But we won't do it with feeling unless you ask somebody to help you all.

(95:10) TOMPAR = Empty of their own

NAMPAR TA-O = One should see that, one should look at that.

This is saying that Chenrezig also has sat down into meditation and he's meditating on, he's looking at TA-O, the empty nature of the five heaps.

Buddha has gone into meditation and Chenrezig has gone into meditation. It's like what's the rest of us to do? Maybe go into meditation too.

So what happens next? 

Fortunately, Buddha knows that we're all going, wait, wait, we gathered for a teaching, somebody say something.

DENE SANGYE KYI TU TSE DANG DENPA SHARADVATIPU

Let's just start there. 

DENE means, ‘and then‘

If you listen to his Holiness the Dalai Lama's talks, it's like the one word I could pick out. He'd go DENE, DENE. And you could tell it means ‘and then‘.

So these two are in meditation and we're all waiting for what happens. Then DENE SANGYE KYI.

SANGYE is another word for Buddha.

SANGYE KYI TU TSE DANG

SANGYE KYI TU means by the power of the Buddha. By the mystic power of the Buddha. The term mystic is not in there. But SANGYE KYI TU means Buddha inspires something to happen. 

Again, we wouldn't know it except that this one who's writing it down for us, he was there and must have in some way been at the level with one of his great 10 powers to know that Buddha inspired this next stuff to happen.

Again, it's telling us that Lord Buddha is conducting this whole teaching, even though he hasn't said anything yet. It tells us again that we can use this or trust this as words of the Buddha.

SANGYE KYI TU

TSE DANG DENPA SHARADVATIPU

This is who he inspired to speak.

SHARIVATIPU. Shariputra is how we usually hear his name. Sometimes it's expanded to Sharadvatipu and Choney Lama says, who is this guy Shariputra?

The PUTRA part of Shariputra means son, the son of somebody. His mother's name was Sharika. So why he didn't become Shariikavatipu, I don't know. But his name Shariputra just means the son of Sharika. They don't tell us who Sharika was, but she must have been special to have Sharivati as her son. I guess.

Lord Buddha inspires Sharivatipu. 

Now, DENPA SHARADVATIPU

DENPA is a word that means has time left.

But it's a funny way of saying junior monk, a young monk.

I don't know if that means that he has novice monk vows, but not full vows yet. Or if it means he's in the later round of fully ordained monks. But the term is junior monk. 

Again, Choney Lama doesn't say anything about why they make this distinction, but it kind of gives us an idea. We've got Buddha and we've got Chenrezig Rezi, who in sutra is a high level Bodhisattva. We know how high he is because of all of the descriptors that go with his name every single time. 

Then we have Shariputra who maybe we would mistake him for being on the same level of Chenrezig if they didn't clarify he's the more beginner of the three. Maybe that's why they clarify that Sharipu as DENPA that we can relate to him. He's asking a question.

Who does he ask the question of?

JANGCHUP SEMPA SEMPA CHENPO PAKPA CHENRESIG WANGCHUK

Great Bodhisattva warrior, Arya Chenrezig, power guy.

Power in the sense of having those 10 powers, not power as in…

LA DIKE CHE ME SO

He asks this question.

He turns, the not so experienced Sharavatipu turns to the great warrior Chenrezig and asks this question.

This is what starts the actual teaching.

Sharavatipu asks.

Shariputra‘s Question

RIKKI PUAM RIKKI PUMO KANG LA LA SHERAB KYI PAROLTU CHINPA SABMOY CHEPAR DUPA DE JITAR LAPPAR JA?

We know the word RIK from RIKCHI, DUNCHI, DRACHI, SOKCHI. Remember that from course 6 recently?

It means type or family. 

Here, RIKKI PUAM, RIKKI PUMO, the type or family they're pointing out is this high family of Bodhisattvas.

Noble—PUAM

RIKKI PUAM means a woman who's in this noble family.

RIKKI PU—noble family, not meaning king or queen or that kind of noble but noble in the sense of aspiring to full Buddhahood, aspiring to seeing emptiness directly if they haven't already.

Those who have some amount of Bodhichitta, some amount of wisdom in them already.

RIKKI PUAM RIKKI PUMO

RIKKI PUMO is the men, the boys who were there. 

RIKKI PUAM is the women who are there.

Before, when they said who all was gathered, they didn't talk about men, women. It sounded like they were talking about, oh, it's only the men who are gathered. But in that batch of Bodhisattvas, now it's saying women and men are there. Maybe some were ordained, maybe some were not. But they are the ones gathered here who are of this noble family.

Buddhism has the reputation of being patriarchal. Men focused. There are even those awful stories where it was to the one who became Arya Tara, Lady of Liberation, where she was asking for all kinds of (teachings and was said to) dedicate to your next life being a male body so you can get enlightened. You're so close. 

You know what she said? Yeah, right. You wait and see.

She goes on and gets enlightened in a female body.

But that's somehow overlooked for long, long time before the practices open up to women. 

Here, and there's argument apparently through history, it's like, no, no, female bodies can't get enlightened. Here's evidence that very early on Lord Buddha is including women in their wish for total enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings. They're right up there. Men and women. Bodhisattvas, called children of noble family.

But here, very specific men and women. Hooray.

Then KANG LA LA means all of us here.

What about all of us here?

SHERAB KYI PAROLTU CHINPA = Perfection of wisdom

SABMOY = The profound perfection of wisdom, as if there's one that's not profound.

CHEPAR DUPA DE JITAR LAPPAR JA

This makes it a question. 

Sharipu has turned to Avalokiteshvara and said, Please, 

If any son or daughter of noble family wanted to practice this deep practice of the perfection of wisdom—CHEPAR DUPA DE, what would they have to do? 

The English becomes, 

And then by the power of the enlightened one, the junior named Shariputra turned and asked this question of the great warrior, Loving Eyes, the realized one, the Lord of Power.

If any son or daughter of noble family hoped to follow the deep practice of the perfection of wisdom, what would they have to do? 

The first words actually spoken are from Shariputra asking the question.

We've learned that in order for Buddha to teach anything somebody had to ask.

That tradition has come down, which makes sense. 

How often have we had something that we know and we try to share it with someone who hasn't asked and we're so offended because they argue with us or they turn us off.

How often does unrequested advice get absorbed? 

Then look at it karmically, how often do I accept unrequested advice? Not very often, I admit. Which tells me I could change that and then maybe my words would be more effective for people. But even still, when we ask, we're saying to our own mind, I'm open to receive. That's why we always start every class with asking, making offerings and asking. A teaching won't happen until somebody has asked for it. Just keep asking.

Here's the same thing. If any son or daughter of noble family, meaning of the Bodhisattva, even Bodhisattva-wannabe, of noble family, hoped to follow the deep practice of the perfection of wisdom, what would they have to do? 

That starts the whole teaching.

Chenrezik’s Answer

I still have some time. So let's carry on. 

Next comes

DEKE CHE MEPA DANG JANGCHUP SEMPA SEMPA CHENPO PAKPA CHENRESIK WANGCHUK GI TSE DENPA SHARIPU LA DIKE CHE ME SO

This whole phrase is indicating that Shriputra has finished speaking and now Chenrezig is the one who's going to answer. 

This is just helping us understand how the conversation is going.

This then is the answer that the Lord of Power, the realized one, the great warrior, Loving Eyes gave to the junior monk named Shariputra.

That's what all of that word means. I'm not going to go through it word for word in the interest of time.

Like, all right, we're on the edge of our seat.

SHARIPU—short for Shariputra, short for Sharadvatipu and whatever we heard before, talking.

RIKKI PUAM, RIKKI PUMO = any son or daughter of noble family.

GANG LA LA =  all of them

SHERABKYI PAROLTU CHINPA SABMU = practice of the deep practice of the perfection of wisdom

CHEPAR DUPA DE = this. No, those words don't mean this, but where it's going is DITAR NAMPAR TAWAR JE TE.

This is what you need to see, practice. If a RIKKI PUAM, RIKKI PUMO wants to learn to practice the deep practice of the perfection of wisdom, this is what you have to do. 

DITAR NAMPAR TAWAR JE TE = we need to do this. 

English:

Here, Shariputra, is what any son or daughter of noble family should see, who hopes to follow the deep practice of the perfection of wisdom.

Now, remember, Chenrezig has been inspired by Lord Buddha to look specifically at the nature of the five heaps. 

Then Lord Buddha has inspired Sharivatipu to ask Lord Buddha: What‘s a Bodhisattva to do if they want to practice this deep practice of the perfection of wisdom?

Avalokiteshvara, Chenrezig says, Here is what you need to do. 

So we're following the conversation.

PUNGPO NGAPO, the five heaps, DEDAK KYANG NGOWO NYI KYI TONGPAR

NGOWO means their nature, their true nature

NGOWO NYI KYI TONGPAR is ‘see that emptiness is their true nature‘

JESU TA-O = the appearance of emptiness as their true nature.

In order to practice the deep practice of the perfection of wisdom, we would need to see how the true nature of the five heaps is their empty nature. We would need to reach this appearance of the empty nature of the five heaps.

Are we getting it? 

Those five heaps are, by the way, SUK TONGPA-O

TONGPA-O = means the emptiness, our physical heap is empty, empty of self nature, empty of its identity in it. 

The whole heap? Yes.

But every leaf in the pile, every physical experience that we have is empty of its own nature. 

Does that mean it doesn't really happen? 

No, that means it really does happen. It really is real, because every aspect of it has no nature of its own. It is what we experience.

When we first hear that, it's like, what? That's contradictory. But it's not. 

SUK TONGPA-O

TONGPA NYI SUK SO

Our body is empty is what SUK TONGPA-O means.

TONGPA NYI SUK SO is turning it around.

Sorry, I got ahead of myself. I need to mark that. We go back to that.

SUK TONGPA-O = my body is empty

TONGPA NYI SUK SO = emptiness is our body. 

That's a weird thing to say. 

Then SUK LE TONGPA NYI SHEN MA YIN = emptiness is nothing but my body and

TONGPA NYI LE SUK SHEN MA YIN NO means my body is nothing but emptiness.

This starts the conundrum part of the sutra, because it's like, wait. Okay, I get my body can be empty of self nature. And then emptiness is my body? Well, when my seeds ripen my body, well then yeah, my body is emptiness. The emptiness of my body is my body's emptiness. I don't know, it is slippery. But okay, I can buy those two. 

But then it says emptiness is nothing but my body. And it's like, whoa, wait a minute.

Then finally, my body is nothing but emptiness. It gets to be hard to wrap our mind around without digging in a little bit more deeply, which is where we'll start next class.

We will have a class on this Monday, the Monday coming, but then we hit the holidays and then we'll be gone for the meditation retreat. Our next Heart Sutra won't be until I think in January somewhere. I think I gave those dates. 

Monday's class we will end up with three steps of Kedrup Je‘s meditation, and we'll dig into this ‚My body is empty, emptiness is my body, emptiness is nothing but my body. And my body is nothing but emptiness.‘

You'll get to play with that for a couple of weeks before we come back. That might work out really well actually. 

All right, so thank you for the extra three minutes. 

[Dedication of Class]

Thank you so very much for the opportunity to share.

For the recording, welcome back. We are studying the Heart Sutra. This is class 4, December 23rd, 2024. I'll apologize beforehand. This cough is probably going to get in the way, especially during the meditation. No doubt. Just ignore it, please. I'm so sorry. Purification, purifying, make merit.

So we'll do our opening prayers. We'll go right into the meditation preliminaries and then our Kedrup Je's session using it to learn the third step. In the middle of that there's a part where I say, just listen to me. I need to talk you through the background. Then we do the meditation and you'll want to go, oh, I need to take notes, but please don't. Stay receiving in this one. 

Then also, before I forget, we've decided just for fun and merit to read the Diamond Cutter Sutra out loud at 10:00 AM on Christmas day.

We'll do it on Zoom if anybody's interested, and those who've had the lung can read along with me. ChrYs asked because she missed lung day for Diamond Cutter Sutra. So we're going to do it, so if anybody's interested, just send me an email. I'll send you the link when I get on about 9:45 Christmas day, Hanukkah day, and we'll launch the Heart Sutra into the universe again, can't hurt. 10:00 AM my time, Arizona time, which is the same as Colorado time now, not California time anymore.

[General Class Opening]

Let's gather our minds here as we usually do. 

Please bring your attention to your breath until you hear from me again. 

Let's hear the heart sutra again.

The Exhalted One

The Lady of Conquest

The Sutra on the Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom

The name of this sutra in Sanskrit is Arya Bhagavati Prajnya Paramita Hirdaya.

In Tibetan this is Pakpa Chomden Dema Sherabkyi Parultu Chinpay Nyingpo.

I bow first to all enlightened beings, and to every warrior saint. Once I heard this teaching.

The Conqueror was staying on Vulture’s Peak in the Keep of the King. With him was a great gathering of monks and a great gathering of warrior saints. At a certain moment, the Conqueror went into deep meditation on the part of the teachings known as the “awareness of the profound”. At that moment too did the realized being, the great warrior, the lord of power, Loving Eyes, see into this one deep practice, the practice of the perfection of wisdom. He saw perfectly that the five heaps – the five parts of a person – were empty of any nature of their own.

Then, by the power of the Enlightened One, the junior monk named Shari Putra, turned and asked this question of the great warrior, Loving Eyes, the realized one, the lord of power: “If any son or daughter of noble family hoped to follow the deep practice of the perfection of wisdom, what would they have to do?”

This then is the answer that the lord of power, the realized one, the great warrior, Loving Eyes, gave to the junior monk named Shari Putra: “Here, Shari Putra, is what any son or daughter of noble family should see who hopes to follow the deep practice of the perfection of wisdom.”

“See first all five heaps – all five parts of a person – are free of any essence of their own. Your body is empty, emptiness is your body. Emptiness is nothing but your body and your body is nothing but emptiness.”

“The same is true of your feelings, and your ability to discriminate between things, and the other factors that make you up, and all the different kinds of awareness that you possess: all of them are empty.”

“And thus we can say, Shari Putra, that every existing thing is emptiness. Nothing has any characteristic of its own. Nothing ever begins. Nothing ever ends. Nothing is ever impure. Nothing ever becomes pure. Nothing ever gets less, and nothing ever becomes more.”

“And thus we can say, Shari Putra, that with emptiness there is no body. There are no feelings. There is no ability to discriminate. There are none of the other factors that make you up and there is no awareness.”

“There are no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; nothing to see, nothing to hear, nothing to smell, nothing to taste, nothing to touch and nothing to think of. There is no part of you that sees, there is no part of you that is aware that you are seein; and this is true all the way to the part of you that thinks, and the part of you that is aware that you are thinking.”

“There is no misunderstanding your world. There is no stopping this misunderstanding, and the same is true all the way up to your old age and death, and to stopping your old age and death.”

“There is no suffering. There is no source of suffering. There is no stopping this suffering. There is no path to stopping this suffering.”

“There is no knowledge, there is nothing to reach, and there is nothing not to reach.”

“Thus it is, Shari Putra, that warrior saints have nothing to reach, and because of this, they are able to practice the perfection of wisdom, and stay in this perfection of wisdom. This frees them from every obstacle in their minds, and this frees them from all fear. They go beyond all wrong ways of thinking, and reach to the ultimate end of nirvana.”

“All the Enlightened Beings of the past, the present and the future too, follow this same perfection of wisdom, and thus bring themselves to perfect enlightenment: to the matchless state of a totally enlightened Buddha.”

“Thus are they the sacred words of the perfection of wisdom; the sacred words of great knowledge; sacred words of the unsurpassable; sacred words that are equal to the One beyond all equal, sacred words that put a final end to every form of pain; sacred words you should know are true, for false they cannot be; sacred words of the perfection of wisdom, which here I speak for you:

Tadya ta, ga-te ga-te, para ga-te, para sang ga-te, bodhi so ha

“And thus it is, Shari Putra, that great warrior saints must train themselves the profound perfection of Wisdom.”

With this, the Conqueror stirred himself from his deep state of meditation. He turned to the great warrior, the realized one, Loving Eyes, the Lord of Power, and blessed his words saying, “True”. “True”, he said. And “true” again.

“Thus it is O son of noble family, and thus is it. One should follow the profound perfection of Wisdom just as you have taught it. Every one of Those Gone Thus rejoice in your words as I do.”

And when the Conqueror had spoken thus, the junior monk Shari Putra took joy, and the warrior, the realized one, Loving Eyes, the lord of power took joy as well. And all the assembled disciples took joy and so did the entire world – with its gods and its men, and near gods and spirits too take joy. All sang their praises of what the Conqueror had spoken.

Meditation With Kedrup Je’s 1st-3rd Step of the Four Part Meditation

(14:15) Let's settle in and do our preliminaries. I'm going to go kind of swiftly.

Sink that body, raise that energy, bring the focus to your breath, allowing the physical to relax with the exhales, the awareness more keen, curious, interested with every inhale.

Recall that person we're wanting to be able to help ultimately someday. Feel in your heart your wish that their suffering could really, really end.

Bring to mind that precious holy being, the one you know who is helping you become the one for the other that will help them. 

See them there. Feel your admiration for them.

Tell them why you admire them so much. What is it that you aspire to become? 

Recall your refuge.

Because of the marriage of karma and emptiness I can create the causes for the end of that other’s suffering, for the end of all suffering.

Take refuge in the Heart Sutra. Our learning its meaning will help us use it to change ourselves, make this transformation in ourselves, in our world.

As a result of our acts of refuge, make some offering to that precious being. Tell them of something that you did quite intentionally because of something they've taught you.

Of course they know already, but they want you to hear yourself telling them, offering it to them, to please them—which it does. Everything you do does.

But they want you to see yourself pleasing your teacher.

So see them pleased.

And then feel safe enough with them to clear your heart of some negativity.

Tell them of some karmic mistake, recent and specific,

Just the facts. Tell them why it was a mistake. Feel your regret.

Offer this meditation and this class as your Antidote and establish a power of restraint.

Feel already that that negativity has been lifted and fill that space with some rejoicing, some goodness you saw someone else do.

Another goodness you did, and maybe another.

See them so happy with you.

Ask them to please stay close, to continue to inspire you and guide you.

That other people around you that help you and inspire you and uplift you or even challenge you stay close. 

Then dedicate this little bit that we've done so far to the easing of the distress of that other person and everyone related to them in any way.

Then if you need to shift and wiggle you do so now.

Then settle back in, back to your breath for a few.

(23:15) Then turn your focus to Kedrup Je’s sequence.

Its first step is to scan your physical being. Starting with your outer experience coming around to your own physical body experience

You can do it with your eyes open if you wish. But once you're familiar with this stage, in your mind's eye you scan what's in your room.

This first step's just to experience. Imagining you're an infant, no names, no labels, no judgments, just interest.

Come around even to the raw data that we would call our own body.

Second step is to land on one of those physical objects of your being. Let its identity and qualities reveal themselves to you.

See the thing as it is out there, its identity, its qualities coming at you, showing themselves to you in them, from them.

Really identify your belief that that's true. It's such a familiar state of mind. It can actually be hard to hold.

If we've studied for a while, it's a state of mind we've been trying to reject. But we want to find it and experience it so that we can investigate whether or not it's accurate.

So land on one object and explain to yourself why it must be true that that object's identity is in it from it, its qualities in it from it.

We’ll stay just two minutes. 

Now to move to step three, I need to give you a little background. So listen.

The Highest School of Middle Way says that that thing you are looking at, believing to have its identity in it, it is dependent origination. All things are dependent origination.

So what does it mean to exist as dependent origination?

On one level, to say something arises depending on something else means that that something arises from its own causes, its own causes and conditions.

And so it's not got its full identity and qualities in it from it all by itself. It depends on its causes having brought it about. 

This is useful, but it's not enough to help us stop experiencing things that make us unhappy, appear to make us unhappy. It won't help us get enlightened to understand that dependent origination means things depend upon their causes. 

In fact, we already know that.

In investigating that, we might say, well that's an incomplete explanation because there are existing things that actually have no causes. How would they be dependent origination? What do they depend upon? 

We learned the logic that says, they're still dependent origination because they depend upon their parts. A whole object, a whole thing caused or uncaused must have parts that make up the whole. Without the parts there'd be no whole, and without the whole, the parts are meaningless except that each part in and of itself is a whole made up of other parts.

So that dependent origination is also interesting and helpful, but not sufficient to transform ourselves and our world from a behavior that perpetuates unhappiness to a behavior that creates nothing but happiness and more happiness for everyone.

The Highest School of Buddhism says that as we continue to investigate looking for those identities and qualities, we will come to recognize that dependent origination means that those existing things caused or not caused have no nature in them, none at all.

The nature they seem to have is the one that is given to them by that being who is experiencing them. Dependent origination means that the object's identity and qualities depend upon the experience, the experiencer. They have no other nature than that, and that is how they exist.

So to have no nature does not mean they have no existence.

All things are blank in nature, available to receive the nature we give them. That's incorrectly worded. They don't receive anything. We receive the identity we put on them in our experience of them.

Then of course the next question is, why does one person give an identity and qualities of an object in one way and another person gives it in a different way? What's making that?

And why then can two people seem to see an object and agree that it's a tree?

Why isn't everyone's experience of everything so vastly different that we couldn't even interact?

To experience in a certain way, those experiences are results. Results do need causes. We learned that the way we make the imprints in our mind that become the results, which are our experiences, is by way of how we are aware of ourselves interacting with others. Our personal behavior imprints our own awareness and influences it to create our future experiences.

This dependent origination, depending upon our behavior, puts the ability to change our outer reality into our own hands by way of our own behavior. That's a dependent origination concept that will work to help us stop perpetuating the suffering that we see in our world—our own and others‘. 

Highest dependent origination, when we see it directly, experience it directly, will be that experience of seeing the karmic seed ripen revealing your experience. It will be that direct experience that the object that you thought had its own identity, its own qualities, in fact did not, does not. That the object you experienced is one that you have created, and are creating as long as it's there as your experience.

With that in mind, our step three of Kedrup Je’s meditation is to land on that object, find your conviction that its identity, its qualities are in it, and then simply wonder whether or not that could really be true, based on actual experience of it.

We'll do this step three imposing the result. But as you use this meditation to explore, you'll use different reasonings to show yourself why your step two belief cannot be accurate to explain the actual experience of the object.

So step number three: look at that object. Feel your belief, its identity is in it, from it.

Then ask yourself, does every being who sees that object, experience it in the same way as me?

Our minds at first go, of course.

But you think a little further and you can easily find someone who could see that object and identify it differently, like it differently, even call it something different.

Recognize then that something about that object must be depending upon the way you see it to be what it is for you.

Impose the idea that when you scan the room and you land on an object, and its label and identity and quality comes into experience, impose on that an awareness of your own mind imaging making that. Imagine you can go from color and shape to object’s identity, quality and function, your own mind pouring that image onto it.

Just pretend you see it happening.

From baby—colors and shapes, to dependent origination—Oh, ficus tree, microphone, video camera, spray bottle.

Unique to you. Each experience unique to you, coming from you.

Now scan again back at level two.

No, no, those objects, identities, functions have to be in them, and then I see them the way I see them. They have to have their identity first.

Then show yourself if that were true, their identity couldn't be different depending on who's looking, and yet they can be different depending on who's looking.

I bring something to the party—Level three.

Go back to level one on unidentified colors and shapes.

If we can even do that, it tells us that the identity is not in the object or we could never not see it. Or actually we could never actually see it at all.

Go back to level three. My mind, making this experience unique to me, making the object there be what it is.

My mind forcing me to see things in the way that I do unique to me. Results of my own behavior. And so how I respond to them is how I will change, how I will create my future.

Think of how you'll use this conclusion in your efforts to help that other in some deep and ultimate way someday. The suffering that we see in them, is our suffering. And so we can stop creating it. We can create different.

So turn your mind to that precious being. Thank them for their guidance.

Ask them to stay, and dedicate what we've done so far to being the antidote to that thing that you're purifying. 

Then feel your body on your chair, yourself in your room.

When you're ready, open your eyes. Take a stretch.

(48:46) You see where we're going. From just raw experience, which is actually difficult, to clearly experiencing our belief that things‘ identities, qualities, functions are in them. They are too Sarahni. Then applying our understanding of dependent origination at the highest level.

If you've got time, explore the lower levels. It is really helpful to see how we cling to things‘ dependent origination because they're based on causes. It is true, but insufficient until the cause you land on is: Oh, my behavior.

Then that things exist independent upon causes is absolutely valid and absolutely useful. But you see you have to come all the way around back to it.

Then existing dependent on parts, we'll talk about it when we're talking about the heaps more. But things have no nature other than the nature of the experiencer's experience of them unique to the experiencer, forced on them by the past imprints made when the experiencer was experiencing doing something to what they experience as other. Which is kind of key.

It's why there are others in the world. Not why as in somebody said they had to be. But that's how we create other. There's something significant about that exchanging self and other practice that starts as the actual exchange and evolves into actually expanding yourself to include others. It's all extraordinarily interwoven. When we start here and we start exploring, we eventually end up with this whole different self-identity. The whole different idea of what we mean by self changes.

That couldn't be true if ourself had some nature of its own, independent of the experience of the experiencer at the moment.

The difficulty is, as we're going through these levels and we reach this place where we're going to go from step three to step four, because you know what step four is going to be: the absence of something that we thought was there that was never there, but we believed was there and we interacted with those things in such a way to try to get what we want, and avoid what we don't want, which perpetuates the mistake. It's just like over and over again.

It's important at step three to notice if there's a reaction under there when we say, No, it's coming from my mind that we believe then that there's nothing there at all except what's coming from my mind.

As we learn all the ACIs, we learn how to investigate all of that. But here we get our first clue. As we learn the rest of the practice, we'll hear how to do step three a little different each time. It's too much to go into it all tonight or we won't ever get to class. 

Step three is dependent origination. How it is that everything you experience is depending upon your experiencing it. It's so beautiful. And how your experience of it is unique to you.

I would like to suggest between now and our next class, which isn't until into January, rather than trying to get it really right to see the images coming, really explore your reaction inside to this idea of ‚this thing that I'm is created by my experience of it‘, and how we go, Yeah but it has to be there first and right. 

Watch your mind, play with it both on and off the cushion. Not while you're driving, but you can do it in the grocery store. You can do it. Take the time, play with it. Please, between now and then and see what you come up with.

I offer that you could actually watch your mind go through those different schools of Buddhism. If you know the schools, you'll recognize yourself doing it.

Let's go back to Sutra. We'll do just a few more minutes and then take a break.

Review

(54:16) Buddha and his disciples have gathered at Vulture's peak and everybody's waiting for Buddha to do something and he goes into meditation on the empty nature of all so called things, existing things.

Then he inspires Shariputra.

Wait, Avalokiteshvara, Chenrezig probably takes one look at Lord Buddha and go, oh, I'll do that too. He goes into meditation. Only his meditation is looking at the five heaps, his five heaps: form, feeling, like reaction to experience, good, bad, good, bad, good, bad, good, bad. Discriminating between things, good that, bad that, this discriminating, telling things apart, identifying things. Aware of all of that, all those different kinds of awareness that you possess, six or eight or depending on what school. Then all the other things that make us up is all our reactions to all of that. I like it, I want it, I don't like it. You didn't hear me, you're disrespectful, you're not listening to me, blah, blah, blah, blah. Life is in heap number four.

Chenrezig is looking at all of that stuff and knowing, experiencing that none of it has any nature of its own. 

So he too is sitting in meditation and Shariputra, thank you Shariputra, is inspired by Lord Buddha, asked Chenrezig what he's doing.

So Shariputra, in all due respect, if a son or daughter of noble family, meaning an aspiring Bodhisattva, man or woman, wanted to practice the perfection of wisdom, this thing called the perfection of wisdom, what would they have to do?

Great question, right?

Perfection of wisdom we understand is the term for your state of mind that you have during and after your direct perception of emptiness, your direct experience of ultimate reality.

You then have, you could even say your mind is, the perfection of wisdom. You're not Buddha yet, but you now know the true nature that things don't have and the true nature that all things do have—things meaning experiences—have, even though you can't directly experience them that way you now know from direct experience that everything is driven by our behavior towards those things.

So you're so keenly aware that it's our reactions that are creating future experiences. 

When they're talking about, how do I practice the perfection of wisdom, for those who have not yet seen emptiness directly, our practice of the perfection of wisdom is what's happening along our first two paths: Path of accumulation, path of preparation. Where we've gained enough ‘Samsara is not acceptable anymore‘, enough renunciation that we go searching, and then enough goodness ripening that we find a path that seems to have the answers.

We meet somebody who teaches us the pen thing, and it clicks with us—because it doesn't with everyone.

We end up on our path of preparation, path number two, in which we're learning more. We learn, learn, learn, learn. We start to work with the ideas. 

We're studying, contemplating, meditating, applying our new ideas to serving and growing our goodness. Actually our purification and growing goodness is happening in path of preparation, moving us towards the ripening of that experience of seeing the seed ripen out of our mind to make the identity of the thing.

Oh my gosh. You sit down into meditation and try to explain it to yourself. 

Because of the power of it, you go into the direct experience of ultimate reality. I mean, off the thing gets you started, but the ultimate reality of your own you is what you encounter first, they say, in your TOM LAM, your path of seeing.

Path of seeing after countless lifetimes takes only 20 minutes or so, they say. Then there's an aftermath of stuff that happens that fills in the details because while you're in the path of seeing you are ultimate reality, which you can't say anything else about. So we're going to talk about it more, of course. We're going to try.

Then you come out of that and realizations come to you. It's like oh, oh, oh… The ramifications of what you experienced for that 20 minutes. 

Then you're on your path of habituation, which is getting used to living according to what you now know is true, but you can't see it directly again.

But you know it so deeply that your seeds are no longer imprinted with that full on ignorance that every seed was imprinted with before that. On your path of habituation, it's just a matter of time before you burn off all seeds that had ignorance in them without replanting them, and damaging them. It's not like you have to burn out every single one. You're damaging them as you see things wrongly but don't believe. You're applying yourself to new behavior. You are overriding old selfishness because the old selfishness was based on misunderstanding, and now you no longer misunderstand as you perceive your world in the same old wrong way.

Path of habituation is the time when you're making your new seeds that will make you into a Buddha. If you went into your path of seeing with a mind imbued with Bodhichitta, which you all will or have, and then your end goal is Buddhahood, which is the fifth path. Path of no more learning means you've also overcome the obstacles to omniscience and you are now perceiving moment by moment Buddha you and Buddha paradise emanating in the next moment, forever. And you start your career as you are Buddha you.

Shariputra is asking Chenrezig, how do we do that?

Chenrezig then said, oh, this is what any son or daughter of noble family should do if they want to practice the perfection of wisdom. See first all five heaps, all five parts of a person as being empty of any essence of their own.

All five heaps.

We've got our five heaps: form, feeling, discriminating between things—telling things apart, all our reactions to all of that stuff and the awareness through which we experience all those things.

All of those heaps of stuff, all the little pieces of every heap, none of 'em have any essence of their own, any nature of their own.

But it does not mean they don't exist at all. It's important to catch our mind flipping over into, oh well then there's nothing out there, I'm just making it all. Well then, wait a minute, you would have to be part of that. Oh, there's nothing out there. And then who you is making it all there? There has to be, but there can't be something first that then receives something else without that experience being also as something first receiving something else.

Our linear minds keep going back to, well, if there's not something to land my projection on, there can't be anything at all. It's the two cliffs.

If things don't exist in the way that I think they must not exist at all.

But if they don't exist at all, well then nothing can exist at all. And that doesn't work either. 

Middle Way is: Because they don't exist with any nature of their own they exist in the way I'm experiencing them to exist. The way you're experiencing things to exist, they do exist like that. Some things are awful, some things are wonderful, but none of them are awful or wonderful from them, in them, having to be like that.

Once they are like that, they are like that.

Once our projection says awful, the thing is awful.

Our projection is: the thing is awful from its own side.

And so it is, but it's not. You see, it's mistaken that it is.

Our experiences are valid. They're just mistaken.

As we become aware of making the mistake, I mean once we learn that, I don't know why this pops into my head making angel food cake. If you have the least bit of old residual oil in the bowl when you're whipping the egg whites or on the spoon that you stir the egg whites with, the egg whites will not whip no matter how long you whip them with the least bit of oil. So you can't use a plastic dish, you can't use a wooden, you can't... I learned this when I was 12 years old and why did it come up? 

Because, why did it come up? The least bit of right now that I know before I would start to make an angel food cake, I would make sure that my glass bowl and my glass utensils are all so perfectly clean.

Because I know the mistake, the results of the mistake, I just don't make that mistake anymore. Thank you very much. 

But we have to really, really know the mistake before we can impose ourselves a behavior that prevents making it again. 

So Heart Sutra, Kedrup Je’s meditation is this sequence through which we can really systematically explore where we're making the mistake and find it more and more subtly, more and more soon in the process of our interaction with someone.

The beauty of using meditation over time, not just for a couple of weeks. 

Alright, so now let's take a break. We're back up to where we left off, which is the emptiness of our first heap. 

My body is empty, emptiness is my body. So let's take a break and then we'll dig back into the actual sutra. 

(Break)

Choney Lama’s Commentary—Analysis Part 3

The Emptiness of our Body

(68:46) We left off last class at these four classic Heart Sutra lines.

SUK TONGPA-O, TONGPA NYI SUK SO,

SUK LE TONGPA NYI SHEN MA YIN,

TONGPA NYI LE SUK SHEN MA YIN NO.

SUK meaning the heap number one. But SUK actually means visual. It means form, which means the colors and shape part of our world. But it's expanded to mean all the different parts of our physical world, which includes things we hear, smell, taste, touch as well.

SUK TONGPA-O means your body is empty. 

The physical nature of your world is empty.

But if we say, oh, my physical world is empty, it doesn't hit home as well as your body is empty. 

I even say, when I'm doing it myself, my body is empty. Because your body's empty. That's fine.

So my body is empty, but what does that mean?

‚My body is empty‘ means this thing I call my body. It's limited to this. But it's not really, because anything that's part of my physical world is included in this thing called my physical heap.

But to investigate this thing is powerful.

So we'll call it right now, we're just talking about my body is empty. But really we're talking about all physical form.

My body is empty, meaning it's empty of any identity, or qualities, or function being in it, from it—like we talked about before. It has no nature of its own. It has no essence. Its ultimate nature is its absence of any specific nature.

It's not at all, it's not non-existent. But what's there as my body is TONGPA NYI SUK SO. Emptiness is my body, says that second term. 

What that means is that the body that is here is karmically ripening mental images that—I want to say give that emptiness identity, but that'll be misunderstood. That for this thing to be here, karmic seeds ripen, emptiness of the karmic seeds ripening thing is also present.

The absence of the body that the karma makes here has to also be here for the karma to make the body that is here. 

SUK TONGPA-O—no nature of its own.

TONGPA NYI SUK SO—what's here is karmic seeds ripening and nothing but that.

SUK LE TONGPA NYI SHEN MA YIN—emptiness is nothing but my body. Meaning that if no karmic seeds ripen of this body, there is no emptiness of this body, is there?

It's not like there's an emptiness waiting to get its karmic seeds ripening on it. This is telling us.

TONGPA NYI LE SUK SHEN MA YIN NO—my body is nothing but emptiness. Sounds contradictory.

Yes it is, because it's my karmic seeds ripening. But even it takes my karmic seeds ripening the body that I have for that body to have emptiness as its ultimate nature and the karmic seed ripening it as its dependent nature. That very process that's happening has no nature of its own, it can't.

The existence of my body depends upon its emptiness. That's not right.

The existence of my body must also have emptiness in order to be the existence of my body in the way that it is, unique to me and unique to you. 

If you've been following all this about Sarahni‘s body, you're understanding the emptiness of Sarahni‘s body and the Sarahni‘s body that's here as your seeds ripening.

Then you take that and you do the same for your own body. 

If you've been hearing it and turning it around to, okay, she wants me to think of my own body.

Is my emptiness there first and then my seeds ripen making me there?

No, that can't be right.

Do my seeds ripen first and then the emptiness is there?

No, that can't be right.

They have to be happening together. But then I could experience it from this way, the karmic ripening way, or I could experience it from this way, the emptiness way. I see that you can't do either one without the other.

SUK TONGPA-O, TONGPA NYI SUK SO,

SUK LE TONGPA NYI SHEN MA YIN,

TONGPA NYI LE SUK SHEN MA YIN NO.

These four statements. It's true of every part of every experience. 

We see it, we experience it, we work with it with our world of visual form because that's our biggest world.

But then it applies to more and more subtle parts of our experience as well.

Once you master these four for your visual world, you use the same process to master those four down to the very subtleties of awareness.

It's called the four applications of profundity. 

Things we see are emptiness. Emptiness is the things we see.

Let me rephrase it.

Every experience is emptiness. Emptiness is every experience. Emptiness is nothing other than every experience and every experience is nothing other than emptiness. 

Why isn't it talking about karma?

It doesn't say it directly, but there's no emptiness of anything unless there's something to be empty.

The dependent origination is the experience part. That's the ripening. The things we see are emptiness. Every karmic ripening is emptiness. You see? Okay.

(77:25) Geshehla went into this thing about literal and figurative.

When Buddha taught, sometimes he was speaking literally and sometimes he was speaking figuratively.

Sometimes when he said, look, I'm speaking literally here, he was actually speaking figuratively. It's like you can't rely on what Buddha actually said to decide whether he's speaking literally or figuratively. 

Literally means he's saying exactly what he means.

Figuratively means he's using words in a way that we have to think about it to figure out exactly what he was trying to get across to us. 

Literal is on all the teachings that said, look, everything about your samsaric experiences suffering. It's either obvious suffering or the suffering of change or pervasive suffering, and don't think there's a moment of some samsaric existence that's not suffering. Because then you'll want to keep a samsaric existence that's not so bad, and then that's a big blocker. That's pretty literal.

Then he also said, be kind, don't harm, don't harm, don't harm.

But then in another teaching, he goes, Yeah, but kill your father and mother. 

Wait, that can't be consistent. He can't mean that literally because that's one of, that's two of the five immediate crimes, wrong deeds. He can't mean that literally. What are you supposed he mean ‚Kill my mother, kill my father‘? 

We learned that he meant our attachment to mom and dad as powerful karmic objects will keep us within the cycle of suffering. 

At some point it's a higher service to them to maybe back out of the relationship to meditate deeply or, No, I'm sorry, I can't come right now because I've got a practice to do. Your practice? How's your practice more important than me? 

It's like, yeah, it actually is. That's how I'm going to help you. I'll be there at three o'clock instead of 7:00 AM. I'm so sorry.

Have that be a higher service to them. It's a hard state of mind to get because people will not understand. They will get mad at you, and they won't want your help until you fix that karma. 

Is he speaking literally or figuratively when he says, 

Your body is empty. Emptiness is your body.

Emptiness is nothing but your body.

And your body is nothing but emptiness.

Figuratively, right? I can't be nothing but emptiness.

Emptiness is an absence.

What does an absence look like?

Can't see me. If I can't see you, you can't see me. An absence.

My body can't be an absence or it couldn't be here.

This is a presence. But in order to be the presence that's here for me and here for you, it must lack its own nature, because if it had its own nature, it would impose that nature onto everybody.

It would not be allowing your unique experience of it, because it's like it has its own nature. You have to experience this in this way because it's in it. It's in me.

It gets really confusing.

We know we depend on causes and conditions and et cetera. But at the same time, when we're interacting with other people, we think there's a me with my personality. People like me and people don't like me. But everybody knows me the same way.

Then you think about it for a minute and it's like, they can't possibly for all those different reasons.

This pendulum swings. It's like, no, there has to be a real me. Well, there can't be a real me.

That's what we're trying to find. That the me I think is here has to lack self nature or it couldn't be the me I think is here.

That always brings up ‘The hat, it has three corners‘ game as kids.

Geshehla brought it up because he wants to make this distinction between emptiness as an absence of something and the misperception of emptiness as a presence of something.

Thinking that, oh, my body has a true nature of being empty, and our mind automatically thinking of that emptiness as a thing. 

That's not empty, right?

It's a mistaken idea and it ends up trying to be explained as, Oh, it's like a black hole, or it's like a clear bubble. You try to use some kind of metaphor or analogy to explain what this thing ‘emptiness‘ is like. Is saying to our own mind that we're thinking of emptiness as a presence, as an appearing thing.

Well, it has to be an appearing thing because TONG LAM is seeing emptiness directly. Why would you call it seeing emptiness directly if it's not a thing you're going to see?

Words fail, it's not a thing you're going to see.

It's going to be an absence of things that we thought were there that we're never, are in fact impossible. It's some state of being your absent nature. 

Then in that state, there can't even be an awareness of me, can there? Because any awareness of me or anything is a presence. It's a ripening, it's an appearing thing. 

Even if it's an ineffable appearing of an aware, an instant of awareness is an appearing thing whose nature is absence of a self nature, absence.

We're trying to wrap our mind around the presence of an absence. It's almost impossible to do to, conceptually. 

These four: My body is empty. Emptiness is my body…

It can't be literal, because it would then be saying absence, absence, absence, absence. 

Figuratively, it means every moment of my experience of body is this pair of what's appearing and the empty of self nature nature of what's appearing. It takes those two. 

It takes commentary, it takes learning to understand what those words mean if we don't have the seeds to hear them and go, Oh, that's all about dependent origination and emptiness. 

So now you have the seeds to go, Ah, that's all about the pair, not a literal teaching. Although curiously in the course on literal and figurative, the conclusion was: Anytime Buddha‘s talking about emptiness, he's speaking literally except not in this part of the Heart Sutra.

You can't ever really get to the, all right, I understand between literal and figurative. There's no such nature of things that are either literal or figurative. Do you see?

This is so crazy slippery.

One way to get at a conceptual emptiness is to use that phrase: 

I am, for example, the opposite of all that I am not.

I am the opposite of all that I am not.

I like to demonstrate it like this.

You see that thing?

Then, do you see the difference?

This one I've canceled stuff to come up with something.

This one I put it there. 

If you think about all existing things that are not you, and then cancel them, what's left?

You.

It's a way of wrapping your mind around an absence that is something.

Or an absence that creates something. Nope, can't get away with that.

How to wrap our mind around an absence.

Are these two the same thing?

They're both a heart.

But they were arrived at in a different way. Arrived at the same thing. 

RiNpoche used to say, Look, fast food, if you look at the ingredients, all the ingredients listed are the same. But you put it together and now it looks like a subway sandwich, and you put it together and now it looks like a deli salad. 

You put it together in different ways and you come up with different things.

The process of dependent origination: no natures of anything. The natures they have are the ripening seeds of the being experiencing them, is like all the same ingredients showing up as different things. 

Profound dependence, dependent origination and emptiness is like fast food. The ingredients are our behaviors and the behaviors are what are mixing things up and creating. Now it looks like this. Now it looks like this. Now it looks like this. Now it looks like that. Never the same two moments in a row, but never not existent. We're never not projecting something, which is why it's so hard to find the moment that it's happening.

Geshela says, the implications are important here.

Everything that we experience does not come from its own side. It's all coming from our own mind.

But that—I always think wrongly when I hear that it. It's coming from our own karmic seeds ripening. Which is to say my mind. Because what is karma? Movement of the mind and what motivates.

At some point, try to trigger when you hear them say ‘mind‘, think karma. As opposed to thinking, my intellect, my awareness, my me and my mind that has karma. Think karma when you hear mind. 

When I tried to do that, it's like, huh?

But it'll be helpful in the long run.

Everything I experience does not come from its own side. It's all coming from my mind forced by my karmic seeds ripening. Therefore, if I can make different seeds, I can make different experiences. 

Therefore, my behavior is my power.

That's how I plant the seeds in the mind that ripen to make my experience in the future.

How long in the future? Next life, lifetimes after that or made powerfully enough that they actually ripen in this lifetime. But the thing is there's always seeds ripening. 

It really doesn't matter so much whether I do a deed this week and it ripens next week. Something ripens next week, and the deed that I did today influences everything in there. So that something that was going to ripen in this way, ripens in that way instead. Whether it was the exact seed ripening, who cares? It was the influence of the current behavior that influenced the outcome.

Technically we're already doing it. Everything we do influences our future and—I don't want to say ‘changes what was going to be‘, because what was going to be hasn't happened yet—but is influencing our future. 

Our habit is to be in react mode. Something happens, we react. Something happens, we react. 

What we're trying to train ourselves to be is to be in plant mode.

It's still a reaction. Something happens, we respond. But plant mode means, I'm going to respond this way. Because of karma and emptiness, because of Bodhichitta, because… 

Instead of automatic pilot I'm going to behave. I'm going to consciously behave.

Maybe you don't really do anything all that different, but now you're just trying to be aware. I am planting. I'm not just reacting. I'm creating my future moment by moment, by moment.

When we can be in that space, hugely, huge shift in how we engage in our world. It's not so hard to do when you're all by yourself. But as soon as you introduce another person, our old seeds come back. It's very hard to be in this mindful plant moment without seeming like you're either distanced or not quite present because you are so focused on your response. But you get good at it as you work with it and as you practice.

(95:40) Finally, I'm so sorry, just finally getting back to the sutra. But see we need all this background and then once we have it, then we just start to skate with the rest of the sutra. 

We covered this. If you wanted to practice the perfection of wisdom, what would we have to do?

This then is the answer. We said that one before too. 

See first all five heaps as being empty of any essence of their own. We did that one.

Then, thus we can say, Shariputra, oh, no, no, we didn't do that one yet.

Here's where we left off.

For fun, Chrys, would you read for us please? 

DESHIN DU TSORWA DANG, DUSHE DANG, DUJE NAM DANG,

NAMPAR SHEPA NAM TONGPA-O.

Anybody recognize these?

DUSHE, DUJE, NAMPAR, SHEPA.

They are the five heaps.

We just said specifically about the heap of SUK, form: My body is empty, emptiness is my body.

Now he's saying the same is true of your feeling heap, your ability to discriminate between things heap—DUSHE, all the other factors that make me up—DUJE, and NAMPAR SHEPA—the consciousness heap. 

We've already talked about the five heaps: 

• form, physical world

• TSORWA, feeling towards each experience. Just attracted to it or repulsed from it. Physically, mentally. 

• DUJE, telling things apart. Which these are not really sequential. I mean you could kind of say they are, but DUSHE and DUJE, they happen so swiftly. You're attracted to something because it's got its quality in it and then you're distinguishing it comes full on. You're already attracted to it even before it's fullon identified, because of the way the seed is ripening. Then all the other factors that make us up is all that comes up in response to that experience. Our mental emotional reaction to it is what's in all the other factors. 

• The NAMPAR SHEPA is the awareness. Our awareness of colors and shapes being presented to our awareness. The awareness of which makes it into oh Ficus is true. Hearing, smell, those are different consciousnesses.

The same is true.

What's the same as true?

My feeling is empty. Emptiness is my feeling. Emptiness is nothing but my feeling. And my feeling is nothing but emptiness.

My discriminating between things has no nature of its own. When it's happening—it's always happening—it's independently originating. It's karmic seeds ripening and nothing but, and because it's nothing but, my karmic seeds ripening the way it's happening, and it can't happen in any other way than that.

Those four distinctions.

Same is true for all those other factors that make me up. 

All the anger, irritation, jealousy, ill will, love, joy, all of that also, no nature of their own dependently, originating, can't be any other way. 

All the way up to the consciousness itself, which seems to be like no consciousness, is it. My mind is it. It's the Uber thing. 

If it had any nature of its own, it couldn't be. It couldn't do what it does if it had a nature of its own. Our minds are blank, empty of self nature also, so they can be what we experience. All of them are empty.

TONGPAR-O.

(101:57) Next. Kading, could you read for us?

SHARIPU, DETAWAY NA, CHU TAMCHE TONGPA-NYI DE TSENNYI MEPA, MA KEYPA, MA GAKPA, DRIMA MEPA, DRIMA DANG DRELWA MEPA, DRIWA MEPA GANGWAY MEPA-O.

Thank you.

Okay, okay. Catching up with my notes here. Ooh, I missed something. I'll come back to that.

SHARIPU, there's Shariputra.

DETAWAY NA means ‚And thus we can say Shariputra‘

CHU TAMCHE TONGPA-NYI DE

CHU is that word for Dharma, here meaning all existing things. 

TAMCHE means all.

So CHU TAMCHE is all existing things

TONGPA-NYI, they are emptiness.

SHARIPU, DETAWAY NA, CHU TAMCHE TONGPA-NYI DE

Thus we can say Shariputra, that every existing thing is emptiness. 

It's funny that he uses the word ‘is‘ emptiness versus ‘has‘ emptiness.

I don't think it's incorrect to say every existing thing has emptiness, but the subtle difference for ‚every existing thing is emptiness‘ has this connotation, or this understanding that there isn't an emptiness over here that the pen, because the pen is here, then can go get so it can have it. It's the very fact that there is a pen present to us means that this object's ultimate nature is emptiness, so that it can be the object that each of us are seeing. So that it can be the pen for us, the chew toy for the puppy, the landing pad for the fly, the I don't know what for the human baby. Not pen yet for the human baby.

All existing things. Every existing thing is emptiness.

TSENNYI MEPA 

TSENNYI means definition. 

By definition, in English you say, what's the definition of such and such? And you would go look it up in the dictionary. Other words would be used to describe the meaning of the word that we were trying to define.

But that's not what's meant by definition here. 

Definition means to tell the difference between things. To give something an identity is to define it.

Like my board. I defined a heart by coloring it in, and I defined a heart by removing an outline. We gave definition to this object in this way. Do you see how the term is being used differently? 

To define means to clarify, or to make it be there—to define something.

You look out in a field and you just see all the cornstalks. Then as you look more and more and more, all of a sudden, oh my gosh, there's a scarecrow out there. Cool. Right? 

It went from undefined cornfield to cornfield with a scarecrow. That's defining the scarecrow, not what's a scarecrow. Do you see?

Do you get it?

When they're saying ,define‘, our ability to define things, it means this is establishing what's there. 

The seed starting to ripen is this defining process, making something definitive, giving it its identity.

TSENNYI MEPA

MEPA means not that. 

Nothing has any characteristic of its own—is what it says.

MY KEYPA, MA GAKPA

These are ‘nothing ever begins, nothing ever ends‘

But wait, yes they do.

But not in the way we think. The pen begins when all its pieces get put together in the pen making company. But without our karmic seeds making the company make the pen, there could be no pen here for me. Even if I had this something in my hand.

If I didn't have the seeds for pen, even if the company did make a pen, I wouldn't be holding a pen.

But I do have the karmic seeds to be holding a pen that was made in a factory that came into being when all its parts came together. Hyphenate all that into one thing.

But that's not where the pen comes from.

The pen never begins in that way.

Will the pen end?

It will run out of ink. I will throw it away. I will not have it anymore. 

The pen will end.

But it never ends from its own side. The only reason it runs out of ink, and I throw it away, is because my karmic seeds to have it have ink get used up, to keep it as a pen gets used up.

So yes, the thing will go away. But the thing itself does not end from it because of it. It ends because of my seeds changing. Then it doesn't have to run out of ink. I could just get mad at it and throw it away and then it's ended.

Nothing is ever impure. Nothing ever becomes pure. 

DRIMA is this word for pure and impure, unstained. 

DRIMA MEPA, nothing is ever impure. 

Wait a minute. Everything about Samsara is impure.

But not from its own side. They ripen as impure things, meaning suffering things, outright suffering or causes for more. But it's not that the thing is impure, it's that the seeds that make the thing impure was impure. So the thing is impure, but not from its own side.

DRIMA DANG DRELWA MEPA, nothing ever becomes pure.

I'm not quite sure how that works out with the words DRAWA MEPA.

But it's like, well, if nothing ever becomes pure, why are we bothering to do anything? But again, it's not that things don't become pure. It's our own behavior changes such that we make the seeds for things to ripen as pure things. The things didn't change from impure to pure. Our seeds changed, and so the things seem to change from impure to pure. 

It sounds like Buddha is saying, just give it up. None of this is going to work. When in fact Buddha is saying, No, see how it works, why it works? Don't expect the object to change. Don't expect your spouse to change. You change.

Plant your seeds differently. Keep planting. Keep planting. Keep planting. 

We want to say keep planting until you get the result you want. But that's like wrong thinking, because that means as soon as I get the result I want, I can quit planting that seed. 

No, you can't. You have to keep planting that seed or the thing you want's going to go away.

It really isn't about the result at all. It's about learning to plant, plant, plant, plant, plant, plant, and enjoy the planting so much that it doesn't really matter when and how the results come.

Really hard frame of mind for a human in Samsara.

But we can get a glimpse of how, oh yeah, that would be a cool way to live. 

Geshe Michael is a prime example, right? He just plants. 

DRIWA MEPA GANGWAY MEPA-O—nothing ever gets less and nothing ever becomes more.

It is completing all these different ways that we think things exist in them, from them. 

We think they have their own defining characteristics.

We think they begin and we think that they end.

We think that some things are impure and some things are pure, and we think that things grow and we think that things get less.

Do they?

Yes. But not in the way we think. nNot from their own side, not independent of being ripening results of our behavior. 

Have I said that enough times?

No. I have to keep hearing myself say it again and again.

I have three more minutes. Let's go on.

SHARIPU, DETAWAY NA, we've heard that twice. It means ‘Thus we can say Shariputra‘.

TONGPA-NYI LA SUK ME, TSORWA ME, DUSHE ME, DUJE NAM ME, NAMPAR SJEPA ME.

We're in the middle of a sentence here. 

Thus we can say Shariputra, that—here's emptiness TONGPA-NYI LA SUK ME, SUK is our heap form. 

ME means not, some negation.

We can say that with emptiness there is no body. 

TSORWA ME, feeling may, there are no feelings, positive, negative, none.

DUSHE ME, no ability to discriminate. 

None of the other factors that make us up, DUJE NAM ME.

NAMPAR SHEPA ME, none of the different kinds of awareness that we possess. There is no awareness.

Can this be literal?

It's slippery, right? Nobody's going to bite on that one. Because yes, it's literal if we say there is nobody without my seeds ripening it, no feelings, et cetera.

But here what they're saying is, they've moved us from exploring the true nature of our experiences through that understanding of everything is karmic seeds ripening. Then now we're into the section of the sutra that's talking about actually seeing emptiness directly, moving into our TONG LAM section where when we are directly experiencing emptiness, our experience is the ultimate nature of one's being oneself, including all existing things. And that ultimate nature of all existing things is their absence of a self nature. That direct experience is what's happening in our TONG LAM, our path of seeing. In that experience, there can be no awareness, and there can be no awareness of body, of feelings, of discriminating between things, of all the other factors that make us up.

Because all of those are appearances. They are all ripening seeds of appearances.

In the ultimate reality, there is only the absence of self natures of all of those appearing things. You cannot at the same time being experiencing ultimate reality and experiencing yourself experiencing ultimate reality, because you're self experiencing ultimate reality would be the appearance of an awareness with some other factor of those five heaps. And that's appearing nature, which even when it's appearing accurately as in from seeds ripening, is still considered deceptive reality. Until we are experiencing the appearing nature and emptiness directly, simultaneously, we're still experiencing things deceptively. 

This is starting to describe what's happening in our TONG LAM and we'll stop there. I do want to go back to a little bit more about the five heaps. I'll make a note to myself.

But we've come a long way already in the sutra reaching the explanation of the direct perception of emptiness. We have several paragraphs to go to complete that. 

Let's do our dedication because I'm a little bit over time. We can let people go and then I'll take questions. 

[Dedication of Class]

Q&A

There are a couple of questions about class.

What does the wor

(Tom) I have 3 questions. I still struggle with the word Heap in English. If you could help me wrap my head around it a little better.

Then my other question was, what happened that Shariputra mentioned daughters as well versus in the past we always spoke about just men.

And then, when you said that we can practice for the next few weeks to catch ourself, putting our, oh, this is my thought rising up, this is my (seeds). How does it work with sensation as it doesn't always have a seed that is associated like emotion or a thought that usually come from something. If I walk down the street and I have this sensation of something creepy is happening, it is rising up within me, or we were doing the meditation and I start having a lot of heat in my body and things like this. I don't know how to associate it so much. I understand it's coming from me, but how do I think of it logically, if that makes sense.

How to explore experiences with the 4 steps?

(Lama Sarahni) Okay, so let me start there because that one's fresh in my mind. As you learn a method for yourself of showing yourself why the object or the emotion or whatever you're working with seems like it has its own nature, identity. But oh my gosh, if it did, everybody would feel it that way. And they don't.

As you get good at that, you'll learn a sequence. You'll teach yourself a sequence that works for you, that when something arises, you'll go, whoa, I don't know what that is. Well, that arising, that I don't know what it is. That's a ripening and nothing. 

Whether this is its identity is coming from it or its identity is still a ripening from my side, it's still there and it's still happening. But now I see that, oh my gosh, it's just a ripening and it can rise up and pass on, or it can rise up and I can get worried about it, or I can be concerned about it. Or it can rise up and I can value it. This is a sensation that tells me to look behind me and I do and oh, thank you very much. 

It's not to invalidate a sensation, it's to learn how to recognize where it's really coming from, which allows you to then use it more effectively.

(Tom) Would those sensation also have karmic seeds in them?

(Lama Sarahni) Absolutely. There's nothing that we can experience that's not a ripening. The very response to the experience is a planting.

(Tom) So even the biological reaction that my body will still be different, or still is a ripening for myself from within myself.

(Lama Sarahni) Absolutely… Right, exactly. 

It's hard you could say, well, obviously, because if it had its own nature, everybody would experience it. Everybody would experience me experiencing this if it has its own nature.

But that's not really so valid. I mean it's valid, but it's not helpful.

If you think, well, here's this sensation this time and really it's different than it was before. If it has its own nature, how could it be different from one time to the next?

Another way, another method to explore it.

As we learn our foundation courses, we learn all these different tools for showing ourselves thE empty nature and dependent origination, that work for different situations, different ones different. Once you find the one you like the best that works for you, you can fit it to any situation actually. Good. So by now I've forgotten your other two questions. Remind me.

Why are daughters mentioned in the Heart Sutra?

(Tom) The other two questions was, why or what happened is Shariputra mentioned daughter one, female.

(Lama Sarahni) I don't know for sure, but I would guess that it's making the shift to the perfection of wisdom, second turning of the wheel. It makes sense that now we would include all existing beings, men and women. Whereas the Abhidharma school was focused on Vinaya. The Vinaya were the men.

So I think it's indicating that we're at a higher level of practitioner here. Not just the ones that were not Bodhisattvas yet. They're still high enough that we include men and women. I think it's an indication of the evolution of Buddha‘s teachings.

(Tom) So that came historically a little after?

(Lama Sarahni) Yeah. Yeah. Heart Sutra came after he'd been teaching for a while.

What does the word „heap“ mean?

(Tom) Then my third question is, I still struggle with the word heap in

English.

(Lama Sarahni)  It is a weird word.

(Tom) When I Google it, it comes up as waves. I understand the rest. But you said so much in the class that I'm like, it's blank in my mind. I don't know how to convey it better.

(Lama Sarahni) How about the word pile?

(Tom) That's what it came up as well, but so I didn't understand how to put it together in that sentence. They pile up?

Is that I associated in English.

(Chrys) Collection

(Lama Sarahni) Collection, collection would be a good one. I'm thinking if you pour six bags of M&M‘s in a big bowl, you have a heap of M&M‘s in the bowl. You have a pile of M&M‘s in the bowl. You have a collection of M&M‘s in the bowl. 

And those M&M‘s would represent for the heap of form, all the different aspects of our experiences through our eyes, ears, nose, taste and tactile.

The heap of form means our form, our experience of form includes all these different things that we can see here, smell, taste, touch.

How many of those are there? Mountains? Huge. Bigger than six bags of M&M‘s were huge stuff. They're not in a pile. They're not sitting somewhere in a pile. Of course.

It just means all the different things that make us up. He wants to make the distinction that when we talk about our form, we're made up of five things—form, feeling, blah, that we don't think we're limited to this thing.

Our heap of form is not limited to this thing. 

And then even if it were, it's made up of trillions of cells and you can break it all down. So it is hard. It's a weird word.

The heap of feeling means our feeling is doing this (thumbs up, thumbs down) constantly. And every one of them is part of this heap of feeling. This group of experience called feeling is happening constantly and it makes us up. It's part of our makeup.

We say I am body and mind. Body, mind. Within mind is this discriminating, all the other factors and awareness. All the pieces. All the pieces of experience. Maybe that helps.

(Tom) Yeah. Pieces I think feels like a better word. I understand the rest. I was like, just the word heaps doesn't tell me much.

(Lama Sarahni)  Yeah, it's a weird word. I agree. Thank you. Okay, good. Khong Lee.

The 2nd and the 3rd Turning of the Wheel

(Khong-Lee) (131:23) Thank you teacher. Okay, mine is a little bit, okay, my first question is similar to Tom's second one. The son and daughter of the noble family. I was thinking during this sutra was spoken. Okay, could it be the Buddha is still in a human figure and then in the old India, you have the noble family because they have a lot of higher status and then lower status. So that's why you come up with the noble family.

(Lama Sarahni) Well, noble here is referring to those who have grown some Bodhichitta in their heart. Rather than noble status. 

(Khong-Lee) Okay. But then during this sutra, is it Buddha is still in human form right after...

(Lama Sarahni) The perfection of wisdom teachings are considered to be the second turning of the wheel, which means that he was teaching the earlier basic teachings for some time until his disciples had worked with the Vinaya, worked with the idea of dependent origination as everything depends upon causes and parts. 

And helping them come to see that there's nothing in Samsara that can satisfy someone, particularly when we're ready for our spiritual path. He's pointing out suffering in Samsara and existing things, and the focus was on withdrawing and renunciation and doing retreat. 

Then, they purify and make merit. As their karma's shift, then their karmas shift in terms of what Buddha is teaching them as well. At some point there's enough of them ready to hear the message in a higher way. Another way, Geshe Michael describes the shifting to the second turning is, he gives a teaching and says, You know, all that stuff I was telling you all exists… Which he'd been talking about the five heaps, the sense consciousnesses, the gateways, all that stuff, all existing things, they all exist and they're suffering.

That's Abhidharmakosha. 

Then the student's seeds get good enough that he's ready to sit 'em down and say all that stuff I told you about, none of it has any nature. None of it has any nature. None of it. And he teaches Heart Sutra, Diamond Cutter Sutra, White Lotus Sutra. Lots of emptiness teaching sutras. 

And some of the students go, oh man, this is key. Some brave Bodhisattva says, In all due respect, Buddha, that's contradictory. You taught us all those things. They exist and they're suffering. And now you're saying they don't exist at all?

Buddha realizes that that Bodhisattva misunderstood hearing the Heart Sutra. When he said, Nothing has any nature of its own, that Bodhisattva thought Buddha was saying, all that existing stuff, it doesn't really exist. 

So Buddha recognized, oh, there are people who need to have it clarified. And he taught the third turning of the wheel. He says, What I meant to say was…, and he goes into this third description of what emptiness independent origination means to address that brave Bodhisattva who saw a contradiction to help them understand better. 

Then out of that actually comes the Mind Only School eventually, which isn't really its own school, its own philosophy. It's the stage we go through as we shift from first turning of the wheel understanding of no self nature, before we can get to the highest understanding of no self nature. We have the stairway we can go through, which is Mind Only and Lower Middle Way that we‘ll recognize our own mind doing as we learn these practices of watching our experience and where we think things are coming from.

Heart Sutra came quite a bit later in Buddha‘s career.

Buddha had an 80 year career, 50 years teaching. In that timeframe he taught, let's call it Abhidharma. He taught Vinaya. Many times in that whole 50 years.

Anytime he taught it, it's called the first turning of the wheel, whether it happened early on or late, it's the subject matter. 

Once he had enough students whose karma was good enough that they could hear the perfection of wisdom, he added perfection of wisdom.

Now, do you remember this story? His first five disciples? He finally gets out from his tree, he sees the five disciples. They go, wow, what happened to you? Sit down, I'll tell you. Right? 

He teaches them. I don't know that anybody ever wrote that one down, but some of them go into seeing emptiness directly on the spot. They become Arya right there. And others didn't. 

Some got Bodhichitta, others didn‘t. It was their seeds, wasn't it? His whole teaching, everything is coming from the seeds of the disciples that are there. 

We want to take things so literally. First he taught that, then he taught this, then he taught that. It must be sequential. 

It's like, no, it was according to who was there at the time and what they were hearing. That's all coming from us.

We need to hear it, and we're ready to hear it. If we're in a class about the Heart Sutra, we're ready to hear it and we can only hear it to the level that our karmic seeds will let us hear it. Which is why I need to hear it over and over and over again.

Your questions are great, and I see your mind still in literal self existent mode, and struggling with it.

(Khong-Lee) I kind of understand it. I mean, sort of like the Middle Way is the bridge to the Abhidharma and the Higher Middle Way. So in between this Middle Way and the Lower Middle Way. So it is kind of like to me, the Buddha is bridging up two of them to let others to get it better.

(Lama Sarahni) Mind only and Lower Middle Way.

(Khong-Lee) My second question is the emptiness. So it is always linked to the absence of something. Now I'm still figuring it out because to me it is more closely linked to absence of something. It's not like you have, yeah, so the hardship, but the first one is the middle is a white color. So you take out all the things and then what is left is the emptiness. It is more closely linked to the absence of something rather than something is there. Is it?

(Lama Sarahni) When I did the removal to show the heart, the heart, it wasn't the emptiness. The heart is the appearing thing. 

The removal was the arriving at the appearing thing. Was to try to indicate how we think a thing is there first, and then we can say, oh, now I know its emptiness. As opposed to its very nature, it's very appearing, it's very appearance reveals its emptiness.

There's no emptiness until there's an appearance. The instant there's an appearance, there's a 100% empty of that appearance's nature, own nature.

(Khong-Lee) I try to figure out myself. I guess this is quite hard to get a fixed picture on that. So I'll do it on my own.

(Lama Sarahni) Really, you can only get it in meditation. You try, try, try, try. But take it into meditation and find it. Okay, good. Alrighty. Oh, Chrys, you had something.

(Chrys) I feel like that there's another cliff that I'm falling off of.

Which is that I've been thinking, oh my goodness, if I'm actually projecting everything that I see and live and I really am a baby Buddha and I really can… Then I keep, it kind of leads to this kind of egotistical thing of which I just wonder in the teachings, what keeps you from falling off that, well, I'm a goddess kind of thing, which is not really what I've been thinking, but I've been wondering what's the limiter.

(Lama Sarahni) Right. So actually there's this term called NGA GYEL. NGA GYEL means pride, and pride is one of those main mental afflictions, because suffering pride, human pride is ‘I'm better than you, so my needs are more important than yours. And so I'll keep stuff that I could use to help you. But because….‘

Do you see how wrong pride goes? It's not really the oh, puffed up, I'm so wonderful. It's not that. It's just I'm better than you, so my needs are more important than you-pride.

But that term NGA GYEL is also used for divine pride. Divine pride means ‘I am the Buddha‘. I am the one who've created all of this, and I am therefore personally responsible for all of it.

To hold our high awareness on our empty nature and that conclusion that you get to, it's like everything is in fact created from my own past deeds. I am in fact creating my world. I am in fact this close to being Buddha. As Buddha I am a being made of love, compassion, and wisdom.

When our divine pride goes wrong is when our human ego pride has not actually been transformed. We could go wrong with our divine pride and become this egotistical monster. But what would happen karmically when we do that? To have that conclusion, oh my gosh, I really am creating my world. I really am a baby Buddha. Wow. I could make it wonderful for everybody. If we go off half cocked the seeds we make, we're just going to plum it.

It'll kick us right out.

So Bodhichitta is the key.

When our conclusion is, oh man, I really am. If we want to show it to somebody else, we're misunderstanding.

If we're going to walk around hidden, a hidden little baby Buddha, because the way I make my world better is I go get you a cup of tea. I pick up the garbage that's in front of your house, not just my house.

You, the baby Buddha is in secret and you're having this fun creating your more and more pure world around all those other beings.

Then that's going to go onto, well wait, maybe they're doing the same thing. Wait a minute. Who's Buddha, who's not? It's actually part of creation stage in Diamond Way. It is to show yourself because of your emptiness, you could in fact decide, I'm going to pretend to be Buddha, a being a perfect love, perfect compassion, perfect wisdom, and I'm going to try to hold that while I'm at the grocery store.

(Chrys) Yeah. Because it leads to the hardest thing for me is conceiving or trying to conceive of, yes, I'm projecting everything. But how do other beings, how can they be their own thing? If I'm, and it gets another way..

(Lama Sarahni) I know. That one's so beautiful. Keep chewing on that one. And really the snag is that when we say, oh, everything's really coming from me. We're thinking everything but me is coming from me. Then that makes it like there's me, but all of them, they're just projections, but not me. I'm not a projection. Because I'm the real thing doing it. And that's a misunderstanding. 

Yeah. Good fun.

(Tom) Do help me think of that description. Remember in the nineties, there was that spring thingy that he would put on a step and it would just fall and move down. Remember that toy? So it's like that spring that moves from me outside of me, but it's still attached to me. So what I do, that's kind of how I view it. So then every time I have this, wait, I'm so much better. It's like, wait. But then I have to do the Bodhichitta. It comes from me, and then I come back to the humbleness of wait, if not me and everyone else, then that doesn't make sense. Nothing is going to change. So I view it as the internal spring and I'm going to follow the spring down a bad path, or I can come back to the core seed, which is the Bodhichitta, kind of what helps me.

(Lama Sarahni) Kat. She describes the slinky from the 1990s. We had those in the sixties. Yours were colored. Ours were gray, but they still were the slinky.

Funny. Sweet. Anything else? No. Okay. Thank you my dears.

For the recording, welcome back. We are studying the Heart Sutra. I think this is class 5, and I will not take a break in the middle of a course again. I can't. I'm all mixed up, so I'll do my best. It is January 17th, 2025.

Let's gather our minds here as we usually do.

Please bring your attention to your breath until you hear from me again.

[General Class Opening]

(7:07) Let's listen to the Heart Sutra. You're welcome to read with yours if you like you know it, recite it or just listen as you wish. 

The Exhalted One

The Lady of Conquest

The Sutra on the Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom

The name of this sutra in Sanskrit is Arya Bhagavati Prajnya Paramita Hirdaya.

In Tibetan this is Pakpa Chomden Dema Sherabkyi Parultu Chinpay Nyingpo.

I bow first to all enlightened beings, and to every warrior saint. Once I heard this teaching.

The Conqueror was staying on Vulture’s Peak in the Keep of the King. With him was a great gathering of monks and a great gathering of warrior saints. At a certain moment, the Conqueror went into deep meditation on the part of the teachings known as the “awareness of the profound”. At that moment too did the realized being, the great warrior, the lord of power, Loving Eyes, see into this one deep practice, the practice of the perfection of wisdom. He saw perfectly that the five heaps – the five parts of a person – were empty of any nature of their own.

Then, by the power of the Enlightened One, the junior monk named Shari Putra, turned and asked this question of the great warrior, Loving Eyes, the realized one, the lord of power: “If any son or daughter of noble family hoped to follow the deep practice of the perfection of wisdom, what would they have to do?”

This then is the answer that the lord of power, the realized one, the great warrior, Loving Eyes, gave to the junior monk named Shari Putra: “Here, Shari Putra, is what any son or daughter of noble family should see who hopes to follow the deep practice of the perfection of wisdom.”

“See first all five heaps – all five parts of a person – are free of any essence of their own. Your body is empty, emptiness is your body. Emptiness is nothing but your body and your body is nothing but emptiness.”

“The same is true of your feelings, and your ability to discriminate between things, and the other factors that make you up, and all the different kinds of awareness that you possess: all of them are empty.”

“And thus we can say, Shari Putra, that every existing thing is emptiness. Nothing has any characteristic of its own. Nothing ever begins. Nothing ever ends. Nothing is ever impure. Nothing ever becomes pure. Nothing ever gets less, and nothing ever becomes more.”

“And thus we can say, Shari Putra, that with emptiness there is no body. There are no feelings. There is no ability to discriminate. There are none of the other factors that make you up and there is no awareness.”

“There are no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; nothing to see, nothing to hear, nothing to smell, nothing to taste, nothing to touch and nothing to think of. There is no part of you that sees, there is no part of you that is aware that you are seein; and this is true all the way to the part of you that thinks, and the part of you that is aware that you are thinking.”

“There is no misunderstanding your world. There is no stopping this misunderstanding, and the same is true all the way up to your old age and death, and to stopping your old age and death.”

“There is no suffering. There is no source of suffering. There is no stopping this suffering. There is no path to stopping this suffering.”

“There is no knowledge, there is nothing to reach, and there is nothing not to reach.”

“Thus it is, Shari Putra, that warrior saints have nothing to reach, and because of this, they are able to practice the perfection of wisdom, and stay in this perfection of wisdom. This frees them from every obstacle in their minds, and this frees them from all fear. They go beyond all wrong ways of thinking, and reach to the ultimate end of nirvana.”

“All the Enlightened Beings of the past, the present and the future too, follow this same perfection of wisdom, and thus bring themselves to perfect enlightenment: to the matchless state of a totally enlightened Buddha.”

“Thus are they the sacred words of the perfection of wisdom; the sacred words of great knowledge; sacred words of the unsurpassable; sacred words that are equal to the One beyond all equal, sacred words that put a final end to every form of pain; sacred words you should know are true, for false they cannot be; sacred words of the perfection of wisdom, which here I speak for you:

Tadya ta, ga-te ga-te, para ga-te, para sang ga-te, bodhi so ha

“And thus it is, Shari Putra, that great warrior saints must train themselves the profound perfection of Wisdom.”

With this, the Conqueror stirred himself from his deep state of meditation. He turned to the great warrior, the realized one, Loving Eyes, the Lord of Power, and blessed his words saying, “True”. “True”, he said. And “true” again.

“Thus it is O son of noble family, and thus is it. One should follow the profound perfection of Wisdom just as you have taught it. Every one of Those Gone Thus rejoice in your words as I do.”

And when the Conqueror had spoken thus, the junior monk Shari Putra took joy, and the warrior, the realized one, Loving Eyes, the lord of power took joy as well. And all the assembled disciples took joy and so did the entire world – with its gods and its men, and near gods and spirits too take joy. All sang their praises of what the Conqueror had spoken.

The Emptiness of the Five Heaps

(14:25) The last class, according to where my mark is, we were talking about that verse that says, 

Your body is empty, emptiness is your body. Emptiness is nothing but your body. And your body is nothing but emptiness. 

Do you remember that?

Loving Eyes is saying to Shariputra, 

PUNGPO NGAPO DEDAK KYANG NGOWO NYI KYI TONGPAR NAMPAR JESU TA-O. SUK TONGPA-O. 

Body is empty. Technically, SUK is the first heap, the heap of form, emptiness.

TONGPA NYI SUK SO – emptiness is heap of form.

SUK LE TONGPA NYI SHEN MA YIN. TONGPA NYI LE SUK SHEN MAYIN NO. 

My body is empty. Emptiness is my body. Emptiness is nothing but my body.

TONGPA NYI SHEN MA YIN

My body is nothing but emptiness.

Meaning, my body is empty. Meaning every experience of my physical world is empty of self nature. It has no identity or characteristic or function in it, from it. Whether it's anything about my physical body or anything about my physical world, meaning my world that I see, hear, smell, taste, touch.

So it's a lot of stuff in our SUK category, our heap of form.

No nature of its own.

Does that mean it doesn't exist at all?

No.

What's there?

We know, we understand, our learning is a projected result of imprints made on our consciousness by how the consciousness of the moment was aware of itself interacting with another. That creates an imprint on that consciousness that does something, and finally its result. The result is the self and the other and the interaction between experience happening. It has no other nature than that. 

SUK TONGPA-O

My body is empty. 

Emptiness is my body, meaning that without a ripening, without a physical body, there's no emptiness of that physical body. That's significant, because it means there's no big outer emptiness existing that shape shifts into our experience. 

Then, SUK LE TONGPA NYI SHEN MAYIN NO, it's showing again how the pair of appearances and the empty nature of those appearances have to go hand in hand. They aren't even two separate things that go hand in hand. It takes both to have anything, any experience.

SUK LE TONGPA NYI SHEN MAYIN NO

My body is empty. Emptiness is my body. Emptiness is nothing but my body, meaning there is no emptiness until that unique experience of the moment of my physical world is appearing. Then there's the emptiness of that appearance. The appearance requires the emptiness. And the fourth one is the emptiness of that appearance requires the appearance.

These four lines are fine tuning our ability to understand the significance of the marriage of karma and emptiness. Call that one thing. I like the term profound dependence, because that refers to the two together. 

See first all five heaps. All five parts of a person. It says, as being empty of any essence of their own.

I prefer the English, See all five parts of a person are empty, because to say as being empty, you could see them as being something else as well. Which you could and you'd be wrong.

I can see why they use this phrase, but in my own mind I always have to think, They are empty.

But then I'm kind of thinking self consistently about that.

Regardless. As being empty of any essence of their own, my body is empty, emptiness is my body, emptiness is nothing but my body and my body is nothing but emptiness. 

That's where we left off talking about the ramifications of that.

No, no, that's not quite where we left off. We left off talking about the five heaps.

He goes on with

DESHIN DU TSORWA DANG, DUSHE DANG, DUJE NAM DANG, NAMSHEPA NAM TONGPA-O.

The same is true of your feeling, your ability to discriminate between things, the other factors that make you up and all the different kinds of awareness that you possess. All of them are empty.

We would take each one of these heaps and apply those four statements. 

My feeling is empty, emptiness is my feeling. My feeling is nothing but emptiness and emptiness is nothing but my feeling. 

It gets a little bit harder to decipher. Feeling meaning just the thumbs up, thumbs down instant reaction to any moment of perception.

We have an instant of an experience and then thumbs up, like we lean into it, or thumbs down, we push away from it. Then of course hot on the heels of that is we've identified the thing. Hot on the heels of that is our actual response, our actual reaction to it–all the emotions and mental afflictions, et cetera that are set in motion that lead to our action in response. Whether the action is to do nothing, to go away, to respond back. All of that requires the awareness of all those different factors happening. That's our heap of awareness.

We are being asked, suggested to investigate each one of those heaps such that we can come to recognize how we are holding that aspect of our experience as having some nature of its own, characteristic of its own, function of its own, to come to see that, Oh my gosh, it can’t. It has to be a ripening result of my past behavior, and so if it's a thumbs up and I want to do more kindness.

If it's a thumbs down and I want less of that, I must create more kindness.

Either way, the end result is keep my morality, keep my vows, be more kind, be more compassionate. Not because Buddha said so, but because I'm coming to that conclusion myself by way of this investigation of why is one thing a thumbs up, and something else a thumbs down, when there's nothing in it, from it that could trigger that. It has to be something forced on me by me, right?

Because unique to me.

Same for the ability to tell things apart, the ability to identify things.

All the other factors that make us up, all of our emotions, our beliefs.

And all the different kinds of awareness.

All of them have no identity, nature, function in them, from them.

They exist, yes. Because our seeds are creating them and they have no existence other than that.

So, when you have the pair of a ripening seed and the emptiness of the subject-object-interaction between within that seed, you have me and my life, you and your life.

That means, because nothing has any nature of its own, anything can be anything at any moment. But only by way of what seeds ripen. Which means where we can make changes is by how we plant our seeds. It's logical, it's so logical. 

Then becoming a Buddha just becomes like mathematics. Burn off the seeds made with ignorance, plant seeds with wisdom. When those are ripening, your experience is Buddha you and Buddha paradise emanating. It won't happen any other way than by creating the seeds that ripen into that experience. 

Review: The five Heaps and the five Buddha Families

I think we also talked a little bit about how these five heaps, each one has a… When it's purified, becomes a wisdom, a Buddha wisdom. Which become the five Buddha families, which when you're a full on Buddha, you are all five of those.

Just to review that, because it's a list that is so juicy, you'll want to come back to it again and again and again. 

1. Physical Form

Heap number one is the heap of physical form. Call it our body, but it's any physical form. The mental affliction associated with physical form is ignorance. When that ignorance is purified, what you are, what you have is what's called mirror wisdom, the Buddha wisdom called mirror wisdom, which is this perceiving profound dependence all the time and more.

2. Feeling

Then heap number two, feeling the mental afflictions associated with feeling is that pride and stinginess possessiveness. When those are purified, we have equal wisdom. Which means equal love and concern for all existence. 

3. Discriminating between Things

Then the heap of discriminating between things. Heap number three is associated with the mental affliction of ignorant liking, desire. When that's purified, it transforms into analytical wisdom. Analytical wisdom means being directly aware of where everything comes from.

I like to think of it as that direct perception of all the karmic correlations. Although it's much more than that.

4. All the Other Factors

Then the fourth, keep all the other factors, corresponds to jealousy. That purified is accomplishing wisdom. 

5. Consciousness

The fifth heap consciousness is correlated with ignorant disliking.

That one I can't quite figure out. All the rest seem pretty clear, but this one I don't quite see why ignorant disliking is correlated with consciousness.

When it's purified, what we have is called the Dharmadhatu wisdom, the wisdom of the sphere of all things, meaning the emptiness of the other four wisdoms. 

That's where we left off.

Review of the 5 Paths

(30:18) In the sutra, what we've done so far, according to Choney Lama's commentary, the conversation is taking us through our path of accumulation and our path of preparation. 

1. The Path of Preparation

The path of accumulation, we sort of went through that just to get to this class at all. There's something wrong with my world. It's so wrong that I just can't tolerate it anymore. There must be somebody who knows how to stop this process, or how to change it, or at least knows what's wrong. And we went searching and searching and finally we landed somewhere where somebody told us the pen thing, and Oh my gosh, I think this is my path.

Path of accumulation is that path of renunciation. Not meaning, oh, I'm going to give up my life and go live under a bridge. But meaning I just reject everything that I thought I knew about the world that told me how I should behave. Now I want to find a way that helps me create a pure world for everybody, Mahayana renunciation.

2. The Path of Accumulation

Then path of preparation is, once we find a teaching and a teacher that makes sense to us and fits us, we dive in with both feet. Don't we Venerable Kading? Study, study, study, contemplate, meditate, serve others, keep our vow book, check our behavior, change our behavior according to what we're learning. 

Path of preparation. 

What are we preparing for? The path of seeing. We're preparing for the third of those five paths, the path of seeing.

In path of preparation it sounds like the way we prepare for the path of seeing is to just think about emptiness so much that we understand it so close to perfectly that when we meditate on it, we ought to be able to get it right. Then that means we need to meditate well enough so that we can slide into that deep platform of meditation and hold it long enough to let ourselves go into that no self nature experience.

But technically, our path of preparation is the time in which we are burning off our negatives and with our study, contemplation, service and meditation, service and making our behavior more kind, what we're really doing is gathering the virtue, the goodness, that can ripen into that experience of the direct perception of emptiness. Because that's such a powerful goodness, a powerful pleasure, it takes a huge amount of goodness to create it.

So yes, we're intellectually learning, but if our intellectual learning does not help us change our behavior to create more kindness, that direct perception is not going to happen. Even if we can get to that platform and even if our intellectual understanding is so close, we need the goodness ripening for that experience. So part of the path of preparation is this increasing kindness.

Next says Chenrezig,

SHARIPU, DETAWAY NA, CHU TAMCHE TONGPA-NYI DE, TSENNYI MEPA, MA KYEPA, MA GAKPA, DRIMA MEPA, DRIMA DANG DRELWA MEPA, DRIWA MEPA GANGWAY MEPA-O.

Thus we can say Shariputra, that every existing thing is emptiness. Nothing has any characteristic of its own. 

I like to say “no thing”, it helps me, I don't know, get bigger.

No thing ever begins. No thing ever ends, no thing is ever impure. No thing ever becomes pure. No thing ever gets less and no thing ever becomes more. 

Now wait a minute, is that consistent with our experience that nothing ever begins?

No. Things begin all the time, nothing ever ends, things end all the time.

Are some things impure and some things pure? Well, more or less right? 

Do things ever get less and do things ever become more? Do things like get subtracted from or added to? It's like in my experience, yes.

Do we think those are doing those things? Do we think something begins all on its own, independent of any other factor?

I dunno, I argue no. We understand that everything that begins had to have some reason to begin.The little seed had to get some rain and some sunshine and some warmth, and then it can make the sprout, and then it can make the flowers.

So Buddha, I don't believe things are self existent. But do I believe that all that happens independent, unique to my perception?

Yes, I think that that seed is there. If there's enough sun, water, et cetera, it will grow into flowers. Whether I ever see it or not, whether I ever know it or not. There's wildflowers all over Arizona that I don't know anything about. But when I think of them, they must be there. That's me thinking selfly, because I'm believing that they're there in some way independent of my thinking of them being there in the way that I do. 

It's starting to get slippery. Words fail to express what is really trying to be said here.

Choney Lama, thank you for commentaries. Thank you Geshe Michael, says that at this point in the sutra, Lord Buddha is pushing everybody into the understanding of what happens in the direct perception of emptiness and the ramifications of that experience. 

3. The Path of Seeing

In that third path, TONG LAM, the path of seeing, we understand that that's that 15 to 20 minute period when we are directly perceiving the no self nature of all existence, particularly of what we call ourself.

To get there, our path to preparation has grown the goodness such that we've gained these four realizations that come first. The final one being the direct experience of dependent origination, the direct experience of something that you're perceiving at the moment. Your experience is the mental seeds ripening into this experience ‘Me seeing stapler’, and this direct ramification of that experience, which is there's no stapler in it, from it. That the one that I'm experiencing is this mental overlay onto some sensory information. When we have that experience–which happens outside of meditation–Oh whoa, that's how things exist. That's how everything appears to me. Run and jump on your meditation cushion. I'm being absolutely serious. 

If it happens to you driving to work: Sorry, I'm going to be late for work. Sit in your car, go into as deep a meditation as you can, because it's your window into the direct perception of emptiness, to have this direct perception of the seed ripening into the thing you're experiencing. CHU CHOK it's called, is this opportunity to get into direct perception.

In the direct perception, do you see the stapler?

No.

Do you see yourself?

No.

In the direct perception, all that's being experienced is that absence of self nature. They say, And there's nothing more you can say about it. But we go on trying to explain it. All the explanations will fall short from the experience. We will know once we have the experience. 

In this verse, every existing thing's emptiness, nothing has any characteristic of its own, does not mean nothing has no characteristic at all.

Well, it does mean nothing has any characteristic at all, because any characteristic that we see in any given thing is not in it. It's imposed upon it by the experiencer of it. But then that doesn't go into the essence of the thing that then takes it along with it somewhere else.

So even as my ripening seeds make this into a red and white pen, it doesn't make this have that characteristic itself. It's always going to be unique to me. It's unique to you. No thing has any characteristic of its own. It appears to have the characteristic, the experiencer is experiencing it, as having.

Follow that?

So even when something appears to begin, I click the pen and I begin to write with it. That beginning to write is also ripening results forcing me to have that experience beginning to write. The seed coming up into the sprout. My seed's ripening for that to be happening.

My seed's ripening that the seed needs water, sunshine, warmth to do that. Nothing begins without some other factor. At highest school, the other factor is the ripening result of past behavior of the one who's experiencing that thing that's beginning.

Same for ending. Same for a thing’s impurity. Same for a thing’s purity. Same for something getting less, as in our misunderstanding, our world getting, less and less and less. And same for anything ever becoming more, as in our growing wisdom, our growing Buddhahood.

Won't exist, can't exist in any other way than by an experience forced on us by the ripening results of our past way in which we've imprinted our mind by way of our behavior.

You with me so far?

We're moving in the sutra into these verses that are trying to show us the ramification of our direct perception of emptiness. I'm going to keep going here.

(45:15)

SHARIPU, DETAWAY NA TONGPA-NYI LA SUK ME, TSORWA ME, DUSHE ME, DUJE NAM ME, NAMPAR SHEPA ME

Do you recognize these? 

TSOWRA ME, DUSHE ME, DUJE ME, DUJE NAM ME, NAMPAR SHEPA ME. Those are the heaps, the five heaps:

SUK – Form

TSORWA – Feeling, thumbs up, thumbs down

DUSHE – defining things

DUJE – all the other factors that make me up and 

NAMPAR SHEPA – my awareness, consciousness of all those other things.

ME means there's not, doesn't exist, not.

So with TONGPA-NYI, with emptiness, there is no body, no feelings, no ability to discriminate–like no discriminating happening, no other factors that make me up and no awareness. That's a little weird.

In the direct perception of emptiness, are you aware of yourself with its body sitting on its cushion, analyzing whether or not those experiences have any nature of their own?

No.

Are you experiencing directly the fact that no thing has any nature of its own, including one's self, including one's awareness of one's self?

We can say yes. But we'll probably be misunderstanding it when we say it in the direct perception of emptiness. 

All that's being experienced is ultimate reality. And ultimate reality is the no self nature, nature of all existence. 

Geshela says, if I took away all the things which I'm projecting. Let's say, if we take away all the projections happening–it can't ever happen, but if you could–and just stare at the fact that all those things I just removed were never there in them, from them, I'd be perceiving emptiness directly.

If that's helpful, use it. I find it a little not sure. 

(Venerable Kading) I beg your pardon for interrupting. Would you please repeat that sentence?

(Lama Sarahni) I will. He says, if I took away all the things which I'm projecting and just stare at the fact that they never were there by themselves, I will be perceiving emptiness directly.

(Venerable Kading) Thank you. 

(Lama Sarahni) We're going to explore that as we add the fourth step in Kedrup Je's meditation later in this class, is what Geshehla means by that. 

When we enter into that 20 minute or so experience of the direct experience of ultimate reality, we can't be aware of anything other than this absence. Because to be aware of something is a ripening presence. Now, the awareness of the absence is a ripening too. It's a projection. It can't happen in any other way.

But it's the first time we ever have a projection of the absence of something.

We don't have the seeds yet to ripen a projection of an experience of an absence. It's called the experience of non-duality. It doesn't mean, Oh, I've become all one. But it's this subject-object-interaction happening, emptiness of that whole process, the lack of self nature of all of it.

Words fail, but I keep trying, right? Because I'm supposed to deliver this class to try to bring you to an Aha. I'm supposed to keep trying until I see a face go, Oh, right. But I only have three faces and they've already gone. But I'm going to keep at it till I've covered what's in my notes. 

You cannot be aware of yourself perceiving emptiness directly while you're in it. Yet it's not deep black sleep. You go to sleep, dreamless sleep, and then you wake up and there was no awareness of anything in that deep black sleep. If I'm understanding the description of direct perception of emptiness, it's not like you're fall asleep and then wake up and oh my gosh, that's what I saw. It's not like that. It's not just unconsciousness.

In the direct perception, direct experience of the absence of self nature, there is only absence. It's such a goodness to experience that, that we only have seeds to sustain it for a short period of time, 15-20 minutes apparently is the average. Then we're stirred out of it. Our seeds shift. They've been ripening, direct perception, direct perception, and then those direct perceptions seeds are done.

4. Path of Habituation

We don't like pop out of it. We come down out of it. In that coming down, we're aware of the ramifications of what we just experienced. Those ramifications of what we just experienced, form, solidify into the four Arya truths. Each of which have four different aspects, so the 16 aspects of the four Arya truths. 16 realizations that we come to have as a result of that direct perception having gone into it with Bodhichitta–I need to make that clear. 

Coming out we have these realizations, and of that on our fourth path, we are now realizing, have realized that oh my gosh, my behavior towards others is how I create my experience. Not in the moment, but now creates my future. Sumati always says, My past is my present and my present is my future.

What I'm experiencing now is a result of things I thought, said, did towards others before. Because you can't plant a seed and get its result at the same time. Because then it's not cause and effect. 

So it has to take some time. Then that means what I'm doing, seeing, thinking, saying, doing towards others, whether it's inanimate other or inanimate other, is creating the circumstances of what I will experience in the future.

That's gotten so clear in our minds that on our fourth path, our path of habituation, we're just determined to let our seeds of ignorance burn off, which they've got to do, and plant the behavior that will create Buddha me and Buddha Paradise emanating. 

What behaviors are those?

The practice of giving, sharing, moral discipline, not getting angry, joyous effort, meditation. So you're not done meditating just because you've seen emptiness directly. Then perfection of wisdom, which we're doing all those others now with our understanding of the no self nature of subject-object-interaction between.

This beautiful spiral is happening where even in our learning, wanting to create the goodness to see emptiness directly, we're working with those perfections as perfection-izers, remember course six? 

Then as that goodness grows, we reach that place direct perception that when we come out of it, we now know directly that what we see still looks like they're in them, from them, but they cannot be that. We know we're wrong. We know the discrepancy between how we're experiencing our world, and how our world really exists. How we're experiencing our experiences as from them, and how they really exist, which is ripening results of my past behaviors and so opportunities to create my future. 

I was going somewhere with that and I just got distracted.

Coming out of the direct perception we go back to perceiving things as in them from them just like before. 

Why? Because the seeds that we have are still stained with that. But now they're colored with the understanding that that's not true. On our path of habituation, every seed out still has the mistake, but we don't believe it anymore. Which means when we plant our seeds, new seeds, the new seeds have the ‘that's not true’. The direct new seeds have the reject of the self existence of the things we're experiencing. That means every new seed is growing our wisdom, whether we're thinking about it or not. The more we think about it as a new baby Arya, the faster we plant our seeds of wisdom. 

But they say that, even if you don't do anything else, seven lifetimes to Buddhahood once you've seen emptiness directly. Now you can crank up the juice and make it less than seven with various practices, et cetera. But you can see how the math works. You do have to still purify all the seeds that are still in there that were made with the belief in the self existence of things, things having their own nature. Those need to be either burned off or purified in some way. But you're never planting another seed, not an instant, not a 65th of an instant of seeds with full on ignorance after our direct perception.

That's why it's so important. That's why it's such a powerful, powerful experience to have. Because you're then on the conveyor belt to the end of all suffering. 

If you've had that experience with Bodhichitta in your heart, doing it on behalf of the end of suffering for all existing beings, then the conveyor belt we’re on is the one to Buddhahood.

If that experience was driven by ‘I want to stop my own suffering, I believe Nirvana is the highest I can reach’, then you're on the conveyor belt to Nirvana. Which is not a bad thing, it's just not the final goal.

When we're in emptiness directly, it is true: There's no body, there's no feelings, there's no ability to discriminate, there are none of the other factors that make you up and there is no awareness.

You are not aware of anything but the absence of self nature of all those things.

Got it? Time for a break. Let's take a break. Get refreshed please.

(61:28) Geshela has a little more to say about this MA KYEPA, MA GAKPA–Things don't start and things don't stop. (He) used a couple of examples. One is, if you're the boss and you have an employee and the employee at first is really amazing and responsible, and then over time they get sloppy and unreliable. Our ignorant nature is to call them out and what's wrong with you? You're really reliable and responsible and now you're behaving differently and you better change your behavior or you're going to get fired.

His example was the opposite, but you were the one getting angry at the boss for blaming you for stuff. But I like to turn it around. Who changed? Did the employee change? 

Our minds want to say, oh, they were really sloppy and unreliable and they were just putting on a show of being not that. Now they let their guard down and they're showing me the real them. Wrong. 

It is our seeds ripening that changed that employee. 

Does that mean we're stuck with them, because well, it's my seeds, I can't fire them, I can't blame them. Maybe, maybe not. But whether you fire them or don't fire them, we would need to change our own seeds in order to either see them change or to see the next employee we get, not do the same thing, be the same way. 

The subtleties of this understanding are really profound, because everything lands on our own shoulders and that's too big for a lot of people.

If you're in a class like this, if you're studying ACI, and you stay, it's because you have this big enough heart to hear ‘personal responsibility’ and go, Whoa, that's the ticket.

But not everybody has the seeds for that. I don't have the seeds to see everybody have the seeds for that. Which means don't go to your friends and family and tell them, you know, you are responsible for absolutely everything that happens in your life. So quit complaining about me. 

The tendency is to do that. Don’t, please.

It isn't seeds that you want.

Use your own understanding to take personal responsibility to change your own behavior. As they see your behavior change, they'll wonder about it.

Our seeds will change how we see them, whether they're interested or not. Their capacity will change according to our seeds changing. Do you see?

Apparently in the scripture somebody goes, excuse me, what about the sunrise? Come on, the sun begins to rise and then it ends rising. It's there and then it sets. Come on, that's something that's happening independent of my karma, because it happens to everybody.

The sun rises whether the worms underground know it or not. The sun rises even if somebody is sound asleep. See, there are some things that begin and end on their own, right?

Wrong. But it's hard, isn't it?

What about gravity? Come on, gravity.

Those are things to investigate. There isn't anything that we can experience or know about or even think about that is not our seeds ripening to know about it, experience it, think about it.

Can we experience something that we cannot experience?

No.

Could you establish there's an existing thing that you can't experience?

No.

Does that mean that there's nothing that exists beyond your personal experience?

No.

But how would you establish it to exist for you? You couldn't, could you?

Studying emptiness can lead us off into this no man's land of black holes and oh, what's it like for nothing to exist? That's a danger of studying emptiness. The scriptures, the Mahayana scriptures say, make sure you've grown your compassion before you study emptiness. Because we need to have a good reason for delving into this no self nature nature of subjects, objects and interactions between.

That will keep us from falling into that ‘Oh, so nothing really exists.’ 

Our minds do it so automatically. In my own experience, when I'm working with this, ‘No, there's nothing there but my projection’, my mind automatically goes, Okay, so it doesn't exist at all. And I phew, get back to the middle here. That's how things exist. Our karmic ripenings make things and they are real.

There's no such thing as something that exists independent of your karmic seed, ripening you to know about it, experience it, hear it, feel it, et cetera.

Those things are all real.

Everything you've ever experienced has been real. 

Because they've all been your projected results of past behavior.

Anything that was in it, from it, was not real. In fact, doesn't exist. Impossible. Remember Nagarjuna’s impossible versus invisible? Impossible, self existent things are impossible. 

Geshela has said, here's something very profound. See if you can get it. I'm quoting him here.

Karma creates international boundaries. International borders are created by karma. The karmas of the people on either side.

It's a really weird thing. There is this line and you cross that line and you're under the jurisdiction of completely different people, completely different rules. Some of us just were in and out of airports and it's like from one to the next. Or you can see driving down I10, you get into El Paso and the highway is right bordering the fence–Mexico's over there and United States is over here. Come on, there's no physical thing. Karmic seeds ripening for this group, and karmic seeds ripening for that group, and the karmic seeds ripening that there's a line between. It's like, no, they designated it because of this river and that river. No. All of that driven by our karma, there don't have to be borders. 

The group of people on this side are all ripening similar seeds from similar past behavior.

You could say probably done as a group before. That's a little hard for me.

But similar seeds at the similar times is what makes this country this country, and that country that country. All constantly changeable. 

Here is another thing I want you to hear. He says, 

It is true that things do not exist from their own side. That does not make them unreal. It is true that things have an unreal nature and that is good enough to say that they exist. 

It's true that things don't exist from their own side. That does not make them unreal. It's true that things have an unreal nature–meaning empty nature–and that is good enough to say that they exist.

To experience something establishes its existence. Do you remember?

What's the definition of existence? That which is perceived by a valid perception.

Things don't start and things don't stop.

(72:26) DRIMA MEPA, DRIMA DANG, DRELWA MEPA, meaning the impurities. Things are not pure and not impure.

In the direct perception of emptiness, of course there's no neither pure nor impure things, because there's nothing but the ultimate reality of all existing things. Their absence, thinking of anything or its purity or impurity is all presences, and that's not happening during the direct perception of ultimate reality.

Choney Lama says, when Lord Buddha is having these two talk about purities and impurities, he's not talking about whether water's pure enough to drink or not.

He's talking about the impurities in our own minds as in our mental afflictions.

Our stinky mental afflictions, blaming something, blaming somebody else for our pleasantness or unpleasantness, even blaming the triple berry pie for the pleasure. It is all mistaken and so stained, and so stinky, impure. If those beliefs and reactions and emotions and states of mind had some nature in them, from them, then they would be existing independent of our behavior. That would mean we could not change them.

If our jealousy continues, regardless of whether we act on it each time we have it, then we are stuck with our jealousy forever.

If our jealousy also has no nature of jealousy in it, from it, then that means every time a moment of jealousy comes up, and we recognize it and decide to number one, not act on it, will burn it off. Number two, do the opposite, which burns it off and plants different. It's faster than just not reacting. Bump on a log is a good thing. You don't replant it. But replant the opposite and you've burned it off and gained some wisdom seed.

Think 'em through. Jealousy is my specialty. What's the opposite of jealousy?

You find the one that works for you. Classically, it's rejoicing in the good seeds I have to see them have that good quality. Woohoo.

Instead of, urgh. 

It's enough to burn off and plant new in this direction that you want to go.

If our jealousy had its own nature, it wouldn't matter how many times you made yourself be happy for their success when you didn't want to be. It wouldn't make any difference in our mind.

The fact that it does, the fact that we can be jealous sometimes and not others, means that jealousy has no nature of its own.

But when we hear jealousy doesn't have any nature of its own, some part of our minds go, Oh, so it doesn't exist at all. It's not real.

It's very real. It makes us do stupid things. Because it's a projection. Do you see?

It is true that in the direct perception these things are not happening.

Coming out of the direct perception, we now are keenly aware that they are happening.

The appearing side experience of reality is full of all these impure states of mind, because of my ignorance that drove my selfishness, that drove my fourth heap of all the other factors of blaming everybody and everything for my experience. 

We have a whole lot of impure seeds to burn off. None of which have any nature of their own, so the ones we think are there actually don't exist. But the ones that are there are the ones we planted by way of our behavior. Those exist and they make very real experiences that we are hot on the heels of ending. So hoo hoo, hooray.

Let's stop there. I'm going to mark my book. I just didn't quite get where I wanted to go, but we need the time to do this last meditation. Not last, this meditation for this class.

Get yourself settled, we'll do our preliminaries and then the three steps, Kedrup Je’s three steps that we've learned already, and then we'll add the fourth today. 

Guided Meditation on Kedrup Je’s 4 Steps Emptiness Meditation 

(79:03) Settle in. 

Feel your body, solid it on your cushion.

Do a body scan top down, inviting that body to relax and you get down to the bottom.

Go inside to that subtle energy body, see it, feel it lifting. 

Your physical body is nicely tethered.

Your energy body is rising, not out of you, but lifting.

Come to your breath at your nostrils. With every outbreath, the physical world drops away, your physical body relaxes more. With every inbreath, your attention becomes more bright, more eager.

Preliminaries

Turn your attention to that precious holy being before you.

Gazing at you with that unconditional love for you, smiling at you with their holy, great compassion, their wisdom radiating to you.

Recall that other being, the one who's hurting and how they help you grow your wish to reach total enlightenment for the sake of all beings.

Again, recognize how that precious being there with you knows what you need to know, knows what you need to learn yet do yet. 

Feel your admiration for them. Feel how they inspire you and tell them, honor them in some way. It's called making a mental prostration.

Ask them to help you with this meditation and feel your gratitude to them so that you want to make them an offering. What they like best is to see you hear yourself telling them about something from your practice, something recent that you thought, or said, or did, because of something that they've taught you.

See how happy they are to hear you tell them, and feeling so safe with them, clean something else from your heart, some negativity, something recent.

Use your refuge and regret.

Establish this meditation as your antidote and then establish a power of restraint, something you can really accomplish.

We rejoice in the virtues of all.

Tell them of another, a special kindness that you did recently and one that you saw someone else do.

And another one, yours or someone else's.

Again, see your holy being so happy with you.

Ask them to please, please stay close, to continue to guide you, to teach you. 

Ask them to help you see them teaching you, even if it's coming through beings that don't look like them. 

That anyone around you that helps uplift you stays close.

Then dedicate just this much to seeing yourself able to help that other in that deep and ultimate way someday soon.

If you need to shift and wiggle, you do it now.

Then settle back in. 

Step 1 Colors & Shapes

First, I'd like you to open your eyes and scan your room without moving your head. Just your eyeballs, what you can see. See the different things in your room, some of which includes parts of your body.

Now either eyes open or eyes closed, pretend you're this very small child and you're experiencing this room. You're having experiences but you really don't have stories and identities attached to all those things.

Do this either in your mind's eye, or actually pretending you can see those things and not know and not care what they are. Just curious.

Actually quite difficult. 

Now close your eyes and mentally scan the room, remembering those items that are there. 

Step 2 The Self Existence of Things

In step two, we let ourselves experience those items in our ignorant, ordinary, automatic way. Their identity, their qualities in them, from them. So pick one.

As you're mentally experiencing it, get in touch with the belief about it, that its identity is in it.

It's showing itself to you. It exists out there from its own side. It's identity, its qualities, whether it's pleasurable or not. We're finding the GAKCHA.

We want it to be very clear. Even use reasoning for why we believe that that object has its own nature and how its reality is based on its own nature. Find that feeling, that belief. 

Step 3 Dependent Origination

Step three, use your favorite logic, your favorite reasoning to show yourself that maybe that's not true, your belief that the things in it from it. 

One easy reasoning for material objects is to ask the question, 

Does every being perceive this the same way I do? 

Does any being perceive this the same way I do? 

Of course the answer is no. No one experiences it exactly the same as I do.

What does that say about the identity and quality of the object?

That means something about us is making us experience that object in the way that we do.

Pretend that that's true, and pretend that you can experience those seeds ripening, making this overlay onto information that makes that object become what it is.

Now, drop back to your belief that the thing's identity is in it. Go back to level two.

Has to be in it. It's there, the same every time I come back to see it.

If I reach out, I could touch it. If I'm not careful, I could break it.

Feel how strong we believe the things identity is there in it, from it.

Then shift back to level one, being the little kid, little baby. No identity laid on that information.

What is it? What does it feel like? What does it smell like? What does it taste like?

Go back to level two, oh baby. Someday you'll know, you'll learn that thing's identity, and its function and its story. Because you'll come to see. You just have to learn what's in it, what's from it.

Find that belief.

Then show yourself how that cannot be true if two beings can experience the same apparent object differently.

Feel the conclusion, Oh, unique to me. And imagine you can't see that uniqueness of the thing being overlaid on information by your own awareness of it.

Your awareness of it makes it real.

Step 4 

Now let's go to step four. One version of step four is to start from step two.

See the object. Let your mind think of it as coming from its own side–its identity in it, from it.

Then remove the object that's in it from it. What's left?

Start again. See the object. Feel that same old feeling that it's coming from its side. Decide that that's impossible and what's left.

Go back to scanning your room, to your mind's eye, all those different things.

Show yourself a thing that is there that is coming from it. 

No such thing, right? 

Now, find one of those things in your room that you particularly like, that gives you a special pleasure.

Gazing upon it in your mind's eye, recognize that feeling that its identity is in it.

Its quality is what brings you the pleasure.

Then recognize that its quality giving you pleasure is a result of some past kindness that you have done.

Now gaze upon and enjoy that object with the understanding that its qualities, its identity is a result of your kindness. And so your kindness is appearing as that thing now.

Anything will bring us pleasure when it is a result of kindness.

Everything will bring us pleasure when all we have ripening is results of kindness. That's how Buddha paradise is created. That's how it's possible.

So scan your room one more time. Recognizing that all of it is a result of some past kind of kindness to just have a room is extraordinary goodness.

Lastly, feel your conclusion then, which is recognizing the power of kind behavior.

Recognizing the power of our own behavior towards others as our power of creation.

Feel your wish to plant the seeds that when they ripen will be a world free of suffering for everyone. 

Dedication

And be happy with yourself for your efforts in this practice, in this class.

Think of this goodness, like a beautiful glowing gemstone that you can hold in your hands. \

Recall your own precious, holy guide.

See how happy they are with you.

Ask them to please, please stay close, to continue to guide you, help you inspire you. 

Then offer them this gemstone of goodness.

See them accept it and bless it and they carry it with them right back into your heart.

See them there. Feel them there, their love, their compassion, their wisdom.

It feels so good, we want to keep it forever and so we know to share it.

By the power of the goodness that we've just done

May all beings complete the collection of merit and wisdom

And thus gain the two ultimate bodies that merit and wisdom make.

Use those three long exhales to share this goodness with that one person, to share it with everyone you love, to share it with every existing being everywhere. 

See them all filled with loving kindness and the wisdom that creates it.

And may it be so.

Nice job. So we'll repeat those four steps of Kedrup Je’s meditation in each class so it'll get more clear how to do it. The first time it's really slippery. Like, what happens to the object when I remove its self existent nature that was never there in the first place? The object doesn't change.

But we're sure it should change because I'm trying to see its emptiness. It has to disappear. It's like, no, it can't disappear. 

Grapple with it for a few days before your questions start popping up. Let it percolate, try it on for size and then we'll have a chance to explore its ramifications as we do more of it.

It's a really, really useful tool, this sequence. 

I have to admit, I don't do the first one very much, and I do spend a little time on step two, really catching the self existent part.

I like to explore the other two and the different aspects of pretending I can put the seed on, and then looking for what's there without that. You'll eventually find yourself going through the six different levels of the Mahamudra. Not the one that's coming up, that I'll be teaching. But the different schools.

You will see your own mind explaining your experience according to the different levels of the different schools. It's quite fascinating.

No, no, there has to be something in it because the thing is there for me to project onto, there has to be something there. 

I never actually experienced it directly, because all I can experience directly is my own seeds. This is Mind Only School. But there's something there that functions and it's even Lower Highest School, Independent School. It's like, Don't need to identify what's there from it. Just interact with what you bring to the party. Like the magic show. Just understand that there has to be something that gets the magic, but doesn't matter what it is, because you're going to change it.

Then Highest School, it's like, well when you go looking for that, you can't find it either. It's still the same process. When you go looking for the thing that gets the label, you don't find anything but the process of labels happening. Ripenings, ripenings, ripenings. So this meditation can take us there. Quite beautiful. 

Alright, end of class. See you on Monday morning for class six. Please try this meditation on for size. Okay. All right. So any burning questions, I don't want to leave you hanging in a black hole. Good. All right. Thank you so much for the opportunity. Have a lovely weekend.

For the recording, welcome back. We are still studying the Heart Sutra. This is January 20th, 2025. Let's gather our minds here as we usually do. 

Please bring your attention to your breath until you hear from me again.

[General Class Opening]

Let's hear the Heart Sutra again. You're welcome to read it along with me if you have it. Otherwise just listen. In these situations I always like to listen and just let it percolate and I sometimes often catch something new. So you're welcome to do that too.

The Exhalted One

The Lady of Conquest

The Sutra on the Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom

The name of this sutra in Sanskrit is Arya Bhagavati Prajnya Paramita Hirdaya.

In Tibetan this is Pakpa Chomden Dema Sherabkyi Parultu Chinpay Nyingpo.

I bow first to all enlightened beings, and to every warrior saint. Once I heard this teaching.

The Conqueror was staying on Vulture’s Peak in the Keep of the King. With him was a great gathering of monks and a great gathering of warrior saints. At a certain moment, the Conqueror went into deep meditation on the part of the teachings known as the “awareness of the profound”. At that moment too did the realized being, the great warrior, the lord of power, Loving Eyes, see into this one deep practice, the practice of the perfection of wisdom. He saw perfectly that the five heaps – the five parts of a person – were empty of any nature of their own.

Then, by the power of the Enlightened One, the junior monk named Shari Putra, turned and asked this question of the great warrior, Loving Eyes, the realized one, the lord of power: “If any son or daughter of noble family hoped to follow the deep practice of the perfection of wisdom, what would they have to do?”

This then is the answer that the lord of power, the realized one, the great warrior, Loving Eyes, gave to the junior monk named Shari Putra: “Here, Shari Putra, is what any son or daughter of noble family should see who hopes to follow the deep practice of the perfection of wisdom.”

“See first all five heaps – all five parts of a person – are free of any essence of their own. Your body is empty, emptiness is your body. Emptiness is nothing but your body and your body is nothing but emptiness.”

“The same is true of your feelings, and your ability to discriminate between things, and the other factors that make you up, and all the different kinds of awareness that you possess: all of them are empty.”

“And thus we can say, Shari Putra, that every existing thing is emptiness. Nothing has any characteristic of its own. Nothing ever begins. Nothing ever ends. Nothing is ever impure. Nothing ever becomes pure. Nothing ever gets less, and nothing ever becomes more.”

“And thus we can say, Shari Putra, that with emptiness there is no body. There are no feelings. There is no ability to discriminate. There are none of the other factors that make you up and there is no awareness.”

“There are no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; nothing to see, nothing to hear, nothing to smell, nothing to taste, nothing to touch and nothing to think of. There is no part of you that sees, there is no part of you that is aware that you are seein; and this is true all the way to the part of you that thinks, and the part of you that is aware that you are thinking.”

“There is no misunderstanding your world. There is no stopping this misunderstanding, and the same is true all the way up to your old age and death, and to stopping your old age and death.”

“There is no suffering. There is no source of suffering. There is no stopping this suffering. There is no path to stopping this suffering.”

“There is no knowledge, there is nothing to reach, and there is nothing not to reach.”

“Thus it is, Shari Putra, that warrior saints have nothing to reach, and because of this, they are able to practice the perfection of wisdom, and stay in this perfection of wisdom. This frees them from every obstacle in their minds, and this frees them from all fear. They go beyond all wrong ways of thinking, and reach to the ultimate end of nirvana.”

“All the Enlightened Beings of the past, the present and the future too, follow this same perfection of wisdom, and thus bring themselves to perfect enlightenment: to the matchless state of a totally enlightened Buddha.”

“Thus are they the sacred words of the perfection of wisdom; the sacred words of great knowledge; sacred words of the unsurpassable; sacred words that are equal to the One beyond all equal, sacred words that put a final end to every form of pain; sacred words you should know are true, for false they cannot be; sacred words of the perfection of wisdom, which here I speak for you:

Tadya ta, ga-te ga-te, para ga-te, para sang ga-te, bodhi so ha

“And thus it is, Shari Putra, that great warrior saints must train themselves the profound perfection of Wisdom.”

With this, the Conqueror stirred himself from his deep state of meditation. He turned to the great warrior, the realized one, Loving Eyes, the Lord of Power, and blessed his words saying, “True”. “True”, he said. And “true” again.

“Thus it is O son of noble family, and thus is it. One should follow the profound perfection of Wisdom just as you have taught it. Every one of Those Gone Thus rejoice in your words as I do.”

And when the Conqueror had spoken thus, the junior monk Shari Putra took joy, and the warrior, the realized one, Loving Eyes, the lord of power took joy as well. And all the assembled disciples took joy and so did the entire world – with its gods and its men, and near gods and spirits too take joy. All sang their praises of what the Conqueror had spoken.

Guided 4 Step Meditation by Kedrup Je

(13:52) Let's start with our meditation where we'll explore those four steps that Kedrup Je has taught us. Reaching number four from a little different way than we did before. 

We'll start with our motivation and a swift go through our preliminaries and then do the same. Scan the room, find some object. I'll lead you through it.

This will probably take a half an hour I would guess.

Settle your body into your chair such that your spine and back stays upright without much effort such that that body can relax and feel safe and supported.

Then turn your mind inward by starting with the breath.

Adjust your fixation, adjust your clarity, adjust your intensity by increasing your curiosity, your interest in doing this meditation. 

Now recall that being who's suffering is so painful for them and painful for us to see them with it, and that wish that you could do something significant, say something significant. 

Feel that wish. 

Develop into the wish to truly know what they need, to be able to truly be what they need with that strong wish.

Recall again your precious, holy being, recognizing that they are that for you. They know what you need. They are being what you need. 

Feel your admiration for them, your reliance upon them and tell them what you admire about them. Tell them of your aspiration. 

Tell them of your refuge in karma and emptiness. Your recognition that from moment to moment interaction with our world is how we create our future experiences. And so there's nothing that we don't create. 

There's no beauty, no leisure, no happiness that we can't create.

Then make that precious being and offering.

What they like best is to see, hear you, hear yourself telling them of some way in which you put something they taught you into practice.

How happy they are to hear what you've offered.

Feel safe enough to clear your heart of some negativity.

Review your refuge, feel and tell them of your regret and why. 

Establish this class as your antidote and establish an achievable power of restraint and feel that your confession has made a little space in that holy of holies in your chest.

Fill that space with some rejoicing. Tell them of another special kindness that you've done recently and something you saw someone else do. 

Tell them of something that you recently experienced that was just especially beautiful or pleasurable. 

Recognize what a powerful good influence they have on you. Ask them to please, please stay close.

Ask them to help you stay close to other beings who help uplift you.

Ask them to please continue to guide you, and teach you formal teachings and the informal ones that come through interactions with others that don't look like them.

Then dedicate just what we've done so far to this meditation, helping you become one who can help that other their suffering forever. 

If you need to shift and wiggle your body, you do it now. If you don't need to, you don't have to.

Settle back in. You start the meditation.

We'll again, scan the outer objects of our room.

You can do it with your eyes open or with your eyes shut. First step is just experiencing no identities, no stories, just simple things. 

Once you have a clear picture of what's there within your visual space, close your eyes and pick one of them that you find particularly nice, particularly attractive, one that you especially like. 

Then also identify one that you don't especially like if there's even one there that you downright don't like.

So we have these two things that are opposites. One, we're attracted to the other. We're actually a little adverse. Two, give me a thumbs up when you have those two in your mind's eye.

Step two is to look first at the nice thing and exaggerate your belief, your feeling, your experience of it with its niceness, the qualities that you like about it, being in it. Tell yourself why that must be true. I like it every time I see it. It has to be in it. I can reach out and touch it. It has to be in it, its shape, its colors. It's so pretty. It's so pleasant. I feel good every time I see it. 

It has to be in it.

Experience yourself experiencing that object in that way. If someone stole it, you would be offended.

If someone carelessly broke it, we would be hurt because our pleasure comes from it. 

Now do the same with the unpleasant object. It's unpleasantness is in it.

Tell yourself the reasons why. 

Trying to identify the experience of that object having its qualities in it.

Now, when we have that strong, we shift to the third step. Check that nice thing.

Check that nice thing for your experience of it. Can its qualities be in it, from it?

Making you experience it the way you do it.

Seems like it, but nobody else feels the same way about it as you do, do they?

Nobody else has experienced it the same way as you have your experience of that object–nice or not nice is unique to you. 

Our own awareness of that object is making us see it the way we do react to it the way we do, like it or not like it the way we do. That's all our own experience unique to each of us.

So get in touch with the experience of that object coming from your own mind.

Your own awareness of the object is bringing you this experience, that object there with those qualities that you like.

This is understanding dependent origination. Our mind making us see the object the way we do is what's meant by karmic seeds ripening.

So imagine seeing those karmas ripening one after the other, putting on the overlay of that object you like and its niceness. Put on the overlay of its qualities that you're attracted to.

Then turn and look at the object that you're not attracted to, adverse to, and see your mind doing the same thing. Seeds ripening. Seeds ripening into the experience happening Me seeing that object not liking, adverse.

Go back to the nice one. My karma ripening. Wow.

Go to the not nice one. My karma ripening. Wow.

Now shift to step four. Look at those two objects.

Is there anything about any part of either of those that is not coming from your karmic seeds ripening?

No.

Show yourself the objects that are not your karmic seeds. What's there? 

Is there such a thing as a nice object that's not your karmic seeds ripening? 

No.

Is there such a thing as a nice object that is your karmic seeds ripening?

Yes, there it is.

Is there such a thing as a nice object, there from its own side, independent of your experience of it?

No, no such thing.

Go to step three. That object with its niceness coming from our own mind, forcing us to see it that way and show yourself whether or not that object can exist in any other way than that. 

No, that's its absence of self nature, its emptiness.

Step three, its dependent origination, depending upon our karmic seeds ripening its emptiness. No other object than that there.

Our ignorance, that belief and experience that the object and its niceness are in it, from it. Go back to that one.

Hopefully it's feeling ridiculous.

Go to step three. No, unique to me. My karma ripening. Wow.

Go to step four. Nothing other than my karma ripening. Wow.

Just consider everything in your room, is any of it there without your karma ripening? No.

Are you there without your karma ripening?

No.

Come back to level three. 

Every moment of experience is my seeds ripening.

Pleasant experience is results of some kind of kindness.

Unpleasant experience results of some kind of unkindness.

Nothing exists in any other way than that.

Nice. Now let go that whole process.

Turn your mind back to that precious holy being.

See how happy they are with your effort.

Ask them again to stay close, and dedicate this effort that we've done to becoming one who can help that other in that deep and ultimate way. 

Then feel your body in your chair. Feel yourself in your room.

When you're ready, open your eyes. Take a stretch. 

Explanation to the 4 Step Meditation

(44:48) We have these four stages of this practice. Just establishing that things are there, no stories. Getting in touch with our ignorant experience of those objects, their identities in them, their qualities in them, and all the reasons why we still believe that.

Then you're pushing the radio stations.

You just push the next button, go to level three, and show yourself that the way we experience our objects has to be unique to oneself. Whatever reasoning you want to use to show yourself that, you then land on one of those reasonings and use it to show yourself, Oh, it has to be something unique to me. 

What makes it unique to me is this thing we call our karma. Imprints made, imprints ripening. We're talking about karmic seeds ripening here into me experiencing that in that way. So at step three we go through the reasoning and then settle on, okay, it must be that. Let's see if I can catch it happening. You even impose that.

Geshela says ‘silver seeds ripens‘, it cracks open and then the picture is there and the overlay goes onto the data. You play with seeing that happen. 

For me it's a little different, because I don't have that visual thing. But I can catch that shapeshift of mind when I use a direct experience that usually includes my eyes, and if I close my eyes it doesn't. Where it works best for me is if I focus in on the sensation of my physical body on whatever I'm on, laying on my bed, sitting on my chair. I focus in on that sensation. We've got this sensation on our buttocks and the back of our legs right now that we automatically go, oh me sitting on a chair.

But when you close your eyes and dig in and ask yourself, what information am I actually getting? 

What is it about that sensation that tells me ‚bottom on chair‘? The sensation is just a pressure. There's nothing about the sensation that gives the identity of the back of my legs, is there? When you can separate the objects from the sensation, you get this really clear picture that, oh my gosh, it's some idea that I have that that sensation means ‘my body on the chair‘. Then from that I can slip into other nuances.

But I have to first show myself that the raw data is not enough. We never get enough raw data to come up with the object and its qualities that we are experiencing constantly.

This four step process is helping us explore that right now we're just using outer physical objects that we're remembering in our mind's eye to use for this exploration. The exploration always first starts with our ignorant belief in their natures in them, their qualities in them. Then you show yourself how that's inconsistent with actual experience.

Any argument that you can use for outer objects, the easiest one is to say, well, does everybody see that object as the nicest, and that object as the ickiest? No, of course not. It has to be unique to me.

Step three is finding the ‘unique to me‘ experience of the object of our focus.

That's showing ourselves dependent origination.

Step four is to show us the necessary no-self-nature of the object in order for it to be dependently originated. In order for an object to be unique to me, it can't have anything unique to it, can it? Because if it has something unique to it, it would impose that onto my experience of it. 

So step three is to show ourselves again and again and again that my experience is unique to me, and it makes the think and its qualities.

Step four is to show ourselves that there's no objects‘ identity or qualities there in any other way than that.

So, you can get to it from step two, Oh, the object's in it, from it. I see it that way. 

I prove to myself that it's not that way. Find myself an object that is in it.

None.

Find an object that every being would experience in exactly the same way.

None.

And we can get to emptiness from step three. 

The thing is my karmic seed‘s ripening, and what would be there if my karmic seeds stop ripening?

It's a little different way to find the no self nature of the object.

The first way is removing the GAKCHA.

The second way is going looking for the thing that gets the label, which is Highest Middle Way‘s method of showing ourselves the no self nature of whatever our investigation is, is: Here's the thing with the identity, the pen.

We show ourselves, no, that can't be true. Because dog sees chew toy, fly sees landing pad.

But our mind still goes, Yeah, but there's something about this object that's pen-ish that allows me to see pen instead of whatever this thing is. They're kind of similar, long and narrow. But no matter what I do with this one, it won't write. And this one does.

No matter what a dog does with either one of these, neither one writes.

You use your logic to pull away that belief that it is in it, from it. But it doesn't disappear, does it? Because it is our seed's ripening and it always has been our seed's ripening. To recognize that it's not in it, from, it doesn't make it go away. Because it was never in it, from it. There's nothing to disappear.

What disappears is that conviction that it is in it, from it. It's something in our mind that disappears, not in the object. Because that quality of the object was never there in the first place.

Going from step two to step four helps shows us that.

Going from step three, which is dependent origination, to the no self nature of the object, which is necessary for our seed ripening to make it what we experience.

We see how those two ideas are two sides of a coin.

What does Je Tsongkapa say?

When you see how dependent origination proves things don't exist and emptiness proves they do? It seems backwards. It seems like dependent origination proves things exist, and emptiness proves they don't really exist.

But that's the wrong conclusion.

The empty nature of something is necessary for our seed ripening to make the thing what it is. The instant we perceive pen, green pen, my green pen, my favorite green pen. Don't touch my green pen. All of that has to be blank from its side so that my seeds can make it into that for me. 

We've got these four steps, but step four you can get to from three or from two.

Technically you've got five different ways to negotiate this four step practice.

Does it mean that that nicest thing in your room is really not nice at all?

Yeah, well from its side it, yes, it's not nice at all. It's not nice at all. It's not anything at all from its side. Which is why it can be nice and it can be pleasurable, and it can bring you happiness. But only as a ripening result of having tried to bring a little bit of happiness and pleasure to somebody else in the past.

Have we ever done that?

Yes.

Are we always successful?

No. But it doesn't matter, really, whether we're successful or not. It's our mind imprinting trying to bring somebody some happiness. If we see them not happy with what we did. That's our ripening result as well from times when we were unhappy with something that somebody did was trying to be nice. Have we ever done that? 

Yes, I know I have. 

We're working at the results‘ place right now to see if we can catch this reality that's coming out of our own results of past behavior. With that we stop blaming the other person for trying to do something nice that's not nice. 

Come on. What's the matter with you? Don't you know me by now? I like cooked food, not raw food.

We blame, blame, blame.

This meditation, when we work with it a lot, it will help us be more aware of when we are turning on the blame factor and blaming the weather for our achy joints, and blaming… Because it means when we blame something or somebody for something else, it means we're at stage two, believing their qualities, identities are in them.

Do unpleasant things happen? Absolutely.

Are we allowed to feel unpleasant about them? Absolutely.

Do nice things happen? Yes. Are we allowed to enjoy them? 

Yes. And we should. And we should search them out and want more.

But how do we make more happiness and pleasurable things in our world?

Seeing ourselves try to bring somebody else a little more happiness in our world. We can do that so easily. Smile at somebody, hold the door open, tell them they look right. Ask them how they are and listen to what they say. So simple.

We don't have to jump into the waters and save the person's life, although I hope that we will if we're ever in that situation.

But that's not what it takes to change our world. It's the everyday little low level kindnesses Sumati always says, low level radiation kindnesses. 

Heart Sutra is helping us recognize that but not in so many words.

Let's take a break and we'll go back to Sutra and see what it's going to tell us.

‘There are no eyes, no nose,…‘

(60:45) We left off last week having spoken about this vers:

SHARIPU, DETAWAY NA TONGPA-NYI LA SUK ME, TSORWA ME-feelings, DUSHE ME-discriminating between things, DUJE NAM ME-all the other factors that make me up, NAMPAR SHEPA ME-consciousness, all the consciousnesses that I have.

ME meaning not, none. They aren't. 

So, 

Thus we can say Shariputra that with emptiness there is no body-SUK ME, no feeling-TSORWA ME, no ability to discriminate-DUSHE ME, none of the other factors that make me up-DUJE NAM ME, and there is no awareness-NAMPAR SHEPA ME. 

We talked about how this is speaking to when we are in the direct perception of emptiness as we are learning, all we are experiencing and experiencing directly is the absent absence of self nature of the experience. We could say the absence of self nature of self, or the absence of self nature of all existing things. 

In the direct perception of emptiness, there is nothing but absence. So we can't experience our body being there. When we're in meditation we still have some awareness, gross or subtle, that our body is there. We're still having feeling, thumbs up, thumbs down. We're still discriminating between things.

In the direct perception of emptiness, all of that appearing aspect of experience is dependent origination side. We can't be aware of the appearing side and the empty side—the no self nature side—simultaneously until we clear the obstacles to omniscience.

So in the direct perception of emptiness, there really is no body. No body in our appearing awareness, because there is no appearing. It's impossible to describe in words, but we keep trying.

Next, 

MIKME, NAWA ME, NA ME, CHE ME, LU ME, YI ME, SUK ME, DRA ME, TRI ME, RO ME, REKJA ME, CHU ME DO.

He is like rubbing it in.

MIKME means there are no eyes.

MIK ME-no eyes, no ears-NAWA, no nose-NA, no tongue-CHE, no body-LU. YI ME- no mind.

Then, SUK ME-no form, meaning nothing to see. 

So there are no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind.

Nothing to see, nothing to hear, nothing to smell-DRI ME, nothing to taste-RO ME, nothing to touch-REKJA ME, nothing to think of-CHU ME DO.

What do you think? Do you think we're still in the direct perception of emptiness?

I think so. When we're in the communion with ultimate reality, the absence of self nature of all of these things, there can't be any of these things in our experience. 

Does that mean when you're sitting on your cushion in the direct perception of emptiness, you have disappeared? If somebody walks into the room, will they see somebody sitting there?

I don't know their karma, but I want to say yes.

We don't disappear when we're in the direct perception of emptiness.

Is your awareness of you gone? Yes.

It's slippery, right? I would actually, if I were on the debate, I would say I do disappear.

If somebody else still saw my body there, that's their karma. That's not mine.

But anyway, I've never done that on the debate.

Do we think our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body and mind have some nature of their own? Come on. I admit, I do.

Do I think that there are things to see, to hear, to smile, to taste, to touch and to think of? Yes, I admit, I do. I do it all day long, all night long.

Again, it's like in the direct perception, none of those things can appear. And out of the direct perception, now even when we experience things through these 12 gateways, which is what these are, we still are experiencing them as coming from them in them. But now we know better. We know that that's not true. We know that they don't exist that way. They don't exist in the way that we're experiencing them.

Choney Lama says that in fact we're starting to talk about the path of habituation already. When I go looking to see where it feels to me like we switch from path of seeing to path of habitation, some days I read the sutra and it's like, oh there it is. Then other days it's some other verse where it shows up. 

If there were some self existent place in the Heart Sutra where you shift from one to the next, it would be the same every single time, wouldn't it? And it would be the same for all of us, wouldn't it? We wouldn't need a commentary, would we?

The beauty of Heart Sutra is as you read and study it, it will reveal different things to you because your seeds are changing as you study it, and your seeds are changing in between times by way of the things that you do in your outer world. So it's kind of fun to go back and revisit it from time to time and realize, oh my gosh, I never saw that in there. I never understood that in that way before.

These sutras all should be able to do that for us. 

(68:45) In direct perception, clearly there's no eyes, no ears in our experience.

But when we come out now, the no eyes, no ears, no nose or no eyes, no ears, no nose that are in them, from them, even though it appears that they are. Got it?

Buddha just didn't say no eyes from their own side, no nose from their own side. He leaves it up to the study or the reader to recognize that that's what's being said.

It gets misunderstood. It sounds like Buddha is saying nothing really exists.

Is Buddha saying nothing really exists? No. He's saying how things exist is not the way we believe that they exist. Things do exist by way of our seeds ripening, making them exist in the way that they do. They don't exist in any other way than that, but we thought they did. The way we thought they existed, those don't exist at all and never did and never have. 

So there are things that we believe exist that don't exist. But that's not the things that we actually interact with. Is it? Because the things we actually interact with have always been our seeds ripening things, and they are real. That was the point of the nice and not nice part of that meditation example, is that the niceness and the object are real because of our seeds ripening them that way. That's what makes them real. 

The object with its niceness in it is unreal and impossible, and has never been there. 

We're trying to get that conundrum.

Our ignorance refuses to buy it until we've really proven it to ourselves over and over again.

Somewhere in here we've come out of the direct perception of emptiness and we're on our path of habituation, which means that we're still perceiving things as coming at us, but we don't believe it. 

And so we know more directly that what we're experiencing is a result of our past behavior. 

And so we know more directly that my current behavior is crucial to what I'm going to experience in the future.

Our path of habituation is getting used to making our behavior choices from this new state of understanding even when things look the same as they did before. Let's see where he goes with that. 

MIKKI KA ME CHING, MIKKI NAMPAR SHEPAY KAM MEPA NE YI KYI KAM ME CHING, (YI KYI NAMPAR SHEPAY KAM KYI BARDU YANG ME DO.)

There's no part of you that sees-MIKKI KAM ME CHING.

We have these three. We have the eyeball, we have the eye consciousness, and then we have the part of me that sees. 

There are these three factors: 

1. the subject-the part of me that sees the object, 

2. the thing that's being seen. You could even say the eyeball that's seeing, and then

3. the experience of the seeing.

There's no part of you that sees. 

There's really no eyeball that's bringing in the data. 

No eyeball at all? No, no eyeball in it, from it, from all those cells that make it up. 

Does the eyeball need cells to make it up? Yes. But because of our karmic seeds ripening it that way, and it's real.

There's no part of you that is aware of what you see. And this is true all the way up to the part of you that thinks, and the part of you that is aware that you are thinking. 

Again, if we're thinking we're still in the direct perception of emptiness, of course none of this is appearing to us, because it's part of appearing reality, and ultimate reality is not that.

When we take this to mean our path of habituation, it means that the part of me that sees is happening again. Now I am aware that I think that it has its own nature, but I know it doesn't.

So there's no part of me that sees that's not part of the karma ripening.

There's no part of me that is aware of what I see that's not part of the karma ripening. 

And this is true all the way up to the part of me that thinks. There's no part of me that thinks that's not part of the karma's ripening. Get it?

Part of me that is aware that I'm thinking.

‚There is no misunderstanding…‘

MARIKPA ME, MA RIKMA SEPA MEPA ME,GASHI ME, GASHI SEPAY BARDU YANG ME DO.

MARIKPA = misunderstanding

RIKPA = understanding

MARIKPA ME-There's no misunderstanding my world.

There's no stopping this misunderstanding. And the same is true all the way up to our old age and death and to stopping our old age and death.

This one rocks the boat, doesn't it? Buddha promised that, you take refuge, you purify and make merit and we're going to stop all suffering.

We're going to stop forced rebirth, aging, illness and death.

Now in the Heart Sutra there's no such thing?

Is he saying, There's no such thing? No.

Does old age happen? Yes.

Does death happen? Yes.

If aging and death have their identities and qualities in them, could they happen?

We say no, because we know the party line.

But come on, deep down in your heart, level two meditation, do we believe that old age has to happen? Yeah. You know I was one month old and now I'm bearing down on 71. Aging has happened.

But is there any aging that has happened independent of my experience of it? No. That's ridiculous to say.

Can I experience anything without experiencing it? No, it's absurd.

What's really meant by ‘experiencing something‘? A karmic seed ripening.

So can a karmic seed ripen without a karmic seed ripening? Is saying the same thing as can I experience something without experiencing it.

No. Every experience is karmic seeds ripening and nothing but.

So is there aging? Yes.

Is there death? Yes.

Because we have karmic seeds that ripen forcing us to interpret information. As as I am getting older. We are forced by our karmic seeds ripening to interpret, I'm dying information as I'm dying.

Then there's no more karmic seeds for this life. The mind still has karmic seeds. Those karmic seeds will make a different life.

The mind in that different life, we think, oh, okay, Sarahni‘s mind will suddenly be in a bug. And now Sarahni is trapped in this little bug body, and she's a stink bug.

But it's not like that. It won't be Sarahni's mind in the stink bug.

It'll just be stink bug mind, or Buddha mind.

Karmic seeds ripening is it, is experience, is reality.

In misunderstanding or no misunderstanding, as we are applying our wisdom from our path of seeing to life, that state of still seeing things as self existent but not believing it, is shifting, shifting, shifting until we reach that level where we are no longer even seeing things as self existent. We are experiencing directly that things are karma's ripening and nothing but. That's actually called reaching Nirvana, or the 8th Bodhisattva bhumi, where we would want to say, oh, all my misunderstanding has now stopped.

We've learned Nirvana means the end of all mental afflictions and seeds for more, because we applied ourselves to what we learned in our direct perception of dependent origination and then emptiness for all those lifetimes in order to burn off the seeds that were stained with ignorance.

So we're thinking there was misunderstanding my world, and then I became aware of the misunderstanding, and I doggedly changed my behavior to burn it off, and I reached the place where I stopped that misunderstanding.

If I was on the Mahayana path, I would go even further to doing what I need to do to clear out the remnants of that misunderstanding, which are obstacle-ing my omniscience, which is my ability to really know what other beings need to take up and give up. So we would want to hold and say there is a thing called misunderstanding, and because I can understand my misunderstanding, I can learn to stop it.

But in using words like that, it's reinforcing our belief that our misunderstanding has some nature of its own. If it did, we would not ever be able to burn it off and not replant it. So this is reminding us that once we're out of the direct perception of emptiness, we actually now see that our ignorance itself has no nature of its own. 

I hear myself say that and my mind immediately goes, oh, so it doesn't really exist. I don't really have ignorance. And it's like reel that guy back again, because yes I do. My ignorance is every time I blame David for the dirty dishes that haven't been rinsed out in the sink. My karma ripening for dirty dishes, not rinsed out in the sink.

Every time I blame my ficus tree for having dust on it, I am misunderstanding my world. I do have misunderstanding, and that misunderstanding has no nature of its own. The misunderstanding that I think I have doesn't exist. But the misunderstanding I do have, which is coloring every seed and every seed out, that misunderstanding is very real. Because of it I make mistakes in my behavior.

That misunderstanding has no nature of its own. So there is no misunderstanding that's coming from its own side.

There's no stopping this misunderstanding that won't be a result of some extraordinary kindness that we do for others, so that we can stop the misunderstanding by way of planting our merit such that when those seeds ripen, ripen as ’no more misunderstanding‘. Then that's true all the way up to old age and death. 

Old age happens because of karmic seeds ripening forcing us to perceive ourselves that way. 

Death happens because of karmic seeds ripening to perceive ourselves having that happen.

Stopping our old age will only happen if we plant the karmic seeds, the merit seeds, for that result of experience.

Stopping death will only happen when we plant the seeds for that experience.

So it can happen—not from its own side. Let's go on.

‚There is no suffering…‘

DUK-NGELWA DANG, KUNJUNGWA DANG

Who was in class last night? DUK-NGEL,we learned, remember? Suffering.

DUK-NGELWA is somehow no suffering. I don't know why it's not DUK-NGELME, but DUK-NGELWA means there's no suffering, and—DANG means ‘and’, KUNJUNGWA DANG—there's no source of this suffering.

GOKPA DANG—there's no stopping this suffering and LA ME—there's no path to stop this suffering.

Anybody recognize these four?

They're the four Arya truths.

We've learned that when we experience emptiness directly, that'll be seeds ripening. Those seeds ripening are going to wear out. We'll come out of that direct communion with ultimate reality, the absence of all existence, and as we're coming out of that, we still have some incredibly good seeds ripening. 

We experience in the next 12 to 24 hours a series of direct experiences, some still in meditation, some outside of meditation that come to be called the 16 aspects of the four Arya truths. 

The four Arya truths are these four things that become true for someone that weren't true before coming out of their direct perception of emptiness. One of those is that direct realization that everything is suffering.

Everything in a desire realm, in Samsara, is suffering—no matter how pleasant or how unpleasant. It's all suffering and that it's all results of causes. If you stop the causes, you will stop the suffering, and that there's a way to do that. Those four truths.

Now here's Lord Buddha having taught the four truths.

Now he says, eh, not really. It sounds like it. Those four truths, they're not really true. Does he mean that? No.

Is it true that there's no suffering? Is it true that there's no suffering that can happen without our karmic seeds ripening ‚This is suffering‘. 

Is it true there's no suffering from its own side? Yes.

No experience that's unpleasant for one being that's unpleasant for every being. Somebody in the world likes that sensation that I call migraine. I can't imagine it, but emptiness being the case, it has to be true.

Is it true that there's no causes to suffering? No. Everything has to have a cause. Any experience is a result and every result has to have a cause. So any suffering has to have a source, has to have a cause of suffering. But is there a cause of suffering that has that suffering deep down inside it and suddenly the result is there? Arya Nagarjuna’s favorite: Just when is it? Tell me when the cause becomes the result. Is it a cause for the result before the result is there? No. But once the result is there, the cause is gone. So how does the cause ever actually make a result? You can't have them both there at the same time or they're not cause and result. They're the same thing. 

It's like, wait a minute, how do these cause result things work? But they have to work because experiences are results. What we see ourselves do in response to those experiences plant seeds in our minds that are the causes, there have to be causes.

In them, from them? No. That whole process is dependent origination and emptiness. The whole process of karma also doesn't have its own nature. It can't, or it wouldn't work. It wouldn't. Now that's wrong. It just can't. No such thing as karma from its own side.

Is there such a thing as what we call karma? Yes. 

Do our selfish seeds ripen into experiences that are unpleasant? Yes.

Is there something in that seed of unkindness that becomes that seed's own nature? No. Karma itself is driven by karma. So no suffering from its own side, no suffering that can happen that's not a result of having caused some kind of suffering to somebody else in the past. 

No cause of suffering that hasn't been made by seeing ourselves cause some suffering to somebody else in the past.

There's no end to this suffering that will happen without us seeing ourselves try to stop the suffering of somebody else. There's no path, none of these methods of helping ourselves move along our path to Buddhahood work from their own side. They're all driven by results of our behavior towards others.

So there is suffering, there is causes of suffering, there is ways to stop it and there is a path to stopping that. But none of it exists from its own side. And that's what Heart Sutra is showing us here. And that's what we are learning to live by on our path of habituation.

So clearly we're on our path of habituation by here. Because these are the four truths that we're living by from direct experience coming out of the direct perception of emptiness.

‘There is no knowledge…‘

He goes on to say,

YESHE ME, TOPPA ME, MA TOPPA YANG ME DO.

YESHE ME, YESHE means knowledge.

SHERAB means wisdom.

So YESHE and SHERAB, they're not actually exactly synonyms. But it confuses me exactly which one is which.

So here YESHE ME, there's no knowledge.

Remember when we learned about the three knowledges? I don't know why that popped up. Knowledge just means learning the things we need to learn to help move us along the path. It's like we learn things that lead to our path of accumulation. We learn things that lead along our path of preparation. Our TONG LAM teaches us stuff. We come out with certain knowledge.

Again, Buddha says, ‘There's no knowledge‘, meaning there's no knowledge that's not the results of past behavior. Past kindness will ripen as our growing knowledge of the path.

When we study and we gain these realizations, we think, Oh, because I studied, because I debated, because I meditated. And yes, all of those things were ripening results that brought us along the path, but they aren't the cause of our growing understanding.

If our growing understanding is a pleasant result, it's a result of somehow helping somebody else understand something better. It could have just been understanding how to set the table better that has grown into these seeds ripening you understanding emptiness and karma better.

There's no knowledge that's not the result of past kindness.

There's nothing to reach. What are we trying to reach? Nirvana and/or Buddhahood. We're in Mahayana, so we're trying to reach Buddhahood.

Is there no such thing as Buddhahood?

No such thing as a self existent Buddhahood.

There is Buddhahood that will be the Buddhahood that's forced on us by way of the ripening seeds of extraordinary goodness.

Purify and make merit is the mantra.

But if we're thinking there's some Buddhahood that's going to be in it from it that we're going to reach, we're not ever going to reach that. Because there's no such thing. If that's what we're aspiring to, we're never going to get there. There's nothing to reach and there's nothing not to reach. Thank you for saying that Lord Buddha.

It's confusing in English, but it means self existent Buddhahood is not reachable. Dependently originated Buddhahood is reachable.

Nothing not to reach is the emptiness of your Buddhahood, which is very reachable by way of this not self existent path to stopping suffering. 

You with me? I only have three faces to watch. I don't know about everybody else. We're moving fast here.

‚Great Warrior Saints have nothing to reach…‘

(96:45) Choney Lama says, according to Geshe Michael, that when Loving Eyes says, SHARIPU DE TAWAY NA, it means we're shifting subjects, subject matters. 

Choney Lama says, we are shifting now to the fifth path, MILOB LEM, with this next phrase.

I'm not sure I completely agree, but let's see what happens.

SHARIPU, DE TAWAY NA, JANGCHUB SEMPA NAM TOPPA MEPAY CHIR SHERAB KYI PAROLTU CHINPA LA TENNE NETE SEM LA DRIPPA MEPAY JIKPA ME DE.

I remember memorizing that.

Thus it is Shariputra—SHARIPU DE TAWAY NA

that warrior saints–JANCHUB SEMPA

have nothing to reach.

And because of this, they're able to practice the perfection of wisdom and stay in this perfection of wisdom.

Let‘s see if that‘s all in there.

SHERAB KYI PAROLTU CHINPA, there is the perfection of wisdom.

I don't know this word for word. LA TENNE NETE SEM LA DRIPPA MEPAY JIKPA ME DE.

MEPAY JIKPA ME DE means they go beyond all fear.

JIKPA—all destruction.

This frees them of every obstacle in their minds, and this frees them from all fear. They go beyond all wrong ways of thinking and reach to the ultimate end of Nirvana.

As Bodhisattvas on the different levels, the different bhumis, we're fine tuning our perfection of giving on level one, perfection of moral discipline on level two. They're all building. The goal of that Bodhisattva is their Buddhahood, which they now know, aren't seeing it directly, but now know that it will be created results from all those seeds that they plant as they work with their perfection of giving, moral discipline, not getting angry, et cetera.

They do have their sights in mind of their Buddhahood becoming that being made of love, compassion, wisdom. And they know that that Buddhahood they're going to reach will be nothing but mental seed ripenings forcing them to perceive themselves in that way. So they know that what they have to reach has no nature of its own, and that's meant by they have nothing to reach.

To reach what they have nothing to reach, they need to burn off or damage the seeds that they already have that are stained with those main mental afflictions, all the mental afflictions and especially the affliction of believing things, experiencing things as having their natures in them—the ignorance.

They're using every instant of 65 ripening to burn those off and not replant any of those mental afflictions. As they do so, moving through their bhumis, using their understanding, using their perfection of wisdom, they reach the point where they're no longer seeing things as having their natures in them as self existent.

They are very aware that their every experience is results of karma, and so they have no more mental affliction or seeds for them. They have no more blaming anything or anybody for anything. That blame factor is what triggers the mental afflictions. No more mental afflictions, no more seeds for mental afflictions, but not yet perceiving directly dependent origination and emptiness in every experience. That's called 8th level Bodhisattva bhumi or Nirvana, depending on your motivational path. 

(102:10) They still need to clear out their obstacles to omniscience. They do that by the behaviors on the last four bhumis until finally the only seeds that are left in their mind are seeds that force them to perceive dependent origination and emptiness simultaneously of all three times, perceiving the minds of all existing beings and knowing, being, what those beings need to take up and to give up.

These warrior saints are on their path to Buddhahood, and they know that that Buddhahood is not a self existent thing.

They know that what they need to do to get there are not self existent things.

So they know to do what they need to do to plant the seeds that when those seeds ripen will force them to perceive themselves as Buddha me and Buddha paradise emanating. It will be very real and not self existent in the slightest.

That process is what's meant here, that the Warrior Saints will use that process to reach this goal, and at this goal they will be free of every obstacle in their minds, the mental afflictions, the seeds for more and the obstacles to omniscience.

When you have those three obstacles finished off, all burned off and not replanted, you are free from all fear.

We don't think of a high level Bodhisattva as having fear, but fear would mean resistance. Fear would be something to blame. Fear would be that something could go wrong. Fear is the basis of Samsara.

I think most of us are comfortable enough that we don't feel like we're in fear all the time, but technically we are. We're a little afraid today could be the day that our karma wears out.

So they go beyond all wrong ways of thinking and reach the ultimate end of Nirvana.

CHIN CHI LOK LE SHINTU DENE NYA NGEN LE DEPAY TARCHIN TO.

Ultimate end—DEPAY TARCHIN TO

End of Nirvana means Buddhahood. You can't end nirvana and slide back into Samsara. But if you stay in what's called Nirvana, you're staying in this place of pleasure for you but not omniscient yet. 

Still can't wait really help others in that deep and ultimate way.

Ultimate end of Nirvana is codeword for reaching Buddhahood.

We have to be beyond all wrong ways of thinking to get anywhere close to Buddhahood, don‘t we?

When we think of the 5th path, MILOB LAM, the path of no more learning, before we were saying the path meant the things you do to gain the realization, and then you have the path as a realization.

When we reach MILOB LAM, there's not a thing you do to reach MILOB LAM, and then you get to MILOB LAM. That's happening on your path of habituation.

When your path of habituation is complete, you have reached the path of no more learning. You've reached your Buddhahood, and your path of no more learning now is your career, your Buddha career where you're emanating and you're playing in your paradise and you're teaching.

MILOB LAM is done. Not something more you have to do to become Buddha. It's what you do as Buddha.

I remember one day where I recognized that I was thinking when I became Buddha, I would just be finished. Then it was like, no, when I become Buddha, I'm just getting started, and it shifted. Something shifted in my mind big time when I recognize that I'm just in training for my real career. Then once I reach Buddha me, it's like now I'm fully trained and I'm going to be on it what I'm meant to do. 

‚All the enlightened beings of the past, the present and the future too…‘

Gosh, what is there to talk about?

DU SUM DU NAMPAR SHUKPAY SANGYE TAMCHE KYANG SHERAB KYI PAROLTU CHINPA LA TEN TE LANA MEPA YANGDAKPAR DZOKPAYJANGCHUP NGUNPAR DZOKPAR SANGYE SO.

So this one is saying,

All the enlightened beings of the past, the present and future too follow this same perfection of wisdom and thus bring themselves to perfect enlightenment, to the matchless state of a totally enlightened Buddha.

Reaching MILOB LAM, our Buddhahood, can't happen in any other way than by burning off our seeds of ignorance, not replanting them. Planting merit seeds in our minds that when that mind ripens those merit seeds, it will be forced to perceive itself as a being made of love, compassion, wisdom. That state of mind acts in such a way that perpetuates itself as a being of love, compassion, wisdom.

So once you're there, you perpetuate it with your seeds, because you don't get there and suddenly become a self existent being made of love, compassion, and wisdom. You are a ripening of that and continuing to be a ripening of that. You're aware of that, and so you spontaneously automatically perpetuate that and that's emanating.

I love this sentence. I just have to go over it again and again in my mind when I play with it, because the English is fishy. All the enlightened beings of the past have followed this same perfection of wisdom. Ok.

All the enlightened beings of the present, like the ones who are doing it now.

The ones who have already become Buddha, they used this system, they had to.

Those who are on their way right now, like really close, they've also used this same method. They had to.

Then, all the enlightened beings of the future too follow this same perfection of wisdom. You would've thought he would've separated out the future beings ‘will‘ follow this too.

The present ones are following it, and the past ones did follow it. But he rolls them all together into one and says they all follow this same perfection of wisdom, which means they're doing it right now.

Isn't that what the English means? ‚They follow this perfection of wisdom’ means they're doing it right now.

It's so rich, this sentence. It tells us that Buddhas who are already Buddhas, they still have to follow this perfection of wisdom. That's what I just said. They are still perpetuating their Buddhahood.

Those who are so close, they're creating their Buddhahood, still burning off their seeds for omniscience and planting their merit, working hard to get those seeds to ripen into Buddha them, Buddha paradise emanating. 

Those in the future, those of us that are beginners on the path, those of us for whom it hasn't even occurred to them yet, are still following this same perfection of wisdom. What does that mean?

If they don't know about the perfection of wisdom, how can they be following it? They can't.

But the perfection of wisdom is this nature of existence whereby no subject, no object, no interaction between has any existence other than the ripening results of that subject side's past behavior.

Is that true for every mosquito? Yes.

Is it true for every brilliant human? Yes.

Is it true for every Buddha? Yes.

Every living being is fact existing by way of the perfection of wisdom. From my side, they just don't know it. I don't know from their side, because I'm not omniscient.

But so all those enlightened beings that are not enlightened beings yet, they exist by way of the perfection of wisdom. Because of that, they will eventually bring themselves to perfect enlightenment, to the matchless state of a totally enlightened Buddha. Because all living beings lack self nature. They will eventually gather enough goodness to awaken to the fact that they have no self nature and thus can transform their perception of themselves from suffering being to fully enlightened being. They will someday do it. We will all someday do it, because of our empty nature.

It's so beautiful to catch that nuance in this one sentence, and that's a great place to end class. And my timer says to do so.

[Dedication of Class]

Thank you so much for the opportunity. I learned something in that class. I love when that happens.

For the recording. Good morning. We are studying the Heart Sutra. We are on class 7, January 24th, 2025. Let's gather our minds as we usually do. Please bring your attention to your breath until you hear from me again.

[General Class Opening]

(8:00) Once again, listen to the Heart Sutra.

The Exhalted One

The Lady of Conquest

The Sutra on the Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom

The name of this sutra in Sanskrit is Arya Bhagavati Prajnya Paramita Hirdaya.

In Tibetan this is Pakpa Chomden Dema Sherabkyi Parultu Chinpay Nyingpo.

I bow first to all enlightened beings, and to every warrior saint. Once I heard this teaching.

The Conqueror was staying on Vulture’s Peak in the Keep of the King. With him was a great gathering of monks and a great gathering of warrior saints. At a certain moment, the Conqueror went into deep meditation on the part of the teachings known as the “awareness of the profound”. At that moment too did the realized being, the great warrior, the lord of power, Loving Eyes, see into this one deep practice, the practice of the perfection of wisdom. He saw perfectly that the five heaps – the five parts of a person – were empty of any nature of their own.

Then, by the power of the Enlightened One, the junior monk named Shari Putra, turned and asked this question of the great warrior, Loving Eyes, the realized one, the lord of power: “If any son or daughter of noble family hoped to follow the deep practice of the perfection of wisdom, what would they have to do?”

This then is the answer that the lord of power, the realized one, the great warrior, Loving Eyes, gave to the junior monk named Shari Putra: “Here, Shari Putra, is what any son or daughter of noble family should see who hopes to follow the deep practice of the perfection of wisdom.”

“See first all five heaps – all five parts of a person – are free of any essence of their own. Your body is empty, emptiness is your body. Emptiness is nothing but your body and your body is nothing but emptiness.”

“The same is true of your feelings, and your ability to discriminate between things, and the other factors that make you up, and all the different kinds of awareness that you possess: all of them are empty.”

“And thus we can say, Shari Putra, that every existing thing is emptiness. Nothing has any characteristic of its own. Nothing ever begins. Nothing ever ends. Nothing is ever impure. Nothing ever becomes pure. Nothing ever gets less, and nothing ever becomes more.”

“And thus we can say, Shari Putra, that with emptiness there is no body. There are no feelings. There is no ability to discriminate. There are none of the other factors that make you up and there is no awareness.”

“There are no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; nothing to see, nothing to hear, nothing to smell, nothing to taste, nothing to touch and nothing to think of. There is no part of you that sees, there is no part of you that is aware that you are seein; and this is true all the way to the part of you that thinks, and the part of you that is aware that you are thinking.”

“There is no misunderstanding your world. There is no stopping this misunderstanding, and the same is true all the way up to your old age and death, and to stopping your old age and death.”

“There is no suffering. There is no source of suffering. There is no stopping this suffering. There is no path to stopping this suffering.”

“There is no knowledge, there is nothing to reach, and there is nothing not to reach.”

“Thus it is, Shari Putra, that warrior saints have nothing to reach, and because of this, they are able to practice the perfection of wisdom, and stay in this perfection of wisdom. This frees them from every obstacle in their minds, and this frees them from all fear. They go beyond all wrong ways of thinking, and reach to the ultimate end of nirvana.”

“All the Enlightened Beings of the past, the present and the future too, follow this same perfection of wisdom, and thus bring themselves to perfect enlightenment: to the matchless state of a totally enlightened Buddha.”

“Thus are they the sacred words of the perfection of wisdom; the sacred words of great knowledge; sacred words of the unsurpassable; sacred words that are equal to the One beyond all equal, sacred words that put a final end to every form of pain; sacred words you should know are true, for false they cannot be; sacred words of the perfection of wisdom, which here I speak for you:

Tadya ta, ga-te ga-te, para ga-te, para sang ga-te, bodhi so ha

“And thus it is, Shari Putra, that great warrior saints must train themselves the profound perfection of Wisdom.”

With this, the Conqueror stirred himself from his deep state of meditation. He turned to the great warrior, the realized one, Loving Eyes, the Lord of Power, and blessed his words saying, “True”. “True”, he said. And “true” again.

“Thus it is O son of noble family, and thus is it. One should follow the profound perfection of Wisdom just as you have taught it. Every one of Those Gone Thus rejoice in your words as I do.”

And when the Conqueror had spoken thus, the junior monk Shari Putra took joy, and the warrior, the realized one, Loving Eyes, the lord of power took joy as well. And all the assembled disciples took joy and so did the entire world – with its gods and its men, and near gods and spirits too take joy. All sang their praises of what the Conqueror had spoken.

Review of the Heart Sutra and the 5 Paths

(14:42) I hope you're finding that when you hear the part of the sutra that we've talked about already, you relate to it more deeply. Every time we hear it, we have another experience of it, and every time we hear a little bit more about it, our experience with it deepens. We'll finish class and we'll go on to 16 million, 84,000 other things.

I encourage you to not forget, use your Heart Sutra from time to time. It can be a tool for clearing obstacles. It can be a tool for revamping our practice. 

It can be a tool. I'm speaking to myself here. I forget to use it like that until somebody asks for something. But we'll see when we get to the end of it that it's talking about our complete practice from suffering human to fully enlightened being which includes the ending of suffering of all beings. Which we then help them actualize as well from our position of having applied the methods and changed ourselves, meaning me and my parts, meaning me and my experience, meaning me and my world.

In Buddhism, every teaching is complete. Here's another one. Complete teaching. If we can read between the lines. Read the meaning of the words.

(17:50) We had left off at the verse that was speaking to the fifth path, MILOB LAM, reaching. Reaching our goal.

(…) Let's do the Tibetan. The commentaries show us that the Heart Sutra is a sutra that is encouraging us to move along our five paths.

The first path being the path of accumulation where we're accumulating our renunciation. Meaning we've lived life long enough to see that nothing goes right. Even the things that seem like they're going right end up somehow dissatisfying and then you die. Then the people you love die, and then you die. It's just like, what's it all about? At some point we have some kind of existential crisis, and we go looking and my goodness, we all had the goodness to hear somebody describe the pen and the goodness to hear it as something profound, because not everybody does. 

All of that is our path of accumulation that you can also call our growing renunciation of whatever it is that's wrong with the way life works.

Then that sets us on the path of first searching, and then finding a path that we relate to, a path that makes sense, a path that we can logically show to ourselves must work. At that level, we're at the beginning of the path of preparation, preparing to reach truth.

In this system on the path of preparation, we are studying, studying, studying, contemplating, contemplating, contemplating, learning to meditate, meditating meaning both on cushion and go meditating in the sense of getting used to what we're learning. It's one thing to learn stuff and not apply it to our own life. It's another to learn stuff and then try it on for size. So what we are learning of course in the path of preparation is the connection between what we think, say and do towards other, and what our experience is. We say, yeah, of course what I think, say and do affects my experience, because I put the key in the car and I turn it and the car starts. See? What I do makes stuff happen in the world. Of course on this path of preparation, we're coming to see that, oh my gosh, that doesn't work every single time and if it doesn't work every single time, there must be some other factor involved that makes it work when it works, and makes it not work when it doesn't work.

What's that other factor? Maybe we could figure it out ourselves.

Or we read or hear somebody say, you know what? If it's like this…, and they describe, well the process we're calling karma. Again, if we have the karmic goodness, we hear that and go, whoa, that explains it. We're attracted enough to study more and to try it on for size.

That points out that yes, our behavior creates our experience, but not the one that comes in the next immediate moment. Our behavior influences our awareness, our mind, and that influence isn't going to just go away. That influence itself is influenced by similar experiences. It's increased by similar, and decreased by opposites, dissimilars, and that influence of all the seeds on all the seeds is this stream of me and my life. Because 65 per instant seeds are reaching the threshold into manifestation and bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, that's me and my experience.

On path of preparation, we're intellectually getting used to that, and hopefully experientially getting used to that so that we're working with our behavior to try to follow the morality that these teachings recommend. They don't prescribe. They say, if this is true about our behavior creates the future, and we can't connect the dot between them, it would take us a really long time to figure out for ourselves what behavior to do that will create a pleasant future. 

(24:00) Why not consider the advice of someone who's been there, done that, and made the mistakes and now has reached that place where they can see the connection between what's done now and what comes in the future?

Because that being is perceiving all things in all times. That being gives a list. Here's the 10 things to avoid the plague. If we flip them around into the positive, these are the things to train ourselves to do. If that's all we did, we would have a rich practice and then it goes on to teaching other kinds of moralities to follow as well. All designed to help our path be easier for us. 

Why am I going there? That's all path of preparation. 

Our different paths are not mutually exclusive. We are still on our path of accumulation as we're on our path of preparation. We're still growing our renunciation. It's getting more and more subtle what it is where we are renunciating. 

Our path of preparation is leading us to our path of seeing, which is that direct experience of the truth of the fact that no thing has any nature of its own. Which means anything must be dependent on something else. Which that's not so profound. Of course everything depends on something else. But the something else that we perceive directly at the end of path of preparation that pushes us into the path of seeing is that, oh my gosh, what everything depends upon is the ripening karmic seed coming from my own past behavior and nothing other than that—which is the emptiness that we're pushed into after we see directly something coming out of that seed of our own making.

Into TONG LAM, the path of seeing where what we're seeing is directly the no self nature of oneself and all existing things. Although our path of accumulation, our path of preparation lasts lifetimes, maybe, path of seeing, they tell us, lasts 10 to 30 minutes and then its aftermath lasts the rest of that day until you go to bed. I don't know why you'd ever go to bed, but you must. You end up on your path of habituation, that GOM LAM, where again it's getting used to living according to what you now know. But you've been doing that already in your path of preparation. We're trying to live according to what we now intellectually know is true—karma and emptiness. But once we've experienced it directly, both the ripening and the known nature other than ripening, now our behavior takes on a different imprinting flavor. 

We are no longer replanting the misunderstanding that we're still replanting before seeing emptiness directly. That’s why it's the doorway to the end of all suffering. Because all suffering at its root is this misunderstanding of the true nature of self other and interaction between.

When we've had that direct perception of the true nature of those three things being their no self nature, now that perception has had an influence on all the seeds that had the ignorance in them, because it's the direct opposite of that ignorance. It doesn't completely negate it, but it's cracked. It's cracked something from every seed that's in our foundation consciousness. That itself is empty, but that's why we can have one. Our task then is to apply what we now know is true, but we're not seeing directly anymore to living according to it, meaning making our choices of our behavior with that amazing wisdom in mind.

If we go into that direct perception of emptiness from a path of preparation that was training ourselves to reach Nirvana—the end of all our own mental afflictions and seeds for more—with the belief or feeling like that's the highest thing that I can achieve, then our path of seeing has that effect on our mind and all our seeds, and the conveyor belt that we are on is the conveyor belt to Nirvana. 

If in our path of preparation we are also preparing our mind heart for being able to become one who can help others become ones who can help others become ones—I can't stop saying it—wanting to become a Buddha so that we can know, really, how to help others stop their suffering. If we have that wish in our mind during our path of seeing experience, that experience‘s imprint on our mind puts us on this conveyor belt beyond Nirvana all the way to the omniscience that characterizes Buddhahood versus Nirvana. 

That we hear it as seeing emptiness with a mind, imbued with Bodhichitta. It's not that while you're in the direct perception of emptiness, you're thinking ‚I'm doing this in order to become a Buddha to help all beings become Buddhas too‘. Because you can't have a thought in your direct perception of emptiness, as we understand. But the experiencer going into and coming out of that experience, if the experiencer has imbued their mind—what that really means, you got to figure out. If it's become a part of you this wish, then it's still a part of you. That influence is still influencing us going into and coming out of direct perception of emptiness. That's what I'm trying to get at. For a Mahayana practitioner, that state of mind of Bodhichitta, state of heart of Bodhichitta, is what makes the difference in our five paths between reaching Nirvana and reaching Buddha. There really isn't anything different we have to do except I mean in terms of what behavior we're choosing. The behaviors are the same. It's the state of mind that we have as we're doing those behaviors that is different from a non Mahayanist and a Mahayanist. Our task as aspiring Buddha is to grow this sense that we mean by the word Bodhichitta. I want to become a fully enlightened being so that I can help everybody stop their suffering completely. Whether that being wants to reach Nirvana or Buddhahood, that's up to them. But I'm going to help them get there.

Our task as a Heart Sutra studier and user is to be cultivating this state of heart that we mean by Bodhichitta. We're trying to load that word so that you don't have to be using the whole phrase, ‚I'm washing the dishes so I can reach total Buddhahood to stop the suffering of all beings‘. That's cumbersome.

I'm washing the dishes because of Bodhichitta, with Bodhichitta and if we can keep that rattling around in us, it's included in the imprint that we're making as we're washing the dishes and it turns washing the dishes into a direct cause for Buddhahood.

Really, if we can do it, it would be so simple, wouldn't it? Because if we've got this Bodhichitta sense rattling around, how unkind can you be to somebody with Bodhichitta in your heart? I'm about to say something nasty. If I've got Bodhichitta rattling around in there, I'm going to choke on that nasty word, aren't I?

Our tasks as Heart Sutra is to train ourselves, practice, try, find reminders, anything you can, to remind yourself as you're doing things. I'm doing this because of karma and emptiness. I'm doing this because they're suffering in the world. I'm doing this to stop all that suffering. Find something that inspires you, some way of saying it that inspires you. Heart Sutra is pointing this out to us.

Path of habituation is where we're just doing math, burning off the seeds that were stained with our selfishness and planting seeds with wisdom. 

(36:45) There'll be a last one, there'll be a last seed of selfishness that ripens and burns off and Nirvana. Still there are the obstacles to omniscience, so there's still a little stuff to do and I'm not so clear on exactly how you do that.

Eventually there'll be the last obstacle to omniscience that is somehow cleared out. Then the next experience is Buddha you and Buddha Paradise emanating. 

Apparently you get paradise for a fraction of an instant and then emanations happen. I don't quite understand that either.

That's 5th path.

I don't remember what class it was in, but I remember hearing myself say, I'm not sure where on 10th Bodhisattva Bhumi you actually reach MILOB LAM, your path of no more learning. It is the beginning of Bodhisattva bhumi 10. Or if you're doing something still on bhumi 10 and by the end you reach it. I wasn't clear. 

But our Wednesday study group was reading Illumination of true Thought and in there they quoted something that I don't remember, I'm so sorry, but an authentic text that said, actually when you reach Buddhahood, you are on 11th Bodhisattva bhumi. 

There's something happening on bhumi 10 and when you complete it, that's MILOB LAM.

‚Warrior saints have nothing to reach…‘

That's where we are in the sutra, is in the verse where Lord Buddha via Avalokiteshvara is talking about how the Bodhisattva who has seen their emptiness directly with Bodhichitta in their heart, came out of it and has been applying themselves to do their kindness behaviors now imbued with this mind of Bodhichitta, and they're making their progress and they're reaching their goal.

We started into it with last class and there's a little bit of it that I went by too fast. I want to go back and cover it again and then we'll get into the sacred words.

SHARIPU, DE TAWAY NA, JANGCHUB SEMPA NAM TOPPA MEPAY CHIR SHERAB KYI PAROLTU CHINPA LA TENNE NETE SEM LA DRIPPA MEPAY JIKPA ME DE. CHIN CHI LOK LE SHINTU DENE NYA NGEN LE DEAPY TARCHIN TO.

Meaning,

“Thus it is Shariputra, that warrior saints have nothing to reach, and because of this they're able to practice the perfection of wisdom, and stay in this perfection of wisdom. This frees them of every obstacle in their minds. This frees them from all fear. They go beyond all wrong ways of thinking, and reach to the ultimate end of nirvana.“

Warrior saints have nothing to reach. Wait, they're not Buddhas yet. They do have something to reach. But is there Buddhahood as something that already exists? No, not for them.

When they reach it, will it be something that suddenly exists independent of their ripening karmic seeds—not called karma by then? They're ripening mental imprints. Will their Buddhahood be a thing that they finally reach that is done with projections? No. 

Do they have something to reach? Yes, they have their omniscience to reach. But is that omniscience a thing in it, from it, a quality in it, from it that you somehow finally get to take on? No, it's still the process of behavior making imprints and those imprints ripening. What the warrior saints have to reach is still a shift in their projection. They still have something pure, more pure to create. But they call it nothing to reach, because it's nothing to reach from its own side.

Then, because of that, because their Buddhahood has no nature of its own, they're able to reach it. Because their wisdom has no nature of its own they're able to sustain it, and grow it, and grow it into their perception of themselves as Buddha them and Buddha Paradise emanating, omniscient, perceiving emptiness and appearing reality simultaneously in all three times. Because time is part of the projection. So of course it's not going to be limited.

Because their Buddhahood has no nature of its own, they're able to practice the perfection of wisdom, and stay in this perfection of wisdom.

That's what I want to talk about a little bit more.

To practice the perfection of wisdom means doing our day-to-day kindness behaviors, avoiding our day-to-day unkind behaviors, and doing both with this heart imbued with the wish.

We've heard perfection of wisdom is code for direct perception of emptiness. Practicing the perfection of wisdom we might think means, oh, after you've seen emptiness directly, you would go back into meditation and pretend you're doing it again. Because you don't just go back into it every time you sit down. But that's not what practicing the perfection of wisdom means here.

It means having that what you now know to be true and your motivation underneath it in mind as you do your acts of giving moral discipline, not getting angry, having a good time doing those things, as you're meditating even. I'm meditating because of Bodhichitta, with Bodhichitta, because of Bodhichitta. Even any intellectual thinking about emptiness, still imbued with this wish I'm doing it all to reach my Buddhahood as an Arya, you're already so much closer than you were before your 30 minute experience.

In that 30 minute experience, they tell us, You know you met your own future Buddha You. Don't think of it in terms of a hallucination or a dream, but some kind of knowing and you know how long it's going to take you to get there, and you know what you have to do to bring it about, like a conviction. You have this conviction that until then we don't really have. We have logical, intellectual conviction that we're on the right path. But getting on the bicycle and really riding it for the first time, you don't really know what it's like until we've done it. Same with this conviction that you're on the conveyor belt to your Buddhahood because of that experience.

Can you feel the difference between pre-path of seeing and after-path of seeing?

But the seeds aren't automatically pushing you to have Bodhichitta foremost in your mind constantly. You still have to think about that. You still have to cultivate it a bit, I understand, I believe. So the practice of the perfection of wisdom on your path of habitation is to intentionally recall and use what you now know to be true as you are driving to the grocery store, as you are having that conversation with your friend, as you are doing stuff. Even the minimal. I am not out serving people in my community, I'm just cleaning my kitchen. I'm just making my bed. I'm just studying my notes. All of that. It doesn't matter. The apparent significance of what you're doing, what matters is the state of heart with which we are doing whatever we are doing. And when we're doing anything with Bodhichitta, the significance of that deed is beyond the biggest we could do in human form with a human mind.

Practicing the perfection of wisdom, as we're doing that, what it means is that the seeds that are ripening, that are still experiencing things have their natures in them. That jerk driver is in them, from them. But because of your practice of the perfection of wisdom, you're catching yourself. It's like, Oh no. My seed's ripening and so... And so my response will be, May they be safe. You can even apply your four immeasurables. May they be free from suffering, may they have love. Whatever your tool is for shifting from the automatic reaction to the practice of the perfection of wisdom, which for Bodhisattva is love, compassion, wisdom, understanding, emptiness and karma.

(48:55) For some period of time we're making this conscious effort to apply what we now know to be true to our behavior choices. That's practicing the perfection of wisdom. Then it says, 

They come to stay in this perfection of wisdom.

This is telling us what happens as we reach MILOB LAM, the no more learning. Is that at some point it is no longer taking effort to apply our Bodhichitta. Our seeds, our cracked seeds of ignorance are getting more and more cracked up as we go along our path of habituation. And as we apply ourselves, the seeds that are ripening as seeing things as in them, from them, still, they're getting less and less strong because every time we negate them, all of the ones that are left behind are getting negated a little bit too. It's just occurring to be now, why they say ‘The obstacles to omniscience are like dust‘. Some kind of dust from the ignorance. 

If you think of these little seeds, their ignorance factor is getting crack, crack, crack, crack, crack, crack, crack by your wisdom, pretty soon all it's going to be is ineffective dust in that mindstream. But that ineffective dust, meaning it can't ripen into a full on seeing things as self existent. But it is somehow blocking our mind's ability to perceive itself as omniscient. So that dust has to be cleared out as well.

When the dust is cleared out, the dust remnants from having seen things as self existent, when that's all cleared out, that's what it is to stay in the perfection of wisdom. 

Your are staying in the direct perception of the no self nature nature of all existing things and the dependently originating nature of all existing things simultaneously. That's what it is to be omniscient. Even at Nirvana, when you are no longer perceiving things as self existent, you are not at the same time perceiving directly the no self nature of the subject-object-interaction between. You can toggle between, but you can't see them both at the same time.

Omniscience perceives them both at the same time.

Intellectually, I can't grasp what that would be like. The ramification of it, however, is that that Buddha you will then be experiencing directly what all those appearing beings need to give up and take up to stop their suffering.

We have to work that one out, how it is that omniscience reveals that. 

That's the point of omniscience. Who cares about knowing everything in the encyclopedia? What we want to know is exactly, exactly, what does that particular being need to become aware of. How amazing to then be the being who loves so much that a part of you, your emanation, is that for that person. Maybe it's the puppy that wanders up to the unhappy child, lovely. Maybe it's the yelling wife that the husband needs in order to wake up in some way. Your emanations are being what any being needs, whether it's pleasant or unpleasant for the being because that love is so strong.

(54:10) Geshela has said, to practice the perfection of wisdom you keep saying over and over and over as you're doing anything for anybody, 

I'm doing this to reach that total bliss so that I can bring everybody to their Buddhahood. 

I personally don't really relate to that word bliss, because it just sounds so self-involved to me. My bliss, I want my bliss. As I worked with it over the years, because it's all over the place bliss this, bliss that, I finally came to recognize with Lama Christie's help that what they mean by bliss is love. But not love like we think of human love, but a Buddha's love.

Love meaning, I want your happiness. Not meaning, I don't want to take it from you. I want to be the agent of your ultimate happiness, and I'll do anything I need to do to be the agent of your ultimate happiness, love. That's bliss. That's what they mean by bliss. Not personal ecstasy, but love this big love.

What if our practice of the perfection of wisdom is, 

I want to love so big that everybody gets infected with it.

If everybody has that kind of love for the bug, the gnat, the neighbor, regardless, our world would change fast.

Staying in the perfection of wisdom is reaching this state where we're perceiving emptiness and dependent origination simultaneously, which means we're seeing directly the mistakes that beings are making that are just unnecessary, just driven by a misunderstanding of where happiness comes from. If they just quit making that mistake, they would change so fast.

Imagine that state of heart. It is just to see, like you see your 4-year-old child pounding their big toe with a hammer and wailing, Mom, my toe hurts, my toe hurts, my toe hurts. Your love goes, Honey, let me have the hammer, and you just take it from them. You kiss their booboo and they get better. Like that.

To stay in the perfection of wisdom. In that staying in the perfection of wisdom, we are freed from all fear. Meaning all mental afflictions. When we reach Buddhahood, of course we'll be free of all fear, of course we're free of every obstacle.

But in the process of getting to Buddhahood, we are freeing ourselves from all fear. Fear means the mental afflictions and the seeds for more. Which is what we're working on in our path of habituation by not reacting in the same old way.

What I wanted to go through in this class was Lord Maitreya’s Six Steps, but I'm already at the end of all our first hour.

We get free of all mental afflictions by being in the situations where they arise, and refusing to act on them. Because of our practice of the perfection of wisdom, we choose a more kind response. We burn off that series of seeds, we'd replant something kinder, colored with wisdom.

Eventually, no more mental afflictions, still have obstacles to omniscience. So we continue practicing our perfection of wisdom until all those obstacles to omniscience are cleaned as well. 

As a result, as you're Buddha You, you will be beyond all wrong ways of thinking. There'll be no more seeds that force you to experience anything as in it, from it. Not other, not self, not experience. 

One reaches the ultimate end of Nirvana. We know Nirvana means to blow out, to get beyond grief. That's what it is to go beyond all fear. The ultimate end of Nirvana means that you don't stay in that place of being a being who's experienced things coming out of your seeds but not omniscient. 

It's not that you lose your Nirvana as you reach MILOB LAM, your Buddhahood MILOB LAM. It's that you take your Nirvana further and add omniscience to it.

‚All the englightened beings bring themselves to perfect enlightenment…‘

(60:14) DU SUM DU NAMPAR SHUKPAY SANGYE TAMCHE (SANGYE TAMCHE is all the Buddhas) KYANG SHERAB KYI PAROLTU CHINOA LA TEN TE LANA MEPA YANG DAKPAR DZOKPAY JANGCHUP NGUNPAR DZOKPAR SANGYE SO.

All the enlightened beings of the past, present, and future too follow this same perfection of wisdom and thus bring themselves to perfect enlightenment, to the matchless state of a totally enlightened Buddha.

I remember talking about this last class. The English sounds funny. How can an enlightened being of the future who's not even an enlightened being yet, follow this same perfection of wisdom if they haven't even reached TONG LAM yet?

But the point is, says Choney Lama, is those who've already reached it did it this way. 

Those who are in the process of reaching it are doing it this way, and those who have not reached it yet, whether they know it or not, will do it this way. Because this is the mental imprints that create this state of mind of being, the state of experience, of being ultimate love, ultimate compassion, ultimate wisdom, ripening and replanting and ripening and replanting.

It really doesn't matter whether you are Buddhas. Your path doesn't matter. It's the process that will happen.

Let's take a break. We'll do a little bit more sutra with the sacred words and then do our meditation.

(62:55) Geshela says, probably the most important thing that we go beyond during our path of habitation to our Buddhahood is going beyond the habit, the impulse of blaming the other for what we're experiencing. Whether it's the yelling boss is the cause of this anger or discomfort that I'm feeling I should yell back, I should lie, I should cry, I should run away. Whatever our habitual reaction is. It starts with this blame factor—in them, from them. My discomfort coming from them.

Same with the pleasure. Triple berry pie. Its pleasure is in it, from it. It's my favorite so David should leave the last piece for me. I like to call it the blame factor.

I feel it harsh, and I use it on myself on purpose. Who are you blaming here?

Mr. Karma's in charge. Blame Mr. Karma. That means, oh, then how I respond right is how I feed Mr. Karma.

‚The sacred words of the perfection of wisdom…‘

Next in the sutra comes 

DE TAWAY NA. SHERAB KYI PAROLTU CHINPAY NGAK.

Here's the key word, NGAK. See, it's repeated, NGAK. It means sacred words. ‚Sacred words‘ usually means mantra. 

Thus are these the sacred words of the perfection of wisdom.

SHERAB KYI PAROLTU CHINPAY NGAK.

RIGPA CHENPAY NGAK.

RIGPA CHENPAY means unsurpassable.

LANAMEPAY NGAK.

LANAMEPAY means equal to the one beyond all equal. I don't know how that evolves. 

MI NYAMPA DANG NYAMPAY NGAK.

Means, words that put a final end to every form of pain. No, I got ahead of myself. That's this one. Sorry, my notes are mixed up. Let me come back to that.

DUKGNEL TAMCHE RABTU SHIWAR JEPAY NGAK.

Words that put a final end to all pain—DUKGNEL TAMCHE

MI DZUNPAY NA. DEN PAR SHEPAR JA TE.

Sacred words that you should know are true, for false they cannot be. That's a little slippery.

SHERAB KYI PAROLTU CHINPAY NGAK MEPA.

Sacred words of the perfection of wisdom, which here I speak for you, I give for you, NGAK MEPA. 

Altogether, 

Thus are they the sacred words of the perfection of wisdom, the sacred words of great knowledge, sacred words of the unpassable, sacred words that are equal to the one beyond all equal, sacred words that put a final end to every form of pain, sacred words you should know are true for false they cannot be, sacred words of the perfection of wisdom, which here I speak for you.

We need to talk about how can words be sacred? 

Lung of the Mantra

(67:38) But first, let me give you the lung of the mantra. I don't remember if I did it before, but in case I didn't. Please repeat after me.

TADYATHA. GATE GATE PARAGATE PARASANGATE BODHI SVAHA

TADYATHA means ’this is the way it is‘. 

GATE means gone, gone, gone

PARAGATE means gone to the other side. Like paramita.

PARASANGATE means gone all the way to the other side.

BODHI means Buddha.

SVAHA means ‚may it be so‘,  like done.

The literal meaning is,

This is the way it is. Go, get going, get going, get going, GATE, GATE

Get going across to the other shore.

In fact, go all the way to the other shore.

Buddhahood, to Buddhahood. All the way means beyond Nirvana, to Buddhahood.

Svaha, done, do it. 

How does a Mantra work?

But how can words…

We've learned in Diamond Cutter Sutra and others that the words themselves have no nature of their own. They have no meaning inside them. 

Does it mean a mantra is useless? See? Off the cliff we go.

No, because they have no nature of their own. They can be ordinary. They could be harsh, unpleasant. They could be pleasant, they could be meaningful. They could be sacred according to the seed ripening of the one who's hearing them, who's using them.

We've learned that what makes a mantra, a mantra is the one who spoke it for us to be used as a mantra was a holy being. According to whom? Them? Us? Somebody else? Ask yourself.

The being using the mantra, for whatever they're using it for, is themselves someone who's keeping their morality.

When you think about it, it's like, well of course that would have to be true, because keeping our morality means we're making kindness seeds to bring pleasant results for us and everybody in order to reach our Buddhahood for everybody's benefit.

If we are growing our goodness seeds and then we're using these sounds made into words for an intentional result of helping everybody get free of their suffering, then those words can actually gain some power by way of our use.

Probably we've used them before, previous lifetimes or something similar. As we keep our morality, the power of these words that we see as sacred because of how they came to us, they can in fact imbue our speech with this power. But not because there's anything in them, from them. 

Yet, that said, when we vibrate the sounds, particularly when those sounds are Sanskrit sounds, that experience of those seeds ripening, we're hearing ourselves do it so that we're planting at the same time. Those vibrations are both coming out of our energy bodies and influencing our energy bodies. 

When we use mantra, whether they're secret mantra or open mantra, in the process of doing so, we are affecting the winds that make up our spiritual bodies. Our spiritual bodies are made of wind and mind. Wind is vibration. It's movement. When we're using what we've imprinted as sacred words with Bodhichitta in mind, we are vibrating our subtle body in a very specific way that we wouldn't otherwise do, whether it's a secret mantra or an open mantra.

There's something going on subtly inside as we TADYATHA GATE GATE PARAGATE PARASANGATE BODHI SVAHA

I just want to point out that sometimes you'll see this Heart Sutra mantra where it says, TADYATHA OM or even OM TADYATHA GATE GATE.

OM is typically what's called the head of a mantra.

Mantras have heads and tails and bodies in between. Usually there's an OM in there. OM means OM, Geshe Michael always says. But it means body, speech, mind of a Buddha.

If you've seen it, or you've learned it as OM GATE GATE, that's fine to add the OM. Apparently in this version of the sutra, it's not included. 

I want to stop there. We'll pick up the sacred words again. Last class, we have one more class that we need to do sacred words, the confirmation of the teaching and then the rejoicing wrap up. But we need to do our meditation.

Guided Meditation on the 4 Steps by Kedrup Je 

(76:25) Do what you need to do to get ready to meditate until the end of class. So about 40 minutes of sit.

Get yourself settled in your seat wherever you are, let that physical body relax into it. 

Your weights on your sits bones. Scan from above down, inviting any tension to release, letting that body balance.

Face relaxed, shoulders relaxed, hands relaxed, legs, feet relaxed.