Amen. Amen. Okay. Hi. You didn't have to translate that. I didn't.

[01:01]

Everyone knows English so well. Um... You know, this room as a zendo has certain obvious disadvantages. But one of its advantages is it seems to have a very good sound for chanting. I think actually better than the crest on zendo. Anyway, it's such a pleasure to chant with you. Now we've talked about so far in Sashin some rather extraordinary things. Actually not really extraordinary.

[02:04]

More, it's things that we don't notice. Or if we do notice, we don't realize to what extent they're part of a sequence of teachings which can evolve within us. So part of teaching is to point out the obvious. The extraordinaryness of the obvious. But still, even if it really is quite ordinary, to some extent it's unusual for us and extraordinary and hence rather exhausting. So today I'd like to give a

[03:15]

A non-exhausting lecture. Of course, I don't know if I'm capable of it, but we'll see. One of the things that comes up most often in Doksha and Sashin here is, you know, how do I continue this practice in my everyday circumstances? Yes, that's really always a question, not just for lay people, because everything is everyday circumstances. If you're a fisherman, where do you look for a fish?

[04:29]

See, it's obvious. He's laughing already. And if you look for a fish, if you look in the water, where else would you look? I mean, even flying fish are only in the air for a moment. So you have to look near the water for flying fish. Let's hear Salvador Dali or something. Salvador Dali. Well, we tend to look for, you know, practice, enlightenment and so forth, as if it were a fish. And instead of looking in the water, this sashin is more about water than about fish. We create a kind of water that the fish of practice swim in. It's getting deep in here.

[05:59]

You have to think about the water, excuse me, of your life. One of the main things we forget in our daily life, actually, I think, is the spirit of bodhisattva practice. That spirit essentially is friendliness. And although we may have some quibbles, do you know the word quibbles? small problems with each other, quibbles. Although we may have some quibbles with each other, basically there's a good attitude of friendliness. And that attitude of friendliness is one of the basic conditions of establishing, of course, a Buddha field.

[07:04]

More a good practice field. And that practice field, or that water we... Yes? He's not speaking loudly enough. I'm in his shadow. Oh. No. I'll turn on this light maybe. Yeah, it's enlightening. I thought I could put a spotlight on you. Yes, you are talking too quietly. I can't even hear you. I'm trying my best. Okay. So this practice field allows us to actualize our Sambhogakaya body.

[08:18]

And this sense, you know, as I said, the Sambhogakaya body is a differentiated body. The Dharmakaya is like the salty sea. It tastes pretty much everywhere the same. And like space, you can't speak about it as near or far. It's always here-ness. But the Sambhogakaya body is differentiated in each of us. And from moment to moment, or from day to day, your sense of this body of actualization will be different.

[09:26]

So I'm saying here actually something wanted to bring up earlier, so that you can understand this idea of lineage. The deep understanding of lineage is not just that we study the qualities of various teachers, but that these differentiated Sambhogakaya bodies are carried in the lineage. person, each of our Dharma ancestors, has one emphasis, really basically one kind of emphasis in their own practice.

[10:29]

But they may carry many emphases, and so you may sometimes have the body of Nagarjuna, or you might have the body of Ungarn. And so when you take, when you study a koan like this one of Nanchuan, and people these days see this flower as if in a dream. Studying the koan and studying, getting the feel of it, you may take on this body of Nanchuan. Or of Shui Do.

[11:33]

Shui Do is also, you know, his commentary. So what I'm saying is there's a kind of... this accumulated wisdom of the past, this accumulated wisdom teaching as well as language and all of our culture. The idea of Zen lineage is that you can actually inherit or come into a knowledge of the particular bodies of realization of teachers of the past. And so you open yourself to be a vehicle of the teaching. Now that's pretty extraordinary, so I said I wasn't going to talk about things like that, so let's go back to this atmosphere of friendliness.

[12:57]

So this Bodhisattva spirit is to develop an attitude of friendliness toward people. And in the Prajnaparamita literature they're called aids to penetration. And they're called like weak heat, medium heat and strong heat. For instance, if you're practicing and you want to the word penetration means allow this practice to enter you and enter others. You develop weak heat is called developing an even mind toward others. So in your daily life you tried to see if you can actually develop an even mind toward everyone.

[14:13]

Seeing each person as representing all human beings, something like that. So this is your basic feeling and you also have all the particular feelings you have. Now medium heat would be to actually have a feeling of wanting to benefit the other person. Now that doesn't mean you do anything, you just develop the feeling of wanting to be a benefit to another person. And if you are going to be a benefit, you wait for them to give you the opportunity. Und wenn ihr eine Hilfe für andere sein möchtet, dann lasst ihr sie die Gelegenheit euch geben, also ihnen zu helfen.

[15:39]

And strong heat or strong aid to realization would be to see each person as a family member. Now, this kind of understanding isn't meant to force you to see everybody as a family member. Which might be quite difficult sometimes. Particularly if you didn't like your mother or father. You might be harming the person to think of them as a family member. You're like my mother. So, but it's rather to say that we can develop this even mind toward people and sometimes a feeling of kinship and sometimes a feeling of benefiting.

[16:46]

And so this is a kind of topography that affects how you see people. And it's not something you force on yourself through your ordinary mind. But it's rather you try to subtly discover the mind where these feelings of evenness or kinship arise spontaneously. So if you want to bring practice into your everyday life, everyday circumstances, It's not just to bring your, you know, to continue doing zazen.

[17:51]

but to also change the water of your life, the water that you're swimming in. And one of the main qualities of that water is always how you view others and imagine they view you. Another quality of this water is that the Bodhisattva said to have a fewness of wishes, only a few wishes. And one of our problems in our ordinary life is that we have so many choices. So one of the characteristics of sashin and practice purity, if you do it, is there's not too much choice about what you do. And it's quite purifying, actually.

[19:05]

I think you'll find out. And if within that you cannot have too many wishes, And it said, not even a wish for enlightenment. This water of a fewness of wishes, this plain water taste of your life, is actually good conditions for realizing enlightenment. So to bring your practice into your daily life, I think you have to begin to see the water of your life. You can't have an idea that practice is going to be this big, strong thing we hammer our life with, just to look at the water itself.

[20:19]

Doesn't help much to hammer water anyway. Yeah. And then, you know, it's helpful to study the orioke. Now, I know you can't eat in a fast food restaurant orioke style. You can do it sometimes, actually, if you're not too many people bothering you. You're sitting in McDonald's and you take your neck. Yeah. But there's a spirit in McDonald's of cleaning up and throwing things away.

[21:36]

It's not so different, actually. But, you know, the Oyoki is based on an economy of movement. Believe it or not, everything is done the simplest way. For example, if your hands are here, take the back flap first. You don't take the front flap first. You take the back, and then you're over there, so you pull this one forward. So you can always really know what to do by noticing in each circumstance what's the simplest way to do.

[22:41]

Given what's going to come next and what happened and so on. So it's based on the economy of movement and on eating and on being served. And it's also based on a gesture of the whole body. I think almost every culture is impolite to point. I think almost every culture is impolite to point. And the difference is when you point, you're pointing with your mind. And when you gesture, it comes from your body. You're unfolding your body and showing somebody something.

[23:44]

Anyway, there's this kind of difference in feeling. So with the Oryoki, you are opening all the movements out from your body and returning them to your body. So like you take out your cleaning stick, the Setsu, here. you hold that parallel to this channel and lift it out and put it here and then put it in you don't just put it down you move it in a circle and then put it bring it back toward your body So if you study the Oryoki, you can see that all of the movements tend to be a circle coming from the body and returning to the body. And returning in particular to this place and so forth.

[25:00]

So now I don't think again you can do that in Oryoki. I mean in McDonald's. But it is a kind of deep attention. You're giving a full body attention to something. And it allows you to see into the physicality of things and actually softens things, makes them more, softens things. So, you know, again, it's probably in your ordinary life too much trouble to eat this way. But maybe you could water your plants this way.

[26:13]

You approach the plant and... have your little water pot, you know, you take some act you can do every day or occasionally, where you have this sense of really bringing attention to the physical object and to yourself and to the action. Or maybe, Neil, you could feed your dog that way. Er könnte mir seinen Hund so füttern. He has this great little dog. Er hat so einen kleinen Hund. He could, you know, get his orioke dish out. Er kriegt seine orioke Schüssel.

[27:17]

Yeah, you don't have to translate that. And maybe, Nico, you could change Pauline's diapers that way. Das könnte Nico sein. Pauline ist wenn ihr noch diese Beine wegnehmt. With this kind of deep attention to what you're doing. Now this deep attention includes the idea in the Yoyogi of the nourishment of what I mentioned before, the four foods. And these are First of all, what you put in your mouth. It's literally called what you put in your mouth, what you fill your mouth with. Now, I should say, maybe I should say, I mean, we're not in practice period or living in a monastery, but I should say maybe that something about how we eat. I have a little resistance in myself to talking about such basic things.

[28:30]

But the sense in a yogic culture are all these things. It's not just things you learn when you're a baby from your parents, but all your life you're studying these things, basic things like how we eat. And one of the basic senses of the orioke is that you're eating a measured amount of food. As I discussed in the practice period, some of the early precepts were that you always fill your bowl. Now that doesn't mean you fill your bowls. Some of you are quite good, by the way, at getting as much food as possible in the bowls. Somebody today, I think, teased me by pushing down so hard on the thing that I had to hold the board.

[29:50]

You know, put a little pillar underneath it to hold it. Oh, yeah. Sometimes I tease because I don't tell a person to stop and I wonder if they're just going to pour soup all over themselves. And occasionally I thought, hey, this guy is going to really do it. I'd better say stop. Yeah. Anyway, the sense of filling your bowl up is that the bowl is a measure of the amount of food that will happily keep you alive. So the sense of the precept is you eat with enjoyment, but you don't eat out of desire.

[30:53]

You eat a measured amount, not according to so much that I really want to eat a lot of this one. It's particularly good. There's a little bird outside my house, outside my window, building a nest. And I think, at least I do, I look out at these.

[31:39]

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