Random Notes on a Chan talk

   Listening to Chan teacher Gilbert Gutierrez's Dharma talk tonight, I felt a strange sense of coming home. In a way, this style of teaching he develops is so much related to why I wanted to practice meditation in the first place. But I can't quite pin down that state of mind. It's wonderful, but then how do I express it? Well, that's a challenge that Gilbert faces all the time in his coming to different cities to teach.
   Gilbert talked about how, in the Theravadin Buddhist tradition, there are these four "pillars" called the Noble Truths, and they are considered "realities" in Theravadin's view. This idea of 'reality' is quite interesting, because in a sense it subtly sets up something in the mind. For me, I experience reality as a kind of 'impassable' mountain: something that is so solid, so concrete, and so 'there' that it cannot be surmounted. And this hardness also seems to characterize the teachings of the Four Noble Truths. It's almost as though a person is told "this is the way things are, and we have a cure for it, and all you have to do is stop craving this and take this noble path out."
   The Four Noble Truths might be analyzed as a kind of prescription, in much the same way a doctor diagnosis an illness and then prescribes a cure. There is something so solid about this. But as Gilbert mentions, in the Heart Sutra, Avalokiteshvara is telling Sariputra that there is no wisdom and no ignorance! Gilbert referred to Heart Sutra as a "manifesto" of sorts, for two reasons. Firstly, by having Avalokiteshvara (the Bodhisattva of compassion) deliver a discourse on wisdom to Sariputra, it is shown that compassion is the highest form of wisdom. Second is that this sutra declares wisdom to be just an 'unreal' or non-existent as ignorance. But why or how is that? I believe it is that as soon as a person tries to crystallize a notion of wisdom, it is not actually wisdom at all. In fact, all polarities are just creations of the mind: divisions which discriminate between 'two' things when there are really no 'two things'. Everything operates within the same matrix of dependent origination (pratekya-sammapadda), to the point where even wisdom is conditioned. And for ignorance: if ignorance is only based on cause and conditions of the moment, is it truly self-existent? Why treat it as something that is enduring or substantial? It would be like calling myself a name and then forgetting that it's I who gave myself that name, not anybody else.
    Another interesting point is that of 'wholesome'. Gilbert suggested that 'wholesome' in Buddhist teachings does not refer to some 'good' or 'bad' thought: rather, it refers more to a specific relationship that we engage in with thoughts themselves. I thought this was an interesting point, because often we blame a thought by referring to it as wholesome or unwholesome. In fact, there is no good or bad thought, but only the way we relate to those thoughts causes positive or negative consequences for ourselves and others. It again goes back to this notion that the practice is not about trying to 'arrange' things in mind to look nice ...rather, it is being clear about what's there and not allowing those things in mind to dominate one's energies. Gilbert suggested that once a person learns to clearly illuminate thoughts and not be drawn by them, they can choose which thoughts are necessary and which are not important to the moment. And this is where the practice of clear mind is of such importance.