Yeah, every time I sit down, I think of Eric Enos. You've always taken that long to find. But I actually think time has foreshortened your memory. foreshortened? Made shorter? Just say it. The difference now is I don't get them untangled. One of my pet peeves is the serious peeves is the annoyances is the way in which Everything is thought to be motivated by self-interest and competitiveness.

[01:26]

Yeah, I blame it partly on Freud, self-interest. In a sort of Calvinistic view of Darwin, survival of the fittest. And now, you know, everybody, economists, and most economists too, of course, And, of course, most economists. And our scholars, you know, they're always saying, well, this school developed because it was in competition with that school.

[02:37]

You know, what it ignores is there was a serious, long, emotional, intellectual, philosophical labor to discover, develop this teaching. Auch die Gelehrten heutzutage, da heißt es immer, okay, also diese Schule hat sich entwickelt, weil sie im Wettstreit mit einer anderen Schule stand oder im Wettbewerb mit einer anderen Schule. Und was dabei außer Acht gelassen wird, ist, dass es einen langen emotionalen und philosophischen Prozess gab, um diese Lehren zu entwickeln. To really make sense of their lived lives at that time. Um wirklich ihren gelebten Leben zu dieser Zeit Sinn zu verleihen oder Bedeutung zu geben. Yes, there surely was politics between the schools. There's no heresy in Buddhism, but there were politics.

[03:40]

Es gibt im Buddhismus keine Ketzerei, aber es gibt politische Einflüsse. But still, 90% of it is not politics. It's 97%, let's say. It's people trying to understand their values in practice. Yeah, and I want to... What I'm trying to speak about the last couple or three days is what's the best imaginal and effective way to describe our practice. And what I want to talk about in these last three days is the question, what is the best way to imagine our practice, perhaps as a vision or something like that?

[04:47]

So yesterday I... I'd like to come... I could riff on that sentence alone for a while, but let's come back to yesterday I... spoke about agency. And I said, if you're going to explore how we exist, you have to explore agency. And if we're going to explore agency, I suggested we notice the relationship among and the differences among self the experience of an observer and pure attention.

[05:58]

Though there's another level of agency that I have to bring up and speak about. And I suppose that the sense of agency I'm speaking about, which we have no real concept for in the West, Although I think it's been encapsulated and incorporated in religions as faith or commitment. Now, I've been speaking about the importance of waiting and what I call plant time.

[07:10]

Like the roots of two plants which just are there in the dirt, in the soil, and they have to wait for maybe it's going to rain or maybe an insect is going to come and gnaw at me and so forth. Now, Nicole, as translator, often, or sometimes, maybe you should do it more often, but anyway, sometimes, I say something, she translates, and then she tells me how she practices with it. Yeah, and that's something that also happens in Dokusan. That there's a fine-tuning that occurs for me in Dokusan and in conversations, for example, with Nicole about translation.

[08:27]

You don't ask me about it. You don't even look. No curiosity. Um... I put it there, so your job now is just to wait and not try to figure anything out. See, you're trying to figure something out. Looking around. A teacher can't teach unless you wait for him or her. to do whatever they might do, which might be nothing.

[09:52]

Ein Lehrer kann nicht lehren, es sei denn, du wartest auf ihn oder sie, darauf, was auch immer er oder sie tun wird, und das mag auch gar nichts sein. The best way in what it's said, you know, traditionally, is you're just present in a tesho or a lecture, and you don't try to figure it out. And traditionally, the best way to express it is that you are simply present in lectures and you don't try to understand them. Or you don't try to find out what is meant. Yeah. Anyway, so... So maybe you could say something about what you said your experience of trying to practice waiting was. I'm just going to pretend I understand her. So I have this word waiting.

[11:07]

I have this for myself as a attitude. I expand that. It is a waiting without waiting. And also as a attitude, it is for me a, as you say about Samantabhadra, the Bodhisattva of the continuing practice, it is an entry without taking a step. And when I look at that, what kind of attitude is that? This waiting without waiting, then that's what helps me with it. Das ist dabei, um ein Verschieben, dieses, ich finde es im Deutschen ganz schwer, dieses Wort der Agenz, im Englischen finde ich es wunderbar, agencies, klasse Wort, im Deutschen finde ich es schwer, dieses Gefühl davon, was ist die, ich nenne es jetzt mal Ich-Instanz. Und im Warten, da verschiebt sie sich.

[12:13]

Da ist es nicht mehr dieses Ich-Tue, I'm doing Zazen now, but now I'm waiting. And it's a bit of a trick, because for me it's like this, when I sit in Zazen, and first of all, as usual, the conscious self sits in Zazen, and I say to this conscious self, Du, jetzt lass mal los, dann ist das gar nicht so einfach, weil das bewusste Selbst für mich nicht so einfach loslassen kann. Aber das bewusste Selbst kann warten. Das hat es gelernt. Es kann warten. Und damit übergebe ich mich auch in das Gefühl von einem größeren, ich nenne es immer so ein größeres Wirken und Weiten. Jetzt muss nicht ich Zazen machen, sondern Zazen macht Zazen. Or the time, I sometimes say to myself as a representation of this attitude, of what I notice there.

[13:21]

Now the time does the work. And the time is then, I don't want to hold the lecture here, because there are, I'm not going to open every pot that comes up, but there are many pots. And one pot is then the question, what is time? What is time in this state? And time is movement, time is change. And there is also something to do with trusting this change. Then it's all about trust all of a sudden. So this is one of these fetters. I could really go on now. To trust the change. Then I suddenly have a whole personality or a very close process around which it goes. How can I trust? Where do I hold? Where do I dare not to trust? And now it's in the loophole of change. What is the change? Yes, then there is always the transience, the inconsistency.

[14:31]

And that makes me scared. So it makes me scared sometimes. So there is simply this one word, this attitude and the experience, to really dive into the experience, into the experience of waiting. Without a goal, not to wait for something specific, just to wait without waiting. Did you say anything you haven't said to me? I don't think I said any of this to you. I guess I have to wait. All right. I like this stone. Because it's a nice round oval shape. And I don't like this side because it has some sort of decoration on it.

[15:39]

And my mind goes to the decoration and not to the plainness. And I particularly don't like this side because it ends up looking like a smile. And then my mind sees it as a smile, which is even less than this nice oval shape. Yeah. So, you know, my mind feels calmer when it doesn't go to anything or identify with anything. Okay, I mentioned Koan, I said 88, but it's actually 89. I remembered it as 89 because I thought it was parallel to and the same as 98.

[16:48]

But I had a dyslexic moment because it's actually... 89 and 98, not 88 and... So I mentioned that in case some of you indicated you want to look up Korn 88, but it's actually 89. But several of those koans in that latter part of the book of Serenity are exploring the same territory beyond usual agency. So the, as I mentioned in the hot drink statement from Korin 89,

[18:05]

Yeah, outside the gate, inside the gate, you must see for yourself. And the gate in this case means Buddha's teaching, the sutras, etc., And partly this is related to Dogen saying, don't let the sutras turn you, you turn the sutras. But it's more extensional than that. So, in any case, outside the gate, outside the teaching, outside of practice, you, inside the gate, you have to find out for yourself.

[19:37]

Then it says it's difficult or to turn the body outside the luminous screen. Und dann heißt es, es ist schwierig, dem Körper außerhalb der leuchtenden Bildfläche zu wenden. It's difficult indeed. Es ist tatsächlich schwierig. Okay. In other words, what's the agency that's going to turn the body And the body, of course, consciousness is unequivocally related to the body in traditional Buddhism because it's related to heat and location. And heat is produced by the body. There's no consciousness without heat. No, I think you may have to quickly say it in two parts.

[20:43]

Or three. Or five. Consciousness is related to the body clearly in Buddhist teachings. Bewusstsein ist traditionell im Buddhismus eindeutig mit Hitze verwandt. Because consciousness is dimensioned by or based on energy and heat. When a dead person is dead, when a person is dead, they are really cold. Yeah. I was there with Norbert... Last year, shortly after he died, he was really colder than the room. So the consciousness is connected to the body.

[21:59]

That's what that means. So to turn the body is to turn consciousness or to turn knowing or awareness. But outside the luminous screen, in this case, the luminous screen means the sensorial field of consciousness. And here I'm still explicitly speaking about the territory which we explore. Yeah. And the Goan 88 is about the Surangana Sutra, to see non-seeing.

[23:10]

Yeah. And to see non-seeing is referenced again, of course, in Koan 20, which is particularly important for our house, our lineage. And it says in this Koan 88, when the Buddha sees the incense burner or the altar as an altar, what is he seeing? That's seeing the altar and the incense burner. And then the Buddha in the Suram Gama Sutra says, what about, Ananda is asking, what about when the Buddha doesn't see the altar and the incense burner as an altar and an incense burner?

[24:31]

And then Ananda says, the Buddha is seeing non-seeing. The Buddha is non-seeing. So what is this non-seeing that's outside of consciousness? Was ist dieses Nicht-Sehen, das außerhalb des Bewusstseins liegt? Und wie können wir dieses Gefühl von Agenz in Beziehung dazu haben? Das sind ganz grundlegende Fragen, die an der Wurzel des Buddhismus liegen. And contemporary scholars say the Suram Gamsa Sutra doesn't come from Buddha's time. It's interesting that it doesn't come from Buddha's time, even though they call it a sutra, because it's part of the evolution of Buddhism.

[25:42]

And scholars say that the Surangana Sutra does not really come from Buddha's time. So it is interesting that it does not come from Buddha's time and yet it is called a sutra. It is part of the development or evolution of Buddhism. And in Koran 88 it says... saying this, implying this non-seeing is another world. Are we really able to imagine that we're in the midst of a world which also has a dynamic which is other than everything we see? It's an intuition which most religions turn into mythology.

[26:48]

And Buddhism turns into another kind of agency. So this koan says, the oceans have dried up. Space is filled. What could be more different than the oceans are dried up and space is filled? And then it says, and the Buddha's tongue is short. It means the teaching of the Buddha can't reach to this aspect of the world. Mm-hmm. How to act?

[27:54]

What to do? As I said last night, we're fishing with a straight hook and we're not even near the water. Can we face such problems? Okay. And the 89, koan 89 says, seeing outside of things. And things here means consciousness, the thingness of consciousness. These are the challenges of the koans at the latter part. of this compilation of the Book of Serenity.

[29:08]

Now I've tried for 50 years, actually 56 years now I've been teaching, practicing, to try to find a word for what in one sense is called ki or chi in the martial arts and in Chinese and Japanese culture. But it doesn't serve my purpose, ki and chi, and it's too much, requires a buy-in to a whole view of world that's not entirely Buddhist. I shouldn't say not entirely Buddhist, that doesn't make any sense, but not useful to Buddhism. Now, Bergson, Henri Bergson, who some of you may have read, influenced Proust greatly and the development of phenomenology.

[30:31]

Bergson, den einige von euch vielleicht gelesen haben, hat Proust stark beeinflusst und auch die Entwicklung der Phänomenologie. He had the idea of Elan Vital. Und Leibniz had some idea of Viva. Now, I'm mentioning Leibniz and Bergson and so forth just to say that this is not entirely foreign to us. It's something in our culture we're trying to, have tried to deal with. But Leibniz's view, which was in some contrast to Newton's, has been scientifically kind of adjudicated, but now it's more or less accepted. But the importance, I think, what I'm trying to point out here, is this is our experience.

[32:02]

It's not necessarily have to be proved by physics or chemistry or something. But the experience is that through attention we begin to accumulate energy or vitality or power. Attention doesn't just develop attention. Attention begins to develop the basic impulse of aliveness, staying alive. And Bergson and Leibniz are trying to get at something like this, but making it scientific, you know, it's just the actuality of our experience.

[33:09]

And Leibniz and Bergson try to refer to something like that, but by trying to make it scientific, it becomes difficult. So it's about the reality of our experience. Okay, so, I see I'm speaking about waiting. Okay, so, and I'm making up words, like the word I made up today was attentionate. I don't think maybe I'll never use it again, but I'm only saying it to say that the words we have available to us just don't work. So the Nate part means birth, like nativity, or like innate, what's inborn. So I'm making up attention aid to mean something that's born through attention and nourished through attention.

[34:29]

And what also Bergson and Leibniz were trying to get at, and some Greek philosophers, was where movement comes from and what happens through movement. is the question of where movement comes from and what happens through movement. And as many teachers have already said, in most Buddhist lists, the second or third point is something like energy, but we don't know how to translate it. When you're in a world of thingness, of things, and when you're in a world that's assumed that there's an outside of you that is what's really real and continues,

[35:51]

The ideas that occur through living for generations in a world where it's always assumed to be changing and developing, evolving, etc. You end up with a different different ideas, different categories of experience, different categories to bring attention to when you explore your existence. So the other word I made up today, I brought you three presents today, this stone, Attentionate and Mogenity. The other word I came up with today is Mogenity.

[37:05]

And I brought you these three gifts today. The stone, Attentionate and Mogenity. Genity comes from Genesis. And Mo comes from motor and motive and so forth. Emotionality. So, Mogenity is what is born through movement. Okay, so I guess Nicole said something like waiting made her realize that she had to let agency move into the background and let some other kind of almost faith that something will happen occur.

[38:15]

Did you say something like that? Okay. So the waiting in Zen practice Awaiting in Buddhism. The plant time like two roots just rooted. So you root yourself in this posture. Now it can be called derogatively silent illumination. Critically. You know the term silent illumination?

[39:24]

Yeah, I don't know how we translate it in German. But it's not dead waiting, it's live waiting. And how do you know when it's live waiting and you can let things ripen because it's an incubatory ripening process? And I would say it's when you, my experience is, it's when you have a feeling of, you know, the word wait also means awake. The etymology of wait is also the same as waking and so forth. So waiting is a kind of awakeness a live waiting in which things ripen and you feel it happening because you feel that attentionate Mogenity.

[40:43]

Don't remember any of these two words. Just for right now you understand what I'm trying to say. You feel some vitality accumulating in you. And this is also one of the main focuses of Taoism in the effort to practice longevity. I am not practicing longevity, by the way. I'm practicing being alive as long as I'm alive. And what else happens? Who cares? I mean, I don't care. Thank you very much.

[41:50]

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