Well, let's continue with the text of the Quran for a bit. Yeah, after punching poor Dawu, he went and later practiced with a disciple, a fellow disciple of Da Wu. Yeah, these persons are, don't think of which one understands and which one doesn't understand. It's just these people did these things. These persons did these things. You're just looking at these folks. As soon as you start evaluating which one understands, you start evaluating yourself.

[01:04]

Do I understand? You're just present with the common. So he went into Shi Xuan's Dharma Hall. Yuan did. And he went in with a hoe. He started hoeing at the floor. As if to dig up a plant or maybe plant a seedling. Als ob er da eine Pflanze sehen wollte oder vielleicht einen Samen ausbuddeln oder so.

[02:15]

And Schwan saw him doing this and said, what the hell are you doing? Und Schwan hat gesehen, wie er das macht und hat ihn gefragt, was zum Kuckuck machst du da? And then Otmar said, we've already sanded the floor. But Yuan said, I'm looking for the relics, ashes of our late teacher. And Yuan said, waves spread far and wide. And the waves and the foam fills the sky, fills the heavens. Yeah. And... Yuan says, I have to start somewhere, something like that.

[03:34]

And Shui Do supposedly said, heavens, heavens, oh my goodness. And then Poole supposedly said all these little comments, said, well, the relics are still here. And Fu, and now we have all these little comments, Fu allegedly said, so the relics are still here. I like the Chinese humor commentary when he says, I'm looking for the relics of our late master. The commentary says, this is hanging a medicine bag on the back of a hearse. Hearse. Hearse is the car you carry a dead body in. Okay.

[04:34]

It's a little late, you know, medicine bag. Well, of course, this is a classic Buddhist, ancient Buddhist concept. That the physical body, seeing the physical body, what's important is the Dharma words, the Dharmakaya Dharma words of the Buddha. is that it's not so important to see the physical body, but what counts are the Dharma words, the Dharma Kaya of the Buddha. And that means, and I'm sorry to say this, but that means it's really not important whether you've ever met or seen Sukhirishi or not referred to Sukhirishi.

[06:01]

The reference now is my words. But they're not my words, but they're the Dharma in words. Ideally, I mean, I hope so, anyway, they don't. Es sind eben nicht meine Worte, sondern es ist der Dharma in Worten, also zumindest idealerweise. Yeah, or Ottmar's words or Nicole's words. In other words, he's looking for the, in the Dharma hall of Schwan, he's looking for the relics of his late teacher. And Fu's comment, that the relics are still here, The means is to say that his hoeing in the dharma hall for the relics shows the relics are still here.

[07:26]

In him he's still holding the dharma teachings of Daowu. And that's why there's such an emphasis on careful evolved and developed transmission. So because the words, the actions of the teacher are the continuation, are the new body, dharma body, dharma body, dharmakaya, dharma body of the historical Buddha. Yeah.

[08:27]

And the waves and... I mean, again, we're starting from infinity, right? Right? Yeah. So, our allness... And so the waves that spread far and wide and which the home of the waves reached to the heavens is simply a metaphor for the relationships of allness. Das ist einfach eine Metapher für das Beziehungsgeflecht der Allheit.

[09:29]

And again, implied here, and I think we can try to get, if you really think in terms of everything is relationships and it's just happening around you like waves spreading far and wide and reaching to the heavens, the heavens in this case, heavens, heavens, means, represents infinity. I mean, heavens isn't way up there. Heavens is the dynamic of here. And when you really think in these terms and in these pictures, that you think everything that happens, everything that constantly happens around you, in relationships, these are all relationships that happen all the time, then this exclamation, heaven, heaven, means... Maybe we shouldn't say the word heaven, because it has such a different meaning for us.

[10:33]

In any case, you have to just imagine, and you can try starting, if all you see is relationships, and it extends infinitely, And all you see is relationships. Yeah, and then? Yeah. Then people are born, people die, people come and go, things happen, that's all the way, that's just the way it is. You're secure in the whole of all this. Which includes birth and death, etc. Du bist dann sicher in der Gänze von allem.

[11:41]

Und das schließt Geburt und Tod und so weiter mit ein. I have the image in my mind always when I speak about something like this of a cat I had once who lost a kitten. Und wenn ich über sowas spreche, dann habe ich dabei immer das Bild von einer Katze, die ich mal hatte im Kopf, die ihr Kätzchen verloren hat. I think there were four kittens left and one died. And the mother cat looked and looked and looked for the kitten and found it and then... It was dead and then just went on being the mother cat to the other four. I think of Chuanza, who, after his wife died, he was found out in the back of his house beating on a pot and singing.

[12:43]

Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. And they'd be saying, what the hell? Your wife just died. Well, yes, she died, and I'm living... But I don't think most days you found him up in the backyard beating on a bowl, singing. It was his way of dreaming. But breathing within the multi-generational dynamic or fact, facticity of our life. Yeah. So... The waves reach everywhere, even to the heavens.

[13:48]

Yep, where are the relics? Well, here they are. So, yeah. So what I would like to emphasize You know, again, these guys, their presence, their presence, their presence. And now what I'd like to emphasize is the starting point makes a difference. Okay. And we have, we can, we can be And we have our starting points in our hands.

[14:53]

Maybe it would be good to start noticing your starting points. When you wake up in the morning, what's your starting point? I'm so-and-so. I have to do this or that. This is a bed, and these are legs. So I guess I've got to get up. Well, these are starting points. But I'm suggesting you start with the experience of aliveness. Because really, the starting point, over and over again, 365 days a year, every nap and every time you, whatever you do, get into a car or whatever, if your starting point is noticing aliveness, this simple thing can change your life.

[15:59]

Yeah. Yeah. So I thought maybe I should, since I keep referring to the four postures of Zazen, I should say something about that. No, I think I have to speak about these four categories. Because we make a distinction between mind and body, and so we might as well use that distinction. If you're born in a culture which makes no mind-body distinction, then aliveness is, you know, what's there. If your culture is telling you there's no beginning, there's just all this stuff all the time, you're born into a field of activity which your culture and your parents and everyone keeps pointing out.

[17:24]

And you're not emphasizing this and that and here and over there. You're just emphasizing the here-ness of everything all at once. This will affect how you function, how your neural pathways, as I said, If you feel this is nothing but relationships, allness and relationships, In that allness, what's there is aliveness and activity. So I'm suggesting you see if you can keep, whenever you refer to yourself, I'm this or that, I have to do that, refer first of all to aliveness.

[18:49]

And when you really get that reference point, it doesn't matter where you are so much. Well, I have to be somewhere. I might as well be alive here. then it's no longer so important where you are, because then the basic feeling is, somewhere I have to be alive, so I can be here at this bus stop. Yeah, but aliveness is here. I mean, this is a seemingly small shift, but it's a life-changing shift. I feel like I'm blathering nonsense. Blathering? Blathering means you're sort of talking away.

[20:10]

Yeah. But it's blather which made a big difference in my life. Okay, so you're going to go to Zazen. And on your way to Zazen, you're alive. I mean, usually. Auf deinem Weg zum Sasen bist du normalerweise lebendig. Here comes the lightning, it's walking along. And then you sit down on the cushion and you, okay, I'll see what I can do with this aliveness. So you construct a posture from your aliveness. And I think if you notice that I'm getting older, it's always been hard to construct a posture for me, but it's really gotten hard with age.

[21:14]

This is this form of aliveness at this time. What are the rules for this posture, the first posture? You create an upright posture, which is likely to keep you awake most of the time. And you construct a posture, create a posture where you can not move. And you construct a posture where it becomes possible to directly be still, to experience stillness.

[22:33]

So those are the rules of the first posture. Das ist so wie das Regelwerk dieser ersten Haltung. From the aliveness that a you experiences, aus der Lebendigkeit, die ein du erfährt, create a posture which is likely to keep you awake, erschaffst du eine Haltung, die es wahrscheinlich macht, dass du wach bleiben kannst, is to give you the, develop the skill of not moving, And which supports itself, ideally, to want to construct a posture which doesn't require much musculature to support. If you have to keep adjusting and supporting your posture with your mind, you don't get very still.

[23:40]

So that's the first posture. And I'd like to keep this really as simple as I can, these four postures. Because what's important is what happens to the postures when they're repeated successively over time. Weil was hier wichtig ist, ist was mit diesen Haltungen passiert, wenn sie über eine lange Zeit hinweg wiederholt werden. The repetition is an evolution. Die Wiederholung ist eine Entwicklung. Then the second posture. Ah, die zweite Haltung.

[24:40]

The second posture is what I'm calling biological or physiological. Now, you're bringing attention to the breath. And as I said, the inhale and the exhale. And you're bringing attention to the trachea and the larynx. So you feel the breath coming up through your body. That's under the larynx. And if you bring attention to that, those tubes, that attention begins to spread to your spine.

[25:46]

But after a while, you feel your breathing through your spine. But that's just the evolution of bringing attention to the physicality of breathing. And so now your aliveness, your internal or interior aliveness is brought into awareness. So zazen gives you the opportunity, which thinking does not.

[26:47]

Zazen gives you the opportunity to create a body located in awareness. So after a while, when you first come to Zazen and you're walking along as a Leibniz, So walking along as aliveness and not thinking all the time about who you are and what you need to do when you're a good person, a bad person. Oh dear, it's like a television commercial. You're selling yourself.

[27:51]

And now you're walking along as your aliveness, and the aliveness is also the lungs walking along. And the spine walking along. And the shoulders walking along. And your body starts being like an antenna. It's sort of, it's aliveness, it's the aliveness of interiority becomes the gateway to amazement.

[28:52]

Do you see how simple this is? But it's transformatively simple. If you can actually get out of the identity trap. I am such and such a kind of person. Oh, no, no, no. What the hell with my lungs? I'm such and such a kind of person. I'm not just blown. If you have a choice between your lungs and identity, you better choose your lungs. Without lungs, you're finished. Yeah. So that's the evil, the attentional body is the second question.

[30:11]

Der aufmerksame Körper ist die zweite Haltung. And the third body is the, to say it, a little complicated way, the coded experience of the ideal body. In other words, after a while of sitting regularly, you get the feel of the spine when it's upright and awake. And your spine is a kind of mind. So your spine also can be awake. Now again, to keep it simple, your spine isn't, and mine isn't always, doesn't always find itself in the ideal posture. But I know the feel of it.

[31:26]

And knowing the physical feel of the spine, ideal spine, is a code, a kind of code. Or it's a kind of station like you can tune in a station. Like you can tune in your spine. And you can tune in stillness. And du kannst auch dich auf die Stille einstimmen. Repeated experience of stillness.

[32:28]

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