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August 11 - August 23, 2019
Impermanence is more than an idea. It is a practice to help us touch reality.
When we look deeply into impermanence, we see that things change because causes and conditions change. When we look deeply into nonself, we see that the existence of every single thing is possible only because of the existence of everything else.
We see that everything else is the cause and condition for its existence. We see that everything else is in it.
From the point of view of time, we say “impermanence,” and from the point of view of...
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Looking deeply at impermanence, you see nonself. Looking deeply at nonself, you see impermanence.
Understanding impermanence can give us confidence, peace, and joy. Impermanence does not necessarily lead to suffering. Without impermanence, life could not be.
It is not impermanence that makes us suffer. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not.
If we practice the art of mindful living, when things change, we won’t have any regrets. We can smile, because we have done our best to enjoy every moment of our life and to make others happy.
We have to nourish our insight into impermanence every day. If we do, we will live more deeply, suffer less, and enjoy life much more.
The Second Dharma Seal is nonself. Nothing has a separate existence or a separate self. Everything has to inter-be with everything else.
We all have the capacity of living with nondiscriminating wisdom, but we have to train ourselves to see in that way, to see that the flower is us, the mountain is us, our parents and our children are all us. When we see that everyone and everything belongs to
the same stream of life, our suffering will vanish. Nonself is not a doctrine or a philosophy. It is an insight that can help us live life more deeply, suffer less, and enjoy life much more. We need to live the insight of nonself.
Nirvana, the Third Dharma Seal, is the ground of being, the substance of all that is.
Nirvana is the extinction of all notions. Birth is a notion. Death is a notion. Being is a notion. Nonbeing is a notion. In our daily lives, we have to deal with these relative realities. But if we touch life more deeply, reality will reveal itself in a different way.
Nirvana means extinction, above all the extinction of ideas — the ideas of birth and death, existence and nonexistence, coming and going, self and other, one and many. All these ideas cause us to suffer. We are afraid of death because ignorance gives us an illusory idea about what death is. We are disturbed by ideas of existence and nonexistence because we have not understood the true nature of impermanence and nonself. We worry about our own future, but we fail to worry about the future of the other because we think that our happiness has nothing to do with the happiness of the other. This
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In Buddhism we talk about the Eight Concepts: birth, death, permanence, dissolution, coming, going, one, and many. The practice to end attachment to these eight ideas is called the Eight No’s of the Middle Way — no birth and no death, no permanence and no dissolution, no coming and no going, no one and no many.
Once these eight ideas have been destroyed, we touch nirvana. Nirvana is release from the Eight Concepts, and also from their opposites — impermanence, nonself, Interdependent Co-Arising, emptiness, and the Middle Way. If we hold on to the Three Seals as fixed ideas, these ideas also have to be destroyed. The best way
to do this is by putting these teachings into practice in our daily lives. Experience always goes beyond ideas.
Nirvana means pacifying, silencing, or extinguishing the fire of suffering.
Nirvana teaches that we already are what we want to become. We don’t have to run after anything anymore. We only need to return to ourselves and touch our true nature. When we do, we have real peace and joy.
The Three Dharma Seals1 are the keys we can use to enter the Three Doors of Liberation — emptiness (shunyata), signlessness (animitta), and aimlessness (apranihita). All schools of Buddhism accept the teaching of the Three Doors of Liberation.2 These Three Doors are sometimes called the Three Concentrations.3 When we enter these doors, we dwell in concentration and are liberated from fear, confusion, and sadness.
The First Door of Liberation is emptiness, shunyata. Emptiness always means empty of something.
We are empty of a separate, independent self. We cannot be by ourselves alone. We can only inter-be with everything else in the cosmos. The practice is to nourish the insight into emptiness all day long. Wherever we go,...
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When we touch these things deeply, we see the interbeing and interpenetrating nature of all that is. Emptiness
does not mean nonexistence. It means Interdependent Co-Arising, impermanence, and nonself.
When we first hear about emptiness, we feel a little frightened. But after practicing for a while, we see that things do exist, only in a different way than we’d thought. Emptiness i...
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In the Diamond Sutra, we are taught that a human being is not independent of other species, so to protect humans, we have to protect the non-human species.
Our happiness and suffering are the happiness and suffering of others. When we act based on nonself, our actions will be in accord with reality, and we will know what to do and what not to do. When we maintain awareness that we are all linked to each other, this is the Concentration on Emptiness (shunyata samadhi). Reality goes beyond notions of being and nonbeing. To say that the flower exists is not exactly correct, but to say that it does not exist is also not correct. True emptiness is called “wondrous being,” because it goes beyond existence and nonexistence.
When we look at others, we see how their happiness and suffering are linked to our happiness and suffering. “Peace begins with me.
Everyone we cherish will, someday, get sick and die. If we do not practice the meditation on emptiness, when it happens, we will be overwhelmed.
Emptiness is a Door of Liberation when we penetrate it deeply and we realize Interdependent Co-Arising and the interbeing nature of everything that is.
The Second Door of Liberation is signlessness, animitta. “Sign” here means an appearance or the object of our perception. When we see something, a sign or image appears to us, and that is what is meant by “lakshana.”
The Diamond Sutra says, “Wherever there is a sign, there is deception, illusion.” Perceptions often tell us as much about the perceiver as the object of perception. Appearances can deceive.
Practicing the Concentration on Signlessness is necessary for us to free ourselves. Until we can break through the signs, we cannot touch reality. As long as we are caught by signs — round, square, solid, liquid, gas — we will suffer. Nothing can be described in terms of just one sign. But without signs, we feel anxious. Our fear and attachment come from our being caught in signs. Until we touch the signless nature of things, we will continue to be afraid and to suffer.
The greatest relief is when we break through the barriers of sign and touch the world of signlessness, nirvana. Where should we look to find the world of no signs? Right here in the world of signs.
“If you see the signlessness of signs, you see the Tathagata.” This is a sentence from the Diamond Sutra. Tathagata means “the wondrous nature of reality.”4 To see the wondrous nature of water, you need to look beyond the sign (appearance) of the water, and see that it is made of non-water elements. If you think that water is only water, that it cannot be the sun, the earth, or the flower, you are not correct.
When we go beyond signs, we enter the world of no-fear and no-blame. We can see the flower, the water, and our child beyond time and space. We know that our ancestors are present in us, right here and right now. We see that the Buddha, Jesus, and all of our other spiritual ancestors have not died.
The Diamond Sutra enumerates four signs — self, person, living being, and life span. We get caught in the sign “self,” because we think there are things that are not self. But when we look deeply, we see that there is no separate, independent self, and we become free of the sign of self. We see that to protect ourselves, we have to protect everything that is not ourselves.
When we look deeply at our own species, we can see the non-human elements in it, and when we look deeply at the animal, vegetal, and mineral realms, we see the human element in them. When we practice the Concentration on Signlessness, we live in harmony with all other species.
The third sign is “living being.” We think that sentient beings are different from insentient beings. But living or sentient beings are made of non-living or non-sentient species.
