What is the Fabric of Reality

Thich Nhat Hanh — Winter Retreat 2013–2014 [Assembly of Stars Meditation Hall, Lower Hamlet], Plum Village · 26 January 2014 · talk 21 of 24

Illuminates: communication begins with communicating with ourselves (returning home is a courageous act; the Sangha supports it) · mindful breathing (exercises 1–4) — harmonizing the breath, then the body; dharma joy (dharma-prīti) · the body as a miracle (stars, moon, ancestors within); freedom (non-political — free of regret, fear, anxiety); “call it by its true name — is it worth your life?” · signs/marks (lakṣaṇa) — the individual and collective mark of every phenomenon (Verse 9) · the three consciousnesses; store consciousness maintains seeds, body, and environment · store consciousness has direct perception of reality-as-it-is (formless seeds ↔ with-form manifestation; physics’ “fields of force” = the fabric of reality) · the twelve characteristics of seeds (the classical six + Plum Village’s six “neithers”), the 4th reworked as indeterminate / organic, the 12th as neither individual nor collective (Verse 9) · store consciousness is already perfect; manas and mind consciousness are what need transforming.

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Dear Sangha, today is the 26th of January, 2014. We are in the [Assembly of Stars Meditation Hall of the Lower Hamlet], in the winter retreat.

Communication begins at home

Whenever we have difficulty communicating with another person, what can we do? Usually we think it is the other person’s fault — we blame them, because we do not see their difficulties; but looking at ourselves, we see that both sides have difficulties. The most basic difficulty is that sometimes we cannot communicate with ourselves — we do not understand ourselves; there are conflicts in us we cannot resolve. So most of us run away from ourselves — into novels, television, the internet — because within us there may be loneliness, grief, sadness, anger, an emptiness we cannot bear, and we look for something to cover it up. This means we are not at peace with ourselves; and if we cannot communicate with ourselves, no wonder we cannot communicate with another. So to blame the other is an injustice — and the very insight that “the other has difficulties and cannot communicate with herself, just as I cannot with myself” already makes us feel lighter, so that we blame neither the other nor ourselves, and feel a deep wish to return to ourselves.

Most of us do not want to go back, because it is frightening to face that emptiness and despair — so returning to ourselves is a courageous act, and sometimes we need a friend, a co-practitioner, a Sangha to support us, because these feelings are so great that alone we might be overwhelmed. The path back is the breathing: breathing in, we bring the mind back to the body — returning by the right path — and our friends, breathing and walking with us, support our return. The methods are simple enough that anyone can do them: breathe, and know you are breathing (mindfulness); concentrate wholeheartedly on the breathing (concentration); and an inner strength is cultivated.

Mindful breathing — harmonize the breath, then the body

First we recognize the body: breathing in, I am aware of my body (the third exercise of the Sutra on Mindful Breathing). In the body there is pain and tension, and where there is tension there is no peace; so breathing in and out mindfully — sitting, walking, or lying down — we have the chance to release it.

The practice rests on the gatha “in, out, deep, slow”: Breathing in, I know I am breathing in; breathing out, I know I am breathing out — the first exercise, recognizing the in-breath and the out-breath. It is simple, child’s play — yet when we can do it, the mind’s dispersion ceases, because we are concentrated on the breath; and that is concentration, the opposite of dispersion. Then, without forcing, the breath naturally deepens and slows: breathing in, I see my in-breath has become deeper; breathing out, I see my out-breath has become slower — the second exercise. In a minute the quality of the breathing improves. And because body and mind are one, a peaceful breath affects the mind; we offer the peaceful breath to the body: breathing in, I am aware of my body; breathing out, I release the tension in my body — and the tension is released. This is the practice of peace.

When Thay went to [Columbia University] to teach, a professor asked, “What do you do when you sit?” In sitting meditation the most basic things are: first, to harmonize the breathing — calming it so it is not rushed; and second, to harmonize the body — the posture upright but soft, not rigid, with no tension. Breath and body go together; for the experienced it takes a few minutes, and then we can go deeper into contemplation, with more peace and dharma joy [dharma-prīti] — a joy that comes not from others but from our own practice. (If we have slept enough, sitting brings this joy.)

The body is a miracle — and freedom

In daily life we neglect the body — two hours at the computer and we forget we have a body, while tension accumulates and we lose our peace; so the mindfulness bell on the computer calls us back. To stop and breathe is not wasting time: time is not money — time is life. Coming back to the breath, aware of this wonderful body, this is life — and if mindfulness and concentration are strong, we see the body is miraculous: it carries the stars, the moon, the universe, Mother Earth; it carries all our ancestors, who have never died but live on in every cell. If we are peaceful and joyful, our ancestors are too. So breathing in, I know I have a body; breathing out, I smile to my body is a deep practice — an awakening — and awakening happens today, not in ten or twenty years. These insights come continuously, and let us untangle ourselves from attachments — for we can be entangled in anger or sadness for hours and days, while life is wondrous. Seeing the body as wondrous, we see that nothing is really important but the peace in our body and mind — and with this insight we can let the other things go.

And every step can bring joy, because we have freedom: our body and mind are not entangled with anxiety and anger. Freedom is very precious — not political freedom, but freedom from regret, fear, and anxiety about past and future. Some of us are caught in the prison of the past, others in the prison of the future, while life, beautiful and full of miracles, passes by. When we bring the whole mind to the in-breath — which takes two or three seconds — we let go of past and future: concentrate on the breath for three or four seconds, and everything else is released; that is concentration, one-pointedness of mind on a single object, the breath. Breathe for three minutes and for those three minutes we are free — and this freedom takes training. When we are anxious or angry, our decisions are poor; but breathing, we become free, and a decision made in freedom is far better. Then we recognize and calm the feelings: there is a feeling of sadness in me; I embrace it; I calm it — as we calmed the body. And in an environment where many practice, we benefit from the collective energy and reach the fruits quickly.

What is it that makes you anxious, that prevents joy in the present? Call it by its true name. How did it get the strength to entangle you? Is it worth wasting your life, when life is so full of wonders? To ask this is already an awakening: seeing it is not worthy of you, while life is miraculous and every step and breath can bring peace, you can let it go, let it fly away — for your happiness does not depend on it.

The signs of things — individual and collective

So Plum Village practice is simple: use the breath and the steps to generate joy, peace, and happiness (the art of happiness), and recognize and calm the tension and suffering (the art of suffering). Now we learn the characteristics of seeds.

When we look up and see the stars and moon, there is a relationship between stars, moon, and ourselves: science says we are made of stars — this earth is made of dust from other stars — so we carry the stars and the universe within us. (The Bible says we are made of dust; in truth we are made of stars.) And moon and stars are, first of all, our consciousness — objects of our consciousness — present under signs, marks [lakṣaṇa]: the star has its sign, the flower its sign, the human her sign; by these marks they can be recognized. There are collective signs and individual signs: a house has its collective sign (the whole house, by which we recognize it), and each brick and pillar that makes it is an individual sign; the cat’s shape and cry are its collective sign. All these phenomena are born from seeds.

In Manifestation-Only there are three consciousnesses: the first is store consciousness; the second is manas (mentation); the third is the consciousness that perceives the world — the mind consciousness together with the five sense-consciousnesses (so there are six: mind plus the five senses). Mentation/manas is the seventh, store consciousness the eighth. Store consciousness has the capacity to maintain the universe — the moon, the stars, the galaxy are in store consciousness; so when we look at the moon and stars, they are not outside us, but in our store consciousness. Manifestation-Only says store consciousness maintains three things: the seeds, the body, and the environment (the universe) — it embraces these three; while manas is the self — a perception that takes the body as itself. And store consciousness has direct, correct perception, its object being things in themselves, reality as it is.

Formless and with-form — the fabric of reality

“Things in themselves” can be understood two ways. As seeds, they are formless — “insubstantial things-in-themselves,” reality without marks and appearances; manifested into moons and stars, they are things-in-themselves with form. Physics is now looking for the same thing — the fabric of reality — and one theory calls the true nature of reality a field of forces: formless, like the seeds, ultimate reality without marks. As H₂O can become snow, rain, cloud — the H₂O the seed, the cloud and snow the world we see, reality with form — so the seeds are the fabric that manifests these signs. Store consciousness can reach the things in themselves (right, direct perception); but manas and mind consciousness cannot, because they are caught in signs.

The twelve characteristics of the seeds

Understanding this, we can understand the characteristics of the seeds — for the seeds are what store consciousness maintains, and from the seeds come the formations (moon, stars, rivers, mountains). These twelve characteristics grow from the traditional six.

(1) Momentary impermanence (kṣaṇika): the seed is always changing, going through birth and death every millisecond. The old word is “dying every instant,” but we say impermanence, because birth and death are only on the surface — deep down, in their true nature, there is no birth and no death. As in a chemical reaction, the original elements seem to “die,” but nothing goes from something to nothing: squeeze lemon into salt and the salt seems gone, yet count the particles and the number is the same — not dead, only changed form. Where is the five-year-old child? Not dead — only changed into the twelve-year-old, the eighteen-year-old. So store consciousness, holding momentary-impermanent seeds, is itself momentarily impermanent.

(2) Cause and effect coexist: the effect is present with the cause — a non-dualistic view. As we cannot take the creator out of the created, nor the father out of the son (in the father is the son, in the son the father), so we cannot take the formation out of its seed: looking at the formation (this board, this tree, this sheet of paper, with its sign), we see the seed in it.

(3) Continuity as a series (santati): the seed continues as a series. One of store consciousness’s names is “store of all seeds” (sarva-bījaka) — the consciousness containing all kinds of seeds; and the seeds can manifest in two forms (formless and with-form).

(4) Indeterminate nature. This is a change from the traditional characteristic (“determinate nature”). The tradition says a seed maintains its character as wholesome or unwholesome; but in Plum Village we see that the seeds in store consciousness are neither wholesome nor unwholesome, because store consciousness is unobstructed, uncovered, and undetermined. Wholesome and unwholesome are the creation of human beings, not of nature: we call the gentle flower “good,” the nettle or poison oak “evil,” but that is from our human perspective; in its nature, neither flower nor poison oak is wholesome or unwholesome. (When we put God only on the side of goodness and being, we lower God — for the ultimate reality transcends good and evil: if God were only goodness, why the earthquake, the tsunami, the animals eating one another?) So God transcends good and evil — and store consciousness likewise is undetermined; hence the seeds are undetermined. We call the seeds that bring us benefit “good” and cultivate them, and avoid those that bring suffering as “unwholesome” — but that idea belongs to humans, not to nature. Indeterminate also means organic (see the 9th).

(5) They wait for conditions: the seeds await enough conditions to manifest — rain or sun, flowers or weeds, butterflies. This is interdependent co-arising.

(6) Neither being nor non-being: the stars we see may already be extinct — gone thousands or millions of years ago, their light only now reaching us; so “existent” and “non-existent” are both incorrect. To “be” would mean to have a fixed substance that cannot become non-being; but this flower has no self-nature, manifested by many conditions — so to say it exists, or does not exist, is incorrect. All phenomena, looked at deeply, are neither being nor non-being — confirmed by the [Kaccānagotta Sutta], where the Buddha says right view transcends being and non-being. “To be or not to be” is not the question; being and non-being are mere mental categories that cannot be applied to reality.

(7) Neither inside nor outside: to say some seeds are “inside” and some “outside” is incorrect, for inside and outside are notions too. The stars and moon we see — we normally call them “outside us,” but Manifestation-Only says they are in store consciousness, so neither inside nor outside. (To say phenomena are “in our mind” is mind-only; to say they are “outside” is materialism — both incorrect.)

(8) Neither new nor old: we think some seeds are innate and some newly planted — the old Manifestation-Only debate — but in fact there is neither birth nor death. As in the conservation of energy: nothing is new, nothing old; matter transforms into matter, matter into energy, energy into energy and back; energy and matter are neither born nor destroyed, only transformed (the first law of thermodynamics).

(9) Neither pure nor impure: pure and impure are our ideas and cannot describe reality — “neither defiled nor immaculate,” as the Heart Sutra says of suchness. The lotus can become the mud and the mud the lotus; suffering can be used to generate happiness, and unattended happiness becomes suffering. So everything has an organic nature — indeterminate also means organic.

(10) Neither the same nor different: the three-year-old and the twenty-year-old are not one person (they are so different), yet not two separate people either. So reality is neither sameness nor otherness.

(11) Neither coming nor going: we ask “Why were you born into this world? Why do you die and leave me?” — holding ideas of coming and going. But in reality there is no coming and no going.

(12) Neither individual nor collective: this is the idea of collective and individual — but nothing is purely collective, nothing purely individual. This body is not a separate body — it is a continuation of our parents’, our ancestors’ bodies; so to say “this is my body, I can do what I want with it” is wrong. If you are happy and can smile, it is not for you alone — your family and community benefit. To be exact, the seeds, and all the phenomena manifested from them, are neither individual nor collective. Everything influences everything: our optic nerve seems our own private matter, but if your eyes fail and you are driving, it affects my life — so your eyes are also our eyes.

Store consciousness is already perfect

So store consciousness has right, direct perception — it touches the ultimate reality. But manas and mind consciousness hold ideas of inside/outside, cause/effect, coming/going, and create much suffering; they are the consciousnesses that need to be transformed. Store consciousness is already perfect — it does not need to be transformed. It is our ground, our foundation. Call it God, call it suchness — but it is neither individual nor collective. To ask whether each of us has a separate, individual store consciousness is incorrect; and to say we have one collective store consciousness is incorrect too — for individual and collective are ideas in our head, and reality transcends them. We will continue this Sunday.