I'm thinking maybe we should drop the chanting of Japanese for a while, see what that feels like, and just chant in English. But I'd have to get your feeling and other people's feelings. Now I'm waiting for translation. There's no translation. Okay. I always want to share my dilemma with you of what the, how the heck the, I say what I want to say because it's your dilemma too. You have to help me or help yourself in this practice by sorting it out. It's not going to be delivered to you or handed to you. And today the inauguration threw me off a little because... During the inauguration you could feel there was a shared civility, a shared accommodation for each other, which we, most of my life, we've taken for granted in public life and hopefully in all aspects of life.

[01:22]

last four years assumed civility and assumed accommodation has not been assumed. What a difference it makes when that assumption is taken away. So I'm emphasizing of course the exploration of our practice and we're in a somewhat similar situation with, as I've said, with China where they had to... They were faced with... I'm faced with a sea of English words. I'm swimming in the water. I wanted to say something about what the water's like and what my... the experience I have through practicing because in a way... Sitting puts you under water, and then you have to begin to look at the water, which doesn't fit.

[02:28]

The waterness itself is your practice. And so I'm, you know, I'm swimming and I grab that English word and it falls apart. And I grab that English word and it falls apart. Okay, so I think that what happened in China was Indian Buddhism just, there weren't, the Taoist words, the Taoist concepts were something to hold on to and that's how most things were translated in the first centuries. in Taoist terms. But there was a recognition that the Taoist terms weren't also Buddhist. Anyway, so they had these think tanks that transformed Chinese culture in trying to find the words for Indian Buddhism.

[03:36]

So we're in a somewhat similar position, particularly for practitioners. And the word I'm thinking of right now is pratichya samupada, which I don't know how to translate it, pronounce it exactly, but pratichya samupada, which is usually translated in English as... dependent arising. Well, I presume it's accurate enough. I don't know Sanskrit, but I presume it's accurate enough. But it's a concept. You can know, oh, there's some kind of scientific idea that there's codependent or dependent arising. But for a practitioner, what it really means is shared arising.

[04:38]

How do we share this arising? Naming immediately stops the sharing. Yeah, so I'm trying to, wondering how to, you know, this assumed accommodation, and in our Buddhist yogic world, there's an assumed shared arising. So when we first sit down, when we have the idea of sitting down, Gary Snyder, one of Gary Snyder's assumptions is, hunters discovered sitting because they have to wait quietly for an animal or groups of them have to wait quietly to take down a big animal.

[05:47]

So while they're sitting there, it might be days, at least hours, you know, something happens. The sitting itself takes over. And even the word asana, used primarily in yoga now, means something like, as I understand it, in Sanskrit, something like penetrating sitting. Sitting which penetrates sitting itself or penetrates the stillness which arises from sitting. So already we have a kind of subtle idea here. There's sitting and there's stillness that arises from sitting and then there's penetrating or getting to know or sharing the stillness which arises from sitting. Well, when we do the Oryoki, we're, yeah, well, there's certain rules, or, you know, I've been talking about it now, and again, I'm speaking primarily in the context of the practice period, the Ango, where we have 90 days to wonder about these things.

[06:56]

So we have 90 days to see what it's like to have these bowls, which are sharing space with us. Yeah, see, we think they're in space. No, they're sharing space with us. So you're using the bowls, opening the bowls. They're nested inside each other. Opening them. And we're sharing that opening the bowls with the others who are eating with us. And you're sharing the opening of the bowls with your own Yeah, body. But you're sharing the opening of the bowls with the innerness of your own body. Your own or the innerness of the body. So you begin to feel the objects as articulating an innerness that you feel.

[08:07]

Even two of us here will receive tokudo. And we have lots of people now who make the robes. But again, the concept of robes are that you dress from this point, the top of the spine. And the clothes rest on your hips, not tied off at the waist. And you're dressing your posture. You're not dressing your body. You're dressing an inner posture. You take the inner posture, and then the clothes require a lot of attentionality. And Westerners, when they make They try to make them simpler so they don't require so much attentionality, but they require quite a lot of attentionality to put on, and they require keeping this spot kind of alive as you put your clothes on.

[09:21]

This is like, again, it's a different way of being in the world. So it's kind of a nuisance. There's always extra flaps in the kimono and here and there. And they get tangled up if you don't make sure everything... And the whole concept of clothes is too, they're layered. You wear various layers and you show the layers. The layers can be seen. Again, I'm just speaking now to us practitioners and the two persons who are going to ordering rogues, we have to take these bodily measurements, which are really, again, measurements which allow you to find a posture which you can share through the clothes. Now, I don't know if this makes any sense.

[10:24]

Find a posture which you Share through the clothes. So it's not like you're being looked at from outside. It's like your inner posture is being shown through the clothes. And then there's a lot of attention, even in Buddhist time, and certainly in Japan, in my experience with Sukhirishi. kind of like making sure I had a feel for how the posture is shown through the clothes, and that posture which you, the spine, as we talked about the other day, that your feet, you just get in the habit of knowing your spine all the time. Nagarjuna said something, it's like putting a snake in bamboo practices, and you kind of get a snake, and put it in bamboo, and of course the bamboo is divided into sections, so it's impossible anyway, but the concept is like, and that's like putting the mind in the backbone. So this image of how do you get the mind or get the aliveness of the backbone, you know, it's, snakes are a little bit dangerous, so you want them to bring the bamboo of your backbone a lot.

[11:36]

So the practitioner is always I think for us Westerners, we need some specific things to do or we get lost. So a specific thing to do, everyone gets lost. Or it's a reference point. So the reference point you can make use of until it's first, second, third, fourth, and fifth nature is the feeling of the spine being present, the spine mind being present. And that spine line then shines in your posture and in how your clothes articulate your posture, manifest. So to penetrate asana, to penetrate seating, to find the posture that's inside of the position,

[12:38]

the posture which brings the position alive. Okay, so when you first sit down, one of the experiences that you can notice is you begin to feel you're inside sitting. There's a new kind of awareness that's inside sitting, inside the posture of sitting, begins to be informed. I mean, at first it's a kind of like gathering information of what it's like to be inside sitting. So you're inside sitting and strangely enough that inside sitting begins to generate an innerness which feels like it's also outside. Isn't that strange? Now I think one thing that happens to folks when they first start sitting sometimes it becomes a little scary because you start feeling your heart beating and you notice we notice our breathing most of us don't even notice our breathing much unless you nowadays practice mindfulness or meditation or something but even noticing when I started in the 50s and 60s even noticing your breathing was kind of unusual but noticing your heartbeat now that was kind of scary it might stop

[14:09]

you suddenly begin to feel, what can I say, how can I say? You begin to feel the difference between wholeness and what-ness. And I've often said, just hear the words, how the words already are embodied in you, whether you like it or not, the simple words of what and who. If you say, what am I? Who am I? But we can investigate this more. So when you're sitting... You know, I just took this vaccine. I got my first shot. And it's made me... It's given me kind of a jet lag-like tiredness. And... a couple times a day for three or four days, and then once yesterday, we'll see if it happens again today, where suddenly I'm kind of like, whoop, I'm just not present.

[15:21]

And what I noticed, I've noticed through being a practitioner, is my whoop. If I sound crazy, I'm sorry, but be patient with me if you please will. I found my who-ness was interfering with my what-ness. Huh? Okay. And what I saw was somehow the metabolism of who-ness... Well, there is such a thing. The metabolism of who-ness was interfering with the metabolism of what-ness. No, I don't know if you know what I mean, but I'll try to explain. Say, I'll find some English words if I can and kind of put them into service here. Yeah. So as soon as I reset wholeness or gave wholeness a rest, it's almost like it, I have no idea medically, blah, blah, blah, but

[16:32]

from my point of view and my experience, the work of the vaccine had to happen through, now I hope I wasn't giving a placebo and I'm making all this up, the work of the vaccine had to function through what-ness and not through who-ness because who-ness takes a lot of energy. It's exhausting even. Our dentiness, our who-ness. So once I got the who-ness out of the way, whatever the vaccine is doing, it did its penetration. Yeah. Yeah. Now, what do I mean here? Say that you have a friend, and she has to have a biopsy, say.

[17:38]

It's a little scary, but she's not so scared, it seems. And she asks you to take care of her cat and maybe bring some clothes she's not wearing anymore to a homeless shelter for teenage girls or something like that. And you can see that her wholeness intends to stay alive and wants to stay alive, but her whatness is dying, and she doesn't know it yet. Well, she sort of knows it, but she doesn't want to recognize it. So she wants me, perhaps, as her friend, to recognize the who-ness. Yes, in a couple of years we'll go to Japan again together or we'll do such and such. So that would be the conventional truth.

[18:44]

Here's the two truths at work. We can begin to see the two truths as a dynamic that allows us sharing at different levels. Primarily at the fundamental level. So you go along with her. In fact you you sort of think maybe she's suspecting she may die. I've been through something like this, by the way. She's maybe suspecting she's going to die, but she can't tell herself yet. And maybe I'm guessing it's the case. Why is she giving her clothes away? And why is she giving them to a homeless shelter for homeless girls? Well, maybe she doesn't think she needs the clothes anymore. So she's communicating to me through the stuff of the world, not through words.

[19:47]

Her words aren't there in her wholeness yet. But her wholeness is talking to her. Her wholeness has decided she should give these clothes away. And her whatness is decided to a homeless shelter. And maybe she's even hinting to me she wants Brian to give her the precepts. Because taking the precepts is to enter or realize homelessness. So maybe there's a hint there, and I'm sort of wondering... Okay, maybe she's going to ask Brian, she was a friend, to give her the precepts because maybe she's hinting that she wants to take the precepts before she dies. All this is going on. But I know what she wants also. I get the message pretty clearly now that she would like me to Join her. Help support her what-ness which knows it's dying.

[20:52]

Well, I can't support her what-ness which knows it's dying unless I know my own what-ness which is dying. Yeah, and I've been practicing a long time, so I know that at some point there's a shift. You know you're sitting and your wholeness is operating and the period's too long and maybe you've got other things to do. You've got to make some... write some letters or read something. Phone somebody. But your what-ness doesn't have to do those things. At some point you just... the wholeness somehow gets out of the way. And there's only whatness sitting. And one of the dynamics of Zazen is, can we ask people to sit long enough that wholeness gets out of the way and whatness takes over?

[22:02]

Because whatness can sit long periods of time. And penetrate the seating, taking a seat and finding what arises from being inside, sitting. So I know when I start feeling my heart beating, and one of the funny things that happens with hotness is your body, I don't know, I don't have the image, your body is like, you think you're still, but then you feel your arm, and it's like, Vacuum cleaner, which is turned on vacuum cleaner. I don't know. It's like an engine Metabolic engine is functioning under you can hold your arm and it's just an arm and sometimes you can hold a cat And the cat wants to be petted and likes to be petted and you like to pet the cat and setter And sometimes you can shift to the flatness of the cat away from the cat has its own wholeness to and

[23:04]

And the cat is suddenly like... You can feel it right now, the incredible aliveness in that cat, even purring in your lap. And we sort of tune that out. But when you tune it in on yourself sometimes, even your arm, you're going to bed or you're going to sleep or something, your arm feels the engine, the metabolic engine of... hotness functioning in the arm and the body and everything. And you mean the simple things like going to sleep, you might want to put your thumb on this chakra. And then once you do that, a flow starts moving in the body that's different than if your arm is just out here. So then you can start feeling it's almost like you're actualizing the jewelry on the statues of Kuan Yin or Kannon or Avalokiteshvara.

[24:19]

Because just like when we do the Uryuki, you're activating the innerness, which is not only inner. So it happened, so we begin, again, let me try to go back to this. When one of the main practices, I mean main practices, one of the essential practices for adept realisational practice is to recognize, it's a beginning practice, but not everyone does it, that every object of perception is also an activity of mind. When I hold this stick, which represents the spine, and this chakra, and this chakra, I'm holding the space of this stick too.

[25:30]

So when I pick up this stick, I pick up the mind, which is... Now, I gave you as a tidbit that we should consider ongoing practice a construction site. 90-day construction site. An infinite construction site called 90 days. 90 days. And I said, the first construction site ought to be exploring how the senses show you a world, construct a world. So it means you have to pay attention to each sense. And again, a very basic practice is to explore for some days primarily seeing, explore for some days primarily hearing, etc. So you get, so you actually experience, like they were different musical instruments that you were playing.

[26:32]

So you really got to be skillful at seeing, and then you switch and you get skillful at hearing. And what you're doing, of course, is... Developing is not just all the world is in some phenomenological sense of what you perceive. No, you are transforming the senses, the acuteness of the senses and the scope of the senses by simply emphasizing one... And then you can begin to bring them together like a quartet or a quintet. You can play separately, solo. They can play together and you learn how to play them together. This is basic Abhidhara Buddhism. Yeah. How am I doing here? Well, not too bad.

[27:34]

So you're doing the chakras, doing the chakras, doing the chakras, doing the oryokis, and you're relating them to your chakras, and you're relating them to the field. You bring them into the field of the body and then put them down on the table. But when you, when you, when you're, just as when you're picking up an object, you're picking up the mind too. Here, you're picking up It's not important whether this is true or not. It's a revelatory, realisational practice in which you feel you're picking up the space of the bowl to it. And when you put it down, you know, maybe the space is like a little bit behind it. So you put it down and then the space arrives where the bowl is. It's some kind of experience like that. Or you pick up the setsu, the cleaning stick, and there's a space with it, and then you put it in the bowl, and you put it in the same space as the spoon.

[28:56]

And then you take the spoon away, but now you've turned the shape of the spoon into the shape of the cleaning stick. This begins to create a shared arising. The distinctions are not so, the distinctions are blurred, I don't know. The distinctions are, the boundaries are shifting all the time and you feel you're in the boundaries. It's not conditioned boundaries. arising. It's shared arising. And when they're shared arising, things are kind of merged. They're kind of flowing together and so forth. So you're in a world of nearness and here-ness and inner-ness that is flowing. I mean, Yeah, it can become an assumption which you live, just like we saw at the inauguration, everyone trying to live the assumption of civility.

[30:02]

Mutual accommodation. Now we have mutual shared arising. And if you can, every time you see something or see a person and everything's talking to you, the way we hit the bells is we don't hit it with our mind. We just kind of try to be an intermediary and let the stick hit the bell. So there's no mind. You don't hear the mind in it. There's no click of the mind in it. It's just, oh, the stick hit it, and the sound is rounder. Do you really want to take your mind out of being the dawn? The situationist is doing it. That would be pratitya samapada, shared arising. Everything has a certain fluidity. and it's quite interesting. When you begin to develop a world where you're looking at the world through hotness, everything starts becoming more precise.

[31:16]

When you look at things, they're extremely precise. Are they really that precise? It's like you have a highly focused camera. Are they luminous? Are they bright? Well, Yeah, it's no mystical experience. No, it's simply really that you have replaced wholeness with whatness. And the whatness is something we share, shared whatness. I wish I could, you know, already connected, I wish I could find a phrase, a Wado phrase, like we could create already whatness or shared whatness. I haven't found one yet. But when you take the wholeness away and the naming away, which traps things, you take away the nameless, then things are just kind of free and they shine and they're precise and they're shared with an innerness with yourself and with others.

[32:30]

Now let me just go, we left that woman in the hospital after her biopsy and it wasn't good news and you come to visit and she's had some other visitors and the other visitors are there and they feel, boy, I'm glad this isn't happening to me. Oh, it must be terrible to have that prognosis. And then it might be if one of us comes, or I'd hope if I come, I come into the room and I park my who-ness at the door and I'm only there with my what-ness and my what-ness takes for granted she's going to die. Takes for granted I'm going to die. So maybe I'm not going to die in the same time frame, but yes, this whatness is, we share this whatness and it's going to die.

[33:38]

It's terrible and it's also no big deal. So I just join your whatness. I'd die with you if I could. I'd change places with you if I could. Self or other. But whether I can change places with you or not, that's Probably I can't actually do that, but I know I'm actually in the same place.

[34:05]

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