Well, this weather is a lot of fun. Not for the servers, I think. April in Paris. I don't know if it'll help much in this very dry drought year we've had, where I expect some fire danger this summer. So maybe it'll help a little. Can't harm, right? Maybe it should be very deep. And we're warming up for Sashim on the second day. Getting used to sashimi. And the atmosphere in the zendo, ideally, I mean, we design a zendo so the atmosphere is different from the atmosphere of other buildings, places, spaces.

[01:15]

In Japan, they have a... spring cleaning day, which is announced in the newspaper, I believe. It's supposed to be a specific time, but somewhat on, depending on the weather and all, they announce it. People take everything out of their house, the Shinto shrine, the Buddhist shrine, they take everything. And I remember Sukershi saying that we should have a We should come into the Zendo with that kind of attitude to take everything out of our life. Have some fresh look at ourselves or experience of ourselves. But of course some things you can't leave at the Zendo door. They come in with you. But sitting still, sitting

[02:19]

following a schedule gives us some opportunity to penetrate the, I think sometimes the core, feel into the core of our story, of our sense, historical sense, our psychological sense of who we are. Maybe your family comes up. You suddenly find your family in this zendo. They're not sure they want to be here, but, you know, they end up being here. Particularly if your family are good Christians, they're not sure they want to be brought into this sendo, but can't be helped. That's one of my favorite Japanese words, shikataganai. Can't be helped. And you can use zazen practice as a kind of psychological process to just sit in your stuff with some faith in the practice of acceptance.

[04:05]

And sometimes, if you do this enough, you throw off thought coverings. And this idea of thought coverings, I've tried to talk about a number of times and many times, and that we have a kind of thought she's. And one of the examples I give trying to I get a feeling for it, and the most common example I've used is when your arm goes to sleep. If you can't find your arm, you know, but yet you finally find a little finger or you touch your... and you suddenly locate your arm. But your arm's still asleep, but you've located your arm. So what you've located is the mental image of your arm. And once you've located the mental image of your arm, or maybe sitting Seiza at mealtime or something, your legs are gone and you have to locate them because we have to get up.

[05:18]

But once you can locate one part, then you can, through the mental image of the leg or the arm, you can begin to find the whole leg or your arm. Now this is very useful, but the point I'm making is the body we inhabit is a thought body, not usually a physical body. And that thought body is loaded with karma. So it's almost like you're in a shell. And the shell is holding your stomach, holding your back, etc. And you can do various kinds of physical practices, yoga and such things. Charlotte Selvers' sensory awareness practice. I saw her at Esalen, 98. She wanted to take a picture of me, and she wanted a picture of us together, and Esalen wanted a picture of us together.

[06:26]

So... And she's quite determined. I said I could only come to part of her seminar at St. Ulrich near Johanneshof this summer. She said, no, you've come to all of it. It's hard to argue with her, too, because she said, don't argue. She almost says, don't argue with me. You know I might die soon. I'm not old enough to say that quite yet. Okay, Charlotta. So I had my picture taken with her and she said, you know, I've shrunk, Dick. So I said, okay. So I get down on my knees. I think I was still taller than she is. She used to be fairly big. Yeah. Yeah. But Charlotte's work and many other approaches, I think what Eureka does, and Susanna, all open us up, open up parts of, get our body outside its thought coverings.

[07:51]

But it can also happen like an eggshell breaking. And if you keep going into the center of the suffering or the stuff, the complications, And at the same time you're practicing acceptance. Acceptance, acceptance, acceptance. Welcoming. Welcoming and giving away. Welcoming and giving away. The way perhaps a water wheel accepts the water and then gives it away. Accepts the water, gives it away. Your fresh, transparent body may appear. If your fresh, transparent body appears, sometimes it shakes off the thought sheaths. This is a traditional Buddhist idea I'm speaking about, but putting it in our context of working with our psyche and what I would call our, as I did the other day, our mythopoetic or mythopoeic identity, the way we put ourselves together mythologically, poetically, and psychologically.

[09:20]

It's good, but it obscures our fresh, transparent body I don't know how much to get into this whole idea of, you know, because we have a body, we have a sense of a body and mind that's locally defined, locally, locally dimensioned. And in yoga culture we have a sense of, I don't know, the body as a portion of the whole. And the whole is all these interactions. of inner awareness, but rather as interactions that have no definite boundary.

[10:47]

Instead of being locally dimensioned, we could say maybe it's locally potentiated. The potential of the immediate location is your aliveness. Sorry, it sounds sort of philosophical, but if you want to shake loose your thought sheath, you've got to shake yourself loose from the idea of a body that's just here, and the idea of a mind that's just here. For this mind and body of interactions has no determinate boundaries. Because this kind of potentiation of the interactions that are present each moment can extend quite far, penetrating into the phenomenal world and into other people and into your past.

[11:54]

and your future. So when you come into the Zendo you leave your ordinary life behind as much as possible and enter into this practice of acceptance. And I think if you really want your practice to work, you need a faith in acceptance. And I can't, I don't have any magic way to give you, inject faith into you, you know. Faith and acceptance. But what does it mean? What do I mean to faith and acceptance? Some kind of sense that things are as they are. And you don't have any choice, you might as well have faith in things are as they are, as they is.

[12:58]

And Shikantaza means this kind of faith. It's based on this faith in acceptance, and just faith in a somatic and phenomena, phenomena, phenomena, phenomenaic. intelligence or knowing. So we don't, you know, sometimes we say, it takes a long time to come to know zazen. Sri Krishna said, we say this not because it takes a long time, but because we don't want you to measure. If we say, oh, you can learn in two or three months, you don't have faith in practice. So we can't, we have to say, oh, it takes a long time, I'm sorry. So you need faith. It's not about long or short, it's about faith, not measuring.

[14:11]

And you may have, you know, Of course we have problems in sitting and you may have some questions or discouragement sometimes. And even by the second day you may have painful legs, I think. But if you have faith in this acceptance, in this faith and acceptance through zazen and mindfulness and the practice of living, living as practice, Then, oh, so I'm painful leg to Buddha. That's what Sukhya always said. So you're sitting here. You may not say, oh great, but I don't want to be a painful leg Buddha. I'd rather be an ordinary person with wiggly legs. But anyway, we have this kind of feeling. Oh no, I'm monkey-minded Buddha.

[15:16]

Painful leg to Buddha. Quite good. It's a good habit to get into. It's actually probably easier to say I'm painful leg Buddha than I'm healthy, powerful Buddha. It's not so easy to say. So practice with it when you have painful legs. This is different than our usual way of doing things. So we have this kind of way in the zendo and way on the second day, the serving and the meals, much more precise, the chanting. We could chant a little faster and I think sometimes we'll find our voice together. And you know we change, even change the sashin schedule so it's different than the atmosphere in the zendo is different than in the ordinary day during the practice period.

[16:34]

We don't have the big bell. We don't chant with the mokugyo. An evening meal is always different. There's no chanting an evening meal. But you know, you feel the absence of the chanting in the evening. This is like my feeling the absence of my aunt in New York. As I told some of you coming on a bus, taxi, or taxi past where she used to live, I suddenly felt her absence where she lived in the village in New York. So emptiness, we could say, is the absence of form. And emptiness is the potentiality of form, but many forms.

[17:39]

So we change, anyway, the schedule or the schedule and we change the way we use the way we chant. And I suppose if you're not, if you've just come to, you haven't been in the practice period and you come to Sashin, you think, oh, you know, you don't, it's just the way they chant here. But perhaps if you were subtle enough, you could feel the absence of the chanting, even if you weren't familiar with our usual schedule. So you'd feel something in the chanting as if there was an invisible mokugyo. In the morning when I bow, usually I bow in the zendo, and then I walk around greeting everyone, saying good morning, sort of like that.

[18:50]

And usually there's the big bell when I bow. But during sashin we don't hit the big bell. But you feel the silence of the bell. Am I making any sense? I think you feel the silence of the bell. But this is, then in every silence you can feel the bell. In every silence you can feel the bowing. You probably won't feel my aunt in every silence, but you can feel the absence. So let's see if I can try to give you a feeling for what I'm trying to say. No, no, again, let's go back to the simple thing. When you're sitting zazen, you're accepting your posture as it is, and it's also being informed by Buddhist posture. There's a dialogue going on in your zazen.

[19:52]

Buddhist posture is there, and your posture is there. It's a kind of a doppelganger. Doppelganger Buddha is sitting with you. Doppelganger is kind of negative, isn't it? It's somebody that, a kind of ghost that teases you. But anyway, a kind of double is there. Your double is Buddha. And Buddha's sitting there, and the more you find your posture, your Buddha body begins to take over. And sometimes it does take over. And you know your backbone suddenly comes alive in a way it's not usually alive. Or maybe your fresh, transparent body becomes present. Now we can look at Buddha in a number of ways.

[21:01]

I mean, perhaps Buddha's also a humanitarian ideal. That's one understanding of Buddha. And Buddha is a historical, historical person. But there's many dimensions to a historical person. I mean, as I said this morning in the first period, I believe, I said, where is your hand? Where are your shoulders? And your experience is not limited to… it's not only your shoulders or not only your breath or not only your thoughts or not only your hands. So even a historical person, we don't know, what was Buddha's hands?

[22:01]

Where were Buddha's hands? Where were Buddha's shoulders? Did he himself know where his shoulders were? You can't exactly ascribe measurement. When you're sitting, what, where are you? When are you? These words, when you stop comparing... these words have no meaning. So a historical person also has some other or deeper dimensions that reach into everything. So another aspect of Buddha that I'm pointing out here is Well, there's the experienced Buddha.

[23:02]

This means your dharmakaya, samurakaya, nirmanakaya. I won't try to speak about that, but let's say simply the kind of experience, well, the experience of a fresh, transparent body would be the experienced Buddha. But there's also a sense of Buddha as experience. absence of something we intuit. Like if you sit in this posture, say you sit in this posture and you just happen to sit in this posture and you know nothing about Buddhism, this sense of a Buddha's body appears. It doesn't come from the teaching, it comes from the experience. So then we have a teaching about Buddha's body and we call it Buddha, but you could call it Sam if you like, I don't know. Gertrude could be sitting and saying, oh, I'm beginning to feel Gertrude.

[24:08]

Or Sam or something like that. Or Buddha. It's a little like in the In the silence of the evening meal or the silence of the sashin chanting, we feel the presence of the way we usually do it. But we open ourselves to some fresh way of chanting. And in zazen, mindfulness practice, we open ourselves to Sam or Gertrude or this Buddha possibility in us. And there's no passive existence. Because each moment is this infolding and unfolding of interactions.

[25:18]

And your fate is found in these interactions. Your human fate, your personal future. In each interaction that's just saying again, like I said yesterday, what is given to us on each moment are these interactions. And you either interact or don't, but there's no way to be passive because these interactions are happening. And they accumulate, and we call them karma. And the best way, or the Nirmanakaya way, is each of these interactions is accomplished by your fresh, transparent body. Just, and it's not such a, you know, I'm not saying something so strange.

[26:31]

Just like in zazen, sometimes you'll suddenly find your body responds, your body, where, what is it exactly, something we can call your body, responds to the difficulty of sitting. As Hotmar said, he sits there in one of his lectures, hurting like heaven, or hurting like hell, and waiting for the bell. And finally the bell rings, then he could sit some more. He says, oh shucks, why did the bell ring? It's so nice to sit here. What happened? Well, waiting for the bell is a thought sheave. So if you're sitting and you have painful legs, if it's just physical, it's not so bad. But when you add, this hurts, then that's a shock. This is something extra. So waiting for the bell is something extra.

[27:41]

You're not really accepting. But the bell comes, oh, now it's easy to accept. Of course, you know you can change anytime you want to. That's why you can't tickle yourself. Because, you know, there's no surprise. As soon as we know we can move, then we can accept. But, you know, as I said yesterday, I kept saying this moment, this site of engagement, this each moment, where we... abide in the distinction between self and other. Now I can say that to you and you can get the feeling of it, but really when you start to practice it, everything happens so fast.

[28:48]

Unless you really use sort of Vipassana techniques to examine the moment, you hardly notice there's a distinction between self and other. So what can you do? The craftive practice offers a simple solution, which is you take the word no self, no other, out of the syntax of language into a mantric use of language. So you just pull the words out of the syntax, though they keep some semantic feeling of language, and on each moment say, no self, no other. Again, without any gaining idea. This is quite strict practice, no gaining idea.

[29:51]

And again, Sukershi said, you can see why old Zen masters had such a hard time with their practice, because it's very difficult to have no gaining ideas. Sri Krishna said, the strictest teaching of all is to practice without any idea of enlightenment. Then your whole body becomes an obstacle to Buddha. Your whole mind and body become an obstacle to Buddha. And this is quite good. Buddha says, poor fellow. And Buddha may appear. But if our whole body is an obstacle to Buddha, this is also the condition of enlightenment of practice. Painful legs, monkey mind. So if you just say, no self, no other, no self, on each chance you have,

[31:08]

Take this mantric use of language, koan use of language, no self, no other, and just say it. Whatever comes up, you're talking to somebody, in the back of your mind you're thinking, no self, no other. It has some power. Strange. You don't try to do anything. You just let the semantic but not syntactic power be there. No self, no other. And eventually you can just say, no. That works just as well. And it keeps opening up this door of emptiness. Because no is an emptiness practice. No self, no other, no form. So you can see, if you do that, you've produced your own jiao-jiao's mu, koan, without ever talking to jiao-jiao.

[32:16]

You started with seeing that we abide in the distinction of self and other. You begin practicing with it by bringing this mantric use of language, no-self, no-other, no-self, no-other, no-self. Pretty soon you're just saying no, and emptiness is... seeping through like the sunlight comes through the Venetian blind or through thick bushes, you begin to see emptiness shining through. No. So then you can start saying mu. Emptiness, not each thing, emptiness. No. No self, no other. And you basically created the so-called famous mu koan. And we can call this, we could call this dissolving of dualism.

[33:28]

as we could call it the organ of perception, compassion's organ of perception. In other words, we hear with our ears, we see with our eyes, but what is the organ of perception for compassion? And it's this dissolving of dualism which opens us up to knowing connectedness. So we could almost call it a kind of organ of perception. but the perception being wisdom or compassion. And we're also talking here about power or strength.

[34:32]

Each of you finding your power, letting your power. Being alive is a kind of, is power. Not a kind of power, is power. And sitting somehow in the stuff of our life tired, painful. Sometimes there's no way to survive except to discover our power. More than strength, our power. Power starts to come up through some brightness or clarity or cutting through.

[35:35]

And we feel our fresh, transparent body that kills the zendo. So we have kute or juji or What's interesting about this teaching, again, is that either Tenryu or Chen Long, who's part of the story, or Gute or Jiuji, the Japanese-Chinese names, explains it. It doesn't explain the teaching. It just holds up his finger. No explanation. What is it? What is Zen? When you find your power or your fresh, transparent body, you don't need any teaching.

[36:49]

You don't need any explanation. What is it? This is it. This is okay. This is good enough. If there's something better, I don't need it. This is good. If there's something better, who cares? This is good enough. So then you'll be good enough Buddha. What kind of Buddha are you? I'm a good enough Buddha. There are times when we go in and betray, and repeat the same place with the truth we're holding on to. We're holding on to the truth we're holding on to. We're holding on to the truth we're holding on to I am the Lord of the world.

[37:56]

I am the Lord of the world. I am the Lord of the world. I am the Lord of the world. That's the end of the story. Thank you.

[39:25]

Thank you. I won't even mention today that today is the third day. I've still been amused all day at the idea of our chuseau frozen in his cabin.

[40:51]

And waiting for Advaita and Beata to come by and leaning out the window, help! He told me this morning his shoulder still hurts from banging against it. And Frank had to come with a blowtorch and melt him out. This is great. This would be a great story about 10 years from now. The snow will be 15 feet deep. The windows obscured. The cabin burns down when Frank It's the best excuse I've heard for not ringing the wake-up bell. Yeah, it's I said yesterday that when we have problems in zazen or some questions, if we have sufficient faith in practice, we just, you know, we have a sense that somehow practice

[42:29]

the various things we do we call practice, will work these things out or show us what's going on. But that doesn't mean you might not have questions for Doksant, please, or for Ikkyo or Randy or Dan or someone else here. But the questions are partly to to solve the problem, if there's a problem, but also it's just to widen our practice together, a way of sharing our practice. Norman Fisher, who is the present abbot, one of the two present abbots of Zen Center in And he's going to come here on the 26th to see us.

[43:34]

And he's Matt's teacher. He's a really wonderful person and a poet. And he asked me a question once years ago. is then nothing but, I can't remember exactly, but it was something like, is then only a search for harmony? Are we trying to achieve harmony? It was actually one of the most difficult questions I've ever been asked. I didn't know quite how to answer it. The answer is no, but it's something similar enough that it's hard to answer. So I would say that I would say something like, what we are practicing, one of the ways to look at practice is the realization of momentary alignment.

[44:36]

Now, unfortunately the word harmony assumes that there's some kind of given reality or that we come in harmony with. That's not the vision of how we exist in Buddhism. There's no given reality. There's no one explanation which all explanations reduce to, or something like that. And that's the intimacy of practice. The true intimacy of practice depends on knowing that there's no one given reality. So lineage is What we're doing here is we have, it's a family. Lineage is a kind of family. It even has images of blood, the clan. It's conceptually very related to this idea of a clan or something like that.

[45:44]

but it's a family armed with certain basic questions. Now we're in the big framework of Buddhism, yogic culture, human culture, and in particular we're in what I'm calling the Dongshan Dogen lineage, which there's certain questions which we explore ourselves and reality. Like what a musician might explore the world through music, and that's not reducible to some other way of exploring the world. So we have a way, in your practice, we're exploring through certain basic questions, postures, attitudes, not some given reality, or not some teaching that tells us what it's going to be like, but something very intimate to you, to each of us.

[47:00]

There's a great confidence in this too. To be in possession without doubt of your own reality. And without being crazy. Now this is a fine line and hard to describe to us. Because our practice is not, in the end it's not conceptual, but it's experienceable. So from the point of view of our practice, the point of view of Buddhism, this is the a situation, an occasion of innumerable, infinite possibilities, in which each moment you single one out.

[48:16]

And this we could call alignment, or I use the word completeness, etc. Now this morning, for some reason, when I was sitting you know, I have to teach Buddhism, right? So I teach you to do things or teach you certain practices. So I'm sitting there this morning, I thought, well, what do I actually do? I said, I'm not teaching Buddhism, I'd at least look at what I actually do. And I'm sitting there and I'm thinking, I don't do anything. Well, how can I teach that? I'm trying to teach it in the sense of emphasizing acceptance and faith. But still, my practice is based on sitting virtually daily for 38 years. When I say that, I always think I should tell you maybe 12, because I've accomplished about 12 years of practice, and most of it is 38 years.

[49:19]

I should really look good. But anyway, I'm a slow learner. I'm sorry. Anyway. So what do I do? Well, actually I don't do anything. But over 38 years I have certain minimal skills at practice. And those skills are part of my not doing anything. Because I have learned to concentrate on my breath. I have learned one-pointedness. And so forth. So what happens when I sit? Well, I tried to explain it once, because I think that the way I sit is based on our lineage practice. So there's a kind of, I used the word gradient the other day, perhaps somatic gradient,

[50:32]

the way a river flows downhill, water flows downhill, if you sit in a certain way, your consciousness, awareness, your aliveness begins to find a certain course. And you, our practice, my practice, is to let that happen. Now, if I were in a hotel room, and sometimes I am, and I sat, sometimes then I would concentrate, maybe count my breath or something. Useful way to get back into practice, back into, as I was in mind. But generally I don't count my breath or anything, but I find myself concentrated on my breath. Or if I look at my room here,

[51:35]

What is my room? My room is walls, a wood-burning stove, a couple chairs, some books. All of those things are my room. I can imagine my room, if I'm thinking about moving things around in it, putting in a bookshelf or something, I can imagine it empty, and then I can move the stuff in my mind. But usually I don't imagine it. The room is the books, the wood-burning stove, and so forth. So when I look at my mind in zazen, my mind is simultaneously my breath, various kinds of thoughts that are part of the breath and the walls and chairs of my mind. So I don't do anything. I sit down. I kind of work on my posture a little bit.

[52:39]

I notice things like if I get concentrated on a particular kind of thought or something, my head tends to go forward. If I get If I become aware of awareness itself but not so aware of my body, then I kind of rock. And if my body falls asleep, sometimes my mind stays awake. Sometimes both go to sleep. Anyway, I notice various little things like that. So I do work with my mind. posture and energy, but mostly I just let whatever happens happen. I just don't make any effort at all. Maybe this is wrong. Maybe you should all say, this is the wrong teacher for me.

[53:41]

He doesn't do anything. He doesn't make any effort. Let's get out of this place. Well, we have made an effort here in the Zendo. And the Zendo is part of the teaching, the atmosphere of the Zendo that we create. It's not just the architecture, of course. The atmosphere of how we practice, chant, how we enter. It's not the same as a hotel room or a living room. So part of the teaching is in the atmosphere of the practice place. And that's part of the lineage teaching, too. Okay, so then I thought, well, if I don't do anything, I don't make any effort, why do I continue practicing? Why don't I stop doing zazen? I could just teach. Perhaps a piano teacher might stop playing the piano, but he could still teach piano. I was wondering, why do I continue to practice?

[54:44]

So I thought of a lot of reasons. One reason is I actually enjoy it. I find it enjoyable and nourishing. And when I don't sit regularly, I find myself less nourished, for example. So that's one reason. Another reason As I've said before, thinking becomes something I can trust. My thinking is something that's always in the realm of the possible. And also, when I'm sitting regularly, I know I can implement intention. Does that make sense? If I have some intention, I notice something, it would be good to be a little kinder, perhaps. That's a nice thought.

[55:51]

But if I have that thought and I'm doing zazen, I find ways to implement becoming kinder. I hope. Feels like it, anyway, to me. What's another reason? Oh, because of dharma friendship. You know, there's lots of different kinds of friendship, and I really value friendship. But the most important kind of friendship to me is this kind of friendship. Couldn't exactly say why. And it's not just Dharma friendship, it's path friendship, or nudging. We nudge each other. Nudge, do you know that word? Nudge means to push slightly. Like you nudge something.

[56:55]

Another reason is I find myself more and more content. When I was younger, I've always had the virtue, I think it's a virtue, of not caring whether things succeed or not. Projects and things like that. So when I've worked on things in the past, like

[57:30]

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