Thank you very much to the Valsyn for that very generous introduction, unnerving introduction. So this year on these men's events, as we've got into the habit of calling them, we came up with this, I remember when we first had them back in the, when was it, sort of mid-70s started, not long after we got Padmalaoka, sort of '76, '77, something like that, '78. And yeah, we've all just got into the habit of calling them men's events. They're a kind of like a weekend retreat, but anything could happen on these events. That's why we kind of had that rather broad title. And this year, our men's events, the theme of our men's events, are devoted to the doors of perception. They're devoted to the senses. And this weekend is devoted, of course, to the sense of hearing and to sound. In July, in the summertime, we have an event devoted to the sense of sight. It's called Look Deeper. So of course, that would be about looking and seeing the sense of sight. And it's very beautiful here in the summer. It's very abundant, there's lots of sights here in the summer. And in October, we're having an immense event on the theme called Touching Life. So that's all about touch and movement about the body. Now some people might be surprised that Buddhists are conducting retreats in the realm of the senses or on the realm of the senses. Maybe they've got ideas from their Buddhist reading, maybe they've imported into their Buddhism, maybe previous religious conditioning, something like that. Aren't the senses dangerous? Shouldn't you get away from the senses? Aren't the senses a snare, an entrapment? Isn't it likely if you're in the realm of the senses that craving and aversion will arise? Maybe a beautiful person, whether a man or a woman, whatever it may be, and your court, your snared, or you see a cake, a lovely creme cake, and your court, you're ensnared by that creme cake, creme cake. So aren't the senses dangerous? Certainly Buddhist tradition speaks strongly about guarding the doors of the senses. They're called doors in Buddhist tradition. You need to take care of what you let in through those doors, what you let into the doors, through the doors, into the mind, into the heart. If you're serious, for example, about meditation, and you want to have a good meditation practice, well, frankly, it's not a good idea to meditate after you've just been to a movie, you know, have just been to kill Bill or something like that. Well it's not a good idea. You know, don't expect to get very far with your metabarthana or your mindfulness of breathing. You're just going to get the images repeating and repeating in your mind. It's not a good idea to try and meditate after a night of intensive clubbing, as I think it's called, which doesn't mean beating people over their head going to these places called nightclubs and things like that. You know, you're not going to get very far, I mean you're probably just full of sleep. And this is why retreats are so important on retreats, you get away. You get away from the usual stuff that comes through the doors of the senses. You reduce your input and that helps calm the mind, quiet the mind, clarify the mind. There's more space in mind. So having said this, the senses are, in fact, and of course, neutral. In the senses themselves, there's no greed or hate or aversion or confusion. There's nothing like that in them. Buddhism doesn't have the view that the sort of human condition, human nature, is sort of fallen or something like that. It's quite neutral. And you can't suppress or repress the senses, and if you try to do that, that is rather dangerous. The senses are part and parcel of our precious human existence. And we need to appreciate our senses fully. We need to enjoy the sheer wonder of seeing and hearing and smelling and tasting and touching and perceiving. It's a very wonderful thing to be able to sense and to know that we're sensing. And we know very well if we become deficient in a sense due to illness or something like that, how we really appreciate its return, its revival, a few months back after a cold, one of my ears got blocked. And you know, everything was muffled and it was such a relief when that stopped, I was kind of cut off, I felt deficient in some way. So when we simplify, when we go away on retreat, we have the opportunity to get back to a purer, simpler sense experience. We can really appreciate, for example, the sound of birdsong and the touch of wind and rain on the face. And we're so busy, especially in the cities, that our senses just utterly overwhelmed. And there's a kind of deadening effect upon us so that we lose all wonder for kind of basic human experience. So we need, I think, first of all, to get back to the wonder of ordinary sense experience writing this. I was reminded of a novel, a short novel. I read many, many years ago, Andre Jied's limor, at least, apologies, L.A.V.A. for the accent, translated into English as the immoralist, but I'm not sure if a French quiet has that connotation. But the story that Jied tells is a very buttoned up Christian, I think a Christian minister actually, and he becomes ill and, nonetheless, he goes to North Africa. And he describes the process of getting better. And then his senses beginning to wake up for the first time, seemingly, in his life. And I remember vividly how Jied describes his hero touching the bark of a tree and just having this incredibly sensual experience that he'd lost, seeing the beauty of the people around him, the colour of their skin, their bright clothes, feeling the sun on his body. His morality had kind of wrapped him up, deadened him. And in these days, it's actually because of it's not so much to do with morality, but it's probably more to do with the kind of onslaught of sense experience that actually deadens us. So we need to wake up again and renew our sense experience positively. The Buddha himself was quite clear that sense experience can, in fact, be used on the path. There's a very, very famous teaching, very early Buddhist teaching, to somebody named Bahia. Bahia was a man who urgently wanted to hear a pith, an essential teaching, a liberating teaching from the Buddha. He was very concerned that he could easily die, that the Buddha could easily die, and he wanted to hear the teaching. So the Buddha said, after Bahia is in treaty, he said, "Bahia, this is how you should train yourself in the scene, only the scene in the herd, only the herd, in the sensed, only the sensed, in the perceived, only the perceived. When you have achieved this, you will not be with that. When you are not with that, you will not be in that. When you are not in that, then Bahia, you will be neither here nor there, nor in between the two. Just this is liberation from suffering." Extraordinarily pithy and direct teaching, and one of those teachings that you really need to go away and ponder to try and see what the Buddha is pointing to, Bahia saw immediately. He was enlightened there and then on the spot, and what this teaching of the Buddha is evoking, of course, is the practice of what you might call pure sensing. You're just seeing purely, hearing purely, all the other senses, the sense of smell, the sense of taste, touch, the sense of perceiving, even thinking, even imagining. You're bringing a complete purity to that, you see, you hear, without what they call mental proliferation of any kind. This is what's known as Prabhancha, technically, which means literally proliferation, mental proliferation, emotional proliferation. What we usually do when we see, when we hear, we kind of work it all up, our mind goes off and works it all up, and in particular, what we work the pure sense experience into is a self and another, directly opposed to one another, into grasp and grasp. And out of this, you get attachment, aversion, and so on. So we need to move in our Buddhist practice towards what you might call pure experiencing, well, actually, you can't really say that because experience implies a self and another, and the Buddha says, actually, where you get to is no here, no there. But yes, you need to practice this pure sensing. So we need to harness our sense experience, use it on the path, use it as a path, use the senses to attain enlightenment. We're not going to find enlightenment anywhere else, but in this human body, in these senses. So on these men's events, we're exploring this huge field over this throughout the year. It's a huge field. The doors of perception, the realm of the senses, because it's all of life after all. And we can only hope to open up directions, we can only hope to provoke, to stimulate. So this weekend, we're in the realm of hearing, we're in the realm of listening, we're in the realm of sound. So where to begin? How do we begin? How do we wind into this? Well, I'm going to start with personal experience, not with theory, but with my personal experience. Just as the few days leading up to this weekend, I started to think, I'll crack you, the sound of reality. Where do you begin? Well, I started to realise that it was through sound, through hearing, through listening, that I entered the Dharma, that I entered the Buddhist path. Sound played a huge part in my own journey and continues to do so. So before I go any further, I want to mark a few key experiences. Real turning points for me. So the first experience occurred some time between the ages of 14 and 16, at difficult time. And it's to do with music. I got into music like most people very early on, pop music initially. And then kind of started to branch out as I got older and there were weekly discoveries in the record shops of Brighton, near where I was living, secondhand stores and places like that, of all sorts of weird and wonderful things, you know, that thrill of discovering a new and weird rock band that I was interested in. But that got me that exploration to jazz, mid to late '60s American jazz. Miles Davis, electronic period, for those of you who are into this sort of thing. John Colman's free form improvisation, free jazz, and the like, and especially lots of others. I hope this isn't completely obscure to people here. But especially the music of John Coltrane. That was a big and important discovery for me. John Coltrane was a tenor and soprano sax player who really, really tried to push the boundaries in his playing and late Coltrane, which a lot of people find difficult and they don't care for, was extremely important to me. And I was trying to think of the track that really had a big effect on me. There were so many. There was the great album 'A Love Supreme' which of course describes in the music his own sort of religious conversion. And actually the track that I particularly remember that had a kind of visceral effect on me was from a double album, sorry to do this, the Anorac stuff here, but I'm going to do it, kind of homage going on here, was 'Live in Seattle', a double album with the classic Coltrane quartet with another tenor player, Pharaoh Sanders, playing weird noises. And he plays a standard called 'Out of This World', a jazz standard. And you know the piano and bass are not that well recorded in the drums and they're plonking along and then suddenly this high register tenor saxophone, Coltrane saxophone just comes in with the most extraordinarily soulful playing. And remember when I first really heard that, it might have been the second or third playing, but when I really heard it, you know, in the lounge, you know, at my parents' place where I was living, it went straight to the heart, straight to the soul actually, I think it went to the nervous system, straight off, because I felt a physical shock, a physical change, a positive shock, I kind of went into another state, a rapturous, blissful, ecstatic state, for a while I was outside of myself. It was a real cry of love, a kind of soul cry, just going straight to my soul. And remember after that experience, I kind of did these John Coltrane meditations, it sounded weird, I'd stick a disc on and I'd sit cross-legged on the floor trying to really, you know, get that experience again, actually it got more and more frustrating, because I was trying to kind of have this experience and of course you can't do that. And that experience was part of a number of experiences around that time that really got me searching, got me looking, got me inquiring, wasn't the only thing that was going on, but that was hugely significant, listening to that music, touching my soul. A few years later, I'm using the soul very, the term soul very poetically here, of course we know that, you know, I'm not using Buddhist technical language, but that's how I felt about it. Anyway, a few years later, because of experiences like this, I went to my first Buddhist class. And my first Buddhist class was a full-length metabarbana, full-dress, 50-minute metabarbana with instruction, thankfully, and then a full-dress, 7-fold puja, 7 stages, all the trimmings, so to speak, and with the mantras at the end of the puja. And when I chanted those mantras after the person, the order member, leading it, I felt enormous relief and joy, and I felt a sense of recognition and homecoming. This was a language that I knew. This was my language. This was my sound. This was my world. I'd already encountered the mantra in many Padmehoon, the famous Mantra of Avalokiteshra, but there were these other mantras that were so mysterious and wonderful, but I'd found as it were my language, my world, and my response to that was to plunge in as deeply as I could into the dharma. Later on, a few years later, I was ordained into the Western Buddhist order by Sangharachta, and I, he conducted, of course, my private ordination. There are two aspects of the ordination, a private ordination where you're just with your preceptor and then the public ordination in front of other people where you're received into the order. So in the private ordination, it was just me and Sangharachta. And as part of the ordination ceremony, he gave me a mantra in every ordination ceremony. A mantra is given, which will be, represents your personal meditation practice, the meditation practice that you will be doing that's kind of personal, individual to you. And he entoned each syllable of the mantra he gave me deeply and carefully out of great stillness and silence, and I repeated each syllable after him. And the vibrations, if you like, of these mantra syllables went very deep indeed. They went right in. And I found after the ceremony, the mantra, just flowing along all of its own for days, for weeks afterwards through the day and through the night. It was in me, it was all around me, like a droning, a deep rhythmic sound, which was deeply satisfying, deeply mysterious, with a profound meaning, not a rational meaning, of course, but a much deeper meaning, which was leading me on, drawing me on, deeper into the heart of things. It was like being in contact with a rich and peaceful energy, like a great reservoir of energy, a seemingly inexhaustible energy. So there were days, even weeks of this. And it's interesting that even now that if the mantra, my mantra begins to sound of itself silently, it's a kind of sign, it's always an indicator that I'm beginning to go deeper in my meditation, in my experience, it's a nimeter, it's a sound sign that something is opening up. So sound is extraordinarily important in my own path, my own journey. And those experiences of course were direct, those sounds I heard and participated in went straight to the heart, perhaps they went in even deeper than the heart, perhaps they went into the inner, to the inner most, maybe, who knows. But sound, hearing, listening has been important to me, crucial to me, in other ways. I heard the dharma, the sound of the dharma in words, in speech, especially the words of the speech of Sankarachta, I listened to those real to real tape lectures that Chandradhasa referred to. I listened to his live lectures that he was, some of which he was doing in those days. I went on seminars with him. In those days there were very few dharma books, it's not like it is now, there are very few dharma books. It was all about listening and hearing. So I heard words expressing concepts, ideas, images, poetry, woven together, brilliantly woven together, clearly woven together, articulating a clear path, clear practices, rousing my spiritual energies and opening up directions, clarifying where I needed to go, what I needed to do. So I heard all this. Now I'm sure my own journey into the dharma isn't unique, I'm sure you can all resonate with my experience in some way or another. It is, in fact, I think worth reflecting on what sense medium has the dharma work through, work through on you, in particular. And I'm sure you'll find that the sense, the hearing sense, has been very important in that journey. The sound of the dharma, even the sound of reality, has been important to you. Now it's interesting to note that the early disciples of the Buddha were known as Shravakas. Shravakas, Shravaka means hearer, in the word is 'savaka', in Pali by the way, Shravaka means hearer, one who hears, one who hears the dharma from the Buddha. And in the early days of Buddhism, of course, that was the only way to learn the dharma. There were no books in the time of the Buddha, and for many centuries afterwards, it was an oral tradition. You heard, you listened, you had to, there was no other way for it to go in. An alerted man, a wise man, was known in the early Buddhist days as Bahushrata, which means one who has heard much. Not one who's read a lot, but one who has heard much. And one who's retained what he's heard. One who's internalised what he's heard, made it his own, made it a part of him. I think there's something very, very important here, and it seems to be a tradition that's kind of dying out, you know, with the increase of kind of technology and, you know, different approaches to life that have developed, but the whole notion of learning by heart seems to be dying out. Learning by heart, the, you know, great poems, great philosophy, great religious spiritual insight, learning those words by heart, learning the words of great teachers by heart. If you learn them by heart, they start to become your words, your sound, that can become a constant reference point. And I think that they give you a kind of depth, a kind of ballast, which you can sort of turn to in the storms and stress of life. So I think learning by heart, making the words you hear from the great masters, your words, your sound, is extraordinarily important. And today Buddhists continue to be Shravakas. We really do have a Shravakasanga, a community of hearers. We learn the Dharma through hearing, through listening, through the Dharma talk, through the study group, through talking the Dharma, listening to the Dharma with one another. And it's a live thing, it's a live thing, it's a total experience, you've got the words, you've got the being, you've got the total environment. And I think it's really important that we don't lose this. In fact, I think it needs to be strengthened more and more and more. Because yes, I think these sort of oral traditions as it were, this way of learning is kind of under threat. In India still, the Dharma talk, the Dharma discourse, the Dharma prevention as they call it, is still hugely popular because the oral tradition is still alive, even though it's under incredible threat from the onslaught of modern technology and entertainment systems. But in India, when I've given lectures out there and I've given many lectures in India, if I don't talk for at least two hours, people feel cheated, people feel, "Oh, you talk for an hour and a half and you're almost on your knees," by the end of it, and they say, "Oh, it's a bit short, it's a bit short, a bit short, a bit short." You know, people like to listen, like to hear, it's a whole, you know, it's a whole experience, a whole event. So this of course brings up this whole area of teaching and learning through words, through sound, the live, existential interaction, call and response, call and response, there's a very, very beautiful notion, there's a lot in call and response, maybe come back to that a bit later. So we are Shravakas, here is listeners. And of course, we can look at that in another way, not simply in terms of hearing the words of the Dharma, important though that is. A Buddhist listens and hears in other ways. What happens when we hear, when we listen, if we just stop and listen? Well, I don't know about you, but when I stop and listen properly, well, I stop. I stop, there's a kind of break in the flow of me when I stop and hear and listen. And I think because of this, hearing, listening, is often used as a metaphor for receptivity. You know, you know it in an argument with somebody, you know, you're trying to get something through yourself. Listen. And you don't just mean here with your ears, here with your heart, listen. So hearing, listening, often used as a metaphor for receptivity. Well, of course, this doesn't mean passivity, but an alert, open state, where you're able to take in to receive, to hear, and because you can really hear, you can then therefore respond fully, completely, appropriately, truly to what is going on. So I want to look at the Buddhist life, the Buddhist path in terms of being a Shravaka, a hearer, a listener. This is a big topic and I can only just open up a few areas. So I want to talk about the Shravaka in three ways, three aspects. The aspirational hearer, the wisdom hearer, and the compassionate hearer. So first of all, the aspirational hearer. To wind into this aspect, I want to refer to an ancient pre-Christian, pagan, Western spiritual tradition, the tradition known as neoplatonism, which is actually been hugely influential on the development of Western religion. And Sankarachta feels, believes that neoplatonism is in fact the dominant religion of the West. If you go down deeply, you'll find neoplatonism and it has important affinities with Buddhism. He did say, many years ago, that he'd love to be able to write a paper on Buddhism and neoplatonism, because it was very important that these traditions were in dialogue. Now there was a late neoplatonist named Proclus, and his kind of neoplatonism certainly had resonances with tantric Buddhism. But Proclus speaks in a very beautiful passage on the prayer of the sunflower and the prayer of the lotus. I can't read you the passage that would take too long. But in this passage, he describes the sunflower's petals opening to the sun and following the sun's movement across the sky. And the lotus unfolding to the sun, sometimes even to the moon. You get some lotuses in the east that open to moonlight. And Proclus says that if you really listened, if you listen very closely to that sunflower unfolding and moving and that lotus flower unfolding, you would hear something. You'd hear the movement of the air as these flowers moved and unfolded. You'd hear that movement, that rustling, that oh-so-subtle sound, and you would realise this, Proclus, that what that sound was was, in fact, nothing other than a prayer. So he speaks of the prayer of the sunflower, the prayer of the lotus. By prayer he doesn't, for sure, mean petitionary prayer and asking for something or anything like that. But he says it's the sound of a kind of praise, an aspiration, a longing for complete fulfillment. It's the prayer of that flower to become, if you like, the ultimate flower, the king of flowers. So this sounds perhaps rather strange, but for me it's highly evocative, highly resonant. But because it describes beautifully the awakening and the continuation of our deepest spiritual aspiration. If the sunflower and the lotus praise aspires through opening its petals, then what of human beings of us, what is our prayer, our wishing, and how is that expressed? And in another way, what is our sound, our music, our song of aspiration? I told you earlier about my experience of sound, how sound affected me so strongly, and how it started me off on my Buddhist journey, listening to John Coltrane's horn. It didn't just give me a thrill. It called out to me, because of course in Coltrane's playing, he himself expresses that deep longing and aspiration. You can really feel it sometimes, something really trying to body forth. Well, that called out to me, it called up something in me, a longing to follow and create a different life, not the life that seemed to be designed for me. It called I responded. What stirred in me was nothing other than a song of longing in myself, from myself, a song of searching and of aspiration. So I was called by sound, and there was a response of sound from deep inside of me. And the Dharma reality is actually calling out all the time. So we need to listen for it, and we also need to listen to our response, listen to our sound, listen to the expression, the sound of our deepest spiritual nature, listen to the deep prayer, the deep aspiration, the deep longing inside of us. And when we hear it, when we listen to that sound, we then need to live from that sound, live from that aspiration and give it full expression. We need to kind of sing it back, if you like, in Pooja, in those devotional verses, in the mantra chanting, of course, we're actually giving expression, vocal expression to that. It's you, your deepest nature, praising, invoking the full expression of that nature, just like the sunflower and the lotus. Speaking like this, it's not surprising that another highly significant sound experience of mine in recent years has been the discovery of koali, the Sufi devotional music of the Indian subcontinent from Pakistan and India, where you have in koal's, koali, settings of beautiful Sufi poetry, either in Persian or Hindwee, which is kind of early, form of Hindi or Punjabi, and you have the great koali singers, the really great ones. They express so much longing in these wonderful verses. I don't know if you've any of you heard some of Nusrat Fatih Ali Khan's singing is sometimes he just cries, a great cry of longing. He's kind of improvising on these words of poetry. But then there's just this deep cry, extraordinary. And a few years ago, I had the great fortune to go to the shrine, the Sufi shrine of the great saint Nizamuddin, Sheikh Nizamuddin in Delhi, where you have the origins of koali. And there every day, you have musicians, the koali musicians, coming to sing to the shrine, and they sing these beautiful verses of somebody called Amia Kushral, who is supposed to be the father of koali. And I managed to get them to play for a consideration, because you always have to make a dana to get them to play. They sang "Chashimi Musti Adjabi", "Chashimi Musti Adjabi", which means a wondrous, beguiling eyes. And they just used to sing this phrase over and over again, "Chasimi Musti Adjabi". And you've got the sound of the drum and the harmony and the clapping of hands going on. And it makes you shake inside. And I didn't, regardless, feel this or experience this as a kind of praise of a god or anything like that, but felt it as the expression of the deepest aspiration that we all have, that we all feel. These things that I've mentioned, the sort of sounds that I've mentioned that has sparked me off, of course, are my sounds as it were. And it might be worth looking into yourself to ask yourself, "Well, what are your sounds? What are the sounds that have really sparked off what is deepest in you? And how are you going to say and give voice and sing, literally, metaphorically, that deepest nature?" We can also say that this is using the idea of singing metaphorically. We need to make our whole life a song of spiritual aspiration, a life where you place your spiritual values right at the centre of your life. I've realised in recent years that for me, being a Buddhist isn't in fact to do with changing myself. It isn't to do with doing something because I'm in a state of suffering, although I do need to change, and I do suffer. But I realised recently that being a Buddhist means for me what Buddhism means to me, what the Buddhist life means to me, is that it's an expression. It's the expression of what is deepest within me. That's why I meditate. I don't meditate to change. I don't meditate to make myself a better person. I meditate to give expression to what is deepest within me. If you like, I practice to sing. All my practice is a kind of singing, an expression, of my deepest nature. So in meditation, you're expressing that deepest nature, in ethical observance, you're expressing that deepest meditation, a deepest nature, thank you, in study and reflection, in devotional practice, spiritual friendship, in benefiting others. And in other things too, music, art, poetry, you're singing a song of a life dedicated to spiritual values. This is the meaning, by the way, of going for refuge to the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. And the more you sing, there'll be more of a response from outside of you, you'll start to hear more. The more you hear, the more you sing, and so it goes on. And the effect of this over time is the creation of a heightened consciousness, a heightened awareness and sensibility. Consciousness, you'll notice, becomes stilled and cleared and quiet and alert and loving. And then you can begin to really hear, really listen, really take in. I'm sure you've noticed this, for example, at the end of Puja's, maybe at the end of a day retreat, or a really good class, when you do those shantis at the end of the Puja, those three shantis, which means, that shanty means, spiritual piece, profound piece, then you can sort of really listen, really hear. So this brings us to the wisdom hearer. There's a beautiful story of the great Japanese Zen master, Harquin. And Harquin describes, in one of his autobiographical writings, how he was on retreat in an old abandoned temple in the mountains, and one night he was sitting late and long into the night with the snow falling all around, falling on pine and bush, falling on the roofs of the temple, flake after flake in the deep, still night. Suddenly, as he sat, there was an awakening, a profound breakthrough into an entirely new level of realisation. And out of the depths of this awakening, he wrote the following awakening verse. This is one of Harquin's most profound moments. If only I could share it, the soft sound of snow falling late at night from the trees at this old temple. So you can sense, even in translation, the profoundly receptive state Harquin was sitting in. He hears, really hears, hears the way things are, the utter purity, tranciency, ungraspability. Harquin's verse gives us, I think, a way into how hearing can lead to wisdom, insight, into the true nature of things. When you meditate, after you've developed calm, concentration, positive emotion, listen. At the end of your morning practice or the afternoon practice, do some listening. Listen to the sounds around you. Listen to the people shuffling in the trine room. Just hear it. Listen to that car going down the road, hear the bird song, hear the bird making its nest outside the door in that scrabbley way, hear the heating going on and off. And notice how utterly impermanent the sound is. It arises and passes. It's utterly insubstantial. You can never grasp it. You can never hold it. It arises and passes. Notice that every sound sings in permanence, in substantiality, which is the nature of everything. You will never find the essence of that sound. Listen, without bringing anything to it, without bringing craving or a version. If it's a nice sound, a pleasant tune you might hear, or something like that, you can listen and get sort of caught up and start planning a whole thing about how you're going to go down to the CD store and get that tune or something like that, and then you get lost in mental confusions. You're taken away from the moment, from your purpose. If it's a nasty sound, there's very likely to be a version, an anger. You hear the car belting up the lane here, the cars, damn cars, petrol, oil, the Iraq war, George Bush, Tony Blair, and you're lost, you're confused. But of course it's just a sound. Just be with that sound. There's nothing actually behind that sound. It just arises, it passes. In fact, as it gets mysterious, the sounds you hear don't even arise. Bullish tradition says that everything is, in fact, birthless, unborn. Sound, hearing, is actually memory. By the time the sound reaches you, it's gone, it's passed. It's previous, and if it's passed and previous, it doesn't exist. The past has no place, you won't find it, it's gone. There's no arising, it's already gone. And this reflection leads to liberation. If you can really notice this, dwell in this, it leads to freedom from all imprisoning conditioning. You experience the joy, the bliss of liberation. It reminds me of a story from the 17th century Chan master, Han Shan, who's different from the cold mountain bow, by the way, quite a bit later. Han Shan was a great meditator, scholar, teacher of the Dharma, organizer of the Dharma. He brought about a revival in Chinese Buddhism in his time, but he used to do these long solitary retreats, and one day he went off for a retreat in a mountain fastness in the snowy peaks, everything frozen, doing days, weeks of meditation, just sitting all day long in meditation, completely alone. And then everything started to thaw. So the mountain rivers just turned into these roaring, raging torrents, and tea says this was very disturbing. So was this the end of his solitary retreat? You know, if we went on to a solitary retreat, you know, and somebody started up, you know, repairing a motorbike next to us or something like this, we'd probably get all upset and go home. Not for Han Shan. He remembered a teaching in the midst of all this roaring sound. He remembered a teaching from a famous Buddhist sutra, hugely influential in China, the Shirangama sutra. And in this sutra, it said, "Whoever hears the sound of water, without using the discriminating mind for 30 years, will achieve the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshras, all-pervading wisdom; whoever hears the sound of water, without using the discriminating mind for 30 years, will achieve the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshras, all-pervading wisdom." So Han Shan went to the roaring torrents. He went to where it was noisiest. He went and sat on a wooden bridge every day above this roaring torrent, and he sat listening. But without using his discriminating mind, he went, if you like, right into the sound. He didn't let his mind proliferate, not setting up all sorts of craving and aversion, not setting up self and other, grasp and grasp, not setting up past or present or future, just listening to the raging waters as they were in themselves. And he noticed that the sound of the roaring water would get loud when thoughts surged in his mind, but faded and dissolved into silence when there were no thoughts in the discriminating mind. When he was in the sound, there was silence. One day, suddenly, as he sat, he felt himself vanish into emptiness and into all-pervading silence, and later he says, "There was only a great brightness, round and full and clear and still, like a huge round mirror reflecting the whole scene, mountains and rivers, the earth, just as they are." And he composed his own verse of awakening, "When in a flash the mad mind haughts, the senses and all outer objects are perceived as they are, as the summer-salting body hits and shatters space, the rise and fall of things are viewed without concern." So this is the wisdom that can come from hearing. You begin to view the rise and fall of things without concern. This isn't indifference, but this is a state of freedom and equanimity. You're at ease and still, not just in your meditation, but in relation to everyday life, as well, the sound of harsh and foolish words addressed to you, for example, just pass you by. They rise and pass away, they're just sounds, just vibrations. So this brings us to the third aspect of the hearer, the compassionate hearer. As you begin to deepen your practice, as you deepen your practice, you begin to hear the sound not just of things, but the sound of living beings, of animals, of human beings. I don't mean by this simply the words that they speak, although of course you do hear those words, and you pay attention to those words, to the meaning of those words, and to the sound and nuance of those words. But what I'm really referring to is that you hear the deep sound in all beings. We heard just now that according to the Shuranga Masutra, one who listens to the sound of water without using his discriminating mind for thirty years attains Avalokiteshvara's all-pervading wisdom. Avalokiteshvara is, of course, the bodhisattva of great compassion. He's the image, the symbol, the embodiment of enlightened compassion, that all Buddhists aspire to embody in themselves. An Avalokiteshvara is known as the "regarder of the cries of the world" or the "regarder of the sounds of the world." Compassion listens to, hears, takes in the cries of the world, hears the pain in the world, the suffering in the world, all kinds of pain, including, and perhaps especially, the pain of those unable to express their deepest human nature and potential. He hears Avalokiteshvara the deepest of pains. Avalokiteshvara hears all this compassion, hears all this. One of the most frequently used terms for compassion in Buddhist literature is Anukampa, which literally means to tremble with or even to vibrate with. Having the deep sound of the world's sorrows, you vibrate with those sorrows and you respond with love, friendliness, kindness, and compassion. This is something that you can also do in meditation. After many years of practice, of mindfulness, of breathing, of metabhavna, of puja, of living the dharma, you can begin to open up to the pain and frustration around you. You can begin to hear it, begin to hear that deep potential in others that's kind of held down, and which causes therefore immense pain. And you respond, you sing back, you call back, you respond exactly, appropriately, you use words, gesture, sound, song, even. Do yourself sing the dharma for others in whatever form gets to them, works for them, moves them. Avalokiteshvara is not actually one person. As it were, Avalokiteshvara is in fact the embodiment of what we call the bodhicitta, the awakened heart of compassion. The bodhicitta is more like a sort of stream of energy, a stream of wisdom and compassion manifesting in the world for the benefit of all. And this bodhicitta, this enlightened aspiration to wisdom and compassion, this manifestation of wisdom and compassion, embodies actually all the three aspects that we've looked at. Spiritual aspiration, wisdom and compassion. And in our practice, after a while, we begin to feel that we're all part of this bodhicitta. We're all part of this activity of aspiration, wisdom and compassion. All of us are playing our part in listening to, hearing the sound of the world's sorrows, and we're all playing our part in responding to that sound, making our whole life a song of response to that sound, a song of healing, of love, of joy, of beauty, of truth for everyone that we meet. This is what we're evoking when we make the sound of Avalokiteshvara's great mantra, om manipadmihung. Actually it's the sound we're making when we make the sound of any mantra. But in the sound of om manipadmihung, in the sound of this great mantra, there is the sound of our deepest spiritual aspiration, and longing, the jewel in the lotus. In this mantra, there is the sound of great wisdom that comes through hearing, the primordial sound of the way things are. And in this great mantra, there is the sound of great compassion, the sound of the sufferings of all beings, and the sound of the loving response to that suffering. It's all embodied in that great mantra, om manipadmihung. And the shiranga massutras describes what this sound is like, very beautifully, and I'll close with this quotation. How sweetly mysterious is the transcendental sound of Avalokiteshvara. It is the primordial sound of the cosmos. It is the subdued murmur of the sea tide, setting inwards. Its mysterious sound brings liberation and peace to all beings, who in their distress are calling for aid. It brings strength to those who are truly seeking Nirvana's peace. [APPLAUSE] (applause)
