A teaching on the Heart Sutra
With the Mahayana there is this ideal that you begin to practice so that you can benefit others. And it's actually a very subtle, but profound, kind of shift. For instance, if you're in a profession where you do benefit others, it's so heartbreaking to realize that you get so irritated with people that you're trying to help, that they push all your buttons, that you actually get angry and don't like them, and all of these things. And so, you start to practice because you want to be able to stay, hang-in-there with them. And you know that only to the degree that you can hang-in-there with yourself are you going to be able to hang-in-there with anybody else.
The bodhisattva ideal is that you begin to practice not just for the cessation of your own suffering (which, of course, we all do practice for that reason), but realizing that to be there other people, we need to be there for ourselves. And to the degree that we can hang-in-there with our own suffering--and our lack of cessation of suffering, but the actual nitty-gritty of what it feels like to feel pain--the more we can hang-in-there with our own and not run away from ourselves, the more we can stay in the room with somebody who's provoking a lot of uncomfortable feelings in us.
Avalokitesvara is a super-bodhisattva. He's also known as Kanzeon and Chrenrezig-- and in female form, I think Kanzeon is female and Kuan-Yin. Avalokitesvara, in different countries comes sometimes in female, sometimes in male form, but always is the bodhisattva of compassion.
So, Shariputra starts asking him questions. And he says, "How should we (students, men and women) sons and daughters of the noble family of the Buddha train, who wish to practice the profound prajnaparamita?"
You notice that even in the very first stanza, or first paragraph, it says that "Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva mahasattva, while practicing the profound prajnaparamita, saw in this way: he saw the five skandhas to be empty of nature."
And then, Shariputra asks him, "How should we practice?" This is actually a really important point. This sutra is instruction on how to practice. It's not like intellectual speculation. It's really instruction on how to practice.
And later, much further down in the sutra, it's says, "All the buddhas of the three times," abide by means of prajnaparamita. They practice the prajnaparamita, they abide by it. It's not like something they study. It's the difference between scholarly accumulation, the first of the Three Prajnas, studying and reading, this is more in the area of contemplation and meditation--like practicing the prajnaparamita, or abiding by prajnaparamita. That's what this Foundation-yana-Shariputra wants to know. He says, "How? How should I practice?"
What occurs in all versions of the Heart Sutra is Avalokitesvara's answer, which is: "Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Emptiness is no other than form, form is no other than emptiness." That little paradoxical, enigmatic, difficult to understand answer.
This answer to how to practice the prajnaparamita is really probably the main thing that distinguishes the Hinayana from the Mahayana.
I'm going to go into it with some detail, but the overview of it is: Avalokitesvara says anything that you're clinging to, anything that you now currently believe to be so-- such as egolessness, or the Four Noble Truths, or the skandhas, as a description of no-self-- anything that you currently believe in, it's not that.
In other words, the Buddhist teachings are progressive stages in groundlessness.
Having taught groundlessness, now the Buddha teaches-- through Avalokitesvara-- the prajnaparamita, which says: even all of that, if you believe in it as a belief system, will block you from understanding the truth-- if you cling to anything, it will block your understanding the truth-- even clinging to the words of the Buddha, the teachings of the Buddha, will be a major obstacle if you hold on to them and make them something solid and use them as ground under your feet.
This is really what distinguishes the Mahayana, or why it's said to be like a next step, because basically it doesn't say that the first turning wasn't true. It just says, it is true, but you can't believe in it. All of that is very, very helpful, but actually the instruction on being and curious and inquisitive, that's more what we really have to stick with.
We don't throw out the teachings on the Three Marks of Existence-- egolessness and impermanence and suffering. But, we can't hold on to it, or it will block the true wisdom. That's the pith of it.
And what was said was that a lot of the arhats, which were the enlightened first turning students that actually had full realization (which is more than I can say for myself, or probably we can say, we don't know who's here tonight [laughter], but generally speaking, most of us don't have a full-blown experience of non-duality of egolessness or of impermanence for that matter. We very much solidify and concretize and think in terms of subject and object. Don't we?). But the arhats were the ones who had actually realized that.
Sometimes they say, when this teaching was given at Vulture Peak Mountain (this was a new teaching), that the arhats had heart attacks. [laughter] But, I love this, I heard a Tibetan teacher teaching once, he said, "Probably, really more the truth was, they got up and walked out." [laughter] Because they didn't want to hear this. And I think that's true.
You see, none of us are so invested in the Four Noble Truths that it's a big shock to find out that "no suffering, no origin of suffering, no cessation of suffering, no path"-- we're not going to get any heart attacks-- but, if you really believed in this. . . So, more, I think, you have to find something that you actually really believe in.
Well, in answer to some of the people's questions, "no cessation of suffering." You're saying, "I've been practicing three or four years, and there's no cessation of suffering." And this is saying, "That's right, no cessation of suffering." You've got to stop believing that there's a goal. Or believing in anything.
You have to come up with things, begin to find out where your real prejudices are. Where you say, "I believe in this," and actually you get hot under the collar and you dig in, "This is RIGHT!" [hits gong bluntly] [laughter] Which makes somebody else "WRONG!" who doesn't believe that.
That's probably true, they got up and walked out because they just didn't want to hear it. Basically, everything they believed in, it was saying, "NO."
He emphasized, at first, just the five skandhas. He just took that. He saw that these five skandhas were empty. And it starts with "form" and says there is no form, and then also it would be, no feeling, no perception, no concepts, and then no thoughts or emotions (consciousness). We certainly believe in thoughts and emotions.
It's pulling out the rug. Trungpa Rinpoche introduced this already by giving all these teachings on "disappointment" (you read two chapters on the subject of disappointment), which he said was "when you think something is going to be a certain way, and then you become disappointed." That's where the wisdom comes from, the disappointment-- things not being the way you think they are. And then "boredom," that was another one, he gave a lot of teachings on boredom.
In some sense, teachings on disappointment and boredom are a way of teaching on groundlessness, on shunyata. You think it's going to be a certain way, or you wouldn't be disappointed. You're waiting for something exciting to happen, or you wouldn't be bored. It's sort of like leveling everything out.
Suzuki-Roshi says (to sort of paraphrase) in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, "I have found that it is absolutely necessary to believe in nothing," and then he says, "by which I don't mean voidness." And then he explains, beautifully, he says what he means is "a mind that is flexible, a mind that is ready and open." And he uses the word, that everything is "tentative," rather than things being solid and fixed-- everything is "tentative," just about to become something. He says, "it's not like it's nothing there, but it's tentative." It isn't like THIS. His definition of believing in nothing is: a mind that is flexible and ready to see what's there, and open. Rather than believing in nothing being a nihilistic statement, it's an affirmation.
Avalokitesvara says, "Form is emptiness; emptiness also is form. Emptiness is no other than form; form is no other than emptiness." So now I'm going to give a little teaching on this.
First, I'll teach it the way Trungpa Rinpoche does. He starts out with "form is emptiness". . .
For instance, when Thich Nhat Hanh teaches this in a wonderful little book on the Heart Sutra called The Heart of Understanding, he says, "But if Avalokitesvara says that's it's empty, we have to help him to be more clear and ask him, 'Empty of what, Mr. Avalokita?'" [laughter]
Trungpa Rinpoche says: empty of our preconceptions, empty of our fixed ideas. Empty of, we say, "It's like this." And so he talks about, if we say, "right/wrong," "good/bad," any of these pairs of opposites, we have to just erase all of those concepts and just look at everything free of our biases. Empty of bias. So he describes that in the chapter ["Shunyata"] that you'll be reading for this week.
There's a famous sutra [poem] by one of the early Zen patriarchs [the third] which begins with the line: "The great way is only difficult for those who pick and choose." This saying that "form is emptiness" is like saying: form is free of our picking and choosing. Form is just what it is without our picking and choosing, without our "for" and "against," without our "yes" and "know."
So then Rinpoche says that that leaves you feeling free, it's like a liberation-- liberated from all this caught-upness. And he says, therefore the Buddha didn't want anybody to get any ground under their feet with this statement, so he said, however, "emptiness also is form."
And the meaning here is, we erase all the preconceptions of right and wrong, the prejudices, but at the same time, things really are happening: people really are hurting, people really need our care; we really are hurting, we really need our own care, our own loving-kindness. Things are happening.
I'm sitting in the traffic jam, and I can be free of biases about the traffic jam, but still there are two thousand people who have all kinds of life stories about all the appointments they're missing, and the child's birthday party they're not getting home for, and who knows what's going on in those two thousand lives-- at least two thousand lives.
It's saying, you can't just say "form is emptiness" and let it go at that. It's called the "poison of shunyata." You can't just use the absolute truth as a way to dangle above the messiness of life.
All things are an expression of emptiness, everything manifests out of emptiness, but it does manifest. And we have to relate to it. Actually, this is the first inkling in the sutra of compassion, the need for compassion. (The other inkling of compassion in the sutra is that it's Avalokitesvara who's doing all the talking. The bodhisattva of compassion. Whose name in some languages means: he or she who hears the cries of the world.)
That's the point: form is emptiness, but nevertheless, there are the cries of the world, emptiness is form.And then, should you get any sort of ground out of that, then: "emptiness is no other than form" and "form is no other than emptiness." Which often is also translated as "form is just form" and "emptiness is just emptiness."
It's sort of like saying, Things are just what they are, and there are no escapes. Either being stuck in our prejudices about them and our concepts, or using the absolute truth to dangle above it. Somehow you have to be in the middle of it and not caught up in "right" and "wrong" thinking, at the same time.
One of the ways I often like to teach these four, though, is: You see the Buddha sitting under the Bodhi Tree, and here's your big chance, you're going to ask him about the meaning of life with the hope of getting some ground under your feet. Poor choice. [laughter] So you go up and he asks you, "What do you think about all of this that you perceive?" And you are being very honest and you say, "It is my experience that it all exists." And he says, "No." He could say that in the format of, "form is emptiness"-- this is all emptiness. But you say, "all of this exists," and he says, "No."
So, you go away and you think about it and you contemplate it -- you study, you contemplate, and you meditate-- and you come back. Actually, you haven't really had this understanding, but you think you know what the right answer is. So you say to him, "All of this does not exist," and you're very proud of yourself. And he says, "No." But he says it in the form, "emptiness is also form."
So you go home for another week or month, trying to get up your courage to go back. And you think, Well, I think there's only one other answer to this. So you back and you say, "I got it. All of this exists and doesn't exist at the same time." And he says, "No." That's sort of like saying that things exist and they don't exit, it's like two things. In your mind you're conceptualizing it, it does exist and it doesn't exist at the same time. And he answers that as, "emptiness is no other than form." In other words, they aren't two things, they're inseparable. Emptiness manifests as form.
So then you go home, and actually it's about a year before you come back. And you've thought of every possible answer, and you say, Ok, I've got it: "Things neither exist nor don't exist." That's a pretty emptiness, groundless answer. And he says, "No."
Where does that leave you? And that's kind of the point of the Heart Sutra, Where does that leave you? Whatever answer you can come up with, the answer is No. That's kind of the point of this. Pulling out the rug, more and more and more.