Introduction to the Alembic meditation center


Kati: Okay. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to week two of Practicing the Diamond Sutra. I know a few of you were online last week, and you’re joining us in person this week. How many of you are here in person for the first time this week? Cool. So welcome to the class. You all got an email with the homework, and I hope you got a chance to get a copy of the sutra. I’ll also email out a link. We have a little group chat of everyone who is showing up in person, so I’ll send out a link to that group chat and you can join it if you want. It’s a little bit of talk about the sutra. No memes so far, but there’s no rule against memes either, so just put that out there.

So most of you were here last week, so you kind of know the deal, but I’ll give you a few logistics. We’re going to go straight through. We don’t take an official, “here’s a ten minute break.” So if you do need to take a break, take one, but be aware that if you’re just fidgeting and that’s why you’re taking a break, don’t do that. But take care of yourself. You can have tea and water in here, but you’re not allowed to kick over your tea or your water or anyone else’s. So yes. Tea. No drop kicking the tea.

We are joined by about 200 people on the internet, so hello internet. It’s up there. Anything that goes through a microphone goes out onto the internet. So if you have a question that’s maybe more sensitive or you don’t want to go onto the internet, or you just feel compelled to say your Social Security number or something, just don’t do that into the microphone.

Student: I want to report that my partner listened to it last week and he could not hear my questions, which were not on.

Kati: So last week was a different story. Last week we had the ceiling microphones on. This week we do not. So that is an actual change. So like all the people out there, they don’t know what you just said. So we will, by default, out of great compassion for the entire internet ask our questions into the microphone, unless you really don’t want to. And Tyson there in the back. Hi,Tyson. He will bring the microphone to you so you can use it as an actual talking stick.

For those of you who have come to Alembic to come to this class, and you haven’t been to Alembic before, and you’re like; “What is this weird meditation center with a bunch of psychedelic art on the walls? Who are these people? What happens here?” I just want to let you know that Alembic is a pan-traditional practice space. So we host events and classes and workshops from all different traditions, ways of knowing, and techniques. Some things that fit into boxes. Some things that absolutely do not fit into boxes at all. And our aim here is that everyone who comes here can become a well-rounded spiritual practitioner according to your own goals. So we are not going to give you a goal. We’re not going to tell you what to do, but we are going to offer things that are curated according to what we think is interesting and cool and valuable. And we’re going to let you choose what you want to do.

Along those lines. I want to let you know about a couple of things that are coming up soon. This weekend, on July 13th, we have our friends from the New York City Psychedelic Sangha doing an event that they call a Bardo bath. So this is a lying down, death meditation, guided death meditation that’s accompanied by Chris Dingman on the vibraphone and handmade, visualization. Two shows on Saturday, 3 p.m. and 7 p.m.. And on Sunday we have Kat Harrison here. Kat founded a nonprofit called Botanical Dimensions with her former husband, Terence McKenna, and she is going to be here giving a day long workshop. And there’s more information about that workshop on the postcards on the coffee table in the lobby. So without more of me talking, I’ll hand it over to Ken. And when class ends, please stay, hang out, have tea, talk to each other. and we’ll see you after class. Welcome back. Ken. Thank you.

Opening prayer

Ken: I think we’ll just start straight in and I have a few points that I’d like to talk about. So we’ll just see what happens this evening. We’ll begin with the lineage prayer, followed by the sanctuary or refuge, prayer, etc., as we did last time.

May my heart turn to practice.
May practice become a path.
May this path dissolve confusion.
May confusion become wisdom.

Knowing there is nothing outside or inside to free me, I take sanctuary in buddha.
Knowing that experience and awareness are not two, I take sanctuary in dharma
Knowing there is nothing to grasp or oppose, I take sanctuary in sangha.

Knowing there is nothing outside or inside to free me, I take sanctuary in buddha.
Knowing that experience and awareness are not two, I take sanctuary in dharma.
Knowing there is nothing to grasp or oppose, I take sanctuary in sangha.

Knowing there is nothing outside or inside to free me, I take sanctuary in buddha.
Knowing that experience and awareness are not two, I take sanctuary in dharma.
Knowing there is nothing to grasp or oppose, I take sanctuary in sangha.

Beings are numberless. May I free them all.
Reactions are endless. May I release them all.
Doors to experience are infinite. May I enter them all.
Ways of awakening are limitless. May I know them all.

Beings are numberless. May I free them all.
Reactions are endless. May I release them all.
Doors doors to experience are infinite. My enter them all.
Ways of awakening are limitless. May I know them.

Beings are numberless. May I free them all.
Reactions are endless. May I release them all.
Doors to experience our infinite. May I enter them all.
Ways of awakening are limitless. May I know them all.

Student feedback: reading the Diamond Sutra


Ken: At our first class last week—first class in this course anyway—we covered a fair amount of ground, but I think there are also a lot of things that were left out. What I’d like to start with first is, how many of you had the opportunity or the chance or whatever to do any of the—as someone put it—homework. That is, reading the sutra and so forth. Okay, let’s hear from some of you. What was that like? Yes. Could we have the microphone up here, please? Because you’re going to get a lot of exercise tonight right here. This person in black shirt. It’s probably like an ice cream cone. You just speak straight into it.

Student: Yeah. Overall I would say it was confusing and somewhat repetitive. Interestingly, after reciting it, I felt it was sustaining my practice to some extent, or under-girding it or showing up in my practice, but I didn’t really understand how or why or to what effect.

Ken: Thank you. So who else? Yes. Take this gentleman next.

Student: I’ll echo that. Yeah. Frustrating, but felt good after. There was a way where it felt like it was kind of adding tensions on my mind as I read it and then, like, later, peels them off again, kind of the same order. And it was also very mathematical, a lot of it.

Ken: Okay, I can see that. All right. Keep passing it around. Yes.

Student: Yeah, I can agree with a lot of what I heard. And also, I would say it was hard to stand for 45 minutes and talk. I’m not used to that. And I felt my body reacting quite a lot while I was reading. I didn’t really know in what way, but it felt a bit different at times.

Ken: Let’s take somebody at the back, please.

Student: Yes. I also found it a little confusing at times, but ultimately it felt like—especially after about five or six pages—a feeling of a being other than myself reading the texts would come about in some very subtle ways, and usually by maybe eight or nine pages in, there is just a lot more energy in the body. And then I also found that throughout the day, the little snippets would come to mind, just like when I used to memorize lines for plays or anything like that. So it would just become part of the bubbling up process throughout the day and evening.

Ken: Okay. Somebody over here. Nobody holding up their hand. Oh, there we are.

Student: Well, I’m not sure what I want to say. I recognize a lot of what people are saying. I’ve honestly felt drawn to it as a challenge. Like, what is it like to read a text, you know, in this way? I found it interesting that just the logistics for my voice of reading something. I had to pace my energy quite a bit.

Ken: You had to?

Student: Pace my energy. Some words that are hard. I had to anticipate them … [Unclear] and make a break. Overall, it feels like a beautiful experience. I can’t really say why. It’s a nice energy afterwards, and there’s something that … the sutra itself is making a lot of propaganda for itself as you read it, so I kind of feel good, you know? So … But I’m still learning.

Ken: Okay. All right. One more up here.

Student: Thank you. I don’t do much Sutrayana. So it was interesting to read sutra again. The advertisement section was very large. I had a hard time figuring out where the message was, and it kept going on about how important … how all these jewels and all these offerings were not as good as four lines well learned out of the sutra. I admit I was looking for the four lines, so … Oh yeah, it was peculiar to me, and not very gripping, kind of off putting, actually.

Advice on how to read the Diamond Sutra


Ken: All right. Well, thank you very much. A couple of points. I would like you to at least consider reading the sutra every day for the whole duration of the course. Now, not all of you will have the time for that. As a couple of people have noted, it takes a fair amount of energy. You’re standing and reading something out loud. This is not something that we are used to in our culture anymore. Though there was a time when one was much more used to this. The reason for standing and reading it out loud is that it engages not just the mind, but also the voice, the speech and the body. And in doing so, engaging with the sutra and with all those three faculties, it’s balancing so that you have a more complete engagement. And as a result, the conceptual mind doesn’t have quite the dominant role that it ordinarily does when we’re reading. And that can be very, very helpful for reasons which I’ll seek to make clearer this evening, but also as we move forward in the course. Now, if for any reason … and a couple of practical things: having a comfortable place where you can do this, using a music stand so you aren’t holding the text the whole time, just little practical things. Don’t do this to the point that you are generating strain and tension in your body. If for any reason, medical or whatever, it’s difficult, then read part of the sutra or as much as you feel capable of. This isn’t a marathon. It isn’t something to work at. It’s a practice.

And one of the principles of practice, which I’ve come to preach, that is very important is balance. And so, you want to make an effort, but that effort needs to be in balance with everything that’s going on. And you all know when you’re moving out of balance everything gets more difficult. That’s usually an indicator. Things will go up and down, but if things just get progressively more difficult and harder, that probably means that you’re out of balance somewhere. And so it’s good to bring attention to that. And the way that you practice balance isn’t trying to maintain balance. That’s impossible, but you’re constantly moving in the direction of balance.

I’ve often done an exercise, and we won’t do it here this evening, where I have people stand on one foot, and the first time, people just stand on one foot quite happily. I say, “Okay, I see everybody standing on one foot,” but they’re all moving a little bit, things like that. “I want you to stand on one foot and not move the tiniest bit” and almost immediately people lose their balance. So you’re never actually in balance. There’s constant adjustment taking place, and learning how to be present in that constant adjustment is going to make a huge difference, whatever your practice is, it’s going to make a huge difference. So I think those are the main points about reciting the sutra. I’m very glad that many of you tried to do it, and it’s something I encourage you to do.

There was one person who mentioned reading this, eventually you develop a cadence. You aren’t thinking about what the sutra means. It’s pretty opaque. I mean, all the words are relatively easy to understand, but what does it actually mean? That’s not so clear. Again, that’s something I hope we can get into this evening. The sutra is actually having an effect on you. It’s leading you through a process. I’m going to go into that a little more detail tonight. And so some people described that, “Oh, well yes something is happening and tension is increasing and then tension is released.” Well that’s the sutra working on you. And the understanding that it is pointing to … the body, you’re actually assimilating it in your body as well as in your mind, and the fact that you feel this tension building up and then releasing and you feel a different kind of energy that’s indicative that the sutra is actually working on you.

One of the big things about practice, this kind of practice anyway, which is very different from how we do most things in our culture, is that we think we can control our experience, and that the point of meditation and the point of practice is to control our experience. Well the illusion of control is an indication of a lack of freedom. You might want to write that one down. The illusion of control is an indication of a lack of freedom.

I was once giving a seminar on the Heart Sutra, and this came up and one person literally got up, went to the wall and banged his head on it and said, now my head really hurts. I think he got the point. How many of you can control what your next thought is? You can control what your next thought is?

Student: And intentionally craft thoughts.

Ken: Pound for pound, an amoeba is the most vicious animal in the world. Can you control what your next thought is? Yeah, but you get my point. We can’t, we can’t. We don’t know what our next thought is going to be. And this goes back a long way. Gampopa, who is the author of the first of the prayers that we do, back 1,000 years ago, give or take, he had a student who was absolutely intent on controlling his mind. And having absolutely no thoughts. Gampopa was discussing this with somebody saying, “I have this student, he wants to do this. He won’t listen to me. I said, ‘You just you just sit there and don’t try to control your thoughts. And if you would just do that, you would have been enlightened ages ago.‘ But he will keep trying to control his thoughts.” Because when you’re trying to control something, you’re asserting your self-hood. And this is the wrong direction. So, again, this is something the Diamond Sutra is pointing to.

Taking refuge or sanctuary


Ken: Well, there are a lot of other things I could say, but I think, the first thing I want to do this evening is, as I promised, to talk about the second prayer that we do. That is what I’ve called sanctuary. The usual translation of the word is refuge. I’m sure many of you will recognize that. Now. I’ve been translating for, let’s see, about 50 years and as most of the people who know my translations are … I don’t think anything about changing my translations, which causes a certain amount of consternation in some quarters because people have memorized texts and now they have to memorize new version.

As I developed as a translator, what became most important to me is that when the translation was finished, it should be in English. And if you read it and felt it was a translation, then I had failed. It actually had to be real, actual English. And I don’t know many people who translate that way, frankly. At least not from Tibetan, which is where I’m coming from. And I’ve always found the word refuge … it isn’t even the correct translation of the Tibetan. I don’t know about the Sanskrit, so I can’t speak to that. But the Tibetan word is about protection or shelter. And when I was preparing for this class, and there’s some other things that I’m doing, I came to this prayer, I went, “Why hasn’t anybody ever used the word sanctuary?” So, in a way, you’re guinea pigs here, we’re trying out the word sanctuary, which I rather like, because it’s a place. What sanctuary refers to is a place where you are safe. You’re safe from the predations of samsara, which is all of the confusion and reactivity that lead us to struggle in our lives. And the sanctuary is provided by what are known as the three jewels: buddha, dharma and sangha. These can be interpreted at many, many different levels. From the historical Buddha, dharma and sangha. The sangha refers to those who take an ordination and have renounced or left ordinary or householder or lay life to become religious mendicants basically. Here I’m giving … interpreting buddha, dharma and sangha at a very different level. Buddha is the empty clarity of your own mind. Dharma is the clarity/knowing of your own mind. Sangha is the way mind manifests.

Now, ordinarily we don’t know the empty clarity of our own mind. It’s too full of thoughts. And if it’s not too full of thoughts, we’re asleep. So it is either too full of thoughts or it’s clouded by sleep. The effect of that is that our lives present a world in which there is me here and the world there. Self and other. It’s a false duality. It’s not an accurate description of what’s going on. Descartes was fundamentally wrong here. He should have said, rather than “cogito ergo sum”—I think, therefore I am—it should be “cogito cogito ergo cogito sum.” I think that I think, therefore I think that I am. And Kant followed him up with noumenon and phenomenon, which I’ll have more to say about, but it preserves the same kind of dualism. And one of the most astonishing sleights of hand that has happened in human history is that since the scientific revolution starting in about the 17th century—post Galileo and then Newton, Leibniz and so forth—the power of these methods was so effective, being able to predict how things were going to take place in the world, we became seduced by the idea that what is out there is more real than what is in here. Which, if you think about it, is an astonishing reversal.

But that’s how it is now. We think that what’s out there is more real. Matter, stars, atoms, everything. And we are less and less clear about what is in here, and don’t know what we are or anything like that. The amazing thing is that the false duality comes from a sense of self. And then once there’s a sense of self, there’s an other. And it can work the other way. Something arises. It’s experienced as other, and there must be a self which perceives it. But both the self and the other are forms of confusion. What has happened is that what we experience and the awareness that experiences have been separated. And that is how the awareness becomes the self. The what is experience becomes the other. And what we’re taking refuge in here is that experience and awareness are not two. Now we can understand that intellectually; it’s not too much of a stretch. But to actually experience it changes your relationship with life very fundamentally. That’s what it means to take refuge in the dharma. And with that shift, then what arises out of mind—all the thoughts, sensations, feelings, which we are normally grabbing on to some and pushing away others and ignoring the ones we don’t care about—we don’t have to do that anymore. Everything that arises becomes part of the way we relate to life. And that’s why it’s the sangha. The sangha consists of all those that share our intention of waking up. And if you take things this way, if you’re able to shift into this way of experiencing things, then everything that arises in your experience contributes to your waking up. Or is an expression of your being awake.

I’m going over this very, very quickly here, but that’s the idea in this refuge. So this is a mystical refuge and it’s a prayer. And when you experience things this way, the things that ordinarily take hold of you and pull you this way and that you struggle with in your life, they lose their grip. And one of the ways this is said, and most people have had this experience. You sit, become quiet. Something happens and your mind, stops, and there’s a moment, maybe a little longer than a moment where everything is okay, even if everything is really not okay. How many of you have had that experience? Yeah. Okay. That’s what this practice is about, is experiencing your life in such a way, not thinking this, but actually experiencing that in every moment everything is okay, even when there are really serious problems to deal with. And there’s a freedom, a wakefulness and a peace in that. And it is not something you can get at with your intellect, which is why we’re looking at the Diamond Sutra. I think that’s all I want to say about that. Any questions on that? Yes, Peter.

Student questions


Peter: Gosh, I have a lot of confusion, and just to share my experience, like from last week, I feel maybe twice as dumb. And I feel like, if regression is possible, I’ve regressed to like, negative in terms of spiritual path, if that’s a thing. So I don’t know if this is helping or not.

Ken: Sounds like it’s helping.

Peter: Yeah.

Ken: I have a friend who would just look at you and say “Congratulations.”

Peter: Right. So my confusion about this particular … confusion about this is … yeah, I’m clinging to the words you’re saying. Funny choice of words for me, but your mind, your own mind. I seek inside to free me. And then we spend all of this time talking about “Well, there’s not two. And if there’s a there, then there’s a here, but there’s no here there. And if there’s an other, well that’s making the self co-dependent with the … you know what I mean. So I guess I’m really confused about … well then if there’s no I to seek sanctuary in buddha, how can I even make that prayer? If there’s no outside or inside, how could I … do you see what I’m saying? Isn’t it sort of expressing the delusion?

Ken: We have to start from where we are. Do you experience yourself in terms of I at this point?

Peter: I think so.

Ken: No, no you do. Right. Who’s talking?

Peter: Yeah.

Ken: Who’s talking?

Peter: I actually don’t know.

Ken: Okay.

Peter: I don’t know. I must be talking.

Ken: So that’s where you start. Now, you’re trying to think this out, and you’ve experienced what happens when you try to think it out. You end up in a mass of confusion. It’s like a dog chasing its own tail.

Peter: Ouch.

Ken: Bill Rogers had a very good expression, which I tried to take to heart. “When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.”

Peter: My mom used to say that to me.

Ken: Oh. So you’re in a hole right now. What do you do?

Peter: I should probably dig my way out of it.

Ken: No, no, no. That’s the point. You got into this hole by digging. If you keep digging, this comes up. A Japanese management consultant came up with this; I love it. “If you’re rowing in the wrong direction, rowing harder does not work.” It’s very important. So, No. I can tell by the way you’re talking, you will be inclined to dig. You’ll find yourself in a hole. “Oh, well, I’ve got to dig harder.” [Ken mimes digging action] “Uh, I think I’m moving in the wrong direction.” So what do you do?

Peter: At least stop.

Ken: What’s that like for you?

Peter: It sucks. It’s horrible.

Ken: That’s where you start.

Peter: Yeah.

Ken: Well, what about stopping sucks? For you. Not theoretically.

Peter: Yeah, I’m feeling into it.

Ken: That’s it right there. What is it?

Peter: It’s like a base level frustration with existence is what it feels like.

Ken: Ah. It’s very interesting. So here’s what happens, if I may. That base level of frustration with existence, with life, whatever you want to call it. Right? Does it come and go, or is it there all the time?

Peter: Probably it’s there all the time.

Ken: Okay. And when you stop digging, there it is. And guess why you’re digging so hard?

Peter: Well, I don’t have to guess. I’m digging to get away from that base level frustration. I’m meditating to get away from that base level frustration. Yeah.

Ken: Excellent.

Peter: Yeah. No. [Laughter]

Ken: Because, and this is something we’ll hit again and again in this course, I hope very much. But here we are today. The peace that you seek is in that base level of frustration. Yes, I know, but it is.

Peter: So, okay, I’m just gonna be honest. Then I’m just like, I want to point the digger at that. That’s basically my instinct. I dig.

Ken: Ah you want to point the digger at that.

Peter: Yeah, exactly.

Ken: Why do you think that will help?

Peter: Fair. Again, feeling very stupid and dumb. So hopefully someone’s getting something out of this.

Ken: Well, it sounds like you are.

Peter: Who am I?

Ken: No, no, but you’re getting a great deal out of it.

Peter: Yeah.

Ken: Okay. The efforts you’ve been making and you’ve been making them very sincerely. But they’re in the wrong direction. They aren’t helping. Yes.

Peter: Okay. That’s that’s the problem is they were working and they stopped working.

Ken: How inconvenient of them. Okay.

Peter: Shit was working in other words.

Ken: No, no, no, it was working for a while. Okay, then doesn’t.

Peter: Right, okay.

Ken: Okay. What do you do then?

Peter: Change stuff up. Flip it up.

Ken: Yeah. You got to change. And that’s that’s really important. You know, one of the reasons why Buddhism puts so much emphasis on death and impermanence? Do you?

Peter: Rhetorically?

Ken: No, it’s not rhetorical at all.

Peter: I don’t know why it puts such an emphasis on death and impermanence, but I know the party line. It’s it’s sort of like, well, oh, death is in every moment. It’s already happening without happening. Right now? It’s like that kind of thing.

Ken: No, we’re taking a much more tangible level. When we really assimilate death and impermanence, it becomes easier to let things go when their time has passed.

Peter: Fair.

Ken: Okay, so whatever you were doing before brought you to a certain point. That was good, but now you’re having difficulty letting it go. You’re having difficulty dying.

Peter: Damn. Damn, Ken.

Ken: You’re expressing that very politely. People have expressed it in other words, before. Okay. Thank you,

Peter: Thank you. Wow.

Ken: All right. Anybody else on refuge or sanctuary? Yes.

Student: So you defined those three words in ways that were a little surprising to me. Buddha, I’ve heard before from Michael that way. Sangha, not so much. Dharma was one of the more confusing words in the Diamond Sutra to me as well. Like there’s a lot of structure that made sense, but it felt like there’s many different senses. One of them kind of felt like this direction outwards. One of them is like maybe teaching. One of them is maybe an idea. And then maybe Tao, I don’t know, that’s …

Ken: First I want to express my appreciation for you asking these questions, and I should have said something about this earlier, and this is for everybody. If you have a question, we have, what, 50 people here, approximately 250 on the internet. That’s 300 people. If you have a question, there are probably ten other people in the whole group here that have the same question. So I want you to regard your question—no matter how stupid it may seem to you—but asking that question is actually a form of generosity, because there are almost certainly people with the same question. And if somebody articulates it, then everybody gets an answer to it. Okay. So thank you for that.

And it’s extremely easy for me, who’s been steeped in this stuff for a very long time, to skip over little points like, “what does the word dharma mean?” It’s a non-trivial question, so thank you. The word dharma—a Sanskrit word—officially has ten meanings. And more than a few years ago, I got out one of my dictionaries and found all ten meanings, and realized that there was an English word which actually captured all ten meanings. It’s the word holding. It will never be used. It’s very unfortunate because there are established translations of dharma and they’ve been around too long. But as someone mentioned, dharma is Tao, the way. That’s not really one of the original meanings of the word dharma. That’s one that the Chinese kind of added on. Fair enough. Duty is one word, one meaning of it.

Instruction, for instance, the dharma of spaghetti are the instructions on the package. How you make spaghetti. Teaching, particularly teaching of the Buddha, another one, and then seemingly totally different is, what this life is made up of— dharmas. Now, I puzzled over this for a long time and the most common way this is translated. And you see this in Red Pine’s commentary, and in other people’s renderings of the Diamond Sutra and many other sutras. It’s translated as phenomenon. This comes straight out of the Kantian dualism that I mentioned earlier, noumenon, phenomenon, which in turn was derived from Descartes. And this dualism is so deeply entrenched in our thinking that we don’t even notice it. But especially in the Mahayana, which is my own training, we have this idea that …you’ll see it translated as “all phenomena are empty.” And people have the idea, “Well, is this chair empty?” And it’s very difficult to understand. But when I was in the three year retreat I thought about this, and you know, a dharma is a unit of experience. And if you look at it, you’ll see that in the Sarvastivadin tradition, for instance, one of the early schools of Buddhism, they break life down into 75 categories. Seventy-five Dharmas of the Sarvastivadins. It’s very well known. It’s what the Heart Sutra is based on. It’s a categorization of all of the different kinds of experience that make up life.

And so the experience of seeing something, seeing a blue flower, or let’s make it simpler, a blue circle, was the dharma of circles, the dharma of blue. There’s dharma of sight. There’s dharma of consciousness. And you put all these together and presto, you have the experience of seeing a blue circle. That’s how it’s thought about. Now, this seems to be totally different from dharma is teaching, dharma is duty, etc., etc. but all of these are in some way some form of holding to, holding to duty, holding to this, holding to that, etc. As I say, that will never happen. Now this becomes extremely important in the context of the Diamond Sutra, and we’ll hit on this a little later in the course, but I’ll mention it. There are several passages in this in which whoever was writing the sutra was having a gay old time doing a little play on meanings of the different meanings of dharma, and this makes it very difficult to translate. I mean, impossible. Red Pine, who did a magnificent job working from both the Sanskrit and the Chinese, saw this problem and just translated. Didn’t use, didn’t translate dharma. He just used the word dharma. So it had that play in all of those places, and you have to be familiar with it. So sometimes it’s referring to a teaching, sometimes it’s referring to an instruction, sometimes it’s referring to experience. And sometimes we were referring to two or three of those at the same time. And so you enjoy the richness of it. But you have to be familiar with that whole way of thinking, etc. Is this helpful?

Student: It is. Yeah. Can I ask to throw in, to orient the words qualia, prediction, and model in that ontology? Is that …

Ken: Qualia …

Student: Prediction.

Ken: Prediction.

Student: Yeah.

Ken: And model?

Student: Yeah. I mean, if you wanted to …

Ken: I would say that dhama is probably closest to qualia. Okay, yeah. I’m not sure how that’s … where’s this model from?

Student: Qualia is in I think a lot of the more recent Western phenomenology. Model and prediction is like predictive processing model of the brain stuff.

Ken: Oh, okay. Yeah. Those would be higher level concepts. Qualia would probably be the closest. But this is where we get into the … they’re based in the dualism that I’ve just talked about, subject-object dualism, that there is a perceiver who perceives qualia. What is the nature of this world? Is it ultimately matter? That’s how most people relate to it here in the West, right? But the philosophy, the metaphysical view of materialism has a very, very big problem in it. And that is, what is experiencing? Materialism is actually the source of the concept matter itself. And so it’s rather strange to think that the concept is giving rise to the subject.

Student: So the map and the territory are kind of flipped?

Ken: Yeah, you could look at it that way. Okay. Does that help?

Student: Yeah it does.Thank you.

Ken: Okay, very good.

Student: Body is also a doozy if we get to it later.

Ken: We’ve got a lot of ground to cover. Any any other questions about this before we move on? Yes. I want people to get something out of this course. So sometimes I tell people, write down the three questions you want answered tonight, and it’s your responsibility to get an answer. I’m just here supplying, doing what I can to respond to your questions. Yes. What’s yours?

Student: So you’ve talked a couple of times about how Buddhist metaphysics is different from Descartes dualism, and also you also talked about the materialist view. How is what’s in the Diamond Sutra different from a kind of idealism, which I assume is also different from … like a pure idealism in the Western philosophy.

Ken: That’s a very difficult question to answer because, there are traditions of thought in Buddhism which are very similar to idealism. And there’s been a lot of debate and argument over the centuries about this. What I’d like to do is to make a little digression at this point and come at this from a totally different perspective, rather than trying to compare systems, because it’s not terribly fruitful for our purposes. The fundamental question, the question that’s most important is, why are you here? Why are you here? I’m asking you.

Student: I want to learn more about the Diamond Sutra and be able to practice it better.

Ken: Why?

Student: I see it as part of the spiritual path that I’m on.

Ken: So you’re on the spiritual path. Is that fair?

Student: Yeah.

Ken: Why?

Student: It strikes me as the most important thing to do with my life.

Ken: Why?

Student: I can’t think of anything better to do with my life.

Ken: Why? I know this is where it begins to get hard, but it’s also where it begins to get really important. And I really appreciate you going along with this, but no, it’s very fruitful. You can see it’s taking you to a very different place. Why? Yes. Now, what are you experiencing right now? And put it into the words only to the best of your ability, because it may be very difficult.

Student: There’s a kind of blankness or void at this point. I don’t know how to think of a way to answer this question at this point.

Ken: So, would it be fair to say your mind stops?

Student: Maybe. Yeah, in some way.

Ken: Okay, so ask the question again and just experience that stopping for a moment. Don’t try to do anything with it.

Student: So I ask which question?

Ken: Why?

Student: Oh.

Ken: Why am I doing this? Because I can’t think of anything better to do. Why? Now, what are you experiencing?

Student: I don’t know.

Ken: But there’s something there, isn’t it?

Student: There feels like a kind of some kind of central mystery or something at this point. Yeah.

Ken: Okay. That’s the fourth thing you experienced. What usually happens for most of us is this question or a question like this is posed. And the mind stops. And there seems to be nothing. But that nothing isn’t a blankness. Like there’s just nothing there. Because there’s some mysterious quality of awareness in it. It’s not like we fell over and were unconscious. So that’s the second thing that happens. And then there’s a little bit of panic.

Student: Mm-hmm.

Ken: And then we start thinking, and we give names to it. And now we’re comfortable again. You follow?

Student: Yeah.

Ken: Is that a fair description?

Student: I think so, not sure I’m at the comfortable point yet, but I can see how one might get there.

Ken: Yes, but you gave it the name a mystery or whatever and things like that. So now and then we can talk, and we’re not hanging out in this. We don’t know we’re space.

Student: Yeah.

Ken: So, the first two of those are what the Diamond Sutra is all about. That’s what it means to know the Diamond Sutra. Now, we have names for this in Buddhism that have come down through the centuries. One of the names is emptiness, which I’m sure you’ve heard the term. That stopping of the mind. Emptiness. The knowing quality that is there all the same. Clarity. And then all of that richness of experience which is just there. That’s the movement of mind which I went through in the refuge prayer. It’s all right there. Now, we cannot get at this with our intellect. We can think about this till the cows come home. But as Peter has experienced, you just end up in a deep hole. And so the way the Diamond Sutra is structured is to keep pointing us to that. And that’s what we’re going to start to go through this evening. This help?

Student: Yes, it definitely helps. I don’t know that it answers my original question, but you’ve held me much more than answering my original question would have anyway, so thank you.

Ken: Well, okay, I’ll take that. [Laughter] All right. Let’s see now. Oh, my dear, we’ve just wasted an hour. Okay.

A sufi story


Ken: Well. One very dark night Nasrudin was walking home, and he noticed some people on horseback, some distance behind him. And thought, “Oh my goodness. I wonder if they’re robbers.” And he became more and more afraid. And he glanced back, and it seemed that they were getting closer, which just increased his anxiety and fear. And he kept walking, convinced they were getting closer, so he started to run. And then you could hear the sound of the horses beginning to gallop. Now he was just terrified. And he kept glancing around. He found he was running beside a cemetery and ran into the cemetery, running up and down all the tombstones. Eventually he found an empty grave. So he jumped into it and lay down on the bottom.

Well, the people on horseback were honest travelers, and they saw this person beginning to run in front of them, and they thought he must be in some kind of trouble. So they followed him, and eventually they followed him into the cemetery. And there he was in the grave. And they said, “Are you okay? What are you doing here?” And Nasrudin looked up at them and said, “Just because you can ask a straightforward question doesn’t mean there’s a straightforward answer to it. But to put this as succinctly as possible, I am here because of you, and you are here because of me.” [Laughter]

The historical context of the Diamond Sutra


Ken: Okay, now that we’ve paid respect to Nasrudin for the evening, I’d like to turn to the sutra itself. Now, I think I mentioned last week, but I can’t be sure, the Diamond Sutra was probably written sometime between 100 BC or BCE and maybe 200 AD, which, interestingly enough, is about the same time that Nagarjuna—who is a very, very famous Buddhist philosopher—is thought to have lived and, I’ve been reading a book called I think it is The Marvelous Tales, Nagarjuna’s Collection of Marvelous Tales, or something along those lines, which are these completely off the wall tales about the six perfections and how important they are. And many of the stories I’ve heard one way or another, but many of them are new. And I was very, very pleased and rather surprised to find that the Diamond Sutra makes reference to one of these stories at a certain point. So this just added to the idea that these may have been around at the same time. And this is a very important period in Buddhism, because it is where the Mahayana begins to emerge as a tradition in its own right. There were before then 16 schools of Buddhism, and most of them have died out or been assimilated. What was known as the Sthavira school became what is now known as the Theravadan school, and dominates Southeast Asia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Laos, Indonesia at one point, but not so much now, and Cambodia. But also the around this period between the transition between BC and AD, somewhere around there, the Mahayana developed.

Now, why did the Mahayana develop? I have my own theory. I think it had to do with the invention of money, because at this point the trading economies started to become very, very important. And you could generate a lot more wealth through trade than you ever could through agriculture. And this is about the same period of time when the Silk Road formed. And one of the results of this is that before then, when you had a primarily agriculturally based society, you either worked on the farm or worked at a trade. And that was a full time job. You didn’t have tractors. Irrigation took an immense amount of time. Have any of you ever tried to grow wheat and actually beat i so that you separate the wheat from the chaff and things like that. An incredible amount of work, and you got chopping firewood and things like that. There’s so much work that goes into it. So very few people had any leisure in that society. And if you had a spiritual calling, basically your route to that was to become a religious mendicant. You just said, “I’m not doing any of this.” And you went off and you depended on people’s alms, which is exactly what Buddha had done 500 years previously. But with the invention of money, a class of people began to form that had amassed so much wealth through trade, that they had the leisure time to practice. And we find this full flowering in some of the later sutras, like the Vimalakirti Sutra or the Vimalakirti Nirdesa Sutra, which is a complete riot because you have this layman, Vimalakirti, who is ill and he’s known to be very profound spiritually. And Buddha is, together with all his top level bodhisattvas and top level monks and Shariputra and Moggallana and Manjushri and all these, And he says, “Well, someone should go and pay our respects to Vimalakirti. Shariputra, why don’t you do that?” And Shariputra said, “Oh, I’d love to do that. But the last time I ran into Vimalakirti, I was giving a talk about this, and he asked me this question and I couldn’t answer it. That was really embarrassing. So I can’t go.” So the sutra just consists of going through Maitreya and Manjushri and and Moggallana and all these people, and none of them have survived the Vimalakirti’s questions. And it’s a pivotal sutra because it is saying that lay people can have just as deep realization as ordained people, or people who’ve given up ordinary life.

And there was a very crucial decision made. As money became more and more part of people’s lives, ordained monks had to make a decision. Are we going to handle money or not? Somebody puts money in our alms bowl. We can’t eat it, so what do we do with it? And basically all the ordained people split, and some said “We’ll handle money. No problem.” And others said, “We’re not going to touch the stuff.” And that’s what led to the to the division between what is now known as the Theravadans and the Mahayanists. The Mahayanists said “We’ll handle money, no problem.” And the Theravadan said, “We’re not touching this stuff.” And that had very important implications. What it meant for the Theravadans is they had to enter into a symbiotic relationship with the laypeople. Because they didn’t handle money, and yet people were giving them money, they had to form a partnership with lay people who did handle the money. And this was the monks money. And so the monks said, “Well, we need a new monastery or we need a new meditation cabin,” or we need this, we need that. And then the lay people would go out and get that, and meanwhile the lay people would make offerings and so there’s this very rich symbiotic relationship which continues to this day. On the other hand, the Mahayanists, their own establishments, because they were willing to handle money that became profit centers. And this reached its climax basically in about ninth century China where the Chinese monasteries had extracted so much of the currency from China that currency had become scarce. The country was experiencing extraordinary inflation, and the emperor of China at that time had no recourse except to move, take over the monasteries, confiscate all the statues and melt them down to reissue currency to get rid of the inflation. The first capitalists were the Chinese monks. Just for your information.

History is full of fascinating stuff. So there are several other things that happened at around the same time, the origins of which we don’t know, but they moved into Buddhism this notion of emptiness and also this ethic of compassion, in which there’s a sun god with a universal vow of redemption based in an ethic of compassion. Where that came from, it possibly came from Persia, where there was such a god. I think it was Mithras, I can’t remember, but this came into Judaism, Buddhism and Taoism all at the same time. In Judaism, it gave rise to Christianity. In Buddhism it gave rise to the Mahayana and in Taoism it gave rise to a new tradition of Taoism. In Santa Rosa, there’s a Russian Orthodox Church. It’s just been newly built. It’s an absolute little gem. And if you look at the cupola, there is a picture of Christ. It’s a fresco, maybe a mosaic, actually. And it says, “The Lord sits in heaven and hears the groans of them that struggle on the earth.” This is exactly the meaning of the original name of Avalokitesvara. So there is something very similar going on with all of these traditions at that time.

Out of this, particularly with the development of emptiness, which I’ll have more to say about later, there was this ongoing exploration of, “What is this experience of life?” Now, one has to understand that Buddhism is very, very clear about what it’s doing. If you’re practicing Buddhism, you’re concerned with one question. “How do I live at peace in a life shaped by old age, illness and death?” That is the question, in my opinion, that is at the heart of Buddhism. How do you live at peace in a life shaped by old age, illness and death? If you look at the life of Buddha, this is exactly what led him to give up his status as a prince, to leave his family and embark on a spiritual quest. He wants to know, how do I live at peace in a life that is shaped by old age, illness, and death? And the answer is, you develop the understanding and the ability to experience whatever life throws at you and not fall into reaction or confusion. Super equanimity? Yes. Super equanimity. It’s not ordinary equanimity at all. And this is known in the Theravadan tradition. It is referred to as the unconditioned, or that’s one English word for it. There may be other words, but that’s the one I’m familiar with. It is something that you can experience, but it is not something you can put into words. We give it words, but we know that words fall short, and people experience it slightly different ways. Some people experience freedom, some people experience a wakeful quality. That’s how Buddha experiences being awake. Some people experience it as a peace, but it is a peace in the Christian sense of “a peace that passeth all understanding.” It’s not an intellectual peace at all. It’s something far more profound, something closer to what you were touching when I was engaging with you. You follow?

So one way to look at religions, and this does not originate with me. It originates with an academic, called James Carse. But I found it a very interesting way to look at religions. A religion is a centuries long conversation about a certain question. Now, the question in Buddhism, as far as I’m concerned, is how do you live at peace in a life shaped by old age, illness and death? The question in Christianity is very different. Again, if you look at the life of Christ, the question in Christianity is, how does the divine take expression in the world? “And the word became flesh.” Right? The word was with God. And I can remember exactly how God at the beginning of John. How does the divine take expression in the world? And that’s another whole way of thinking. And it’s a different conversation. So that’s something for you to think about, because everything in the sutra and everything in all the Buddhist teachings I know are aimed at that end. How do you live at peace? Developing the capabilities, the understanding, whatever you need to be able to live at peace in this life which is shaped by old age, illness and death. Questions about this up to this point. Anybody? Yes. Right here.

Student questions


Student: This is probably only a side question. So it’s more of a … if you’ve got pointers. But the description you just gave of Christianity I was just like, can I please learn more about that? Has anyone ever phrased it that way? And is there someone who writes about it or that understanding of Christianity?

Ken: Yeah.

Student: I know we’re in a Buddhist workshop right now.

Ken: It’s what Catholicism is about very,very deeply. That is the question they’re talking about all the time. That’s why the Pope puts out encyclicals. This is what the divine looks like in the world. That’s what basically the encyclicals are saying. So, yeah, they’re talking about it, and they’re really talking about it. But people who are talking about it as an answer to that question, I don’t know of actual people doing that. I had a friend in LA who was a Catholic priest, but I’ve lost touch with him.

Student: Mm-hmm.

Ken: Okay?

Student: All right.

Ken: Right here.

Student: Hi. Forgive me for being really basic with my questioning, but I think I’m trying to take stock of the teaching from tonight and from last week and try to understand what it is I’m doing here and what it is that we are doing here, and I’m still having trouble with it. I think that what you said about experiencing, not intellectually but experientially, this moving through the world without a sense of me being here and everything else, experiencing outside of myself and trying to arrange the world so that I feel a certain way and can meet my own needs, is the reason that I’d like to touch into that. Is the reason that I’m here and interested in many different versions of this path. And doing sutra study is a completely different way that I’ve not experienced before, so I’m interested in that. And I’m trying to understand how, like, we’re kind of going into the definitive language and translation of some of the texts and I’m trying to think how I can take this into either my practice or like how how are we translating? How am I translating? How should I try to translate that into an experiential version of this thing that I’m seeking?

Ken: Very good. Thank you. You do this by doing it. That may sound a little tautological, but from the time I started practicing, I heard people talking. “How do I take this into my life?” That’s never, ever been a question for me. You sit in meditation. Why is meditation important? Because it is in meditation that we are building skills and capacities. And I want to say a bit about that this evening. I’m not going to get to the sutra again. I don’t have enough time. What you’re doing in your life is you’re exercising that. That’s what you’re doing. So, how do you practice that attention in your life? Well, everything you do, you do with attention. I don’t want to use the term mindfulness. It’s accumulated way too much garbage. Okay. How do you do that? Well, there are different ways. And you can become very creative about this. And they’re all wonderful.

Always take a breath before you say anything. Always. It will change everything. Listen to the sound of your own voice as you are speaking, as if you are listening to another person. I had a student in LA. I gave this exercise to her. She was a real estate agent. When we met in the group two weeks later I said, “So how did it go, Lynn? She said, “Ken, she never shuts up.” She heard herself. You will hear when you’re not speaking in your own voice. You’ll hear when you’re speaking in your mother’s voice, your father’s voice, or your who knows. There it’ll be. And you’ll “Oh,” So, that is how you practice, right speech. You don’t try to say things correctly. That just ties you in knots. You listen to the sound of your own voice as you are speaking. Change everything. That’s the practice of attention in speech.

You do the same thing when you’re walking. In other words, the same kind of attention that you’re practicing when you’re meditating, you practice when you are walking, you practice when you’re speaking, you practice when you’re cooking, practice when you’re whatever you’re doing, you practice when you’re driving. And it changes everything. It’ll change how you walk. I used to give people who had difficulty sitting. I’d say, “Okay, go and do walking meditation. I’d say, “Well, okay, here’s how you do it. Most of the time you think we’re walking on the earth. But there’s another way of looking at this. The Earth is a gigantic ball. You’re standing on top of it. And as you walk, you’re rolling the ball.” And I gave this to an old friend of mine who’d come to one of my retreats in British Columbia. He said, “I can do this, Ken,” because he says he has a beautiful, natural relationship with attention, but sitting doesn’t work for him, and he’s just spent the whole ten days of the retreat walking around the grounds, rolling the earth underneath his feet. But you try it and you’ll find it changes how you walk. So you come up with these ways of just doing your everyday activities in attention. And that’s the difference between formal meditation and living. Formal meditation is practice unmixed with other activities. You’re sitting. The rest of your life is practice mixed with activity. That’s it. You start off doing things that are simple. Yeah, but that’s it.

Student: I read the sheet that you handed out from the quote, and it gives a sensory practice kind of like that I guess.

Ken: Yes. you can do the ecstatic practice,

Student: Right.

Ken: Yeah, let me cover this before we run completely out of time. This this was a response to the a question that came up last week about, how to develop the abilities. This is the five-step mindfulness practice that I mentioned. It comes from Thich Nhat Hanh. It comes from the Anapanasati Sutra. I think I’ve got that right. But it’s condensed from 16 down to five. And I think this is a dynamite meditation. A friend of mine, Yvonne Rand, taught it, and she in turn had got it from Thich Nhat Hanh. I think it’s great. It is not about controlling your experience, these five steps. You don’t take, these five steps, you do this and your practice matures through these five steps. So when you’re breathing with an emotion or a pain or a problem, when your attention gets to a certain point, you find you’re aware of a whole bunch more reactions that you weren’t aware of before. And when you can rest in those, then you find when you can be in those, you find, “Oh, I can actually rest here a little bit,” which is really strange because you have all of this reaction going on and you’re resting. This goes back to what I was pointing to earlier, and you go on a little bit further. Not only can you rest, you can actually be relaxed in all of these reactions. And about then some other kind of understanding or way of relating to them just forms naturally. So I think it’s a great thing. This is a way of building energy and building ability to open to things, the ecstatic practice. So these will be very useful practices for you to do in order to build the kind of skills and capacities which are required to really engage the Diamond Sutra. A small point, a little important. Okay. Yeah. Can we go over a little bit, Kati?

Kati: If anyone has to go, you can go.

Ken: Okay. There’s one or two more things I want to say about the sutra, and then I want to go a little bit further in the sutra. And then next week we’re going to do a lot more on the sutra, I promise. Oh, dear. Now I have to do that.

The Diamond Sutra is very, very important in Chinese Buddhism and by extension, Japanese, and particularly Zen, because of exactly the qualities that several of you described when I asked, what was your experience reading the sutra? It doesn’t seem to make any sense, or it seems very repetitive. What’s going on? And at the same time as you read it, something is happening. And it is that something that is happening that has made it such a treasured sutra over the centuries. Now the name in Sanskrit is Vajra Chetaka Prajnaparamita. Vajra is an implement, it’s Zeus’s thunderbolt. It’s a weapon that can destroy anything but not be destroyed itself. And it’s a very important symbol in Tibetan Buddhism where you see lots of deities holding vajras. But in Western lore it’s Zeus’s thunderbolt. It’s the same, comes from Indra when he was regarded as a rain and thunder god. Chetaka is the word to cut. So this is the vajra cutter. Now, way back when, like in the 19th century, people happened to come upon this, when they heard that the vajra was the hardest thing that could cut anything, but nothing could cut it, they thought of diamond. And that’s how it became the Diamond Sutra. Its actual name is the Vajra Cutter Sutra. Okay, now in Tibetan, that’s dorjé chöpa. Dorjé is the word for vajra. Chö is the word for cut.

How many of you heard of a practice in Tibetan Buddhism called chö? Oh, a lot of people here. This is where the name comes from. Padampa Sangye and Machik Labdron. Padampa Sangye was an Indian who went to Tibet in the 11th, now 12th century, I think, and Machik Labdron was a Tibetan nun, who wasn’t very good at keeping her vows, but, she was an extraordinary practitioner, and she studied with Padampa Sangye, and the two of them developed two lines of practice. Padampa Sangye developed the practice shije, which means to pass, to make calm, to pacify. And it was based on the Heart Sutra. There is a line in the Heart Sutra which says, “This is the mantra that calms all suffering.” It pacifies all suffering. Shije, pacification was the basis for what he took as his way of approaching the experience of the world, so that you could find calm in every experience of the world. That’s what that practice is about.

Machik Labdron, a really quite remarkable figure. A friend and colleague of mine, Sarah Harding, has translated her autobiography. It’s known as Machik’s Complete Explanation. It’s about everything you want to know about her. So you can read it there. But she came up with the practice of chö derived from the vajra, or the Dorjé Chöpa Sutra, the Vajra Chetiaka Sutra. The chö there means something quite different. It means clear cut. That is, you have this forest of thoughts and, this tangle of brushwood and everything like that. And this sutra cuts through it all in exactly the way that you’re experiencing this evening.

A reading from the Diamond Sutra


Ken: You bring attention to this, and the mind stops. That’s the cutting. And I want to go through one instance of this evening. Now I’m reading from my own translation, of which I’m one third finished, so the wording may be a little different, but I think at the end of last week we got to the point where Subhuti had asked the Buddha, “How should those who have entered the way of the bodhisattva live? How should they practice? And how should they hold their minds?” And here is Buddha’s answer: [Ken reads from his translation of the sutra]

One who has fully engaged the bodhisattva’s way will set this intention. However many sentient beings are counted as sentient beings, whether they are born from an egg, born from a womb, born from heat and moisture, or born miraculously, whether they have bodies or don’t have bodies, whether they conceptualize, don’t conceptualize, or neither conceptualized nor don’t conceptualize. However many in the category of sentient beings are counted as sentient beings. I shall take them across, right out of misery, into the vastness of the transcendence of misery (which is a synonym for nirvana) in which no aggregate remains. Further, although I take sentient beings beyond reckoning right into the transcendence of misery, I shall think that no sentient being has come right into the transcendence of misery.


Let me read those last two again.

All these sentient beings, I shall take them across, right out of misery, into the vastness of the transcendence of misery. Further, although I take sentient beings beyond reckoning right into the transcendence of misery, I shall think that no sentient beings come right into the transcendence of misery.


Questions? No questions?

Student questions


Student: Yeah. No it’s not. Yeah. Question. So from one view, sentient being is just an idea, a concept. There really are no sentient beings from that view. So since we are all buddha nature in the ground of being—

Ken: You were doing fine up till then.

Student: Okay. So, yeah, it was a concept.

Ken: Yeah, but you just made buddha nature a concept. No, no, Just say the first part of what you said again.

Student: It sort of evaporates, but it’s, sentient beings, that’s just a concept.

Ken: There really are no sentient beings.

Student: Yeah.

Ken: Okay, We’ll stop there. Okay. What’s that like?

Student: Peaceful.

Ken: Ah. Why?

Student: Just an inner nothingness. It’s just an inner … there’s an equanimity sense.

Ken: Is there nothing there?

Student: No, there’s an energy. There’s an aliveness there.

Ken: Yeah. What else is there? How do you feel about sentient beings from there?

Student: Love. Very close. Well, it’s not sentient beings that I feel it for. It’s—

Ken: What is it?

Student: Life, I guess.

Ken: Okay. And how do you feel about life from there?

Student: Really good.

Ken: Say a bit more.

Student: There’s like a sense of sort of joy and a sense of companionship.

Ken: What do you feel about the people who struggle in life?

Student: There’s a mixture. There’s a sense of sadness, and yeah, I think sadness and I guess … I want to help them.

Ken: Yeah, so this is very interesting. Thank you very much. When you drop the concept of other, you actually feel closer to life. A closeness which is at once a peace and, I’m putting words in your mouth, but you tell me if you disagree, a warmth and a sensitivity. Is that okay?

Student: Yeah. Also, there’s a connection.

Ken: Can we have the mic, please?

Student: Yeah. There’s a sense of connectedness. Connectedness and it’s not a oneness, really. But it’s … just what I feel is connectedness.

Ken: This one paragraph and in the different translations, you’ll have different versions of this. The first time I read this, I just went, “Oh my God.” I went, “Wow. That’s what drew me to this sutra.” I hadn’t read it before. I was reading a line, and you read this and all of that happens without you thinking about it. That fair? This is how the sutra works.

Dedication prayer


Ken: Now we’ve gone over. Thank you very much for your patience. This is where we’ll start next time, I’d like to do the dedication prayers.

Goodness comes from this practice I’ve done.
Let me not hold it just in me.
Let it spread to all that is known.
And awaken good throughout the world.

Awakening mind is precious.
May it arise where it is not arisen.
May it not fade where it has arisen.
May it ever grow and flourish.

When everything is known.
There’s nothing to understand.
When everything is clear.
There is nothing to explain.
When everything is in its place.
There’s nothing to do.
May the joy of this way
Touch beings everywhere.

Practice instructions


Ken: So, going forward, I would encourage you to spend time with the sutra. If you manage to read it every day during this course, you will not regret it. That I can assure you. It will help to cultivate in you a relationship with the sutra that will blossom in time into an understanding. If, for whatever reason, it’s difficult for you to do that, to spend what time you can each day, whether it’s just reading half the sutra, a quarter of the sutra, even, it’s just reading a couple of the sections of the sutra. And when you read it, don’t try to understand it. Let it speak to you. Let it work on you.

In your own meditation practice, if you choose, please feel free to use either or both the meditations or the practices that I’ve given to you. And the reason I gave them out this evening is because they will help you develop the skills and the capabilities. This is called practice now. And whether it’s Cal Ripken Junior or Caitlin Clark, they practice. They’re things like Cal Ripken Junior fielded the thousand baseballs, a thousand hits every day. Caitlin Clark shoots 300; 100 three pointers, 100 two pointers and 100 foul shots. And she wants to make a score of at least 230 out of 300 every day. This is practice. This is practice that we’re doing. And the more that you do or you know, the more regularly that you do it, the more these skills and capabilities become part of you. And so I encourage you to do that to the best of your ability. I will see you at this time next week. Thank you.

Kati: Thank you Ken. Thank you everyone for being here. Please feel free to stay, have tea, talk with the other people. If you arrived late could you please check in with Bellringer Matt. Bellringer Matt, raise your hand or wave, please check in with Bellringer Matt at the desk so that he can check you in. And we can send you an invite to the group chat, which you are free to join. Other things. Oh, you can leave your zabuton and zafus all other practice materials. Everything else gets put away, and you can bring your handouts home with you and bring them back next week. Thank you everyone. Thank you Ken.