Does anyone want to say something before I say something, if I can think of something to say? Yeah. For me, it's like medicine. medicine something just like i take it in the medicine or not to take the rest of my life but it's still medicine it's not an end in itself and compared to therapy that people's therapy to kind of get into your own life, but it would be absurd to say, you know, now I'm 55 and I'm going to be a therapist for the rest of my life. But it wouldn't make sense if you could talk about that. It's better. I mean, it's difficult for me to see the things I'm seeing in my life that I can't see.

[01:08]

Well, I mean, I think that's a stage of practice and many of us start with that feeling of, yeah, we're doing this because it helps us function or something like that. But I think there's several shifts that can occur. One is a shift that you just do it like you sleep. You don't just sleep because you're tired. Sleep is a territory in which we live. We could say something like that. At some point, meditation practice just becomes a territory in which we live that's a kind of alternative to our usual territory.

[02:46]

We don't do it because it's somehow beneficial. We do it because it's different. And it stirs us up. I mean, one reason to do a Sashin, say, once a year. And I think today, now I should speak a bit about Sashin. Is that... is that, you know, and I'm not somebody who... You know, I'm actually surprised when people come to Sashin. I think, why the hell are you coming to Sashin? It's going to be so painful for you, I'm sure.

[03:48]

Particularly when it's the fourth or fifth, like Eric, you know, it's... The hundredth. But then he sits with a little more comfort than most of us. Yeah. But it does stir things up. You know, it kind of refreshes our life somehow. But also, I think if you have this image of non-dreaming deep sleep surfacing in your meditation, often non-dreaming blissful deep sleep, This state of mind is usually only happens but not discovered in sleepings.

[05:02]

But it's not limited to sleeping. It can be in our conscious life, and it's brought into our sort of aware life or conscious life through meditating. So now, yeah, well, that's enough to say. Well, let me just add, another shift is when you perhaps the biggest shift is when you start practicing really for others and not for yourself. When you decide somehow Somebody should live this way and it's beneficial to do it, you know, so I'll do it. And then you, knowing its value, you try to make it possible for others to practice. Okay. But there's lots of medicine Buddhas.

[06:38]

I'm happy if you're one. And they sit with little bottles of medicine. You're like our doctor here who knows every pill he's ever given to any patient. Okay. So, Shiriya, are you? Ah, there you are. What are we going to do now? I mean, let them eat cake, I know, but... This does not help me much. Yeah, what, you know... Everybody's legs can only sit so long and I can only talk so much. So if we skip lunch, in effect we're skipping lunch.

[07:38]

So it's almost twelve. So let me see if we can go somewhere. And then after that we'll make a decision whether we continue or stop. Okay, okay. So I have this funny feeling, you know, these seminars I've done in Munich the last, what, four years now? More than other seminars, I seem to have picked up the... the previous seminar when I start and I don't exactly remember even what I talked about but I find I've discovered I'm continuing what I did in the last seminar.

[08:44]

And I have that feeling now too. And I also have the feeling that I want to take some recognizable step with each of you. So I have that feeling and that feeling becomes part of how to practice for me. But I don't quite know how to Bring that feeling out to fruition. It's like there's a topic here that I feel, and I think you feel, but we can't quite So let that be present.

[09:53]

You know, I think of how a flock of birds, a migrating flock of birds, Not that I know much about the behavior of birds, but they seem to circle a bit and get their direction and... So I feel that in my speaking now, we're circling a bit. And maybe we'll find the direction. But in the meantime, let me speak about the difference that sashin makes in our practice. And Yeah, it doesn't mean it can't happen in daily practice, but it more clearly happens in Sashin for most people.

[11:09]

We could say that Sashin is the definition of Sashin is to sit for seven days is to make a three foot square or whatever you call it one meter square where you live for a week. And you've just got to get used to being there for a week. And what happens is you have to shed a lot of preferences. And there's mental distractions. You've got to do this. You've got to make a phone call. The world can't wait seven days. And after you give up that, then you start hurting.

[12:09]

And then they say, oh God, when will that bell ring? Oh Buddha, I mean, when will that bell ring? Now again, you break the connection between thought and action. When you can really just stay there. Now, as I said, we won't all experience everything others experience. And for myself, for instance, it took me a long time to really notice or acknowledge the blissful experiences of Zazen.

[13:34]

For some reason, for quite a few, I mean, I experienced them, but for quite a few years I kind of brushed them off. I don't know, I wasn't serious enough or something. And I didn't want to indulge myself. My Puritan background. But, you know, one day I thought, these are nice little feelings that occur. Maybe this is what they're talking about, you know, the bliss body and things like that. So then I began to, at some point I said, okay, I'll acknowledge these experiences. And then they started opening up and being the continuous presence in mostly all of my sitting.

[14:45]

And as I became more familiar with and kind of created the channels, it began to be sort of the undercurrent of my daily life. No. If you do find like this more likely to happen in Sashin than otherwise. That just sitting on the cushion, you break this, again, break this connection between thought and feelings and so forth and action. You actually create a new kind, I would have to say, a new kind of interior space.

[15:58]

Because the... usual habit to externalize our feelings and thoughts. I think of the children, I mentioned this before, but of Children were asked, what is the mind for? The most common answer they gave was to keep secrets. But secrets are a form of externalizing. It's something you could tell. When you have this sense of an interior space, it no longer feels secret or private. And in fact, in some way, it feels continuous ordinary space.

[17:11]

And this... Yeah, let's say new interior space feels boundaryless now, feels without boundaries. And you begin to recognize that this is what's meant by the Dharmakaya Buddha, the Buddha as space. An externalization of The experience of kind of no longer do you feel space and presence are contained by the body. If it's no longer contained in the body.

[18:12]

Yeah, and that's why in the teaching of the three bodies, so-called three bodies of Buddha, the Dharmakaya comes first. You know, the Nirmanakaya is the Buddha in the world, like the... And the Sambhogakaya is the so-called bliss body. Or the reward body. Yeah, and usually if you see depictions of this body as a... scroll or a sculpture. Or Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva, if you look closely, the robes and the ornaments articulate the chakras. So it's not that the historical physical person Buddha gives birth to the bliss body, gives birth to the Dharmakaya.

[19:41]

It's not. It's not. It's rather that when you break through this interior exterior space everything becomes interior space. That then, when you pull that in, is what we call the bliss body, or the reward body. And when you bring that into its present in the way you are in the world, we call that being a Buddha in the world. No, what I'm doing here is I'm adding teaching to the practice you've developed, one develops, through sitting in your daily life.

[21:03]

No, some of the question behind what I'm speaking about is, you know, there's just bringing this posture without teaching and without institutional, you know, aspects into your city. Into your life. So I'm calling that non-institutional informed non-institutional lay practice. No. What happens when we add the Sashin to this? What happens when we add monastic practice to this? What happens when we add teaching to this? Now, as I've said, you can bring, without much information from Buddhism at all,

[22:06]

you can come a tremendous way just through bringing this posture into your life. I should say, this posture of still sitting and mindfulness practice. Okay. Now, although I don't want to say it's limited to sesshin practice, I'm going to speak about it as sesshin practice. Now, let me say again also, generally when we meet each other, we meet each other as two selves. And we almost don't know any other way to meet each other except as two selves.

[23:19]

We just don't, nobody's shown us any other territory. So every meeting reinforces Our experience of a self in the world. A self which grasps past and present as self. No, I'm not saying that's not normal or just fine. But it's sad if that's the whole of your life, because it's a narrow confine to put your life in. Yeah, wisdom and compassion are asking us to do otherwise.

[24:22]

And it's almost like two texts are meeting each other. This is myself, this is my text of my life and everything I've done and it's meeting yourself and we're trying to, you know, and that can be fun too, you can tell stories with each other and stuff like that. But it's not a very good way to meet strangers. You don't have time to tell them your story. Okay, but if you do break this interior-exterior space... Mm-hmm. you definitely are in a different kind of world with others and with phenomena.

[25:34]

Now, if I say a different kind of world, you may think, well, different kind of world, I don't know, what's he talking about? It's just words. I have a very close friend who wasn't Who was? Let's see now. Everyone I know is getting so old. He's now 70. 74 or 75, but he was 60 before he fell in love. He said to me, Dick, now I know what everybody's talking about. But I'm going to assume all of you have fallen in love once or hopefully only once.

[26:38]

No, I mean... And if you've fallen in love, you do know that the world is different for a while. It's the same old world. The trees are still everything, but hey, it's different. And not only are Is your loved object different? Or maybe they're seen to be exactly like you now. But the objects of the world are different. So somehow practice can make this kind of difference. The world is as different. as it is when you're in love.

[27:40]

You may have a taste of it, you may already know it, but just accept that it can be quite different. Now let me give you a poem, which has been important to me, that comes from a koan. And let me give you a poem, which was important to me, which comes from a Quran. True friendship knows neither... What? Alienation or... True friendship knows neither alienation or, let's say, affection. True friendship knows neither... Entfremdung noch Zuneigung. Between meeting and not meeting, there is no difference. Zwischen sich begegnen... Oh, no.

[28:41]

Okay, let me start again. True friendship knows neither alienation nor attachment. Between meeting and not meeting, there's no difference. Okay. I took this poem and I, you know, for some reason it's one of those things that sticks with you and when something sticks with you, it's good to stick with it. And friendship's very important to me, and I've always found it quite painful not to be able to be with my friends or, you know, et cetera. So this wasn't true for me, that true friendship knows neither alienation nor attachment. And there was a big difference between meeting and not meeting. Yeah, so I was

[29:43]

Well, it's a koan, maybe I take it seriously. But it wasn't my experience. And then the next lines, on the old plum tree, on the ancient, on the old plum tree, fully blossomed. The southern branch owns the whole of spring. As also does the northern branch. True friendship knows neither alienation nor attachment. Between meeting and not meeting, there's no difference. And the old plum tree fully blossomed. The southern branch owns the whole of spring. The northern branch, as also the northern branch, owns the whole spring.

[31:17]

Now, this can be pretty schmaltzy. But it changed my life. Schmaltzy or not. Schmaltzy oder nicht, es hat mein Leben verändert. I mean, I was really engaged with this. I stayed with it. I'm walking down the street. I know the street. I know the block in San Francisco. And suddenly, it was true. There was no difference between meeting and not meeting. And it's interesting that when you have this kind of shift or experience, the location, the physical location in the world where it happened remains a vivid part of the experience. The address. There's an address for it.

[32:19]

An address in yourself, an address in the body, and in the world. Yeah. So this is an example of teaching, bringing teaching into your practice. And it's a way to bring a certain kind of vision into your practice. Yeah, I mean, you walk around with everything's one, which isn't true. Everything's connected, that's truer. But somehow put in this poem, it has more kind of vividness and power. And I've never forgotten that everything owns the whole of spring.

[33:23]

Okay. So you're, again, you're, you've learned to live for a week. Your home is now this meter square Zabuton. And the, the, um, The necessary dynamic is the attitude of acceptance. You have no choice, really, not much choice. Think about things. But to just accept what's happening. And I think you can try to use certain words. Now, again, I never know how they're going to work in German, but the word arrival is quite good in English. You can try to attach the word arrival to each perception or each noticing or each mood. So at each moment you have a feeling of arriving.

[34:59]

Yeah, or accepting. Yeah, or arriving in your breath. Or if I look at you, I don't think about you, I just have a feeling of arriving with you. Now that process of arriving you begin to be in the midst of the ingredients of your life. And not only the ingredients you like, lots of ingredients. And you just start accepting the ingredients of your life. And At some point, there may be a shift in our practice.

[36:17]

Yeah, a bit like you brought up. You know, one of the ways we're constructed is a lot of fear. You know, I mean, we're trying to teach Sophia to eat. with some dignity in restaurants. Particularly when she visits her ah-mama and ah-papa. And she thinks food is great, she loves it, she likes to mix it and spread it on the table. She thinks food is great, she likes to mix it and spread it on the table. So we can now, if we go out to dinner, you cannot do that.

[37:22]

Well, there's a certain fear in that. Just all these little things you said, she knows that there's going to be If it won't be good, we'll leave the restaurant in the middle of the meal or something. So in thousands of little ways, inconsequential ways like this, you use flying buttresses or you bolster your personality, your behavior with kind of fears, little fears or consequences. And whatever the reason, I know that for many people there's a point at which you can be overwhelmed by fear. When this interior space breaks down, or exterior interior space breaks down, there can

[38:30]

you often have to go through a time of extraordinary anxiety or fear. Or pain. And the pain of sitting actually opens up the pain in a sashin actually is very useful. I hate to say that, I'm sorry. But if you get the ability, and it's kind of like a little training, I mean, I suppose, if you get the ability to just Okay, whatever this period is, I'm going to sit through it. And Sukhiroshi really, I don't do this, but Sukhiroshi, some of you know the story, in those days they didn't have Xerox machines, right? They had what's called onion skin. Thin paper that you put for making carbon copies?

[40:07]

Not carbon, yeah. So anyway, the schedule was on onion skill, which is very noisy paper. And one time in Sashin, the afternoon of the third day, He seemed to have forgotten to ring the bell. So, you know, he had a little apartment, a Kafkaesque little apartment upstairs above the Zender in a tower, an old synagogue. And we could hear him walking around, you know, up there and going upstairs and coming back down. We're sitting there. Well, you know, 40 minutes is long enough.

[41:12]

45 is really quite long. 50 is an eternity. And every minute after that, So after about, I don't know, 70 minutes, he decides to come into the Zendo. And we hear him coming in to cook. We hear him picking up the onion skin of the schedule. He puts it back down and he walks out. And then another 20 minutes, we think, no, maybe he forgot that he didn't ring them. So 40 and 40, that's 80. That's 10. Then after a while, he comes in again, picks it up, rattles it, and goes back out again.

[42:16]

And then he goes upstairs. Two and a half hours. Anyway, we somehow, some of us sat through it. I mean, if you're old and short, nearsighted and forgetful, you can get away with this. But he was younger than I am. But if you get so that you can just at some point just sit there, one of the things that makes it possible is that pain doesn't flood you anymore.

[43:19]

It's just a feeling in your knees. It doesn't go through your whole system. Or it just seems to, if you really accept it, just seems to float off. And this becomes a tremendous kind of strength because from then on you've kind of made, created the ability to sit through pain or anxiety or anything and just goes away. I mean, you feel it, you know it, you're not repressing it. It just Yeah, it goes through you. So something hurts, but most of you is fine. Somehow your mind rests in the most of you that's fine and doesn't rest in the pain.

[44:25]

This is a really powerful psychological strength to be in the world with. It's a kind of, you know, Mostly, I mean, maybe puberty rights and things like that were supposed to do it for us, but we don't have puberty rights anymore. What is it? Puberty rights? Ach so, pubertätsräten, ja. Ja, pubertätsräten. Also vielleicht geht es sowas noch in, gab es mal sowas in pubertätsräten sozusagen, wo man durch sowas durchgehen muss, aber das haben wir nicht mehr. Okay. So that change in interior space is one of the most important transformative And then statements like,

[45:31]

Heaven and earth and I share the same root. And myriad things, the 10,000 things and I share the same body. Begins to be a feeling. Or to go back to Dogen's wonderful statement. That the continuous practice which actualizes itself is your continuous practice now. The now of this continuous practice does not originally belong, is not originally possessed by the self. So that statement is pointing to the same mind, being, way of being, that heaven and earth and I share the same root.

[46:58]

This is also like the image of the lotus in muddy water. But up above the water. And when you do shed this self-referential, preferential space. Not that it's not there, too, as well. But it's something you can shed. Shed means like a snake sheds its skin. Yeah. Yeah. You feel like there's a kind of water, the kind of clarity, something settles.

[48:01]

And there's a kind of mind of the backbone. This is also what... The entry to this feeling of heaven and earth and I share the same root. And you know the famous remark of Nagarjuna, practice is like trying to get a snake into a bamboo. Yeah, I picked up a snake in a stream once. I knew it wasn't poisonous. I picked it up by the tail. It was about this long. And the darn thing, he didn't like it, of course. Of course. Anyway, so I was amused. I was sitting in this stream and I saw this big water snake and I picked it up.

[49:05]

He wasn't amused or she wasn't amused. I didn't wait to see if it was a he or she. And it whipped its head back and left teeth. and they all infected for about a month. So you can imagine how hard that would be to get into this bamboo. But Nagarjuna means how do you get your mind into your backbone? How do you discover the mind, not of self-text and thinking, but the mind of, let's call it the body's mind, the body mind? And in oral tradition, you know, we use the liar. The liar of the breath, not, you know... All these phrases like, you know...

[50:11]

The southern branch owns the whole of spring. The southern branch owns the whole of spring. I mean, I think you can hear, this isn't a great line of poetry, but you can hear the body in it. The southern branch owns the whole of spring. Usually these Wado phrases, these teaching phrases, have to have a bodily aspect so that you think with your body through the phrases. Yeah. Now, part of what I feel here, I'm just giving, I'm presenting some notes, you know, this is like suggesting some notes, but I'm not trying to make it a whole.

[51:37]

I can't quite find how to make it a whole for us right now. What I'm struggling with is how to express, find ways, and I've never tried so specifically to do it as I'm trying now, to speak about how the oral tradition is part of our orality, or the mind of an oral tradition is part of our practice. Yeah, but I think of, you know, as I told you, I was just in Bremen. And, you know, I sort of like to walk around.

[52:45]

I'm not a sightseer, but I like to just wander around, see where I get... I don't really get lost usually. I came out of a restaurant in the basement of the Rathaus. And somehow walked the opposite direction, so it took me an hour and a half to get home. And I finally ended up among a river or something. Anyway. And I hate to look at maps. I just like to... Until I can make my own map, I don't want to look at a map. But I was struck and I went back several times and just looked at this Rathaus. What kind of culture made this building.

[53:46]

Because if I give myself over to it, it's interesting that it's very different than in Asia. At least in Japan, I think it might be different in China, but at least in Japan there aren't facades or buildings like this. And there's no public sculpture, you know, which militarizes and eroticizes our public space in Europe. There's not buildings with griffins and gargoyles and faces on every little bump. But still, I find a building like that gathers one's attention. and generates a mind which is very similar to what I understand from the way space is used in Japan.

[54:54]

And I'm often struck in a similar way, the way in films A film of almost anything, an ocean beach. I can see we need a break. An ocean, you know, just the waves coming in our ocean. Or a highway stretching off into some... can have an iconic quality. I mean, it's very particular. This is some highway. But it calls forth all the highways one's ever seen.

[55:59]

I think of this Janusz, I think I told some of you the story a while ago, Janusz Perkson. It's this very sweet little two-year-old boy who lives in Hamburg with his parents. For some reason, they spend their one or two week vacation at Johanneshof every year. I don't think it'd be most people's favorite resort, but anyway, somehow they like to do it. So this little boy came up and we had tea with them just before they left. So we had this little whistle. You know, with a little cuckoo bird on it and it's a little wooden whistle and you can go cuckoo, cuckoo.

[57:06]

You can make a cuckoo sound. And he figured out how to do it. And just as he did it, the cuckoo clock we have in the wall came out and said, cuckoo, one o'clock, cuckoo. This little boy was thrilled. I did it. And he fell back like seeing the world in Shiva's mouth or something. He was so thrilled. So he kept trying it. Cuckoo. And I had to run over the clock and keep turning my head. So I spent about 20 minutes going through the whole afternoon as we went cuckoo. But there's something like that in an oral culture that the situation calls forth the unexpected.

[58:19]

Yeah, and so, you know, again, I see some film and I see it opens with the ocean or something. and you feel All the oceans are called forth. And yet, it's not possessed, it's a now not possessed by the self, even though it calls forth your experience of oceans or highways. And it's a now that is not possessed by the self, although all your oceans or even roads call forth your experience. And I used to wonder, why can you feel the iconic quality, the timelessness of each thing? The timelessness of ocean waves from Greek times to... Whatever a man's future, why can a film do it and why doesn't it happen in my daily life?

[59:37]

And because in my daily life at that time, all my truth was so embedded in my text, myself was grasping past and possessively grasping past and present. And one of the things practice does when we talk about non-self, etc. Or thinking non-thinking. Or the now which is not originally possessed by the self. Or heaven and earth and I share the same root. Ten thousand things and I share the same body. This is a shift in which Somehow. But you understand.

[60:46]

Yeah, shall we have a break or have our cake? Break. Break and cake. Cake and break. A cake break. I don't know. Okay, let's have cake. Then we'll either sit together or have a short time together after the cake. So at 1.15 we'll have a sit together or maybe something will appear for a short time. Is that okay? He says no. No, no, no, it's okay. That was from the 13th to 14th century at the height of the Hanse

[61:52]

Yeah, and the surrounding was very, really wired. So it was civilization points. And it was woods and forests, probably this is similar to Japan. It's very mysterious and really can't formulate it very well. Yeah. Perhaps it was a way of mind where you were sort of more magically orientated. Yeah. Well, I think that we have to feel our way toward these things. That sounds right. Do we have our cake upstairs or downstairs?

[63:11]

Oh, here.

[63:11]

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