Heart Sutra Retreat — 2011-04-22

Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.

About this talk. In this five-hour Easter retreat, Ven Jampa Ignyen guides practitioners through foundational teachings on the Heart Sūtra before addressing the text itself. He traces the twelve deeds of a Buddha, the three turnings of the wheel of Dharma, and the four types of wisdom from which understanding emerges. He then walks through the sūtra’s opening sections line by line—the assembly at Vulture’s Peak, Avalokiteśvara’s vision of emptiness, Śāriputra’s pivotal question—unpacking the five aggregates, the eighteen bases, and the three types of suffering. Throughout, Jampa Ignyen returns to one practical anchor: establishing virtue and compassion in the present moment is non-negotiable, and it is from that foundation that the perfection of wisdom arises. The retreat weaves together story, cosmology, and frank discussion of how the mind resists its own transformation.

File metadata (for organising)

File: 2011 04 22 Heart Sūtra Easter Retreat.mp3

UUID: 83557c30-2b6b-4042-822e-4401e6b88b1a

Teacher: Ven Jampa Ignyen

Collection: Heart Sūtra Retreat (Ven Jampa Ignyen)

Date: 2011-04-22

Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide

Duration: 319.6 minutes

Words: ~32,055

We’re gonna do four sessions. We scheduled sessions. Two in the morning, two in the afternoon, but we may vary this depending on just how how we go. Otherwise, I think we’ll post this up somewhere so people can see exactly how we start anyway. Now I think the best thing to do would be to do some just preliminary prayers, which is traditional in the beginning.

Now we’ve got the small prayer book and I noticed this also has the Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra in the beginning as well, so that’s really ideal. So we will recite the Heart Sūtra, but we won’t do it first. We’ll just start on page number four with refuge and bodhicitta and which is about halfway down page four, refuge and bodhicitta. And then we’ll just do a short mandala offering, which is on page five. So first we recite the refuge and bodhicitta in English three times.

I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Supreme Assembly. By my practice of listening to the teachings and other perfections, may I become a Buddha to the benefit all sentient beings. I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and supreme assembly. By my practice of listening to the teachings and other perfections, may I become a Buddha to benefit all sentient beings. I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the supreme assembly.

By my practice of listening to the teachings and other perfections, may I become a Buddha to the benefit of all sentient beings. So we’ll just do a short mandala offering on page five, and we’ll recite this in Tibetan. This is quite a traditional offering. It’s really to generate some merit before we discuss the Heart Sūtra. Okay, so these are traditional recitations before we engage in something virtuous.

Now, before we proceed, we should just think of our motivation and think of the state of our mind in the present moment and check up on where our mind is. And we notice that initially when we look at the mind it’s not necessarily virtuous. It’s not necessarily just dwelling a comfortable, virtuous state, but often it is mixed with various attitudes or thoughts or concerns and so forth. So, in checking on the state of the mind, what we’re looking at is whether it’s virtuous or not. Now, how do we recognize when the mind is virtuous?

One way we can tell whether the mind is virtuous is whether it’s influenced by love and compassion, patience, faith, these sorts of attitudes. And in fact the mind of virtue itself is a mind that fundamentally is not engaged in harming other beings. And really virtue taken to step beyond that is a mind engaged in benefiting other sentient beings. These are really the two types of virtuous practice that we can engage in: not harming and benefiting. So if the mind itself is settled, dwelling, comfortable in that sort of a state, it’s an indication that it’s virtuous.

Because we realize that really where our mind the state of our mind is where we are heading. It’s our direction, our current state of mind. So we need as much as possible to make our mind virtuous. Because the mind doesn’t just naturally become virtuous, it takes effort. It takes a lot of effort to make the mind more pliable, more flexible, more able to function and engage in helping other beings.

The virtuous mind is able to do this. If the mind is not virtuous, it’s not very functional, it’s not very pliable, flexible, even practical. So right at the very beginning, and the reason for reciting these prayers, is really to mix the mind with a little bit of virtue as much virtue as we can generate in the present moment. And we realized too that this mind then, the more it mixes with virtue, then the more beneficial it is for ourselves. And the more it has a heritage of happiness.

It will bring happiness. Making it virtuous, in a way, we’re doing is we’re eliminating the negative habits of the mind and replacing those with positive attitudes. So this does take effort. It takes a huge amount of effort and it’s something that we need to be engaged in full time. And it really is just a recognition that our minds themselves do tend to become a little bit negative.

Just naturally. And we need to put some effort into making them positive, making them white. In fact, this is the whole issue about white and black. We need white types of mind. So, minds that are mixed with love, with compassion, mixed with patience, mixed with faith and so forth.

Now again, this does take effort and as much effort as we can put into this, then more beneficial the greater benefit it is for ourselves. And in fact, you know, sometimes we need to actually just spend the entire entire hour even just improving our present state of mind. So, virtue is absolutely not negotiable. We need to establish it continuously. Now why are we generating virtuous motivation?

It’s really that we’re going to start looking at the Heart Sūtra and also in order to really successfully begin our contemplation of the Heart Sūtra requires a great deal of merit. And what is merit? Merit is the accumulation of virtue. As it said in one particular sūtra, Sonam denpa means Sonam Namkyang Drup. A person who possesses merit is able to accomplish what they wish to accomplish.

So really having merit which means having an accumulation of virtue allows us to achieve what we seek to achieve. So we really do need to generate virtue in the present. So just while we’re contemplating virtue, we’ll also now just quietly look at the breath. Having set the mind in a virtuous state, and we’re just simply going to watch the breath. Watching the breath here is really to counter discursive thinking.

So again, what we’re doing here is watching the breath as we breathe in and out. And in doing this, we’re relaxing the mind itself. Just letting go of thoughts in general, just letting them pass. So we just stop the meditation there. Right now we will just read through the Heart Sūtra itself which is on the first page, inner page, starts on the inside page of the prayer book.

The Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra. Thus I have heard at one time. The Bhagavan was dwelling on Vulture’s Peak in Rajgriha, together with a great community of monks and a great community of bodhisattvas. At that time, the Bhagavan was absorbed in a concentration on the categories of phenomena called profound perception. Also at that time, the bodhisattva, mahasattva, Aria Avalokiteśvara, looked upon the very practice of the profound perfection of wisdom and beheld those five aggregates also as empty of inherent nature.

Then, through the power of Buddha, the Venerable Śāriputra said, Listen to the bodhisattva, mahasattva, Aria Avalokiteśvara. How should any son of the lineage train who wishes to practice the activity of the profound perfection of wisdom? He said that, and the bodhisattva mahasattva, Ārya Avalokiteśvara, said to the Venerable Śāriputra, Śāriputra, any son of the lineage or daughter of the lineage who wishes to practice the activity of the profound perfection of wisdom should look upon it like this, correctly and repeatedly beholding those five aggregates also as empty of inherent nature. Form is empty, emptiness is form. Emptiness is not other than form.

Form is also not other than emptiness. In the same way, feeling, discrimination, compositional factors and consciousness are empty. Śāriputra: Likewise, all phenomena are emptiness, without characteristics, unproduced, unceased, stainless, not without stain, not deficient, not fulfilled. Śāriputra, therefore in emptiness there is no form, no feeling, no discrimination, no compositional factors, no consciousness, no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind, no visual form, no sound, no odour, no taste, no objective touch, and no phenomenon. There is no eye element and so on up to and including no mind element and no mental consciousness element.

There is no ignorance, no extinction of ignorance and so on up to and including no ageing and death and no extinction of ageing and death. Similarly, there is no suffering, origination, cessation and path. There is no exalted wisdom, no attainment and no non attainment. Śāriputra, therefore, therefore, Bodhisattvas rely on and dwell on the perfection of wisdom, the mind without obscuration and without fear. Having completely passed beyond error, they reach the endpoint of nirvana.

All the Buddhas who dwell in the three times also manifestly and completely awaken to unsurpassable perfect enlightenment and reliance on the perfection of wisdom. Therefore, the mantra of the perfection of wisdom, the mantra of great knowledge, the unsurpassed mantra, the mantra equal to the unequaled, the mantra that thoroughly pacifies all suffering should be known as the truth since it is not false. The mantra of the perfection of wisdom is declared: Tadhyata Om Gate Gate Pāragate Pārasamgate Bodhi Svāhā. Śāriputra, the bodhisattva, mahasattva should train in the profound perfection of wisdom just like that. Then the bodhisattva, mahasattva, Aria Avalokiteśvara, saying, Well said, well said, son of the lineage.

It is like that. It is like that. One should practice the profound perfection of wisdom just as you have indicated, even the Tathāgata as well. The Bhagavan having thus spoken, the Venerable Śāriputra, the Bodhisattva mahasattva, Ārya Avalokiteśvara, those surrounding in the entirety along with the world of gods, humans and asuras and were overjoyed and highly praised what was spoken by the Bhagavan. So that is the Heart Sūtra.

There are a few terms in there, Sanskrit terms, which are a little bit obscure. But one of the aims of the weekend, our course, will be to unpack some of the terms that exist there and look clearly at the meaning, the underlying meaning of the Sūtra. Right. Everyone everyone’s seen this sūtra before. Right?

Everyone has had okay. Good. Now before we actually begin an explanation of the sūtra, I wanted to talk a little bit about, in a way the background of the Sūtra. And just to try and put it into context, because it’s quite an esoteric piece. It talks about a lot of this doesn’t exist, there’s no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind and so forth.

So, you know, in past times people have often said that it’s quite a nihilistic teaching and it’s not really true because it needs to be explained in a certain way what is actually meant. And so the purpose in the beginning will be to give it some context of how this was first stated because it all happened a long time ago. And in fact, it was taught probably when the Buddha was around thirty six years old. Thirty six, thirty seven it is said. And the Buddha himself was born five sixty seven BC.

So a long a vast amount of time ago it’s almost a hundred years is long for us but twenty five times that two and a half thousand years ago in India in a far different era than ours. Things were quite were much simpler than there are many less human beings on the planet when facing global warming as a problem. Technology was quite undeveloped, but in its own way there was some sophistication in the technology. I think these days we tend to be a little overawed maybe by our own technology and the achievements we’ve made there. We may look back on earlier times and think well they were primitives and they hadn’t really achieved very much.

But actually they were sophisticated in their own way and we need to keep, I think, keep this in mind. And the Buddha himself, he was born into a family in northern India right on the Nepalese border in the Republic of the Sakya, as it was called then. His father was the hereditary chief of this clan. They used to grow sugar sugarcane. The actual name Shakya refers to the, you know, those who grew sugarcane and so on.

And he was born into a family. He became, you know, the heir to the throne or the chieftain and so forth. And then he ended up leaving home, generating renunciation, and then seeking the deathless state, as he put it, seeking what was beyond death. And that took many a number of years. He lived in isolation, he lived in great austerity.

For six years he practiced austerity in order to uncover the basic meaning of life, actually. Just that, you know, the basic issues we face, they face. And so it’s said these days that the Śākyamūni or Siddhartha as he was called before he became a Buddha went through the twelve acts of a Buddha. And the eleventh of those deeds was the turning of the wheel. And within the turning of the wheel, we find this sūtra.

So this sūtra, the Heart Sūtra, in a way is the essence of the turning of the wheel. Okay, so we’re discussing some of the historical features here. Why are we discussing some of these? Because I think it’s it is useful to put it into a little bit of context where this sūtra comes from. Now also we might ask: well, what were these twelve deeds of a Buddha?

So I thought just in the beginning we talk a little bit about these. And in fact the Buddha in this eon there were there are a thousand Buddhas and Śākyamūni Buddha is said to be the fourth of the one thousand. And prior to that came Kanakamuni and Krakucchanda and Kāśyapa Buddha and the fourth Buddha, there’s three, and the fourth was Śākyamūni, the historic Buddha that we know. It’s useful to understand this because from a Buddhist perspective it’s not that there’s just one Buddha. In fact, there’s a beginningless lineage of beings who attain the state of full enlightenment and then they teach And then they pass away.

And the teachings remain for a certain period of time. And then they die out. And then other teachings arise. And that continues. And then another Buddha comes.

And that Buddha attains full enlightenment and they teach and those teachings abide, but they’re impermanent. They die out and so it continues. So Śākyamūni Buddha, a historic Buddha, is said to be a Buddha because he was someone that went through the twelve deeds of a fully awakened being, including the eleventh deed which was turning the wheel of Dharma. We ourselves have to get to that state. One of the reasons why we talk about this is that the purpose of studying the Heart Sūtra is to become a Buddha.

And so we need to understand a little bit about what a Buddha does. Buddha just means awakened one. Budh is the Sanskrit term meaning to awaken. Buddha means awakened, past participle. Awakened being.

What are they awakened to? They’re awakened to their own potential, to their own nature of their own mind. They’re awakened to who they are, where they’ve come from, where they’re going. All the issues, deep issues in life, they’ve had an moment and understood. And so they become awakened.

Buddha. And in fact we need to do that ourselves. And in fact because we have Buddha nature, that Buddha nature in a sense compels us to understand. And so these basic issues always are there. We keep on bumping into them, but you know we can’t resolve them all in the present.

We put them on the back burner. But those issues keep on you know, rising to the surface and then underneath we really do need to know when we fully know we’re a Buddha. And the process of becoming a Buddha is a long long process. There’s a lot to know and knowing takes a long time and knowing depends on purifying the mind purifying the mind takes a long time. So, when we understand this then we realize that we need a long term strategy.

Strategy not only for this life, the next week, next month, next year, next decade, but then next life, life after that, life after that. So, the Heart Sūtra is really bringing these issues together in a short statement, short teaching. And so what is a Buddha? A Buddha is someone who completes the twelve deeds of a Buddha. So, let’s talk a little bit more about the twelve deeds of a Buddha.

Okay, for instance, the first is in Tibetan they call it Ganden Ne Powa. Ganden Ne Powa means leaving Tuśita, leaving the heaven of Tuśita. A Buddha before they manifest on the earth, they dwell in what’s called the heaven of Tuśita. It’s a particular abode called the joyous abode, Ganden or Tuśita. A Buddha remains there until the time comes right for them to take rebirth on this earth, on this planet.

And the first deed is a Buddha awakens, or well, he sees the time is right and he passes away from that abode and takes rebirth on the earth. And the second deed is entering the womb of his mother. And then, for instance, Śākyamūni Buddha, when he entered the womb of his mother in this life, her name was Mahāmāyā and the entire community in which he lived were all practicing the seven virtues, the ten virtues it said. So, such a pure being to take rebirth, the clan, beings amongst which he takes rebirth have to be very strongly practicing virtue. So he enters the womb of his mother, then he takes birth is the third act of a Buddha.

Then the fourth is engaging in the play of youth, which also includes like study, learning the skills of the day like archery and various other, you know, the games that they play, mastering all of these, learning the language, Sanskrit as it was in those days. Then the fifth act of a Buddha is living with the retinue or harem of princesses. Fifth act of a Buddha there is enjoying the worldly nature of things. So that from and then during this period the Buddha was married and he had a son and the name of his wife was Yashodhara And also in previous lives I’ve been together many occasions, been reborn and were married for a number of lifetimes. Then the sixth act of a Buddha is to generate renunciation.

See that just the ordinary life that we live is not leading to a pure state generate renunciation, wanting to attain purity, wanting to attain a state of pure state. Then the seventh is having ended renunciation then wanting to practice austerity to eliminate attachment to the object to the senses. Having indulged in the objects to the senses previously, then showing how to practice austerity. When if you go to Bodh Gaya in India where the Buddha attained enlightenment, not far away there’s an Niranjana river and there is a site there that’s marked by stupas where the Buddha was practiced austerities for six years. And there he lived on a few grains of food every day.

And so he became very thin. He became like a skeleton. And you can see statues of the Bodhisattva when he was practicing austerity. Then the eighth act of a Buddha is realizing that just practicing austerities by themselves is not enough. Practicing indulgence in the senses is not enough.

It’s not it just doesn’t bring what we want, doesn’t make us happy. But then going in the reverse way, by giving up everything and just completely stopping the senses and our indulgence indulging our senses also just leads to we become like a skeleton. We become weaker and weaker and less and less energy. And there’s a danger that we die in that process. And it doesn’t necessarily by itself bring realization.

So then, coming to the end of the seventh deed, which is the deed of practicing austerity, realizing that that’s not just starving ourselves as sense objects, is not in itself going to produce enlightenment. Now, said at that point, the Buddha was so weak, the bodhisattva at that time was so weak that when he tried to go down and bathe in the water, was almost carried away by the river. And he thought that well, if I can’t even do this, I can’t even engage in, you know, normal activities, then this can’t be the way. And then at that point he thought back, Now what is the way to enlightenment? And he remembered when he was young as a prince in Kapilavastu in the palace grounds.

One day he was down sitting under a tree and he was watching this farmer or one of the laborers plowing the field. While he was sitting there in the shade watching the plow, he could see all the, you know, earth being turned over and all the insects and the worms and so forth coming up and then birds coming down and eating the insects. And while he was looking at this scene and reflecting on impermanence, he naturally entered entered what are called the concentrations or the absorptions, the four absorptions. And then remembering back on that, remembering this contemplation of impermanence when he was maybe ten, fifteen years younger and that that was actually in a way a way to understanding the actual nature of existence. He then thought, yes, I must practice that type of contemplation.

And so then he engaged in the eighth deed of a Buddha which was the process of attaining enlightenment or going to the place where he would attain enlightenment. So from there, from the river, he went to the foot of this tree called the body tree, the enlightenment tree. And then he sat underneath that and then he reentered those meditative states. Then the ninth act of the Buddha was overcoming Mara, overcoming the various interferences that obstacles that prevent one from attaining enlightenment. And then the tenth act of a Buddha was attaining actual enlightenment itself.

So then through developing those states of meditation, contemplating impermanence, the law of cause and effect, the nature of the afflictive emotions, and the nature of karma and the afflictive emotions, those two together how they produce our experience in this life. The afflictive emotions, karmic acts together produce our continuous state of becoming which is unsatisfactory. And he contemplated the nature of this and through that he understood what was at the very root of the process and eliminated severed it from the root. And at that point he attained enlightenment itself. So that was the tenth act of the Buddha.

And the eleventh act of the Buddha is what’s called turning the wheel. Chakra Pravartana, turning the wheel. It’s an unusual term. Turning the wheel of the Dharma is the eleventh act of the Buddha. That is the purpose of the Buddha there.

That’s the purpose of others. Teaching. Turning the wheel of Dharma means to teach. What’s the wheel of Dharma? What is it?

It’s the path of seeing. This meditative state of the direct perception of emptiness. That’s the wheel of Dharma. That we must realize, that we must develop. So turning the wheel of Dharma really means teaching how to attain that state.

So the eleventh act of the Buddha is turning the wheel of Dharma. And then the twelfth act of a Buddha is passing into Parinirvana or dying, passing away, showing the method of how to pass into pass away. So the Buddha completes these twelve acts. Now what we’re looking at here is this eleventh one: the teaching. So within the teachings it said the Buddha turned the wheel of Dharma and These days when we look back, it’s said that the Buddha turned the wheel of Dharma three times.

So what that means is that he gave three different teachings on the nature of ourselves as beings. Three different ways of how we can understand our fundamental nature. These three are actually quite, you know, they’re harmonious, but they’re slightly different ways of looking at the same thing. Now, when the Buddha attained enlightenment in Bodhgaya, he thought initially: It’s too obscure, no one can understand. It is so profound that no one will understand it.

And then it’s said at that time that divine beings requested the Buddha to teach, like chakra, the king of the gods and so on. And so the Buddha then contemplated, well, who could possibly understand this teaching on the perfection of so he then thought there were five I had five companions when I was spending six years in austerity and they were really a great help to me. But then, when I decided that I would start eating again, they became so disgusted they left and went to Varanasi. They thought, Oh, the backslider Gotama, you know, has gone back to his old ways. And we were so impressed with his practice for six years and he looks like a skeleton, you know, but my words, you know, we were impressed.

But then he decided he would indulge again in food, grow coarse food. So they up and left. So then he checked and he saw that they were in Varanasi staying at the deer park. And then he thought, well, if anyone would understand it’s those five because, you know, they’ve trained for many years. They’re tamed, their minds are somewhat tamed.

They’d be ready to hear what I had to say. So then he thought, well, I’ll walk to Varanasi. That’s not that far, it took about six weeks apparently to walk from there to Bodhgaya to Varanasi until he walked there. When he got there, they saw him coming and initially they said amongst themselves, I’ll just ignore it, Here comes Gotama. Just don’t pay him any attention, you know, he’s a backslider, he’s just indulging himself in food and so forth.

But as he got there, the closer he got there, the more impressed they were. They could see that there was a change and so even in spite of themselves they got up and offered him a and then he sat down and he taught the first turning of the wheel in Sarnath or the Deer Park, which is just a bit outside of Varanasi. Has anyone been there to Sarnath? Yeah. So it’s a it’s just a little village on the outskirts of Varanasi.

And there are some historical ruins there and a large stone stupa that marks the spot where he taught first taught. So what he first taught was the four noble truths, and which are the truth of suffering, truth of the origin of suffering, and the truth of the cessation of suffering, and the truth of the path leading to the cessation of suffering. So really just a simple formula In a nutshell, that’s what Buddhism is. You know, you have to give the brief meaning, of course at that point he can’t give, you know, He has to condense it all down into a gist meaning so that, you know, it’s understandable for us. Can we maybe be able to, you know, remember it.

Okay, there’s just four and the first is suffering, origin, cessation path. Not too difficult, but actually understanding what they mean is extremely difficult. Suffering what that means is extremely difficult. And the origin of the suffering extremely difficult. That’s even more obscure.

And the cessation of suffering. Is it possible? We don’t even we have lots of doubts about that. Could we ever possibly end suffering? A lot of doubt about that.

Path that leads there. Is there such a path? We have doubt about that. And so on. Anyway, in a nutshell, the Buddha then proclaimed these four points.

And when he proclaimed it then of the five then Kauṇḍinya, there was one of the one of his companions, Kauṇḍinya understood and achieved the path of seeing. And then at that point there were two ārya beings. Then a person who attains the state of an ārya is said to be a noble being. They attain the path of seeing and they’re no longer an ordinary being. And then he repeated the teaching and then as he repeated it the others who were there also understood and they became liberated.

Not only attained the path of seeing but also then attained the path of meditation and then the state of what’s called an Arhat or a liberated being. Okay, so we’re using a lot of historical terms here. In a way we have to get beyond the history of these events as well, but it just helps to, I think, understand a little bit of the history because actually the situation in the world hasn’t changed much from that time. The superficial elements have changed, but the basic issues are there. So that was the first turning of the wheel of the Dharma and then it’s called the turning of the wheel because then when Kauṇḍinya understood and then the others such as great name, Mahanama, the other’s disciples who were there, then they also went off and taught others.

And so, then it became like a movement or a turning, turning at a wheel. And so that was fine. Then probably a year, a year and a half later, the Buddha then traveled off to the east again. He was gradually wandering towards the east and he again made it to Rajgir. Now Rajgir was the capital of this state called Magad or the central region really means.

And there was a king who was there and about a year and a half later he was there and at Vulture’s Peak he turned the second turning of the wheel. So the second set of teachings. And the second set are the perfection of wisdom. There he taught basically the perfection of wisdom how really it’s teaching the four noble truths but teaching it on a slightly more profound level. And so this is what the Heart Sūtra is.

The Heart Sūtra is this profound presentation of the four noble truths. And then some years after that in Vaishali, another town, he taught the third turning of the wheel. And the third turning of the wheel was the third turning wheel actually interprets the first and the second turnings of the wheel, if we could put it like that. So just why did the Buddha teach the same thing three times from three slightly different perspectives? It’s because the minds of beings are different.

And some people are attracted to this presentation, some are attracted to that presentation. So it’s really to just to make people feel comfortable, you know, to present the basic instruction in a way that appeals to some. And not everyone’s the same. And now the fact that the Buddha actually gave three different presentations has presented scholars with a lot of gist for discussion and disagreement over the centuries. A lot of argument about which is the highest way, which is the highest view, which is the better view.

But in a way they’re equally valid because it’s just three different ways of presenting the nature of reality that appeal to different types. Now this particular teaching is the Heart Sūtra is the second turning of the wheel. Now the first turning of the wheel really talked about the Four Noble Truths and it taught the Four Noble Truths in really in a way a very straightforward simplified manner practical, simple, down to earth. This is how it is. This is what you need to do manner.

Second turning of the wheel is a more profound teaching. In the first turning of the wheel things are assumed not assumed, but the whole issue of whether things truly exist or not is left uncommented on. In the second turning of the wheel the Buddha talks about the emptiness of the entire process. So the lack of true existence. In the first, we could say that the true existence is something that’s not talked about and it’s just assumed, but in the second turning of the wheel things are empty of true existence.

So it’s a more profound teaching. In the third turning of the wheel, it differentiates what is truly existent from what is not truly existent. So, it became like a sort of a fifty-fifty split the third turning of the wheel. Now many people didn’t like the second turning of the wheel. And the Buddha said, you know, everything is empty of true existence.

Well, people didn’t like it. And it was like, what do you mean not truly existent? Of course it truly existent. And we prefer the first turning of the wheel. That’s fine for us.

But there were people at the, you know, the first turning I thought, well, there’s a deeper meaning here not being enunciated. And then that was enunciated maybe eighteen months later in the second turning of the wheel. And they liked that. Then there was some at the second turning of the wheel that thought, well, wait a minute. Now the first turning everything’s assumed to be truly existent.

The second turning nothing’s assumed to be truly existent. Well surely there must be some things that are truly existent. Now to those beings the Buddha then taught the third turning that there are some things are truly existent, the mind is truly existent, but there are imputed entities that are not truly existent. So, the Buddha was engaged in a process of gradually leading people through one teaching, maturing them through one teaching so that they were then ready to receive the next teaching. But not many who are at the first teaching would have been ready to hear the second teaching, the second turning of the wheel, only, you know, such a short period afterward.

But that’s the skill of the Buddha. What a Buddha is doing is once they become a bodhisattva, then what they do is for the purpose of other beings, and the best way to help other beings is to teach. As I said that a Buddha cannot wash away the impurities of other. They cannot remove their obscurations with their hand. The only way a Buddha can benefit others is by revealing the path, teaching the path and recommending other beings follow it.

So if the Buddhas could actually enlighten us or lift us to enlightenment, we’d already be there because there’s no limitation from their side about in their compassion or love for beings such as ourselves. And in fact Avalokiteśvara, this being here who figures in the Heart Sūtra, is called Avalokiteśvara because Avaloka means to look down. Avalokita, to look down. Chen or Re in Tibetan, Chenrezig. Chen Re is Sikh.

Zig, to look, Chen Re with his eyes in a downward direction. What that means is not looking down, it’s someone who’s looking at the world with compassion, seeking to remove their suffering in some way. Have a look at that. Īśvara, Avalokiteśvara. Īśvara means the powerful one.

Īśvara. Īśvara is the name of an Indian deity. But Avalokiteśvara means the powerful being who looks down with compassion on sentient beings. And tries to devise any method to awaken them, any means whatsoever to relieve their suffering. But a bodhisattva like Avalokiteśvara understands that the only way they can really help is to lead beings to the path through teaching them.

So the whole purpose of a Buddha is to get to the eleventh act which is to turn the wheel of Dharma to teach the path of seeing. And in the path of seeing the penny drops big time and that penny drop is permanent irreversible. But it’s only in that way that beings can be helped. So turning teaching is the great kindness of the awakened beings. They teach they’ve trained for eons and eons to be able to teach clearly.

To see clearly so they can teach clearly. Right. So this is just a very rough discussion on the nature of a Buddha. Why? Because we’re looking at the Heart Sūtra and we’re putting the Heart Sūtra into context.

The Heart Sūtra is the second turning of the wheel teaching. The Buddha engaged in teaching from the age of thirty five to the age of eighty, eighty one. So for about fifty five, fifty six years, no, forty five years, forty five years, I think. My arithmetic is a bit out. And when he taught all those that he could directly teach, then he passed away.

So he’d spent eons cultivating beings to bring them to a point where they’d be able to understand the Dharma. And those that had the merit were born when he attained enlightenment he was able to teach them to tame them. And then when the last ones that he was directly able to tame had achieved realization, he passed away, but he passed on the rest to his chief disciple Maitreya. He’s the fifth Buddha of this eon. So it’s not as if Śākyamūni was abandoning the rest of humanity, but again, it’s the rest of humanity, rest of all beings need to train in order to be able to understand the teachings.

And the Buddhists do employ countless methods of getting people to practice virtue. But it’s all for all the teachings are really there for the purpose of beings generating virtue so that they have the merit, the accumulation of merit, so they’re able to understand the second turning of the wheel. And the essence of the second turning of the wheel is the Heart Sūtra. And as as Śākyamūni Buddha said: Even then, I don’t mind if you forget or you burn or dispose or discard all my other teachings, but if you don’t preserve the perfection of wisdom, you’re not repaying my kindness. So really the perfection of wisdom is the essential teaching.

And the Heart Sūtra is like the pith essence of that. So in a sense, our job at present is to become as familiar as we can with the Heart Sūtra because in doing that then there’ll be a connection with future Buddhas who come specifically to teach the perfection of wisdom, which Maitreya will do. As it said in one of the Abhidharma texts: When the sun of wisdom shines, you know, the flowers open but the rocks don’t. I think And what that also means is that basically again, we’ll go back to the practice of virtue. The flower is virtue.

When the sun of wisdom shines, it’s the virtue that responds to the wisdom. The virtue within us. The accumulation of virtue. When the Buddha was here teaching, we were where were we? We were probably somewhere else.

We didn’t have the virtue. We didn’t have the merit, the accumulation of virtue to be there. And true, even if an awakened being when next door teaching, if we don’t have the merit, then, you know, we might go and tell them to keep it down, you know, because, you know, we’re watching something on TV. This we’ve done many times. Lacking the merit, lacking the virtue, we don’t recognize the opportunity.

We understand the value. It’s true, if we don’t understand value inside internally and understanding value internally is understanding the value of virtue, then we don’t understand value outside. And so when there’s an opportunity, there’s some, you know, like a Buddha is there teaching, we don’t recognize it. Okay. Okay, so this is a very rough, small introduction.

Are there any questions about this? Any issues that one has with this? Yes. The third is differentiating the first and the second or commenting on the meaning of the first and the second, putting them together. Really the students of the third turning of the wheel, the third presentation, really are attracted to some things being truly existent and some things not being truly existent.

They don’t think everything is truly existent, but at the same time they don’t think nothing is truly existent either. So they prefer something which is a bit of a mix. Yep. So for them, the Buddha taught the teaching on the three natures which comes up in the Lankavatara Sūtra where impermanent entities are functioning entities, are truly existent. You know, like everything we see around us, the sense objects and primarily the mind itself is truly existent.

But objects of conception, our memories, what we think about, those objects engaged through our thinking process are not truly existent. And emptiness itself, the third nature, is non duality, which is that fundamentally the mind and the objects engaged by that mind are not substantially distinct. They’re the same nature, same substance. What it implies then this view is really profound. I mean, it’s a it probably is a very good view for those that are really attracted or are immersed in a materialist view of the universe.

If we think all there is is matter, all there is is form and this is quite a dominant view in our society that, you know, we are pretty much just our physical bodies and physical brain. And there’s, you know, once we die there’s nothing more, right? Then the third turning of the wheel, which is really the third turning presenting the mind only view, the Chittamatrin view, can be very useful. Because from the Chitamatran point of view, everything is of the same substance as the mind itself or the same nature. Even form itself is not made of particles.

It’s of the essence of the mind. So this table, although its form, that form is the same substance as the mind viewing it. And understanding emptiness is understanding that say the eye consciousness understanding the table and the table itself are not separate substances, not separate energy. Whereas in the first turning of the wheel: mind separate substance, table separate substance, all truly existent. Everything exists how it appears to exist and it’s all truly existent.

But within that, there is the truth of suffering, there’s the truth of origin of suffering and so on. And the truth of cessation, truth of path. But the third turning of the wheel is very profound. But understanding it is not easy. But it’s not regarded as the highest view.

The highest view occurs in the second turning of the wheel. Alright. Well, there’s a lot written on this. Some say they are completely inconsistent. And for instance, Je Tsongkhapa who is a great Tibetan scholar spent a lot of time explaining how they are consistent.

How the three turnings of the wheel actually are completely in harmony, but it just from the perspective of how you’re looking at it they may appear to be contradictory. And we’re familiar with these sort of examples, you know, something may look to exist in one way from one perspective, we look at it another way. A bit like light, you know, is is it a wave or is it a particle? If we say it’s a particle, it’s okay. If we say it’s a wave, it’s okay.

Right? But when you try and put those two together, it’s difficult. You can’t having a particle that it’s a wave, that is a wave, it’s not easy. There’s another classic example you find in Buddhism of a cup of water. And for a human that which is a cup of water may appear to a divine being as a cup of nectar.

But as to a hungry ghost it may appear to be a cup full of pus and blood. But it’s due to their karma, their frame of reference that it appears differently although it’s just a cup of water. That’s and true. And again, when we’re looking at the three turnings of the wheel, we’re actually looking at the karma of beings. And what are we looking at in the karma?

We’re looking at the habit, mental habits of beings. And some of us, you know, we just like things, you know, what simple straightforward matter of fact things exist as they appear to exist. That’s all it is. But within that reference, within that framework, we need a method of getting beyond the afflictive emotions. Like the four truths, fine.

But then others come along and say, wait a minute, things don’t exist as they appear to exist. The more we examine, the more we find that, wait a minute, they don’t quite exist in how they appear to exist. We have many examples of this, you know, like an echo or a mirror image. You know, at times we walk past a mirror and we think there’s another person and then we look and we see it’s ourselves and so on. Initially it appeared to be another person.

For instance, a dream. When we’re in a dream things appear as if they exist in that way and we get quite caught up in the dream. Suddenly we’ve been chased by elephants and shock horror, we’re running, you know, we’re in fear. We take the dream image to be true, and then we wake up and think, oh, it’s just an illusion. But, you know, we might it might take us a while to recover from the dream and we try and puzzle out, well, why did I dream that?

Where’s all that coming from? And so on. But the second turning of the wheel is saying, Actually, it’s as if it’s all just a dream. A very convincing dream, but it doesn’t we don’t actually exist in the way we appear. And so on.

But then the third turning of the wheel again it’s standing back and it’s saying, we can have a little bit of each here. We might be comfortable with, you know, ordinary things like this being truly existent, but other things being not truly existent. Yeah, that’s fine. You have a mixture. The main issue with all of this, why I present the three turnings?

It’s really to be different presentations to make people feel comfortable. But the main thing is to get people to practice. Practice virtue so that they gradually are able to realize the four truths. And it is a very, very long process. Okay, look we might yep, we’ll just stop there and we’ve got a tea break now.

Now I think we’ll go we’ll have a maybe well, see how we go. Twenty minutes, half an hour for tea break. We’ll see how we go. Okay. We do this to generate merit.

And So what we’re doing actually, it’s a we’re offering a symbolic mandala gift to the awakened beings in the universe. And giving generates a lot of merit, especially if we give to enlightened beings. So giving a little mandala: a mandala here is a symbolic representation of the universe. So we’re offering really like a very precious universe of pleasant things to all beings in the universe. Okay, now this is on page five.

Short Mandala offering, we just recite it slowly in Tibetan. And then the words at the very bottom of the page, Right, so we continue with the Heart Sūtra. So, so far we’ve done a little bit of a preliminary investigation of what a Buddha is. A Buddha is someone who teaches the four truths at a time when they’re not they’re unknown. That’s the mark of a Buddha.

Okay, we’ve looked at the twelve acts of a Buddha and specifically we’re looking at the eleventh, the turning of the wheel of Dharma. And in looking at the turning of the wheel of Dharma there are three different turnings. So we’re looking at the middle one, the second one in particular because the Heart Sūtra belongs to the second turning of the wheel. And the second turning of the wheel is the really profound one. Right.

So the second one is really it’s called the turning of the perfection of wisdom. And so the perfection of wisdom what are we looking at? We’re looking at how our wisdom itself is improved. Now we do have wisdom in the present. The wisdom that we have is not very developed but this it’s there.

In fact, it says we have potentially four types of wisdom: Inborn wisdom. Inborn wisdom is the wisdom that carries over from past lives. So that might be like an instinctive urge not to commit unethical actions. It’s like an inborn wisdom. It’s a very important type of wisdom.

Even though we don’t, we just have an urge to act in a particular way, Positive way. So that’s inborn wisdom. Then there’s the wisdom of study, contemplation and meditation. So how we perfect wisdom in a way is that we take what inborn wisdom we have whatever level that may be and then we engage in study contemplation and meditation to improve it to develop clearer, better wisdom. Now what is wisdom?

Wisdom itself is a state of mind. What do we what states of mind do we have? From a Buddhist perspective we have what are called main minds and mental factors. We have six main minds, fifty one mental factors. One of those fifty one is wisdom.

In fact, it’s in a sense it’s the most important of all six main minds. Fifty one mental factors the most important one is wisdom. So what we’re seeking to do is generate wisdom, enhance, increase, deepen, expand, purify that wisdom until it becomes perfected. Because it’s wisdom that is going to free us. The only way that we can free ourselves from the afflictive emotions is through wisdom.

Even the Bible says that, you know what is that statement? Of all the things that you get, first get wisdom. Which that’s I remember seeing it a long time ago, but is relevant here being Easter weekend. We need wisdom, but often we don’t recognize it when we have it or when we don’t have it. Especially we don’t recognize the lack of wisdom.

And it’s wisdom which is like the illuminator of the path. It sheds light on things. It protects us. It’s the wisdom that makes us choose the better option. It’s the wisdom that chooses virtue.

Wisdom is for us what’s able to differentiate virtue from non virtue. This is wisdom. On the basic level that we’re working at, wisdom is being able to tell that’s virtuous, that’s not virtuous. For instance, is this cup virtuous? Sorry?

Not relevant, okay, not relevant. Why isn’t it relevant? Okay. But can’t inanimate objects be virtuous? Maybe.

Virtue does go with intention. Yeah, generally. Sorry? Yeah, that would be a neutral object. That’s just a neutral object.

However, it’s said that objects, inanimate objects, can become virtuous. For instance we spend a lot of time circumambulating stupas, right? We walk around a stupa, you know, a shrine. Why do we do that? Actually, from our side, doing that action can be useful even if the object has no, you know, merit from its own side.

Because if it makes us contemplate the path and so on and just walking around like a shrine, a stupa can be beneficial for us no matter what is there. But it’s also said that external objects can become virtuous due to the power of the mind. The mind can convert something that’s neutral into something that’s a positive object. Anyway, for instance like relics we go to and watch look at relics. Has anyone seen the relic tour?

Yeah. The reason we go there is that those objects, you know, whether they’re pills or whether they’re pieces of bone or hair or cloth or whatever, go there because we have an idea that there’s something valuable in that object itself. True? That just being in the presence of the object is going to be useful. Go on.

That’s it’s true. Actually, the main thing is our own mind. Very much. But there is a slight there is a little bit of benefit, it’s said, from the object itself potentially, if the object has been blessed by a virtuous mind. It all comes from the mind, but even like there’s a story at the time of the Buddha about that a person who was quite quite old and he went to the Śāriputra in order to take ordination and Śāriputra who had extrasensory perception had clairvoyance and he could see the past lives of other beings and no matter how far back he looked he couldn’t see that this particular person had committed sufficient virtue that would act as a basis for their taking ordination.

So he said no. I’m sorry. And so the person was absolutely distraught and they wandered off and they were weeping in the forest and the Buddha happened to come by and ask him why he was weeping and said oh I asked for ordination from Śāriputra and he refused. And so the Buddhist looked and he could see that in the distant past he’d been reborn as a fly and the fly had landed on a cow pat and in a storm the cow pat had been swept around a stupa in a clockwise direction. And that was sufficient merit for that being to act as a basis for that being taking ordination.

Almost sounds a bit farfetched, doesn’t it? You wonder what has this person been doing for so many thousands of lifetimes if they Surely they must have done more than True. But there, the merit generated was due to the power of the object, more than the intention of the being. But that’s probably a, you know, a special case. So was he observable?

He was. Yeah. Yep. It more like a parable. Yeah.

Yeah. It’s actually often used as an example that the insight of a Buddha even exceeds that of a liberated being. Because Śāriputra, even though he had great wisdom, he didn’t have wisdom like the Buddha’s wisdom. And that comes up in another text by Maitreya. Is it compares a tenth level bodhisattva, the merit of a tenth level bodhisattva to that of a Buddha.

And in that text it says the merit of a tenth level bodhisattva that’s a being who’s just about to attain enlightenment is like the water held in a hoofprint of an ox whereas the merit of a Buddha is like the ocean. So even yeah. There’s still a big difference, you know, as even though you’re very close to enlightenment, there’s great difference still between that state and the state of a Buddha. Right, so what we’re doing here is just examining how do we understand wisdom. So wisdom is that which differentiates, say, a virtuous object from a non virtuous object.

A virtuous pathway as distinct from a non virtuous pathway. And so for us we need to be able to understand what virtue is. And recognize in ourselves that this is a path to virtue or this is not. Really, what is virtuous is just what I call the eleven virtuous mental factors. I won’t go through the entire list, but from a Buddhist point of view, which is actually it’s almost like an accountant’s point of view, it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

If you have to say what is virtue? Point it out that is virtue then this sort of approach is useful. What is virtue? Virtue is the first virtuous mental factor is faith. Faith by its very nature is virtuous.

So what is faith? Faith is really like confidence in what is positive. Just having that confidence in the positive attributes of something, whether it’s another person, whether it’s a particular way of looking at things and so on. Just having faith is rare and valuable. And if one has faith, it means that when that faith is manifest, the mind becomes virtuous.

So, faith is indispensable. And then there’s others like equanimity, just having an even mind to other beings, you in a knot, being even handed, fair minded. And of course, love. Love by its very nature is virtuous. So when we generate love, the mind itself becomes virtuous.

When the mind is virtuous then it settles the mind. It’s like medicine. So love is virtuous. Compassion is virtuous. Patience and so on.

So these but also in the Christian tradition there are similar lists of virtues and so on, the qualities that we need to develop. And they’re quite similar. So wisdom is being able to differentiate what is virtue from non virtue. So again, have a certain amount of inborn wisdom that just by itself it tends to nudge us in one direction or make take you know due to it we take interest in some things. Positive things.

The interest in negative things is not wisdom. We also have that. And in a way we have this bit of a battle going on between wisdom and ignorance or wisdom and attachment. For instance, we’re attached to just about everything. Attachment is almost pervasive.

And that attachment then leads into hatred. So those two things are negative. So understanding them to be negative is a sign of wisdom. So understanding virtue to be virtue, understanding non virtue to be non virtue is a sign of wisdom. But developing this takes a long time.

In fact, understanding karma which is really the paths of virtue and non virtue and how they manifest over extremely what long periods of extremely remote places in the universe is even that type of wisdom understanding karma is even more profound, more difficult to develop than the wisdom understanding emptiness. In comparison the wisdom understanding emptiness is easy. But what we need is the wisdom understanding emptiness. Generating the wisdom understanding emptiness depends on really these four: the inborn wisdom, wisdom of study, wisdom of contemplation, wisdom of meditation. So study is in there and study This presentation then also implies that developing this wisdom, perfect wisdom, is not something that just happens with a snap of the fingers.

It’s not like one day we’ll find a button and it’s all there suddenly. It’s not at times it might appear that that’s what’s happening, but really it’s all relies on hard work and the hard work is starting with study. One has got to become familiar with things like the Heart Sūtra. So for instance we have a certain amount of inborn wisdom that leads us to taking an interest in the Heart Sūtra. That’s really from past merit.

Then that bit of interest leads to the point of we want to study. We want to investigate this Heart Sūtra. There’s something in there that’s important. Something of value in there. Okay, so we want to study it.

Now studying here really means examining the words, the text, sorting out the words as we do with anything that we study. We first have to read it. And then, what’s this word? Well, that doesn’t make any sense. And what does that mean?

And why is it put that way? No, that’s the wrong word there. Surely it must be Does it make any sense? And so on. We have to sort out the words.

Sorting out the words may take a long long time. It does actually. Because another element there is that the meaning exists on different levels and even though we may get the words sorted on a particular level and we get some meaning, ten years later: Oh, that’s what those words mean. Why didn’t I understand that? It was obvious.

I mean, you know, we think well that’s the first time I’ve understood that. It might take ten years. So the study itself is getting the words straight. Looking at the Heart Sūtra. Oh, who translated this?

I don’t like this version. There’s another translation looking at it. Oh, that’s a bit better. Still don’t like it. And then examining it.

All of this is the part of the process of studying. So then we develop wisdom. We develop a certain amount of wisdom from that study whereby we can sit down and say, we might memorize it. You know, we have it, you know, all which is useful. This is part of the wisdom of study.

Like we memorized it in Sera, like, etc. Tibetan. And it’s a wonderful, you know, sūtra. And in fact in Sera it would be recited every day, many times, the Heart Sūtra. And we’d go out and debate, and there’d be morning debate, halfway through morning debate the chant master would come, we’d stop debate, we’d all go and sit and he would recite the Heart Sūtra.

And everyone would join in and recite it through three times. Then we do the next section which is sort of in the book here, we’ll do that later. And then maybe a couple of other prayers, twenty one Taras, and then finish and we’d go back to debating. In the evening, same thing. Debate, chant leader would come after an hour or two, then we’d sit down.

And now on every second night, the Heart Sūtra would be recited really slowly and it might take an hour to get through it. So it’d be like, Thus, I have heard. At. One. Time.

So you do it very slowly and when you do it really slowly you can then focus more clearly on the words. And that also helps the meaning to arise. But getting the meaning, penetrating the meaning to the meaning takes time. So getting the words straight is the wisdom of study. Then we go to the wisdom of contemplation.

Wisdom of contemplation is when we’re starting the meaning of the words is appearing to the mind. Is that a hot cross bun? Yeah, an Easter agreement. Oh, the Tibetans can go to a hundred. Oh, can they?

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. It’s just you. It’s just save time. It saves time.

Yeah. You can. Yeah. Oh, exactly. And recite it through quickly three times, and then you do the lion headed dakini mantra and so forth.

You clap three times, get rid of obscurations, do some other prayers, then finish, go back to debating. That’s how it was in the monastery. But, you know, as Westerners, we need to develop this tradition as well of just reciting it very slowly, having the leisure to do that and not being in a hurry. Because we get busy and we have this bad habit of just being busy for busy’s sake, thinking that we’ve got to do something with and I’ve got to do it quickly. And I was thinking, and when I finish that, I’ll then move on to that.

And then after that, I’ll do that. And so we’re not really focused on very much on what we’re doing in the present. We’re unskillful by just trying to, you know, think three steps ahead and not really therefore fully be engaged in what we’re doing in the present. It’s just a habit we’re in. There’s a little bit of benefit.

It’s It does. It does. And then also it depends on the motivation. It then if you settle the mind a little bit and why am I doing this? Actually, a lot of time we do need a lot of time to settle our motivation in the beginning because otherwise we just we’re busy and distracted and the thought of virtue doesn’t penetrate the mind very far.

You know, it’s just okay virtue, yep, got that. Okay, Heart Sūtra, then I’ll do that. And the real benefit comes by having the mind really steady and not be distracted by being busy. But it is such a habit that we have and that’s why breathing meditation for us is so important because it just gives us a bit of space takes us a little bit out of our habitual life just so that we can relax. Which we need.

We need to be as relaxed and comfortable as possible and the more relaxed we are, the more efficient we are. In fact, we’re often so busy that we get a hundred things done in a relatively unsatisfactory way unsatisfying way. Whereas if we took our time, took one hundredth of the energy and just did one thing simply, we’d get more from that than, you know, doing many things. But it’s a sign of the times, think. Just that, you know, we just are busy.

Society is busy. You get out in the traffic. The traffic is everywhere. It’s busy. It’s going here, going there.

You know, sometimes we wonder where are these people going? What’s so important? You know? I mean, what is it? It’s well, you know, people gotta live.

Okay. They need a certain amount of money. Alright. Animals are similar. Actually, at times we look at the animals and we may think, oh, the animals look pretty lazy.

They just hang around. They don’t do much. Look at humans. You know, they’re busy. They’re driving cars and striding down the street and Ants are pretty.

Sorry? Ants are pretty well, we’re pretty much like ants, I think. But Yeah, they’re very driven. Yeah. But this whole attitude of being busy is something that we do need to step back from a little bit and give ourselves allow ourselves to reflect on the deeper issues because what can one say?

In order to penetrate deeper issues, the mind has got to be still. But if we’re thinking a lot, there’s a lot of discursive thought, then we’re just, you know, touching on issues and we’re not really penetrating very deeply. So therefore to recite the Heart Sūtra slowly and not be too distracted can be very beneficial. But that’s something that takes a lot of work to do. To be relaxed and not busy takes a lot of work.

A lot of energy. To be able to weaken that habit even a little bit. So anyway, what we’re talking about here is generating wisdom. So we generate the wisdom of study or hearing by looking at the words and then through looking at the words then the meaning begins to appear and the different levels of meaning. But we just take the most obvious level.

Okay, so once we start looking at that meaning and just contemplating that then that’s the wisdom of contemplation. That’s a little deeper level. And that wisdom means that then we’re able to talk a little bit about the text or it has this meaning, it has that meaning. So that level of wisdom is very important. Then we can contemplate that at any time, the Heart Sūtra.

What does it mean? Now beyond that we develop the wisdom of meditation. But the wisdom of meditation depends on us having Samādhi. So that means that we’ve stopped the busy mind completely. In order to get the wisdom of contemplation we have to slow it down, the busy mind.

But the wisdom of meditation means the mind has stopped. It is still. We’ve taken the mind by the horns and set it down and stopped it. So how do we do that? We do that by you know, like a Buddha image or it could be any object whatsoever and we hold the mind to that object and we stop the mind from moving from that object.

It must be a visualized object. It can’t be like a candle flame or something like that that we’re looking at. It has to be an imagined object. And by doing that then we gradually slow the mind down and stop it on that object. And in doing that then we completely eliminate the coarse faults of the mind, such as in Tibetan, Ching Gue.

Ching means sinking or laxity, really means falling asleep. You know, when we’re contemplating something and, you know, ten seconds after holding that image, we start, we fall asleep. We sink into sleep. So that’s a fault.

That’s laxity. And the other fault is this, the busyness one: excitation. In Tibetan it’s gopa, agitation. It’s this when we try and think of something, the mind settles on it for a little while and suddenly it’s off thinking about something else, off thinking about something other. So this is Gopa in Tibetan means like excitation or excitement.

Now this we have an abundance. We need to quell it, we need to train our mind so that it’s able to we’re freed from that, so the mind becomes is able to relax. And it’s a fault of the mind just to follow objects, you know, here and there without discrimination. Just anything comes to mind, the mind, you know, we follow it. And wisdom from meditation means that we train the mind so that it’s no longer affected by this sinking or distraction.

So the mind is able just to rest in the object itself without effort. And when we attain, we go through progressively the nine stages of mental placement eventually we come to single pointed concentration. And that still is, as it said, a mind that belongs to the desire realm. But then when mental and physical pliancy arise, the joy, the bliss of mental and physical pliancy arise, then one really has Samādhi. So this is a natural joy that arises mentally on a mental level and a physical level both.

And it means that one is in a very joyous mental state and a very joyous physical state that allows one just to remain seated or whatever one’s doing for very long periods effortlessly. That is Samādhi. Samatha, it’s the development of Samatha or calm abiding. Then on that basis, if one contemplates the meaning that one has understood, say in the wisdom of contemplation, then that wisdom becomes the wisdom of meditation. So that wisdom is the best wisdom because it’s free of the faults of sinking and distraction or sinking and excitement.

It’s blissful, it’s effortless, it’s clear. So if one develops that then one has really quite a high level of wisdom. But even at that stage one is still an ordinary being. One then needs to contemplate emptiness and develop an understanding of emptiness. Right, so these these are the types of wisdoms that we have access to at present.

We can develop these sorts of states in the present and to a degree we have inborn wisdom and the wisdom of study and also the wisdom of contemplation to some degree. Is everyone okay with that? Okay. Look. I’ll just Alright.

Now what we might do is Yes. Yes. Just to well, just recite the Heart Sūtra. Yep. Recite it every day is good.

And then when you get a chance, reflect on the meaning. But if you don’t have time just to recite it is good. So when reciting it, to recite it if you’ve got time to recite it more slowly. And if you can take a break, you know, recite a little bit and then think a little bit about it and try and picture it, you know, as we go through it we’ll do this. If you can get a sense of the meaning behind the words because what is it?

It’s just a description of a conversation and it’s a conversation that took place at a particular mountain. And you can visit there. You should go. It’s in India. It’s in a town, an ancient town called Rajgir, which means the residence of the Rāja, the residence of the king.

And it was sorry? In Rajasthan? No, it’s in Bihar. Bihar state. In fact, Bihar state is one of the poorest in India these days.

And it’s on the route between Delhi and Calcutta, closer to Calcutta, and it’s near the ancient city of Gaia. You may have heard of the Gaia tree? Oh, anyway. You’ve been to Gaia? Oh, you went to Gaia and didn’t go to you went to Bodh Gaya?

Of course. Okay, if you want to go to Vulture’s Peak, you need to go about forty kilometers to the north. And there you find this ancient the ancient walls of Rajgir are still there. And there are seven mountains around the ancient city and on one of them halfway up there’s this group of rocks called Vulture’s Peak and it’s there. There’s a brick platform that’s been built which marks the site of where the Buddha sat when he gave the teaching.

But it’s, you know, it’s a little out of the way place. Probably a little bit like, you know, if you went to Palestine these days and you went to some of the sites there, you know, a rock here or, you know, stream there or whatever. It’s but it’s becoming actually over the years now, it’s being upgraded by the Indian tourist paths and now there was a chairlift was put in some time ago, but it didn’t seem to work very often. But you don’t really need the chairlift to in fact there’s an ancient ancient pathway that was said to have been put in place by a king, was it Jatasatru, to visit the Buddha and so for the king to go there they built this path. But there’s old ruins there.

Like there’s a set of ruins down below in a plain looking up towards Vulture’s Peak. And there there’s a monastery and the monastery apparently was dedicated to this one disciple of Buddha who was a doctor and he treated the Buddha and then he passed away and he was born in a heaven called Trayastrimsha, which means the heaven of the thirty three, where there are thirty three principal deities living in this heaven. Does everyone accept the existence of heavens? Maybe yes, maybe Sorry? Possibilities!

Well, that’s all we can ask. As long as it’s a very interesting issue: what are these heavens? Now Triestrinsha heaven is in the desire realm. So it’s the second of the six levels of heavens or God realms. So he was reborn.

This doctor passed away and was reborn there. When he was reborn there the Buddha decided he would go and see him because he’d been kind to him as being his doctor. And so the Buddha went to the heaven of thirty three and there the doctor had been reborn as a god and the god was resting on this, you know, divine divan or, you know, like a seat of some description. And there were heavenly nymphs, you know, to his right and left. And the Buddha approached and all he could do was raise his arm.

And that was it. He was unfortunately, he was somewhat with attachment in this particular realm, and so it would have then went. Anyway, the foot of Rajgir, this particular Vulture’s Peak, there’s a set of ruins which say that this is where this particular doctor had lived. Anyway, now the whole issue of there being heavens or not is a very interesting question. Also, whether there are hells or not.

A very interesting question. In a way, not necessary to believe one way or the other. If you were a follower of the third turning of the wheel, you could say that they’re just states within the mind. Right? If you don’t follow that particular teaching on the third turning of the wheel, then you say, well, they are external states.

They’re as real as the human state. But the human abode is not regarded as real anyway, so pretty much an illusion. But then, you know, if you are were to ask, but wait a minute. Now these places are the Buddha himself went there, so they’d have to exist externally. And then at least on a nominal level you could say, well they do exist externally.

But then if they did, then what are they? So are you talking about planets where, you know, beings live that are more highly evolved or have more, you know, clearer faculties, they’re better, they have more merit than we have here. Well, maybe it’s something like that. I mean, are many descriptions of the God Realms and they’re wonderful, you know, like reborn there. And, you know, the ground is just encrusted with jewels, you know, diamonds and pearls and semi precious stones and and the trees are magnificent.

And when the the gentle breeze cooling breeze blows, the leaves make a sound like divine music. And the flowers are incomparably beautiful and their scent is, you know, just nothing like on this level, if far better. And a being when they’re born there, they just have to think of something and it manifests. And they’re radiant. Their bodies are, you know, beautiful and radiant.

Their clothes never need to be washed. Or ironed and they can read the minds of other beings and these beings also do very well depending on what level of God realm as well, there’s different levels. Because you have the six levels in the desire realm really which is our level. But there actually they can fight amongst each other. It’s said in this if you read, you know, like the great Indian epics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata or you know, Bhagavad Gita.

Have you heard the Bhagavad Gita? Yeah, and so forth. Actually, although those battles were said to have taken place on earth, they actually exemplify or they demonstrate battles that occur in these divine realms between a lower and a higher divine No. No. These are the gods gods in our in the desire realm.

But there are gods in the form realm as well and there are gods in the formless realm. So and the gods in the form realm are even more highly evolved, finer, more attractive and so on. And within the form realm there are seventeen levels of God. Oh, well compared to humans, you know, gosh, you know. There was a story of Nanda, the cousin of the Buddha.

And when the Buddha left the clan in Kapilavastu and then went off and so forth, his cousin ended up getting married. And he was so attached to his wife that he used to take a bit of sputum, whatever, put it on his finger and put it on his wife’s head if he had to go to the toilet or leave. He said, I’ll be back before it dries, don’t worry. They were inseparable and they had such attachment, right? Then one But then one day the Buddha came back and he saw Nanda and he gave Nanda his bowl.

And Nanda was just mortified because that meant that he wanted him to become a monk, you know. And Nanda was beside himself and you know he’s so attached and in love with his wife but he couldn’t, you know, give the bowl back because, you know, of his respect to his cousin, Śākyamūni. So he followed Śākyamūni, you know, and Śākyamūni could see, the Buddha could see, you know, he’s having problems here. So he said, come Nanda. And he took Nanda and he went to the heaven of the thirty three, I think, again.

And there the heavenly nymphs are just magnificent. They’re beautiful. They’re, you know, like divine beings. And Nanda looked at these beings and the Buddha said, Nanda, you progress in your meditation, you’ll be re reborn here. And the light went on and he said, Now what do you now think of the humans?

humans are, Oh, compared to these beings, the humans are like monkeys, you know, they’re unattractive. So therefore Nanda came back and he’s progressed in his meditation. Then he did and he practiced as a monk. Now, well, course the Buddha himself left his wife. I know.

He just showed her and yeah. But why is that same as Buddha? Well, it’s yeah, no, that’s a very good question. He well later he taught his wife and his son and they both became arhats. But there was a period where both his wife and son were very, you know, they were very sad because her father had left.

And probably she was quite annoyed with him. If I were her, I would have been annoyed because he left at night. He didn’t I don’t think he left a note even. He may have left a note. And he made no contact.

And he was off in the woods for six years. And then after enlightenment he did did, you know, make a point of visiting, revisiting his father. His mother died when he was a week old. And his aunt who looked after him was his wet nurse from a week old, Maha Prajapati, he visited her and his wife, Yashodhara, and son, Rahula, had a young son. Rahula’s young son became the first novice and he ordained his son.

And then sometime later his aunt, Mahaprajapati, she she was quite an independent thinker, very strong woman and she decided that’s it. I’m going to start an Order of Nuns. You know, this is unacceptable that, you know, the all these you know, the husbands go away and take ordination. We have no option to do that. And so she went to the attendant of the Buddha, Ānanda, and she requested Ānanda, please go to the Buddha and ask for ordination for women.

And Ānanda said, please don’t ask. And the second time, a third time, and then the third time Ānanda asked on her behalf and the Buddha agreed. And then he set up the women’s order. And the chief was his aunt, Maha Prajapati. And then Yashodhara, his wife, also became a nun.

Actually, was very radical in those days because women were generally not allowed to take ordination. And in fact, when you look at the Brahmins at that time, the women could not become priests. And so the Buddha went against the tradition. But but he needed to do that. And so the ordinary sorry.

He was a Buddha. A Buddha No, that was before. Oh, when is the first time he left? Oh, sorry, yeah. At that time actually from a great vehicle he was a Buddha, even at that point.

Just demonstrating the way a person becomes a Buddha. So, in reality there was no negative outcome from that. But from the side of his wife she would have, you know, been very sad probably, but still she had such excellent merit. Thing was that she had been with the Buddha many many many lifetimes in the past. Many many lifetimes as the so maybe she was used to it by the time.

But the thing was that she was a highly trained, highly realized being herself. Oh, well yes, she well she became married. Yeah, that’s right. And there was a selection process when I remember that anyway they were together for many lifetimes and while and it goes back also to a much earlier vow she made when he first entered the path. There’s a story about that, about when Śākyamūni first became a bodhisattva.

There’s different versions of when it occurred. You’ve heard those? One of them is when he was with his I think he was with his wife standing on the side of the road and the Buddha came past and they’d heard that there was someone coming and they decided to wait on the side of the path and see who it was. And I think the name of this Buddha was also Śākyamūni. Was eons ago.

But when he saw him, he made the Buddha in this previous lifetime, he made the vow. I want to attain that state. Yashodra was with him and said, and I wanna be with you during that period. And so they were reborn together. I don’t know.

Whether she did or not is a good question. I think it’s possible that, yes, she may have been obscured still, slight obscuration. But excellent merit. So being like that, once they turn their mind to enlightenment, like Śāriputra, he just had a few words enlightened. Just took, you know, a couple of words from an enlightened being saying this is how it is.

And the words that were given were something like all conditioned entities are impermanent. And hearing that, you know, the penny dropped. And their whole path was understood. But in order for that effect to take, you know, for that to occur they have to have such a vast amount of merit. If you have a vast amount of merit supporting you, then there’s no way out of it you’re going to realize.

Do you think they would have known they had this merit or that will happen at once when they had the right second Oh, they may not have, but when the results come so quickly yes. And then they develop, you know, extra sensory perception very quickly. With extra sensory perception you have many different types and one of them is understanding your past lives. And then you see, because often in the discourses of the Buddha, when the Buddha would meet others, you know, it would be Ānanda, his attendant, would be there. And like there was a time they were walking down a path and this crow flew over.

And the crow shot on the robes of the Buddha. And Ānanda, the attendant, asked the Why? What is the reason for that crow being able to shit on the robes of the Buddha? And the Buddha responded and said, well, this being will be a great outsider opponent of Buddhism and in future he will be reborn as a great opponent and he will convert many away from Buddhism, but then in the end he will be converted to Buddhism. And so this shows the fact that he’s able to do that demonstrates that he has the merit to be able to do that.

But in the end, he will be converted to Buddhism. Now later there was a person called Ashvaghosha around the time of Nāgārjuna, so maybe five hundred-six hundred years later, who became a great opponent of the Buddhist view. And he would wander around the great Buddhist universities in India at that time, say around the second century AD, and challenged the monks to debate. But he was such a had such sharp intelligence that no one the monks were advised don’t debate him because in those days if you debated someone in India the tradition was if you were defeated by someone you had to adopt their religion. So the Buddhist monks were advised don’t debate with this person.

He was brilliant at debate. And so the monks are there and he’s walking up and down the aisles, know, like deriding them and so on. The monks having a terrible time. And the message was sent to the south for Nāgārjuna to come. Nāgārjuna was this great, very erudite Buddhist monk.

Yes, Nāgārjuna, sorry. And he couldn’t come so he sent Āryadeva. And Āryadeva went north and Āryadeva was able to defeat him in debate and his punishment sorry, go on. No, no. First he was pissed off that he’d lost the debate.

And as punishment he was locked in the library and there were only Buddhist texts there and which he refused to read. Because he was a great scholar, the curiosity began to get to him and he started to, you know, leaf through some of the scriptures and he came across that story previously of Ānanda on the path. And then he understood that, you know, that event predicted his, you know, current actions. And so he he then took an interest and then and then it was converted to Buddhism and he wrote the Buddha Charita, the acts of the Buddha, twelve acts of the Buddha. So yeah, so many stories like that occur.

Oops. We’re a bit out of time. Oh, no. Where’s my clock going? Oh, no.

It’s fine. Right. What were we talking about? Wait. How do we get on to that story?

Oh, Voltus Peak. Yes. That’s a disputed point. Yeah. The but, yeah, there was a there there’s an outcrop of rocks.

There’s a a major it’s like a big hill. It’s Well, in Australia you’d call it a mountain probably. It’s not really a very big hill. But halfway up it there’s an outcrop that looks a bit like vultures, I guess. But actually in that part of India there’s lot of vultures around.

And when you see them, you often see them in trees, big banyan trees, and they just might be covered with vultures and they all sort of have this hunched look, you know, they have a certain shape and that shape is there in the rocks there. And some say that it’s simply because the rocks there have the shape of vultures or that when the Buddha taught the Heart Sūtra or when he taught the Perfection of Wisdom Sutras, beings from other realms manifested as vultures with the appearance of vultures, but they’re actually highly realized beings who wanted to just be there when the teaching occurred. Whichever way, you really you need to go there and have a look at the rocks and that site. Right. Well, see.

So we just start with the Heart Sūtra itself. Now we’ve done a little bit on the twelve acts of the Buddha. We’ve done a little bit on the three turnings of the wheel and a little bit on wisdom and the perfection of wisdom just as a preliminary. And also there’s another probable I’ll just do a little bit more on the wisdom aspect. Perfect wisdom and what it what we’re really talking about and really the this perfect wisdom is distinguished by three or four characteristics.

Really the perfect it’s called the what? The Heart Sūtra or the victorious essence of the perfection of wisdom sūtra. And the perfection of wisdom perfect wisdom has four attributes. So the first attribute is that it exists only in the continuum of a Buddha. So the perfect wisdom only exists in a fully awakened being.

And by nature it is a type of sublime wisdom, exalted wisdom, and it also has a particular aspect or mode of existing and that is that it’s non dual. And here when it talks about non dual it means that it’s mixed with its object. Perfect wisdom takes as its object emptiness. And so the wisdom, the perfect wisdom and the emptiness are merged inseparably in a non dual way. And the the fourth attribute is that it’s free of the object of negation.

Object of negation here refers to true existence. So in a sense what that’s saying is that it it is free of appearing to be truly existent. Any way for us to understand it would be very difficult because we can’t even see the minds of another being, an ordinary being. We can’t even see our own minds very clearly. True?

Let alone the minds in another being. Let alone an extremely subtle mind like perfect wisdom in the mental continuum of a Buddha. So, for us to understand perfect wisdom is not possible at present. But when I say that, it’s not possible for us to directly perceive perfect wisdom, but we can generate an intellectual or a conceptual understanding of it. And this is the whole purpose of our study.

Why we study is to develop an intellectual understanding, a conceptual understanding of something. Because the conceptual understanding is like the blueprint. It’s like the what? The basis. Really is like a blueprint that allows us to understand it conceptualize it.

We’ve got to be able to conceive of it first. And it’s so we develop conceptual wisdom about what perfect wisdom is. That’s what we’re trying to attain. We’re trying to attain perfect wisdom. Where does it exist?

It exists in the mental continuum of a Buddha. How do we attain it? We attain it by becoming a Buddha. How do we become a Buddha? How do we become a Buddha?

Through realizing emptiness. Yes. Okay. Okay, we’re just on the verge of starting the Heart Sūtra itself. So, we just covered some of the preliminary topics.

So again, we’ve looked at the twelve Acts of a Buddha and in the twelve Acts of a Buddha what they demonstrate is the Buddha investigated the two extremes: investigated the indulgence in sense objects as a prince and then the opposite of that austerity. And in a sense his life demonstrates that both are extremes, both need to be avoided. And in avoiding both you come to the middle path, the middle way. The middle way is really the perfection of wisdom. Through the middle way one generates the perfection of wisdom.

And then he taught the eleventh act of a Buddha was to teach. And then when he taught, he taught the three turnings the wheel: the first turning, the second turning and the third turning. And there’s a huge a vast amount written on each of these. And then also we’ve looked a little bit at the nature of the perfection of wisdom itself. So good.

That’ll that will do as a preliminary introduction to the actual text. Now there are any other issues that have come up? I think indirectly it is. Yeah, it’s but of course people do tend to be attached to their own specific viewpoint or way of looking at things and that’s just a reflection on their habits from the past. Because we’re all a product of our past habits habitual ways of thinking.

And due to that we’re attracted to certain ways of looking at things. And so it’s accommodating that, not trying to force everyone into one category. But actually beyond that there are many other categories as well of beings. But if you condense it down, we could say that there’s three main ways in which the poor truths may be understood. But when you go into it in detail then, like in the first turning of the wheel, there were eighteen different subsets that had their own view on what the first turning of the wheel meant.

The Vaibhāṣika schools. And even those had subcategories. And they argued amongst themselves about what the Buddha meant on many, many issues. And that that’s just human nature. And then this middle turning also has many different subdivisions.

And the third turning also. But they’re useful to beings because, you know, it’s if you don’t find something you’re comfortable with, you’re going to elsewhere. You’ll keep wandering around until you find something you’re comfortable with. Oh, then that not throw it out. You know, that’s it.

Not necessary. And in fact, it’s, you know it’s potentially a very good sign that people are have moved away from traditional ways of looking at things. And in fact perhaps for those that say that, oh, you know, we don’t need to contemplate, you know, external hells and heavens and so forth, are really candidates for the third turning of the wheel. You know that there everything is within the mind itself. There is no external existence anywhere.

In the third turning of the wheel nothing is external. This table is not external. There’s no extension in the universe. The fact that it looks as if, you know, the center of Adelaide is ten kilometers in that direction is a pure illusion. There is no external Adelaide whatsoever.

There’s no external universe. It’s just the mind. In fact, there’s countless minds. There’s countless minds, one for each sentient being, then in a sense have no spatial dimension. Does that make any sense?

So, it’s an incredibly profound in a way it comes from the prime example of that is the dream. When you ask when you’re having a dream and you ask, where is the dream world? Right? You know, like in the dream we’ve got dream Adelaide and so on. And the dream hills and, you know, dream, you know, Portrush Road and so forth.

And in a dream they all function more or less as they do. And they look distant, you know, we look up at the hills and those hills are as distant in the dream as they may appear in real life. But when the dream’s over, where do they all go? Where is that dream abode when we’re dreaming? Right?

For the mind only, for the third turning the wheel advocates, they say that actually the waking state is the same. There is no extension. There is no abode, coarse human abode. It’s just an illusion. There is no extension whatsoever.

There’s no nothing made of molecules and atoms in the universe. There’s no coarse physical object. So. Yeah. No.

This is a big issue. Just how you explain the heavens? How do they exist? And, you know, maybe one could make a case that they exist externally as planets, at least in the desire realm, in the first of the three realms, that they are like planets that exist in other parts of the galaxy. And where the beings that are born there have much greater merit.

And and that’s it. You know, they’re just like super versions of earth. Earth on steroids. Not quite like that. Actually, more much more refined and meritorious about it.

And beings have much longer lifespan. But then when you go to the form realm, actually the form realm, the form that exists in the form realm is even subtler than the form and it’s said in in the human realm. But, you know, whether there are like planets there and so forth. This is a very interesting question. It’s interesting because in the past these were never issues that were really raised because, like for instance when Buddhism spread to Tibet, the idea of the universe then was Mount Meru and Mount Meru was a vast mountain that existed on a mandala.

Actually, had it how the it came into formation was you had this huge wind of mandala that’s the turn to the in a clockwise direction and gradually of it turning after turning for a long period, earth began to form a base, an earthen base, actually a golden base. And there was sort of bulbous in the middle. Gradually beings began to inhabit that realm. Actually it’s a little bit like the Milky Way galaxy, you know, that’s sort of an explanation. And then the gods occupied the higher regions at the very center.

And then there were seven rings of mountains that encircled the inner innermost part that was a bit like a mountain, and that was regarded as Mount Meru. And then at the formation of the universe then beings that have existed in the form realm gradually reincarnated into the earth plane and started to reincarnate down through the desire realm gods onto a course of course of everyone until they began to be reborn as human and so on. Now these ideas really weren’t challenged. This is the classical Buddhist view of the origin of the universe. But now in the West, with science, and the science has developed to such a degree that it’s now able to detect planets in distant galaxies, distant stars, and discover very fascinating things.

Even the Dalai Lama said, well, you know, we really have to investigate what science is discovering and see, does this corroborate what we have, you know, the descriptions we have in the text, in traditional Sanskrit Tibetan text. So it’s still it’s a very early stage yet. But yeah. Whether the heavens exist as external states or whether they exist as instant internal states, right, or even something other than that. That’s right.

Yeah. The whole this is another issue that comes up because time is an important issue within Buddhism. And you really see it in Buddhist tantra, like the Kālacakra tantra, which talks very extensively about the nature of time and the universe and the evolution of the universe, and how the universe this external, internal and alternate universes in Kālacakra. Kālacakra means the wheel of time. But still, even within Kālacakra, the sequence of causation is maintained so that the cause always must precede the result.

So that I think is the only provider that’s put on it. Yes. The ten directions. Yeah. Well, they’re quite, you know, they’re just the four cardinal and sub cardinal and up and down.

From a point of view of science, yeah, I think it is regarded as a dimension. Well, loosely speaking, the fourth dimension and so on. But from a Buddhist point of view, time really is reflected in the idea of impermanence and the nature of the mind itself. Yeah, just exactly what science is saying at present doesn’t correspond exactly with what Buddhist philosophy is saying. Yes.

This is yeah. No. Those ten dimensions are, I think, a little bit different. Yep. Yes.

Yes. It is absolutely. That’s the basis. This life generating a positive state of mind in the present is not negotiable. That is the practice.

Absolutely we’re grounded there. Exactly. That’s the work we have. That’s the coal face in front of us. That’s what we’ve that’s the grist for the mill.

That current state of our mind and making it positive. Eliminating the problematic nature of the mind. The philosophy, you know, like cosmology and so on are potentially useful, but they’re not the main thing. In In fact, was a story at the time of the Buddha where the Buddha was in a forest and he picked up a handful of leaves and he asked the monks, which are greater the leaves in my hand or the leaves in the forest? Right?

And the Buddhist the monk said, oh, leaves in the forest, I’m far greater than those in your hand. And he said, well, so too, what I teach is like what I the leaves in my hand, but this is what’s needed for you to attain liberation. What exists is like the leaves in the forest. You don’t need to know all of that. That’s like cosmology and so on.

What’s in the hand is the four noble truths. That you need. You get this if you assimilate that you know everything. Then you come to know all the leaves in the forest. And that’s a really important point.

Often we focus too broadly. Yeah, we get distracted. Okay, we better have some lunch I think. It’s just How’s everyone feeling? A bit sleepy?

No? No? Well, no. We are gonna get sleepy at some point. But we’ve got an option of doing some walking meditation.

And if you really sometimes it’s good just after eating to do walking meditation. Or we could wait for the next session between the third and the fourth session to do some walking. Okay. Oh, we can wait. Okay.

Okay. We’ll just start again with the mandala offering. This is very traditional. It Often in Tibetan teachings, it’s done this way. So it’s on page five again, halfway down page five.

And we just recite it in Tibetan. Right. So first, we’ll do a little bit of breathing meditation again. So, prior to doing the breathing meditation, again, we should check our motivation. And checking our motivation is just to really look at our mind.

Really, it’s very much taking note of our feelings, what our feelings are at present. So we’ll just start in the beginning of the sūtra and look a little bit at the meaning as we go through it. Now we have a copy of the sūtra here. Okay, so Now the sūtra itself is one of many perfection of wisdom sutras and there’s the extremely extensive hundred thousand verse Prajñāpāramitā Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra and there’s a twenty one there’s a twenty thousand verse, there’s an eighteen thousand verse, there’s an eight thousand verse, there’s a seven fifty verse and so forth going all the way down to the shortest Prajñāpāramitā or Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra which is just the short syllable ah. So there are many lengths and the reason why many lengths of Sūtra are given is because they’re different faculties, intellectual faculties of being.

Some are very sharp, some less sharp, some quite dull. And in general, the duller, the more words are required. So we’d probably take a lot of words. In general, what that means is that we as beings, have lots of doubts about things. The more doubts we have, the more words it takes to dispel those doubts.

And this is the way it is for us. This issue about the nature of existence really should be very clear, but we’re even unclear about why it’s unclear. Or if there’s anything to be unclear about, you know, we’ve got doubts about everything. In fact, is it an issue that we should be worried about at all? We have an incredible number of doubts.

Now, order to eliminate these doubts requires a lot of conversation, a lot of talking. And which is fair enough, you know, and we know that ourselves. If we have a doubt about something, then it may take a lot of talking with someone else to really clarify the doubt, put it in perspective until we get to the point, oh, okay, I understand, and we break through to the meaning. So, as it’s also said that the Buddha’s teachings consist of eighty four thousand different instructions and there’s twenty one thousand on eliminating hatred and there’s twenty one thousand on eliminating attachment and greed and twenty one thousand on eliminating ignorance and twenty one thousand eliminating all three together. In fact, whether there are if you added them all up, whether it came to eighty four thousand, I really don’t know.

It’s often one of these traditions that exist. But still, when we look at it, in order to get rid of our hatred and aversion that we have for things, probably it would take at least twenty one thousand different instructions. Right? Because we have unresolved issues with so many beings that rest on aversion, that we often don’t deal with very well. So, actually for us to be able to I don’t know get a clear perspective on the issue we have with aversion may take many many different instructions for us to follow and implement in order for us to overcome anger and hatred.

Does that sound feasible? Think a version of life is really like, it didn’t even be this far. Oh, that’s right. I mean, we’ve got long heritage of aversion to just about everything, and we’re very we’re masters at generating it. We know every trick in the book about how to generate hatred and aversion.

And we’re masters. We have, you know, graduated eons ago. And for that reason it becomes very difficult for us to overcome it with such great masters at generating hatred that we often don’t even see the fault and we don’t understand how hatred destroys our happiness. We think that hatred is protecting us and so forth. But actually, it doesn’t protect us.

You know, we think that if we hate an enemy, that’ll protect us from our enemy, but actually it just makes us incredibly vulnerable. Even if we think about that person and we’re unhappy, they don’t even have to do anything if we’re unhappy. We think about them, we’re unhappy. We even blame them for us getting unhappy when we think about them. And that’s another reason to hate them.

Poor other person, you know, they don’t have anything to do with the process. Actually, it becomes such a an ongoing issue. We’re so habituated to the process that we don’t even see the problem. It’s too close to us. You know, we can’t step back and separate ourselves.

And so much of our activity on a day to day basis is made up of protecting ourselves from enemies. And, you know, like activating hatred and aversion as a method of doing that. But it this we have to investigate. Does it Is it beneficial? We still think it is beneficial to do.

We think there’s some purpose to hate. Actually, only thing worth hating is hate itself and anger and ignorance because they’re things that are really negative through and through. We shouldn’t hate other beings because they’re not negative through and through. Only should hate things that have no good qualities whatsoever. Anyway, so twenty one thousand instructions on how to overcome hatred and anger, twenty one on greed and attachment and so on.

The reason so many instructions are given is because we have so many doubts about even whether these attitudes are useful or not. So we need we need a vast amount. We might need two hundred and twenty thousand instructions per version. And if we listed them all out, I mean they’re only the root aversion the root afflictions. If we had a look at the secondary afflictions, we get into things like resentment, which is based on hatred and anger.

But it’s downstream from that. But, you know, this we get angry because of something, but then we resent, resent, resent. There should be another twenty one thousand instructions on resentment. Because resentment who is being harmed by the resentment? Yeah, it’s just ourselves.

We hold onto it as if it’s a precious jewel to resent because that’s going to separate me from my enemy and protect me. The enemy’s moved on. They were never in fact the enemy to begin with. In fact, are no real enemies out there. There’s no one in the universe worth hating or getting angry towards And so on.

But in order to come to understand the process we need very extensive instruction and we need to generate the wisdom, inborn wisdom, wisdom of study. So again these instructions we have to study. Get the words right. Then understand the meaning And then even bring it to a level of wisdom and meditation in relationship in relation to those instructions. So anyway, similarly, there are different levels of the Perfectional Wisdom Sūtra.

It’s extremely extensive, a hundred thousand verse. A hundred thousand verses? It’s a lot of verses. But the reason it’s so long is again because of the doubts we have about the process of attaining the perfection of wisdom. So, Now the Heart Sūtra itself in Sanskrit it’s called Bhagavati Prajñāpāramitā Hridaya which means roughly the victorious essence of the perfection of wisdom.

The essence there referring to the heart, the heart teaching on the perfection of wisdom, the essence of it. Bhagavati the first term Bhagavati actually means the female Lord. The victorious female Lord. Right. Now, why is that?

Because wisdom itself is regarded as a is personified by a female deity Prajñāpāramitā. I don’t know if we have any depictions here. Generally, in order to attain enlightenment we need method and wisdom. We need the two things. Method is regarded as a male attribute, wisdom as a female attribute.

So the method is what? The method is renunciation and compassion. Wisdom is a female attribute. So therefore here it’s called a victorious it’s called victorious, but that victorious there is really perfection of wisdom herself. And it’s called okay, so this is the name of it: the Victorious Essence of the Perfection of Wisdom or as we call it in English the Heart Sūtra.

And it’s called a sūtra meaning a discourse because it reveals a particular dialogue that went on that was really important that really summarized. A little bit like in the Christian tradition we have the Sermon on the Mount, where so much is just condensed into a few words. So this similarly is a Sermon on the Mount. It occurred on a mountain and it’s a type of discourse. It’s a dialogue that occurs between those that were there through the blessing of the Buddha.

Now I’m using a particular commentary by a Mongolian Lama called Tendar Lharampa and it’s a very clear sort of clear, very clear commentary. There’s a nice thing about the Mongolian Lama’s that when they came and studied in Tibet they would have to take of course what they learnt and understood in Tibet, often back to Mongolia. So they needed to really get the teeth essence and make sure that what they got was contained the essence of the teaching and so often their works are very useful. Right, and so as it’s said here, as this Tendar Lharampa says: It is called the essence or the heart for just as consciousness that pervades the body is condensed into a single site that is condensed to the single site is called the heart or is condensed at a single site called the heart So to the entire meaning of the extensive intermediate and abbreviated mothers are condensed in this sūtra and it is called the Sūtra of Sutras. So in other words, consciousness pervades the body.

We have different types of consciousnesses but tactile body consciousness pervades the entire body. But consciousness itself has a seat, a like it abides in one place, which is really at the heart. Even more the spiritual heart than the physical heart. I’m not sure. From a Buddhist point of view, the heart or the seed of consciousness is regarded as being two finger widths to this to the right of the sternum.

It’s like where you point if you’re someone says you and you say me, it’s really where you point to. I’m not sure. I think on the right side. Anyway, there’s a little bit of debate about exactly where the seed of consciousness is. But the example here is that although consciousness pervades the body it has a heart.

There is a like a seat, a point at which it is focused. And similarly, the Heart Sūtra condenses the all the other perfection of wisdom sutras at a particular point at the heart. And so it’s called the Heart Sūtra. In other words, it means it’s the essence of the perfection of wisdom, the essence of the instruction on how to obtain the perfection of wisdom. Then, it’s also said in a text called The Smaller Essence of Eloquence.

Whatever you have stated beginning from dependent origination enters this sūtra for the purpose further it is for the purpose of attaining nirvana. So in other words, this author is stating that all the instructions of the Buddha, beginning from dependent origination exist in this sūtra. They’re all condensed there. And all of those are for what purpose? They’re for the purpose of attaining nirvana.

And what is nirvana? nirvana is permanent, the permanent state. nirvana is not in a sense an external place, it’s a state in which suffering has ceased permanently. So that’s really what nirvana means and it’s to do with the mind body continuum. When we have a mind body continuum, right?

We have a body and the body is like a vessel which contains the mind? When the mind that’s supported by the body is free of all suffering permanently that’s the state of nirvana. Do you think such a state exists? Anyone have doubts about whether such a state is possible? No, bliss is impermanent.

This state is permanent. It’s an absence. It’s like our current state eliminates all the suffering from its root. Like if we have who we are at present and we take out everything unsatisfactory. That’s nirvana.

For us it seems as if there’s not going to be much left, and that’s because everything, you know, for us, our mind is completely contaminated, and it seems as if we took away the problematic aspect, there wouldn’t be much left. But nirvana is a status. It’s the absence of the truth of suffering. And it’s permanent. Yeah.

No, that does happen for us. At times the our normal concerns might subside for some some reason. You know, maybe just we’re in another place or just conditions come together and suddenly, you know, we just feel, oh, that’s nice. Yeah. That’s actually, meditating is a central condition for that.

Because what we’re doing when we’re meditating is we’re just allowing the mind to relax and giving the mind some space to relax. And as the mind does relax, then, you know, we develop a certain degree of contentment from that. It’s not that absence of, you know, the problematic unsatisfactory nature of existence not doesn’t last long and it’s not perfect absence at all, you know, it’s like just a degree of a bit of the weight we carry on our shoulders might have dropped off for a minute. We might have won some money or, you know, something nice happens. We meet a friend, that takes us out of our current state happens.

And it’s like, oh, that’s nice. We feel, yeah, pleasant and as if a bit of the load has dropped off temporarily. But our normal state is like the load, you know, carry this burden, this heavy burden of our, I don’t know, our normal existence. And we’re so used to it. We often don’t think that there’s much of a you know, that something like enlightenment might be airy fairy, you know, it’s like, oh, well, you know, it’s all well and good for some people, they can think about these things, but the reality is that that’s how it is.

It’s as good as it gets. It’s probably roughly what it is now. Again, this is when meditation is so important. Just to sit down and do a bit of breathing meditation. Just allowing the mind to relax, allowing the preconceptions to lessen.

These preconceived ways that we think about how things are. We’re just full of opinions about who we are and what the world is like and all of these preconceptions tend to lock us into a particular way of looking at things and where we think, you know, not much is possible. But it’s just these minds are impermanent. They’re just conceptions. And when we look at them, is the world actually like this?

Or am I actually like this? Are other people actually like this? We look at it, no. So the best thing for us at present is to develop a habit of, say, meditating on a breath which just lessens this, you know, the preconceptions we have. Without expectation, you know, just What we’re really doing is relaxing the mind, because the mind is sort of hardened with the habit of anger and hatred.

It’s not the mind is not hardened with the habit of love and compassion. There’s a bit of love and compassion there, but not enough. Certainly not enough. We need to strengthen that as much as possible. But then, yes, dealing with our preconception.

They can, yes. Fear of others. Fear of not getting something that I think I need to be happy or fear of losing something that I have. Oh, That’s absolutely. Fear of criticism, rejection, all negative fear.

Negative fear is absolutely useless. Positive fear is very good. Positive fear is just that that makes us concerned about doing something in a proper way. You know, like fear of being run over in the street, we’re going to look and see if there’s a car coming. Fear that we take the wrong medicine and poison ourselves, we read the bottle carefully and so on.

That’s positive, that’s useful. Those fears or concerns are very useful. But just having, you know, like unnamed fears about this or fear of this, fear of rejection, fear of not being rejected, or fear of going broke, or fearing of having too much money. You know, just we can yeah, I mean there’s no real end to the number of fears we can have. But all of those, they’re just like types of conception that are not very useful for us.

Putting them to one side requires this is where meditation comes becomes very important. Really just being able to again, breath meditation is one of the best. As the Buddha said, breath meditation and death meditation are two of the most beneficial types of meditation for us. We think a little bit about our death, then we may meditate on the breath. And then meditating on the breath helps us to stop the process of just, you know, generating misconceptions about ourselves and others.

How it does that is that it just gives us a break from the process. You know, so that so we need to develop the habit of putting down this discursive thinking. But that that will take some time, but that’s very necessary. And then also what’s what really does protect us is love and compassion. Especially compassion.

So, the Heart Sūtra itself, it directly teaches emptiness. This will become clearer as we go along, but it indirectly teaches great compassion. And great compassion in a sense is our ultimate refuge. So this text here teaches great compassion. What is great compassion?

Great compassion is just having this unlimited attitude towards other beings and just this aspiration that other beings are free from suffering. In a sense, there’s no greater refuge for us than just generating compassion. And direct it towards ourselves. It’s okay to have compassion for us. We need compassion for ourselves because we have problems and, you know, we have difficulties and we want ourselves to be free of those difficulties.

We generate compassion for ourselves and just as we generate compassion for ourselves then we need to extend it to others because they’re just like us. No different. Absolutely not different in the least. Meditating on the breath and calming the mind and then meditating on compassion are, you know, two wonderful practices that, you know, we need to practice regularly because they generate great benefit to ourselves and others. For instance go on.

Oh, well it’s just really the simple attitude that I want myself to be free of suffering. That’s all it is. That we need. That we It’s interesting in the West, you know, it’s the attitude of loving oneself and having compassion for oneself is not something that, you know, we can take for granted as being something universal. But it should be.

Everyone should have love for themselves and compassion for themselves and strongly so. But not in a you know, having love for oneself doesn’t mean pride, arrogance or whatever. It just means I wish that I am happy. But love is just I wish loving myself. I wish I’m happy.

It’s also saying I deserve to be happy. And if I’ve done things that I shouldn’t have done then I need to purify them. That we have to do. That’s extremely important. There’s a bit of an issue in the West with hating oneself, which is really destructive.

And one should never hate oneself. One can hate negative things that one has done and therefore regret them, use that as an option to generate regret. Not oneself. And one really needs to generate love for oneself and compassion for oneself. But really, if one can’t generate it for oneself well, I mean, it’s possible to generate for others, but one should also generate it for oneself.

Because also because, you know, we it becomes an example for how to treat out others. Or it could go the other way. It could how we treat others becomes an example of how we treat ourselves. It doesn’t matter which way it goes. If we should treat others with compassion, we should treat ourselves with compassion because we’re the same.

No difference. Same with love. If we love other beings like love our children then similarly we should that’s how we regard ourselves. We respect ourselves, we respect other people, we respect ourselves. Because there’s issues there.

If we don’t respect ourselves, then because other people don’t risk would maybe not respect us. And maybe there’s also a similar thing there If we don’t love ourselves, then other people, you know, may not tend to like us and so on. I’m not sure. That’s something we could investigate. Oh, it is so, so important.

That’s right. Also, it’s very important. I completely agree. It’s very important for children that they have that example because kids often go through this period when they’re young of hating themselves and which is very destructive and especially, you know, in their teen years and so on. So, they really need to be able to deal with that.

I have strategies up their sleeve, you know, to deal with it. But very destructive to hate oneself. Right, so nirvana itself is like a current state with all the truth of suffering removed. A current state and there is no truth of suffering. But for us also, would to even identify the truth of suffering is not easy.

But there seem to be three types of suffering: the suffering of suffering, the suffering of change, and the suffering of formations or conditioned states. And we have to get rid of all three levels. Eliminating all three levels means we’ve eliminated the truth of suffering. So the suffering of suffering is the easiest and that’s negative feeling. Well, that’s really what suffering is, the essence of suffering.

For us, negative feeling. Physical feeling, negative mental feeling, those two. So that’s the suffering of suffering. So we have to eliminate those. Suffering of change is contaminated positive feeling.

We have to get rid of that as well. Contaminated, tainted positive feeling. That’s really positive feeling that’s arising from ignorance. Now, at present we regard that feeling as that’s our happiness. We experience.

But even that happiness is said to be like honey on a razor blade. It sort of looks like happiness, but it never satisfies. The happiness we have at present is like that. It’s like the image of a city in the distance and we go, oh, yes, could only get there. No matter how far we walk, can never get there.

Our current happiness is like that. It looks like happiness, but it changes. It’s a suffering of change. It’s like something that we’re attracted to but when we get there it’s changed to neutral or it might go to a negative feeling. This is very difficult to understand.

But, in other words, what we need is uncontaminated happiness. The happiness is never going to change. The feeling of happiness never changes to unhappiness. Actually the Buddhist path is very simple: it’s just getting that uncontaminated happiness. That’s all it is.

We’ve never experienced it. Simple things are not necessarily easy. But that’s something we’ve never experienced. We’ve never had uncontaminated happiness. It’s all contaminated from the very beginning.

And so, it’s hard for us to conceive of uncontaminated happiness or pure happiness or untainted happiness, perfect happiness would be. And then we have doubts about it: Oh, well, does it exist? All these doubts come up. But from a Buddhist perspective, it’s that sort of happiness that we have to have. Because the rest just doesn’t hit the spot.

It’s just not doing it for us. It’s just not, you know So when we begin to think along these lines that’s when we start to develop renunciation thinking, oh, no matter what I do in this in my life, it’s just it’s all just producing either negative feeling or positive feeling, but that positive feeling itself is insufficient. Right, the suffering of conditioned states is just the suffering of having a mind body continuum that arises from ignorance. Which means that we always have the potential to suffer from either negative feeling or contaminated positive feeling. The first two.

Oh! Oh, the mind body continuum that is susceptible to experiencing negative feeling and contaminated positive feeling. So that when we eliminate those three, that’s a suffering of suffering, suffering their absence is the nirvana. That absence arises in our own mental continuum. And when we achieve that we’re a liberated being.

No, it’s not quite pure, but it’s it’s pretty good. But the trouble is it’s the suffering of change because then gradually it changes and it’s sort of lost. But we have the memory and when we think about it again, some of it comes back. You know, that’s really coming from the blessing of, you know, being there in a particular place, that particular person and so on. That does occur.

This is, you know, like you often hear this in Buddhist circles, receiving the blessing, receiving the blessing. That’s what receiving the blessing is. When you just go somewhere and your mind is changed, just, you know, by being in a particular place happiness. Look, that is happiness. That is happiness.

But it’s not uncontaminated happiness. That’s all. The Buddhists are quite strict on this point. Strictly speaking, it’s suffering, the truth of suffering. Now It’s because it’s suffering of change.

Yep. But it’s not the feeling of suffering, right? It’s the feeling of happiness, positive feeling. But that positive feeling, again, it’s described as honey on a razor blade. Like, is a good thing.

Honey is nutritious. It’s nice. It’s sweet. But what it’s on is what it what it’s based on, the razor blade, is dangerous. Similarly, that happiness Oh, that’s Oh, okay, good.

Or then that’s even better. If you can use it that way, it’s an example, then very good. It is an example of uncontaminated happiness. It can be used as that, right? But it itself is not there yet.

That’s all. Mainly because it’s based on ignorance. That’s like the razor blade, you know, it’s like it’s based on ignorance and that ignorance cannot it is sad. It shouldn’t be the case. Ignorance shouldn’t it can be far better if it was wisdom.

Well, that’s why we’re looking at this text, the perfection of wisdom, because we need the happiness that’s resting on wisdom, not the happiness that’s resting on ignorance. Yeah. And we want transcendent wisdom as well, not just mundane wisdom. We need the happiness that arises from transcendent wisdom. Then that’s the uncontaminated.

That’s what it comes from other it’s wonderful. You know, at times you’re in a position, a place, there’s a teaching, there’s a person and you feel very inspired. And that inspiration remains for days, you know, it just sort of lingers, which is really nice. So important. But then in the end it sort of, you know, becomes a memory.

And it’s hard to get the feeling back. The feeling sort of, yeah, we try a bit and ah! And the feeling actually this is the one of the most important things is getting that feeling and maintaining it. Is so important for our practice. So, anyway, we use what, you know, what methods we can.

But then, that’s really what a blessing means when you receive a blessing. Something that filters down into the mind, inspires, elevates and it’s good. And one knows that, Ah, that’s good. That’s what I want. That’s where I want to be.

And if we don’t have that, we really don’t have much direction. So, maintaining a memory of that is very important. But we have to be easy on ourselves. The reason that it disappears is because, you know, we have these other unskillful mental states like aversion and hatred and so forth. Was sort of a bit distracted of that sort of inspired mind.

In nirvana, there’s no destructive element like that. Those sorts of inspired states just remain effortlessly. There’s nothing there to undermine them. In fact, only you can enhance them more and more. For this reason, wisdom is really important.

Absolutely essential. The teachings and then the text goes on, this commentary by this Mongolian lama. The teachings of the Buddha are intended solely as a means for sentient beings attaining nirvana. And since the means of attaining nirvana is the wisdom comprehending emptiness, it is called the essence of wisdom. So again, teachings of the Buddha there, as we talked before, the teachings of the Buddha really are the eleventh act of the Buddha, the turning of the wheel.

At that stage, when a Buddha gets to that point, enlightenment is the tenth act. So Buddha has attained enlightenment, they can put their feet up at that stage. They’ve done the work. They’re in nirvana. Their mental continuum has no three levels of suffering are gone.

Not only that, they are completely omniscient. Are unobstructed because they’ve eliminated not only the seeds of ignorance and the latent imprints of ignorance. Every level has been eliminated, so they are completely unobstructed, unobscure. Now, if they didn’t have great compassion at that stage, they would put their feet up. But because they’ve generated great compassion for many eons, then at that point their work begins because then they start to teach, they turn the wheel of Dharma.

And if it wasn’t for them at that stage turning the wheel of Dharma, we would be in trouble. If we wanted to find out about the path to enlightenment. Therefore, since all that is stated in sūtra and tantra is stated as the means for purifying the stains of minds of sentient beings alone, if you understand this you comprehend all the teachings incontrovertibly. So, in other words, what also is being stated here is is the pith essence of what enlightened beings teach is just this method of removing the stains and again, the perfection of wisdom sūtra is the essence of all the Buddha’s teachings, and the Heart Sūtra itself is the essence of the essence. So really the Heart Sūtra contains just everything in a nutshell.

Not only that, all the Buddhas of the three times arise from the wisdom comprehending emptiness. So being becomes fully enlightened because they arise, they emerge from the wisdom comprehending emptiness. And that wisdom is like a mother. So therefore it’s designated as a mother, as a female. And not only that, as a victorious mother, Chömdendema or Bhagavati in Sanskrit which means like a female lord.

Perfection of wisdom is like the mother and the Buddhas are almost like the children of that mother. So this is explaining the title here: The Victoria’s Essence of the Perfection of Wisdom. The perfection of wisdom is the mother, in other words. Does that make sense? And at this point also the translators of the text put in a line just the prostration, I prostrate, I bow to this victorious mother, the perfection of wisdom.

Alright. Now then I’ll just read on a little bit further. Now there are many means of perfecting something. And another word for pāramitā here or phar chin in Tibetan also means transcending. So but it’s often translated as perfecting.

And it gives examples of what perfecting here may mean. So perfecting in the sense of transcending is something like an ārya being who transcends the state of an ordinary being, or ultimate truth transcends conventional truth, or nirvana transcends saṃsāra. And wisdom transcends ignorance. So here it’s meant the latter sense. The perfect wisdom there is wisdom that transcends ignorance.

So, it’s useful just to perhaps useful to know that. Further according to the Cittamātrins, the term that perfection of wisdom is the sublime wisdom of non duality of subject and object. That is the excellence of realization for one’s own purpose and explicitly refers to the state of a Buddha. Okay, we’ve covered this before, but I’ll just go over it again. It might be useful.

You don’t need to remember it. Wisdom itself is something that benefits us And so, it’s generally for our own purpose. So, in fact, there are four Buddha bodies, four types of Buddha. You may have heard this four types of Buddha. I wonder if we need to go.

Would that be useful to go over this or how are we doing? Are there any issues coming up so far? And we’ve only done the title so far, so we haven’t gone. Shouldn’t be too many issues about the title. Are there any other other things that have come up then?

Okay. Well, we might as well talk about the four Buddha bodies. Okay. So what is Buddha? Buddha is four types.

When we talk about Buddha, which means awakened, There are four states which are called Buddha. The first is like Śākyamūni Buddha, like a statue. Śākyamūni Buddha. So that is what’s called the emanation body. And then there’s a from the point of view of great vehicle Buddhism, there is another there’s an emanation on a subtler level of a physical Buddha called the enjoyment body the Sambhogakāya that exists in the form realm.

In the pure pure states of the excuse me, of the form realm. Okay. They’re the two bodies for the purpose of others because other beings can see them and interact with them and then there are two bodies for the own purpose of the Buddha, for the Buddha’s own purpose and they are perfect wisdom, the perfection of wisdom and the emptiness of that perfect wisdom. So really all in all four. The perfect wisdom in the continuum of a Buddha is Buddha.

Some say that’s really the actual Buddha and the emptiness of that equally is Buddha. And the physical manifestation of the Buddha is Buddha and on a subtle level as well. Physical manifestation on a subtle level that we couldn’t see is also Buddha. Anyway, is just some added detail. Not necessarily that useful.

Exactly! If it’s confusing, then don’t worry, don’t worry. It’s just things that come up in the Perfectional Wisdom Sutras. There’s a lot, a vast amount of information on this and on the entire process of attaining enlightenment. And yeah, not necessary.

It’s downstream stuff. Next lifetime, yeah. Although one thing is the more inference you have in this lifetime, the easier it is in next lifetime. So, is useful to keep up a little bit of study. Wisdom derived from study is very useful.

But really as much as we don’t need to go overboard either. We need to keep it in the middle there, just enough that we’re comfortable with. As I say, it’s better that we know one verse and practice it than know a hundred and not practice any of it. There was a story at the time of the Buddha of these two monks. One was called Great Path and the other Small Path.

And Great Path, Lam Chen, became a monk and he was really clever and intelligent and his younger brother was a bit jealous that he’d become a monk and he was doing so well. So eventually he requested to become a monk as well. Small path, the younger brother was not very intelligent. And so when he was eventually allowed to take ordination and first he was sent off to learn some verses and his brother he came under his brother’s mentorship or tutelage or whatever. And so his brother would send him off into the fields to memorize some text.

And, you know, so he’d be out there with the sheep and he’d be going through and he’d be reading it through again and again and again. And then the shepherds started to complain. They’d memorized all the verses, but Small Path would be still there struggling to remember one verse and they would complain to the older brother about this. Anyway, I think the the older brother got tired of him and so he was he sent him off to find another teacher and he came across the Buddha. And and he saw the Buddha, said, you know, well, I’m not very smart and, you know, my own older brothers wouldn’t teach me any longer and I just can’t learn anything.

And the Buddha said, okay. I just want you to learn a couple of lines. Dulwa Chimpa in Tibetan. Sweep the dust, remove the stains. And so, he had him sweep the temple and he’d sweep the temple and the Buddha would actually cause the wind to bring the dust in from one side and when he swept it out one side, he’d cause the wind to bring it in from the other side.

But still, he swept and swept and as he swept, in a way gradually, he began to remove the stains and eventually became an Arhat. So again, it was just a simple instruction that he followed. So often if we get a pith instruction like the Heart Sūtra that’s really relevant to us, then just focusing on that can, be just the absolute priceless instruction with benefits. Oh, often that’s the case. Yeah.

We’re just there and we’re part of the furniture, so to speak. I used to go to teachings in in India, his holiness would start teaching. And depending where you were sitting, if you’re sitting right outside and lots of people are out there and the kids are out there, As soon as His Holiness would start teaching, a number of people would just fall asleep. It’s like amazing. Was almost like the first, you know, the prayers and so forth are done.

And then His Holiness would cough a few times and then, Where are we in the text? And then he would start reading and then he was not off to sleep. And next time they wake up was when, you know, the tea would be served and they’d always hunter out and get their cup. Was funny it used to happen that way, but even so, just being dead, even if you’re asleep, you know. To some degree, yeah.

Actually, if you’re asleep, unless you’re practicing dream yoga, sleep yoga, they’re not going to be strong imprints. Yeah. There’d be something for being asleep in a future teaching maybe. But no, it’s still useful. But yeah, better to be awake if you can.

I remember sitting at a teaching once and there’s a monk in front of me and he used to take snuff, you know the, Oh my word! I think he took it to keep awake, but he used to use so much. Had a container that was big. He used to pile it up, you know, and, you know, take it it through his nose and of course it would go everywhere, you know, not only up his nose, but it’d be in your eyes and were getting so annoyed at this person, but, you know, he would He also had this huge handkerchief, was like two bits of cardboard. Was He’s gonna Lynch it open, sneeze into that, and close it up.

But then he was a great teacher, wasn’t He was, he was. To stay awake, yeah. We couldn’t fall asleep, that’s for sure. Yeah. But, no, good to keep awake as much as one can.

But yeah, still better to be there going to sleep than somewhere else. Oh, that’s yeah. Yep. It depends on the mind. Mean, if you go there with a virtuous attitude and you have respect for His Holiness, then as it’s said, even those who take vows you know, like the ordained, those vows continue to generate merit whether they’re awake or asleep.

So it may be a little bit like that. You go there and you have regard for the, like, the Dalai Lama is teaching or Lama Zopa or and just being there, if you’re distracted, you’re thinking about, you know, your finances or mortgage or you’re not really listening. Still, there’s benefit of being there because it generates a you know, you have a positive motivation to be there. And you’re sort of, you know, you’re zoning in and zoning out on what’s being said probably, but still some benefit there. Yeah.

Maybe a lot of benefit. Oh, that’s yes. Yeah. Their elbowing is wake up. What the hell are you doing?

Stop snoring. Oh, yeah. If you’re sitting right at the front, it’s not doesn’t look so good, but yeah. It happens. Yeah.

That’s yeah. No, no, it’s okay. We should have a break there, I think. A very ancient practice, but similar to breath meditation we’re just focusing on the contact of the foot with the floor. And in doing that we’re trying to relax the mind, let the normal conversation that’s going on dissipate.

Just relax that foots and just focus completely on the contact of the foot, the different parts of the foot as it’s walking across the ground. Also, we get exercise while we’re doing it, so it has some extra benefits. Now I just wanted to check if anyone is taking precepts tomorrow morning. Anyone wants to take precepts? One, two.

Anyone else? Now what we were thinking was that we have the process for doing the vows here and that they could be done at home before you come. Is that okay? That’s exactly, you know, it gets early quite early. I mean, the sun comes up quite a bit.

Yeah. And then, that’s right. And then you may have to go back home again because that’s right. We don’t do anything. We start at nine and so it’s a long, it’s a long wait.

So maybe this is the best. So now I think currently we’re scheduled to have lunch at around twelve thirty. So that twelve thirty is probably okay to start lunch at twelve thirty. Of course, earlier on it was before watches and clocks, it was done on the sun, and so it was midday is taking us there. The time of the shadow is the shortest, so it’s not easy to be really accurate and down to the minute.

So it’s around midday to start lunch. Anyway, I’ll check with George. George is organizing food tomorrow. If we can have it at twelve, that’s fine. Twelve thirty also is fine.

So whichever it is, it should should be no problem. Well, who else is here for lunch tomorrow? Two, three. Yep. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.

K. Yep. Right. So continuing with the text. How is that doing walking meditation?

It’s good to try different practices because at times we do have a little bit of time and if you do some walking meditation then you sort of get into the habit even of just doing a little bit. But again, the main thing is just relaxing the mind. It is. Exactly. And part of it is really just to give ourselves a rest from the normal thinking process.

And that’s the real test. If, you know, when we’re doing the practice, we’re really we have to it takes a bit of work to stop thinking, you know, just to put that aside. And so, really, we have to strongly concentrate on the feet and just watch the mind what’s happening and to let go of that process. It’s really basically the practice of letting go. What tightens everything up is the attachment.

So countering that process. So as much as we can do it, it’s beneficial. Just doing a bit of walking meditation With we can say mantras as well. So we’re just starting at the very beginning of the Heart Sūtra. We’ve had a look at the name of the Heart Sūtra, is something like the victorious essence of the perfection of wisdom or the victorious heart of the perfection of wisdom.

And the victorious there refers to the deity Prajñāpāramitā herself or it’s really the perfection of wisdom that is personified it is the deity, the female deity Prajñāpāramitā. And Prajñāpāramitā it’s as if gives rise to all the Buddhas. All the Buddhas are born from Prajñāpāramitā. So it then becomes the mother, the womb, source of that wisdom. And then there are different types of perfection of wisdom.

There is like actual perfection of wisdom which is the wisdom in the mind of a Buddha, in the mental continuum of a Buddha. Is the term mental continuum mind stream okay? Yep. So that that just refers to this continuum of mind that any being has, whether a Buddha or a sentient being, continues from one moment to another, like in a stream. And that stream that we experience at the present is like the stream of becoming, and it is the twelve links in the forward order.

So this stream. In this stream, have main minds and mental factors. The subtle main minds like mental consciousness and more coarse sense consciousnesses arise, they can arise at the same time. And then in association with those we have many different types of mental factor that arise. So all of this constitutes the stream of consciousness that we have.

So, then also we have textual perfection of wisdom, which is the Heart Sūtra itself, for instance. And then we have path perfect wisdom, which is the path generated in our mind stream. That wisdom that will become perfect wisdom. So in a sense, we have the wisdom we now have, the continuum of that will eventually become path perfect wisdom. It’s not path perfect wisdom yet, but it’ll become path perfect wisdom when we become bodhisattvas.

So, a is one that generates great compassion towards all sentient beings. Anyway, this will be explained a little bit later in the text. Right. So we’ve done the title and now we look at the body of the text itself. Now, I’m using a slightly different version of the Heart Sūtra here, but it’s the same thing.

Now in the beginning we have ‘Thus I have heard’. Now when it starts at that point now we’re just on the title. Thus did I hear at one time we have here same thing. So this begins the introduction in the text. So we have the ordinary, the common introduction, and the uncommon introduction.

So this is the common introduction. The Bhagavan was dwelling on Vulture’s Peak near Rajgir. Actually it’s near Rajgir, it’s just outside the old walled city of Rajgir together with a great community of monks and a great community of bodhisattvas. So this is the common introduction. Now here it’s just introducing where it was.

And also it indicates that there was a compiler. There was someone there that listened and took notes or remembered what went on. So that’s who the Thus I have heard or Thus did I hear at one time. Now, so this is not the actual words of the Buddha. So this is the words of someone else.

And it’s said to be the words of Ānanda, his attendant. And he was there, but actually he wasn’t there. He was there later. There’s a bit of debate about this. Ānanda wasn’t the first attendant of the Buddha.

He was a later attendant. But, it’s, one line of explanation is that anyway, this is attributed to Ānanda who actually heard it was there who was present who who heard the entire discourse and remembered it without error. He’s the one that was there, witnessed it all, and he spoke of it. He’s the one that compiled. He’s the narrator, in other words.

Yes. It means great bliss, the blissful one. So according now there’s one scholar Haribhādra says that ‘at one time’ means that due to the blessing of the Buddha all the words of the sūtra appeared to the ear consciousness of Ānanda in one moment of time. At one time, it said here. So what he’s saying is that the question arises what does that mean at one time?

So there’s a some say that it just in one moment everything appeared to the words of the sūtra appeared to the ear consciousness of Ānanda. Haribhādra states, The entire meaning of sūtra appeared to the ear consciousness of Ānanda in one moment. This is rather esoteric debate actually. I’m not sure whether we need to go into it in much detail. But the useful thing is that if we talk a little bit about this, next time you read it, you’ll come and you’ll think, Oh, there was some point about ‘at one time’, what that actually means.

So, it has some use. Now, there’s another monk scholar, Bhāvaviveka, and he said that vajrapani was the compiler. Since the Perfection of Wisdom sutras not something that’s taught to the hearers. So okay, we have another issue here. Ānanda is regarded as someone of the hearer vehicle.

In other words someone not so much interested in the great vehicle path. Just because in the teachings of the Buddha there are really a division into two types: those that want to generate great compassion or have an interest in generating great compassion and those that are not so interested, they’re just interested, more or more interested, in attaining liberation, their own liberation. So, for this reason, another Indian scholar says, Well, wait a minute. Ānanda couldn’t have been there because he wasn’t interested in the great vehicle. It must have been vajrapani because vajrapani was there are references to vajrapani and because vajrapani was a student of the great vehicle, it was he that compiled these words.

He heard them and then he later narrated them. Does it make sense? Does great vehicle sorry? It doesn’t it’s just that all these issues come up from time to time. Probably, you know, they’re not essential but it may be, you know, a small use to understand the debate that goes on.

Some then say that Ānanda was an emanation of vajrapani, and so it smooths it out of it, yeah. But Ānanda was, you know, he’s such a revered figure in Buddhism. But, anyway, that just occurs in the beginning. Thus I have heard the I there is really Ānanda, the attendant of the Buddha. And whether he was an emanation of Vajrapāni or not, there is some debate about.

Then at that time the Buddha was staying. The Buddha was the Bhagavan here means the Buddha. Bhagavan means the meaning of Bhagavan will come up I think a little bit later. The Buddha was staying in Vultures Peak near Rajgir or the Mass of Vultures Mountain. Now regarding the city of Rajgir, there’s a little bit of a story about Rajgir.

Rajgir means the residence of the king. And there was a story that came up in a particular sūtra that explained how it got the name the residence of the king, and that was because there was a king who lived in another town called Kushinagar, which is to the north of Rajgir. And they were having the fires destroyed the towns and so the king had to depart with his subjects and they found another site and then the next site they found was a place called the Cool Grove. And the Cool Grove is about thirty five k to the south of Rajgir. It’s a cremation ground called the Cool Grove and it’s at the it’s near Bodh Gaya.

Did you go to the Cool Grove? The Cool Grove, it’s sorry. It was on the it’s actually on the way to the Markata Cave if you went there. Right. Anyway, says in this history that the king then decided, well he had his astrologers find another place and they decided the Cool Grove would be best and so they started to build there but they had the same problem with fires there.

So they eventually after they found the site at Rajgir and that site appeared good so they settled there and it was therefore called Rajagriha, which means the residence of the king. Rajgir means that residence of the king. Right. So thus I have heard the Bhagavan was dwelling on a massive vulture’s mountain at Rajgir together with a great community of monks and a great community of bodhisattvas. Now here monks means refers to a fully ordained being and a fully ordained there are ten methods of attaining full ordination.

But in this context it means not only one with full ordination, but one who’s attained liberation. So these great beings, these highly evolved beings that are fully liberated, that have attained nirvana, in other words. And they were present with a great assembly of monks and a great community of bodhisattvas. So there was Sangha who were present. Now the Sangha generally refers to four fully ordained monks, fully ordained nuns.

If there’s a group of four together, there’s the Sangha. The community is present. So here the Sangha was present because there were at least four and again Sangha refers to those that again aspire to virtue. In Tibetan the word is ‘gendun’ which means those who aspire to virtue. So it’s really those who aspire to the practice of virtue that dedicate their lives to the practice of virtue.

So they are given that particular name. Now, bodhisattva is explained in many ways and bodhisattva in Tibetan is Jangchub Sempa. So there’s a great assembly of monks and a great assembly of bodhisattvas. Bodhisattva means enlightenment being. Bodhi means enlightenment.

Sattva means a person. So really a person who is focused on attaining the state of enlightenment, but it implies a great vehicle being. So it really refers to someone that’s on the path to attaining a state of a Buddha. So in that you have the two assemblies, you have the assembly of arhats who are focused on attaining liberation for their own purpose, and the assembly of bodhisattvas who are focused on attaining enlightenment for the purpose of others. So both assemblies were there.

The great assembly of bodhisattvas can contain both ordained and non ordained and male and female. Here it doesn’t mention nuns, but I think that’s implied. And great is applied here. So great here when it’s referring to the community monks, it means many, but great when it’s applied to the community of bodhisattvas has further meaning such as great giving, great mind, great power, great supreme vehicle entering those who enter the great supreme vehicle of the conquerors, those who wear great armor, those who subdue the Maras, and all of those are properly described as great. So here it’s even each term like great here, great assembly of monks, assembly of bodhisattvas has many meanings.

And together, together is mentioned. In Tibetan it’s tab chik meaning they’re of the same in the same way, this staying together in the same way. Tab meaning method. Meaning that they’re staying together harmoniously or they’re residing for the same purpose. So in brief it means that group of people were at Vultures Peak abiding for the same purpose, compatibly or harmoniously.

And then also it says dwelling or staying or seated. So again, what that means is that in general there are four types of staying or being seated or dwelling and that is like seated as a type of conduct or seated seated teaching Dharma or seated in equipoise or seated with correct internal placement. But here it refers to the first type which is seated with the same purpose as a in fact it means that they’re all sitting down. So that first bit is the common introduction. It just it is setting the place, setting the time.

The time is set because actually it’s the Buddha was thirty five, thirty six years old at that time. So, actually we can probably pinpoint the year if he was born in five sixty seven BC. It’s probably around five thirty BC that this occurred. For roughly that time at that particular place. So that’s the introduction, the common introduction, just setting the time and place, who was there.

So the compiler, the narrator, took note of all this and this was a common feature of the sutras, which is reasonable because you want to know where it was, when it happened, who was there, what they were doing. So, they were harmoniously gathered there. Actually, when you go there, there’s not a big place there, it’s quite small, so you couldn’t have a huge assembly. But that’s how they it is described. Now we have the uncommon introduction, the next part.

Now something further is happening. At that time the Buddha was engaged was absorbed in the concentration on the categories of phenomena called profound perception. Or another way, at that time the Buddha was engaged in equipoise in the concentration on the diversity of phenomena called profound illumination. Okay, now that first part Okay, we got the general setting and now we’re focusing on the Buddha himself. Bhagavan Him refers to the Buddha.

It’s a term of praise. So he was absorbed in meditation. The Buddha was seated there silently. He wasn’t doing anything. And he was in meditative equipoise in this concentration called profound illumination.

And within that set of profound illumination, that state of profound illumination is what enabling the categorization of objects that exist. It’s like it’s in a way it’s like shedding light on what exists in the universe. So it’s called that. It’s called profound illumination. Now at that time, the second at that time also has another meaning.

It means that the root of virtue of the assembly of those who were listening had thoroughly matured. So what that means is that those that were there were able were there because the collection of virtuous actions in the past had matured and that was the cause that allowed them or permitted them to be there at that time. So that second at that time has that meaning and it refers to the ripening of karma of past virtuous actions. Then also at that time, the bodhisattva, the great being, also at that time the bodhisattva, mahasattva there means great being, ārya there means noble. The bodhisattva, great being, noble Avalokiteśvara, looked upon the very practice of the profound perfection of wisdom and beheld those five aggregates also as empty and empty of inherent nature.

So among the gathering there, Ānanda was there and now Ānanda, the attendant, was in the group of the community of monks. And Avalokiteśvara was within the great community of bodhisattvas. Avalokiteśvara was not a monk. Avalokiteśvara is Guan Yin in Chinese. He’s a great bodhisattva.

He was he was contemplating things. The Buddha was there in meditation and Ānanda is there listening, waiting to see what happens, taking note, taking notes. Avalokiteśvara was viewing the profound practice or contemplating the profound practice of the perfection of wisdom contemplating the profound practice of the perfection wisdom and saw that the five aggregates were empty of any inherent nature. So the Buddha is contemplating profound illumination. Avalokiteśvara is contemplating the nature of the perfection of wisdom itself.

And while he’s contemplating the nature of the perfection of wisdom, he notes that the five aggregates are empty of any inherent nature. Okay, the five aggregates. What are the five aggregates? The five aggregates of the mind body continuum. The five aggregates are what we label I, in other words.

They’re called they’re singled out just for that reason that we label them I. If we have to what do we label as I? Where does I what object does I engage? What does I refer to? Form.

Body. This is I. Okay, this is the first of the five aggregates. Our physical body, I. And the second one?

Feeling. Feeling. So, I call my own feelings I. You know, we say I am happy, I am sad. Actually, the sad is a feeling, isn’t it?

Happy is a feeling. Happy is a positive mental feeling. When we say I am happy, we so closely identify our feelings with ourselves that we call the feeling me. That’s I. I am happy.

I have happiness. We also say it, we say I am happy. So, the second aggregate is feeling. What’s the third aggregate? Oh, that’s the fourth one.

Perception. Perception is sometimes translated perception or discrimination or recognition. Discrimination maybe? I think here what do we have? Probably discrimination.

Yep. Here it doesn’t mean racial discrimination or something like that. Here what it is, is the ability to recognize the unique identity of something. Recognition, discrimination. They were able to discriminate one thing from another, recognize what a chair is.

This process of recognizing the unique identity of things and having once been had this is a table being pointed out, then later we can recognize it. We can discriminate what a table is. So this is a very fundamental part of our makeup as a human being to discriminate, to recognize. That process of recognition also is said to be something we label as ‘I’. This ability to recognize that might be more difficult to see, but okay, it’s said to be one of the bases of iron.

Now the fourth aggregate is the aggregate of compositional factors or formation and here it’s rather a big category of mental factors, the main one being intention, volition, the intention to act. And the intention to act is so important to us as individual beings that, again, it’s something that even the I refers to. Will. Will. Yes.

Intention to act. Impulse to act. The guided directed impulse to act in a certain way. So that’s the fourth aggregate. And then the fifth aggregate is consciousness itself mental consciousness and that’s the subtlest they’re progressively more and more subtle and the subtlest is consciousness.

So these five we lump them all together and then the mind body continuum that we label as I. Because the I, of course, is more than just our body. It’s our feelings, discrimination, intention, consciousness. These things together we label as I. Sometimes the body is the I, sometimes the feelings are the I, sometimes it’s discrimination.

So the I, this practice of labeling really is directed at these five objects when we think of I. So that’s why they’re a category here. The five aggregates are a central category because that’s us. That’s the five aggregates is us. Me.

Little old me, that’s me, the five, all together, going along together in this mind body continuum. Avalokiteśvara at this point is looking at those five and saying they’re empty of any inherent nature. The base of I, empty of any inherent nature, not truly existent. So he’s contemplating that. Not only is he contemplating it, he sees it to be the case.

So he looked upon the very practice of the profound perfection of wisdom and behold those five aggregates also as empty of inherent nature. Right. So this is the uncommon introduction. So we got the two there together: we got the common introduction which is just the first bit which describes the two communities. That’s the common introduction.

The uncommon is the next part where the uncommon introduction has the Buddha meditating on profound illumination, on a concentration called profound illumination or profound perception. And Avalokiteśvara, one of the eight near sons of the Buddha, meditating on the perfection of wisdom itself. And as he’s meditating on the perfection of wisdom he’s looking at at what? He’s looking at the I because that’s the central issue for any being. I.

What am I? Who am I? And he’s looking at the five bases of I. That’s the physical body, our feelings, discrimination, intention, consciousness, and saying they’re empty of any inherent nature. Right.

So that now we’re looking at the uncommon introduction. And again at that time indicates that the maturity of the maturity, the maturing of the positive actions, the virtue of those beings in the past that allows them to be there at that time. Now, in terms of the meditation of the Buddha, the profound illumination or the profound perception, Profound means that it’s difficult to appear to the mind. That’s why it’s profound. It’s deep, difficult to understand.

It’s not something that’s readily understood, therefore profound. Profound there also because it’s referring to ultimate truth emptiness because conventional truth like tables and chairs and our physical body and so on, our feelings are not difficult to understand. But their emptiness is difficult to understand. So emptiness is profound. And then engaged in engaged in the concentration on the diversity of phenomena or as it says here: The Buddha the Bhagavam is absorbed in the concentration on the categories of phenomena.

So what that means is the Buddha was examining how we divide the what exists in the universe, how we look at this, how we understand it, how we categorize it, the diverse elements that exist in the universe, and that refers to the aggregates, the realms, and the bases. Aggregates again refers to the mind body continuum, and the realms and the bases refers to further classifications of what exists. There’s twelve bases and there’s eighteen realms. I wondered. Oh bases, bases, bases.

Or they’re sometimes referred to as sources, sometimes referred to as entrances. Āyatana in Sanskrit. Āyatana refers to the it’s more like a base in Sanskrit refers to the hearth, the base of the fire. They’re also in Tibetan called kye che, which means multipliers. And there are twelve of them, and they’re called multipliers because they multiply states of mind.

What are they? We could put it on the board. Is that would that be useful? How are we doing? We’re not?

Technically the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara was a student of the Buddha. So the Buddha already fully awakened. He is setting up a situation there, meditating on this concentration called profound illumination, which is illuminating all the categories of existence. And while the Buddha is meditating on that, then Avalokiteśvara is reflecting on the perfection of wisdom, which is related but it’s not exactly the same. And also then on the five aggregates.

So, not only on the perfection of wisdom, but on how the mind body continuum is empty of inherent nature. So, are different meditations that they’re undertaking. Probably Avalokiteśvara is being blessed by the Buddha. Just as, you know, when we are inspired. The implication is that Avalokiteśvara is meditating on that through the inspiration of the he’s receiving from the Buddha.

They’re both meditating on emptiness. Yes. Well, the Buddha always meditates on emptiness. The Buddha is always focused on ultimate truth. Buddha doesn’t sleep.

When we become Buddhas, we don’t get any sleep any longer. But at that time, you don’t need it. But, yeah, the Buddha always in equipoise, mind always in meditative equipoise, and understanding the nature of the empty nature of phenomena. Oh, in Chinese it’s Guanyin. Guanyin statue, yes Guanyin.

That’s Avalokiteśvara. That’s Chenrezig. Chenrezig, yes. That’s the Chinese version. The earlier version.

Well, what can one say? That yeah. That is the depiction that arose in China of Avalokiteśvara. Oh, this Avalokiteśvara, that’s more a traditional Indian. Now, that’s Avalokiteśvara with one thousand arms.

Yep. Let’s Avalokiteśvara with two arms. And there’s also a four-armed Chenrezig. We probably have here as well. Yes, you do see Kuan Yin as female.

Yeah. That’s one one of the ways you can spell. Yes. Yeah. But very important in China.

Have a look at Īśvara. But often takes not always takes female form in China. You see both male and female. But I think in China compassion was often seen to be a more feminine attitude. So perhaps that influenced because Avalokiteśvara is the bodhisattva of compassion, of course.

The personification of compassion. Right. We were going to have a quick look here at now the Buddha was engaged in the enumeration of phenomena or the classification of phenomena, and that refers to aggregates, realms, and bases. Okay. We’ll just do we’ll just do the bases.

Okay. Or also they can be called the sense bases. And really it’s very straightforward: the eye and form, Ear and sound. Like, ear nose and smell, tongue, taste. It’s pretty straightforward, isn’t it?

Body and tactile objects and or you can put mind here, I guess and phenomena. So, it’s really one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. So, is just a brief classification. Now, everything that exists can be included in those twelve categories. So, therefore Is that okay?

Feeling goes into phenomena. Everything that doesn’t fit in any of the other categories goes into phenomena. It’s cheating a little bit perhaps. But what it’s saying is that we have six types of consciousness and then six types of object. And everything is included in that.

What it’s looking at is the object, the mind and the object that that mind is But in this all the minds go into mind itself. And anything that doesn’t fit in any other category goes into phenomenon. So what we’re looking at basically is the duality of existence. And the eighteen realms are an expansion of this. And how that is expanded is the mind then is expanded into a further six, seven is expanded into seven.

But anyway, we don’t need to do any more on that particular issue at present other than to say: Why are we looking at all of these things? What’s the purpose? Just give us a headache. Why are we doing this is because we need to develop certainty about what exists and what doesn’t exist. And what we’re trying to do is work out the nature of the eye.

Fundamentally, what Buddhism is looking at is what eye is. And so we’re trying to discern the nature of the eye and the bases, the five aggregates for instance, which are the bases of imputation of the I. And then we’re looking at objects themselves, sense bases and determining whether the ‘I’ exists there or not as well, if you give a little bit more broadly. All of this is to understand selflessness. But in order to understand selflessness we need to, in a sense, simplify things down so that we develop certainty, more and more certainty about what the I is, what are the bases of the I.

And why are we doing that? It’s not just to give ourselves a headache or just create, you know, things for us to do. It’s because of course we need fundamentally to understand the nature of the I. And why is that? Because everything revolves, everything comes back to I.

Everything that we do in this life, everything we’ve done in the past and we’ll do in the future actually involves the I. From a Buddhist perspective we’ve lived from beginningless time. We’ve never been a time when we haven’t existed in the past but we still haven’t understood the ‘I’. What the ‘I’ is. How the I exists.

And the riddle of existence is centered on this issue. If we understand I, we understand the universe. And that’s the same for every being. But being ignorant of the ‘I’ is the perpetuation of saṃsāra. Sorry?

I. Sorry? Yeah, the like, the personal I. The self. Oh, not this eye, no, sorry.

Not that eye. Now here the self. Okay, so that’s the common and the uncommon introduction. And the uncommon we have the Buddha meditating on the classification of phenomena through the concentration called the profound illumination or the profound perception. And Avalokiteśvara, he’s looking at the five aggregates while he’s contemplating the nature of the perfect wisdom, the perfection of wisdom.

Right, so then we have the next section. The actual sūtra itself. So far it’s the introduction and here it’s been set up to say who’s there. There’s a common introduction which is like in general, we have this group of bodhisattvas, the group of monks. But now in particular, the Buddha is meditating in this way Avalokiteśvara is meditating in that way.

And Avalokiteśvara belongs to the group of bodhisattvas. And the person that’s writing all this down, taking note of it, is Ānanda. He’s the attendant of the Buddha. He belongs to the group of monks. Right, now the actual sūtra has three parts to it as well.

And the first is the way in which Śāriputra asks a question, and then the second is the way in which Avalokiteśvara responds. And then the third is the way in which the Buddha rejoices in what is said. Right, so we just go a little bit further. Then through the power of the Buddha, the venerable Śāriputra said this to the bodhisattva, mahasattva, Ārya Avalokiteśvara. mahasattva there means great being.

So Śāriputra is asking a question of Avalokiteśvara. How should any son of the lineage train who wishes to practice the profound perfection of wisdom. So it’s very straightforward. This is the question: how do we practice it? No, he’s in the monk category here.

Śāriputra was foremost in wisdom of the hearer followers or the followers in the small vehicle. There were two. He was one of the first two disciples or one of the early disciples and he became See, the Buddha has two attendants here in the front. Avalokiteśvara and Mañjuśrī. See on the two sides they’re standing in front.

Often you see the Buddha depicted with two monks, one standing on either side. I don’t know if we have any. But this is a slightly different version. Have a look at this far on the right there. You see?

Standing below the Buddha. Yeah, on the throne and Mañjuśrī on the other side. Now, in the other depictions of the Buddha you have on the right Śāriputra, on the left Maudgalyayāna. And they’re two early disciples. In fact, were students who were following the teachings of another teacher and they had this pact that whoever developed or found out or discovered information about the deathless state was to contact the other immediately.

And then one day, I think it was Maudgalyayāna came across a monk who was a student of the Buddha and he taught him one verse and then he realized that that was the teaching that he’d sought. And he went and told Śāriputra and they both went to the Buddha and became his students. So, Śāriputra is a foremost a monk disciple. Oh, it’s the other way around. At that time the bodhisattva Mahāsattva Then through the power of the Buddha, the Venerable Śāriputra said this to the bodhisattva Mahāsattva, Avalokiteśvara.

He’s asking Śāriputra is asking, Avalokiteśvara a question. But this is done through the power of the Buddha, through the blessing of the Buddha. And the question is how should any son or daughter of good lineage train who desires to engage in the profound practice of the perfection of wisdom? So this question is important, isn’t it? Actually, understanding the importance of the question.

We should spend about six months on the importance of the question. But we’re pretty distracted, you know, so it’s not, you know, we don’t have the time of course to do that. But if that question arose and it was given to someone like Avalokiteśvara, Now you might wonder why isn’t he asking a Buddha? But the Buddha thought he would set up a situation. And so he inspires Śāriputra to ask Avalokiteśvara.

Śāriputra asked the question: and at that point now it’s explained by this Mongolian lama that the word then also refers to power by the power of the Buddha Avalokiteśvara realized the meaning of what he would need to say to Śāriputra. That word then teaches that. And venerable here, Venerable Śāriputra. Venerable Śāriputra. In Tibetan it’s sedandenpa meaning one that has life.

But it doesn’t mean quite that here. Venerable in general is a term of address. But since this term occurs in the context of compiling the speech of the Buddha or as reporting and the rating speech of the Buddha, The term venerable is used here, but there is an issue of the two: Śāriputra and Avalokiteśvara who is more senior. Actually Avalokiteśvara is more senior in understanding and development. Even so, venerable here is used for Śāriputra, but with the understanding that the bodhisattva, the great being Avalokiteśvara is equally venerable.

More venerable in the sense because Avalokiteśvara is a great bodhisattva. And Śāriputra. Śāriputra was born near Nālānda which is and his mother’s name was Sharika and so he’s given the name Śāriputra. Shari from his mother and putra meaning son. There’s the son of Śāriputra.

And Shari also there’s some debate in the text here about Shari. There’s a bird called the Sharika bird, so which occurs in Sanskrit, particularly the bird that lives in that vicinity. And so they speculate about, well, his mom was called Sari after the bird, Sharika. That may be the case, we’re not sure. But this bird lived in the forests of Nālānda and in the swamp woods of that vicinity.

Now also now in different versions actually, it should be son or daughter. Some but we just have son mentioned there. Now there’s a bit of debate about this because son or daughter occurs later, whether it should be applied there as well. Okay now, son or daughter is applied son or daughter of good family, of good lineage. So, good lineage here means okay, either a male or female who is not a eunuch or a neuter.

Might as well. What that means is that it refers to a being who has the potency of their gender. Because only a being that, you know, has full, not a hermaphrodite, not a eunuch, not a neuter and so forth is capable of taking the vows of a monk or a nun. So too, here son or daughter is meant meaning someone that’s capable of practicing the path leading to the perfection of wisdom. Should not be a hermaphrodite, neuter or a eunuch.

This is an interesting issue that came up. It was a prominent issue at that time and monk if you were a eunuch or a neuter or a hermaphrodite, you weren’t given ordination, you could request but you would not be given ordination. And the reason that was said was that those who were not didn’t possess the, I don’t know, the complete what? A perfect body? They didn’t have the stability of mind necessary to maintain ordination or to attain understanding, realizations and so forth.

So what if had full gender about the limits? Oh, that’s fine. There’s a fault, but even if you’re full gender, limb missing or something like a club foot or something like that, then you’re not really supposed to take ordination. But under special circumstances you can. And there were different reasons for that, but there were exceptions made.

But anyway, it’s an interesting issue, but son or daughter here refers to that someone with a full gender that they are and the implication being that that meant that person had the, you know, a stable mental basis for practice. I’m not sure if these days what would be thought of that actually because there might seem to discriminating against. That would be I think. Oh, that’s fine. That would be something that yeah.

Here yeah. Now, mainly in gender, but also deformity if you had a particular physical deformity, you may not be permitted to take ordination. But But and part of the reason there also was for monks and nuns gaining arms from the people. If they were not there was or that if the Sangha was seen to be a refuge for those, you know, who are not full full and able-bodied, they may lose support of the community because the monks and nuns were fed by the population because they were big with alms bowls. And it was seen also that the Sangha really needed to be respected, you know, in the community, otherwise they wouldn’t be fed.

So, I mean this was was an issue then. It’s not so much an issue now because arms I mean, you see it in Thailand, Burma, Sri Lanka and it’s important there that the Sangha is, you know, is seen to be pure and worthy of offerings. Otherwise it wouldn’t be fed. But now that the Sangha actually often does have property and they can, you know, feed themselves, so it’s not such a big option. In China, when the Sangha was set up in China, they didn’t have a system of begging.

So they really required, you know, grants of property and so on. And the monks would have monks and nuns would have to cultivate their fields and grow their own food, which I think is what will happen in the West. Because I don’t think the Western mind really is taken up with begging as a I don’t know profession. It’s and I think there’s an expectation that okay, go out and learn your own living. Why should I support you?

In India, they had the idea that if you were actually engaged in a spiritual practice, you were worthy of being fed. And so that’s how the Sangha survived in India. And it still survives there. You go to India now and there’s millions of sadhus and so forth that still survive just by begging. But in the West, we’d probably look at that as like, you know, as a bludger.

Someone that just can’t get a job or some or won’t get a job. So anyway, there’s just that issue there. But that issue also still exists. But just how that now would mesh with the modern West a there there was this other issue that used to occur in ancient times of gender change. That if you change gender three or three times, you would lose your ordination.

Yeah. It’s a it it comes up in the in the text in ethics. If you’re a male and you change gender three times or a female and you change sorry? It’s a very interesting topic and there’s a lot of commentary on it in the ancient texts, especially going back two thousand years. It is one of the but, yeah, it’s reported to have occurred that yeah.

Maybe two I know two people who have done just that generally. So Right. This is more a natural process rather than even a hormonal change. It might relate to some sort of hormonal change. It’s interesting people are investigating what the actual what it actually refers to, but apparently it was something that it did occur.

It wasn’t necessarily that common, but it did occur. Yeah, that’s right. It was one of the ways you lost ordination. And it was actually also at present there’s the issue of reestablishing the female full ordination. That’s become more and more of an issue.

And one of the things that’s stopping it at present is the fact that the lineage of nuns died out a thousand years ago. But if there are monks who change gender to nuns, then it’s possible to reestablish it in that way. But I sorry? This is not rebirth. This is someone that takes ordination as a monk, change gender and they become a nun.

Then as a nun, they can then establish ordination of nuns again. That could be cultural issues that I mean it’s hard to say. When ordination spread from India to Tibet already full female ordination did not exist in the system of the Mūlasarvāstivāda which spread to Tibet. But anyway, it’s something that the Dalai Lama is currently investigating and I think it will be re established. It can be re established, but it can’t be re established without fault.

There’s a certain there are a few clauses in the Vinaya that mean that it’s possible but you know it can’t be done faultlessly. There’s a certain degree of fault because in order to especially in the Mūlasarvāstivāda system you need already nuns. You need nuns in the ordination ceremony of new nuns and not just monks, you need both nuns and monks to officiate. But there are no nuns at present. But it will be reestablished.

In fact, it already is being reestablished. So in future, maybe the nuns, like in Taiwan, the nuns outnumber the monks. No. Not from the Tibetan point of view. Yeah, definitely.

Of course females can become Buddhas. In her tradition, yes, that’s okay. In the Tibetan tradition, yes. And the reason being is that a female to actually from the Tibetan point of view to attain Buddhahood you not only need the perfection vehicle, you need the tantric vehicle, right? So the female has all the qualifications in the perfection vehicle as well as the tantric vehicle.

So there’s no problem but yeah, it doesn’t matter. It’s up to the individual. Especially anyway, as beings progress further and further on the path, one has the ability to decide, you know, how we reincarnate as male or female. At present we don’t have much control over the process, but as one progresses on the path, then one has more and more freedom on this issue. So what’s ever of more benefit?

Like, Ariatara, this green Tārā, she attained Buddhahood as a female. So to demonstrate that it’s possible, that there is no, there’s no difference whatsoever. In fact, all of us here, we’ve been male fifty percent of the time and female fifty percent of the time. So it’s really the current state of our society is just a product of our common karma from the past. So anyway, we should stop there for today.

Oh, Shaliputra. This is just a variation of the name. I I think that addition reflects the name of the father, but I’ll check on that if you like. Daddy. I have a feeling that reflects the name of the father as well.

So the father. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Right.

So we’re just, quickly just, a dedication. Okay, on page number six, we’ll just do two verses of dedication. And the prayers of dedication, we can recite this in English. This last verse on page six: Due to the merits of these virtuous actions, may I quickly attain the state of Guru Buddha and lead all living beings without exception into that enlightened state. May the supreme jewel bodhicitta that has not arisen arise and grow and may that which has arisen not diminish but increase more and more.

We do the long life for his Holiness too. In the land encircled by snow mountains, you are the source of all happiness and good, all powerful Chenrezig Tenzing Gyatso. Please remain until Samsāra ends. And then Lama Zopa Rinpoche. The subdue is a moral way, who serve as the bountiful bearer of all, sustaining, preserving and spreading Mañjuśrī’s victorious doctrine, who masterfully accomplish magnificent prayers honoring the Three Jewels, protector of myself and others, your disciple, please, please live long.

Okay. Oh, thank you for coming and have a nice, relaxed night tonight. Put your feet up and