Is reality the same as our experience?

Ken: Thank you all for coming back, Bill and I had no idea how many of you would return.

Bill: I see three people who aren’t here.

Ken: You have such sharp eyes.

Bill: So, we were answering some questions when we left and there was one question … was it Joseph’s question about representation and reality? Or appearances and reality? The perspective advanced by the Heart Sutra and most other Buddhist texts, is that there is no other reality than what we experience. And we can overlay, or we can look at that experience and divide it up in such a way that we can say that there’s a floor or a ceiling, and we can talk about appearances because we’ve developed this vocabulary and this way of dividing up the universe of our experience.

Ken: So, are you saying there’s nothing behind my projections?

Bill: There’s everything.

Ken: I don’t find that any more comforting.

Bill: Well, it’s that your projections are, as we’ve learned, empty of self-existence. That is, there’s no real way of actually separating them from anything else in the universe.

Ken: Im feeling very, very alone.

Bill: Well, but if we just take that very, very aloneness and look at that line around it, that makes you feel so alone. And if we just take that line away, then you shouldn’t really feel that alone, you should feel …

Ken: I always hate it when people tell me how I should feel.

Bill: Well, I think maybe another three-year retreat is in order.

Ken: Anything but that, anything.

Bill: But that is sort of the Buddhist perspective: that there is not some reality out there and that what we think of as real, which we might call an appearance, and then we also might call it a delusion. That’s also completely real. I mean, it’s not separate from what is real.

Ken: Just a second, please. Joseph?

Joseph: Would you go so far as to say that it’s all a mental event? Or would you just say nothing about it? That this is what we’re given and so let’s just work with it as is?

Bill: I liked the last one. Yeah. I don’t like the mental event idea because we think that there’s mind and matter. That’s the tradition that we represent in the West, we live in a material world and somehow we have this mind in this material world or opposed to the material world. So it’s not so much that it’s a mental event, it’s the only event happening. It’s all we know.

Student: I mean, some other sentient creature that … [unclear] the same energy that we experience … having an entirely different mental representation, entirely different universe built up of presumably an objective reality, you can never touch … [inaudible]. All of our representation, color, sight, sense and sounds is a function of our sense organs, in our brain and neural structure. Change any element there, the representation changes … [unclear]. If there is a reality, and I’m not sure how you work, do you work with what you’re given or do you recognize that our representations are subjective? And can you get through that subjectivity, is a reality to be found beyond the representations, within the representations?

Bill: It’s earlier, when Ken was saying, where is this scene holding up the cell phone? That’s all we have is we know we’re seeing the cell phone. We can’t be sure of anything else. We don’t even know where that scene is taking place. I mean, you talk about, about an outside world, but we don’t know that there’s an outside world. That’s something that we’ve invented, the idea that there’s an outside world. All we really know, and all we can really address is the experience that we have.

Ken: I think what one has to keep in mind, Buddhism is pretty radical. And, my training, as many of you know in the Tibetan tradition and in the mahamudra tradition … and I know there’s a Zen teacher who takes the same point of view, a person called Uchiyama who’s a 20th century Zen teacher. You may ask, “What is life?” Because that, in a sense is really what you’re asking here. What is life? What is … and Seungsahn and others they’ll ask, “What is this experience we call life?” Well, when we look at it very precisely and let go of our scientific training, our philosophical training, our ordinary education, etc., and we ask, you know, what is life? Life consists of three things, and three things only: thoughts, feelings, and sensations, sensory sensations. That’s it. So, blue, round, I say, there’s a blue circle.

And what you’re talking about as a reality behind those projections or those representations, I think Bill and I are regarding as an apparent reality what is constructed out of those representations. Would you agree? Yeah. And so, and this is why Buddhism is so very, very radical because it says all we can actually know is what arises in terms of our sensory experience, what arises emotionally, and what arises cognitively. That’s all that we know. Out of that we construct the notion that there is some kind of reality out there because we seem to interact with other people, and we have conversations, we have families, we have jobs and all of this. And it is a very, very compelling story, but ultimately it’s a story.

What is communication?

Ken: Now this does raise some quite deep questions and this is why I was teasing Bill, just now saying, well, if there’s just these representations and there’s nothing behind them, then I feel very, very alone. Because it raises the question what is communication? What does it mean to talk with another person?

There’s a whole school of Buddhism that takes this approach. It’s called the mind-only school or the experience-only school. And the answer is that what communication is, is mind speaking to mind, or heart speaking to heart, cause the word for mind and heart are the same in Sanskrit and Tibetan. And it moves very quickly from there into what Bill and I were talking about earlier, and that everything is connected and experience arises out of all of these interconnections. It is an extremely radical way of viewing experience, but it does have one really big advantage. And that is when you develop the ability to experience the world that way and relate to the world that way, it ends suffering. And this we have to remember is the point of Buddhism.

It isn’t to come to an answer about how things are, Buddhism has never been really interested in that. It has always been a method and an approach to end suffering or end struggle. And, radical as it is, the more one moves into this, in my experience—how do I be present in whatever is rising in my experience?—we find, and it’s almost like magic; that the more we pay attention to what’s arising in our own experience and interacting with that, with mindfulness, with attention, with compassion, etc., what’s arising right in my experience, then everything else seems to take care of itself.

And there’s an analogy which I draw from Uchiyama Roshi, which I find illustrates this very well. And it’s also something I’ve found through my own experience. There’s a duck, and it sits on a clutch of eggs and every now and then the duck gets up and with it’s beak turns over all of the eggs and sits down again.The consequence of this is that the eggs are evenly warmed. And so they hatch properly. Now they don’t get too cold on one side, they’re turned regularly. If you’re a scientist, the natural question is how does the duck know when to turn the eggs? And so you can conduct all of these experiments and theories, etc., and the conclusion to come to is the duck turns the eggs over when she gets too hot. And I think it’s a wonderful illustration of how being really attentive to our own experience, exactly what’s arising, when you interact with another person, what is arising in my body, which often we’re not paying any attention to at all. And usually that tells us a lot of what’s going on and how do I respond to that? Then we have this appearance of communication, which is some kind of mystery, but the result of that is that there’s a quality of attention in the interaction and less struggle, less reactivity.

What we say, what we do in one situation or another is appropriate because we are attentive to our own experience and that ends suffering. And I think this is really what, I mean, returning to the topic of the day, the Heart Sutra. The Heart Sutra is saying pay attention to this being-nothing-there quality of experience. It’s the aspect of experience that we continually ignore because it’s so frightening because it takes away all our usual reference points. But the more we actually pay attention to that ephemeral, undefinable, mysterious quality of experience, then the more responsive and the more appropriate and the more accurate our responses become to other people. And this is how we end suffering. Does this help?

Student: So if I were to encapsulate, it seems that what you’re saying is that we accept the representations for what they are and Buddhism tells us how to work within those representations to relieve the anxiety and the conflict of those representations by kind of letting go. But there is, we have nothing beyond those representations. Enlightenment is not something beyond representation. That’s something that takes place within representations. If there even is such a thing as enlightenment, it’s within the representation.

Ken: Yeah. It’s awakening to the nature of that experience, those representations.

Student: But it’s not understanding that representation in any deeper sense, it’s just accepting it.

Bill: Well, and also seeing you’ve only accepted because you see it for what it is, which is empty.

Ken: Empty of intrinsic being.

Bill: Of being real itself.

Student: So I relate to it as if it’s real, but understand that it’s not?

Bill: Yeah. In terms of it being separate from anything else.

Student: But I’ll never know what it is.

The relationship between time and self

Bill: Well now we’re getting to the point where we need to ask who?

Ken: Yeah. And and Bill’s right on the money there, because I remember in Sarnath when I was there in 1971, I was invited to join a small class on the five skandhas actually and so this young Nyingma teacher was explaining the skandhas, and I came up with this question. I said, where are time and space in the skandhas? And the reply was “form”. I said, no, not form. Where are time and space in the skandhas? “Form”, no, I’m not talking about form. I’ve got form, I’m clear about form. I’m talking about time and space. “Form”. And eventually I understood that he was asking the question “for whom?” And it just stopped because you only have a concept of time, if there is a sense of self. That’s very frightening. And it’s very clear from our experience. When does time pass most slowly for you? Well, when you’re bored or when you have a headache, right? How occupied are you with a sense of self when you’re bored or have a headache? On the other hand, when does time pass most quickly? When you are completely engaged, whether interaction or an activity, it just, there is no sense of time. So the relationship between time and self is very, very close.

Bill: Yeah. That’s good.

Student questions

Student: Took my thoughts away. Okay. Last night I was reading and I’m trying to remember if it was in Wake Up To Your Life or in … I’ve been reading a lot of Alan Watts. I just went to a garage sale and got six of his books. So I’ve been madly reading Alan Watts. And that was it you who said …

Ken: I don’t know.

Student: I’m going to ask you about this, not being aware of your own feelings being one of two kinds of evil?

Ken: I think that sounds like Alan.

Student: Okay. That sounds like Alan. Okay.

Ken: What are the two kinds of evil?

Student: Well, I can’t remember the second right now, but the first was that you do many evil things when you are not aware of what you were feeling, but if you did, if you distanced from your own inner state then those people who do that, chronically tend to do things in the world that are evil. I’m trying to frame this question cause it’s back to Alan again. Sorry about that. But he is a not-two person. And he emphasizes that what is form is also not form. And is there a difference in the way the Heart Sutra addresses that and how Alan Watts addresses that? Cause I know he took a particular kind of a way of speaking about it and that assumes that you’re familiar with it, Alan Watts.

Bill: It doesn’t sound different, what you say, because the Heart Sutra is talking about form is emptiness, which means form is not form.

Student: However, he’s saying that that’s all there is because it’s the front back of the same thing up, down, in, out, whatever. And I remember being at your retreat and learning how to do some kinds of meditation. And one of the ones that was most helpful was saying no inside, no outside. That for me, if I’m having trouble with staying present, saying that is amazing. Thank you.

Ken: You’re welcome. Okay. Question back here.

The two worlds we live in

Student: So we talked about aloneness and when I think about the framework that you have thoughts and feelings and experience sensual experience, I experience sadness or I experience joy. And yet when I say I experience, I put that line around it. So I heard you use the word connectedness. And my sense is that these are shared experiences that I have. And so I’m sort of confused in the paradigm here. Is it only what I am thinking, feeling, seeing?

Ken: Oh, I’m going to bring out if I can, just how radical Buddhism is here. One way, a distinction that is helpful is to make a distinction between the world, in which we think we live and the world in which we actually live. From the Buddhist point of view the world in which we think we live is the world of families, jobs, careers, hobbies, social interaction, etc. The world in which we actually live is the world of thoughts, feelings, sensations, just straight experience, out of which we construct the other world.

Now there’s a very important distinction between these two worlds. In the world of interaction, I can give Bill a cell phone, I can actually give him a piece of my mind in, the sense of anger, etc. And we can exchange, we can share things, we get a pie and share it. So sharing, exchange, trade, all of these things are possible in that world.

But in the world in which we actually live, that is thoughts, feelings, and sensations, there is absolutely no possibility of sharing or exchanging anything. And it’s like, huh? But you and I can take a slice of the same strawberry pie. And when you take a bite and I take a bite, we have no idea whether we’re having the same experience or not. We may agree it tastes good, but we actually have no idea whether it’s the same experience.

If I’m able to relate completely to my world of experience and open to it, then I don’t struggle in it. And in not struggling in it, I don’t introduce imbalances and thus those go out like waves into other people’s experience. And that’s where we create suffering. And this is why I found the perspective of being able to relate completely to one’s own experience, really a wonderfully freeing way of working with things. And it puts the responsibility exactly where I think it should be, on experiencing whatever arises. So that’s one aspect of Buddhism being a bit radical. The second one is what is “I” here? I’d like to suggest that “I” is an experience, not a fact. Okay? Do you have anything to add to that?

Bill: No, well, I like the silence.

Student: It’s kind of eerie isn’t it? If there was no suffering and there was no struggle, what would that be like? And particularly if that was the case over a long period of time, would everything go away?

Bill: Well, Ken was just talking about how what I experience and what you experience is not shared. We have our different karmic pasts and the way we address our experience is equally different. What I struggle with is not what you struggle with. From the Buddhist perspective, we can’t look outside of that. We can’t like arrive from another planet and look down on people and say, whether they’re suffering or not, all we know is what’s happening with ourselves and how we deal with other people in the world. And they become part of our experience. And as we are open to our experience being liberating, then we assist in their liberation from suffering. But as far as an end to suffering, well in a sense that would be the end of the game. You know, there’s no more fun to be had. There’s no more challenges. Our work, you know what, makes us joyful is when we, we break through things, we learn to give up things. And so I’d say suffering is essential to our spiritual path. With no suffering then we would be extremely bored.

Student: I was afraid of that.

Bill: Yeah … [unclear]

The story of Avalokiteshvara

Ken: There’s a story or a myth associated with Avalokiteshvara our hero of the Heart Sutra. Now, as many of you probably know, Avalokiteshvara is the bodhisattva who is the embodiment of awakened compassion. And the story is told that when he was a student of Buddha Amitabha, who was his guru, he took the bodhisattva vow, and as his personal expression of the bodhisattva vow, he vowed that if he should ever fall into a state of despair, his head would burst into 1000 pieces.

So with this very strong motivation, he started working for the welfare of beings. Whenever I say this now I’m mindful of Bill’s translation of the Diamond Sutra saying a bodhisattva who conceives of sentient beings is not a bodhisattva. Still working on that one. So for three incalculably long eons, he works for the welfare of sentient beings. And then he stops to take a break and see how he’s doing. He’s still attached to the idea of progress you see. And he looks, and he sees that there are more sentient beings suffering in samsara than when he started, that they’re suffering from poverty, and that their reactive emotions are stronger than before.

And he says “What’s the use?” And his head burst into 1000 pieces. Amitabha appears on the scene says, hmm, you broke your vow. Now you’re going to have to come up with a new one. And he heals, and then the story says that the 1000 pieces of his head became the 1000 arms of one of the forms of Avalokiteshvara. And as he formulated his new vow, he saw that sentient beings needed help fast, they needed help with reactive emotions, they needed help with poverty. So this black Hung the letter Hung, appeared in his heart and became what is now known as the six-armed Mahakala, which is the wrathful emanation of compassion.

And I’ve heard this story many, many times, my teacher Kalu Rinpoche told it many times when I was translating. And over the years, it gradually sunk into me that one way to understand the story is that true compassion goes beyond despair. And so it’s not concerned with achieving or arriving at some kind of end state. It is meeting what is arising in terms of suffering or struggle in the present moment with no attachment to a goal or an end state that will one day be reached. And that story then became very, very powerful for me,

Student: Yeah. This is related. I’ve just spent about a year and a half in Sri Lanka. And I know you’re aware of the situation there, but where does Buddhism and politics come together? Because it was very confusing to me to be there and listen to the way the Buddhists talked about the Tamil Tigers, and, you know, the head monk would actually get on the TV and say, well, we have to kill them all. And I was just struck by that, but where does—if we’re talking about what you’re talking about—how does one be political in a larger sense outside of being aware of one’s own experience?

Bill: Well, you can’t do anything more political than be aware of your own experience and any benefit. If you want to look at it as an external benefit to your society, won’t come about without that awareness. Somebody once asked Confucius about the same situation. And he said, if you want to bring peace to your country, you have to bring peace to your state. And if you want to bring peace to your state, you have to bring peace to your village. And if you want to bring peace to your village, you have to bring peace to your family. And if you want to bring peace to your family, you have to bring peace to yourself. And so any Buddhist political program can’t go beyond dealing with your own experience and in transforming that experience to compassion, to what Ken was talking about in terms of what Avalokiteshvara does.

I mean, one can criticize other Buddhists as being, well, you’re just not a real Buddhist, but that’s doomed to create more disharmony in the world, that sort of attitude. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just the way I approach things, but I like what Confucius said. I work on myself. I figure the better person I am, well, my family, my community, my country will be benefited that way, not by me getting on a soap box and criticizing those people and supporting those people and creating more division.

Ken: It’s a complex and difficult question. Buddhism as it was originally developed was not terribly concerned with politics. It was concerned with individual freedom. Nevertheless, in the time of Buddha he found himself involved in a lot of political situations. There’s a set of recordings on dharmaspring.org which is a very good website. It’s got a lot of recordings from various mainly Theravadan teachers, but one of them is Stephen Bachelor, who some of you may know, and he does a series of lectures on the life of Buddha in which he completely demythologizes the life of Buddha. He makes use of a concordance that a Theravadan monk did of the Pali Canon earlier in the 20th century, and is able to reconstruct with some precision, the political machinations that were going on in the life of Buddha.

It’s very, very instructive. And at one point Buddha’s cousin, Devadatta, and the son of one of the kings got together and said, well, you knock off Buddha, and I knock off the old king and we can take over the whole thing. You become the spiritual leader, and I become the temporal leader. Now this plot actually didn’t work. Devadatta didn’t succeed in knocking off Buddha, though he did try, but the young king did manage to succeed in killing his father, or at least imprisoning him, I can’t remember precisely. So even though, Buddha had little interest in politics, he found himself embroiled in these situations.

And fast-forward a couple of thousand years to the Second World War in which we find the Japanese regarding themselves as the instruments of karma and inflicting a great deal of suffering on China and other countries, figuring they were just cleaning the world up. And this, to my mind, is equally as specious a justification as we had in the Crusades when Christians regard themselves as acting on the will of God. I think we have to, at least for me, distinguish between that kind of ideology or ideological position from what Buddhism is talking about as practice. What you’re talking about in terms of those ideologies is how various institutions and various groups of people are fighting for their survival one way or another, which is a very, very different matter. So they will use Buddhist formulations or Christian formulations or Islamic formulations, whatever, to justify, but this doesn’t mean that what they’re doing is actually the practice of the religion. And so I think one has to approach this very sensitively, but also with very, very clear eyes. Okay.

Bill: Questions up here?

Student: Connected to both what Bill said about healing, myself being connected to all of society. And also the talk about politics. I’m going back to what you said about memory, and when you gave the example of thinking of a mild irritation, and then switching over to saying, I’m glad about it, and it disappearing, that worked very well for me, but when I start to think of more serious irritations like PTSD, which you raised, how is that? I’m not sure I have the question formulated except the practice of Buddhist practice. How can that relate to some wound that is so deep as PTSD?

Bill: What’s PTSD?

Ken: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Student: And I just want to add to it that as a psychotherapist that works with them, a more appropriate label for that acronym or words for that, is post-traumatic soul disorder. So …

Ken: Well, even with PTSD, one way of looking at it, certainly not the only way, but one way of looking at it is something happened which we simply did not have the capacity to experience. So there’s an undischarged emotional reaction. And that may be because of the physical trauma, that may because of the emotional trauma and whatsoever.

And in a certain sense, when that happens it’s like a part of us is now unavailable to us and it goes back to Bill’s idea of drawing a line around it, it’s something that happened and we can’t touch it. It’s just too hot, too painful, or what have you. The approach in Buddhist practice would be gently and appropriately to start forming a relationship with that part. Now with a mild irritation that was very easily done, as you pointed out. With something that is deeply, deeply painful, it has to be done much more carefully. And there are two or three techniques with which I’m familiar.

One can apply the Anapanasati Sutra, the Full Awareness of Breathing Sutra to this. The Full Awareness of Breathing Sutra in using the breath and opening to, as you breathe, allowing yourself to move into however much of that experience you’re able to and doing that very gently. So if you can only open to one thousandth of it, that’s what you do.

Thich Nhat Hanh has a technique for this. It’s a five-step process, which consists of holding that part, tenderly in attention, and even starting with just a very, very small amount of it so that you gradually form a relationship. And he knows of what he speaks because he comes through having been driven out of Vietnam from both sides, ’cause he was equally unpopular with the Americans and with the Vietcong.

There’s this other technique in the Mahayana tradition called mind training which is a way of forming a relationship with any aspect of our experience from which we are alienated. Because in that aspect of experience from which we are alienated, there is some suffering. And in mind training, you’re taking that suffering and you give your own understanding and joy and support, and you just do this again with the breath taking in the suffering, giving your own joy. And in this way you start a process of mediation with that which forms a a relationship. In the case of something as deep as post-traumatic stress disorder, I think it’s highly advisable to, if one is undertaking those kinds of techniques, to do it in conjunction with seeing someone you can talk about it with. Because it’s very easy to over-expose oneself to these experiences and thus re-traumatize. So I think one has to be quite careful here, but I’ve worked with a number of people with both of those techniques and it’s been very helpful.

Bill: You had a question?

Student: I wanted to thank both of you for enlightening. providing for me another translation for the Heart Sutra, the one I’m most familiar with that I recite and the favorite line is dealing with fear. And since there are no obscurations of mind, there is no fear. They transcend falsity and attain complete nirvana. And so this whole idea of fear for me I think can piggyback on what Ken was saying earlier about feeling alone. And if the antidote for that is taking the box away. Sometimes I feel myself being … I have young children, I don’t know how many of you are familiar with Harold and the Purple Crayon, but I’m actually out there drawing that line around myself, you know, entrenching myself further in fear, even though I have the mindfulness and the awareness that I’m doing, it, I’m just caught in it.

And it’s the idea of not clouding my mind or being without the walls of the mind is the reason I keep doing this and to live without that fear. And so I was hoping that either of you or both of you could share a little bit about how the Heart Sutra helps us work with fear. Because for me that’s one of my biggest obstacles, of being willing to show up once again to this moment to be present, even if I’m using my body as a barometer of, okay, my jaws clenching I’m feeling anger, or this is happening. I know this, it’s that fear and the antidote for that for me is faith. And the faith is that, oh, I can live through this moment again, if I’m just present here now. But when I’m the one with the crayon drawing the line around myself and constricting, contracting, imploding. I don’t go into a thousand places I implode. But how to work with fear, I guess is the essence of my question?

The Heart Sutra: emotion vs. intellect

Bill: Well, the first parts of the Heart Sutra are essentially intellectual, but the part you’re talking about, the very end of the Heart Sutra, is emotional because as Ken was saying, the extent of our ability to access the universe is all mediated by our feelings and thoughts, emotions. So we can’t expect liberation intellectually. That’s like chasing your tail. And that’s why Buddhism isn’t really a philosophy. It can use philosophical tricks and argue logic with anybody, but that’s just a way of just giving you a toy to calm your fears with. The Sanskrit you’re talking about is acita avarana, no walls of the mind. The reason you’re afraid is because of those walls, you’re always afraid of something on the other side of the wall. You’re afraid something’s going on outside your house. You hear those noises at night.

Student: How did you know that?

Ken: Because he is too.

Bill: If only I could get rid of those walls, then I would see that that it’s just the wind blowing. And so you’re right, the Heart Sutra only works if it works emotionally. And you … we can talk about those walls of the mind as, in a sense intellectual too. We have to take down those walls. And if we do that, if we can take down those walls, then we can deal with our emotions. Then we can free ourselves from those fears because we’ll see there’s nothing there. And that’s why the Heart Sutra doesn’t pretend to present an intellectual solution. It, it counters an intellectual quagmire: the form is emptiness.

And again, this is just a counter of the Sarvastavadins who built up this big intellectual house of cards. But basically the sutra comes down to becoming free of fear. And that’s the truth of the sutra. And that’s why at the very end of it, they don’t give you a statement about what’s the truth of the universe. They give you a mantra at the end which doesn’t say anything. It just says beyond, just whatever it is you would like to resurrect as your salvation go beyond it, because that’s just another wall. And so the intellect, the mind, and the idea, the thoughts and the emotions are related, but to overcome one you have to overcome the other.

Ken: I’m just delighted to hear you say that because the, Tibetan tradition tends to be a very academic tradition. At least there are significant parts of it which are very, very academic. And I would often teach retreats using these pretty heavy-duty logical analyses and the philosophical presentations of different schools of emptiness and so forth. And I found out that this just didn’t work and didn’t work for precisely the reason that Bill just mentioned, because what people were having problems with was not the intellectual concept of emptiness, but their emotional reaction to it. And so I started putting a lot more emphasis on focusing on when you look at your mind or you look at experience and you see nothing, how do you react to that?

And it is very frightening. And this is why in the accounts, it says that emptiness wasn’t taught to the sravakas or the pratyekabuddhas because when they heard about emptiness they had heart attacks and vomited blood, because they were so scared. But speaking to your question and to what Bill just said in this translation, anyway, it says because for bodhisattvas there is no attainment, they rest, trusting the perfection of wisdom with nothing clouding their minds, that’s the no walls part, they have no fear.

So I think you mentioned something about devotion or faith, but this is the emotional quality that is very, very important. In fact, it’s not important, it’s essential if one is going to open to the world in this way. It’s primarily an emotional opening. We can start by sorting through the logic and opening to it intellectually and say, okay, yeah, I can see that, that makes sense. But that doesn’t touch what’s in here. And so the second level is opening to it emotionally, like accepting this extraordinary openness and groundlessness of being, which is initially very, very disturbing.

But paradoxically, the more we’re able to accept that, the more responsive we become to people. For instance, you’re dealing with your kids or something like that, when we get angry with someone, I think most of us who have children have got angry with them occasionally. We only get angry when we feel weaker than what we’re opposing. And so there’s the fear of that. And we just forget, you know, well, these are just my kids what’s going to happen? And so if we can just move out of that temporary misperception, then the clouding of the mind falls away and the fear falls away. And now we can be more responsive.

There’s a deeper level of opening than the emotional, and that’s perceptual. So we actually perceive things as being that open and that we need a special, usually special meditation techniques, which allow us to experience things very, very differently from the way we do. And all of these reinforce each other. But in terms of practical applications, you know, when you find yourself drawing, as you say, the line around you and your fear, I found that the most reliable thing to get out of that kind of reactive thing is to go to the body and say, okay, what am I experiencing in my body? And you do this in your meditation. You do this in your life, and you begin to develop a different relationship with attention so that you don’t get completely caught up and wrapped up in it because once you’re caught up and wrapped up in it, there’s nothing you can do. One has to bring the attention to the process earlier, and that’s the purpose of practice. Okay.

Student: Thank you. You spoke earlier about dependent origination in relation to the Heart Sutra and also emotions and thoughts and your feelings and that, how does that all tie together? Is there a way to speak of that?

Ken: What are you asking?

Student: They seem separate to me and I don’t know how to understand the individual part of it with the dependent origination. I can’t tie them together in my perception somehow.

Bill: Well, the idea of, of dependent origination is just another one of these ways that we try to say, what’s going on right now? Where am I?

And looking at what’s going on right now as a temporal sequence, as ongoing change and saying, well, if this is me, well, where does it come from? And so the meditation on these links on the chain of dependent origination were just developed to show us that whatever state we happen to think we are in is simply based upon a previous state. And there is actually no we there. All there is is this state, this awareness, this experience going on. And when we try to find a self in that experience, we can’t do it. But what we can do is we can say, well, it came from this, and then it’s going off, it’s going in this direction. It’s really resulting in this. And so this was the Buddha’s meditation, the night of his enlightenment, to meditate on the sequence and see that there’s no self in any of this. And so all of these categories in the Heart Sutra are just our ways of … again, they’re like toys, they’re ways of occupying your attention. So you can exhaust yourself looking for yourself.

And so that’s the idea of that dependent chain origination for people who like to think of their search as a temporal one, or as based on logic, on A leads to B, equals C, and so forth.

Ken: Do you ever do anything that you don’t intend? How does that happen?

Student: How does that happen?

Ken: You say something and it just comes out wrong. I didn’t mean to say that. Ever happened to you?

Student: Oh yeah.

Ken: How does that happen?

Student: I’m not really sure.

Ken: It’s a bit of a mystery, isn’t it. And yet we attach ourselves to the notion that we are the sole determinants of what happens in our life. And we’re proved wrong every day, sometimes several times a day. Okay. Bill was talking about interdependent origination in the 12 links.

What we decide to do, and what actually happens, often have very little relationship with each other. It’s very disturbing to the notion that I am an agent of my life, but that’s exactly what the 12 links shows us, just as Bill was saying, when this state arises, then this happens, and then this happens, and this happens, and there is no “I” that is causing any of it.

This is very disconcerting. What do we do about this? The only way that we can short-circuit that is by being completely awake and present in each experience that arises because it is the lack of awareness that produces this chain of causation. Whether we’re awake in that state, then whatever state arises it doesn’t necessarily just react and go into the next state. And that’s how we bring the whole chain of causation to a halt.

Student: Thank you.

Ken: Okay.

Karma

Student: If we have this problem of “I” being a false impression and we can know only what this being senses, how then does the notion of karma and multiple rebirths fit in? How can I believe in karma when all I sense is what I can sense?

Bill: How you can believe in karma, if all …

Student: How does it fit in? It seems like it’s an intellectual ideation perhaps to help us think through the Buddhist approach, but it seems contrary to believe in rebirth, believe in karma, when you are saying, I can only go as far as my thoughts, awareness and sensation will take me.

Bill: Well, I bet you’ve had children, one or two?

Student: Two, and grandchildren.

Bill: Well, they grew up in the same environment and yet I’d be willing to bet their personalities are different. And what accounts for that? And since you’re the mother, you probably see these differences happening really early. Maybe when they’re a few weeks old, or even a few months old, you start to see children in the same family developing different lives, and you can see they’re experiencing their life differently. And so what accounts for that? Buddhist answer is that it’s because they’re of their karma, you all have a different karma. Buddhism doesn’t believe that a person is not reborn. Karma is an ongoing process whereby one thought leads to another. What the Buddhists like to talk about being reborn is ignorance. The belief in itself is reborn, and this baby believes in itself.

And the moment that thought occurs, the whole chain begins again. And, you know, it’s a little bit different than the other baby. Then within a couple of years they’re widely divergent. And after 20 years they won’t even talk to each other. Well maybe, hopefully not. But, anyway the idea of what Buddhists have towards karma is: what I experience I want to find out the origins of it. And whether you think of karma as true or false is really irrelevant. What’s at stake is how am I going to be responsible for what I am today? I’m not going to really be able to deal with it if I don’t know where it comes from and where it comes from is this belief in a self.

And if we trace that belief in a self we can trace it down to … we don’t even know where it began, because we’ve had it ever since we were born in this life. And so Buddhists look at this and just say, well since we had it when we were born, we must have had it before we were born. Because even today people debate, when does birth begin? When you exit the womb or when you’re first put together in the womb And, why is it just at that moment? So the Buddhist view of karma is just a way of looking at your current awareness, current experience, and trying to gain a sense of responsibility for it, become responsible for it so that you can then liberate yourself, your self from no self. Oh, I think I’ll turn this one over to you. I’m digging myself a hole here.

Ken: I’d like to just keep watching you dig. I’m going to take a rather different approach, cause I just saw the hole he dug himself into. Three analogies for karma: God’s will, evolution and gravity. I referred to Stephen Bachelor before. What he has to say about karma is this. In the East, karma is the answer to everything, which means at the end it doesn’t tell you anything. There’s some truth in that. Go back a few hundred years in our own culture, when something inexplicable happened, what did people say? It was God’s will. Why did my child die? It’s God’s will. This was the way of referring to the inexplicable. And I think this is one thing we have to keep in mind. Life is a mystery, things happen. We have no idea of why, we may even say or do things, we had no idea that we were going to do them, how that comes about.

Sometimes they’re good. Sometimes they’re horrible. And what happens there? It’s a mystery. So one of the very important things is to get away from the idea that we can actually explain life and understand everything about it and enter into the mystery, which involves letting go of control, letting go of all kinds of fixed ideas and entering into our experience. And as all of you in this room know, every relationship is a mystery. You enter into a relationship, you have no idea how it’s going to work out and it can be wonderful, it can be difficult, and sometimes it can be wonderful and difficult and difficult and wonderful. You just have no idea, which is why in the marriage ceremony, it says for better or worse for good, or in illness and in health you’re together.

And it’s expressing this idea. You’re entering into a mystery. And raising children is a mystery where the way Bill was describing it. You know, we bring these beings into the world. We have no idea who they really are or how they’re going to turn out and we do our best and something happens. So that’s one. The second—I’m going to go to the gravity. Now we hear about the law of gravity. Has anybody been able to repeal this law? And we have to be careful how we use things. This is a law in the sense of principle.

Bill: I think Bush is working on it. I had to do that. Sorry.

Ken: That’s great. I love it. It’s cool.

Bill: I still have to work on that. Okay.

Ken: Just one of those little inexplicable … Okay. So, gravity is how things behave. You know, how masses interact with each other. There’s nothing you can do about it. You know, if you step off a branch of a tree and there’s nothing under you, you’re going to fall to the ground, that’s it. That’s what’s going to happen. And if you strap a bunch of jet fuel on your back and light it, you’re going to go up in the air because the power of the jet fuel is temporarily going to overcome the force of gravity. But when you run out of fuel, you’re going to have a problem again. There’s this guy who floated his lawn chairs over into Des Moines or something like that.

What did he use for ballast? Bottles of soda pop or something? Anyway, the only way to work with gravity is you have to apply enough power to get over it, but you can’t get away from it. And what karma, one way of understanding karma is saying, if you cause harm or pain to others, because you’re putting that into your world of experience, you’re sowing, you’re creating the conditions in which you yourself are going to experience it. It’s got nowhere else to go because it’s in your world of experience. And if you do good to others, then something different is going to happen.

Then the third analogy is evolution. Here at least maybe I’m being a little more radical than most Buddhists here, but I just really encourage people not to believe anything. We only have our own experience and in the Catholic church we had this concept of original sin. And I remember, I think James Joyce in Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, says, “any religion that condemns you to eternal damnation before you’ve been born is inhumanly cruel.” I kind of go along with that. And I feel exactly the same way. When a bus goes over a cliff with a bunch of school kids in it, and somebody says, well, why did that happen? Well, they were all murderers in a previous life. I just don’t buy it. That’s a belief and it’s a belief which serves certain functions.

But the main function it serves is to preserve certain political and social structures. And I don’t know if anybody’s noticed this, I’m a little anti-authoritarian. But I do think karma has a different interpretation. And that is, that it’s a very precise description of how actions that we do evolve into experienced results. So that in the way I was saying, if I steal something from somebody, then I conditioned myself thinking, you know, what other people have is actually mine, it’s just in the wrong pocket right now. And I should correct this by taking it and putting into my pocket. All I’m doing is correcting the world. And I start reinforcing that whole way of relating to things. Of course, meanwhile, the people that I’m stealing from become less and less trusting of me. They gradually figure this out and so they start hiding their stuff.

And that means they certainly don’t want to interact with me. So what I experience is my world, the resources I need to live, are becoming more and more scarce, which actually encourages me to steal more and more. And it just creates this vicious cycle, which is completely a process of evolution. And so now I am, in this sense, creating or setting in motion the process of evolution, which evolves into a rather miserable form of experience.

So that notion of karma as a process of evolution, I found very, very powerful. And it’s how my own teacher used to teach it because, I didn’t understand this for years, but whenever you talked about karma, he always drew a picture of a tree. He didn’t draw a picture of a lever, which is how we usually think of cause and effect in the West. He drew a picture of a tree and that there were seeds, which grew into a tree, which had leaves and then bore fruit, and then that’s what you got to eat. And so the way a tree grows is through a process of evolution. We can say the seed evolves into a tree. It doesn’t cause a tree. And I found that these are very, very powerful and helpful ways of thinking about karma. So maybe that’s helpful to you.

So we have time for two or three more questions before we close. I think there’s one back there.

Student: I was studying Buddhism pretty seriously for a few years. And then I got the crazy idea that I wanted to be a poet. And and I know it’s ridiculous because much of our most beautiful and important poetry is Buddhist poetry. I couldn’t reconcile the fact that I was trying to say what was kind of unsayable and this might be a question more for Bill in your translations of Buddhist poetry, but how do you see Buddhism in literature coming together and how do you reconcile that as a translator?

Bill: Well there’s lots of ways to translate. You could translate an aircraft maintenance manual or a bus schedule. There’s lots of language. We could call it literature. We can call it the use of language and somebody could make a living translating that. Language is a very odd phenomenon. It can be extremely superficial or extremely deep. And so when you’re translating language, you develop different techniques to translate it based on what kind of language it is. Poetry and language that spiritual teachers use in their teaching share something in common in that it’s only put into words because they have no other means. Because, while they do have other means, sometimes a slap in the face or a poke in the ribs or just a smile does just as good. But when poets and teachers who are basically relying on their spirit are using language, a translator has to confront that language differently.

I do Chinese poetry mostly when I do poetry, but the Chinese word for poetry, the original meaning of the word poetry, was words from the heart. That language from the heart is what poetry is. And so when you translate that you can’t just translate, you can’t just pay attention to the words. The words are just the surface. And I like to think of it in terms of a dance, that’s the way I work, that I see somebody dancing: Li Bai or Du Fu among Chinese poets say, or Avelokiteshvara, they’re dancing. And I want to dance with them. So what am I going to do? Am I going to dance with my feet on top of their feet? That’s what most people think of translation as. They think it’s dancing with your feet on someone else, your language replicating the language of somebody else.

And that’s fine if you’re reading a manual of how to operate a VCR, but if you’re translating poetry, you’re translating something that has almost nothing to do with the words, there’s something underneath the words. So to me, there’s music. A poet … before you write the poem, you have a feeling, you have a vision, you have some sort of sense that’s non-linguistic and then you put it into words because you have no other choice, no other way of expressing it if you’re a poet. if you’re an artist, then you do a painting, maybe. And so when I translate, I’m more interested in trying to hear the music that is impelling this person to dance so that I can dance with them. And so the net result is I’ve realized that this person who’s dancing, their dance is no less valid than my dance.

And if I can hear the music, if I can dance with them, for example, this Chinese poem that I’m translating is not the real original poem. The original poem is not linguistic. And that poet heard the poem, felt the poem and put it into words. So I have to try to do that too. I have to find out where they’re hearing the poem from. And so when I translate a poem or a Buddhist text, that’s my attitude: that the words are important for showing me there’s something there, but there’s something there that’s not the words. So that’s how I look at translation and where I see both poetry and spiritual texts sharing the same common ground, which is our spirit. And the fact that we’ve used our spirit as the source, and we’ve also used what comes out of our mouth or out of our pens as a way of expressing what’s inside of us. And then I am using my other language to trace that back to the same place that, because we share common experiences, common feelings, even though we don’t know what the other person is feeling, but we can try to replicate that. Somebody has a question back here?

Student: Your answer is really beautiful. How do you know that? Do you try to be in emptiness yourself when you translate? Is that how you know that you’re doing the same dance because nobody else will know that.

Bill: That’s true. Nobody else would know it. You develop your own sense for whether you’re dancing or not, and whether you’re really moving with the text. And that’s why there’s no perfect dance. There’s no perfect translation I should say. There’s no perfect translation. There’s lots … there’s both good translations and bad translations, just like there’s good dancers and bad dancers, but anytime you get on a dance floor, you’re going to dance differently. And every time I translate a poem, I go through maybe 20, 30 drafts of that poem. And each one is a little bit different and I don’t know which one’s going to be the best one. Maybe it’s the last one, but maybe it was an earlier one. I don’t know. It’s something that, you never know.

I don’t know. What I’m really translating, I just feel like I’m having fun and I’m learning something too, because what I’m looking for … all I do is translate really. And I use translation as my practice. That’s my spiritual practice. So that’s my teacher, the Buddha’s my teacher, I learned from the Buddha. So if I’m learning something, then I feel my translation is working and the same with a poet. If I’m learning something it’s working and then if I can pass it onto somebody else, then I figure I’ve done well, I haven’t done any harm.[laughter]

Ken: Yeah. We have a saying in retreat, if you want to learn something, study it. If you really want to learn something, teach it to somebody else. But if you really want to learn, translate it because you have to … I think Bill described this very, very well and very beautifully. I love the analogy of not dancing on someone else’s feet. And I think that captures exactly why I find so many translations from the Tibetan so irritating.

Bill: And also not dancing across the room either.

Ken: Yeah. I mean, you really have to be right with your partner. And so some people go off and they’re doing their nice thing on the other side of the room, but it bears little relationship with what the first person did and then other people are just sort of stomping on the first person. I just hate to have that person as a dance partner cause they got really heavy feet.

There’s a big difference between translating and writing your own material. And they’re very different exercises. When you’re translating, as Bill described, the person has felt or seen or known something which they’re expressing in the words of their language to the best of their ability. And so, you pick this up from reading that to the best of your ability and then try to figure out how to say that in the target language, in our case English. But we don’t really have to worry about … the task is to understand what the other person was saying or what the other person is feeling or something like that. When you’re writing your own material, you’ve got to come up with your own feeling or your own knowing, and then try to figure out how to say that. So in one sense, it saves a step, in the other sense, you don’t have anything as explicit to work with.

So they’re very, very different processes, and I find that I’m in very different states of mind when I’m writing stuff that I’m trying to formulate versus when I’m translating. And I won’t say that one is easier than the other, because they both present very, very different challenges. But the big thing and I think this is where Bill and I certainly overlap is the responsibility of the translator to try to create the experience of what the original author was describing in the reader’s experience. Would you agree with that?

Bill: Yeah, absolutely.

Ken: And you know, all’s fair in love and war in this one, you know, you just use whatever trick you have available to do that. And if there’s a particular phrase in English, which captures something really just elicits that feeling, then I will use that even if it isn’t a literal translation. What do you do with stuff like that?

Bill: Yeah, it’s the same way, it has to sound to me … it has to sound as if the original language was English. Otherwise people will read my translation of this great poet and they’ll think his poetry stunk. You know he’s not, you read lots of translations of poetry like that, they’re not poetry at all.

Ken: Yeah. I think this is, this is really important because one of the things I find irritating is that so many translations from Tibetan into English are not in English. They’re in some kind of weird hybrid language. And so they read very, very strangely and … but I think Bill said it very well, that the translation becomes effective when it becomes transparent. Okay. Nick, you had a question here.

Mantra: relationship with the Heart Sutra

Nick: I’d like to ask if you could elaborate a little bit more about the role or the relationship of the mantra within the sutra. I also noticed how and in your choice of translating and keeping it in the literation or translating it to English and just what the mantra is doing. I mean, we use the sutra for practice, but how do we use the mantra within that sutra?

Bill: Well, that’s a good question to wrap this up with, I think cause for most people who use the sutra, the mantra is not just the most important part of the sutra, it’s really the sutra. Everything in that mantra is in the sutra. And it’s a bit of an odd duck of a mantra because a lot of mantras don’t make sense. It’s that they’re just alliteration. They’re just syllables, but the Heart Sutra mantra both makes sense and is also powerful just in terms of the effects of its sounds. So by putting that mantra at the end of the sutra, the artist who put that sutra together is saying, we’ve dealt with the intellectual side of this thing and now we’re going to go to the heart of the matter, which is beyond intellectualization, of emptiness or these different categories.

And that’s why the mantra’s just saying going, you go beyond. I translate it when I tell people what it means, it’s into the gone, into the gone, into the gone beyond, into the gone completely beyond. Because the way the Sanskrit is set up, it’s directing you towards a direction as if you’re going into this womb from which you’re then reborn.

And by chanting the mantra, you’re creating that womb, that womb of sound from which you can then be reborn. So for me the mantra reminds me at the end, what this whole sutra is about. It’s not about emptiness in this form and all this other stuff, but it’s about just going beyond whatever I find in front of me, my experience, but should something come up, my credit card debts, the Mariners losing again. I have to go beyond it.

Ken: That’s pretty extreme isn’t it?

Bill: It’s been a tough season, but … yes.

Ken: I take a little different tack on mantras. When you go through the Heart Sutra, you find that there are, living in Los Angeles, you’ll have to excuse my vocabulary here. There’s emptiness, take one, emptiness, take two, emptiness, take three, emptiness, take four, awakening. And that’s how the heart Sutra is actually set up. Emptiness take one. This form is emptiness, emptiness form. Emptiness is not other than form, form is not other than emptiness. And you know, the Tibetans didn’t need those extra two lines, and that is like, okay, experience is empty. Emptiness take two is all experience is empty. It is not defined. It’s not born or destroyed, pure impure, free from impurities, complete or not incomplete. Which are usually interpreted as negating the three marks of existence.

And these, as Bill was saying earlier, what the Heart Sutra does is it takes everything away. So the three marks for existence, many of you, I’m sure you’re familiar here, there’s impermanence and suffering and non-self. So Avalokiteshvara says, not born or destroyed. Okay. What happened to impermanence? Because if there’s nothing born or destroyed, then there’s no impermanence either. And so regarding impermanence as a thing has just been taken away and that’s exactly the intention and so forth for the others. So that’s emptiness take two, taking away these really core building blocks of the whole Buddhist edifice or at least the Sarvastavadin edifice.

And then emptiness take three is where you get into this long list of in emptiness there is no form, no feeling, no mental concept, no mental formation, no consciousness, no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, etc. Going through all of these lists that Bill commented on right at the beginning of this afternoon. And because these were all meditation methods designed to eliminate very specific notions of self and yet they had become, been made into facts. So emptiness take three is okay, let go of all of that. I mean, because in that you get even the four noble truths are no suffering, no origin, no cessation, no path. I mean like this is getting pretty intense here and finding right down to no attainment, no pristine awareness. What ? No pristine awareness? How can you do this to me? No attainment, non-attainment. You mean I’m not going to get anywhere? This is terrible. So that’s emptiness take three.

So this whole notion of having a path and having something to practice, etc. No, you don’t get that either. So finally come down to resting in the perfection of wisdom. Okay. This sounds a little more positive. And then it immediately turns around and says when there’s no obscurations or no clouding in mind there is no fear. Okay. That’s cool. There’s no delusion. Okay. That’s cool too. And you come to the end of nirvana. Huh?

I don’t even get nirvana out of this. So everything is taken away. So you have those four steps in that. And that’s what I refer to as emptiness, take one, take two, take three, take four. Which are precisely reflected in the mantra. Gate, as Bill just said, how do you say that? Going into, into the gone, and then into the gone further, and then into the gone beyond, because that’s what para has, this idea of to something else, not here, but something.

And then you go there completely, which is exactly what Avalokiteshvara has just related. And then it says, and so by trusting perfection of wisdom, the Buddhas of the three times awakened to unsurpassable, a true complete awakening. And that’s the line about awakening. He said, okay, so in this letting-go process, then something else happens. And the Sanskrit word for that is bodhi. So that’s the awakening. And that’s why that word appears in the mantra. So Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi, awakening, there.

So I find that it’s a way of summarizing the Heart Sutra. And this, I think, goes back to the original version, which was the shorter one, I believe where it was called a dharani. And very often those dharanis were ways of making things easy to memorize. So you’ll have this exposition and then a very short formula, which all of us are able to memorize, which allows us to come back and just recall all of these steps in this process.

How you actually use a mantra in practice is quite different. One of the methods of using a mantra is you just say it all the time. Earlier. I made reference to this woman in Tibet, Machig Labdron, who lived in the 11th century, Padampa Sangye, and beginning of the 12th century. And she had the good fortune, I mean, women’s status in Tibet wasn’t terribly great back then. But she had the good fortune to have learned how to read. And so people hired her to read the Perfection of Wisdom sutras in their homes, because this was good luck there. The aristocracy did this kind of thing. And so she fell in love with the Perfection of Wisdom because she was reading it all the time. And when you’re doing this practice, you say this mantra and you say this mantra over, and you just say it all the time. Not just when you’re meditating. You say it when you’re talking to somebody else, you say it when you’re doing your work, you say it when you’re going to sleep, you say it all the time. And eventually that mantra replaces what Trungpa called, I think just a wonderful term, replaces the subconscious gossip in our mind. And this is the traditional use of mantra. You say it so much that it starts to say itself, and it’s just with you all the time. And it completely replaces the subconscious gossip. Now you actually have a quiet mind. And you have the opportunity to know directly, because the mind is quiet and clear, the perfection of wisdom.

Bill: And just to add one little thing to that: after Bodhi, there’s another word, Swaha, and swa means self and ha means ha. Always leave them laughing.