Good afternoon. I'm early. Sorry. You know, when I first... Somehow the idea of this... winter branches. It wasn't called that yet, but winter branches came up. I imagined five or six people or ten, fifteen people maybe just, you know, And then maybe I could make something that I conceived of as for 10 people stretched to 20 or 25 or something. but then as you can see quite a lot of people wanted

[01:07]

to participate. So I've had to kind of change the conception because, you know, you can't stretch something you can do with 10 people to 30. And what's the advantage of having only 10? Well, I can say to Gerald, Gerald, I want you to prepare this and teach this today, and I want you tomorrow to teach that, and so forth. Like we've done in the Dharma Wheel meetings, more like that. You know, Sukhyoshi at one point, the last five or six years of his life or something like that, he said,

[02:24]

to me, let's go to New Mexico. Because I can't teach this unless I just spend the next five years alone with you. And I said, no, we really should try to keep doing it in the context of the larger Sangha. Yeah, okay. So, you know, that's what I'm trying to do, too. But I really want you to understand that I really expect your participation. And again, I am genuinely impressed and satisfied with your practice.

[03:30]

But I expect more. For example, I said twice now in the seminars that I would like someone to volunteer to present the five dharmas in relationship to the Maybe some of you have decided to do that, but what I would expect... When I said I would like someone to volunteer, every single person would put up their hands. And maybe next year, if less than every single person puts up their hands, I'm going back to America. Why should I waste my time?

[04:31]

I'm not threatening you, because who cares whether I'm here or not, but I'm trying to teach you. I can only teach you. You do it. Otherwise, you've got your lives. You don't need me. I can only teach you something when you do it. You have your own life and so on. And if it seems difficult, well, then the second day some people volunteer. The first day, maybe you're not quite ready, you want some preparation. Or if it seems even more difficult, even though some of you have been studying with me 10 years, 20 years, you don't remember the five dharmas, One karma a year, you should be able to remember that.

[05:45]

Then you get together in your small group and say, hey, let's get together and figure out how to do this relationship between the five dharmas and the twelve ranks. And it's easy to do. It's just an exercise. It's not difficult. I would like one of the topics of the small groups coming up to be the relationship of the five dharmas and the twelve links. Because I want you to be inside the teaching. So, Dogen says, don't let the sutras turn you, you turn the sutras.

[06:56]

I don't want you to be the passive recipient of the teachings. That's for ordinary people. For people who continue the lineage, they have to turn the teaching themselves. And I really believe, that's why I'm sitting here, you individually and as a group will continue the teaching in various ways. And some of you will make it your life and some of you will just make it the way you support people who practice. Through your own practice. So, unless you're Unless you get an understanding of how the teachings put together, first in simple ways, you can't generate teaching yourself.

[08:24]

Now to change the topic. Okay. Thich Nhat Hanh says something quite accurate. I've seldom seen someone write this down. He says people tend to see the Buddha's teachings As a description of how the world is. And not as primarily a way to support our practice. This is completely true. So I'll try to give you a simple example.

[09:43]

Or maybe it's not so simple. First, Buddha's teaching, the teaching of Buddhism, we don't know if it's Buddha's teaching, but let's say the teaching of Buddhism because it's been developed and is being developed by you and you. Okay, so Buddhist teaching is a way to... Buddhist teaching tries to describe and reflect the world as it is. That's true. But it also, and many of the practices are really designed to develop your practice, not exactly to be a description of the world as it is.

[10:45]

But as a construction which might make you feel the world as it is. Now these lists are all constructions. And can you map them on reality exactly? Well, no, not quite. Okay, so let's just play with something for a few minutes. Okay. So the basic teaching of Buddhism is interdependence.

[12:00]

Yeah, the clouds, the rain, the ecology, the wind, everything's interdependent. You can't separate anything from anything. If I lift this stick here, it has some effect in China. It's very difficult to measure, but it does. So interdependence is a kind of, you know, you can think it, you can't really see it. You can see the wind blowing the... The bamboo and I can. And I can feel my mind, senses, noticing, feeling the bamboo and the wind. You know, the classic kind of little kernel of is it the flag moving, is it the wind moving, or is it the mind moving?

[13:26]

Yeah, so I'm in fact seeing, feeling interdependence at that moment. Yeah, but it's really a kind of intellectual conception to really realize that's interdependence. Because I'm just seeing some bamboo moving. Okay. But we know, and it's not too difficult to know about interdependence and ecology. It's not too difficult to know. Well, I should say it actually took Rachel Carson in 1962 or three, who wrote the book Silent Spring, to bring to people's attention

[14:27]

That's when ecology started. So because we thought of the world as a container, it was going to take care of itself. It was independent of us. No one thought environmentally in the couple thousand years of Western history until Rachel Carson, just in my lifetime, some of yours too, So it's been quite difficult for Western culture to think conceptually about interdependence. But once you've got the idea, it's easy. But still, there's a conceptual background to it.

[15:47]

Okay. So one of the teachings of the Abhidharma is you use something to index the mind. Now I've suggested to you when I've taught the three minds of daily consciousness. When you are just noticing things, with no thinking, just immediacy, the immediate presence of my feeling, all of you say right here. Or like I say, you may be taking a walk in the woods and just walking along not thinking.

[17:03]

And then you remember you've got to do something. You start thinking about what you have to do. And there's a bump. You go over a bump into another state of mind. When you wake up in the morning, you go over a bump from sleeping and dreaming into consciousness. Are you okay? Thank you, yes. Do you want a chair? No. Well, I worry about your hip. Just hobble around a bit. Okay. So now it says in the early teachings, the monk marks his mind. The monk knows the marks of his mind. Is that difficult?

[18:25]

Yeah, find the right word for mark. You don't make marks in German? Okay. How do you translate the four marks? A little different. I see. I think we have it. It's wonderful how words overlap different territories. And then there's territories, which I want to talk about, which no words overlap. You didn't translate that. Sorry, I was thinking about it. There's no word to overwrite what I said. I was trying to figure out. That's part of the reason one should learn to think. Thinking, non-thinking is to think where words don't reach. So you want to really learn to think outside of language and then, when necessary, put language to it.

[19:36]

From the earliest times it would say you should know the bump, the feel of the bump or mark between waking and sleeping. Between the mind of immediacy and you suddenly remembering, oh, I have to make a phone call or something. So... You have to go make the phone call or whatever you have to do. But you also say, hey, I felt that bump. I'm going to remember that bump when I went over into the mind that has to do things. That's the practice of mindfulness. That's the purpose of mindfulness. To notice the mind itself. Mindfulness. And to notice what's not pointed out to you by your culture or your language, but appears in your experience.

[21:19]

But the teaching of Buddhism has tried to give you lots of arrows pointing at the bumps. Notice the bump, please. But the bunts, you have to notice. There's no way to say much about them, except you can say, well, there's this mine and that mine. But the bump is your experience. But sometimes, maybe in a lecture or something, we can take you over a few bumps. I hope you notice them. Yeah, maybe we have... Well, how was Bekharoshi's lecture today?

[22:21]

Bumpy. That would be pleased. Okay. So you notice the bump between states of mind Or you notice the bodily feeling of the breath in certain states of mind. You build up a mindful inventory of modes of mind. And what we discussed today is you feel resistance to something and you shift that resistance into acceptance. And as someone pointed out, acceptance of the resistance too.

[23:31]

And that's what it means when it says the monk notices the mark's of his or her mind. And related to this you So, how do you see interdependence? Well, for me, the way I index it, The simplest way I've found to index it is that objects usually are on a table or on the ground or on wings or something.

[24:35]

And when you see an object, it's very clear, then it's interdependent. It's an example of interdependence. It's resting on the object. The table or the ground is supporting the object. So it's a very simple example of interdependence. So it can become a way the mind is indexed to the larger feeling of interdependence. I suppose when you're lying out on the hillside watching the clouds This is a mind of interdependence.

[25:56]

Yeah, you kind of a little bit let go, focus, and you feel the clouds moving and the air and so forth. So let's call that a mind of interdependence. It's a mind directly experiencing interdependence. The clouds, you... Now you, in a way, index that you understand index, to any object resting on the ground or whatever. Und ihr indiziert das, und ich hoffe, ihr versteht, was ich damit meine, also markiert das sozusagen...

[26:57]

Okay, so conditioned co-arising. If we're looking at this text of the twelvefold links, you can Read about, oh yes, it's the clouds and the water and the spring and blah, blah, blah. But that's not an experience. So you discover the mind that feels the conditioned co-arising. And then you index that to something you see all the time. So all you have to do is look at an object sitting on a table, say, and if you pause and look at it for a moment, this pause of acceptance, it stops.

[28:25]

It reminds you, it uses memory, a kind of indexed memory, to bring the memory of the mind of watching the clouds on the hillside into your presence. Is this artificial? Yes. All your minds are artificial. Every mode of mind you have is constructed. That's his teachings. And if you think there's natural minds, what you mean is, I like the minds that consciousness supplies me where I don't know where they came from. I like the minds that consciousness supplies me where I don't have to know where they came from, so I call them natural.

[29:46]

Sounds good. Okay. Now, what are you doing when you do this? This is actually only the first of four stages of establishing conditionality. This is a practice inside this teaching of the twelve links. What happens when you do this? And I won't go into the other three ever.

[30:46]

Until you tell me the relationship between the five dharmas. No, I mean it's getting too late. I'll do it tomorrow or the next day. Spring branches, I don't know. What you're doing in addition is you're developing the mindfulness of the mind. Okay, now if there is no destiny, and you're free from usual impulse and desire, how do we make decisions? If we just don't depend on where consciousness and ego want to push us.

[32:00]

How do we, in the midst of this mind of ego, everything being present, how do we function? To be continued.

[32:20]

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