Teisho on The Diamond Sutra, by Harada Roshi: Retreat Day 1, 15 July 2018.

Translated by Daichi Zenni and transcribed by Jirin-san.

Today, and tomorrow for two days of Teisho, at the request of Senshin Roshi, the Roshi will teach on The Diamond Sutra. Of course, this is a huge endeavour to teach The Diamond Sutra. During ten years he taught the entire Sutra in Europe for the various Teishos there, from Russia to Switzerland he completed this. It is not yet published, the copyright is held by Hokuozan Sogenji. But to try to do a talk on The Diamond Sutra in two days is just a little difficult. So the 32nd of the 32 chapters will be taught tomorrow. The Buddha did not divide this into 32 sections when he gave it. It is a part of the great Hanya Sutra, 600 chapters of which exist, but over 25 years at the area, which has been named Gion Shoja. The Hanya Sutra is the longest of all of the Buddha's teachings, taking 25 years of his 49 years of teaching. The king of sutras is the Lotus Sutra taught at the Vulture Peak over 8 years. The Hanya Sutra is the essence of the Buddha's awakening however, and so it took the longest and was taught at a place called Gion Shoja. And today you can see there at the Gion Shoja, a place which is called the Diamond Platform. It is a little bigger than a one metre square area. Now it is framed in bricks, but at the time the Buddha was teaching there it was a wooden platform about one metre in height, and his disciples would all gather around him as he taught from that platform at Gion Shoja.

Gion Shoja was the Buddha's second great temple. A very wealthy man of that time, Gion Nakoen gave the Buddha this land, and a temple was built there. But the story of how this happened: Shari Hotse Sonja found the excellent place with a river and a lovely woods, and they looked to see to whom this perfect land belonged. The person who was going to donate it. They found that it belonged to the prince. Shukhi went to the prince who said he did not want to sell it. He went many, many times and was told that he was noisy and bothersome by the prince who owned the land. Finally, the prince said he had decided to sell the land but only with the conditions that he would sell the amount of land over which they could pour gold. The prince was in amazement at what was done when they poured gold over a large part of the land and he asked them how they did it? The very wealthy man said he was not doing this for business but for the Buddha to be able to teach there, and the teachings would last for a long, long time. When the prince heard this explanation he said, why did you not tell this to me in the first place? I didn't want to sell it to a rich man like you for business, but now, since there is no gold where the trees of the forest are, I will donate all that land on which the trees stand. And from that time on the land became a joint project between the prince and the wealthy man who had always been helping the poor orphans. The prince's name and the wealthy man's name, a shortened and combined version of both of their names, became the name of the land, Gion Shoja, and the Buddha taught there for 25 years.

Today it remains a very holy pilgrimaging site. For 25, of his 49 years of his teaching life, the Buddha taught at that place, teaching the Hanya Sutra. This Sutra is written as a teaching conversation between Buddha and his great disciple, Subhuti who was known to be the great disciple, the brilliant disciple in the understanding of emptiness or void. The infinite galaxies, all the celestial bodies, one of which is our Milky Way, and our visible gatherings of stars, that in which countless numbers of those same galaxies and gatherings of stars are held; this is the cosmos, and this is what is able to be understood by this Sutra. Whenever these cosmos – and they all do – are completely disintegrating, a new one will be born. All of that disintegrating and being reborn is taking place in great space, the great void, the great emptiness. As it says in the Sutra, “that which is form is emptiness, that which is emptiness, form”. The Heart Sutra says it so clearly. Our bodies will all disintegrate, but the space that holds them will never go. Even the sun goes, the world goes, the climate of the world goes, but all of that is being held by this great space, which never disintegrates. The Buddha realised this and saw that emptiness was what held all and everything.

Guju Sonja, another greatly brilliant disciple and successor of the Buddha who was at Nagpur in India at the Mansa Lu Mountain in India in Nagpur, which is a very red, iron filled mountain – a mountain which is made from iron and filled clay. Guju Sonja made a university there where there were then thousands of people who later studied at that university. Guju Sonja was a very brilliant successor of the Buddha, and this great wisdom came with a certainty of the emptiness of space and the void. We are in this room right now where there is a floor, windows and ceiling, but if those were all gone we could not go in and come out of a room, because we exist in this space. Things of form all have to have space to be able to exist, like the space of a car, without which it could not possibly move. To work, to study, to exist to function to manifest we have to have space. Since these Buddhist statues do not move, we make offerings to the statues because they allow us to honour the teaching of the Buddha's deepest wisdom. They are not able to teach each person what they need to know in order to manifest that wisdom, but they allow us to honour and express our deep respect.

We are all deceived by our physical bodies, and also by the emotions that go with those physical bodies. We are all caught and attached to our physical body and its emotions. In fact, it is only about how we act, express, move, function and manifest. It is not just believing in the things. It is to awaken to the wisdom and then with that wisdom, to use it, to manifest it, to function from it. That is the Dharma. We do zazen, and right away our legs begin to hurt. But the space we occupy does not hurt. Our body is what hurts. We get caught on that and the feelings and emotions around our hurting body. But when we dive into our zazen we forget our body completely. We don't feel the pain anymore. If we are not attached, our possibilities are infinite. Our freedom, our movement, our actions, our manifesting, are infinite. The Buddha taught this in particular to Subhuti in The Diamond Sutra. And it is in this way we also have, as he spoke of last night, the great awakening of the Sixth Patriarch at the young age of 24 years old. Eno Zenji, at that age of 24, heard the words, “abiding nowhere, awakened mind arises”. And when he heard those words he was awakened deeply. From nowhere at all, we stand. From nowhere at all we sit, we walk. We who are gathered here today as well, all came here from somewhere, somehow, hearing about this gathering today, we have come here from that space source. Our senses heard these words that brought us here and we came, and this is our functioning and our truth, and this is what the Sutra is teaching us. We have the emperor Bhutai's son, Prince Shomyo Daishi who was also brilliant, and he was the one who divided this Sutra into 32 sections. Prince Shomyo made this division, and in the last chapter, there is the very famous gatha – poem. Tomorrow the Roshi will teach on that. That is the central issue of this Teisho. But if we do not have the context of the chapters before the last one, then we will easily misunderstand that final gatha.

As he spoke about last night, talking about the Sixth Patriarch who was awakened at the lines from the 14th section of The Diamond Sutra, when he heard it said, “abiding nowhere, awakened mind arises”. He then went to Gosun Gunning up on Plum Mountain where he was taught the sutra. The Diamond Sutra was also taught for a very long time by the Buddha, and in that time also, there were the teachings of the Sixth Patriarch referring to what he was taught in The Diamond Sutra. First of all, that we are in the truth, not physical bodies of form. There is no form to that truth. That there also is no mind moment that is constant and set, and that also, there is no abiding. It was the Buddha who said again and again, that the notion of selfhood, personality, entity and separate individuality was not something which existed. None of those were accurate or true. There is no such thing as selfhood, a personality, a being, an entity, a separated individuality, that we are in existence but if we let go of all of those notions, of personal and egoistic existence then while it took a long time to teach The Diamond Sutra, its essence is plain and simple. If we let go of all of that idea of an individuated ego then it is clear that we are the truth. The Diamond Sutra is teaching that. As long as we are attached to an idea of I exist, there is an I that is substantially existing, then we cannot understand the meaning of this Sutra, and it is for this reason we have these many ways of getting around the saying, I am a human, I am one of these living animals, when in fact, none of that applies to us in truth. We are not that now, we are beings that will be continuing, but we will not be that idea about something going from one body to the next. The Buddha taught again and again, that none of these apply to our way of being. We are not a form. We are also without abiding. As the Sixth Patriarch said, “abiding nowhere, awakened mind arises”. We can easily take this and walk it into a nihilistic mind set around this way of looking at it. Our ego does not exist. We are always flowing, as an old poem says, beyond those great roots and those huge rocks. The water keeps moving forward, going on, going on, hitting these great obstructions, but never stopping flowing. This alive, active flowing, we are always giving birth to a new and fresh life energy, and this is what the Sixth Patriarch is teaching about. Stagnant water goes rotten. We keep flowing and we are fresh, we are creative. We have the healthy functioning of the Buddha's wisdom and we live in this way. And this non-attached, non-abiding mind sees flowers of spring and leaves of autumn with great joy and clear perception. And that is our true mind's truth. It is also the teaching that is being given here.

The Buddha taught that the mind to which he was awakened, that mind is already held by each and every one of us. We don't get it from some aesthetic practice; we are all already that true Nature. And it is not about the external phenomena. It is about what perceives that external phenomena. We have eyes and ears, a mouth, a nose. These are only tools of perception. What is it that perceives through those tools? What is it that uses those tools, uses those senses? The eyes and ears are only tools. What perceives has no thought, no form and no location. There is no Buddha or paradise outside of us, external to us. We can't lose track of that true Buddha Nature within each of us. No matter how the external world changes we are not moved around by anything whatsoever in that true Nature, or our wisdom becomes occluded. This is what the Buddha was teaching, that mysterious functioning as well. This is what is being taught in the Sutra.

So, doing zazen is for encountering this Buddha Nature. It is not about fighting with our thoughts and fighting with our emotions. If we don't fight then we can realise that those thoughts and those emotions will go away by themselves. As the Buddha taught, there is no such thing as any mind of the past, the future or even the present. The mind of the past is already finished, the mind of the future hasn't come yet and as soon as we think of a mind of the present, then it is already gone. That is why we have this experience of emptiness. In fact, we can't find any of those, a mind of a past, present or future. We do zazen and are not moved around by any ideas of there being a past, present or future. And in this way, in the Yuiong Sutra, the Buddha taught, that if we put our whole entire focus with everything we are into one single point, then there is nothing that we cannot accomplish. Like the single rain drop that enjoins all the other single raindrops to become a rivulet, and that rivulet and many other small rivulets become a big river. These big rivers join and they become a great water, and turn a turbine from which huge amounts of energy can be produced, like the infinite drops of rain. The same is for infinite energy, which fills space, and lightning is an example of this. The dam's energy then turning the turbine and goes to all the houses and is used for daily use. This is the same as for our awakening to that which the Buddha also awakened. It has infinite functioning. It is not about a graven image in our head and thinking about something in that way. It is about wisdom, wisdom which is caught on nothing. This is not the wisdom of making money, getting benefit and profit, and that is why, he uses the word Prajna, because it is not the usual use of a word that we use as wisdom. This Prajna uses our senses and both inner and outer space, and brings profound wisdom that sees that which is alive, it sees the moon, it sees the mountains, it sees the flowers, it sees the birds and it becomes them in its perception of them. This Prajna is not worldly wisdom. This great space, for this we sit so we don't get caught on all those usual attachments. In order to help this Joshu gave us Mu, and the Buddha gave us the breathing to ripen and not stay caught on anything until we can also know this place where abiding nowhere, awakened mind arises - this infinite wisdom and functioning. There is nothing to hold onto in our head at all whatsoever. To not put any thinking into it, this is zazen.

If you do zazen and think all the time, then you waste all of your energy. Instead, to let go of all of that thinking and then this huge energy builds in your zazen, and there is enough of that energy to turn a turbine as well, or we waste all our time in zazen just caught on our thoughts.

Text:

The Diamond Sutra. Translated by A.F. Price & Wong Mou-Lam. Boston: Shambala, 1990.

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