The Heart Sutra

James Low
12–13 March 1994

Köln, Germany

www.simplybeing.co.uk © James Low

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

The  Four  Noble  Truths:  Suffering  .....................................................................................................1

Symbolism  In  Tantra  ........................................................................................................................2
The  Second  Turning  Of  The  Wheel  Of  Dharma  ................................................................................4
MeditaCon  And  The  Gap  .................................................................................................................6
The  Three  Marks  Of  CondiConed  Existence  ....................................................................................6
Ques&ons  about  suffering  .....................................................................................................7
Consciousness  With  No  Object  .....................................................................................................11
The  Tibetan  Wheel  Of  Life  .............................................................................................................14
Using  DeiCes  In  Your  PracCce  ........................................................................................................19
The  Three  Kayas  ............................................................................................................................20
The  Heart  Sutra  And  Commentary  ................................................................................................21
The  se4ng  –  Vulture  Peak  ...................................................................................................22
Chenrezig  medita&ng  on  the  emp&ness  of  the  Five  Skandhas  .............................................23
What  happens  when  you  die  ..........................................................................................................29
Tantra  dissolving  prac&ce  ....................................................................................................30
Prajnaparamita  Verse  ....................................................................................................................31
Chöd  ....................................................................................................................................34
Why  I  Teach  The  Way  I  Do  .............................................................................................................36
Heart  Sutra:  Sariputra  QuesCons  Chenrezig  ..................................................................................38
Emp&ness  and  form  .............................................................................................................39
Fourth  skandha:  associa8on  ............................................................................................................40
Things  are  without  significa&on,  says  Chenrezig  .................................................................45
Chenrezig  speaks  of  the  eighteen  dhatus.  More  on  the  Wheel  of  Life  .................................46
Advice  On  How  Apply  The  Dharma  A\er  The  Retreat  ...................................................................49
A  story  from  C  R  Lama  .........................................................................................................50
How  the  dharma  helps  us  change  .......................................................................................51
Heart  Sutra  Mantra  .......................................................................................................................52
How  The  Sutra  Arose  .....................................................................................................................53
Bodhisa`va  DeiCes  ........................................................................................................................53
MeditaCon  And  DedicaCon  At  The  End  .........................................................................................55
Appendix:  The  Heart  Of  The  PerfecCon  Of  Wisdom  Sutra  ............................................................57

www.simplybeing.co.uk © James Low

 THE HEART SUTRA

The focus that we have this weekend in on the Heart Sutra and I will start by saying
something about studying the dharma and what that means. Then I’ll go on and go
through the Heart Sutra line by line and try to make sense of it both in traditional terms
and in terms of western psychological thinking, in particular bringing the idea of
emptiness and what that means. That will be interspersed with time for sitting meditation
and reflection on what’s been discussed. Tomorrow afternoon we’ll take some of that into
a more tantric view of visualisation and practice.

But first of all to think in general about the place of study in dharma practice.
Traditionally the teachings of the Buddha are represented as being three baskets, or three
containers. These are the vinaya, the sutras, and the abhidharma. The vinaya is a sections
of text which deal with morality, with rules about behaviour, what you should do, what
you shouldn’t do. The sutras deal with the nature of meditation, and reflections by
Shakyamuni Buddha on the place of meditation in life. He teaches through examples, like
how Jesus used parables. Then the third part, the abhidharma – abhi means “first” and
“dharma” means “reality” in this context – so the abhidharma deals with the basics of
reality. Abhidharma texts analyse perception and ordinary experience and try to explore
the assumptions that we operate from.

THE FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS: SUFFERING

Because as the Buddha said in his first teachings, “We are all caught up in suffering” and
this suffering has a cause. And the cause has different parts. Partly it’s our habitual
behaviour that we respond in a very unconscious way and that’s what the teachings on
morality seek to take charge of. Then suffering also arises because we make assumptions
about the nature of the phenomena that we experience. That is to say we take the
assumptions of language to be real. So that we imagine that when we use words – that
when we say, “This is a room – this is a beautiful room with nice flowers” – this is
referring to something actually real, substantial.

And on the basis of this sort of assumption we continue in the subject–object pattern
which gives rise to samsara. So the abhidharma section – this section of the three baskets,
the Tripitaka – is the antidote to the assumptions of the ordinary understanding. Thirdly is
the sutra section which is dealing with meditation. This goes to the deepest level of
analysis in looking at thoughts as they arise.

So these sections of the teachings are set out in order to give us more confidence and
more ease, both in being in ourselves, and being in the world with other people.

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So I mean many of us maybe have had the experience in school of having to learn a lot of
information which we could never understand why we were having to learn it. And it
maybe that normally in order to live our lives we actually don’t need to know very much.
And we can also see that in order to practise the dharma we actually just need a few
particular practices to do and feel that that’s enough. And in particular if we are practising
tantric visualisation, making use of colour, and sound, there’s an enormous power in this
practice to transform the quality of our experience. Nonetheless this kind of practice is
embedded in a particular view, a particular understanding of how it is to be a subject in
the world. And certainly in my own experience of having studied quite a lot about
Buddhist philosophy, both through Tibetan sources and through translations, I think it is
very helpful for meditation practice. Because even in tantric practice, when we look into
the symbolism of the deity, to the clothes that they wear, to the things that the deity holds,
and to the nature of the mandala house in which they live, each of these qualities that the
bodhisattvas are wearing and representing are aspects of the dharma teachings of these
three baskets.

For example, if we think of Guru Rinpoche, of Padmasambhava, he is normally described

as wearing monk’s robes, which is a symbol that he embodies or represents very pure
morality. And this means that he represents the vinaya, all the teachings on the
discrimination between good and bad actions. He also wears the rich robes of the
bodhisattva; rainbow–coloured silk robes, and this represents the rich variety of his
compassionate being in the world – his ability to respond to others in the precise nature of
their need. Now all the tantric deities, all these practices have commentaries in which it’s
explained the correlation, the relationship between the description of the deity and the
general understanding of Buddhist philosophy.

SYMBOLISM IN TANTRA
So in tantric practice what one has is a condensation or a distillation of all the various
facets of Buddhist understanding. and while in order to do the meditation practice you
don’t have to be a great scholar, you don’t have to spend years and years studying these
things, yet there are many allusions, there are many symbolisations which if you don’t
understand the, somehow there is less potency in the form of the deity. Say for example
you went to an art gallery to look at an exhibition of renaissance art and you didn’t know
anything about Greek or Roman mythology and you didn’t know anything about
Christian symbolism, particularly medieval symbolism. You could see the paintings and
you could be very impressed by the colours and the dynamic quality of the figures, the
gestures, but there would be all sorts of subtle nuances, all sorts of meanings represented
by the painters which you would be completely blind to. Of course you could go in as an
art expert, tearing the painting apart to pull out these symbols, to steal knowledge as it
were form them. But in that way you would miss the aesthetic richness, the living quality,
of a beautiful painting.

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So what one needs is to bring together the aesthetic openness of the heart and the sense
through which one would respond to the painting, plus the knowledge of the meanings of
the symbols, of the history that are embedded in them. And these two streams running
together give you a total impact of the image. All the study that we can do into Buddhist
philosophy is ultimately only of value to us if we turn it into strengthening and deepening
our meditation. And this knowledge of information and analysis has been developed as a
method of helping us to deepen our meditation.

So we need to make sure that when we study something we get some sense of what we
are going to do with it. These are tools, like we have a knife and fork to eat food, these
Buddhist concepts are for helping us to cut into reality and to digest the world to break
down the subject–object division. Traditionally they talk of three stages of study or
practice. First there is hearing, or maybe more often in our case, reading. Then thinking
or contemplation. And then finally meditation. It’s said to be hearing, and many of the
things we hear we can also read in books and part of the reason why it’s important to hear
people talking about the dharma is that one can get a living sense that it makes sense for
somebody else.

Hopefully you will feel at ease enough here to ask questions otherwise you won’t know
whether I am some kind of parrot repeating things that I have heard and I haven’t
understood. Because it’s very important to understand whether this knowledge can be
applied and can become something that’s flexible and that helps us to respond to life,
rather than being a dogma which sits and keeps us tight and so separated off from the
free–flow of life itself.

We are fifteen or so people in this room and we will each have our own personality, each
have our own way of being in the world. Some people here may be predominantly feeling
types and learn through having an emotional contact with something. Others may be
more thinking types and able to have their primary access through thinking and
intellectually understanding something. And for this kind of person getting a conceptual
overview gives a sense of order and direction is very reassuring. Other people may be
more doing types who are concerned, who learn by doing something, by actually being
caught up in it through the process of direct involvement. And other people perhaps live
more in terms of being. Of being in the presence of something and just absorbing it as it
were through a process of osmosis. In Europe we don’t pay much attention to this last
kind, we tend to think that we have to be very dynamic and active in the world if we want
to get anywhere.

In India, in Hinduism and certainly in Buddhism as well there is the idea of darshan or
satsang – darshan means to be able to see to view the presence of the other. “Satsang”
means, “sat” means both truth and being and “sang” its the same root as in sangha – it

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means assemble or “being in the presence of”. So it means being in the presence of
people who have some realisation of some practice.

So there are these different styles and each of us will have a predominance in one or other
of them. The topic that we are particularly covering this weekend – the Heart Sutra – is
probably easiest for people who have a predominance in the thinking function because it
has to do with the analysis of the categories through which we understand phenomena. So
it’s important to be aware of yourself and to recognise what happens to you when you are
confronted with a whole lot of stuff, a whole lot of ideas. It might excite you, or it might
just make you feel kind of stupid or maybe very angry. And we have to remember that the
Buddha taught many many different paths to enlightenment. He wasn’t insisting that
everybody follow the same path. Nonetheless although we maybe need to recognise that
maybe that this sort of way into the dharma is perhaps rather difficult for us I think it is
worthwhile making some struggle, some effort, to get some idea of what a text like the
Heart Sutra is about.

THE SECOND TURNING OF THE WHEEL OF DHARMA

The Heart Sutra belongs to what is called the “second turning of the wheel of the
dharma”. The first turning of the wheel of the dharma is represented by the teaching that
Buddha Shakyamuni gave in the deer park at Sarnath. And some of you, if you have been
in India or seen Tibetan monasteries, or seen pictures of them, might have noticed that on
the roof of almost all Tibetan monasteries over the front door there are two deer looking
at a wheel. And these two deer represent the deer in the deer park where the Buddha first
taught. And the wheel represents ... it’s called “the turning of the wheel of the dharma“.
A wheel gives the sense of effortlessly moving and so it implies a sense of inevitability.
There’s also a sense that it’s a royal symbol. It represents a chariot in which a king would
ride. It also represents a vehicle, a more rapid way of travelling than going on your own
legs. And it also represents a turning around a central point.

Samsara turns around the central point of the ego, of a self identification. This is the root
of suffering, of attachment to the self, that I exist apart from the world. And the central
point of nirvana or liberation is the letting go of the sense of self. That in the very centre
of every wheel there is a point that does not turn. So this wheel represents both nirvana
and samsara.

So anyway the Buddha taught in this park at Sarnath and he taught the four noble truths. I
am sure that this is something that you are familiar with, but I’ll just go over it again very
briefly, suffering, the cause of suffering, the ending of suffering and the path to the
ending of suffering. In this first teaching of the wheel of the dharma, which is normally
seen as being a Theravadin, or from the Tibetan point of view, a Hinayana teaching; the
cause of suffering is attachment. So it’s as if my self is like a hand it wants to get hold of
something, so if there is something for it to get hold of it feels comfortable. Now if I open
my grasp and let go then there is nothing to hold on to. But if the hand has been trained

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for a long time to grasp something it gets sort of twitchy, it wants something. And it
keeps looking like if a baby’s playing with something and you take it away, its hand
keeps going because it liked the feel of whatever it was that it was holding on to.

This is the way that the karmic impulse operates, the tendency to repeat the same action
to go back. It wants to get some more of the same thing. And by doing stilling meditation,
by calming the mind, by not being involved in the phenomena that are arising in the mind
there is a space between the karmic impulse and the one who would normally identify
with the impulse. So the practice that one is concerned with there is to reduce the impulse
that one has to grasp onto things.

So that’s why in these Theravada or Hinayana teachings there is a great stress on

renunciation and that there is a great emphasis on becoming a nun or a monk, on giving
up the worldly life, sexual activity, occupations directed towards finance and power and
status in the world. So that one has a particular position that one has taken up that acts as
an antidote to all the different situations of temptations that arise. Just as somebody might
stop drinking alcohol, then they don’t have to think, “Oh well I won’t drink beer but I
maybe I’ll drink wine if it is a good vintage” because the level of renunciation is a deeper
level – it’s alcohol. And alcohol is the common nature that runs through all the different
kinds of alcohol that exist. So it’s a one-liner, you’ve cut off the whole thing. So if you
are a monk or a nun you say, “I won’t have any sex at all” whereas ordinarily you might
say, “Well I might have sex with you, but I won’t have sex with you, or I might have sex
with you on Monday, but not on Tuesday” and you get into all sorts of adaptions.

Of course that makes the world very simple because you are no longer so concerned with
how people look or what they are interested in or if they are interested in you, it’s just
that that’s not your bag, that’s not what you are into any more. There’s less hooks in the
world drawing you out towards them and so you can slip through the world more easily.
And generally all the rules around morality that are about monks’ and nuns’ vows and
general lay peoples’ vows about not killing or stealing or telling lies, or whatever, they
are all concerned with simplifying the impression of the world, simplifying the exciting
qualities of object so that the mind won’t be so stimulated.

And I think it is very important to understand this that these are methods to help us in our
meditation, these are not real statements of the truth: “To live like this is to better than to
live like that.” They are pragmatic.

Then secondly in terms of meditation, the main kinds of meditation which are connected
with this view, are ones which are directed towards calming the mind. Externally through
morality we have simplified the external world and now through the meditation we are
calming down our urge to go out and fascinated by things. And usually at first when we
start to do calming meditation we become aware of how confused and jangly our
thoughts are. Externally we may feel that we are somehow rational beings, making clear
decisions about our lives but when we start to become aware of the way that thoughts and

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feelings arise in meditation we realise just how out of control and how peculiar we are
inside. Just like somebody who is very stoned on cannabis is just fascinated by
everything and can look at their hand in amazement. When we sit and try to keep our
minds focused on our breath or something else we realise how fascinating every other
thought is.

MEDITATION AND THE GAP

So that’s what this kind of meditation is trying to do, is to simplify things and to stop the
magical fascination that we seem to have with whatever is arising in our mind. It’s maybe
a little bit like a baby who gets into playing in its own shit and is quite fascinated by the
smell and the taste. Because the shit is both self because it came out of my body, and it’s
not self. And similarly the thoughts that arise in our minds in meditation they are like our
own shit, they are our creativity, but are they self or not self? And we get very fascinated
sniffing around. So this kind of meditation is like a potty training that we learn to put our
shit into one little pot, the pot of the breath or the pot of the statue, or whatever is our
focus of attention. And then the Buddha says “Good little boy, good little girl.”

So basically it is about trying to create this gap and in a sense to keep us clean, just like a
small child being trained to shit in the right place, because then you can be more at ease
in the world. Then the third aspect that I talked of in the beginning, the abhidharma, on
this level this is connected with the analysis of the categories of phenomena in the world.
And there are many different systems of analysis that were developed historically. We’ll
look at just two of the most simple and important ones. And in particular these are the
two which are mentioned in the Heart Sutra. Because the Heart Sutra is particularly
important because the Heart Sutra represents the crossover point form this Hinayana or
Theravadin viewpoint into the Mahayana Buddhist philosophy, which is the philosophy
which underpins the whole of tantric practice and you could say the whole of dzogchen.

Now I am using lots of technical terms and you may not know what some of these mean,
but we’ll have a space soon to ask questions, and I am happy to explain any of the words
that I have been using.

The three marks of conditioned existence

In the Buddhist teachings in the Hinayana there are said to be three marks of conditioned
existence. Are these are said that all phenomena are suffering, they have suffering as a
part of their nature, nothing is apart from suffering. Also all phenomena are impermanent,
and all phenomena are devoid of inherent self–nature. And if you study Buddhism in
Thailand or Burma or some place like that you will find that again and again they will
come back to that focus on these three particular points. But first of all we have to think
“what does it mean ‘all phenomena’?” I’m using this word phenomena to represent the
Sanskrit word “dharma”. And the word dharma means both the teachings of the Buddha,

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it also means each particular thing that exists, each phenomena, and it also means reality.
These are the three main ways in which the word is used.

In this sense talking of these three signs of conditioned existence it means dharma as
phenomena. Now of course if we have to think of each phenomena as it arises then every
time we meet it we have to wonder what is it? If I hold this up and you don’t know what
this is you have to work out what it is. But the way our perception works is that when we
encounter a phenomena we have various categories through which we recognise what it
is, we locate it in various ways. Thus we might say this is red. Now roughly it is red, but
it also maybe more maroon, or ox blood coloured. So red would be a rough category, and
if we were an artist and we really wanted this colour we would have a very precise name
to put on it. So all the time we have particular categories into which we pull all the
phenomena of the world and place them inside the field of our knowledge. This is how
we sort of order the gestalts of our perception.

But often these gestalts or categories are simply cultural constructs. They don’t represent
any profound level of truth. They are simply patterns of interpretation which make sense
in the field of knowledge of our own culture which is changing through time. In the
simple way if we don’t know much about it at least most of us recognise that this is a
tree. But some people know the names of most trees. And other people know so much
about trees that they know the Latin names, and they can go to other countries and locate
new kinds of trees they’ve never even seen before inside their Linnaean families. And in
Buddhism they have a similar, a bit like the way Linnaeus went around working out these
genuses and families in botany, they started to work out these categories or families of
phenomena.

And the most common system became developed as the five skandhas. Skandha means a
heap or a pile. So it’s as if everything that is manifest in the world can be sorted into five
different heaps or categories. And these are form, feeling, perception, association or
composition, and consciousness. And I’ll go into exactly what these mean in some detail.
But I think maybe first we could see if there are any questions.

Questions about suffering

Question: About the four noble truths. Why is the way to end suffering the fourth one?
What was the third one?

There is suffering – that suffering exists– then there is the cause of suffering. The third is
the cessation of suffering, which indicates the fact that suffering can end. And then the
fourth is the way to bring about the end. Because otherwise somebody might think, life is
suffering, that’s it. Nothing to do. But what is saying is that yes, suffering is very
important but it’s not eternal it has a cause.

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Question:[Our group came to the conclusion it’s not the objects that suffer but we that
suffer when looking at objects and seeing that they won’t look nice after twenty years.]

So suffering is in the subject not in the object?

[And also it was difficult to see that a non–living things like this picture can really suffer.
We weren’t able to see that this object is suffering. There was no... We weren’t able to
recognise it.]

Maybe I don’t know if everyone can follow that if it is just in English. Any other
thoughts?

Question: What is suffering? Then she came to the conclusion that when things are taken
out of their natural surrounding, or like a tree is cut to make paper out of it or whatever,
that this could be suffering. Then the difficulty is what is with this artificial things,
because like lamps or whatever? So they found out that there is a difference between
natural objects and artificial ones. And with the artificial ones it’s more that they cause
suffering for the lets say people or whatever. And also the distinction between organic
and inorganic. She thought that inorganic material wouldn’t suffer.

Which I’m not sure of. I think it’s very different to make a distinction because you don’t
know. We don’t know what a stone feels like. (?) that subject and object are the same that
is something I can only understand when I am in a meditative state of mind, but not when
I am rational and functioning in my daily life. That is for me, or for us, the most hard
thing to understand.]

Any other thoughts?

Question: She was pondering if the light ray when it is broken by a window or whatever,
if it is then suffering. Because otherwise she couldn’t figure out how a light ray can
suffer. My personal feeling is that somehow there is this difficulty about things. Artificial
things, of course they don’t have any nerves or whatever in our sense, so what does then
suffering mean. Does suffering only mean something if you have a sensory perception
like we have or maybe animals have?]

In the Buddhist tradition only creatures with minds suffer. In the Tibetan language they
talk of semchen, those having sem, or mind. So from that traditional point of view the
idea that a plant could suffer would be ridiculous. Imagine in lonely isolated places in
Tibet if a tree is standing alone that might become the habitation for ghosts or spirits of
some kind and these spirits might be suffering. Also ghosts and local spirits are
particularly fond of door frames. But the inanimate things in themselves don’t suffer.

And this goes back to the fact that suffering is in the subject that does the suffering. But it
does also mean that from a traditional point of view any object at all can be a cause of
suffering for us. But often in life we imagine that there are some objects that will never

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hurt us or harm us. And if you think of it, even the dharma causes suffering because you
try to sit and meditate and you get sore knees, and even at the weekend instead of being
able to relax you come in a place like this. So in these ways we can imagine that
something will be a source of pleasure but actually it can rapidly turn into suffering.
Traditionally suffering is classified in three groups.

There is firstly suffering of suffering which means that when there is something which
is clearly a suffering, maybe like a back ache, then you suffer because of that suffering.
[But why do you call it suffering of suffering?] Because Buddha thought of everything
don’t worry! Because for example, say you become depressed, or you become anxious,
there is the depression itself, but there is also the feeling that I shouldn’t be depressed,
“Why am I depressed?” So there is the suffering itself – the pain in your knees itself,
that’s one level, but there is also the feeling that this shouldn’t be troubling me. why is
this happening to me. So one suffers from the suffering. by not accepting it, it becomes
the enemy.

The second kind of suffering is called the suffering of change. And that’s when good
things turn bad. But also when bad things or bad situations become good. Because
certainly working in therapy you can see that many people are tormented by hope and
that if you could predict my life would just be depressed, then OK. But suddenly
somebody’s nice or friendly or you think you might have a relationship or whatever, and
then there is all this hope and this disturbance and a confusion, so that there is a change
that is disturbing. Now a lot of our culture is predicated on the basis of excitement. You
know going to the movies, falling in love, getting drunk, being ambitious, getting
possessions, you know the culture says that this kind of excitement will make you happy.

On the plane coming over I was reading a newspaper and there was a big article about an
English fashion designer called Paul Smith. And Paul Smith usually designs only men’s
clothes, usually in black. But he’s just opened a new collection of women’s clothes in
very nice shades of blue. And the person writing the article was very excited about this.
And it’s this kind of excitement which is permeating our culture all the time. It’s actually
quite difficult in the moment to see how this sort of excitement is actually a cause of
suffering. But then when you actually look at the clothes – first of all they are very
expensive, and in order to wear them you have to be very tall, very thin and very young!
Which is bad news for most of us. And many many situations are like this where a
commodity, a substance is presented to us as if it will carry some hope for us, but when
we actually enter into a relationship with it we feel a dissatisfaction.

But then when that disappointment arises, because most of us don’t like ourselves very
much, we blame ourselves, that there is something wrong with us that we are not able to
make use of this commodity, rather than thinking, “what an asshole to set up this whole
silly nonsense.” So instead of his new collection being a gift of kindness, it’s actually the
opportunity for many thousands of people to feel ugly, stupid and humiliated.

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“If only I was different then I would be able to make use of this wonderful thing, and then
my life would be complete.” So it means that the living subject is subjugated, is put under
the power of the dead object which is always being reinforced because the subject
torments itself and puts itself down. It’s in this way that the dead object, the thing out
there, the dead object is invested with power and significance, and my inability to come
into contact with this good object I identify as a sign of my own failing, and so I have to
work harder, strive harder to become one who is worthy of this good object. But because
of the nature of modern capitalistic production new objects are being produced all the
time, so as soon as I make myself worthy of one object it’s out of date and I need to
struggle then for the next object. And you see this particularly in fashion which in many
ways is the dominant metaphor of our culture. So that’s the way in which the suffering of
change is operating; that one never arrives at a point of stability and even if we do get
into a stable situation, we then start to feel bored and then we long for some excitement.
Because the ability just to be fully in our sense and just to be fascinated and satisfied by
the most simple phenomena that are arising is very rare. It’s very difficult to hang on to
that.

Because the tendency that our consciousness has to enter into judgement, to sort things
out as good or bad, is being intensified all the time by the pressure and the culture around
us. And so we get drawn more and more away from the possibility of realising this state
of Samantabhadra, or always good, which is the central image of the Nyingma system of
the nature of enlightenment.

And the third form of suffering is described as a very subtle kind of suffering and it’s
usually said that in our ordinary state because we are so caught up in gross suffering we
don’t experience this, and it’s compared to like having a hair on the palm of your hand or
having that hair in your eye. And if it’s in our eye we feel it, and if it’s on our hand we
don’t. But because most of the time we are so tormented by gross suffering, our
sensitivity thickens up like the palms of our hand when we do physical work, so we don’t
experience this more subtle level. The subtle suffering is the very experience of being a
subject interacting with objects. It’s the feeling tone of dualistic experience itself. It’s the
subtle feeling tone of subject–object interaction. So that when we sit and do a calming
meditation and we find ourselves caught up in thoughts, most of the time we are quite
interested in the thoughts that come. The subject that is doing the knowing of the thought
or the object or the feeling that’s occurring, in that moment of being aware of the object
that’s arising is reaffirmed in the meaning of its own existence. Because in this idea,
subject and object always arise together. There is no consciousness without an object.

Traditional illustration of this is the question that was asked of the Buddha, “If in a
distant forest where there is nobody present a tree falls, does it make a sound?” What do
you think? Would it make a sound? Why?

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 THE HEART SUTRA

Question: Only if there’s an ear? What is a sound? Maybe it’s more obvious with seeing
somehow because the colours are not there if there is no capacity. It seems to me that is
easier.]

But we can imagine that there would be a sound because we can imagine a tree falling
and we imagine there would be a sound, but that sound is being created in our thoughts as
we think about it. The sound itself we can’t... I mean the sound without a hearer is...!

Question: You could install some equipment for recording it.

OK there is a tape recorder in the forest and nobody ever goes to inspect this tape
recorder. Is there a sound? From this point of view there has to be a subject somewhere.
And I think this is absolutely vital that subject and object occur together. You can’t have a
latent sound in a tape recorder. In terms of Buddhist understanding and the practice of
meditation, this is absolutely vital that we have this sense because the highest realms of
samsara are the states of pure consciousness. In Buddhist cosmology in the centre of the
world is this huge mountain called Mount Meru. It’s forty thousands yojanas high, and a
yojana is about seven miles, which is more than ten kilometres, it’s about half a million
kilometres high. And on the top of this are the god realms. There are the realms where the
gods have a flesh body and then with increasing levels of subtlety they have light bodies.
And then right at the very very top there are four levels of pure consciousness.

CONSCIOUSNESS WITH NO OBJECT

The very highest level of this is a consciousness that has no object. Now that state is
created by doing this calming shiné meditation for a long time. So that in doing this
calming meditation the last thought has gone and now it’s just open and calm and there
seems to be no thoughts at all. And because one has practised for a long time, an open
expanse of calmness opens. And so these great meditators go into this state in which
because there is no thought at all there is nothing around which to crystallise any body.
There is just this state of pure consciousness. What they didn’t realise though was the last
thought that they had was actually a boomerang. And then after some time, maybe after a
hundred thousand years, maybe a million years, this little boomerang goes round “UH!
What the hell was that? What am I doing here?” and then it starts all over again!

Because this state of consciousness needs a thought. It cannot be separated from thought.
Now this might seem a bit kind of medieval, the things that you know medieval monks
would think about – “How many angels there are on the top of a pin?” But it’s very
important that when we come in to look at the Heart Sutra because this state of
consciousness when people feel that the only thing that causing me suffering is having
thoughts coming and disturbing my consciousness then they have the notion that if only I
can get rid of all these bad disturbing thoughts – if only I can get rid of the other – then I
myself will be complete. I will be entire and so I will be happy.

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 THE HEART SUTRA

We can see that this view is quite common in our world. If only we can get rid of all the
people who are not the same as us, then we will have a pure place in which everyone will
be happy. All my troubles come because these outsiders who are not the same as me
come in here and upset me. And so there is a desire to push out the disturbance and to
create a wall, behind which I will be safe. But the nature of the mind is that it is creative,
that thoughts keep arising. And so the only way that you can try to not be disturbed by
your thoughts is to kill off all your creativity.

And so that from the Buddhist point of view this state of highest consciousness is like
being brain-dead because it’s trying to achieve a state of consciousness without object
when in fact subject and object on the level on consciousness always arise together.
Subject changes and object changes in response to subject. So our subject – our embodied
subject – changes and the world changes against us. There is no way to stabilise the
setting that we have in the world. So to try to halt a process which is dynamic and
changing can only be done either by attacking the other or to turn it against oneself, and
say, “I will not be this, I will not become what I must become.” So subject and object are
involved in change. The only way I can try to stop that change is to resist difference or
change in the world of object out there by pushing out the other like the fascist solution.
“you are not me; you are nothing to do with me” Or that anger can be turned on oneself
“I will not be this.” Like “I will not have thoughts”. It’s a kind of resistance.

Student: What is a sutra? How does it fit in with other types of Buddhism]

The word sutra means basically something that’s said. There are Theravadin sutras, there
are Mahayana sutras, there are Tantric sutras, and dzogchen sutras. ‘Sutra’ on that level
means a kind of literature.Because the words can be used in many different ways there
can be a kind of confusion. Sutra really means a text in which the Buddha is talking to
some people and he teaches by example. It’s a bit like in the Bible when Jesus teaches
through a parable.

Student: I meant the sutric lifestyle of becoming a monk or a nun. The renunciation of
form in the external lifestyle.]

Okay, now I think I understand your use of the term. That would more often be called
Hinayana or Theravadin. But if we call it sutra, to use the way you’re using it, yes
Mahayana Buddhism, the Heart Sutra is on the cusp, on the joining point, of that way of
viewing things and the Mahayana view. And tantra is part of the Mahayana and most
Tibetans would say that dzogchen is part of the Mahayana as well. Does that make sense?
Is that clear?

Student: Why does there exist this Theravadin lifestyle if this boomerang effect exists
and the thought comes back again.]

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 THE HEART SUTRA

We need to be clear here. This is why many people decide not to study very much in
Buddhism and only to do a simple practice. But I think it is worth the struggle to try to
get a sense of the geography of this whole thing because then you can see that what is
being built up is a complex conversation.

Do you have a flip chart here? Because it is easier to do it using a diagram1 .

1 Image taken from www.reonline.org.uk\

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 THE HEART SUTRA

THE TIBETAN WHEEL OF LIFE

You may have seen the Tibetan wheel of life. Have you seen that? Is everybody familiar
with that In the top section. In the top middle section of the wheel there is the god realm.
And it’s at the top of this god realm that these states, the four levels of pure consciousness
arise – the formless states. These states are still inside the wheel of the six realms These
are still places which are created out of karma, maintained by karma and then you leave
them when the karma that is created and maintained them is exhausted. You leave them
when the karma is used up. So many ordinary forms of both outer religious practice like
making offerings to the Buddha, or giving charity to poor people, or maintaining vows of
moral purity, or more inner kinds of training like doing mind–calming meditation, these
create the basis for getting reborn in the higher realms. Mind calming meditations like
shiné is found in Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Islam, even some kinds of Christian
practice. They help to give from the Buddhist frame of reference, they help to lead you to
a higher rebirth but they are not sufficient for getting out of samsara. When you get into
thinking of the sutra path, some things in the sutra path will help you to get out of
samsara, and some aspects will help you to get a better place in samsara.

And the same occurs in tantra when they talk of absolute and relative siddhas or
attainments. The absolute siddha is enlightenment, freedom from samsara, and the
relative ones are having more power and potency to achieve things inside samsara. So in
the sutra path, things like becoming a monk or a nun will help to reduce the amount of
disturbance that you have which will than provide a good basis for doing meditation, but
then you have the different notions of what enlightenment is according to the different
views. So that in the Theravadin tradition all the causes of attachment to the world are
gradually burnt up. The traditional example is described as like a lamp going out. So that
if you have a butter lamp or a candle it burns down and down and down until all the wax,
all the substance is gone, and then it’s exhausted, there is nothing more to burn. This is
the traditional Theravadin idea of what happened to Buddha Shakyamuni. He stopped
performing sinful action. He purified all his attachment, and so at that point there was
nothing left. And he was gone.

So on from this point of view this is different from this highest level of formless
consciousness because at this point there is no consciousness at all. It’s just gone out. So
and at that point there is no thought of what becomes of the Buddha. He is just gone. It’s
as if we imagine we are all here in some terrible prison here in this room and one
morning – we have been here for a thousand years all living in this room – do you know
there is a play by Jean-Paul Sartre called Huis Clos which is exactly about this – so we
are here now for a thousand years all stuck in this room and then one morning we wake
up – Oh,Theo’s not here! Then we think “Hey, he got out – he got lucky” We don’t know
where he went because we can’t go out but we think “He’s not in this shit any more.”
This is the basic kind of metaphor for the Theravadin approach. Samsara is suffering. We
keep getting stuck in suffering because of karma and attachment. If we cut the root of

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karma and attachment we will stop having the anxious grasping onto object and then we
will slip free and be gone. It’s a sort of emigrant story – America!! – freedom!!

If you think it is bad where you are you don’t really care where you go. And you also
think well if I don’t leave it will get worse. It can never get better, that’s the whole idea, it
can never get better in samsara. “I Must get out I must get out.” Whoosh! It is very
important to recognise that the Heart Sutra is the point where a different view opens up.
But what’s really important here is the difference between that view of the Buddha’s
mahaparanirvana, and this highest, fourth state of consciousness. The fourth state of
consciousness you come back into rebirth because the karma seed has not been finished.

Student: So would you say that it sounds very much like existentialism. If you happen
not to believe in rebirth then it’s very similar.]

No it’s not a belief system. It’s absolutely not just simply exchanging one idea for another
the fourth state of consciousness is where you block off thoughts. There are no more
thoughts but there is still a thinker. In this state the thinker and the thought both vanish.
That’s why it’s gone. In the Theravadin view. In the Mahayana view it’s different and
that’s what we’ll come on to with the Heart Sutra. You can see that there is a rationale for
it. It’s a view, it’s a philosophical view and it all makes sense. It is quite coherent.

Student: What you called this ending of all things. That you call Theravadin?

Yes

Student: What do you call the other one?

Which other one?

Student: The one with the fourth state of consciousness?

That’s state is achieved through doing parts of the practice of the dharma, but not fully
realising it. I mean until you’re out you are still in. I mean samsara is shit, but you might
have a beautiful house in Barbados with a private beach. Is that better? So living on this
fourth level of consciousness – no thoughts – very peaceful, very nice. You don’t have to
got to work on Monday morning, very peaceful, no traffic, no tax.

Student: My question was, is that attributed to another way?

No I think we need to be clear about this. Any vehicle can take you there for a bit unless
you get enlightened. It’s the highest state in samsara but it is not out yet. the danger of it
is that when you are in this blissed–out state you can’t do anything. So nothing changes.
It’s like being in a deep freeze. If you want to get free of samsara you have to get down
from that level and that’s why they say in the whole of samsara a human birth is the most
precious.

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Student: But this view is possible in the Theravadin system as well?

Yes this view is taught in the Theravadin sutra. The Theravadin sutras teach this. The
description of the realms occurs in the Abhidharma teachings of the Buddha himself.

And then to go back to the other point. All the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism are said to
have been taught by the Shakyamuni Buddha. The idea is the Buddha taught three
turnings of the wheel. He described the first one in which there is suffering, the second
one we go onto in the Heart Sutra and the third one is the teaching of tantra. Buddha
Shakyamuni did it all. So the first turning took place in Sarnath outside Benares. The
second turning took place at the Vulture’s Peak at Rajgir about one hundred kilometres
north of Bodhgaya. And the third turning took place on Mount Malaya in South India
which some people say is in Sri Lanka on Adam’s peak in Sri Lanka. Now other people
who are historical scholars will say this is a retrospective validating myth. [The myth is
created afterwards] Tibetan Buddhists would believe that Buddha Shakyamuni taught
everything. You would say that if you were a western person thinking of linear
development of theory. Tibetan Buddhists would say, “no the Buddha taught all these
things. Who else would be able to teach such wonderful things? “ So you have a different
historical paradigm operating.

So the basic thing we have to remember is that if you are not in samsara you are in
nirvana. There are only these two options and yet it is said there is no difference
essentially between samsara and nirvana. So that in the Hinayana idea there is a bad
place, bad samsara and there is another place, a good nirvana. And if you have seen the
picture of the Tibetan wheel of life you’ll often see this wheel is held in this clasp like
that by this god of death – Yama. And usually there is a circle like this with the Buddha in
it. And he points across to another empty circle showing nirvana. So whatever is in here,
and maybe if somebody’s got a copy of this could bring it along tomorrow and we could
look at it in more detail, whatever is in here is samsara from this point of view.

Now the Buddha said there are twelve stages on the outside here which show the path of
rebirth. And then on this level there are the six realms where we can be reborn and here at
the top of the god–realm are these four levels of pure consciousness. And in the centre
there is usually depicted three animals – a snake, a cockerel and a pig. They are chasing
each other round in a circle. And the snake represents anger. The cockerel desire. And the
pig stupidity. So these are the three basic poisons or affective tendencies and they run
around here chasing each other round and round. And this is the energy that is really
driving this wheel. So what one is trying to do is to try to get out of this situation.

In the Theravadin tradition it is as if one can get out of it by going somewhere else. It is
as if there is a nirvana, a pure place, somewhere else. In the higher views, and I’ll run up
quickly what they are, the idea is that one doesn’t leave it and go somewhere else, one
finds a way of being inside this which is without suffering. In order to make this journey
either from one place to another or one experience to another one needs the two

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accumulations of merit and wisdom. So merit would be things like morality, generosity,
bringing goodness into the world. In a sense compassion, it’s the basis for compassion.
And wisdom is more the practice of meditation, seeing directly into the nature of things.
Understanding impermanence.

Now where one is in these six realms here depends on the karma that you have. If you’re
doing this mind–calming meditation and you are trying to purify yourself because you are
frightened of the suffering of samsara, then basically you are getting yourself into a better
situation. Because in the hell realm there is the most extreme form of subject–object
difference. Where somebody is burning you with a hot iron or something. It’s really
“ugh!” onto you. You retreat into yourself . Horrible!! So and as this pain is coming
towards you, as this man with a big pincer coming. You feel your shrinking in. So your
sense of self becomes like a little tight ball. And this makes this sense of self, a separate,
frightened self more and more strong. At the other extreme up here one has this state of
pure open consciousness, no barriers, no walls, not even any sense of a body. But there is
still.. this is still a consciousness which is concerned with objects. Because it is a
consciousness which is predicated on the relief of “Oh” like if you are in a prison cell and
they take you out and they torture you and they put you back and you “Phew!” at least it’s
stopped for the time being. It’s that kind of relief. Object isn’t coming onto me any more.
But object hasn’t gone. The torturer returns.

It’s being pushed away. In calming your mind it’s a kind of a retroflection. You go back
into yourself. You don’t go into the world of others. So it becomes solipsistic. You are
sort of turned into yourself. But sooner or later object returns because you have a self. It’s
not free. It’s still... Yeah.

Student: That’s quite often what is misunderstood as meditative or something, a

meditative state.

Yes it is a meditative state. But it’s not free of samsara.

Student: Is this one state what is like taught in the Hinayana system or is it also for
Mahayana?

It’s also for Mahayana. Everybody does it.

Student: But as I understood it is not that one push the thoughts away, and one should
observe the thoughts and still be inside the world. And to be a light that doesn’t need to
go outside but stay inside and still I don’t know how but it’s not to be...(?)

Until that state is achieved one is still in samsara. Until you’re out you’re in. There’s no
third place here. But you’re quite right. The view is different. But the practice, you may
be trying to do dzogchen shiné and not pushing thoughts away, but until you really get

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the result of that you are still caught up with thoughts. And as long as you are caught up
with the thoughts this is what you’re revolving.

You see one way to think about this is here we have the nine yanas. And in the Nyingma
system there are these nine different levels of practice. Down here is this basic Hinayana
which is the Arhat or listening system. And the Arhat’s were the close disciples of
Buddha Shakyamuni and they gain a state which is very somewhere between here and
nirvana. Because their desire was to end the pain. “I am hurting. I want to go someplace
where there is no pain.” At that point they are not concerned with what’s happening to
anyone else they just want to get out. They go up through these stages and make some
kind of transition across. They are in state near to Buddhahood, but not quite. You then
get into the politics of the hierarchy of whose enlightened and whose not.

He doesn’t want to become a Bodhisattva. And the Pratyekabuddha gets enlightened as a

Buddha but pratyeka means a silent or isolated, and this is a Buddha that gets enlightened
but doesn’t want to talk. He could speak but he doesn’t want to, I don’t know why. And
this is a traditional classification. Then you get to the third stage which is the
Bodhisattvayana or sometimes called the Paramitayana. And at this stage one is
concerned now to help other beings. One says, “I don’t want to get enlightened just for
me. I want to do it for everyone else.” So you can imagine If you are in the
Bodhisattvayana, and you are doing the mind calming meditation, at a certain point you
remember your obligation to other people – that you can’t just go into this nice cosy state,
but you have to get up and do something.

It’s like having small children. You go to bed and you want to sleep. And then you hear
“wah wah wah” and you have to get up and clean a bottom. So, even when you are doing
the meditation that might take you up here, you are always being pulled out of it, out of
these states because of your obligation to other people. Does that make sense? That the
bodhisattva vow is a protection against getting lost in these spaced out states because one
is always being called forth towards connection with the world?

Now I have marked out a difference here between these three as causal and these six as
result. Because in these states, one’s focuses of attention is on creating the causes of
enlightenment primarily through developing merit and wisdom. But in these six yanas
which are the tantric yanas and finally the dzogchen, they are called “the path of the
result” because in these one practises as if the result had already been attained. So that
means that you get an initiation into a practice, and in the initiation you are given a direct
link to a deity. On the basis of that initiation you then can practise “I am Tara” or “I am
Chenrezig” or “I am Padmasambhava”

Student: I think it is also very important to tell us also that these deities have nothing to
do with the gods inside. But for people who have no idea about Tibetan Buddhism, they
don’t know what is Tara. And where do you situate Tara or Chenrezig?]

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USING DEITIES IN YOUR PRACTICE

These are all up here at first anyway. Later they can go down here. These are pure forms
and by identifying with these pure forms you recognise your own purity. I mean it is a
very kind of simple ... let’s do it with Tara. [writing on board] Tara is pure. I am Tara.
Therefore I am pure. Exactly the basis of all tantra. And this is why it is called the path of
the result because what I want to achieve is my own purity. So I am making use of Tara to
help me achieve that. All the deities that we make use of in Tibetan Buddhism are
methods of practice. If one was praying to them in the sense of “you are up there, you are
wonderful, you help me” only that, then you would be increasing duality. That’s why in
tantric meditation we always have to dissolve the deity into us or us into the deity so that
this unification leads to recognition. I’ll say a bit more about this tomorrow. But basically
Tara is pure. We have to praise “Tara is pure!” All the positive goes up. She is very pure.
This is very pure. “I am Tara! I am very pure!” And then it all comes back down again.

Student: How is it for example with Mahakala or the deities who are angry because if I
identify it means that I am also very angry, but I didn’t really understand how it should
work this kind of system in Tibetan Buddhism.

I’ll say more about this tomorrow afternoon when we do this kind of practice. If you ask
this question again then. OK?

Because the place we actually need to come to just now is here because the Heart Sutra is
on this line [points to the board]. This is where the Heart Sutra is. This below here, these
two stages this is the Theravadin or Hinayana system, and above here, this is all
Mahayana Buddhism. And the doorway from this system where the focus is one’s own
individual liberation to the path of a focus on other people’s liberation as well is through
the understanding of the Heart Sutra idea.

And this is very important because from the Buddhist point of view the meaning of any
action depends on the intention behind the action. But we’re very often used to the
meaning of an action being the outcome of the action. So if one’s intention here is to help
myself, “I am suffering, I don’t want to suffer. I want out of this!” Then one gets a result
but one’s intention is narrow. So the result is narrow. And in this Mahayana view which
includes all of tantra, my intention is to help all sentient beings. This is a very.. if you
think about it it is an amazing idea that I want to help everyone. For most of us we would
feel that thought running across our lives. Usually I want to take care of me. I want to be
happy. But this idea runs across that.

So it is really disrupting this path from here which is the most normal one. “I don’t want
to suffer..off I go...” And it’s a bit similar in therapy when people come in with a problem
and the desire is just to get rid of it. “I am depressed” or “I am unhappy. It is a problem
and I want to solve the problem.” And sometimes what is required is that the person
actually goes into the problem and deepens their experience and through that their

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understanding of the nature of the problem. And if they can really go into the problem,
then they can become able to manage the problem as it comes back to them. That’s why if
one has this bodhisattva intention, the intention to help other people, one goes back again
and again to suffering and through that one becomes able to manage suffering in oneself
and suffering in others. One’s not frightened of it any more.

Whereas everyone is primarily trying to avoid it and get away from it there is less
understanding. You get the relief of the distance, but you haven’t actually learnt how to
manage it. In the Tibetan paintings of the deity you may have seen that they often have
these rays of rainbows coloured light all around them and these rays of rainbow light
represent the five wisdoms. And the five wisdoms are the purification of the five poisons.
The five poisons are stupidity, anger, desire, jealousy and pride. By that purification of
them what it means is really the ability to manage them It’s not that they vanish forever,
but one is able to have s relationship with these energies, not be overwhelmed by them,
but be able to work with them. And in that way they become transformed from being
limiting factors in one’s life to becoming a rich potential for transformation. But the basis
for being able to do this transformation is to have enough space not to be able to be
caught up in them every time they arise. And the basis for that space is an understanding
of emptiness. Which brings us back to the Heart Sutra which is the beginning of the
possibility of this more dynamic, creative way of working where one is driven, not by
fear, as in this Hinayana system, but a courageous willingness to look into the nature of
what is arising.

Question: Can we only help people once we have got free of the wish to accumulate
merit?

THE THREE KAYAS

No because in the tantric system they have the idea that … [writing on board] Have you
heard of the three kayas? The Buddha is supposed to have three kayas, or three bodies or
three modes of expression. Now it’s said that that the dharmakaya is the result of the
accumulation of wisdom. And the sambhogakaya and the nirmanakaya are the result of
the accumulation of merit. The dharmakaya one does for oneself. That is to say
dharmakaya is this state of complete relaxed open happiness. Nothing can ever disturb it.
In this state of openness one is responsive to the needs of others. And one responds to the
needs of others by manifesting the sambhoga and nirmanakaya bodies. And the ability to
mobilise to manifest these is often seen as being the result of this merit. The word
“sambhoga”, “bhog” means “pleasure” and “sam” means “with”. So it means a
pleasurable body or a pleasurable way of being. And this pleasure was seen as the result
of all the good things that you have accumulated. So that’s a kind of formulation. That
view you get in the Mahayana sutra called the Lankavatara Sutra.

They formulate the explanation in that way so that although this may seem on one level
to be selfish it is actually turned into a resource for others. So that you might have two

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people and both of them feel touched by the suffering of beggars. One person goes to the
vegetable market at the end of the day and gets up all the old leaves from the vegetables
and finds an old dustbin and cooks up a big soup and he gives this soup to different poor
people. Another person joins a big German bank and learns all sorts of lying and cheating
and manipulation and becomes very very wealthy, and then he opens a beautiful five–star
hotel only for beggars. And this latter one is this story. But again the main issue is in the
intention. Because if you do bad things with a good intention it is good. If you do good
things with a bad intention it’s bad in this system. Try telling that to the lawyer!

There is this story of the Buddha on a boat going on a pilgrimage to an island. Have you
heard this story? There are eight hundred pilgrims on the boat and there is one man who
is going to kill everyone on the boat. So in order to save all these people the Buddha kills
the murderer. Now because his intention was good, basically it was a good act, but
because he killed someone, he has the karma of killing. At that time he was in this human
realm and he went down to hell but came back up again immediately.

That’s why it’s much simpler to think in terms of intention, because you can know from
inside, do I want to help this person, or do I want to harm them? In Buddhism mental
activity is considered to be more important than physical activity. That’s why when we
come into the practice of tantra and we are practising with merit, we can visualise many
many offerings going up to the Buddhas and by making offerings to the Buddha this
creates merit. So then rays of light come down from all the Buddhas to all sentient beings
and help to purify all sentient beings.

THE HEART SUTRA AND COMMENTARY

Before we start to look into the Heart Sutra, let’s start with a minute of silence in which
we have a sense of taking refuge in the Buddha and having an intention to study the text
to help all sentient beings. This kind of refuge and Bodhicitta we can do anywhere at
anytime. You can have a sense of all the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas above you and just a
sense of you being situated beneath them and you are siting yourself in that family. And
so there is a sense of all the Buddhas all the Bodhisattvas above you and then they can
instantly dissolve into you and then your heart opens and you open your eyes out into the
world with a sense of “Now I am present here to be available for others.”

That takes only thirty seconds to do so you can do it all through the day. Whenever you
get a bit lost or confused, get grounded through this sense of belonging in the dharma and
then open into the world.

I am going to work from the Tibetan version of the Heart Sutra. I imagine it will pretty
much correspond to the version that you may be familiar with.

The translation of the full title is “THE HEART, OR THE ESSENCE, OF THE TRANSCENDENTAL
WISDOM WHICH IS LIKE THE DIVINE FEMININE PRESENCE OF THE ESSENCE OF THE TRANSCENDENTAL

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WISDOM.” This is very important because it’s through this transcendental wisdom that all
being enter enlightenment. When transcendental wisdom took on a symbolic or
personified form, it was as a goddess known as Prajnaparamita. Because the path to
enlightenment is through her womb – is to be reborn in the womb of this wisdom – she is
in that sense the mother of all the Buddhas.

So the text itself begins by saying “Thus have I heard at one time.” And this indicates
that this text has been repeated after the time of the Buddha’s death when all the sayings
of the Buddha were gathered together. Buddhism was transmitted in the early stages
entirely in an oral tradition. And so the close disciples of the Buddha, in particular
Ananda, would repeat to their students, “Thus have I heard”, meaning “at one time I was
in the presence of the Buddha and this is what I heard. So this is a traditional introductory
phrase which kind of alerts the listener’s ears to the fact that what is going to be said is
now the authentic true tradition.

Then, “At this time the Buddha (here the Buddha is referred to as Bhagavan)”. This word
in Tibetan is interesting. In Tibetan it is “chom den de”. “Chom” is to defeat. To push
down, to be victorious. “Den” means to possess, especially to possess good qualities. And
“De” means to pass beyond, to transcend. So “chom den de” means ‘All bad things are
finished. Has all good things.’ It means victorious over all the difficulties of samsara,
possessing all the good qualities of nirvana and completely passed beyond any conceptual
definition. So the essence of the Buddhas qualities are encapsulated in his names.

Tibetan is an agglutinative language, meaning sticky, like sticky rice. An agglutinative

language is one which is composed of these morphemes which carry semantic meaning.
So, a sound element is also a meaning element. So when they were translating Buddhist
texts from Sanskrit into Tibetan they were able to find syllables which represented real
meaning and take the meanings of the Sanskrit words and put them into them. The
Tibetan words are often much richer in meaning than the Sanskrit words, but the Sanskrit
words are more familiar now to us, words like ‘Buddha’. In the way the dharma is
coming into the west we have to learn all these words which don’t really mean anything
to us, they are just imports. This also happened in Tibet, and it took about two hundred
years to really transform and develop a Buddhist Tibetan language. As people gradually
struggled and asked, “Can’t we have a language that means something that means
something more directly to us?” Because we’re stuck with words like dharmakaya,
sambhogakaya, nirmanakaya bi I think that gradually we’ll move in the same direction.

The setting – Vulture Peak

So, there is a Buddha and he is sitting at this mountain peak which is called the Vulture
Peak. You can still go to this place where the Buddha taught the Heart Sutra. It’s a very
beautiful place. It’s near a town called Rajgir which is about one hundred kilometres
north of Bodhgaya. There is a big hill and on the top of the hill is a new Japanese stupa
which is very shiny. There is a kind of chairlift to take you up quickly. That is very nice

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because if you walk up the hill then you walk past the place where the actual vulture peak
is. Most tourists take the chairlift and so never go near the vulture peak. In that way it is
preserved a little bit.

At this place the Buddha is surrounded by the great assembly of the sangha of monks and
nuns and also by the great assembly of bodhisattvas all sitting together. In the traditional
descriptions you can read that the monks and nuns are put first and the bodhisattvas are
put after, that they are ‘du chig’ and ‘du shupa’, sitting at the same time in the same place.
You may think that the monks and the nuns represent the Theravadin tradition and that
the bodhisattvas represent a later Mahayana tradition and that there is a bit of a conflict
between the two. However the text is pointing to these two groups being on the same side
in the presence of the Buddha. You could see this as either being a particular historical
revisionist way of minimising conflict or you could see this as a true depiction of how
things actually were.

The texts describe how the Buddha “was moving in the profound meditation of the
enumeration of all dharmas which is called the profound illumination”. “Nang wa” is a
Tibetan verb and as a noun it can mean light, as a verb it can mean illumination, but it can
also mean appearance as a verb, “to appear” and as a noun, “appearance”. So both means
light and luminosity and appearance. Insubstantial – substantial. It’s got a nice play on
meanings.

So there’s the Buddha sitting there surrounded by all these beings including the great
Bodhisattva, Mahasattva Chenrezig. Mahasattva [Tibetan sempa chenpo] means a great
being, that’s to say that the quality of his existence is notable because he embodies
something of value. At that time this person was sitting there called Chenrezig, or
Avalokiteshvara, ‘he’s sitting there’. The term Mahasattva means maha, great, and sattva,
being; so it means somebody who embodies some realisation of truth. It’s a high–praising
title. And he’s there and he is doing a meditation practice which involves fully seeing the
purity of the five skandhas. So he is looking very clearly into the five skandhas and
recognising that in their essential nature they are empty.

Chenrezig meditating on the emptiness of the Five Skandhas

Okay, so now we have to go back to this idea of these five skandhas. Now the first is
form and form is usually defined as being colour and shape. So what ever has shape and
colour has form. So it could be outside form or inside form. It could be a dream would
also be form in this sense. Whatever can be seen. If you remember what I said earlier,
these five skandhas are the basic categories of existence. They are called like these heaps
or piles, and if you imagine that all possible phenomena was a big pile of sand on the
floor, you could take a little brush and sweep them into five piles and then all the
confusion and the messiness of everything that could possibly arise would be in five little
neat heaps.

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I think we know that from modern psychotherapy a common response to the anxiety that
we feel in the face of the confusion of modern life is to retreat into some kind of
obsessive–compulsive behaviour. So when there is a whole lot of stuff going on and we
feel overwhelmed, we check if the tap is turned off. We check if the tap’s off. We check if
the tap’s off. We check if the tap’s off. So now I have in front of me five piles. Five
skandhas. and every time reality throws me something I put one down, and reality’s
coming very quick but I am very good at keeping my piles going. And I am not joking,
this is primarily the way in which the analysis of these five skandhas is used. It reduces
the complexity of the ever changing becoming of the world phenomena into five
categories of existence. So if it’s got form, if it’s got colour. There it is. You know where
you are.

The second one is feeling. Feelings are good, feelings are bad and feelings are neutral.
Nothing else, very simple. Feeling good feeling bad, feeling neutral – feeling. So how do
you feel today – I feel feeling. Yeah? You don’t need to take it any further. All
psychotherapists are out of work. But it’s very simple, because whatever you feel – it’s
feeling. You are not concerned to work out the nuances, the differences, there’s nothing
interesting because it’s “feeling”. So it’s very important this to use the ability to name, to
accurately identify a range of experience under one title, and just relax. It’s feeling – stick
it in the pile.

Then the third one is perception. Now perception arises through the eyes, through the five
sense organs. So we see things, we hear things, we smell them, we taste them and we
touch them. So this is the way in which our embodied being experiences the world. So
when something is occurring and one is aware that through one’s sense organs in touch
with an object, that is a perception. So for example you might look at the bright light,
your eyes might be tired, and so you look at the light and think ah. So you are seeing
something with shape and colour, you are feeling something – “too bright” and you are
also in perception. The shape and colour are out there, the perception is what’s occurring
here and there’s a feeling tone to it as well. For most of the time we are actually caught
up in a very rapid impacting of all different kinds and now we have got these three
bundles we can start to unpack an experience – direct experience – into these three things.

The fourth one is association. Has somebody got a wheel of life that they could bring in
tomorrow? If you could bring it in tomorrow, particularly if it is a fairly big one a detailed
one with the outer circle because this term is quite difficult to get a handle on. In the outer
circle of the wheel of life there are twelve stages that go round the first one is ignorance
and the second one is the active form of this term, of association. Ignorance is
represented in this drawing as a blind old woman. Now she is a woman because wisdom
is female. OK. She’s blind because it’s the potential of wisdom that is blinded against
itself. It doesn’t see what it could be. It’s old because it has been around a long time. Now
the second stage which arises from this is this associating. And it’s depicted as a potter
with a wheel.

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Because when we don’t understand the world clearly, when we are in ignorance, when we
are blind, it’s not as if this blindness makes us paralysed so we don’t move, but we act in
our blindness and we create things. And this is represented by the potter taking the raw
material, the earth and creating things. And particularly, out of this you know you have
clay and you can form it and it goes back into clay. But the potter takes it and bakes it so
that it becomes separate. So it is separating things out from the world. and you’ll see
particularly in Mahamudra and some dzogchen texts that they often use the metaphor of
water. Particularly the idea of the wave arising out of the ocean and going back into the
ocean. In the sense that the thoughts arise in the mind and collapse back into the mind.
And as the thought arises from the mind it’s the expression of the mind which sinking
back into the mind does no damage to the mind, it doesn’t help the mind, it’s just the
same as the mind. Sot here’s the sense that water arises as a wave, it seems to become
something different, something separate, and then it just shows the same water–ness
again. Yeah? But clay is a bit different isn’t it. I don’t know if you have worked with clay
but you can make something, and if it doesn’t work you can put is down and make a mass
again and redo it.

But once you make something and you think” Oh it’s a beautiful pot!” Then you have to
let it dry and then glaze it and then bake it and then give it to someone who can’t throw it
away because you are going to visit them and think “where’s my beautiful pot?” Do you
get the sense of that? And that is very different from the sense of the ocean and the wave.
Because when you are working with clay, once your ego gets into what you’ve made with
the clay you don’t want to put it down back into the clay bin. So there’s this sense that
this word “association”; in Tibetan it’s du che “du” means to bring together, and “che” is
an active verb meaning to make. So it’s bringing something into being; separating it from
the mass. In Sanskrit this word is samskara. It’s used in Hinduism a great deal also this
terms and it means a sort of basic components. The basic ways in which one brings things
into being. In a sense it is the like rules of relationship between entities. The ways in
which we take the raw materials of the world and construct particular forms. I mean we
would probably see it as a kind of gestalt formation.

OK do you get some sense of this, what this means? And that you get a particular kind of
confidence in this ability to do this. So that for example having been brought up in
Germany and gone through a socialisation process here you learn social skills that you
can take to other cultures. So that as a small child you didn’t know how to behave
socially. Gradually you learnt the rules. But it’s not a set of rules that you learn, it’s a
particular kind of sensitivity to what other people are doing or how they are behaving.

And so this ability you can take into other situations, you have found a way of associating
yourself with the world and working out what is going on. When you have to go into a
new office, you know, you check out what the rules are, when people take a coffee break,
how long for, all sorts of things. Whether they worry if you are late in the morning or not.

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You find a way of getting into the rhythm of that place. So you get a sort of a sense of
things. It is not a concrete shape, it’s the style.

Then the fifth skandha is consciousness. Consciousness, there are usually considered to
be six or eight kinds of consciousness. Each of the sense organs has it’s own
consciousness and that gets a bit detailed later in the sutra. So there’s eye consciousness,
ear consciousness, nose, tongue and body surface consciousness. So that each sense organ
has one organising consciousness behind it. Then there is a central organising
consciousness that organises these organisers. And that’s usually called mental
consciousness. So in the system of six consciousnesses that’s the six. And this organising
consciousness is located in the heart. The mental consciousness. Some of us may know
that our heart’s the worst place to put any kind of organising consciousness! So anyway
then these six consciousnesses all have an organ that they operate through so we have our
eyeballs, our ears, and tongue and the organ of operation for the mental consciousness is
the physical heart.

And the consciousnesses each have an object. And the object of the eye consciousness is
form, is what we see, colour and shape. And then for our ears it’s sounds, tastes and the
others. The object of mental consciousness is the data produced by the other five sense
consciousnesses. So you have got six objects and six organs and six consciousnesses.
And in traditional texts you’ll often see a reference to that the eighteen dhatus. And dhatu
means a kind of reality or a thing. So I would suggest to maybe take about 5 minutes in
pairs talking together to see whether these five things make sense to you. And then we’ll
take up the questions to that.

Student: Where does the brain belong?

In traditional sense of the organisation of the body the brain is not very important. In
traditional physiology – eastern physiology. Thinking is done through the heart. That’s
the traditional kind of idea.

Student: Thinking and understanding

Yes it is a completely different idea. And there are two other consciousnesses. The
seventh consciousness is what’s called afflicted or defiled mental consciousness. And
affliction is something that limits you in some way and this afflicted mental
consciousness, the afflictions mean the five poisons – again stupidity, anger, desire,
jealousy and pride. It’s quite interesting I think that the notion is that there is a
consciousness which holds the burden of these defilements. It’s as if these are separate
from ordinary mental functioning. That they can run in but they can also be separated out.

The ground, or base, consciousness

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Then the eighth form of consciousness is called the ground consciousness or the base
consciousness. The base. In Sanskrit this is “alaya vijnana” and it means the
consciousness which is the ground of all. So it’s the consciousness which contains the
seed of all the different formations that arise in samsara. When you come into tantric
texts, particularly dzogchen texts, they talk a lot about the ground. They use this word
“zhi”. Zhi means ground, basis. And zhi there refers to the basic Buddha nature, the
undefiled, the unchanging basis of the open aware mind of enlightenment. Now the half
brother, or the half sister rather it would be of this state of open awareness is this “kun zhi
nampar shepa”, this “alaya vijnana” this ground of all consciousness. Because there is the
ground, the basis of enlightenment, and there is consciousness which is the beginning of
samsara. And they’re like back to back. This is the eighth consciousness. It is the
consciousness that is the ground of all manifestation. And the ground of the enlightened
being are back to back.

Again it is a very similar idea. You could say that the ground in the dzogchen sense is the
ocean and the wave – it is the ground in which nothing is ever born – the groundless
ground. And then this ground of all consciousness is like some manic property developer,
where you’ve got a bit of ground and this madman keeps building and building and
saying, “It’s mine. I want more!!” until, “Get your house off my ground! I’m going to
knock your bloody houses down! I need your ground for my house. I want a big house!”

This consciousness, this ground of all consciousness, has that attitude of needing to build.
You can see how this seventh consciousness, which has these poisons running through it,
would immediately come on top. This is the eighth consciousness. It is the desire to build,
to get territory. It is infected by these five poisons and is operating on all the material
coming through the six other consciousnesses. So this whole thing goes into this egoic
territory–building, securing my landscape.

Does that make sense? These eight consciousnesses exist around the heart chakra as the
eight main channels, which takes us back to the question about the brain because here it
is seen that the heart is the place where these channels are moving. Sometimes you might
experience this. You are walking down a street and you are looking into a shop window
and immediately you get kind of interested in all this stuff. You have no need for these
things and you actually don’t have any real interest in the things, but somehow you find
yourself getting in there, into this thing. I think this gives us some sense of the way in
which this ground of all consciousness is working because it seeks to go out and connect
with things, it wants to be involved and be busy. So it has a slightly paranoid quality to it
because it believes unless I have some knowledge or some ownership of things as they
arise, unless I know what’s going on “Uh, I don’t know what’s going on!!”

So it’s got a kind of restless quality to it. And I think it’s what you experience when you
are in meditation and feel it’s going quite well, maybe you are doing a tantric dissolving
kind of meditation, and there’s a sense of openness. Then some thoughts arise and you
find yourself being involved in them. Even though you don’t want to be involved in them

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you find yourself getting involved in them. That’s this kun zhi nampar shepa moving into
action. It’s a sort of Don Giovanni of the soul. It won’t leave the girls alone. It just has to
have a bit of this and a bit of that.

Student: This eighth consciousness sounds to me like it is in itself a problem for your
functions, but I can’t believe this. I mean, the nature of things are given, and they all have
some function. How you describe it, it sounds as if the eighth consciousness is nothing
but a problem. But should there not also be some sense in it?

The reason I described it as being back to back with this ground awareness, is that it is
the other side of open awareness. It is the misunderstanding of what open awareness is.
When we are open to the world then everything that appears to us is just part of the
richness of what’s there. And we can allow ourselves to enjoy it without appropriating it,
without turning it into some self or kind or some other transaction. But this kun zhi, this
ground of all consciousness has already been infected with the virus of a separated sense
of self. So it’s stuck like in a boring job in a factory, with a conveyer belt, where you have
to look at this constant stream of stuff, saying into the box, into the bin, into the box, into
the bin. And that’s what it is doing. Self, not self, self, not self, self not self. And the kun
zhi is doing that all the time – mine, not mine; I need, I don’t need. It’s that basic kind of
movement.

On the other side in the zhi in the ground there is an openness which says that there is
neither self nor non–self. There is no place to appropriate anything to, there is an open
awareness in which everything arises. So it’s naturally complete. And that’s the level of
Kuntuzangpo where everything is good. So if you want to know what the function of this
thing is, its function is to fuck you up and make you suffer! And in a sense it is the
ultimate enemy, because it is the point at which you identify your basic sense of being in
the world separated from the world. So what one has to do at the point of going into deep
meditation is to take these two things which are back to back, an open awareness, and this
subject object discrimination, and turn them around and merge them together as
“Kunzang Yabyum”. Because this ground open awareness the pure awareness is actually
in nature this dharma okay state. This is the reality of the nature of one’s mind. And this
ground of all consciousness is the basis for identification in the world for the movement
into the world. And so it’s the basis in its purified form, when these two are turned into
each other, it’s the basis for the other two kayas, the sambhogakaya and the nirmanakaya.
That is to say it is transformed into the richness of all the ways in which one can exist and
be in the world with all the richness that’s in the world.

When the open pure awareness is merged with the possibility of identifying all different
things, when these two come together, then what was the opening up of all the
possibilities of samsara is revealed in its true form as the compassionate display which is
the integration of samsara and nirvana.

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It’s like awareness teenage-trauma, awareness-boy and awareness-girl used to be best

friends riding about on their bicycles. They were just the same. Then they get to be about
twelve or thirteen and they don’t like each other at all; they feel that they are very very
different. Then they get to fifteen and they fall in love and they have sex together for the
first time. Then the difference was the same. They had been in opposition against each
other, but now they recognise that they are similar.

This is very important because this is the point at which this kind of analysis of the nature
of phenomena and consciousness reveals itself as the basis for the understanding of the
transformation of tantra. Otherwise we don’t know why we are doing tantric meditation.
Because tantric meditation is grounded in the same philosophy as all Buddhism is. It is all
one family. It’s not different. It’s not special. It’s just part of the same story. Boy and girl
story, boy and girl the same, best friends, but unaware. Once upon awareness-time there
was samsara and nirvana, they were best friends and they never bothered about whether
they were the same or were different, they just swapped and used each others’ bicycles.
One day samsara said “I don’t like girls any more. You’re not my friend and you’re not in
my gang, go away.” Samsara went off and did all sorts of boy’s things, go into fights,
broke his leg, got very unhappy. Then one evening at awareness teenage-party, under the
influence of alcohol-meditation, samsara looked round and said “Wow! Nirvana, you’ve
changed. I want to be with you for ever and ever and ever!”

Student: One last question. What is with babies? Do they have eighth consciousness? ]

Yes, they have it. They are born from the eighth consciousness. It’s a very interesting
question.

What happens when you die

There has been a lot of writing and discussion in Buddhism of what happens when you
die. In Theravadin system it was thought that consciousness was composed of moment by
moment by moment by moment arisings. Each moment of time is separate from each
other moment of time. And each one is a separate dharma. And so when one dies, one’s
consciousness when leaving the body is going on in this kind of sequencing of moment
by moment appearances.

But of course the five sense consciousnesses aren’t working at that time because you
don’t have a body. So the five sense consciousness sink down into this thinking, or
mentation consciousness, the sixth one. Then the sixth one dissolves into the seventh and
the seventh into the eighth. Then the eighth consciousness is moving almost unconscious
out of control, having all sorts of thoughts and fantasies.

There are many different possibilities at this point. This was the old idea. And at a certain
point there is a manifestation of the seventh consciousness which takes one into desire
and anger, which then takes one towards an object. Then out of this one comes into

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relationship between the parenting state, whether it’s two people having sex, two animals
having sex, a chicken being sprayed or whatever it is. In some of the like in the hell realm
you just suddenly arrive there in a moment of fear. Then in the god realm you arise fully
formed, fully grown up, with no developmental traumas.

In the Tibetan system with the idea of the bardo – that there is a kind of transitional state
between one life and the next – there developed the idea that in the bardo that one takes
on a transitional bardo body and in the first art of the journey in the bardo, the illusory
body that you have is roughly in the form that you have in your past life. And then as you
move towards your next birth you start to take on the form that you will become. And it’s
a very interesting idea. So it’s as if this potential consciousness which is moving towards
the moment of conception, is already, through its karma, being cued into the form in
which it will be born. So that it means that if you are going to be born in a human birth, at
a certain point you see two people having sex, and particularly your perception hones in
on their sexual organs, now you may not have been human in your past life but you are
already now coming into the kind of mode of being human. So you feel some excitement
seeing this sexual act and your consciousness is drawn in there. There is a mixture of the
eight consciousnesses but the dominant driving force is this eighth consciousness. So in a
sense the eighth consciousness is really on the cusp, on the joining point between samsara
and nirvana. If it relaxes back it dissolves back into this ground openness of being and
then if it goes forward it goes into this differentiation of the eighth consciousness.

If we imagine that here’s all the phenomena of the world. There’s all of this stuff. And
there is one little hole here. And at the end of this little hole is enlightenment. Up here is
enlightenment. But everything has got to get through into enlightenment at the same time.
So here you are with your eight consciousnesses. And you’ve got to run around and pick
up all of these bits, all of them without one exception, you’ve got to get hold of all of
them and carry them through here. It’s like a TV gameshow! So it really helps if you can
train all these little things that are running around to jump into the five baskets. So you
set your watch, “OK, one lifetime to go (whistle)” and they all come running and jump
into the baskets. And then you hold onto your five baskets and run very quickly and try to
get into this little hole...

Tantra dissolving practice

...So this is exactly what we practise when we try to do dissolving meditation in tantra.
We take all the phenomena of the world and reduce all the phenomena of the world into
the one figure that we are concentrating on, whether that is Machig Labdron or Guru
Rinpoche or whoever. It says pray with one–pointed faith. Your whole universe,
everything in the world is dissolved into this deity. They are all contained through the
focusing of your attention on this one deity. It is as if they are all condensed into the deity
because they have vanished from your attention. They have ceased to exist at that time.
The world is this one person. So then you are praying with one–pointed attention, a lot of
faith, more and more you are concentrating your focus on this. Then the deity comes to

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the top of your head and dissolves down into your heart. And you have to remember the
heart is where the mind is in this system. So now my heart, my mind, the centre of my
being is merged with the deity. Then my body dissolves into this point. And this point
gets smaller and smaller. The whole universe is coming now into this one point. And then
this point just dissolves and there is just open space. You pass through this tunnel and this
is the practice of tantra. It’s exactly predicated on this kind of thinking.

It’s all ways of dealing with the complexity of phenomena as they arise, and bringing that
complexity under control. Bringing it closer and closer to one point so that the basic
dualistic structure of subject and object can be understood. We haven’t grown up learning
that the basic components of the world are these five skandhas. And in that sense they
don’t have much emotional investment for us. They are not very charged as being things
that we can really use. However, if we understand the principle underpinning these five
skandhas, if we are able to use categories of identification which simplify the complexity
of the phenomena that we experience in our ordinary interaction, these limited range of
categories, then we simplify the ways in which we are in the world. So that for example
when you see and object, if you can bring to mind the sense that this is form and colour,
just as if I don’t know if any of you have done life drawing classes in a studio, and
you’ve got a model but you are really just following the line. It’s just you know. And so
all the complexity of that person is just a line. How is the back going? So instead of there
being a naked person with all sorts of sexual connotations there is simply some
interesting lines. So it’s in that way that by focusing the attention down into a particular
thing, the world is simplified, then we are not so busy, then we don’t have so many
thoughts, meditation becomes easier.

So I would suggest that gradually getting used to these five skandhas can be quite helpful
as a way of organising some of the sense data that we come across. Maybe a hundred
years from now in the West they will be using very different basic category systems. In
the Buddhist practice as it is then but at the moment we have to make use of translations
of texts which are all predicated on these systems. So if we want to get benefit from using
these systems we need to put as much emotional meaning, as much identification into
these terms so that they actually work for us, so that they are actually part of our
embodied way of experiencing the world.

[end session]

Prajnaparamita verse
Before we go on with the Heart Sutra I want to teach you this little four–line verse to
Prajnaparamita. There are nine syllables in each line.

MA SAM JO ME SHE RAB PA ROL CHIN

MA KYE MI GAG NAM KHAI NGO WO NYID

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SO SO RANG RIG YE SHE CHÖ YUL WA

DU SUM GYAL WAI YUM LA CHAG TSAL LO

Instead of these last three syllables you can put other three syllables as an alternative
ending: “Chö pa bul”, or “Kyab su chi”, or “Chag tsal lö”.

Now I’ll go through the meaning of the words. This is a prayer in four lines to
Prajnaparamita, the goddess who represents the wisdom of emptiness. She represents
sunyata, emptiness itself.

Back to the first syllable – “Ma” means to speak, “sam” means to think, “jo” means to
express in any way, “me” is a negative. So this “me” means here negativeness in the
sense of beyond, so it means beyond speech, thought and expression. Then “she rab” is
usually translated as wisdom. “she” means to know and “rab” means best. So it means the
best kind of knowledge, that is to say, knowledge which sees into the heart of things, and
not just the names of things. Then “pa rol chin” “Pa” means further, or farther, over there,
“Rol” means to go, like a movement, like the far side of something over there. “Chin”
means to go. “Pa rol chin” means together, going over to the other side, which means to
transcend something. In Sanskrit this is paramita. So it means the idea of transcending,
going beyond your present situation over to the other side into something different.

So the first line is saying the transcendent wisdom is beyond speech, thought and
expression, it’s inexpressible this wisdom.

Then the next line. “Ma” means not. Then the second word “kye” means to be born. So
“ma kye” means unborn. And then it says “mi” and “mi” is another negative. Then it says
“gag’” and “gag” means to cease or to stop. These two terms are very important – unborn
and unceasing. Unborn means because everything has this nature of emptiness, it is never
substantially real. Things appear but they don’t have any self–substance. Traditionally
when you look in the mirror you see an image in the mirror, something is there, you look
in you see you own face, but it’s a kind of illusion. You can’t grasp it. The picture that
you see of your own face looking in the mirror remains in the mirror. It can’t come into
life. It’s in the mirror. It cannot be born out of the mirror. So it’s as if the mirror is like the
mother’s womb and the baby never comes out. It remains unborn it always remains in the
mother. And this image of the mother’s womb is used a lot in tantric Buddhism to think
of emptiness. It’s the place where everything manifests but it doesn’t come out of the
womb. It stays inside unborn.

And then this second phrase “mi gag” – unceasing – means appearances continue to come
endlessly. Appearances are manifesting. We look around this room; we walk out on the
street there is always appearance. Appearance is always occurring. But these appearances
are empty appearances. They never cease, but they are not born. That is to say they have
never separated out as something real in itself. This is absolutely vital. This is the
essential thought in tantra. This is what form and emptiness means. Because if you think

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again of the mirror. Imagine that you are looking at your face in a mirror, it’s there. You
can move your face around and this thing will keep changing. Something’s always
happening but it doesn’t separate. It’s ungraspable. So similarly we, in this room, if we
allow ourselves just to relax and just open, there is just this room becoming itself. We are
in this flow of appearance. We are just in this room in the flow of appearance. If we think
I’m in here looking out of here, in out, then these things out there seem real because
being in here seems real. And my body boundary, my sense organs are the limit between
me in here and what is out here.

When we relax and particularly when we do this dissolving meditation, and we go out
into openness, then when gradually appearance returns, there is the appearance of the
room and oneself in the room. There is an unbroken flow of appearance so that there is no
clear division between what is self and what is other. There is a co–appearing. This is
what this “mi gag’” means. Unceasing, not divided between subject and object. So these
two words “ma kye mi gag’” carry an enormous amount of meaning.

Then “nam khai” means sky and it’s in the possessive case so it is “nam khai”, not “nam
kha”. “Ngo wo” means nature and “nyid” is a gerund. So “ngo wo nyid” means real
nature. “Nyid” in English would be something like “ness” and emphatic. “nature–ness”
the nature of something. So the second line is linked to the first line. The first line is
saying transcendental wisdom is beyond expression. You can’t speak it, you can’t think it.
This second line says “and it is unborn and unceasing in nature like the sky”.

A very useful exercise is on a clear day go out and look into the sky. Not looking in the
direction of the sun, but allow your eye to just open and open and open to the vastness of
the blue sky. At first seeing if you can find where the end of the sky is. Where does this
sky begin and end? At first one is doing it in an analytic way and then relaxing and
letting the eye open to the sky and through the opening of the eye, let the heart open as
well so that one is just merged in the sky. By allowing yourself to merge with the sky,
thought becomes very very subtle, less disturbance. You can see that as clouds,
aeroplanes, birds pass in the sky – there is always something moving in the sky and often
when you look into the sky you start to see little balls of light moving around in it, you
have seen these little white things little tiny balls. Have you seen them? They are very
nice. Like shooting stars but very very tiny, and when you open your energy you will see
more of these. And these are always moving in the sky. These are like the dakini, the
energy of the open dimension. So the sky is always full of movement but the movement
never touches the sky. Even if an atom bomb blows up in the sky, after a while the cloud
blows it all away and the sky is left.

So these are the two qualities of this understanding of awareness – it’s unborn, so in that
way it is like the sky, having no limit to its dimension, no top or bottom or size. And it
has no front or back. It doesn’t begin at the back of your head and go out. As human
beings we are very much front–focused and we often have a kind of linear sort of panning
view of things. But the sky is going that way as well. It’s all around and the task is to

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allow one’s awareness to detach from an identification inside this front focused body into
an expansiveness which includes the body and the environment. So it is really open.
That’s the second line.

Then the third line. “So so” means each individual, each thing individually. Then “rang”
means my. “Rig” means awareness as in Rigpa. then “Ye she”. “Ye” means primordial,
from the beginning. “Che is again this verbal grouping to know, like “she rab” we had in
the first line. “She rab” and “Ye she” are quite similar as ideas. the concepts of She rab
and Ye she are similar but a bit different. Ye she is more like the innate capacity of
awareness, the innate luminous quality of the mind. The “chö yul”, “chö” means
behaviour or conduct or activity. and “yul” means a country or a territory. Together “chö
yul” makes up a concept like sphere of activity. And “wa” is just a syllable for the ending
there. It doesn’t carry any particular meaning.

What this line is saying is that this wisdom which is mentioned in the first line is the
sphere of operation of the pristine awareness. Pristine awareness of one’s own most pure
understanding, which sees each thing just as it is. The second line is saying this is really
big, vast like the sky. The third line is also saying but this Prajnaparamita, this
transcendental wisdom is very precise. Not just spaced out – it sees every little thing
exactly as it is. So this is important. The second line is talking about openness, being
without limitation, and the third line is talking about a very precise ability to be in touch
with everything just as it is.

Then we come to the fourth line. “Du sum” “Du” means time and sum means “three” The
three times means the past, the present and the future. “Gyal we” means Buddhas. Gyal
wa in Sanskrit is jina and it means victorious one. It is the title of a king and the Buddha
Shakyamuni was seen as the great king who had conquered all sin and confusion. “Yum”
means mother. The “la” means to – towards. Then “cha’ tsal lo” means I bow. I offer
salutation. Homage.

The second version of the ending “Chö pa bul” – “Chö pa” is an offering and “bul wa” is
the verb to offer. Then the third version, “kyab su chi” means I take refuge. And the
fourth one, “Chag tsal tö” chag tsal again means salutation. And “tö” means to praise. So
these are four different endings that you can put on to one little prayer. The second one
“chö pa bul”, you can also say before you eat. You can recite this out loud if it’s a good
place, offering the food up to this goddess of wisdom.

Chöd

And this verse is recited in most chöd practices. Does that word mean something to
everyone? Chöd is a practice that was developed between India and Tibet by an Indian
yogi called Padampa Sangye. And he had a student called Machig Labdron and Padampa
Sangye belonged to a school called the Zhije. “Zhi–je wa” means to pacify. And the Zhije
lineage emphasised teachings to pacify all the suffering in samsara. And the way you

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pacify all the suffering in samsara is to put it into emptiness. So it’s as if all of us all the
time are pregnant and we keep feeling all the time this pressure, this little baby trying to
come out. And every time it comes out we have to pop it back in again. Because when the
baby comes out, samsara begins. When we are meditating and we are in this open space,
if a thought arises, we notice and say, “I know you, thought. I recognise you, thought”.
The baby has come out. So when we feel the baby, then we pop it back in again.

The way that this is done in the chöd practice is to cut off from your body. If you cut off
from your body then you have no place for physical babies to come from, no place for the
real thoughts to develop from. If I’m here in my body and you’re out there in your body
and these things are out there, then I am real and the world is real. And if I am real then I
am going to have these real babies all the time.

Now, we can’t stop having the babies of thoughts since it’s our nature to be very fertile.
We have them all the time. So we have to shift our relationship with our body and in the
chöd practice one is offering one’s body so that one’s body can be turned into something
of value to others, so that it benefits them and one is also relieved of the burden of having
to be in a flesh and blood body.

Typically one meditates that one’s awareness leaves one’s body and becomes a wrathful
dakini. And she then because she is yourself, your consciousness is now outside, and cuts
off the top of your head round here. This top of the skull, the kapala, becomes a pot
which becomes very very big. Then you chop up with your dakini knife chop up the rest
of your body and pop it in the pot. And you invite everyone for Sunday lunch.

What does it mean? It’s a visualisation.

The important thing about the practice is that it confronts the feeling that we have that our
body is very real, very precious, very important. All the tantric practices are concerned
with transforming our experiences of our body. And some do it by identifying with a
deity – now I am Tara now I am Padmasambhava – and so one is displacing one’s
ordinary sense of being embodied and becoming a deity, and trying to integrate, when
one is back in one’s ordinary body, the sense that one is still a deity. So this practice of
chöd is a variation of that but it’s trying to really undermine this sense of being in the
body. And then when this everything has been eaten, then one dissolves everything and
goes into this state of openness. And then if thoughts arise in which you seem to be back
in your body you use this expression “Phat!!” to separate off that thought, to blast that
thought away.

So in the practices of chöd this prayer to Prajnaparamita is usually said at the beginning.
It’s said at the beginning because this verse embodies the philosophical view of the Heart
Sutra which is the basis for the practice of chöd and also the basis for the practice of all
the tantras.

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There is a class of literature called the Prajnaparamita literature. There is a

Prajnaparamita in a hundred thousand verses. There’s a Prajnaparamita in twenty
thousands verses. In eight thousands verses. Then there is the Diamond Sutra. Then there
is the Heart Sutra, getting a bit shorter, then there is this verse. Then there is the mantra at
the end of the Heart Sutra “Tadyathā, gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā”.  Then
finally there is the letter Aa. Then the Tibetan letter Aa is the distillation or the essence of
all this literature. So which ever way one goes into this, whether one goes to the extensive
form or the most basic form of Aa representing emptiness, the focus of attention is always
the same.

Just as we were talking yesterday about being reborn in these six realms, and all of us
have a human body, so at one time we were in our mother’s womb, what we are trying to
do with this understanding and this practice is to be reborn in this life. It’s a kind of
rebirthing. And that means that the womb that we want to be reborn from, to have our
rebirth in is this womb of this great mother, Prajnaparamita. That’s why it says in the
fourth line “the mother of all the Buddhas of the three times”. All the buddhas who have
become buddhas in the past, all the people who are becoming buddhas now and those
who will become buddhas in the future, which means everyone. All of these people in
order to be born will have to go through the womb of the great mother. And she never
gets tired.

It’s a way of also giving some kind of symbolic idea for this idea of emptiness, that it is a
returning home. Because when we came out from between our mothers’ legs we were
born separate into the world. We went out from one subject, from our mother, we went
out to become separate. We were born into duality and this is how we came into
suffering. A separate existence in the world but experiencing ourselves as separate from
the world. And so by being born through the meditation, through this womb of the great
mother, into emptiness, we are born into the unborn in which reality is always
manifesting, but never separated.

Maybe we take five minutes to be talking in pairs to see if this makes sense to you and
then we’ll start reciting it together. If you have any thoughts or questions or anything that
is unclear, or anything that is clear.

Student: To me this practice sounds like it could really freak out people. What I heard is
that all teachers said a beginner shouldn’t start with chöd because beginners can freak
out.

Why I teach the way I do

Yes, but the reason that I present dharma in the way that I do is because I think it is very
important to strengthen the thinking function. If your thinking function is clear, and you
understand what the practice is, what the principles underlying it are, then you have some

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ability to identify thoughts, feelings, experiences that occur in the practice. You have a
frame of reference.

Once you have that in place then it is fine to put a lot of feeling into the practice. But if
you just start from the feeling, being caught up in something, you can get lost. The whole
practice of tantra is very romantic. Think of young Goethe looking up in the sky and
seeing dakinis flying around. If you understand the principles then you can make full use
of this rich expression.

I think we have to start in a very balanced way. Attending to our behaviour, not lying,
cheating, stealing or doing anything like that. Living in a very straight forward way and
using that balanced existence to study and slowly do practice so that we understand and
then we can relax more. There are many teachers who talk a lot about teaching with
energy and transmissions like that, but I think unless you have a basis for understanding
that you are likely to just be knocked off course in your life.

Over the twenty–five years or so that I have been involved in Tibetan Buddhism I have
seen many people get lost. Usually what happens is an experience arises and the person
cannot make sense of it and then they are not in a situation which is containing enough
for them. We in the West do not have a very containing environment for the practice of
the dharma. We are often having to do it on our own, without people who we feel we can
trust very much for discussing our experiences. That’s why I personally believe that we
have to rely on the thinking function, a clear understanding of the principles as a way of
stabilising ourselves. Then you have a support that is with you every day, twenty–four
hours a day. Otherwise you just have intensive inputs, maybe at weekends, and you get
up like this, and then you get down like that.

I used to go to a lot of things like encounter groups, and marathon groups and gestalt
groups of various kinds. And my experience was always that this was very intense, and
very powerful, but I had very little power to contextualise them in my ordinary life. As a
result my experience was that intense experience moved into a split in myself whereby
ordinary life was kind of boring and dull, and there were these wonderful occasions when
you get a whole lot of energy and you get very high. It didn’t actually make ordinary life
feel any better.

That is why I personally prefer for myself and for other people to have just ordinary
weekly therapy, a small but regular dose. It keeps a balance. If we are going to do a daily
Buddhist meditation practice we need to have some supportive reason for doing the
practice. Just to do it because we feel we should is not enough. We have to do it because
we can see and clearly understand that there is a reason for doing it. Just like if you are
encouraging children to clean their teeth it helps if you can explain why they do it. It’s
not a punishment but there is a particular reason. It cannot be somebody else’s reason, it’s
not the dentist’s reason. It has to be your own reason, because it’s your own teeth in your
own mouth.

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So let’s chant this together. There are nine syllables, so very often it is one–two, one–two,
one–two, one–two–three, one–two, one–two, one–two, one–two–three, one–two, one–
two, one–two, one–two–three, one–two, one–two, one–two, one–two–three.

MA SAM JO ME SHE RAB PA ROL CHIN

MA KYE MI GAG NAM KHAI NGO WO NYID

SO SO RANG RIG YE SHE CHÖ YUL WA

DU SUM GYAL WAI YUM LA CHAG TSAL LO <x3>

We can sing it quite slowly and you just join in.

That was one of the basic tunes sung in the Khandro Gegyang Chod, the sound of the
dakinis’ laughter, which is the most popular of the chöds at the moment. It’s the chöd
form of Jigme Lingpa, and adapted from it is the one that Namkhai Norbu uses. Integrate
you meditation into the recitation of that. Recite it slowly and now that you know the
meaning of each word, as you are saying the sound you can allow the meaning of the
word to arise in your mind. Then, having used the sound to open yourself up, you
contemplate on the meaning of the words. The more familiar you become with the
meaning of the words, the more you can start to have the feeling of the words as they
arise.

Heart Sutra: Sariputra questions Chenrezig

So now we go back to the Heart Sutra. So we were at the point yesterday that the
Buddha’s there with all his gang and there’s Chenrezig and Chenrezig’s looking very
clearly at the empty nature of the five skandhas. You’ve got to remember the scene. The
Buddha is sitting in this profound meditation. Eyes not moving, nothing is moving. Here
is Chenrezig. He is also doing some meditation. Now here also is Sariputra, described as
ayushman (Sanskrit) or tsedan sempa (Tibetan), meaning a long-living hence good
person, worthy of respect. He is also sitting there very quietly. By the power of the
Buddha, in his meditation he sends a little message to Sariputra. “Say something”. He
doesn’t have to do it by words because he is a Buddha and he can just… “Phat!” This is
what the text says, I am not making this up. By the power of the Buddha, Sariputra puts a
question to Chenrezig. He asks him, “Chenrezig, those children of a good family who
wish to practise according to the profound transcendental wisdom, how should they go
about it? How should they train in that?”

So then Chenrezig, this great Bodhisattva, Mahasattva, replies to this good man Sariputra,
and says to him “Sariputra, if there are sons or daughters of good families who wish to
train in the profound transcendental wisdom, then they should look in this way.” He
continues – and this is now moving into the main part of the Heart Sutra – “The five

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skandhas, they should really see, purely and truly, that the nature of the five skandhas are
empty.”

Emptiness and form

The way the grammar is here indicates that they are both naturally empty in their nature
and empty. It’s not as if the five skandhas were at one time real, but later somebody
sucked the reality out of them so that now they are empty. Chenrezig goes on, “Form is
empty, emptiness is form. Form is not other than emptiness, and emptiness is not other
than form.” That is to say that if you have got form then there is nothing else there apart
from emptiness. That is to say, when you have form, this form is absolutely at one with
emptiness. When we normally look at something, we are looking at it with eyes suffused
by our dualistic perception: “I am a subject in here this is an object out there.” So it
appears that this is something that is solidly real, that there is something substantial out
here. If I hit myself with it I feel pain so I think I know that this is real because it hurts
me.

This is the kind of logic in terms of samsara once we accept the dualistic vision. But what
it is saying is as if imagine that now I am looking into a mirror and I see myself, and I can
see the mala which I am holding. I can see looking into the mirror that there’s no real
substance in my reflection and that there is no real substance in the reflection of the mala.
They are there, very visible, very clearly visible but empty.

This understanding that they are there, but unborn, is what form and emptiness means
here. It’s here, we can see it, it’s not nothing at all, but it’s a presence which is nothing as
such. It’s not the presence of some thing it is simply presence. But I can use the womb of
my dualistic consciousness to give birth to this as a real separate object. Because I am a
man with two wombs. One is a womb of emptiness which gives birth to this as unborn
and empty, and I have another womb which gives birth to this as real plastic beads which
I got at somewhere or other but I can’t remember where!

This is the division between samsara and nirvana, which mother we are going to have and
which we are going to be. Is my mother emptiness, or is my mother Mrs Low in
Scotland? “Hi mum.”

Oh, I have just remembered that today, March 13th, is Mother’s Day! That must be an
unconscious reason why I am talking about mothers. If ignorance is our mother then we
are born as somebody separate and real and we are giving birth to this world of separate
real objects. But when our mother is emptiness, then we also are emptiness giving birth to
the display of emptiness inside emptiness. Does that make sense? Do you get a sense of
what I am saying?

Student: I have the feeling that at this point it is still just concepts and nobody really
understands what it is.

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Then you have to look in the mirror and play this game in a mirror because it is very
important. Who is in the mirror? By looking and seeing, something is there, but it is not
anything. If you can really see, “Oh that’s what that is” then this is a metaphor which is
used again “Oh, it’s like this.” Here we are here but what’s here? One has to make the
jump from a conceptual understanding into a direct recognition. If you are clear about the
concept it will help you in the meditation practice.

Chenrezig then says, “And the same applies to feeling, to perception, to association, and
to consciousness. They are all empty.”

Does everybody have some idea of these five skandhas now? I am happy to go over them
again if you are unclear about it.

Fourth skandha: association

Student: I think of my lover. That’s association. When I am sitting here meditating,

trying to calm my spirit suddenly the image of my lover comes to me, so is that an
association or what?

The associating is the bringing together of a thought that pulls it into being. Interest is a
factor of associating. So that maybe a thought came to mind of an old lover and you are
glad that you don’t know that old lover any more and there’s no interest and so that
thought goes away quite quickly. But if it’s your present lover and you think “Oh I hope
I’ll see him tonight or whatever” then there’s some interest and that becomes a factor that
associates, that associates, that binds things together.

Student: Shall I put it on the fourth pile then? Association?

Yes.

Student: How to separate these five because if you think of the lover probably there is a
feeling, and probably also a perception.

All these factors are present. So when there is an image of the lover there is a sense of
“there is somebody there”. This is the result of the meeting of these five skandhas in this
one place. It is a fully-formed image. So what one would be trying to do through this
analysis is to unpack it. For example here is a pen. When we ask what this is, we answer
that it is a pen. It’s as if pen–ness is in this. But this is made in a factory where they make
pens and they have a big machine that makes red plastic. And it goes into a mould and it
comes out as this bit. And they put the other bits in. And then it’s a pen.

So the pen–ness of the pen is not inherent. It doesn’t belong in it. It’s a construct which
hovers over it. It’s a cultural concept. If you were a tribe in a jungle in South America you
might never have seen this and if somebody gave you one of these you might put it

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through a hole in your nose because you wouldn’t know what to do with it. It’s not
inherent, the meaning, the function, is from the outside.

This is where these five skandhas make sense, because what it’s trying to say is that when
we see things that seem to be real in themselves, we are not seeing actually something
that is there in itself, but something that is being constructed.

This view of the absence of inherent self–nature has two levels.. The first level is the
absence of inherent self–nature in people. For ‘people’ here it means more ‘beings’. In
Sanskrit it’s pudgala, a being. Now if you have an image of your lover or your friends or
your children or whatever, and you imagine them, you are imagining somebody. That
sense that there is somebody there is a construct. It is a meeting together of the five
skandhas. There is a shape there is colour and form. When you were coming here today
you may have walked in the street and passed some people, hopefully you didn’t walk
into them. You didn’t walk into them because you could see that there was shape and
colour. But there probably wasn’t very much feeling. If you remember yesterday I said
feeling is positive, negative or neutral. So it’s a kind of neutral feeling that you have, and
not much more is going on there. So there is a perception, “Oh there’s someone in the
street”, and you move over. It happens very automatically. So there’s the sense that there
is a person there but it’s not very elaborated.

Now if you think of your lover or someone that you’re close to, then there is form or
colour, plus some intense feeling, maybe love, maybe hatred. Your perception is probably
a bit more acute, you probably look at them a bit more closely. Alternatively if you think
you know the person very well you may have a very complacent eye. You may not see
them at all because they are so familiar. So you may have already developed a fairly
habitual relationship in which the presence of the other person is existing mainly as an
idea in you head rather than in the perception. Remember when you first met your lover
and were really interested in them your eyes are very alert? You are looking and listening
and touching, “Wow.” You really have the sense of the presence and gradually the energy
drops and they become more an idea.

So in terms of the associating factors, you are walking along the pavement this morning
and you pass someone. Part of the associating factor is as sense of Sunday morning, it’s
light, it’s a public street, there are other people. So there’s a sense of safety. Imagine it’s
four o’clock in the morning. You are walking along the same street and someone’s
coming towards you. There’s a different factor of association going on. The perception’s
about the same. So these factors of association are called into context by our own internal
state, our mood, our health, or whatever. They are called into play, They come forth, they
arise. Also what you perceive in the other person. And by memories and associations.

Student: So this is very much to do with concepts

With concepts and with context – how you make sense of it.

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Like say for example when you go home, usually you put your key in the door and you
go in without thinking. One time you open the door you go in and you think, “Oh my
God, somebody’s robbed my flat!” Then you find every time you come in you open the
door you look around. Because a new kind of association has arisen in your mind. A new
kind of gestalt that gets imposed on this situation. And similarly in psychotherapy a lot of
the work that we do is to try to change the factors of association.

Student: Could this also be called conditioning?

Yes it’s a kind of conditioning.

Student: Is it the function which makes the child learn through experience?

Yes, in English we say, “once bitten twice shy”. Now an association has come in. Even
before the dog bites you – “I don’t like dogs”.

Of course, there is another level to this that we have from our karma. We haven’t just
come into this life and developed our pattern of the skandhas from this life experience,
but also informed from past life experience. Shall we have a tea break now and analyse
every action in terms of the five skandhas?

Student: How do I deal with the normal thoughts during meditation. For instance have I
switched off the water tap? Where do I put it in this system?

What arises in the first moment is consciousness. So what you can say is ‘consciousness’.
And then what you have there is maybe a feeling tone in it. You might be anxious. It
might just be a thought that goes by “Oh God, I don’t think I turned it off.” So then you
might also have a perception, you might see yourself back in your kitchen at home, or
there might be a feeling.

Student: not like fear, anger

That would be a negative feeling.

Student: So you would say bad]

You would just label it “negative feeling” and so you would not get caught up in it, you
would just label it. You know it’s a bit like a developmental process when you see with
small children, when they start to learn language, because they get more confidence
because they can make discriminations. So they are getting more confidence by having
more words to open up more precise differentiation. We’re reversing the process here by
reducing the categories and it’s done on the basis of a doctrinal emphasis or stamp that
the Buddha said that the Buddha said “these are the five basic categories of existence.”

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Student: Have I got it right? The five skandhas work together and they build the
construct and that’s what we call reality, and this is a cultural idea, but in reality it’s not
there at all.

It is there, but it’s not there – substantially real. It’s form and emptiness.

Let’s have a fifty minute break now and then come back and do some practice.

[Break]

Right, we’re doing wonderfully well here.

Chenrezig has been saying that all of these five skandhas, each one, is emptiness and that
emptiness is not different from each of them.

And then he says, “Sariputra, it is in this way that all phenomena, all dharmas are
empty.” So if you remember from yesterday “All dharmas” means everything that is
possible, every-thing, each different thing. All of these are sorted into these five heaps, so
that if you prove that each of the five heaps is empty, you therefore prove that everything
is empty.

In the Hinayana or in the Theravadin tradition, by understanding that all phenomena are
actually a patterning of the five skandhas, one is able to deconstruct the notion of a
person. So that instead of seeing, “this is my friend, this is my enemy”, one starts to
perceive that “this is a form created out of the meeting together of these five skandhas”.

Say you were working in something like intuitive massage or shiatsu, where you are
thinking about the balancing of the five elements in the body, then when you are in touch
with the state of the person’s body you are thinking of how these elements are moving.
You are not thinking, “here is a person”; you are experiencing a field of movement of
these five elements.

Taking up this view of the five skandhas, one becomes freed from the idea that there are
real people existing in the world. Dharma as genocide. Everybody is wiped out. Not one
survivor. “If even one person survives, my plan for universal domination will not be
successful. All must go into emptiness.” This is this idea. For as long as we perceive one
single person, subject–object comes back very strongly. So, when I am starting to
perceive a person what I have to do is to recognise this I am now being conscious of the
operation of this fourth factor of assemblage or construction which is creating a person
out of my sense–perception, my feeling and the form that seems to be there.

One of my teachers told me that the job of the guru is like two brothers sleeping in one
bed. One is having a nightmare and the other is awake. And the one who is awake is
trying to wake up the person who is having a nightmare. But in the nightmare they keep

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including the one who is awake, imagining that they are part of the dream. So we have to
try to crack through our absorption in, “there are real people, everything is real”.

This is why we have to use this idea of these five skandhas as a tool, as a method for
dislocating, for disrupting our intoxication in the dream, that things really exist as
separate entities. These five skandhas are not a mantra, they are not just something to
recite. One actually has to try to use them, to make use of them to analyse things. “Oh
now I am creating something.” And we can do that in ourselves but also in observing
other people.

You often see that with children. They go to school and in the school there can be other
children interested in something and they come home and they are also very interested in
these things. Or they might decide that they can no longer eat this kind of food because
their best friend is not eating that food. So you can see the way this factor of association
that constructs things is operating in them.

Things like that. Maybe you know two people in a relationship and one of them has an
affair, and the person who is not having an affair finds out and feels betrayed. The factors
of association that were in place before regarding their partner change into different ones.
Now they are suspicious, watchful whereas before they were trusting and open.The
consciousness that they had before of their partner was maybe fairly relaxed or open, it
wasn’t focused. Now every time the phone rings and the partner on the phone, they’re
thinking “Is that their lover they are talking to?” The ear becomes huge. We can use such
situations in our ordinary life to see how people are construing, creating their existences.

Another thing that we are influenced by the weather. In the wintertime you can wear a
baggy sweater then summertime comes and most people, because it’s hot, wear more
exposing clothes. Anxious feelings about the shape of one’s body rise more to the surface.
It’s a regular feature in women’s magazines around this time of the year; they have
exercises preparing for the beach. So you can see how the factors of association pull
different parts of our experience, form takes on a different meaning in a different context.
So you can see how easy it is to fall into, “Does my bum look big in this? Oh, no! I
should look like her” Then anxiety, worry and different kinds of activity follow. Whereas
if one stays relaxed and says, “This is shape and colour”, and what shape and what colour
and the feeling is neutral! The perception is “I don’t want to see!” The association is
“Nothing to do with me. I live up here!” Consciousness is thinking of something else. In
that way you can save yourself a lot of anxiety.

I think we can learn to apply this to all sorts of things. The kinds of choices we make,
how we are influenced by the world.

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Things are without signification, says Chenrezig

Then again Chenrezig is speaking. Chenrezig is the Tibetan name, Avalokiteshvara is the
Sanskrit name, in English it would be “Glancing Eye”. Chenrezig said before to
Sariputra, “In this way all phenomena are empty.” Now he continues, “They are without
signification.” That is to say they cannot be signified.

Signified means “named”, they don’t have qualities which can be identified. In Sanskrit it
is lakshan. They don’t have these qualities which you can get a handle on. For example,
here is a pen. We can say it’s red, it’s plastic, not the worst quality, not the best quality,
look at the shape, it’s made by Parker. We can put all sorts of things onto it. So in that
way we load this object with all of these projects or assumptions. What Chenrezig is
saying is that, in itself, this doesn’t have these things. They are imposed, put onto it.
Phenomena are unborn and they are unceasing. And we have already talked about that.;
how are without stain, free of defilement, not marked in any way in the sense that they do
not have anything missing. They don’t diminish and neither do they increase.

So, we have this pen. Now I can use it for a while and the ink will run out and it will
getsscratched and broken. On the level of it being a pen I have assumptions about what a
pen is and what it should do. I’m on the telephone and I reach for the pen since I want to
write down the message. But it does not write, so I throw it away in a bad mood now.
Because it is no longer a pen. I can’t use it. It’s worthless, useless. So there’s a loss. I
thought it was a pen, I thought I could write with it, I thought I knew what it was and the
bloody thing doesn’t work! So this object can no longer sustain the assumptions I am
projecting onto it. It has betrayed me and now I feel angry. Like when the car won’t start.

This is what this means. We create something in the world and then put all of these
qualities onto it, and then we come to feel that somehow the things doesn’t live up to it.
But what Chenrezig is saying is that in its real nature, whatever is there has never been
added to by the qualities and projections I have put onto it and is not depleted by the
changes that go on in it. Because it is not in itself a pen.

However, as long as we live in this world of assumptions it is important to know what

things are and what they should do, but it gets us caught up in hopes and fears. So we
relax into the openness that everything is simply in the mirror, in the womb, that
everything is the unborn display of emptiness. Then there is a lot of relaxation for us
because we no longer have to put these names onto things, we just allow things to be as
they are.

Next Chenrezig says, “Sariputra, if you look in this way emptiness is without form, it’s
without feeling, perception, constructing, association and without consciousness. It’s
without eye, without ear, without nose, without tongue, without body and without
mentation, without this thinking function. It’s without form, without sound, without smell,
without taste, without touch. It is without dharmas.”

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Chenrezig speaks of the eighteen dhatus. More on the Wheel of Life

You remember yesterday I said that there were the six objects, six organs and six
consciousnesses and that these are referred to as the eighteen dhatus? Chenrezig speaks
next referring to these about the eighteen dhatus but using a different system of
clarification.

He says, “From being without the dhatu of the eye...” He’s making a list now of eighteen
in a row, and at the very bottom one, because he starts with the eye consciousness, “From
being without an eyeball until being without the dhatu of mentation and further up to the
mentation consciousness, emptiness is without any of these.” It’s a very condensed
sentence and quite difficult to understand. Basically it means all the sense objects, all the
sense organs and all the sense consciousnesses, all of these are just emptiness. “All these
phenomena are without ignorance and they are without the exhaustion or the cessation of
ignorance. And moving from these, they are without old age, sickness and death and the
cessation of old age, sickness and death.”

What this refers to is in this wheel of life,

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http://www2.kenyon.edu/Depts/Religion/Fac/Adler/Reln260/Images260/Wheel%20of%20life.jpg

If you look at the outer circle, there are twelve stages. These stage are called the twelve
nidanas. It means the twelve linked stages. It is a process of what is called dependent
origination and the link between each stage is summed up in the phrase,“On the basis of

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this, that arises...“ Each stage becomes the basis for the next one to arise. A bit like these
Russian dolls which fit into each other. So the first stage is ignorance, that’s like the big
doll. And you open it up and out comes association. And you open association and out
comes consciousness. Consciousness is shown as some monkeys playing in a tree. Then
comes name and form which is a man in a boat. Then comes the consciousness and
objects – subject and object – which is shown as a house, usually a house with six
windows, because we live in a body with little windows we look out of. Then comes
touch or contact, which is shown here by a couple kissing. Then after kissing you get
feeling. Which is shown by having an arrow in your eye. Broken hearts come quickly.
Then comes craving. After having had your heart broken by this one, you go and look for
another one to do it again. And this is shown by some people sitting drinking alcohol –
“Have another!” And then that leads to taking, because you get into the habit of having a
lot so you need more which is shown here by a man reaching up to pull some fruit down
from a tree. And in that way we reach forward in our lives to pull the fruit to us, the
karmic fruit, that we have already planted in the tree of our past action, we reach forward
to pull it into our lives. That then leads to becoming in which things are progressing and
that’s shown by two people having sex. Which then leads to the next lifetime which leads
to birth. And then if you’re born you get old and die and that leads to old age, sickness
and death and it’s shown by an old man and then a corpse. So this is the cycle of rebirth.

When Chenrezig says “it’s without ignorance and without the ending of ignorance…” up
to “...being without old age and death and the ending of old age and death.” this means
both taking this twelve stage cycle in its positive way and in its negative unpacking way.
And “in that way it is still without (and he’s still referring to all dharmas) suffering. And
without the cause of suffering and without the cessation of suffering and without the path
to the cessation of suffering.” And so he is saying that all phenomenas are free of the four
truths which is to say that in their real nature, in this unborn nature, they are free of the
causes of the four truths of suffering.

He says, “They are without pristine cognition. They are without wisdom. They are
without gain. And they are without the absence of gain.” This means that all phenomena,
don’t need to have wisdom added to them. It’s not as if when the Buddha came into the
world and started to teach the dharma he was adding this special new ingredient like a
new washing powder, but rather he revealed that everything is perfect in itself. Because
it’s unborn how could it be impure? Because it’s unborn how could it be improved?

For example if you look at your face in the mirror, and you want to put on some makeup
to make your face look different, you have to put the makeup on your own face, you can’t
put it on the reflection in the mirror. If you put the lipstick on the mirror, and then you
moved your head, it wouldn’t be on your mouth any more. Like that, all phenomena are
free of wisdom, free of gaining and free of not gaining.

These last statements are an important underpinning of the Nyingmapa view. Do you
remember yesterday we spoke of the form used to represent the original buddhanature

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and called Kuntuzangpo, ‘always good’. The Heart Sutra here is saying clearly what is
the basis for the Nyingmapa dzogchen view that everything is pure from the very
beginning, kadag. So it is important to understand that the dzogchen or tantra views are
not different from the mahayana view of the Heart Sutra; the view is exactly the same
view as is here.

The difference lies in which method you use. The method that is usually appropriate to
this kind of text is an analytical, philosophical view where you struggle with these
concepts and try to understand them intellectually. In tantra the methods used include
visualisation, movement and sound. Dzogchen also uses different kinds of exercises.

So we have now covered the heart of the Heart Sutra and we can take a break now.

Student: I can’t find any reference in the sutra to emptiness being good.

The connection is that because everything is empty, it is neither good nor bad. Because
it’s neither good nor bad you don’t need to worry if it is good or bad; it just is what it is.
That is the level of good. When we say, “Samantabhadra is always good” it doesn’t mean
always good as opposed to bad, since that would be to reintroduce a dualistic notion.
‘Good’ on this level means ‘complete’ like the word ‘dzogchen’ which means ‘a great
completion’. It’s just perfect the way it is. There’s nothing to be added to it or taken from
it. It’s just... OK.

[Break]

Advice on how apply the dharma after the retreat

Perhaps one thing I can offer is, from looking at texts over many years and having done
different kinds of practice, as well as reading and thinking about western theories of
mind, is to make some space in which we can think about these things together.

In order to do that I think it helps if people also do some studying in their own time. Then
one can have more focussed questions and answer sessions, and a more thoughtful way
of taking up the dharma. Tibetan life was not particularly reflective. But for us to live in
the West with all sorts of choices and possibilities we often have to really think about our
lives and think about what we want to do. Having some tools to do this is really useful.

One thing that I would suggest is that, if people are interested, you meet in small study
groups and read together chapters from some of the traditional dharma books. Something
like Gampopa’s “DUAL ORNAMENT OF LIBERATION” in which he gives a very clear account of
the ten bodhisattva stages, what is refuge, what is bodhicitta, many of the basic concepts
of the dharma are spelled out according to the traditional sources. Often if you try to read
a book like that on your own it can just becomes a headache if the language is heavy and
dense. Meeting and discussing a text may be more rewarding.

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Maybe for people who would like to do that we can talk about it after the teabreak. My
thought would be to meet something like once every three weeks. With a group of maybe
four people and each person takes it in turn to present a chapter, to introduce it, but
everyone will have read the chapter. Through that different people can have different
ideas and with the meeting of the ideas and trying to relate what you study to your
ordinary life you can see if there’s a way through that and support each other. From time
to time you can invite someone like me to come and go over the sorts of things you have
been doing and take any questions and clarify them.

In general, in the practice of the dharma faith is very important, yet in our time scepticism
is also very important. One needs the ability to have both an open heart and faith, whilst
at the same time keeping your head clear and able to think about the implications of what
you’re involved in.

Buddhism is not a cult; it’s a range of teachings or interventions through which people
can understand more about themselves. But you can’t understand yourself by only trying
to be what you think somebody else wants you to be. I think that the reason that people
get drawn towards cults is because it takes away anxiety. You can rely on the group to do
your thinking for you and then you don’t need to have to worry because you say, “The
group must be right, I am a member of the group. therefore I am OK.“ Some people do
maintain that kind of dharma practice! In fact a lot of dharma practice in Tibet operated
on those terms.

A story from C R Lama

C.R. Lama told me that once when he was young and travelling in Tibet, he came at night
to a small monastery. He and his companions were very dirty from the journey, and they
were wearing the kind of outer robes that laypeople often wear. They went into the main
hall of the small monastery and a monk came up to them thinking they were village
people and said, “Oh, it’s very nice that you to come to visit our beautiful monastery.”
And C.R. Lama said, “Yes, it looks very wonderful. Can you tell me about it?” And the
monks said, “This is the place where you come to make offerings to the Buddha, the
dharma, and the sangha.” And he pointed to the big statue in the middle and said, “This is
the Buddha” and he pointed to some books on a high shelf, not books that anyone was
reading, and said, “This is the dharma” and then he pointed at himself and said, “And I
am the sangha.” In that way people don’t learn anything. Of course as a monk he was part
of the sangha, but he was so comfortable, so “in his home” that nothing was changing for
him.

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How the dharma helps us change

For the practice of the dharma to help us to change, then it is has to make us feel upset in
some way. When we study the philosophy we might feel stupid and we shouldn’t feel
ashamed of this. This may be our state in relationship to these difficult ideas. These
dharma ideas have been developed for many many years by the greatest thinkers in many
different cultures. Not only are they intellectually challenging, but they also carry with
them the depth of the intensive meditation practice that many yogis have carried. If we
can’t understand them at first then we shouldn’t be down–hearted, we should be full of
respect that there may be some meaning there and go back to them again and again. We
should try to understand them, not by wiping out our own thoughts, but by using our own
thoughts and understanding to engage with the texts. If we accept the traditional notion
then we have been born again and again in samsara many times, and in that time we have
built up many powerful karmic habits, then yes, to get free of the power of these habits is
very difficult.

If giving up cigarettes is difficult imagine what giving up attachment to the sense of

things existing in truth is. When you take a cigarette out of the packet you can see it. You
can have a choice to smoke it or not to smoke it. But most of the time when a thought
arises in our mind we don’t have any choice. We don’t even recognise that there is a
choice. We are just right after it. So first of all we have to recognise how we are caught
up in this habitual response. The we have to start examining what other options are
available. Then we have to develop the force of clear awareness and attention that will
give us the willpower to effect a change. And then we have to sustain this as our ongoing
attitude towards the future. If you give up smoking and you don’t buy any more
cigarettes, and you let your friends know that you are not smoking, then the temptation
recedes gradually because you start to imagine having a life without cigarettes. But as we
have been looking this weekend it is very difficult to imagine a life without thoughts. It’s
not about giving up thoughts, rather it is about changing our relationship to them.

Some of you may have had the experience of being in a relationship which became
difficult. Maybe you started to feel, “I am just too close to this person. When I first met
them we were just friends and that was just fine. Then we got into this sexual thing and
we started living together and it’s all too much. I can’t cope. I need a bit of space. If I can
have some space then I think we can go back to being friends again” That, I think, is
often quite difficult. Although you may feel that you have to let go of that person, get
them out of your life because there are unresolved issues between you that you can’t
really work through, yet every time you see them you want to have a drink or a chat or
whatever, and somehow you get caught up in the same old stuff.

It is like that when you try to change your relationship with your thoughts. You can’t just
dump your thoughts and say, “I’m never going to see them again. They are just trouble.
I’ve had enough of these thoughts!” You’ve got to continue living with these things

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which can disturb you. Renegotiating this new relationship requires maturity because
every now and then the thoughts, exactly as you know they will, play nasty.

Your thoughts have been living with you for a long time and they know exactly where
your weak points are. They can press all your buttons. So they set you up very nicely.
They give you two or three days good meditation and then just when you think it’s
getting better, puff!

That’s why it would be my suggestion that studying the traditional texts and giving
yourself more resources, more information, and more options, the basis for different
choices is very, very useful.

[break]

Heart Sutra Mantra

Chenrezig goes on to say to Sariputra “It is because bodhisattvas gain nothing…” and
also “It is because bodhisattvas have nothing to get...” – he is making both meanings –
“...that they are able to rely on the transcendental wisdom. And because of this their
minds are without obscuration and without a kind of false clarity. Because of this they go
beyond all faults and gain enlightenment, gain nirvana. All the Buddhas of the three times
rely on this transcendental wisdom in order to gain the unsurpassed, supreme
enlightenment of Buddhahood.

Because this is the way things are, the transcendental wisdom has a mantra.”

By this it means that the essence of what has been said before can be brought together in
the form of a mantra. “This is the precious mantra. It’s the unsurpassed mantra. It’s a
mantra which has nothing similar to it. It is the mantra which completely pacifies all
suffering. You should know that this is the undeceitful real truth. This is the mantra of
transcendental wisdom. And this is what you say:

TADHYATA, GATE GATE PARAGATE PARASAM GATE, BODHI SVAHA.

“Tadhyata” means “like this”, “in this way”. It’s an opening phrase that you get in the
early mantras.

So this mantra is: This is it, this is how it is. Gone, gone, Completely gone. Gone beyond.
Complete enlightenment. This is how it is.

And what is gone and what is going where? What is gone is a reliance on things being
separate objects. So the first “gate” means all objects are gone into emptiness. The second
gone is subject gone. Because if you are waiting for your friends and you are looking at
your watch and you think “Two hours and they never turned up. Why should I wait any
longer?” So all the thoughts are gone, they are not coming back. (whistle) It’s boring isn’t

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it? So I am not going to hang around. I’m going as well. Object gone, subject gone. It’s
all gone. Over. “I don’t want to see you again I don’t want to see me again. Puff,” gone.
And that’s the point at which everything goes into the one point of emptiness.

Chenrezig continues, “Sariputra, the great bodhisattvas have trained in just this method
of transcendental wisdom.” That is the end of Chenrezig speaking.

The sutra then says, “And then the Buddha awoke from his meditation. Got up from his
meditation.” Chenrezig had to do all the work and the Buddha just sits there very nice!
But he is not ungrateful because the Buddha tells him, ‘Bodhisattva, great being,
Chenrezig. Well done. Excellent, excellent. People of good families that’s exactly it.
Because that’s it, that’s the way you should train. You should develop yourself according
to this profound transcendental wisdom. And if you do this then all the Buddhas, (and
here he uses this other word for Buddhas, Tathāgata) all the Tathāgatas will rejoice at the
merit that you have developed by this training.’ The Buddha said this directly and then
this good person Sariputra and then the great being Bodhisattva Chenrezig and everyone
else, all the other circles of the people who were there, all the gods, all the humans and
all the asuras – the jealous gods – and all the gandharvas – angelic spirits who float in
the air and play music– together and everyone in the world was happy and rejoiced. And
really praised the words of the Buddha.”

And that is the end of the Heart Sutra.

HOW THE SUTRA AROSE

The structure of the sutra is interesting as well because of how it all arises from the
Buddha. The instigation comes from the Buddha who, in his meditation, goes to Sariputra
prompting him to ask a question of Chenrezig, who is in his meditation as he replies to
the question. The Buddha stimulates Sariputra to ask a question of Chenrezig. So the
teaching that then arises, arises out of the state of meditation. This indicates to us very
clearly this is not some kind of mental activity that gives rise to this statement of the
Heart Sutra, but that the words are a direct revealing of the profound understanding of
Chenrezig from his meditation.

BODHISATTVA DEITIES
I’ll say a little bit about deities and their background and then we can do some practice
together.

If everything has the nature of emptiness, everything that arises can be the door that we
go through because everything is potentially, when we meet it in its form, a door into
emptiness. We can recognise “Oh this is not form, this is emptiness.” That flip can occur
through any arising and there are many stories of people, more particularly in the Ch’an
and Zen traditions of people who are, for example, watching the moon rising, or hearing

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some wood being chopped, or listening to the river, or a bird singing, and suddenly there
is a click and they see through that gap.

In tantra one makes use of these deities as intentional devices to give you the moment of
recognition of the nature of form and emptiness.

On war memorials in Britain it is very common to carve the statement “No greater love
hath any man than to lay down his life for a friend.” Think of it, the bodhisattva lays
down his life endlessly for everyone by becoming a meditation deity. With almost all the
deities, all these Tibetan divine forms, whether peaceful, wrathful or whatever, we can
read the story of how they came into being. It’s usually a story like, “Once upon a time
there was a good person who was very troubled by.... and after many difficulties and
years of practising became very very good.... and then suddenly become a god.” By
becoming a divine form they let go of their individual personhood but they continue to
manifest.

Therefore the form that manifests from this state of enlightenment, the form of
Chenrezig, or Tara or Padmasambhava or Mahakala, or Vajrakilaya, or any of the deities,
peaceful or wrathful, is an empty expression of the open wisdom of enlightenment. Out
of this open state of awareness these forms arise as a manifestation of their compassion.

So it’s as if we are all crazy teenagers. It’s three o’clock in the morning and we’ve been at
a party and we are a bit drunk and we can’t get home. And we dial the number “Hello
Dad! I’m fifty kilometres away and I have no money. Can you come and pick me up? I
don’t think you were sleeping, were you?” And papa replies, “No, I never sleep, I am a
bodhisattva and I am coming for you now.” And the car comes and takes you home. That
really is how it works because they take you back to your true home. Here we are
wandering lost, crazy, drunk, stupid in samsara, and we get an initiation, and we get a
mantra – telephone number – and we keep dialling it.

The thing about all these forms is that they are this expression and they manifest in order
to be made use of. The angry forms, what we call the wrathful forms, are not themselves
angry, just as the peaceful forms are not in themselves peaceful. It is often said that
Chenrezig is the bodhisattva of compassion, but every bodhisattva is compassion.
Vajrakilaya is not less compassionate that Chenrezig. All have the same basic nature. The
form that they show is for the specific task that they take on.

So that what is important for us is to find the particular deities that we have some
connection with, that we feel some connection with so that we will be able to make use of
them to go home. If you have ambivalent feelings towards a deity then that will get in the
way of your being able to merge totally in the deity and have the deity merge in you and
use that as a means to dissolve. It’s not that all of these forms are enlightened therefore
you should be able to make use of any of the forms. Just because somebody is physically
attractive doesn’t mean that you want to have sex with them. There usually has to be

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some particular kind of connectedness that draws you into a desire to be involved with
that person. In theory, if you have sexual organs you could probably have sex with all
attractive people, but that’s not how it works in practice. Similarly with these deities, in
principle they can all help you, but the issue is to find the ones that you actually get
connected with, because one needs to have some degree of intensity and passion in order
to make these things work – but an intensity and passion that is grounded in an
understanding of the principles of the structure of the practice.

Regarding the wrathful deities, most of us in our education are told that it’s not allowed
to be angry, that people will not like us if we are angry and that we will get into trouble.
So we try to hide or repress our anger. It’s as if we live in a dilemma of: ‘Either I bottle
up all my anger and try to be a nice person but have this deep frustration because I am at
odds with myself, or, I express my anger but I become so wild and terrible that I lose my
connection with other people and I find myself unwanted and alone’.

These wrathful deities are ways of indicating that anger can be both released and
contained at the same time. In that way they become a channel so that if we find we have
a lot of repressed anger and that we frightened of it bursting out, we can make use of this
wrathful deity. By being there fully with all the flames and everything and doing the
mantra one is both radiating this anger, and keeping it contained because it is integrated
now in this mirror–like state of emptiness.

MEDITATION AND DEDICATION AT THE END

The essence of all tantra, as I was trying to say yesterday, is to bring all the phenomena of
the world and concentrate them, as if they were present in this one deity form in front of
us. To have one-pointed attention on one focused object.

Then we are bring this point, this object to the top of our head, down into our heart.
Remember we were talking about how our heart is the centre of our subjectivity? So, we
have an object outside coming to the top of our head, and then this object is sinking down
into our hearts. We really focus on this object that we’ve been thinking about, and
praying to coming closer and closer, and dissolving object into subject. Then our own
body which has already become filled with light dissolves down into this point. We go
into that point and just dissolve straight through it into openness.

So, visualise in front of you whatever deity you would like to visualise. Then we recite
together “Om Aa Hung.” which is the essence of all mantras. “Om” represents the
nirmanakaya or the Buddha’s body. “Aa” is the sambhogakaya or the Buddha’s speech.
And “Hung” is the dharmakaya or the Buddha’s mind.

If you prefer, you can visualise a translucent ball of light and then watch this ball of light,
or the deity there in the sky in front of you, in the midst of a clear blue sky; this is the
sole focus of your attention.

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Then we recite “Om Aa Hung…” several times. As we are reciting “Om Aa Hung” we
are imagining that rays of white light are coming and merging in our forehead, purifying
all the sins of our body, and filling our body with white light. Then imagine that rays of
red light are coming in and dissolving into our throat, and filling our bodies with red light
and purifying our speech. Then rays of blue light come and merge into our heart,
purifying all the sins of the mind and filling our body with blue light.

When we stop reciting Om Aa Hung, this deity, or ball of light, comes to the top of our
head and dissolves down into our heart in the way I have described. Then we’ll stay in
that open state for a while and then just gently allow our attention to return to the room.

Okay, so just having that presence in front of you, in the clear blue sky…

[Recitation of Dedication of Merit Prayer]

End.

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