I wore one of Suzuki Roshi's rock suits this morning. It's one of the kind of bigger ones for ceremonies and things. Because if I wear his regular rock suits, which I have a number of, They look like postage stamps on him. But I sort of, you know, I think what we're doing here would make him happy, so I decided to wear his dress. And I know what he went through to, what he went through and what led to starting Tassajara. which is basically he said you know it's great practicing here I committed myself to practicing here but I need a place where I can live with the students for months at a time he said it's great to practice here and I like to practice but I need a place where I can live with my students

[01:19]

So when he said that to me, I started looking at the Russian river in the north and south, and I somehow found Tassajara. Then it was actually quite a job to turn Tassajara into a practice place. My middle daughter, Elizabeth, just had one of the female leads in Don Giovanni. I would have liked to have seen it, but it wasn't possible for me. But anyway, setting up an opera is quite a job. And to get the sets together, the singers together, everything, the orchestra.

[02:33]

Well, a practice beer is not an opera. I mean, for some people it is, but... Or nor is it a swimming meet, you know. A swimming school? Swimming meet, where swimmers, you know. Yeah, that's not a swimmer thing. But still, you have to get a lot of things together, you know, kitchen, sleeping place. a way to eat and live and so forth. And how to do it so that there's a mutual mind and body appear. As Ulrike Kello said yesterday or so, How do you turn 15 people, in your case, into the whole world?

[03:36]

For three months. And 15 people you might not choose to turn into your whole world. But remember equanimity, compassion, you know, somehow it's possible. And I think we're making big progress by having this place now. And I just received the latest bulletin out of the press. One possibility is we have 32 seats around the perimeter. And eight seats, you're counting for me. No, with you. With me. Yes. He's whispering in my ear.

[04:52]

I'm getting old, right? Eight seats, full tan in the middle. That might work as a permanent solution, actually. But anyway, at this stage, we're going to have to make do with what's possible now. in the near term. Yeah, and the most important thing is to develop the momentum within the Sangha and the momentum within the practitioners for the 90-day practice period. And we're trying to, basically, we're trying to create a location. Turn this group of building, this compound, into a somehow unified, interrelated location.

[06:12]

Anyway, you know, I've always enjoyed going into churches. And although the few examples I know of meditation centers in churches, it doesn't work too well. There's just too much upward movement. There are great spaces, but you need a kind of inward movement, a downward-inward movement. But what I've always found great is what they do with the walls. In Romanesque and Gothic churches, stone carving and shaping the walls. Yeah, and in Baroque churches, there's this effusion of plaster and gold and figures that appear out of the walls.

[07:51]

Well, we don't want that in our Zendo. But it's interesting that to create a location They do all this stuff with the walls, heck with the space, the walls. And there's various churches that we like to, I mean, I think there must be churches you like to go into, just to sit, some more than others. Now, what makes it a different space than the home, different space than the city, a space where somehow you feel it's a location? And that's our challenge. How do we... create an unseen inner location here.

[09:02]

Yeah, like yesterday I talked about the Alba Loquita statue, where you don't see the bloom, but the unseen bloom is the location. So anyway, I want to, I hope, before I perish. I'm not in a hurry, by the way. Before I perish, we can really make this a location where we want to practice. And it's already three quarters of the way there. So, you know, there's also a parallel to creating a location in your own practice. Creating a location within phenomena. How does phenomena show itself through itself?

[10:21]

How do you get past the coverings of phenomena? The coverings of consciousness. Well, really you have to sort of pierce phenomena with attentional perception. I mean, we speak about practice moment by moment, moment after moment. We know from Buddhism and we know from physics that the world exists moment after moment after, within moment, moment, moment, etc. How do we notice this?

[11:28]

How do we pierce the coverings of consciousness and phenomena itself? We need some wisdom practice. Now there's a craft to being an acceptable human being. It usually requires a clean face and clean hands. And maybe even fingernails where the moon shows. Clean feet. You don't shit in public. I mean in public. There's just things that we do as the craft of being a person.

[12:40]

At least acceptable to others. And you have to have a high degree of taste and social skills before you try out being Lady Gaga. Lady Gaga, David Bowie, they require a lot of social skills to pull off. They're not just wild, they're skillful. Elton John. But there are also the social skills or the craft of being a Buddha. The etymology of skill is to take the shell off.

[13:51]

You take the shell off. a craft of mind and sensorial crafts of mind and senses. If the world is moment by moment, or moment, moment, Augenblick für Augenblick oder Aufblick Augenblick ist. How do you notice this? Wie bemerkst du das dann?

[14:53]

In English I spell notice in this case K-N-O-W-T-I-C-E. Im Englischen also notice ist sowas wie bemerken, wie notieren, die ist N-O-T. That's what I see in my mind. Yeah. To notice this. To know. Like that. I mean, because it's a knowing that's a noticing. How do you... encounter appearance. How does appearance appear out of phenomena? An appearance appearing out of phenomena is what's meant by dharma. And this, I think, did we call the title of this weekend Sangha Dharma Buddha?

[15:57]

Oh, this is good. So maybe we don't approach this from Buddha to Dharma to Sangha. Maybe we really approach this through the Sangha. Through the institutional and individual practice that Sangha establishes. And through that we discover Dharma. And through Dharma perhaps we create a habitable world for a Buddha. So the four marks of a Dharma are birth, a beginning.

[17:15]

That's not so obvious. What is a beginning? What is a beginning within the Where phenomena shows itself. And the second mark of a Dharma. The way we notice a Dharma. But also the way we create a Dharma in our own experience. The second mark. mark of a dharma is duration, manifestation, duration. You know, we know everything's changing.

[18:16]

And as I endlessly, endlessly say that everything is endlessly changing, that there's no dimensions to the present, it's always past or future, and But we experience dimensions of the present. What is this experience of duration that we call the present? Created, of course, by saccadic scanning and so forth. Yeah, but the word Dharma means literally to hold. The word everything's changing and yet Dharma means... holding in place for a moment.

[19:26]

So the second mark of a dharma is holding the phenomenal world for a moment. And one of these acupunctural tools is, of course, to pause for the particular. Yes. The tools of the craft of mind are like mental postures. Like to pause for the particular. Or to be able to use the four marks as a tool, as part of our wisdom craft.

[20:29]

To establish our engagement with phenomena. Moment. Within moment or after moment etc. And the third mark of a dharma is dissolution. And the fourth is disappearance. And it's going to dissolve anyway because it's all femoral. So disappearance is your wiping the slate clean. You're developing the craft of noticing the appearance of an appearance.

[21:42]

And being engaged there for the moment it is appearing. And then dissolves and it's released by you. It's just, it's an activity of receiving and releasing, receiving and releasing. So you're not just kind of living along and continuing and you know, blah, blah, blah.

[22:43]

You're receiving and releasing, receiving. And you're engaged, you are this receiving and releasing. In one of my favorite koans within the Shogaroku, the book of equanimity, It says, Old Master Chi Cho says, In walking, in sitting, just hold to the moment before thought arises. Just hold to the moment thanks old master but how the hell do you do that yeah how do you hold to the moment before thought arises now most of us you know a moment is a thought

[24:01]

Für die meisten von uns ist ein Moment ja ein Gedanke. But, oh, Master Chisa, okay, he says, hold to the moment. before thought arises. This is truly a wisdom skill. The craft of making yourself a habitable location for a Buddha. You know, there's all kinds of Buddhists around here. We see one hanging on the wall, but there's a whole bunch of them. There's that marble one over there.

[25:10]

You know, and they're kind of hungry ghosts until they find a home in the practitioner. And they're kind of looking at each one of you and saying, hmm, could I live there? Well, too many thoughts arising there, there's no room for me. Oh, hey, there's a woman over there and she's holding to a moment before thought arises. Maybe she's a potential Buddha. Anyway, Old Master Chiso says, in walking, in sitting, just hold to the moment before thought arises and look into it and see not seeing. And seeing not seeing, then put it aside.

[26:23]

Well, this is one of the challenges of noticing the four marks. Now I said, how does phenomena show, show itself from itself. This is the challenge of your wisdom craft of mind and body. Of course, your breath is also part of phenomena. I mean, in fact, the word in English means not stuff out there. The word phenomena means stuff that is known through the senses.

[27:28]

The word phenomena. The word phenomena doesn't mean things. It means It means sensorial, the sensorial world, because that's the way we think, the outside stuff. So how do we make the sensorial world through our senses our own? So we live in this world as our own. This is home. This is family. Like that. Right. So if seeing and breathing are also phenomena, you can use seeing and breathing and so forth as a way of engaging phenomena through phenomena.

[28:33]

Yes, so you see something. When you... Have an enough attentional presence. You have an enough attentional presence. To notice that seeing, to take that seeing as the beginning of appearance. You have to create a beginning, otherwise if you don't have a beginning, you're not going to have a dharma. So part of this practice is establishing the beginnings, the birth, as the first mark is, the birth of the Dharma.

[29:50]

And birth is, you know, you could say the first Dharma's appearance. As the teaching of the five dharmas starts with appearance and then naming and this, etc. But the four marks start with birth. The birth of what? The birth of The world as appearance. The birth of the mind of a Buddha. The birth of you as a Buddha.

[30:52]

I mean, really, I'm not kidding around. This is the way it is. You can use these wisdom tools to explore and engage the sensorial world, which is not other than us. Dogen says the entire world in the ten directions is nothing other than the true human body. How did Dogen get to that place where he said that? Well, we're trying to get there too. The true human body. I mean, if you just think of the corporeal body, the physical body, that doesn't explain beingness. Doesn't explain the mutuality of being as phenomena and other persons.

[32:19]

The mutuality of being. phenomena as beingness and others, other persons, as beingness. I'm stuck, I'm sorry. Don't be sorry, just get unstuck. I know, it's a little complicated because I'm winding words and folding them into each other. Phenomena, you can't describe a person independent of phenomena. And Mahakali, where is Mahakali? Oh yeah, and what's your cushion doing there with a name on it? It's not yours. Oh. I was missing you in there. Thanks. Hi. As he said yesterday, he puts on his raksu and his sitting robe and it makes a location.

[33:33]

And if we were all sitting here in a nudist colony, we'd feel rather different. And partly we create our location And our posture. Yeah, and so you can't define a person separate from other people, friends, parents, etc. Or from what you sit on, what you eat and so forth. The true human body. You notice seeing or breathing.

[34:43]

And you notice it as a kind of beginning. You can make it a beginning appearance. And you stay with, for a moment, you stay with that as a beginning. And for a moment, Maybe you use attentional breath the same way. Not just autonomic breath, which goes on and on. And you know the word moment actually means momentum. If the root is momentum and move. Yeah, so this each moment is rushing into the next moment. So we're trying to stop the momentum of the moment.

[35:53]

Just discover an unmoving moment. And I think a good time to discover an unmoving moment is right now and have a break. Because we haven't got very far into the four marks, so we can continue after.

[36:15]

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