Day 6: Motivation & Wisdom

So let's begin once again with practice, but this time also we're going to add another element right at the beginning of practice, which is actually a very important part of this style, which is this bringing up one's motivation, the motivation for practice. We'll be talking a fair bit about motivation as we go forward now. What is your motivation? One thing we should notice is what our actual motivations are, but also we can aspire in that way of in a sense telling a different story of the self, even entering a different narrative universe. And one key motivation is of course the relief of one's own suffering, but for the practice of the bodhisattva, as we will see, even beyond one's own suffering, it's also the relief of the suffering of all others and the attainment of full awakening, of full Buddhahood, the manifestation of full Buddhahood as a means to becoming the kind of person who can help others, who can serve others to relieve their suffering. So let's bring up that kind of motivation now and then with that motivation in place, just let go, settle, feel that sense of stability effortlessly held by the earth. Settling now onto the breath, just allowing the mind to ride on the breath and nothing more and then opening awareness. Perhaps now very gently, just again like the hand, your hand is on a boy in the water, the breath is a kind of anchor and as if gradually pulling your hand away from the boy, withdraw your attention from the breath and just rest without focusing on anything, simply aware. So let's begin with a verse, a very famous verse. The tathagata, the transcended one, a way of referring to the Buddha, said he spoke of those things which come from causes along with their causes. This is what he taught and he also spoke of their cessation. Thus did the great ascetic speak. So this is a very famous verse. It's a verse that we find actually inside of what are called stupas. It's a very famous kind of monument that we see throughout Asia. It's a monument actually to the Buddha's mind. Originally it began as a way of keeping his relics but now you will see them throughout Asia, big and small. And what it means in a sense, the fact that we find it inside of these stupas as a way of blessing them, it's kind of pointing to the fact that this verse is a core. It's at the core in a sense of the Buddha's mind, at least in terms of what he's teaching. It's at the core of the Buddhist teachings. And what does it mean? What's it about? It's about the idea that suffering comes from causes and conditions and that by eliminating those causes and conditions, one can eliminate suffering. So this is the famous idea of what's known as the Four Noble Truths. This is the kind of teaching that the Buddha first gave after attaining awakening. It's said that he attained awakening under the Bodhi tree some 500 years before the common era. There's a little debate about exactly when. In a place that's called now Bodh Gaya. And then he traveled up to the holy city of Varanasi to see his old friends, his former practitioners, who actually had shunned him because, you know, he had stopped doing the kind of practice they were doing and they were convinced this was the right practice. And he made his way to the outskirts of Varanasi in a place called Sarnath where he saw his old friends and they at first thought, oh, we'll just ignore him. You know, he's a fallen practitioner, but they couldn't resist the glow around him. And then he came to them and taught them, gave them the first teaching he did for the first time. He turned the wheel of dharma. He did what's called the dharma chakra pavatna mudra, the gesture of turning the wheel of dharma. And he taught to them this notion of the Nobles Four Truths. What is true for noble ones, for persons who are really committed to their spiritual practice and who are seeing clearly. And what are they? First, that there is suffering, an interesting starting place. And then that there is a source or origin of suffering. That cessation is possible, in a sense, there is the fact of cessation of suffering. And there's a path that we can follow to attain that cessation. So this is the core, in a way, of the Buddha's teaching. It's what, from the earliest days, is presented as the core of the Buddha's teaching. We've been talking a little bit about suffering and the various manifestations of suffering. Perhaps we don't need to say too much more. But especially if we focus on the way in which suffering has to do with, there is, of course, suffering that is pain, physical pain. But the main issue is the way in which we respond to our pain, our reactivity in general. So in a sense, it's especially mental suffering that's most important. And what is the cause of this kind of suffering? Well, one way of thinking about it, a traditional way of talking about it, is that we can't get what we want. We end up getting what we don't want. And what we do want, which we manage to get, we lose. So what's going on there? Remember the blue monster? The idea that we're confused about who it is we're making happy. We have a confused sense of our own identities. And because we're confused about our own identities, we're trying to make someone who doesn't exist happy. The kind of person we think we are just isn't there, like that person in the story. That's just a story. It's not a real person. The narrative of the self is just, in a sense, an act of imagination. It can be useful. But there's no real person who is you in a story. Just like there isn't even Frodo in the Lord of the Rings.

It's just a story. So our inability to obtain what we want, which is to say genuine, sustainable happiness, is based in this confusion about the nature of our own identity. And so the solution to that, so this is called ignorance. This is the source. This confusion about self is the problem, the underlying problem. We are able to eliminate that, however. And this is another key idea in Buddhism that runs throughout the Buddhist traditions, which is that even though, in a sense, we are born with this, and the claim is, interestingly, there's no beginning to this fundamental problem, the problem of ignorance, the confusion about the self. We can think in, even in evolutionary terms, we kind of step back and take a kind of evolutionary perspective. You could say that the development of a certain kind of sense of self is very useful, obviously. Right? Because we can tell that story. And that story, the ability to do that mental time travel, enables us humans to do amazing things. Without that capacity, we wouldn't be able to make this video. We wouldn't be able to build airplanes. We wouldn't be able to do all kinds of things. And so much of that is based upon, of course, our capacity for the simulation, the mental time travel, the kinds of thinking that we do, the simulating that we do. And that needs to have one of its organizing principles, is that it's organized around a sense of self, like that character in a story. So it can be certainly useful from an evolutionary perspective. But you could say there's something maladaptive to use evolutionary speak about the way this sense of self has developed, which, in a sense, is that we're too fixated on it. Right? We have that grasping. In a sense, it seems too real to us, that character, that sense of self. So that is the fundamental problem that we are born with. It's not our fault, so to speak. It's just we're born with that. And from an evolutionary perspective, we've evolved that way. And what we need to do is undermine that false sense of self, that unreal sense of self. How do we do that? That's through the practice of the path. And especially we do it through wisdom. So the path, there are many elements of the Buddhist path. There's the kinds of ways we change our behaviors, our ethics, so as to live in a different kind of narrative universe that opens up new possibilities for us. And those are critically important. We'll come back to some of that next time when we talk about the role of ethics and especially the cultivation of compassion. But the key element here, no matter how ethical we are, no matter how kind and compassionate we are, the key element has to be wisdom. Without the wisdom that sees through the delusion of our sense of self, of this false sense of self, without that wisdom, we're not able to transform that experience. Now, of course, remember, we have ultimate and conventional. There's an ultimate sense of, from the ultimate perspective, the kind of story of the self is definitely false. We've seen how you're not the person you were when you were five years old. You're not the person who will be 95 years old, perhaps someday. You would have to be three different people. Remember the story of Bob, right? You know, Bob in the past, Bob in the present, Bob in the future. If they're all the same person, are there three Bobs or is there one Bob who is a time traveler or what? So there are various kinds of analysis, conceptual analysis, we won't go into those in this course, but there are various kinds of conceptual analysis that enable us to, in a sense, take apart that false sense of self from an ultimate perspective.

Conventionally, we still tell stories, we still have a sense of self, but now we know, in a sense, it's like a play almost. So we're not so stuck in it. So that's the perspective, you could say, of early Buddhism, the perspective in which the fundamental problem is a misunderstanding of the nature of one's identity. And by eliminating that sense of self, then we solve the problem of trying to make some unreal person happy. But interestingly, along with this idea of a fundamental problem of confusion, also comes a notion that, well, ultimately, there is no self, but the stuff that we find ourselves working with, that is to say, the constituents of the mind and body, and the elements of the world, all of that is real. So there is a kind of real mind-body system. There's real stuff that makes up the world. And that's not being denied at the level of early Buddhist philosophy. Part of the implication of that, interestingly, is something that has to connect with the idea of karma. So what's the source of suffering? Go back to that. The source of suffering is this confusion about self. That confusion, often referred to as ignorance, is a kind of clacia. Remember that term, a kind of sticky state of mind, a dysfunctional state of mind, a dysfunctional aspect of mind. It's a dysfunctional kind of lens through which we're experiencing reality. And it's also karma. Karma is also part of the problem. That is to say, the conditioning, the causal process that is making this go along. So the causal process that's driving the merry-go-round of suffering, a term referred to with the word samsara, the flowing together of this mind-body system in a dysfunctional way, literally flowing together, there's an engine that's driving at it. And that engine is, I want this. I don't want that. I want this. I don't want that. I'm trying to make myself happy, but I'm confused about myself. It's like I'm trying to make that non-existent blue monster happy. I want this. Don't want that. I want this. I don't want that. And when I'm doing all of this, I'm also literally like making a world, shaping a world, forming a world, creating interactions. And the perspective here is that the world we encounter in this way is actually arising out of a causal process, which is structured by karma. Very interesting idea, even in early Buddhism, is that the whole universe actually is constructed in a sense by the minds of the beings, the minds and bodies of the beings that is inhabiting the world. In some sense, we could see that even very concretely, like when even a species like ants which are fairly simple, it would seem from the human standpoint, they alter their environment. They change things. We humans do so in a much more dramatic fashion, and sometimes rather disastrously as we're discovering these days with the climate crisis. So we're living in this world driven by all this confusion, making a mess of things in a way. And so what do we do then? Well, interestingly, the Buddhist theory here is that the very stuff of this world is also participating in that confused causal process. So that especially the elements of this mind and body are the products of this karmic causal process. And since that karmic causal process is driven by that fundamental confusion or ignorance, that is that lies at the root of our suffering. That means that this stuff is also contaminated by that ignorance. In other words, if we want to end suffering, once we end suffering, where do we end up? Well, we can't end up here, in this contaminated mind and body because this is actually the product of that whole process. So in early Buddhism, the paradigm of nirvana, which is the state of cessation that one's attained when one has eliminated the causes of ignorance, the paradigm of nirvana is nirvana as cessation. It's just the end. It's like blowing out the candle. In fact, in early Buddhism, we even see this distinction between what's called nirvana with remainder and nirvana without remainder.

In other words, a person who actually eliminates that ignorance may still be alive and they then continue on for a while until all of the karmic causes and conditions that are driving the mind body system finally run out and then they die. So when they're alive, even though they've obtained nirvana because they have eliminated the causes of suffering, they've eliminated that ignorance, they're still being driven by the past karma until they die. So they're in nirvana with remainder and then they die, they pass away and now they're into nirvana without remainder, which in a sense is just like the metaphor that's given is blowing out the candle, just it's gone. So that paradigm of cessation of nirvana is one that carries along for several centuries in Buddhism. But then starting around the start of the common era, maybe a little before then, possibly, things begin to change and we don't really know historically why they change precisely. We see some elements, for example, it may be that the worship of the Buddha in an act of what's called puja, worshipping the Buddha, which would often happen around stupas, around those monuments, that as practitioners are kind of doing that, they're sort of thinking in some way or maybe enacting like the Buddha's presence. And what we see therefore in iconography is that previously when we see representations of the Buddha around these great stupas, there we don't see the Buddha himself, he's not in his actual form. Instead, we just see the traces of the Buddha like his footprints or an empty throne underneath the Bodhi tree, but he's not there. But then starting around the start of the common era, suddenly he's back, we see physically the new representations of the Buddha, actually the Buddha in his iconographic form, his full like body, which is what of course you're probably familiar with. You've seen representations, statues and so on. Before that point, we didn't have those. So something changes there in a sense like the Buddha's not really gone anymore. Worship may have something to do with that. The involvement maybe of lay practitioners may have had something to do with that. There are various developments. But one of the key developments that emerges that enables this change is a shift in the idea of what is nirvana. So now nirvana is not cessation. It's like radical transformation. It's not a matter of blowing out the candle to matter of completely transforming from an ordinary being into a fully awakened being. And so nirvana is not like the world of suffering samsara, the merry-go-round and nirvana, which is its cessation. Now nirvana is like somewhere in between what is called unlocated nirvana, apratishta nirvana. And an awakened being is in that location. Along with this needs to come some changes in philosophy. So remember, we said that the causal process that is driving suffering is not just about the mind. It's also about the body in the sense that it's part of this whole karmic process. And even the whole world actually is part of this karmic process. And since it's all contaminated by the causes of suffering by ignorance, that means that there's nowhere to go. I mean, it's all samsara. And since the nature of each thing is determined by its causes and conditions, just like you could say, you can't take an apple and just turn it into an orange. An apple is an apple as a result of its causal history. Therefore, we're kind of stuck. So that's why the only option is blowing out the candle. Because the world's in a sense stuck in its own causal history. And then, when this paradigm changes, and nirvana is no longer cessation, it's transformation, we need a change in philosophy. And this introduces us to this new form of philosophy that arises along with what's known as the great vehicle, the Mahayana. And this new form of philosophy, the sort of first champion of this new form of philosophy is the great Buddhist philosopher by the name of Nagarjuna, who arises around the first and second century of the common era. And he teaches a philosophy that's known as the philosophy of emptiness, shunya-ta. Now, there's so much we could say about this philosophy of emptiness. And we won't get into all of those details in this course. But we can say this much, which is that the main point of this philosophy is that things do not exist intrinsically or essentially in the way that they appear. In other words, things are not fixed in their nature. They are infinitely malleable. An orange and apple, in a sense, can in a way be totally transformed into something radically different. How is that possible? Because all things are not fixed in their identities. Instead, they simply exist in radical interdependence. And so Nagarjuna says, very famously, that those things which are dependently arisen are precisely the things which lack any kind of fixed identity. They are precisely what we mean as empty things. They are empty of any kind of a fixed identity. Empty, you could say, of essence. So part of what this means, therefore, is that the world now is not just fixed in its identity. It's radically transformable. So we do not, in a sense, need to escape from samsara. We don't have to leave samsara in order for us to transform it into nirvana, or if you like, transform it into what comes to be known as the Buddha field, the field of awakening, the awakening world. And how do we do that? Well, remember that the engine that drove samsara for early Buddhism is ignorance. And it's still going to be ignorance in Mahayana. But now, instead of ignorance about one's own identity, it's now even not just ignorance about one's own identity, a sense that that story, in a sense, is who you really are.

But it's actually a belief that the world as it exists, as it appears to you, is truly real just as it is, objectively. That in a sense, the world simply, whatever you see, is just as it is. That that sense of the objective reality of things, independently of the way you look at them, so to speak, is false. That's the second level of ignorance, ignorance about the essential identity of things. So eliminating suffering now is certainly about eliminating that false belief in a kind of fixed absolute self. But it also now involves eliminating a false belief in the fixed identity of all things. And that second level of ignorance, the first level of ignorance eliminates suffering for yourself. But that second level of ignorance, by eliminating that, then the world becomes, it's possible to, in a sense, remake the world. And how do we remake the world? Well, if the engine that drives the merry-go-round of suffering is ignorance about the self, the engine that drives the making of a new world is compassion, great compassion, what's called mahÄ쳌-karunÄ쳌. And thus, the paradigm of the practitioner also changes. So in early Buddhism, we could say the practitioner is focused on especially a monastic practitioner who is trying to obtain a state of nirvana, that's cessation. Now the new form of practitioner is called the bodhisattva, the awakening being. And that being is one who is seeking to transform radically this world into a world for all beings to be free from suffering. What drives them in terms of that motivation is what we call bodhicitta, the awakening mind. So why would this be, in a sense, necessary? I mean, how does this make sense? Well, one way of thinking about this is that there is a sort of orientation toward the self, toward the sense of one's own identity that can be eliminated, like the story of the self can be eliminated, but still there's a very subtle kind of self-focus that remains. Even after we eliminate that first level of ignorance, there's a kind of subtle sense of self-focus that remains. And part of what Buddhahood is about, about being a fully awakened being is about, is the capacity to be the best possible teacher actually, the best possible servant, helper for sentient beings to help them free themselves from suffering. That means that one needs to have this capacity, a kind of radical capacity, to stand in another's shoes, to see the world from the perspective of others. In order to do that, one has to be able to completely radically drop one's own perspective. It's sort of a very deep form of empathy, if you like. And in order to do that, simply kind of analyzing, using philosophical analysis to deconstruct one's sense of the world is not in itself adequate. There has to be a sort of affective or emotional reorientation. And that affective or emotional reorientation comes through compassion. And it compels one, in a sense, to stand in the other's shoes. So the new paradigm of practice, therefore, is now not the practice of an individual who is seeking their own liberation. It's the practice of the bodhisattva who is seeking to achieve complete awakening so that all might be free from suffering. So what drives this practice is great compassion. That's what the bodhisattva needs to cultivate. That's what the awakening mind or bodhicitta is all about. And we'll be talking about that in the next episode. But along with this also comes in another level of wisdom. So remember, wisdom is what counteracts confusion or ignorance. And the first kind of wisdom is wisdom that sees the nature of things in terms of our own identity. So in general, we can say wisdom is jatabhuta darshana, seeing the way things truly are. The first level is seeing that this sense of self, the story of the self, is not who we are. There isn't this kind of self at all. It's a story, it's a convenient fiction, but it doesn't really exist. This next level now is seeing that even our, in a sense, story of the world, the narrative universe in which we are telling our stories, the very stuff of the world is not fixed in its identity. And so when Nagarjuna teaches his philosophy of emptiness, he goes through a number of different kinds of analyses to undo our sense of some kind of objectively real world. But then another form of philosophy arises, a couple of hundred years, maybe one or two hundred years after Nagarjuna. And this new form of philosophy, which is called yoga chara, the practice of yoga, literally, actually, sometimes also called chitamatra, mind only. But that's a little bit of a confusing term. This new philosophy is all about our own sense of subjectivity, that other level of identity. Remember, we said we can talk about self as object in the past episode. We said we could talk about self as object or self as subject. This, so yoga chara, in a way, is really pointing us to turning us more toward that sense of self as subject. And there's a reason for this. If we are trying to see the way things truly are, like what is actually happening, and if part of what the problem here is this, according to Nagarjuna, is that there's a sense like there's a real objective world out there, which also means that even if there's no true story of the self, at least maybe there is a sense of some kind of subjectivity, consciousness, or something like that, that is seeing that world. So there's a world out there and a consciousness knowing that world in here, so to speak. This ends up with this kind of very basic fundamental structure of subject-object duality. And the basic claim here is that that structure of subject-object duality is precisely what enables us to create objectivity itself. So if we have a sense that the world is just objectively real simply as it appears, therefore can't be radically transformed, that sense of objectivity, that not just an idea, but actually a behavior, a way of being in the world, a kind of being in a narrative world in a way, a kind of way of constructing a narrative universe, that way of being rides on top of a much more fundamental way of knowing. And that more fundamental way of knowing is precisely subject-object duality. We can't have a sense of some kind of pure, purely objective, truly real reality unless we have a sense of there being something, an object, that is being held or regarded by a subject. So objectivity requires subject-object duality. In order for us, therefore, to really see what is going on, we need to examine whether or not that subject-object duality is in fact truly real. Is that what is happening? And the claim here in Yoga Chakra is no, it's not. And there are a number of different ways of coming to that realization, but one of them, a very intriguing one, is this. If you look, let's maybe use the visual sense, but you could also use your auditory sense for this if you like. As you are looking at, let's say, me at this image, maybe there are various colors here that you can see, a really fundamental question you can ask yourself is, where is the color? You could choose some color that you can see in the background here and say to yourself, where is it? Where does this color exist? Now one way we might say is we might naturally sort of point, right, or it's there, the color is out there, maybe on the screen. That's where the color is. But even if we use sort of very simple high school physics, we know that at that level of analysis at least we'd say that, well, actually what's happening is that there are photons at certain frequencies that strike the eye and certain other causes are in place. You know, the visual system eventually processes that kind of information and produces color as a visual image. But that color is therefore a product of your visual system. It's not out there in the world. It's actually presented in your consciousness. So what you're actually seeing is not a color out there. What's presented in your consciousness is this color. There is no out there. There's simply what's happening within your own field of consciousness. That also means that the sense of out there requires an in here, right? In order for us to say there's something out there, we need to have something, we have a sense of in here. That's the structure of subject object. Out there is only possible if there's in here. So that means that there's a sense of subjectivity standing over against some kind of an object like the image of color.

But since that image of color itself is not out there, that means that this sense of subjectivity is a false sense of subjectivity. Because both of them are actually nothing other than consciousness itself. In other words, each sensory experience and each thought is being presented within consciousness for a subject which is also within consciousness. So what's actually going on in a sense is just consciousness. Now the reason that term mind only is a little confusing is it can sound like we're saying, well, we're taking the whole world and we're like collapsing it into our sense of subjectivity, like the knower. But that's not what's going on here. When this sense of, if we recognize that there really isn't a color out there, the out there-ness depends upon the in here-ness, but the in here-ness also depends on the out there-ness. So when this goes, this also goes. And what's left? It's a very good question, isn't it? What is left? It's a question that's a fundamental question in this style of philosophy, where you can say the emptiness now, unlike Nagarjuna's interpretation of emptiness, which is where we're talking about emptiness of some kind of objective identity, some kind of essence. Now emptiness in this style of philosophy is about the emptiness of this subject-object duality, that actually each moment of experience has this structure for ordinary beings, our ordinary experiences like that. But in fact, consciousness is, in terms of its ultimate identity, in terms of the way it ultimately exists, consciousness is actually empty of that structure. And so is there something left? That's the, you could say the almost the riddle for the non-dual traditions in Buddhism. It's something that we could go into great detail in, but we won't in this course. But we can, however, maybe get a little bit of an experiential taste of this kind of thing, of what we're talking about. And that's going to require us to really let go. So let's just try this. Of course, we're not going to have a full realization of non-duality or something, we're not even striving to do that. We're just going to try to notice the way in which we can be aware of subjectivity. And yet, that awareness is occurring, not from the standpoint of subjectivity itself. So let's first settle. Just again, find that sense of stability and effortlessness. Or maybe I should tell you one more thing before we start this practice. One of the things about subjectivity, of course, is that the sense of I'm knowing this is very much connected to me doing something. I want this. I don't want that. The old grasping and rejecting. It's about effort. So as soon as I'm making effort, I'm caught up in that subjectivity. So that's why in this style of practice, it's especially important to really let go of effort and to not make anything happen. Not need anything to happen. To simply be aware without effort, without adjustment, without fixing anything, without contrivance, what's called intubation. So we'll just see if we can settle into that a little bit and see what we might notice when we let go in this way. So just settle. Find that sense of stability.

Again, allow the mind to attend to the breath. And now notice the gaps between the breath. Notice how there is awareness, even when there's nothing to be aware of in the gap. And again, settling onto the breath. Now, as if out the corner of your eye, simply notice that sense of attending. Who is watching?

Keep the attention on the breath and yet notice the sense of being the watcher. To notice subjectivity without turning towards subjectivity. And now let go of the breath. So what was that like? Perhaps a few moments, even a glimpse of some sense of being aware of that structure, of in here, out there, of noticing the inhearness from the standpoint, some other standpoint, if you like. To notice that sense of being the one watching without turning to look at the watcher. There's a moment there that maybe starts to give us a sense that that sense of subjectivity is just as constructed, just as contingent as that sense of the story, of the self in the story. That too is just a product of a particular kind of process. And that can open us up to even a more radical possibility of change and transformation. Let's settle in that once more for just a moment, just letting go. Now just totally let go. Simply remain aware. So now I'm