I vow to teach the truth of the Tathagata's words. Good afternoon. Guten Tag. Guten Tag. Well, of course, I would like to continue what we started in the koan seminar, to what extent that's possible. At the same time, because of the scheduling of the koan seminar along with the sashin, we ended up having more open places in the sashin than usual. So we were able to accept some people for whom this is their first Sesshin with me and some for whom it's their first Sesshin altogether. And of course some of those people and some other people, persons, weren't at the koan seminar.

[01:16]

So I have to I feel out how to include everyone in what I say and in the feeling of this Sesshin. Mostly those of you who are New at Sashins, most of the support actually comes from sitting with people who've done quite a few Sashins. It's actually not intimidating to be with experienced people.

[02:27]

It's much more supportive than being with a lot of new people. Now Dogen says that there are two ways to study the way. He says through the mind and through the body. And he says we study the body through We study the way through the body through the body that arises through the study of the way. That's natural enough. So I'll try to make... clearer what that sentence of Dogen's means.

[03:35]

And famous Gute in Japanese or Jude in Chinese, one finger Zen, I'd like to bring up this koan. Chute is fine. One finger zen. This is a famous phrase. Chute is one finger zen. And the story starts with Zhu Te, who lived in a hut in the mountains somewhere in the ninth century of China.

[04:44]

And this... He was living quite happily, he thought, in this hut and one time sitting probably in the evening breeze outside his hut enjoying the late afternoon. A figure appeared out of the dark and it was a nun, a nunc. Wearing her big monk rain hat, you know. And carrying a staff. And it was the custom in China, as it is here too, if you go to visit someone to take off your hat and have a conversation with them.

[05:47]

But she came walking up walked right up to him quite rudely almost and circled around him three times and she said please give me a word Huh? Shiji didn't know what to do. He was lost. So this nun, Shiji, went around him again three times and said, please give me a word. So she did it again three times when I ran in. Please give me a word. So she started to leave. And he said, It's getting dark.

[07:09]

Won't you spend the night? She said, If you give me a word that satisfies me, she left. So that night he tossed and turned in his bed, feeling, lamenting at what a stupid monkey was. Hear this powerful female monk nun appeared And in the tradition of Dharma dialogue, he didn't have any idea what to say. So, that's the first part of the story. And then, She was quite a woman.

[08:24]

We don't know much about her, unfortunately. I'm sure you women will go down in history, but in China in those days they didn't keep such good records of what women did. So anyway, he decided I must go and find some good teachers to help me. But during the night he had a dream that the guardian figure of the mountain came to him. And said, you shouldn't leave, you should stay here, a great teacher or what you need will come. Yeah, so... He waited, or he got up the next morning and just did his life.

[09:35]

And about ten days later, a monk came. Named Ryuten in Japanese. I forgot what his name is in Chinese. With the name Ryuten in Japanese. I forgot what his Chinese name was. Chen, Chen, Chen, something. Anyway, he, Zhu Te thought, this must be the person foretold in my dream, so he treated him with a great deal of respect and so forth. And told him the story of what happened with this nun, Jishe. And he held up his finger. And Juthe was enlightened. And I know most Zen stories end like this.

[10:59]

But it really happens. Maybe on this story, who knows, more people have been enlightened than any other story. So that's the part two of the story. Part three isn't so nice. Unless you understand it with a grain of salt. Although these were rougher times and people were tougher with each other than we are, so who knows, it might be true. But he had a young attendant, sort of servant boy who was studying, preparing perhaps to be ordained. And this boy... imitated the teacher.

[12:18]

Because Jute, after that time, while he was never able to say anything much with this nun, or wasn't able to say anything with this nun, from then on he still didn't say anything except that he raised his finger to everyone's question. What is the essence of Zen? What is your true nature? Who is Ulrike? Like that. So some guest came to the temple and the boy was at the gate and the guest came and said, it's your teacher. He says, what does your teacher teach?

[13:23]

And the boy went... So the guest came in and said, oh, your young acolyte out there told me you teach with one finger. Acolyte means aspirant to be ordained or to a young disciple or something. Oh, said Jute. So later on, after the guest left, he called him the boy. What did you say to the guest outside? Would you show me what you said to him, the way I teach? The boy held up his finger. He went, yeah! Cut it right off.

[14:24]

And the boy went running across the Zendo to the other side, and just as he was reaching the door at the far side, Zhu Tei said, Hey, you! And the boy only turned around, and Zhu Tei went... So you see, we're not so rough these days. Yeah, so the boy was enlightened too. After that, he was known as Four Fingers Zen. I just made that up.

[15:52]

It's not true. Yeah. But... The point is that this kind of teaching can't be imitated. So in the telling and retelling of this story, probably to emphasize that this can't be imitated, the story became stronger and stronger until he finally cuts off the boy's finger. But who knows? I didn't live then. And maybe there's some value to toughness sometimes. If it's a matter of losing your life or true life or not.

[17:04]

Anyway, that's the third part of the story. And the last part of the story is when he dies or just before he dies. He says, since I met my teacher, the teaching of one finger has been inexhaustible. For 30 years I've been unable to exhaust this teaching. And he died. Is that that thing that makes all that noise? Yeah, it's something's not quite right, but I couldn't figure it out.

[18:23]

Okay. I thought it was Stefan's heart. Hmm. Hmm. There are several other stories connected with this, and one I like is that there was a half-blind turtle that used to swim very deep in the ocean. And this is a story that I think is in the Parinirvana Sutra and the Lotus Sutra. And anyway, this turtle had only one eye and never seen anything except the depths of the ocean.

[19:28]

And one day a board floated by with a knot hole in it. And supposedly this turtle swam to the surface, finding this board, and held onto the board and put one eye to the knothole. And for the first time was able to see the sun and the world above the water. That's how rare the sutras use this story to say how rare it is to get a precious human body. And how rare it is to hear the teachings. As rare as a half-blind turtle finding a board with a knot hole.

[20:45]

In other words, this is the sashin of half-blind turtles. We're all waiting for a board to float by. And we're all waiting for a board to swim past us. Yes. Now in the koan seminars we are, I think we did pretty well in the koan seminar.

[21:46]

At peering under the surface of language and our life. But it's still mostly in the realm of consciousness. And associations and dream mind. But I think you could feel already from last evening and certainly from this morning that Sashin is in a different place. Sashin is much deeper in the body and in the mind that appears as the body. The subtle mind that appears as the body. Now I'd like to overuse the word interactive a bit if I could.

[23:11]

Because I'm thinking, you know, watching us learn the orioke last night and eating with the orioke today at breakfast and lunch. It brings up again for me the study of the way through the body. So I don't know exactly how to... I'm commenting on perhaps the koan, but certainly Dogen's statement about studying the way through the body that arises through studying the way. So... I don't know where to start, but let me say that I went shopping the other day in Hamburg.

[24:38]

And I pretty much have the same wardrobe, both robes and regular clothes that I've had since the early 70s and mid-70s. Except for socks or stockings, which have a rougher relationship to the world than the rest of my clothes, I've been able to have pretty much the same clothes. These are all falling apart, but they still work. So I decided to buy, if I could, find a jacket, because it's become quite cold and I didn't have any warm jacket to wear. And most of the jackets I have are either too small or falling apart now.

[25:55]

So anyway, I decided to maybe buy, if I could, since Hamburg is a little like Boston and London, I thought maybe I could buy a Harris Tweed jacket. So I hadn't had one since I was in college, so I thought it would be a nice tough jacket there, kind of like made of iron. So people recommended a store and they had one. And I like the idea of getting one too, because in the Hebrides, where they're made, an island off Scotland, the cloth is still woven by hand. And recently I read a story that the Scottish television

[27:15]

was going to put a relay station in so that they could receive television. Because of the mountains and the shape of the island, they can't receive television. Yes, and I recently read that the Scottish Television wanted to build such a special reception station, because they can't receive the normal people because of the mountains. They have no reception. But the people of the island and the women, especially, I believe, who weave the cloth, voted not to have television. They didn't want the relay station. They said if television comes in, we're sure we'll be very interested, but it will destroy our way of life. So they chose the way of life which allows them to make this unfashionable fabric over television. So while I was walking around Hamburg, I was thinking about these things.

[28:59]

And thinking about at least how it seems to me that we monumentalize, militarize and eroticize public space. Most public space, traditional public space, is quite big, big plazas. And they usually have soldiers dressed in armor or riding gigantic horses in the middle of the space. Or they have statues of naked women in inaccessible postures. Or self-absorbed and distant. But then I was noticing all these new shopping malls and the way they make these covered walkways and so forth.

[30:35]

And penetrate the surfaces of some of the traditional buildings with all kinds of little passages and so forth. And making a much more interactive almost biological space. So I was thinking too about how the body looks through our clothes, how the body itself looks out through our clothes. And how we can choose clothes from which our body looks out.

[31:42]

Or some people choose clothes from which you can, from outside, you can look in at the body. Or we choose clothes where we look at the surface of the clothes. And the surface then can be quite delicate and almost useless for protecting you from the environment or whatever. So what I'm doing bringing this up is just trying to give us some way to think about our relationship to the physical world. Because let's say there's mountains and forests. And in between mountains and forests there's fields and dishes.

[32:58]

Yeah. Like a soup bowl. A cup. Okay. So the dishes and the clothes and the fields and the houses all are a a membrane between us and mountains and trees. An interactive membrane or not so interactive membrane. So when you're picking up a cup, you're picking up the clay of the of the mountain or the field. This wooden floor is the forest and this is a manzanita bush. So we have this interactive relationship with the phenomenal world.

[34:01]

And if you watch some of these space movies, you know, future space movies, people almost never have to do anything They walk toward the door and it opens automatically. They go into a room and the lights turn on automatically. They only eat pills. If they want to go down to the planet below them, they beam themselves down. They almost have no interactive relationship with the phenomenal world.

[35:22]

Now, you could imagine a culture, now that's our imagination of the future. You could imagine a future which is more interactive. Ulrike was saying when she served the food, she has been translators for so long, she hasn't done things like serve food and so forth. And so, not since the first Sashin has she done that, so she wanted to do it this Sashin. And she carried the, she said how much she enjoyed carrying the food back and forth from the kitchen and so forth.

[36:26]

And at Crestone we grow a lot of our own food. And we grow the food, you know, partly of course because the vegetables taste better. But mostly we do it because we like the interactive relationship with growing the food. And we cook almost all our food from just basic ingredients. And even though there may be very good and tasty soup mixes and so forth, we don't usually use them. And it's not because we...

[37:26]

It's not a moral thing, it's just that we seem to intuitively prefer a more interactive relationship with what we eat and do. Now at lunch we had a very good three ladle interactive soup. you had to have one ladle for the stuff floating on top you had to have a second ladle for all the lentils which sank to the bottom and you had to have a third ladle for the liquid And if people didn't get three ladles, they didn't get all of the soup. Now, whether our tenso and the staff in the kitchen intended to make a three-ladle interactive soup or not, I don't know.

[38:53]

But if you were in a culture, a body culture, that emphasized an interactive relationship with the phenomenal world, you'd make more soups like that. that required awareness and intelligence to serve. Now, if you play a musical instrument, you have to have intelligent hands, if it's a piano or a violin or a guitar or something. Now, do intelligent, aware hands lead one to be a musician? Or does being a musician lead one to having intelligent, aware hands? Of course, probably both are true. You could say, I can imagine a teacher, a music teacher saying, you must study the violin with the hands that arise from studying the violin.

[40:35]

At least in some ways, that's just what Dogen says. You have to study the way with the body that arises from studying the way. Okay, so imagine, I mean, of course a musician has to have not only a body that can study the instrument, But you have to have an instrument, a drum or a violin or whatever, that's made to be interacted with. Well, can you imagine a culture which makes everything to be interacted with as if everything was a kind of musical instrument?

[41:43]

The opposite of these movies where they eat pills and beam themselves around. Where you'd make doors that were a trouble to open. You know when you pick up a baby You pick up a baby and you feel its arm and its leg and you support its head. And you can have a physical relationship with the world that way. And this body culture that arises from Zen and yogic practice is much like that. You treat the physical world almost the way a lover treats the beloved, the body of the beloved.

[42:47]

Or the mother or father treats the infant child supporting its head. So when you wipe the eating bowls with the cloth, you're doing it not just to clean the eating bowl, but to caress, to feel the shape of the bowl, just like you might support the baby's head. So these clothes are definitely made that if anybody watched me try to sit down in zazen, it takes me several minutes just to get myself arranged in all these tablecloths.

[43:58]

Because this comes out of a culture which emphasizes creating an interactive interface or interbody between you and the phenomenal world. Now, when I was walking around Hamburg, I was not only observing public space and musing on such things as these big public squares are the extended body of the leaders. It's these military types who mostly controlled the design of public spaces. Then you get some anachronism like a warrior of nostalgia named George Bush.

[45:11]

Trying to extend his body through television instead of being public spaces. I think when you change the public space in society, you change governance. I'm saying this to just say that this relationship of you to the physical world is not a minor thing. And how you control it or don't control it or how you relate to it has a great deal to do with your personal life and your society's life. So in addition to thinking about clothes and public space, I was watching the way mothers and fathers were treating their babies.

[46:39]

And it was Saturday, so first Saturday in the month, and according to the rules here, stores are open until four, I believe. So the city was full of, it was a nice day too, so the city was full of young and middle-aged couples pushing children in various apparatuses. And naturally, a lot of the children were tired of being pushed around and were crying and fussing and so forth. And what I noticed, though I couldn't say it's a universal pattern for Westerners, is that if it's an infant, and the infant is crying, the mother or father holds the baby to the body to calm it.

[47:42]

If the baby is old enough to be able to walk with any skill at all, the mother or father talks to the baby and doesn't hold it. And no matter how much the baby is crying, the mother or father says, come on, I can't tell, they're speaking German, but they seem to say, come on, it's okay, you don't have to do this, etc., blah, blah, blah. But they don't relate to it physically, they talk to the baby. And I was almost certain in the instances I saw that if the mother and father had just held the baby, the young boy or girl, they would have immediately stopped crying. But the unexpressed rule I felt, which I've also seen in England and the United States, was beyond a certain age, you calm the child through talking to them about being calm.

[49:08]

It would be interesting to note at what age that happens. Where is the unspoken rule? Will you make the shift? Now, if that's the case, if my observation is correct, You dramatically alter the baby's physical relationship to the world. If the culture as a whole does that, you won't have an interactive environment. You'll have an environment you try to control mentally and verbally. You'll walk beside the world rather than in and through the world.

[50:34]

So we serve the food, the whole way we serve the food, there must be quicker ways to serve the food. Is to make it interactive. To make a complex territory between us and the physical world. And it's thought in such cultures, yoga cultures, that only through such interactive territory will the body's intelligence develop. The less interactive, the less intelligent you'll be at a subtle body level. And even athletes and specialists in body consciousness, like athletes and musicians, will suppress some of the subtleties they know because it's not culturally acceptable.

[51:59]

So this is part of what Gute's finger, Jute's finger is about. And this one-eyed turtle grasping a board. There's a little poem in this koan, see if I can remember it. Deep in the night, finding the road by which we came, Deep in the night, finding the road by which we came.

[53:10]

Leaving immediately by the pass, leaving immediately through the pass and not waiting for the dawn. Something like using words according, not making up your own rules, but going to the source of words. And I guess the first line we could say is this morning's moon and this morning's wind and moon. This morning's wind and moon.

[54:26]

The void of a thousand ages. Deep in the night, finding the way by which we came. Going immediately through the path without waiting for the dawn. Not making up our own rules, but going to the source of words. Hmm. So I'd like us to, in this session, to pay attention, as I said this morning in the first period, to a certain softness in our zazen.

[55:32]

A subtlety in our breath. And perhaps deep in the night we will find the road by which we came. And as much as possible, see if you can have a sense of not walking beside the world or on the world, but through and in the world. And through and inside your own body. And Zazen, Sashin, Zazen and Sashin will sometimes put you deep in your own body without ordinary thinking. And suddenly you flip to the outside, observing yourself from the outside.

[56:51]

And the pain and the discomfort and the length of time will make you see yourself from the outside, when's the period going to end, etc. But the nature of Sashin, particularly for beginners, is that sometimes you're deep inside and sometimes you flip to the outside with not much in between. This is a different territory than in the koan seminar. So we have a lucky chance to become familiar with this territory. Even though there's so much unfamiliarity with it and cultural barriers about it that we tend to flip either inside or outside.

[58:07]

Still, if you can just give up, follow the schedule, and don't worry if the board with the knot hole ever appears. Your one eye may be enough. May our intention... Just before we came in, Ulrike said, well, I'm looking forward to hearing another lecture from the workhorse of Zen. I don't know what she means exactly, but I do have to include you in my work.

[59:13]

And so I'm, I don't know. You know, I decided to do, it occurred to me to do this koan, Judy's, Judy's One Finger Zen. As I said, this was an important koan for me in which I worked with Suzuki Roshi on. And in fact, there was a very funny scene because Yamada Reirin Roshi was up doing the sashin with us. And Yamada Reirin Reirin, R-E-I-R-I-N.

[60:29]

There's quite a few Yamada Roshis, so anyway, Yamada Reirin Roshi. And he used to come up sometimes, and he's actually technically the person I had my first lay ordination lineage through. And I had some good encounters with him and teachings from him. Tsukiroshi, even for a Japanese, was a rather slight, small man. He actually always seemed very big to me until I saw photographs of us standing beside each other. And Yamada Roshi was a kind of stocky man, a little bit big for a Japanese.

[61:32]

And they enacted this meeting between Judy and the monk, or the nun, Shiji. And rather big Yamada Roshi put a zafu on his head for a hat, like the woman's hat. And Suzuki Roshi stood in the middle of his endo. And Yamada Roshi kept going around him in a circle thing. Give me a word, give me a word. It was hilarious. Hmm. So I feel, I'll come back to that in a minute, but I feel the second day General Malaise sets in for at least many of us.

[63:08]

Everything seems to, you know, I mean, I think for many people, things start seeming to be, I don't know, kind of drear and hopeless. You think, you know, shit, this is the second day, five more days, sitting in this little place. Shit. And when I went bowing over there, I was struck by this zendo. Even though we're accepting less people than we did at first, still there's always a fight with the space here. By next Saturday, though, you may be so used to your place you're wishing you could put in a little stove or something. But it's, I think it's, you know, we, when you start sitting sashin, you start getting into physical memories.

[64:40]

There are memories outside the convention of your life. And the first level of those memories is usually tends to be less integrated and more negative ones. And you have to go through those layers. And then the leg that you think you've killed in one period begins to come alive in the next period. And you don't want the dead to come back to life. You say, I killed you in the last period, you corpse of a leg, stay dead. But no, no. And you start asking it to be soft like butter and it profuses.

[66:15]

On the second or third day I feel I should stay out of the Zendo because I don't like to see you suffer. I could get mirrors and I could look in. Then I suffer too, so it's terrible. And I know that this morning the Eno started beating you up with a stick. I'm sorry, Ruth. Actually, it was my idea, not hers. But I can blame the Eno sometimes.

[67:47]

So, what my feeling is, is, you know, by not using the stick here much, we've gotten, it turns into something too negative. The basic meaning of the stick is pretty much the same as just somebody like myself or Gisela sitting facing out. When you're used to it, it's mostly just somebody's walking around. Very seldom is anyone hit. Very seldom is anyone asked to be hit. It's just somebody walks around in the Zender. And if your back is a little stiff and you want to have it freshened up, you can ask. And generally, by the way, you wait till the person is near you before you put your hands up if you do ask.

[68:52]

You shouldn't get so desperate for the stick that when the carrier is way over there and you're over here and you're sitting like this You should be alert enough to be able to notice when the monitor is fairly near you. And now I'm about open sitting at night after the last period, after the hot drink. It's quite good. It's surprising how different the feeling is when you're sitting outside the schedule of a session rather than inside.

[70:12]

So, anyway, it's... useful thing to do, a good thing to do in Sesshin is to sometimes sit a bit or whatever you want in the open sitting. But I wouldn't sit so long that you don't get up the next morning. Two people this morning were here but I don't know if they were even in open sitting last night because I wasn't there till late. But anyway, I don't think you should wipe yourself out by sitting too long in open sitting. So that you either can't get up or you need transfusions of caffeine during the day.

[71:16]

Now you may have a habit of having coffee, which if you don't continue it, it's disturbing. But in general, it's better to sit without caffeine. You can explore your energy much more intimately without caffeine. Because part of Sashin is a chance to explore your energy, your consciousness, awareness and interplay among the three. Sometimes you can be quite non-conscious or virtually asleep but quite aware. And you can feel your energy move into consciousness and then subside and so forth. This inner language is not exactly Buddhism, but it is a fruit of yogic practice.

[72:53]

And it's a language that's spoken in the koans and very useful to know. Okay. So when I decide to look at this koan, as I said, which was an important one for me, and I don't know You know, I've sort of shied away from discussing this koan, actually. And over the years, I've found presenting it in a limited way and presenting the one finger hasn't been... I don't think people have really gotten a feel for the koan.

[74:15]

Are the units I'm speaking in okay? You get so good at this I almost forget you have to stop to translate. But anyway, when I decided somehow, something decided that I would speak about this as a continuation of the Koan seminar and as perhaps a weave, a text for this Sashin, Then, of course, something starts working on it all the time. Once you're used to them, they become a mode of being. It's like, again, since this is a kind of theater, these koans are a kind of little theater pieces.

[75:37]

You could say they're philosophical, sociological, and spiritual theater. Man könnte sagen, das ist philosophisches, spirituelles und... Spiritual, philosophical, sociological. Ein soziologisches Theater. We could add some more. It's like when an actor takes on a particular role, they probably... have to feel out that role and it affects their life while they're developing that role. And you see the world a little differently. And koans aren't exactly so much a role as changing the stage.

[76:39]

So you change the stage of the set and each koan represents a little different mode of being. And even in the other sense of the word stage, another stage of being. So I found myself again in my Hamburg trip. Everything that appeared was Juti's finger. Each event I saw, each crying child or shopkeeper was Juti's finger. So here I'd like to share with you some maybe work of Zen. Or my work in struggling, or a little bit of a struggling, to try to be clear about these things.

[78:26]

I like Hamada, the potter, said... Creativity shouldn't be a struggle, he said. It should be like walking downhill in a spring breeze. Anyway, so I'm going to think out loud with you a little bit here, if you don't mind. As I did yesterday. And I'm not trying to exactly give a useful lecture in Zen to you. It might be useful, but my motivation is more to try to feel something out. Now, as I said last night, the hot drink, we can't avoid, like the weavers of the Harris Tweed, we can't avoid the relay stations of Western culture.

[79:58]

We have nothing but Western culture relayed to us. I guess I shouldn't say Western culture because those folks are certainly involved in Western culture too, but I mean, of course, present day, internationalized, whatever it is. It sounded like you said exactly what I said. We have to find some way to live within the TV culture.

[81:14]

And we have this decision at Crestone that we're debating is the community more or less would like to produce our own electricity. And we have, what, ten solar panels? And eight batteries? He's the boss. So... And right now, I talked with Randy and Mark last night, and even though there's a group of 35 people or something visiting, they don't need a generator, because there's enough of us gone that they're just using the panels. And we also have eight batteries, and Gerald is the boss.

[82:22]

And yesterday I talked with... We put the two bosses next to each other. Including Mike. And so what we'd like to do, we have enough fall from the... from the water that comes down for our water system to actually put hydroelectric on the pipe. But our donor prefers us to hook into the local electricity. And if we're going to have a dishwasher in the new Zendo kitchen, probably we'll need more electricity than we can produce ourselves.

[83:26]

So we're debating how to maybe go on the electric grid and maybe also have some hydroelectric and solar power and so forth. How to make a mixture. And we have the same decision about what to do with, excuse me, our shit. Do we make more leaching fields or do we share it with the community and let them take care of it? So anyway, we have this kind of... The community thinks it's better to share it with them because then it supports their system and so forth.

[84:46]

So I spoke to Scott Johnson last night and so forth about these things. Because we have to make some decisions right away, whether we set it up for hydroelectric or not, and so forth. Hmm. Anyway, so in practice I think you have to kind of have a mix of systems of sensing perhaps different kinds of cultures in which you live. And I think probably that's healthy for the larger culture to have some mix. And something is communicated through the mix.

[86:13]

Now, I don't think yesterday I gave you much sense that's practical of anything, but I feel there may be some, I hope, some fertility in what I said that will bear fruit in your own thinking and actions. Nun, was ich gestern gesagt habe, da hatte ich den Eindruck, das hatte nicht so einen praktischen Aspekt für euch, aber ich hoffe, wenn ich den noch hinzufüge, dass Frucht in eurem Leben tragen wird. Okay. So this koan has a line in it that says, supposedly quoting Confucius. He said, supposedly, the master of sources, the master of sources lives outside convention.

[87:16]

I live within convention. And then it also says somewhere in the koan, to master the sources, you need a technique outside of convention. So it's presenting this possibility of being outside convention as well as inside convention. And so wird jetzt diese Möglichkeit dargestellt, sowohl außerhalb als auch innerhalb von Konventionen zu sein.

[88:18]

It says another funny line, only a king of geese can pick milk out of water. I don't know. I have no idea what yeast can pick, milk out of water, but it's a great image. Okay. So I think that maybe I should... try a little intellectual rap about perception. Now, I'd also like to demystify enlightenment a little bit if I could, but maybe there won't be time.

[89:18]

Okay, so enlightenment has something to do with perception. And it's rather odd that it has something to do with perception. Why should changing the way you perceive have something to do with enlightenment? But this is part of this koan, certainly. So this koan is a kind of... Quite marvelous. Instead of rap, I'll say riff on perception.

[90:35]

And so is this choir, so a pretty wonderful riff in relation to perception. And if Gerd is sitting in front of me, I can use you as an example, okay? Or say a server comes to serve me food. So... One of the common phrases used in Buddhism and the whole scene of Buddhism, Hinduism, yoga and so forth is the subject-object distinction. And being free or altering the subject-object distinction.

[91:38]

Now, this is what I think I should talk about a little bit and what partly this koan is of course about. Now, in order to perceive something, you have to separate the world. You can't perceive anything without separating it out from the background. Okay, so that's given number one. Given number two, or say it another way, you have to divide things.

[92:29]

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