Well, thank you for suggesting I might give the talk today. I've been stating recently that Buddhism is the practice of actuality. Actually, I think really it's always been, but it particularly emphasizes that since the Tang and Song dynasties, which isn't yesterday. And as a practice of actuality, I would say it's also a craft. I craft you practice, and that's why I sometimes say craft this.

[01:11]

You know, my daughter Sophia, who's at Berkeley for freshman year now, has a good sense of craft. Even when she was three or four years old, she could When she put her hands on the piano, she produced chords. She didn't know the word chords, but she could hear the sound was different. I can't hear it. I still clunk, clunk, clunk. And it was a piano when I was young, too. I just clunk, clunk, clunk.

[02:23]

Since she's three or four years old, when she puts her hand on the piano, she's already started to tend to produce chords. She didn't know the word chords back then, but her ears heard the difference when two notes fit together. And my ears don't hear that. I always just do clunk, clunk, clunk. Yeah, she'd say to me, don't you hear the difference, Papa? I'd say, no, what's wrong with me? Anyway. Yeah, and then I remember when she took piano lessons, the piano teacher told her, oh no, even though she's quite naturally talented, The teacher told her, don't hold your hands on the keyboard that way, hold them up on the keyboard.

[03:28]

Yeah, those kind of distinctions are what I mean by craft. And how you sit on the bench, you know, how the piano bench is and all that stuff. So now early Buddhism says, know when you have a short breath and know when you have a long breath. No, like... No, K-N-O-W. Oh, no, okay. Yeah, that makes a lot more sense. In fact, if you know when you have a short breath and you know when you have a long...

[04:46]

You're dead. And it says, know with the whole body. And that's what it's called in early Buddhism. It means, know it or notice it with your whole body. Now I said this, Sukhir, she wants something like, before we plant the trees of Buddhism in the West, we have to, you know, know what the seeds are. Yeah, and I find it useful to go back to early Buddhism, as I just did, to early Buddhism, to sort of see if I can feel what the seeds of Buddhism are.

[05:50]

And then I'd like to see if I can pare down the trees we have or pare down the basic teachings we have to see if I can see what the seeds were. Pare down your... You take off the extraneous things. Okay. You pare something down. When you peel a potato, you're paring. Shearing, okay. Pares with wood specifically? A pare is to pare down these just to take off what's extra. Yeah, got you, got you. Okay. So let's look again carefully, you know, like the posture of the hand, the posture of your sitting on the piano bench is really... playing the piano well.

[07:29]

Yeah. Now, you don't, in the Sango, my impression is, we've talked about breathing quite a bit. Okay, so I won't talk about it much, but just a little bit again. So, if you know this is a craft, if you cut, if you're making a Buddha, Carving a Buddha, it's good to have a sharp knife. If you're a farmer, it's good to know that you have fertile seeds and fertile soil.

[08:34]

Wenn du ein Bauer bist, dann ist es gut zu wissen, dass du einen fruchtbaren Boden und fruchttragende Samenkörner hast. Yeah, if you're a carpenter, that you have tools and materials. Wenn du ein Handwerker bist, dann brauchst du deine Werkzeuge und Materialien. So, now, this is just what we human beings do. It's not Buddhism, it's just... People had learned how to cook and farm and so forth, and their crafts. I was present at my daughter's, not my daughter, my friend's daughter's birth. And she was born with a hole in her heart.

[09:49]

Which is fairly common, I guess, and then you see how serious it is. And the young delivery doctor spent about half an hour with this newborn baby, freezing cold, trying to find out whether, you know... What do you call it that you can look into the body with? Sonography? Sonography? Yeah, something like that, right? He was looking and the little girl, Nora, was freezing. And the young doctor who was responsible for the birth was with his sonography, is that how you say it in German? With his instrument, he was there and examined her. And the poor Nora froze, she was freezing cold. And this is moderately fancy equipment.

[11:01]

But this young doctor saw an older doctor go by, probably in his 50s, I guess. And he said to that doctor, come in, please. I know the baby has a hole in its heart, but I can't find it. And he called the older doctor and said, please come here. I know that this baby has a hole in his heart, but I can't find it. He looked at the machine and found the hole in seconds. Because he had a sense of the craft of that machine. The machine doesn't do everything. And he looked at it and operated the device, and within seconds he found the hole. And the reason for that is that he had a feeling for the art, for the handling of this machine. The machine doesn't do everything alone. Nora is now in her 30s, 40s.

[12:04]

Quite healthy. Okay, so when you study the early Buddhism, you have to notice, know when you have a short breath and know when you have a long inhale. And for a craftsperson, a Dharma artisan, you If you know it's a short breath, it's just code for knowing what each breath is, what each inhale is.

[13:05]

And then it says, knowing with the whole body, That's something you have to explore. First there's knowing, and knowing each inhale and exhale. And knowing of the whole body. And then knowing that on that short breath you also feel joy. Und dann zu bemerken, zu erkennen, dass du vielleicht auf dem kurzen Atemzug auch ein freudvolles Gefühl hast.

[14:07]

Or on that short breath or long breath, inhale, you also might feel discouraged. Und dass du während dieses kurzen oder langen Atemzuges vielleicht auch ein Gefühl von Entmutigung hast. Now this is extremely basic unit of dharma practice. And when you get in the habit of doing it, on each breath you can notice, you develop the skill, like a pianist or something again, can feel each key, each note. And if you don't feel each note, you can tell when people feel each note. So what you're doing is you're creating the tools

[15:09]

the tools you need for investigating how you're alive. One of the keys is noticing triggers. When there's a little trigger, a trigger, I don't know, a shift, shifts from like feeling joy on the breath or feeling kind of shitty on the breath. What was the other thing you feel? She's so pure, you know. Oh, I'm sorry. Now I remember, yeah.

[16:37]

Yeah, now you remember. After you embarrassed me. And so this vielleicht suboptimal feels, my mom. Did you say I used a suboptimal word? No, I said you feel either joy or you feel suboptimal. Suboptimal. Okay, I'll try that in the future. Why do I feel suboptimal? How are you feeling, suboptimal? Who taught you that? Okay, so because, you know, I say to somebody, or somebody says to me, geez, I've got a headache today. When did it start? They don't know. They didn't always have a headache, but they didn't notice when it started. Usually you can tell a few days in advance when you're going to get the flu, say.

[17:42]

It's a slight little shift, and you say, oh, I better do something about that. So, I mean, I'm not bragging or anything, I'm just talking about practice. I practiced this and noticed what triggers headaches. I don't know, sometime in my 20s, and I've never had a headache since. Because I notice, I feel a little bit, okay, change of the blood flow in your brain. I practiced it when I was around 20 and I started to notice when there was a headache and I started to feel this little change and since then I have never had a headache again.

[18:52]

I notice it and then it comes and then, okay, now I have to change the blood flow a bit and then it goes away again. Actually, what I said isn't entirely true. Once I had the flu, some kind of flu. Boy, did I have a bad headache during that flu. But that's the only time since my 20s that I've had a headache. I remember that. It was the pig flu, I think. Boy, I don't know what it was. It was really bad. The pig flu. Yeah. It was a less than optimal health. Suboptimal health. Suboptimal health. Okay. But that's simply the craft of practice. You're practicing with your body, knowing how you feel on the out-breath. Not just knowing, in general, I feel pretty good today. You know on which breath And that is simply the craftsmanship or the craftsmanship of the practice.

[20:00]

You do not notice in a very general way how you are doing today, but you notice with every breath what is happening. And you notice the breath on which a headache begins to be in progress. So in the early Buddhist teachings, which suggest no, no, the short or long breath, and short or long means whatever kind of breath it is, With the whole body. It means you're using, turning, knowing the whole body into a unit of experience. And then you create a little space, a space, a unit of knowing on each breath. Yeah, and that can be like noticing a trigger.

[21:25]

It can also be the little moment of nanosecond of temporality where you introduce a wisdom. We're not born complete. We're not born gods. We're not born by a god. We're not born as acorns. We're incomplete, and our living completes us, or it doesn't. Now, what would be great if our culture could challenge us, or I can challenge you, Are you going to approach completing yourself?

[22:41]

Is this something you want to do? You're not complete, so you're an incomplete Buddha. Yes, so if you can bring that little unit of time when you know that you're creating this pace of breath, exhale, and inhale, and in that little unit of time, you can bring the practice of the five skandhas and so forth. Okay, so that much I wanted to say, I just said. I also want to say that early Dharma artisans, can you use the word artisan?

[24:13]

It's not so good for me. Okay, hold on, sorry. I can say Dharma artist then. So Dharma ancestor artists. Okay. Because in pre-Buddhist India, they noticed that we have four domains of mind. Because in pre-Buddhist India it was noticed that we have four different spiritual domains, four different areas of the spirit. Now, Nicole, I guess, has been speaking about the four domains in which we live, which are kamadhatu and rupadhatu and arupadhatu.

[25:19]

Kamadhatu. Rupadhatu. Yeah, but you said four. Four refers to something else. If I said four, I'm sorry. I love it. There's only three. You can hit my wrist. And those four realms, we can call it mind, are waking, sleeping, dreaming, and non-dreaming deep sleep. Okay, now that was... That was the basic way of looking at what this kind of animal is in India before Buddhism.

[26:48]

Now, they again, whether they were deities and so forth, they didn't have the concept of a creator god. So you had to create yourself. You had to study yourself. So what's going on here? I got thrown, as Heidegger says, thrown into being born, and now I have to die. Or postpone it for a while. In English, I think it probably sounds a little different in German, but to be thrown into life. How did I get here? You were thrown in. No, it's like that in German.

[27:59]

It's a very physicalized expression. I mean, I felt thrown out sometimes, but in this case thrown in. Okay. So if we're going to study ourselves, investigate our lifing, again, as you know, I don't like to use being because it is distinguished in English from non-being or from, you know, all this stuff, which is having its revenge now. We've been exploiting this stuff for centuries, since Mesopotamia, and now it's saying, ha, ha, we got you. Yeah. The revenge of the objects. Also, wenn wir unser lebendig sein, unser sich verlebendigen untersuchen,

[29:15]

And you know, I don't use, I make this complicated word with verlebendigen or das Lebendigen, because I don't like to use the word sein, because the sein is immediately in contrast to nichtsein. And with the, well, at least that's where we came from, that the objects are calculating. I don't know the way anymore. I heard the other day that some of the scientists who are really investigating global warming have such deep grief they can hardly do the work. who investigate global warming and who are so deeply sad about what is happening there that they can hardly afford the work. Yeah, so now if you want to study these four things, these four domains, these four minds, let's call them that, it's clear that consciousness isn't the whole of our knowing.

[30:28]

And it doesn't say be conscious of a short breath, it says know a short breath. So it's clear that consciousness isn't the whole of our life, I think. And dreaming is outside of usual consciousness. And if you try to know you're dreaming, you can only know some of your dreaming.

[31:34]

Some of your dreaming happens involuntarily and you don't know what's going on. But you can start, as we're doing, and we use zazen as the tool, our craft, of observing consciousness, observing dreaming mind, and to some extent you start observing sleeping, particularly in sashins, you're sometimes present throughout sleeping. Or sleeping in Zen, though, and not present at all. And we use zazen as a tool, the zazen spirit as a tool, to study consciousness, to study dreaming, to study sleep. And just like in sashin sometimes, where you have the feeling of being awake all night, right?

[32:40]

And what interests me is some shamanic genius or something or other realized that non-dreaming deep sleep was its own kind of unit. It wasn't just sleeping without dreaming. It was its own dynamic. And what interests me is that some shamanic genie has noticed that the non-dreaming deep sleep has its own dynamic, its own existence, and that it wasn't just the sleep without the dream, but that it is something of its own. Yes. In our contemporary world, Freud recognized that bringing the unconscious into some degrees of consciousness is a healing experience.

[33:51]

But our ancient background in shamanism Healing is bringing non-dreaming deep sleep into realms of knowing. Yeah, but then Jung tried to He was a Swiss Protestant. Jung tried to say there was this collective unconscious, which has some merit, I guess, but it's still within our culture. It's not non-dreaming deep sleep. So what I'm trying to say is we, our ancient ancestors, And what we're doing here is finding ways to investigate the domains of mind.

[35:29]

And the main tool we use is still sitting. Still sitting until the body is still, and then until the mind is still. Those are the tools of yogic Zen practice. And these are the skills that make possible transformative practice and freedom from mental and emotional suffering and so forth. Yeah, okay. Now, some, again, somebody, somehow, decided that samadhi, samadhi, Freedom, a mind space that's free of distracted thinking.

[37:01]

A knowing space, but not a thinking space. is somehow non-dreaming deep sleep surfacing into our experience, into our more knowing experience. that this is somehow something like non-dreaming deep sleep, which is in the shield of our recognizable intellect. Knowing experience, experience of knowing. And the dynamic of really being able to sit still inside and out

[38:06]

Und die Dynamik, wenn man wirklich lernt still sitzen zu können, innerlich still und äußerlich still, is what makes possible dreaming to be absorbed into daily consciousness. ist das, was es ermöglicht, dass sich das Träumen in das tägliche Bewusstsein, dass das vom täglichen Bewusstsein hinein absorbiert wird. And the samadhi of non-dreaming deep sleep arising into your zazen. And that the samadhi, the non-dreaming deep sleep, appears in your zazen. Gary Snyder, the poet, and his academic background is anthropology. And he's a Zen practitioner, a long time, an inspiration for me.

[39:18]

And he, one of his guess he made was maybe people discovered Samadhi, hunters discovered Samadhi. Because you have to be very still and be there for a long period of time and you may go into Samadhic states. And one of the speculations that he gave, is that he said, well, maybe hunters have discovered the state of Samadhi, because hunters have to lie on the meadow for so long, and it may well be that you get into Samadhi states. And what I've heard from people who hunt, is that you get into a state of mind in which you begin to feel the animals, feel them approaching before there's any ordinary sensorial way to know.

[40:23]

And I would say in our ancestral culture and in Native American Indian culture, there's a realm of animal spirits that we share. And I would say in the old cultures, and for example also in the Indian culture, that there is something like a world of animal spirits, and it is a world that we share with ourselves. What I observe and guess and imagine Is that through hunting or whatever, people discovered the samadhi and the transformative dynamic of samadhi?

[41:27]

And they discovered what I have to call now, I don't have words for, mutual samadhi. A shared feeling of body, like what we mean by dharma friend in contrast to personal friend. And these folks seem to also observe that, I mean, we know it happened, and I've had quite a few friends who practice shamanism, The drumming helps.

[42:28]

If I lived longer, I would maybe start our seminars I don't want all of you to start drumming this next seminar with sitting in a circle and maybe drumming. It's part of Buddhist practice, too. So what I'm adding here to pre-Buddhist Indian observation of four domains of mind, Waking mind.

[43:31]

Dreaming mind. Sleeping mind. Non-dreaming deep sleep. Non-matting. And I'm adding mutual samadhi. And I'm adding animal spirits. Because when I look at Buddhism, it's trying to explore those seven minds. Yeah. And animal spirits, I just as a code for the feeling that mind is present, can be called forth anywhere. Animal spirits.

[44:47]

Animal spirits in the sense that mind is a field not just related to human beings, but is something that can be called forth with animals and with your pet, your dog, you know. Oh, excuse me. And to point out animal spirits is something like a code. It stands for that the common spirit or that a spiritual experience can not only be produced together with people, but with everything, with animals and, for example, also with your pets. I think if I'm going to give lectures like this, our two dogs should be able to come. Yeah, see if I can speak to them. But I'll let you do the speaking. Thank you for translating. Thank you for teaching. May our intentions be the same in every being and every being.

[46:04]

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