So then thinking analysis itself becomes blissful. So the bliss of emptiness arises through analysis. And that's another kind of thinking. And it's understood when you're having bliss thinking analysis. analysis from which bliss arises, you can trust that kind of thinking as valid. Because in the end, Buddhism is based on, particularly the Yogacara school, is based on valid cognition. How do you know something's true? We don't have a Bible. We have nothing outside the system of Buddhism that tells us this is true. You have to decide whether it's true or not. How do you know whether it's true or not?

[01:24]

You yourself know there are some decisions you make or some experiences you have that have been true throughout your life, that have changed your life. They're true for you. And that experience of something being true in the deepest sense is when a deep ease and even bliss arises on the cognition. So when a sense of completeness or nourishment or bliss arises on your thinking, we call that a valid cognition. So that's how intellect or thinking is used in Buddhism. Now 6.30. I just heard the dinner bell ring.

[02:40]

Didn't you hear it? With which mind did you hear the dinner bell? Oh, yeah. My eyebrows must really be getting warm. They say that when you talk too much, your eyebrows get long. Oh. So they're still putting the food out, so let's do a few minutes of sitting, okay? Okay. And as our host said, the food won't get cold because it's already cold.

[03:40]

Or something like that. Thank you.

[04:58]

I think you can imagine putting your seeing at the back of your eyes. Perhaps imagine putting your thinking at the back of your thinking. Imagine your first level of perception is acceptance and not responsiveness. Just let the moon of every object shine into the pond of your mind. You can react to things, but before you name them, before you discriminate about them, just give appearances a chance to appear.

[07:21]

Yeah, for a few moments or a few account of... one, two, three or something, don't name things, don't react to things. Just let it, just absorb it first. Just let your senses enjoy things before you start thinking about them. Just to develop a little habit like that, if you do it a little every day, at least it will make a big difference. The pure body of reality might creep into your mind. So for those of you who want to, at 8 o'clock we'll meet here.

[09:16]

And if you don't want to, it's okay, but I hope you all want to. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you for translating. Thank you for the meeting last night. And thanks for the little bit of dancing we did last night. Maybe we'll have a dance at Johanneshof as well as a sit. Yeah. So your questions yesterday have caused me to go into this question a little more.

[10:43]

deeply. You know, the sense of asking a question is, well, one is, as I've often said, it's several generational. In other words, it represents, you ask yourself a question, try to answer it yourself, and then a question comes out of that, and so forth. And another way of looking at a question, we often say, don't ask with a question. In general, that means three things. One is to ask with your own understanding. In other words, the question should be the edge of your own understanding. Does that make sense?

[12:05]

The edge of your own understanding? And also you ask a question with things, with the world. And third, you ask a question in which you're willing to accept the answer. I mean, you may eventually come to disagree with it, but you don't start out with, I'm suspicious of this. You put yourself in the position of vulnerability... You're willing to accept the answer even if it isn't what you wanted. You're willing to work with the answer. And this sense of willing to work with the answer means you're also willing to take the consequences of the answer and the question.

[13:30]

The worst thing is people who ask questions that look like real questions, but it's actually just curiosity or something. So one of the most common questions in all of Zen is, you know, what is Buddha? And that's part of what's behind this koan or this phrase, the pure body of reality. And I would like you to to feel some companionship with these fellows.

[14:50]

Too many fellows, but you women are going to change that. These fellows, anyway, you're related to the Vido. I mean, we're not only descended from one sex. who wrote these koans or are the protagonists of this koan. Because they were far away from the Buddha. They were about as far from the Buddha as we are from, say, St. Augustine's. And they were probably even farther because they didn't have a historical tradition like we have of record keeping the way we do.

[15:57]

So actually right now we probably know more about the Buddha in a historical sense, than they did. It was really in the murky past for them. It was 1,500 years earlier. But they had a tradition of knowing that was past, not history. Anyway, like you, I hope like you, they found themselves practicing this thing, this teaching. So they wondered, what does Buddha have to do with this? Yeah.

[17:06]

Yeah. Now, the Buddha was, we're fairly certain, an historical person. And he was not divine. He was an ordinary person who wasn't divine, but we might say discovered divinity. I'm using divinity here. you know, in a cautionary way. But in any case, so what he is, what the Buddha and what Buddhism is about is that this historical person himself realized

[18:21]

I don't like using the word enlightenment, but I'll use it if you realize I don't mean some kind of experience that occurs in historical time. Anyway, because he was a person who wasn't... I mean, who he's the son of or daughter of is completely unimportant. Yeah. So in this kind of teaching that you are studying or practicing or curious about or looking at, the founding mythology is about a real person who discovered a principle, shall we say, of realization or divinity.

[19:48]

And what's important is that principle is, as a principle, is always available to us. So they asked this question in a variety of ways. Yeah. Like a monk asks Nanyan, what is the Vairocana of one's own body? And a monk asks Nanchuan, what is the Vajracana of his own body? Vajracana, for those of you who might not know, is a word for an Adi Buddha or a Buddha that's so big in concept that it's virtually equivalent to space. And for those of you who don't know what a Vajracana Buddha is, it's a Buddha that's so big that it's actually another expression for space.

[20:58]

Yeah, it's the historical Buddha and the principle of enlightenment enlarged to being, you know, so big that you can hardly offer incense to it. Yeah. My personal Buddha is a Vajracana Buddha, and it was on the altar at Crestone for a long time. That's a wooden statue about so big. And it's, you know, got this sort of sweet-looking guy with slim arms, something like this. Anyway, it's a nice sculpture and represents Vairocana Buddha.

[22:07]

So this is a very big idea, Vairocana, this principle enlarged to being everything all at once. And so this monk asked, what is the vairācana of one's own body? You know, I'm doing this practice. It's about Buddha. It's about vairācana Buddha. But not in the past. What is the vairācana of my own body? And Danyan says, would you, you know, we have to imagine a situation there, sitting around in the pojo. That hojo is what we're trying to build at Crestone, which is the abbot's teaching room or house or something.

[23:14]

Often in monasteries there's an abbot and there's a teacher, and they're often not the same person. Did I say in Japan? Anyway. Didn't you? In any case, not important. In Zen, anyway, that's the case. And sometimes higher than the abbot is the attendant of the teacher. Because you get to hang out together and sort of on your own schedule, you know. Actually, really in the tradition of the jisya and anja, the anja just studies in the abbot's room, works in the abbot's room, treats it as his own room.

[24:24]

It's kind of like being a couple. So, you know, when you have a chance, if you're the Anja or Jisha or something, you pop in a question if you're... feeling on the edge. So he said to Nanyan, he said, what is the Vajrachana of one's own body? Nanyan says, oh, bring me a pitcher of fresh water. So the monk goes and gets the pitcher and brings it back.

[25:28]

And he gets there, and Nanyan says, oh, take it back to where you got it. So the monk does this, and of course he's been doing this for months. He's been bringing pitchers of water and tea and, you know, cookies and stuff. And so, you know, he brought the pitcher of water, and he didn't know what the heck was going on. He said, oh, sorry, brought it back. You know, it's typical of this guy. So he comes back and then he asks the question again. He says, what is the Vajracana in one's own body? And Nanyan says, oh, the ancient Buddha is long gone. So we can understand this in a conceptual way and relatively accurately, I think.

[26:40]

But I want to give you, see if I can give you a more textured way of understanding it. In the same koan, which is, I don't know, 40, 43 or 40-something, in the Shoyaroku, the Book of Serenity. They also tell this anecdote about our old friend Daowu, And Shishwan asks Dawu, What is the enlightenment before our very eyes? This is really the same kind of question.

[27:44]

What is the pure body of reality? What is the vairacchana of our own body? What is the enlightenment before our very eyes? So, Dawu calls to his attendant. This monk isn't his attendant, but is visiting him. Shishuan himself became a famous teacher. So anyway, Da Wu, as you know, who's the kind of more alert of the two brothers, Yun Yan and Da Wu. Da Wu calls to his attendant, his own attendant, and says, oh, could you fill the basin with water? And then Shishwan is about to ask the question again.

[28:51]

And Dawu simply gets up and walks out of the room to his own quarters. Okay. Now, I'm not sure these answers help you in understanding what is Buddha or what you're doing. But don't give up yet. Okay. I think I need a medal for bravery. To try to talk about these things must be nuts. Anyway, okay. There's something called Vipalka. Which means mental constructions that arise from the habituated karmic consciousness.

[30:18]

Yeah, it's good to know about these things. One, there's eight of them. You know them already because it's most of your, I'm afraid, it's likely to be most of the way you think. One is essences, to construct the world as essences in terms of either permanence or inherence. And one of them is an essence, and we tend to construct the world in these essences. One of them is transience, so inconsistency. The other is coherence. And the second is distinctions, just to make distinctions, this, that, naming, as we talked about yesterday, dualistic, dividing things up. And this stuff arises just from our habitual, unreconstructed alaya-vijjana, our storehouse consciousness.

[31:22]

Third is seeing the world as material without understanding emptiness. And third is to construct the sense of an I, of an ego. That's fourth, I think. Isn't that right? And then fifth is to construct the idea of mind, that you can possess things or reject things. And sixth is to construct things as being pleasant, and seventh unpleasant, and eighth neither. Now, if you look at your own mental formations, I think you'll see that it mostly falls in these eight categories.

[32:59]

You see things dualistically as having qualities like permanence or inheritance. You see things as something you like or dislike or that you could possess and you have the idea of I. Okay. It's useful to see that. You know, Charlotte Silver used to say, she was sort of my first teacher, even before Suzuki Roshi. She said, if you notice that you're clenching your jaw, sometimes you can relax your jaw. But if you don't notice it, sometimes you go... So if you notice this pattern of these eight mental constructs, you can begin to imagine other possibilities.

[34:13]

Und wenn euch dieses Muster, diese acht mentalen Konstrukte auffällt, dann könnt ihr vielleicht etwas tun. Now, it is said that one of the qualities of a Buddha is a Buddha has an awareness free from these eight constructions. So, hey, you want to be Buddha? Wollt ihr Buddha sein? We have now a formula. Free yourself from these eight constructions. I mean, the world was created in seven days. You can probably do this naked. Work on one on Monday, work on another on Tuesday, and, you know, by the following Tuesday, hey. You think I'm kidding.

[35:39]

I actually believe what I just said is possible. Okay. Now another approach to this is to create antidotal constructions. Now, something that I think we should recognize is This is a world which assumes everything's impermanent. This is a world that assumes, which is not like our world, which basically assumes things are permanent.

[36:45]

Now, one of the ways this comes out is we think the Buddha, if the Buddha is enlightened, the Buddha is always enlightened. Excuse me. But did you ever think that maybe enlightenment is impermanent? Everything is impermanent. Enlightenment is impermanent. So what does that mean? It means enlightenment is an episode or an event. It means awareness is an event, not a continuity. Sometimes you may have the awareness of a Buddha, and sometimes you may not. Yeah. Just like Eureka sometimes has the awareness of Buddha and No.

[38:24]

First time I've had a cold in a long time. Excuse me for coughing. But not only you sometimes have the awareness of a Buddha, Buddha sometimes has the awareness of a Buddha and sometimes not. Yeah. So you're not always Uli, you're sometimes Buddha. If you really are stuck in the fact somehow you're always Uli, I mean, she's Uli too. I mean, Uli III. I mean, yeah. Anyway, you have to imagine that you are sometimes a Buddha, or that's a possibility, but you can't imagine that if you're really stuck in the sense that you're always Uli or Ralph or, you know, Christina or something like that.

[39:43]

I think this has to take some time to sink in. So let's imagine some antidotal constructions. Okay. That you're going to, in this case, put yourself... into the reality of. Okay.

[40:46]

Whether the world's permanent or impermanent, the experience of the world as permanent is a mental construction, which is somewhat reinforced by information you get from the phenomenal world. The world seen as impermanent, known as impermanent, is also a mental construction. It may be also informed accurately, let's hope, by information from the phenomenal world. But you see that whether one's true or not, they're both true in that they're mental constructions. So what you'd like to do is make a mental construction that most accurately reflects the world.

[42:09]

Because where you're going to live most of the time is in a mental construction. It's what it means to perceive, to think, etc. This is a mental construction. Okay, so let's think about some nice mental constructions. I mean, if we're going to choose them, let's choose some nice ones. One of the nicest mental constructions around is the Buddha. Yeah, he's usually gold. Or at least grainy wood. And he usually has a good posture and things like that. Okay. But the Buddha is also maximal greatness. Now, do you dare put yourself in a relationship to maximal greatness?

[43:37]

You might feel inferior. But you really don't, actually. Okay, so what is the way to put yourself in relationship to maximal greatness? That is to swim in the distinction of gross and fine. This again is something I tried to deal with too and talk about in the Sashim. In other words, I have a certain consciousness right now. It's a lot clearer than it was several years ago and much clearer than 20 years ago. I'm not particularly distracted and I can rest in the clarity of what I see.

[44:40]

Yeah, that's nice. I like that. Okay. But compared to Buddha, it's very crude. It's quite gross. But by knowing it is, instead of thinking much about that it's better than it used to be, mostly thinking about or noticing that it's not as clear as it could be. This gives this clarity more depth. To think of it as crude or gross in relationship to the Buddha's clarity actually makes my gross clarity clearer. Isn't that great? I mean, it's like a treasure to discover that. The shots of realizing one's gross. In relation to the Buddha.

[45:57]

Not in relation to Rika, no. You don't have to translate. Now, what happens when you create a consciousness? Because whatever you do with engagement and consequence, But consequence is that you generate a state of mind based on that. So when you begin to see your own consciousness as less clear or less aware or less, etc., whatever, than the imagined Buddhas,

[47:05]

You create both horizontal depth and vertical depth. In other words, you create immediate depth to your consciousness and you create a movement into a more developed consciousness. ...generate another mind which is aware of both crude and refined. Now that is a power of mind that you may discover. Now this, what I just taught you, is like what I told you in the beginning, a teaching as a sequence. In other words, it's probably something you wouldn't discover for yourself.

[48:44]

To imagine the Buddha as maximal greatness, to put yourself into that spectrum or continuum of the Buddha and yourself, through then imagining yourself swimming or being in this crude, fine distinction, and then through that embeddedness generating a mind that transcends crude and refined. Now this is why teaching is not natural. This is an inherited wisdom that I've inherited and I'm trying to share with you. But when you discover it, it's completely natural. This morning I seem to have thrown some Kleenex in a small green plastic container.

[50:03]

And Eureka said, that's for composting. And Ulrike said, that's for compost. I said, it is? It looks like any old container to me in America. She said, no, it's green. In Germany, it means compost. She said, everyone knows that. Yeah. Okay, well... Well, I know the big ones, when they're green, mean something, but this little one, I don't know. Well, this kind of mind, when you're practicing after a while, this kind of mind that's generated, that transcends gross and fine, if you're practicing, oh, everyone knows that. It's just where we compost ourselves. Okay.

[51:14]

Now, I feel I would also like to talk about... I'd like to continue this and talk about dharma and sangha in the same way I've spoken about Buddha, but I think that the energy required to do that would best occur after a break. So it's quarter after 11. So let's start again at 20 to 12. Is that all right? Okay, thank you very much. Okay. Yes. On what you said, and I understood from the idea of the Buddha, I find myself in a position that I had to allow myself to actually be and feel like it.

[52:32]

I had to give myself a kind of an allowance, And so far I was always waiting for somebody to give me a kind of allowance. That's it. Okay. Maybe you could share your allowance in Deutsch. For the idea of putting this up. from this Buddha. I have always been waiting for someone to give me the permission to be with me. And I find it very different when I can allow myself to do so. Here I can allow myself to be and to feel. But then what I realized then is in some ways I think the world starts kicking at me.

[53:40]

Or it can happen. You mean if you act too much like the Buddha, the world gets mad and picks at you? They don't understand me. I'm the Buddha. Sometimes I have to laugh about things. Then people don't understand me, so they tell me that I'm crazy, or trying to tell me that I'm wrong. I believe them. I mean, I do still. I feel this is... It takes effort. Uncontrolled happiness is a problem, I know. Maybe you want to say this in German?

[54:43]

Yes, I remember when I was a child, when you can simply be happy, that you are in such a state, that the world around you starts to look at you, trying to make you believe in me. Okay, something else, someone else? Do you want to say something else? Yes. I was just wondering, I wanted to know, this morning during meditation I had a lot of feelings and I was unsure whether I should say that we are in a relationship.

[55:53]

And then I thought, how about the others? How about their feelings? Is the fire already gone? Have they already worked a lot that there is no more fire? Or is there no more fire? I don't know. And that's clear. And that's exactly where I don't need it. And that's where I really like the fire. My question is rather personal. This morning during zazen I felt a lot of emotions coming up and I felt rather sad and almost crying or tears. And my question is, how do I deal with this? Does it belong into the territory of meditation to have all these emotions and how? to the other people deal with it, they all look like they've sort of, I mean, passed that stage, or they've done so much work on themselves, they, you know, they don't feel emotions anymore and so on. Yeah.

[57:04]

No, it's just normal. Especially in the first, I would say, two years. And if you're really doing zazen, but I mean, you're not just sitting, you actually have begun to develop zazen mind, That's actually a kind of rebirthing process. And so for around two years, people will basically reconstruct their alaya-vijnana. In other words, much of what's been stored in your in your storehouse consciousness, your repository consciousness, is drawn up into zazen mind instead of drawn up into the usual consciousness mind.

[58:23]

And it realigns itself in zazen mind in a different way than in the historical or associative succession of ordinary consciousness. And then it's stored again in your storehouse consciousness, but restored in that story. The image I used to have when I was first sitting was gothic cathedrals have all these flying buttresses. Flying buttresses are those things that support the walls of gothic cathedrals from the outside.

[59:25]

When I started to meditate, I always imagined these Gothic cathedrals with these round domes. is that all of those flying buttresses come down, pilasters, and the walls settle and support themselves instead of needing being supported by all kinds of artifice. Is this your brother's drawing? Your brother's? Oh, your brother's, yeah. Wanda did some drawings for me and it has very special flowers in it with little halos and nimbuses around them. So, anyway, this process goes on and... And at a later stage, when emotions occur in a purer sense, you're purely feeling sad or purely feeling anger, which you can observe.

[60:58]

This is the birth of the bodhisattva practice. Because bodhisattvas are based on emotional realities. It's rather different. The Buddha is not born from a bodhisattva. Bodhisattva is born from our emotions, and the Buddha is born from principle. So you can understand emotions as first a restoring, a re... a reforming of your karma, restructuring your karma, and then the basis of compassion and so forth. What was the last thing? The restoring of the karma? Restoring your karma.

[62:18]

For example, the emotion anger is the basis of wisdom. And likes and dislikes are the basis for compassion. Now, why is anger the basis of wisdom? So the root of Manjushri practice, the bodhisattva wisdom, is anger. Because I can be angry about something, say my daughter or something. But I can also be angry about Chernobyl. I cannot just feel rage, I can feel outrage at the way the world is. And that outrage can be a kind of clarity. You've got to straighten things out. That's wisdom. So bodhisattva practice is to work with root emotions as the seed of bodhisattva.

[63:27]

That's one way of understanding. OK. Something else? Yes. I have a question to Palka about the eight constructions. If I understood correctly, you said at the eighth point that things are neither pleasant nor unpleasant to see. I tried to explain to you that things are neither pleasant nor unpleasant to see, but obviously it is a construction. You said that the first point of this mental construct is to try not to see things as either pleasant or unpleasant, but I don't quite understand it because this is my own attempt to neither see things pleasant or unpleasant.

[64:41]

Oh, you mean neither. When I said the eighth one is neither? Yeah. Well, this means a mental construct where you're trying to, say, protect yourself from likes or dislikes. I don't like that person. I don't want anything to do with that person. I don't like them or dislike them. I'm feeling like that. Can you say that again? But the neutral space is to create a space where you don't, where things, which includes likes and dislikes, but is bigger than.

[65:52]

But you're quite right in pointing out the similarity because you're working with your human territory, which has the potential of both enlightenment and darkenment, benightedness. Okay. Anything else pressing, or should we go on a little bit? Okay. Yeah, Uli is quite right in the sense that it's rather difficult to imagine yourself as Buddha. And it was difficult for these folks back then, even though they were in a culture more open to a way of thinking about it.

[66:55]

Hence the question, what is the Vajracana of my own body? But if you tend to think of yourself as Uli, then if you substitute Buddha, it's just like you're changing from one identity to the other. But if you think of yourself as sometimes Uli, then you're more open to being sometimes Buddha. Really, these small differences in the way you conceive of yourself make a big difference in what you're open to. And if you have a, each of us, like Paulina has a, you can already see she has a particular kind of personality or feeling that will probably be present when she's older.

[68:08]

My two daughters had personalities which are still intact from when they were first born. But even a Buddha has to learn social skills. Sometimes we have to hide our intelligence or our happiness and things like that. Those are social skills. Okay. So what I would like to have us get across is, in the sense of practising with Buddha, is that sometimes you have a Buddha consciousness as well as sometimes you have a Uli or a Christina or whatever consciousness.

[69:20]

Now let me try to define knowledge. The Sanskrit word which is translated as knowledge in English. Actually means something more like knowing. Okay, so imagine, create a mental construct that I'm giving this lecture. I am giving this lecture, but you also have a mental construct about it. That mental construct is going to affect how you hear me. Now say that I have a mental construct that I want to speak to you with knowledge.

[70:22]

Now, I remember vikalpa. And I remember sankalpa, which is antidotal mental constructions. But right now I forget the Sanskrit for knowledge. Okay. Maybe I should not give this lecture now. I've just lost my knowledge credentials. Yeah, I can think that way, and that's, you know, if I really had my knowledge credentials, I'd have a Ph.D. I'd be Dr. Baker. But I decided to do other things rather than complete my doctorate, so I don't know much.

[71:32]

But actually the knowledge I bring to a Zen lecture is secondary or tertiary. What knowledge means is more something like the meeting of the three again. You all understand the shorthand of this meeting of the three, right? Okay. Now, the experience of knowing things through the meeting of the three is actually called the path of vision. Because if you keep knowing things through the meeting of the three, you generate a mind which is called the path of vision. And I invite you to discover the truth of what I just said.

[72:44]

Okay, so I'm giving this lecture. And ideally, I'm giving this lecture through the meeting of the three. Through knowing this immediate situation. This is not just the same as being conscious of this immediate situation. To be conscious would be, I'm conscious that this woman, these three women, four women are sitting in front of me, and these men to the side. Unconscious, I'm in this room. But that's really not what awareness means. Awareness means that I have a sensation, an experience of knowing you while I'm giving the lecture.

[74:08]

And it's considered to be a valid knowing when what I know coincides with what you are. So when knowing coincides with what is known, this is called knowledge. That's different than the kind of knowledge where I have a lot of things, facts stored, and I can call them up. That's usually what we mean by knowledge. So when the Buddha is spoken of as omniscient or all-knowing, Doesn't mean he knows every fact in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

[75:13]

It means the Buddha has the experience of knowing which coincides with what is. And that knowing can't be changed, that knowing can't be stored, because it changes from moment to moment. So one of the qualities of a Buddha is to be in a constant stream of knowing, which is always changing. So that's what is understood by the meeting of the three again, is not only does my hand know this cup, I mean, my hand feels the cup and the cup is looking at my hand.

[76:19]

And a field of consciousness arises. And that field of consciousness, which I know, is an accurate, non-dual representation of the situation. So that's what non-dual awareness means. So awareness is different from consciousness because consciousness has contents, awareness has knowing. I don't know about you, but I think these things are amazing. I mean, one of the interesting things about being a Westerner studying Buddhism is you have to sort out among your own distinctions but you make out of habit what is really being talked about in Buddhism, which falls into different categories than our words give us.

[77:42]

And that gives us as Westerners an opening into practice that's quite fresh. So now you can, I think, look at these koans a little better. Now remember, we're not talking about these two stories I gave you earlier. We're not talking about something permanent. We're talking about something impermanent. If nothing is permanent, it means that everything is an event or an episode. So being a Buddha is episodic. You go to a doctor and say, I'm having episodes of the Buddha.

[78:52]

Can you help me? Oh, dear. For some reason, it makes me think of this dumb joke about the woman who goes to the doctor because her, I remember very few jokes in my life, but woman who goes to the doctor because her husband thinks he's a refrigerator. And the psychiatrist says, well, It's okay, let him think he's a refrigerator. And she said, well, fine, but at night when he sleeps with his mouth open, the light keeps me awake. So anyway, you have every now and then, like the Buddha, you open your mouth and even light is emitted.

[80:07]

And you tell the psychiatrist, let him think he's the Buddha. Okay. So, This monk asks Nanyan, what is the vairacana of one's own body? He says, bring me a pitcher of water. He brings the pitcher of water. He says, oh, put it back where it came from. So it's something important that the water is fresh water or pure water. Because emptiness, these big visions, purify. So water, one of the metaphors and facts of water is it's purifying.

[81:10]

So water is used quite often for its metaphorical extensions. That it has dynamic stillness. That if you dump a lot of dirty water in the ground, it bubbles up pure somewhere else. And it reflects the moon without impeding the moon or impeding the water. So in this case, he's talking about water as representing the mind in its purity.

[82:24]

But instead of telling him anything, he just says, go get a pitcher of water. At that moment, like the flowering hedge, recognize your Buddha nature as an event, as something that moment. There is a function. I speak, you go do something, you bring it to me, I speak, you go do something else, That's the way we exist. It's said about young men, sometimes he stands so still, he's like a ten-mile-high mountain cliff, unapproachable. Sometimes the Buddha is called a lion because the lion is the animal that other animals don't approach.

[83:36]

This is also this scary thing of taking, of relating ourselves to maximal greatness. This is taught to us as being impolite, vain, and things like that. So it... it requires some work on yourself to take on without vanity as a practice maximal greatness. But it also says, young man is sometimes, he is so kind, he just opens a path for you, And he dies with you and lives with you. Okay, so the second story, Da Wu, the Shih Chuan says, what was it he said?

[84:52]

Shishuan asks, what is the enlightenment before our eyes? And Daud says, calls the attendant, and the attendant answers. That's part of the story. So he doesn't just say he calls the attendant. He calls the attendant and the attendant answers. This is essentially saying, who's asking the question? Who's responding to the question? Who are you, Shishwan, who just asked this question? So Sichuan asked a question, so he asks, he calls the... It's a mirror, you see. You ask me something, so I ask him something. I'm mirroring the activity.

[86:20]

Spiegel, spiegel. So... So the attendant responds, and then he says, would you fill the washbasin, would you fill the basin with water? And then, as Shishwan tries to ask the question again, Dao gets up and leaves. Now, in Zen terminology, the first response is called a body block. A body block saying, in other words, someone asks you a question, and instead you do something in the physical world which looks unrelated. You block the question with your body or with materiality.

[87:22]

And then, when he gets up and leaves, it's called a body throw gesture. Because he's present, and then he returns, he goes out of the room, which is like emptiness or something. So you use a gesture. As I said the other day, in almost all societies, pointing is impolite. But going like that is not impolite. What's the difference? Pointing is a mental act, and this is a physical gesture. Of course, they can be either.

[88:34]

But the feeling is, when you make a gesture, is it coming from the body? You can sit there. But if you sit there, it feels very different. So there's a whole vocabulary of thinking with the body as gesture that's part of these stories that's not apparent unless you know the teaching. So if you're going to know this Buddha awareness, you have to know it, the territory of knowing it, the territory that's being pointed out by these teachers, are in very specific things.

[89:36]

Hearing a voice. Acting in response, responding. Doing something like bringing a pitcher of water. Now, we would say he really went into the weeds by telling him to bring it back. I mean, we'd say he's oozing kindness, almost pus. Because you overly are making the point by telling him, oh, bring it back to where you found it. But that represents everything appears and disappears. The mental function of one, zero, two, zero. So bring me a basin of water, a pitcher of water. Oh, put it back where it came from.

[91:06]

Where did it come from? Where did the request to bring me the pitcher of water come from? Do you see the depth of these, the texture of these stories? It's not just where did the where did the pitcher of water come from, but where did the question come from, where did my response come from, and so forth. So Hakuin Zenji says, if you want to practice this practice, when you're standing, study standing. When you're silent, study silent. When you're speaking, study speaking. And return everything to yourself where it turns freely. Which means this unstructured mind. Okay, now these stories, if I explain them like this, what I'm hoping is that it gives you a sense of possibilities in your own actions.

[92:31]

Okay. And I think you need to understand, to get these stories, you really have to see that the awareness of a Buddha, Buddha awareness, or vairāchāna in your own body, is not some continuous identity that substitutes for your identity. That it's impermanent and hence occurs occasionally. And Buddha awareness occurring occasionally woven into your mind streams, in some ways makes you a Buddha.

[93:40]

Do you get the concept of what a human being is here? And how you work with the ingredients that you are, your mental, physical, emotional teaching events. I think there's a lot to take in, actually. So I think I'll leave. Maybe we can sit for a quarter of an hour. Or a few minutes at least. Uh-huh.

[95:09]

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