Introduction

Valerie: Hello everyone. I think it’s time for us to begin. I’m Valerie Brewster and on behalf of the Cass Street Sangha and A Snail’s Pace, welcome to Anything is Possible. I am so excited to see all of you here today and to be introducing our speakers. Both Bill Porter and Ken McLeod have devoted much of their lives to Buddhism through practice, scholarship writing, and teaching. Both have done the extraordinary work of learning and becoming fluent in other languages so they could understand their teachers, and they could read the texts in their primary languages. Both Ken and Bill have translated what they learned from traditional sources into contemporary English for our lives today. Not so long ago, it was rare to find people with deep knowledge of Buddhism within our culture, and today we have two seasoned representatives here in our community to share what they know with us. They are the transformative energy of what may someday come to be called American Buddhism. So please welcome Bill Porter and Ken McLeod

Bill: Well, all in all, I also would like to extend my thanks for all of you coming today and especially Ken for coming so far away. It’s funny, the last time I was in this building was when Neils Holm asked me to come and give a talk on the Heart Sutra. It was also Neils who later told me he had met this wonderful teacher in Los Angeles named Ken McLeod, and so I’m just thankful that I finally got a chance to meet you. We should have a lot of fun today, and so what’s on your mind?

Ken: Well, we’ll get there [Laughs], there’s a couple of things I’d like to say before we get started. My introduction to Bill came when a student of mine sent me a copy of the Diamond Sutra. Now, the Diamond Sutra is a pretty substantial text. It’s a very important text, as many of you know, in the Zen tradition. There is a tradition of Tibetan Buddhism that is named after the Diamond Sutra. It’s called the practice of chöd or “cutting”. It was developed by a woman in the 11th, 12th century called Machig Löbdron. But I had never read the Diamond Sutra or I’d only read bits and pieces of it through people like Edward Conze, who was one of the great pioneers of the project of the prajnaparamita literature in English, but I didn’t have any relationship with it.

I sat down and started to read this, and I was just so impressed because not only was there a very, very coherent high-quality translation, and as a translator I’m rather picky about that, but there was also this extremely sensitive commentary in which I could tell that whoever was writing this, and I only knew him by Red Pine at this point, knew something about the dharma as well as a great deal about Chinese language and Buddhism, but really had some kind of experiential relationship with it. And I got so much out of it. Then skip forward a couple of years, and at the encouragement of a colleague of mine, I finally decided to tackle a commentary on the Heart Sutra, and I was having a terrible time finding my way into it.

This was the be the second book I was writing, and I don’t know how it is for you Bill, but when I’m writing something, I have to know for whom I’m writing before I can write anything that isn’t just complete dribble.

And I had just started to find my way into a kind of technical historical way of talking about the Heart Sutra, when my friend and student who’s here today, George Draffan, sent me a pre-publication copy of Bill’s commentary on the Heart Sutra. And I looked this over and it was the same really exquisite work that he’d done, exquisite quality of work, that he’d done on the Diamond Sutra. He’d gone into the history and the context, and very, very deep consideration of some of the thorny technical terms in the Heart Sutra and cleared up for me so many of the things that I knew something was wrong about how it had been treated before, and he just, I thought, got it all right.

And as a consequence of that is, great! I don’t have to do this [Laughter] because here’s a person, and he’s done so much better a job than I could ever have done, so I said now I can play. And that’s what freed me up to write this one. So I feel just a great debt of gratitude to Bill because he’d done this work. I didn’t have to reproduce any of it. And I could just launch into a totally different approach to a commentary on the Heart Sutra, knowing that if anybody had any questions, then they had this book to go to. So that’s where I want to start. So to meet you, today as I have, is just a great pleasure.

Bill: Well, I’m glad we got that out of the way.

Ken: Now, go ahead.

Bill: What are you going to do now?

Ken: Well, Bill and I talked about this for five minutes this morning, and my understanding here is that there’s a lot of practice and experience in this room. And we have no idea really what any of your questions are or what any of your interest is. So that’s where we’d like to start. Valerie said at the beginning that this is being recorded for the internet. There are many people who’ve said to me, when I said I was going to meet with Bill Porter, and we’re going to do this afternoon; They said, “Gee, I wish I could come”. So, we’re going to put this up on the internet. What we’d really like to do is to hear what your questions are and the things that you’re interested in us discussing and talking about.

So, we’d like to involve you right from the beginning. And the Heart Sutra is a wonderfully rich text. It’s a very short text. So, we can launch into that. And please don’t be shy about the fact that this is being recorded for the internet. Because any question that any one of you has, there are probably five other people in the room who actually have the same question and don’t have the temerity to hold up their hand. And there’s probably going to be 100 people listening to this who have the same question. So at least from my point of view, I’d like you to approach asking a question as an act of generosity on your part, and maybe you’ll get something out of it too. So that’s where I suggest we start. How does that sound to you?

Student questions

Bill: Great. Anybody have any questions?

Ken: Well, let’s just start and let’s get about five questions up here quickly. Here’s the first one. First we need the microphone and Valerie is coming right now.

Valerie: Raise your hand please when you want to speak.

Student: This was not so much a question about anything in the text as yet, but I was thinking perhaps for those who may not know much about the Heart Sutra, that one of you should read it first.

Ken: Okay. That’s one

Student: I’m wondering for whom the Heart Sutra was originally written, what was its original purpose?

Bill: Okay. Okay. Purpose of the Heart Sutra.

Student: I was wondering if you could tell me your translation, each of you, of the words “Be a lamp unto thyself”?

Ken: Okay.

Student: And while you’re at it discuss some of the paradoxes in here.

Ken: There are paradoxes in the Heart Sutra? [Laughter]

Bill: We’ll look for that. Maybe one more question?

David: I was really intrigued by the title of today’s event. So if you could talk about the relationship between Anything is Possible and the Heart Sutra, I think that would be a fascinating thing to hear.

Bill: Okay,

Ken: Well, that’s five. I think we can start there and then we’ll come around for round two. Okay. You all have a copy of the Heart Sutra don’t you? I don’t. I’ve got these two right here.

Bill: This one?

Ken: Okay. So we have a problem right at the beginning. Which one shall we read?

Bill: Well, I think visitors, honored guests, should read. Read yours.

Ken: Well, I think we should all read it together.

Reading the Heart Sutra

Bill: Okay. So it’s on the left side of that handout, the left side of the page, which is: “I bow to Lady Perfection of Wisdom”.

Ken:

I bow to Lady Perfection of Wisdom.
Thus have I heard. At one time, Lord Buddha was staying at Vulture Peak mountain, Rajagriha, with a great gathering of the monastic sangha and the bodhisattva sangha.
At that time, Lord Buddha entered an absorption, called Profound Radiance, in which all elements of experience are present.
At the same time noble Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva mahasattva, was looking right at the experience of the profound perfection of wisdom and he saw all of the five groups to be empty of nature.
Then through the power of the Buddha, venerable Shariputra asked noble Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva mahasattva, “How does a son or daughter of the noble family who wishes to practice the Profound Perfection of Wisdom train?”
Addressed in this way, noble Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva mahasattva, said to the venerable Shariputra, “Oh Shariputra, a son or daughter of the noble family who wishes to practice the profound perfection of wisdom looks in this way: See the five groups to be truly empty of nature.
Form is emptiness; emptiness is form. Emptiness is not other than form; form is not other than emptiness. In the same way, feeling, concept, mental formation, and consciousness are emptiness.
Therefore, Shariputra, all experience is emptiness. It is not defined. It is not born or destroyed, impure or free from impurity, not incomplete or complete.
Therefore, Shariputra, in emptiness there is no form, no feeling, no concept, no mental formation, no consciousness; no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind, no appearance, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no mind object; no eye element up to no mind element and no mind consciousness element; no ignorance, no end of ignorance, up to no old age and death, no end of old age and death; no suffering, no origin, no cessation, no path; no pristine awareness, no attainment, and no non-attainment.
Therefore, Shariputra, because for bodhisattvas, there is no attainment, they rest trusting the perfection of wisdom. With nothing clouding their minds, they have no fear.
They leave delusion behind and come to the end of nirvana. All the buddhas of the three times, by trusting this perfection of wisdom, fully awaken in unsurpassable, true, complete awakening.
Therefore, the mantra of the perfection of wisdom, the mantra of great awareness, the unsurpassed mantra, the mantra equal to the unequalled, the mantra that completely calms all suffering is not a ruse: know it to be true.
Thus, the mantra of the perfection of wisdom is said in this way:

Om gate gate pāragate pārasamgate bodhi svāhā!

Thus, Shariputra, do all bodhisattva mahasattvas train in the profound perfection of wisdom.”
Then Lord Buddha arose from that absorption and praised the noble Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva mahasattva, saying: “Well done, well done, o son of noble family; thus it is, thus it is. One practices the profound perfection of wisdom, just as you have taught. Those Who Have Gone This Way also rejoice.”
Then venerable Shariputra and noble Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva mahasattva, that whole assembly and the world with its gods, humans, titans, and sky spirits, rejoiced and praised the words of Lord Buddha.

An Arrow to the Heart: A Commentary on the Heart Sutra, Ken McLeod, p. 2

The purpose of the Heart Sutra

Bill: Well that’s one. The next question I believe was the purpose of the Heart Sutra. And you’ll notice that the Heart Sutra introduces a series of topics on which people were used to meditating, like the five groups, and the eyes and ears, and all those things, and old age and death, and the path, and truth, and things like that. Well, those were a series of meditations. When the Buddha taught, he just taught whatever was on his mind, whatever he thought would be conducive to his audience in their quest for liberation. After he died, his disciples felt at a loss and some of them started compiling lists of topics that he had talked on. And after a while one of these sects in particular, began to see these sets of topics as real in themselves. The Buddha had taught that there is no self.

One sect that became the most prominent sect in all of northern India and central Asia. The Sarvastivadins believed that we may not have a self, but these things we meditate upon have real existence. They have some substrate or essence, which in itself is real. And the Heart Sutra was composed as a critique of that attitude that treats what you meditate on is real. And it uses the same list that the Sarvastivadins used themselves, beginning with the five groups, and then proceeding to the sensory organs, and sense domains, and the elements of perception, and the 12-fold link chain of dependent origination, and the four noble truths. And so that’s why it was composed, but it was composed by a lineage of teachers who had a different take on Buddhism than those who saw Buddhism as a quest for knowledge. This school is called the prajñā school, prajñāpāramita. Prajñā means wisdom.

And so there were these two major threads you might say of early Buddhism, those who saw Buddhism as a quest for knowledge, and thus a nirvana, the attainment of nirvana, and those who saw Buddhism as a quest for enlightenment and liberation from knowledge. And so Prajñā, which is the term that sort of designates this lineage, pra means before and jna means knowledge. So prajñā means what’s in your mind before you know. It’s pre-knowledge as opposed to knowledge. And so that’s the purpose of the Heart Sutra. The Heart Sutra is aimed at showing you that your mind is something before you know anything. And that’s the mind of the Buddha, that’s the original mind of the Buddha. And so the Heart Sutra is addressed to that.

Ken: Can I add to that? The school that Bill’s referring to, the Sarvastivadins, can be translated into English as: the everything exists school. And in point of fact, this debate about the status of what we experience is still engaged to this day in Buddhism. A friend and colleague of mine, Joseph Goldstein, got into fairly hot water, and he wasn’t the only one, with some of the Theravadin people because he was taking this point of view: One dharma, and nothing has any real existence. And there are other Theravadin teachers who’ve moved in that direction. And that’s still a debate about what is the ontological status of what we experience. Now, as Bill was saying the prajñā schools never really concerned themselves with whether things actually existed. They’re much more concerned with how we experience things.

Paradoxes in the Heart Sutra

Ken: And I’m going to jump ahead to one of the questions just a little bit by saying there are paradoxes in the Heart Sutra. We are probably thinking of these lines form is emptiness; emptiness is form, and so forth. In every philosophical tradition, whether Eastern or Western, we very quickly realize that there’s a discrepancy between how we experience things, and how they are. For instance, if we take a scientific point of view, we experience something like this as being solid, but when we examine it, it is 99.99% empty space. The density of an atom is approximately equivalent to a golf ball being at the center of a football field with a few flies flying around in the seats. You know, most of it’s empty space. And if you go into the nucleus of the atom, it gets similarly tenuous.

And yet we experience this as being very solid. So an interesting thing happened in Eastern and Western thought. For the most part in Western thought, when this discrepancy showed up, all the scholastic philosophers and all of these people said: okay, there’s something wrong with our reasoning because we keep coming to this conclusion that how we experience things, and how they seem to be, is different. So there must be something wrong with our reasoning. And so you had endlessly repeated analyses, and more elaborate analysis. In the East, they took a very different approach. They said, there’s nothing wrong with our reasoning. There’s something wrong with the way we experience things. This is how things actually are. They are form and emptiness. And what we need to do is come to know that this is the way of things. And that’s exactly the kind of knowledge that Bill was referring to. This is the knowledge that is the way of knowing what is present, before any concept enters the mind. You want to take it from there?

Bill: No. You’re going good. just, keep going

Ken: No, I just finished.

Bill: I want to know what comes next.

Ken: I don’t know. [Laughter] So in terms of the purpose, one of the things that I found so illuminating about Bill’s commentary was just what he laid out, that this actually is the recognition, or the view, that this particular school, the everything exists school of Buddhism, had come to a dead end. They couldn’t go any further and they recognized that they had to let go, if they were actually to move into some kind of awakening. I’m not sure the Heart Sutra always has been used for that, but I think it’s a really insightful way of understanding how it came into existence.

Bill: So it does confront what appears to be essentially a paradox. It’s what you were asking about, and which in fact, it’s not a paradox if you look at the language and see how the language is being used by the Heart Sutra. This of course revolves around the concept of emptiness.

Ken: Oh, do tell. [Laughter]

The concept of emptiness

Bill: Touché. When they started using emptiness in India, they used obviously the Sanskrit word shunyata; and when they started translating that into Chinese, they used the word kung; and when we’ve translated it in English, we use the word emptiness; and people still wonder if that wasn’t a bad translation from the Chinese; and the Chinese wonder if that wasn’t a bad translation from the Sanskrit; and the Indians wonder if that wasn’t a bad translation from whatever the Buddha had to say. And so the people who have used this concept of emptiness have had to defend its use in each culture, because it begs a question: You mean nothingness? And the answer is no. When Buddhists use the concept of emptiness, it is exactly the opposite of nothingness. And the way they use it, again it’s as a critique of those who consider their experiences to be made of real entities, that there’s some real entity going on in my experience; some object out there; I’m here, it’s there.

And so, when we think of something as an object, whether it’s outside of us or even whether it is us, then we give it the quality of what in Sanskrit is called a svabhāva: self existence. We say it exists by itself. This book exists by itself, and I can only say that because I can draw a line around it in my mind, or maybe a line on a piece of paper or emotionally, I can draw a little line around it. I can say that has self existence. Well, the Buddhist point of view is that the moment you have done that, you have negated the rest of the universe. By drawing a line around something and saying it exists by itself, then the rest of the universe no longer exists. You’ve negated something and so the creation of any self-existence requires … is essentially a negation. And the concept of emptiness is a negation of that negation. Emptiness means …

Ken: I’m getting lost here, Bill. [Laughter]

Bill: You are? Well, again, we’ll go back to the line. The line. The line around the book.

Ken: Okay.

Bill: There’s the line around the book, which is the creation of self-existence. Emptiness is the removal of that line. Take away the line. That’s all, that’s all it is. Now the book’s still there, nothing has changed. Its just there’s no lines anymore and that’s the concept of emptiness. That’s why emptiness does not mean nothingness. It means no lines. No self-existence.

Independent origination

Ken: That’s really helpful. I’m going to link this up with another very important concept, which is a Buddhist concept, and that’s the concept of interdependent origination. One of the great Indian teachers, a chap called Nagarjuna, some of you may have heard of him, said that interdependent origination, which is this fancy Sanskrit term, if I can pronounce it correctly: pratītyasamutpāda, equals shunyata. So interdependent origination equals emptiness. Now let’s translate this into English. Everything exists only in relationship to something else. And that’s the principle of interdependent origination. I exist as a son only because there is someone else who is my father; and big only exists in relationship to small, etc. And when Bill was saying, when you draw a line around something and say it exists independently, it’s saying I can be a son, or something, without any relationship to anything else.

That’s how I understood you to mean. That’s the line that’s being drawn around, and when you draw that line you negate everything else in the universe because of the interrelationships. So what shunyata or emptiness, and I love what you say because it’s exactly true: every culture, every translator has had to defend this translation of emptiness. It annoys people so much, it’s one of the great values, it’s the magic of the word. You’re removing that line and you’re saying everything exists in relationship to everything else and this links up actually to the next two questions, in my mind.

Bill: I forgot those.

Be a lamp unto yourself

Ken: Well, if I recall one is “Be a lamp unto yourself”, which I think is the Buddha’s last words, and then the other one was about the paradoxes. So Buddha’s last words: there are various translations of this, but the one that I’m most familiar with is: “I have shown you a way. Work out your own salvation or work out your own freedom”.

And to my mind, this is an extraordinary statement from a person who had been a teacher for 40 years, who is obviously highly regarded, and probably by that time worshipped by his disciples. And he says “I’ve shown you a way”, he doesn’t claim to be any kind of savior, any kind of representative of the divine, he simply says, “I’ve shown you a way” and this is the central way that we regard Buddha in Buddhism, is as a teacher. Then he says, “work out your own freedom.” That’s where the Heart Sutra and many, many other teachings come in, in my mind, this is a description, a presentation of emptiness.

Then we’ll go a little bit more into that because it links up to the last question, which was about Anything’s Possible. What the Heart Sutra is talking about is not something that you can learn from anyone else. It is something that each of us can come to experience and know through our own experience. But for that, we’re going to have to make our own efforts. So it’s pointing us in a direction it’s showing us a way, but each of us individually is going to have to travel that; we can’t buy it in a store. We can’t get it from somebody. It is something that we have to do and come to know through our own experience. And fortunately, or unfortunately as the case may be, there isn’t any other way. And I think, again, this is one of the aspects of the genius of Buddhism. You want to tackle the paradoxes?

Bill: What?

Ken: Or do you want to follow up on something?

Bill: I was just going to add to that one expression. “Be a lamp unto yourself.” I’ve never run into it in the scriptures I’ve read.

Ken: It’s from The Light of Asia, by that poet, I can’t remember his name … [Sir Edwin Arnold]

Bill: I only read what I’m going to translate and my knowledge of Buddhism is actually very limited because I only know about the texts I translate and books that I might have to use in reference to help translate those. I never actually read that sutra or that text, but there’s a similar one because there are many accounts of the Buddha’s last days. In another one at the very end of his life, he says something very similar, he says, “I’ve taught for over 40 years and I’ve never spoken a word of truth.”

Ken: I haven’t heard this one. [Laughter] Please.

Bill: Anyway, it’s the same idea: That I haven’t given you anything, I’ve only, maybe, you might say, awakened you to the fact that you have to find something on your own. So it’s the same idea. In other sutras when the Buddha is entering nirvana, he says something else. He says, “I have no further teaching to you except the code of conduct, rely on how I’ve taught you to pass your days”. And so that’s another answer to the same question, “Be a lamp unto yourself.” “I didn’t speak a word of truth” and “follow the code.” And the reason he does that is because in order to conduct yourself on a spiritual path, you need to have your life in order.

If your life is a mess, your spiritual quest will be a mess. All the Buddha could really say is, “I’ve shown you how to get through your day in a decent manner, and just do that, and the rest you’ll figure it out yourself.” And so those are three different takes you might say, on the same dying of the Buddha. The Buddha leaving us on our own; a lamp unto ourselves, no word of truth, and then a way to live by. So I just wanted to add that.

Ken: I’d like to go a little further with that, because I think it’s a really important thing. What Bill’s referring to of course is, is the vinaya, the monastic code, but there’s also a code for lay people. When Buddha was asked as he was numerous times in his life, what do you teach? He would usually reply: “I teach suffering and the end of suffering.” And the code or the way of living was designed primarily as a way of living in such a way that you didn’t generate suffering for yourself or for others. And that’s the basis for it. Now we have this term suffering and it’s used all the time in Buddhism. A lot of people in our culture can’t connect to it like “I don’t suffer that much,” but so I’d like to ask you this question: how many of you have experienced any struggle in your life? [Laughter] So I’ve been toying with this as translating dukkha as struggle.

Bill: Struggle. Because you have struggle?

Ken: Yeah, because it’s a broader term and people can really relate to that one, you know.

Bill: Or stress?

Ken: Yeah but for some reason I like struggle, maybe that has to do with … I’m not going to explore the psychological reasons for that. And the vinaya, or this monastic code, it starts off with very, very basic things: Don’t kill other human beings; don’t lie about your spiritual attainments; don’t steal; anything of value. In many respects, what you find in Buddhism is profound common sense. And this business about suffering and ending suffering is very, very important because it’s not actually about becoming superhuman or developing superhuman powers or even any special powers. It’s about finding a way to live in which you aren’t struggling and you don’t cause others to struggle. It’s very grounded in that way and it’s very immediate. Now you may ask what on earth do such abstruse concepts as emptiness have to do with that? And I think we could talk a bit about that. I’m going to throw that one at you Bill.

Bill: Okay.

What does emptiness have to do with suffering?

Ken: What does emptiness have to do with ending suffering?

Bill: Well, maybe we could talk about the paradoxes and go from there. I was just thinking that maybe I would use this translation of mind which is different from the Tibetan. There’s one essential little series about emptiness: form is emptiness, emptiness is form; remember that one that we went through? Well in Tibetan there’s only two statements, but in all of the Sanskrit texts, there are three statements they made. And the reason is because the Heart Sutra was addressed to the Sarvastivadins, who were logicians. They were very much into Buddhist logic. Again, they were intent on acquiring knowledge. And so, what they were interested in doing is finding out what are the real entities of the mind. The first series of categories they always meditated upon were the underlying entities of the mind, the five skandhas, the five groups.

And the first of those is form. That’s why we have: form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Then there was a series of other ones: sensation, perception, memory, and consciousness are my translations, but just think of it as: form means the external world, and the other four mean the internal world. Because what we do is we begin with this: all we know for sure is we have experience. We have this moment when we, right now, when we think there’s something going on. We don’t know what’s going on, or who’s going on, but something’s going on. And so we begin with this experience and then we start addressing it in terms of, well, is there an external aspect to it? Is there an internal aspect to it?

And so the Sarvastivadins meditated on this; on form, on the external aspect to our experience and then the internal side of it. So whenever they would start their meditations, they would begin with form. So the Heart Sutra just deals with form and doesn’t really talk much about the other ones, because it says if we can apply emptiness to form, then the same is true of the other ones. And so it says, if I can just go over this thing, I can never remember it cause I never memorize my translations because I’m always changing them. [Laughter]

Ken: So I’m so glad to hear that

Bill: A translation is just a work in progress until the publisher says, time’s up. [Laughter]

Ken: It gets a little sticky when you’re translating liturgy because you get these people who use it, and then you change the translation and they come back to and say you changed our prayers.

Bill: I hate that too. [Laughter] Yeah, it’s a dicey business we’re in. Just keep changing your address [Laughter]

Form is emptiness: emptiness is form

Bill: So, anyway, this is what I wanted to do. So we have form is emptiness and emptiness is form. If you study finite mathematics or set theory, the statement: form is emptiness, emptiness is form, is just if this is form here, and that’s emptiness right here, all we’re saying is that these two sets intersect. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form, but they are the same at some point. They could have relationships outside of that intersection. And then in the next statement, emptiness is not separate from form, form is not separate from emptiness, now we’re just saying that they are identical, right? They’re not, they don’t exist outside of each other. So we have form and, and emptiness right there, but then for a logician there’s another possibility. And that’s why there’s a third statement saying: whatever is form is emptiness, and whatever is emptiness is form, because we could have a different kind of F, F subprime here and E maybe three prime over here, whatever.

We could have several kinds of emptiness, several kinds of form. We could redefine form in such a way it wasn’t identical, but this sutra is saying whatever is form is emptiness. Whatever is emptiness is form. And so that’s why there are these three statements or two, if two’s enough for you, then two’s okay. But because these Sarvastivadins were such sticklers, the person who wrote the Sanskrit version of the Heart Sutra with these three relationship things was trying to to show that: form is emptiness, and emptiness is form; and they are identical in all times and all places. And the impact of this for our spiritual practice is because when we confront something it’s empty, and when I say it’s empty, again I’m not saying it’s not nothing, it’s everything. It’s one with the universe. So when we’re struggling in our lives, what we’re struggling for is actually a struggle we have with all beings, not just with other human beings, but with the insects in the ground, and the birds in the sky, and the molecules, and the rocks. There’s always the question, does a rock have a Buddha nature or not, but why not?

Ken: Can’t move [Laughter]

Bill: So emptiness is knowing that whatever we can think of, if we want to divide our mind, and think of our mind as divisible, this Heart Sutra is saying, if you want to do that and play that game, that is okay as long as you realize it’s empty of self-existence. These entities that your ego, your id, your super-ego, whatever, a psychological framework you may want to address your experience with, that framework itself is just an artificial construct. And even if we don’t think of it in those rarefied terms, if we’re just walking through our day and we meet another human being, and we’re struggling somehow with them and in conflict with them, if we think of these lines in the Heart Sutra, we’ll realize that we’re not different. That is we’re not ultimately separate human beings where we’re all one, or we’re not, as Buddhists would say, because Buddhists hate the word one. Buddhists prefer the phrase “We’re not two.” [Laughter]

Ken: That’s absolutely true.

Bill: I think that’s about all I have to say about the paradox

Ken: Monism is an official no-no in Buddhism.

Bill: Yeah.

Ken: Well just to go into this from a somewhat different point of view, I’m looking for a suitable object. Oh, this’ll be fine. Now probably not many of you have done this with me and, as George says, the nice thing about church is that they all have a back door, which I may have to use very shortly. How many of you can see this? Okay. I’m just going to ask you a series of questions. Okay. So I’m holding up a cell phone and I have the business end pointed away from you. The object here is this, just an object. So everybody can see this right? Now here’s the very simple question that I want to ask you. Let me preface it a bit. Do any of you have any doubt about where you are? That is you’re sitting in a seat, in this church, here in Port Townsend. Is there anybody who has any doubt about that? Okay, good. We have established that. Does anybody have any doubt about where the cell phone is? You can see it, I’m holding it up in my hand? Okay. Does anybody here have any doubt about whether they are seeing the cell phone or not?

Okay. That’s clear. So all those three things: you know where you are, you know, where the cell phone is and you know that you are seeing it. Do we have agreement on that? And this is very important. Okay. The next question that I have, where is the experience of seeing? You know where you are …

Bill: The door’s open …

Ken: Yeah. I see that. [Laughter] Thank you. You know, where you are, you know, where the cell phone is, you know that you’re seeing it and you have this experience of seeing it. Where is that experience?

Student: [unclear] … things that have locations, number one doesn’t have a location.

Ken: Well, yes. I’m not sure that number one is an experience, but we live in the material world, so, you know, we regard these things. So can anybody tell me where the experience of seeing is? Yeah. I know this is what we get and I love it. Okay. She wants that recorded for posterity.

Student: This question does not bother or concern me at all because not everything in this world has a location, numbers don’t have locations, abstract ideas do not have locations.

Bill: But you said it’s in the world.

Student: Sorry?

Bill: You said things in the world. All the things in the world don’t have locations, but that’s a contradiction.

Student: Okay. I guess I misspoke. What I meant is sort of in our mental world or our language, maybe of our language would have been a better expression.

Ken: Okay. So I’m going to ask you just to bear with me patiently for a few moments. So you have this experience of seeing, but nobody can tell me where it is. Correct? We have a candidate here?

Student: The experience is a mind state. If you were a scientist, you would then say that it is a process that is happening within your mind. You might say, within your brain. And so that is what we call this experience. Obviously it exists at a different level in the movement of atoms in our realm of thought, but it’s possible, and probably very likely, that at some level it has a correspondence in the physical realm of the interactions of the energy of the universe.

Ken: Okay. Yes. That’s all true. But it doesn’t tell me where the experience is.

Student: On that level, but it’s not a good question, maybe. [Laughter]

Ken: That door is still open isn’t it?

Bill: Yeah.

Ken: Okay.

Bill: Now it’s closed.

Ken: There’s a comment back, just a second, just a second …

Bill: For posterity.

Student: To me experience is where I am now and where I have been, I don’t know where I’m going.

Ken: So let’s just keep it simple. You see the cell phone, but when you look at the experience, you can’t locate it anywhere. Now you may take the position as one gentleman is saying, well experiences don’t have location, that’s fine. Yes, you have a question?

Student: Well, it seems to me that this is a space-time continuum. So my experience is in the now.

Ken: Well you see if you’re going to take the point of view that it’s a space-time continuum, then you’re right where Bill was saying, this is something that takes place in the world. So if the experience does take place in space-time, then it has to have a location.

Student: I’m not experiencing seeing. I’m not experiencing seeing the cell phone right now. Now, I am.

Ken: So where is the physical location of the seeing?

Student: It’s a temporal experience. Not a physical one.

Ken: Then how does it exist in space-time?

Student: Because space-time appears to have a temporal component.

Ken: But what I’m interested in is the space component.

Student: Well maybe that’s not what experience is. [Laughter]

Ken: Okay. So we’re getting a lot of different views here. Yes?

Student: I wonder if we can move your question, revisit it, because I wonder if you really ever do see the cell phone? When you see what I’m seeing is light bouncing off that cell phone. Light is not the cell phone and not only do I not see the light, but I see the electrical signals that have gone from the eye and traveled through the nervous system, into the brain. I don’t even see those. What I see are neurons firing somehow.

Ken: Well, actually we don’t see the neurons, but out of all of this, you construct the notion of cell phone.

Student: Cell phone is a representation of who knows what?

Ken: Exactly, no argument there, but where it exists … ?

Student: Moot point.

Ken: Okay. Just bear with me for a moment here. If I take the cell phone away, the experience disappears, right? Do you know where it goes? [laughter] Not the cell phone, the experience, it just disappears. It seems to go. It just goes, it disappears. And yet, if I raised a cell phone up again, then you see the cell phone again. So this experience of seeing, we can’t say where it comes from, we can’t say where it goes. And we can’t say where it is. What do you normally say about something, but you can’t say where it is, you can’t say where it comes from and you can’t say where it goes?

What do you normally say about that? It doesn’t exist. Okay.This is what emptiness is pointing to. Because you have this very vivid experience, but when you look at the actual experience, you can’t say a thing about it. It’s not saying that it doesn’t exist. This is what Bill was pointing to. It’s saying that you can’t say anything about it. It is just experience and this quality of not being a thing, not being something solid, actually touches everything. The totality of our experience, which is why the Heart Sutra is in many ways so important. Do you want to take it from there?

Bill: No, I think we need new questions.

Ken: Well, I think we have one more question. That’s the Anything Is Possible.

Bill: Right, right.

Ken: Do you want to say, a word or do you want me to?

Bill: Why don’t you? Cause …

Ken: I’m the guilty party.

Bill: You are the guilty party.

A sufi story

Ken: Okay. There’s an old Sufi story—and we can use it here—about the student who comes and asks a teacher a question. He asks a very erudite complicated question. And by answer—I won’t do this here—the teacher just fills his glass. And when the glass is full, he just keeps pouring water. And of course the water is splashing over and making a mess. And the student is watching this and says, “Why are you doing that?” He says, “Because as long as the glass is full, I can’t pour anything more into it.” So normally, we regard space as a negative, but actually emptiness, which is a form of space, is what makes things possible.

We move our joints. We can only move our joints because there’s a little bit of empty space in there. If our lungs were full, we couldn’t breathe. It’s only because the lungs are empty that we can breathe, the same with the stomach. We can put food in there only because the stomachs are empty most of the time. And when the stomachs are full, we can’t eat anymore. So from this point of view, space is what makes things possible. And emptiness points to the space that is present in every moment of experience.

Unfortunately, most of the time we don’t notice or pay attention to that space. How many of you here practice some form of meditation? Okay. How many of you have a little trouble with wandering thoughts? What happens to the stillness of your mind when a thought arises? And this goes directly to what Bill was talking about when he was explaining the term prajñā. What happens to the stillness of your mind when a thought arises? Yes?

Student: Your thought takes up the empty space.

Ken: That’s what we think happens, I agree. I prefer to give a slightly different interpretation. Our attention is caught by the thought, and we cease to be aware of the space and the stillness. And so one of the things you might think about in your meditation is when thoughts arise, don’t worry about it. Just continue to pay attention to the stillness and openness of your mind that is there, whether thought is there or not. And that’s the sense, that’s how we came up with the term Anything’s Possible because the Heart Sutra is pointing to this emptiness that is present in all experience. And if we can stay attuned to that openness in our experience, then in any moment we can do whatever is appropriate, we aren’t limited by concepts or restrictions or conditioning. Okay? And I agree, I think we’re ready for a new round of questions.

Student questions

Valerie: More questions …

Ken: We’ve not said anything controversial here. So start off with the same gentlemen, round two.

Student: Or finish with me. Another interpretation of emptiness is, or form is emptiness, is that there is nothing that can be held onto that can be attached to. And I think that goes along with what you were saying as well.

Ken: Okay.

Student: That holding up the cell phone, or doing anything, we have an experience of it now, but that was the past already.

Ken: Right.

Student: So it wasn’t so much a question just in addition to.

Ken: All right. So any of the questions about anything we’ve touched on or anything you’d like for us to touch on?

Student: Where do you put indelible memory?

Ken: Indelible memory?

Student: We all have an indelible memory. Some things happen to us that we remember forever. Sometimes it’s a tiny moment. Sometimes it’s something huge. Sometimes it’s a catastrophe. Sometimes it’s a bit diced, you know, but we all have transitory memory and then we have indelible memory.

Ken: Okay.

Student: And how does indelible memory fit in or how do you explain it?

Ken: Okay. There’s a question up here. Hold up your hand, so Valerie can see it. Thank you.

Student: Okay. In my own practice, I get hung up a lot on the idea that everything that I see and experience is a representation, and that it is my unique human mind, which is creating all these images, and if my mind were different, or if my neural system was different, my representations of the world would be quite different. The way you held up that cell phone and you asked, do you see the cell phone? Well, for me, I realized I really can’t see that cell phone. What I am seeing is light bouncing off that cell phone, and light is not the cell phone. So I get this feeling that there is a reality behind the representations. And I’m wondering how, what role that plays in a practice, do you look at that as a barrier, as a stumbling block or is that a direction to honor, acknowledge, and try to work with?

Ken: Okay. Gentleman, back there.

Student: Ken, you were talking about thoughts getting in the way of the emptiness or being aware of the emptiness. And you made it sound so simple [Ken laughs], that we could just kind of look at the thought and still maintain our sense of the emptiness. And I would like you to talk about that some more, because to me it seems that, from my experience, like the lady in the back, that the thought just dominates and grabs the awareness, and therefore the emptiness goes away. And so I’d like you to show me, or us, how we could get beyond that.

Ken: Oh, yes. That’s very straightforward.

Bill: I have something here we can give him.

Ken: Two more, two more, one up here.

Student: Is it possible to have no thoughts?

Ken: Well, my reaction to your question is immediately yes. Because I had no thoughts when you asked it.

Student: I’m not exactly sure how to ask this, but I ask it with respect. I often find myself resistant to a lot of intellectual conversation about practice, and wonder what part of that is me? Wondering where is the practice element in this conversation that we’re having right now? As opposed to the intellectual mind-piece that we could go round and round in, or I could anyway, for a long time.

Ken: Can you remember all of these?

Memories and emptiness

Bill: No, but I’m sure someone will remind us. Well, I think we started with the idea of memories, of transitory and indelible memories. And of course the Buddhist approach to our lives is one built upon memories. We call it karma. We do something in the past, and it has results in the present. Our minds are at any one point to the extent that we’d like to think of them as divisible and made up of pieces of our past moments, our past memories, whether it’s a minute ago, an hour ago, or when we were two years old, or last life or five lives ago. And there are certain memories that tend to linger. Sometimes we need therapy to overcome certain memories that are traumatic.

But it’s very seldom that we think of memories as being the same over time when actually they aren’t. I mean, they do vary as we get older, we memorize, remember different elements, and we have to create what we think is a memory, which is actually something we’re creating right now based upon things that happened in the past. But that memory is all that we have at any one moment. We are simply made up of our memories at any one moment. What we do right now in this moment will have repercussions in the future and that’s why it’s important to address what we do right now with this. We can call it a concept of emptiness, but with the experience of awareness. That’s why we’re trying to stress the experience of awareness so, that we don’t intellectualize this teaching. So that when we are meditating and we’re worried about this stupid thought that just came up, we can realize that that thought is emptiness.

And there’s no reason why we have to think of, “Oh I have to maintain this perfect still pond of my mind and I really hate this thought of my credit card payments being due.” Well, that credit card payment thought is no more or less empty then the still pond thought. And so what we’re trying to stress and what the Heart Sutra is trying to stress is this attitude of emptiness. And to remind yourself … if form is emptiness and emptiness is form, then every thought you have is emptiness. And that thought is no more or less than the emptiness that fills all minds. And therefore when you have a memory that seems indelible and it keeps coming up and coming up, that’s who you are, that’s what makes you who you are in this particular lifetime. And you can never walk away from being an individual, because we all have different histories. And so that’s what you’ve got to deal with, that’s your material, that’s what you come to practice with.

Ken: Well, it’s interesting because in the second round of questions, they’re all very closely related, it seems to me. So I’m going to speak a little bit to all of them. Let’s start with the question of memory or indelible memory. I don’t think this is always the case but frequently, what seems to be an indelible memory is actually something that we don’t have the capacity to experience completely. So it keeps coming back calling for our attention and we just can’t get it out of our mind. And it can come back very vividly. This is certainly the case with a lot of post-traumatic stress syndrome, but it also arises elsewhere. So one way to look at a Buddhist practice is to regard it as a way of building a capacity in attention, uncovering awareness to the point that you can actually experience whatever arises.

Now, I want to just take a very simple experiential example of this, how many of you can recall something that irritated you over the last 24 hours or a week? [laughter] So I’d like you to bring that very, very clearly to mind, and let yourself feel the irritation. Maybe it was a gas station attendant, maybe you got short-changed somewhere, maybe somebody let the door close in your face. It doesn’t have to be a big thing, maybe somebody just didn’t answer the question that you asked, but something. So just recall, and recall the irritation, recall the anger, and allow yourself to feel the anger. It may not be a big anger, it could be a little anger and that’s fine. Then I want you to say to yourself, while you feel the anger: “I’m angry and I’m glad.” What happens, anybody? Valerie, are you ready there? This woman up here.

Student: I feel a sense of space and less contraction.

Ken: Yeah. And what happened to the anger?

Student: I laughed.

Ken: You laughed. How many of us had that same experience? You laughed. Okay. This is what happens. Now, we have this and if you recall that incident now, how do you feel about it? Can we go back to you? If you now recall that incident, how do you feel about it?

Student: The knots untied. It’s simply gone.

Ken: Yeah, exactly. So, that’s the point here. This is a little demonstration of transforming anger into pristine awareness. You didn’t know that at the time, I didn’t set it up that way because you would have been intimidated, but that’s exactly what has happened there. Because we have this anger, this incident that happened, and we haven’t experienced it completely most of the time, because we’re heavily conditioned about feeling anger, feeling anger is a bad thing.

You know, it’s a social no-no, we’re not allowed to feel anger. So when you feel the anger, we sort of suppress it. We don’t feel it. And this irritation keeps coming back. So when I said to you, say to yourself, “I’m angry and I’m glad” It was like permission to just open to that anger, and then you open to it. And now you actually experience it, and you experienced the situation, and it is no big deal. And the anger goes poof, and you laugh. And that’s an example of what happens when we experience something completely. If you were an emotion, what is your raison d’être? What is your reason for being, if you’re an emotion? What does an emotion want above all else? This is a nasty trick question.

Student: To move on.

Ken: To move on, more of it. What else? What was that over here … to be felt? That’s what you want. If you’re an emotion, you want to be felt, because once you’re felt, what happens to you? You’re done. Well, they lurk until they really felt, okay? … Please hold on a second.

Student: Biologically emotions generally have survival value of one or the other type. Anger would be called up in for instance, under threat and would be an indication that you might need to fight, will be associated with certain hormones, there might be other anger emotions, such as fear, which perhaps would be indication that it might be good to run away. These emotions are actually calling on the whole for action. There might be some that would be calling for withdrawal of some type. They’re actually asking for action. They’re not asking for you just simply to feel them. This is sort of a more modern thing.

Ken: Well, we’re talking about two different emotions coming up in two different contexts there, and certainly in terms of survival and things like that, it’s a way of mobilizing the system, no argument. But many times, I think you’ll agree, that the system is mobilized when it doesn’t actually need to be mobilized.

So we have these very strong emotions come up when there’s actually no call for them at all. And that’s what we call reaction to experience. I know if there’s a lion chasing us, then we have a reason to feel fear and start moving very, very quickly, but when we see a piece of rope and mistake it for a snake, then it’s a whole different question. So if you’ll bear with me just a moment, so when we experience things completely that way, then something lets go, just as you experienced. So if you approach things this way: Can I experience this? Can I experience this completely? Then you find that things don’t stick in us. There was a gentleman back here who asked about these thoughts, how our attention collapses down.

And that’s exactly right. When a thought comes up which has some kind of emotional charge, the tendency is for our attention to collapse down to that thought. And we cease to be aware of everything else. In a certain sense this is the experiential version of exactly what Bill was describing at the beginning. That when we regard something as existing independently, then we negate the rest of the universe.

Experientially what that means is when all our attention is absorbed by one thing, we cease to be aware of everything else. And thus, how we act now is probably going to be inappropriate because there’s so many other factors that we aren’t taking into consideration, and this is where we end up in struggle and creating suffering for others. So another way of looking at Buddhism is as a way of developing the ability to be open in our experience all the time, so that we aren’t doing this collapsing down thing. And that is something you can train yourself to do. We do train ourselves, one of the ways is when you’re resting in the breath, open to the physical sensations of breathing. And from there open to the rest of the physical sensations arising in your body. I think this is very important. And then when you can open to all of that, then you can open to all of the sensory sensations that are arising.

And when you can stay in all of the sensory sensations that are arising, then you can start opening to all of the emotional and cognitive sensations, which are called thoughts. And you just keep opening and opening and opening. And this is a form of training. And when you can do this, then you can actually experience things.

Now I’ve come to appreciate the importance of this approach because, as this woman was saying back there, “Where’s the practice element in here?” When I was in the three-year retreat … training, I worked very hard, and the Tibetan tradition is not a body tradition, it’s a very intellectual scholastic tradition. It’s also a very devotional tradition, and you really push, push, push. And I was pushing and I was focusing on devotion and I was focusing on understanding, but what I wasn’t focusing on was my body. In fact, my body, as far as I was concerned, was just a vehicle. It was a car, and we reached a point my body and I, when my body said, you can go and get enlightened if you wish Ken, I’m not going any further.[Laughter]

This was a problem. And although it took me many, many years, I’m embarrassed to say how long, to really start relating to the body in an appropriate way, that was the beginning. When I realized you couldn’t exclude anything from experience, and this goes to … directly to what Bill was talking about a few moments ago, the way that I put it and I had come to appreciate it now, is that there isn’t any enemy. And that’s something that’s very, very difficult to accept, but that whenever you find yourself opposing somebody, something’s coming up in you that you don’t want to experience. And by not staying away from that experience in you, it’s so much more convenient to regard them as the problem. Do you want to?

Bill: No, no, no. That was great.

Ken: Okay.

Bill: I think we’ve probably come to our break. We’ll take about a 15, 20 minute break. Okay. Smoke ’em if you got ’em. If you don’t got ’em, bum ’em. And, and we’ll be back in 20 minutes.

Ken: Okay. Thank you very much.