What a wonderful thing to be here with each of you, to discuss the mind of Buddha. Perhaps to realize the mind of Buddha. And it is possible. You have to know it's possible first. You know that much, you're already 80% of the way there. But the last 20 percent may present some difficulties. Shouldn't. Because all the ingredients are here. I mean, the teaching of Buddhism is that whatever Buddha mind is, it's here, not back 2,500 years ago.

[01:17]

Well, what is this Buddha geist, this Buddha? Now you've got me talking about this geist stuff. What is this? Buddha Geist, Buddha Mind, that's right here. We had a pre-day from 10 o'clock this morning. Then we spent a good part of the time discussing Geist and Mind and so forth. You didn't miss anything. The mind of Buddha. This is something new in Western culture, actually. It's new in our... Yeah, our view of the world.

[02:36]

I've been reading Huizinga, a Dutch author who wrote a book called The Autumn of the Middle Ages. That's a book I read almost 50 years ago in a different translation. Yeah, and this is much better in translation, and it's wonderful to go back to it. Yeah, and he talks about what the Middle Ages Of course. And you know, you can really feel the life was much more vivid than our life.

[03:42]

Much more difficult. At least by everything we can read, it was much more difficult. But it was more vivid, no? What do I mean by vivid? Well, I mean, there were simple things, first of all. When it was night, it was dark. I mean, really dark. And you didn't have a flashlight. And maybe you could see in the distance a little light in a window. That felt different than a drugstore or an apple taker down the street. And maybe you could see a small light in the window in the far back.

[04:48]

And it felt quite different than a pharmacy down the street. Tassajara, the monastery we started in the United States. Tassajara, the monastery we built in the USA. Well, as long as I was there, I tried to keep it with that feeling. We had no electricity. And it was a pretty big place. Always 65 people living there. Sometimes more. So there had to be, I don't know how many people. 200 kerosene lamps. Yeah, and that's fairly new, kerosene. But you can imagine one of the jobs was cleaning and filling and lighting the lamps. It was a pretty big job.

[06:00]

The kerosene lamps lined all the paths. Zendo and the buildings in the room. It was a different feeling. And the difference between summer and winter and so forth were much stronger then. And he's famous for suggesting they had three paths to a beautiful life. And even the idea of the possibility of a beautiful life kept them going. the Renaissance Dutch scholar and Catholic theologian, Erasmus.

[07:24]

Erasmus, the Renaissance... Roman Catholic theologian who kind of revived an interest in antiquity, classic Greek culture and so forth. He wrote at one point, you know, I'm really not so keen on staying alive. I've already lived too long. I'm in my 51st year. Shucks. I passed that a while ago. He said... Yeah, but the idea that there might be a golden age dawning makes me want to be young again.

[08:35]

When the glories of friendship and true minds come together, in the glorious day. glory, the wonder, the big good stuff. Friendship and what? And true minds. And come together. So anyway, Huizinga says there were three paths to a beautiful life.

[09:36]

There were three paths to a beautiful life. One was the afterlife. And that was a path of denial. The other was the idea at that time, vague, that you could improve the condition of man and society. And that only became possible in really a strong idea in the 18th century. And the other was life, the life of dreams, a life of dreams. Which mostly meant a life of dreams. of art, of theater.

[10:45]

To make things beautiful. And having just been in Venice for several days, you can see they really tried to make things beautiful. And you can see it in the older parts of all European cities. And now our cities, they just kind of melt into factories, suburbs and so on. We don't try to make life an art anymore. Wir versuchen, aus dem Leben keine Kunst mehr zu machen.

[11:46]

Yeah, what do I mean? Well, I mean, I think that when we eat with oriokis and sashimi... Was meine ich damit? Ich meine, wenn wir im Sashimi mit den oriokis essen... That makes life eating an art, sort of. Das macht aus dem Essen gewissermaßen eine Kunst. A kind of art form. Eine Kunstform. And... What else can make gruel taste so good? I mean, I really do feel that our pretty ordinary food really tastes good in Oreoki. The three bowls, you know, Oreoki if you don't. But we wouldn't want to eat, I wouldn't want to eat that way all the time. We want something else now, what we call a more natural way.

[12:51]

But it takes some of the vividness out of life. When do we feel life as vivid. Well, one time is when there's disaster or sickness. We appreciate things. We clearly appreciate things better. In the middle of a hurricane, a tornado in America, people are quite alive.

[13:53]

And everyone says... But for some months after the World Trade Center disaster, New Yorkers were more friendly to each other. Felt more connected, more alive. Yeah, I mean, I don't think we have to create a disaster, though. Yeah, the other time, sometimes festival or holiday times, there's that feeling. The other time is when we, I come back to this every now and then, because it's our human capacity.

[15:04]

When we feel when we're in love. Life is more vivid when we're in love. We can ask What is it? What characterizes being in love? Other than that you're in love. I think we feel accepted. We feel completed in some way. And accepted just right now as we are. You know, we can have some of that feeling with a teacher, too.

[16:09]

Because a teacher more accepts our potential than our present situation. The teacher accepts us but also expects something of us. Oh, it's somewhat different, of course. Yeah, but anyway, I'm wondering what makes us feel more complete or connected, etc.? Well, certainly nowadays the idea that we're going to improve improve human beings and improve society, we're really, that's now, I mean, I think most of us view that with some skepticism.

[17:11]

Yeah, we have some, a lot of progress, but we also, I don't know if it's really progress for us human beings. Don't... build cities like Venice anymore. Okay, so what I'm getting at, of course, is that the idea of the mind of Buddha is Something actually quite new in our society.

[18:12]

You've all been touched by it. But I think it really hasn't had... profound effect on our society yet. Yeah, it's sort of like in the category of New Age, you know, thinking or something. Although New Age tradition is really, actually seems to go back historically to mystic and occult traditions in the Middle Ages. It has origins in our own culture, historical origins. Our culture, our science is extremely interested in mind these days.

[19:31]

In concept. But they haven't really got... entry into the real possibilities of participating in your own mind. Yeah, so let's call that the mind of Buddha. No, it's also a dangerous idea. Because, you know, if it's somehow the path to a beautiful life, if it's better than being rich, then a lot of people are going to

[20:34]

have unrealistic expectations of it. So now you know I think the historical place of enlightenment in our contemporary society is in the process of being kind of discovered. And how it will affect and ripple out through our cultural forms. And science. It's just now starting. And we're part of the ripples. And I think, yeah.

[21:59]

Yeah, we have to kind of make our boat float on those ripples. The Dalai Lama comes by, followed by movie stars. Yeah. It's like a passing boat and the ripples come out and our boat's rocking away. Maybe we should be with the Dalai Lama. Maybe we should be a movie star. Maybe we should be a movie star. I'm not, by the way, I'm not criticizing the Dalai Lama. He's a really great person. So we do see that some kind of, something's going on in our society. How do we, you and I, just concentrate on our own practice? Although we're part of some societal movement, actually, change in our society.

[23:23]

Yeah, it still doesn't make any sense unless we just, in a modest way, ordinary way, practice. Mindfulness and meditation. Then try to bring the teachings into our own life. Maybe this mind of Buddha will flower in us. And if it can flower in us and flower in us together, maybe the mind of Buddha can open in the middle of our society. Okay. Now there's three words

[24:49]

Three words which are clusters of ideas. Which come close to what we mean by mind in Buddhist English. One is, and again we discussed this earlier, is a word called manas. which really emphasizes the functioning of mind. As I said earlier, as the eye is suited to visual objects in the ear suited to aural objects.

[26:02]

Minus is that functioning of mind suited to rational objects. So Manas is really, we could say, something equivalent to the thinking mind. And the editing mind. And the editing mind. The mind that selects what we're going to pay attention to. Yeah. Another word... A word for mind is something like prajna.

[27:14]

But prajna is now translated often in English as wisdom. But in English, Prior to Buddhism or in Hinduism, it means something like non-dreaming deep sleep. Okay, as non-dualistic, non-dreaming deep sleep. In Buddhism, it came to mean non-dualistic mind. Von dort aus gewann es im Buddhismus die Bedeutung eines nicht-dualistischen Geistes. And I think you know, I think we've talked enough about that meditation is in some ways a means to allow non-dreaming deep sleep to surface into our consciousness, into our daily life.

[28:25]

And I think you know, we've talked enough about it, that meditation is a means to allow the non-dreaming deep sleep to reach the surface in our consciousness. Yeah, and the concept in Hinduism was that this non-dreaming deep sleep was the mind in which we are really one with Brahman, one with the world and so forth. And the world. So we have... So now we have a concept of mind in this background culture of Buddhism. A mind that is inseparable from everything that is. A mind that being non-dualistic It's not separated from things.

[29:40]

Yeah, I'm just presenting this as an idea. What this means to you, you have to figure out. And of course we have today and tomorrow and Sunday to explore it as much as we can. Okay, so part of the yogic culture of Buddhism and Hinduism assumes it's possible that you can have a mind in which the subject-object distinction is not there. Not only is such a mind possible, But you already have it.

[30:46]

But it's hidden under your dreaming. You barely know, consciousness barely knows dreaming, and consciousness and dreaming don't know at all, non-dreaming deep sleep. Mm-hmm. It seems they had a drug culture way back 3,000 years ago, sort of like we had in the 60s and maybe around today too. And this drug culture seemed to give one also a taste of this objectless consciousness. And a territory of mind that you can't just say is unconsciousness. And a territory of mind that isn't consciousness. But the yogic tradition said, okay, mind's associated with posture.

[32:12]

Let's find the posture which connects us with this. objectless mind, which we already actually are, but we don't have access to it. So the idea was mindfulness practices and this, what we can call a wisdom posture, allowed this mind to surface in us or touch us, and really gave us a chance to generate this mind ourselves,

[33:19]

generate this mind without going to sleep. And be like, yeah, without going to sleep. It's like, could we generate the mind of being loved of being in love without falling in love, instead of without falling asleep. How do we bring the capacities and potentialities of mind into the realm of our intention? Now, the third aspect of mind is, yeah, I think that we can use the word citta.

[34:21]

Citta sometimes is used almost as synonym for manas, But I think if we look at it from our point of view, it's the mind which emphasizes intention. And bodhicitta is the intention to realize enlightenment with intention. each other person. So they thought of mind, I would say, let's take it in these three categories.

[35:23]

Functioning, thinking, editing part of mind. A non-dualistic domain of mind. Yeah, and this... mind of intention, which was also identified with the alaya-vijnana, which is something, I mean, the closest thing I've seen to it in Western literature is Heidegger's definition of memory. He says in the ancient, from earlier idea of memory, was the ability to hold in one concentration the field of memory that brought past, present and future together.

[37:02]

The field of memory that brought past, present and future together. So memory didn't mean what you had stored in your memory. But memory meant the state of mind that continuously integrated past, present, and future. So not a mind shaped by the past and thinking of the future. Not a mind shaped by the past and thinking of the future. But a mind integrated in the present. Integrated with the present. So citta means we could say something like the mind of integration and intention.

[38:22]

So we have these three functions or three aspects. the thinking, editing aspect of mind, the non-dualistic aspect of mind, and the intentional, integrative aspect of mind. Okay. So when you read Zen stories and so forth, and they're talking, saying things to you, they think they're talking to this simultaneously, to this non-dualistic being.

[39:27]

presence you know about, and talking to a mind that's integrated somehow in the present, and a mind which you can experience as an editing function then. And this editing function of mind was considered to be necessary and useful. But thought to lock us in, yeah, in... to a realm of thought only. One of the most famous statements in Buddhism and in Zen is that great way is not difficult. Only don't pick and choose.

[40:29]

So that really doesn't say don't think. It says, transform the editing function of mind. Can we open a window perhaps? Edit the air a bit here. And if it gets too cold or too breezy, just push it shut. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Have I given you too much or too little already? That's OK so far. But you told me in Hannover people had to take a vacation the next day. We don't have time for a vacation on Monday. Or tomorrow.

[41:53]

Ah. I... Okay, so what I would like to maybe continue with, if we have a little more time, is what I spoke of in Hanover, and I've spoken in various ways about this before. What I would call the path of breath. I never spoken about it exactly this way until... And I think maybe it's useful to share with you as a way to bring ourselves into a

[43:09]

a more vivid life, vivid sense of life. Vividness being a quality of mind itself. This bell isn't vivid, it's our mind that makes it vivid. Okay. So... We don't take too much time this evening. Path of breath, I would say, first of all, as most of you know, is attention to the breath. And I call it a path because this means continuous attention to the breath. domain of breath, a habitat of breath.

[44:34]

Yes, but not just talking about bringing attention to the breath during zazen or during mindfulness practice. But again, as most of you know, bringing attention to your breath Continuously. Now you may think that sounds difficult. Yeah, it is difficult. But you bring attention to your posture continuously. Art culture teaches us to do that. You're aware of your physical posture right now. And you're probably somewhat aware while you're asleep.

[45:43]

Which side you're sleeping on and so forth. And you can do yoga practices. I've discussed in Hanover about how to increase attention to your postures while you're sleeping. Increase your attention to your postures while you're sleeping. Bring attention to your breath exactly the same way. Until you don't even notice you're doing it. It's just part of your doing. Now the problem is, and why it's difficult, we establish the continuity of our identity, of our self, from moment to moment, in our thinking.

[46:56]

And if you interrupt someone's thinking too much, they can be, you know, they feel crazy. If your thinking is interrupted. So there's some kind of fear of that. And the ego likes to be in charge. It doesn't want to give up this continuity established in thinking. And it seems irresponsible and lazy and so forth. But if you can get so that you bring attention to your breath as you bring attention to your stance, your posture, you find yourself in the present in a new, deeply engaged way.

[48:09]

Your continuity is established in your breath, body and phenomena, as I say. And thinking becomes more a tool, a function, but not a process of identity. This is one of the most huge changes you can make in your life. It changes your psychology, it changes memory, it changes the way you function. Okay. Second is bringing attention to speech, bringing breath and speech together.

[49:23]

And this, as you know, is the center and main door to the Eightfold Path. To bring breath and speech together. Now, bringing attention to the breath is also weaving, because attention is mind, breath is the body. Bringing attention to the breath... Aufmerksamkeit zum Atem zu bringen und Aufmerksamkeit ist der Geist und Atem ist der Körper. Also as a part of a process of weaving mind and body together. So im Teil des Prozesses Körper und Geist zu verwieben. Bringing attention to your breath might even be something like bringing breath and speech together. Atem und Rede zusammenzubringen might even be something more like plowing mind and body together.

[50:36]

Speech and the foundation of speech, which is to establish connectedness and communication, It's part of the way, I mean, the main way I would say we construct mind and body as we're growing up from childhood. How we construct mind and body. Yeah, because, I mean, again, if I move my arm like this, is that mind? Is that body?

[51:40]

Is that speech? You can't separate them. It's mind, body and speech. So now you're bringing breath and speech together. And breath and speech becomes... And thinking. By speech I mean thinking, too. Your process of articulating, communicating, so forth. connecting, is now connected with the breath and thus with the body. And you create, as I've said again, a truth body.

[52:51]

Now that may seem kind of funny to you. What? Why do lie detectors work a good part of the time? Because it's much harder for the body to lie than the mind to lie. And when your breath, your articulation, your breath and thinking and speech are just naturally joined, It's much harder to lie to yourself. Have you ever found yourself bullshitting yourself? Bullshitting yourself? You're sitting thinking about something. Something embarrassing has happened. And you're trying to explain it away.

[54:03]

And you're thinking, if I say this or I say that, it won't look so bad. But you're not even talking to anybody. You're just sitting in zazen telling yourself this. And you're trying to convince yourself too. This kind of weird thinking stops. You just don't think that way anymore. Why don't I say this? What if I say this? What if I say this? What happened then to a strangely memory unfolds in the present? Yeah. Well, you're not editing as much.

[55:15]

There's no fear. It's just this sense of a truth body. There's no fear. What happens is what happens. And a kind of... ease of mind and bodies develops. It's amazing. I think amazing that such little things can make such a big difference. Okay. And the third, what I'm calling the path of breath, is to bring perception together with your inhale and exhale. Now, what does that do? It really brings you into the particular. And it really cuts you off from generalizing.

[56:40]

Yeah, just as I had in Hanover when I talked about this, I have some flowers beside me. Very nice of you to sit while I do some props. Props is like in the theater, you have a prop. So if I look at these flowers, I look at them within the pace of my breath. Pulse, pace. As you know, I think the word pulse is quite good. Because the root of it means to draw near. Like the pulse of music or the rhythm of music draws you into the music.

[57:42]

If you find the rhythm of something, you're drawn into it. Coming back to the Middle Ages a minute. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. They had the idea of a minion. Minion? Minion, M-I-G-N-O-N. I don't know the word. Well, let's just say minion. But now it's coming to me. Mini? Yeah? Yeah, maybe. Well, now it's come to mean a sycophant or a dependent follower or something. Sycophant means fawning obsequiousness.

[58:45]

I'm testing my translator. Obsequiousness. A dependent follower. Yeah, so I'm... It's a stalker or not? No, no, it could be a stalker, no. Don't worry, we'll work it out as we go along. But a minion in the Middle Ages was a person who was such a good friend. And there seems to have been no homosexual element to it. And your friend dressed like you did. And even kings and... aristocrats had a friend who would dress, they'd all dress exactly the same. And that was your minion. And two lords from disparate duchies might have this minion relationship.

[59:50]

It might happen with monks dressing the same. Anyway, this... Friendship, this real deep sense of friendship, as part of the beautiful love, of really coming into a similar rhythm with another person. So similar you dress alike. Now we see it when people start looking like their dogs. I wonder why the dogs don't start looking like the people and still it's the people that look like the dogs.

[61:12]

So this coming in, sort of coming away from our thoughts kind of example. leaving aside those kind of examples. Let's say we look at the flowers again. You just look at them with your exhale and with your inhale. They cease to be some generalization flowers. Or a bouquet. But it's something very particular. You're not even sure they're flowers. We might be from an alien planet.

[62:19]

Anyway, somehow this sense of inhaling and exhaling with your thinking and perception You bring your rhythm sort of to the pulse, to the flowers, and the pulse of the flowers begins to affect you. All three of these paths of the breath really increase the vividness of life and the simple beauty and magic of each breath. And such practices are assumed to be the foundation of what's called Buddha mind or the mind of Buddha.

[63:28]

Ingredients we already have. But we can transform and bring these ingredients together. In a way that's not the Buddha's mind of 2,500 years ago. But a mind possible now. Yeah, something actually very close to a beautiful life. Some sense of joy and completeness.

[64:31]

That is our actual possibilities. And never far away. And this path of the breath brings us closer. Okay. Thank you very much. Vielen Dank. We'll meet tomorrow at Zazen, I guess. The first period voluntary and the second period enforced by the Buddhist police. Actually, they're off duty now, so don't worry. It's the weekend. And we'll meet again at the seminar at 9.30.

[65:41]

Is that right? Am I doing what's right? Okay. So I see some of you at Zazen and all of you, I hope, at 9.30 tomorrow. Okay. Schlaf gut. Sleep like a baby. No.

[66:08]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_76.04