Is that comfortable enough? Yeah. Good. And Gural, did you speak, or Kisla, did you speak to those young people who were here yesterday? Yes, I did. How did they, what was their idea? They wanted to visit us, and I think they heard about us through Zabina, and they want to come back next Sunday or later. Is this from your town trip excursions in Bed-Sackingham? One of those people was present during my first driving message. During your first? Driving message. They just knew what was going on here.

[01:05]

And then I took them around. I was very impressed by this film, so I wanted to show it to his friends. Wow. So Sabine met one of the people at her first driving lesson. The driver led her up and then Sabine led him around. He was very impressed by this room, so he wanted to show it to his friends. You know, this isn't a missionary religion. You're not supposed to... You wanted to see it. Oh, you wanted to see it, huh? Yeah, you're just supposed to go shopping, not turn people into Buddhists.

[02:06]

Anyway, I was a little embarrassed yesterday because we came out of lecture and here these young people from our little nearby town meet this foreigner in a black dress. And then a native taller than me in another black dress. I thought, we're making a terrible impression. Anyway, I'm quite aware of the anomaly of us speaking here, practicing something I hope of immediate value to us.

[03:16]

But to speak of it, somehow I dress up in this monkey suit. I can't explain it exactly. I just like wearing these robes. And of course I want to point out that this isn't something I just thought up in the last few years. I'm trying to represent to you a tradition. To re-present to you a tradition. And yet at the same time, I do feel this is basically modern thinking. I think what we consider what modernity goes back into the past in various patterns and certainly goes back through perhaps all of Buddhism, but certainly Buddhism since the beginning of this millennium.

[04:50]

And I think all that we call modern thinking goes back to different patterns in the past and especially in Buddhism or what Buddhism was at the beginning of the millennium, how it developed. So I think we have to restore language and practice to the intimacy of what we are. So in this session and this lecture right now, I'm trying to feel my way into talking about something.

[06:09]

Sashim allows me to go more slowly than I sometimes want to do in public lectures. And I appreciate your letting me, though I don't have much choice about it, recover from my jet lag. Since I went to the United States and returned in less than two weeks, I was just getting used to it there, and now I have to readjust my antenna. In English we have these two words, antenna and aerial. Car aerial is the same word as an antenna. I see.

[07:34]

Antenna comes from the antenna of insects, another sensory apparatus. And aerial means air, something that reaches into the air. And to reset my clock, I have to reset my antenna or my aerial. I have to reset it so I can sit. The sun, in English the sun doesn't sit, it sets. We could say the sun sits in the sky above the clouds. But when it sets, it sets all our clocks. So to set is like, we also, a doctor sets your bones, puts them together if you have a broken arm or something.

[08:59]

So I suppose I could say that what I'm talking about is setting ourselves so that we can sit. So let me try to speak about this, see if I can do it so it makes sense. Let me try to speak about this so it makes sense. But it may take a little shifting of your sense of of sense. We could say that kin-hin is a practice to turn you into an antenna. And there's a lot of communal learning in monastic practice, of course, that we can only get a sense of in such a short time as a sashin.

[10:37]

And if I give you, or Gisela's the Ino, or... or Geralt is the Tanto, give you too many instructions, I think it makes you go crazy. We can only handle so much being interfered with by someone else. Yeah. The word for... We're in this room and there's all these nice windows and all those pretty plants. And the word for this in Buddhism is Tathagatagarbha.

[11:38]

Tathagata means, we don't call it, from a practice point of view, we don't call it the world or something like that, we call it Tathagata Garbha. Garbha means simultaneously womb and embryo. And Tathagata basically means movement. But it also means the movement of a Buddha. But we can understand it to mean that movement which awakens the womb-like, embryo-like quality of this world. That movement which awakens the fertility of existence.

[12:57]

The practice is, we could say nothing else but the study of those movements. Or becoming someone who knows these movements. Yeah. So, I'll speak about Kinhin first. Now, Kinhin, we go quite slowly. It's like the schedule, a way of stopping ourselves. And if you want to be an antenna, it's good if we are very exact in our posture. And if we want to be an antenna, then it is very good if we are very exact in our attitude.

[14:10]

Yes. What I'm getting at here is we generally think of the world as an enclosure. As a thing with boundaries. And I'm sorry to be so philosophical. But again, the eightfold path begins with right views. And if you think of the world as an object, as a container, this is not a right view. And this will invariably, out of sight of your consciousness, interfere with your thinking, realization, activity.

[15:11]

We have a phrase in, I don't know, Shakespeare or somebody, armies that clash at night. And there's a kind of, outside our consciousness, there's a kind of conflict, clashing of our views going on. It debilitates us. It takes away our energy. and it confuses us. And enlightenment, we could say, is when that conflict of views outside our consciousness no longer occurs. That's why realization can be sudden.

[16:24]

You can practice for a thousand years and not be realized. But if you change this conflict of views that's going on outside of your consciousness, like that, there is realization. The problem is, it's outside our consciousness. No good luck. So feel good. What's the solution? Turn yourself into an antenna that sends and receives. We have a... We have something called an omnidirectional antenna, which means something that receives and sends in all directions.

[17:34]

Now we call this stuff the universe. This is a terrible, delusionary, deluded word for this. You might realize I've been hanging out with some physicists the last week or two. It makes me think in big terms, sorry. I actually met a really wonderful person this last week. We seem to have become quite close friends in a short time, in a couple of weeks. He's one of two astrophysicists at the Princeton Institute of Advanced Study. He has what would be generally acknowledged one of the two best jobs in the world in astrophysics. And he, I won't mention his name because he actually wants to leave the institute.

[19:12]

Because he says astrophysics is here and science isn't explaining what's really going on. He's one of the quickest people at understanding practice I've ever met. Most scientists aren't too quick at catching what practice is about. Because they also have views which are in conflict with how things are, even if their views are scientific. And nowadays, if your views are scientific, they're right.

[20:23]

And that's one of the problems this new friend of mine and I both feel. So, universe is a terrible name for this because uni means one and verse means turn. This is not one turn. It is many turns, many movements. So maybe for our sake right now we could call this an omniverse. So what I'm trying to suggest is you stop thinking. All I'm trying to do is to suggest for this week that you stop thinking of this as a container. I'm not saying any more than that.

[21:25]

You can forget everything else I said. So if you don't think it was a container, what can we think of it as? All you can say about it, unless you extrapolate to a generalization like a container, Is it a bunch of movements? And you are at the center of those movements? If you just think of it as a bunch of movements, you're not perplexed by such imponderables as what's at the edge of the...

[22:28]

universe? Or does it have a beginning or end? To think things have to have a beginning and end is just a way of thinking. It's much more logical or observational, is just to say, this stuff is always here, always has been here, and why even worry about whether it begins or ends? To think in terms of beginnings and ends from a Buddhist point of view is very primitive thinking derived from babies being born and stuff like that. So whatever all this is, is movement.

[23:55]

And you are these movements. And coming to know this allows us to have another kind of relationship to people, to plants and animals, Gary Snyder, the poet Gary Snyder, said, often quoted, I hold the most archaic values. ancient or archaic. They go back to the Neolithic.

[24:58]

The fertility of the soil. The magic of animals. The... The power vision of contemplation in solitude. The common work of the tribe. The common work of the tribe. Am I going too fast or saying odd things? I'm sorry. So I think we, what Gary means, Gary's also a Buddhist, Even in the midst of this tradition of our whole society up until now, Buddhism itself asks us to go back to the most basic values.

[26:10]

The values from where we can start from scratch. Just walking. So in kin hin we, again, walk so slowly, we're walking outside of ordinary doing. And you begin to... When you walk, you step forward half a step. Then the back foot, you lift up your heel before you step. And you feel an energy coming up the heel all the way to the top of your head. Sometimes on the foot that stepped forward, then you curl your toes upward.

[27:35]

And then you move the back foot forward half a step, half the length of your foot. And you have the space of a fist between your ankles. And your hands are Your thumb is in your right palm. your hand is closed loosely around it. And your left hand is on top of your palm, your right hand. And your thumb feels as if you were holding your backbone. And you have a feeling of moving your navel in close to your spine.

[28:47]

In a way, we can say you're turning yourself into an antenna, trying to stop this leaning forward into doing and wanting and the future. And you want your shoulders not to do any work. So you want your shoulders to be open. Because for some reason our shoulders are the first part of our body to get involved in doing. Even in zazen they're working. The most common thing is not to have your Backbone curved in sitting, but to have your shoulders up.

[29:51]

And there's something magical when you read a book in which there's some kind of realisational fragrance to the text. Perhaps a holographic fragrance from the writer, I hope. We read it, maybe Sukhreshi's book or some other book, and as soon as we start to read it, our shoulders relax. It's quite amazing that certain or some poems will make us do that. How can words on a page... bring our shoulders into the position of the person who wrote the passage. This is a kind of magic almost.

[31:01]

A kind of very subtle connectedness. Part of this movement. the movement of your shoulders downward into greater openness. Now, we don't have much support for this way of being in our society. And our language also has gotten so removed from the world. At least in American and English poetry, there's a few good phrases, but then most of it's filler. And to shape it into something that our educational system would call a poem.

[32:12]

And it betrays the attention required from the reader. This is one reason Gary again said he holds the most archaic of values. No, in the I Ching there's one of the I think Sui, number 17, talks about the hard under the soft. And how the noble person, faced with evening,

[33:14]

follows delight with no purposeful activity, goes out into the evening to find himself or herself at rest. I've always liked the English word crepuscular, which means evening. It's a word which means evening. The same word exists in French. Does it exist in German? I don't know. You don't know. It means when the sky becomes granular. This granular light of evening, like little grains.

[34:38]

And I, as a kid, used to feel I could almost eat or imbibe, take in the sky in these little grains in the evening. But when you turn to, if you are in yogic culture, in Asian yogic culture, you have from the I Ching and from many sources, you have support for this other way of being. So that I don't go on, we don't go on too long this afternoon, I'll just introduce briefly a koan. This is in the Bluetooth records number 36. So this is the case number 36 in the Bluetooth records. And he, it's about Changsha.

[35:52]

Changsha, the case says, went out wandering in the mountains. And returning back to the temple gate, the head monk says, oh, where have you been? Changsha said, I've been wandering in the mountains. And the head monk said, where did you go? And Changsha said, I went following the grasses. pursuing the grasses. And I returned following the falling petals. It's rather poetic, but Tsukiyoshi liked this story. I always did, too. Tsukiyoshi has always liked this story, and I like it, too. And so the head monk says, Oh, it's such a wonderful springtime feeling.

[37:18]

And Changsha says, No, it surpasses even autumn dew dripping off the lotuses. And Changsha says, Those drops almost didn't fall off. Waiting for them to fall. And Shuedo, the commentator, says, ah, thank goodness for that response. And you can see in this little discussion exactly what we've been talking about. The monk is... trying to pin Changsha, who was the disciple of Nanshuan.

[38:29]

He was a disciple of Nanshuan. He tried to pin him down. He's trying to pin him down. Where did you go? I was wandering in the mountains. Where did you go wandering in the mountains? Well, I was following the grasses and then I followed the falling flowers. And so he says, oh, it's trying to pin him down against it. Oh, it's like springtime. And then so he says, Changsha says the opposite. It's like the icy cold dew in autumn falling off the flowers. And it surpasses even that.

[39:31]

So this is called a comment which falls on both sides and doesn't remain on either. Only Zen could make so much of a little story like this. But when we do something very basic, like take a little walk in the evening, what world do you think you're walking in? The monk thought one world and Changsha thought another. Changsha was a contemporary of many of the great... than teachers of the time. And he was a friend of Yangshan who was considered to have perhaps the sharpest intellect of those folks.

[40:45]

And they were out enjoying the moon together one evening, as we might, and Yangshan said, looking at the moon, everyone has this, but Seldom does anyone know how to use it. And Changsha said, ah, quite so, quite so. And Changsha said, I mean, Changsha said, but quite so, but will you show me how to use it? Oh no, he said, so I will show you, let me show you how to use it.

[41:48]

And Yangshan said, use it yourself. People should be in a mental hospital. So... So anyway, Changsha says, shall I show you how to use it? And Yangshan says, use it yourself. And Changsha at that point kicked him and knocked him over. And Yangshan said, revered uncle, you really are a tiger. So from then on, he was known as Tiger Shah. Believe me, this pertains to what we're talking about here. So when you are doing kin-hin, please don't knock anyone over.

[43:25]

But I'd like you to imagine when you're walking in that direction that the wall is barely there. I'd like you to also have a feeling for the field and the pond and the little garden house above. And when you're walking in this direction, knowing that the boiler or heater is there, And the stairwell. And the cars and then the farm and the cows and so forth. And this way the forested hill and the forest tower. In other words, I'd like you to examine the space of every object. Let's start with the

[44:26]

the space that we can observe. So whatever you notice, notice the space of that object as well. If it's your nose, notice the space around your nose. And the space within your nose. In your eyes, the space within your eyes and around your eyes. In your cheekbones, the space of your cheekbones, the cheeks in and around your cheekbones. This is simply an exercise. So I'm asking you to particularly notice the space which allows objects to appear. This is the meaning, really, why In mythology and poetry and in our own walking around, the sky is so important.

[45:52]

Because mostly our mind is constructed, the whole world is constructed.

[45:57]

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