Good afternoon. Guten Abend. See, I can do a little of that. I'm still amused at how amused I am by hearing everything in German. Partly I feel a freedom because now it belongs to you. I don't have to do so much. Of course, Buddhism is not new to German, but in our Dharma Sangha practice, doing this is new. And I guess I feel a little bit like I tricked you. Because now you're responsible. So I can enjoy myself more. So I'm trying to create with you a Buddhist philosophy.

[01:35]

And a Buddhist philosophy. practice for us together. What I just said could be understood in many ways, and I don't think I can go through all the permutations. But at least when we attempt to create a map of Buddhism, with which we can practice in English and German,

[02:47]

We're creating Buddhism. And Buddhism, of course, in many ways like science, is a process of mutual creation over time. Now, Much of what I have said the last few days has been an attempt to bring us to the point where we understood the practice of the critical point. And this is based on my experience that presenting this critical, this

[04:03]

practice to this, my experience in presenting what we're calling critical point practice has not been pursued as a practice with much faith. So I thought I should, it's so essential and unique to Zen that I thought I should present it in a new way or a way you might understand it better. Ramakrishna says somewhere The winds of God's grace are always blowing.

[05:16]

But you have to hoist your sail in it. And I would say we also... have to discover how to stay in the wind. And sometimes how to sail against the wind. Now I have more than I ever have before taken these two words, awareness and consciousness, and made them aspects of human and natural reality. And I've been holding back from doing that, I don't know, out of a certain shyness or something like that.

[06:34]

And a fear of a philosophy that's too explicit and then hence too simplistic. Because, you know, you take something, a distinction like this, and you kind of bandy it about. Do you know that? Bandy it about just means to say it freely in any old context. Um... it quickly loses its power as a guide in practice. Now my dream for the Dharma Sangha is that we somehow together create the conditions for studying and practicing together and developing a common practice but also developing ways in which this can...

[07:57]

lead to different practices for each of us. Yeah, and I don't know quite how to do this, but maybe now that the responsibility is yours, because you're doing it in German, We'll find out how to do it. Now, we need a philosophy, a personal philosophy. To varying degrees, because... Because we think and we separate things into this and that and it's natural we think about whether this is the same as that or different or both and so forth.

[09:29]

In other words, we learn how to, to some extent at least, think clearly. As soon as you separate things, you have relationships, and those relationships have implicit rules. So I think to some extent we need to study our own thinking. And then I think, in addition, we have to study our own views for consistency or for inconsistency. And for whether those consistencies or inconsistencies are useful to us or not.

[10:38]

And how also to compare our views to other views, other persons, other teachings. And to some extent, this is done by everybody. To do it thoroughly is quite unusual, actually. But we can do it together. fairly thoroughly even though no one of us does it real thoroughly. And in Buddhism we can use not just a logic based on thinking, but also a logic based on inner seeing and emptiness. Emptiness. Yeah. I'm speaking about philosophy really to say what philosophy is not.

[12:02]

It should not control or direct or limit or describe your practice. It can aim at your practice, but you shouldn't take it as a description of practice. Practice is always more subtle. And the Buddhist schools which had very refined and beautiful philosophies, but not much practice, have all disappeared. But the schools which have emphasized practice are the ones that continue.

[13:10]

Now, someone mentioned to me that they found... qualities of pain that couldn't be described with words. Now, outside this Tashin, most people would not think that's in advance in learning. But it's just what I mean. This philosophy can't match what our practice is. We have the word for pain, but there's hundreds of... of features to the topography of pain.

[14:32]

For instance, when just to continue my discussion of pain the other day, if you notice pain in your leg, for instance, and you then really try to to see exactly what part of the leg it occupies. The part it occupies, the more you look carefully, is smaller and smaller. And then you can look at what part of the mind it occupies.

[15:41]

But it's easy to quickly lose hold of that, and then it's all over your leg and all over your brain. And then the pain is distributed over the whole leg, over the brain. But I notice when my legs are hurting, for example, that I can tell when I'm in awareness or consciousness. If I'm primarily located in consciousness, it hurts a lot more than if I'm located in awareness. And then I say to myself, you dumb guy. All these years And you still get stuck in consciousness. You better just suffer for that.

[16:45]

So I say, okay, well, I'll suffer. I deserve it after all these years. To be such a poor practitioner. And if I really feel that, usually my practice gets better right away. Mm-hmm. So, with the caveats I've mentioned, let's... pursue this distinction of awareness and consciousness. Now in the practice week I spoke about an experience I've

[17:50]

in which I experienced the work in which I threw away the distinction between outside and inside. Front and back. And this is very different from a philosophical understanding that somehow inside and outside are the same or something. You can describe it philosophically, but there is no comparison to the actual experience. There's no such thing as outside and inside. Or up and down. And it took that kind of switch to allow Newton to notice that apples fell.

[19:17]

Because as long as, I mean, gravity is hidden in things as they are. Yeah. Gravity is hidden in everything being in place. We only notice things when they're out of place. So it took a radical idea of Newton's to think, well, things could fall up. So we use the word down all the time, but down is just a word for gravity. So, you know, I threw away this distinction between inside and outside, up and down, and so forth.

[20:49]

And, of course, provisionally, or relatively, sometimes it appears. It's built into our language, and so forth. But somehow that experience, it never again has functioned in the way I think about things. Now, critical point practice is to bring you to the point where you have that kind of recognition. And usually it's not useful to have too much of a map of the territory. For instance, none of us can be... None of us are surprised by the idea of gravity anymore, the way Newton must have been astonished.

[22:06]

But we can't hide the philosophy of Buddhism. With a bunch of young monks, maybe in a cloistered valley. Yeah, and you tell them they can't read. Maybe we can create a situation where they know very little about Buddhism. And then you can have these fresh apples and make them fall. But that's not the case with us in the West. We all read too much. Or perhaps not enough. So anyway, we have this distinction I'm making, awareness and consciousness.

[23:12]

Now, in general, what you want to know is you have to practice with these things in their particularity. Yeah. So, you know, a sashin works for me when pretty much by the fourth or fifth day, we're all stumbling around in awareness. More or less, by osmosis or practice, we've got a feeling for awareness and we're kind of stumbling around in it. With half-opened soft eyes. And of course I'm making fun of this, but something like that, you know.

[24:16]

Mm-hmm. But we can begin to see, like, perhaps now you understand, when a famous koan in the Blue Cliff Records, a monk asks young men, what about when the tree withers and the leaves fall? And gentleman says, the body exposed in the golden wind.

[25:19]

Philosophically, this is nothing but the distinction between consciousness and awareness. When the tree withers and leaves fall is when you stop being embedded in the distinctions of consciousness. Of course in one way it's just a description of fall. Winter fall comes and the leaves are falling because the colored breeze of the changing leaves, etc. In New England and in the aspens of Colorado, wind is certainly golden in the fall.

[26:37]

But here the body is exposed in the golden wind. And this is Ramakrishna's setting setting our sail in God's grace. So I said last night, gather up all the leaves, the 84,000 thoughts. Gather up everything I've said. And put it in a bundle and throw it into the ocean of life and death.

[27:41]

Or use it as a cushion. Put it under you and sit on it. Yeah, or hold it up in awareness. And say, what is it? What is it? Just that you can make such an image. You can imagine taking all these things that we've all been experiencing and everything I've said and wrap it up. And hold it up. This is already awareness. And sometimes it opens by itself, like Pandora's box. And you're back in consciousness. And sometimes it opens up like God's treasure chest.

[28:50]

And you see everything appearing. And you see everything appearing and rising. then sometimes we can take this bundle and put it on the shelf. And when we want to open it, in consciousness we do, and when we want to put it away, we put it on the shelf. So, we could say a seshin is... Perhaps a sailing vessel where we all discover for this week how to hoist our sail in God's grace. And maybe we got, you know, like you take little babies sometimes, if you want to teach them to swim quickly, you just throw them in the water.

[30:09]

You hope it works. Yeah, so maybe Sushin being a shortcut method is a little... Too much like that. The koan of the practice week suggested it was like taking a brick from a kiln and putting it on ice. You may have felt that a little bit occasionally in the sashin. Now some questions arise, maybe I could respond to a little bit.

[32:10]

Is this something new, or this Buddhism we're creating, or is this Dogen and Zhaozhou's and historical Buddha's teaching? Well, The teaching is a bit different, but the experience is probably pretty close to the same. But I still agree with, say, Hegel, who would, I think, say that new forms of consciousness are possible. But I can only speak about my own experience. And so far I can't keep up with Dogen and Zhaozhou. They're way ahead of me.

[33:15]

So, um... But still, can I speak about new forms of consciousness? I think, inevitably, if we use German and English, for instance, in English to make this distinction, awareness and consciousness, And all words have cilia, is that the little, like cells have little things that stick out? Is that what it's called? Cilia, I think. All words have cilia that embed it in a language. And or like coins, you can't entirely deface a coin. The face means to take the face off.

[34:29]

As long as you're going to spend the coin, it has to still look something like a coin. So no matter what meanings we add to these words in English and German, they're still going to be spent in English and German. So if the spaces between things are a little different, other forms will evolve in those spaces. And if the spaces between things are a little different, other forms will evolve in those spaces. And also it can't all be captured in any philosophy. So each of you, each of us is our own representation of Buddha mind. So I think the last thing I might say about this is, again, it's not a philosophy.

[36:25]

It's a praxis-sophie. And you have to trust your own practice. You can't trust the philosophy. You can't even trust me. Although I'm sitting here with you. You have to trust your actual experience. That's why this practice belongs to you. And belongs to us. Dogen says the Zhaozhou's koan of the oak tree, the cypress tree, was created by the entire body of Buddha. And he means by the entire body of Buddha, this... Buddha body of awareness we see with soft eyes.

[37:41]

And meaning by saying to trust your own practice means to trust and acknowledge your own experience. And to trust your own practice means to trust your own experience and to recognize it. So, if it's, because this, in Yogacara practice and Zen, which is Yogacara practice basically, this is not philosophy, it's experience. So space, emptiness and so forth is something you experience. And you experience through each sense. So when you hear silence, when you hear stillness, you're hearing awareness. In this way we're speaking now, you're hearing perhaps God's grace.

[38:56]

When you hear the stillness or silence that is present even in speaking and sound. And the gaze is to see space, we might say. Air is our experience, an experience of breathing space. Now, you can say, well, air, as you know, on Mars, they don't have it, and et cetera, et cetera. But our experience is air. Yeah, and we breathe something like consciousness, and we breathe something like awareness. then you have a different experience of awareness than of consciousness.

[40:23]

But awareness is also as hard to see as gravity is hard to see. As gravity is hidden in everything being in its place, awareness is hidden in everything being in its place. Awareness is hidden in consciousness. If you take, let's take, we used to play with the word wave. You talk about rearranging the letters and at some point you bring them together and you see the word wave, but when they're apart, they're just letters. So we could take the word aware. And we have W and E and R and so forth. And what holds it together?

[41:25]

a spell. You spell a word, but a spell is also a magic formula. The world is a spell. In Japanese, the entry to a house is called the genkan. And it means mystery gate. And it's just everybody's word for the entry of the house. Hmm. although it comes from Vimalakirti's, you know, Doksan hut, meaning mystery gate.

[42:52]

And in English, what's it called? Entrance. We're entranced when you go across a threshold. When you're fascinated The word fascinate means to be held spellbound. When something fascinates you, the word actually means it holds you still. So when the spell holds the letters aware together, it's just the word awareness. or entrance.

[44:05]

But when you take the letters apart and step through the spell,

[44:11]

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