You are just a part of God's sort of In line with my wanting to teach and practice with you by seeing the process of practice and teaching itself,

[01:41]

Let me thank you for giving me these lectures. Now, I wouldn't have said that at the practice week. Because during the practice week I had to bring what I knew, I had to remember what I knew. And then, of course, we had the koan and we had the group of us who practiced together. And the discussion that people had with each other was a big part of the practice week. So, although certainly what I said during the practice week arose out of that week.

[02:53]

Much of it arose out of my previous experience. But in Sashina, I don't have to bring anything to Sashina. You give me most everything. It's sort of like an onion. Yeah, I actually don't know what I... how I understand certain things. Or I only partly examine it. But being with you in Sashin opens this onion. Which is... I would understand with Dogen the entire body of the Buddha.

[04:07]

The entire body of all the Buddhas. That's a nice thing to say, but what does it mean? Sometimes it means... There's no alternative to saying this because it's truer than what else I might say. And although I'm presenting this onion, I can't present it to you as tasty a way as Mahakabi and Daniela and the kitchen crew has. And I'd like to give them and everybody in the kitchen a bow. Thank you very much. It was good food. I enjoyed it. Maybe some people come to Sashin just for the food.

[05:27]

Which reminds me, I could say something else about pain. Pain is a rite of passage to stillness. Right, R-I-T-E. And because as a number of you noticed, the ability to sit still allows you to sit through what the waves of life and death are. And the ego is not going to let this challenge go by. Unnoticed.

[06:42]

And it says, even if you've studied yoga postures for years, and you're as flexible as a pretzel, I'm going to make you suffer. You're not going to sit still without paying a price. Okay. Now, What are some of the limitations of the use of this word, awareness? And Gerald told me that the words that Christian has chosen for awareness and consciousness work very well in German.

[07:51]

I don't know where they lead in the language, but I'm glad they work, I hope, as well as they do in English. Okay. Well, you couldn't say form is awareness, awareness is form. You can say form is emptiness and emptiness is form, but you couldn't say it, couldn't substitute awareness. So I don't want to spend time looking at the ways it doesn't work. Just think of it as a partner with consciousness and an experiential gate of Buddha nature and emptiness.

[09:15]

The way I'm speaking is in line with, I believe, Tsongkhapa, for example, who lived in the 1600s, I believe. and was the founder of the Gelugpa school. And I mention it because he saw consciousness, he saw emptiness as an existent. In other words, as something that can be experienced. And most modern commentators treat emptiness very philosophically as something that's akin to nothing.

[10:32]

Yeah, if form is emptiness, and you can experience form, then you can experience emptiness. It may be a different kind of experience because there's a distinction between form and emptiness, otherwise there'd be no point in making it. So we can ask, what is this experience? And, I mean, for us, Yogacara, Zen, Chittamatra guys, There'd be no point to having emptiness as just a logical foil.

[11:41]

If we're alive, it's our experience. So these teachings of Madhyamaka and Yogacara need each other. And together they need the wayan avatamsaka teaching. Now let me try to define... yogic analysis. In contrast to just analysis. Yogic analysis is to see things in a field of mind. And to sort out your views consistent with the field of mind.

[12:59]

And this is a somewhat different way of thinking than to just analyze in terms of consciousness itself. Or we could say an analysis which always is based in awareness. Now there's one importance of this is the fruit of this thinking. Another result of this is the seed of this thinking. In other words, If you sort out your views so that they are consistent within a field of analysis, then the practice of mindfulness

[14:15]

is always working on those views. Because when you bring a field of awareness into your activity, which is what mindfulness is, Implicit in that field of awareness is the views that support it or obstruct it. So always when you practice awareness, or mindfulness, it is implicitly working on your fundamental views. So you have a teaching, seeds and onions, that you receive from a lineage, and maybe going back many generations, a few or many, and receiving that teaching, you don't know you're working on it, but if you're practicing mindfulness, you're working on it.

[16:00]

And so also then a lineage is involved and evolved in working through views over several generations. Yeah, there's involution and evolution. We don't, in Christian terms, just evolve toward God. Exploration of ourself is an exploration of God. At least that's how I understand some people's distinction between involution and evolution.

[17:05]

Yeah, it's okay. There's an essayist, Thomas Brown, English writer, who says, in effect, we don't have to go to Mars. or discover other planes of existence. There's a larger earth right here within this earth. Mm-hmm. Okay, so what I'm trying to talk about today is the relationship between awareness and emptiness.

[18:25]

Because I don't want to leave you with some half seeds, half planted. So this is to round out the sowing. Yeah, and sowing myself too. S-O-W. Sounds like a pig, sowing. The word for pig is also S-O-W. Sorry. Has anybody seen that movie, Babe? My mother called us all Babe. It's worth seeing. It's a wonderful movie. Yeah. So I'm also trying to deal with the idea of in a relationship to consciousness and awareness is the witness.

[20:15]

And some people say the witness is a kind of beam of light from God or something. You know the story about the emperor who went to the wise man and said, what's the earth sitting on? And the wise man said, it's sitting on a lion. And the emperor said, well, what is the lion sitting on? And he said, the lion is sitting on a Elephant.

[21:16]

What is the elephant sitting on? A turtle. And the emperor starts to say something, and the wise man, don't worry, it's turtles all the way from the front. It's turtles all the way down. The white man says, the ruler should not worry, from now on there are only shields. So that's the problem with my feeling, from a Buddhist point of view, that's the problem with seeing the witness which sees the witness which sees the witness. It's a kind of infinite regression. So let me venture another definition of consciousness.

[22:40]

Now from the point of view of mirror instead of memory. When you produce two, you produce three and four. So if I hold this up and you look at it, There's two. There's you looking at it and there's the object you look at. And that observation also then produces the relationship of observer and stick. So that's the third. You have AB and you have AB. And that observation also produces the mirror which can observe the relationship. When you observe something, you produce the ability to observe the observation.

[24:02]

But in my opinion, and I'm fairly sure consistent with Buddhism, It doesn't go beyond that. The mirror is a function of the observation. It's not separate from that with its own existence. So we can have an observer we can we can observe we can have AB and we can have an observation of AB.

[25:10]

And then we can have an observation of AB and that observation. But that's still not regressed somewhere, that's only another part of that activity. Yeah, okay. So that's, you know, as Buddhist thinking is important to know because it gets you out of the trap of who's doing this. The doing is doing this, but that doing can be observed. Now that's a, from a Buddhist point of view, an extremely important point. Okay. So we can say consciousness is awareness with a mirror.

[26:25]

In other words, when the mirror of awareness is established as accompanying awareness, that's consciousness. In other words, when awareness observes itself, it turns into consciousness. And then memory is just another form of that mirror. Now the problem with that is, It's so convincing and so exciting and so interesting. And it's also a kind of sea of love because it becomes an extraordinary way to relate to others. Here I'm trying to defend consciousness.

[27:26]

Because I think I gave it a bad rap in the last few days. It's nothing but the wrong side of rapture and things like that. We should say it's its own form of rapture. But consciousness is such a convincing creation of us human beings. As we've evolved it, we've come to identify with it. And it's so convincing, we've forgotten about awareness. So we use words like individual. What does individual mean? Undividable. So we begin to think consciousness is undividable. We think there's no outside to it. So all we begin to see is consciousness and the observation of consciousness

[29:03]

And the memory of consciousness and the repressed memory of consciousness. And we live in a kind of prison. Guarded by Mimir. The Norse god of memory. And we get trapped in it not only because we identify with it, but also because when we identify with it, That identification is accompanied by fear and selfishness. Yeah. And so all religious practices or any teaching that tries to get us free of this limited view has to teach some kind of freedom from self.

[30:28]

and some kind of deep security that allays our fears. That somehow everything is deeply all right. Okay. So, if... I must be crazy. If... If this witness is always part of what's being witnessed, what would big self be?

[31:45]

Well, it's called in Buddhism great function. Because it's a functioning... but not a observing self. And it's a functioning that can't be observed or remembered exactly. So now we come to a central point in our lineage. Which is a little too complicated to tell you the story in its entirety, but I'll give you a gloss of it. Now here we're talking about a teaching that comes from the seventh century.

[32:55]

And was this teaching developed over about 500 years in primarily China. And my understanding is that this was understood through several generations. Understood and worked on. Because when I read the statements of these teachers over several generations, they compute. And I would say most Buddhist teachers, if I listen too carefully, they don't compute.

[34:02]

I don't know what other word to use, but compute, I think you know what I mean. It's colloquial slang. Do you know what I mean? You know what I mean when I say it doesn't compute? Is it clear? Not very. Oh, all right. In English it means, maybe it means grok. Do you have the word grok from that science fiction book? No. Okay. Doesn't compute means when you see the whole picture, you intuitively feel whether it fits together or not. There's an inner coherence that you can feel. Okay, all right. I would say that, for example, Thich Nhat Hanh and the Dalai Lama Every time I listen to them, they compute.

[35:06]

I may disagree with them slightly about the way they understand things, but I'm not saying I do, but I could, but still what they say And maybe I don't agree with everything you say. That's not the case, but it could be. But still, there is this harmony with everything you say. Forgive me for saying so, but there's almost no other Buddhist teachers I know for whom that's true. But of course I don't know them all, and I don't know them all very well. But even if a teacher doesn't fully compute, hasn't actualized it, still, they may still be a good teacher.

[36:12]

I'm saying this not to be critical of contemporary teachers, but just to say that you can apply this standard to the lineage over some generations, and around the 1300s, very quickly it stops computing. You could say the understanding went underground at that point. Or it becomes what we call winter branches. They look dead, but when spring comes, they bloom. Or the opportunity isn't there to make the teaching explicit in the culture. There was that opportunity for about 500 years in China.

[37:33]

And I think that opportunity has come again in Buddhism in the West. In other words, to make this explicitness of the teaching that revives it may require a culture that needs it. Once the culture settles into an acceptance of it, then it's just done, but it's not always understood. So I would like us, as much as possible, and I would like myself to do the teaching and understand the teaching.

[38:43]

And this dialogue we are able to have, like in Sashin where you give me these lectures, I'd like to find some other form of Sashin-like meeting we can have where we can have other forms of discussion. And again, I see, this must be obvious to you, Johanneshof is such a possibility here. Now, we did decide to name it Buddhist Study Center. And the word Zen doesn't appear except hidden in Zentrum. Sneaking in in the middle.

[39:58]

Okay. So... Okay, Nanue was a disciple of the Sixth Patriarch. And he was, he's not one of the... He's not the disciple that our lineage or the Linji lineage comes from. But he was a Dharma brother, of course, of those guys. And he's the person who the famous koan about the seamless tomb is about. Which will probably be the next koan we work on when we have a koan seminar or something.

[41:05]

Now, Nanyue said, insentient beings teach the Dharma. And Dung Shan had heard this statement. And he puzzled over it. We could say maybe it computed in his onion. But it made him cry because he didn't understand it. So he knew he had a feeling for it but he didn't understand. So he went to Guishan Guishan is the same Guishan of this koan of the cypress oak tree.

[42:15]

And he asked Guishan, what did Nanyue mean by insentient beings preach the Dharma? And so Guishan had a discussion with him. And it's a little mixed up in the various versions I've got of how these several conversations went. Anyway, the conversations go something like this. I don't hear... I don't hear... The preaching of insentient beings.

[43:23]

And Dung Shan says, do you hear it? And Guishan says, if I heard it, I would be numbered among the saints. And then you would not be able to hear my teaching. And later he asked Yunyan the same question. And Yunyan said, only the insentient hear it. Poor Dung Shan. Everybody's giving him the runaround. The runaround means, go there, go there, do that.

[44:25]

So, Guishan raised his whisk and Guishan said now do you hear it? And Guishan said, no. So, and Guishan said, even if you do not hear my teaching, if you even do not hear my teaching, how do you expect to hear the teaching of the incentive? Then he said the thing I've quoted to you many times. Although you do not hear it, do not hinder that which hears it.

[45:33]

This is not a big mirror self. This is not interfering with great functioning.

[45:53]

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