Well, I hope you enjoyed your change of schedule yesterday. And you spent the afternoon noticing the stream of impermanence. And how short the afternoon was. The flow of moments of impermanence. Now I'd like to come back to the beginning of the pointer. When you see smoke, you know that there's a fire there somewhere. When you see over the fence, you know there's an ox there.

[01:05]

When you pick up one corner, you know three. And you're able to judge precisely at a glance. This is the ordinary food and drink of a pastoral monk. Now, we passed over this, well, not quickly, but quicker than we should, probably. All of us like to go to the advanced part of a teaching first. We think we deserve to have the advanced first and then if necessary we'll go back

[02:07]

to the preceding and then understand it immediately because we know the advanced. We want to get to the meal right away without all the chopping. But it's probably not so wise. Preparation itself is realization. Let's just look at the contextual weight. This is the most famous book of koans in the Zen canon. Yeah. This is the first paragraph in the whole book. They decided out of a million or thousands of things they could have started with, this is what they started with.

[03:40]

Yeah. Now that you can figure out. And you don't just sort of zoom over this to the case. Yeah. I mean, really, if this is your family business, family affair, don't worry about a hundred koans. Or even other collections. What do you make of this first paragraph? This kind of attitude is really helpful in practice. I don't even want to know what the second koan is until I understand this first paragraph. With that attitude, you know, When you proceed eventually to the second Quran, I don't know, in 2011 or something like that, you might even get to the third Quran in 2012.

[04:52]

Anyway, excuse my theatrics. Okay. But they also say it's the ordinary food and drink. They don't just say, oh, this is important. They say it's the food and drink. Sie sagen nicht, dass es wichtig ist. Sie sagen, das ist das Essen und Trinken. And this is not just some sort of colloquial phrase. Und das ist nicht nur einfach so eine alltägliche... It's not just a way of saying it's important. Again, let's go back as I talked in the early Teshos. We get long winters, a kind of taken for granted hibernation as part of our life.

[05:56]

And that hibernation, perhaps yesterday afternoon, was a kind of hibernation. Yesterday was a kind of hibernation. It's a winter schlaf without winter. I drove to Freiburg yesterday on the highest places where there's always snow. There's no snow. Anyway, so... And so the sense of hibernation is part of our life in the Shoyaroku koan. And for many people, depression is a kind of hibernation. Melancholy or down periods are a kind of period. If you know how to go through them, they often bring things into clarity, into relief.

[07:14]

So practice is also to discover how to make use of our down periods. So down periods, seasonal hibernation, An inner incubation that's going on all the time. And zazen itself. There's a kind of textual And this koan, you know, I mean, of course, you know, being a novice Zen Buddhist in my mid-twenties.

[08:21]

Yeah, naturally, this was maybe the first koan I read. And Sukhiroshi, in the first years I practiced, once or twice a week, lectured on koans, the blue clear fragments. So this has been This koan has been incubating in me for a very long time. I haven't hatched everything yet, but some things are clear. And I mentioned picking up one koan and knowing three as something that's been incubating. I mentioned picking up one corner and knowing three as something that's been incubating.

[09:45]

You know, when I'm in America, the only bad thing about being in America, other than politics and things like that, but that's looking better these days, I missed the experience of not knowing what's going on. I missed the experience of not knowing what's going on. It's really boring to sit in a restaurant and have everybody talking at the next table and understanding them. I don't want to understand them. It's nice when it just goes on. I try to find the good in my linguistic incompetence. But I also enjoy the translation. But I'm also happy about the translation.

[10:59]

And I say something and then I think, what will happen with it? And then I feel the body, what do I start with? And then it's sort of like, plunk, plunk, two versions are put into the room. Yeah, actually. I miss it. As I said, when I first get back, I always pause for the translation. I've considered having somebody translate into Swahili, just for the heck of it. And then the audience wouldn't understand the Swahili, just like me. I don't understand the German. This orality, oral transmission is complex.

[11:59]

So, you know, often I see horns over the fence or I see smoke and I, you know, feel this go on. By horns over the fence, I mean the branches at the top of the window, stuff like that. But this is the ordinary food and drink. That's robe monks. Food and drink. And as I said, you know, bringing in the long winters of the time. The relationship to the written language and to text was just so different from now.

[13:17]

They just didn't have printing presses and things like that. So every word... When you look at a text, you realize every word has been settled on with tremendous care and thought. So it helps to... Read the text aloud, which you have been doing. But to read it aloud to yourself or when you're by yourself. And even read it with the sense of each of these words was pondered.

[14:19]

So you kind of like ponder each word. It's a bit like, you know, looking at a painting and then drawing the painting to sort of go back and do it as the artist did it. Now, if you do a koan in this way, and it's an activity, it's an action, it will incubate in you. And it will begin to bear fruit beyond just the key phrases, which also are key in that they unlock the text.

[15:23]

So we're talking also about how to use key phrases, turning words, as keys. keys that unlock the text. But we're also talking about how to incubate the text as a whole. Okay. Now, I said earlier that as Perhaps German had to be Latinized to pour English into it, Christianity into it. And the Chinese recipient of Buddhism had to be transformed through meditation. And the Chinese receiver of Buddhism had to be transformed through meditation.

[16:48]

Buddhism will be poured into you. It's very clear to me when I sit here which ones of you do daily Zazen and which ones of you do Zazen only occasionally. There's the porous ones and there's the ones some of you are not so porous. Porous Porous is to have pores. You can pour something like a sponge. Hi, I'm a sponge. Sponge Bob? No. Sponge Bob. I don't know much about him, but I've seen the pictures. Anyway, let's not talk about that. I like shifts in tone, but that's too much. Now, we're not only talking about the transformation of meditation and the transformation of

[18:12]

mindfulness practice. And the transformation of having breath, mind and body fundamental rhythm of your activity. We're talking here about articulating consciousness itself. Now, a very big step in Buddhism is when you become conscious of being conscious. The consciousness of consciousness. As I often speak about the hearing, hearing. And the best example I can give of that is, you know, if you look, I think you've heard me say this before, if you look at a beach stone, a stone in water, in a lake or something, you can tell it's refracted and

[19:41]

altered by the medium of the water. You can feel, know, you can feel the medium of water is part of how you perceive the stone. Now the consciousness of consciousness would be able to feel the medium of consciousness altered wetting every object. Now, you can take the stone out of water and see that, oh, it's different out of the water. It's very hard to take a mental object out of mind. Oh, this is how it looks without consciousness and this is how it looks with consciousness.

[20:55]

There's no way to do that. But in a way, meditation gives you the ability to some extent do that. You can't take it out of mind, but you can take it out of consciousness. Now, what we're talking about here is pramana. Which is loosely translated as valid cognition. In other words, to know things Perceptually and inferentially. The word prāma... Prama, not pramana, prama.

[22:05]

And the word prama, also not pramana. Ma means to decognize. Davon bedeutet die Silbe ma, also erkennen. And pra means... perfecting or excellence. So it means something like an excellent cognition or a perfecting cognition. And when anna, A-N-A, is added to the prahma, When supra jetzt ana noch hinzugefügt wird, Ana means instrumental. Und bedeutet ana dabei, die letzte Silbe, also instrumentell.

[23:06]

So it literally means to how do you make a perfecting cognition. Buchstäblich übersetzt hieß es also, wie machst du eine Eine vollkommen werdende Erkenntnis. Yeah. And it's instrumental in how you do it, and it's also instrumental in what it leads to. Instrumental ist es, wie du es tust, sowohl als auch wohin es führt. Yeah, now, I don't know much about... Medieval scholasticism. You know, I know Occam's razor. Razor? Razor? Yeah, it was right.

[24:06]

Yeah, you were right. Accidentally right. Okay. I accidentally write occasionally, too. Most of the time, I hope. I'm accidental most of the time, at least. The right part, I know. Okay. Anyway, medieval scholastics, and I think in a way we could say Ivan Illich was, you know, such an important mentor for me. Seems to be. medieval scholastic transported into our century. So it was a way of thinking carefully about things and it's often very similar to Buddhism. And one way they One distinction they made is that external objects don't have intention.

[25:30]

But mental objects can have intention. So by emphasizing developing a mind of intentional mental objects, they were probably very close to something like the consciousness of consciousness. And I found that Illich and I we're really in the same territory trying to look at how we function. Now, how can I give you an idea of what's going on here, what I'm talking about? Now, you have a culture, a yogic culture, which assumes everything is constructed.

[26:43]

There's no natural. You don't just talk and think naturally. Only in Buddhism and for medieval scholastics that would be only the ignorant. And it wouldn't be natural at all. It would be entirely prescribed and proscribed by the culture. Okay, now we assume that you can parse a language. So we can divide a language into its parts. So we take for granted you can parse a sentence.

[27:52]

You're a linguist. How would you say it? In German too? To parse a sentence. Okay. What the medieval scholastics did and Dharmakirti did and so forth is to parse consciousness. What are the events of consciousness? Now, I think Dharmakirti says something like the apprehension of an object is the defining characteristic of consciousness.

[28:56]

Now, he also means make the apprehension of an object the defining characteristic of consciousness. Make the apprehension of an object The defining characteristic of consciousness. Now, this I think for most of us, at least for most of my life, it's been quite a foreign idea. It is a foreign idea. I don't want to do anything with my consciousness. I want to tune it away. I mean, it's really, you know, I don't know. I've got enough trouble without trying to do something with my consciousness.

[30:00]

But perhaps the motivation to do this practice, as we talked about motivation yesterday, includes a recognition that, hey, makes a difference if you parse consciousness. Now, I should stop. But I don't want to go on like yesterday. Then you'll need another afternoon off. Let's see if I can say something briefly. Maybe I'll continue in the afternoon. So, prāma basically means a knowledge event. A knowledge event. Prama heißt grundsätzlich ein Wissensereignis.

[31:04]

And with pramana added it becomes an instrumental knowledge event. Okay. Now when I give you a phrase like the pause for the particular. I'm asking you to pause for a knowledge event. Okay, now what is a knowledge event? Now, in this beginning part of the pointer, a knowledge event is a perceptual or inferential Now a singer, you know, my older daughter is becoming, my middle daughter is becoming a really good singer.

[32:08]

She holds her own with opera singers in the Bay Area. She does things with her voice. I can't do it with my ears. And she, you know, okay. she has to pour herself into each word as if it was an independent unit. And she also has to pour herself into each word as part of the stream. Okay, now Dharma means Moment by moment apprehension.

[33:11]

So how do we pour ourselves into each perceptual moment? As if we take it out of the mental stream and pour ourselves completely into it and simultaneously let it be part of the stream. So to articulate consciousness is to be present in consciousness Each knowledge event. Bewusstsein zu artikulieren heißt, gegenwärtig in jedem Wissensereignis zu sein. Each momentary knowing. Jeden augenblicklichen Wissen. And also release it into the stream. Take it out of the stream and release it into the stream. Also es herauszunehmen und es wieder in den Strom zu entlassen.

[34:12]

Now, it makes me very happy, believe it or not, when I'm, you know, getting up for Kin Hin. And some of you are leaving to go to the kitchen or the toilet or something. And as you go by the altar, you give a little nod or a little bow. You're articulating the stream of consciousness. This would be a little knowledge event. And dharmic, institutional dharmic practice is based on creating these little re-inhabited knowledge events. Okay, so I think of music. You know, This is one of the things, like German, I really don't know anything about music.

[35:18]

I kind of like to talk about it. Because the musician I'm growing up with now is Sophia. And as I told you once, she bangs at the piano and she makes music. And I bang at the piano and I bang at the same way I did when I was her age. She said, Papa, don't you hear the notes? I hear pa-pa, but that's about it. So she goes over to the piano and she says, you know, this is a couple of years ago. She says, look, you do this and you do that. Oh, do you hear the relationship between them? No.

[36:21]

So she tries to explain, no. And I watch her reading music. She can sort of read music now with her cello, quarter-sized cello. And she remembers things from several years ago and she just plays them by ear or sometimes reads them. Okay, so I spoke about, I've spoken so often about hearing, hearing. And I spoke yesterday about perhaps musicians when they play together. About? Musicians when they play together. I'm imagining. About? When they play together, their reference point becomes the region of sound.

[37:27]

Now, what Dharmakirti and this koan are suggesting is, what about the region, the six regions, the region of mentation? The region of mentation is the word. Well, mental activity. Okay. Can you hear the music of the region of mental activity? Can you feel the notes of consciousness? Now, I can't... I imagine someone, not you of course, saying, what the heck, I don't want to hear all this

[38:42]

What the heck, I don't want to hear all this stuff. But you know, it's actually interesting and fun. And once you have the idea, once I've presented it, you begin to hear the notes, which are the text of consciousness, the language of consciousness. You can start to highlight the notes you want to emphasize. Now, you can pause for the particular by letting Whatever a particular appears, appear by itself, through itself. Or you can decide what is a particular. Now the practice of valid cognition is to decide the particular is going to be a perceptual or inferential object.

[40:01]

What is the yogic skill of one-pointedness for? It's for many things. One of the things it's for is to be able to rest attention on perceptual and inferential objects. And to get in the habit of that, two things happen when you develop this new inhabitation. You create a kind of island of certainty or clarity in the middle of the mind. And it's a valid cognition, a feeling of certainty.

[41:06]

This is clear. And then things that are not valid are not certain. Like psychological habits you have. That are the first thing that pop into any appearance. Before appearance can appear, you've already got an attitude. So generalizations, psychological things, things everyone thinks. they don't have as much reality. They're like waves around the island.

[42:10]

And when you first start practicing, you make the island, but pretty soon the waves... The waves go right over the island, the sand, the beaches wash away. But by the practice of Pramana, you begin to make the island more and more firm, rises above the sea of generalizations and... This is tremendous knowledge because you can take refuge like Robinson on the island. The other thing that happens.

[43:15]

You know, Igor, we have this big dog. Igor. Igor likes to go outside a lot. He's got a girlfriend in town now. When I come down to go to Zazen, He's at the door hoping to escape at three in the morning. Anyway, so we put him out in the back, and he has got a fenced-in area. And if he wants to come in, he knows exactly what kind of scratch to make. And if the house is fairly quiet, it's just one little... If Sophia's practicing the cello... It's kind of like... And he likes to come in and sing with the cello.

[44:21]

And he sits down and he really gets on the same note. And he really gets on the same note. It's fantastic. I come for the show. Now, when he scratches, this is an inferential mental object. I can infer very easily that Igor wants to come in. He's got his horns scratching on the door. So Igor and I completely merge at that moment of an inferential mental object. Now the more we as patch-robed, raksud monks develop a mind rooted in the clarity and certainty of

[45:26]

inferential and perceptual objects, there's a flow within the Sangha of what we would call loosely an intuitive understanding of each other. Food and drink is monks eat together. And through this parsing of consciousness, We begin to have a similar flow of consciousness, of articulated consciousness. So in the flow of In the flow of impermanence, there's simultaneously a flow of certainty.

[46:58]

Now, I barely scratched the surface of this topic. But that's enough to get us started, I hope. Fantastic, huh? I think so.

[47:20]

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