(Bell)
Dear respected Thay, dear noble community,
it's such a happiness to walk into a room so full of love.
My brother and I we just arrived a few minutes ago, and came in.
And to feel the sangha sitting in peace -
(fr.) La traduction, ça marche?
Pas encore.
Can we turn the volume up on the French?
So walking into this room and feel the energy of peace, of calm,
of deep aspiration to practice
is like walking into a kind of Pure Land.
(fr.) Ça va?
Là-bas ça va, mais, là-bas? Ça ne va pas.
We can just enjoy our breathing.
The beautiful thing about a smile is it doesn't require a translation.
So maybe if you like you can look around the room and smile to one another.
Just to appreciate the presence of
so many people who
come for the bodhisattva path.
Today's talk is about the path of the bodhisattvas.
How the Buddha taught of how
he takes good care of the bodhisattvas.
And by looking at each other and smiling to other bodhisattvas,
we take good care of each other.
Bring up that seed of caretaking.
And then our heart opens and we,
we water the seed of joy in the other person.
(fr.) Ça va? Okay, voilà.
So dear respected Thay, dear brothers and sisters,
today is the 6th of December
in the year 2018,
and we are gathered in
Loving Kindness temple, in New Hamlet,
for the last lay day Dharma talk of the Winter Retreat.
(fr.) N'est-ce pas?
There is a very wonderful book called The Diamond That Cuts Through Illusion.
And it's
Thay's teaching on the Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra,
or sometimes called The Diamond Sutra.
The diamond that cuts through illusion.
And I was preparing for this talk reading through this book,
and I remembered that it was one,
I think the first book of Thay's that I read all the way through.
Somebody had given it to me when I was a lay friend
practicing in a Vipassana center.
And it was like receiving a stroke of lighting.
I, and -
The sangha asks us
to look into this sutra today
as the last lay Dharma talk. Lay day Dharma talk.
So I practice getting in touch with the teaching in the Diamond Sutra.
But somehow I've forgotten that I - How important finding this book was to me,
and my study of Thay's teaching.
And so, actually I re-read it this morning.
(Laughter)
Sometimes it's like that. Because Thay is such a
profound teacher,
that sometimes I like to look in other places first.
Because I know when I read Thay's teaching, Thay's -
One thunderbolt after another.
And it is difficult to find areas that Thay doesn't go into,
that Thay doesn't reveal deeply.
So we are invited this morning to look into this teaching.
How many of you have ever read The Diamond Sutra?
Wow! Okay, not bad!
So I want to start to share a little bit about
the relationship of this teaching with
some other teachings we already had in this retreat.
So we've learned about mindful breathing,
we've going into the 14 mindfulness trainings.
So we know the Sutra on Mindful Breathing,
the Sutra on the Four Establishments of Mindfulness
are very old teachings of the Buddha.
Like the teachings that the Buddha gave later in his life.
At that time the sangha had grown quite large,
and it was not so easy as just going
to the Buddha website and registering for a retreat
to go study personally with the Buddha.
It's not so easy.
People only learned about the Buddha through word of mouth.
When the Buddha first came to a big city, to Rajgir,
which at that time was the capital
of that region of Magadha,
they spread the word
to all the women, and the parents,
'Please, take care! Hide your men!
Because the Buddha is coming, and wherever he goes,
many of the men become monks!'
(Laughter)
'Be careful!'
So the teaching of the Buddha in this day and age sometimes we forget
was very dependent on physically meeting the Buddha.
He didn't have a -
an iPhone, or a GPS transmitter,
so it is not easy to find where the Buddha is.
You had to ask.
So the early community, as it began to grow,
was surrounded by monks that had studied personally with the Buddha.
They had spent time living with him, walking with him,
going on alms round with him.
And so a lot of what they learned was just by watching him.
Watching how he talked, watching how he walked.
Listening directly to his teaching.
We are listening to a direct teaching now.
(Laughter)
From the Buddha himself.
So often times, when we talk about the Dharma,
we think about some book.
And when we study the Dharma,
we need to go buy that book and we need to read that book.
But that would be completely foreign to the sangha of the Buddha.
None of what the Buddha was teaching was being written down as far as we know
at that time. In fact, writing was considered a kind of
lower form of transmitting or communicating.
When something was -
When something was sacred,
then it would come directly from the mouth of a teacher.
So the teaching came orally.
Nowadays we are like - We've turned it upside down.
If something is written down, we take it as an authority,
but if it is said from spoken word we tend to question whether it's true or not.
So we suffer a lot.
And so, hopefully, in looking into The Diamond Sutra
we will be able to pierce through that veil of,
that veil of delusion.
Our practice is always to come back to the here and now,
to experience life as it is in the present moment.
That is a - Is there is something that we can call truth,
in the Plum Village tradition in the Buddhist teaching it is that.
It's that truth is found in life. Not in books,
not even in the words of people, what people tell us.
Even if that person is a very prominent spiritual teacher.
Thay always reminds us that we need to take the teaching
and apply it in our daily life. That is where we find truth.
So we walk the talk.
But we know that
studying the teachings can benefit our practice.
It can help us to break through
a view that we are holding on to tightly.
We can become aware of the ways in which our vision is limited.
Like the blinders on a horse.
We only see the way forward
so that we only continue to walk forward.
And much (inaudible) education in the modern world
is really how to get well-fitting blinders so that we do the things
that are expected of us.
That we get a job, that we make money, that we have a family, that we
so we can have a car, and a house,
and then we can go home and enjoy Christmas together.
And then we can yell at each other.
(Laughter)
And complain, and, yeah.
Because of all the problems we have making sure we have a house, and a car,
and a family, and a job, and money, and all those things.
So our current education system is designed like that,
to try to increase our capacity to obtain those things.
Those objects of desire.
So when the Buddha walked into Rajgir,
he cut through all of that
by his mindful step, his mindful gaze, his mindful speech.
And many young men who were very well-educated,
many of them who studied to become the spiritual leaders of their community,
prominent priests
who would take care of the spiritual needs of their community,
just by seeing the Buddha walking mindfully,
looking mindfully,
eating mindfully, speaking mindfully,
they cut through the veil of their delusion, those blinders they had
that were keeping them on the path that was accepted in society
for them to walk on.
And so that is why they warned people, 'Please hide your son, hide your husband!'
People were afraid of what can happen when people remove those blinders,
when suddenly their view becomes very wide and open,
and they go beyond just the limited idea of who they are,
and what they are here for.
So this teaching of The Diamond Sutra
is part of the fruit of a tradition that developed
when the Buddha was no longer physically there
in the form of which we think of him as a human being walking on the Earth.
And for many centuries the monks,
in order to get in touch with the Dharma body of the Buddha,
without his physical presence,
had begun orally reciting
the teachings that the Buddha gave in many different situations.
Chanting them regularly, and then
teaching the young monks that came in also to chant them.
And so the teachings were passed on through this practice of oral recitation.
Also the precepts, we call the Vinaya,
it means the way of life of the monastic community,
was regularly chanted
and recited in that way.
And at some point,
people started to write them down
on palm leaves.
Can of like a cheat sheet.
But sometimes they forgot some passage
or maybe a monk would go to a very remote area,
and he wanted to make sure that
he would not be a -
In the midst of a large community, where there would be elders he could consult
when he forgot one passage of the sutra.
Maybe there was one text like the Dharmapada
which had very precise sayings and he wanted to remember them exactly.
So he started to write them down on palm leaves
so that he could bring them with him in his robe.
And whenever he forgot a line, he could take them out to remember that line.
So a kind of cheat sheet.
A new technology, very controversial.
Like the Internet.
And,
and this new form of transmitting the Dharma
brought in new issues in the community. Just like the Internet
has brought in new
wonderful things and also sometimes difficult things
into our monastic community.
So in the same way, writing also
did the same thing.
So we have to a little bit expand our view
to see ourselves in a time when we don't have books everywhere,
we don't have the telephone, or we don't have Internet.
And we deeply want to practice the Dharma.
We take refuge in the Buddha, in the Dharma, in the Sangha.
So we know the sangha is all around us.
At that time, the sangha was clearly the monastic community.
And the Dharma with how we
see the Buddha in ourselves.
Through studying the Dharma, we learn how to
reveal the nature of awakening already within us.
So keeping in touch with the Dharma is very important.
And so how do we do that when the sangha
is going a little bit everywhere all over India?
So we can write it down so we can remember.
So the words themselves took on
a kind of sacred meaning.
First the oral word and then the written word.
Can we listen to the sound of the bell?
We come back to our body.
(Bell)
If we are a Christian, it is not difficult for us
to understand how the word becomes sacred.
If you read the Gospel of John, I think it says,
'In the beginning, there was the Word -
The Word is God and God is the Word.'
Logos.
The Greek word is logos.
Was God, and God is Logos.
If we are Muslim,
and we know that to recite the Koran in Arabic has a special importance.
A translation is only an approximation of the direct word of the God
as it was told to Muhammad.
In Arabic.
Also we know in the Jewish tradition there is a similar attitude.
Ultimately the name of God we cannot pronounce.
It is only an approximation.
Recently I was asked by the community to go to Abu Dhabi.
And we went in the mosque there, and they had
100 names of God.
So there are many names, like The Firm One, The Infinite One,
written in Arabic in beautiful thorough patterns
all in the wall, in the main prayer room in the mosque in Abu Dhabi.
But a the very top,
there is a very beautiful floral pattern
around empty tiles.
And the 100th name of God cannot be pronounced.
It is empty of form.
And at that time, in India, when the Buddha was teaching,
there was also this sense that the word had a sacred quality.
There were two young Brahmin men who came to the Buddha,
and were very concerned about
the future of the Buddha's teaching.
And they knew that in the Vedic tradition, they were trained to orally recite
the words of the Rigveda and other sacred texts,
to commit them to memory,
in order to approach
God, to approach
liberation.
And,
and because of their love of the Buddhist teaching,
they were monastic disciples of the Buddha,
they said, 'We need to do that!
Please Buddha, let us put your teachings into verse!'
Into the formal language that we now call Sanskrit,
so that future generations would benefit
and be able to remember it.
And the Buddha said, 'No!
You have misunderstood my teaching.'
I'm paraphrasing a little bit.
(Laughter)
He told them, 'My teachings should be taught in the common language,
in the vernacular, the language of the people.
The daily language that people use.'
So he refused them,
to give in to their fear
of the teachings disappearing.
It means that the Buddhist tradition continues through the realized practice
of living human beings.
Not through a word, or a text.
That is how the Buddha is offering us.
In our laziness sometimes to practice, we want to put up some text
as being the ultimate.
And if we want to discover God, we only have to look in there.
We only have to read that text and then we will find God,
we will find Awakening, we will find Liberation.
And the Buddha said, no, he didn't allow us to be that lazy.
So the Diamond Sutra
is arising after the teachings of the Buddha had began to be written down
for already a few hundred years.
And so, very quickly the monastic community started to depend on
these written teachings to get in contact with the Dharma,
rather than looking to their brothers around them.
Rather than taking refuge maybe in the elder brothers,
and their capacity to recite,
teach and put into practice the Dharma.
And instead they started to look for it in the words on a page.
That was where the true Dharma lived!
Not in my elder brother, or my elder sister.
They don't say it so explicitly, they just spend all their time studying the text.
And they don't spend very much time
taking refuge in the brothers and sisters in the Dharma.
And so, as a result of that phenomena,
and also the experience of reading the Buddhist teachings,
written down on these palm leaves
which soon became sacred objects in their own right,
then many monks,
and perhaps nuns,
began to
try to find a way to help the young monastics
to become free from that attachment to the written word,
to become free from the attachment to the form of the teaching.
And so, a whole form of literature we call prajñāpāramitā arose.
These are teachings that were written down and they spoke about how to
awaken to the highest understanding.
The understanding of the Buddha
which cannot be found in words,
but can only be lived and touched directly
in our life, in our practice.
And it is in that spirit that Thay founded Plum Village,
to create a community of practice,
to create a community where there is the living Dharma,
not just the Dharma that can be found in books.
Thay said, if you want to get a degree
in an Institute of High Buddhist Studies, then you can go to many universities
and do that.
But if you want to realize the living Dharma,
then you need a community of practice.
That is what the Buddha built, he built a beautiful sangha,
walking into Rajgir.
There is a beautiful scene, where
the Buddha walks into Rajgir,
and he is with Uruvela Kasyapa,
who was a very famous spiritual teacher.
He and his brothers they led a number of
kind of dreadlocked spiritual ascetics in that region.
And they worshiped this fire.
So we can take a word as a sacred,
we can also take fire, or some object in nature
and worship it as sacred, as the ultimate.
So they were part of a kind of fire worshiping cult.
And the Buddha came in and he -
And because Uruvela Kasyapa had a community of many people,
many disciples,
he was a little bit proud.
And so it took many teachings from the Buddha
before he realized that the Buddha actually
had awaken to a deeper understanding.
I'm not going into it now, but you can read it in the Vinaya.
Eventually, after many
times of seeing the Buddha prove his deep understanding,
Kasyapa eventually accepted him as his teacher.
It's kind of like
a monk suddenly showing up here in Plum Village,
and then, over the course of many weeks,
the eldest brothers and sisters and the community suddenly accept,
'You are now our teacher.'
You can imagine such a thing.
Sometimes in Plum Village in the past we had people come in a little bit
unstable mentally, and they believed
they would be the new teacher of the community.
But, unlike the Buddha, they didn't have that deep understanding, and so -
But sometimes that happened in a spiritual community.
So Uruvela Kasyapa was not quite sure. 'The Buddha really
has a deep understanding?
My eye kept seeing my understanding is still deeper, still higher.'
But eventually, he could not - He saw a few wonderful actions of the Buddha
that he could not deny any longer the understanding of the Buddha,
and he accepted the Buddha as his teacher. And then, immediately after that,
all of his students, who probably already had realized
the Buddha's deep understanding, they became disciples as well right away.
And then his two brothers as well and their communities.
So very quickly the sangha became quite large,
and all these kind of
grungy looking dreadlocked ascetics, they shaved off their dreads,
and became,
they got a robe and a bowl and they started following the Buddha.
And so there was a very interesting scene, where the Buddha walks into Rajgir,
and the people are quite confused, because they never heard of the Buddha.
But everyone knows about Uruvela Kasyapa, he is a very famous spiritual teacher,
he is all over YouTube, and, you know, many people are buying his books,
and you can see all over the airports, and anyway, you know what I mean.
(Laughter)
And so, when the Buddha came in, people are quite confused,
because they saw Uruvela Kasyapa and the Buddha, and they said,
'Is the Buddha the student of Uruvela Kasyapa?
Or is Uruvela Kasyapa the student of the Buddha?'
They did not know.
And then,
at that moment, Kasyapa begins to fan the Buddha.
And it is at that moment that the people know that, 'Ah!
Uruvela Kasyapa has now become the student of the Buddha.'
And through that gesture, he recognizes he is now studying with the Buddha.
There are all kinds of beautiful teachings like this in the Buddhist teachings.
Maybe we can listen to another sound of the bell.
(Bell)
So looking around us, as a monk,
a few hundred years before the Common Era,
maybe in the northwest of India,
and seeing how our monastic brothers and sisters are now
spending much of their time reading the sutras in written form rather than,
in addition to reciting them but how this reading is now taking on a new importance,
and seeing how -
Yes, because when we live together as monastics,
we come to understand each other pretty deeply.
We are not very blinded by the insights of our brothers and sisters.
I think Thay Pháp Dung gave the talk last week.
He told me he came up with a new line,
'It's hard to live with people who understand us.'
(Laughter)
It is very easy to come for a week, or two weeks, or even a few months,
but then when people start to understand us, oh!
It becomes a little bit difficult. Because they always seem to be looking at
those things that we don't want to look at in ourselves!
(Laughter)
So I think something like that happened as well in those monasteries.
And the monks looked around, and they said,
'Mmm, wow! He knows a lot about the Dharma!'
He can teach the Abhidharma, the highest form of the Dharma,
where everything becomes atomic particles of the teachings of the Buddha,
'But he still slurps a lot when he eats his food,
and he
smells really bad,
walks unmindfully.'
So this attachment to knowledge became a virtue in itself.
And even though the Buddha taught very clearly
that knowledge, along with afflictions, are the main obstacles,
the main hindrances to awakening,
but the community became a little bit attached to its knowledge.
And the monasteries become a kind of ivory towers
guarding the sacred teachings of the Dharma,
no longer very concerned with the life of the common people.
So that the teaching that the Buddha gave about not putting my teaching in verse
but teaching in the language of the common people,
although the monks would be very able to recite that teaching,
but that is not how they were living so much some of them.
And so, as a monk living in that time, and trying to renew Buddhism,
what do you do?
How do you deal with the situation?
How can you use this written form, this new written form
as an skillful way
to help people to get beyond the attachment
to the words that the Buddha taught?
How can you help to cut through the delusion
that the words themselves are the Dharma?
That the words themselves are the teaching that the Buddha offered?
So out of that deep wish, deep hope to renew Buddhism
came these new texts called the prajñāpāramitā texts.
How can we
get the insight that brings us to the other shore?
We don't just sit down in the same shore with that insight.
It has to bring us to the other shore, it means we have to walk the talk.
We cannot just hold on to our knowledge
in a way of getting offerings, of getting status, getting respect.
And so these teachings of prajñāpāramitā they became quite lengthy.
And there were many texts we don't know exactly where they were written.
We don't have that much information.
We didn't have somebody making a video of the Dharma talks
on the early prajñāpāramitā with the date written on the board.
So it's very difficult for us to know exactly when,
we have to use different means to try to place the exact location
where these texts where composed.
But the internal evidences from the text suggest what I'm sharing is that
there was a response to the increasing scholastic nature of monastic life.
So how can we recreate through the form of a text
the experience of being near the Buddha?
How can we recreate
in the written form, the kind of awakening that is experienced
by someone directly witnessing how the Buddha walked,
how the Buddha talked, how the Buddha ate, and how the Buddha taught?
That is the aspiration of these monastics who composed these prajñāpāramitā texts.
And they knew full well that the danger also came with that.
Which is that people would start to take these new texts and make them
holy and sacred.
So somehow we have to build into it,
the teaching that allows us to see
that the words themselves are only representations,
they are not the deep teaching.
Okay, so we are going to start to look into this a little bit.
And I'm just going to really what is the most essential part of the teaching.
And I hope you have a chance to read the rest for yourself.
"This is what I heard one time
when the Buddha was staying in the monastery in Anathapindika’s park
in the Jeta Grove near Shravasti with a community of 1,250 bhikshus,
fully ordained monks.
That day, when it was time to make the round for alms,
the Buddha put on his sanghati robe
and, holding his bowl, went into the city of Shravasti to seek almsfood,
going from house to house.
When the almsround was completed,
he returned to the monastery to eat the midday meal.
Then he put away his sanghati robe and his bowl, washed his feet,
arranged his cushion, and sat down."
So the teaching of the sutra is happening in Shravasti,
a place where the Buddha spent many of his rain's retreats,
not far from modern-day Nepal.
And there was a monastery that had been founded there.
We may have heard of Anathapindika,
in our Chanting Book we have a wonderful discourse on
The Teachings to Be Given to the Sick, which Shariputra offers to Anathapindika
when he is passing away. He was a very loved lay disciple of the Buddha
who lives a very simple life
and he was called Anathapindika,
it wasn't the name that he was given at birth,
but it's a name that means 'the one who gives to the poor'.
Anatha are those who -
An-atha, it means 'those who don't have wealth',
and pindika is 'food', a kind of like almsfood.
So he was known as the one who was always offering food
for people who were poor, who didn't have food to eat.
The legend is that he payed for the Jeta Grove by laying
coins of gold on every part of the park.
Because the prince Jeta, he loved so much that forest
and he didn't want to sell it. And he said,
'I will only sell it if you can lay coins of gold across the entire park.'
So that's a legend, I don't know if that really happened,
but that's just to show how much Anathapindika loved the Buddha.
He was willing to give up everything he had in order to provide a place
for the Buddha to teach, for the monks and nuns to live.
So the Buddha passed many rain's retreats in Shravasti.
And we have the Buddha going on almsround. Sometimes we forget that the Buddha went
just like the other monks and nuns, to go on service on food.
Or to receive food from the lay friends.
It could be very easy for the Buddha, he had many disciples, 1,250 monks,
'Please go, can you go get my food for me today?
I'm a little bit lazy. I have to give many Dharma talks,
would you mind to bring my food for me?'
We wonder why do we always have that information.
But it is to show the humility, and also the freedom.
Because by offering - Sometimes when we become a teacher in a spiritual community
we can become a slave of our disciples.
They want to wash our clothes for us, they want to cook wonderful food for us,
and then we think, 'Oh! it's so lovely in the monastery.
I don't want to go out anymore!'
It is like the Pure Land, my personal Pure Land.
But the Buddha saw that if he wanted to maintain his freedom,
he could continue to go on almsround,
and then receive food from even the poorest person,
even the people who never heard of the Buddha.
He would just come like any other beggar to their door and receive almsfood.
And then, "At that time, the Venerable Subhuti stood up,
bared his right shoulder, put his knee on the ground,
and, folding his palms respectfully, said to the Buddha,
'World-Honored One, it is rare to find someone like you.
You always support and show special confidence in the Bodhisattvas."
So to bare your right shoulder is a sign of respect.
So we know the monks they had robes they put over their shoulders.
But nowadays, when we see Theravadan monks
we often see that their right shoulder is bare.
And that is a part of the tradition, it's respectful to show the right shoulder
in that culture.
When Buddhism came to China,
the Chinese were scandalized by somebody showing their shoulder.
In Chinese culture, that's very inappropriate.
So in that way Buddhism always adapted to the culture in which it took root.
And that is why we have robes that - You don't see my shoulder.
So I'm wearing a robe that is Chinese style robe.
We cover the shoulder. That is considered more respectful.
He puts his knee on the ground.
So we don't know that at that time
the monks practiced touching the Earth in the way that we do today.
But they put their knee on the ground
in order to show their respect for someone.
And they fold their palms. () it means like this, join the palms,
respectfully.
“World-Honored One, it is rare to find someone like you.
You always support and show special confidence in the Bodhisattvas."
So this ideal of a Bodhisattva was part of what
inspired the young monastics at that time
to go deeper in their practice.
A bodhisattva is a kind of awakened being.
It could be translated as
someone who is bent on awakening.
They are
leaning towards awakening.
In Pali, we have many references to the bodhisatta,
which is the Buddha before his awakening.
And 'satta' can be translated as 'being', but it can also be translated as
kind of like 'attachment'.
Like you are drawn towards awakening.
But in Sanskrit it was translated as 'sattva', which is very clearly 'being'.
So it lost that ambiguity. Bodhisattva, awakened being.
So this ideal of a bodhisattva was a kind of revolution
within the Buddhist community.
Because up into that point,
it was very clear, one became a bhikshu or a bhikshuni
in order to attain arhatship, it means, perfection.
And it is very clear that to become an arhat
one had to become a bhikshu or a bhikshuni.
So the monastics had a kind of
monopoly on awakening.
(Laughter)
And the Bodhisattvayana, which is usually how we find it,
it means, the vehicle or the path of a bodhisattva,
suddenly burst through that monopoly
and allowed both monastics and lay people to be on the bodhisattva path.
So this is a path that can be taken not only by monastics,
but also by lay practitioners.
The Bodhisattvayana.
Usually we talk about Mahayana, you probably heard the term Mahayana,
the great vehicle,
but more often in that time what later became called the Mahayana
was called the Bodhisattvayana, it means,
the path, the vehicle, of awakened beings.
And the prajñāpāramitā texts are
teaching us the way of the bodhisattva.
What is the way to wake up
to walk the talk, to the lived awakening.
So Subhuti is pointing out to the Buddha,
"You always support and show special confidence in the Bodhisattvas."
That means, when there is somebody who has that deep aspiration,
we feel very
inspired also to help them on their path.
When we see somebody who does kind things to another person,
we don't care whether they are Catholic, whether they are Muslim,
whether they are Jewish, whether they are monastic or they are lay,
we just want to help that person, we want to support them,
we feel inspired to help them in their path.
When we are generous, when our generosity is not
transactional, it is based on just giving only just to give,
we want to help someone to continue to do that.
We are coming into the Christmas season,
and sometimes we feel like, 'Well, I have to give a present to my mum,
to my niece, to my nephew, to my -
That brother, if I don't give a present to that brother,
then he is going to get mad at me.'
So our generosity is based on a form.
What is expected from us socially.
Maybe we give a lot to our son or our daughter,
but that is also,
that is was is expected from us. If we are a mother or a father it is expected
that we give to our son or daughter. But can we give to somebody
who is very, is living in poverty on the street?
Can we open our heart to somebody who has killed somebody?
Somebody who has stolen?
Maybe somebody who is causing great harm.
Do we have enough generosity in our heart to offer our time, our presence,
to that person?
That is the path of the bodhisattva. We don't rely only on form.
If people yell at us and slander us, they say,
'Why do you help that person, why do you give to that person?
Look at what they are doing! They are the living incarnation of evil!'
We don't care, because that is part of our path,
we are not dependent on the form in our way of giving.
And so, when you see someone like that,
you feel inspired, and the Buddha felt inspired
to give them special attention, special confidence.
“World-Honored One, if sons and daughters of good families
want to give rise to the highest, most fulfilled, awakened mind,
what should they rely on and what should they do to master their thinking?”
If sons and daughters of good families
want to give rise to the highest, most fulfilled, awakened mind,
what should they rely on and what should they do to master their thinking?
This is what everybody wants to know!
This is what we all want to know when we come to Plum Village!
Just tell me, can I buy it in the bookstore?
(Laughter)
It is some special ring I can wear, or maybe some special incense I can burn
that is going to give me the highest, most fulfilled awakening?
Just tell me, please, and I'll buy it!
Even if it is sold on Amazon!
(Laughter)
Everybody is coming because they want this awakening,
they want to be happy, in every moment of their life their want to be free!
So what can we do
to give rise to this highest, most fulfilled, awakened mind?
Where should we rely on? What should they do to master their thinking?
So everybody is waiting with bated breath to find out
what it is.
The Buddha replied, "Well said, Subhuti. What you have said is absolutely correct.
The Tathagata always supports and shows special confidence in the Bodhisattvas.
Please, listen with all of your attention,
and the Tathagata will respond to your question."
Thank you for listening with all your attention.
"'If daughters and sons of good families want to give rise
to the highest, most fulfilled, awakened mind, they should rely on the following
and master their thinking in the following way.'
The Venerable Subhuti said, 'Lord, we are so happy to hear your teachings.'
The Buddha said to Subhuti, 'This is how the Bodhisattva Mahasattvas
master their thinking:
‘However many species of living beings there are
– whether born from eggs, from the womb, from moisture, or spontaneously;
whether they have form or do not have form;
whether they have perceptions or do not have perceptions;
or whether it cannot be said of them
that they have perceptions or that they do not have perceptions,
we must lead all these beings to the ultimate nirvana
so that they can be liberated.
And yet, when this innumerable, immeasurable, infinite number of beings
has become liberated, we do not, in truth, think
that a single being has been liberated.
Why is this so?
If, Subhuti, a bodhisattva holds on to the idea
that a self, a person, a living being, or a life span exists,
that person is not an authentic bodhisattva.'"
Maybe we can listen to a sound of the bell.
(Bell)
So in the Sanskrit, it says,
Whatever beings -yeah? - sattvaha, it says living beings,
that are born from an egg, from a womb, from moisture, or spontaneously,
whether they have form or they have no form;
whether they have perceptions or they don't have perceptions;
whether they neither have perceptions nor non-perceptions;
all these I would lead to nirvana without remainder, ultimate nirvana.
And even when these immeasurable, innumerable beings
are thus liberated,
not any single living being,
we do not think that any single living being
has been liberated. Why is that?
Subhuti, it is not said of a bodhisattva
that he has the perception of a being. Why is that?
A bodhisattva, we cannot call someone a bodhisattva
who has the perception of a self, the perception of a being,
the perception of a life, a life span, and the perception of a person.
So these four areas.
[ātman]
A self.
[self]
[sattva]
A being.
[being]
A living being.
[(living being)]
[jīva]
A life.
[life]
Or a life span.
[life span]
And the pudgala.
[pudgala]
Which is just a person.
[person]
So the text is saying that
as long as we, in our thinking, give rise to the idea of a self,
of a living being, of a life span, or a person,
then we cannot be called a true, we cannot be called a bodhisattva.
We cannot be called someone who is on the bodhisattva path.
It seems like a contradiction, right?
So we are, we need to give rise to the aspiration to lead all living beings.
And the Buddha is quite specific.
You know, those born from the eggs those born from the womb,
so all the reptiles, and the fish, and the amphibians,
born from eggs, then all those born from a womb,
then those born from moisture.
Sometimes the insects, they have such a small eggs
that they don't call them eggs.
They seem to be born spontaneously from moisture, but even bacteria, mold,
living things.
So you can imagine that, as a bodhisattva we have to lead mold to nirvana.
(Laughter)
And even though we have to lead mold to nirvana,
(Laughter)
we cannot think that any mold has been lead to nirvana.
So I'm bringing this to its natural extension.
We cannot only think of
even just living beings.
How about the very stones beneath our feet?
It has a kind of life,
if we look deeply.
We also use to dividing up the world between the inanimate and the animate,
the non-living and the living.
And the Buddha is just pointing that out.
So first of all, we have to learn how to understand
when we define ourselves and others in terms of a self.
So in what way do we say, this is me, this is mine, this is myself?
We think, I can extend my hand,
so that must be me.
But I cannot extend the brother's hand.
So that must be not me.
So we rely on this very simplistic understanding
of what is me and what is not me.
But if I look more deeply, I see that when
I practice and I live together with my brother,
then he knows the right time to invite the bell
in the Dharma talk.
And so somehow, even though he is not me,
and yet there is some capacity to be able to invite the bell at the appropriate time.
There is a kind of understanding.
And so, when we see that,
we see that actually this body, the limit of this body
is not the limit of who we are.
There is not only the,
this body which we can move and animate which is
ourselves.
But we are made up of many non-self elements.
When we look into the orchid, we can see that
the orchid is on the platform.
We do not say that the orchid is up in the sky.
We do not say that the orchid is in the earth that is surrounding New Hamlet.
But if we look deeply, we can see that the sun is in the orchid.
Without the sun, there would be no photosynthesis
for the plant to generate
the branch that comes up to offer these flowers to us.
If there is no earth,
then there is no nutriments to provide the minerals that the plant needs to grow.
And we know that there is also the farmer, the one who grew the orchid,
the one who transported it here. All these elements, we can say,
non-orchid elements are present in the orchid.
And we are also made of no-self elements. We are made up of our friends,
of our parents, of countless generations of ancestors. They are all in us.
And when we see that, then we become free from this idea of a self, of an atman.
So that way of dividing up the world, that dualistic way of seeing things,
then suddenly falls away.
And we see that this body is not me, it is not mine, it is not myself.
I'm not limited by this body.
And we see that we are also present in all things, and
all things are also present in us.
So the mold is not separate from me.
The stones are not separate from me. The deer are not separate.
But we actually inter-are.
So this is a deep teaching of the Buddha on interbeing.
And when we look at the world in that way,
we become free from our ideas about ourselves,
we practice what Thay called the deep ecology.
He said, the Diamond Sutra is the earliest teaching on deep ecology,
because we see that we are not separate from Mother Earth.
That all of our efforts
to raise up human beings,
to make them comfortable,
so they always have enough food to eat,
so the always have enough places to live,
so they are warm enough, so they get to go on a vacation
once a year,
that that all has come at a price.
And that price is our attachment to our idea about ourselves.
Ourselves as a person, who is separated from other living beings,
like animals, the plants, the minerals.
So we exploit the Earth, we think of the Earth as something separate from us
that we can dig in, that we can extract oil from,
and we don't think about all the consequences
that that has on ourselves, on our well-being,
because we don't see it as ourselves.
We see ourselves as something separate from the Earth.
We treat animals with great cruelty,
raising them in horrible conditions
to be slaughtered
to serve our appetite.
Because we think that they are not us.
Of course, we say we would never do that for human beings.
I remember when I was a young practitioner and I read
a saying from Mahatma Gandhi,
which was, 'If you want to understand the nature of a civilization
look at how it treats its animals'.
If you want to understand the nature of a civilization
look at how it treats its animals.
Does it hide its animals away when they are going to be slaughtered,
or mistreated, or killed?
So when we look deeply, there are structures that had been created
in the human mind,
which have split us off from that which is also ourselves.
That have removed us from Mother Earth.
And the Buddha is trying to point those out.
What is the source of those wrong perceptions?
What are those ideas which separate us from our connection to the Earth?
(Bell)
"We must lead all these beings to the ultimate nirvana
so that they can be liberated."
This is a very radical statement.
The early Buddhist community
was mainly concerned with its,
with its own attainment of nirvana.
You became a monk or a nun
because you wanted to become an arhat, a perfected one.
You wanted to attain the nirvana that the Buddha taught.
And that led to attachment to these kind of ideas,
the idea about a self, even though the teaching of non-self was there,
but ¡wow!, the monks tend to have a very big self.
A very big non-self.
And they can have a very strong idea that
they are sattvas, they are living beings,
but the stones, the minerals,
those things that are not living, those things we don't need to care about.
What we need to take care of is only the living beings.
Or they have an idea, 'I'm an important person.
These animals, these plants, they are not
they are not so important.
What is important is my own attainment of nirvana.'
So when we look deeply into this statement
we see we break through these very limited concepts of nirvana.
And we see that
awakening is something that can be experienced by all.
That is possible for -
When we no longer see the separation between me and not me,
we see that the wood that I'm sitting on is not separate from me,
when I see that the stones are not separate from me,
they become part of my path to awakening.
They are not separate.
And so,
taking care of the stones is taking care of myself.
Taking care of the trees is taking care of myself.
Taking care of the cows, the sheep,
taking care of, even of the mosquitoes,
is taking care of myself.
The brothers we become very expert at capturing mosquitoes
and putting them back outside so they can be free.
And the Buddha, one of the reasons he had us wear a robe and not walk around naked
was to protect us from mosquitoes.
Also, you know, is a little bit -
Even in the Buddha's time, to walk around naked
was a little bit extreme.
(Laughter)
So we don't have to kill the mosquitoes, but we can be protected,
we take care of ourselves but in a way that is not harming other living beings,
or even the stones themselves.
We know that if we've ever thrown something at a stone, or you throw a stone
at another stone or something hard, and then you look at it.
What do you see?
A kind of like white, powdery bit at the impact.
That is a kind of suffering.
We tend to think of suffering only in terms of the human nervous system.
That is a very limited view.
But now we start to extend that to include
the suffering of animals.
Even as short as the past few fifty years,
people have believed, many scientists believed that animals did not suffer pain
in a way that can be compared to human beings.
That is a way of justifying doing studies on animals.
You can treat them however you want as long as they don't suffer
in the way that human beings suffer.
So we have to be careful when our mind is caught in these perceptions
we can use it to justify hurting.
We can use it to justify creating suffering.
And it doesn't take much deep looking to then go and extend that understanding
to the stones, to the minerals.
Then, when we look in - We hear about climate change,
or we experience this pretty warm December right now,
then we know that maybe we haven't been taking good care
of our mineral brothers and sisters.
Maybe in our greed to
have electricity, to have power,
to produce,
we extract minerals from the Earth,
and then release the remains into the atmosphere.
So this is all connected. This is coming from human desire.
So in early teachings, we have
the teachings on
too much craving leads to suffering.
And so here, in the Diamond Sutra we're going into what is it that we crave?
What is it that leads us to have a kind of wrong perceptions
that bring about the suffering?
And so the insight of the Diamond Sutra is that these four -
That when we look deeply into our perceptions, we can find these four
somewhere there at the bottom.
Our ideas about ourselves.
Our ideas about living beings separated from
non living beings.
One of our long term lay practitioners, in Upper Hamlet,
he has dedicated his life to building sanghas that
live near fracking operations in the United Kingdom,
so that they can put their bodies there in a non-violent way
to shine light on what we are doing to Mother Earth
when we get caught in this kind of perception.
The Earth, that is not a living being.
So if we inject chemicals into the earth in order to produce more oil, produce more
other products that we have a lot of craving for, that is no problem.
And then we don't look at the suffering, we don't look at the water
that comes out of the tap that you can light on fire.
So sometimes, when we are on the bodhisattva path
we need to put our own body
in the way, in order to help people to look deeply into -
Encourage others to practice looking deeply.
Sometimes, that is why some of us become monks and nuns.
We want to deal with our own suffering, but we also have an aspiration,
we know sometimes we need to be, go a little bit outside of the norm
in order to help each other to look deeply into what is really going on.
We are attached to the idea of a life span, jīva.
We have the kind of thinking, 'Ah! Now it is this time in my life for me to do this.
And when I get old, I will be like that.
When I get old, I will travel. I will have a bucket list
and I will go to all those countries and do all those things.'
Thay often told the story
of Frederic, a business man,
whose wife came to Plum Village.
He told his son,
'Son, what do you want for Christmas?'
And the son was not sure what he really wanted for Christmas.
He had to think about it. And when he thought,
he shared with his father, 'Daddy, I want to be with you.
I want to be with you.'
Because Frederic was head of a large company, and he was so busy!
He could buy his son anything that he wants.
Anything that he imagines. But all his son wanted was just to spend more time
with his father.
And even when his wife
was sick,
then he could not- I'm sorry, not his wife it was his son, his son got sick,
and he could not
he could not be there, he could not leave work to go to the hospital to be there
with him. He had to ask his wife to represent him, to be present for him.
And he told his wife, 'Very soon I will be able to transmit all my responsibilities
in the company to someone else. So just in few years,
we will have so much free time! Just bear with me for this moment.'
And then, very soon after he told his wife that,
he was killed in a car accident.
And so all his hopes, his dreams to spend more time with his son,
to spend more time with his family,
they never had a chance to be realized.
And we all live that reality.
We live our life, we think, 'Oh! After I'm in Plum Village, I will go there,
I will do that'. But we don't know what will happen even in the next moment.
And so, when we learn to live happily, to dwell happily in the present moment,
without basing our thinking on these perceptions,
we no longer have fear.
We no longer
place our hopes and our dreams in some future time
when we will do this, or we will do that.
'I promise you! Just next year I will do that!
We will have enough time to do it.'
We learn to come back to ourselves, come back to the present moment,
and to really enjoy all the wonders of life that are here and now,
fully present for us.
Within us and around us.
So, mastering our thinking is learning how to dwell happily in the present moment.
Remembering all the good conditions for happiness that are already here.
That is how a bodhisattva masters her thinking.
And even though we have that teaching,
oftentimes we forget.
And we still hope, and we plan,
and it is not that planning is bad,
but we do it in a joyful way in the present moment.
And we are happy to let go of our plan.
We are happy to let go of it,
because we know that our happiness doesn't depend on that.
Our happiness doesn't depend on going to see that person for Christmas,
or being with our family for Christmas.
Or doing that thing, or getting that job, or getting that promotion.
But it is realized right here and right now with our mindful breathing,
with our mindful step, with the community of practice around us.
And we don't have to
become some important person
who is respected, who is respectable.
Sometimes our greatest teacher can be a homeless person in the street.
They can give us a wisdom that we need.
And that was the insight that the Buddha was trying to
give to people by living humbly himself, by begging for his food,
putting himself as the lowest in society.
Not riding around in fancy, on fancy elephants.
Some of his disciples, when they became monks,
they thought, 'Well, I'm a monk. But I can continue to ride around on an elephant
like I did before.'
That is why we have the precept about not riding in luxurious vehicles.
(Laughter)
Most of us don't think about riding an elephant as a luxurious vehicle,
but at that time, it was a sign of royalty.
So how can we learn to recognize these,
when our thinking is based on these perceptions?
When we look for approval from others,
how much of it is based on an idea of a self? Of a person?
We want to be appreciated, we want to be recognized.
We treat human beings well but we don't treat Mother Earth in a respectful way.
In Thay's commentary, we can read
that he loved to get out of the city and to go into the countryside.
And Thay said, because in the city, you have to, when you go to pee
you have to go into very smelly bathrooms, very
dirty, very unpleasant.
But in the countryside, you can go and you can pee anywhere you want.
But then, after a while, when Thay started to look deeply,
he felt very ashamed when he would go and pee behind a tree.
Because the tree was such a beautiful, sacred thing,
how could you pee on it?
(Laughter)
But then he - So he tried to go somewhere else,
but there would always be a bush or a tree somewhere, everywhere,
and then he realized, what would he do? He has to pee somewhere!
And then, one day he had the insight which is that peeing is also sacred.
(Laughter)
That he was caught in the idea that peeing
is something profane.
That by peeing on it he is disrespecting Mother Earth.
But we know when we pee we are returning our nutrients back to the earth.
So we can see that the tree is sacred,
and when we pee next to it it is also a sacred act.
That is the insight we get from freeing ourselves from this kind of perception.
We see we are not damaging the tree, we are not causing suffering to the tree.
So we pee in such a way, that we can bring happiness and joy
to us and to the tree.
We have to learn to recognize suffering. That is why it is the first noble truth.
And that suffering is not only in ourselves,
we need to recognize the suffering of fracking.
The suffering of not taking care of
the animals.
That is why in Plum Village we eat vegetarian, it's very easy for us,
because we know, we know how animals are treated when they are used for meat,
or to produce dairy products.
Now with the Internet, if you don't know, you can find out very quickly.
It is not difficult.
And so when we get in touch with that suffering,
and we really practice deeply the teaching of the Diamond Sutra,
we want to lead all beings to nirvana.
Then we become free from the idea that that cow, that that chicken
is separate from me.
That the tree is separate from me,
that the oil deep in the earth is separate from me.
That we are all part of one organism, Mother Earth.
And Mother Earth is also part of a beautiful family of brothers and sisters
going around our Sun.
And that the Sun is also part of a beautiful Cosmos, the Milky Way,
universe, galaxy, and that beyond that,
the whole universe of many hundreds of millions of galaxies.
And when we look in that way, we see that we are not alone.
So that teaching
that we see that no one single being has been saved
is another way of saying we are not alone.
We break through the barrier of loneliness.
And we see that this body, these feelings, these perceptions,
these mental formations, and this consciousness
are not me. They are not mine.
They are not a separate self.
We become free from all those concepts.
And then we can begin the true work
of liberation
knowing that not any single being has been liberated.
That is how we master our thinking.
That is how we set our mind.
(Bell)
So,
so we didn't get very far today
in the sutra, but I think that
we get to touch the essence.
We cannot be caught in words.
Many times in the Diamond Sutra we will hear something like,
'When the Tathagata speaks of signs, there are no signs being talked about.
Subhuti, what is called Buddhadharma is everything that is not Buddhadharma."
When the Buddha talks about the highest, most fulfilled awakened mind,
there is nothing that can be called the highest, most fulfilled awakened mind.
That is why it is called the highest, most fulfilled awakened mind.
That is the refrain that we see often in the Diamond Sutra.
And it seems like, 'What sense do we make of that?'
And that is also to help us break through this barrier
of perception.
Of getting caught in a perception.
Thay talked about one Zen master
that when he - Because everyone keeps saying,
Buddha, Buddha, so much, Buddha this and Buddha that
that he got so sick and he said, 'I have to go to the stream outside
and wash my mouth out, it's like saying a filthy word.
If you say the Buddha one more time.'
And he is trying to point out that tendency we have
to idolize, whether it is the word, whether it's a person,
whether it's a concept.
And so when we talk about the highest, most fulfilled awakened mind,
we can start repeating it and it loses all of its meaning.
And so when the Buddha says,
'What I call the highest, most fulfilled awakened mind,
that is not the highest, most fulfilled awakened mind.'
It means that it is not the word, highest, most fulfilled awakened mind,
it is not that phrase.
It is much more than that. It can only be realized.
That is why I just call it highest, most fulfilled awakened mind.
But you need to realize it yourself. You need to touch it by breaking through
and freeing yourself from these wrong perceptions.
So I invite you to continue your study of the Diamond Sutra.
And as you go out, and be back to your family, back to your friends,
you can really have a chance to sit and look deeply at them in that way.
You think, 'That is my mother, that is my father.
That is my son, that is my daughter, that is my husband.'
And because your ideas of husband, and father, and mother, and son and daughter
have become a view,
a perception,
maybe you don't really see them as they are,
as this wondrous manifestation
of beauty, of understanding, as well as of suffering,
of pain, of ignorance.
But with the help of this teaching,
you can sit and look at them, and really look at them.
Look them in the eye. You don't have to say anything.
You can smile.
That is a smile of a bodhisattva.
So I wish you well on your path of practice,
and thank you for being together on the bodhisattva path.
(Bell)
(Small bell)