I'm Chol Sung,
A monk with the Five Mountain Zen Order,
And I wanted to talk today about ignorance.
Buddhism doesn't really have sins,
Not in,
Say,
The way the Abrahamic traditions do.
The root of all of our problems within Buddhism is ignorance.
But what is ignorance?
Now,
If we go from the Greek roots,
The gno is to know and the I in front of it means not knowing.
And if we think that ignorance is not knowing,
I think we're making a basic mistake.
I think that ignorance in Buddhism isn't not knowing,
It's thinking that you actually do know.
My father likes to say that there are two types of people in the world,
Those who divide the world into two types of things and those who don't.
And most of us are in the first group.
The minute we label something,
We think we know something about it and we stop paying attention to it.
It's also often said that within Buddhism,
The core basic ignorance is the splitting of the self from other.
That's what we're ignorant of.
We're ignorant that we're not really separate.
And so we see ourselves as apart from everything rather than among everything,
Which is actually much more the truth.
And so the minute we see something and we think we know something about it,
We see a person,
We think we know them because we saw them yesterday or because of the color of their skin or we know something about the religion.
The minute we make that assumption,
We make them other than us.
And the minute we other them,
We think we know something and we stop paying attention at that point.
Back in China,
It used to be the case that monks would travel from temple to temple and train at one for a while,
Maybe a year or so,
And then they'd travel to another one to train somewhere else.
And so there's a classic story about the monk,
Fa Yang,
And he had been traveling and he was staying at a temple where the abbot was Dijong.
And after some amount of time,
He decided it was time to move on.
And Abbot Dijong met him at the gates of the temple and asked him,
Where is he going?
And Fa Yang said,
I don't know.
And Dijong said,
Not knowing is most intimate.
Not knowing is most intimate.
When you're driving and you think maybe you see something up ahead,
You look really carefully.
When something catches the attention out of the corner of your eye,
You turn and you look at it more carefully.
When we don't know something,
We pay better attention.
So the basic ignorance,
Within Buddhism at least,
Is thinking we know.
And once we think we know something,
We usually give some amount of prejudice towards our views.
We start thinking not only do we know it,
But that we're right.
The problem is,
The world is divided into people who think they're right.
So the basic sin,
If you want to use that word,
In Buddhism,
Is ignorance.
But ignorance isn't not knowing.
It's thinking you know.
See if you can try to keep a don't know mind going throughout your day.
What is this?
Don't know.
What is this?
Don't know.
And that allows you to open up that space for intimacy between yourself and others and recognize that you truly are among rather than apart.
Thank you.
