Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute teaching on calm abiding meditation, Choedak explores the often-surprising role of thoughts in developing stability. Rather than viewing thoughts as mere obstacles, he shows how they emerge naturally as mental stability grows, and how a meditator can shift from fighting thoughts to observing them with precision. He walks through the progression from focusing on the breath as the primary object, to treating thoughts and other objects as secondary meditation objects that can be used to rest the mind when concentration wavers. Through concrete examples—a knock at the door, a bell ringing, a horse passing—he demonstrates how mindfulness of thought reveals that thoughts have no independent existence and cannot truly destabilize practice unless we grasp them as solid realities. He then connects this to the broader emptiness teachings, showing how understanding the illusory nature of both thoughts and external phenomena liberates us from reactive patterns and habitual misunderstandings in daily life. Suitable for practitioners already engaged in sitting meditation.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 13 TtT.mp3
UUID: b01b99bb-3ac8-4364-a7a3-f4fbf8c659d5
Teacher: Choedak
Collection: Calm Abiding (Choedak)
Date: 1987 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~6,220
Now this brings you to the next topic. Mindfulness as a thought. Because the moment you’re watching the mind from the body and mind as a feeling, you become then more aware of your thoughts. I mean you had no intention. It wasn’t in your list of things to do that I’m going to watch my thoughts.
Your idea was I’m going to be calm and have no thoughts. Thought wasn’t at all in your idea of having. But you just realized that it’s something it needs to be looked at. Mindfulness of thought. And you can disassociate the mind, the thought, from feeling.
Whether the thought… I believe that thought precedes feelings. Thought precedes feelings, unless it’s regurgitated past feelings. Then it doesn’t seem to require much of a thought and the feeling it takes on it. But most probably it’s the thought that precedes feeling.
If you see something, if you see an object go past that door, and we say, what is it? What is it? First, we have to conjure up the label. Horse. Is it a horse?
Is the thought, is the thought our mind labeling it? Does the object exist independent of our thought? Even there was a horse that went past, but who, what is a horse? Horse is a labeled phenomenon by us as human beings. If you ask the horse, do you think are you called horse? He says, no. I don’t know what we’re talking about. I don’t know what people call us.
I’m me. So thoughts are just mere labels. Thoughts are mere labels. Thoughts are mere labels. Whether we have any role in making the thought thought or whether thoughts are just ready made product as well, like feelings will appear that way. When you look at, when you become more conscientious, you can only see thought when your mind is focused on the breath is really stable. And when your mind is focused on the breath, until then you didn’t know breath also was a thought. And that’s allowable thought, I suppose, that you focus on. And any other thought that comes to you it takes you away and therefore you try to come back and you develop attachment to breath and you develop aversion to non-breath thoughts and you realize that. And then you start seeing thoughts. You say, ah, if there were fewer thoughts I can spend more time on the breath.
That will be good. Who said one breath, one thought is allowable and others are not? Now this comes a big inner conflict. Of course meditators, all while developing stability in the breath, they want to just stay with that and not many thoughts. But the whole idea of your ability to see thoughts is not an obstacle.
Your ability to see is a progression of your practice, is a sign of your progress of your practice. Previously we weren’t able to see breath. Then we became able to see breath. Previously we were not able to see thought. Now we are able to see thought.
And previously we weren’t able to see enlightenment and we might see it too. So don’t stay alarmed. Stay unalarmed by the existence of thoughts, but see what the thoughts are and see whether you could choose one thought from the other thought. Is the breath a thought? And you have to say, oh, I’m sorry, it is.
So it’s not the thought that we are against. It’s not the thought that will make us unable to stay calm. It’s not that. It’s what we do with it. So if any thought, if any non-breath thought comes to our mind, now this is stated in the śamatha manuals, that when you develop wisdom to appoint the thoughts as your secondary object of meditation.
Secondary object of meditation. First, the primary object of meditation is breath and thought, our secondary object of meditation, because it takes a while for you to appoint that because until then you’ve been rejecting the thoughts: you go away, how are you coming here when I’m focusing on it. So later on only you befriend the thoughts, you realize that you have to make friends with the thought so that you know exactly what they are, if there are any. And when you begin to do that, then you use the thought, secondary thought as a resting place when the mind gets agitated, when no longer can stay on the breath. Just see whether you can deliberately focus on that thought or that object.
So maybe a bell, the bell. And after a while of counting rounds of breath, bell seems to be something nice to look at. You rest your mind on the bell, and then until you get bored with the bell, and if you get bored of the bell, bring it back to the breath. So that’s the secondary object.
Secondary object, the thought, any thought or any object used, appointed as a secondary object of meditation. And see whether you can now interchange your mind between these two chosen objects and not the third one. Not the third. First you were allowed one, you can’t stay with one. And when you’re having difficulty with one, you have other thoughts and now you have learned to stay with two thoughts.
And whether you can now stay with two thoughts interchangeably without being agitated by other thoughts. So in many ways the more you are able to gain stability of the breath thought, the more you will be able to see the existence of other thoughts. But when you see the thought, normally when we have thought, we try to lump those thoughts into past thoughts. Present thought is sandwiched with the past thought, and then with also those future thoughts, then becomes a phrase, and sentence maybe, and then becomes a story. But if you keep, if you singularize those thoughts, if you alienate those present thoughts from the past and the future thought.
And simply use the present mindfulness of the breath as that which alienates the thought from having other thoughts. The thought itself, thought as a singular, just a thought. When you can see it’s just a thought, it’s a lot easier to handle. When it becomes two thoughts, three thoughts, four thoughts, a phrase, an alarm, a statement, and then it becomes too big a reality.
It’s not just a thought anymore. You can say it’s been bugging me for a few days. It wasn’t just a thought. It can stay on quite a long time and has made up some kind of pattern. And now when you are able to focus your concentration on the object of breath, object of meditation of the breath, when you see a thought, the thought instead of destabilizing actually seems to sharpen your concentration.
You’re more sensitive to the arising of thoughts, the coming of the thoughts, but at the same time you’re not as agitated as you used to be. You almost have become very dependent on the thoughts so that how soon can you reinforce your concentration on the object of meditation depends how quickly you saw the thoughts. Because sometimes we don’t see the thought coming and they already have swum to you and all of a sudden it’s too late. And how did you guys all got in? I thought the front door was locked. Front door was locked but back door was open.
And we thought we were focusing on the breath and nothing else, but all of a sudden there’s just thoughts mushrooming in the middle. And just to watch your own part is a bit of a handful of a job. Let alone anything. So you can see how human beings are naturally, naturally in everyday life, to be sharp or intelligent is one thing, but to be able to be focused and calm and do nothing that is harmful to others is quite difficult, I think, to keep. Because mind is often swayed by defilements and conditions and circumstances, things are so impacting on each other.
How can you sit and stay so guarded that you never do anything wrong or think anything wrong or say anything wrong? It’s very, very hard. And unless you’re locked up, it’s difficult. So staying in retreat is quite a good sort of luxurious stage where you definitely get to know and see your mind. You can see the lack of progress but at the same time you can see the slow progress.
Slow progress, very, very appreciable progress. However slow it is. People say, oh, I’ve been doing this retreat. I’m just able to start liking to sit. And that’s about it.
That’s the progress. The progress is that I’m able to like sitting. Taking a while, that’s quite a nice thing because being able to make such small but beautiful progress seems to last long. And the problems are also very small. Misunderstood ones create huge problems. When we understand it, it’s small, but when we understand it, they just make a very tangible gem.
It’s a gem. It’s small, but it’s still a gem. What people call sit well, can you sit well? Means whatever circumstances you are, how well you situate yourself. Now that’s quite a talent, being able to situate well, adjust yourself in a given situation and not react irrationally, and negotiate with the situation, and sitting well really, and not saying, no, I want to move over there, that’s where the sun is shining, can I go over there?
Not restless like that. Just sit wherever you are, like the Buddha, under the tree, whether it’s sunny or cold, and he just sat there. He didn’t move. In the afternoon one spot. He didn’t say, I shall move over there. And there was no, nothing. Didn’t even have a blanket, I think. Nothing, nothing to choose from. Just sheer discipline.
No dining room to go to? No hot running waters? No chefs cooking for you? Birds dropping on your nose? Still concentration is best friend?
Really, you can’t stop admiring the effort of the Buddha. If you can sit well better on third day or fourth day, you have reason to like it and treat it as a precious gem. Buddha would have been accumulating like that every day. Wow. It doesn’t just happen overnight, but it did happen.
Sheer perseverance, maintaining oneself. Because we remember the bodhichitta at the beginning, generating enlightenment thought, generating the right thought, the thought of enlightenment, instead of negotiating with all other incurring thoughts and choosing and transforming them into inherent enlightenment thought. So the mindfulness of thought is most important. The former two are forerunners for you to be able to develop mindfulness of thought. Because when you have the mindfulness of thought, then only you can develop mindfulness of the enlightenment thought.
And in particular in Mahāyāna teaching, but not forgetting bodhichitta, thought of enlightenment is one of its main precepts. Now, it is keeping our thought, keeping our thought alive, keeping our wish alive. And one doesn’t have mindfulness. However precious that wish is, we cannot keep it. And that’s what the mindfulness of thought is. So when you start seeing a thought, should really treasure it. When you start seeing your thoughts and then you have a choice of your thought to focus on the breath, and how readily you are able to bring back your mind to the breath. And what is your opinion about other thoughts when they just get crushed? And do you fall with them? Or they fall upon you?
Or you stand, they fall all over your feet. Let that be, that’s a good one. You wouldn’t fall with them, but you can see them coming and turning into nothing. Because you remain unperturbed and therefore the thought just, it’s just like the pole, the flags. No flags or no flapping. The wind blows but nothing. It just comes from this side, goes past you, goes that way, and nothing. Thoughts are like that. You thought you had one, but when you look at it, you can’t see one.
You can’t measure it, you can’t weigh it. You can’t DNA test it. It doesn’t take any space. Has it got a tendency with you? Oh, some thoughts do. Some thoughts have a fairly secure room. Only if the bodhichitta had it, we’d be good. Only if the bodhichitta had the tendency in us that it always stays there and it doesn’t go away. So if you really look at the thoughts, they say look at the origin of the thoughts, look at the lifespan of the thought, look at where the thought goes to in order to develop mindfulness of thought. Right, we were talking about the breath, gentle beginning, prime climax of the inhalation and the gentle ending.
Now that’s exactly what we’re talking about thought, beginning of the thought, the origin of the thoughts. Look at the origin of the thought and the abiding place of the thought and where it goes to. Now you’re using the same technique, you’re looking at the thought where the thought came from. Did the thought come from the object that moved, which I thought was a horse? So I can’t find the origin where the thought came from.
I could say the object, but without object moving, I can have thoughts, all sorts of things. So the object, origin of thought is not a moving object. Origin of thought is unfindable. If the origin of thought is unfindable, the production of it would be highly unlikely. And it doesn’t really matter where it went or where it didn’t because if there was no production, you wouldn’t worry where it went to.
So all thoughts are illusory. All thoughts are like a phantom. Now when you can meditate, Buddha used these eight similes to teach emptiness: illusion, dream, rainbow, twinkling of the stars, lightning, flash of lightning in the dark night. All thoughts are nothing more than that. When you see a lightning, you say, oh, there was a lightning, but when you thought you saw it, but when you look at it, there isn’t one. But you keep thinking there was a lightning and write about it. So just like a flash, just like a dream. Now when you understand, when your stability of understanding of the thought is like that, then you focus on the breath, all thoughts, whatever thought arises, they only are so momentary, so fleeting I think, they don’t stay, they have no, thought has by nature don’t stay long unless you unknowingly hugged it, kept it, as if it’s something very, very cherishable. The thought doesn’t stay, and if you really, if you have a surgery, ask the doctor, please look where all my thoughts are stored.
I don’t think they can find anything. Maybe some biochemical product will be interesting to watch, but I don’t think they can say this is this thought, this is that thought, they can’t. Because thought is not a compounded aggregate. It requires five elements. Whatever is produced out of five elements usually have weight, color, shape, density, softness, texture.
Thought has none of that. So that’s why thought is like a flash of lightning. It’s just like a dream. Now when you are able to treat like that, you come back to your mind on the breath as object of meditation more readily, so your thought cannot really become an incessant cause of suffering, or problem, or irritability. It doesn’t.
The more thought you see, then the more you are able to see the emptiness of your mind. Emptiness of thought, so to speak. You can see the emptiness of thought. And it’s not very far, not very far from here onwards for the mind to realize the mindfulness of thought, mindfulness of thought enables you, meditational, you are able to stay longer on a calm abiding situation because thought doesn’t, hasn’t got the ability to destabilize or irritate you as much as it had previously. You’re no longer demonizing thought.
You’re no longer demonizing object. You’re seeing the emptiness of everything. When you start seeing emptiness of everything, and your thought is a prime, a good example of that, you are liberated. When you have not many difficult thoughts, you are liberated. Enlightenment is where you completely vacate all difficult thoughts. Completely vacating your Buddha-nature of all afflictive thoughts is enlightenment.
Enlightenment is completely emptying everything that has been cluttering our walls. And when you are sitting in the meditation, that’s what you will slowly achieve. The more calm you are, the more precisely you see the relative phenomena of moving objects. Definitely it was a horse, and I thought it was a horse, but it’s merely labeled horse. And because of that I don’t give so much credence to what I saw or what I say, but because I see everything as just merely labeled like illusion.
When one can see that, that the teaching of Maya, that everything is an illusion, it helps. It helps to dismiss and downplay all the tough problems. Even if the problems, they are problems, the problems only stop. If somebody knocked the door and you were meditating for instance, and first you heard about it, you say, ah, let him knock a few more times if he’s serious, he’ll keep knocking. And then of course he stopped after third knocking, then you start worrying more, oh who must that be? Then you are, the knocking, you are knocking constantly.
This is what we’re talking about, mindfulness of thought. So when you’re not mindful of thought, it’s difficult to govern. Person has left. You’re thinking who it might be. You didn’t have the courage to open the door as soon as he knocked.
See? Basic hypocrisy looming here. And so this is mindfulness or lack thereof of thought can do that. When you heard the door knock, say, is this my discursive thought or somebody really knocking? Probably somebody is knocking, but I wouldn’t mind. I let it go. Because if I didn’t mind it, it wouldn’t matter. Even if you knock hundred times, it wouldn’t matter. Hundred times is after all accumulation of many ones.
Many ones become hundred. They never become all of a sudden hundred. Just one, one, one, one. So if you’re mindful with the one thought, two thought, four thought, dissolve, dissolve, dissolve. As soon as they rise, they dissolve.
It’s constant sheer concentration. So that’s why when you’re using the breath as an object of meditation, it increases your perceptivity, perception, to be able to know your thought. Mindfulness of breath straight away because breath itself is not a visual or so much of a sensual object, but yet you can feel. And the moment you focus on that, then you become more aware of your thought.
And you’re becoming aware of your thought, but not letting it destabilize us, but to increase our awareness, therefore we are seeing our thought, mindfulness of thought. Mindfulness of thought is, of course, when the Buddha said, form is emptiness. Form is not other than emptiness. Feeling is emptiness, feeling is not other than emptiness. And likewise, mind is emptiness.
Mind is not other than emptiness. Emptiness is not something you refute the existence of phenomena. It’s really affirmation of what things actually are by nature. All things are by nature emptiness. That’s a great affirmation. It’s not a refutation of everything.
It’s affirming that everything is basically emptiness. And the moment you are starting to dawn these experiences, very, very genuine ones, this is not intellectually believing in some theory, but you just understand that thoughts are empty. As long as you realize thoughts are empty, you don’t fall victim to it. Because of that, you don’t take action on that thought, and because there are no consequences of that thought. All karmas are misunderstood thoughts executed on its behalf.
Through body, speech, and mind, all is just like concretized thought. Concretized thought becomes karma. That’s why when Buddhism says karma, they say it’s intention. If there’s no intention, there’s no karma. Intention is thought. The intention to do something, a thought to go somewhere, then one goes. Without the thought proceeding, one doesn’t have, will actually do the going, act of going. Likewise, unless one is able to see the thought in its contents, one is not going to be able to choose whether that is what is called positive wholesome thought or unwholesome thoughts or neutral thoughts. So while you’re meditating of course, śamatha wise on the object of meditation, whatever thought comes they are all called discursive thoughts.
So we will discuss later on about what kind of discursive thoughts. There are wholesome discursive thoughts, unwholesome discursive thoughts, neutral discursive thoughts for a śamatha meditator. For a non-śamatha meditator, when they have wholesome thoughts, all of a sudden feel so loved, so grateful to somebody, and it’s good, wholesome thought. Generally that’s a good karma because you’re developing wholesome thought. But when you’re meditating, even wholesome thought is considered as a discursive thought.
So, but of course there is a difference between wholesome thought, discursive thought, wholesome thought, as well as discursive thought, unwholesome thought. A person supposed to be meditating on the breath, but he’s developing strong devotion to the Buddha, or strong liking of something or whatever, and become totally emotional, you know that. And that as far as śamatha meditation, it’s a distraction.
It’s a not subtle, it’s a gross excitement and perpetuated by the wholesome thought. That normally is very difficult to give rise to, when that comes in a meditation one can’t help but to make it grow. And the technique of śamatha which is not analytical, and which is therefore one-pointed concentration, one-pointed concentration meditation during which one is not supposed to analyze and go beyond, stay with the technique to focus, go back again and again with object of meditation. And so once, that’s why they say gross excitement is where a person is feeling so happy about their life, all of a sudden in the middle of meditation. I mean these are valuable experiences of meditation, but at the same time not something we need to, we should become attached to.
If we become attached to the temporal, I would say, happiness that one finds in the meditation practices, it is a gross excitement. That gross excitement usually comes from after a long effort of practicing, only you are able to again experience gross excitement. Most people don’t even know how to have gross excitement, but in the middle of meditation you will have it, you will have the gross excitement, and it’s gross only in the sense there are more subtle to come, there are more subtle forms that is yet to come, but otherwise it seems completely virtuous, it is doing no harm to anybody, it seems like a very happiness-providing state of mind, it’s perfectly that. And that is the kind of mindfulness of thought.
Now, in relation to this gross excitement, when you have gross excitement, you have an object of gross excitement. You have an object in your mind that your mind was focused upon where it therefore lost from the breath or whatever the object happened to be. So your mind went to some object or some situation in your life that you reflected and you feel so happy in the middle of a meditation you feel so happy. And some people have this what they call the pride of saying, oh I knew, I knew I was intelligent, I knew I can do this meditation, look look there it goes. I knew I was a genius kind. All of a sudden they’re thinking like this in the middle of meditation.
It’s one of the eight entanglements, self-entanglements. I think these are natural, you can’t deter these experiences. You’ve got to face them and then undo it and let them go. You can’t deter them and avoid them. That’s the process of meditation and stages of meditation.
Experience teaches us when you have this. But had you not done meditation you may not have been able to think that way, feel that way, see those thoughts, and that’s why it’s only gross in relation to subtle, but it’s not necessarily non-virtuous in its content, and encouragement is very necessary whether it’s from others or from ourselves. But if the overblown encouragement goes and becomes pride, subtle pride, pride of that, but pride of arrogance within the meditation, within meditation. Ah, why is somebody so restless? I haven’t been moving at all.
Wish they were not doing like this. Why aren’t they like me? Hush. They should go somewhere else. You can see the subtle, it’s a totally distractive, very discursive.
So as a group, meditation is very good for the subtle ego. I’ve been doing this years. When did this guy start it? Even though you’re calm, you can see you’re doing this. Otherwise, it totally overtakes us.
It totally overtakes us. We have lost even though you’ve been meditating so many years, so what? You’re just getting in the middle of this puddle. Puddle of selfing, completely engrossed in this state of arrogance, which is not only distraction, but it’s non-virtuous. So it’s easy to see, easy to have discursive thoughts quickly come in as a great helper. Humility is a long, and humility is the best of all outcomes of good experienced practitioner. Humility is seen, will be seen in a seasoned good practitioner. Years of experience, more humility they increase. More contentment they have.
Less demand they have. Calmness completely nourishes them. They crave nothing, for things that is within them is adequately there for their sustenance, and therefore they don’t make ill in comparison with others. Their thoughts are not incoherent anymore because of that it doesn’t allow itself or prey to discursive thoughts such as gross excitement. So in order to develop stage by stage śamatha meditation, you can appreciate, learn to develop mindful of body, mindful of the feeling, then mindful of the thought.
And the next one, if your mindfulness of thought has now become registered fairly, very, very clearly, then even when you’re out of meditation, there is a thing called mindfulness of phenomena. You’re more aware of things there, phenomena. And the phenomena, without your thought are phenomena anything. Or without you, a phenomena exist, without your existence anybody exist, type of doubt or curiosity comes in your mind. This called mindfulness of phenomena, your awareness, your thought makes you to wonder the existence of phenomena, whether phenomena has independent existence, independent of you.
Most people believe when I die, everybody will be around except me type of feeling. Therefore, they fear death because I have to go alone type of thing, leaving this beautiful world behind, as if the world exists independent of us. When you die, actually world actually dies too. World actually dies, but most dying people don’t understand it. They think the world exists, and they also continue to exist.
They’ve only departed from the body, but they actually continue to exist, because they didn’t have mindfulness of thought. One who has the mindful thought in real living life, at the moment of death is very easy, not a difficult part at all. Because life was a long thought. And death of it is a short thought. Why make it long?
Life was already long enough. The mindfulness of thought, this is why you can appreciate at this stage why we had one school in Buddhism called Mind Only School. People used this theory that everything is mind. No matter how they study phenomena, think everything is a reflection of mind, and there’s a lot of truth in that. How far it can take, it’s a different matter, but for the time being it will suffice.
It will be more than sufficient to think, it will be maybe very safe to think everything’s my mind, but one shouldn’t get stuck in that, because it could be quite demeaning too later on. Think everything is my mind, and if all you have is defilements and negativity, you can’t really blame yourself too much. And so that’s why mindfulness of phenomena is very important. There are phenomena that if there are no labeling base like horse, you wouldn’t just call a horse. So labeling, the mind which just does the thinking and conceptualizing labeling only does so when there are certain characteristics of phenomena that exist. What defines a human being, a person, what defines a human being, what he does, what he’s able to do, and we all have certain way of defining everything. A table is which at least have a couple of legs, and these days they make three-legged tables too, so you can’t say four legs is table, definition of table.
It’s quite difficult these days. Maybe there’s not only one, maybe only one leg these days. Only one-legged tables. So in the old days there was a definition of table, four legs and a top on it which support objects. So definitions are just defined for the function of what phenomena provides. But you don’t call table to anything, like you can’t say this is a table. You can say it, but you’ll have great difficulty putting a cup on it. Depends how big your cup is, I suppose. Depends how big your belly is too. So everything’s relative.
So everything’s just merely labeled based on many, many factors other than itself. So phenomena has no independent existence. And that’s really liberating because then your object, your objects of your thoughts becomes now liberatable. You can liberate the objects because otherwise we’ve been holding some objects with great aversion and great anger and great attachment as if these are the valid objects of aversion. These are the valid objects of attachment.
These factors are given rise because of the factors that we cushion to it, not because it exists independently. This is, by the way, not even bell, let alone table. What’s the definition of bell? Give a just simple definition, you’ll be safe. That we can hear.
Come on. Ding ding. Okay, okay. Good, good, good, good. But you said that too.
Okay, good. I wouldn’t make it, take it a bit more difficult and make more complicated. Okay, say ding ding bell. Takes ages. It hasn’t proven to be bell.
It probably will never. It takes my hand to ring maybe, if I’m so willing. If my ringing will prove it’s the bell, if it’s the bell, let’s try. Oh, that’s not bell. So it’s not my effort of ringing that makes bell bell.
It’s not us labeling this bell bell that makes it a bell. So what is phenomena? Is there any phenomena that really exists what we label it for? So there’s so many causes and conditions. There is nothing inherently existing phenomena. Even say, I pick the bell up and ring the bell. It’s good that you have two ears. If you didn’t have ear, even I ring the bell, you wouldn’t hear it.
So this way you slowly disaggregate the lack, disaggregate the existence of inherently existing bell. If one condition is missing, the phenomena have no valid existence. And that includes us as a hearer or labeler or a cognizer of the object. Phenomena itself never says, I’m a bell, please ring me. Ring me. Come on, ring. Phenomena doesn’t. So phenomena are merely labeled objects by us, by namers, by labelers. This is very, while this is not very philosophical even though you thought it might have been, not really. It’s really, really practical too if you really think in everyday life situation when you have a problem and you have mindfulness of thought and you know it’s not really my thought, it’s that, this is the problem, the object is the problem. Whether the object really is independently the problem without your thought, without anything else to do, you can actually excuse many things from the object and that object is not entirely responsible for all the things you thought it was.
It completely liberates the tension and misunderstanding that we have of phenomena, of objects, of people, or events. It completely liberates us from this danger of misunderstanding, danger of this ignorance, not understanding of things. So mindfulness of phenomena is something a śamatha meditator who particularly does the retreat, goes out, will be more aware of. All phenomena now manifest to you. Does that really inherently exist?
Even if one phenomena gives rise to some thought or feelings or emotion in you, is it the phenomenon that gives rise or is it what you do with the thought? Does it depend on you? So there’s a greater degree of flexibility as to what you do with the thought. Because normally we think our thought is caused by some other object, and therefore we can’t be bothered to take responsibility of our thought because we think it’s caused by factors other than us. And we can’t be enough, we can’t be intelligent enough to view inwardly that what factors, what makes the phenomena phenomena is not the object itself, but what is the perceiver, how is the perceiver seeing of it.
That’s why Buddha said, not only, he didn’t say just, when he says form is emptiness, form is not other than emptiness. Sound is emptiness, sound is not other than emptiness. He’s talking about mindfulness of phenomena. He’s talking about meditate on phenomena. Sense, visual objects, sense tactile objects, all five sense objects.
He says meditate on them. That’s the whole topic of the Heart Sūtra. We meet our problems in life. If we think somebody did something to hurt us, it is a little scar of mine, it’s because we misread that, misread the phenomenon. We misunderstood the phenomenon, and therefore we have the perception.
The perception was empty, emptiness. Emptiness is not other than perception, but we make, we concretize the perception as to be correct and valid, and we have since been the custodian of that perception. We couldn’t change it, better or worse. It has stayed that way because we grasp it as truly existent. So you can see the teaching on the emptiness is not