I like being back here in Munster in the midst of the train station. I don't know why I like it, but somehow sitting still with all these trains coming and going is a nice feeling. I mean, breath is something so familiar to us, obviously, that can we really spend two and a half days looking, studying, practicing with the breath? Maybe sitting still, the breath comes and goes on its own. tracks somewhat like trains.

[01:09]

Certainly if you've practiced meditation, you find that many things come and go on your breath. The breathing and the breathing is a friend in your body that you meet every time you practice sasin.

[02:33]

I think if we're gonna get on the track here, we're all gonna have to move forward here. Can you do that? You think you're some sort of insect, a toad? Well, this is much cozier. This is somewhere in between a train station and a sauna. There's something here between a station and a sauna. So do we have enough copies in English and German of the koan?

[04:31]

No. Do we have enough Christian for everybody? Okay. Well, those of you who have a book... Well, let's not pass them out just yet, but those of you who have the book... Maybe you just take it in German, but in general, I'd like you to have it in German and English. So I'm sure that most of you have not read the Koan. And I think although this koan is rather long and perhaps could be seen as complicated, I think actually at least aspects of it will be pretty useful in helping you study

[05:42]

Zen practice and yourself from the point of breath. And you'll see, I think it'll become very clear how central such a simple practice is as your breath. And how it reaches to every aspect of your life and to every aspect of Buddhism. I suppose we could say it's your most immediate experience of everything changing. And I'm not trying, don't want to try to teach you anything magical or special about the breath.

[06:58]

But just a way to, ways to become familiar with it. Right now of course we share a common sense of being human beings here in this room and we can all speak with each other and we can all see each other But also we're all breathing in some relationship to each other.

[07:58]

And we're all breathing in and out the same air. And there's a kind of consciousness that goes with this breathing in and out the same air A kind of consciousness that's not accessible to us for the most part because we usually dimension ourselves through a conceptual eye consciousness. So the first thing we could say is that breath is a kind of consciousness that is not the same as our usual conceptual consciousness. So to practice with your breath means to separate your breath, the sense of breathing from your usual consciousness.

[09:16]

And I often describe sitting still as being a means to break the adhesive connection between thought and action, between thought and physical action. In a somewhat similar way, while making a similar kind of image, your breath is sensitively connected, modulated by your emotions and thoughts. I would say that the volume of your breath and the pace of your breath,

[10:37]

And even a kind of freedom, a feeling of freedom on your breath is actually monitored and shaped by your emotions and thoughts. You seldom breathe on your own. Your breathing is keeping you alive but it's also supplying what's necessary to keep your thinking and emotions going. So when you get the habit of paying attention, giving attention to your breath, That very attention, strangely, breaks the link of breath and emotions and breath and thoughts. It's a little bit like there's an arrow or a direction of breath always going toward ballooning your thoughts and feelings and emotions.

[12:25]

And when you turn that arrow the other direction and look from your thoughts toward your breath, You begin to actually free your breath from thoughts and emotions. So already you can see we have a more subtle picture here of breathing than just something that we do all the time. I mean, this is going on all the time, but it takes meditation practice to notice it. And if I say even that your breath is your friend, already we've given breath a name, a new name, your friend.

[13:43]

And you've, in a way, by naming it, you've also freed it in a certain way. We've made it independent. Just as a friend is independent. Sometimes your friend is visiting you and sometimes not. Usually our breath is not a friend, it's a kind of slave. Or just something, someone hanging around that we hardly notice. So when you sit down to do zazen or to do meditation, you're greeting your breath as a friend. And often, you know how you, when a friend, maybe you're sort of slouching around the house and a friend comes to the door who you like to see and your body straightens up with a kind of pleasure.

[15:06]

You're sitting reading or having a cup of tea and a friend comes in and you straighten up to greet them. And there's a kind of, when you sit down to meditate, and you experience your breath as a friend within your body, there's a kind of natural or instinctive straightening up that your body does. Straightening up in a kind of pleasure of greeting a friend. And this straightening up and pleasure are two aspects of signs that you've begun to free your breath.

[16:16]

And breath is such an ephemeral thing. It comes and goes. And it has virtually no substance. And yet when you let this friend of your breath this acknowledging your Friend, straighten you up. That's straightening up when you begin to really follow that straightening up. Listening to that straightening up. Yeah, then you'll understand why in the koan it describes the backbone as, what does it say, Christian, an iron spine?

[17:25]

Yeah, your backbone feels like an iron spine supporting the sky. Now although I said I wasn't going to talk about anything magical, it's quite magical to go from something as ephemeral and flimsy as your breath to an iron spine that supports the sky. But this is what happens when you give yourself over to this straightening up, a kind of instinctive straightening up, recognizing not just your friendship with your breath, but your friendship with the world. The whole strength of your being can be in your breath and in your backbone.

[18:31]

And your backbone becomes alive in a new way when you begin to breathe in a way that joins your backbone and your breath. Mm. Mm. So your breath is a big space and a big freedom. Now I'm assuming that most of you have some experience with sitting.

[19:48]

So in this seminar, without any special instructions about sitting or questions about who can sit and who can't, I've just started us with a kind of feeling of sitting, although somewhat informal and unstructured. And I want the feeling of sitting to come into you through your breath, through your nostrils. And I don't care about at this point any special posture, but just the feeling of sitting coming in through your breath. As I've said, again, greeting an inner friend. Welcoming that friend. And even when you're not doing meditation but practicing mindfulness of the breath, again, you meet this inner friend.

[20:53]

Who's always with you. This friend is always ready to greet you or meet you or relax with you. But it's a little sensitive. Maybe it's sometimes like a genie in the bottle. You have to know how to rub the lamp the right way. Now, I can't guarantee you this genie, this breath genie will grant all your wishes, but it will grant some of your wishes. In fact, every time you breathe, you're gently rubbing this lamp. I don't think this image is familiar. It isn't, people.

[22:27]

You don't have the story of rubbing the lamp and a genie comes out, Aladdin and all that stuff? There's a Walt Disney movie about it now. Have you seen it? Maybe you could explain? Do you know this story with this bottle ghost where you have to rub a lamp so that the wishes are fulfilled? Well, I'm sorry, your childhood was so deprived. Is it in England, is Aladdin and the Lamb coming? I've never seen it. You've never seen it? Is it showing in Munster tonight? Shall we... I know this story for Stevenson with this devil in the bottle.

[23:34]

Is that related? It's the same kind of idea, yeah. Well, actually, the idea of genie and genius are connected, and it's connected with Daimon and Socrates' inner voice. It's actually an old theme. So actually the sense of genius implies that breath, spirit is a kind of your inner genius. Which is to find a freedom, a freedom that functions outside your personality and within your personality. And one of the gates to this is to find your breath functioning inside your thoughts and emotions and outside your thoughts and emotions.

[24:40]

And the purpose of sitting still in zazen is to begin to move into your breath outside of your thoughts and emotions. Not that being outside is... a better place to be in the sense that you'd want to be there all the time. It's not a way to, as I think I always have to point out, it's not a way to avoid your thoughts and emotions and working with your life in an ordinary way. It just gives you a sense of movement, as Suzuki Roshi says, a swinging door. Yes, on one side of the door you're in your ordinary life, on the other side of the door you are in a kind of timeless realm. Auf der einen Seite dieser Schwingtür ist man in seinem gewöhnlichen Leben und auf der anderen Seite in einer zeitlosen Zeit.

[26:03]

Your heartbeat and your breath are the most physical, are most directly physical experience of time. Euer Herzschlag und der Atem sind für euch die direkteste körperliche Erfahrung von Zeit. But this koan, the first lines of this koan in the, are about being outside of time in a timeless realm. So already we have this familiar breath becoming a genie which can bring us into a timeless realm. How can that be possible? Wie kann das möglich sein? Nun, ich glaube, ihr wisst schon wie. Aber mit diesem Koan und mit unserer gemeinsamen Zeit an diesem Wochenende können wir das erforschen. So first of all, you greet this inner friend, your breath.

[28:01]

And as you settle more into your breath and a little bit out of your thinking mind, You begin, as all of you know who meditate, you begin to hear sounds a little differently. The trains begin to more or less move through you. The trains begin to move through you. The sound of the tires and cars and so forth all begin to have a kind of intimacy. And voices and someone coughing. And voices and someone coughing. And those sounds are sounds that, if you're practicing, you don't hear so much as sounds out there, but rather air itself coming to you.

[29:19]

So you begin to feel that your breath is also the medium of sounds. So there's a certain vitality to the world, the movement of leaves, sounds, etc., which is again, the vitality of it is breath, is air. Yeah, and even the brightness of the world that your eyes see is also mediated in air. The sunlight makes its wonderful glow as it hits the air of the earth. So what I'm trying to suggest here is breaths not as the physical act of breathing in and out.

[30:31]

Or breath as something as ephemeral as air. But rather we're talking about here something, I mean, I'm trying to give you a feeling for breath, as you'll see in this koan too, as a kind of essential, substantial material. If you want to look at, if you want to take each of you as an individual and then the physical stuff of the world and then your mind and thoughts and so forth. And you wanted to find a metaphor for a quality that was essential to everything you see or name.

[31:58]

Or you wanted to find some quality of experience that's common to everything you see or name. Then breath is a pretty good metaphor and also an experience of something that is present with everything. So in this sense, breath becomes a kind of text of the world. Almost like an invisible scroll that moved through and touched everything. And in this koan, you'll see this Prajñātara and Xu Fang, is that his name, speaks about not reading the sutras, but reading the endless scroll of the breath.

[33:12]

But first you have to begin to feel your breath in your own body. In your lungs. In your throat, in your nostrils. And then as it gets more subtle as the sort of energy that pervades your body through your breath, through your breathing. So anyway, practice has to begin with just becoming familiar with your breath as you find it. Inside and outside. These sounds of the train are a form of air.

[34:58]

So in a way you could say your ears are breathing the sounds. Your eyes breathe the sights of the world in the light, in the air light. Can you translate something like that? Air light. And... And I can give you various of course traditional teachings about breathing as this koan also refers to the traditional teachings about breathing.

[36:07]

But I'd like us to start with your own immersion in the air. In the air of your senses. Of hearing and seeing and breathing. And that immersion, you know, as you practice mindfulness of the breath between now and tomorrow morning. And if you are sitting now and if you sit this evening for ten minutes or half an hour before you go to bed. And perhaps in the morning or in the morning. I'd like you to feel yourself immersed in your breath.

[37:17]

Immersed in the air. Creating this friend of the air, the air that appears as your breath, as your friend. And to greet this friend at least several times, maybe many times between now and tomorrow morning. Now that's one half of what I'd like you to do. Or one whole of what I'd like you to do. Another whole is I'd like you to help me make these traditional teachings ours together.

[38:25]

By very practical questions about breathing and breathing practice. And if you can feel the extensions of breath in the teaching itself, then, you know, some questions about that. Because really, if you practice thoroughly with your breath, you don't need any other practice. Breath is, in all practices, breath is home base. Do you have such a term as home base? Even though you don't play baseball? But in the more subtle practices when you begin to work with your personality or amplifying feelings, those still breath is your home base.

[40:05]

I think that's sufficient introduction to the materiality, essentialness, essential, sensuality of breath. Now, if some of you want some zazen instructions or something like that, you can individually ask Ulrike. Or Gural, who's sitting here, or Gisela, who's sitting behind Gural. You can ask Beate or David and have your own little private instruction. Or just a nice conversation. A conspiracy.

[41:30]

Conspiracy means in English to breathe together. A complice means to fold your legs together. So now if you want to straighten your legs or stretch for a minute, I'd like us to sit and then we'll end. Have a stretch and then sit comfortably.

[43:52]

And I'd like it if those people in the back can come a little toward the front so that I don't have to speak so loudly over the trains. And so I can feel you a little better too. And that I can feel you a little better. Thank you for starting, President. I get scared. Sorry. Are we ready?

[45:15]

Let's go. Does anyone have anything you'd like to bring up from last night? It's your turn.

[46:22]

I understand that breathing leads out of thought, identification of thought. but it seems breathing and what makes me very concerned about having my being and my attention so much in breathing is what happens in the situation of dying or when your breath becomes in any other situation really physical and controllable. Some time ago I had a physical breakdown and my breathing was going very heavy

[47:26]

I tried to calm myself by calming my breath. But it was really hard to do and in some way it seems to increase panic because I was more and more obsessed with this law function of my body. To train that identification with the breast in some way seemed to make me cling more to my body functions. And then the thought was coming, when I'm going to die now, what does it help me to, or where can I go or hold on? Yeah, it was like, where does the breath go when I die? No one knows.

[48:34]

Do you want to say that in Deutsch? I suppose I have to. Yes, actually I understand that the breathing takes you out of the thoughts, the identification with the mind, and into the breathing, into the mind. I don't know what happens to make the situation of death or breathing in another situation uncontrollable. Some time ago I experienced a situation in which I had a physical collapse. It was so that my breathing was very difficult and I tried to calm myself by breathing so calmly, but it didn't work. And this attention, concentration on the breath actually increased my panic because it increased my attention or obsession with my body and especially now in this case with my physical, my physical feb function.

[49:51]

At that moment I would have wished more to have something where I can get out of the breath, where I can, so to speak, release myself from the body, from this terrible panic and fear that I have. And I ask myself, what happens when we die? Where does the breath go? Or is it useful to learn so much to put yourself in the breath, when the breath is gone one day? What's the point in living? Especially, what's the point in loving? It wasn't meant so funny. I mean, the most serious things are the funniest.

[50:59]

Of course, I didn't want to question the words of breathing and living, because that would be too mean to say what is the word living anyway. But the problem for me is kind of the real situation when this physical panic comes, what does breathing help then? It's an actual thing which is coming up to everybody. My understanding. Well, to answer this question, we'll take at least the rest of the seminar. If it can be answered. I'd like to use the question to say some practical things about breath and then go into the koan. Now someone else asked me also about the relationship between breath and fear. I would like to add a question.

[52:17]

What relationship is between breath and bliss? Anything else? When I start to concentrate on my breath, I feel I get tight and breath becomes very difficult breathing. When I start to concentrate on my breath, I get very tight or rather cramped and the breathing becomes very difficult, much more difficult than before. Do you mean to concentrate on the breath, to control it? I don't think so. To concentrate is not the same as to control the breath.

[53:18]

Yeah. Okay. Did I understand it in English, Ulrike? Yeah. You said it. Okay. Anything else? Yes. I give up. This is too much for me. I don't, you know, usually, and it's often happened at Munster for some reason, I... start opening up something, teaching something, and then I get really want to finish it by Sunday afternoon. And by Sunday morning you are all feeling like a large bucket of undigested teachings have been poured over you.

[54:22]

And by Sunday morning you are all feeling like a large bucket of undigested teachings have been poured over you. So by giving you this text I feel like I free myself from that a bit. Because I can introduce this and then if you want to continue you have the text to sort of like lead you. Now, I can't speak, of course, to your particular situation, Martin. Maybe if I'd been there with you, you know, but I wasn't, so... But in general... I salute as the trains go by.

[55:37]

In general, it's considered, and that's also my experience, that in psychological situations of psychological stress and anxiety, and in situations of mental confusion, the best anchor is the body. And the body. And the best way to anchor yourself in your body is through the breath. And through practices of direct perception.

[57:05]

Now, your breath is, as I said last night, very connected with, in fact, for the most part, shaped by your emotions and thoughts. And I think the first practice with breathing, it's fine that it's counting, but it should be more basically just taking an inventory of the different kinds of breathing that come up depending on your state of mind, so forth. Until you really see and become sensitive to, familiar with how your breath is so responsive. Now, when you first pay attention to your breath and even your heartbeat, you start noticing your body just that it's there and it's, you know, like going along, you hope.

[58:37]

It's often very anxious making. Because when you become aware of your body, just as you said, you become aware that it's going to stop. And you feel fooled. Because all this time you thought your body was telling you it was permanent. So it's actually rather scary to really notice your breath and your heartbeat. Mm-hmm. So my guess would be that when you went through this crisis, personal crisis, my guess would be actually being able to some extent anchor yourself in your breath was helpful.

[59:48]

But I'd say two things. One is, you haven't developed the practice enough, I would guess, that actually your breathing was independent of your emotions and feelings. And so you had that fear of noticing your breath and heartbeat and body, and that fear interfered with the anchoring process. Because the very anchoring process made you aware of the fact that you're going to stop. So that... Wonderful.

[61:11]

This is the best place to do seminars because I get to pause for the translation, I get to pause for the trains. I only have to teach a third as much. And then also one of the things that one develops in practice is in the easiest of the three levels of suffering to get rid of is the fear of fear, the suffering of suffering. And until you get free of the angst of the angst, it can balloon into enormous proportions. So you have a clear, this incident was a teaching for you. To show that your breath practice is not developed enough yet.

[62:40]

And you haven't freed yourself yet from the first of the three sufferings. Okay. Now I'd like to say something in general about the real basics of teaching or the framework of teaching itself. And I'd like to say this just because it's, I think, useful, of course. And also because it is one of the main subjects of this koan.

[63:41]

This koan talks about... reading the sutra of your breath. You all know the word sutra? It comes from an English suture. I mean, to sew or to stitch something together. It comes from the English word, or the word in English is nähen, something to flip together. Now for those of you not familiar with the Book of Serenity, let me put it another way.

[64:48]

What I want to say is not dependent on being familiar with the Book of Serenity because it's a kind of general example. Okay. But the first koan in the Book of Serenity, Mr. Hu, the world-honored one, gets up and Manjushri says, this is the dharma of the Buddha or the world-honored one, and then he gets down and he doesn't say anything. So the basic teaching of this koan is that emptiness itself, the Buddha doesn't say anything. He gets up and gets down. So this is a teaching of emptiness. But he also gets up and he gets down. So this is the teaching that you have to do something.

[65:51]

You have to open the book. You have to open the book. Yeah, you have to sit down and do zazen. Yeah. So this koan opens the book. It's the first one in the book. Okay, and the second koan, bodhidharma, the... Patriarch, the ancestor who brought, our ancestor, who brought in the practice, who brought the Indian person, who brought Buddhism to China. He actually spoke to the emperor. The emperor says, what is all this stuff, holiness, merit and all that?

[67:06]

And Bodhidharma says, emptiness, no holiness. So he's teaching emptiness, but he's speaking. He didn't get down, at least he said something. And then the emperor says, well, who the hell are you anyway? Bodhidharma says, I don't know. It's either a safe or dangerous answer, depending on the emperor. So in this second koan, there's the teaching of... Emptiness by the language itself is the language of emptiness and the actions are the actions of emptiness.

[68:11]

Okay. So we can say the first koan is the presentation of the Dharmakaya Buddha. Now, you don't have to learn these terms for those of you who are unfamiliar with, but it's really fairly simple. The Dharmakaya Buddha means the Buddha who is the vehicle of the Dharma, but it specifically means the Buddha as space or as emptiness. Okay. And the second koan is the working of a person in the world working through emptiness, which is called the Nirmanakaya Buddha. Und im zweiten Koan geht es darum, dass jetzt eine Person in der Welt arbeitet durch die Leerheit oder mithilfe der Leerheit.

[69:22]

Und das ist der Name Nirmanakaya Buddha. So, or Nirmanakaya body, the body realized in emptiness that acts in the world. Oder der Nirmanakaya Körper, das ist der Körper, der jetzt durch Leerheit verwirklicht ist und in der Welt handelt. So, the second koan presents the second aspect of Buddhism. Of the Buddha, the Nirmanakaya body. Okay. So, what have we got here? We start out with, well, first we got a book, right? And we've opened it. You get down to basics here. We open it. And you're studying the Buddhism. And the first koan presents the Buddha as undifferentiated. And the second koan divides the body of the Buddha into two parts. The Dharmakaya and the Nirmanakaya. And the early teachings of Buddhism, there were, after the historical Buddha, then there was the teaching of the Buddha with two parts, emptiness part and form part.

[70:50]

Or life and the human being seen from the point of view of emptiness and life and the human being seen from the point of form. Or life and you, yourself, seen from an undivided mind or seen from a divided mind? All right. Now, already this is a teaching and a challenge. Can you experience an undivided mind? Or can you perceive an undivided world? Or do you even believe, or what kind of act of faith is necessary to intimate that the world or the mind might be possible to realize as undivided? So you, of course, cannot know this fully until you've realized it.

[72:04]

So until you've realized it, there's a large dimension of faith required. So here you see the first sense of it. Very simple what we've done. We've gone from one to two. But it requires, this is also a teaching, but it's a teaching that requires faith. Faith and practice. Okay. Okay, now the third koan, the one we're looking at together, presents the Sambhogakaya body. Nun, das dritte Korn, das wir uns gemeinsam jetzt anschauen werden, stellt den Sambhogakaya Buddha vor.

[73:19]

In this Korn we divide the Buddha's body into three parts. Und in diesem Korn wird jetzt Buddha's Körper in drei Teile aufgeteilt. Or a way to look at yourself in life into three instead of two. Eine Art, wie man jetzt sein Leben und sich selbst betrachtet, indem man es jetzt unter drei Aspekten sieht, statt zwei. Mm-hmm. So you have the body as space or undivided. And then you have, that's the Dharmakaya, then you have the Sambhogakaya, which is the body as bliss. Or the body as an interior and exterior craft. of differentiated consciousness. And what does this koan tell us? The access to this differentiated consciousness is the breath. The breath is a gate.

[74:44]

And the breath is also a subtle body trainer. Or a metaphor for the subtle body. But it's more than a metaphor. It's actually a kind of subtle body trainer. When I was a kid, there used to be things called link trainers. Yeah, L-I-N-K, I think. And I believe a man named Link developed this little airplane that sat on the ground that you played, flew, it kind of flew, and you learned how to fly by sitting in this link trainer. Now I think they do it by simulation through computers and all, but it's the same idea. So here the breath is a trainer that links you to the subtle body. Now, here you see a basic teaching again.

[76:11]

Now, let me say, you can go from, you can take an egg, you know, in the womb. And it divides in half and so forth, right? But once it divides, it can't go back to zero again. So how you divide it is extremely important. So you can go from zero to, say, three divisions. Then you can merge those and go back to sort of zero. But it won't be the same zero you started with.

[77:15]

So it'll be like if we made it, if I had a flip chart here, which I couldn't carry in the car this trip. I could draw a zero. And I could divide it into A, B, and C. And then I could draw another zero, and I could divide it into 1, 2, and 3. Okay. And then on the next side, when you merge them, you're going to have zero, A, B, and C. Then you're going to have A, B, and C equals zero. And down below, you're going to have 1, 2, 3 equals zero. And 123 equals 0 is different than ABC equals 0. Do you understand that basic idea? I mean, it's very simple, but it's extremely important. For instance, If Freud had followed that, he wouldn't have divided the consciousness and the mind into id, ego and superego.

[78:30]

Because id, ego and superego don't go back together very well. In fact, I think they're modeled on the Victorian family where the parents didn't get along. Anyway, so one of the teachings of Buddhism is you divide things in ways they can merge again, go back together. But still, they don't go back together the way they were originally. But at least they go back together. So the teaching of Buddhism in a sense is undifferentiated, differentiated, merging. Okay, so in this third koan we're practicing differentiation and merging. Is that fairly clear?

[79:44]

You know, you guys learned this in one minute. It took me 20 years. We should stop soon, huh? Oh. So maybe we should take a break. Is that all right, or would you rather go on a little bit? Okay, let's take a break, and then we'll come back and look more specifically at this undifferentiated breathing. Thanks.

[80:26]

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