foreign tears those of us like our spirituality with a Twist so we are in the midst of this series on the Buddhist concept of the three kayas and we're ultimately going to get to the point where we'll talk about kind of The Dalai Lama's taking this but we wanted to go through and kind of give do justice to the whole the whole idea and I had like a little self-reflection as I was sort of prepping on my side of the notes for this week on this Daniel so I have this feeling like working on these podcasts and really trying to explain these really complicated ideas as best you can these very very deep ideas it pushes you obviously to really think about what they truly mean what they really mean that's a whole bunch of really is in a bunch of sentences but it's really like real and uh this has been like I would say a blessing of doing this for me because it's kind of put me in the situation of trying to explain this stuff and think about how to present it and uh yeah I think when you have to try to articulate things in this way to try to make them real for people it's uh it does something to you and what I started to realize about this and I'm really curious about your thoughts as I started to realize that you know different Traditions or systems of thoughts they all have their own Patriot Concepts so this is kind of like a universal uh Buddhist concept right and probably every Buddhist like approach School philosophy whatever will have to like address this somehow right so I'll have to talk about this some way or another it's just really fundamental oh I can see the pooch in the background I'm getting like a view of his backside uh uh and so you start to you know you have this realization and then it's not too surprising then that like these basic fundamental things will mean different things to different people right you know and I think that's when we started the whole series why I wanted to begin talking about this whole idea of high and low uh christologies talking about Jesus it's like a couple episodes back at this point yeah but I wanted to kind of show like there are like really different ways that people think about what that name means when you say it people think it like means entirely different things and that's you know kind of like a a place to start in this for me and a place to where to start thinking about this and the more that sinks in kind of the more uh I don't know the more that affects me in doing this I realize we're trying to present a whole bunch of different ideas doing them hopefully do justice respect and diligence right and you start to realize yeah there's there's other ways of looking at this and um you know uh you start to you start to want to present those in Fair ways and the depth of that idea that everyone sees the same ideas through different prisms really hits you yes so yeah I did but not in my notes and antidote about my anecdotes about my son last night because we're talking about this and he said you know he's 10 years old and he basically said you know that people think we were talking about Christianity I might have started the conversation really by just saying you mean your 10 year old son didn't start a philosophical conversation about Christianity you never know what's going to come out of that dude's mouth dude all kinds of things that you're like why is he talking about this throughout the other day and he wanted to like I'm watching this Jeffrey Dahmer thing on Netflix if you watch this at all um my partner watched it and uh uh yeah I'm good yeah it's well done you know sure I guess it depends on whether or not you're into the to the genre it's not graphic exactly there's not a lot of violence in it right no they're tense scenes sure where you're stuck with this thing is this person gonna like you know Escape or not escape from this you know mentally ill lunatic person right um it's a little bit more like uh almost like a Tarantino like there's long long scenes of dialogue that are incredibly tense you know like some Samuel L Jackson scene from Pulp Fiction or something what's gonna happen with it it's building and building and building you know and so I'm gonna get shot at the end or whatever right um or in this case bludgeon strangled and eaten I suppose but uh um they don't show a ton of violence so you know that's a turn off for people I get it but it's not like that but it's very intense right anyways what that I'm talking about this because my son knew about Jeffrey Dahmer and I had no idea how he knew this so he's oh yeah Jeffrey Dahmer I know all about it I was like what and he was like yeah yeah he started talking about all this stuff and I was like why do we even know this so maybe you don't know what kids are gonna know that's okay fair yeah but he was talking about like uh he eventually started talking about Jesus and he said yeah the people believe that 2 000 years ago some guy that they never heard of and they don't know who exists dominates the whole thought of their whole life you know he started asking that question um and I was like and he was being kind of like uh that's just stupid he was taking that attitude and I kind of came back a little bit more like well you know maybe if you believe that literally I wouldn't do that you know what I mean right but to see that there are great things coming from potentially associated with that person or from that tradition around that person that's not a crazy thing no and then he went uh he you could tell he was kind of like yeah I guess so that's uh yeah but you can tell he didn't believe it so now they'll have to be a follow-up conversation you know anyways I read I brought it up just because you see he's wrestling with the idea if there's I'm trying to say there's different kinds of jesuses right doesn't mean the same for everybody no it doesn't and what's interesting actually when I was in um Italy like you know yeah yeah last week we got a tour of the Forum and you know first of all it's really amazing this was after our last conversation yeah but they you know the Romans pre-christianity were you know Pagan but they had many beliefs you know and what was the interesting part is that like many of their beliefs actually were transported from Egypt and so one of the guy mentioned our tour guide mentioned is that like the Roman or the I don't know if it was Greek or Roman but one of the deities Apollo maybe he's probably Greek right the Apollo is a Greek version yeah yeah so the Greek version I can remember what the Roman name for that is so the Greek the Greek version is Apollo the Egyptian version is Horus the modern version is Jesus and it's this very similar rising and Dying God or something yeah that's correct the rising and Dying God so you know and I had never I had never had all those three things lined up just like that for me you know and it was interesting because the tour guide I thought they would be so Pro Roman that they'd be like oh this is you know like are they and they super Christian or super Catholic not at all actually there was I don't want to project onto them but like it almost seemed like they have equal reverence for the Pagan practices that they the Pagan beliefs they have because even when I say the word Pagan beliefs what does that sound like it sounds almost like not to us but maybe to somebody listening be like oh Pagan naughty naughty but actually like uses like a pejorative or something yeah exactly but like they look at it as like this is you know especially if you're Roman the greatest civilization ever to exist their level of technology and um civility is vast you know and stretched the majority of the world and again in there I have a weird call because they're a powerful situation civilization that was also super brutal what for sure right but I'm saying but they look at it as they had a court system they had a you know citizenship if you could if you join the military you can work your way up and become not you don't have to be a slave absolutely there's meritocracy within it I guess you'd say yeah yeah so they looked at this as like the seedlings of democracy but that like they still had you could still and I'm sure there's numerous if we had somebody who was uh you know a comparative World religious probably a scholar you know they could make all these leaps between all these different beings um but the idea that like there's these repeating themes over and over again that would land itself in the idea of Christ means to me that like we have this but we hold these beliefs to be part of like our human psyche you know either that or it's been passed forward like some things get passed forward like two eyes nose two arms and leg eggs and the belief that there's something that's going to rise and fall or there's a rising and Dying God and you just name it different ways at different times right right it's an actual thing like that I don't know yeah so I got like obviously being interested in Carl Jung when I was in undergrad started like pushing you down this road because you start thinking oh this is a similar archetypal figure yeah but then I also knew a bunch of people who were specifically interested in Wicca and you know this is the whole that's their whole Jam right just to point out that these are the same divinities just wearing different masks is different at different times right yeah like uh uh Joey C Joseph Campbell right one of our peeps like for this uh for this podcast you know the the guy with a thousand faces or it's actually the hero with a thousand years but we could say God you can see God why not yeah yeah yeah uh masks to the gods yeah that's what he calls it right um yeah I think sometimes Osiris is mentioned around that too yeah because he gets like what he gets dumped at the bottom of the Nile and I think his penis is bitten off by a crocodile there's some weirdness in that story it's very strange Isis has to repair it somehow top job but you know important work oh randomly uh oh this is like randomly now this is right now for something is a complete tangent at random well well you mentioned you mentioned penis is being bitten off oh no I asked one of the tour guides why you know all these naked men you know why is their junk so small when they're so big and what he said was that it was a sign of Civility oh interesting and so they overcome their animalistic natures and they were just slaves to their penile instincts yes that's a great answer yeah that's a great answer so there you go okay good good that came up at the pot that came up in the podcast last week we were talking about the Statue of David yeah and the relative uh modesty of his uh external genitalia yes and whether that should be the point of embarrassment for the model for the Statue but they said they said they were showing that it was quite civil yeah that the artist took liberties that I if I was that dude I'd be pointing that out constantly hey bro at every Baca now I went to for Dionysus I'd be like he took liberties Liberties yes yeah all right okay good so this is a very educational podcast yeah sure we're bringing it home education going all different ways all the way home yep even where you don't expect it there's going to be some Pearls of Wisdom drop that's right but the size of uh the the external junk on statues from ancient Rome right um all right so the thing with my son and I got thinking about like how many things are like this like just to draw the parallel between these three bodies idea like if you had a bunch of people from different parts of the religious World talking about what they meant by God or Holy Spirit or original sin what did those things mean you get like a like a lot of different takes on that obviously right they probably would have some kind of interconnection with one another but if you like you read them all to say they'd be exactly the same that wouldn't be quite right either you'd have to recognize that there are differences and again this is giving a shout out to the Dalai Lama because he does point this out it was very helpful for me personally in this mistake you know read things on their own terms and try to see what they're trying to say right well if you want to go to a different part of the world matter particles waves Fields entanglement even what you mean when you say the word universe what do you mean right even when you say parallel universes what do you mean right so people have different takes and all these things and I was thinking like also like really big picture I was talking with a friend of the show uh and uh Professor Justin key and we were talking about like the nature of the self at some point over our conversations over the last few weeks I think what does that mean or to have a relationship with another person what defines the relationship and what defines relationships or sex or love or these really big picture questions we're gonna do episodes on these relationship sex and love things coming up it's in our doctor that things to do um but you know you're kind of like yeah this could be like radically different things to different people but to me when they say those words so anyways that's just I think it's just such a I know for some reason for me it really hit me thinking about these three kayas because the truth of that he like struck me in the way I had never thought about relative to this concept that like it's an idea that all of these different schools of thought are going to comment on but they're probably going to have their own takes and say different things and somehow that really hit me in a deep point I just want to try to communicate that to people that it's kind of the intention of the episodes here to my mind sure and present these different ways of thinking about this very fundamental thing and then you know each of us gets to kind of like uh look and see what these things mean to us right you know what do these things mean especially to ourselves especially to oneself because that's kind of like the major stick and pro project of this podcast to do this thing to present these things and give people a chance to kind of like stew them internally for themselves right anyways you get more on that or like I just the depth of that idea really hit me and I don't think I had thought about that with the three kinds but I just thought oh yeah this is such a big idea everyone's gonna have to talk about it and then I'm going to talk about like from potentially different angles and that it got to be really important to me like to not just go and talk about what the Dalai Lama says even though that's obviously a very important way to talk about it because he is the Dalai Lama and he's representing a very deep school of thought but I thought no I want to talk about make sure that we talk about this in the biggest possible way so people can get a sense of like different ways that people think about this basic idea and somehow the depth of that really hit me anyways that's my own person I think the um it gives permission for people to to be to accept the way that they view things might be different from another even if we're all hearing the exact same thing and not from a I mean we can get that and like pick something apart you know take apart an argument and pick angles that we feel like it's deficient or excess or whatever in but that when it comes to like larger philosophical ideas that are all that are definitely transcending even quote unquote life itself that really could live on for Millennia you know yeah that like even if even though that seems like some kind of deep truth perhaps in a way that even that is like based upon your perception your perspective of it you know and your experience of it and so like when we talk about these things not only are not only are they philosophies practices ideas beliefs and so on and so forth but there are states of being that hopefully are in existence that we are describing not that we are describing that have been described in past four that we are now presenting but I guess like people plan like uh presenting different Slants on what this might mean correct right that can be used in different ways by different people right I mean so they say well a picture is worth a thousand words yeah how do I describe a state of being I mean we're taught you know so we're talking in this case we're continuing our conversation you know about the the three bodies or the three aspects or you know three kayas but like though these are you know these are fundamental states of existence let's just describe the state of being drunk which you know probably is in the name of our show gin and Tantra right the G for the Gin right yeah yeah then maybe lots of people have had some experience being inebriated with alcohol but how can I even describe that to somebody else even if we drink the exact same amount in the exact same time and we're the exact same place my experience is going to be different from theirs but it doesn't mean that like the Core Essence I guess I'll use this you know crude example of being inebriated off of alcohol off of spirits if you will there is not still some some kind of shared wisdom or experience that could be passed forth and talked about if it has the value of being transcended and maintained over a long period of time which these teachings have so yeah I guess if you're a good communicator you could probably try to describe the experience of what it's like to be drunk for someone just to give them an idea sure but they're also they actually drink the wine then they'll go oh yeah yeah and they'll be able to compare their own experience into how it is versus somebody else's right and the person who is experiencing it has to be clear enough in order to bring back that information in order to bring that experience back and then orate it through their mouth in a way that could be comprehensible for other people like you said it'd be a good communication but they have to be conscious you know so you can't also be totally lost in it you have to be aware that these things so somebody experienced this or somebody's more than likely experienced these states and then pass it forward and then other people experience it and continued it so it's it's been able to be uh continued because it had you know because it has that was kind of the point to my son like you don't have to believe that there was like a Jesus necessarily who knows maybe you believe that maybe you don't like to me believing that whether there's a Buddha or not isn't like a big deal breaker not one way or another someone came out and said oh you know this hope with the thing was made up there was never this guy I'd be like that's totally fine but Buddhism still exists because it's like right here right now right so people have been talking about this for a long time you know and uh uh that's still that's still a thing right and so we could still be trying to share you're talking about kind of the experiential aspect of it which is really important right and talking about these three kinds I guess I'm also because I know we're going to be talking about this the sixth patriarch of Zen yeah and like it's almost a way of thinking about what these words might mean that you could use them a different way so it's almost like what did they mean as a tool sure developing yourself as a person that's another way to think about it right yeah yeah the experiential side and also like the therapeutic side you might say sure like how do you use this how do you use these Concepts as a therapy because that seems to be for the main dude we're going to talk about today if you can call him a dude the six Patriot group said hey nank you seemed like he was a righteous dude yeah why not he also might be a completely fictional character might never have existed at all seems entirely possible that there was never a person like this but um uh in any case the idea is leban the same way that junk on the Statue of David has lived on and we can still comment two thousand years later on how Noble it was that he overcame his animal nature to be able to hit that guy in the head with a rock that's right yes um okay uh so yeah okay so it's good so we're in this we're in a lot of the same space with this kind of a thing yeah there's an experiential aspect that people have been trying to communicate like what you're saying about not for Millennia here's an experience we're trying to communicate you know and for you coming from a shamanistic perspective and for me too coming from a Zen perspective we want to know like okay describe the experience maybe I can try to get some taste of that experience too well not yet but I won't know what you describe it I'll give you some idea and I'll go on my own drinking binge and I'll see if I could see if I can taste it right literally that is that is the that is the view of the of the shaman really yeah from my perspective is to you know I think that's a view of all of this right I think that's the Gin And Touch review yeah I mean I tell many students of mine I'll be like oh I you know I saw this in a vision I'm gonna go look it up and I'm like well then now that that's taking what someone else said about it and then absorbing it and comparing it for what you experience you go experience it first and then after some time after it sat with you and you've worked with it then you go look but don't ruin don't ruin the the newness the freshness of this thing that you have no frame of reference on that is talking to you or coming from you however you want to view these kind of experiences by putting constructs where there are none yet it might be more personal for you correct right this might be a personal vision for you and you might as well own it as your own yeah yeah yeah we're always doing this little dance because that doesn't mean that you can't read a Zen book and get something from no it's just like different ways that you'll handle things and but I think what I'm saying is that it's not a it's not merely a uh a psycho uh psychological you know process it's not it doesn't only exist in one thinking part of your mind yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah there's other um there's other deeper resonant aspects of that experience and just something you look up in a book yes I'll just explain you oh okay well I saw the jaguar and red in the Flaming Vision in the sky that means such and such yeah right and you can read you know we can you know read um tantric practice manuals that'll tell you how to do things right they'll tell you okay you breathe like this you visualize this you say this thing but just because you read it doesn't mean you did it you know that's the dance that we're on here because on the one hand and I think this is true and like someone like Lama yeshu will make this point like just as a person you know who kind of say like uh well it's great that sunkappa wrote this practice guide because now I have someone else who experienced it that I can kind of like use someone who's a bit of a guide for me on the other hand from the time you're talking what you're talking about yeah I still have to go on that thing for myself see what that feels like he's a help to me you know as uh the guru coming out of a book you know like a book is a guru for you in moments right yeah a teacher uh but yeah you still gotta go and like experience this for yourself you still have to drink the wine right yeah yeah yeah all right so on this three Kaya thing you know this is just I know for some reason this hit me with a particular Force just because I maybe I hadn't thought about this with the three kayas everyone's like using this this idea in different ways try to help people and communicating about in different ways so it's this quintessential idea everyone's going to talk about and then you know again for the episodes for me it just got important to say okay let's make sure we do do justice is this to do to do do justice to this and then describe different ways to go think about this sure and then people go out and kind of do whatever you want to do about it um okay so I think we'll get back to the Dalai Lama part is what I see to be like kind of the Capper to the series when we get to that it'll probably be the next couple of episodes yeah and we will move on to other subjects but again I really want to do the whole thing Justice and share other ways of looking at it and I it's kind of a paraphrase but to me this thought you know if you only know one way of thinking you don't really know any way of thinking including your own I feel there's some truth to that you know if you only know one way of thinking and if you're like partisan in some way and you can't open yourself up to other ways of thinking then you probably don't understand anybody else's way of thinking and you actually don't even understand your own way of thinking because you don't know what other people are going to say about it I know how you feel about that no oh that I do feel I feel like that there was um there's a um I forgot what power nine hot nine seven or power 103 or whatever there's there's a radio program in New York called The Breakfast Club it's DJ Envy and DJ Envy Charlemagne the God and Angela Yee they're a very popular morning radio show and they have on all kinds of people on there I mean they've had Kamala Harris from Kamala Harris to you know Lil Wayne you know whatever 50 Cent like all kinds of different people you know yeah um and somebody asked Charlemagne who's a black you know radio host from South Carolina they're like oh Who you gonna vote for uh and he said free thinkers don't wear hats meaning a red or blue hat yeah yeah you know and that just like it summed it up so perfectly for me because it's it's true you know you want to be you want to be able to kind of move back and forth and if you only have one way of thinking I'm specifically thinking like Republican Democrat conservative you know this kind of ideology which is huge in our country you know you're kind of a useless idiot no offense I'm not you know and we're just or a useful idiot for other people there you go yeah you know and look we're we're all about and ironically like we're both wearing hats I just wanted to point that out free thinkers don't wear hats it's two dudes talking wearing hats okay okay let's you know we'll just let that go we'll call it a cap yeah yeah you know but like you want to have you want to have that freedom to be able to move back and forth without being rigidly bound to to one particular thing and look I'm a student of tradition you're a student of tradition this is not to say that like we can't carry things that have value forth but I could study every piece of you know Roger Yana ideology I'm still gonna have my own thoughts on things even if that's you know like you know some of my most major insights into like things do in Zen were reading things that were like a practice manuals written around uh Hindu Tantra or something sure that's why I had like some of my or like you know I talked about like this in the episode back it back a bit ago but like I had a major thing like understanding stuff about Buddha nature reading things in the Kabbalah I was like oh [...] that's what they're talking about do do this give that story Eric that you had in the notes I think it fits here oh we're talking about uh the sixth patriarch or yeah yeah we're gonna definitely tell his tale oh yeah yeah that fits here really but it's like a really perfect yeah yeah okay yeah so okay so the purpose of this like this part of the episode and I don't know if this would be a different episode when you edit it no I probably because it we're gonna have so much background before and after that we'll just uh okay you know so anyway so this is the the tale of the sixth patriarch of Zen patriarch is kind of a funny word because it obviously has that uh ominous yeah correlation to patriarchy but you know it just really means like person in the line or something like that you know teacher or or something like that so anyway so there's the sixth one in this in this lineage of people who are all doing Zen and he's probably one of the most famous Zen characters in all the Zen literatures it's an h u and an i and then new word n-e-n-g if you want to look them up later on or something like that so um though I'm sure we'll probably have the name maybe in the podcast or something like that right in the notes yeah so anyways so his backstory is one of like the quintessential Zen stories and it's a funny one to tell because it's also the story of like the old Matt Damon Robin Williams movie Good Will Hunting so uh we will get to the Goodwill Hunting part when we get to it I've been meaning to watch that with my son by the way talking about my son because he's really in the rom-coms I was like well this is a classic we gotta watch this you know Robin Williams talking about how he missed the home run from Carlton Fisk or something because yeah I need his wife outside Fenway Park or whatever uh I don't know how it holds up over time have you watched it recently Good Will Hunting oh it's been a while for me I mean watch it ever yeah along but it's been a minute yeah it's been yeah it's maybe several minutes even yeah yeah that that's a long time that might mean decades yeah yeah so same for me probably anyways I'll let I'll I will let you know in the GNT audience if I watch it again how Good Will Hunting stands up for me over time I like Rob Williams right yeah yeah well I mean yeah what's not to like so okay so the the primary uh source for his backstory is this thing called the platform Sutra that's one of the main sources of probably the Zen tradition overall there's always a tale in Bob this and I remember really trying to read it out with a bunch of Russian people at this really late night Cafe in Chicago and I was just had this book with me and I don't know why I wasn't paying other people I I think I was just in this very Zen mood and I was just reading this thing at like two o'clock in the morning trying to figure out what he was saying so I have a relationship with this book that's gone back a bit for me uh it's presented as kind of like a dialogue by this quenang and we're going to tell this backstory and you know doing the prep and it was interesting just from the question from my son about you know Jesus it was like when I read it back in the day it was just you know I thought this was the writing from this guy but you know when you do history you kind of realize oh this book was probably written over years by different people and you know that's always the way these Tales are so this is really not historically true person probably not but still a great still a great story nonetheless and don't let the truth ruin a good story uh Mantra and model okay so um so this Huang Nang his father is banished from the government from a government position I you'd imagine probably for some political reasons that's usually where these Chinese stories go and then his father dies young so it's just him and his mom and now they're in poverty and um to help support the help them support themselves Huang Nang is selling uh firewood so he's just going around schlepping this firewood around I don't know if they really even say how old he is at this time this is what he's doing so while on his rounds of schlepping this firewood around he hears someone chanting the diamond Sutra which is this really important uh Sutra sometimes you do a little short version of it it's really famous for this whole idea of performance emptiness Emptiness is form all that kind of language it's really on this idea of shunyata which we talked about in podcast episodes here and there keeps popping up but anyways he hears this suture being Transit and then he gets this instant click of understanding it just goes for him um but he's like you know in illiterate uneducated person but there's something in the word speak to him before you um just so we you know make sure we give little references you know shinyata meaning uh emptiness or Freedom something like this yeah yeah we've had major episodes on this where we talked to guy Newland about this was written books on this thing yeah we talked to uh our beloved Bobby T Robert Thurman about this we have we'll give you a very very long long-winded long-winded and uh detailed and elaborating colorful and entertaining version of this too yeah I think I actually think I knew Lynn's version is also very entertaining too anyway so we got some episodes on it yeah yeah so we'll keep it you know it's going to come up again in this conversation actually so I think we can double back on that we can see what Huang Nang seems to think about this thing sure yeah so he gets this this click of understanding and she goes up to the person chanting the suture and he says why is this being chanted why are you chanting this thing and it's real common to chant right like a lot of times in tibetan Retreats it'll be the first thing before teaching people will trance this you know in Tibetan or uh for years I was actually chanting this sort of in a like you don't you Enchanted in English though English isn't a great chanting language I was chanting and you know to get the rhythm of the words you just kind of chant it in more closer to the original language uh so anyway so um and it has a great rhythm you know so if you have Enchanted any sutras ever in your life there is a thing about that and I didn't understand it when I first started doing it like didn't make any sense to me why I would do this and there was a professor who was sort of a zen teacher from DePaul University in Chicago the place where I was like studying and he said well you know they have a rhythm to them they have an energy right so you're doing the chant that has an energy and we've had episodes on this too we've talked about this with uh you know Ayahuasca Retreats and stuff right you present the Rhythm and the energy so anyways so great suture the chant I chanted it every day for years and there's a certain like it has a certain Vibe and I think even the guy from Nepal had said do you have a favorite Sutra and a lot of people say it's this one because it just has a great feeling to it when you do it but anyways he asked about why it's being Enchanted and the person who's chanting it doesn't give that long explanation but basically says I'm a student of Zen of the this fifth zen master right in this line so hangnang heads off to this monastery to go meet this uh this fifth zen master whose name is Hong wren so they meet and they have this dialogue so some of this stuff is really in the words and then the dialogue that's kind of interesting about this and then we'll get to the Matt Damon part uh but there'll be nothing about any baseball games there's no Robin Williams character though I guess Hong Wren would be the Wild and Williams character but you're right so hung ran uh s uh asks this young man who's coming who are you and what do you seek and so queng Nang the who will become this sticks then Master replies uh your disciple is a commenter from shinzhou of Ling Yang I don't know where those places are but that would mean something at the time and it says I have traveled far to pay homage to you and seek nothing other than buddhahood and then uh the fifth Zen master you know this Hong Wren goes uh so you're from Ling Nan and a barbarian which means he was probably from some like dicey place how can you expect to become a Buddha okay probably just seeing what he's gonna say right answers back although people exist as Northerners and Southerners in the Buddha nature there is neither North or South a barbarian differs from your Holiness physically but what difference is there in our Buddha nature boom mic drop so he answers back this way and then this Hong Ren this fifth zen master says oh okay so this guy understands something about this so he says okay you can stay in the monastery you have to avoid going into the main hall but you can like split firewood Pond rice and like hang around here you know and we'll see how this progresses now the Good Will Hunting part of the story so this is the poem contest so eight months go by and then this is end mastered the fifth patriarch or the fifth semester ask the students to present their understanding so he can pass on his model uh uh mantle on whoever's gonna be the next person in the in the line and he has a main student whose name is shenshu and the main student writes a verse stanza but I guess in the way it's presented he's too nervous to present it directly so he writes it on the wall which is the Goodwill Hunting part because the problem's on the wall right at Goodwill Hunting so the diversity rights goes like this the body is the Bodhi Tree the mind is like a bright mirror stand at all times we will strive to polish it and must not let dust collect one take two days later this Huang Nang hears this verse being Enchanted by some people out in the courtyard of the monastery or something like that and he goes so he asked to be led to the verse saying he can pay homage so he can pay homage to it on the wall where it's written but that doesn't seem to be his true intention because when he gets there instead he asks someone else because he's personally illiterate he has someone else to write a counter verse of his own on the wall which goes like this Bodhi originally has no tree The Mirror Has No stand the buddhu nature is always clear and pure where's their room for dust question mark so he writes this contrasting verse and when you get to that when you can really see he's emphasizing this idea of what we're talking about he's saying something else right so the one guy says something about practice which is bad right but his verse is more about like kind of like more like deeper truth or something you know so they had these like comparing contrasting verses written on the wall the one guy's saying well keep clearing off the dust is that wrong is that wrong but obviously the six patriarch comes back and presents this like very deep more like commentary on like um maybe the deeper truth of things and the deeper ground of being of things or something like that so it's an interesting kind of like way these two verses are presented and there's kind of different versions like even historically but I kind of like this one I think this is even the original one for the oldest versions of this so I wanted to share that one and it seems to speak the most clearly to me you know so yeah this I want to say those two statements without each other are not as impactful yes do you know what I'm saying and there's lots of commentary around this too like what exactly does this mean these two verses and so like kind of like complementary they are absolutely common because if you have a question without reference to what it's questioning then it doesn't fit and and to me that is this is kind of like uh maybe a historical emanation of the diamond Sutra itself form is emptiness yeah this is for right one one being a very literal kind of practice way about referencing a tree and a mirror stand and and you know matter collecting dust you know needing to be polished and worked on practice and what you're the mind has to be cleared and has to be monitored yeah it's not like that's wrong or something no that's the interesting thing about it that it was totally stupid no and this is it would be worthwhile writing another verse right this is the practical application of a practice of a discipline you know that's like the nitty-gritty but the other side of that is that like the the nature of existence it's itself is without any of those things and cannot collect dust because it is not in matter in the way that a tree or a nightstand or a mirror might be you know maybe in some ways everything is just the pure ground of being anyways which is going to be kind of his slant yeah he has a deep idea what he's trying to say here in the second set of verse but they are complementary right yeah there's no doubt and you're right the second one wouldn't even make any sense if the guy hadn't written the first one no and I think if you want to be a little like uh Dalai Lama about this the one seems to have something a little bit more to do with conventional truth sure sure right and the other one has to do with more like ultimate truth ultimate truth right you know you can kind of throw those words on that or something and say okay the one guy's writing from like a practice point of view like what you were saying that means they have a practice and the discipline and refine yourself and the other one's talking more about like a kind of a deeper epiphanous realization or something um this is like I mean I think you like you're hitting on a really important point in this and there's like lots of discussion around this and if I'm putting words in his mouth but there's this really famous uh let me text him hold on well you have to text him in the Bardo and Beyond because it's shunru Suzuki so he has departed this Mortal coil but you know like he wrote this book called Zen mine in beginner's mind right you ever read that one ever Daniel of course okay of course so yeah I don't know we all read a lot of stuff I you know it's hard to say which particular ones either one episode that one's that one for that's like you know then my beginner mind is like a kind of a must read I think for oh that would mean a lot to me for anybody who was like on the kind of like spiritual path of an Eastern philosophical you know flavor that one is on the short list like the very very short list whether you're whether you're Zen or not Zen doesn't matter whether you're Buddhist or non Buddhist it doesn't really matter yeah I took it matters for that book I think he's making points that are a little bit beyond that yeah yeah he's very like playful in his language too like it's very craftily spoken it's a playful interesting use of language yeah he's coming from a very deep place you can I mean with just the way that he uses language it's it's he's like a major person in this Zen school called the SoDo School we've had some conversations about this in previous podcasts too which is a little bit unset and they're very practice oriented so his slant on this is a little bit like I don't even know these two verses both have a certain kind of truth then and he says if I'm remembering correctly I think he even says like ah this verse from Huang it's good but it's you know it's even one-sided or something at the other side yeah yeah so anyways Zen mine beginner's mind give it a read I was reading it on the Rock Island train line from Chicago out to my parents that's my story I picked it up actually in the bookstore of the train station for some [...] weird reason and it changed my life so good book Karma anyway so this is the thing but I mean you could see what happens with the Huang Nang verse he's talking about like an epiphanous realization here or something sure right yeah okay so you can kind of Imagine where this story is going to go if you've seen Good Will Hunting sixth patriarch is considered to be more correct in this version of the story and so hung Ren the uh fifth person in the line passes his mantle on to the sixth and then you get that you get the the Escape story because there's this realization like people aren't going to accept that he's passing on his mantle to some dude who is just like working in the in the kitchen pounding the rice and like delivering the wood so people will judge him people will judge him right right so that actually comes up in the story kind of an interesting way too you know he's a barbarian the same way Goodwill Hunting is like from like uh what's that neighborhood in uh Boston where he's supposed to be from I forget the name of it I don't can't remember that [...] it'll hit me later anyways you know he's like a barbarian or something and an uneducated person but he obviously has the understanding so Hungarian passes this on and he basically says that you have to run now because people are gonna like not accept this and then in sort of a symbolic part of the story our Robin Williams character the fifth Rose the sixth guy across the bank of the river so he can start having his run and uh Hui Nang the hero of our story realizes oh this is symbolic too because there's always these stories and Buddhism about getting to the other side of the river get to the other side of the river get to the other side of the river right and it's like if you get the gist in this this is like a little you know deeper dive into Buddha symbolism or something because when you get deeper into things you realize there's always these little subtle points being made but there's a whole thing in Zen where they say if you have a boat and you're trying to cross a river once you get to the other side of the river like you don't just keep carrying the boat you leave the boat sit there because now you don't need the boat anymore right you've gotten to the other side of the river meaning that like uh things are tools right to go and accomplish and accomplish something and then you can drop them and that's okay right you're not supposed to like uh hold on to the tool you know once you're done you can leave the tool there right and maybe someone else will take it over to the river too take it across the river for themselves or something so anyways like Huang then goes oh yeah yeah he kind of gets like this is a symbolic action that's just happened here and so he does flee and he's pursued by hundreds of men chasing him we don't want to accept that the the the begging bowl and the robe of this great send Master went to this barbarous person this is where you get to the Thor part of the story depending on how it's told because one of them catches up with him I think he's usually describe this Hui Ming I don't know what the symbolic significance of some of these names are but there probably is one anyways he catches up to him um and he tries to like take the ball on the road but he can't so he's kind of like uh Age of Ultron or something in the Avengers where they're all trying to pick up Thor's hammer they can't do it you know and he goes oh so this guy is like seriously the the uh the person who deserves to have this passed on this is really his robe and his bowl you know they've been giving to him legit and then you know that's kind of like the main part of the tale right and then uh it gets to the teaching part but what do you think of that as a story I don't know do you see similarities I tried that it's Good Will Hunting it's Thor it's other things any other stories pop out to you there uh not off the top of my head no but I mean you know it's a kind of a I think it it shows that like they tried to do this but failed miserably in the new version of Star Wars oh okay you know with people who are you know quote unquote like force sensitive they one of the complaints at least the modern complaints was that like everything was based around basically this one kind of Royal fam you know one sort of family the Skywalkers right oh I see okay and that like they were the only ones so they're they're kind of talking about privilege in a sense right these are the only ones in the entire galaxy right who have this Force sensitivity um and then they sort of ruined it you know spoiler uh for you know whatever the force I haven't seen it what happens whatever like everyone gets it or something no it's that like it ended up being that she was related that the girl was related to them you know related to like [...] sake right so they screwed it up they but then and then in the next step the last one they kind of had a bunch of random little kids who were all sort of force sensitive when they felt these kind of force ghosts in the in the universe now kind of looked up all these different scenes of like these different poor kids and kids in the jungle like you know they tried to like fix it they tried to fix it by by this by Distributing this kind of idea and I think this story speaks to that like that the any man you know not just the rooted in the the university that could have realization but that yeah yeah if it speaks to you even doing it what it is that you're doing on a normal basis if you're willing to go follow the path of difficulty then you two can achieve you know some kind of uh I don't know Enlightenment or yeah I think actually this uh fifth patriarch or fifth Zen master uh hung Ren says something to him like he first gets to the monastery about you know are you willing to follow this path of difficulty and Huang says yeah if you want to go after the truth you have to do this thing you know so that does come up I get what you mean though because yeah when the way you structure a story really kind of matters you know when you're trying to like because they're structured I mean let's say these events didn't exactly pass this way you know you're telling a tale to kind of like impact people and yeah part of it is yeah he's he's a from a Barbers part of the country he's poor you know and like uh but you know he could still break through just as many as much as anyone else because he has the same core correct uh acts uh spiritual truth within him right well and that was what his could do it that was what he said when he first met the the teacher yeah the barber the Barbarian part yeah that's right there is no you know Buddha Nature has no or buddhahood has no North no South yeah Buddha natures and all of us equally yeah so that's an important point and uh you know you probably could say well this is probably important because things come from India in the China and Chinese have to say we can get it too we could look at it that way too sure but there's a personal side to this which is kind of meaningful everybody has this thing so this the story is communicating that and you're right you don't have to be like uh University educated or something like that or whatever right you can come from this from all kinds of different directions right and find your way through sometimes and then they say like it's a narrow gate but you can get there from like a gazillion different angles or something right that's kind of a nice Zen metaphor for that kind of thing too well and it's interesting because like you know as we're talking about this and we're talking about like different perspectives on reality and like you know our my view on things and as I understand it like when you write a story the hope is that many people will read it but the truth is only one person is going to read it at a time so you're really only writing the story for one person uh your mic is muted still there is a treat I'm learning that way you think I'm sure that was genius it couldn't even be said audibly for the world to you know yeah I know the the archons of uh just caught my little pearl of wisdom because it would have been like too powerful to be carried out by waves throughout the Galaxy all those little Star Wars kids and all the other planets would start seeing forced ghosts everywhere if my words could just find their way out yeah so uh yeah no there's a truth in it like I mean you're trying to like now we're doing the podcast you know and you're trying to like connect to a bunch of different people but you have to acknowledge each person is going to get their own slant on it right and I mean like like one person is listening to this and then another one person is listening to this and another one even if it's broadcast on a megaphone for thousands of people standing it it's only going into one it's one continuous kind of thing at a time this is like a rare point of controversy in our episodes but I do think that that's how I think about people overall I think no matter where you're from no matter what part of the world that you're from no matter what subpopulation you're from I think in the end each person is an individual being I think it has to be that way you know and everyone has to go through and have their have their own story and come to their own conclusions no matter where you're starting up you know from the North or from the south you know Buddha nature is the same in all of us so I don't know I don't know where our culture is on this question now but that's how I think about it and I guess you know I'll never be able to think about it deep down I'll never be able to think about it any other way even though of course there are people from the north and people from the South and people from all over the place it doesn't minimize their differences at all no you know in some ways each of us is an individual no matter where we're from who ultimately have to come to like discover our own truths yeah all right so okay so we did the Escape story so that gets us to the I think like the major parts of the thing and then by the end huangning is uh the hero of this story and he does his platform Sutra thing and we're going to be kind of trying to draw on the platform suture to talk a little bit about the three bodies which is kind of our closing part of this episode but I wanted to spend some time talking about it especially I think because he presents it kind of in a different way that might be funnily more practical or something oh you know Daniel I realized I screwed something up okay give me one second I may have to go off camera and off mic for one second all right well let me uh let me do this Timmy pause it okay we'll be back we'll be back we're back ah I realized I wasn't as incompetent as I thought because the thing I wanted was actually right here so um isn't that the metaphor for Life Eric yes yes so it was always there the whole time that's right it's also the part of every rom-com Goodwill Hunting has to realize in the end that that she Irish or English chick was his two hearts desire just from the beginning uh what was it a mini driver I came up with the actress's name um all right so what does Queen Nang have to do with our subject matter of this series like if we told his amazing backstory this idea of these three bodies okay so uh we'll try to take a little shot here to try to explain the three bodies according to Queen Nang uh as I say in the show notes no challenge there at all it should be like super easy no not easy but we'll try okay so here's what he says if you can remember we had these three different kind of levels in this Dharma Kaya symbolga and again there's different ways of describing this the most subtle aspect of this is supposed to be this dharmakaya idea so here's sort of Huang nang's take he kind of says this dharmakaya which sometimes is like translated as truth Body Spirit body reality body people will do this in different ways is itself pure tranquil perhaps Blissful all on its own and so it could be seen as kind of like the Buddha nature inside all of us is like this we have a part of ourselves that's just like that and when we tap into that it's a very powerful experience right it probably has to do with that metaphora of the glass where all the little sediment and the glass Settles you can see the pure water or something hidden behind so it could be the deepest parts of all of our natures but it's also pretty clear in Hui Yang that he's saying that everything around us all the dharmas in this case meaning phenomena are also this same thing so in a way everything is Buddha nature that we see and this is uh the ground or the nature of being itself and then we can kind of understand that our deepest self nature is therefore identical with everything entwined with everything so that's the Dharma Kai idea from the point of view okay Nang which we've seen this idea before right we've been talking about this for a few episodes and this is kind of this idea I wanted to avoid like our deepest self nature is one with everything because I wanted to avoid like the old terrible hot dog vendor joke what did Buddha say to the hot dog vendor make me one with everything without bumps I wanted to avoid that because that sounds corny you say make me one with everything and actually what Hui Nang is saying is that like even that joke wouldn't be right because we already are that there's a part of ourselves that is transcendent in that way and has that quality to it so he's saying that thing what do you think of that idea Daniel so far so far so good so far so good all right so that's the Deep idea that he's trying to point out and I think that's the idea even in the verses you already have this part of yourself that's this so it's not a question of like scrubbing the mirror exactly to find the thing that you already have right and sometimes you'll get this in Zen stories you know uh someone will be like uh scrubbing something clean and the idea would be like you could you could scrub that forever but it doesn't matter because it's already intrinsically clean you know your scrubbing doesn't matter that's a little bit what's happening in some of those verses he's trying to make that point this is this is what I tell my dentist you can scrub forever but it's already inherently Dr Feldman you let that like yeah it's already clean it's intrinsically clean I'm good I'll see you in 20 years bro but see that's that's that ignores conventional truth I'm moving on to Ultimate truths now yeah hold on the ultimate truth of the nature of my teeth that's like that's a hell of a question anyway so that's the point that's being raised here all right so so this is one part of reality the steepest part where there's a part of us that is actually kind of like uh really entwined with everything yeah okay so he's trying to make people realize this right by his verse on the wall so then we get to the idea of like what's nirmanikaya this is usually considered to be like the most uh dense and like you know most physical of all of this part right and so there's an interesting take when he talks about this or malakaya and sometimes this is talked about as being emanation but sometimes this is talked about as being transformation so what Huang Nang ends up saying is that all of these Myriad things that we experience around us the phenomena of the world is this nirmanakaya and in Buddhist thought these things are all created by us right we are creating these things really probably on multiple levels and this might be the biggest part of the conversation for you either kick around here to my mind but our actions led by our thoughts are creating this are creating the realities of our worlds so our mind creates this reality in a very direct way we think about things in certain ways and then we act in certain ways and then this becomes the Myriad phenomenon of the world which is this transformation body or put differently when we have our sense of Buddha nature clear and we can see this deepest part of ourselves where we're just going along and we're chilling hmm what what hey Queen Nang will point out is but then when our thoughts start going in all of these different directions uh good and bad things can arise from them and then once these good and bad things arise within our thoughts we'll probably have like different ways this will affect what we'll do and so even though our self nature the deepest part of who we are can be transformed into countless ways when people don't recognize this they end up going into all these different lines of like uh uh producing either good or bad in the world right because they don't recognize that they're doing that even and then he does say some Buddhist things like if you act a certain way you'll be born in some kind of angelic realm if you act a certain way you might be born as a fox living in a mountain he doesn't say those exact examples but something along those lines right but it's our own mind our own thoughts and our own actions that are kind of doing this we're transforming things around us but if we become aware of this and this is I think where he's trying to be very practical if this makes any sense you know he's trying to say you know it's our own mind that's producing these things that will then kind of translate into these actions while not doing things and we'll take ourselves nature and we'll make it into other stuff but if we can like change what we're doing and focus on knowledge and compassion and develop these qualities then that will become the transformation body like right here and now you'll be living it like right in this moment like right out right out now um and I was thinking about this a lot okay so then in the end it will be uh since we are emanating out of our own Buddha nature the own ground of being which is like kind of everything but we're coming as this relative phenomenon now uh we're in this funny position because from the spiritual body the dharmacaya when thoughts of various types arise this will naturally become this transformation body if we direct it in that way towards things like love compassion wisdom and knowledge we're making a transformation body now which is why I thought this might be useful for people to slant on it what do you think yes very nice point no I mean now right we had this Transcendent part of who we are what we're thinking how we're doing how are we actually now the universe that we're creating through our actions is the transformation world that we're creating so they recognize that we can make something of that I forgot who I heard this from maybe it's Robert I think it's Robert Thurman it's either Robert Thurman or Glenn Mullen but it seems more like a Bobby T point like yeah it's right it's Bobby T and he makes this point in in his uh not the newest book but the second to newest book which I'll look up and find and give people the name of um but he says that like your practice is your performance this is a very particular attitude you know and that like that that is it so when you practice being compassionate therefore you are being compassionate and that then is the trend that is the transformation so that is that is it's itself you know and it's um you know it's a really I mean it's a very practical way of looking at things uh but I when it comes to something like this I don't know how else to to bring it down into the ground I think it grounds it in a really interesting way like it makes it grounded and kind of real oh you know uh the book that he talks about this is the infinite life oh yeah that says one on uh uh whatever six Perfections or something or six Perfections yeah but yeah from a fair path or something he does like yeah he does that kind of rip he does he takes some Buddhist thing and he breaks the part chapter by chapter yeah yeah and it's and it's good but super practical but there's a partisan where they talk that way like I can remember there was I think maybe I mentioned this like little anecdote at another time but there was like a one of the Zen students was this woman named Lori and she and her husband had started doing this at the same time and it turned out she was just really gifted in Zen and he got discouraged and we never saw him again actually I don't think I ever met him but that was sort of the back story like to them as a couple but she kept like kind of chipping away and she was a very like nice person I would sometimes be at the longer Retreats with her if you wouldn't necessarily come every week or something and you know she was working through her Zen riddles her co-ans and things like that but at some point they asked her to like kind of give a short lecture because she was making progress and I don't think she really wanted to do it but she did and one of the things that she said she had asked Jose roshi who was the Zen master I was studying with like well if it's just me sitting here how am I like changing anything in the problems of the world and his answer to her was very much of this platform Sutra kind of a way where he was saying we're all energetically intertwined right and actually from this point of view if you really believe it we are all like kind of quantumly entangled everywhere and the deepest part of who you are is everywhere all the time um and so when you kind of make that Vibe and go you are having an impact like on this more subtle level like all the time and that's how Zen is supposed to work and then each individual being per what the platform switcher is going to talk about will find their own way to their own Enlightenment right but you're sending out the Transmissions of this constantly right just because you're connected with everything and the power of your own mind experience doing this is like kind of transmitting everywhere all the time you know so it doesn't take I don't know okay so there's a couple ways to think about this then I I'd like to kick this around a little bit and see what we think about it but as I was thinking about going in I thought okay there's some part that's like really down to earth about this which is just like yeah how you think about things and what you do with your life uh is going to be uh just immediately impactful like there's this there's that level of ground level reality right if your thoughts are limited and narrow then you'll probably produce limited and narrow results right right if your thoughts are yeah one-sided and confused and so on right so there's a kind of like an immediate thing and that's like and some of the kind of obviously true you know we all participate in this world and in this society and if our thoughts are like then we're adding to this right so there's that level of reality that's definitely there and if we clarify this then what we're going to be bringing out into the world and the people is just going to be different you know presumably hopefully better right um and then this keeps getting more subtle because then you could say um yeah I'm also like karmically creating things as I go forward so he's pointing out if you create the karma to be born as like some kind of like a jealous God you know when you look at the Buddhist Cosmos then you'll create that you know if you create to be born as some kind of like hostile figure within some nasty realm of reality then you'll be that way too you're making this happen right through your own actions and mind especially and then you know ultimately you get to this really big picture level which is like there's a part of you that's like transcended and everywhere all the time and if you can like get hold of that then of course you're like really transforming things in this deep way right and then you can go through and also uh keep improving yourself and this will come up when he talks about this in Boca pyre part but you know as you keep kind of like generating more and more positivity in Who You Are that will just naturally sort of emanate out into the World At Large so I know I see this kind of like multiple levels does that make sense to you yeah no totally yeah yeah but maybe like I don't know I was trying to think yeah like for people who want to hear like I know maybe a more practical version of this even though some of it sounds like kind of esoteric and we're trying to talk on multiple levels there's obviously part of this which is like very like down to earth and kind of practical way of using this concept you know he's like taking this three bodies idea that can be like used in multiple ways you can talk about all kinds of ways and he's trying to make it really practical you have a part of yourself which is Buddha nature then you have the part of yourself that's acting in the world right and creating the world around you immediately through your actions which is true you know and you can become empowered to do stuff with this if you just recognize this you know and then you can either help other people okay I'll do the closure on this in Boca guy part I wanted to just read this part from the platform suture so let me give this a tumble and um so uh in the translation I have sometimes they call this enjoyment body sometimes they call this reward body so I'll just kind of like throw these couple paragraphs out okay and you can kind of tell me what you think when we're done so like Huang Nang says what is the perfect reward body and he says a single light can eliminate the darkness of Millennia a single piece of wisdom can dispel the ignorance of a million years do not worry about your past always think of your future and for your future always think of good thoughts always think good thoughts this is the reward body okay interesting so he's pointing out this very kind of like way of how you orientate your mind right it says from the spiritual body the dharmakaya when thoughts arise this is a transformation body always think of good thoughts that is the reward body if you are awakened yourself and cultivate yourselves this is called taking Refuge now in Buddhism they had this idea that you take refuge and the Buddha the Dharma and the Sangha but he's changing this around he's basically saying if you're doing this action this is what it really means to take refuge our bones and flesh constitute our physical bodies but they are only Dwelling Places and cannot be spoken of as Refuge if you understand the three bodies you comprehend my main idea and and quotation right so it's pretty deep so what he ends up saying about this enjoyment body is if you generate these positive states of Mind always think good thoughts that will create this energy of rewardment uh reward pleasure and enjoyment for you in a very kind of immediate way and it's really going to come from the nature of your own mind to do this and in the end he goes on to say like this is what it means when they talk about taking Refuge they're not saying that you're going to go back and take refuge to some historical guy a long time ago in India that's not what it is nor is it even that you take refuge to some a media teacher now in the present that's not what it is you're taking refuge in these aspects of your own nature and the process of how he's trying to describe how you can develop the potentials of your own nature that's the Refuge so he'll say like he talks about taking refuge in the Buddha he says yeah you're taking refuge and your own Buddha nature which is transcendent and everywhere and pure and always like that and that's your Buddha right and when you do your uh your Dharma you're taking refuge and the wisdom of realizing how you cultivate this and when you take refuge in the Sangha you're taking refugees an idea that you're doing these practices that are going to build up these different elements of who you are right he's saying that's the true thing it's not some people from India it's not some people from China it's like you you know and these different aspects of your own being that's the Refuge right and the development of that is the Refuge as opposed to some external thing outside of you you know and then it goes on to really say like every living thing then will come to this in their own way right we were talking pre-show like Ram Das right did all the acid experiments back in the day you know with Timothy Leary then he became the spiritual figure and you know uh beloved person I don't know as much about ramdasp I have a friend who loves him and ramdas just says we're on our own trip right but ultimately yeah we keep working that we'll come to this place that's the idea so I don't know to me that feels like I don't know like very uh practical in some way even though it's deep you know you have a Transcendent part of who you are try to tap into it right you have uh your actions your thoughts in the world go through and try to think about what those implications are because you're you're you're manifesting these your potentials of your own being through your thoughts and actions and then the last part is if you make these things positive that will create the reward and enjoyment for you that'll make your bliss body you know okay that is like just a certain way of using that tool you know which is very Chinese to be honest uh the doctor I say was from China he would like do his style of Qigong and uh and I have some episodes on this I recorded back in the day that I've never really put up as like little solo things but I'll probably do that under a little shot of spirit thing which we never seem like we really do we really should but uh in any case I have these things and uh uh you know he was like always trying to get people to think positive thoughts and that you know when I was writing these my part of these notes up I was like yeah that's a little bit what is talking about if you just get yourself into this positive frame then you're creating your own reward body you're creating your own Bliss body you're building up inside of you in a way that no one can really take away it from you because it's your own creation no external thing can stop that the same way I think in Bobby T's book uh Robert Thurman say Canada talk about cheer the [...] up if you just do that you're going to build this reward body I know it's deep to me I know what do you think you probably have some reactions like lay it on me man let me know what you think no I think it's true I mean it's interesting because I I hear one of my friends who's been on the the show before um Samantha or I think we called her nurse Berkey you know yeah this is a long time ago you know but she's definitely uh into like um Abraham Hicks and uh Power of Positive Thinking and yeah it's it's it's a lot I mean like really really like thoroughly drinks all the Kool-Aid and then licks the bottom of the cup you know leaves nothing like you know and so I'm always a little like I think maybe a little leery because I I could see how like this is also like maybe a bit of an Escapist attitude on some on some level but then on the other on the other hand maybe that's not good for like 10 or 15 of the situations and I could certainly look and find and pick out those things that like it doesn't where it doesn't perfectly fit but then everything else it always is a good practice you know I suppose like he's trying to talk about something about the nature of reality he's trying to say this is how it is not like uh the secret or something right no I just have like positive thoughts about like getting like a new Mercedes-Benz I'll get a new Mercedes Benz he's not saying that no no but but I mean it's in the nature it's in the nature it's in the nature of being yeah like your own because our minds are processing and generating constantly constantly constantly but if you are transforming them right you're in the transformation body towards the positive yeah then that is going to then trickle back down on yourself right in your own mind in your own actions in your own um and who you are as a being yeah create who you are you're never eating who you are and then you will emanate that into the world yeah and that will be your actions of compassion love and wisdom correct as well he's trying to say will naturally happen as Don Juan would say you are the way you tell yourself you are yeah something like well that's that's what he's trying to get people to recognize he's trying to get people to recognize like okay we have this Transcendent part of Who We Are you know which is the like kind of the the true spiritual power source and you know how we're like entwined with all reality and all that stuff we have this part of ourselves and yet we also are creating these other parts too right which is probably the other part of the verse Shine the mirror right right but you shine the mirror with with the context of like oh yeah I had this Transcendent Blissful part of myself and yet I'm also working through in a very concrete way on the relative reality scale Ultimate Reality in this thing is I have this Transcendent part of myself right that's infused with reality overall but of course I can't deny the relative level I'm still like plonking or long within this universe as a relative being but like if I go through and I keep like start keep doing this very practical thing of like tweaking my mind and directing myself in these areas I will grow and transform in these positive ways and then the trippy part is that will also build up this symbolga part two because that will naturally create reward enjoyment and pleasure within me as I get myself going in that direction and all this stuff isn't like it's all entwined but it ends up creating like I don't know I don't think it's just the Power of Now no you're saying something deeper than that he's trying to say like this is how reality actually works right this is what I'm trying to tell you in this platform Sutra if you want to know how it works it works like this because a Transcendent Part of Yourself there's a relative Part of Yourself if you work on these relative parts of yourself you're going to build the transformation and subhogaya parts of yourself it's just going to happen naturally out of this process of recognizing these different aspects I know I hope it sounds practical to people what do you think does it sound practical or no I I mean we're talking about internal transformation which which is what we always talk about yeah so yeah if this is just built on it's a dip like we like everything gets always wrapped up perfectly in the end right that's how that's how this works and so that's how you know it's the end so we we talked about this from the very beginning of our conversation we talked about different Stakes different takes on reality right yeah different perspectives and the importance of having your own perspective and however you're going to cultivate that and so as we come into kind of like the end piece here what we have done is we've taken one perspective from um waning the sixth grade Master Great Master great Zen master sixth patriarch of Zen and taken his perspective on the three bodies or the three aspects and presented it in a way that is emblematic of what of the exact lesson that we were trying to hit from the very beginning well let me like okay so sometimes the words hit you as we're talking right so he's taking this tool of the three kayas right and you will look at this we go further and you certainly could talk about something external there's this Buddha that has this like karmic you know uh Cosmic reality and then he has all these different levels and so on right right right you could talk about it that way but Hui Nang is grabbing these tools and he's saying no I'm going to show you a different way of thinking about this that is inside of you you have this inner aspect of yourself it's not some external Buddha it's you you have this and then you have the ability then to work with the relative parts of your mind to transform them you can do that right and that's what we mean by narmada this Transcendent part of you that's what we mean by dharmakaya this part that you work on yourself and change yourself as you manifest in the world that's what we mean by environment and then the part that you'll feel the enjoyment and reward of your own pleasure and the helping of other people that's your symbolga Kai he's baited into something different he took that tool and he flipped it and he made it something for people to have inside themselves I think that's powerful to me oh yeah it makes any sense he's made it like a this is a therapeutic tool for you not something to look at outside of yourself this is a truth about your own nature your own reality and this is how you grab this truth and you start to run with it to change what you're doing I think that's what I'm trying to get across of this yeah yeah yeah thing he grabbed the tool and he used it in a different way he turned it in a different direction but what's interesting is that like he totally stole it from the other dude because this is totally about dusting off one's mirror but I think the point he's trying to make there is if you don't recognize the big part then the other sure doesn't right right the right guys you got to see that yeah it's how they call it holographic yeah I see that yeah you gotta see the big picture otherwise you're just scrubbing the tile right because the conventional truth remains limited without the relative or without the there's a kind of a sensory I think if I remember it correctly where there's like some guy and he's meditating you know and the master comes up and he starts scrubbing this tile you know and he says what are you doing well he said something I want to scrub this and make it into a diamond and the guy's like you can't scrub that and make it into a diamond and he's like yes that's exactly right you have to recognize that you have a diamond you know you can't sit there scrubbing a tile you know what I mean anyways I'm getting animated about this because the truth of this is getting like knock the microphone knock the headphones out no this is like this is something like I for me the part of this thing that really spoke to me and like kind of like into my side prep work for this was just the idea of like yeah he took this tool now that I see it you know for me it's something that has been around this for some decades now he took this tool and he flipped it and he made it something very personal for people right he took it from an external thing to something internal for each of us to work on in ourselves I think that's kind of a that's amazing no I agree yeah all right this was fun yeah this was the thing this is and I will say you know like conversations like this are you know are challenging and they should be even though even even though it's you know practical in a way right it doesn't mean that it's uh the conceptuality is like instantaneously absorbed upon hearing so so for you know for people who are you know for just our you know several hundred thousand listeners um it's okay if it doesn't make sense yet and it's okay if it seems rough you can go back and listen to it again right number one you can send us an email at gin and Tantra gmail.com number two certainly hit us up on on uh Instagram right at gin and Tantra or Facebook you could find me Daniel double acne Eric and Eric Baker there's a multitude of ways of getting a hold of us but these are very kind of like deep thoughts to wrestle with and to Eric's point you enjoy the way that that he wrestled with these things and took it and kind of like did a tantric thing you know and it Formed it you know and transformed it and made it something that is still Transcendent and yet utterly practical utterly on the ground like right right here right now not necessarily the power of now but you know but sort of empowering and now but maybe not like right not like no right but something like that but it makes it like not just you know quote unquote real but like tangible as in like you could do something about it with your next thought after you hear that you can change your next thought in me immediately and start to activate those things it doesn't require anything else and those are the kind of deep teachings that you say what earlier erase a million years of ignorance because now you know now you've heard it that's what he's trying to say yeah yes trying to say so it's it's lovely and it's nice to be able to to present this and so you know some of the terms that we use today we've used several times before right darmokaya and monicaiah symbol kakaya umata these terms that we've used before I always try to make sure that we we stop and touch on some of them but sometimes we're if we're in the flow you know uh for people who don't have the ground that we have but we've done multiple episodes on this previously so if there's any questions like part of a series talking about these ideas but you could too but people who are just tuning into this is their first one you're not lost you you know we're trying to give some background but again any specific questions always feel free to hit us up um you know and any points of clarification too like we're very happy to do clarification if clarification is needed from even one person because I promise if there's one person that has a question everybody has a similar question that's just the nature of how it goes you know so um yeah please or leave a comment in the YouTube channel whatever and you know get at us it's all good this is what we do it we enjoy doing it you know um the several million that we make off this podcast we donate immediately so yeah yeah so excellent yeah there we go Eric um like subscribe share all the usual all the usual things you know um I'm assuming people know to do that you know what I'm saying people keep saying it you know he's saying it over and over I'm tired of hearing it you know what I'm saying so that's because I mean like you're like me you still never do it so people right exactly so if you like us about this do something about it you could leave a review or you know how to share it whatever you know it's good it all helps it helps to show if not for you for us that's that's what I could say um Eric is part of your reward body and transformation you did something nice for us that's correct and and we do appreciate everybody who listens and Tunes in and all that kind of stuff we do we get feedback from all sorts of folks which is really wonderful usually in various means and roundabout ways but it's all good we definitely love it so thank you for tuning in Eric as always thank you for um for being a part you know uh and we I would like to thank a special thank you to all the beings who have uh brought this material forth and have kept it strong and so that we can be able to present it for those uh who have not heard it or who are hearing again for the thousandth time maybe the next time that we all hear it will be the last time that we ever need to yeah mm-hmm thanks for tuning in to Jin and Tantra peace