Yes, I would like to welcome you all very warmly and I am happy that you have come here despite the Christmas market or because of the Christmas market. Richard Baker Roshi will give a lecture today on the subject of Buddhism, religion or philosophy. Our small Zen group here in Göttingen, called Living Zen, was invited to this event. Richard Baker Roshi is the successor of Suzuki Roshi, a pioneer. that Zen has been brought to the West, especially in America. And he wrote this book, Zen Spirit, Beginner Spirit, which you probably know from one or the other of him.

[01:02]

And Pekka Roshi is a member of the Questerman Zen Center in Colorado, in the USA, and the head of the Buddhist study center Johanneshof in the southern Black Forest. He spends about half a year in Europe and the other half a year in America. I assume that there is still time for questions after the lecture. I wish him a good evening. And, Gregor Washi, thank you very much that you came. Well, it's awfully nice that all of you came to an English-speaking American Buddhist. But I've got a helper here. And certainly one of my main helpers for more than 20 years has been Gerald and his Dharma partner and wife, Gisela. And they were really helped me found the center in Colorado 20 years ago and have really got me started in the place here in Germany in the Black Forest, Johannesburg.

[02:26]

So now they've graduated to having their own center here in Göttingen. And... And I hear they may get a small room, I don't know, small or large here in downtown. Medium-sized. Medium-sized room in the city where they can do 24 hours meditation. So if you work downtown, have a crisis in the middle of the day, you can rush over and sit. You can be there, develop the habit of sitting. Now, are you able to hear me all right back there?

[04:05]

Not perfect, huh? All right. Last year they had a platform here. This is the second time I've done this. Oh, in this room, the second. And the platform was so precarious that people in the front row were afraid that it was going to... And Nicole was sitting in the front row and Gerard was translating. And she said, do I have to translate on that platform? So Gerald got us this platform we could build a building on. I feel kind of funny being way up here, but okay. It's like being on the dining room table. Yeah, okay. So let's start with this topic, of course, of is Buddhism a philosophy or a religion?

[05:32]

It's a good topic to talk about Buddhism and particularly to talk about Zen Buddhism. Now, some of you would probably know or guess that I don't think Buddhism is either a philosophy or a religion. I mean, of course, in Asian societies it takes the form of a religion. But it's still not a religion in the Western sense, even when it's a religion in Asia. And it's not really based on belief. And you can believe in it if you want.

[06:41]

And there are aspects of Buddhism which develop belief as a way to practice. You don't have to go so fast. Then I can go slowly. So Buddhism has not developed through being a philosophy. Buddhism has developed through being really a practice, or we could better say a craft. A philosophy can come out of the craft, but it's rooted in a craft. And if the philosophy gets separated from the practice and the craft... Then it's no longer really Buddhism.

[08:07]

So it's always checked up on by, can you do this? Can you enact this? Can you realize this? Well, this means that at the core of Buddhism and Buddhism the way it's developed, it's related to our actual experience. When it's not something that's within the categories of our own experience, it's no longer really Buddhism. Und wenn es nichts mehr ist, was sich innerhalb unserer eigenen Kategorien der Erfahrung befindet, dann handelt es sich eigentlich nicht mehr um Buddhism. And there are some things which look like exceptions to that, but I'm not going to deal with them tonight. Now, I mean, each of you has a philosophy.

[09:21]

The way you live is rooted in a philosophy. Someone told me once, when they're at a party and they're bored and they don't know what to do and somebody comes up to talk to them and they don't want to talk to the person, they say to them, what is your philosophy of life? He said that always ends the conversation. But we actually do whether we know it or not, a living, yeah, in many ways, Aristotle's sense of categories, what we perceive and what we notice and so forth. But for us, it's just the way the world is. We don't notice that it's rooted.

[10:25]

Most of us don't notice that it's rooted in a philosophical view of how the world exists. How the world exists. Okay. Now let me use the example of a potter. Yeah, simple example. If you're a potter, you probably have to pot. You can read a book about potting. What do you say in German? Potting? Making... You can read a book about it, but you could make a wheel or buy a wheel or buy clay or mix your own clay.

[11:33]

But such a book would really be really more, it's not philosophy, it would be more instruction. And you could follow the instructions, but you wouldn't get very far unless you started actually making some pots, turning the wheel, feeling the clay, and so forth. I've never done any putting, but I'm quite sure that the wetness of the clay and the speed of the wheel and all, these are things you have to find out. Now, there could be a kind of religious dimension to it. Yeah, you might really find your life works best when you can pot regularly. I had a kind of Japanese grandmother for 20 years.

[12:58]

I know I don't look a bit Japanese, but... When I moved to Japan, I inherited the poet Gary Snyder's house and he... There's this Japanese woman that lived with him, and then she just lived with us and moved to America with us and was really a teacher for me and a kind of grandmother, especially to my kids. And Nakamura sensei practiced Buddhism? Then Buddhism.

[14:04]

And she was a no chanting teacher, the no theater, you know, that she was a chanting teacher. And she was a tea ceremony teacher. But for her they were all not beliefs but crafts. Now, living with her all those years, she lived upstairs when we were in Japan and beside us when we lived in America. Her daily practice was primarily chanting. It would be a bit like if we decided to chant certain passages of Shakespeare or Goethe when we felt like we needed that.

[15:07]

But she said when she was in a crisis or she needed to take her life the next step, she did the tea ceremony. And what this tells me in knowing her for all those years was none of them were about belief, they were just ways of being alive. And Buddhism has practiced Zen especially as a way of being alive. And you each can make this choice. Is this a way I want to be alive? And you can say, I want to do it all myself and I want to be natural and, you know, stuff like that.

[16:26]

But, yeah, that's okay. I understand that. That's how I used to feel. Then at some point I realized that these teachings were like a garden hose from the past. You know, it doesn't make any difference to a plant whether it gets the water from the sky or from a garden hose, as long as the water is good. So I got as much as I could from the sky, but I also found that the insights and practices that people developed before me could be very useful. But no matter where you get the water that nourishes you, the teachings, the wisdom,

[17:33]

None of them work unless you're rooted in your own life. Rooted in your own experience. And Sukhirishi, my teacher, was Japanese, obviously. He used to say, don't try to be Japanese. Be American, be European, and then see how this water affects you. Now, there's also, again, this, how does teaching evolve? I think of painters and writers. The ones I know or know about who really develop as painters also develop as persons through their painting and through their writing.

[18:57]

The painting develops as they develop. So you can see that I'm clearly emphasizing that Zen practice especially is a craft. It's a way of being in the world and in yourself. No, it very definitely helps. I'm not going to talk about sitting meditation tonight. But it very definitely helps to do sitting meditation in this exploration.

[20:00]

And that's what Gerald and Gisela are trying to offer as a possibility for anybody who wants to in this area, to have a place to develop sitting meditation. And they don't need translators. Because what sitting... Let me just say, though, that what sitting offers you is to... kept familiar with a mind that knows, that's aware, that's not consciousness. I mean, maybe that sounds a little strange. But you have an experience, yeah, quite similar every night when you go to sleep.

[21:18]

You can't go to sleep really unless you can let go of consciousness and go into a mind that's different than sleep. That's different than being awake. So in a simple sense, we can say that when you sit meditation, in the Zen style at least, you find out how to be still enough and relaxed enough to let go of thinking mind, there's nothing wrong with thinking mind. It's great, you know. But if you're always in it, it's kind of tiring. And if you can't get out of it, you need sleeping pills at night. And when you don't come out, you need sleeping pills at night.

[22:34]

I mean, really, we need to be able to let go of consciousness and thinking mind sometimes. And this ancient practice, two and a half millennium, 2,500 years old about, more than that, is based on noticing, not knowing, but noticing what happens. Noticing what happens when you let go of consciousness. This posture isn't so different from sleeping on your back, except your knees are up. But because you're upright, you go over that bump into something like sleeping mind. You probably all come into a room when somebody's pretending to sleep. Or a child pretending to take a nap and the father opens the door, you can tell right away they're not sleeping.

[24:06]

Their breathing is conscious. You can feel the consciousness on their breathing. There's an involuntary quality to the involuntary. It's a non-conscious quality to the breathing when you're asleep. Children look so beautiful when they're asleep. Adults too. There's something that happens. And something similar happens when you bring a mind that's very similar into your awareness.

[25:19]

So that little bump you go over into the involuntary or non-conscious breathing and et cetera, sleep. And so meditation is about knowing how to go over that bump and then wake up in this new kind of mind that otherwise you'd be asleep in. And this upright posture, it brings awareness up out of usual consciousness. And you get... It's a different mind.

[26:23]

You would make different decisions in such a mind. You can check up on an unconscious mind, but they're more... They feel more true. They're more intuitive. So really you could say all of Buddhism has developed out of coming to understand and practice what happens when you go over this bump into awareness out of consciousness. And the practice and what there is of philosophy comes out of this experience. Now an extension of that is the practice of mindfulness.

[27:52]

Or the practice of, in English it sounds a little different, mindful attention. Now, you couldn't have meditation practice without mindful attention. And really, I would say mindfulness practice is more fundamental than meditation practice. But mindfulness practice really becomes much stronger, more powerful if you also meditate. Okay, so what is it? We're not painting, we're not writing poems. We're, you know, a painter or a poet brings attention to the language and the brush strokes and the colors.

[29:09]

But we're bringing attention to the brush strokes of our life. And so attention is the most I can just say this is a fact whether it's Buddhism or not. Attention is the most precious dimension of your life. It's attention which shapes your life. What you give attention to will become your life. So, you know, it's your treasure. You should take care of your attention.

[30:10]

But most of us just live in certain categories and we put attention to those categories and we don't really bring attention to categories themselves or what we're actually doing. Now attention isn't just like pointing a camera around and taking pictures. I'm good at just pointing a camera and taking pictures, but I'm not a photographer. Yeah, and now that they're digital, they're cheap. You can just keep taking them and taking them. My pictures end up as bookmarks. I've always amazed at how a good photographer can look through the lens of the camera and how

[31:17]

The world phenomena appears to that lens and to him or her. And take some kind of extraordinary pictures, wonderful pictures. So that's attention. That's just not pointing the camera, even the camera. That's bringing attention through the camera to the world and bringing the world back through the camera. And that's really what mindfulness does. It's something very similar to mindful attention. So let's say mindfulness as a practice is first of all bringing attention to attention. Bringing attention to attention itself. Okay. Now I'm very fond of the word trivial. Well, you have the same word, trivial.

[33:03]

Trivial. I like that better than trivial. It sounds less trivial. It's true. But you know what the word trivial means. Three roads. Tri-via. Three roads. What does that mean? It means it's an intersection. There's a road you're on and there's a choice. We have a saying in Zen, when you come to a fork in the road, take it. Take it. Try it. Come to an intersection and don't think about what to do. You'll go one way or the other and it might be interesting.

[34:04]

You'll have to know whether it's a one-way street or not, things like that. So, I mean, I don't want to get any of you in trouble. But Baker Roshi told me... So the word trivial clearly means that at one time it was understood that our choices were in the smallest details of our life. Somehow, society develops, culture develops, we start living through the habits that we're born into. And you don't see anymore that the little tiny details of your life, all of them are choices.

[35:40]

If you're a tracker, if you live that kind of life, tracking an animal or something, every little twig is a choice. When our life was less of a habit, I'm sure, that things really were, each moment was a choice, a choice. But when you're beginning to, if you're trying to find out what the world is like, not necessarily the way you've been told it is, or your habits are, you've got to kind of be able to look at the details. Aber wenn ihr euch damit befassen wollt, wie die Welt ist, und nicht unbedingt nur eure Gewohnheiten, dann müsst ihr eure Aufmerksamkeit auf die Details legen.

[36:56]

Ja, now let me give you a kind of example of the relationship between philosophy and the craft of practice. Early Buddhism is based on the talks, talking, lectures of the historical Buddha. Der frühe Buddhismus basiert auf den Vorträgen des historischen Buddha. And at some point, a few centuries later, people thought, you know, he got pretty far away and it was an oral tradition and so forth. Let's codify. Do you have the word codify? Organize, systematize. Let's systematize, organize the teachings of the Buddha. So they'll be easier to understand. So they... sifted through everything and made a system that's called the Abhidharma.

[38:14]

Now, once they got it organized, they started looking at it philosophically. And we tried to make it consistent. So one teaching, one aspect would map on another aspect. So all the terms were consistent from teaching to teaching. But it didn't work. And that development, philosophical development, is really boring. I mean, sometimes it's intellectually interesting, but rarely it kind of leaves a list. But the lists that were really closely related to the practice and arose from the practice and weren't philosophically extended

[39:16]

added a new insight and a new way to practice to the practice. Well, let me give you an example. Recently somebody I've been practicing with, I don't know how long. Ten years. He's Swiss actually. And we were talking about the Eightfold Path. The Eightfold Path is the historical Buddha's earliest teaching. Okay. So he didn't start with the Eightfold Path, though.

[40:32]

He just started with Zazen sitting practice and mindfulness practice. Now, what is mindfulness practice? It's bringing attention to your activities. Bringing attention to your perceptions, to how phenomena appears to you. And how the mind functions in perceiving. But, I mean, you all think you're sitting there. Yeah, and I think you are too, actually. But my experience of you is you're in my field of awareness.

[41:33]

I mean, I know you're sitting there, but you're all... What I know of you is what I hear, see, smell, feel, etc., The heart of mindfulness is to be mindful of mind. When I'm looking at you, I am always aware, because I've been doing this a long time, I'm seeing my own mind I mean you all are quite nice looking actually but I like my mind too and you even look better in my mind it's a pleasure to see how my mind differentiates you And if I breathe a little differently, my energy a little differently, you brighten up.

[42:55]

I feel like the photographer who can take a good picture through the camera. Now I can take a good picture just looking at you. So mindfulness practice is like that. So you're bringing your attention to your activity, walking, what I'm doing, etc. Not exactly consciously like I'd be self-consciously. Just more aware as it happens. Can I bring attention to my, not consciousness, attention to my body, inside, not inside. And you start doing, really, your hands are warm, your feet are warm, because attention somehow keeps the whole body healthier and warm.

[44:21]

Really, it's true. I always know when a flu or cold is coming down the tracks. The tips of my fingers get cold. And I go, oh dear. Two days away. And then I try to warm up my fingertips, because that has something to do with my whole body. And if I get them warm enough, I tell the train, just go right on through the station. Sometimes it stops and the flu gets off.

[45:22]

But if possible, I say, no passengers here. So there's really something magic about it. It's almost like a religion. And when I was walking high, When I was walking over here with Gerald, I would just see all this, everybody, anybody around here is out Christmas shopping. Christmas market. But, you know, I'm just walking with this great guy and And, yeah, I feel my breathing. It's like I've had a, you know, a couple of drinks. Except everything's clear and not the way a couple of drinks does. Not that I drink, but, you know, I have had a couple of drinks occasionally. Not that I drink, but, you know, I have had a couple of drinks occasionally.

[46:25]

Anyway, so we're bringing attention to attention itself to the awareness that everything we know, everything we look at, also points at the mind that's knowing it. And we bring attention to our body and the functioning of our body. You can feel your lungs, heart, etc. And you bring attention to your breath, which is probably the most magical practice of all. Because when you stop identifying with your thinking as thinking your thinking is you, thinking your thinking is all of you,

[47:43]

Which is exhausting. And that's why people do have a few drinks, just to forget that they're there thinking. Well, why do we go to movies and things like that? We forget for a while and, you know. I want to forget it now and then. But if you practice mindfulness, you can forget it all the time. And you can remember it when you need to. So When you bring attention to the breath, and your attention doesn't keep jumping back to your thinking, you actually enter into the metabolic pace of the body and the breath.

[49:05]

And it's a tremendous sense of location. Feel located in yourself, settled in yourself. Yeah, and it changes... you're less fearful. And you not only come into the pace, the basic pace of the body and mind and not just your mind, you come into the pace of the physical phenomenal world itself too. And you know, in what we call for the people we practice with, I'm supposed to stop soon, huh? When we call it what we call it, I'm only half done.

[50:31]

I don't even know where I'm going, but you know, okay. I'll stop soon. Quite a lot of the people who practice with this are musicians. And many times they've come up to me and said, you know, what you're talking about, it sounds like what we feel when several of us are playing together and the music really comes together. Yeah, and it's sort of like that. You suddenly feel the kind of music of your own body and the music of each situation. And any musician will tell you, if you play with these five people,

[51:31]

They play the same song and it's different than if you play the same song with these five people. Then if you play in this room instead of another room, it's different. And if you play Roundabout Midnight or Around about nine, it's different. Well, those differences begin to be clear when it's your body through which you're identified. And not through your thinking, which tends to try to make everything consistent and predictable. Okay, so then we need certain kind of phrases. Teaching. One I often suggest is to pause for the particular.

[52:58]

For each thing you notice, pause a moment and let your breathing and attention come together with it. Anyway, Anne, let me go back to this Swiss practitioner. So he started and he just joined us and he was very doubtful about whether he wanted to practice Buddhism or not, Zen. But he began to practice mindfulness and find himself located in his breath. And then he did, yeah, he works in Zurich with people.

[54:04]

And he found at work, yeah, he began to, his mindfulness, his attention to his breath, et cetera, at work, changed the way he was at work. And he found he began, like now, if I'm speaking, I can feel my breath in my speech. He began to find his speech and the way he spoke, etc., you know, like that. And then at some point, he heard about the teaching, introduced to the teaching of the Eightfold Path. Okay, which is, I'll just give you the teaching. It's right, the word is right, right view, but right is, it really means appropriate or something like that.

[55:07]

It's not like right or wrong. It's more like, well, that feels right, we'd say in English. It feels good. That feels right. So it's right views. Right intentions. Right speech. Right conduct. Right livelihood. Right effort or energy or intention. Right mindfulness. And right concentration. What he discovered that he was already doing it just by practicing mindfulness. But when he saw the teaching too, then he began bringing his attention into his livelihood, his job, in a new way.

[56:23]

And he began feeling it was behavior and conduct. And he began to see almost like you begin to notice what you can't usually notice. Like I said, when we started, we all lived some kind of philosophy, but we don't notice it. It's just how we live. And he began to see through his intentions and what his views were. And what views didn't make sense. and what views were closer to the way the world actually exists.

[57:47]

So in this way, he sort of practiced to discover the teaching, and then when he discovered the teaching, the teaching, not as philosophy, but as part of the craft, transformed his practice. Well, you know, I thought I would have... I didn't know. How am I going to talk? you know, you all should be at the Christmas market. So I didn't know what I was going to say. And here I talked ten minutes more than I should have. I'm sorry, I apologize. But it was such a nice group, it was fun. So we should stop. And I don't think we need discussion or questions.

[58:54]

I'll go out of the room for a few minutes and come back. And if anybody's here, we can have some conversation. No. Everybody needs a chance to escape. I actually don't know if I can go in the other room, but I don't know if I can get off this platform. So thanks for being here. Thank you.

[59:21]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_71.92