Diamond clarity is our natural state of being.
The Diamond Sutra explains how a clear and strong consciousness cuts through foggy or disillusioned mind states to reveal wisdom and ultimate truth. In this talk, Doug Sensei uses the metaphor of clothing to explain how conditioning and previous karma cover up the diamond clarity of our natural state of being.
The Diamond Sutra is also the focus of the first Planet Dharma online course of 2020, Diamond Realization: Clarity in an Unclear World. Taking place over 4 weeks in January, this course can be joined live or via recordings during that time. There are also optional Master Classes and an at-home weekend-long retreat available for a more immersive experience. You can learn more here.
In 2020, Planet Dharma will be holding 4 online courses over the course of the year, along with various in-person retreats and public teachings. To learn more about these events, visit our Year of Meditation: 2020 Schedule page.
Podcast Transcription:
Welcome to Dharma If You Dare. Today’s recording comes from a recent talk given by Doug Duncan on the Diamond Sutra. The Diamond Sutra explains how a clear and strong consciousness cuts through foggy or disillusioned mind states to reveal wisdom and ultimate truth. In this talk, Doug Sensei uses the metaphor of clothing to explain how conditioning and previous karma cover up the diamond clarity of our natural state of being. The Diamond Sutra is also the focus of the first Planet Dharma online course of 2020. Taking place over four weeks in January, this course can be joined live or via recordings during that time. There are also optional master classes and then at-home, weekend-long retreats available for a more immersive experience. You can learn more here.
And now here’s today’s recording:
Qapel: Now the Diamond Sutra: as you probably all know, nothing cuts the diamond but another diamond. And the diamond that’s being used here to cut is to cut through the illusions of the ego, the illusions of the conditioned programming. So the Diamond Sutra is about cutting through illusions, and in order to be able to do that you need to be very generous and you need to be interested. So one of the big words in the Diamond Sutra is charity, practicing charity. But it follows on the first point which is the understanding of the view. So let’s go to the view first, the illusion, the illusion of the ego identity, and then we’ll return to charity, which is how you put it into practice.
So, I like metaphors, and the reason I like metaphors is that they’re easy to understand and they’re fairly easy to explain. And if you get into trouble, you can say, ‘well it’s just a metaphor’, and drop it – which is exactly what I’m going to do at the end of this talk. I’m just going to drop the metaphor and whatever mistakes I’ve made or whatever trips I’ve fallen over in the process, then I can just walk out of the metaphor and leave it at that.
So the metaphor is that you’re born naked, but not quite. You’re born with a bathing suit on, because the bathing suit is previous karma; it’s the karma you come in with from previous formations, through your tribe, your biogenealogy, previous experiences you might have had in other lifetimes or bardos, and so on. So you’re born naked, but you’re born with the bathing suit on as well. And this bathing suit then is kind of the karmic propensity. Now you’re born into a family and immediately as that happens, clothes start getting put on. Obviously, the big ones are social-cultural conditioning and religion and gender identification, and all the values and the modalities by which your family and culture interact in the world. But those are kind of the outer clothes, the parkas and the jackets and the boots and the hats – the inner clothes are things like subtle reaction patterns to your parents and how they responded and interacted with you from their conditioning.
So as a child, you’re not seeing your naked parent, you’re seeing a parent with clothes on. And so what you learn to do as a very small child as you learn to wear the same clothes or similar clothes as they do. And when you get to be two, and you start to understand that you’ve got clothes on and your parents have clothes on – well, you may not completely understand you have clothes on, but you know something’s wrong, and that’s called the terrible twos. And that’s when you start saying, “No, mommy, I don’t like that clothing you’re wearing, Daddy, I don’t like that clothing you’re wearing. I like my clothing better!” except you’re just learning to say my clothing. So before you know it, you’re two years old and by the time you’re five you’ve got a whole lot of clothing on you don’t even know you’re wearing.
And so from 5 to 55 to 85 to 105, all the world that you’re involved in and everything you’re busy with is about the clothes, but there’s something not right with these clothes – they’re too frickin’ hot or they’re too uncomfortable or you don’t like their style. So you’re gonna change your clothes, you’re not gonna be this kind of prairie guy in blue jeans and a T-shirt. No, I’m rebelling. I’m gonna become my own person and I’m gonna put on a fedora and straight pants and a top hat and a cane, I’m gonna be a new me. Well as you probably follow this, the thing is, they’re just different kinds of clothes. Well in our day-to-day lives we’re busy, busy, busy, busy and it’s clothes, clothes, clothes, it’s clothes all the way down.
So the Diamond Sutra comes along and says you’re wearing clothes and I go, ‘oh okay, I’m wearing clothes. So let me see what you’re saying is Buddha is changing from my jeans and T-shirt to a white robe’ and we go, “okay good, yes, put on a white robe. That’s good. It’s a change, it’s loosening the grass on the blue jeans and the T-shirts. ” But we’re also saying “no, it’s still a white robe.” You ‘go it’s still a white robe,’ right okay? So now as we start to attack, metaphorically speaking, the ignorance that’s contained in the conditioning – because understand we’re not after the ego at all. The ego is just that which identifies with the clothing. it thinks it’s the clothing, it identifies with the clothing, it relates to the clothing, and so on and so on and so on. So you need to take some reflective time. You can do some therapy to change up the clothes, or you can do some meditation to start to see how the clothes that you’re wearing are determining everything that’s going on in terms of your reactions and so on. So as you do some more practice, either karma yoga or meditation or serve your community karma yoga etcetera, right? – you start to see how the clothes are causing your difficulties and problems and you’re starting to get a view that the clothes are what we’re talking about, not the thing underneath, which as you remember is the baby – now the adult – with the bathing suit on. So now we get down to the bathing suit, we go, ‘okay, this is what the awakening is. It’s a bathing suit, it’s empty, it’s compassion, it’s the paramis, it’s merit.’
And we go, “yes, yes, it’s very good, very good, excellent, wonderful, Well done. Yes, But you still have a bathing suit on. That’s the karma that you’re bringing in from all those previous lifetimes, your biogenealogy and so on. So when you finally see what it is to be naked, you go, “oh, this is where I’m actually in my natural being-ness”. But here’s the trick. The natural being-ness has no characteristics, it has no agenda, it has no purpose. It’s not going anywhere, it doesn’t have any plans. It doesn’t have a job, it doesn’t have a career, it doesn’t have relationships, it doesn’t have anything. But it’s not nothing, it’s not a negation. It’s just not any kind of clothing. So you say, well, what’s that got to do with the world I live in and we go “absolutely nothing.” It has nothing to do with the world you’re living in because you’re living in the world of clothes and bathing suits. However, you can never find peace of mind in the clothing, or the bathing suit, because the only place where peace of mind inherently exists is in the nakedness. So you go back out of the world and now you go, “okay, this is the bathing suit level. This is where I fall into a kind of almost unconscious knee-jerk reaction to my conditioning. And this is where – like the clothing – this is where I have my whole identity built.”
A diamond. Now, as you know, diamonds are a girl’s best friend. It’s a sign of engagement, commitment, marriage, the diamond quality of our love. But as you also know, diamonds have flaws and many diamonds have flaws. So the thing about the diamond of the first water is if you take the diamond of the first water, which means that absolutely pure diamond, and you put it in a glass of water, it disappears. This is the Diamond Sutra. The diamond is your ego and the glass of water is life. So if you are in a pure state, naked, then you’re the diamond of the first water. You’re invisible to life, the water, from the point of view of being seen. But within your own essence of your core, the own essence core – the diamond’s still there. So the ego does not get destroyed with transcendence, it just becomes unified, or one with the matrix of the totality of the nakedness. Now, what happens is, if you get the diamond with impurities in it, then that’s like clothing, that’s like the bathing suit or that’s like more clothes on top of that and now you can see it and you pick it up. So if you happen to be another diamond in the glass with flaws – you know, impurities – and you’re a diamond in the water with impurities, then you’re going to be talking to each other about impurities all the time. “Oh, you’re too yellow, you’re too red, you’re too blue, you’re too green. What do you mean I can’t be yellow?” and on it goes. But insofar as the diamond Sutra cuts through illusions, what it’s cutting through are the so-called flaws or the so-called impurities which aren’t inherently impurities; they are merely ignorance about the nature of the clothing, the patterning, and the conditioning that we’re wearing. And because our life is all about working in the world with other people who are also wearing clothes. We spend our entire time working with the clothes, we spend all our time and energy on the clothes, about the clothes, and with clothes and that’s what life is, life is clothing. So enjoy it, enjoy your clothes, enjoy other people’s clothes – and this is where generosity or charity comes in. If I have an understanding of the nakedness of my being, then when I meet somebody else with different clothes or clothes that I don’t particularly like – which is a condition – then I will be seeing their nakedness, I won’t be seeing their clothing. I will be relating to their clothing because clothing relates to clothing. That’s life. But at the heart or the core of my being, I will be seeing naked to naked, I’ll be seeing empty to empty. So when we talk about generosity, the generosity is not just supporting somebody else’s attempt to see through their clothing – now we’re not changing the clothing necessarily – being able to see through their own clothing to their own nakedness. So this is what it means when we talk about self-realization. I can’t, say, show Cara her nakedness particularly. I can reflect my nakedness, insofar as I see it, to her, but she has to see through her clothing, in the interaction of my interaction with her, from my clothing. And if I’m sitting in nakedness in my understanding, she’ll pick that up at some level and that’s the role of the teacher to mirror back one’s own nakedness or emptiness through dialogues about clothing. and where the ego, in this case, say Cara or me, but whoever – where the ego hangs on is where it’s really, really hardest to see the nakedness. So in the Diamond Sutra, the Buddha talks about no characteristics, there are no characteristics to the awakened mind. This is the nakedness bit. In other words, we define characteristics from the point of view of clothing. So whenever we start to try to define something, it’s a kind of clothing. We may get down to the bathing suit level. That’s really good. But it’s still clothing. So when the Buddha says no Bodhisattva is a Bodhisattva who calls himself a Bodhisattva, or when we say there are no characteristics or its no-thing-ness or there’s no inherent identity, that’s what’s being referred to.
Now as adults, we think we’re adults, we think we’re mature and we’re not children anymore. But if you watch two children fighting over a toy, the mother will kind of go, “oh, what are they going on about? Why do these two kids have to fight over this toy or argue about the toy or get upset about the toy? Why are they going on about these toys?” And in fact, the Buddha taught quite a long discourse on that called the Burning House sermon. I think it’s called the Fire Sermon that basically adults including us – right, that’s all of us – are arguing and debating and wrangling and wrestling and grabbing and pushing and trying to hang on and hold and cling to these toys or from the previous metaphor, to the clothing. So in the same way that a mother looks at the argument between two children over clothing, right, the awakened mind goes, what are these egos going on about? And we use the arguments and debates about the toys or the clothing to try and help you see through it, to the nakedness that is inherently the essence of your core. So these are ways, different metaphors, the clothing, the toys, showering with your clothes on, where, you know, your naked mind would be the awakened mind and showering with your clothes on iIs your fear of being seen or if you’re being naked and the petty grievances that all go around are all about clothing, and the clinging.
So the question really becomes one of surrender. Now, as some of you know, Islam means to surrender to let go and to let go, you have to stop spending all your time and all your energy on the clothes, and start seeing behind the clothes to the nakedness of the mind itself, which doesn’t have characteristics and so on. And in the process of doing that, you can’t do it all at once. You’ve got to do it kind of a bit at a time. So you first, you start with all these heavy clothes on. You sit in meditation at busy, busy, busy, you get a little glimpse of the sweater coming off, where you get to get a little glimpse of the pants-dropping off and you go, “oh this is amazing, this feels so much lighter”. And you keep meditating, you keep meditating and now you get down to the bathing suit and then you go, “oh I’m almost naked” everybody, especially if you’re a Canadian in Hawaii or Florida in January, that you see the Americans that they are all being naked almost all year long and they’re like comfortable naked or in their bathing suits, Canadians are taken off their parkas, they’re going, “I’m naked, right?”
So it’s a little disturbing or a little disrupting when we start to not – we’re not getting rid of the clothes, you understand – we’re just setting them aside metaphorically in our mind to see the bathing suit. So this is kind of a halfway house. From the point of view of Vajrayana Buddhism, the clothing is the Nirmanakaya, It’s the body of form, it’s the life in the world. And the Sambogakaya is the bathing suit, it’s the radiant energy levels, It’s more the subtle patterning of the conditioning and then the nakedness is the Dharmakaya. So when you’re surrendering, you’re not surrendering your ego like ‘somebody else is going to be my boss or somebody else is in control or somebody else is in charge.’ What you’re doing is surrendering the fight about that based on clinging and attachment.
Now of course, if you can’t do that, like if you just surrender but don’t really surrender, then you need to go to therapy to learn how to fight, because you can’t get out of your clothing if you’re feeling weak like “okay I give up but I get my parka on. I’ve given up, I surrender.” You can’t get your parka off that way. You need to be strong. So first we strengthen the will. So you feel oh this parka is really frickin’ heavy, I’m taking it off. And so that’s the process
We said at the beginning that dana is about charity or that one of the main verses in the text is about charity and that’s usually translated as dana, but it’s also from caritas, meaning heart or love or compassion. Like one of the forms of love is caritas, charity, heart, love.
And so another word for charity or Dana is interest, investigation. So this is considered one of the most important parami – remember because your interest is what takes you through to the skin. If you don’t have any interest in seeing the nature of clothes, but just want to keep changing your wardrobe, then, that’s your life, you’ll be changing your wardrobe and your costume and who you’re with and who you’re not with and who you’re married to and who you’re not married to and what you do for a living and what you don’t do for a living and you grow old and die and when you die, you’re gonna freak out because you think what’s dying is the clothes. Well, the clothes do die. When you die, the clothes die – not only – but the bathing suit and the nakedness don’t necessarily die.
If you manage in your life to get through the illusion of the inherent identity of the clothes, then you’ll be left with the bathing suit, the nakedness, and the bathing suit, and the bathing suit is karmic propulsion. Now, once you get the clothes off, it’s real easy to take the bathing suit on or off according to your needs. So the bathing suit is a very thin layer of obscuration, can be very stubborn but it is very thin, which means once you get the big clothes off, usually the bathing suit part is a little easier. And in order to do this, you need interest. You have to be interested in it. If you’re more interested in what’s on Netflix than you are about, what it is to be naked or what it is to be in your bathing suit, you’re never gonna get there and thus your struggle, like I said, will be about clothing and the things you get into trouble with will be about clothing.
The Diamond Sutra is there to say “cut, cut, cut, get to the nakedness, cut, cut, cut, get to the nakedness.” And the number one way to do that is it has no characteristics, there are no labels you can put on it. It’s a practice of engagement and interest and generosity and the other parami that follow like patience and morality – morality here simply means being cool or being even-handed in the face of the clothing. so you don’t get all confused. Concentration comes with interest. Energy comes with interest. And when those things start to pour, wisdom is the natural result. Prajna MahaPrajna Paramita Sutra, at which the diamond Sutra is kind of a core little text on cutting through illusions in the middle.
Cara: Question: can you please say more about what is happening and why it is that we cling to certain items of clothing so intensely?
Qapel: Because you’re surrounded by people who are also intensely clinging to their clothing and in order to fit in and not feel (like a) weird, abandoned alien other, you just try to find the right clothes in order for it to work in given situations.
So the dialogue about clothing and the dialogue about fitting in, the dialogue of having, for instance, a partner which is really just a distraction from being naked because naked can be scary if your whole life is nothing but clothes, naked can be very scary as Cara said earlier she thought she would be annihilated if she got naked And I tried to convince her that in fact, ego’s job doesn’t change, it’s still there, but that the annihilation is only from the view, it’s not from the core or the essence, or the ego’s ability to function – but we are conditioned and programmed to think of the ego as its clothing. So taking it off is very scary and you don’t take it off anyway, you only take it off metaphorically to see because when you’re in the world you’ve always got clothing on. So it’s not like you’re going around naked, It’s your understanding is naked, your understanding is the bathing suit and you interact with the world from the point of view of clothing, but the key is, is you know your core or essence is the nakedness and you don’t forget that – ever – when you’re involved with clothing and if you do, you will have compassion, you will have interest you’ll have engagement, you’ll be able to wear any kind of clothing you want and you will help other people not be confused by the pain and sorrows of their clothing clinging. It’s just programming. It’s like you’re a North American, Canadian female of a certain age and a certain gender and certain culture at a certain time in history. And so I need to have my cell phone. When I grew up there were no cell phones.
So we didn’t cling to them. We didn’t cling to our cell phones because we didn’t have them. So if you take away the cell phone, a lot of people freak out. So why certain ones? That’s karma that has something to do with what you came into what you came in with the bathing suit bit, a little bit in there to the biogenealogy, the family history, and your desire not to see. Now the ego doesn’t want to see because the ego thinks that’s gonna disappear in that glass of water. But once the ego recognizes that nothing happened to the ego in that pure glass of water, pure diamond, no flaws. Then clothing is just fun. It’s entertainment. It’s theater, it’s not identity.
It’s hard to remember that when you’re up to your neck and alligators, your original intention was to drain the swamp. So when you’re doing something like walking in nature, meditating, or doing yoga, a lot of the clothing has been, you’re down to your underwear. You’ve taken off all the business of life. So that’s cool, That’s great, that’s wonderful. But you can’t live on a yoga mat and most people can’t live walking around in nature, just the nature of life is complicated and engaged and involved and worthy of exploration and interest, by the way. So you go out into the world and get busy and you learn how to maintain that – at least the bathing suit level – you learn how to maintain the bathing suit level when you go about your business, and in order to do that, it’s an act of will, it’s an active decision. Karma is will, karma is decision So we’re back again to that Interest that dana, are you interested enough in what it’s like to live naked or at least with a bathing suit or naked or you know both, or are you more interested in what’s happening in the clothing world? Are you more interested in what’s happening in the fashion world than you are in the fact that your fashions are gonna be gone? Imagine walking around in a 17th-century costume. Actually it would be kind of fun, but you wouldn’t get along very well with your banker, probably, or your accountant.
Cara: How do I maintain equanimity in the face of passion. How does one not have joy and grief? This is when my emotions get out of control?
Qapel: Because your identification is with the clothing, Your passion, your energy, and your grief and your joy are all identified with the clothing. If you’re naked, you have way more passion than you’re ever gonna have with clothing on, I guarantee you, and if you’re naked with a bathing suit on, you’re gonna have way more passion and way more joy and experience grief much more powerfully than you ever will with the clothes on because your skin is more exposed. But because of the strength of the naked mind, the power of the awakened consciousness is that while it’s experienced more fully, you identify it with a less, it’s not your pain, it’s not your passion, it’s not your suffering, it’s not your attachment, it’s not your cleaning, it’s just life clinging and then you have much, much more freedom and you have peace. This is an important point. You have love and peace and generosity because there’s,,, why are we fighting or struggling over clothing? Because in 80 years, all that clothing is gone! The naked consciousness never dies and is never born. Remember, it has no characteristics, and the bathing suit will be the karmic propensity that carries that into the next formation. Hope that helps.
Cara: The comment you just made about interest is really helpful. I had always thought of interest as being towards a person or people you say it’s also towards choices, decisions, and karma, interest in the path, not in the world.
Qapel: It’s not not in the world, it’s just more in understanding how what I’m talking about, what the saints have been talking about for centuries. Everybody’s – all these people, the Buddha, Christ – everybody has been telling you the same thing forever. It’s not that you’re not supposed to be interested in the world. Give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. You’re just supposed to be way more interested in what I’m talking about. Where is the naked mind? How do I live in the naked mind? How do I remain in the naked mind? How do I move from the naked mind? Because that’s where the peace is, that’s where the compassion is. That’s where the love is. That’s where the wisdom is. And then go get dressed.
Cara: Would you say that the experience of consciousness as the diamond of the first water and having no characteristics at all – is that enlightenment? Is that awakening? (Qapel: Yes) So before enlightenment? we don’t really know what that means?
Qapel: Well we do! We do, we just ignore it. Remember your first sin? Really? Sin means to miss the mark is ignoring you want to ignore it because as you said earlier today it feels like if you meet it or face it, you’ll be annihilated, or abandoned or you’ll go crazy or you’ll do something – you’ll be bad because if society doesn’t hold me in its constraints, I’m going to go crazy and kill everybody! Well, the only person who ever wants to kill anybody is a person with clothing. A naked person has no motivation to kill or hurt, or harm in any way, because why? It’s about clothes. They come, they go!
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Today’s episode covers ideas that Doug Sensei and Catherine Pawasarat will explore in more detail in their upcoming online course, Diamond Realization: Clarity in an Unclear World. In 2020, Planet Dharma will be holding four online courses over the course of the year, along with various in-person retreats and public teachings. To learn more about these events, visit Planetdharma.com/2020. See you next time and may all our efforts benefit all beings.
