Yesterday I tried to, I wanted to make clear that we already know much of what this koan is about. Yeah, both, because I've given you practices, we've done practices related to this koan already. I mean, I don't mean we've learned to pay attention to our, give attention to our breath. I don't mean that's what we've learned before. I mean, I'm taking for granted that This is so basic that you don't have to find this out through any special teaching. And the way in this koan it is a kind of special teaching, then the koan becomes useful.

[01:08]

But in any case, the point is that some of the teachings we, I mean, what interests me is, I can present you teachings. Like I give you the example again of the yogic shift in seeing from the particular to the field. That's an assumption or that's a practice implicitly recommended presented in this koan. And you may not recognize it's presented in the koan. So part of reading koans is to get familiar enough with them until you see

[02:33]

what they're presenting uniquely and what they're presenting in another way, something you already know. And then if you've read, as I pointed out yesterday, quoting from Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, If you've read Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, and especially if you've read it with the feeling of trying to find in yourself what he's talking about, Then the section on breathing in Zen Mind Beginner's Mind in many aspects is very parallel to this koan.

[03:42]

Seeing breathing as a swinging door and somehow implicitly that it hinges on emptiness It's a common image that the hinge depends on the hole, and the hole is empty, like this. And that it moves freely, spontaneously. And that the sense of I and me disappears. And that this is all within... It induces a kind of timelessness.

[04:48]

Yeah, you... Yeah, okay, that's enough. Now, it's not... Just to pay attention to breathing. I mean, yeah, without this presentation in Suzuki Roshi's section. Why is paying attention to breathing create a sense of timelessness? Now, this is a kind of koan-type thinking that is present in this section of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.

[05:55]

Is that a practice results in a number of things? And sometimes surprising. And you can tie them together by a kind of story. But they really come together when you practice them. And such a text gives you a chance to notice. When you're giving attention to breathing, do you find yourself in a kind of timelessness? Und dieser Text gibt dir eine Chance zu sehen, ob du, wenn du dich auf deinen Atem konzentrierst, in einer Zeitlosigkeit, ob du dich da in einer Zeitlosigkeit vorfindest. Yeah, but as this koan says, it says, ideas are nice and words are nice, but they end up having a kind of literary content.

[07:02]

It's sort of like you might read recipes because the person writing them is such a good writer, it's fun to read them, but you never cook. wie wenn man zum Beispiel ein Rezept liest, weil der, der dieses Rezept geschrieben hat, ein toller Schriftsteller ist, aber man wird es nie selber kochen wollen. And I think most of us often read Sukhya Rishi. It's fun to read it. It's nice. Yeah, it feels good to read it, but sometimes the pleasure in reading it and the understanding that comes from reading it gives us an escape route from practice. It feels good and pleasant to read this text by Suzuki Rashi just like that.

[08:10]

And sometimes this good feeling that we get when we read this text gives us a kind of emergency exit to sneak past the practice. So, you know, the trick here is how do we read Sujuji, how do we read the koan, so we can pull these practices out of the text into our lives. And what's good about us meeting together is we all actually know a very large implicit amount about practice. And with you I can speak to this implicit and sometimes explicit understanding you have and make it more explicit.

[09:24]

Because there's a lot of truth in saying in any one practice, almost all practices are embedded. But making them explicit makes a big difference. Now, I tried to give a kind of review yesterday. I guess that's what it ended up to be. Yeah, like how the hermit rhinoceros is combined into an idea of the practice of a monk.

[10:35]

how this settler horn is connected to the monk. Yeah, and so that the monk and the bodhisattva can find this cave forest mind in immediate circumstances. So that the monk and the bodhisattva can find this cave forest mind directly in their situation. And there's a big value in practicing with a sense of whatever you need, you're going to bring into zazen. If you need to be calmer, you go into zazen thinking, I'm going to find calmness. And if... And if you're easily disappointed, you're not going to be disappointed.

[11:44]

If you want to go to the mountains, you just go into Zazen and have the feeling, I've gone to the mountains. Yeah, I mean, this really works. I mean, it works for me, anyway. So if I want to live in a cave, hey, I've got the breath cave. Yeah, and that's kind of implied here. Somehow... the breath, when it's articulated in a certain way, becomes the equivalent of a cave forest mind. Und das ist hier enthalten, dass irgendwie, wenn der Atem auf gewisse Weise artikuliert wird, er zu diesem Höhlenwaldgeist meint, wird.

[12:47]

Now, I can't say that. Can't say what? A forest ghost. It sounds German. Really? A forest ghost? Sounds scary. Three men were sitting around a campfire. Hmm. You didn't translate. And a forest ghost appeared. So I think, you know, maybe the review was okay. But I think I should try to be very specific this morning. Now, for most of the time that I practiced, I felt my breath as a kind of continuous presence. I mean, not from the beginning, but after a while, it began to be a continuous, tangible presence.

[13:55]

A kind of drone. Like in Indian music, there's a one note, you know, keeps an undercurrent going. Yeah, I think that, yeah, anyway. And that, and also the background mind of the early, of what I've spoken about as an early effect of Zen practice, of Zazen practice. It's kind of like a drone too, a continuous undercurrent or note. Yeah, I remember the example I used to give back, and I'd have to speak about Zen occasionally back in the early 60s.

[15:24]

I'd say it was like driving along a highway and you see the billboards. And it wasn't necessarily an Autobahn. It could have been a country road. More likely. And there'd be billboards along the road. And the billboards were like thoughts and feelings and emotions. And with doing Zazen, I began to see between the billboards. Yeah, and the billboards and the thoughts and feelings just became sort of like billboards.

[16:26]

They were less real, less real, less something or other, than the background behind the billboards. And I could feel how the billboards were created from the background, the forests and the caves and et cetera. And in this little image from the very beginning of my practices, got lots of the whole of the teaching in it. Und von diesem kleinen Bild am Anfang meiner Praxis, das hatte schon eine Vielzahl von Übungen oder Praxis in sich.

[17:32]

Because the background from which the billboards are made, the trees, the wood, etc., There's implicitly a background of emptiness or space behind that. So very early on I felt from just doing Zazen and beginning to feel my thoughts as billboards. And I found very early that they were also usually advertisements for me. Or other, you know, you failed yesterday. Big billboards, oh, really. Yeah, I sort of liked the behind the back billboards better.

[18:43]

Yeah. So the background mind that I began to feel behind the billboards of thoughts and etc., ...began to be a background always present in my activity. For some reason, there was some connection with the drone of that background, with the drone of a continuous... tangible presence of breath. The connection was between the background mind and your breath.

[19:59]

The continuous presence of the background mind and the continuous presence of breath began to fold together. This constant presence of the background spirit and the constant presence of the breath they have begun to fold together. They have danced together in a very slow way. A little aside here, I mean, you probably know that neurobiologists now are talking a lot about the plasticity of the mind, even up into advanced age, etc. Yeah. And something like this has always been assumed in Buddhist practice.

[21:00]

And I think it probably rooted in the simple difference in view from a world of an initial creation and then its subsequent development Yeah, and it's slowly winding down. Second law of thermodynamics or something like that. And a concept of no initial creation... and only continuous recreation and a continuous creation and a development through continuous creation, which is a different idea of development.

[22:20]

And these are very hard differences to translate, because both are interested in development, etc., but... It takes a while before you see that development rooted in continuous creation is different than development rooted in an idea of initial creation. Yeah, so Buddhist ideas of transformation have two main concepts, arise from two main, function within two main, two concepts. Yeah. Well, three sometimes. The third is wrong.

[23:20]

The third is the idea that it's all there and you're just uncovering it. That's a simplistic understanding like you have some inner original nature or something that you're uncovering. It's an easy way to think and it's the way most people think and it's... Yeah, it's not bad, but it's not deeply productive. So the more accurate, I think, anyway, concepts in which transformation functions... One is there's actual change, there's differences created. And second, or first, is there's a significant change in emphases in what's already present.

[24:31]

There's a shift in how things are emphasized. And much of practice to enter into real difference is first of all to change emphases. And much of practice, which results in real difference, is initially a practice in changing emphasis. The very simplest example is a changing emphasis from seeing separation to seeing connectedness. You're not changing anything about the world. You're just changing your view. But that change in view starts changing everything.

[26:05]

And eventually, probably in the neurobiological sense, it starts rewiring you. Okay. Okay, so at first I'm trying to stick to something very particular here. So at first my emphasis was this continuous presence of the background mind and the continuous presence of breath. Also zuerst lag meine Betonung oder Schwergewicht auf dieser unablässigen Gegenwart des Hintergrundgeistes und dieser unablässigen Gegenwart des Atems.

[27:14]

Und an einem Punkt habe ich Atem It's shifted from being a drone to more of a drumbeat. And that was the simple shift from from emphasizing each inhale and each exhale separately. Now the word hail, H-A-L-E, in one sense it means healthy without any infirmity.

[28:29]

Sickness. It means more than without sickness. It means without weakness. Hail and heart. Which I feel occasionally. But the hail of inhale means to pull. It didn't mean the other word. No. It's another meaning. So it means to pull the breath in and to push the breath out. But I don't care. I use the word hail to mean a breath. So I would say, hail, hail. But not that other meaning, hail all ye Romans. And then I would say, hail, hail. Hail and hail, he said, but I don't mean hail, you Romans, and so on.

[29:48]

And when I found I began to articulate each hail, inhale. The swinging door image became much more powerful. And I thought of the Rumi poem that I've given you a number of times. Oh, how often I knocked on that ancient door. For years I knocked on that ancient door. And when finally it opened, I found I was already on the other side. So suddenly each hail became a door, but I was already on both sides simultaneously.

[31:02]

Und plötzlich wurde jeder Atemzug zu einer Tür, aber ich war schon gleichzeitig, simultan auf beiden Seiten. Aber beide Seiten waren auch unterschiedlich. Und als ich wirklich die Aufmerksamkeit auf jeden Atemzug oder Atemzug which is actually rather surprisingly difficult. It was much easier to have a tangible, continuous presence. Yeah, but then I noticed that consciousness is always seeking continuity. Consciousness wants, needs, functions through continuity. This continuity is a shock to consciousness.

[32:07]

And then I found that self, ego, etc., is also dancing with consciousness. Let's be continuous together. Yes, because the self wants, I want to be continuous in fact for a long time. So discontinuity is a shock. And there's a resistance to it. It's worse than flossing your teeth. You want your teeth to be continuous. But it's a kind of flossing the mind when you... Am I going too far?

[33:28]

When you notice each hail. We woke Frank up. My God. He heard flossing and he thought, oh, what time is it? I'm teasing. Are you translating or are you? No, you can't translate that. So, strangely, when I added the discontinuity of each heo, I found it was slightly different. There was some presence that wasn't exactly the same person, And I began also, not only did the image of the swinging door start to have power,

[34:55]

As I began to stop, whether I intended it or not, stop... How can I put it? Thinking in time units... It was rather difficult to think, oh, lunch will be at 1.30 or 1.15 or something. Yeah, I just, I knew it would come through one of the doors. After a while, somewhere.

[36:15]

So this simple shift from articulating breath as a presence to articulating breath as a posture. While that's no more difficult, really, shouldn't be, than having attention on your left foot and then your right foot as you're walking. wo das doch nicht schwieriger sein sollte, als diese Aufmerksamkeit beim Gehen einmal auf dem rechten und auf dem linken Fuß zu haben. It is much more difficult because consciousness is seeking continuity. Es ist sehr viel schwieriger, weil das Bewusstsein nach Kontinuität strebt. So to define or floss consciousness into a unit of hail and hail and hail and hail

[37:21]

Can you say it differently? Yeah, it's almost crazy to say it that way, in English anyway. The experience of dividing, of interrupting the continuity of consciousness, with each inhale and each exhale, changed lots of things. First, it was more difficult than paying attention to your left foot or right foot. And although your left foot and right foot is a change in posture, And breathing in this way is a kind of change in breath posture. I had a lot of resistance to it.

[38:36]

And when I got over the resistance, and sometimes you can just try it for ten minutes, eventually it begins to make a shift. Just as when you begin to develop a sense of background mind in zazen, between the billboards of thoughts, you notice that as, yeah, something true. But when you begin to shift attention and emphasis to this background mind between the billboards, well, you're noticing something that's already there.

[40:01]

But the noticing what's already there primarily as a background and as a potential. The noticing, the bringing attention to it. actually generates a background mind that wasn't there before. Now it's a new ingredient that wasn't in the kitchen before. And it becomes a new ingredient in your practice. Now, the second half of this little specific thing I'm trying to talk about will have to wait. Thank you in appreciation of your anticipated patience.

[41:21]

Sincerely.

[41:23]

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