I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Yeah, does that mean that I'm the Tathagata because you're listening to me? No, that's too much. But it means, I mean, there's some meaning to these, as I'm pointing out these days, these chants we chant. It means that somehow the Tathagata's words the words, Tathagata is the biggest name for the Buddha, the coming and going, the one who comes and goes, these words somehow also can be our words. And receiving them, they're the Tathagata's words. When I, in a sense, receive them, they're the Tathagata's words. That's a big idea, but Even that's a big idea, but why not?

[01:02]

What is the scope, range of our possibilities? Now, yeah, often I find myself speaking about early Buddhism and later Buddhism and so forth. as a way of finding, you know, a ground on which to speak. But it's also that I think that we recapitulate the history of Buddhism in our own practice, or at least the various changes in emphasis that drive the history of Buddhism, are also changes in emphasis that we find in ourself as we practice. And we're doing something here. Obviously we're doing something here. But the outlines of what we're doing aren't fully apparent.

[02:08]

And some of you, I mean, some of you will never come back. I mean, there may be a few of you. I hope you come back. But, I mean, if you don't come back, You've done it even like being here, just counting the days. Every morning you get up, how many more days, you know, till Christmas, I mean till... Still you'll find, I know you'll find, certain outlines of this practice unfold at other times in your life. Yeah, why? It's so simple what we're doing these 90 days and yet there's They're simple and yet a lot's folded, folded within them. Within what we do, this activity. Yeah. No, I find myself, I mean, you know, I said last time, I said, stuck or started, we'll see whether it's stuck or started, in constructing a posture.

[03:15]

What is posture? Now I've recently, last few shows, been emphasizing the thinking that posture itself is, or the knowing that Zazen posture itself is particularly, among all the postures, Zazen posture in particular. But the more refined our observation is, the more complex such a simple act of sitting is. Now, why is it? I mean, you know, we're in immensely complicated red cells, white cells, neurons, fascia. I mean, we're a complicated event here, so why shouldn't... I mean, we experience ourselves rather simply, arms, legs, etc.

[04:20]

But what's going on is the most complex thing we know about in the cosmos. So why shouldn't our sitting... When we take this which we, this event, then we, for example, I used the word suppress gestural thinking, suppress gesture, but probably it's better to contain gesture. So when you sit, you contain gesture by not scratching, contain gesture, and it enriches the mind or changes the mind Okay. Now also, I make this distinction, and some of you are paying attention to this distinction in your practice between awareness and consciousness, and I think that the distinction between awareness and consciousness is, as far as I can tell in practice, an essential experiential dimension in practice in the West.

[05:30]

However, when we bring to this distinction a higher, a more refined knowing, the distinction gets much more complex and the distinction starts enfolding itself. So anyway, that's partly what I'm talking about now. Yeah, and going back to chanting, we chant the lineage every morning, most mornings. And although, you know, in some political sense it's been used to establish credibility of a school or a lineage or something, but as a practice this is not an important aspect of lineage. As a practice, you're reciting the names of people, some mythological guys, but mostly real people.

[06:44]

And they're not your family. You're not saying my grandmother and grandfather and my great grandmother and great grandfather. Yeah, that's your family. Here it's another family. Another lineage, you know, at least the idea of it is a wisdom lineage. And even if you know some of the guys in our lineage, too bad there aren't more gals in our lineage, but anyway, guys in our lineage, but there will be. Some of the guys are, I'm sure, quite ordinary folks. But Yeah, but they're part of our lineage, just as our blood lineage has a lot of ordinary folks in it. So somehow, chanting the lineage, the vertical lineage, the lineage through time, brings us into a sense of responsibility

[07:54]

to all these folks. And it brings us into a sense of responsibility to the ones who come after us. For here you're in, at least you have the possibility of not just knowing in your life as a person in this century, but of knowing in a way that includes The knowing of our predecessors. Again, it's like playing, what's that game? Telephone? You call it something else in German? You whisper something to somebody, and they whisper it to somebody, and they whisper it to somebody. At the end, it's very different. Surprisingly, it's different. You'd think smart people, they'd get it straight. But it gets different, maybe because you whisper. But here what we're doing is we're whispering for 10 years, or 20 years, and then you whisper it for 10 or 20 years to you.

[09:05]

It's a very different game. You know things you wouldn't know through your own life. That's just a fact. But you confirm them in your own life. And you have a possibility that you're knowing whatever you accomplish. You know, Shakespeare writes poems. Long and far I'm dead, people will read this poem. It seemed to be important to Shakespeare. A lot of poems, poets have written poems like that. So Kirushi wrote in his dictionary, a little old beat-up dictionary, said, this little old beat-up dictionary is going to last longer than me. We have a chance that what we know, what we come to in our life, can actually continue to develop in others in a very direct and intimate way.

[10:15]

I mean, whatever you know goes to your children or your family. I mean, you write books and people understand them or misunderstand them or deconstruct them, you know, all that stuff. But here's a very intimate way in what we come to know continues and develops. Now, in early Buddhism, the emphasis was on the enlightened Buddha and on virtue, conduct, uprightness, morality, sila, and on freedom from suffering. The Buddha was one who was free from suffering. We hope. Though he died of eating supposedly spoiled pork or a bad mushroom or something, I don't know.

[11:19]

What was he eating spoiled pork for? He should have had better sense. Of course they didn't have inspections, I don't know. The later Buddhism emphasizes the Buddha not so much as one who's free of suffering, but one who knows how we actually exist. It even becomes a higher priority to know how we actually exist than to be free of suffering. In fact, knowing how we actually exist may be suffering. And the emphasis isn't any longer on the enlightened Buddha. I mean, the Buddha was an ordinary person, right? I mean, we know everything we know about him. He was an ordinary person who became an extraordinary person or was also an extraordinary person. And early Buddhism emphasizes the extraordinary person and, yeah, it doesn't emphasize, forgets about the ordinary person.

[12:37]

And so the practitioners, the followers of the Buddha and the Buddha's way imitated the Buddha. They imitated the extraordinary person. Now these are rather simple generalizations, but they, I think, reflect something in our own thinking, but I think they also reflect shifts in the history of Buddhism. So later Buddhism emphasizes the ordinary person, not the extraordinary person, but emphasizes the ordinary person who can become a Buddha. But what's the dynamic of becoming a Buddha? Not imitating the Buddha. But now since the Buddha is seen as one who knows how we exist, it becomes possible for us to know how we exist. No, I think it's important to be clear at where we are individually in this practice, in the history of this practice, because if you also have the ideas of early Buddhism floating around in your mind sphere, it can be kind of confusing.

[13:55]

because the pedagogy of our Zen practice is not particularly based on freeing you from suffering. It is, but it's not the main emphasis. The main emphasis is, first of all, knowing how we actually exist. Well, how do we know how we actually exist? How do we know? Well, that has to be the first step. How do we know? So, we have the five skandhas and the vijnanas, the alaya vijnana, sense impressions and so forth. This is all a study of how we know. It's a mind, I always say, a mindology, not a psychology.

[14:59]

Yeah. So our practice in this life, this activity here, is to engage us, to enhance the possibilities of discovering how we know. But if we ask how we know, when we know, what do we know? Well, I'm sorry, it's rather circular. In the end, what we know is how we know. So the object of how we know becomes how we know. Now why is that the case? It's partly the case because that's what happened, but it's also the case that it was discovered that how we know transforms what we know. There's even a kind of self-corrective or something like that.

[16:05]

Own corrective. Self? No, not self. In this knowing. If we take the phrase, let the mind flow freely without dwelling on anything. Now, if we equate let the mind flow freely with knowing how we know. There's an implicit trust in there that when we know how we know, when the mind flows freely, without dwelling on anything, the mind knows what to do. There's an integrity to mind itself, an implicit integrity to mind itself, and now we're very close to the idea of Buddha nature. that when we know how we know, Buddha nature appears.

[17:11]

Now Dharmakirti, he says, you know, he's one of our important ancestors along with Dignaga and both Dignaga and Dharmakirti, make the point that It takes an object to create a sense impression. Sense impression is of some object. But that sense impression is an impression on consciousness. And what we know, consciousness knows the impression on consciousness. Oh dear, this sounds like splitting hairs. Splitting hairs, yes. But why bother? Why at this level of awareness, this level, this refinement, which may be too much for most of us, you know, because our mindfulness, our mindful attention has to have developed to the point that we can notice these kinds of things, otherwise it's just nonsense.

[18:24]

Nonsense. A non-sensible But, you know, here we are when, you know, we've got to get to the point of finding out how we exist sometime, and the point of what our teaching's about, so let's venture into it. So Dharmakirti, they make this point, and it takes a while to kind of get it, that there's a sense impression that we can be conscious of, and that sense impression is in the medium of consciousness. So in fact, you're conscious of consciousness. Well, you're conscious of the sense impression made in consciousness. Now this is a point at which Buddhism becomes psychological because what you're perceiving is not the object but the subjective experience of the object which made an impression on consciousness.

[19:29]

Did you follow that? So what you're always perceiving is your subjective experience, not the object. There's no objective experience, there's only subjective experience. That's obvious enough, but here we're looking at how it actually functions. But then there's another reason he makes this distinction. Because not all the impressions made on consciousness are consciously perceived. You know about the gorilla and the soccer game. No? I can't remember. I didn't see the movie. But I know a number of people have seen the movie. They have this film of a soccer game. and they say there's a black team and a white team and you're supposed to watch it, etc.

[20:33]

And it goes on for about 20 minutes. Well, everybody afterwards and which team did what and people... But if you look at it three or four times, finally you see that there's a big gorilla in the middle of the field. And this gorilla is... No one sees it. People who practice Zen tend to see it sooner. Maybe on the second showing of the film. I think I know one person who saw it right away. But in general, people don't see it because they look at the two teams. Really, the gorilla, once you see it, it's nuts. It's like there was a gorilla in the middle of his end out here. And you just saw me lecturing and you didn't see the gorilla sitting here going... So, the spotlight of consciousness... doesn't illuminate all of consciousness. That's a very important distinction that has been studied a lot recently.

[21:38]

And the self-light of consciousness. So now we are with this awareness, is this consciousness? Well, I would say that the impressions, let's call them non-conscious impressions, if I try to create a term. So we're living in the midst of non-conscious impressions all the time. I mean, trillions of them. But only certain ones does the self-light of consciousness or the spotlight of consciousness illuminate. So consciousness perceives consciousness, that's one of Dharmakirti's points, but it's not the consciousness of consciousness. They're not experiencing, they are actually experiencing not the object, but the consciousness of the object, but they're not experiencing the medium of consciousness. Now this may all seem pretty weird to you.

[22:43]

But actually what you start to do if you do satsang is you start experiencing the medium of consciousness. And when you experience the medium of consciousness and then the field of mind and not just the contents or the non-conscious impressions, now we're talking about something like Buddha nature or Buddha mind. So I'll leave you with this to mull and muse over Thank you.

[23:22]

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