I have to figure out as much at least as I figure out. And I'm bringing this up also because I'm teaching things that require you to follow up on it or require you to continue practicing. And each year I'll teach a little differently depending on the readiness I feel in you and who comes and whether the same people are coming and so forth. So what teaching you get will depend also on what you're doing and how you're continuing your practice.

[01:08]

And if I can find a place to live in Europe, I will probably start soon, living here six months a year or so. I don't know where yet. It depends on where I find a place. Me and the Eastern Europeans are all looking for apartments. Okay. In a way, what you're going to do now is I'm trying to give you a sense of how you create a mandala to practice within. If you can imagine your language, if you could visualize... The mandala is a bubble or the dharmakaya is considered your space body.

[02:29]

You can consider that you have a space body. And when you do zazen, sometimes you'll feel when you're sitting, you've located that place where there's no movement. You'll feel maybe you can't locate your body exactly. It's like sitting somewhere in space here. You may feel this is coming out in or in out. And sometimes if you don't know zazen very well, if you just go to sleep at night, but find a way to let your body go to sleep, but your mind stays sort of awake,

[03:34]

It's not uncommon for people when they do that to feel themselves suddenly floating above the bed a bit or something like that. This is one of the sensations of this Dharmakaya or space body. Dharmakaya just means Dharma body. Means the body you can hold. Because this body you can't hold is changing all the time. So the uncaused space body you can hold. So how do you do that? You turn it into a mandala. And to turn it into a mandala is to begin to have a visual sense of it and a physical sensate sense of it.

[04:38]

So if you imagine that language is outside this bubble, and that, now I'm just trying to give you visual images to work with, all right? If you imagine that when you start thinking, this body collapses. Then you start using language and you talk and you do various things. Okay, but now you want to change out of this body into this, excuse me for sounding so new age, space body. Okay. And so to do that, you have to stop thinking in the usual way. Dogen says, think non-thinking.

[06:00]

He doesn't say, don't think. He says, think non-thinking. And you transform the way you use language. So your teacher says to you in Zen, say Mu to everything. So you just get in the habit, maybe for a year, two years, everybody says, whenever one of them does, they say, moo. They think you're a raw steak. Still mooing. Moo.

[07:01]

But after a while you don't say it aloud because it drives your shopkeepers and friends crazy. I'd like some toothpaste. Doesn't work. But you get the feeling in you. You're changing language. You're using the poison of words to make it into a medicine. And that's the way Zen tries to practice with language. So here I'm trying to give you an image of changing these words into a picture.

[08:02]

And if you look at the etymological roots of language, it's mostly pictures. To scrutinize in English, you mean to look at something thoroughly, to scrutinize it. The roots of that mean to go through the trash, to go through the garbage. And as I said yesterday, perceive means to take hold. And we say that tables have legs.

[09:03]

And most in conceptually, language is organized around the center and the periphery and up and down, which are all physical. Up, down, up. So language is sort of squeezed out of pictures primarily based on the body. Then once it gets squeezed out there, it begins to have its own independent history. And becomes literature, philosophy, and so forth. With an independent history from the pictures. And Buddhist practice is to take each word, take it out of its history and pull it back into the picture.

[10:13]

Then it's no longer a poison for the spiritual life, but becomes medicine. Is that fairly clear? Would I say that again? Yes, why don't you say what you want. Ask her, in German, what part you want me to say. How you squeeze the word out of the original image, then it becomes its independent life, and independent history and independence, and how you, in Buddhism, take it away from this and put it back in and turn it into medicine.

[11:29]

How do you do that? Oh, well, she just said it again. So you take these words out of their usual context and begin using them in a repetitive way to transform them. To transform them and you. So then you can keep a sense of this mandala of body and mind, of the spectrum between sensation and thought. And then view that as mind. And that's the teaching of this sutra, how to view mind, heart-mind. And you view it with no eyes, no ears, no nose, etc.

[12:49]

So, again, a koan I've mentioned, a brief koan I've mentioned once or twice recently. Maybe you can catch the switch in the use of words here. Okay. It's the story of the teacher and the disciple who later becomes a very famous teacher. And they see some wild geese flying overhead. And I'm using certain stories and repeating them so you can really get the feeling of a story. And you know how beautiful the migrating birds are in their patterns.

[14:07]

I mean, it takes your breath away just to see them. This incredible intelligence of these birds flying together great distances in this lovely pattern. So, walking, taking a walk, the teacher looks up and says, what's that? And his student says, wild geese. Okay, but remember the first question is, what is it? What's that? That's a question that turns both ways. Remember when you mentioned the word aura, I said it's better to say, what is it, not aura.

[15:08]

Here we're talking about the medicine of words and not using them as names. So what is it is not a name. It's just what is it. So he answers with a name. Oh, it's wild geese. Obviously. He doesn't say obviously, but... and they're flying, and the teacher says, where have they gone? And the monk says, the student says, they've flown away. The teacher, you have to submit yourself to this again, the teacher reaches over his nose and twists it so hard

[16:21]

that the next day he still twists it so hard and says, when have they ever flown away? You've got the picture. Okay. So that actually is a little mandala. And if you want to practice with that, every situation now for a while, Whether something's appearing and disappearing, whatever, you grab the nose of the situation and say, when have you ever flown away?

[17:26]

And if you take that as a feeling, flown away, not flown away, is it real, is it not real, are the geese here or not, that sort of overall sense to bring to situations transforms language in your situation. Also, das ist wirklich so zu tun, wirklich damit zu arbeiten, wann sind sie weggeflogen, wohin, was ist das, das transformiert die Sprache in Medizin. And this sense is also of the dialogue between the teacher and the disciple is here in this. This initiates this dialogue way of thinking. Because you have the Avokiteshvara telling Shariputra, O Shariputra, and there's a dialogue going on in this. Yeah, form does not differ from emptiness.

[18:34]

Geese have never flown away. So now it's time to have a break. That was a little long, I'm sorry. Jeez, that was long, wasn't it? Please sit in any way that's comfortable for you. That was a 20 minute break and 25 and 15 or 20 minutes of sitting. And this morning you said for 40 minutes.

[19:35]

That's a full professional monk's amount. Yes. Sometimes it's nice actually to sit for two or three hours. But in general it's better to sit for half an hour or 30 or 40 minutes and then stop and have a change and then sit again if you're going to sit long. And someone asked you about how you find zazen in your schedule.

[20:40]

Well, to find zazen in your schedule really means you're finding time for your spiritual life. To manifest your spiritual life, you already have a spiritual life, but usually it's not manifest. Manifest requires an adult decision. Again, it's like my friend Michael McClure, a poet, said he and Charles Olson, another poet friend of his, said, we were trying to find a life that produced poems.

[21:54]

To find a way of living that poems came out. So how do you find a way of living so your spiritual life comes out? Well, if your life always runs from 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 to A to B to C, you won't find a manifest spiritual life. Because the nature of Letting this lead you to that and this schedule leads you to that, there's no space for it. You have to create a zero in your life. One leads to two, to three, but it doesn't lead to zero. It may lead to 10, where if you look to the right, there's a zero, but mostly you don't see it.

[23:14]

Yeah. And, you know, every now and then another zero appears, but it's obscured as 20. So to change your schedule is the first step. And then to see if you can organize your life around a changed schedule which has a zero in it. but nothing in your life is going to lead to zero except your intention the circumstances of day unless you're in deep psychological shit doesn't lead to spiritual life So a lot of people in psychological trouble look for a spiritual life.

[24:29]

They can sense that's what they need. But as soon as their non-spiritual life is healed, they stop looking for a spiritual life. So it's very rare that a person whose non-spiritual life is healed has the intelligence or awareness to seek a spiritual life. So we always have reasons, you know. A daily life is an addiction. Like smoking or drinking. And one of the difficulties with stopping smoking Is it one cigarette is no problem?

[25:51]

It's always one cigarette, one cigarette, one cigarette, one drink, one drink. One cigarette isn't going to hurt you. So one more appointment isn't going to hurt you. One more busy day isn't going to hurt you. But then death comes knocking on the door. Or illness. And you say, hey, what happened? And it is in fact too late. Mm-hmm. So it's helpful to change your schedule so you have a little time, 20 minutes a day. And after you get good at it, 20 or 30 minutes a day actually allow you to sleep an hour or two less. So there's candy at the end of the rainbow of your busy life.

[27:02]

And zazen will actually give you more time to make money and stuff like that. To rise in the ranks of the corporation. Okay. But it helps to change your schedule. Bye-bye. She has to go take care of her children, don't you, Ryan? But also, if you Now the point of zazen, the basic, the overall zazen instruction is to practice with an uncorrected state of mind.

[28:16]

An uncorrected state of mind means, as it says in here, you have to practice with no attainment, no cognition. No cognition, no attainment. To practice with no attainment, with no idea of attainment, no idea of enlightenment means an uncorrected state of mind. However, if you've understood what I mean by Dharani memory, or Dharani awareness, we could say, then when you're doing zazen, you begin to accumulate...

[29:30]

a vocabulary of zazen mind, zazen experience. And as your body learns these things, say that After 20 minutes, your zazen generally gets better. I remember Sukhiroshi, after he'd been meditating all his life, saying, you know, the first 10 minutes, 20 minutes, usually your gift's getting settled, and then you can enter. That's after he'd been sitting for many, all his life. And although 20 minutes, okay, but your body knows what zazen is like at 20 minutes, 40 minutes, 32 minutes, etc., The way my body usually knows when 20 minutes have passed or 40 minutes have passed, you know, in sitting.

[31:14]

The way my body knows almost to the virtually minute when six hours of sleeping have passed or five hours. Your body knows these things. I'm saying your body. I mean your body, mind, mandala knows these things. And it's the more your non-man, non-conceptual let's say non-conceptual mind is... your non-conceptual Dharani mind awareness is present, then you have a memory of all the stages of sāsana. So if you have a minute... you can suddenly enter the 20-minute point at Zazen in one minute, because your body remembers that.

[32:29]

And that's not the same as 20 minutes of meditation. 20 minutes of sitting before you enter that. So it's not the same, but it's like the difference between reading a whole poem and one word in the middle of a poem. We're singing a whole song and remembering one phrase from the song which triggers the song. So sometimes we sing the whole song. And singing the whole song will transform the one phrase which represents the song.

[33:46]

Like ringing the bells yourself makes a difference. But you still have the experience of a song appearing In a certain situation, a song will appear, one phrase from the song. And the transformative power of popular music, the Beatles, et cetera, basically uses deronic awareness. I was in Prague the other day where there's an active attempt to redistribute the wealth of the West. So you have to watch your car carefully. We have a kind of station wagon type where you can see the luggage through.

[35:04]

So we even watched people sort of studying our car and parked looking at it. So we found a restaurant on a balcony that we could look down and see the car under the linden trees, their linden. And there was on this famous street where all this revolution has occurred, where we were, we could hear a demonstration with loudspeakers going on up the street. And then suddenly I began hearing singing in Czechoslovakian.

[36:06]

And I said to Ulrike, can this be true? Is that We Shall Overcome being sung in Czechoslovakian? And it was. And after a while they started singing in English. But he shall overcome, booming out in the plots. And I remember, you know, I know Joan Baez, and I remember when this was first being sung in the student revolution days in Berkeley in the 60s. So when a phrase like that pops up in certain situations, we shall overcome. It's a kind of mantra or a dharanic awareness coming up. So these are not such a, you know, not such a special thing.

[37:36]

It happens to everyone. And do you remember, Mark, when we were in the Andes doing that hiking thing? For two weeks we got to this little tiny village way up somewhere, 14,000 feet. And they were playing in this little tiny bar. What rock group? I forget now. One of the main rock groups was being played in this little village with people about this tall. So the point I'm making only is that if your, as your body remembers phrases from songs that pop up in certain situations, When you really start zazen as a part of your life, like sleeping and being awake, you begin to find you can, in those little moments like yesterday when I stood up and stopped, and took a step and stopped.

[39:04]

In those moments you can have zazen. And so it begins to be a way in which there's a continuity of ordinary mind and spiritual mind simultaneously in your day. As if you had a kind of song of Buddha being in the background of your mind. And to create that sort of background song is one way koans are used in Zen to keep introducing some phrase like, have they ever flown away, that's behind your thinking all the time. So form is emptiness is such a phrase. Shiki-shiki is form here.

[40:32]

So you get so it's there. Shiki-shiki-fu-hi-ku-hu. Shiki-shiki-so-ku-ze. It kind of is a little... So in English you'd have form as emptiness and when you look at things you have this sense of form as emptiness. Emptiness is form. It begins to change the way you perceive things. When you see form, you think emptiness. And you can begin to feel emptiness or the ability to throw it all away in the midst of doing things. I practice, as I've said before, once over a year with the phrase, there's no place to go and nothing to do. I did things, went places, but simultaneously every time I did something or went somewhere I thought at the same time there's no place to go and nothing to do.

[41:48]

First I had to get to the point where I could just repeat the phrase constantly or have the phrase present. That's hard enough. After a while, I could not only have the phrase present all the time, night and day, through my sleep, that if I forgot it for two months, When I remembered it, I didn't criticize myself, oh, you failed in practice, you forgot the phrase for two months. I said, oh, great, here you are again, old friend, no place to go, nothing to do.

[42:50]

And at some point I began to not only be able to repeat the phrase, I began to find that more and more when I did things, there was this place where there was no place to go and nothing to do. That's also reflected in the short phrase from a Zen story. where one brother monk, he's actually his real brother as well as his Dharma brother, says to his brother who's sweeping, oh, you're so busy. And his brother, the brother looked at the brother and said, you should know there is one who is not busy. So can you have that feeling all the time when you're doing things, knowing at the same time there is one who is not busy?

[44:16]

Now, you asked a question yesterday. You said something about language and Buddhism also. What did you say? Do you remember? I wanted to have a platform. And I felt very stupid because I know that there was a band in my life You mentioned that, but then you also said you realized then that something is a language, or that Buddhism is a language, or... Aha, so I... that we can go beyond everything. Everything is a structure, like languages, etc. Yeah. And you know that Buddhism is a structure, too. Yeah. And so we can go beyond that, too. Yeah. So let me repeat, sort of, so you can say it in German. She said something to me like... She needs something to grasp hold of at the same time as she saw, if I'm repeating it correctly, same time as she saw that everything is a structure and is limited in being a structure.

[45:33]

And so everything is a structure like a language, and everything can't be contained in a language. Yes, and so I said, and yes, Buddhism is not the truth, it's a language. And so she said, well, then we must have to go beyond Buddhism, too. Okay, so what is the most basic teaching of Buddhism? The Buddha's first teaching. Anyone? Yes. What?

[46:49]

Suffering, yeah. Well, the Four Noble Truths. Suffering. There's a cause of suffering. And there's a stopping of it. And there's the path. That's the basic teaching of Buddhism, the Four Noble Truths. If Buddhism is anything, it's the Four Noble Truths. So look at your card for a moment here. In the middle of the one, two, three, fourth paragraph, see the line, no ignorance. Yeah, look at the next line. It throws out the four noble truths.

[48:06]

No suffering, no cause, no origination, no stopping, no path. So this teaching throws Buddhism away. We don't even have Buddhism to depend on. What are we going to do? We're going to have lunch in a few minutes. What are we going to do? Leave everything behind. Did you say it in German? Leave everything behind. Yeah, that's good. To have that feeling. That becomes a way of being. Now, before we go to lunch, does anybody like to bring up anything?

[49:18]

I meant to actually just talk with you, but that took longer to say than I thought. I don't know if this is the moment but I would be interested also in the two lines of the second last paragraph saying in just three words and attain unsurpassed, complete, perfect enlightenment. So I'm interested in the three worlds and why the enlightenment has to have three adjectives. Unsurpassed, complete, and perfect. Yeah. Okay. I will comment on that when we come back.

[50:19]

So I think we're going to lunch.

[50:23]

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