Now I felt maybe I, as you probably noticed, I tried to be as clear as possible about the, let's call it the dimensionality of immediacy. Or the the dimensionality of the durative present within our sensorium. Now, trying to be clear like that is a kind of meta-information that doesn't seem to be grounded in our daily... a gritty life.

[01:05]

But the effort to be clear is rooted in the concept of an imaginal body. Recently I pointed out that we can imagine Zazen as a realized as four postures. The first is the physical posture, which I'm trying to do the best I can with my inflexible etc.,

[02:07]

So you establish the physical posture first. And then with the attentional skills. And then with the attentional skills. You develop the physiological body. And I think it's useful to know that practice changes you physiologically. The body you are before you practice is not the same body after you practice. So the physiological body is evolved through bringing attention to the interiority of the body. And that's implicit in the instructions in the Anapanasati, in the Satipatthana Sutras about posture.

[03:49]

And breath. That you're bringing attention from the crown of the head to the soles of the feet and back up. wo du die Aufmerksamkeit von dem Scheitelpunkt des Kopfes bis hin zu den Fußsohlen bringst und dann wieder zurück nach oben. And that's code sort of for like imagining an inner flashlight in which you explore your organs and lungs and spine and so forth. And there's a lot of specificity about this physiological dimension dynamic of practice. So you spent a fair amount of time developing the ability to feel the inside of the body simultaneously with the outside of the body and the outside of the world.

[05:36]

So you're not just in the world with the eyes of seeing. Your body is also not just feeling because there's tension or stress or something like that. Your body is also feeling the world as if the entire interior of the body was a kind of eye. It's one of what is indicated by the third eye, which is the inner body looking out. So that is the development, and you use the posture, the outer posture, to develop this inner posture or inner physiological body.

[06:51]

And it simply takes time. And this is not the same as the click or the enlightenment experience, the shift, the enlightenment shift. It's this inner awakeness, that's awakeningness, that is the basis for the actualization of the enlightenment experience. Now the third posture of these four is the imaginal body. You begin to feel what the spine is like when it is kind of awakening you in the viscosity of gravity.

[08:31]

And you begin, the spine is of course a physical backbone. But it's also a feeling. And you get, so you know the feeling of the spine almost vertebrae by vertebrae through its various sections. And up through the neck and the atlas and axis vertebrae. And through the head, which is only imaginary, through the head. To the crown chakra, which now is also verbed with the feet.

[09:47]

And that's partly developed by Lagen Kinhin, walking meditation. You develop a feeling that you're breathing through each raised heel, and that breathing is going up the spine into the crown chakra. In short, the way you get to feel a good Zazen posture, where you feel open and relaxed and at ease, Completely present and simultaneously completely at ease. And this is cued by certain feelings that arise within the body and as the body. So that's the imaginal body.

[11:11]

Now the fourth posture is when you can bring that imaginal body, the feeling of zazen, which you've evolved, Into all your postures. So you're standing in a doorway talking to somebody and you can feel your spine being present in the conversation. So through the evolved imaginal body, the zazen posture is not limited to the traditional zazen posture. It's present as a taste and feeling and guide in all of your postures. Maybe when you get up in the morning and you bring your feet to the side of the bed, onto the floor,

[12:28]

Vielleicht wenn du morgens aufstehst und deine Füße vor das Bett stellst. You can rise up as you're sitting on the edge of the bed, rise up into the imaginal zazen posture. Da kannst du vielleicht, während du vom Bett aufstehst, dich in diese vorgestellte, in diese imaginierte zazen-Haltung hinein erheben. And in this way you can even sort of start the day within and through the imaginal zazen posture before you do zazen. Okay, so that's a kind of teaching of the four zazen postures. Now, that is all related to and informed by the imaginal zazen posture.

[13:50]

Das alles bezieht sich auf und ist geprägt von, informiert von, der imaginierten zazenhaltung. Now, I'd like to show you in some ways, show you, perhaps, what I've learned from koans. Ich möchte euch vielleicht ein This Midwestern farm town New England to boy learned in his life from injecting koans into his activity. Okay, this koan that I'm emphasizing... One of the... Suzuki Roshi and I both practiced Rinzai and Soto Shun.

[15:16]

And we actually have discussed whether we should emphasize Soto Shun more or Rinzai Shun more. And I can't, in this last seminar, the last day of the last seminar, I can't explain all this, but I can say simply that we ended up adopting a more Rinzai institutional articulation. And so there are some differences in that what we've adopted is more a sotashu conception of practice. So the Soto-Shu emphasis in practice is more Sangha-determinative and less teacher-determinative.

[16:26]

And so the Rinzai approach, Linji approach, is more that the teacher gives the koan to the sangha, to an individual. So the Soto-shu approach is more, you present the koan to the sangha, but not to individuals, and you see who picks up on it. So from that point of view, for some months now, I've been presenting Koan 52, the show you wrote. And I present various parts of it here and there.

[17:48]

Sometimes I point out that it's a koan, sometimes I don't. And then I see who picks up on it, and then that begins to shape my relationship to the person. So now I'm being more pedagogical in this last seminar and showing you some of the process of practice and teaching. If I show you and then you pick up on it, then it's not the same as if I didn't show you and you still pick up on it. Yeah, so this koan... It starts out with a line, basically, although we can extend thinking through metaphors, what about when there's no similitude, nothing on which to base a metaphor?

[19:21]

Then what do we do? Okay. Now implicit in that statement alone and again if you what I've been suggesting is Now, in Rinzai shu, Linji shu, shu means school in Japanese, the practitioner brings the koan to the teacher in Sanzen. In the Rinzai shu, shu means school in Japanese, in Linji, the practitioner brings the koan to the teacher in Sanzen. In sotashu you notice whether the insights or practices, teachings which are demonstrated in the koan are then begin to be demonstrated by the person in their activities with other people, washing dishes or something.

[20:45]

In addition to presenting the koan in various little particles of it and stuff like that, I want to see if it's actualized in our behavior together or in my behavior with you. So I might say to Sukhi Rishi, standing on the bridge once I did it, Tassajara, what you brought, what you mentioned in your lecture, this is how I understood it.

[21:52]

And he turned, he said, I already said that, and walked away from me. So I... I was left with, yes, he acknowledged that I noticed what he said and that he mentioned that he'd already said that and then he turned away. So I was left with that. And so a practitioner came to me recently in Doksan and he asked me a question and I said, take off your watch. So he took off his watch and put it in his pocket and I bowed to him and out he went.

[23:00]

That should be enough. Okay, so I'm trying to demonstrate that Also ich demonstriere dabei die pädagogische Dynamik der Soto-Schule. So you can spend quite a lot of time as I've been using metaphors to kind of fiddle around with them you can spend a lot of time with just this first line in this koan. Du kannst jede Menge Zeit damit verbringen einfach diese erste Zeile in diesem koan zu untersuchen. Those who have wisdom, at least those who have wisdom, can understand by means of metaphors.

[24:09]

Of course, this already means right here that language, words, and metaphors only point at, approach how we exist. Now, again, I'm trying to emphasize how different this yogic actuality is from our reality. For example, the word truth or something close to the word truth in Sanskrit means when all things are considered. And since everything's an activity, no entities again and again and again, it means that the methodology used to arrive at all things being considered is the truth.

[25:19]

And because, over and over and over again, everything is activity and nothing is an entity, this means that the method that is used to consider all things, that this is the truth. Yes. Yes. So there's no truth in Buddhism. Truth requires a truth place where truth can exist independent of other things, a God space. And if something's going to be true, it's true only when all things are considered and what's the methodology used to consider all things at once. That's one reason we can say that emptiness is considered to be if there's a truth to the truth, because that's when you consider all things

[26:47]

All things from the field of interdependence can be only understood as emptiness. And being bhava in Buddhism, Sanskrit, doesn't mean emptiness. A being is something like ising. Being means something more like perceptible realm or perceiving realm. And it's understood like Hans Jorg's click. Which is that perceiving is simultaneously the act of perceiving and the turning things into entities or objects.

[28:16]

Object is to perceive. get in the way of something. Subject means to throw, and when you throw it against a wall, it's an object. And subject means you throw it under. But there's no under in Buddhism. There's no understand. There's only standing. No understanding. I'm trying to use these as exhibit A and B, C and Z of this other way of being in the world which can be seeded in us, S-E-E-D-E-D, and sometimes little springlets spring up.

[29:35]

I just try to show the A, B, C and Z of this really different way of being in the world. What did he say? Sprouts. So if you're going to really look at this koan, you don't just read it. You start with the first line and see if you actually think in metaphors. Wenn du dir diesen Koan wirklich anschaust, dann liest du den nicht einfach durch, sondern du bleibst zum Beispiel bei der ersten Zeile und fragst dich, ob du wirklich in Metaphern denkst. And then you might say, what's the difference between a metaphor and a bunch of words? Und dann kannst du dir die Frage stellen, was ist der Unterschied zwischen einer Metapher und einfach einem Haufen Worte?

[30:43]

Well, maybe the most basic metaphor in Buddhism is the wave water metaphor. The water can become waves, but it's always trying to return to stillness. The shape of the wave is trying to return to stillness. Yeah, so this stillness wave metaphor, form and emptiness, et cetera, is maybe the most basic metaphor. But the metaphor is powerful because we feel the stillness of the water and we feel the activity of the wave. You're not just thinking. The stillness, you can feel the stillness.

[31:51]

You see water just being still. A little water button on the top of it. And in this koan you have a version of that. A reference to Kanadeva. Who went to see Nagarjuna. And the attendant brought him a bowl of water. Nagarjuna's greeting. And Kanadeva being a monk, had his little sewing kit, so he took a needle out and suspended it on the water, on the surface tension, so it didn't sink. This is communicating by metaphors. There's wave and there's water and there's stillness, but then there's the needle being still on the water.

[32:56]

A third position. So the first thing to recognize is maybe, the first thing to recognize is that metaphors are felt, not thought. Now, when our words, now you might think about the fact that this was Chinese and written in Chinese. And so it's written in characters, in kanji, what we call often ideograms. But they're really not ideograms, they're not ideas, they're metaphorgrams. And even though person looks like a person and a tree looks like a tree,

[34:19]

And as Magritte said, this is not a pipe. Even the drawing of a tree is still a pipe. A metaphor for a tree. And then the 3,000 or so kanji, there's 20 or 40,000 kanji, but the 3,000 or so kanji that most people know. Are various kanjis put together to make radicals, to make one meaning, one meaning, but it's made of several meanings? And the Chinese also are, just extending this a little, writing these with a brush.

[35:40]

And where the radical is on the left or right or above or below, it makes a difference in just how you end the brushstroke, whether you end it with a string or you end it firmly or you end it with a little... All that communicates proportion, space, etc., Yeah, and of course it's dangerous. The brush is full of ink and you've got more or less water in one part of the brush and inky water in the other part of the brush. So it's a little bit tricky. It just simply requires more attention than a ballpoint pen. So people are learning attention all the time when they're just learning to simply write.

[37:31]

And it's interesting that here we have this much more complex and time-consuming process to learn the language. Japan has basically 99% literacy. There's almost nobody who doesn't read. In America, there's a lot of people who don't read. So the basic concept in Asian culture is make the culture complicated because it makes the brain and the body complicated. But the idea of plasticity is fairly recent, in recent decades. Okay, so when Einstein used his... metaphors to kind of get the feeling for relativity and so forth that he's spoken about, written about, and his shift into seeing the world as he did in his papers as a young man.

[39:07]

Als Einstein all seine Metaphern, seine Gedankenexperimente beschrieben hat, die von denen wir wissen, die er aufgeschrieben hat, um seine Veröffentlichungen, seine Berechnungen als Schiff in ein neues Verständnis, die er als junger Mann publiziert hat, anzubauen. He didn't just think the possibilities, he wanted to feel the possibilities. So I would like to go about 10 minutes further, but I think I'll give us a break. And as usual, I thought this little riff would take about 10 minutes. I'm out of control. I'm out of control. I'm sorry. So maybe we can come back to this a little bit, but then I really want to discuss all this with you.

[40:17]

Yeah. To feel the world is what metaphors are about. But when you come to the point where there's no possibility of comparison or similitude, which you need comparison or similitude to make a metaphor, Then how do you present the practice? No, this is an interesting question. I mean, I never had a college text which said, when I can't use words and I can't use the feeling of metaphors and there's no place, how do I teach? Right, right. But that's the problem we Zen practitioners who are tricked into teaching have to face.

[41:24]

Thanks.

[41:44]

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