Now, in discussing the controversy about the body, I heard some differences, but I didn't hear much controversy. Maybe we can have controversy about the concept of the body, but I don't think we can have controversy about the experience of the body. So can anybody say what was the controversy? Also mir kam vor, die Komproverse war einfach nur der Punkt, dass diese Frage überhaupt gestellt wurde, wieso nehmen wir an, dass wir wissen,

[01:01]

My feeling is the controversy was just the point of asking the question, why do we assume that we know what the body is, while all these years we have talked about what is mind, what is awareness, and so on and on, but never we talked about the body in that way. And it was understood by some as, why shouldn't we talk about this? Why is it necessary to talk about this? Yes, thank you. On the one hand, body is the matter, the physical matter, but on the other hand, isn't it also the field of experience? And? Okay, yeah. For me, in my experience, the body feels like the instrument of the mind, like a tool.

[02:39]

I think the body, the experience and memory from the past is somehow gathered, also gathered, and then And also they form the mind. Yes. And there is also an interplay that by my intention and consciously I can work, somehow work on the body and induce a kind of shift in the body.

[04:04]

Okay. And recently I had the experience that I can let go of the mind, because I can depend on the form of my body, and the form of my body holds me together. So in this case, your mind would be the instrument of the body. Okay, you started out by saying you see the body as the instrument of the mind. So that's what she translated. Also, yes, in the sense of a musical instrument, the mind expresses through the body.

[05:19]

Okay. What comes up for me are comparisons to describe what may be the problem. For example, the nature of light was described very controversially in physics. So there is the theory of particles and of waves. But now we know that both views can be proved, although theoretically they exclude each other.

[06:34]

So the nature of light seems to be somehow more complex and not to be understandable in that way. And this body-mind problem and everything that's associated with it, it seems to be somehow similar to that. Yes. So that, for example, if I bring something up, according to which direction I'm coming from, I get it somehow confirmed, either as a phenomenon of the mind or of the body.

[07:34]

And maybe in reality, there is an enormous range, and you only have a part of it in view. Yes, Ali? Yes. that the missing part, or the part that can speak, has a perspective. When we are listening to the discussion, we assume when we talk that the part who is talking is the part which understands.

[08:50]

It has an overview. The part which is talking is the part which understands. Yeah. The part which... No, who are you? The part which is talking. Which part? I'll try to say it in English. When we talk about mind, it is true, or at least I understand it so far, that the mind is the same dimension as the thinking, understandably. Okay. Which part said that? Okay. So let me see if I can say something. Yesterday Eric was speaking in English first and often translates one, which makes sense.

[10:14]

But I asked him to speak in German first. And I notice that I understand you better when I hear Deutsch first than when I hear the English first. And if I study, observe that, and now I'm trying to define some terms, prajna would be to observe that. With an English speaker, I have the ability, by three years, to separate out the bodily sound of the voice from the meaning sound of the voice, the conscious sound of the voice. Also mit einer englischsprachigen Person habe ich über Jahrzehnte die Fähigkeit entwickelt, diesen klanglichen Teil der Stimme zu trennen von der bedeutungstragenden Teil der Stimme.

[11:35]

But when a person is a native speaker of German, I don't feel their body in their English. Not Eric's, of course, but anyway. His body is all over the place. I had a problem in Holland when I used to teach there. The Dutch think of themselves as bilingual, and they are more than any other European country I know. So they really, out of a kind of pride, natural pride, pride is good in Buddhism, by the way, it doesn't go as before a fall. So they had a certain natural pride in their English and they didn't want me to be translated.

[12:42]

And I couldn't give lectures. I didn't know what to say. Because I couldn't feel them understanding what I was saying. Because their bodily language was still more integrated with their Dutch than it was integrated with their English. And if I can't feel you understanding or not understanding, I lose my location. So I think part of the controversy was, should we all, as Erwin said, have the same definition of words?

[13:49]

I wouldn't say, I probably wouldn't use the word definition, but I'd say probably, if we're going to practice together, we need the same or similar use of words. And as we said yesterday, words are primarily defined in yoga culture. Contextually, they don't have a fixed meaning. They have a meaning in the way they're used. And if I hit the bell, this could be, of course, The beginning of Sasa.

[15:06]

That could be the beginning of that. It goes out there and the context defines what it is. And the word body is out there and it takes a lot of different meanings. But we can say the way body is used in Sanskrit and Pali and Japanese and so on. You can't use the word body for a corpse. The body of a corpse is what makes the corpse alive. So body... What?

[16:08]

It really didn't mean? It's difficult to... Do I do that? No. Oh, you did that. I did it in my mind. Oh, okay. So... So body, like all things in this Buddhist culture, all things are activities. So in this case, body is what makes what looks like a corpse alive. It actually was an issue in the koan 14 we discussed in winter branches. And the word body, the etymology seems to be connected in English at least to a brewing vat, like for a beer or something.

[17:10]

It's a kind of location. And in Chinese, there are quite a few words for body, but one of them is a body is a share of the whole. And a share of the whole is rather different than a brewing vat. Then you have statements like Dogen's. The entire universe is the true human body. Wie das gesamte Universum ist der wahre menschliche Körper.

[18:22]

So where does that take us? Also wo führt uns das jetzt hin? The question, how can you say it's my body? Yeah, I understand. Deutsch bitte. So I can understand what you're saying. Wie man überhaupt sagen kann, dass es mein Körper ist. Suzuki Roshi used to laugh at us because we'd say things like, my stomach hurts. And he would think it funny that we said, my, because who else's stomach would we be talking about? In Japanese, you just say stomach. You don't say my stomach. Okay. Yeah. But the sense of location... And your ultimate state.

[19:37]

Yeah. Wishing... In this sentence, I can feel this location of this I and of the you. But he's assuming the whole thing, including the listeners, are the location. Okay. So that's not a location like a brewing vat. Yeah.

[20:37]

Unless you think of the whole thing as a brewing vat or as washing machines that we did yesterday. Deutsch? Could you say it again? No. Could you pay attention? What I've been speaking about quite a bit recently and I wonder if I should go into it again, but I think I should. That started primarily in the second Rostenberg seminar last year. And these Rostenberg seminars become definitive for me in some ways of what I'm trying to in the end evolve and develop during each year.

[21:54]

Partly because I only see quite few people only once a year. Yeah, but also partly because I've been practicing with many of you for many years. I've been coming here to Rustenburg, I think, 25 years or so. So I want to advance the discussion of Buddhism each year here, but also get us all on the same page. So I started last year particularly speaking about bodily time. And Chandrakirti says something like take the observation of the body as a starting point.

[23:09]

Proceed observe the body as a starting point. Where does a statement like this come from? What are the implicit ingredients in a statement like this? Well, first again, the fundamental viewpoint, as we partly talked yesterday, of the worldview of Buddhism, is that it's a field of activity, which is always

[24:16]

becoming something new and has no ground. And because it's so pluralistic, it can't have a ground. And because it's always changing, if you imagine the past, That fringe is always getting bigger and changing and so on. So there's no center. And the recognition that there's no center became an implicit part of the development of Zen Buddhism in particular. And do you have your Zabu here?

[25:38]

Yes. Okay. And so then the question came up, is Buddha somehow a center or not a center? And so what would be a center? Okay. You made this? Yes. This is impressive. Well, I don't know. I know. So there's a concept of a Bodhi Mandava. The center is where you can realize enlightenment. But if the center is where you can realize enlightenment, what constitutes that center? Because in a worldview where there's no center, every point is the center.

[26:43]

So how do you create a point which can be a location for enlightenment? Because if there's any kind of importance to a center, it would be in Buddhist context where you can become a Buddha. So this is expressed in the, I don't know the design of this, but we'll see. I open it. So when you're ordained as a monk carry a cloth like this. And the cloth is partly so that when you put your Buddha's robe down on the ground you're bowing not on the ground but on the cloth.

[28:00]

So you open this and that is Amadap. And when you put it down on the ground, you don't put it down so the mandala is already there, you put it down so you make a mandala. So that every time you bow, you created a mandala. And on special occasions, you open it the whole way. It's called Daitan.

[29:00]

Fully spread. But you're still making it because the usual way is to do it the other way. Sorry? The usual way is to do it... So when you do it this way, it's the unusual. So that also becomes, you're making it, it's not already sewn. So, Also dieses Verbeugungstuch wird ein Hasenfuß. Thank you. Then Evelyn wollte gestern ein Hase werden.

[30:03]

She was trying to decide whether she should be a rabbi or a rabbi. So it's a talisman A rabbit foot in English would be called a talisman. And because of the nature of the Shoyuroku case we discussed in the branches I brought up the concept of a talisman. habe ich dieses Konzept des Talismans besprochen.

[31:18]

And is it the same word in German? Talisman? Yeah. Etymology in English means to complete something at a distance. So it makes a full circle. Die Etymologie im Englischen vom Talisman ist etwas über die Entfernung hinweg vervollständigen, so dass es einen Kreis beschreibt. And I think that in both English and Deutsch there's a feeling that it's kind of superstitious or magic. But the practice of the practice of the But without the word, the practice of the talisman is everywhere in our culture.

[32:25]

If you have to have a Samsung smartphone or an Apple smartphone, these are both talismanic decisions. I mean, the watch you have is the talisman. I can't go out without my watch. And if you're ordained, for instance, when you're practicing, you don't wear a wedding ring. This is also a talismanic idea, that the physical objects affect you. And athletes often have to have a certain piece of cloth in their pocket or some particular thing that they wear. So I gave this as an example yesterday or the last week with Like this could be a talisman.

[33:49]

Five pronged vajra. Prong. These are prongs. Like the prongs of a fork. Two, three, four, five. I saw only four before. You count that one too. And you count this one too, then it's six. So, sometimes I carry something like this around. I had it when I had dinner with you the other night in the restaurant when you picked me up at the train. And in the middle of the meal I put it down on the table.

[34:50]

What the hell is he doing? It gives me a feeling of practice. And, for instance, if you wear bees, I had to write to Nicole Bodden and Mark Blustein and others at Crestel to tell them, because Mark's father died, how to do a cremation ceremony. And my instructions included, it's customary to put beads on your left wrist. And wear them loosely so they interfere with what you're doing.

[35:56]

The effort is not to make it convenient. But to make it inconvenient. Because that interferes with how you do things and then you're reminded your body is different. So this concept is also like in the kind of robes we have. They're made to interfere with your bodily movements. They're not made of spandex. Do you have spandex?

[37:02]

I think so, yes. I have elastron. And so the sleeves are too long. And for young monks, they have really long sleeves. You can't hold your hands down because your sleeves drag on the floor. So it means you have to walk around like this. And sometimes it's said in a koan something that he was walking with his hands down. That means he's a senior elderly person who has shorter things and he can walk with his hands down. So the concept of talisman, let's take it away from magic and recognize we are actually relating talismanically to the world all the time. So, again, Chandrakirti starts with...

[38:11]

let's take as a starting point the observation of the body. And he means the body as an activity. So he means notice what you can notice. So the first aspect of body practice in Zen is not the concept of the body as an object. but the concept of the body as an activity, and your relationship to the activity of the body, through what you notice. And then the practice is, can you increase the

[39:39]

depth and sensitivity of what you notice. And then it's assumed further that the sensitivity and depth of how you notice that attention itself changes the body. So by bringing attention to the body, to the activity of the body, you're changing what the body is. So that can be so subtle and extended, Dogen can say the entire universe is the true human body. And I think what we noticed, quite a number of us were in the practice period together, the first European practice period.

[41:10]

But somehow, just being in the same place together, following the same routines, And the routine sounds confining and boring. And some people actually simply can't handle the routine. But if you can allow yourself to enter into the routine, the route, it's a routine, the routine becomes a path, a route. And you discover along the route of the routine new adventures in how you feel related to other bodies.

[42:32]

And just as the attention to the noticeable activity of the body Changes the body. The noticeable, the attentional space within a shared routine the attentional dimension of a shared routine, the attentional dimension of a shared routine, begins to change the body in ways that you can't change the body or know the body all by yourself.

[43:40]

But it takes a certain kind of skill or discipline to allow yourself to be in that kind of space for three months. And some people, just particularly in the West, are just too individuated to do it. Or can't allow comparative mind to subside enough so you just don't make comparisons to others. Or can't allow comparative mind to subside enough so you just don't make comparisons to others. You really have to discover yourself in a field of acceptance.

[44:46]

A field of acceptance when you really do accept others without comparison. Not at every moment, maybe. Sometimes you get kind of irritated at someone. But somehow there's almost a medium of acceptance that absorbs the dissonance. And that kind of experience which is one of the reasons some degree of monastic experience is a definitive part of transmitted Buddhism.

[46:00]

In other words, it's just a historical fact. that the Buddhism that's been transmitted from teacher to disciple, teacher to disciple, is in fact transmitted through the experience of a mutual body. And sometimes it becomes a kind of, you know, historically rather a stretch. They want to say that this person is a disciple of that person, but they only met them for 15 minutes.

[47:03]

But then they create a whole mythology that they felt each other at a distance. But knowing something about this particular case, for instance, It would be more accurate to say they both were in a mutual field of body's practicing, which included these two famous teachers, And there's no need to make the stretch that actually they were connected at a distance, though some things like that do happen.

[48:07]

So the experiential fact of this mutual attentional body is what leads to the concept of the Dharmakaya and the Sambhogakaya and the Nirmanakaya. Okay, Kaya means body. So here it's not Dharma mind, it's Dharmakaya, Dharma body. So body is used in Buddhism also to mean anything that sort of sticks together.

[49:09]

Körper wird im Buddhismus auch dann verwendet für alles, was irgendwie zusammenhält. Also wir verwenden das zum Beispiel auch im Englischen für incorporation, also ein Unternehmen. But I believe, I'm not sure of my sociological history here, but I'm pretty sure that the first concept of an organization as a body arose in Catholic monasteries. The cloister in a way insisted on being treated as a body, even though it was quite a few bodies. And then that idea of incorporation got extended to companies and other organizations.

[50:18]

So if you release a word, a concept like body into the world, it begins to find its own uses. And in English we speak about the body politic. Meaning, can a democracy govern a group of people as if they had a common body? And when you can't say like a king might, off with his head. You've got to get everyone to agree. How to get everyone to agree is the problem of democracy. But this is unrelated to the concept of the body. But even though the word body goes out into the activity of human beings,

[51:48]

And then its uses begin to show you how it can be used. It's still somewhat different than mind. And when I make a distinction between hearing you at Deutsch first I'm speaking about the sensorial body being present to your sensorial body in the process of speaking. So I might say that's more a bodily presence than the presence of mentation. Even though they're intimately related.

[53:18]

Okay. Is that all crystal clear? Clear enough, anyway. Okay. Maybe before I go to say something else, is there anybody who wants to say anything? Any comments about what I said? Yes. Yes. A commentary. Yesterday you told us about your efforts to advise and tell people how they can do this ceremony, this cremation ceremony.

[54:42]

He also told us about this organization that is called, under quotes, Neighbors Burning Neighbors. Neighbors Burning Neighbors, yeah. That's just a shadow. Can you say it in English? And then you have a million desires and a million problems and problems and you have a million problems and problems. And that reminds me of the fact that there is no need for that anymore. And then they don't know what to do, just stand around and watch it, watch it.

[55:49]

One of them said, we do the checks, give you email addresses and lines. Told us that you were describing this email, which is 13 pages long. I'm glad you were paying attention yesterday. So the people of town Thank you.

[56:53]

Mm-hmm. And it's something which is not accessible through the mind, or through the discursive mind. It's something which is with the . It's something which is inaccessible through the body, through physical experience, and following physical experience. My body knew that this would be too much for me. Your body knew? My body. No, that's what I'm saying because I couldn't translate. Oh, I see.

[57:53]

So this is really against what we are thinking in the West and what we are allowed to think in the West. And I think especially in German-speaking Central European countries. Because I think that the reason for that is because we only think it is a shared space when it's made explicit and when it's made discursive. Yeah. And everything that has to do with magic and talisman and so on, this is forbidden. Which cannot be shown and is pushed aside. And I find it very interesting to explore and notice this other space that can be shared with others.

[59:40]

And to develop a non-discursive vocabulary for that. This is only my commentary. That's it. Well, let's go to work. Yeah, I mean, part of the sensitivity is when you come into this space, where the cremation is going to occur. There's a dead body. And there's some people. And as it says in this koan we just looked at, these seven wise women saying, why see all the corpses? Where are the people? And so far, when I've been to two or three cremations that they've done at Creston that I've attended,

[60:48]

Most comments are, the person's not gone, they're watching from above or something like that. Nobody can definitely Nobody seems able to define the space as if this person is gone. I like Derrida's comment. Unfortunately, Derrida died of pancreatic cancer. But he commented something like, I've realized I'm one of the not yet gone. But he was saying by that that all of us are the not yet gone and most are gone.

[62:07]

So if you bring attention through this talismanic statement, I am one of the not yet gone. Your attention to your aliveness is a little different. And a mantra that reminds you of practice is a talisman. So some of the ones we used are already connected. You can think of it as a talisman. So part of the sensitivity is you come into this space where the cremation is going to be.

[63:31]

And there's a particular day, wind, weather. And there's a particular group of people. And among that, from that group, there's probably not an infinite number of spaces possible, but there's, you know, 10 or 20 or 30. there's not an infinite number of spaces possible, but there's probably 10 or 20 or 30. And so the adept practitioner, you know, knows, okay, among the possible spaces, the one that should be created is such and such, and he or she will do things to create that space in which the cremation can occur.

[64:43]

Okay, so that's enough on that. Someone else? Yeah. You said before, in Buddhism there is no center. And I ask myself how far I can create a center in which I can create a practice. And I'm asking myself, to what extent can I create a center by doing a specific practice? So this can become a center. So the basic idea is, if the world is a series of moments,

[65:47]

In that series of moments, in a sense, each one is a beginning. Yeah, I mean, you have a statement, every day is a good day, etc. Today is the first day of your life. And every waitress in America or waiter says to you, have a good day. And sometimes I can't resist saying, I'm sorry, I have other plans. But this very common idea is what Chandrakirti is saying. Basically, make the noticing of the body a beginning.

[67:11]

Make it your Bodhi Mandala. develop the habit of using the body as a talisman to locate practice. Yeah, so you put down the bowing cloth, is that good? And it's a mandala. Where I put this down. Or I put this on. Or whenever I come to the cushion I go through the invisible door into samadhi space. So I bow to the cushion And then I turn around and say goodbye to the world.

[68:21]

And then I sit down. But those are talismanic behaviors. Do you understand what I'm saying? They remind you of practice. And they begin to be habituated in a way that makes you feel practice. For example, if some people wanted me when I lived in San Francisco to start a school, They figured if I can start a Zen center in a monastery, I can start a school. So there's a group of people who wanted to send their kids to the school. I would start. They don't know what they were asking. But there would be no bells at the beginning of class.

[69:23]

No bells at the beginning. There'd be the three rounds of the heart. So somebody had to... 15 minutes, you know. And you'd have to clean the rooms yourself after class and things like that. But just the idea that it's not like bring and now you go to the next class. It's like something happened that changes you into the next class. But just this idea that there is no clock and then you go into the next hour, but something creates a transition that brings you into the next hour. So when we're at Gyanathap, when we hear the Han, we already start entering Zang.

[70:46]

Okay, so if the starting point is the body and the starting point is those aspects of the body you can notice, And what you're noticing is the activity or movements of the body. So you notice more and more, first of all you notice your breath. So in order to develop this as a practice, And as a Dharma door, I suggest we contrast your experience, you focus your experience of the world by using the word time in relationship to bodily time.

[72:06]

Because you are time. As I say often you can't be out of time because you are time. And if there's any original time it's your heartbeat. But your heartbeat is not the same as others and clocks and things like that. So you begin to notice your heartbeat. So this is the body. Or bodily time.

[73:13]

And as I say, you notice your breathing. And you notice your intraceptive sensations, which means the sensation of your organs. And you notice your proprioceptive sensation. The proprioceptive is, at least in English, your balance, your sense of location. And then you may get, as your noticing gets more subtle, you may notice that the heartbeat and the breath don't have phase synchrony.

[74:14]

But you may notice that you do have phase synchrony to some extent in samadhi and in satsang. So you're making an attentional investigation of the body, an attentional observation of the body. And this can become finally so powerfully your sense of Time as existence. It's in a real contrast to clock time. And clock time, of course, is not just about clocks.

[75:33]

It's about the elliptical orbit of the Earth around the sun and so forth. And the declination in the orbit and so forth. So it's actually also related to the physicality of the world. But it's only one of the successional rhythms we can call time. So from Chandrakirti and my point of view, the first successional rhythm to establish your location is through bodily time. And you make that your primary reference point. And you make that a beginning of each moment. So you're using your body as a talismanic cue to start to practice.

[77:00]

Okay. Okay. Then there's, you know, more we could say here, but I think it's good to take time to take a break. This is a longer period than usual. And I hope... If you have any thoughts about this, we can discuss them after lunch. And shall we start at three? Okay, right.

[77:51]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_77.32