This podcast is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for real life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, come and join us at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. Thank you and happy listening. Mr Chairman and Friends, it's now, as I think most of you know, about a month since we stepped down into what we may describe as the current, as the mighty river, the mighty stream of the bodhisattva ideal. And each week, as we've come here, we've gone or we've tried to go just a little deeper into that river, into that current, into that stream. And by this time I think, we can say, I think we can feel that we find ourselves more or less right in the middle of that stream. Not only find ourselves in the middle of it, but find ourselves, feel ourselves being born along bite more and more rapidly. Perhaps at first we might have struggled a little against the current. We might not have been altogether happy about being born along, but perhaps now we are not struggling, not resisting anymore, but just allowing ourselves to be born, as it were, in the direction of the ocean. That is to say, in the direction of what we call enlightenment, nirvana, buddhahood, and so on. Now in the course of these last four weeks, we have traveled quite a distance. We've left behind, perhaps, quite a number of old familiar landmarks. We've passed through quite a lot of unfamiliar country, unfamiliar terrain. We've seen, perhaps, to continue the metaphor, have seen, as we were strapped along, this river, have seen dense forests, have seen, perhaps, in the distance, lofty, mountain peaks. In other words, we've seen, as we've been carried along week by week, different aspects of the bodhisattva ideal. In the course of the first week, in the course of the first week's lecture, we saw that the bodhisattva was the ideal Buddhist, one who lives for the sake of enlightenment, enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings. We saw further that the bodhisattva is the living embodiment of both wisdom and compassion that he's inspired in his life, in his activity, in his work, not only by what the Buddha said, not only by the verbal teaching of the Buddha, but also by what the Buddha in his intrinsic being was, and what he did, the sort of influence he radiated upon other men and other women. In the course of the second week's lecture, we saw that one becomes a bodhisattva, one becomes a being dedicated to enlightenment for the benefit of all by the arising of what is called the bodhicitta. Literally this means, as we saw, the thought of enlightenment, but we also saw that the bodhicitta is much more than the thought of enlightenment in the sense of an idea or a concept or about enlightenment. We saw that it's a sort of spiritual force, a spiritual power, if you like, at work in the universe. We saw that it is something transcendental, something above and beyond this world in its ultimate essence. We saw that it is not, in fact, individual at all, but universal, that there is one bodhicitta, one will to enlightenment, and the individual bodhisattvas participate in this, in varying degrees. We also saw that the bodhicitta arises in dependence on certain conditions, and these conditions are represented by Shanti Deva's supreme worship and Vazubandhu's for factors. Now, in our third week's lecture, we saw that whereas the bodhicitta itself is universal, the individual bodhisattva is an individual, a person, and the bodhicitta therefore expresses itself in his life and in his work in a thoroughly individual manner. And this individual expression of the bodhicitta through the individual bodhisattva is what we call the bodhisattvas vow. And though we speak of the vow in the singular, rather than in the plural, it is in fact we saw really plural, and there are a number of famous sets of vows which illustrate the nature of the bodhisattva's vow. The most famous set is, of course, that of the four great vows wherein the bodhisattva gives expression to the aspiration, the fourfold aspiration, may I deliver all beings from difficulties, may I eradicate all passions, may I master all dharmas, and may I lead all beings to Buddhahood. Now, last week we dealt with altruism and individualism in the spiritual life. And we saw that the bodhisattva himself represents, or the bodhisattva ideal itself represents a living union of opposites. We saw that the bodhisattva ideal synthesizes the mundane and the transcendental, samsara and nirvana, wisdom and compassion. We saw further that it does not represent, the bodhisattva ideal does not represent altruism as opposed to individualism. We saw that the bodhisattva is not concerned with the salvation of others as opposed to his own salvation. This we saw is a popular misrepresentation. These expressions should not be taken literally. The bodhisattva does, in fact, embody both altruism and individualism. The altruistic aspect of the bodhisattva ideal is represented by dhan or giving the first of the paramitas, the perfections or transcendental virtues, whereas the individualistic aspect is represented by Sheila or uprightness, which is the second paramita. We saw, by the way, incidentally that the practice of the paramitas, the perfections, the transcendental virtues represents what is known as the establishment aspect of the bodhicitta. Now, last week we dealt with this question of dhan or giving, the first of the paramitas along traditional lines. And we saw you may recollect to whom one could give, what one could give, how one should give, and why. In the case of Sheila, the second paramita, we adopted a rather different procedure. We took traditional categories like the five precepts for granted, and we examined the bodhisattitude towards such things as food, work, and marriage. So in this way, week by week, we have seen quite a lot as we've allowed ourselves to be born along by the current of the bodhisattva ideal. And today we're going to see just a little more. Today we're concerned with another pair of opposites, a very important pair of opposites, and we're concerned with the way in which the bodhisattva synthesizes these. Today we're concerned with masculinity and femininity in the spiritual life. Now those who have seen the printed program, or rather the cyclo-styled program in the newsletter, will have noticed that these words, masculinity and femininity, are in single inverted commerce. And this indicates that we're not to take these terms too literally, we're to take them in a more metaphorical sense. How they are really to be understood in this context, we shall see in due course. And while we mustn't forget that we shall be all the time, this evening still concerned with the establishment aspect of the bodhicitta. In other words, with the practice of the six palimitas. Last week, as I've just reminded you, we dealt with Dhana and Sila, the first two palimitas, that it would say giving and uprightness, and this week we are in fact dealing with kshanti and viriya, or patience and viga, the third and the fourth palimitas. And it is these which represent within the context of the bodhisattva ideal what we may describe as the masculine and feminine aspects of the spiritual life. Or if you like, these palimitas represent the active and the passive poles of the bodhisattva ideal. Viriya or viga represents the masculine aspect and kshanti or patience represents the feminine aspect, incidentally in the Indian languages, at least in the ancient Indian languages, in a compound of this sort, the feminine usually comes first. For instance, in palimita in Sanskrit, one always says matar putu, that it was a mother and father. One never says father and mother, but always the other way around mother and father. In English, of course, it's very often the opposite. But today, we're following the more traditional, the Indian order, and we're dealing first with kshanti, the feminine aspect, and after that with Viriya, the masculine aspect. And after that, we shall try to see in what way Viriya represents the masculine and kshanti the more feminine aspect of or in the spiritual life. Now kshanti, this is by the way to be distinguished from kshanti, which means peace, kshanti with an initial k, is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful words in the whole range of Buddhism, one of the most beautiful words in the whole vocabulary of Buddhism. And it links, it combines quite a number of associated meanings. Note one English word is really sufficient to do justice through the fullness, the richness of meaning which this word kshanti contains. Literally, kshanti means patience, it means forbearance, but included is also the idea of gentleness, of docility, and even of humility. Sometimes we say that humility isn't exactly a Buddhist virtue, but we mean humility in the more artificial sense, the more self-conscious sense. In this connection the little story about Mahatma Gandhi, when he started one of his ashrams in India, he drew up a list of all the virtues which the inmates were supposed to practice. It was quite a long list. And right at the head of the list he had the virtue of humility, everybody was supposed to practice that. So someone pointed out to him that if you practiced humility deliberately, self-consciously as it were, then it wasn't humility, it was just hypocrisy. So he crossed it out and he wrote at the bottom all the virtues that would be practiced in a spirit of humility, which was a rather different thing. So everyone takes humility in the right things as a sort of unself-conscious self-abnegation of spirit, an unawareness of self, then one can include humility also as part of the meaning, part of the connotation of this term, "Kshanti." And Kshanti also contains very definite overtones or undertones, if you like, of love, even compassion of tolerance and of acceptance and receptivity. On the negative side, Kshanti covers such things as absence of anger, an absence of the desire for retaliation and revenge. So it isn't very difficult from these facts to understand what kind of attitude, what kind of mental, what kind of spiritual attitude Kshanti represents. Generally speaking, we may say it represents within the context of the bodhisattva ideal, it represents the antidotes to anger. In other words, it's a form of love. You may remember that dharma, or giving the first of the parliamentars, represented within the context of the bodhisattva ideal, the antidote to craving. So in the same way, Kshanti patience forbearance or love, if you like, within the context of the same bodhisattva ideal is the antidote to anger. Now there's a lot that one can say about Kshanti as one can in fact about all the parliamentars, but I propose to discuss this evening just the three principal aspects of Kshanti. First of all, Kshanti as forbearance, a secondly Kshanti as tolerance, and thirdly Kshanti as spiritual receptivity. And I'm going to depart from my usual custom and I'm going to introduce each aspect with a story. The story is not going to come long in the middle at the end, it's going to come right at the beginning and this will serve to remind us that Kshanti is not something to be theorized about or speculated about, but essentially something to be practiced in our everyday life as in fact we shall see with the help of a verse from the dhamma partha a little later on. Now first of all, Kshanti as forbearance. Kshanti as forbearance is illustrated by a story from the life of the Buddha himself. And this story is found in the sutra of 42 sections. This incidentally was the first Buddhist text ever to be translated into the Chinese language. We haven't got the Sanskrit or perhaps the Pali original of it, we've only got this Chinese translation, but historically it is of considerable importance. So one of the earlier sections relates this particular story about the Buddha. Apparently the Buddha was going about as usual, he was either preaching or he was going for arms or something of that. So what would happen to encounter somebody probably a brahming we don't know, who for some reason or other wasn't very happy with the Buddha, wasn't very pleased with him. So he straight away started to abuse the Buddha, called him all sorts of names. We often find this in the Pali scriptures, the Buddha, by the way, wasn't universally popular in his own day, quite a lot of people didn't like the Buddha and didn't like what he was doing, enticing people away from their wives and families and putting on the spiritual path and making them think that Nirvana instead of thinking about making money, with some people he wasn't at all popular. So he encountered it, it seems one of these characters, and he just started abusing the Buddha with all the bad words in his vocabulary. So the Buddha didn't say anything, didn't say anything at all, he just waited for the man to stop. So after five minutes of uninterrupted abuse, he just stopped, he got out of breath apparently. So the Buddha very quietly asked him, he said, "Is that all?" So the man was a bit taken aback and he said, "Yes, that's all." So then the Buddha said, "All right, let me now ask you a question." He said, "Suppose you have a friend, and suppose that friend brings along for you one day a present, but suppose you don't want to accept that present, if you don't accept it, to whom does that gift belong?" So I said, "Well, if I were to accept it, it belongs to the person who wants you to give it to me." So the Buddha said, "Look here, you have tried to make me a present of this abuse. I decline to accept your present." He said, "Take it, it belongs to you." So this is the story told about the Buddha. So this is how the Buddha behaved. But I think we'll probably agree upon a little reflection that this is not how we usually behave. This isn't the way in which we are likely to behave. What we usually do, if we are abused in this way, is that we either make a similar retort or we retaliate in some other way. At best we keep it burning within our mind and we perhaps take revenge later on. So this is the way in which we behave. And we find that the great teacher, Ashanti Deva, gives some very useful hints on how we are to practice Ashanti in this sense, in the sense of forbearance and emulate the Buddha's example. He gives us some hints. In other words, on how to check the arising of anger, Ashanti Deva says, "Supposing someone comes along and beats you with a stick." Well he said, "That's a very painful experience, but you shouldn't just straight away fly into a rage." He says, "You should reflect and you should try to understand what has actually happened." If you just analyze it, when you're beaten with a stick, all that has happened is that two things have come together. One of them is the stick and the other is your body. They've just come together and the painful experience arises in dependence on the coming together of these two factors, stick and body. Now Ashanti Deva says, "Who is responsible for this coming together for this painful experience?" The other person, the enemy, admittedly, he has taken the stick to you. He's partly responsible, but Ashanti Deva says, "You've taken the body." He provides the stick, but you provide the body and where does that body come from? It comes from your previous Sank Skaras. It comes from your ignorance and activities based upon ignorance of previous lives. He's put the stick there, true, but you've put the body there. So you are equally responsible with him. So why should you get angry with him for his stick and not with yourself, for your body, for being there? So in this way, Ashanti Deva has a number of reflections which we can read in the Bodhic area of Atara, which help us to practice forbearance in situations of this sort. Now, it isn't just a question of practicing forbearance towards harsh words or people with sticks. It's a much bigger, a much wider question than that. And sometimes the objects towards which forbearance is to be practiced are classified in Buddhist literature into three groups. First of all, nature, nature. The material universe that surrounds us, especially in the form of the weather. We have to practice forbearance towards the weather, either it's too hot, or it's too cold, or there's too much wind, or too much rain, or no, there's no sunshine. And I need hardly to remind you that this sort of forbearance is especially necessary to us, whether Buddhist or non-Buddhist, in this country. And also, we need to practice forbearance towards what are known in law as acts of God. Natural calamities and natural disasters beyond human control like fire and flood and earthquake and lightning. So this is the first kind of object towards which forbearance is to be practiced, nature in general. And then secondly, our own body, especially when the body is sick or suffering in any other kind of way. We shouldn't get angry with the body. We shouldn't start beating brother ass. It isn't his fault. After we've brought the body here, it's our own responsibility, we should just practice forbearance towards the body and his aches and pains and so on. As some people, of course, find this a little difficult, they just get a little headache sometimes and you might think from the first they make that they were undergoing a major operation without an aesthetic. And they express need for sympathy and so on. Now the fact that we should practice forbearance towards the body, towards physical suffering doesn't mean that we should not try to alleviate suffering, whether it's our own suffering or whether it's the suffering of other people. But we should realize at least that there's always a residue which cannot be relieved and this we simply have to bear with patience. And even if there's no sickness, even if there's no disease, in any case sooner or later come along old age and eventually death. In the West we know many people rebel against this sort of thought, the old age must come creeping upon us and they refuse to grow old gracefully as people tend to do in the East. And this is sometimes quite tragic. In the East one they say, especially in the Buddhist countries, people very often look forward to old age. They think as if well or even they say, well how wonderful, in ten years time I'll be 60, huh? They look forward to it and they tend to think, in many parts of the East, that old age is the happiest time of life, or happiest time of life because in old age all the passions of youth have subsided, all the emotional turbulence and so on. One has gained the experience and with experience perhaps just a little wisdom and then one has fewer and fewer responsibilities, one hands over everything to the younger generation, no one doesn't have much to do, only got plenty of time for reflection, even for meditation. So people do very much look forward in the East to their old age. But even in the East one must confess it isn't always, in fact very often it isn't easy for people to accept the fact of death. Whether in East or West this is usually, for most people, a very sobering consideration. But there's no alternative, whether we like it or whether we don't like it, one day death will come and therefore one is advised to practice forbearance towards the dissolution or the idea of the dissolution one day of the physical body. And then thirdly and lastly one is advised to practice forbearance towards other people. And this is said to be the most difficult of all, much more difficult to be forbearing towards other people than towards the weather or even towards one's own body and one's own physical aches and pains, other people can be very, very difficult indeed. And this is why perhaps someone once said that hell is other people, of course heaven is other people too, but that's another story, there's no time for details, I'm sure we can supply all of us the details from our own experience. Now one can begin to see perhaps already that the Buddhist ideal of forbearance is a very lofty one, a very sublime one and in Buddhist text, in Buddhist literature, even in Buddhist life, the idea that is sometimes carried to what we in the West would regard as extremes. For instance there's the Buddha's parable of the saw, the Buddha one they call all his disciples together and he said monks, suppose you were going through the forest and suppose you were seized by robbers who were highwaymen and suppose they should take a sharp two-handed saw and saw you limb from limb, he said if in your mind there arose the least thought of ill will, he said you would not be my disciple, so this is the sort of extreme to which this ideal can, could, but should be carried. It isn't of course just a question of historical endurance, it isn't just a question of gritting your teeth and burying it but feeling angry and resentful in sight, the Buddha's teaching makes it clear that forbearance is essentially a positive mental attitude, essentially an attitude of love. And this fact is very well brought out indeed in a passage from the Majimaniqaya, the collection of middle-length sayings of the Buddha. And here the Buddha says again addressing his disciples, when men speak evil of you thus must you train yourselves, our hearts shall be unwavering, no evil word will we send forth, the compassionate of others welfare will we abide, of kindly heart without resentment. And that man who thus speaks will we suffuse with thoughts accompanied by love and so abide. And making that our stand point we will suffuse the whole world with loving thoughts, far reaching, wide spreading, boundless, free from hate, free from ill will and so abide, thus must you train yourselves. Now just one more word before passing on to other aspects of Kshanti, there's a little verse, not even a verse, a line, half a line of the dhamma-partha which goes like this, which is usually translated as patience is the greatest penance or forbearance is the greatest asceticism. And this verse or this line of the verse is highly significant. So let's look into it just for a minute. The line mentions tapa or tapas, tapas means penance, it means austerities, it means practices of self mortification. There are lots of these in ancient India for instance if you fasted for months on end or just reduced your food to a few grains of rice a day or every other day or every third day or once a week this was an asceticism. Or if you hung head downwards from a tree with your feet in the air and meditated like that that was another kind of tapas, another kind of asceticism or you stood with one hand in the air and you kept it there for months until it withered, until it shriveled. That was also tapas, that was also asceticism and then there was a famous one called the Pancha Agni tapas, the tapas, the asceticism of the five fires and in this one you kindled five fires, four at the four cardinal points and when they were blazing and bright and hot you sat in the middle with the sun directly overhead that was the fifth fire and you meditated like this and this is called the Pancha Agni tapasya, the asceticism of the five fires and all these forms of asceticism, all these kinds of penance and self mortification and self torture were very very popular in the Buddhist day, there are plenty of references to them in the parley scriptures and many people in the Buddhist day regarded these various practices of asceticism of self mortification as means to salvation, they felt they believed that the more the flesh was mortified the finer and purer and more subtle and more enlightened the spirit became, but the Buddha didn't agree with it, the Buddha didn't approve, he tried it all for six years and he had found that it didn't work, so this is what he says in this little verse, kunti palamang tapo jitikar, it's patience, it's forbearance which is the greatest tapas, the greatest asceticism, it's as though the Buddha said if you want to practice this penance, if you want to practice asceticism there's no need to seek out special opportunities, no need to sit in between five fires, just go back to ordinary everyday life, you just live in the midst of that, that'll give you opportunities enough for penance, that'll give you opportunities enough for tapasya, that'll give you opportunities enough for the practice of forbearance, in other words if you bear properly the trials and the difference of difficulties of life, other people and so on, well you couldn't have a tapasya more difficult than that, so in that sense forbearance, patience, kunti is the greatest of all penances, the greatest of all asceticisms, all right secondly we come to kunti as tolerance and we'll deal with this and with the following aspect of kunti a little more quickly, a little more briefly because we've still rather a lot of ground to cover, so first comes the illustrative story, this particular story some of you must have heard before because we had occasion to refer to it in our series on Tibetan Buddhism, those of you who attended that series or part of that series, may remember that the Mongols were converted to Buddhism in the 13th century by a great spiritual master called Phagpa, Phagpa who was of course at Tibetan was the head at that time of the Shakya past school, one of the four great schools of Tibetan Buddhism, you may recollect that there are the Geleuk past, the Nyingma past, the Kagyu past and the Shakya past, so in the 13th century this great spiritual teacher, this great spiritual master Phagpa was the head of the fourth of these schools, the Shakya past school and he was a man of great influence, great ability, great prestige and he was the guru, the spiritual teacher, the spiritual master of the great Kubula Khan, who you may remember Marco Polo visited and the emperor Kubula Khan, who of course was emperor of China as well as Khan of Mongolia, ingratitude to Phagpa for his teaching, for his instruction gave him the secular jurisdiction over the whole of Tibet, so that he became as it were the ruler of Tibet and at the same time Kubula Khan wanted to pass a law and apply it throughout his domains, compelling all Buddhists to follow the Shakya past teaching. Now, you may be thinking that Phagpa must have been very pleased and very happy that there was going to be a law compelling everyone to follow the Shakya past teaching, but no, not at all. What happened was that Phagpa dissuaded Kubula Khan from passing that law. He said to the emperor, he said, everybody should be free to follow their own conscience, to follow that form of Buddhism which they liked best and he said, this is the ancient Buddhist teaching, the ancient Buddhist tradition, so the emperor did not pass that law. So this is an example of tolerance and this we may say this tolerant attitude is the general attitude of Tibetan Buddhists. It is in fact the attitude of all Buddhists everywhere at all times. If there have ever been any exceptions, they have been very, very, very few in dict. There might be two or three or the most four of them, very minor ones, in 2500 years of Buddhist history. And we can't help feeling in what striking contrast this all stands with the history in the West of Christianity. If one goes through the history of the church, especially during the early and the Middle Ages, one can't really help being, I would say, revolting. Because there are so many instances of intolerance, of fanaticism, of persecution, these things seem to be the rule, not the exception at all. Now we only got to think, for instance, of the rather ruthless destruction of the whole pagan culture of Western Europe, the wholesale massacre of heretics, like Dakotas, the Albi-Jensis, the Waldensis. We only got to think of the sad and sorry story of the inquisition and the crusades and the witch-burnings later on. And we only got to recollect that all these things represented the official and the declared policy of the whole body of the church and everybody from the Pope downwards that was involved, even in some cases, some of those who are considered to be saints. And if we go through the history of the church and if we attain to this particular aspect of it, we can't help sometimes getting the impression of something deeply, aberrant, something deeply even pathological. Some people of course do say that all this is an aberration. They say it doesn't represent real Christianity and that may well be so. But one may certainly observe that there are strong traces, quite strong traces, of intolerance, even in the gospels themselves. In fact, we may say that Christianity seems to have been intolerant right from the very beginning and continue so in the vast majority of cases right down to the present day. The only difference being that nowadays the church has very little secular power and therefore it can't do very much harm to its opponents. But it would seem to go a little wider to generalize. It would seem that intolerance, exclusiveness, and attainency towards persecution and fanaticism, it would seem that this is characteristic of all forms of monotheism. Monotheism tends to be of this nature. Monotheistic religions do tend to be of this nature. It's not just a question of Christianity, but Judaism and Islam are also very, very intolerant. As I mentioned, I believe the other week. If you wanted to go and preach, if I wanted to go and preach Buddhism in a Muslim country, I just couldn't do that. If I attempted, I probably pay very dearly for it because Muslims do not have this tradition of tolerance, of other religions, and this would seem to be true of all the monotheistic faiths. But Buddhism we know is non-theistic. It doesn't believe in a personal God. It doesn't believe in a supreme being. It doesn't believe that religion consists in submission to such a supreme being or faith in such a supreme being. According to the Buddhist teaching, each and every individual is responsible for his or her own spiritual destiny. But you can't be responsible, you can't be expected to be responsible without freedom, and therefore in Buddhism everybody is encouraged to choose and to follow in their own way their own path. This is why we have so many different forms of Buddhism. These different forms are not sect, they are not rival bodies. They don't all claim exclusive possession of Buddhist truth. The different school, the different forms of Buddhism represent, we may say, particular aspects of the one total tradition. Now though Buddhism is tolerant, not only towards all other forms of Buddhism itself but towards all other religions, at the same time it isn't vague and it isn't only. Sometimes you find that people, individuals are tolerant but they're very vague and they're very woolly. They mix everything up, they don't distinguish, they don't divide, they don't analyze. But Buddhism isn't like this. In Buddhism there's no pseudo universalism. The teaching of Buddhism is a clear teaching, it's a precise teaching but at the same time perfect tolerance is practiced. And this sort of thing, this sort of combination is very very difficult for the Western minds to understand this combination of certainty on the one hand and tolerance on the other. We tend to think in the West that the more confidence you are in the truth of what you believe or more confidence you are that you know, the greater your right to impose your views on other people. We tend to think well I know it's wise and I know it's true, so therefore I've got by hook or by hook to bring other people into this and even to force them to accept. Why can't they see it? It's their blindness, it's their foolishness, it's their stupidity, this tends to be our attitude in the West. But in Buddhism it isn't like this. Buddhists are clear in their understanding of say the four troops, the eight volt path, conditioned co-production, Shunya Ta. These are a clear precise teaching which have been well formulated intellectually, well thought out and those who do believe them, who do accept them, believe them fully, wholeheartedly, accept them completely, that fully convinced of their truth. But at the same time perfect freedom is extended to other people to think differently. And the Buddhist doesn't become agitated, he doesn't become worried, he doesn't become upset at the idea or at the thought that elsewhere in the world even in his own environment, there are people who just don't accept what he accepts, who don't believe that the Buddha was enlightened, who don't believe that's the noble eightfold path leads one to a nirvana, who reject all that. The Buddhist recognizes this fact, he sees it quite clearly, but he's not disturbed, he doesn't feel upset, he doesn't feel threatened, but is in the West if someone doesn't share our belief, we tend to feel threatened, we tend to feel insecure, we tend to feel undermined. So this sort of fanatical desire, this fanatical insistence to make everybody believe what we believe, to propagate our faith. Now there's much more which could be said on this particular topic, but we don't have any time to pursue it this evening. So let's pass on now to the third aspect that it is a county as spiritual receptivity. And this time our illustration comes from chapter two of the sadharma pundureka. His chapter opens with the Buddha seated, surrounded by his disciples, by other hunts, by bodhisattvas and so on, hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of them. And the Buddha is just sitting there, just sitting there cross-legged in the midst of the assembly with his eyes half closed, and his hands folded on his lap, and he's just sitting there in deep meditation, and he sits there a long, long time. And as it's an assembly of our hunts and bodhisattvas they don't become impatient, they don't start fishing and coughing, they just sit there along with him quietly, calmly, also immersed in meditation. So this goes on as I've said a very long time, and apparently the Buddha was immersed on that occasion in very, very deep, very profound meditation. And eventually he came out of that meditation, and when he came out of it, he announced that the ultimate truth was something very, very difficult to understand, very difficult to pursue, that even if he taught it, even if he tried to explain it, having seen it himself, but he likely nobody would be able to understand, it was so profound, it was so vast, it so transcended all human capacity that no one would be able to fathom it, no one would be able to grasp it. But naturally his disciples entreat it in, well, just at least to try to tell them, to try to communicate this truth to them. So, eventually the Buddha agreed, he said, "All right, I shall now proclaim to you, I shall now announce to you a further, a higher teaching, a deeper teaching than anything you have heard before, something which will make your previous understanding, your previous knowledge, your previous experiencing childish, because this is so tremendous this goes so far beyond anything you have heard before." So, when he said that five thousand of the disciples, they just walked out, and they murmured among themselves, and they said, "Something further, something higher, something we haven't understood, something we haven't realized impossible." We knighted already, we reached, we realized, we're there. So they just walked out, five thousand of them. So, this is a very characteristic, a very typical sort of incident. People think that they've nothing further, nothing more to learn. It represents a very universal human tendency, an attendancy that is especially strong and especially dangerous in the spiritual life. We think that we've nothing more to learn, we think that we've taken it all in, we think that we've got it, we think that it's all under control. So, what happens? We close our minds, we shut off our minds, and we become no longer receptive. Of course, we're not all together fools, we'll of course say at least verbally, "Oh yes, I've got a lot more to learn, I know I don't know everything," and there are some things I haven't understood yet. We may say that, but we don't really mean it. In fact, we don't really know what we mean by those words. We go on thinking in the same old way, we maintain the same old attitude, we go on behaving in the same old way. And this isn't just a question, this receptivity, this openness, this isn't just a question of acquiring additional information. It doesn't mean that having learned all about the Madhyamika school, you should be open minded about further historical developments and the arising of sub-schools, it doesn't mean that. But it means that one should be prepared. Receptivity means one should be prepared for a radical change in one's whole mode of being, one's whole way of life, one's whole way of looking at things, one's whole attitude in fact. And it's this that we're not prepared for, it's this that in fact we resist and against which we set our defenses to protect ourselves. So we may say that spiritual receptivity is of the utmost importance, is of supreme importance and that without it spiritual progress cannot be maintained. So we should be open, we should be receptive, we should hold ourselves open as it were to the truth, just as the flower holds itself open to the sun. We should be ready if necessary to give up whatever we've learned so far. And this isn't easy by any means. And we must be prepared also to give up whatever we have been, whatever we have become, whatever we are so far. And this is still more difficult. So this is what we mean by spiritual receptivity, holding ourselves open to these higher spiritual influences which are as it were streaming through the universe and with which we are not usually in contact, against which we usually shut ourselves off. So much then, folk shanty in the sense of patience and forbearance, in the sense of tolerance, in the sense of spiritual receptivity. And as I indicated earlier, this represents the feminine aspect of the spiritual life. So now for Virya or Vega, the fourth parameter, the fourth perfection, the fourth transcendental virtue, and this of course represents the masculine aspect of the spiritual life. The word Virya itself presents us with no difficulties. Virya means masculine potency, driving force, energy, and vigor. And it comes from the same Indian audience root as our own English word virtue, which originally meant strength and also virility. And this is the general meaning, vigor or energy. Now in specifically Buddhist terms, in the specifically Buddhist sense, Virya, energy of Vega, is energy in pursuit of the good. This is how it's defined by shanty deva. And good here means enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings. And it's important to notice here that Virya, Vega, energy, doesn't mean just ordinary activity. If you're rushing here and there all day doing this and doing that, being very busy, doing lots of things, getting through a lot of work, you're not necessarily practicing Virya part of Mita. You're not necessarily practicing Vega or energy as one of the Buddhist virtues. That's quite a different thing. In fact, in this connection, it's very interesting to refer to Gampopa's definition of laziness. Gampopa was a great Kharkupa teacher at Tibetan at about the time of our Norman conquest in this country, and in his dual ornament of liberation, Gampopa defines laziness as being constantly busy and constantly active in subduing enemies and accumulating money. He says this is laziness. In other words, subduing enemies, you can take that as representing politics, and accumulating money, you can take that as representing business. So Gampopa is saying that to engage full time, but energetically, in other politics or business or both, is simply laziness. However apparently busy you may be. This isn't Virya. This is an energy of Vega in the Buddhistic sense. Now this part of Mita, Virya, energy, Vega, is extremely important because in a sense all the other part of Mitaas depend upon it. If you want to give, you want to have a certain amount of energy. If you want to practice the precepts again, energy is necessary. You want to meditate. Again, you need energy. Even if you want to practice patience and forbearance, you need a certain amount of at least negative energy in the form of resistance. And if you want to develop wisdom, well of course you need more energy than ever then. So this particular part of Mitaas is very, very important in as much as the practice of all the other part of Mitaas, in a sense, depends upon it. And this brings us right up against a very big problem. And the problem is this. We have let us say a spiritual ideal, an ideal of a state or an experience or a goal that we want to reach and realise. Let us say that our spiritual ideal is the bodhisattva ideal itself. And we have of this ideal a clear, a quite clear, intellectual understanding. We know all about it. We've read about it. We've heard about it. We've understood in our own minds. We could perhaps give a connected account of it if anybody asked us. So we genuinely accept it. But what happens, what usually happens, despite our clear intellectual understanding of the ideal, despite our quite genuine acceptance of it, we don't somehow manage to attain it. In fact, the months and the seasons and the years, perhaps even the decades go by, we've still got this ideal. We're still hanging on to this ideal, but only too often, we do not appear to have made any perceptible progress. We feel as though we're just where we were. I remember a very, in a way, moving example of this many years ago in India, when I went along to here a talk by J. Krishnamurti, and there's a very, very good talk. And at the end of the talk, there were, of course, questions and answers and discussions. And in the midst of the discussion, one woman got up and she said, "Two Krishnamurti with her voice sort of vibrating with emotion." This often happens in Krishnamurti's meetings, by the way, when people get up and ask questions. She said, "Sir, we've been following you and accepting this ideal and trying to put it into practice for 40 years." But she said, "We're just where we were 40 years ago. What shall we do about it?" So I forget what he said. But this is the sort of thing which can, which does happen. He wasn't speechless. No, he had quite a lot to say. But this is the sort of thing that happens. And I wouldn't like to think that any of us are in 40 years' time. We look back and we have to admit that 40 years later, 40 years from this day, we're just where we were all those years earlier. So the question arises, "Well, why is this?" We've got the ideal. We're quite clear about it. We know what we have to do. But nothing seems to happen. We even make an effort. I've sort of feeble into an effort every now and then once a week and hour or two. We make an effort. But nothing seems to happen. There's no perceptible progress. It's just as though you stood at the foot of Mount Kanchanjanga and you look up at the snow peak and it's there. And maybe 20 years later, you're still at the same spot. You think you've made a few steps forward. But as far as you can see, it's just as distant as ever it was. So what is the reason for this? Why do we not make progress? At least no perceptible progress. Certainly nothing at all spectacular or dramatic. So if one is asked this, one will say, "Well, most likely, one has no strength or no energy." This is why one hasn't been able to make any progress. One couldn't put the energy into it. In other words, there was no viria, no viga, no energy. So why should this be? Why should there be no energy? No drive for the living of the spiritual life or the realization of the ideal? Why do we say that we have no energy when we haven't enough strength? Because actually, in fact, we've got plenty of energy. Plenty of energy. There's no shortage of energy at all. In fact, far from being short of energy, we ourselves are embodiment of energy. There are concretions as it were, crystallizations as it were, of psychophysical, even of spiritual energy. The fact that we've got a body at all, a mind at all, these are all made up of energy. We ourselves are energy. So there's no lack. There's no shortage of energy for what usually happens. What usually happens is that our energy is dissipated. It's like a stream, which is broken up, which is subdivided, which is led off, led away into thousands of channels, so it loses its force. In this way, in the same way, our energy flows out, as it were, over innumerable objects. It's dissipated in numberless directions. Not only dissipated, but divided. Only part of our energy, a little of our energy, goes into the spiritual life. And the rest of the energy goes into all sorts of other activities that contradict the spiritual life, that are working against it. So we seem, sometimes, we feel sometimes, sort of, pull the part. Part of our energy is going this way to the ideal. Another part of our energy is going that way away from the ideal. So we feel as just pull the part as it were. And for this reason, we feel very often, exhausted. So the real problem of the spiritual life, we may say, in a way, the central problem of the spiritual life is that of the conservation and unification of our energies. And some of you may recollect that we went into all this some months ago in the course of a lecture on the sevenfold puja, poetry, and devotion in Buddhism. And we saw, in that lecture, we saw on that occasion, that our energies, especially our emotional energies, are not available for the spiritual life, are not available for the living of the spiritual life, because they're either just blocked within us, or they're wasted and just leak away, or because they're just too coarse, too unrefined. We find, for instance, that our energies are blocked within us for various reasons. Very often our emotional energies are blocked because we've been brought up to repress our emotions, not to show them, not to express them. In this way, emotional energies get blocked, get damned up, as it are. And some people say that the English are particularly good at this sort of thing. And then again, we are compelled to engage in mechanical routine work into which we can't put our energy. So in this way, also, energy gets blocked. We don't want to give our energy, just something in which we're not interested. And then again, energy is blocked because we have no real positive, creative outlet for our energy. And in this way, energies can deal within us, and they petrify and harden within us. Again, sometimes, emotional energies are blocked on account of emotional frustrations, emotional disappointments, fear of being hurt through the emotions, and so on. And above all, perhaps by the absence of any real communication with other people. We find that real communication has an energizing, almost an electrifying effect on people, that most people are out of communication with one another. But when they're coming to communication, it's as though two terminals have met a positive and a negative and a spark is produced. Energy is produced. And then again, we find that people's energies, the emotional energy, become blocked on account of the wrong type of conditioning, the wrong type of education, especially say things like the orthodox Christian teaching on sex, which must have resulted in the emotional stratification of probably tens of millions of people, if not hundreds of millions, in the course of history. So in this way, emotional energies are blocked. And because they're blocked, they're not available for the living of the spiritual life. And secondly, emotional energies are wasted, just allowed to leak away. And this happens in a number of different ways. But mainly, we may say, on account of indulgence in negative emotions. Negative emotions are terrible wasteers of energy. And if you indulge in negative emotions, it means that energy is leaking away, draining away from you all the time continually. And the negative emotions are, for instance, fear, which I spoke a few weeks ago, then hatred, anger, ill will, antagonism, and then again, jealousy. Perhaps the most terrifying of all the negative emotions, self-pity, self-pity, guilt, remorse, anxiety. These are all negative emotions. Some of them, of course, in the West, we tend to regard as virtues. But from a Buddhist point of view, they're all negative, the negative emotions. And if we had the word vice or sin in Buddhism, it would certainly apply to all of these. So energy is leaking. Energy is draining away from these things all the time. Just cast your recollection back over the previous day, the previous week, and just think how often you must have indulged in fear, in hatred, in jealousy, self-pity, guilt, remorse, anxiety, worry at the least. So ticking over the mind about this and about that. So this means loss of energy, waste of energy, leaking and draining away of energy. And then there are the verbal expressions of these negative emotions. In the lecture I mentioned, we went into these into in considerable detail. For instance, grumbling. Grumbling just expresses negative emotion, nothing more. And then, carping criticism, carping criticism, fault-fighting. And then what I called, coining a term, dismal jimmy-ism, looking on the gloomy side of everything, discouraging people from doing things. And then a rather poisonous expression, gossip, which is usually, of course, malicious. And then lastly, nagging, especially common in the domestic circle, unfortunately. And all of these are verbal expressions of negative emotion. And through these verbal expressions too, energy is leaking and draining away. As I said, all these were explained in detail in the lecture I mentioned. So there's no need for me to repeat all that material over again. But this is just another of those ways in which energy, especially emotional energy, becomes not available for spiritual purposes. But it goes to waste through the negative emotions and their verbal expressions. And then thirdly, emotional energy is not available for the living of the spiritual life because it's just to course. Spiritual life requires spiritual energy. We can't, for instance, meditate with our muscles. The muscles may be full of energy, may be very strong, very powerful, but for meditation, we require something finer. So ordinary human energy, even though the human emotional energy isn't available for the spiritual life, just because it's too coarse-grained as it were. We thought it can be used for, and by the spiritual life, it has to be refined. Now, there are various ways of resolving blockages of emotional energy, various ways of stopping the waste of emotional energy, and of refining the more coarse emotional energies. And if we can do this, if we can resolve the blockages, stop the waste and refine the coarse energies, then energy will be conserved, it will be unified, and it's just flowful for the stream-forth as it were. Blockages are resolved through awareness, through awareness, through introspection, through engaging in genuinely creative or at least productive work, through the stepping up of human communication, if necessary with the help of what we call the communication exercises. Then again, we find meditation helps. There quite a lot of blockages get resolved as it were automatically spontaneously in the course of meditation practice. Waste is also stopped through awareness, awareness of the fact that one is indulging in negative emotions, and waste is also stopped by cultivating the opposite emotions, say, love instead of hate, confidence instead of fear, and so on. As it regards the verbal expressions of negative emotions, these just have to be stopped by an act of will, there's nothing else that one can do about them that don't deserve any better treatment. And as I've observed, as I've observed on more than one occasion, if we can only be silent, if we can only stop talking, not just verbal expressions of negative emotions, but all verbal expressions whatsoever. If you're going to stop for a while, a few minutes, a few hours, maybe a few days, some of us have done this in the retreats, at least for a day, or say half a day. And one finds that when one cuts off, when one shuts off verbal expression, energy accumulates within. It's quite wonderful. And those who had this experience will know this, that an enormous amount of energy goes out of us because we have to talk. And probably most of you know that if you can spend a day quietly at home, all by yourself, not talking to anyone, you experience an accession of energy. So not only can we save energy by shutting off, by stopping the verbal expressions of negative emotions, but by stopping for a while, for a time, for a period, verbal expressions altogether. One feels calm, one feels peaceful, more aware, more mindful, and then you find gradually that it's as though a little spring of energy, a fresh, clear spring of energy, was bubbling up inside you, pure, and as it were virginal, not touched, not tainted, because it was just kept within you and not expressed outwardly in any form, in any manner. While the causa, emotional energies are refined in two ways, one through practices of faith and devotion, like our sevenfold puja, and also through the fine arts, through music, painting, poetry, and so on. And this incidentally is one of the reasons why we have an arts group. Some people may wonder, well, what's a Buddhist movement doing with an arts group might think the two of it incompatible, but it isn't so at all. This is just one of the ways in which the emotional energies can be refined and made more readily available for the spiritual life. So in this way, two energy is released and becomes available for the spiritual life. So we refine the energies, we stop waste and so on, and in this way energy becomes available for the living, for the practice of all the paramitas, all the perfections, which the body's up for must practice to attain, to realize Buddhahood. So there's no division of energies. The body's up for becomes the embodiment of energy, but at the same time there's no hurry, there's no fuss, there's no restlessness, or anything of that sort. There is, we may say, just smooth, uninterrupted activity for the sake, for the benefit of all sentient beings. And Shanti Deva may be quoted here, again, in this connection. Shanti Deva says the body's side is like an elephant. In Indian literature, if you are compared with an elephant, it's highly complementary, by the way. Now they say, for instance, there are beautiful woman that she walks just like an elephant. And this doesn't mean that she clums your, or bit well built, or anything like that. It means that she has a graceful, slow, swinging, stately movement. So it's a great complement if you're compared to an elephant. So Shanti Deva says, the bodhisattva is like an elephant. And in what way is he like an elephant? The elephant, I don't know whether you know this, is very playful, especially the male elephant. A very playful beast indeed. And he loves to bathe. He loves to bathe in lotus ponds, and to squirt water over himself, and trumpets gaily, and cluck up great bunches of lotus flowers, and washes them carefully. And then he eats them. And this way he passes the day very happily. So Shanti Deva says, it's just like the elephant, or the bodhisattva, it's just like the elephant. Just as the elephant, as soon as he's finished playing and sporting in one pond, clunges into another lotus pond, in the same way he says, with equal happiness, with equal delights, the bodhisattva, as soon as one work is finished, he plunges into another. Well, I hardly need to remind you, with us it isn't like that. One work is finished, we'd like to have a good rest, have a cup of tea, or something like that. But not the bodhisattva. As soon as one work is finished, he plunges straight away, joyfully, into the next. At the same time, the bodhisattva doesn't really think that he is doing anything. He doesn't think, well, I'm working on doing this, and I'm doing that. His activity, his functioning, his manifestation of energy, is selfless. It's a spontaneous activity. It just comes bubbling up, just like a fountain, just like a flower unfolding. And sometimes the bodhisattva's activity is spoken of in the Indian languages as a leela, which means it's a game. It's a sport, it's a play, a sort of game that the bodhisattva plays, just like a child plays spontaneously, manifesting energy in the same way that bodhisattva plays, manifesting the perfections, manifesting the different aspects of the path through enlightenment, and eventually playing the great game of Buddhahood and manifesting enlightenment. So there's no time to dwell upon this, but this idea of spiritual life being a sort of playfulness, or sort of bubbling up of spiritual or transcendental energy. This is very prominent in some forms of Indian thought and Indian religious life. In this country, we tend to take religion very, very seriously. We've got Sabbath faces and Sabbath gloom, and things of that sort. We think the more serious you are, well, the more religious, and the more religious, the more serious. You never laugh in church, but the bodhisattva's life isn't like that. It's a game, it's a play, it's a sport, and in the East religious life, spiritual life is very often compared to this sort of game, because in a way it's in itself, it's self-contained, it's complete in itself, it doesn't in a way look beyond, and it's spontaneous, it's free from ego-tism, it's natural, and it's enjoined. So much, then, for the viria parliamentar, very much for the perfection of vigor, which represents as we've seen the masculine aspect of the spiritual life. So now we've completed our account of both Kshanti and Viria, both patience and vigor, better to say the third and the fourth paramitas or perfections or transcendental virtues to be practiced by the bodhisattva. We've seen the masculine and the feminine aspects of the spiritual life. Our account of them hasn't been exhaustive, but I hope at least sufficient to indicate the specific nature, the specific quality of each of these paramitas, and also sufficient to make it clear why one is described as masculine and the other as feminine. Vigor is, of course, clearly the more active, the more assertive, the more creative parameter, and therefore it's said to be masculine. And patience is the more passive, more receptive, the more creacent, and therefore it is said to be feminine. And this distinction represents a very important polarity in the spiritual life. We may even say that there are two radically different approaches to the spiritual life itself. One approach stresses self-help, do it yourself, as self-exertion. The other approach stresses reliance upon dependence, upon the power outside oneself, in some cases in some systems, reliance on dependence upon divine grace. One approach, we may say, represents the attitude of getting up and doing things, oneself. The other approach represents the attitude of just sitting back and letting things happen, letting them do themselves as it were. And in India they've got two rather charming expressions for these two religious attitudes. One they say is the monkey attitude, and the other they say is the kitten attitude. Now what does this mean? They say that the baby monkey, when it's born, clings on to its mother's fur. It clings on tightly with a very tight grip. So this represents self-help, self-reliance. The mother admittedly is moving by and carrying the monkey, but the baby monkey has to hold on itself with its own strength, with its own energy. But the baby kitten is completely helpless. The kitten, as you know, has to be picked up by the scruff of its neck, by the mother, and carried everywhere. It completely helps it, can't do anything for a while. So this represents the approach of dependence on another part, reliance on divine grace, and so on. And in the Indian traditions, the first approach that of the little monkey, the monkey type approach, is associated with nyana or wisdom. The wise man is the self-reliant man, tries to find things out, understand things by himself. But the attitude of the kitten, this is associated with partly the path of devotion, which consists in a feeling of dependence upon some divine power or divine ideal, superior to oneself. No time to go into this, if all is Indian. Religion is concerned in general. But in Japanese Buddhism, we find that these two different approaches, of reliance on oneself, reliance on some divine power outside oneself, these are represented respectively by Zen Buddhism and Shin Buddhism. Zen, as is well known, represents or stresses, even, reliance on the self-power, as it's called juriki in Japanese. Whereas shin, the jodoshin, especially, represents reliance upon the other power, or tariiki, as it's called in Japanese. In other words, the power of Amitava, the power of the Buddha, the spiritual power of the Buddha, of infinite light and eternal life. And these two approaches that are to say the approach of the baby monkey and the kitten, of the intellectual and the devotee, reliance upon self-power, juriki, reliance upon other power, tariiki, these are generally held to be contradictory, generally held to be mutually exclusive. If you follow one path, you can't follow the other. Either you depend on your own efforts, or you depend upon another power to do it for you. In fact, Buddhism itself is usually held to be a religion of self-effort, of self-help, as opposed to being a religion of self-surrender. But this, we may say, is not strictly true. In the Buddhist text, in Buddhist literature, we have a number of references to the helpful spiritual inferences which emanate from the Buddha's and Bodhisattvas, if one is receptive to these, one fills them. And these are sometimes called grace-waves, which come as they were wavering down, vibrating down, from the higher spiritual regions, from Buddhas, from Bodhisattvas, and can be felt by those who, as I say, are receptive to them. This isn't like the grace of God in Christianity, because in Buddhism of course there is no God, no supreme being. These spiritual forces, these grace-waves, we may say, arise essentially within oneself, but again, not within oneself. In other words, they arise, or appear to arise, or appear to descend from heights, if you like to call it heights, or depths, if you like to call it depths, of which one is not usually aware, not usually conscious, but to which one's awareness can be extended, and which can in a sense be included within one's greatly enlarged self. Now the Bodhisattva combines both approaches, combines both approaches, and for this reason the Bodhisattva practices patience and vigor. He synthesizes the masculine and the feminine aspects of the spiritual life. In fact, we may say that both approaches are necessary. Not only in the course of our spiritual life, as in the course of our worldly life, it's necessary to hang on, if you like, for grim death. It's necessary to make an effort, it's necessary to do, it's necessary to strive, and to exert, and to struggle, and to resist, but sometimes also it's necessary to let go, to let things look after themselves, to let them even drift if you like, to let them just happen, without one's interference, without one's initiative, and there's no hard and fast rule. Sometimes you have to do, to exert, put on other occasions, if you have to just let things, I won't say slide, but let them look after themselves, think well, it isn't my response, but it isn't my duty. Let whatever is going to be done, be done. Sometimes we'll have to adopt one attitude, sometimes the other, according to circumstances, and there's no hard and fast rule. But broadly speaking, very broadly speaking, one may say it's safe to assume that a lot of self-help, a lot of self-effort, a reliance upon self-power is necessary at the beginning, and later on perhaps, after a great initial effort has been made, one can begin to rely more upon the help if you like, the power, the force, which comes apparently from somewhere, outside oneself, at least outside one's present, conscious self. But one can't start relying upon that prematurely, or thinking that one is relying upon that prematurely, otherwise one will just drift in a purely negative sense. Again, there's an Indian illustration. In India, they say, well, when you leave the shore in a little boat, a little rowing boat, you have to row yourself first with a great deal of effort, with a great deal of straining of muscle, rowing boats against the current, against the stream. But when you get out into the middle, when you've got out into the middle of the river, buy your own effort, then you can roist your sail. And then the breeze, then the wind will come along, it will fill the sail, and it will carry the boat along. In the same way, they say, a great deal of effort is necessary in the early stages of the spiritual life. But a time comes, a point comes, when you contact forces, which in a sense are beyond yourself, in another sense, part of your greater self, and these begin to bear you to carry you along. Now, there's just one more very important point before we close. The active and the passive aspects of the spiritual life have been termed masculine and feminine, now observed at the outset that the use of these terms was more or less metaphorical. At the same time, it must also be said that the use of them is not entirely metaphorical. One may say that there is in fact a real correspondence between biological and psychological masculinity and femininity on the one hand, and spiritual masculinity and femininity on the other. But one must bear in mind, one must recollect that the boat is sought for, combines both. We come therefore to the rather, or what may appear to be to some people, to be the rather curious effect or the rather curious statement that the boat is sought for is, for this reason, what we may describe as psychologically and spiritually by sexual. And this means that the boat is sought for, integrates the masculine and feminine elements at each and every level of his own psychological and spiritual experience. And this fact is reflected very clearly in Buddhist iconography. We find in some representations of the Buddha and the various bodhisattvas that it is sometimes very hard from a western point of view to distinguish whether the figure is masculine or whether it is feminine. I know that I have sometimes had the experience of showing for instance an image or a picture of Avalokiteshvara to a friend who perhaps didn't know very much about Buddhism. And I say, isn't this a beautiful figure? And they say, yes, she is lovely. And then I say, no, isn't it a female figure? It is a male figure. And they looked a little more closely and they saw, yes, it was a male figure, but it seemed to have certain feminine characteristics at the same time. And this iconographical representation reflects this sort of principle, this sort of idea of the psychological and spiritual bisexuality of the bodhisattva indeed of the spiritual person in general. Now this idea or even ideal of psychological and spiritual bisexuality is rather unfamiliar to us in the West. But it was known through the ancient Gnostics, one of the heretical sects of early Christianity, but the teaching was of course rather quickly stamped out by the church. But anyway, there is an interesting passage in a work known as the Gospel of Thomas. We know the Gospel of Matthew and the Mark and Luke and John, but there is another one, in fact there are several others. This one is called the Gospel of Thomas and it is a Gnostic work, not an orthodox Christian work at all. And it consists of 112 sayings attributed to Jesus after his resurrection. And the text was discovered in Egypt only in 1945. And there is a very interesting passage because in saying 23, Jesus is represented as saying when you make the two one and make the inside like the outside, and the outside like the inside, and the upper side like the underside, and in such a way that you make the man with the woman a single one in order that the man is not the man and the woman is not the woman when you make eyes in place of an eye and a hand in place of a hand and a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will go into the kingdom. This is not the sort of teaching that one normally encounters in church, but you can see is obviously profound significance and import. Now within the context of Buddhism, this idea or this concept or even practice of spiritual bisexuality is dealt with especially by the tantra. And Buddhahood enlightenment itself is represented in these terms. In other words, Buddhahood or enlightenment is represented as consisting in a perfect union of wisdom on the one hand and compassion on the other. And here in this union, wisdom represents the feminine aspect of the spiritual life, and compassion represents the masculine aspect both at the highest possible level, the highest possible pitch of perfection. And this sort of representation, this sort of symbolism, if you like, is often represented in tantric Buddhist art. And it's then that one encounters representations, for instance of the Buddha accompanied by what some writers describe as his female counterpart. And both figures are represented as being in the act of sexual union. But one must notice, one must observe that though there are two figures, there are not two persons. There's only one person, one enlightened person, one enlightened mind within which are united, reasoned emotion, or wisdom, and compassion. And this sort of representation, this sort of iconography, a Buddha with female counterpart, one representing wisdom, one representing compassion within the enlightened mind, represented as being in sexual union. This sort of representation in the West would be regarded as possibly obscene, perhaps even as blasphemous. And you certainly wouldn't encounter this sort of thing in a church anywhere. But in the East, especially in Tibet, this sort of tantric representation, this sort of symbolism is regarded, one may say, as extremely sacred. These representations are called Yab Yum. Yab means literally father, Yum means mother. So father-mother representations, or representations in bodying the ideal of enlightenment, of wisdom and compassion united under the form of sexual symbolism. But here of course one has nothing to do with sexuality in the ordinary sense. It is one may say a representation of the highest consummation of masculinity and femininity, wisdom and compassion in the spiritual life. We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at Free Buddhist audio dot com forward slash community. And thank you. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]
