Good afternoon. As some of you know, I was just in Stuttgart, or near Stuttgart. Meeting with a small group of more or less business people, administrators. Mm-hmm. Yeah, because someone comes here once or twice a year, has been asking me for a couple of years to do this, so I said, oh, there's a friend of mine joined me, and so we did it. Yeah, and for me this practice is, yeah, life itself. So then I have this funny... Funny experience.

[01:08]

What can I... If this is life itself, how can I make life itself useful to these guys? And a lot of women, actually. So I somehow would like to take that bamboo out of the garden and wave it. Oh, this is bamboo. What do I point out? Yeah, and I said this, you know, I'm not presenting this, I'm not thinking of this as a religion, Yeah, didn't wear a raksu even. And the tradition certainly is, if you're teaching this path, which is received from others, you wear the raksu to show that you're part of this path, or the robe.

[02:21]

Yeah, if you may remember, if you've read sutras, you notice that very often the sutras start with a question, and start with a question asked by someone who bears one shoulder. Yeah, so in representation, a representation of this, we always wear the okesa now with one shoulder. To show that we are, to indicate that we are both carrying, questing and questioning the path. Sorry to cause a problem for you.

[03:35]

Yeah, and if this is life itself, we're just living it. What are we doing here in the Zendo? Yeah. Yeah. How do we notice it, though? And... So, without trying to answer that question, that's... Yeah, another time. I'm trying to speak to what Zazen mined a bit yesterday and now Sashin mined. As you know, sashin means to collect or gather the mind.

[04:40]

And strangely enough, maybe not strange, that we collect or gather the mind together. So I said yesterday, I think, to teach yourself But when I say that, I feel all kinds of problems with it, both as a statement and as what you might make of such a statement. Wenn ich das sage, dann tauchen sofort Probleme auf, einmal mit der Aussage, die ich mache, und mit dem, was ihr daraus machen könntet.

[05:42]

I see you creating a little guy inside yourself saying, okay, I'm going to teach you. But so, what can I say? If this practice, as far as I'm concerned, is life itself, how does life itself also mature through us, evolve through us? And of course the problem is the skillful habits of consciousness. The necessary skills of consciousness. joined to narrative self, joined to continuous self-referential thinking, makes it hard to notice

[06:44]

life itself. So I've been puzzling, in effect. with this since yesterday and actually before. So yesterday I used the example of a plant. And a plant which Which knows the light through the leaves of reala trees. No. Yeah, this is a problem. And can we, how do we... Yeah, okay, forget about it.

[08:27]

So I won't say what it is. I'll just say, I'll start talking about practice a bit. So one approach is You want to get out of entity thinking. That's the problem, one of the big problems. If your habit is to think and look for entities, you look for the predictable aspects of things. And you only see the predictable aspects you can name. So there's no teaching when everything is predictable. When you keep looking for things that reinforce the self, make you feel good, Good in a very simple, self-reflexive way.

[09:32]

And of course, I don't want to put down self. You need a strong self to practice. Yeah, but... Yeah, but it can be a problem. Okay, so one of the steps is... Basic to mindfulness practice is you notice activity. Just get in the habit of noticing activity. Yeah, that's one of the things I will say for this session very strongly from now on, please. Notice activity. So you notice the activity of walking.

[10:34]

Yeah, and I'm right now, you know, I guess there's someone here, but my experience is the activity of speaking, that's all. Yeah, maybe there's someone here, but for me, there's the activity of posture, the activity of speaking. The activity of sharing the teaching staff that Sukershi gave me. Yeah. I remember Sophia when she was 14 months old, about somewhere in there, 13 months old. Some of you may remember this story because I told it when she was that age.

[11:48]

She sort of imitated the sound of blue jays, gray jays and blue jays. Some sort of un-writable word. She'd make this noise. And I thought, well, she's named the birds. Then one day I noticed that outside the house somewhere a bird flew by. Yeah, I couldn't see the bird, actually. We have a bird feeder outside, and, you know, birds are around, you know. But the shadow of the bird passed across the floor. And Sophia went... Whoa, this is beyond Zen students.

[13:08]

Because for her, clearly, she hadn't yet been inducted into entity thinking. Somehow this sound for her just represented the activity. She saw the birds landing in the bird feeder, the birds flying. So the shadow of the bird was also... The bird. Or the activity of the bird. No, I don't know exactly, but if that's what she... But that seemed to be the case, and it was borne out by other examples. Yeah, that's not different than saying the reflection of the moon in a puddle is also the moon.

[14:09]

And you have to assume that when you read Dogen, Dogen talks about the moon in a dew drop and all that stuff. That's all. the activity of the moon. If you're an astronaut and you go to the moon, you don't want to land on a dewdrop. That's good. Very good to land on the physical object. But then you're also involved in the activity of the moon, you know. Less gravity, sunny. So if the emphasis is always on the emptiness and entity-lessness, the emptiness, the entitylessness, and hence the activity of everything, then the moon is also the tides.

[15:26]

And our reproductive cycle. And we call it that. And the tides, though, are also the ocean, the water, the beach. The boundaries of the moon are not clear. When is the ocean the moon and when is the ocean, you know, currents, seawater? So we're living in a sea of connectedness, of boundarylessness. How do we... What is the... What's the feel of, the practice of this boundarylessness? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[16:26]

But we always have some particular location. Yeah, Wittgenstein says he's never free from a particular location. Yeah, that's a way of saying there's some kind of self. But if your location is then that's not so likely to be filled with self-referential thinking. If your location is a kind of word or substitute for self... If you're experiencing location, there's not so much self-referential thinking likely. Because what are the boundaries of this location? Can we come to Dogen?

[18:01]

I find extraordinary statement. The now of continuous practice is not originally possessed by the self. So what mind knows this flow of boundaries? which is closer to how we and things actually exist which is closer to closer to how we and things actually exist now i gave an example again yesterday of But plant.

[19:09]

Yeah, but maybe we should turn to a more Buddhist example. Yeah, to see if we can come to the possibilities, closer to the possibilities of this Sashin mind. I mean, Well, I say this is life itself. It's also not able to be fully known. Without knowing how do we fully enter into what can't be fully known. My opinion and experience is unless you can do this, you cannot be fully happy or realized. And my experience is that if you can't do that, then you can't be completely happy or realized.

[20:28]

How can we enter in? without knowing, because we can't know. So how can we, without knowing, enter into what cannot be fully known? And yet we are that which cannot be fully known. This is the kind of problem that Buddhism has evolved from. And the practitioners, the path-enterers, are entering into this which cannot be fully known... Knowing this is, how can I say, is how we all exist.

[21:42]

So the Buddhist example I implicitly gave last night Is it, you know, a kind of quote from the end of the Diamond Sutra? The Diamond Sutra, which is, along with the Lankavatara Sutra, at the center of Zen practice. So I said, what is a life span? A flash of lightning. Does light blitz just mean lightning, or does it mean a flash of lightning? It's just one word.

[22:44]

We say a lightning bolt, or we say a lightning flash. We say blitz is a lightning. It's not important, I'm just curious. Yeah. Well, think about this more difficult. Okay. Anyway. Yeah? Yeah. Flash of lightning, yeah. Okay. What is a lifespan? A flash of lightning. A star at dawn. A drop of dew. Okay, so the Diamond Sutra starts out. The Buddha supposedly, you know, I don't know exactly, but supposedly a couple of rich guys had given him a

[23:44]

200-acre sort of place outside the city where they had lots of huts for people. And the Buddha came back from his daily rounds of begging. I think he ate something, washed his feet, etc. And then he sat down and taught. And he didn't teach every day. So good old Sabuti came forward, bared a shoulder, And this is to show and to kneel. Normally you walk with your right foot, so you kneel with his right knee.

[24:51]

So before he even asked the question, he showed his respect and intention, commitment. He said, if a son or daughter of noble family or good family or something like that, which means karma enough to have been brought to some place where you can perhaps hear the teaching, And the term is used to mean it goes beyond being a monk or male or female or lay bodhisattva. If a male or female come forward, set forth on the path, how should they stand?

[25:54]

How should they walk? How should they control their thoughts? That's how Buddhism starts. Doesn't ask what should they believe? What should they read? Just how should they stand? How should they walk? How should they walk? control their thoughts. Now, they've just seen the Buddha, the historical person we now call the Buddha, walking in the city, begging, eating, washing his feet, and so forth.

[26:56]

So they asked him, how should How should one, entering the path, stand, walk, and control one's thoughts? But let's say that the word control is for us something of a problem. And it's been a problem many different translations have changed the word control or made it create the thought of enlightenment or something. But I would say it means something like, how do you know your thoughts? You can't control your thoughts until you know them.

[27:59]

So how do you know your thoughts? How do you direct your thoughts? The word I prefer is enjoying your thoughts. And I have to explain what that means. A little bit. It means both to prohibit and to command. It means both. So how you translate it, I don't know. But it means like I enter into my thoughts with authority Or I shape or hold back my thoughts. Something like that. So command or prohibit. I think for us we can just say, how do I deal with my thoughts? How do I take responsibility for my thoughts?

[29:19]

How do I free myself from being limited by thoughts? So this is the question that Subuddhi asks. And the Buddha answered the latter part first. Partly, of course. His standing and walking is answer enough. Okay, but now let me switch to an old anecdote about an old friend of mine, Rushdie Schweikert. He happened to have been the first astronaut to float in space or walk in space. Yeah, so he... You know, he knew he had to do this.

[30:40]

Because they rehearsed these things many, many times. So he had to go outside the spacecraft and floating with a tube. If you were old enough, you probably saw it on TV. And he had to sort of do something or other. I can't remember. But he thought, if I have to do this, I would like to know what the great thoughts of humankind are. I would like to be there with the great thoughts of humankind. So he wrote down quotations from, I don't know whom, Shakespeare, Goethe, Plato or something. Mick Jagger. Mick Jagger recently in a song said, Life is short, one quick look and it's gone.

[31:48]

It's quite a shock. Life is short, one quick look and it's gone. It's quite a shock. He's getting old enough to feel that way. So he got out there and he's, but you know, everything is calculated, the minute, the whole thing. If you think Sashin is scheduled, you should try being an astronaut. So he's floating out there, you know, and one of the things they're doing is taking pictures of him doing whatever he's doing. And the camera jammed. It changed his life that the camera jammed. He thought he had a few seconds while they fiddled with the camera to get this piece of paper he'd stuck in his boot out.

[32:49]

And he'd keep hidden this in his boot. So he reached down to get it and he realized he didn't have time there, just getting the camera fixed. So instead he just turned and looked at the whole earth floating in space. And he was, I guess we could say, completely blown away. He changed his life this moment. You couldn't reproduce this in the laboratory. I don't think we can all stand outside tonight, put something in our shoe, and then look at the moon, and we won't have the same experience.

[34:11]

I mean, maybe you will. Maybe you're out there tonight, I'll join you. So he had, I mean, this has become an iconic story. I mean, I think he's written about it. It's something he and I have talked about. But he looked and saw, what could we say, the suchness of the earth. And what he saw, he saw the activity of the earth. And he felt inseparable. I mean, he was way up there, way up, I don't know, up, down, over. And he felt the same suchness. There were no thoughts.

[35:25]

There was teaching. This one look outside the scriptures, outside the great thoughts of humankind, didn't need the great thoughts of humankind. This was the teaching of his life. So how did the Buddha answer Subuddhi? He said, if a son or daughter of a good family enters the Bodhisattva path, sets forth on the Bodhisattva path, they should produce the thought that in what, I can't remember exactly, but that in whatever way

[36:38]

realm of being, beings exist. I mean, listen to that. In whatever realm that beings exist in whatever realm we can conceive of that being exists whether born from an egg whether born from a womb or water or air hmm whether with perception or without perception.

[38:03]

Yes, it's a little more than that. In whatever beings that can be conceived, in any conceivable realm, these I vow I shall liberate. Sometimes it's translated save. I would say to join in their being. Or to awaken in their being. All beings in whatever realms beings we can conceive of.

[39:12]

There might be beings. I will awaken in their being. Okay. This is how we control, awaken our thoughts. This is a sense of awakening a thought that's probably deeply embedded in all of us and wants to come forth. I don't think it's different than Rusty turning and looking at the whole earth. I don't think it's different than turning and looking at this Buddha.

[40:15]

Yeah, that's only the beginning. But it's five o'clock. Thanks. You have to do the same for every being and every car.

[41:04]

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