Currently I’m studying Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones with a Dharma friend, the Venerable Tashi Nyima.

This is my contemplation on the last two lines of verse 14 of the root text of Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones.

“All talk is like an echo,” said the Buddhas,

But these days it’s more like the re-echo of an echo.

What the echoes say and what they mean are not the same,

So don’t take any notice of these insidious echo-words.”

       Explain to someone else (making it my own)

The heart sutra reminds us of the nature of samsaric existence, “All phenomena are merely empty…”. Sometimes I ask myself how that can possibly be true. Right now, I’m holding a pen. I’m sitting on a chair. My notebook’s on a table. I’m putting words on paper. None of it feels empty. And it certainly doesn’t feel like an echo of anything. It feels like the thing itself.

But if you stop to think about it, a ‘pen’ is really just a conglomeration of atoms and molecules with mostly empty space between them. That’s true of my hand, the notebook, the table, my chair, even the floor that seems to be supporting me. Looked at this way, it means ‘pen’ is actually a thought about a chaotic arrangement of molecules and atoms barely held together by very strong bonds.

All right then. So, thoughts must be real, right? No. Meditation has taught me that thoughts are perhaps the most ephemeral, the most empty of our samsaric experience. If our thoughts are merely imputing meaning, and they reference unknown objects, then what is it in our samsaric experience that is not an echo? Nothing.

Samsara depends on talk—either our thoughts or our speech—to exist. And “all talk is like an echo”. It’s the nature of echoes to distort the source that gave rise to them. If we go about in the samsaric world never realizing that all we experience is a distorted echo of the reality of emptiness, we will impute reality to the echoes. We will believe, as we are constantly told, that if we just look hard enough, permanent happiness can be found in samsara. The corollary of course is that if you can’t find it, then there’s something wrong with you. You’re to blame. We live caught in this blame and shame, and Madison Avenue is the pied piper whose melody leads only to despair and disillusion.

Apply to a past situation (how would it have been different?)

A few years ago, before I had a Kindle, I went to the annual Friends of the Library sale. This is where libraries donate books they no longer want on their shelves. It’s a massive room with table after table of books. The books were priced anywhere from twenty-five cents to two or three dollars. When I went, I sought out every book Stephen King had ever written. Even though I’d already read every single one of his books, I wanted them so I could read them again. I also picked up maybe a dozen books by writers I’d always wanted to read, but never had. I had so many books I needed the suitcase I’d brought to get them to my car. I’d gone prepared.

What I wasn’t prepared for was what happened once I got the books home. After spending hours combing through the tables for hardcover copies of Stephen King’s cannon, I stacked them against a wall of my living room in order by series, then time. Then I went about my life. I never read even a single one of the books I bought that day. In perhaps the ultimate irony, I ended up boxing them up and donating them to my local library.

Looking back on this, I can notice that when I went to the book sale, I was acting on an echo from my past. I was doing something “I’d always wanted to do” in the belief that it would bring me happiness. In retrospect, I can notice that Stephen King’s books had once been a source of temporary happiness in a very unhappy life. But once I was here in Texas, I was free to seek different ways to be happy, instead of relying on an echo of what had once brought very temporary release from suffering.

Having noticed that, I could have breathed, taken a step back, and taken a look at my motive for going to the book sale. I could have asked myself what I was setting out to accomplish by buying books I’d already read. The answer would have been that I had had so little freedom in my prior relationship that such a thing would have been unthinkable. Once I’d noticed this, I might have taken yet another step back and assessed my needs in my new life, and then turned my search for happiness in a direction that wasn’t a re-echo of my past.

Apply to an (ongoing) present situation (how does it matter today?)

The ongoing situation in my life right now continues to be Salem [a co-worker]. That’s becoming a really interesting place of learning the Dharma for me. These days, what once felt like a tornado of anger, resentment, and frustration has slowed down to a mild breeze with intermittent high gusts that can sometimes still knock me over.

I worked with that situation by purposely injecting the Dharma into my workday every day, on the hour. Every hour there’s a reminder that pops up on my computer that says ‘breathe’. Every time it comes up, I stop (even in if I’m typing and I’m in mid-word). I silently recite ‘om amideva rhi’ ten times, then shuffle through my Dharma Brigade stack of index cards and silently recite whatever lines of prayer come up. Then I go back to work. On my desk is a sign that says “Less Drama, More Dharma”, and a little yellow Post-It that says, “Give impermanence a chance to prove itself.” These signs are positioned in such a way that whenever I talk to Salem, they are within my peripheral vision.

I did all of this out of desperation. Honestly, I didn’t think it would work. What’s interesting is that the situation hasn’t changed at all. Salem is still Salem. She always will be.

What’s changed are the “insidious echo-words” of my thoughts. Doing this daily practice, on the spot, in the midst of the storm so to speak, has helped me to see that my thoughts were rampaging through my mind in a constant emotional hurricane. This was blinding me, deceiving me into believing I had to be a helpless victim to the constant repeating echoes. Now, the echoes still happen, but they’re quickly followed by a snippet of prayer. This has been tremendously powerful.

When the Dharma goes through my mind right on the heels of an echo-thought, it’s so easy to experience the distortion as exactly that—distortion, untruth. In contrast, the Dharma resonates in a way that is beyond language, beyond thought. It simply is. For that moment there is utter clarity and the echo simply dissolves. Of course, the echo-thoughts return, but they are easy to recognize for the distortions they are.

Apply to a potential situation (bringing it home to play)

I turn fifty next month. Yesterday in meditation the idea of a pilgrimage arose. It was very attractive. I feel somehow that this is the right time in my life to do that. Since both Mecca and Tibet (not to mention Jerusalem) are beyond my budget, I had to come up with something else. It had to be something I could do while living my ordinary life that would make me feel that I was taking a journey I’d never taken before.

The idea that I’ve come up with is what I now call The Pilgrimage of 62. It would be a commitment to meditate/pray twice a day for the 31 days of March and journal for ten minutes afterward.

Oh! The echoes that came with that. The insidious echo-words were flying. “I can’t do that!” “I NEVER meditate twice Saturdays.” “What if I start, get almost all the way through, then miss one day at the very end?” “What if I get laid off?” And the ultimate trump card, “What if I get sick and die?”

In meditation, I listened quietly to monkey-mind pinging thoughts around. I really noticed how much they sounded like echoes in a giant cave. After a few seconds (and a few hundred thoughts whizzing by), I noticed something. No matter what the actual ‘words’ of the thoughts were, they were all echoes arising from one afflicted emotion: fear. The thought underlying all the echo-words was: I’m afraid I can’t do this. And it’s so important to me.

It was interesting to notice how compelling each thought was, how convincing, how utterly persuasive. From this I learned that one way to read Dilgo Khentse when he says, “What the echoes say and what they mean are not the same…” is to realize that our echo-thoughts all arise from some deeply rooted karmic formation.

I wonder if all our ‘echoes’ rise from one inescapable fear, a fear which has become so covered over and so twisted that it’s a monstrous karmic formation, eons old: One day, I’m going to die.