Mahamudra: the stamp of emptiness

Ken: This is the second class in our six-part series on mahamudra.

Mahamudra is a form of meditation. It is also a system of teaching, or a tradition of a body of teaching. And the word mahamudra itself is Sanskrit. The word maha means great. The word mudra has a number of meanings. It means expression, or gesture or seal—in the sense of the king’s seal, or things that you seal things with. And the idea for the term mahamudra is that it is the great seal whose stamp was on every aspect of experience. And the stamp is, of course, the stamp of emptiness, that all experience is empty.

In teaching mahamudra, there are many different approaches, but one of the more common ones is to talk about mahamudra in terms of view, practice, and behavior, or outlook, practice, and behavior. And last week we talked about the outlook, or the view. And I suggested that the view, or the outlook, is really a response to certain fundamental questions that we ask. The kinds of things that most people don’t worry about. As one person said, “I was always too busy to worry about those questions. I never paid any attention to them.” And they are questions such as: what am I? or what is life?

One version we have in our culture is: what is the meaning of life? Which I find is a very interesting question, because you can’t translate it into Tibetan. It doesn’t come out. And so it raises the question, what are we actually asking in English? But these are questions which some of us—and I would presume all of you—entertain, at least from time to time. Otherwise you probably wouldn’t be here. What is this experience called life? I have a calligraphy by Seung Sahn Sunim, who is a Zen teacher—just in the hallway there—which is a single circle or ensō and underneath is written in English and in Chinese characters: What is this? And that’s one of the big questions. What is this?

Why are we here?

Ken: So we looked at the view from that perspective last week. And towards the end of the class I talked a bit about practice, and that’s where I’m going to pick up. But before I pick up on the practice—and look at that in a little more detail, and take it a considerable step further this evening— I want to read you a story which is, reportedly, the oldest European fairy tale known, that goes back to at least 900 AD. Fairy tales and myths, of course, one way to understand them is they are records of very, very deep, sometimes psychological, often spiritual, processes. And I’d like you to keep that in mind—or that possibility in mind—as you listen to the story:

Connla of the Fiery Hair was son of Conn of the Hundred Fights. One day as he stood by the side of his father on the height of Usna, he saw a maiden clad in strange attire coming towards him.

“Whence comest thou, maiden?” said Connla.

“I come from the Plains of the Ever Living,” she said, “there where there is neither death nor sin.” “There we keep holiday alway, nor need we help from any in our joy. And in all our pleasure we have no strife. And because we have our homes in the round green hills, men call us the Hill Folk.”

The king, and all with him, wondered much to hear a voice when they saw no one. For save Connla alone, none saw the fairy maiden.

“To whom art thou talking, my son?” said Conn the king.

Then the maiden answered, “Connla speaks to a young, fair maid whom neither death nor old age awaits. I love Connla. And now I call him away to the Plain of Pleasure, Moy Mell, where Boadag is king for aye, nor has there been complaint or sorrow in that land since he has held the kingship. Oh, come with me, Connla of the Fiery Hair, ruddy is the dawn with thy tawny skin. A fairy crown awaits thee to grace thy comely face and royal form. Come, and never shall thy comeliness fade, nor thy youth, to the last awful day of judgment.”

The king in fear at what the maiden said, which he heard though he could not see her, called aloud to his druid Coran by name. “Oh Coran of the many spells,” he said, “and of the cunning magic, I call upon thy aid. A task is upon me too great for all my skill and wit, greater than any laid upon me since I seized the kingship. A maiden unseen has met us, and by her power would take from me my dear, my comely son. If thou help not, he will be taken from thy king by woman’s wiles and witchery.”

Then Coran the Druid stood forth and chanted his spells towards the spot where the maiden’s voice had been heard. And none heard her voice again, nor could Connla see her longer. Only as she vanished before the druid’s mighty spell, she threw an apple to Connla.

For a whole month from that day, Connla would take nothing, either to eat or to drink, save only from that apple. But as he ate it, it grew again and always kept whole. And all the while there grew within him a mighty yearning and longing after the maiden he had seen.

But when the last day of the month of waiting came, Connla stood by the side of the king, his father, on the Plain of Arcomin. And again he saw the maiden come towards him, and again she spoke to him. “‘Tis is a glorious place, forsooth, that Connla holds among short-lived mortals awaiting the day of death. But now the folk of life, the everliving ones, beg and bid thee come to Moy Mell, the Plain of Pleasure, for they have learnt to know thee, seeing thee in thy home among thy dear ones.”

When Conn the king heard the maiden’s voice, he called to his men aloud and said, “Summon swift my Druid Coran for I see she has again this day the power of speech.”

Then the maiden said, “Oh, mighty Conn, fighter of a hundred fights, the druid’s power is little loved; it has little honor in the mighty land, peopled with so many of the upright. When the Law will come, it will do away with the Druid’s magic spells that come from the lips of the false black demon.”

Then Conn the king observed that since the maiden came, Connla his son spoke to none that spake to him. So Conn of the Hundred Fights said to him, “Is it to thy mind what the woman says, my son?”

“‘Tis hard upon me,” then said Connla; “I love my own folk above all things, but yet a longing seizes me for the maiden.”

When the maiden heard this, she answered and said, “The ocean is not so strong as the ways of thy longing. Come with me in my curragh, the gleaming, straight-gliding crystal canoe. Soon we can reach Boadag’s realm. I see the bright sun sink, yet far as it is, we can reach it before dark. There is, too, another land worthy of thy journey, a land joyous to all that seek it. Only wives and maidens dwell there. If thou wilt, we can seek it and live there alone together in joy.”

When the maiden ceased to speak, Connla of the Fiery Hair rushed away from them and sprang into the curragh, the gleaming, straight-gliding crystal canoe. And then they all, king and court, saw it glide away over the bright sea toward the setting sun. Away and away, till the eye could see it no longer, and Connla and the Fairy Maiden went their way on the sea and were no more seen, nor did any know where they came.

Connla and the Fairy Maiden, Celtic Fairy Tales, Joseph Jacobs.

So what’s going on for you?

Student: Besides misogyny?

Ken: [Laughs] Yes, besides misogyny. Anybody? Joe.

Joe: Did I look like I was going to speak?

Ken: Yes. You look pregnant with thought. [Laughter]

Joe: Yes. Pregnant is a good choice of words. Well, trying to put it into words, obviously he’s come to a passage in his life. And it’s something only he can know, and it takes him away from family and friends. And what does it offer?

Ken: Well, before you go any further, do you recognize any of this?

Joe: Sure.

Ken: Anybody else? Valerie, say a word.

Valerie: I think it’s also significant that he’s the son of his father, he’s a son of a thousand battles. And so, he glimpses … yes, I recognize it.

Ken: Ken: What do you recognize?

Valerie: I recognize being the daughter of a thousand battles. And wanting to live in the land of, well, I think it’s rather un-Buddhist, but peace and endless pleasure. [Laughter] Yes, I recognize that, and I like the idea of going there in a crystal boat.

Ken: Oh, if only it were so easy, that’s what we’re about building here. Anybody else? How many of you have met this maiden? How many of you want to? [Laughter] Why is that? Why are you here then? If you don’t want to meet her, why are you here? Now, they’re all those hands that didn’t go up. There should be a lot of answers right now. Diane, I’ve given up asking for volunteers, I learned that everybody actually has an answer, they just don’t put up their hand.

Diane: Why am I here in this class? Or why am I here in this world?

Ken: Why are you here in this class if you don’t want to meet this maiden?

Diane: I have to say that the whole story was a bit cryptic for me.

Ken: Okay. So ask a question.

Diane: So what does the maiden represent?

Ken: Let’s say she represents wisdom, awareness, your true nature. What then?

Diane: Well, that’s a good reason to be here. [Laughter]

Ken: That changed things a little bit?

Diane: Yes, it did.

Ken: [Pause] What changed?

Diane: Well, I understood the story a little bit better. I mean, I thought that’s where it was going, but I’m not, not very good at those, I must admit.

Ken: Okay. I have a question for you.

Diane: Okay.

Ken: Why don’t you trust your own knowing? You knew, but you didn’t trust it.

Diane: Well …

Ken: You don’t have to answer.

Diane: Okay. I know where that comes from.

Ken: Okay. How many also knew, but didn’t trust? Anybody else? So, you might take a look at that, because it’s very important to what we’re talking about here. Thank you, Diane.

Reviewing practice and the shift

Ken: The sections of Clarifying the Natural State, and Wake Up to Your Life that I asked you to read for this evening, are the traditional instructions for what is commonly called insight practice. Last week I talked at the end about placing the attention in open awareness. One of the ways was setting the physical posture which supports attention, and then precipitating a shift into awareness by asking three instructions, four, if you wish: don’t chase the past, don’t entertain the future, don’t dwell on the present, rest.

And there’s a shift. In the beginning, that shift doesn’t last very long. In many of the texts it says it lasts about one or two seconds. But you keep coming back to that, and resting in the shift. And in this, gradually one comes to be able to rest in that shift, and you experience resting in a way in which there is much less thinking—conceptualizing—going on. How many of you have tried this over the last week? How did it go?

Nava, how did it go?

Nava: At the beginning of the week, it went very well. [Laughs] After three days, I started to be very dull, and, you know, it was harder.

Ken: Okay. Did you try it again tonight? How was it tonight?

Nava: Yeah, it was very vivid.

Ken: What’s the difference?

Nava: I was very determined. [Laughter]

Ken: Okay. Anybody else try this? There are a few other hands. Hands up again who actually did this? There were more than that last time, come on, don’t be shy. Rory, what was your experience?

Rory: Well, something that you said last time, which I kept coming back to, because the chatter of my mind doesn’t stop was: “body like a mountain; breath like the wind; mind like the sky.” So I found that when my mind wanted to chatter, I just would go back there, and then I’d breathe, and I could let go again.

Is chattering mind a problem?

Ken: You raised a very important point. Is the chattering of the mind a problem? How many say it is? Yeah, quite a few people. There are only two honest people in the room. The mahamudra meditation is a very deep form of practice. And the instruction mind like the sky is a very subtle, but also very deep, instruction.

Does it make any difference to the sky whether it’s cloudy or clear? Does it make any difference to the sky whether there are helicopters and planes, birds, flying around in it? I say helicopters, because we live in Los Angeles. Does it make any difference to the sky? Okay. Does the sky seek to get rid of rain, and helicopters, and planes, and clouds? This may be helpful in your practice. Thoughts arise, but I want to suggest it’s not the thoughts that are a problem, but it’s the engagement of thinking that is the problem. That’s a subtle difference, but it’s a very important one.

Now, how many of you experienced a little bit of frustration, or a lot, in the course of your practice over the last week, or months or year? So we all experience frustration, right? [Pause] What do you do when you experience frustration, when the meditation isn’t going the way you think it should? What do you do? Aaron.

Aaron: What I try to do? According to the instructions, it would be to try to start over, fresh.

Ken: Yeah. What do you do? What do you actually do?

Aaron: I literally shake it off. Take a deep breath. Reset.

Ken: You never swear at yourself?

Aaron: I didn’t say I never swear at myself.

Ken: I’m just asking. Do you ever do that?

Aaron: Of course. I get up and storm across the room and say, “Turn down the heat!”

Ken: Fidget around just to get something to make it work, right? Yeah. That’s what we do.

Aaron: In those really a delicious times, I actually get up and entertain my desire to get off the cushion.

Unwilling or unable? Building capacity

Ken: Yep. That’s what arises, that’s right. Okay. So I want to point out something which came up in a rather strange context, which I don’t need to go into. When we ask someone to do something and they don’t do it, we feel similarly frustrated, don’t we? That’s pretty close to the same thing. Now, when we ask somebody to do something, and they don’t do it, why don’t they do it?

Student: Who knows.

Ken: But, yeah, we always think there’s a reason.

Student: They don’t like you.

Ken: Yeah. We always think that they were unwilling to do it. That’s where we go first. But there are two other possibilities which we rarely consider. They may not have the capacity to do what we asked them to do, or they may not know how to do what we asked them to do. And the third possibility is, they didn’t want to do it.

But most of the time when somebody doesn’t do something we asked them to do, we assume they didn’t want to do it, and we feel frustrated, angry. We don’t really consider the other two; that is, they may not have had the capacity, or they may not know how to do it. Because those two are very addressable. If they don’t have the capacity, we can show them how to build the capacity. If they don’t know how to do it, we can actually show them or teach them how to do it. But for some reason or other, we always go to that unwillingness part.

Well, when it comes to meditation, we need these same three qualities. If you want to answer these questions like, what am I?, what is life?, and so forth, we need these three qualities: we need to have a certain capacity; we need to know how to approach those questions; and we have to be willing to do so. What I’ve come to appreciate is that, I would say, at least 90% of the problems that people experience in meditation aren’t due to unwillingness and aren’t due to lack of know-how. It’s lack of capacity. ???

But when we’re practicing, and the meditation isn’t going the way that we want, how often do we say to ourselves, “Oh, I just can’t do this right now”? That’s not usually where we go, is it? So we get frustrated and angry and upset with ourselves. And the effect of that is it just churns the mind up. So we get into a very nice vicious cycle.

Understanding vs. knowing

Ken: Now, another distinction which I found very important, is the distinction between understanding and knowing. And I may be playing a bit with the semantics here, but here’s what I want to suggest. I imagine pretty well everybody in this room could get on the internet and probably within five to 10 minutes, 15 at the most, understand how to do an appendectomy. [Laughter] You know, a couple of medical sites, procedures, things like that. How many of you would know how to do an appendectomy? Okay? There’s a little difference, isn’t there? Because there’s certain capacities—certain skills—that take time to accumulate, to develop.

I remember back when I was in Vancouver in the early 70s, and I was publishing a couple of meditation books, and we hired this Czech guy to do the layout. This is back in the “cut and paste” days where you were literally pasting stuff, long before layout software and computers. And this person was astonishing with an Exacto knife. He never used a ruler. He just went [sound effect of cutting paper], and just cut it perfectly every time. I said, “How do you do that?”

He said, “This is how we are trained in Czechoslovakia.” They had to take a piece of paper, and draw free-hand, with a sharp pencil, lines exactly one centimeter apart, absolutely straight. And they kept practicing that until they could take up a piece of paper to the teacher, and he could look up and say, “That’s good enough.” And then they had to cut it free-hand with an Exacto knife. That was a skill. That was a capacity they developed.

This is what we need to develop in our meditation; developing this level of skill and ability. And this is what makes the difference between understanding—which is essentially an intellectual thing, and doesn’t actually change very much in us—and knowing. I’m going to talk more about what we’re seeking to know here, but I’m going through this because I want to emphasize and underline that the primary effort in our practice is building capacity, building ability. That’s why we practice every day. And the more time you put into that practice, the more attention you put into that practice, the more actual ability you’ll develop.

Practicing with daily activity

Ken: Now, I know that we live very busy, very complex lives here. I look at my average day and it’s quite astonishing the number of different things I have to put attention on. And I’m not very good at doing that just one thing at a time—phone calls, emails, etc.

So we need to do this in our meditation period, but we also need to do it in our lives. And if we’re serious about this business—and I assume most of you are—this is a practice. It’s not simply something we do when we meditate. A practice is something that we work on. And the nice thing about a practice is you’re constantly failing at it. So it’s not about succeeding. That’s why it’s a practice.

So you don’t have to worry about being successful, or winning, or any of that stuff. And the really reassuring thing about meditation practice is that you’re going to fail at it a hundred million times. We all do. So you can take that one completely off the table. Don’t worry about it at all. In our formal meditation practice, what we’re doing is cultivating attention and uncovering awareness, unmixed with activity.

In our lives, as we go about our day, the practice continues. But now we’re cultivating attention, or uncovering awareness, mixed with activity. And then you say, “How do I do that? I can’t just stop what I’m doing.” That’s true, because we all have work, we have a need to earn money, pay for our homes, and so forth. How we do it, is that we experience whatever we are doing in attention.

Life practice examples

Ken: And I’ll just give you one example, which may give you the idea. And you may find this makes a little difference in your life. Whenever you’re talking with another person, listen to the sound of your own voice as if you were listening to another person. That’s how you bring attention into the act of speaking. It’s very interesting when you do that. When I had a group down in Orange County, there was a woman in that group. The first time I gave this instruction to the group, nobody did it. So when we met two weeks later, I growled about that.

So the following week this woman came in and I said, “How’d it go?” And she just looked at me, and she said, “She never shuts up.” [Laughter] She heard herself for the first time. And she said that she was so embarrassed and so mortified. She had no idea how much she talked because she just thought out loud, and there was no attention in it.

We do the same thing when we’re walking. Thich Nhat Hanh touches on this, and he says most of the time when we’re walking, our attention is on what we’re going to do when we get there. Put the attention into walking; actually experience walking. This is how you practice attention mixed with activities. It takes an effort, but it’s something that each of us is capable of working at. And this is how you actually bring attention into your life.

One of my pet rants is the way that the many Buddhist traditions and teachings are presented in such a way that you feel you’re really only alive when you’re meditating. And the rest of the time it’s like some kind of secondary aspect of your life, which would be better if you could just get rid of completely. But for better or worse, each of you here, including me—each of us—has chosen to practice in ordinary life. Not in monastic life, and not as a hermit in the mountains. This is the form of practice that we have chosen.

And thus, it’s our responsibility to actually do that practice in our lives because if we’re only doing it for half an hour or 45 minutes, or even an hour a day, that’s going to be very helpful for a lot of things. But until one has a continued, sustained experience with attention, it’s very difficult to penetrate some of the deeper habituations of subject/object duality, and so forth. And the thing is that you may think it’s very difficult, but it’s actually not that difficult. It takes a consistent effort, and one does this in a practical way.

A person, who’s now a very good friend of mine, she lives in another city, when she first started working with me, I gave her a similar instruction that I’m giving now. And since this is an extremely capable and determined woman, what I said was, “Just pay attention whenever you open a door. Just take a breath whenever you open a door. It’s a way of bringing you back into attention.” We go through lots of doors. It’s very simple; a very practical thing. We call this mindfulness or attention alarms. Well, she took this very seriously, and she started doing it with absolutely everything, and ended up somewhat disoriented, and called me up about it. So I sent her a CD in the mail called just The Doors. [Laughter]

So you start off and you build your capacity in attention. If you try to do too much, you’d just experience it as a burden—as a task—and it loses it’s life and vitality. So you start off with one thing and you start bringing attention to that. Doors are very good things. A student of mine in Orange County, when I gave him this instruction … I used to stay overnight at his place because they had a group down there. And one time I came down, and there were posted notes on every door in his house: “Take a breath.” [Laughter] Yellow ones and green ones and red ones. We have car doors, elevator doors, cupboard doors, and so forth.

Listen to the sound of your own voice when you’re talking; it’s another practice. Another practice, which I found very useful, is to always take a breath before I start speaking. That immediately stops you from interrupting anybody. The other thing it does, it means that you never have to ask to be heard, because you will never say anything until everybody else is quiet. So you don’t have to ask for attention at all. Every time you take a breath and somebody starts talking, you just let him talk. Eventually they go, “Don’t you have anything to say?” and you go [pause]. And now they’re all waiting for you. It works wonderfully.

So, you can make up many, many more practices. A colleague of mine makes the point of whenever she crosses over a threshold, she always does it with her left foot. Nothing special about that; it’s just a way of bringing attention to it. You can make up your own for answering the phone on the third ring, or when eating; all kinds of ones. But these are all ways of actually practicing attention in your life. So your practice isn’t simply what you do in your formal meditation sessions. This is how you build capacity.

Insight practice: capacity in looking

Ken: Now, what I asked you to read, this is insight practice, which is building capacity at yet another level. The first level is resting, and that’s very, very important to build a capacity in resting; resting in attention. And whether you do it with the breath, or whether you do it with body like a mountain, breath like the wind, mind like the sky, or whether you do it resting in open awareness; it doesn’t matter. They all work.

The second level is developing a capacity in looking. And the way this is usually presented, unfortunately, leaves the idea that you are to do a lot of intellectual examination and analysis. But that’s not the way it works. Now, in the texts here, it says, “Examine the identity of mind.” And then, “Examine the identity of perceptions.” It’s on page 27 in Clarifying the Natural State. Oh sorry, “Establishing the identity of mind,” and, “Establishing the identity of thoughts and perceptions.” And it reads: “

In other words, does it have a shape that is round, square, or the like? Does it have a shape like the earth …?

Does it have a color …?

Clarifying the Natural State, Dakpo Tashi Namgyal, p 27

You know, all of these kinds of things. [Pause]

There is a quotation I rather like from John Audubon, the ornithologist: “When there’s a discrepancy between the book and the bird, always believe the bird.” [Laughter] Now the relevance here is that when you’re doing this form of practice, this is more like birdwatching than it is like a philosophical analysis. So if I said, “There is a bird on the mantle piece. What’s it like?” What would you do? [Pause] You’d look at the bird, right? That’s what you do. And then you’d tell me what it was like. Okay. So let’s try that.

Now the first part is establishing the basis of mind, establishing the identity of mind. Now that’s a very formal mahamudra Buddhist way of doing it. What’s the actual question that’s being asked here?

Student: What is experience?

Ken: No, not quite. Close.

Student: What is mind?

Ken: Yeah, I think we can put it, make it simpler than that.

Student: What is being? What is it?

What am I?

Ken: I think—it’s just my opinion—it’s, what am I? Does that make sense to you? Saying, “What is the identity of mind?” is like saying, “What am I?”

Student: What’s the bridge between those two?

Ken: What’s the bridge between those two? Well, as we noted last time, what’s the one thing we know about ourselves? The one and only thing we know about ourselves?

Student: We’re aware right now.

Ken: We’re aware. We actually don’t know whether we’re alive, or dead, or asleep, or dreaming, or we’re an object of somebody else’s dream. We don’t know any of those. They’re all [unclear] things like that. The only thing we know is that we’re aware. So when you say, “What is the identity of mind?” Or “What is this?”, it’s like saying, “What am I?” That’s how I look at it. So, ask that question [pause] and tell me what happens. Anybody? What happens? George.

George: I feel vividly present. I see everything in the room. I’m not narrowly focused.

Ken: Okay. So let’s shear away all the conclusions. What actually happens?

George: I feel free inside and I feel …

Ken: Yeah, you still got conclusions. This is very interesting. We can do a quick exercise here, but I’ll just explain it. I often do this at retreats. I pair everybody up, and have people look at each other, right in the face, just for a couple of minutes. And I say, “What do you see?” What I always get is, “I see a wise person,” or “I see a sad person.” But this is nonsense. What you see is two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, and face. That’s what you see.

George: Just what actually is.

Ken: Now try again, George. What happens?

George: I experience what actually is.

Ken: No, that’s a conclusion. Chuck.

Chuck: There’s an opening.

Ken: Say a bit more. That’s a little bit of a conclusion. It’s closer, but what happens? [Pause] That’s better. [Laughter] That’s much better. Yeah! Okay?

Chuck: Yes. It’s just an opening [laughs].

Ken: Well, no, that’s the conclusion, but there’s an experience there, right? And we can call this experience all kinds of things, but there’s an actual shift. How many of you experienced a shift? This is a different shift from the earlier shift that we talked about when you go: Don’t chase after the past, don’t entertain the future, don’t dwell on the present. Rest. There’s a shift there, right? And now, let’s go through that again and then we’ll add the second one. So, don’t chase after the past. Don’t entertain the future. Don’t dwell on the present. Just rest. Now, ask the question: “What am I?” [Pause]

Okay. Everybody get that? Two shifts. Now in terms of practice, one is generally recommended to work with the first shift until you can actually rest there before you add the second shift. And the reason for that is that the second shift raises the level of energy up another notch, and you can probably feel that. And until one has developed the capacity to rest with that level of energy, the energy tends to destabilize what was forming underneath. And that’s why one is generally recommended to proceed in stages. Not everybody has to do that. Some people have natural ability; some people find it just works better for them. You need to work with this and figure out what works for you. But you can see how the essence here isn’t about understanding emptiness. It’s about building capacity so you can know it directly.

Because all of the things that are described in this book—experience this, and experience that—those don’t come out of trying to understand. And I know this very well for myself because I spent many, many years really figuring this all out. And I got really good at it. And I could explain it to everybody else really clearly. And it didn’t make a damn bit of difference in my actual experience. I just sounded good. It didn’t change anything at all. Maybe it opened the door about that wide. And this is the difference between understanding and knowing. And the ability to know comes from that capacity in attention of being able to actually rest and experience things that way.

So, the second question: “The identity of thoughts and perceptions.” To my mind, it can be rephrased as another very simple question. Any guesses as to what that question is? First question is, what am I? Second question might be …

Student: Who?

Ken: Who?

Student: What’s been experienced?

What is life?

Ken: Getting close. I’m just going to put it down as, what is life? Now, how do I get there? You may say, “How did I make that jump?”

Well, I’m reminded of an exchange that took place with Seung Sunim, I think back on the East Coast somewhere, when he was giving a talk. And Seung Sunim—a typical Korean Zen teacher—the only thing that he does is point to nature of mind. He gave a talk here in Los Angeles and this poor woman asked this question, “I’ve been thinking it would be helpful for me to go to India to study Buddhism. What do you think?” And what is Seung Sunim’s response to this? [Silence]

“Do you go to India or does India come to you?”

And the woman goes,”What? Do you think it would be a good idea if I go to India?” [Laughter] She couldn’t get what he was pointing to at all.

So in this particular exchange, Seung Sunim starts off by saying, “What is the meaning of the Buddha’s teachings? If you say anything, I’ll hit you. If you don’t say anything, I’ll hit you. So who would like to answer this question now?”

So one person in the audience stands up and says, “I hit the Buddha!”

And Seung Sunim looks at him and says, “You understand one. Do you understand two?”

Then the person says, “I understand three.”

To which Seung Sunim replies, “I thought that there was a leaping lion here, but I see there’s just a slinking fox.” [Laughter] This is typical Zen stuff. It’s all coded, of course. So let me explain it a little bit. When Seung Sunim says, “What is the meaning of the Buddha’s teaching? If you say anything, I’ll hit you. If you don’t say anything, I’ll hit you,” he’s saying, “What have you got? What do you know? I’m not interested in anything coming from a scripture, or a philosophy, or anything, but I want something from you right now.”

So it’s a challenge. And this person stands up and says, “I hit the Buddha,” which is code for: “I’m beyond the concept of Buddha. I know what is. Buddha and I … there’s no separation there. If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”

So Seung Sunim says, “Okay, that’s fine. You understand one. You understand the nature of things. Do you understand two?” What two here refers to: okay, you understand the one nature of everything, do you understand how experience actually arises? Because that’s where we get into form and emptiness, right? Two.

Well the student, who’s being utterly pretentious, has no idea what Seung Sunim is talking about and says, “I understand three.”

“What’s that?”

“The trikaya, the three jewels …” all that kind of thing.

So Seung Sunim says, “Ah, nothing there; the slinking fox.”

So, we come back. What is life? Now [pause], what is life? We can go on that whole routine, Life is a magazine, etc. But, what is it? That’s another of the questions that bring us here: what is life? So we have these two questions: what am I? and what is life? Now, how do I get what is life? out of, “the identity of thoughts and perceptions”?

Well, in just the same way that I was giving George a hard time. I say, “This is a book.” Well, that’s a conclusion. I don’t actually experience a book. I experience orange. I experience rectangle. And there are enough associations so that I put all of that together and I come to the conclusion: book.

Sensations, feelings, thoughts

Ken: So, if we really look and examine what life is, we see that it consists of three kinds of things. It consists of sensory sensations: shape, color, tone, taste, texture. These are sensations, sensory sensations. There’s another kind of thing we experience; it’s emotional sensations. We call those emotions or feelings: love, anger, jealousy, joy, etc. And there’s a third category: cognitive—what I’m going to call cognitive sensations. It’s a fancy phrase for thoughts.

So, I have lots of thoughts all the time. But that’s actually what life consists of. Everything else is a construct. Everything else. Right now, I have the impression that I’m looking at a room full of people. Well, there’s nobody here, you know, there’s just a bunch of shapes, different colors and forms. Sometimes I hear sounds and so forth.

I think we have time for this this evening. This is totally relevant. So, what I’m suggesting here is that what we call life consists of thoughts, feelings, and sensations, and everything else is constructed out of that. But a strange thing happens, and that is that we take the constructed world to be what is real—to be what is true—and we lose any actual connection with the world of our actual experience which consists solely of thoughts, feelings, and sensations.

So, that’s why I say, when he’s talking about thoughts and perceptions, which is just another word for sensations, this question’s about, what is life? Now, let’s explore this a little bit because it’s very easy to get hooked into the analytical, the logical analytical thing. What do you see? For the purposes here, you see a book. Okay? Everybody with me on that? My next question is a little more difficult: Where does the seeing take place? [Pause] Anybody? Where does the seeing take place?

Student: In your hand?

Ken: Is that where the seeing takes place?

Student: In the book.

Ken: The seeing takes place in the book? How do you see it then?

Student: Well, at some point I’ll read the book.

Ken: Yeah, but right now, you see the book?

Student: Yes.

Ken: Okay. Where’s the seeing?

Student: Somewhere in the book.

Ken: The seeing is in the book? But you experienced seeing the book. If the seeing takes place in the book, how do you experience the seeing?

Student: I read the book.

Ken: No, you’re seeing the book right now. It’s got nothing to do with reading. You’re seeing it right now. Point to where that seeing is. Oh, it’s in there? Then how do you see the book? [Laughs]

So it’s not here, it’s not there. Maybe it’s in between, right? Where’s that? Do you get the point? It’s a little difficult to say where the seeing takes place. You can do the same thing with touch. Just touch any part of your body or somebody else’s body if you want. But it’s better if you do it with your own body. So you touch the back of your hand with your finger. Now, is the back of your hand or the finger sensing things?

Student: Well, they have to come together.

Ken: Yeah, but which is sensing the touch?

Student: Both.

Ken: Both. Okay? What in the back of your hand is sensing the touch? What in the finger is sensing the touch? It’s very interesting. The sensation is right there, but when you look right at it, you know … I did this when I was doing my M.A. in math. I did this with a bunch of the graduate students. And they would say, “It’s in your brain.” And I really wanted to stab them with a pin to see if they would move their head when I stabbed their hand with a pin, because they wouldn’t move away from that. “It’s in the brain, it’s in the brain.” It’s not in the brain. Sensations just arise.

And it’s very difficult to say where they actually are. This is not how we ordinarily experience things because we are so caught up and so invested in the apparent reality of the world of shared experience—the world we’ve constructed—that this world that I’m talking about now, we’re very unfamiliar with. And yet it is the world, the only world, that we actually know. So when you’re looking at sensations, or actually it’s easier to start with thoughts and emotions, and you’ll see that it’s written in here that thoughts and emotions are like waves on water. I would say that emotions are like waves, and thoughts are like ripples. That’s very easy to understand, right? Pretty well everybody here can understand, okay? Thoughts and emotions are to mind what waves and ripples are to water. That’s not hard to understand.

Resting fosters knowing

Ken: How many of you know that? Know that when a thought arises, it’s your mind? Know that when an emotion arises, it’s you? Because we are mind, right? How many of you know that at that moment? And what difference would it make if you did know that? Because when emotions arise, we usually feel like: they’re something other, they have this power over us, and they do these things to us. They make us do these things that we regret afterwards, often. So, we don’t have that kind of intimate acquaintance or experience.

So, rather than trying to understand this, what I want you to do is to pour your energy into developing the capacity, because then you will just know it. And it will arise just as natural knowing, and you’ll think, “Oh, that’s how it is, interesting … oh.” And, pouring your energy into building that capacity—and the hope from this discussion is you’ll understand this—that’s what we do in practice.

Rather than trying to figure it out and understand it, and translate it from that intellectual understanding into some kind of experience … that’s a really, really tough way to go. Whereas if you pour your energy into just resting and, when you can rest in resting, then add that dimension of looking … And when you can rest in looking, you’ll find that you will just know. [Pause] And what the know-how consists of is learning how to rest that way; learning how to work with our mind which, right now, throws us all over the place and is very, very confusing. We don’t know what to do with that. [Pause]

So, just as the last perspective on this. It’s said that the identity of mind has to do with the question, What am I? And the identity of thoughts and perceptions has to do with, What is life? And, just to show you that I’m not completely insane, here is a Zen teacher—a contemporary Zen teacher. He’s probably dead now, but he lived in Japan in about the latter half of the 20th century:

When we look at a cup that is set down between the two of us, we have the feeling that we are looking at the same cup, though actually, that is not so. You look at the cup with your vision, and from a certain angle. Moreover, you see it in the rays of light and shadows that come from your side of the room. This applies equally to me as well. In a very rough sense, we proceed to separate the reality of this situation by entertaining the idea that we both see the same cup. This is what I mean by the fabrication of ideas.

How to Cook Your Life: From the Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment, Dōgen, with commentary by Uchyiama Roshi, p. 27

That’s the construction of a world of shared experience out of what you experience individually and what I experience individually. And we take that world of shared experience to be what’s real when we actually know is only the world of individual experience.

In the same way, we assume that there exists a world which you and I experience in common with all other human beings, that this world existed prior to our births, and that it will continue to exist even after our deaths. But again, this is nothing more than an idea. Not only that, we wind up thinking that we live and die within this world of fabrication. This is an utterly inverted way of looking at one’s life.

p. 27

It doesn’t matter that 99 percent of the population looks at it that way. It just happens to be the wrong way. That’s why I like this guy.

My true self lives in reality, and the world I experience is one I alone can experience, and not one anyone else can experience along with me. To express this as precisely as possible, as I am born, I simultaneously give birth to the world I experience; I live out my life along with that world, and at my death the world I experience also dies.

From the standpoint of reality, my own life experience (which in Buddhist terminology equals mind), and reality (which means the phenomena I encounter in life) can never be abstractly separated from each other. They must be identical.

p. 27

So we have these two questions: What am I? which deals with mind, and, What is life? which deals with what we experience—thoughts, perceptions, feelings, and sensations. And just as you saw from this, we can’t separate the two. Awareness, mind—whatever you call it—and what we experience, are not separate. So, it’s a very short step using the terminology that I’m using tonight to say: I am exactly what I experience—neither more, nor less. That is what I am.

Now, that can be both a frightening prospect or a liberating prospect. In terms of meditation practice, it makes life a whole lot easier because now there is no need to fight against anything that arises in your experience because whatever arises is you. And if you start fighting against it, you’re fighting against yourself, and I have good experience from that … I always lose. [Laughs]

The primary practice

Ken: So, returning to practice … I’m going to give you a slightly different practice tonight which builds and combines actually everything we’ve been talking to. This is the practice that I want you to use. Some people call it the primary practice. You may not be able to do all of these steps right away but there are four or five steps here, and with each one, you’re building a certain capacity. When you can rest in each step, you know that you’ve built the capacity for that.

Resting in sensation, feeling, and thought

Ken: So the first step is to pick a focus, and we’re just going to use the breath. So you sit and you rest in the experience of breathing. I say, “Rest in the experience of breathing,” rather than, “Watch the breath,” or, “Look at the breath,” because when you rest in the experience of breathing, there’s less separation. And when you become somewhat good at that—or you’re resting in that—then you expand the field of attention so that you experience everything that is arising in sensory sensations. So everything that you see, everything you hear, all the kinesthetic sensations, tactile sensations in your body, and tastes and smells also. But they’re usually pretty fleeting.

Now you may choose to develop that one by one. First of all, the audio ones if you want, and then all the visual ones, or all the tactile ones. It doesn’t really matter the order. You may find that working with the breath, you open to all the tactile ones first. Then open to all the visual, and then all the audio ones … you end up with a field of sensory experience. That’s the second step.

The third step is to include all the internal material. What’s the internal material? All the thoughts, emotions, all the stories. And again, you may find it helpful to go step by step. So, we usually start with the emotions because it’s too easy for us to get caught up in the stories. So, resting in our sensory experience, emotional experience, and then all the stories. And this is including more and more; not shifting from one to the other. That’s the third step.

Now, at this point, you have sensory experience, which we generally associate with being outside. And we have thoughts and feelings, which we generally regard as inside. So you have outside and inside. The fourth step is to let go of that sense of outside and inside, so you’re just in the field of experience. [Pause] That’s the fourth step.

What experiences this?

Ken: And then the fifth step is to ask, “What experiences this?” And there’ll be a shift there. Don’t try to answer that question. Just experience the shift and rest in the shift. So: focus, field, internal material, drop inside and outside, What experiences this? Five steps. Now, what is very important in this work is to work from the basis of stability. One can run through that pretty quickly and have a certain kind of experience, and that’s fine to do. But when you’re working at this in practice, let things become stable at each stage. You’ll find it very different then.

And you do this over and over again. You’re building capacity. Don’t worry about trying to understand anything. That will come naturally. So what I’m giving you is a mixture of know-how and practice. When you bring your practice experience, I can point out ways to work, and increase the know-how—knowing what to do with different kinds of experiences and how to work with them. So you continue to develop that capacity for resting in resting, and resting in looking that I talked about earlier. Okay?

So, that’s about it for this evening. Perhaps there’s some questions? Michelle.

Michelle: Well, as one of at least two Czechs in the room, I now understand why I’m such a perfectionist. [Laughter] I had a question about the reading assignment, Ken, the one from Clarifying the Natural State. I had a lot of resistance to his directions, partly because I think it would have taken me three months to go through all those exercises. And also because he says, over and over, “Look until you see that such and such a thing is true. And if you don’t see it, then go back and correct your practice until you do see it.” And somehow I had cognitive dissonance between trying to see with an open mind and being told that there was only one answer.

Ken: This is why I talked about capacity. Rangjung Dorje lived at the end of the 13th and beginning of the 14th century. And he was being taught this stuff—practice the resting meditation that I talked about last time—for three years before his teacher would let him do anything else. We get a textbook like this. It’s a manual. This was written about 500 years ago. And because it’s laid out in neat paragraph form, we think, “Oh, do that, then now I should be able to do this, now I should be able to do this, now I should be able to do this.” These are contemplation manuals; these are meditation manuals. Any one paragraph can take anywhere from a month to a year to actually master. Now we’re going over this extremely quickly. And, it doesn’t say, “Work on this for a month” or, “Practice this for a month.” That’s understood. [Pause]

Let’s take swimming as an example. Or take riding a bicycle. That’s easier. Now, what I say is, “Get on the bicycle, start peddling, and you’ll end up just coasting.” And the equivalent is, “I have a cognitive dissonance; I can’t believe that’s just one right answer to that.” That’s actually what you experience when you ride a bicycle. That’s what happens when you develop the capacity, and that’s what’s being reported here.

When you develop the capacity, this is how you experience things. It isn’t because there is one right answer; it’s just how things are. And it’s exactly the same way as if you’re riding a bicycle. Once you get up enough speed and you’ve learned the balance thing, then you just experience that. And it’s not right or wrong. It’s just how it is. If you’re really good, you can do it on a unicycle. I’m not that good; [laughs] a bicycle is about my speed.

Does that makes sense to you? This is why I’m emphasizing: you practice, you build the capacity. Don’t try to understand it. It’s not going to work because you’re going to be working your head so hard that you’ll never actually develop the stability in your being, which is what this is really about. Okay?

Practice questions

Michelle: Do you want us to actually do the exercises as he talks about them in the book also? Or is this more for a kind of general context?

Ken: More for a kind of general context. As you build a capacity using the practices that I’ve suggested, then you come back and do these exercises. You may be surprised because if you do these exercises with any kind of stability of attention, you’ll experience shifts. They won’t last for very long as you don’t have much stability, but you’ll see the possibilities. And that can be very helpful. Okay. Other questions? Darren.

Darren: Is the instruction to pick one of these for a day?

Ken: Of those five steps?

Darren: Do we do some of what we were doing last week and then do some of this?

Ken: No, it’s all incorporated into this.

Darren: And it’s up to us when to move on?

Ken: Yeah. You can work through all five in a period of meditation if you want. Or, you can work through it repeatedly in that period. But often people will find that, “Well, I’m not really resting with the breath,” so they’ll do that for a while. Or you can take your focus, that open awareness that we talked about last time. If you want to use that instead of the breath, that’s fine. And then you start opening to the whole field. And people will find, “Oh, I can’t. Whenever I do that, I start focusing on things. It’s like falling into thinking.” So you keep practicing that until you can actually open to the whole field.

You know what’s a really good place to do this, especially at this time of year? Shopping malls. You know why? Lots of Christmas decorations, and slightly different versions. But the shopping malls, they set a frame and you can just look at everything in that frame. Go to a store that sells glasses. And you look at all of those glasses, and in every one of those glasses, the whole store is reflected. So can you see every glass, every reflection of the store and every glass at the same time? It’s a really good way to practice.

There are some buildings, you know, they have these fountains where there’s just like sheets of water coming down. They’re great for practice too, until you can see the whole sheet of water—every drop—moving at one time. That’s quite a cool experience. I don’t recommend you doing this and driving just yet. One time I was driving and it was raining and I kept just looking at my windshield. No … watch the road! You like music? Hear every sound at the same time. Every instrument—every instrument—at one time. And you’ll find yourself listening to the music. Don’t follow one instrument, or one line of the music; all of it at one time. It’s very interesting what you hear.

Student: Now I understand why you were recommending Bach.

Ken: Yeah. But I found actually that Dylan has such a good backup band that you can do the same thing with him, [laughs] especially the earlier Dylan. It’s very good. Bach’s very good. Mozart also. So, this is what it means to practice. You go to a meeting … I know you go to meetings, difficult meetings, right? Experience everybody in the room all the time you’re in the meeting. It makes for a real interesting meeting. You’ll probably notice a lot more of what’s actually going on. This is what I mean when I say practice. Can you see all the pattern in this carpet? Okay? So you work at these things. Other questions? If not, we can close here for the evening and we’ll see you next week.