So he then presents a teaching on this point. But he presents it in the same... in a way that puts Dung Shan in the same place. He can't hear it. And when you raise, if I raise this staff, I raise the whole world with it. Because in this staff, at this moment, there's a unique world that arises at this moment.

[01:03]

Michel Foucault, the French philosopher who died of AIDS. said that the constitutive part of myself is the way of not remaining the same. The most essential part of myself is my way of not remaining the same. And Foucault, Morgan, almost any other contemporary philosopher, I find often very close to the same thinking that's in Zen Buddhism. So if your effort as a person is to discover how you're the same every moment, and to remain the same every moment, one thing, you're going to have a hell of a time with Sashim.

[02:17]

the more you become a person who constitutively does not remain the same every moment. As Szydlowski used to say, is face to face the facts that one faces. Excuse me, facts? The facts, the facts of the, whatever facts face you. At this moment, that's who you are. So you never interpret yourself as a person who might be free of disdain. It may take an awful lot of pain before you get to that point. But when you really don't separate yourself from the pain, and you don't think comparatively, ah, there will be a time when the bad act wins.

[03:39]

I didn't say this was easy but it is really different when you actually become a person who way is not to be the same on each moment. You reach down into some nourishing depths that are flowing up all the time. Someone said the biosphere is always flowing into the possible adjacent chemistry. And we are always flowing into the adjacent chemistry mind chemistry that's possible, but if you think the same all the time, that flow is not passing through you.

[05:04]

The plasticity of this fundamental, unique time is not available to you. And Sashin is a way in a sense to force you into another kind of time. I'm sorry we use force. I apologize. But it's the Eno's fault because she controls when the bell is rung. Even sometimes I wish that door would ring the bell. I've got pretty bad pillows in the sushis.

[06:10]

I keep cutting off my circulation. Who needs circulation? So, I can't believe it's already this time. I haven't even started. But at least I've finished this story, all right? So, he raised his whisk, Guishan.

[08:04]

And the raising of the whisk or the finger or whatever it is, is a way of pointing to the absolute uniqueness at each moment. And the absolute uniqueness in which we are absolutely free. This moment that can't be measured but where we actually live. Where we live and die and where we take the precepts. So, when Dung Chan didn't understand, he said, the mouth that was given to me by my parents, society, culture, language, can never explain it to you.

[09:09]

We don't just live in a human world. He means. So Dung Shan, like a good Zen student, persists. Are you persistent? Yeah, some way. And he says, is there someone else who reveres the way, reveres the Dharma as you do? Who could explain this to me? Because Dungsan intuitively realized that he had missed the opportunity to become Guishan's student. And there's no fooling around in this business.

[10:23]

You miss your chance, you miss your chance. It's not like college advisors. You go back and you can have another to rearrange your courses. And Dung Shan knew he'd missed his chance, so he also knew he had to go. So he said, is there someone else who reveres, who knows the way, the way you do? Guishan said, well, in such and such a province, in such and such a district, near where there's some adjoining stone houses, you will find someone with whom, if you can know the bending of the grasses, you will treasure his way.

[11:35]

So he left and found Yunyan. And then asked Yunyan the same question. Now, when I met Suzuki Roshi, you know, there was no Buddhism around. And he was just a local priest in a Japanese. There's a lot of Japanese folks in Dusseldorf. And in those days there was a lot of Japanese people living in Los Angeles and San Francisco. There was not a single Japanese restaurant in New York, for example. No one knew what sushi was. Now you can't go out to lunch in New York without having sushi.

[12:59]

Dead, uncooked fish, it's terrible. I mean, that's how people would react back in the 50s and 60s if you talked to them about dead, uncooked fish. And here was this tiny Japanese man who was the priest for the local Japanese folks. There was no way the mouth of my parents could tell me whether he was a good teacher or not or I should do this or something like that. So I had to, so this story became important to me. Because it was like someone said, well, you go down here and there's a stone house and then you go in the stone house and if the grass is blowing nicely, it's okay.

[14:01]

So I thought, this has to be a decision I can only make for myself. There's nothing in my culture that can support me or even... support or go against this decision. And while there's a lot more Buddhism around and a whole lot more sushi, still the decision is basically the same. You can't just look at your human world to make this decision. You have to look at the subtle mind that's present everywhere. And at the same time ask, Is really the welfare of our present society my paramount importance?

[15:16]

If those two things come together, you're ready to make this radical decision to practice. Or to understand that even in the midst of taking care of your life, as I also learned to take care of my ordinary life, and be married and have, as you know, two daughters, somewhere in there this radical decision still is happening. Again, sometimes the trees... The bamboo even and the birch tree and the pine tree are quite still. And you look along the ground and tiny leaves seem to be stirring the air.

[16:23]

And sometimes some leaves are going this way and right beside them some leaves are going this way. And this sense of some kind of wind or energy that moves in the tiny pathways. And this expression in Chinese, to see the wind in the grasses. means to see not just the wind in the trees, no, but these tiny little winds in the grasses. And it means to see beyond the words into what is really being said. And to see into yourself beyond the words of your mind into what you really want to do. So you can ask, what bright moon will show me the way.

[17:40]

What mind will show me the way? What tiny wind will lead me to my practice? The mouth which your parents gave you cannot This is the fundamental problem of life in general. How do you make this kind of decision? Where you find, really, how to order a hot dog. Okay, thank you very much. Die grünen Geisten sind fabelos.

[19:36]

Ich belobe, sie zu retten. Wir beten, sie sind um uns zu erschließen. Ich belobe, ihnen ein Ende zu bereiten. Sie damals sind grenzenlos. Ich belobe, sie zu beherrschen. Erdbebnis wurde riskant übertreiblich. Ich belobe, ihn zu erreichen. Mŭŭŭŭŭŭŭŭŭŭŭŭŭŭŭŭŭŭŭŭŭŭŭŭŭŭŭŭŭŭŭŭŭ

[20:49]

Vare man henon jiji tsuru koto etari, Nea wakuan yorai o shen, Jitsu nyerokeshi katei napsuran. I believe that the truth can be heard in every detail. Good afternoon.

[22:39]

And somehow we've gotten... I like my new voice. Somehow we've gotten to the fifth day? Sixth day? Fifth day. And we started doksan. which I'm very grateful to be doing. I really like meeting with you. Dharmasanga, the word, the name Dharmasanga, it means, we can translate it as those who study the truth. Now, I think it's better that we disguise it in Sanskrit as Dharma Sangha.

[23:43]

I think if Sabina is going shopping in Bad Säckingen, I say, who are you? She says, we are those who study the truth. I think there would be less grocery clerks who came up to see what we're doing. We tell them later that we're interested in studying the truth. Yeah, but, you know, we take this very seriously, to study the truth. And what is the truth? No one knows. This is a big question. Yeah.

[24:45]

But anyway, that's what we're doing and I want us to do and I hope we're doing. And together. So... If we're going to... You've become a cripple. Is it getting worse or better? Worse. I'm sorry. It's my fault. It is? Well, I don't know. So, if we're going to study the truth, we have to study how we know things.

[25:57]

And let me try to sum that up briefly. I want to say that it's very difficult to know what our society is like. And in Europe, and I consider America part of Europe, I know you don't want to admit it. But it was settled by all those people you didn't want. Those people you threw out are my ancestors. So we want to be Europeans too. Anyway. Anyway, we Europeans have a horrible... And now that I'm half German, I can say this.

[27:21]

And half Austrian, excuse me. Anyway, we Europeans have a horrible history. I mean, just a hundred years war where everybody was fighting everybody. This is a terrible history. But I think we can't let this fool us. I think in our own European history there are pockets and streams of enlightenment. It's just that the historians don't don't know about it or don't write about it. And it's not about the formation of nation states and so forth. So I want us to, I feel we're in a European wisdom tradition as well as an Asian wisdom tradition. And I don't think this wisdom tradition falls only into categories of Buddhism or Catholicism or something like that.

[28:37]

I think this wisdom tradition is deeper than that. And sometimes it disguises itself as Buddhism or Catholicism, and sometimes it disguises itself as poetry. Or psychology or science. and sometimes it's within the institutions of the society, and sometimes it's within gatherings of friends. Now, how... we know things through our senses.

[29:53]

Now, it's mostly the way we know things through our senses is generalized and diluted. I'm going to try not to get philosophical here. I'll just try to just be brief. Sukershi, I said last night, said there are many thousands, many moments on each breath of time. Let's put this in a big, tiny scale. And I've been talking about science partly just to throw this into a bigger scale. There are something, I'm told, something like ten raised to the twelfth power neurons in the human brain.

[31:00]

Ten to the twelfth power. Yeah. And this is a huge number. Just offhand I'd say it's something like the number of seconds in three or four hundred years. It's about 31 million seconds in a year. Please live each one. Why not? Yeah. And the number of connections in the human brain, the nervous system, are, I'm told, 10 to the 14th power.

[32:02]

We're getting up there with the number of molecules in the universe. These are huge numbers. And yet we look at things and we say this tree is three-dimensional. Our mind is trained to think in three-dimensional sequentiality. When you look at a tree and you say it's three-dimensional, you have created a mental box around it. Which is useful if you're trying to figure out if a truck will get under a bridge. But it's not much more subtle or accurate than that. Each stem, each leaf, each part of each leaf, all are in these little three-dimensional boxes, if you want to think of it that way.

[33:23]

And they don't add up to three dimensions, they add up to something vast. So we live in a vast world which is not apprehensible because of the way our senses work. But we're actually participating in this vastness. So the first sense of the way when we study our senses, we see that our senses are homogenized. And usually under one sense, and for us humans it's the seeing of the eye. So practice is to, and the vijnana practice, as most of you know, is to separate out the senses.

[34:27]

So the process of beginning to know is to, first of all, get to know each sense separately. So you can smell the mood in this room, not the fact that we haven't taken a shower. The mood? We can smell the mood of the room. And we can hear the mood of the room. And we hardly notice we're doing it, but actually we react within this perception. There are thousands of tiny sounds going on now.

[35:28]

And when you begin to work with your senses in a unitary sense, one at a time, You begin to recognize you're hearing things that when your senses are homogenized you don't hear. I mean, you notice in the Zenda when somebody clears their throat, about five people have to clear their throat or cough. My throat didn't itch, but yours started to itch and it made mine itch. This is a gross level that's much more subtle than that action. The connectedness is... Our perception of it is very slight.

[36:56]

Conscious perception. Okay, so this is taken for granted in Buddhist way of thinking about things and in the teaching of the sutras and koans. And then the next third category is to orchestrate the senses, to be able to bring, say, sound and smell together, but not sight. And the fourth is to recognize that there are things going on that don't fall into the categories of the senses. And the koan we've worked on, off and on, for a couple years, back and forth, about going on a pilgrimage and not knowing his nearest, about acting in the world,

[38:02]

Acting in the world. Where the senses don't reach. For example, right now, the example I use often is Right now there's hundreds or thousands of cellular phone calls right here. A hundred years ago, if you told somebody that, they'd say, you're crazy. But in fact, it's... And many, many television stations. Oh, I see a movie right there. And these... But these are still... they're beyond our senses but still in the realm of senses.

[39:20]

In other words, we may be affected actually by the cellular phone calls in this room even though we can't listen to the conversation. But then there's the way in which The sixth, then, is the way in which it's not in any category of the senses. That is also present. It's somewhat analogous to mathematically the world is much simpler in ten dimensions than three or four. That's where scientists come up with the idea of hyperspace and string theory and stuff like that. Yeah. And the world is so folded together that it's outside of our perceptual any way we can perceive it.

[40:38]

But we are it. Now, Buddhism, I think, because it's basically non-theological, has had to look very carefully because they've had to say, this is it. There's nothing outside the system. So the mystery is somehow folded into the system. So Buddhism has assumed that, and much of the koans, the so-called great function, The term great function means to know how to exist where the senses don't reach and cannot reach. where the senses don't reach, where they cannot reach.

[41:48]

Now, this is remarkable that we are part of a wisdom stream here that imagines how to exist where the senses are. teaches us how to exist where the senses don't reach. I never imagined, when I was a kid, I never imagined this was possible. No one told me. So it's been a revelation to me. It was a revelation for me. A metanoia. Oh. Just testing your English. It's not in the dictionary. In the curriculum. Well, it's in some dictionaries, but you have a pretty big one.

[42:50]

Yeah. Okay. So, what would I suggest you know? What would I suggest you know? As if I knew. Knowing there's a limit to knowing, what do I suggest we know within those limits? I suggest that we know that everything changes. And I suggest we know that everything we know is mind. So I would practice with these As the precepts are in the background of your mind, you really need to have in the background of your mind, before thought arises, your mind is a structure. The structure has been developed since you were born.

[44:06]

And I think there's, as I was implying yesterday, an immense plasticity to how the mind can be formed. And I believe that we are, in Sashin and in Zazen practice, we are working directly with the plasticity of the mind. And we're restructuring the mind. And part of that restructuring is is what basic views you hold before thought arises. Because thought, once it arises, it arises in the structure of the mind. The structure is prior to the thinking. I think, just something I read a while ago, that the intelligence of a child is in direct relationship to the vocabulary of the parents.

[45:30]

But it seems to be the vocabulary of the parents that is... face-to-face communicating. It's not the vocabulary of the babysitter. Or the vocabulary of the television programs that are going on in the background. It's a fleshly vocabulary. Okay, we need to know to hold in view that everything changes. That everything you see or think about... So as I say, since I like my own mind, I like everything I see. How could one not be friendly?

[46:51]

The third thing to know is that everything is interdependent. That everything is changing means that everything is interdependent. And it's both. sequentially interdependent and simultaneously interdependent. And it's also interdependent with mind itself. With the structural capacity, sensorial capacity of the mind. So this interdependence should always be held as part of your accurately assuming consciousness. In addition, I think you should know that mind always

[47:53]

has a physical component and sentient physical always has a mental component. And this is the secret of practice, one lifetime practice, is to get to know the physicality of your mind. And when you practice bringing your attention to your breath, you are physicalizing your mind. Now, the next two are more speculative, but I think I take them as true. All is existence. Everything you see is existence. And everything you see is void.

[49:18]

This is a formula of Yogacara. All is existence and all is void. And then it was developed to be said more deeply. All is neither existence nor void. Which means we're really out of a human-centered world. Wir sind in der Mitte von etwas, das wir sind, aber das wir nicht verstehen können. Moment by moment it disappears and reappears. Close your eyes. Open them. Everything appeared.

[50:19]

Close them. It's gone. No, this is rather mechanical, but there's some truth to this if you begin to sense it. Okay. Now, what I really want to talk about here is friendship. And I'm surprised, you know, I'm not a scholar of literature. I'm not a scholar of anything, in fact. But I can't think of any novel about friendship. All are romances, Roman. They're all about love and stuff, but they're never about friendship, that I can think of.

[51:33]

On the other hand, my... acquaintance, limited acquaintance, with Chinese literature. Friendship is much more celebrated than love. And spousal relationships are most celebrated when they're also or fundamentally friendship. Now, And this does take certain forms. It's assumed that friendship is productive and creative.

[52:34]

And it's because of friendship that lineage is so important in Asian culture. Lineage is not vertical. Die Leerlinien sind nicht vertikal. It's horizontal, [...] over many generations. Es sind verschiedene Schichten von horizontalen Leerlinien über viele Generationen. Someone might say Richard Baker came to Germany and founded the Dharma Sangha. Jemand könnte sagen Richard Baker kam nach Deutschland und hat Dharma Sangha gegründet. It's easy to write this way. That's what a magazine article might say. It's not really true. It might be more accurate to say, I came to Germany or to Europe and I...

[53:37]

I made some friends. I mean, the Dhamma Sangha, there's no way the Dhamma Sangha would exist without all of you. I mean, I've been an agent of it, but many of you have been agents of it. And I did make some basic decisions, for example. I decided for the most part to only do seminars or give lectures in cities which had sitting groups. Even if the sitting group was tiny, two or three people, two or three friends is the whole world. A thousand strangers at a lecture means nothing compared to two or three friends.

[55:00]

I'm wearing these robes because Suzuki Roshi was my friend. Almost nothing else. And because I wanted to be friends with the other people I practiced with. And Sukhiroshi decided he shouldn't be the... We decided together that he shouldn't be the only one who dressed in funny robes. There should be at least two people dressed in funny robes, so that... that other Americans, I mean Europeans, would have a sense of it's possible. Very good translation. You're getting better every day. So, I mean, this friendship, this Dharmasanga is not possible without Gerald and Gisela's friendship with each other and with me and being at Crestone for 10 years.

[56:29]

Dharmasanga would not have been possible without the friendship between Gerald and Gisela and their friendship with me and their 10-year stay in Crestone. And many of you in this room are equally part of this horizontal flow of friendship. As many of you know, one of my first friends in Europe, and why I... One of the reasons I came back was because of Martin Kramer. And I think in this room there's at least four people who are here because of Martin Kramer. So this one friendship led to... Many friends and some of them starting to practice. And we practiced at the Haus der Stille really through the friendship with Frank and Angelica.

[57:41]

Because of my friendship and Eureka's friendship initially with Frank and Angelica. They let us use their kitchen to cook our own meals. They don't let any other group cook their own meals. And I think this decision to cook our own meals is what created the dharmasanga. People who cook together stay together. And sometimes fight together. But, you know, we just did a practice week here a few weeks ago, which I think was quite successful in how we practiced together.

[58:53]

And I believe the main difference and why it worked in the other practice weeks didn't work anywhere near as well at Haus der Stille. Yes, because it was the only thing we did at Haus der Stille where we didn't cook together. So we somehow didn't cook the practice together as well either. I believe these small things make a difference. And by the way, we do have to make a Sangha decision about whether we're going to support this Sashin coming up. Out of friendship to them. For all the support they've given us, we agreed, I agreed to do one more Sashin there this year.

[60:05]

But they only have three registrations. So they're thinking of cancelling it. And if they do, I think we, I or we, will have to give them some money to cover the loss of the week of income. But I'm looking forward to doing a session there. I think we'll have a good time. It'll be beautiful to be back there on those ponds and in that building. So if any of you are planning to go and haven't registered, please register. So that they'll have some more registrations. I'm going to send in my registration.

[61:06]

Mm-hmm. But if it doesn't work for various reasons to do it, we'll have to cancel it. It's okay, but it would be nice if we could do it. Now, I'd like to continue speaking about friendship, but it may not be friendly to your legs. So let me just say, you know, a little bit more about the story of Guishan and Dungsan.

[62:15]

This is a story of Guishan, and Dongshan is about friendship. Now, it's assumed in Buddhism that, as I said, friendship is... Productive and creative. And many poems are written together. I think of an example of... Ford Maddox Ford was a writer, quite an interesting writer. Ford Maddox Ford. Actually, his name was Ford Biffer. And he was an Anglicized German, or Austrian, perhaps. And he, as the way Ezra Pound helped T.S. Eliot, and there was a group of writers who all helped each other, Ford Maddox Ford was so upset with Pound's style in translating poetry that he threw himself on the floor and rolled around on the floor.

[63:33]

And Ezra Pound finally got the point. And Pound said, that roll on the floor saved me two years. And we can see in something like The Beatles, The Beatles were very creative together, but individually not so creative. What was the drummer's name? Ringo Starr. Ringo Starr. He was kind of the dumbest one. Ringo Starr, the drummer, was actually one of the dumbest. But that doesn't mean he wasn't equally part of the creativity. So it's understood in Buddhism that all is existence.

[65:03]

So all, each is an embodied, everything you see is an embodiment of the truth. Every person you see is an embodiment of the truth. And as Dogen emphasizes and the Lotus Sutra emphasizes, we all equally share the dimensionality of everything. And so through practice, and through Zazen especially, we discover... What can I say? In practice we're equal. In the way we create a common bodhisattva identity we're equal. And part of Sangha life is how to keep the clever ones from making trouble. Smart people are always a problem.

[66:06]

So the sangha has to... It needs smart people to help develop the Sangha, but it also has to keep them so they don't cause too much trouble. I don't know which one of us is smart here. Okay. So a precept is to know that each person is an embodiment of the truth.

[67:08]

And this deeper aspect of our character comes out through practice. So the point of practice is to discover this deeper aspect of how we're equally dimensioned in the universe. In the cosmos. that our practice is to together be able to recognize a Buddha. Yeah, our practice is also to become a Buddha. But more deeply, it's to be able to recognize a Buddha. And this is also expressed in the disciples should surpass the teacher.

[68:11]

So the teacher's work is not to be a great teacher, but to make his disciple or her disciple a great teacher. So Guishan is exhibiting friendship in these terms. Which I would say, in this sense, friendship is you know another person. You watch another person. You're available to the other person. And you give choice to the other person. And most of this is silent and not expressed.

[69:23]

Friendship in this sense is to watch and be present for another person, but not necessarily do much. And you can see in this yogic Buddhist culture, people went to great lengths to create the conditions for friendship. A great deal of the literature and poetry is about friends traveling hundreds of miles to thousands of kilometers sometimes to spend a few days together. They built their houses so that they could have friendships within the house. And wisdom can be understood as to know how to create the conditions for friendship.

[70:25]

And I believe that if society loses the wisdom of how to create the conditions for friendship, it will eat itself up. So you see, People would do a painting, and then their friend would write a poem, and another friend would put their seal on it. This way of thinking even pervades the culture today. I mean, in Japan, they really don't understand the idea of a patent. Yes, one person may think up a light bulb, but he had friends and books and teachers and so forth.

[71:38]

So, you know, we have to acknowledge the Western emphasis on individual creativity. But I think it's good if we can also understand this Buddhist emphasis on friendship. The Bodhisattva, we can understand the Bodhisattva as what happens when friends are together. The activity of a bodhisattva may be the activity of a sangha in a society. So Guishan gave this opportunity to Dungsan.

[73:01]

And so Dungsan, he knew Dungsan, even from a brief encounter. He knew he was in this spell or aura of friendship. So he made himself available. I can be your Dharma friend. I can present to you the teachings. He gave them the freedom of a choice. And he watched him. And Dungsan chose the teaching. So Guishan sent him to another friend, Yunyan. So it was a larger functioning of a bodhisattva presence through Dungsan. Guishan and Yunyan.

[74:04]

And that Bodhisattva presence, which is friendship, I think we are trying to discover together here. Thank you very much. Thank you.

[74:35]

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