Good day. I mean, guten tag. I always, I must confess, look forward to being able to spend time like this with you. Mm. And, um, Particularly since this will be or maybe, well, won't be, but it's close to being the last Sashin we'll do here. We agreed to do one more Sashin here next November, I believe. But probably we won't do, as long as Johanneshof works, we probably won't do sashins here other than that one.

[01:02]

And the reason is, you know, we can only do so many sashins, but also a practical reason. To do sashins here has been a slow development. We've had to get all the pots and pans for serving and the oyokis, and we bought a special extra refrigerator for them, things like that. Because we're the only group here that comes to Haus Destilla which does their own cooking and uses the kitchen. So now at the end of the Sashin we have to bring everything down to House de Stilla so we can do a Sashin there in end of November.

[02:19]

But also there's quite a lot of work to learn how to do a Sashin in this particular place. We, you know, Christian's been in training to be the Eno for quite a few Sashins. And now Mahakavi is training Daniela to do saschins here which won't occur here. As the tenzo because it also requires a special relationship with Angelica since we're using her kitchen. So I think if we only do sashimi once a year or something, just maintaining the knowledge of how to do sashimi independent of the pots and pans is difficult.

[03:29]

But I want to try to do something here, even if it's not a Sashin, once a year, just out of fondness for the place, and because this is northern Germany and so forth. So anyway, I like honoring this place, practicing here some more. And this funny altar, which one will never find anywhere else, I think. This pile of tables with a rather drunken-looking Buddha at the top.

[04:42]

Yeah. At least in a tranced-out space. Now maybe that's... Being here, while Ulrike yesterday said Rumi's caravan of love. Maybe it's because she's only going to be here one day that she can think of the Sashin in these terms. We may have a caravan of many things during the middle of Sashin. But hopefully at the end we get back on the love boat. Or the wisdom boat. There's an image in, I think, a Chinese image that life, existence is a boat on a sea of love.

[05:45]

a sea of love. And you really have to know how to sail carefully. Because if you don't go with the current, love turns into a lot of other things. But it's a wonderful image of life, a boat on a sea of currents of love. Now I would like to bring up some of the themes during Sashin that we discussed during the practice week.

[07:06]

And I'd like to discuss a aspect of practice unique to Zen called something like the critical point of potential. There was an early Buddhist term, something like corresponding to potential. And then in Tang and Sung dynasties, Matsu and the other classic Zen masters developed this sense of a critical point of potential to be the main teaching device. Maybe we could call it pivotal potential.

[08:24]

Sometimes it's characterized in koans as pearls rolling in a dish. You can't, you know, where is it exactly? It's rolling around in the dish. And sometimes its subtlety or difficulty is sometimes referred to as two arrow points meeting. So I think I should find, I'd like to find some way to talk about this with you. And I'd also naturally, perhaps naturally enough, like to study Sashin itself. Since that's also the point of Sashin.

[09:43]

The point of Sashin is to do Sashin, but it's also to study Sashin. Because this is right now our immediate situation. Now, When I come in in the morning and walk around, I'm doing three things. You know, I do, for those of you facing the wall, don't know what's going on, I do three bows at the altar. And then I walk around the room with my hands in gassho and greeting you. And it's the custom for you to put your hands up in gassho, not to bow, just to put your hands up in gassho as I, or whoever does it, walks by.

[11:11]

This session I'm walking around the other way. You can only circumambulate. like a clock, but then I have to go back. So anyway, I'm trying it this way this time. So one of the things I'm doing is I'm greeting you. Now, another thing I'm doing is I'm opening up the room. Rather in the spirit that if you wanted looking at a new apartment or a new house, you might walk around the rooms getting a feeling of the place. And you wouldn't want to decide to move into the place probably until you had a chance to walk around each room.

[12:15]

So there's that kind of feeling in this Buddhist culture that you open up a space by walking around it. And, you know, that will be mostly the ceremony at Johanneshof later this month. When is it? October 20th, we'll open up Yohanneshof for the Dharma Sangha. Let me say at this point that for some reason I like Yohanneshof and the area very much. And I have two little rooms up in the eaves and that's really, I feel totally at home.

[13:29]

And part of the reason is that I can make a clearer commitment to practicing here in Germany. More clearer and but fuller commitment. But also I feel that, at least I hope it does, allow you to make a fuller commitment to practice. Und dabei ist meine Hoffnung, dass das auch für euch zutrifft, dass ihr eine klarere und vollere Verpflichtung spüren könnt. So that's one of the reasons we're chanting mostly in German this session.

[14:34]

Das ist einer der Gründe, warum wir fast hauptsächlich jetzt in Deutsch rezitieren werden in diesem Session. Because now I don't feel like a visiting teacher from America. I feel like a German teacher incompetent in the language. Yeah, my competence is right here. Yeah. Okay. So I'm greeting you and I'm opening up the room. And you putting your hands up are also opening up the room. The sense of a room being opened and alive is, again, it's part of yogic culture.

[15:35]

In Japan, you don't ever leave a house alone. If you go away, you always have someone stay in it. Now, I'm doing a third thing walking around, is I'm calling up rooms of yore. Yor means from the past, ancient. So I'm calling up zendos I've practiced in the past. And I'm calling up Zendos as Suzuki Roshi taught me about them. And these rooms being called up are not just in the architecture.

[16:38]

They're in the act of calling up. So there's an imaginary Zendo here in the midst of this particular room. And we carried that imaginary Zendo in the small living room at Crestone. And when we built the larger Zendo, people who were used to it could feel the imaginary Zendo from the smaller room open up in the bigger room. So I hope we will open up in Johanneshof of this Zendo and the Crestone Zendo And the zendo I first practiced with was Suzuki Roshi on Bush Street in San Francisco.

[18:07]

And the zendo stretching back to Zhao Zhou's and Matsu's time. This might be a little bit like going back to visit a house you lived in when you were in elementary school. And seeing some room that you particularly liked as a child, which you felt identified with. And to realize that in some ways all the rooms you set up that you felt comfortable later in life, felt comfortable in later in life, were in some ways calling up this room from childhood.

[19:10]

So when I walk around the room, I'm doing these three things. Greeting each of you. And with each of you opening up this room. And calling forth the tradition of meditation room. Now, Zen practice is always to start from where you are, where each of us is.

[20:18]

And we talked about in the practice week this calling up the room to some extent. And we also spoke about taking inventory of what's here on your cushion. So you've got to start, as I said, from where you're at. So where are you at? Yeah, you're on this little mountain peak, as I said. And what's here? The minimum, what's here. Something's here. So practice sitting still is to find a way to look at what's here without being distracted by other activities.

[21:29]

So some skills are needed to sit still enough to know what's here. So let's make a list. And you can make your own list, of course. When we made our list, started the list during the practice week, one of the items that were added to the list by the discussion discussants was doubt and faith. So what's here?

[22:34]

First of all, a body's here. You can say your body. Now you have two things. A body plus something that observes it as a body, your or thinks they own it. So when you say a body, it's not so clear where the boundaries are of this body. If you say your body, it's more what belongs to something called you. So then what else is here? Well, I mean, we're alive. There's something happening here that's not just stuff. So there's a mind here. So you've been living with this body and mind, you know,

[23:35]

Pretty long time all of you are adults. And I would hope in this session we have seven days in which we can look again, refresh ourselves. What is this body-mind that we live? And I would like us to bring this or understand this body and mind also during these seven days as pivotal potential. Can we discover what is meant by or even discover in fact a critical point of potential? Okay, so the inventory has to also include phenomena. Everything not included in body and mind.

[24:55]

The crying of the wind. And the crying of the doves. And many things that are our sensate realm. So this is a third thing you discover here, whether you like it or not, it's here. And a fourth we could say is time. The unexpected. Accidents. Sequence. Somebody spills soup on you during the meal. This did not arise from body or mind.

[25:56]

So we have some successive experience. I'm not recommending that anybody spill soup, by the way. There's other experiences of time we can have. And you'll find much in a Sashin if you get tired enough, exhausted enough, worn out enough. Overscheduled enough. Much of time fast will come up. So in addition to time or accidents or sequence, there is other people.

[27:01]

So other people have to be part of our inventory of what's here. You know, the other people in this room are affecting us and how you work together in the kitchen or sit together or share a room with someone. And undoubtedly your mother and father will appear. and other people you think about or care about and sixth we have to include mystery our inventory can't be complete So if in these seven days you study actually there's seven things you could take one day for each if you like.

[28:24]

Or seven periods during the day you can take one for each. Or more likely we naturally enough just do it as it comes up. So mystery is what you don't understand or don't know. And mystery is also what's not in the realm of the knowable. And mystery is also What... I mean, our senses, as we've discussed in the past, are very particular, cover certain areas, hearing, seeing, smelling. But none of our senses cover radio waves and television signals.

[29:29]

But they're also part of this situation. What else might be in the situation that our senses don't know about, can't sense? So allowing for what isn't known or mystery is also part of the inventory. And finally in this list I'm making you can modify it or make your own is teaching. This list itself is teaching. And every way you walk in this room, the way you sit down, the way you eat your meal, the way you think about your mother, all is teaching.

[30:43]

There's no way to get away from mental and sensate cognitions being in the realm of teaching. So since teaching is an indisputable ingredient of what's here, Buddhist practice is to clarify what is teaching. And if teaching is going to be part of your life, to make what teaching you receive and accept clear. Now what is the unmentioned ingredient that's part of each item of this inventory?

[31:49]

And that is relationships. Everything in this list is about relationships. The relationship of the body to phenomena. The relationship of the mind to body. And the relationship of the body or mind to others. And just the relationship implied by someone's making the inventory list. And the relationship to mystery and the relationship to teaching. So the Common ingredient in the list is relationships.

[33:01]

And so in Buddhism, because this emphasis on change and interdependence and this emphasis on there being nothing that's permanent, Permanent being outside of relationships. Everything is inflected. Inflected means influenced in some way. Everything is artificial. Everything is artifice. And that's actually when you carry it to that point, you realize how that is prejudiced in our own culture. In English, the synonyms for artificial or artifice are imitation,

[34:04]

Synthetic, affected, insincere. We've got a prejudice against this word, artifice. What's the alternative to artifice? Natural. And what's the alternative to natural? Ex nihilo. Out of nothing, God created this. It's interesting, and we discussed this again in practice week, in a culture which emphasizes that somehow this was all created out of nothing, the idea of emptiness is very difficult. That human activities always interfering in what's natural.

[35:18]

And I suppose in Christianity this would be the discussion between grace and works or something like that. One of the reasons we're in such trouble with the environment is because we assumed somehow the environment was natural and would take care of itself. And in contemporary science what we haven't made is now explained as own organizing, own self-organizing, own self-ordering systems. But these are also now clearly, there's no boundary between our involvement in self-organizing systems and our not involvement. So we can have gene splicing and so forth, and it's not clear where to draw the line, what we shouldn't mess with and what we should.

[36:48]

You're trying to teach this to your students, aren't you? Set up experiments so they understand. But this kind of philosophy or praxis sophie, a practice wisdom as well as a love of wisdom, is essential to understanding or practicing Buddhism in any real way. In Buddhist culture, in yogic culture, which is not the same as Asian culture, although there's a big overlap because Buddhist culture and yogic culture have been part of Asian culture for so long,

[38:06]

And I'm trying to teach yogic culture and Buddhist culture, not Asian culture. And much of Asian culture is understood by their effort to deal with yogic and Buddhist culture. And in yoga culture, there's no nothing. There's no concept of nothing. If I put this down here, And then I move it over here. It's now out of sight.

[39:06]

But it's just over there. And if I smash it or burn it, it's just somewhere else in a different shape. There's no possibility of nothing in yogic way of thinking. So emptiness does not mean nothing. Emptiness is the condition, we could call it a simple understanding of emptiness, is the condition which allows you to move this. In that sense, emptiness is equated with space. And it's space that allows this microphone to be there and Martin to be there and so forth.

[40:12]

A deeper understanding of emptiness is emptiness is that which allows both space and form to be here. But it's the same logic. It's the jump from seeing objects require space to seeing space and objects require emptiness. No, I'm not trying to teach you the whole of Buddhism in 45 minutes. So I have bad habits in that direction. I'm really just trying to say that Buddhism is the study in particular in the Sesshin of relationships. So let's just quickly mention the Oryoki. An orioki is the study of one object in relationship to the other.

[41:27]

And that's always going on. But a ceremonial study of objects in relationship to each other is very dense, so you can explore, feel, how objects relate to each other. And it's a study of how we relate to objects. Both our physical body, our hands, and our subtle body, our chakras, and so forth. And it's also a study of how we relate to each other through objects. Because we all are doing exactly the same thing at the same time, pretty much at the same time.

[42:29]

So Buddhism says, what happens when things relate to each other? What happens when you create a one week period? When through a schedule everyone relates to each other and the situation and the place in the same way. Now, everything has a schedule. Ulrike's gymnasium has a schedule. But the point of the schedule in Ulrike's gymnasium is not to study the schedule. And in Sashin it's to study how we relate to each other. And to time. And to meditation practice. And to the concentrated body of meditation and the ordinary mind of activity.

[43:58]

And when you do the orioke, is the concentrated mind or the ordinary mind there? And what difference is there between picking up the orioke bowl And stepping in the door. Christian happened to remark last night that you step in through the door with the foot nearest the hinge. We talked about it in the relationship to opening the room up in the practice week. But it's also, well, it's actually not usually taught so specifically or mentioned so specifically.

[45:03]

It's part of one of those occasionally mentioned teachings that you notice by yourself usually and enter into something. Now, when you step into a room with a particular leg usually, but not forcing it, you're treating the world like an Oyeruki bowl. Now, what hinge do we use to describe a relationship? We enter the room with our leg nearest the hinge. And you can do it as you wish, of course.

[46:06]

But is the door teaching us how to enter the door? When we listen to the wind, Is the wind teaching us how to listen to the wind? Mm-hmm. So what is the hinge that we describe, this listening to the wind or letting the wind teach us to listen to it and so forth? So this idea of a critical point or a pivotal potential, is to discover or feel that point in relationships.

[47:20]

And walking into a room and sitting in zazen and the arising of mental phenomena as you're sitting. in walking within the sound of the doves. So all of Sashin can be understood as a practice to allow yourself to come to that point. where this potential this is not discovered through your own who you are it's at the edge of who you are where everything comes in together two arrows meeting in the air Anyway, it's expressed that way in Zen sayings.

[48:51]

As long as we are the three of us, we are the three of us. We are the three of us. Shoo-joo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o I feel that life is endless. I want to save Europe as much as possible. The desire to save Europe is overwhelming. I want to end it. The years are endless. I want to save Europe as much as possible. Der Weg des Buddha ist unerwartet.

[50:12]

Es ist nicht grober, ihn zu erreichen. Oh, Jen, Jen, Mimi, oh, no, oh, oh.

[51:29]

Yakuzen man no yo, ayo koto katashi, ware man ken, onji juji, suru koto estari, Megawala kuwala nyorai no shen jitsu nyo geshi tate matsuran Good afternoon.

[53:39]

I surprise myself at how much I like chanting in German, even though I can't do it. And it seems to be entirely that I have shifted thinking that your practice place is Crestown to thinking it's Johannesburg. Yeah, maybe I used to think I want it to be partly in English so you don't exclude me. But now I realize the functional reason was that I wanted you to be able to go to Crestone if you wanted to. Now Crestone can just be a holiday monastery for you. be a holiday monastery.

[55:04]

But you can practice seriously there, too, if you want. Okay. Now, I always hope Sashin isn't too difficult for you. Especially the newer ones of you who are still exploring the degree to which this practice makes sense. But at the same time I know that unless the sheen is somewhat difficult, it doesn't make any sense to do it. It's a mixture of indifference, annoyance, boredom, pain. So let me speak about the pain a bit. It's not the third day yet, so no one's hurting much probably.

[56:30]

Yeah. Well, there's several, you know, you can go through pain. You can go through it. You can give up. You can wiggle. You can have certain strategies and plans. You can try to be reasonable about it. But if you want to do sashin at some point, you have to mostly go through it. And usually, except for sleepy legs when you have to stand up soon, wiggling only makes it worse. Now, since our society has done away with puberty rights and such things,

[57:38]

It's maybe beside the point for me to say that there's actually some advantage, psychological, emotional advantages to going through pain. But the first thing you should notice if you want to have some skills at going through the pain, you should be able to differentiate between pain that's doing damage, that represents damage, and pain that's just from all kinds of other sources. Yeah, and then the next thing is To be able to see the pain you feel as belonging to the part of the body that hurts.

[59:15]

In other words, say that your right leg is up on your left leg. And your right leg is hurting. Instead of you hurting, let your right leg hurt. This is probably much more important than you realize. If you can just say, oh, geez, that darn right leg, here it goes again. Sometimes I feel like there's a dog lying in my lap. But my lap is the dog. And this dog has always been, but I said, oh, just stay still, it's okay.

[60:27]

And you can't bark in the sendos. Anyway, I have some, you know, feeling like that. And if you see me petting my leg, you know. Mm-hmm. And also to be able to know the part of the mind that's hurting. Because your whole mind isn't hurting, just part of your mind is hurting. So you can get to know and see suffering as one portion of your mind and one part of your body and it doesn't flood you. Yeah.

[61:29]

I don't know if it makes sense to say, but if your neighbor's car's got a dent in it, you don't mind too much. But if your car has a dent in it, you mind quite a lot sometimes. Because you identify with your car. So, you know, this is obvious somehow. It's just a fender. So maybe you need some attitude like that. It's just a right leg. Now, zen is a quick path. And practicing together and Sashin practices are all part of this quick path.

[62:48]

And to be able to drop the you that hurts changes the relationship to pain a lot. I mean, your leg still hurts, but you don't hurt. Yeah. Now I notice that we have different hand mudras during satsang. And I'm quite flexible in what kind of hand mudra you want to use. You can put your hands together pretty much any way you want. And the two main ones, usually for cold weather, is to put your

[64:01]

right thumb and your left palm and just close your hands. And the other mudra is to put your left hand on top of your right hand, mostly just the fingers overlapping. And to make and touch your thumbs together lightly. And to make an oval with the opening. This is said to contain all postures. And we talked in the practice week not only about just about putting your mind in your hands, but putting your whole body in your hands. Even putting the whole room in your hands.

[65:10]

Now the usefulness of this mudra in contrast to the others is it allows you to monitor your mind and body. If you can get so you can with one part of your mind pay attention to your mudra. It tends to stabilize your mind through your body. There's three ways we stabilize our mind through our body. I mean, other than the overall posture and your backbone. One is the hands. And the other is keeping your tongue at the roof of your mouth.

[66:29]

And the third is feeling a sense of seeing. Or something like, even though your eyes are closed, there's a sense of unfocused seeing. These are a kind of skill, maintaining your state of mind. with your body in a kind of simple and subtle way. Because in this Yogacara Zen practice, In this yogic Zen practice, we're trying to learn how to hold our mind with our body.

[67:33]

And I even said the other day, it's like finding the handle of the mirror by which the eye sees the eye. It's like there's a subtle witness that can watch the self itself. So we can have a corner of our mind watch our ego, or we can have a corner of our mind pay attention to our mudra. Now if your legs hurt, you know, you don't, you know, if you want to move, okay. As I said in the introduction, please do it mindfully.

[68:50]

When I first started sitting it was so difficult to push my legs down into this posture. And if I didn't move after a little while, like a jack-in-the-box, I would pop up. Do you have such a thing, a jack-in-the-box? Similar. What do you call it, a Martin in a box or something like that? So I used to, after five minutes or so, have to change my posture.

[69:52]

And do what I called the half lily, because it nearly killed me. And I had to take a posture that I called the half lily position, because it almost killed me. Yeah, my right foot was way sticking out my bottom. And people used to say, oh, you shouldn't do that, etc. But I knew, to learn how to sit, I had to go at my own pace. And after a while, I could go to the middle of the period, which almost every period Suzuki Roshi got up and walked and carried the stick in those days. So I got so I could last till he got up and then I would bow and usually get hit and then I would change my posture.

[71:11]

The custom is when you change your posture you bow and then change your posture. And also the custom is when you bow you get hit. So they happen to coincide in this case. Yeah, but anyway it was something to do in the mornings. Before I went to work. No, there are certain conditions required for practice.

[72:14]

Faith. A willingness to do the mental work required. An acceptance that everything is here, there's nothing outside the system. And physical and mental health. or a commitment to realizing physical and mental health. I would say these four conditions are necessary. Now, if this conflicts with some of your views or beliefs, maybe just treat this not as a religion but as a teaching.

[73:21]

Like, if you're a scientist, you accept the rules of science in order to do science. And in Buddhism, maybe we have to accept the rules of Buddhism in order to do it, at least thoroughly. And the main rule we have problems with, I think, in the West is There's nothing outside this system. There's nothing transcendent. But to do science, you also have to have that view, so you can think of it that way. Now, when Buddhism first came into the West, it was translated into Western views.

[74:55]

And in general, Western words and their dictionary equivalents in Asian languages were considered to be equivalents. And they assumed that the correspondence between western and eastern languages found in dictionary books was real. And now we're at a stage in which it's seen that Buddhism and yogic culture is different. So we try to find the similarities. But we try to find those differences which we need, that fit us. that fills some gap in our own view. Some similarities or differences we can accept. And then we translate Buddhism entirely in terms of those similarities. And again, we don't really see the differences.

[76:13]

And we tend to make a big conception of Buddhism or what meditation is. which then runs a roughshod, we say, over the smaller conceptions, the smaller differences. Now the big magnets that's affecting Buddhism right now Are the magnets of modernism? What's modern is best? The old is old-fashioned or primitive or something. And the magnet of science.

[77:24]

And everything being rational, reasonable, etc. And the magnet of psychology. And in the case of psychology, I think, in psychotherapy, I think there's a mutual attraction. And we have to look I think we have to be careful not to too quickly see the similarities and resonances without also continuing to see the differences. Again, as I said the other day, it's like we don't want to, we don't respect our spouse or ourself when we try to make our spouse exactly like us.

[78:32]

So those of us who are doing this practice, it's a long marriage. Now, the tools of practice. Two kinds of meditation, three kinds of meditation. Concentration. Learning one-pointedness and so forth. Inner seeing. where you learn to observe your mind, for example, following thoughts to their source, etc.

[79:47]

And third, meditative absorption. Now I'm distinguishing between concentration and absorption. And absorption is... meditative openness. Again, something we talked about in the practice week quite a bit. How to not interfere with the ten thousand thoughts. How to not interfere with the ten thousand thoughts. Now the trouble with emphasizing meditative concentration psychologically is that it tends to push our life processes out of view.

[80:54]

We either learn to exclude or concentration itself excludes our life situation. It's also, from the Zen point of view, too directed and uncreative a way to proceed in your meditation practice. From the Zen point of view, it's also too directed. And an uncreative way to proceed with your practice. But we need to learn the skills of one-pointedness and concentration. So one of the things that Zen does is, like in a sashin, externalize the practice of one-pointedness.

[82:14]

externalize the practice of one-pointedness. In other words, the orioke practice is a practice of one-pointedness. As we discussed yesterday, of bringing together that point where the bowl, your body, the serving, other people come together. And when we started the lecture, Although I presume some of you are tired and the tea didn't revive you completely. As soon as we started the chanting, everyone came in with energy. This is the Zen style, which is to bring your energy to everything, no matter how tired you are.

[83:36]

So we can say the whole of Sashin's schedule is a practice of developing one-pointedness. Now last night I said, what is this critical point? How do we find it? And then I said, we throw driftwood into the night ocean to rescue blind turtles in the dark waves. Now, I didn't make this up. This is from a koan about Jujie's finger. Every time somebody asked Jujie a question, he'd raise one hand. Every time Jujie was asked a question, he raised one hand. This was probably the most important koan, Sukhiroshi, I worked on together.

[85:19]

And in my mind over the years, I've gotten this mixed up with the Lotus Sutra story about the turtle. Turtles represent longevity and wisdom in Asia. They're often shown in drawings with their shell white bearded. And science, even contemporary science says turtles may for all practical purposes live forever. These great ocean turtles. I guess, you know, at least as far as we know, they've lived to be 800 or 900 years old, and their death rate seems to be primarily from accidents.

[86:27]

It's hard for us to live long enough to measure their life. So this image of blind turtles in the night ocean is kind of wonderful. And in the Lotus Sutra it says a one-eyed turtle finds a board with a hole in it. And just by chance, this one-eyed turtle finds this board with a hole in it and pulls its one eye up to the board and looks at the world out above the water. That's supposed to be how difficult it is to come to this pivotal point.

[87:46]

So good luck, everyone. Yeah, there's maybe some boards floating. So in this koan of Jujie's finger, they change it into not even one-eyed turtles, but blind turtles. But this is... Again, a particular way of teaching in Zen, which is to use metaphor. And I took this when I studied this koan. To see my meditation as a night ocean of dark waves. Sometimes we say the waves of life and death. So this is, you know, the Shoyaroku version of this, the Book of Equanimity version of this koan, Number 84 says, starts out with 10,000 awakenings at one hearing.

[89:24]

And the... Blue Cliff Record starts out. Case 19. When a speck of dust appears, the whole cosmos is contained in it. And when a flower opens, The whole world arises.

[90:25]

And then it says, but before a speck of dust appears, or rather, before a speck of dust is held up, before a flower opens, How does one set one's eye on it? How do you aim at this? How do you discover this pivotal point of potential?

[91:05]

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