For all the years I've been practicing, I've been pondering the meaning and role of ritual. Yeah. As I've said before, when I started practicing, I was sort of Mr. Natural. That was nearly barefoot, as much as I could be, even in college. I refused to wear a tie and so they wouldn't put me in the yearbook and stuff like that. And I thought I should support myself by collecting thrown away pop bottles and turning them in.

[01:02]

Yeah, I somehow wanted to be outside of society and its rituals. And look at me now, nothing but ties. How did it happen? Well, I met Suzuki Roshi. And he was so natural and yet so embedded in ritual that I thought, okay, here we go. So... So let me speak about it in whatever way occurs to me. The basic form of a ritual is to gather, arrange and share. So we've gathered here. We arranged ourselves and the arrangement is often to make sacred.

[02:43]

Sacred means in English to dedicate to a single purpose. So often one aspect of a ritual is you gather to do a specific thing. To do a specific thing is something like making sacred. And then we share. So, that's just what we just did. And they're doing. So, you know, tanking again was banging away on things. So, I came in and Then when I bowed, the doan is supposed to bow, or at least acknowledge that this doan has now joined me in what I'm doing.

[04:04]

And while I'm bowing, the Doan doesn't have to bow with me, but puts his or her hands up. So there's some kind of relationship established between the doshi, the jisha and the doan. And then we all chant together and that's... moves that relationship to everyone. And then I, now I'm speaking within this arrangement and sharing that we've established.

[05:09]

Now, this sense of ritualism, of a rite, is very close to the idea of a dharma. And the dynamic or technique of deconstructing your habits. Now, let me say first, I want to talk about the use of a koan, and particularly the subtextual instructions or indications in this koan.

[06:25]

And I think it's necessary and also important that I talk about it. I just don't know if I can get there in one tesho. So, we'll see. And if not, I'll continue some other day, probably tomorrow. Okay. Now, I'm really not speaking about ritual... We have the word in English, but I'm not speaking about... in almost any way that's similar to ritual as we use it in our culture. When a coyote bites another coyote too roughly, the coyote who

[07:29]

bit too roughly, puts its ears back and bows. I'm sorry. So if you wash your face, usually starting with your forehead or your eyes or something, that's a ritual. So in a culture like China, where rights are at the top of whatever culture is, is rights. And I think it's actually rather important to realize it's not R-I-G-H-T-S, but R-I-T-E-S. Which means things precede through... initiation rather than proceeding through rights or simple existence.

[09:06]

So... Thanks. Go ahead. Through initiation. Now, so rites is almost another word for form. Now, which rites? The word rite, R-I-T-E. So rite, a ritual, is just a form you pay attention to. So how you shave or wash your face or brush your teeth, you do it in the same way all the time, usually roughly the same way.

[10:07]

And if you vary it, you notice it. That's a sense of ritual. Now if you think of all form, conscious form, as ritual, then ritual develops a whole different place in a society. Okay. Okay. Now in this koan, you know, a lot of it is standard reading of a text. Yes, there's ritual built into this text. The introduction follows the pattern of action, consequence, action, consequence right through.

[11:10]

And then ends with body of reality without it being clear whether that's an action or a consequence and that's left for you to figure out. Okay. Maybe I can do this all in 15 minutes. I suddenly realize I have nothing to say. Okay. So, now... I think it must be clear to all of you that koans are written texts. And they were definitely compiled. And even if occasionally it is the repetition of an actual conversation or dialogue,

[12:34]

Once it's inserted into the koan with commentary, etc., it's part of a written text. And it's no longer important whether it's a report of an actual conversation. Und dann spielt es eigentlich keine Rolle mehr, ob das jetzt eine Wiedergabe einer tatsächlichen Unterhaltung ist. So we can think of this koan as a talismatic text. Also können wir uns so einen koan als einen talismatischen Text vorstellen. A talisman, you have the word in German, the same word? It basically means an inscribed object, written on inscribed object. And the word etymologically is related to complete, telos.

[13:35]

So it means, now I'm just calling, no, I don't know, anybody else has called it a talismanic text, except the koans imply it. But my calling it this is the fruit of my trying to understand how we most effectively study and use koans. So let's define a talisman again as an inscribed object which completes something. Now, Taoist practitioners in China used to write down the equivalent of Wado's wisdom phrases on pieces of paper. And then they'd Chew them up and swallow them.

[15:15]

Without salt and pepper, I believe. But the idea was, you digest this, you incubate it in a big time, or a little time. So this koan is a unit. With a number of ingredients. And the idea is that it works talismatically in your practice. Now, the text, although it's a written text, a literary text, And follows a lot of the rules of Chinese poetry and composition and so forth.

[16:20]

And literature. It doesn't really stand outside the Sangha. In other words, it's a text written text but meant to be incubated within Sangha practice. Okay. Okay. Although the dialogue is composed you know composed It may never have happened, it's just part of the text. It functions as a talismanic text, digested, functioning, used within the Sangha.

[17:23]

Yeah, it's used, and I say Sangha because traditionally it's used within the monastic Sangha. And it's written almost as a medicine you're going to swallow. In the context of monastic practice, I think since we're an adept lay sangha, we can actually think of it as functioning within sangha life as well as monastic life. And Sangha life occurs not just at Johanneshof, but also wherever you live, and as I always say, going to an apotheker. Okay.

[18:46]

Okay. Now, as I said just, Stephen Cohen is asking, if you don't practice the Four Noble Truths, What does it mean to not practice not practicing? I mean to practice not practicing. Because he says, I don't even practice the Four Noble Truths, which really means he doesn't practice anything. Weil es ja heißt, dass er noch nicht mal die vier edlen Wahrheiten praktiziert. Und das bedeutet ja tatsächlich, dass er überhaupt nichts praktiziert. How the heck do you not practice anything? I'm going to stop breathing right now. Wie zum Teufel praktizierst du überhaupt nichts?

[19:49]

Da könnte man ja gleich aufhören zu atmen. Okay. Okay. Now... Okay. When we do Kinhint, This is something you don't do in the apotheke. You could, if it's crowded. When the kin hin ends, the door and rings a bell. And then three things happen. Well, at least we can, let's say, we can identify for the sake of this ritual three things. There's a bell and we bow. And we walk.

[20:57]

Okay. So, there's a bell, and the next step is you bring your feet together, and when you bring your feet together, you bring your hands together, and you bow. Actually, your hands are already together in Shashu. So you do three things. You hear the bell. That's one thing. Then you bring your feet together because one is ahead of the other. And then you bow. And then you start walking. Some people, as soon as they hear the bell, they start to walk. Now you're just, when you do that, you're just, from a point of view of Buddhist practice, you're just following instructions. In a sense, you're not taking possession of your experience.

[22:14]

The big difference between ritual and yoga culture and ritual and Western culture is there's no idea of natural. Natural is a theological idea. You can only be natural if you're created by God or something like that. In a yogic culture, everything is artifice. Everything is artificial. Everything is something you do. There's no way. I mean, if I shave my head, that's not natural.

[23:14]

If I let my hair grow and it gets matted and tangled up like an Indian saint, that ain't natural. I asked Bhagavan, an old friend of mine who You don't have to know who he is, but some of you know. He had matted hair like this. You know, for years it just matted. Yeah, Bhagavan. So I said to him once, why do you run around circumambulating everything and have your hair matted like that? And he said, I'm compensating for not suiting up in gym class. Not suiting up, sorry.

[24:34]

In high school he was really difficult and he refused to go to gym class and put on little shorts and things like that. So he refused to suit up for gym class. Oh, I see. So you know you can't get to natural. Okay. So if nothing's natural and nothing's left to chance I mean even if you leave things to chance it's always produced by the context. So ritual is a way to enter this, leaving it to chance or not leaving it to chance. Which is again at the center of the idea of a dharma. How do we enter everything changing?

[25:52]

Now the word connect or connection means to tie things together, to join things. In English. And continuous basically means it doesn't have to be tied together. It never ends. It never stops. And it's related to the word contain, to enclose. So the idea of dharma is a spatial idea. And connection is a spatial idea.

[26:54]

And how do you connect each moment? Okay, now say you get used to these little Sangha monastic rites. You stop, I mean, when the bell comes for the end of Kinhin. Yeah, you allow yourself to hear the bell first. everything has its own space. You don't act immediately on the bell. You hear the bell, and then you act. You may think I'm nuts going into this detail.

[27:58]

But there are life-changing differences, I think, I find. But I believe and I also notice that there are life-changing differences. And what a relief. You're always on vacation. You hear the bell. I've got nothing to do. Just going to hear the bell. Oh, the bell's not on. Put my feet together. Oh, put my feet together. You're in the zone right away. Spaced in. Okay. Okay, so you hear the bell, you put your feet together. You haven't got a care in the world. You haven't got a care in the world. You worry.

[29:07]

Okay. Thanks, all these helpers. And then you bow and then you walk home. Okay. All right. So, what are the four units of of our location. Mind. Body. Sight or situation. And emptiness. Emptiness is the context in which sight, mind and body appear. So basic dharmic practice is that each moment you pause for the mind, pause for the body, and pause for the situation.

[30:13]

It's absolutely no different than the end of kin-hin. And the practice, sangha practice, like ending kin-hin that way, begins to enter you into a kind of experiential, experienced territory. Where actually, used regularly, you deconstruct your habits. What an extraordinary thing to do. No, I don't think we can easily teach anybody this unless they enter Sangha life. How could you do it outside of Sangha life? So if the Eightfold Path starts with right views or completing views, that basically means you have to deconstruct your habits.

[31:37]

because your habits, the word habits, your habits are where you inhabit, it's where you live. So deconstructing your habits is deconstructing your views. Using a phrase like already connected is reconstructing your habits. Okay. Now if you, in a kind of immeasurably short length of time, moment after moment, are pausing for the mind, pausing for the body, and pausing for the situation, those pauses are emptiness. Those pauses are a kind of space in which things appear.

[32:52]

So the fourth is emptiness, which is the pause for the other three. And you can think of it in the same way in relationship to accept question, or what is it? And what is the third? No harm. So those three, like the four I just gave you, can appear in this space of pausing. No, I said you can't really do this outside of Sangha life.

[34:16]

You can learn it in Sangha life. But you can practice it, again, I would say, in the Apotheke. I have a neighborhood apotheke. I go in there every now and then just to practice these things and then I have to buy something. But there's a pause with two pauses within each cycle of breath. At the top of the cycle and at the bottom of the cycle. And if you bring attention to those pauses, I find actually, the clergy in the apothecary store feels it.

[35:20]

If my main attention is on the silence that accompanies words, words are arising out of silence. And some silence clings to them. And if you feel the silence around and between the words, I think even right now, you feel the silence too, as well as the words. And if you feel the space, the pause in the breath, Our bodies are so connected, really. This is a way you make that connection.

[36:44]

And how your posture is too, at the counter and so forth. And notice other people's postures. Culturally determined or psychologically determined and so forth. And notice how the clerk gives attention to each person. It will be closely related to the posture mental and physical posture of each person. Okay. Now, this is not to enter into steps and stages. Now, I really haven't said much about how you really talismatically use the koan. But I think it's enough that we get to the point where the great peace or something has no sign.

[38:02]

And then it says, is the star on the banner showing yet? The great peace has no sign is this invisible ritual. Der große Frieden hat kein Zeichen. Das ist dieses unsichtbare Ritual. The act and the consequence. Die Handlung und die Folge. And yet the consequence also, the act also has a form as a star yet visible on the banner. Und dennoch hat die Handlung auch eine Form, nämlich den Stern, der ganz sichtbar auf der Fahne steht. And I don't... What work? The word work occurs several times in the koan.

[39:29]

And the English sentences don't need it often. The construction of the English sentences don't need the word work. But clearly it keeps the word in the sentence. Because it's one of the keys to the koan. What work is done not to enter into steps and stages? Okay, thanks a lot. Thank you.

[40:01]

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