I'm very happy to be sitting here with you again in the midst of these different paths which have brought us together somehow at this moment. Now I'm trying to talk about something that's familiar to all of us. At least all the ingredients are familiar to us. But you arrange the ingredients slightly differently Yeah, it's quite a different picture, experience. You know, when I, again, having just arrived here, landing in Zurich,

[01:03]

And you know, I just arrived and landed in Zurich. I'm always struck by, as I, you know, stand on the moving walkways, all the people coming toward me. Is that really what I said? I trust you. How thoroughly none of these people could be Americans. I mean, you know, most Americans are just displaced Europeans. Or maybe not now, so many Asians are coming into America. But in general, it's just Europeans living there in this... But the bodies of Europeans don't look like the bodies of Americans.

[02:30]

The language shapes the cheeks. Yeah, but something shapes the buttocks too, I don't know. Anyway, the feeling is different. And most of you could be an American and I'd say, oh, that must be a European. So somehow a culture shapes a body. So again, we have this lived body.

[03:31]

Maybe I should have said, you know, I should have called the seminar Body Self. You know, what do I mean by Body Self? We certainly, again, live our body, live as our body. But how can I find words, the same words, in English and German, with Marie-Louise's help, that convey something slightly different? The same words, but I want to Well, anyway, you understand what I mean. Now, Marie-Louise asked me yesterday, could I say something more about authenticate?

[05:04]

And someone, I guess, suggested we could translate it as realize in German anyway. Now, why am I paying attention to the words like this? Because we're speaking about the craft of practice. How you... It always seems funny that it's handwork, but maybe it is. How you inject into... the flow of your own activity and thinking. So in your ordinary activity, the practice is somehow

[06:09]

injected into your ordinary activity. And your ordinary activity begins to bear different results. Even give birth to a different world. Or you notice your world somewhat differently. And through noticing your world, a little differently. It might be the nudge or shift that, yeah, you have some insight or enlightenment experience. Oh, we're just talking about a craft. rooted in enlightenment and so it begins to open us to what we mean by an enlightening world.

[07:51]

Can you say this again? Really? Or it can begin to move us in our activity and thinking a craft rooted in enlightenment, can begin to move us into this world which we call enlightening. How do we let the world enlighten us, which is really what's happening? Wie können wir also die Welt uns erleuchten lassen? Und das ist eigentlich, was wirklich passiert. But we have to let the world in. Also müssen wir die Welt herein lassen. Why don't we let the world in in our usually seamless self-thinking, self-referential thinking? Wie können wir die Welt herein lassen in unsere nahtlose...

[08:55]

Now, I don't want to give self a bad name. We all are individual selves, maybe. And the word citta, which sometimes means mind and even can mean self, Das Wort cheater, das meistens als Geist, aber manchmal sogar als Selbst verstanden wird. Das kann auch diese Kontinuität des Seins bedeuten, das nicht, that doesn't. imply any continuous substance. So it's the seamlessness of self-referential thinking I'm speaking about, not simply that sometimes we reference things through the self.

[10:21]

And I think if we can see it, that it's the seamlessness that's the problem, not the self. Then we can do something about it. We can find the seams and separate them a bit. And if we take the clothes, the thought clothes apart, maybe we can keep some of the seams or sew them together a bit differently. How do we see the seams in the self?

[11:30]

Now, if I say it that way, you can begin to have something to practice with. Let me just refer to one of the common gate phrases I offer you, suggest to you. already connected. Now, already connected is a phrase you inject into your thinking is in contrast to and an antidote to the assumption that we're already separated.

[12:38]

So it makes you notice that we normally think, oh, I'm separate from you, I'm separate from the world, etc. We take it as a fact of our world. we take it so for granted we don't notice that it's actually a cultural assumption. So when I look at each of you I actually inject into my looking, feeling, thinking the feeling already connected. You know, if I look at my friend Frank right in front of me, and if my assumption is we're already connected,

[13:59]

This is very different than an assumption we're separated. So now I'm acting and thinking in a context of connectedness rather than separation. and the flower of each so-called separate human being this flowering in the same garden blooming in the same garden. So in such a way I want to find ways to bring the sense of body-self into our activity. And Dogen clearly emphasized also this crafter practice.

[15:15]

And Dogen has clearly emphasized this craft of practice. Because there's almost no generalizations in his teaching. You can't practice generalizations. They're just like walls. So, again, he used this word shusho. As a compound, it just means something like to do. Yeah, but the shu just means to practice. And the show part means to authenticate or certify.

[16:39]

So Dogen would assume that when we take a word and live with it, Its various meanings would come out. Like if we use the word authenticate. The word author is in there. So we begin to feel, oh yes, we're authoring the world. We're writing our own world, our own script. So I don't know, in English at least, you couldn't really translate this as real life.

[17:45]

Because realize means in English at least to comprehend fully. But does it also mean to put into reality, right? Not really. You can say I had a vision of a, if you're an architect, I had a vision of a building, finally I built it, I realized it, but it's not the same as authenticate, just to confirm its existence. So you're making the world. When you authenticate, you're verifying that's the way it is.

[19:15]

If I say tree without the sense of treeing, I'm confirming that that's an object and not an activity. Now, you know, you may think, oh, this is a lot of trouble. This guy is too intellectual or something, you know. But I'm not an intellectual. I do not believe my thoughts. But I use... This thinking. Okay. But, you know, enlightenment is a big deal, you know, isn't it?

[20:18]

Well, so all I'm asking you is do some little things with the way you think about things. Yeah. And may, I guess it is, means... May like the month? No, it's a Japanese word. The Japanese word may means delusion or illusion. But it actually means just getting lost. So if you convey the self to things, You get lost in things. So how can you not convey the self to things? That's the problem I'm presenting you. Most of the time we can't do anything about it.

[21:47]

Sometimes we can do something. And through practice gives us more of a chance to do something about it. If you start noticing, geez, I just thought about those things entirely in relationship to self or to myself. Whether I like it or not. So you notice it, you can pull back a little and say, oh, I'll just look at it without... liking or disliking it. Sukhirashi says when he was a teenager his first enlightenment experience was when he ate some buried, boiled, spoiled pickles. I've told you this story before.

[23:03]

He and the other young monks with his teacher, they know his teacher would eat anything. And they had some spoiled pickles. So they just didn't want to eat. So they took them out in the garden and buried them. And a few days later, in comes Gyokushin Soan with the buried pickles. He'd found them in the garden. And he said, boil them, we're going to eat them. So they boiled these boiled pickles and they sat down. And his teacher, without commenting, just started eating them.

[24:11]

So Sukhir, she picked it up with his chopsticks, looked at it. And it's the first time he felt free from likes and dislikes. From preferences. So just a little opening like that in this opening the seams of likes and dislikes. You can see into things. Now yesterday I mentioned that, you know, kanji characters, you know them in your hand or your fingers. You know, you weren't there.

[25:19]

When you try to say, what is that character? You write it with your hand and you can figure it out. That's like spelling is done also in German. Really? If you don't quite know, you write it two different, three different versions. And then you see what it looks like. But although English, anyway, is not so clearly, is not so obviously physical as the... Japanese or Chinese. Because the fact that the Chinese person knows it in his hand, because that's how he practices it in a certain stroke order. There's a physical component that's there.

[26:26]

But in English too. If I say I'm talking right now. I say, but... The gesture of... Do you see the gesture? But... In effect, I'm saying, but... But if I say however, which in the dictionary are basically synonyms, but if I say however, but is like that, however is like that. However, let's look at it again. But stop. And In every word, there's actually a gesture.

[27:48]

And you can feel when a person speaks with a gestural language. And it's not just a burning talking head. He, by the way, is not a talking head at all. Okay. I remember Sukhiroshi. He had a stick like this. And I... Yeah, he carried one. He gave such sticks to me. Yeah, so... Yeah, so I have one. And it's originally a back scratcher. So, you know, these guys are sitting there in this hot weather with flies all over them and, you know, no air conditioning and no – so they either had whisks to get the – like a horse to get the flies off them.

[29:22]

Taking a bath wasn't so easy. They had to carry water and all that stuff. So you're back itched. So while you're teaching, you're going... So it turns into, as Sukhirashi used to say, because it's a back scratcher, it can reach anywhere. So it becomes a teaching staff. That also represents the backbone. And it's also, I mean, ideally, I've never checked this one, it stands by itself.

[30:24]

If this platform is flat, because when you hold it, you have the feeling in your backbone of your backbone being upright. So Sukhirashi used to hold this stick when he gave talks. And I used to think of it as, you know, like painters. I knew a lot of painters when I lived in New York and even San Francisco. And it was very common for a painter to leave the radio on in the background while he painted, he or she. And sort of like the radio took care of some activity of mind, So you could concentrate on the painting.

[31:39]

So I sort of thought the stick was Sukhiroshi's radio. That he, you know, while he was talking, his body wanted to do something, so he distracted his body with the stick. But now I understand it a little differently. You know, the root metaphor of Buddhism. A metaphor that's present in all aspects of Buddhism. Eine Metapher, die in allen Aspekten des Buddhismus vorhanden ist, ist Ruhe und Bewegung. Das ist eine Metapher, aber gleichzeitig auch eine Beschreibung unserer Aktivität. Dinge tauchen auf und verschwinden.

[32:40]

Now a no, if you have ever seen a no play or kabuki play, there's in the actors, in the no actors, in the kabuki more explicitly, there's movement and stillness. And movement is very specific, and then there's a stop, and then there's movement, and then there's a stop. And in the stop, often the feeling comes out. I use the word paratactic, paratactic pause. Ich verwende das Wort parataktisch oder parataktische Pause.

[34:07]

Yeah, and parataktisch means just to put things, arrange things side by side. Und parataktisch bedeutet, Dinge nebeneinander anzuordnen. Now, I've used this word before. Ich habe das Wort auch schon früher verwendet. And it... And... It's actually a very useful way to give a feeling of what I mean in Buddhism by lived body. Or the self body. The body self. It's a body that... doesn't imply a continuity of substance. If you look at a page of words, each word is sitting beside each other.

[35:18]

And between each word, there's Nowadays, in the old days, they used to just run the words together. There's a space of the paper. And... And practice is more to kind of read the page more than to read the words. This metaphor of silence and movement means the silence is always there. It's not just between the words. Hmm. Gladly beyond any experience.

[36:35]

Your eyes have their silence. Suzuki Roshi's eyes had their silence. His actions had their silence, a silence. It's like in each movement, each movement was clear and articulated, then there was a silence. It's like there's a grammar of sentence, a grammar of language where each word, and then it's a comma or colon or whatever. There was a grammar of gesture. And the center of that grammar was in his hara.

[38:00]

The pauses always went back into the hara. And so the silence could keep appearing in his actions. He came from silence. I borrowed somebody's magazine on Japan. from the table yesterday to look at. And Maria Louise read something which said the tea, the Japanese don't think Westerners can understand the tea ceremony. And then I guess it said there, and maybe they can't understand Mozart. Let's get even here. I don't know if that's a good comparison. Because there is something about the tea ceremony that a Westerner can of course understand.

[39:31]

But it's not immediately accessible. Now, these, again, I'm going back to these clothes. As a body shape. These clothes are not about a freedom of the body to move. That's clear. They're about a particular posture. They're the opposite of spandex. Das ist das Gegenteil von Spandex. Do you have that word in German? Spandex, okay. Das Wort kennen wir in Deutsch. They are meant to be adjusted all the time.

[40:33]

Die sind dafür gedacht, dass man sie ständig anpassen muss. They are meant to be a problem to wear. Die sind dafür gedacht, dass sie ein Problem sind zu tragen. And every time you adjust them, you also are adjusting your posture. Passt man auch seine Haltung wieder an. I remember when I went to Eiji, lived in this monastery in Japan. It was very, very hot and muggy after I was there for a while. And in every little crease, the mosquitoes could just go through layers of clothing if they found the crease. So I got the lightest, thinnest clothes I could get. And I had an okesa made of some sort of plastic that wouldn't stay together. So I sewed a little velcro And so I'd go, you know, when I took my robe, I'd have to, because it would make a noise, I'd go, ahem.

[42:03]

Ahem. Well, they got onto it right away and said, uh-uh. The monks came and cut off the velcro. Because it's about adjusting the robes. So in tea ceremony, there's a point where you stop. You find your posture. And even if your kimono does not need adjustment, you adjust your kimono. This is an aspect of tea ceremony that maybe Westerners wouldn't get naturally. You know, matcha, the tea ceremony, is nothing but instant tea.

[43:05]

Instant. It shows how backward she is, you know, not part of popular culture. So you just add powdered leaf and you whip it up and drink it. But then you need clothes. You have to adjust. So in this adjustment, silence comes out. Maybe it's like, I don't know, maybe driving a car, there's the stillness of the shift.

[44:07]

On one hand, you're steering. On the other hand, you're just still, waiting for the shift. Then you shift into another gear. And then you're in the stillness of that. So there's a kind of feeling that actually Suzuki Roshi had the stick as a kind of stillness. While he was speaking, his left hand was touching his stillness. So the stillness in movement was present and you could feel it in his actions. So this sense of a body-self Or this is a taste, at least, of what I mean by a body-self.

[45:23]

Yeah, and we have to stop now, so... Silence. Thank you.

[45:25]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_72.41