First of all, I'm very happy that Marie-Louise can translate for me again. Yeah, I find it quite a good experience to practice and work together like this. But I have to get used to again having German appear in the pauses. This is the first seminar I've done since I came back. Of course when I go to back to America, to the United States, I pause and no German appears. And I miss it, actually. It takes me quite a while, and sometimes even after being there some months, I pause and my German body doesn't appear.

[01:04]

And that takes a while. Even after a few months, when I take a break, my German body just disappears. Where did it disappear to? And now I feel good because my German body reappears. I must be half German by all this time. I mean, you wouldn't say so, but after all this time. But Sophia is our daughter. She's now just turned four in March. And she goes, as she did last year, to the local kindergarten One of the few German words I know, kindergarten. And she's old enough to walk back from the local bus by herself. So Marie-Louise can, there's more opportunity for Marie-Louise to translate.

[02:19]

Yes, Sophia, we have this topic, of course, the lived body. And I would like you to think of a topic like this as a question. Or a lot of questions. You ask yourself, what is a lived body? A good title in our tradition should, the exploration of the title itself, should lead you into the whole seminar. And by your own exploration of the title, by repeating it and so forth to yourself,

[03:38]

Yeah, letting the questions that are in it come out. You produce your own seminar. And then you see, yeah, how come he went that direction with the seminar and I went the other direction? So ideally there's two seminars going on. Or many. For each of you two. the seminar I'm doing with you and the seminar you're doing within yourself. And I'm speaking to the seminar you're doing within yourself. And the more developing the seminar is within yourself,

[04:56]

the more it will be brought out of my half of the seminar. Okay. And then you will meet in the afternoon and And there's some more joining of your seminars with each other. This is the process that's assumed and consciously assumed in Zen teaching. Yeah, so I look at Sophia.

[06:15]

There she is with her lived body of four years old, of four years. Four years young. Then she goes to, I could understand that, then she goes to nursery school, kindergarten. And she comes back with the bodies of her friends. Dann kommt sie zurück mit dem Körper ihrer Freunde. No, sometimes she actually brings them over and has sleepovers. Manchmal bringt sie sie wirklich mit die Freunde und dann übernachten die bei uns. But usually she just comes home and she starts acting like the girl or boy she's now most in love with. Ja, aber oft kommt sie eben alleine nach Hause, aber sie... She's very open to the other kids and falls in love with them and then she has this pain of that. How come Rosalie went back, went home from kindergarten with that other kid?

[07:15]

And then Rosalie has a... This is the Crestone, Colorado kindergarten. And then Rosalie throws tantrums. And then Sofia throws copies of her tantrums. Same tone of voice and shouting. Yeah. We say, this is a fake tantrum. And if you make her laugh, suddenly the tantrum is gone. So what is this lived body? Lived through yourself and through others. Yeah, we have this kind of experience, each of us.

[08:42]

So you'd say you're living your body within somebody else. You live your body through yourself and you live your body through others as well. Now, Sophia also says things like, she's my teacher, you know. She says things like, Mommy, I only love you. She used to be Mama, but now in America she's Mommy. Mommy, I only love you this much. And how much do you not, Marie-Louise says, and how much do you not like me?

[09:44]

Only this much. And then she suddenly says, sometimes this much. And the other night Sophia called Marie-Louise and said, Mommy, come here. So Marie-Louise went in and Sophia said, I love you. And then Marie-Louise said, I love you very, very much. Sophia said, I don't love you that much. I only love you as much as I want. But if she bumps her head or has a crisis, her body runs to Marie Louise's body.

[11:02]

So her body has unending love for Marie Louise. So what are these two sides? The side that only loves Marie Louise as much as she wants. And then the side, the body, the lived body side, which has no question about who it loves. So we can see this quite clearly in a child. But in ourself, what is our experience? We all know that our body is a process and changes through our living. Yeah, through our lived life. Through living our life. So again, what is our lived life? Because there's already the sense of karma in the word lived.

[12:19]

And I think we all know expressions like, your face belongs to your parents until you're 30 or something, and after that it belongs to you. I remember I had a friend named, still a friend, he's old, named Houston Smith. And he wrote the book on world religions. And did a famous television program in the 50s, maybe, on world religions. And I think his parents were Christian missionaries in China.

[13:28]

So he grew up in China. But then he went all over the world and lived in China. various kinds of religions, religious centers, communities, monasteries. And when I knew him, he was, I would say, mostly a Buddhist. But the latter part of his life, he's been more a Sufi or something. But he was on our board for a long time, the Dharma Sangha board in the United States. Anyway, he had a face which had been places I hadn't been.

[14:32]

So he became a teacher for me. Because when I was with him, I felt the presence of where his face, his experience had traveled. In his presence, in his gesture, in his voice, there was lands, places I hadn't been before, experiences I didn't know. And he was one of the two friends I had who had a cast eye. Do you know what a cast eye is?

[15:43]

No. One eye just goes other directions. The other person was a poet, teacher also, my name, Robert Duncan. And Robert, when he was giving one of his early big poetry readings, He started speaking and he could tell there was a woman in the front who was beginning to laugh about his poems. And he thought, this is going to ruin. She starts laughing, I'm finished. So he took his cast eye and put it on her.

[16:55]

While he read the poems and went up and down like this, and she sat there. Anyway, Houston had a similar kind of cast eye. He always felt that he was with you, but one eye was... So Houston had also an eye. He was always... And he always, in those my younger days, I was very fond of a poet named E.E. Cummings. And he was one of the first poets to experiment with the typography in a way a typewriter allows. So he never used capital letters. It was always small e, e, Cummings. Well, one of his favorite poems, the first line is, Somewhere I've never traveled.

[17:57]

Somewhere I've never traveled gladly beyond any experience. And whenever I was with Houston or saw him, I thought, these lines came to mind, somewhere I've never traveled, gladly beyond any experience. The poem, I can give you some of the poem. It goes, somewhere I've never traveled. Gladly beyond any experience. Your eyes have their silence. In your most frail gesture, are things which enclose me, or which I cannot touch because they're too near.

[19:42]

In your most frail gesture are things which enclose me. In deiner zartesten Geste sind Dinge, die mich mit einschließen, die ich nicht berühren kann, denn sie sind zu nah. And later the poem goes on. The power of your intense fragility whose texture compels me with the color of its countries, rendering death and forever with each breathing. I do not know what it is about you, Ich weiß es nicht, was es um dich ist.

[21:03]

I do not know what it is about you that closes and opens. Ich weiß es nicht, was es um dich ist, das öffnet und schließt. I think if Sophia could express what she feels about her classmates, her schoolmates... She might also say that your eyes have their silence. I do not know what it is about you that affects me the way it does. But she's just in the midst of it. And practice is also to be in the midst of it. And yet to explore how we're in the midst of it. Now a sentence I keep wanting to bring up from the Genjo Koan.

[22:30]

I don't know, half a year or more that I've been working with this sentence. With its instrumental power. And, Dieter, I think we might take the Genjo Koan as the text. Why not? It's good to get familiar with it. And look at each line as I said about the title of the seminar. Look at each line as packed with questions that aren't meant to open up on the first reading. die gar nicht dazu gedacht sind, dass sie sich öffnen beim ersten Mal durchlesen.

[23:44]

The difficulty of the text is the openness of the text. Die Schwierigkeit des Textes ist die Offenheit des Textes. The openness that can keep opening up every time you read it, any time in your life. Also diese Offenheit, die offen ist jedes Mal, wenn du den Text liest... And it's like a hidden box. And every time you happen to find it, and you can open the box, And there's often something different in the box. Anyway, this line, you know, big build-up, this line here comes. I went to too many movies, you know.

[24:46]

To cultivate and authenticate Oh, my goodness. Authenticate. To author, to make real. We need a nice word. A nice word. How has it been translated before? We had it in English only. Authenticate? Authentifizieren. Authentifizieren. Authentifizieren. Yeah, that's right. They know the good endings for that. Okay. To cultivate and authenticate. The ten thousand things by conveying the self to them is delusion. Is this true? What does it mean to you? And if it is true, or you imagine it might be true, how can this truth, if it is true, find its truth in your actions?

[26:01]

Now, that's an That's what I mean by instrumental. It's a tool. It's a tool you can use to notice your actions. To bring your attention into the midst of your living and lived body. Now, the 10,000 things is often translated as myriad things or many things. werden oft als myriaden Dinge oder als viele Dinge übersetzt.

[27:21]

And it's, yeah, to cultivate and to bring, to cultivate and authenticate the ten thousand, the many things. Also die zehntausend oder die vielen Dinge zu kultivieren. The many things, it's almost always how it's translated, a myriad. But it's a fundamental mistake. Because it moves in the direction of generalizations. And generalizations mean nothing to the lived body. Nothing. 10,000 things is not a generalization. But 10,000 things, it's a reachable number. It's possible to have 10,000 books.

[28:29]

Most of us don't, but you know. Sometimes it seems to me it's possible to have 10,000 things in my closet. But the point is, it's not a generalization. It's a metaphor, but it means the universe. But if we say the universe, how do you relate to the universe? First, it's not a universe anyway. But... But you can have a relationship.

[29:29]

The idea of calling the universe the 10,000 things means you have a relationship to these 10,000 things. You might live in the universe like it was a big box. Vielleicht erlebst du in diesem Universum, als sei es eine große Kiste. But you live with and through the 10,000 things. So already we have to cultivate and authenticate, to cultivate, to relate to the things around you. So we have this cultivating and authenticating. And cultivating means being in relationship with the things around you. Yes, it's delusion. And what kind of delusion is it?

[30:38]

Well, you cultivate these 10,000 things maybe like you cultivate a field for corn or wheat or something. You cultivate it in relationship to the self. And you authenticate it as real through the self. And this is delusion. Now I can say that you can pivot the whole of Buddhism on this sentence. If you can work with this sentence, in your activity, rendering death and forever with each breathing, all of the teachings of Buddhism will become apparent and clear to you.

[31:58]

Now the move the Buddha made, the historical Buddha, as I've said, And I hope that those of you who have practiced with me a lot will be patient with me in coming back to some basics. Because for the newer people, I want to try to be as clear as possible. And again, for the newer people, this practice week is an experiment. in combining a feeling of saschin or monastic life with a more lay life, study and so forth.

[33:07]

So in the morning I wear my Buddhist dresses Which are conceptually very different. They're big pieces of cloth that don't fit the body. But did you sort of find a way to live inside like it was a sort of tent, portable tent? And in the afternoon I'll wear regular clothes. Like Batman coming out of the phone booth or something. Like Batman coming out of the cell phone.

[34:08]

I'm more like Batman than Superman. And wearing clothes that are cut to fit the body so the body is free outside the clothes instead of inside the clothes. And if the concept of Clothes in Asia and in Buddhism. As your body is free inside the cloth. And the cloth is pretty much as it comes off the loom. So the cloth has its own separate identity and power. What is the lived body inside the clothes in control of its own temperature? and the lived body in the convenience of our Western clothes, which, for example, isn't so in control of its own temperature,

[35:32]

where you have to put on sweaters and things like that. It's very hard to put a pullover on over this. So we have these questions that come up. Why do we do this formality stuff? Why do I bow three times before I start talking? I won't in the afternoon. It's a waste of time. It takes five minutes or so. Yeah, but for me, I'm acknowledging that what I'm speaking about is in the context of what this figure on the altar represents. So I make it clear with my lived body. I don't just think it.

[37:02]

Oh, now I'm talking about Buddhism and I respect the lineage of practitioners. No, I actually physically bow. Is this a different statement than just saying it in my head? Verbeuge mich körperlich, ist das ein anderes Statement, eine andere Aussage? And why does the handmade, mostly handmade Kesu bell, the big bell there? Und warum ist diese zum größten Teil handgemachte Kesu-Glocke, die große, die dort steht? Have such a fancy Victorian Buddhist red lacquered stand. These are the questions I want to be part of our practice week seminars. So the move of the Buddha, the historical Buddha,

[38:27]

In the context of his own teaching and practice and living, in the context of what we now call Hinduism, there was the overall sense of an eternal, permanent self. So the Buddha had to take a position that separated His teaching from that. It wasn't a political move. It was an instrumental move. He couldn't deny the self. Really, because we all function in some sort of way with the self. I love you, Mommy, as much as I want to.

[39:49]

Yeah, that's the self speaking. So the Buddha's move was to say the body is the self. Now what does that mean? It means that the self, while we function through a self, while we function through a self, the continuity of self is the body. So to finish, the practice I want to give you, the suggestion I want to give you, the exercise, is see if you can bring the continuity of attention to the body and not to the self.

[40:50]

No. Look if you can bring the continuity of attention. Of attention. From the self to the body as self. Yeah. As if you were crossing a crevasse, a big crevasse in the mountains. You can't be thinking, oh, what am I going to do later in the day? You've got to have your entire attention in how to get across this icy crevasse.

[41:55]

So Buddhism, the teaching really suggests some kind of athletic-like attention to the continuity of each moment, of the self-body, the body-self. Now the whole body is self-sync. To bring an athletic like attention to the self body in each situation. So that's your exercise for the next week.

[43:06]

You can bump into each other, I don't care. Just try to shift into this bodily continuity. And try not to convey the self to things. Just as an exercise. And see what happens. That's enough for today. Sorry I went on so long. It was good for the legs. Thank you very much. Al Fatiha.

[43:52]

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