So in that sense it's a womb. And one way of practicing is actually to feel this is a stomach or a womb or you're inside an organic event. Now, what we're working with here when we talk this way are attitudes. Now, I have said quite a number of times that I would look at Suzuki Roshi's teaching after some years and I'd say, what is he really teaching? I would have to come down to, he's teaching attitudes. I didn't know if I should tell people that I was devoting my life to having the right attitude. But it actually is something like that.

[01:15]

Because the practice, the zazen, the experience of zazen, are all influenced by your attitude. And the two truths at a level of It might be scientifically true. It might be philosophically true. I would say it's probably pretty close to both. But how you enrich that or make use of that is your attitudes toward it. this philosophical or scientific perhaps truth. So what I'm talking about now is our attitudes.

[02:18]

Now, the other sense of garba is as embryo. But this is not only a womb, but each particular event is an embryo. So from each action, as I suggested, myriad things are born. Now, The full perception of this was said to uplift the heart. And it's a word which isn't as familiar as bodhicitta, but it's very similar to bodhicitta. It's cittapada. Cittapada. And it means the uplifting of the heart that occurs through seeing how things exist.

[03:43]

So what is seen? As I was saying yesterday, that things are immeasurable. We don't know where the streams flow. And as well as immeasurable, there's an unknowability to it. We can't put boundaries on things. We don't really know for whom the flowers are red. And And in addition to immeasurable and unknowable, there's a quality of, as I said, hiddenness. And as I said, we touch this hiddenness with this full passage of being.

[04:46]

So this sense of hiddenness and immeasurability is you do not know the consequences of your actions. Or how things are connected. And in a way, you can see how this guy who became a fox for 500 lives got into trouble. Because as an adept meditator, it assumes he was described as a Zen master. He could do what we talked about a couple of days ago. to look past the cause, to look past the afflictions in the mind, and see the ox of the Dharmakaya whitening.

[06:07]

And there's this one set of the ten ox-fling pictures which was popular in China. The ox gets whiter in each picture. So it's getting whiter and then at some point there's the pacing around of the ox. So this has both the sense of the craft, the gradual craft of practice, and the enlightenment, sudden enlightenment of the turning around in one's being. And enlightenment or realization is a turning around, a changing of direction. So this Zen master, soon to be Fox, saw through the afflicted mind to the whitening, turning around, facing around ox and concluded that the ox could be entirely white.

[07:39]

The Dharmakaya could be pure and free of suffering. And in a certain way, it's true. But the emphasis in the koan is that there is still this pulse of form and emptiness. And even of affliction and purity. Hillman says at some point, perhaps influenced by Buddhism, that the first step is to fall apart. The second is to come together. So Sashin is a good chance to fall apart. That's why we need seven days and many hours. Because we need a certain re-entry process. So hopefully now the six days are beginning to come back together.

[09:14]

And from Doksan it seems like you're coming together. And at this point I always wish I'd started Doksan earlier. But I'm doing pretty well, so maybe tomorrow we'll have some chance for some free duksan. And a couple of times I've almost talked about Dogen's emphasis on the face-to-face meeting. As the ultimate measure of truth and the seed of culture. If everything comes down to this womb embryo moment, for us human beings, that's most fundamentally in face-to-face meetings. Even in our culture, the sense of a trial by a jury in the end comes down to face-to-face meetings.

[10:27]

So I was, but I didn't mention it because I was afraid when you came to Doksan, I'd have all these people staring at me with this heavy feeling of face-to-face meeting. And I'd have to hold up a mirror in which no image would appear. Then I'd bow deeply. Yeah. Yeah. Now, when you take a phrase like dharmas have no beginning and no end, this is understood, the attitude brought to it to understand it in a certain way. When you pick up one dharma, because it has no beginning and no end, you pick up all dharmas.

[11:52]

And this is expressed in the koans often as they talk about dying thread. This is like you take a reel or spool of thread and you touch... Thread? Thread, yeah. Like a sewing thread, yeah. Yeah, I know. What did you translate? You said dying thread? Yeah, with color. Oh, ein färbender Faden. I thought a dying like death. Oh, yeah. Afraid dying thread. You poor thing. Ein ausgepant versterbender Faden. It's the tailor worried about the giants.

[12:55]

Ja, wie der Schneider, der sich um die Riesengedanken macht. Anyway, that you can take a spool of thread and you touch dye to it, and the whole reel is... It's all dyed at once. So you touch one thing and you touch everything. And even with a sense of hiddenness, you touch one thing, you touch everything. How to bring yourself to that state of mind where you feel when you touch one thing, you touch everything. And to understand the world like this is said to uplift the heart. Because it's a very hopeful vision of the world. Because its interconnectedness is right in the embryo of your every action.

[13:57]

That myriad things are born. Now there's also a sense here which I can mention, it's been on my mind to say it, is that the six senses are sometimes called the six sources. The six sources, because the world, the source of... Sources. Because the source of the world is in your perceptions. And so your eyes are not just passively seeing, your eyes are spoken of as a power, eye power, ear power.

[15:13]

Because there's a potency, potency, power, to the kind of consciousness that comes up on seeing, hearing, and so forth. And what is the potency of a consciousness? Or the potency of a sense field? Is it, since we're emphasizing in the Sashinan earlier, seminar's karma? When karma enters into a sense field, a memory or association, what does your consciousness do to it? It may make it into something rigid and worse. It may recontextualize.

[16:19]

So the sense of this is how you hold a sense field and what streams of consciousness can move into a sense field and recontextualize a memory or transform a negative or afflicted emotion to a positive and so forth. So part of this in yogic practice is to realize the potency, power of your consciousness. For example, can you bring an attitude into each consciousness, a feeling of the hiddenness and immeasurability of each moment?

[17:22]

In such a way that your heart is uplifted. And you feel your being. You feel being, our being, your being on each moment. on every perception. The Portuguese poet Pessoa speaks very much in the way phrases or wados, turning words, are used in koans. How this phrase from a poem, somebody else's poem, that everything he sees is the size of himself, and how that uplifted his heart when he began finding that phrase gripped his perceptions. He speaks of seeing suddenly when he saw the grocer boy on the corner, he became a spiritual being.

[18:49]

Through this phrase, everything I see is the size of myself. Which is not so different from the perception of the Dharmakaya. Elsewhere, Pessoa says, I am a sailor on the unknown sea of myself. And woanders sagt Pessoa, ich bin ein Seemann auf der unbekannten See von mir selbst. Ulrike told me to bring a little Western culture in, so I did my best. She actually gives me notes before that. And I usually don't do so well. So, just to finish, I hope that it's possible that this way of seeing the world, of feeling the world in your own presence,

[20:24]

and even through the pain and discomfort of Sashin you can feel your own heart uplifted to be in such a creative magical world and if you can see it that way in your own way of perceiving. I think the world actually exists that way. And through practice, we can remind ourselves of it. Okay.

[21:29]

Thank you very much. May our intention equally penetrate every being and place through the true merit of this way. All I want to do is to say, you know, you're out, you're not out. All I want to do is to say, you know, you're out, you're not out. I'm going to start with the beginning, because I want to be able to do this. I want to be able to do this. I want to do this. Not surpassed penetrating and perfect dharma, it is rarely met with even in a hundred thousand million powers.

[22:47]

Having yet to see and listen to, Do you remember and accept? I am about to taste the truth of that godless worst. Eberhard said something funny to me the other day.

[24:14]

I said, knowing I think you're the oldest person who's ever done a sashin with me. I feel I'm pretty old, but you're older than me. So... I said to him, how are you doing? He said, it's the survival of the unfittest. And that's how I feel sometimes. And unfortunately one of my students didn't survive and her name is on the altar. And the Buddhist name I gave her. And she died of breast cancer a couple of days ago. And she tried very hard to stay alive the last, I think, I don't know exactly, four or five years, because she had a 16-year-old daughter, a daughter who's now 16.

[25:47]

And I remember when she became pregnant, she... was thinking about maybe she shouldn't have the baby because she wasn't going to live with the father and so forth. So I encouraged her to have the baby, and I said, the community will help take care of you. So she's ended up actually living the rest of her life at the Green Gulch Center, which I founded. And I think Robin, her daughter, is now going to live with another family who lives at Green Gulch.

[26:48]

So this evening I would like to do the chant the Daihi Shindirani as well as we do usually, but also in this case chant it for her. So I'm explaining so that you, just to share it with you, and also so that you understand why, when we do the service, it'll be the same length, but slightly different. Really, only the echo is different. That's the part the Doan says. Now, someone described one of the three people who left.

[27:56]

described, said that, I seem to be doing a high Buddhist monastic ritual. And I sympathize with this point of view. I'm a person who refused to go to either my high school or college graduations. I refused to wear a tie and so forth like that. So how did I get wrapped up in this huge tie? Sometimes I don't know. It's the biggest tie. It takes me forever to get it straight. But I assure you, I now know how to tie this tie much better than a regular tie.

[29:21]

It goes back actually to a perception I had when I first started practicing Buddhism. A large flock of Roshis came to San Francisco. Their black robes, you know. And I in fact called them a flock at that time, and one of the students almost left because of my remark. This was 60, I don't know, two or three. I'd been practicing a year or so. So Tsukiroshi asked me to say something to this group.

[30:43]

And actually I gave him something and he said I shouldn't. That's for later, he said. So I said something very simple. which has actually characterized my practice ever since. Which I said, you can't take a Japanese redwood tree and strip it of its limbs, branches, and bark and expect it to live transplanted even in California. You have to leave it intact for some time as it adjusts to the soil of the West. So this is the bark of a Japanese redwood tree growing in a temple somewhere.

[31:44]

And this must be apparent to most of you. I've eliminated everything from the service and practice and orioke practice and so forth that I felt was extraneous. That I felt was either Japanese culture or not Buddhist culture or not teaching. In other words, it had to be either teaching or Buddhist culture.

[32:51]

Now, in the Oyoki practice, there's only one thing I've eliminated, but in the service and things like that, there's many things I've eliminated. And Suzuki Roshi actually was worried sometimes that I would do things too much my own way. And Haruka met Mrs. Suzuki and realizes how outspoken she is. And Ulrike met Mrs. Suzuki and realized how openly she expressed everything. And Mrs. Suzuki said to Oksan, don't worry about him, he's just like me. I don't know if that reassured him or not. But anyway, we've always been good friends, Oksana and I. Yeah.

[34:11]

Now, I wanted to not change things or eliminate things right away unless I worked very closely with Suzuki Roshi or Tobin Chino Roshi. So I waited quite a long time and lived in Japan for four years or more before I began to see what I felt I could do. could eliminate without doing things too much my own way. And I think, what is it now, 30 years later, that actually all in all I did pretty well. That intuitively I think I made, either by knowledge or by intuition, made the, on the whole, pretty good decisions about what to incorporate and not to.

[35:35]

Someone else might disagree, but... Anyway, this is my way and I have to be clear about it. And as I implied the other day, it's something a Westerner can do actually in some ways better than an Asian. It's harder for an Asian to know because he's embedded in his own culture. And usually, an Asian teacher doesn't know Western culture very well. So I feel, despite my refusal to wear a tie and accept degrees, I'm embedded in this responsibility I have. And I'm bringing this up because really we've been talking about the Dharmakaya.

[36:48]

And by implication, the Sambhogakaya. And it occurred to me that one aspect of Buddhism that in a way I've been wrong about or haven't understood so well is the idea endemic in Asian Buddhism is the transfer of merit. Now, most of the services, Buddhist services, the echo is involved with offering the merit to everybody, offering the merit to somebody, transferring the merit to somebody, and so forth.

[37:52]

And this seemed to me, along with the fox shrines and so forth and Zen Buddhist temples, pretty, you know, some sort of popular religion to make it all work for folks. I didn't actually, I mean, really fundamentally, I didn't put it down. I just didn't see how it could make sense in the West or made sense as practice. And I'm sharing this with you, I guess, because I am. But I must have a reason, I suppose. And as usual, it's the feeling that this is so fundamental or central to practice that we should be clear about it.

[39:17]

Or at least as clear as we can be. And I also think that it... Mm-hmm. It's the kind of thing which we reap the merit of later. So in a way, what I'm emphasizing here is the degree to which practice produces merit. And I've tried to save those details of practice which later enter your consciousness stream, your activity stream, and produce merit. Now, there's two basic ideas in merit, one that you can produce it and the second that you can transfer it.

[40:24]

And this is intrinsic in the idea of the Bodhisattva. Okay. Now, I don't mean to going back to the ordinary temple life in Asia, that all of it ultimately is, you know, practice and so forth. Very much of it is simply... institutionalized forms of people's needs. And not always practice needs. But what is surprising to me is the degree to which the seeds of most of those things in some way are fundamental to practice and arise from yogic experience.

[41:44]

So I'm not trying to give you... a general explanation of merit, but just as I see the root of the idea as practice. Now, one person coming to Togsan gave me a teaching. That the dharmakaya of immediate entry is a single bow. Not that each activity is preceded by or followed by a bow, but each actor thought itself is in effect a bow.

[42:50]

When we have that state of mind which is not contained by the six. Now, someone else gave me a useful word in Doksha. And I'm always looking for useful words that touch both our ordinary language and can also be used to turn language or understanding into the two truths or a deeper way of looking at things. And this person said that when she has a state of mind where she names something, as soon as she names it or identifies it, that state of mind collapses.

[43:52]

And I'd like to expand that idea so that you can understand the idea of merit a little better. She also used the word coma, which I don't know exactly if she meant it in this way, but there is a quality of these minds that they pass by us as if we were in a coma. Okay, so... Now, the Sambhogakaya body is often called a reward body, meaning the bodhisattva is generated by meritorious actions.

[45:25]

And those meritorious actions generate a reward body. So the two main translated names of the Sambhogakaya are the bliss body and the reward body. And I've usually ignored the reward body translation because I didn't really see the connection. And the connection is very simple, actually. In early Buddhism you have a form body and a dharma body. Now, some scholars feel that the dharma body really means the body of the teachings of the dharma. And the idea of the emphasis being not on dharma but on body is a creation of contemporary Buddhologists in a confusion over plurals in Sanskrit.

[46:50]

And the emphasis on the body and not on the Dharma is now a creation of overactive Buddhists in a Confucian context. Overactive Buddhists in a Confucian context. Good try. Please. Yeah, that's right. So, but all I can say is my inherited teaching and what I inherited in studying the koans, it's very clear that the emphasis is on body, not dharma. Is the emphasis on body, not Dharma?

[47:51]

Yes, so it's a body, an experiential body. So first you have in the early days, again, for those of you who have scholarly interests, it's really not clear, but in the early days basically the consensus on the whole is that there were two bodies, a form body and a dharma body. What are the two bodies? The form and dharma. The rupa kaya. Form in the sutras, it's form and emptiness. Rupa is form. So basically the form body and the dharmakaya body were just paralleled form and emptiness.

[49:08]

Anyway, so the sambhogakaya becomes a bridge between the two. And the connection is the recognition that there's a mind-created body. Not just your form body of flesh and blood and so forth, but a body that your mind and your lived life creates. And in contemporary philosophy the idea of a lived body is discussed quite a bit nowadays. Okay. So that's a little background.

[50:20]

Now during the session, my, at some point, I don't know when, the fifth day or so, I got, I was on the edge of getting a bit sick. And I could say, being truthful, that I am very seldom sick. And I could also say, being truthful, that I'm always sick. What I mean is, maybe I'm just getting old, of course. And actualized suffering. Naming is a projected suffering. Old age is an actualized suffering. You don't have to translate that. Maybe I need three translators and you could each take turn.

[51:26]

Which is that I have the feeling that sickness is something that ebbs and flows in you, and depending on your immune system and your energy and so forth, you either keep it under control or etc. When I tend to get sick, I have two physical manifestations. If the tips of my fingers get cold, I'm usually going to be a little sick or possibly sick in a day or two. And the other is my legs cannot stand any pain. I don't know what it is, but it's like... I don't even have to cross them, but if I cross them for one moment, they're like somebody's driving nails into them.

[52:54]

And I think, well, I'm the Buddhist teacher here, I have to sit here with nails. I feel like Jesus. Nailed to a lotus. That's a bad joke, I'm sorry. Anyway, so I try to study that, of course, you know, what else is there to do. So sometimes I used to think maybe it's just my immune system is so occupied in getting this flu germ to pass through the station of my body and go on down the track. But I think that's not the main reason. Somehow, when you're partly sick, it collapses my mind, the ability of my mind or consciousness to absorb pain. And I think a lot of you noticed that by the end of the sashin you have a mind which handles the discomfort of sitting in a very different way than in the first days.

[54:25]

At least for your sakes, I profoundly hope so. Because I wouldn't want to make any promises on the third day, but I hope anyway that by the fourth and fifth or sixth and seventh days, your mind is sustaining, absorbing, etc. Now, the mind that you have at the end of Sashin is a mind produced by merit. Or is a mind produced by meditation. So let me try to characterize a mind, as I hinted at yesterday, that has a potency or a merit-producing quality.

[55:53]

Such a mind can... absorb or contain, if you again think of it as a stream, it can contain various streams or layers of mind. Now I'm afraid this may be a little technical for you, but I'll just try to make it simple. And such a mind also can carry the activity, the ripples of self and ego. And also self and selflessness. And such a mind can have not only activity, but also stillness.

[57:07]

So that it will reflect the world as well as act within the world. Now, there's other qualities the mind has. It can hold the present. And it can retain memory. And absorb experience. Okay. So if you develop such a mind through sashin and other practices, And it's related to merit because as you get to be able to see through past and more free of afflictive emotions, your mind doesn't get literally bogged down in afflicted emotions.

[58:09]

Yeah, so such a mind is produced, this activity is called merit. And what it also does is it recontextualizes memory. Because mind also has negative potency. For instance, if every time a memory comes into your mind, it comes in the same way, it tends to rigidify your consciousness. Please catch her if she falls. And any therapist would know it's necessary for a person to recontextualize memory. But in Buddhism, a merit-producing mind is a state of mind that automatically recontextualizes memory.

[59:40]

And literally can transform places, impurities and so forth, into purities or into things that have good effect on you. And it's such a merit-producing mind, or merit-produced mind, that becomes enlightened. Sorry. Your usual state of mind involved a distraction or your ego and so forth doesn't have sufficient perspective or ability to absorb, to see things in two or three ways at once. So you want a state of mind which has activity in it and at the same time stillness in it.

[60:54]

Now, such a mind, we can call a mind, produces your body and your activity. And this is considered the bodhisattva's body or the process of becoming a bodhisattva. And it's generated through your activity. And it is understood that it can be passed to others. This sashin is an attempt to create a situation where you may catch a feeling for this mind. Both through your meditation practice and through my being here and other students who have practiced for a time being here.

[62:07]

durch eure eigene Meditationspraxis, dadurch, dass ich hier bin, und durch eben die Gemeinschaft mit den anderen, die hier auch praktizieren. And it can't be done alone, but together we can activate this merit-producing mind. Allein kann man das nicht schaffen, aber gemeinsam können wir diesen verdienstproduzierenden mind aktivieren. The mind of realization or the potentiality of realization. And such a mind gets wounded by distraction. And such a mind gets wounded or collapses by a simple thing of noting or naming your experience. So the practice of mindfulness is a way to, on the one hand, develop a mind that doesn't collapse, And also through mindfulness to maintain a mind that doesn't collapse.

[63:27]

And if you can do that in your lay life or touch that in your lay life, then lay and monastic life, there's no distinction. So as I suggested, such a mind uplifts the heart. And such a mind can uplift the hearts of others. And if your mind has the capacity to absorb experience, To absorb the pain of my legs so I don't notice it much. Such a mind is actually manifest in the small physical activities we do. It's manifest in how we hit the bell at doksan. It's manifest in how the incense is passed to me or I take it.

[64:42]

And this level of practice is based on enactment. In the context of sâshin we develop a way of being together which more has the possibility of transferring this mind or this merit. And you can begin to feel that mind in your daily activity when you see that the grocer is a spiritual being. Or suddenly a homeless person awakens your capacity to love others. The homeless person at that moment has passed you a merit-producing mind.

[65:54]

And merit-producing because the stream of your mind has the capacity to understand the world in terms of Tathagatagarbha. Because the stream of your mind has the capacity to see the world as the Tathagata Garbha. I think we've actually said and talked about enough.

[66:58]

I think if you can understand the value of this kind of mind, and you can see when it collapses and when you can sustain it, your practice has come a long way. We are in tension, equally, perpetually, in every degree.

[68:10]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_73.15