You all look like normal human beings. Why would you be doing such a crazy thing? And Ulrike, thanks for getting out of bed. You're welcome. It was fun translating with Neil too, but it's nice. That was just some modesty. Maybe I'll have to do a special seminar for father tongue. You could translate. Fathersprache. Okay. I think I... You okay?

[01:04]

I think I've given you enough sort of territory that we can begin to cover some territory. And let me say something about Zen's kind of basic Zen Buddhist attitude toward maps in practice. I used to think Well, let me put it this way. I'm continually struck by how characteristic of Zen it is not to have maps.

[02:12]

It, I think, completely makes sense once you get the... For example, the word zen derives from all of you must know, probably, derives from Chan, which derives from jhana. And one of the main maps of Buddhism is the four jhanas, or four concentrations, absorptions. And sometimes translated as the four trances.

[03:23]

So even though this word jhana, absorption or trance is where the word zen and chan comes from, Zen almost denies any connection with the four jhanas. Of course the connection is there, but Zen pretty much denies it. And what are they rejecting? They're not rejecting really the fact of absorption or trance.

[04:25]

And the word trance is dangerous because it has a lot of... kind of hypnotic negative characterizations in at least English. So I use it with, you know, four or five quotation marks. Yes. Do you put things in quotation marks in German when you kind of don't mean them? Yes. But what then is denying is that practice occurs in recognizable stages.

[05:36]

So the feeling is more like if you learn a city, through wandering around the city. That's very different than learning it through a map. Now, you may get to know a... You may, when you first, say, move to a new city, if you've ever done that, you may... Use a map to get yourself generally oriented. But if you live there, you begin to learn the city by going shopping or finding a dry cleaner or taking the wrong bus.

[06:38]

And practice is a lot like that. You often take the wrong bus. That was funny. I don't know, just normal funny. How are you today? Good. Much better. Oh, good. Or it's like if you learn a language living in the language, in the country or in a family that speaks the language, you don't learn the language like a textbook. You're learning complicated forms at the same time you're learning strange words like winterschlaf.

[08:04]

When you don't know the word for three, you know the word for winterschlaf. So you're not learning in any kind of stages, you know. Oh, that's clear, right? So if you're practicing zazen, you're learning advanced and beginning and everything, you're wandering around this city. Dharma city. You know, I've, as you've noticed, been a little sick during this session.

[09:27]

And again, characteristic of the attitude of Zen practice, I don't exactly try to get well. I find it quite interesting to be sick. And I mean in a sense I try to get better, but I don't try to get better like I've got some grain of sand in my eye I'm trying to get out And I'm not trying to, you know, usually I don't take medicine. I have nothing against medicine, but I usually don't take it because it hides the grain of sand from me. So I treat the grain of sand more the way an oyster does. Oh, what an interesting grain of sand. Maybe I can make it into a pearl. So I try to concentrate on, I try to locate this disease wherever it is and then I try to sort of make it smaller and more content instead of like that.

[10:59]

So I'm full of pearls because I've had colds and flus quite a lot. I don't think anyone would want them in a necklace, though. They're pretty funny-looking pearls. Now, Of course, after you know a city well, you look at the map and you say, oh yeah, yeah, right. So after practicing for some time, you can look at the four jhanas and say, oh yeah, I've been in that territory. And one-pointedness is one of the characteristics of the four jhanas. There's some scholarly disagreement about whether one-pointedness occurs only in second, third, and fourth, or in all four, but we don't need to know that.

[12:17]

So there is an educated dispute whether this one-pointedness now only appears in the second, third or fourth genres or in all four, but we don't want to stop there now. I mention that kind of thing only to remind you that a lot of thought has gone into this Buddhist practice and teaching. Now, Zen also, a characteristic of Zen is to hide maps here and there in the city. So you don't have much of a map, and I give you a lousy map, a very sketchy map. It says, enter the city here and sit down. And there it says, enter the city here and sit down. And you sit down You sit down in the northern district but after three 40-minute periods you find you're in the southern district Not quite how you got there but it looks different

[13:57]

And after that happens several times, once while you're sitting, you see a stone and you lift it up and there's a little map underneath it. And you open it up and you say, hmm, Mount Sumeru. I thought I was in Dharma City. It says I'm in Mount Somero. So this is Yunmin's kind of answer to this question. That I gave you last night. This is a quite famous koan. And I'll repeat it again. Mm-hmm. When a monk asks, or someone asks, Yanmen, Umman, when not producing a single thought, is there any fault or not?

[15:10]

Umman says, Yanmen says, Mount Sumeru. Mount Sumeru is said to be the center of the world in Buddhism. It's actually identified with a mountain in the Himalayas that you can circumambulate. It's quite a job to circumambulate it, but you can do it. And it's not as high as Mount Everest, but it's up there with the top peaks. And in some way I believe the Tibetan astrological system revolves around Mount Samaritans. And Mount Somero is said to be 80,000 leagues high.

[16:26]

We don't know how high that is, but that's pretty high. 80,000 anything is pretty far. And it's said to be 80,000 leagues under the sea. And it's said to be as winds can't touch it and rain can't wet it. Now, this is a brilliant answer of Umman's Now, you don't have to be advanced, adept Zen Buddhist to know it's a brilliant answer But that helps.

[17:48]

But it's also just as good a teaching and a non-diluted teaching for a beginner. Because if you take this answer and just put it in front of you, Mount Sumeru, it's very hard to know where it's going or what to do with it. It's like practicing with Mu, but it's different than practicing with Mu. Of course we can say it's the same, but different is different, and it's a different practice.

[18:56]

Not scenario, not scenario. So everything that you, if you really take a question like that, which you can't, An answer like that, an answer question that you can't put your mind around, it just looms in front of you like a mountain, like a cliff. It's said when you put this Mount Sumeru cliff in front of you, You hear great noises on the cliff above you as great pieces of it fall into the sea and lightning thunders around it and still at the same time nothing touches it. So if the beginner can take this practice like that, this is very powerful.

[20:16]

Now why that's powerful, you don't really need to know. But I'll try to give you some maps to show you why it's powerful. Are you still with me? Okay. Ah. To really make practice work, to really make the chemistry of practice work, you need to have an absolute certainty about practice.

[21:18]

A completeness about your decision to practice. Now, I don't know how to convey that to you in sort of reasonable terms, because it's not reasonable. It's like you don't know what existence is, but you exist. And even if you doubt that you exist, you act with certainty that you exist. So practice is like that. You decide to practice with the thoroughness that you decide to breathe.

[22:36]

And it's really no harder than deciding to breathe. And it doesn't mean breathing is the best way to live. You're not making that kind of comparison. Oh, I think there's some other way than breathing. That's a good way to live. You're just breathing. Now, it can look... When I think about the fact that I often wear these funny robes, And I made this decision to practice Buddhism when I was 25 or so. And I gave my whole life to it. And I'm still giving my whole life to it. And you might think this was a big decision.

[23:52]

But when I made it, it wasn't a big decision at all. I made it like getting up in the morning and deciding to have lunch or something. I would say that the ability to make this kind of absolute decision to practice is the same or comes with seeing mind. It's so clear, like breathing, that someone can't come to you and say, you should not be breathing.

[25:04]

No matter what they say, you're going to keep breathing. Okay. So that brings us back to one-pointedness. which I'm still trying to make clear. Now, one-pointedness is not to... The point of it is not to clear the mind. Okay, now let me stop there and come back to it a minute. Let me say something else about maps. Neil mentioned to me when we were in Berlin that the East German government modified the maps of East Germany

[26:17]

So I guess so that there were not only some things weren't on the maps or roads went different places, but they altered the scale of the map so that things looked closer together or farther apart than was actually the case. And that's quite sophisticated actually. So the East German government allows a map marked highly secret to slip into West German hands. Isn't this mad? Then a West German spy is spying on an East German village and the map's all... Well, I bring it up because actually maps in Buddhism are a lot like that.

[27:31]

But that's also the way you learn to sit. You spend a lot of time in one district. Like I know Kyoto very well, but I know certain parts of Kyoto extremely well. And I tend to know the rest of Kyoto sometimes from my knowledge of certain parts of Kyoto. And when I'm in another part of Kyoto I don't know so well I orient myself by kind of referring back to the part of Kyoto I know. So inside of me, some parts of the map are highly detailed and in a much different scale than other parts.

[28:45]

You understand that image. What I'm saying is you can take one aspect of Buddhism and really spend most of your lifetime practice in that one area. And you can begin to know the whole city, the whole Dharma city from this one district. And Buddhism is also taught in such a way that any one practice leads to all the practices. So Mount Sumeru, rightly practiced, or one-pointedness rightly practiced, leads to... all the other parts of dharma city.

[30:07]

So there's no harm in going deeper and deeper into one practice. And in Zen this is sometimes called one practice samadhi. So in this sense, Mount Sumeru is one practice samadhi. One pointedness is one practice samadhi. That's great. Okay, so, one-pointedness is not, the point of one-pointedness is not to clear the mind.

[31:12]

Point of one-pointedness is to see the mind. And you have to find a way to see the mind. Now, the example I've often used is my experience as a kid of washing the dishes endlessly, procrastinating. I would spend hours at the sink. looking at the silverware under the soap suds with the glasses. And my parents thought I was a bit nuts because they thought I procrastinated and would never get it done. Dickie, are you still washing the dishes?

[32:21]

I can't hear you, Mom. And the silverware looked great. I don't know why. But I realize now I was intuitively looking at mind. And one pointedness allows you to do that. If you can begin to stay with something, you can see mind. Now actually mind can't be seen because it's not an object. But that's why I say you have to practice uncorrected state of mind.

[33:21]

An unfabricated state of mind. That's not so easy to do. But it's the only way because as long as there's an object you're not seeing mind, you're seeing the object. You can impute mind from the object but that's not the same as seeing mind. And to see mind is the same as the Zen expression to see your original face. Now, one-pointedness is also a tool of practice. So Mount Samarra is also one-pointedness. Just this mountain.

[34:47]

Oh. That's a German word I've learned which we don't have in English. I think Peter taught me that first. From the Black Forest. He'd say during my lecture sometimes. Maybe that's one-pointedness There's actually a practice where you... Mount Samaria Okay, now some of you may have noticed that during Sashin, third, fourth or fifth day, you sometimes don't know which bowl to pour your water into.

[36:00]

Or you start to wrap up your bowls and... Wrap them up in the silverware still under your lap. Sometimes you look at the bowls and you can't imagine what stage you're in or where to start or anything. You're lost. Isn't that true? The bowls are just complicated. You can get completely lost in them. Yeah, you can learn a lot from this grain of sand. You can learn a lot from this grain of sand. Mount Sumeru is a grain of sand.

[37:02]

Because on the one hand you can see that you've lost through tiredness and so forth of sesshin and the repetition of sesshin you've lost your usual clarity of mind. You're wandering in Dharma City and you really don't know what the intersection is. So you can see that you've lost your clarity of mind. Okay, so on the one hand you can see how energy, sleep and so forth allow a certain clarity of mind. So one of the practices of Samad, of Sashin, is being able to maintain clarity of mind no matter how exhausted you are.

[38:18]

That means that clarity of mind has to come from some other source than whether you're rested or not. That ability to maintain clarity of mind under all circumstances, almost under all circumstances, is also one point of wisdom. Okay, now there's another aspect to this, being lost in dharma city. Lost in the middle of your orioki practice. You're not just tired. Your tiredness or the length of sitting or the repetition outside your usual ability to distract yourself You've begun to lose your ability to conceptualize.

[39:44]

Do you understand? No. One of the main stages of practice is non-conceptual practice. And this is what the question of the person speaking to Oman means. When not producing a single thought This is non-conceptual mind. Now I'm taking this koan and working it over with you to give you a sense of how koans are used.

[40:48]

Now Yesterday and the last couple of days I haven't been able to get through what I want, so I might go a little longer today. So please sit comfortably. Maybe we will go as long as Mount Sinairo.

[41:20]

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