Huineng

And, uh, one of the joys of a clean room is, um, shiny windows.

Shiny window or clear window, no, you know, Hui Neng would say it doesn't matter.

There's no window, and there's no dust.

But I have to say, I'm not Hui Neng, and so I'd still perceive dust on a window.

But a dustless window is different even than, um, clear seeing no window, meaning the fact of a window, the windowing of experience- Uh, is dualism.

There's a sense of I'm here, and then there's the object or like the tree leaves I'm looking at now on the other side of the window.

[laughs] Um, but before that, so I just want to take you with a little journey, you know.

Uh, for me, when I read those, the ancient texts like Dogen or Huineng or, or the teachings of Joshu or all the golden age of Zen master in China, um, it's not easy to read with this kind of mind, the mind that we have right now.

So because reading those texts with the mind that we have right now, maybe can get boring, [laughs] or sometimes can be misinterpreted, or maybe can get confusing.

Um, so sometimes for me reading those texts, I have to imagine those times.

So, so there's a, there's a, there's something called the Platform Sutra.

Uh, you pr- Huineng is, uh, one of our, um, you know, legendary ancestors.

Maybe even there's some histor- a little bit of historical truth to it.

Um, and you know, and so the Platform Sutra is kind of the s- the, the story of his, uh, you know, kind of a little bit biographical, but also a lot of his teachings.

And, you know, the Zen masters are often thumbing their noses at these stuffy, doctrinal interpretations of Buddhism or approaches that, uh, depend on book learning or intellectual aptitude.

And, you know, some figures like Huineng, uh, were sort of celebrated as being, uh, you know, illiterate peasants, like, coming from a, a background that's not intellectual at all.

Zen, as, uh, Shunryu Suzuki described it, is a return to the beginner's mind.

It's a non-attachment to everything that one thinks that one knows or has learned, and therefore, the arrival at a place, at a standpoint where you can simply not know.

How lamentable!" End quote.

And that is more or less what happened.

By the time we get to the sixth patriarch, Huineng, the Lanka is pretty much obscure.

But today, we're going to talk about the Lankavatara Sutra because I find it to be a fascinating document and one which was very important to me when I was doing Zen, and that's probably because, uh, it appeals to my personality.