Lankavatara sutra

They are illusory objects created by consciousness.

In the Lankavatara Sutra, it says very clearly that the way samsara functions is In the field of awareness rises form, and as form rises, and here I simply mean sense experience, perhaps the sound of this irritating voice, perhaps the sight of the windows outside, whatever it is, form rises, okay, and there's immediate affinity or non-affinity, liking or disliking, and then comes language.

And the teachings say very clearly this is the mechanism of the trap, This language business.

Language is amazing.

So it's-- it was just like an image, an idea, um, and, uh, very much following in that, that Zen rhetoric of mind-only Pure Land.

Um, but when I ha-- when I experienced my grandmother's funeral, during the funeral or w- on the drive down to Texas, I was reading the Lankavatara Sutra.

Um, in that line, the Buddha says repeatedly throughout it, which is, "There is nothing experienced of reality but what is of mind itself." I think that's, uh, Red Pine's translation probably.

Um- Just kept like getting stuck in my head.

And then I started thinking, well, well, if all of this reality is mind-made, then, then what is death? [laughs] Death is just the breaking apart of, of that construction.

Uh, well, why couldn't anything be reconstructed? Like, if, if consciousness is just like this field and the, like, the objects that we're experiencing are, are just impressions.

And basically, uh, the obstacle for me, like most Westerners, I think, was clinging to like ontological materialism, right? Um, and it was reading through the Lankavatara Sutra while going through, like, the three days of funerary chanting and the 49 days of mourning into that experience where, like, basically every- everything I knew about reality was being deconstructed in that 49 days.

[laughs] Um, and when I had that experience, it was no longer a challenge to me, like, how can, how can you die and then be reborn into another world? Because it seems very simple in, in the same way that, like, if you ever meditated to the point where, where like your body disappears.

The second turning is the turning that teaches this radical doctrine of emptiness and enshrines the Bodhisattva path as the fundamental moral idea.

And the third turning is the Yogacara texts that begin with the Samdhinimochana Sutra, or the Sutra Unraveling the Thought, and the Lankavatara, or the entry into Lanka Sutra.

And these texts are highly phenomenological.

So while the Madhyamaka texts are talking about the emptiness of all objects of knowledge, The Yogacara texts are talking about the cognitive processes that lead us to understand empty phenomena as non-empty and to superimpose intrinsic identity and subject-object duality on a reality that has no intrinsic identity and is not primordially given as a distinction between human subjects and everything else as objects.

And let's be honest that the conceptual mind is powerful.

It shapes our thoughts, beliefs, concepts, and as we learned in the teachings on the Lanka, it also influences our feelings and perceptions.

And it's really important that we see that.

So we practice with it wisely, we train, we have teachers.

This vast luminous field As Roshi said, his mind, universal mind, pure awareness.

You know, do you know your Lankavatara list? Buddha nature, thusness, suchness, I ran down, vastness, warm-hearted spaciousness, clear bliss light, wisdom, mirror mind, Tathagatagarbha.

And as Doan is always telling us, this field, recognizing this field, abiding in this field, activity from this field is our birthright.

And by nature, what already exists can't be cultivated.

The kerosene lamp casts a glow in the cabin.

I go out and pick some ferns like the ferns of a Lankavatara scripture, those hairnet ferns.

Looks, sirs, a beautiful hairnet.

Late afternoon.

Old Ben, much thinner than he used to be in our madder Dharma bum days of five years ago.

A little gaunt, in fact.

But still the same old Ben who stays up late at night chuckling over the Lankavatara scripture and writing poems about raindrops.

And he knows me very well.