Sun, 28 Mar 2010
Know Nothing
The next section of the Heart Sutra is very shory, but filled with meaning.
no understanding and no attaining.
The Sanskrit (without diacrits) is "no jnanam na praptir na apraptih." I would translate this as "no cognition, no attainment and no non-attainment." The quoted translation leaves out "no non-attanment" for some reason.
The Heart Sutra has explained that all dharmas, both the impure dharmas of samsara and the pure dharmas of nirvana are empty. Because they are all empty, the practitioner who surveys all of phenomena sees nothing is real. As nothing is seen as real, the mind is not attracted or repelled by anything and rests in equanimity. Because nothing is apprehended as real, the mind rests without cognition. This meditative equipoise that rests free of cognition, apprehending the emptiness of all things is nothing but the practice of mahamudra. So we see that madhyaimka is the theory, mahamudra is the practice, the two are a unity and are the essence of the dharma.
So, when one understands emptiness, one rests in the meditation of mahamudra. One sees all phenomena are empty and could not be anything but empty. So there is nothing to attain. Because all phenomena are empty, they are self-liberated, so there is nothing not to attain. Transcending the notion od a path, practitioner, or a result, one rests in the emptiness of the three spheres.
Sat, 27 Mar 2010
Empty Truths
The next section of the Heart Sutra says that the Four Noble Truths are also empty.
There is no suffering, no accumulating, no extinction, and no Way
The translation here is a little unclear. I would translate as "no suffering or its origin, cessation or its path." Up to now emptiness has been applied to the impure dharmas. Here it is applied to the pure dharmas of the Four Noble Truths. A well known saying goes "all dharmas are empty, from form up to omniscience." All cessations are dependent phenomena. The absence of an elephant in my bedroom is an imputation and not a real phenomenon. So all cessations, including nirvana, are imputed and therefore empty. Since nirvana is an empty phenomenon, it is not produced or stopped. So there no path. Suffering, also, is a composite and empty phenomenon and hence has no origin. So all Four Noble Truths are empty.
Thu, 18 Mar 2010
Uphill Climb
I have this recurring dream where I'm going somewhere and the road keeps getting steeper and steeper until I wake up out of a sense of frustration. Now we're coming to the steep part of the grade in the Heart Sutra:
and no ignorance or ending of ignorance, up to and including no old age and death or ending of old age and death.
This is the twelvefold chain of dependent origination (pratiyasamutpada). Ignorance and all that arises from ignorance is what binds us to samsara. Without explaining all twelve links, the core of the process is that from the contact of the five senses arises pleasant feelings, and from pleasant feelings arises attachment. And all of this arises from ignorance. But what is this ignorance? It is what has just been explained. There is no independently existing object out there whhich meets and independently existing mind in here, and thus there is no contact between the two. When it is seen that both the experience and the experiencer are unreal, merely dependently arisen phenomena, then there is no basis for attachment to unrise. It's not enough to intellectually understand all phenomena are dependently arisen, you have to come to a definite understanding of this truth through your meditation practice. Once this key link is broken, the whole chain falls apart. But it never was real, hence there is no old age and death nor ending of old age and death. This point will be explained further in the next section.
Wed, 17 Mar 2010
Sensations Are Empty
The Heart Sutra takes a technical turn in the next few words:
no eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, or mind; no sights, sounds, smells, tastes, objects of touch, or Dharmas; no field of the eyes up to and including no field of mind consciousness;
According to abhidharma for a sense perception to take place three things have to come together: contact with an external object, a functioning sense organ, and the mental faculty that perceives that sense. So the sense perception is just like a rainbow, the result of conditions, and it does not exist anywhere. There is no world where there are colored objects, noises, odors, tastes, or textures. Nor do these sensations exist inside the mind. Here is a simple example of how all sensations are relative. Everyone knows how bad orange juice tastes after brushing your teeth. That's because there's a chemical in toothpaste that temporarily removes your ability to taste sweetness. The sweetness is not in the orange juice. If it was, the chemical could not remove it. Nor is it in your tongue or mind, or else you would always have the sensation of sweetness. So all sensations are empty.
Sun, 14 Mar 2010
A Contradiction
The next verse of the Heart Sutra starts:
Therefore, in emptiness there is no form, feeling, cognition, formation, or consciousness
This statement contradicts the earlier statement, "emptiness does not differ from form." What we have here is an equivocation, a term used in two different senses. The earlier statement spoke about form as it actually is: empty. This statement speaks about form as we usually understand it: as independently established. Since all phenomena are empty, no independently established form can be found. So, "in emptiness there is no form." But because form arises in dependence, "form does not differ from emptiness; emptiness does not differ from form." This is the middle path, beyond the two extremes of exaggeration and dismissal.
Sat, 13 Mar 2010
Marked by Emptiness
The next verse of the Heart Sutra says:
Shariputra, all Dharmas are empty of characteristics. They are not produced, not destroyed, not defiled, not pure; and they neither increase nor diminish.
Not only are the skandhas empty, so are all the dharmas. Everything which is a dependent phenomenon is empty and all dharmas are dependent phenomena, in one way or another. All dharmas are the result on conditions. For example, a rainbow is the result of the sun, rain, and a person viewing it from a certain angle. The rainbow has no existence apart from the conditions that bring it about. It is not created from these conditions, nor is it destroyed when they cease, because it has no separate existence apart from these conditions. Things that we consider defiled seem so because of our cultural conditioning. They are not inherently defiled and would not seem so to a hypothetical visitor from Mars. Our ideas of gain and loss are also the result of cultural conditioning. No one is inherently a success or failure. Ideas of success and failure are culturally conditioned.
Fri, 12 Mar 2010
Form Is Emptiness
Next comes the most famous verse in the Hart Sutra:
Shariputra, form does not differ from emptiness; emptiness does not differ from form. Form itself is emptiness; emptiness itself is form. So too are feeling, cognition, formation, and consciousness.
Shariputra was the disciple of the Buddha who was foremost for his learning and intellect. And the rest of the sutra has Avalokiteshvara explaining to Shariputra what he had realized through his meditation. For while emptiness can only be realized through the practice of meditation, it can also be understood through the intellect. Which is the point of this explanation, otherwise there would be no reason to try it.
The verse won't make much sense without understanding what emptiness is. Emptiness is the lack of independent reality in a thing. For example, the border between Mexico and the United States is the Rio Grande River. But the border has no independent reality, it only exists in the minds of people. Even though the border performs a function (it separates the two countries) and has a basis of designation (the Rio Grande River), the border has no existence outside of the minds of people who conceive it. Similarly, even though the five skandhas perform a function and have a valid basis of designation, they have no existence outside the mind.
Why is that? The simplest explanation is that the five skandhas are composite. And all composite phenomena are unreal. The body is the form skandha. But the body can be divided into parts: bones, flesh, blood, hair, and so on. None of the parts individually is the body. Nor is the collection of parts the body. Body is only a designation used when the parts are assembled in the usual manner. So it is with any composite phenomenon. There is a name for the assembly of the parts, but it is only a name. It is not some ghostly reality that floats above them or in them. Since all the five skandhas are composite, all are empty. It may not seem that consciousness is an assembly, but it is a collection of different moments of experience.
So now for the reverse statement, emptiness is form. This indicates that emptiness is not some reality above or beyond the phenomena which are seen as empty. Emptiness is a mere designation indicating the lack of independent reality in phenomena. In other words, emptiness itself is empty and the statement "emptiness is form" indicates this.
Thu, 11 Mar 2010
The Heart Sutra Explained
The Heart Sutra is more often chanted than understood. It was criticized by a Theravadin practitioner on a forum for preaching nothingness. I thought that was a misunderstanding of the sutra, but I wasn't able to explain the meaning there, so I am doing it here. I'll take the sutra a little at a time and explain what I can. The translation I am using comes from The Buddhist Text Translation Society and can be freely republished.
When Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara was practicing the profound Prajna Paramita, he illuminated the Five Skandhas and saw that they are all empty, and he crossed beyond all suffering and difficulty.
Avalokiteshvara speaks every line in this version (the Chinese version) of the sutra. It's not clear why Avalokiteshvara was chosen, except that he is a bodhisattva and all bodhisattvas attain that state through seeing the truth of emptiness. Which is exactly what this verse says. Prajna is a Sanskrit word usually translated as wisdom. Wisdom here means the ability to see things as they are, instead of how we imagine them to be. This ability is the result of meditation. Buddhism classifies all forms of meditation into two types: calming and insight. The phrase "practicing the profound prajna paramita" refers to Avalokiteshvara's practice of insight meditation. Paramita is another Sanskrit word that has two meanings: perfection (from the root parami) and transcendent (from param ita, literally other shore). The rest of the verse suggests the other translation. "Other shore" refers the understanding of enlightened beings, as opposed to the understanding of ordinary persons. The five skandhas is a traditional way of classifying all conditioned phenomena, both mind and matter. Through his meditation Avalokiteshvara saw that all conditioned phenomena are empty. What this means will be explained later. And it was this seeing that changed him from an ordinary person to an enlightened being and removed all his suffering and difficulty. Suffering and difficulty are conditioned phenomena and when they are seen as empty, they melt away like shadows melt away in the daylight that we took to be phantoms during the night.
Mon, 08 Mar 2010
Correcting mistakes
The pugnacious, but always interesting, Bill Scwartz misquotes the First Karmapa, saying:
As the 1st Karmapa Dusum Khyenpa put it, "To see the mountain on the other side, you must look at the mountain on this side."
The way I remember the quote, it goes, "To see the mountain on the other side, you must stand on the mountain on this side." Which makes more sense. If my memory is not faulty, the meaning of the quote is that to realize mahamudra (the mountain on the other side) you must meditate using the seven points of posture of Vairochana (the mountain on this side.)
Nathan, who I met at Khenpo Karthar's teaching on mahamudra in Crestone and at Thrungu Rinpoche's phowa teaching in Toronto, said:
Sattva is a Sanskrit term translated roughly as "one who walks the path of."
Sattva is best translated as "being." "Sat" is the Sanskrit verb that means to be or to exist and "-tva" is the gerund endig, which is "-ing" in English. So sattva is being, the act of existing.
Wed, 03 Mar 2010
Innate Enlightenment
If enlightenment is ours already, then why do we need to practice? Here's an analogy I've used before. If a jeweler is carrying a bag of gems and they fall out of the bag into the mud, he won't leave a single one of them behind or think that they've lost a single penny of their value. But he won't sell them until every last speck of dirt is removed from the gems. Practice is like washing the mud from the gems. Until the dirt is gone, the sprkle of the gems isn't seen. But the gem is always a gem, the act of removing the dirt deosn't make it a gem. Enlightenement is innate. It is not special ability we develop through practice. When we remove all our misconceptions, all our mental tics, we will discover nothing more than what we've always been. But that will be enough.
Tue, 02 Mar 2010
Perl and Mu
It's not often that I get to talk about Perl and Zen in the same post. The Perl 6 type system is unusual in that a class is an instance of itself. An undefined instance of the class is set to the class type object. This is done to give a natural way to handle class methods. The question then is what is the class of Nil, the undefined constant value. Damian Comway suggested that this be called Mu. Mu is also the base class of the object hierarchy in Perl 6. The name is a little joke. Mu was Joshu's answer to the monk who asked if a dog has buddha nature and literally means no. His answer is not meant to be taken in a simple literal manner, no as opposed to yes. Joshu's answer was given to cut off the monk's thoughts about buddha nature, to point the monk away from his thoughts and towards the real. There are different sorts of nothing, the nothing of the undefined value, the mystics' via negativa, and the nothing of emptiness. Nothing is always relative to the thing being negated. In Perl's case it'd defined values versus undefined variables. A variable is undefined between its declaration and first assignment. In the case of emptiness, what is being negated is independent existence, existence above the factors a thing is dependent upon. And in the case of buddha nature, what is being negated is all contingent phenomena. Emptiness and buddha nature are the two opposite poles of Buddhist metaphysics. Emptiness denies the real in what is relative and buddha nature denies the relative in what is real. Yet they are not opposites, they are poles of a single thing, not real because relative and not relative because real. Even Damian Conway couldn't top that.
Wierd stuff in the news today. A Buddhist nun discovers an udumbara flower under her washing machine. And a Hindu group is promoting a soft drink made from cow's urine as a healthy alternative to Coke and Pepsi. Maybe healthier, but I doubt it will be more popular.
