You know, when I was in Europe, the first seminar I did, we had the title, Zen Mind. And it alluded to, of course, Sekiroshi's book, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. And as most of you know, I... I don't speak about Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind much at all, except sometimes certain things Sukhiroshi might have said, or just things I know Sukhiroshi said or did. Because when I have spoken, and I did in Santa Fe seminars, and I have occasionally spoken about Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, usually people don't like it. Because, as I've mentioned, I think people want their own interpretation. The book's been important to people and they like the way it feels to them. So I just don't talk about it.

[01:03]

It's kind of a precious text for a lot of people and so why should I interfere with it? But anyway, we had the title so I decided to say something and see how it worked and I decided to stick to just a couple sentences And, you know, the original title of the book was Beginner's Mind. The publisher's title was Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. Or rather, the publisher insisted, he was a friend of mine, Meredith Weatherby, insisted that we had to have the word Zen in the title. Well, I don't know. I don't know. Somehow, maybe I was inspired by Paul Retz's book, Zen flesh, Zen bones. So I suggested to the publisher and to Tsukuyoshi, Zen mind, beginner's mind.

[02:04]

And it was okay with Tsukuyoshi. Yeah, but there's not much in the book about Zen mind. He doesn't speak about it, not really. But there's an epilogue to the book, which was actually not part of the Los Altos lectures. that I actually pieced together from two lectures, two and a couple other things, but mostly two lectures, to end the book with, in Japan, they eat cucumbers in the spring. Anyway, in that epilogue, he does mention not only Zen mind, the word Zen, the phrase, the two words Zen mind, but he also speaks about, you know, what is my feeling that the biggest difference between Asian Buddhism and Western Buddhism is the adept lay Sangha. And in that epilogue, he speaks about, you know, we're not quite monks, we're not quite lay persons, we're some new something.

[03:13]

So anyway, the two or three sentences I decided to speak about, and I thought it would be useful for me to share it with you here at the practice period. is, Sukhriyashi says, you can find it in the epilogue, reality cannot be caught, reality cannot be caught by the thinking mind or the feeling mind. Moment after moment, moment after moment, just to watch your breath, to watch your posture, is true nature. There is no secret beyond this point. Well, that's a pretty big statement. Starts with reality, ends with there's no secret beyond this point. So what's in three sentences like this?

[04:20]

Reality cannot be caught by the thinking mind or feeling mind. Moment after moment, just to watch your breathing, to watch your posture is true nature. Can it really be so simple? And there's no secret beyond this point. Now, one thing that is important here is the difference between reading a prescriptive text and a descriptive text. Now, in general, Chinese commentaries, koans, and so forth, and Buddhism in general are prescriptive texts, not descriptive texts. And I think, you know, I mean, you've heard me say this kind of thing before, but how...

[05:25]

Really, what does it mean? Well, it doesn't, he's not just saying pay attention to your breathing, pay attention to your posture, as like you should do that, that's a good thing to do. I mean, you know, he means that. But he really means what happens when you do that. And it's only what happens when you do that that allows the sentence that follows to be in an entirely different level. There's no secret beyond this point. Now, there's no secret beyond this point. Of course, in one sense he means that in all of Buddhism, in all the texts and blah, blah, blah, there's no... There's nothing you'll find beyond watching the breath and watching the spine or watching the posture. Yeah, I mean, we have to imagine.

[06:30]

Can this really be true? Another sense of it is, I've implied, is that when you prescribe this medicine to yourself over some length of time as an activity, then whatever secrets there are become apparent. And when he says reality, of course the word reality is such a problem in It means something real to most of us. But anyway, what Sakyasi means is how we actually exist or how things actually exist, how things actually are. He used the word reality. And he says reality cannot be caught by thinking mind or feeling mind. But then the implication is reality can be caught

[07:33]

Or somehow you can participate in or be or be. There's an inseparableness from, I mean, there's no way we're not also reality or whatever you want, however you want to describe it. So, but he clearly says proscribes can't catch it by thinking mind or feeling mind. Now Bodhidharma, he also quotes Bodhidharma here. This is kind of a great little several pages. There's quite a bit there. He says, he quotes Bodhidharma supposedly saying, to see a fish, you must watch the water. To see a fish, you must watch the water. Why the heck? I mean, that's quite a big deal. See a fish, you must watch the water.

[08:38]

Then he says, Sukershi comments, before you see Buddha nature, you must watch the mind. Before you see Buddha nature, you must watch the mind. Now clearly then Sukershi is implying that bodhidharma means to watch the waters, to watch the mind. But again we should know that in yogic culture there are no entities, there's only activity. And I say that often, but we've really got to get the feeling, as I say, there's not a tree, there's treeing. There's the activity of treeing, activity of the water.

[09:42]

In that sense, when you watch the activity of the water, immerse yourself in the water, and here again, this is written prescriptively, so you have to kind of immerse yourself in the sentences. I mean, if you just take these three sentences and you take them the rest of the practice period, this would be fine. Because You know, like there's a Chinese saying, if you, something like, I can't remember how it goes, but when you look at the water, you see the wake of the fish. Not the fish. You see where the, how the fish was there. So when you watch the water as an activity, you see the fish before it appears. You see how the fish, the water anticipates fish. And you see the activity of the fish or fish or mind or Buddha nature.

[10:50]

So if you watch, before you see Buddha nature, you must watch the mind. Okay, so here we have again the basic practice, basic Zen practice of on every perception and cognition you see the mind primarily as well as the object which gives a rise to the mind. That just should be your habit. It should be the habit, as I say, you inhabit. To really never stray from that. So Nsikirishi says, before you see Buddha nature, you watch the mind. Well, that means really, prescriptively, don't stray from the mind that appears on every object in every cognition. This is possible to do.

[11:52]

You just know about it. But how to make it your practice? How to make it the ordinary bread and water of the patched-grove monk? So Sukhya Rishi doesn't say reality cannot be caught by thinking or feeling. He says reality cannot be caught by the thinking mind or the feeling mind. Okay? So in other words, it's not about thinking or feeling, but the mind, the water that arises, the mind that arises in thinking doesn't know reality. The mind that arises through feeling, emotions, and so forth, means reality. He doesn't mean non-graspable feeling, he means feeling in the sense of emotions, etc.

[12:57]

The mind that arises through feeling and emotions also doesn't know reality. Okay, but then there's some implication here. What does know reality? Well, here we have the appearance of Zen mind and the appearance of original mind, or what the concept of original mind is, and the appearance of Zen mind, Zen mind we can understand as what validates reality, what validates your life, what validates how you see the world. Now for most of us, it's almost impossible not to have consciousness validate our world. Sukershi is saying just in these three sentences, consciousness does not validate your world. It gives you the experience of the world you function in when you're not sleeping and dreaming.

[14:00]

And you know, if you're getting nervous or crazy or anxious, it's really helpful to have consciousness give you a clear picture of where you're at, etc. But it doesn't, in any fundamental sense, validate the world you live in. And if you think it does, there's suffering, lots of suffering. Yeah. Yeah. So, but Zen mind, can we imagine then the implication is that some other kind of mind that arises in some other way than through thinking and feeling validates the world? That's really what Zen mind means. It's the mind that validates existence, objects, phenomena, you yourself, your activity. So that's in that first sentence. That view, that feeling, that practice, that experience Sukhiroshi has leads to him writing that sentence.

[15:07]

It's like to try to find some words from his experience and put them together that maybe you can feel in the prescription of these words. medicine of these words. His mind or his transmitted mind or what he means by true nature. Now this isn't just about this practice in these three sentences and Bodhidharma's comment isn't just about noticing and actually experiencing, not just knowing about, knowing about enough and often enough and repeatedly enough until your experience is mind arising on each object, mind arising on each cognition, on each perception, on each cognition.

[16:15]

But that you feel the field of mind, how can I put it? You feel mind arising on phenomena and cognition, and you feel the field of mind, the space of mind within which that arises, within which thought arises, feeling arises, perception arises, sensations. And as I say, you get the experience of this, what I call the yogic shift from the particular to the field, from the particular to the field, without discursive thinking. Until not only is your primary perception mind itself on every cognition and perception, but the field of mind in which the object arises. Now it's assumed, our culture assumes that things are separated and we can connect them.

[17:26]

And Asian culture assumes that things are connected and we can separate. That's a really big difference. In Japan, you meet somebody. The assumption is, just an ordinary Japanese person, they're not Buddhist exactly. Extraordinary Japanese person who doesn't practice Buddhism except as it's implicit in his culture. And he or she feels when they meet a person. They're already connected, but they have to create separation for a while. And then depending on the relationship, they can let that separation disappear. in Europe and America that we have the tendency to think there's a separation but lets we can make a connection through friendship that actually is a quite a different world and it's different in the sense that like when I'm speaking now the experience of speaking is I'm pulling the words out of silence and I let them go and they slide slip

[18:45]

Drawn back into silence. I draw them out of silence. And some silence sticks to them. And the silence that sticks to them is a kind of maybe reality. Maybe the space of mind. You know, something like this. And the Japanese have a word, ma, which many of you know, which is the word for the silence that sticks to things. The connectedness that sticks to things. Even when they're separate, they're always moving back into connectedness. Now, just a simple difference in worldview like that makes a big difference in how you act, practice, think about things, etc., Okay. Now, as you know, if you bring your attention, just to watch your breathing, just to watch your breathing.

[19:55]

if you bring your attention, if you lock in an intention, as I say, if you lock in, and you'll know this by heart, if you lock in an intention to bring attention to your breath, eventually, without the effort of some kind of doing attention, the locked in intention in the, as they say in complexity theory, in the fitness landscape, in the fitness landscape of each moment that locked in intention functions in the minute particulars of every moment. And attention begins to penetrate each situation. And then when attention is locked into breathing and the body and phenomena, as you know, Tension no longer establishes your continuity of self in thinking.

[21:01]

And when your continuity of self is not established in thinking, you're in a different world. That's also doable. Doable. Then he says to watch your posture. Mainly what he means to watch your posture is to bring, to lock in an intention to bring attention to the spine. To bring the spine to mind, the mind to spine. And this isn't to have a kind of picture or photo of the spine and you kind of The photos and images are very powerful in practice. This is more like you bring non-graspable feeling to the spine. And from the base of the spine, the coccyx, all the way to the crown of the head, to this chakra.

[22:06]

You just get in the habit of doing this. You inhabit the habit of doing that again. And it's like... It's like a lot of little soft hands. This is your spine and this actually stick represents the spine and... It's like a lot of little soft hands around your spine. Holding your spine. And then I wouldn't say bring breath to the spine first. I'd say bring attention, these soft hands of attention to the spine until eventually you feel it all the time. What happens then? What's the advantage of doing that? And then to enhance that, you can start bringing breath to the spine and eventually, eventually,

[23:12]

you have subtle breath in the spine. And you can feel it. If you keep bringing this soft attention to the spine, and then bring breath to enhance that attention, pretty soon a kind of breathing occurs in the spine. Like this. Like this. What happens? You stop externalizing space. Your location, the locus of your location is so fully spine and breath that space is an external container Yeah, come. Melts.

[24:15]

N-E-L-D-S, melts. Melts and melts. You know the word, you know in Zen we say, ordinary life. Your ordinary life. But ordinary, I like the, you know, as you know, I like the etymology of words and ordinary order, order means the threads in a loom, in the loom itself. So the ordinary world, the weaving of the ordinary world, when your locus, your location is not in discursive thought, not in self-referential thinking, and not in externalized space, again, this is a different world. And you can feel the world being woven, as I said last tesha when I was here.

[25:22]

You're always stepping into your representation of the world, and you can begin to feel that weaving of the world As you step into the world, the world steps into, your representation is affirmed by the world. Or not. So just to watch your breath prescriptively, what happens? The sense of the continuity of self and world is taken out of self-referential thinking, out of thinking, any thinking, into breath, body and phenomena. And your sense of the reputation of the world as an external container collapses.

[26:26]

Maybe a little scary sometimes. the world arises then from the locus of mind, breath, spine, and you're walking into the weaving of the world as you weave it. Now, yeah, you can do this. Or, you know, really. It takes a locked-in attention. Intention. You know, the sense of the wake of the fish in the water, or the hidden bird, you know, lots of illusions like that in Zen koans and in Chinese poetry, etc., represents the hidden landscape, the landscape you don't see, but is what happened and what could happen is the...

[27:29]

hidden landscape or the mystery where the senses and the mind don't reach or sometimes we say the shape which has no shape. Now if you're thinking the world and representing the world externally and blah blah blah and thinking The shape which has no shape doesn't draw you into its silence, into its space. But it's a locus of being, becoming, is activity. Stillness is the spine and the breath. Then we can understand Sukershi saying, Before Buddha nature rises, watch the mind. You must watch the mind. If you watch the mind, the shape which has no shape, Buddha nature, original mind.

[28:39]

Original mind here means not some entity prior to other entities, but rather that we don't even need Buddhism. that if you really listen... You know, I sort of avoid pay attention because it sounds like a commodity or something commercial, but the etymology of pay is to please, to satisfy, to endure. And that works because if you endure attention... if you satisfy attention, if you please attention, if you listen, listen to attention, and listen, the etymology of listen is to obey, if you listen and obey attention, it's such a simple thing as watching the breath, watching the spine, Buddhism is already there.

[29:44]

then the teachings unfold. The teachings help you unfold. But it's not back in Buddha's tongue and text. It's right here if you bring attention to the breath and the posture. And there's no secret beyond this point. Yeah, so that's sort of what's Suzuki Rishi's mind in these three sentences. I think so. Anyway, that's my experience. Thank you very much. Bill, you're here. Thanks. that we need be in that place.

[30:45]

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