Is there any reason the left side of the zendo sits closer to me than the right side? Are these the senior people? The wire. Actually, the wire determines. Pretend you have a wire. Yeah, there's about half a half a slate difference. Okay. So what I brought up yesterday in effect was the contrast we have between Western culture and Buddhist, Asian haptic yogic culture. And the contrast we have between the absolute and the relative. And I think actually for us to be able to see the contrast between the Western and Asian yogic culture actually helps us to enter the threshold, to cross the threshold of the way.

[01:22]

into the dialectic, really, a dialogue I always say, but philosophically it's a dialectic of relative and absolute. So there's a little statement or poem meeting. They laugh and laugh. are many fallen leaves. I mean, you can understand that. Maybe you've had some sort of experience like that, meeting somebody just laughing. But although we can understand the words, and we can understand the feeling of meeting, they laugh and laugh, many fallen leaves. Are they really coming from the same world? I mean, I don't know, these two people come from the same world, but is the way we understand it the way it's intended in its writing?

[02:34]

Another one, you know, Guishan and Yangshan, I quoted last night, and they founded a school. Guishan was one of Sukershi's favorite teachers, and I often think Guishan and Sukershi had many similarities. But they formed a school, and Guishan was the teacher, but many of the dialogues between Guishan and Yangshan are, they're both, you know, realized masters. But still, Yangshan stayed with Guishan a long time. So Guishan is coming along, carrying a hoe, actually. And this is case 15, I think, in the Shoryuk. Carrying a hoe, and Guishan says to him, where are you? Where are you coming from? Yangshan says, from the fields. And Guishan says, how many people are there in the fields?

[03:39]

Yangshan just sticks his hoe in the ground and stands. Plants is holy. And so, Grishan says, on South Mountain, I gave you this last night, on South Mountain, there are many people cutting thatch. Cutting thatch is, you know, thatched roof. What's the word in German? Like a thatched roof farmhouse or something? Yeah. We're having the architect and the builder are having a dispute. Okay, so anyway, all of you German speakers know what thatch is now, right? Okay.

[04:44]

On South Mountain, there are many people cutting thatch. So what kind of meeting is this? Is this the same as meeting they laugh and laugh? Where are you coming from? Oh, the fields. How many people are there in the fields? On South Mountain, there are many people cutting thatch. Both of these little statements, poems, can catch us, can... gather us into them. If you try to think about it or understand it too much, you get gathered out instead of gathered in. And the introduction to this, Column 15, says, knowing before speaking It's called silent discourse.

[05:45]

Knowing before speaking is called silent discourse. I mean, you understand that, but do you practice it? For example, if you look around in the Zendo, you're not practicing it. And so many of you, something happens in the Zenduk. Or some of you now know you're not supposed to look around, so it's real discreet. But you're still checking things out. Your mind is trying to see what's happening with your eyes. That's not practicing knowing before speaking. Or, Marie-Louise and I have fun because we notice it's the same people always who walk by the main house and look in the windows. Some of you never look in the windows and some of you always look in the windows. But in Zen practice there's a whole custom of, as I said yesterday, unsighted.

[06:57]

To try to practice not knowing through your eyes. Or notice how often you connect knowing with the eyes. So here we have a basic Buddhist practice also of trying to shift the organizational patterns of knowing from one sense to the other. The whole Vijnana practice is to get expert at, like a musician, at shifting the patterns of knowing from one sense to the other. So this is why I said the other day to practice with the six kinds of objects. Or one way is a six-fold object. One is the object brought together by the six senses. One is seeing the object as having six aspects folded together. And the other is to see the object as six separate things.

[07:58]

So if you hear something, the object you hear is a different object than the object you see. You're only seeing whatever that object is, the mystery of whatever that object is. You know five or six ways of getting a feel of it, but that's not the whole of it. So don't give yourself the delusion it's the whole of it. but rather separate the six ways of knowing an object into six different objects. You can bring it together in one object, you know, if you have to pick up a ball and throw it, or a stick and throw it for Muji. I'm always afraid Muji's going to grab my teaching staff and run off with it. And he's after my firewood, I see. Supply of kindling. When you're, you know, doing your outdoor walking around Keen Hin or here in the Zendo or while you're sitting Zazen, do a simple practice like shifting from one sense to another and to know and

[09:30]

explicitly bring the idea into your thinking that the hearing of the object is a different object than the seeing of the object or smelling or tasting it or thinking it This is all, you know, practices related to knowing before speaking is called silent discourse. To try to actually find yourself in a discourse that's not speaking or that's prior to speaking. So the speaking, maybe right now I'm in a discourse with you which the speaking comes after the discourse has already happened. if you're 28 uncountable insides.

[10:32]

Okay, so it starts out. Knowing before speaking is called silent discourse. A continuous insight without clarifications, insights without clarifications, insights without needing clarification, It's called hidden activity. Hidden, why is it hidden? Do you hide it? No, you can't bring it quite to the surface. But there's a flow of insight, rather, not a flow, a flow of knowing but not knowledge. To not turn knowing into knowledge, as I said. Now, I'm not telling you anything. I'm not making this up. I'm just giving you the introduction to this koan, which is hundreds of years old, and there's hundreds of years of people practicing it.

[11:37]

I'm just trying to gather us into this practice. Continuous practice. Spontaneous insights without clarification is called hidden activity. And then it says, gashowing, bowing at the gate, walking down the hallway of the monastery or the main house. These have their reasons. That's true. Then he says, but what about... Dancing in the garden or wagging the head out the door? Now that's not predictable activity. So one is predictable activity and the other is what about dancing in the garden and wagging the head out the door? So already we know this is some kind of

[12:45]

Something other than an ordinary meeting. This is some kind of hidden activity or insight without clarification. Anyway, that's what the induction kind of aims at. It's on top of this little story. Guishan saying, where are you coming from? Oh, the fields. How many people are in the fields on South Mountain? So what's the shift here? Now, many of you have heard me speak about borrowed consciousness, secondary consciousness, and immediate consciousness. We can at least understand this as Guishan is fooling around. Here comes Yangshan. And in a sense, he sort of draws him into borrowed consciousness.

[13:54]

Where are you coming from? From the fields. So now he draws him in further into counting, measuring, thinking. How many people are in the fields? Yangshan simply refuses to be drawn into borrowed consciousness. So he stands there. My teacher, oh boy, I'll stand here for a while. And so Guishan then turns the whole thing, recognizes it, and says, yes, on South Mountain that means somewhere human activity is going on. Basic human activity is going on. That's always present in us. That's how we eat our meals, have shelter, etc., On South Mountain, there are many people cutting thatch. Right now, we're here on this mountain, but we know in the world there are many people cutting thatch, farming. Our life depends on it.

[14:59]

Meeting, they laugh and laugh. Many fallen leaves. So the words I gave you yesterday, nameless, unsighted. Now unsighted is a, nameless you can bring that into your, you can look at things like withdrawing the distinction of self and other, you can withdraw the name, nameless. So when you look at something, you cut off. It's like saying moo. You cut off slippers, bowing mat. But I look at it and I say, nameless. It's basic Zen practice.

[16:04]

And one of the main teachings in Zen and Mahayana Buddhism is the signless, the signless. So here I'm trying to give you an entry into the signless. Signless, oh yes, everything's signless, we can intellectually understand it, but you need some way to take this idea of everything is without, it's signless, it's one aspect of emptiness. And we can work with nameless or unsighted or without distinction. So you kind of let your mind, it's a shift, it's an actual kind of shift into a mind that doesn't need distinction, that doesn't run to distinctions, that doesn't run into either or. I mean, mostly our mind runs to either or. And it's a kind of natural thing because we tend to divide the world. We need to divide the world. So like wishless, another of these things, signless, wishless.

[17:11]

Wishless, you can practice with the phrase that most people seem to like a lot, just now is enough. You want something, you wish something, just now is enough. You can use this phrase like a sword to cut just. That's a practice of the wishless. Now you can still have your usual conceptual framework, usual habits, but you can find a contrasting concept. So I want to bring I want to speak a little bit more about this sense of practice as a contrasting of concepts.

[18:16]

And again, this is not just between Asia and the West, but within Asian Buddhist culture. For instance, there's a teaching of heat, summits, and patience. A heat is to bring energy into basically contrasting contrast, energy into a perception, energy into noticing something that you feel, the five or six kinds of objects. That would be a teaching which is in contrast to the habits of perception. which you could practice, and you practice it. First, heat means you bring enough energy actually to raise the body temperature to sweat. You bring enough energy. An energy is to bring energy to each moment, not just to bring your attention to each moment, to bring energy to each moment. That's like when we chant, when we bow, you kind of plunge into the bow.

[19:21]

You plunge into the chanting with energy. This practice is In me, it's like when you really bring concentration to something, you do everything 100%. Right or wrong, you do it 100%. We don't try to do things right in Zen. We try to do it 100%. 100% wrong is better than right. I know that's hard for some people. And that's called heat. Summit is when you... Because the heat or the energy or holding a dharma or a teaching in front of you, like the five, six kinds of objects, or no distinctions or nameless, to hold that in front of you is the practice of what's called heat. We can call it heat. And the second, summit, means you've actually gone across the threshold into this new way of looking at things, and you're engaged in it.

[20:23]

And then the next is patience. And patience is interesting. Patience means you have to have time to let it happen. Let comprehension happen. You don't just notice it. You're letting comprehension sink into you. And then again is the way Buddhism likes to divide things up. There's weak, medium, and strong comprehensions. But those are useful too, because you can be patient enough to feel yourself going from a weak medium to a strong comprehension of just a practice like nameless, or without distinctions, or unsighted. Oh, we can see things, but don't let seeing be the way in which Your knowing is organized because seeing always makes things outside. Washing your feet, hearing things are inside.

[21:32]

When you hear a bird, it's inside. When you see a bird, it's outside. This kind of thing should be noticed. Excuse me for wagging my finger at you, but this kind of thing should be noticed. No, I always think I should speak a little about the Oryoki practice. Every Sashin, not every Sashin, I've tried, recent Sashins I've tried not to do it, but I should speak about it I think sometimes because I'm a little embarrassed at getting it all to eat in this funny way. You know, so I have to apologize. And I have to explain a little bit why I think it's important. And I think, again, it's useful to see it conceptually. And I'm making a distinction here between what's logical and what's conceptual. And logic is very enticing, speaking about Plato, yesterday, et cetera, or logic, mathematics, because mathematics is true in every culture.

[22:40]

But we still divide the world. And that's prior to and more fundamental than logic. We Westerners tend to divide the world into outside and inside, public and private. And I've mentioned this before, but you should be aware that these are arbitrary distinctions. One of my deep experiences was when I threw a piece of paper down on the railroad tracks and I realized I thought it was outside wouldn't be cleaned up. And I was working in a warehouse, and I knew I had to go inside and sweep, and I thought, hmm. Inside, I'd cleaned up. Out here, I'd sit in the railroad track like all this other stuff. So I suddenly realized, I think there's an outside that's different than inside. Now, outside and inside are pretty much meaningless distinctions for me. You can intellectually get that, but to actually feel it so there's never more an outside.

[23:50]

This is what is meant by insight or summit or penetration. But so we divide things into outside and inside. We divide things into public and private. And you know, it's interesting. I really was struck when I went to Bali. All these folks are struggling to have a tourist industries, so that means they have to create public space, which is the kind of British Empire number of where everyone can be the same, and it's not based on initiation. We take for granted public space, but most Asian cultures didn't have public space. They had initiated space. And even Japan now, many restaurants, bars, you walk into them, you are not welcomed. They're for initiated people, people they know, people of a certain way of behaving. And you go in, you're treated funny. Because it's not public, it's initiated space.

[24:55]

As I say, it's a culture based on rights, R-I-T-E-S, not R-I-G-H-T-S. We have a right to public space, that's a Western idea. You have initiation into shared space is a different kind of world. And we should see that that's different. But if you want to have a tourist industry, you've got to create public space and hotel lobbies and chairs everybody can sit down on and so forth. Because there's a lot of money in it and it's a way to be part of the world, but it's all on Western terms. But if you want to get past that, you have to learn how to be initiated into Japanese or Indonesian space. So I'm just, again, trying to give you a sense of how important concepts are. And that the Oriyoki is a different concept.

[25:58]

And that's why I keep it, because it's a different concept. Again, we Westerners, we enclose the outside, basically. We make enclosures and we heat the outside, but we think it's still the outside because we wear shoes inside. It's the same ground level we go in. Inside is really outside. But in Japan, I can't speak for the rest of Asia because I don't know it so well, but in Japan, inside is outside because they don't heat it but it's a table, it's a surface. So they don't divide inside from outside, they divide the ground from the sky. So basically they make a platform, and Japanese architecture comes from Indonesia or someplace like that where buildings were built on stilts because it was flooding and wet all the time. China doesn't build buildings on stilts, but Japan does. So they get the platform like this, up off the ground, and then they put a roof over it.

[27:04]

So basically they're dividing the sky, so you keep the rain off you and it keeps the wet ground away, but you don't make much difference here. And there's lots of sideways distinctions, not up and down distinctions. And we basically, we create a floor, which is pretty much like the dirt, except because we walk on it with shoes. And then we put a table, but the table is still a surface, like the floor, and then we put a plate on it, and the plate is still a surface, like the table. So the plate is, the table is an extension of the floor, and the plate is an extension of the table. And then we take a shovel and a pitchfork, and we eat our food off the floor, or off the table, off the surface. That's a different concept. And I'm not in any way saying better or worse here. Just saying, please see it's a different concept.

[28:05]

In the Asian way of eating, the bowl and the chopsticks are one utensil. The bowl is part of the utensil. So you're not eating off the, here, and bringing it up. You're lifting the bowl up. Okay, so now you have an air table. Basically the concept in Asian eating is this is your table. Does that make sense? Or maybe the topography, it's a surface. You bring the bowl up into this surface and you eat from this surface. And it requires a lot more attention, as you noticed. Several of you drop things and stuff like that. So when you eat this way, you have to have somebody always available to pick up what you drop. But it requires a lot more attention. And what's interesting is when attention is required in eating, the food tastes better. Ordinary food tastes better. We can serve you almost anything. Whoa, this is good.

[29:07]

And also it's interesting that, I mean, things, if we served you some of this food in the restaurant, you'd say, do you have anything else, you know? But it tastes quite good when you just concentrate it. And you're holding the bowl here. And also what's interesting is when food, complex food, tastes better also too when you bring a lot of attention to it. So if you have a good restaurant also, usually takes a great care in the serving and requires more attention in how you eat. So it's creating a way that requires you to attend to your eating, makes ordinary food taste better, and makes you able to taste more complex food. But it does take quite a lot of energy to eat the way we do. And you know, if we look at the bowl, I'm normally...

[30:18]

Japanese people, again I'm only speaking, don't eat with a spoon. They always eat with chopsticks. They eat everything with chopsticks. So why do we have a spoon? Because the bowl is a skull. It represents Buddha's skull. Maybe that's the original bowl. Someone's skull, I don't know. But in any case, it represents a skull. And you can't drink out of it. It's shaped so you can't drink out of it. And you can't really eat with chopsticks. I mean, you can't. You need the side of the bowl to use chopsticks. So we have to give you a spoon. However, our Western cuisine is entirely based on spoons and forks, but not on chopsticks. So we have rules that come with the Yoyoki tradition. that you use the spoon only in the Buddha bowl, and you use the chopsticks in the other two bowls. And that's a rule based on Asian cuisine. So I noticed, I think some of you, and I think some of the people with priests, monks bowls, try to follow this rule, and I don't think, if you do follow it too strictly, I think it's the way in which we're gonna stop using the Yoyogi.

[31:36]

Because if we want to use the Oryoki and keep it as another conceptual way of eating, then we have to make it flexible with our cuisine, which is, last night I tried both, the potato-tomato gruel. It wasn't bad. I ate it with a chopstick, but I couldn't get the last part up very easy, so I used the spoon. But in Asia, in Japan, Everything is made, virtually everything is made to be eaten with chopsticks. So they cook in a way and cut in a way that you can eat everything with chopsticks. But we don't. I gave up a long time ago trying to get our kitchens to know how to prepare everything in such a way that you can eat it with chopsticks. And why should we? We actually have a better cuisine than the monks in Japan do. more varied i mean in japan you only get white rice miso soup and yellow pickles every morning every morning 365 mornings a year

[32:42]

It's real hot. I used to have to... I mean, it's served like boiling rice water, hot. And I used to have to line my mouth with the green pickles so I could get the hot rice down fast enough to finish when the other mug's finished. So it's easy to use chopsticks. So for us, I think... It's important. Restrictions are a good practice, but meaningless restrictions are not necessarily a good practice. I think we should be free to use the spoon if we want to for the gruel. It's easier. But I think it's also good not to bring the spoon out. If you have the monk's bowl, you leave the spoon in the bag until you get the gruel and you say, this doesn't work too well with chopsticks, and then you bring your spoon out. So we keep a kind of appendix, a vestige of the traditional way of doing it.

[33:47]

And most important, as I always point out, is this whole thing is interlaced with the body. The bowl is a skull. And they're designed so you use both hands again, and they're designed so you bring it into the territory of the body. You bring it into the chakras, you move it in, put it down, you're always moving it in a circle in relation to the body, and you're bringing it to this chakra and this chakra and so forth. So it's a way to interlace the body with physical objects. And I think it's so useful to learn that, to feel that, to feel what it's like, these practices which get the body to be interlaced, meshed with the physical world. So the eating system, and to consider the table, the topography of the space in front of you, and the topography of the space in front of you articulated by the chakras.

[34:59]

Now when you conceptually see that, the whole way the orgy is put together makes sense. The way it's folded up, the way it's opened up, et cetera. And I don't know any other Buddhist, I mean in certain ceremonies, but all of you are not gonna learn how to do ceremonies. I mean there's ceremonies where under my sleeve, I do certain mudras under my sleeve. But not all of you are going to learn those things because not all of you are going to become monks and monkettes. But the Aoyoki we can all learn. So we divide the world into inside, outside or sky and earth or floor as table or floor as platform just to bring things up into this eating space this is a different eating space than down here it's a whole different experience than forking pitchforking and shoveling your food up now we can drink we also sometimes pick up a bowl of soup and drink it

[36:19]

It looks the same, but it's not the same. We don't have the sense that this is a topography for eating. So we have a different experience lifting the bowl up than in this. And we usually put two handles on the bowl. Most soup bowls where you serve a soup and the Asians don't put handles because they want you to feel the heat and they want you to have to use two hands. So if you can start to see that the world we live in is divided up into concepts. Wearing these robes, if you start wearing robes, you'll see it's a different experience. Your body heats itself, takes care of itself differently. And there's little rules like the chopsticks are... you know, so many of you seem to forget, even though you've been here the whole practice period, I mean, some of you are very curious about everything, but you don't notice what the guy next to you is doing, that chopsticks across the bowl means you don't want seconds.

[37:32]

So it's really a call of the server. If the server comes along and it's a new person, be kind and offer them seconds if they put up their hands. But if it's somebody who's been here the whole practice period and they've got their chopsticks across and they put up their hands you if you can walk right by if you want because this lummox still doesn't understand well let him go without seconds or her go without seconds or if you it's a sweet kind of klutz who's charming in the way he or she doesn't know anything well serve them seconds even if they don't ask and sometimes monks do that you don't ask for seconds they just take your bowl and fill it up because you didn't So we don't play around. We follow the rules so carefully. We don't play with the rules much. In Asia, they play with the rules more. Fill my bowl. Now, please, I don't want anybody to take this to heart and fill my bowl against my wishes.

[38:40]

But I'm trying to get you to see that we divide the world. You can stop the division of the world. You can stop the subject-object habit of dividing. You can divide. You can decide how you divide. You can borrow a Western way of dividing. Borrow a road to walk out on. Or we can borrow an Asian way, the orioke. Or you can borrow a teaching, five kinds of objects separating the world into its five or six sense categories, knowing categories, and we can see that we bring it together or take it apart. Or we can name, or we can change the name, or we can peel off the name, Knowing before speech is called silent discourse.

[39:55]

Spontaneous insight is called hidden activity. What about wagging the head out the door, dancing in the garden? You know, still we bow at the gate. walk in the halls.

[40:20]

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