that the basis is always shifting. So we name and find something to name. Now can you imagine bringing your mind back before naming? Yes, I think you can. I think in our practice sometimes we're at a point where there's a freedom from naming. So if in our practice we feel and sense this freedom from naming, it doesn't mean you go back to a place and live where there's no naming, or you create in zazen a no-naming state of mind all the time. It's ridiculous. Not really possible, anyway. but rather knowing the mind before naming, intuiting the mind before naming, we find non-naming in the midst of naming.

[01:17]

I think that's the best I can say. You feel things without naming them, but ready to name them. Now the problem with something like the idea of original mind or a mirror, if you feel there's some original mind, originating mind, at the base of you, it's very much like believing in a soul or something like that, then when you see something, even if you see it, if I look at this pillar, if I see this pillar as Formless, perhaps, or without, I don't name it a pillar, it's something popping up through the tile floor. But if I think of it as arising in mind, or reflecting original mind, it tends to reify the sense of something substantial in me.

[02:28]

Does that make sense? In other words, even if I see things as changing, if I see them as reflected in a mind I think of as somehow inherent in me, it's a kind of substantiation. So this... asks us to... The Diamond Sutra, which we read in the mornings, emphasizes a non-dwelling mind, as it's described in this koan. A mind that doesn't dwell anywhere. We could say it doesn't abide anywhere, but we're trying to make a subtle distinction between a mind which is still in place and a mind which is still without place. In other words, do you feel your still mind is a place, or do you feel your still mind has no boundaries?

[03:32]

And the key to this is seeing, first of all, let's go back. When you're practicing, this is, I'm sorry, this is so abstract, but let me try to go through it. When we're practicing, one of the first things we do, as I've been pointing out recently a lot, is we stop identifying with thinking. So we remove our sense of ourselves from our thinking, that our thinking is somehow ourselves. If you do that, it's a big change. It's as big a change as being able to concentrate in your breath. That thinking comes up, and thinking is something that happens, but you don't think of the thoughts as you, as representing you.

[04:34]

You don't find your continuity in your thoughts. Keep coming back to this. So you, by practice, begin taking the sense of continuity away from thinking. of your continuity away from finding your sense of need for continuity in thinking. You bring it back to your, as I say, your breath, your field of mind, your body, phenomena. Then you begin to take, withdraw a sense of reality as being discovered through language or being reflected in language. This is different than just seeing that language isn't you, it's also not the world. And then we're drawing it from any concepts.

[05:51]

Like if you use a concept of original mind, you still believe that concepts somehow, because original mind may be some kind of experience, but it's also a concept. And as long as you are trying to seek out your practice and concepts, ultimately, you're caught in as concepts. Cohen says, in an interpretive route. So you're withdrawing your sense of reality and self from language. So where do you put it then? And I've said, if you withdraw your sense of continuity from language and from sequential sense of time, you put it in your body, in your breath, field of mind and phenomena.

[07:00]

But where do you put your sense of reality if you withdraw it from concepts of the world? The I think the best thing to do is to put it in your feeling, non-graspable feeling. As I say, not emotions, but as I say, feeling at the level that there's a feeling in this room right now. What these koans are trying to suggest is you take the sense of reality out of language and bring it into feeling. And then you keep removing it and find no basis at all. So if you're, sometimes you may in zazen feel again this sense of no boundaries to your body. Now again, we don't treat such an experience as, oh that's just something that happens in zazen.

[08:08]

We treat this experience as something that's as real as anything else. that it's one aspect of being alive or being another kind of body and other people can feel it. Now you may, okay, so you may get caught in concepts, you may get caught in concepts of science and paradigms of science. Instead of the paradigms of language, Still, it's very hard to say, well, can science measure this? Well, there's some things that only human beings can measure. There's no tool, no scientific machine, chemical test or anything that's as subtle as we are. So there's some things that science can't measure, but we can measure, or we can feel.

[09:13]

So this means a real trust jumping off a flagpole. You have to be able to trust yourself at a level that goes beyond language and paradigms of language concepts and the paradigms of science. Nowadays we have to look at how our world is shaped by what's possible from the scientific point of view. So what do you end up with? You end up with everything bang up in your face. You end up with a kind of face-to-face immediacy. And we really have this sense of a physical passage in this physical world which has no boundaries. So this is a here-ness

[10:18]

that may have more depth than anything you imagined. Now I can't, you know, I don't feel I'm doing this, you know, it's still maybe a little intellectual where I'm trying to present this, but we're trying to, I'm trying to get free of I'm trying to suggest that you can trust yourself and your practice enough to let go of your mental body, your habit body, your language body. I like the Lankavatara Sutra. It says, let go of the sentence body, the phrase body, and the syllable body. Just a little aside, this is quite a wonderful statement.

[11:20]

It means that when you hear language, a body arises through the syllables, like a poet, like in a poem. A different body arises through the phrases, or the words, and another body arises through the sentences. The sentences produce one kind of mind, just the word produces another kind of mind, and the syllable itself is another kind of mind. And all three are present when you're listening to language. If you become aware, not conscious, consciousness limits you, consciousness limits you mostly to the sentences and the phrases. Awareness, you start entering the words and the syllables. So maybe you hear we're moving our sense of body out of the sentences into... The words just this or each word displacing the usual sense of time and space and into each syllable.

[12:40]

And a big space surrounds each syllable. So if you, again, find a way to occasionally, or sense, intuit this withdrawal from the paradigms of language, of science, of concepts. We say, again, exposed in the golden breeze. So you could, here's a phrase from Chinese koans that tries to This is a kind of golden space. The altar is meant to represent a kind of golden space.

[13:48]

I said to Rhonda the other day, we should put a dish or something under each object there. Not just because the water might spill on the brocade, that's true too, but also because the brocade is a kind of space. And if you really feel the brocade is space, then the vase might just disappear. You put something so it floats, you might put it on the alternate. Where'd it go? It's somewhere in the brocade. So we're floating it on the brocade. So everything appears, the Diamond Sutra says, giving the translation in this poem, through enlivening the non-dwelling mind. So we enliven everything we do.

[14:52]

We enliven it in naming it. There's another way to look at naming. Withdrawing from naming and then re-naming. Some kind of experience like this is what is meant by jumping off the flagpole, the flagpole of concepts, of paradigms, of reality, and finding yourself exposed in the golden breeze, or bang up face to face with each of us. Bang up face to face. I mean, this slate floor is right in my face. There's no distance.

[15:56]

So let's use concepts in practice and let's have sophisticated or refined concepts of practice because it allows us to practice with more subtlety and accuracy and allows us to develop way to teach But let's also know to proceed in our zazen with no concepts, no paradigms, to feel the non-dwelling, the no place. So we say in the Heart Sutra every morning, no eyes, no ears, no nose, no form, without substantiating things. If there's any trace of an interpretive root,

[17:13]

we are still caught in what we could say the narrow bandwidth of mental broadcast. In other words, you know, we broadcast a radio signal very widely, but it's a very narrow bandwidth. We tune it in, And thinking is like that. It reaches very far, but it's a very narrow bandwidth. And it's very part, it's very convincing, because it reaches and touches everything. It's a very narrow bandwidth. So what we're asking of you heroes, you warriors, you fools, that you let yourself out of this narrow bandwidth The bottom, I mean, such ideas of original mind are only the bottom of conceptual mind, not our true nature.

[18:23]

You can't grasp your true nature. Again, let me come back to this koan with Dung Shan. Among the three bodies of Buddha, Dharmakaya, Sambhogakaya, Samantabhadra, like that extraordinary tanka we have to the right of Kannon. Blue-faced, bliss, blissed out, blissed in, Samantabhadra, Nirmanakaya. This is already pretty subtle, these bodies. But the monk asks, among the three bodies of Buddha, What one does not fall into any categories? Dung Chan says, I'm always close to this. So we can use language like a phrase, like I'm always close to this, to free ourselves from categories.

[19:37]

You can't grasp this what I just called true nature, our true nature. But we can find ourselves close to it. So maybe you counteract your thinking and feelings which your definitions, with no categories. I'm always close to this. This kind of practice should be implicit in all your practice. The nameless should be implicit in all your naming. Like that. Although we can't grasp it, so Dungsan said, yes, but we can be close to it.

[20:53]

I'm always close to this. We can't be far from it because this is how things fundamentally exist. Retention, you believe and trade every being and place with the true narrative of God's way. Thank you. Amen.

[22:16]

Amen. Chant Chant

[23:18]

May all the kumbh-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la Hiding into strenuous virtue, to remember and accept how I grow old to taste the truth about our jealous hearts. It's very nice of you all to come to my lecture again this afternoon.

[24:46]

The last two lectures I've not been satisfied with that I found a way to express what I wanted to. And it's Dan's fault. See, when you're a good practitioner, you're always willing to take the blame. Always. But he suggested in Russell 2, this Dogen seminar, which got me thinking about Dogen and Zazen and its… And contemporary commentators on Dogen, if any, don't seem to me to be very clear about him. So anyway, I somehow got started on trying to be clear about, as I'm saying, aspects of practice which

[25:57]

especially what I would call the yogic practice concepts that vitalize our practice. Yeah, but it's not, you know, as I said, I've never really spoken about it so specifically, and I haven't found a way to speak about it yet that satisfies me. So, I mean, you may want to do something else, but unfortunately you're part of my experiment in trying to find some way to speak about this. I hope it's something useful to you, Sashin. Yeah, now let me say about Sashin, a number of you have brought up you know, the feeling of an assumption that sesshin is Zen practice.

[27:19]

And it's not. As I said to many people, there's actually a debate within Zen whether sesshins are valuable at all. I, of course, obviously think they're valuable. And it's always interesting to me that so many people sign up for them. I always think, I would think people sign up for the seminars, maybe the practice weeks, and one or two for Sashin. But no, usually more people sign up for Sashin than anything else. If it's a week long, at least. Maybe, Janosov, more people have come to a seminar. Also, we can accept more people for seminars. But if we do a practice week, only recently have the practice weeks begun to have as many people almost as the Sashins. Now a practice week, and I think doing them at Yohanneshof made a difference, at Haus der Stille there would only be about half the people coming to a practice week.

[28:23]

Now a practice week is a Sashin, a sitting schedule And the mornings are somewhat like sesshin, but there's also much more study and discussion and breaks and things. So it's more of a time in which there's more zazen, but there's more study and sangha time, too. And for most people, I think this is a useful form. I don't know of nothing exactly quite like it exists that I know of in Japan. But anyway, I think it's a good thing for us who are primarily lay practitioners to do in the West. And maybe we should schedule one here at Kresten and see how it works. Something like the Dogen Seminar, but extended over a week. Okay.

[29:25]

Oh my goodness, I've got some shaking heads here. Quakers, Shakers. Now, if I ask myself, why do people come to Sashim? I suppose some people come because it's a stereotypical Zen practice, but that lasts till about the afternoon of the first day. Has a reason. So I think probably the main reason is the purge. It purges you emotionally. You feel cleaned out. And often people, I mean, I've had people, so many people swear up and down, right and left, in ten directions, that they will never come to a Sashin again, you know, the fourth day. But, you know, six months later, they're back. You wonder why.

[30:25]

And I think somehow the effect of cleaning things out, something like that helps. Of course there's also the recognition afterwards for many people that their practices jumped about two years, or at least quite a bit after one sesshin. And then too there's a, you definitely do increase your power, you increase your mental resiliency. And you increase your general access to strength, power. You feel your own power sometimes. And it's, you know, since we don't have, I often say, puberty rights and things like that, which teach us, show us that life isn't what we expected. Often when friends, relatives, etc. are sick or other things that happen, we find we don't have the resources to face it.

[31:30]

But often Sashin gives us the resources to face things. And finally, there's some kind of joy that comes up in Sashin, and especially after it's over. And I think we do recognize intuitively or in fact that a lot of the pain in Sashin comes from one, our habit body, which we can feel changing, and two, our basic mental and physical restlessness and the mind's kind of addiction to distraction. So if you break your addiction to distraction, kind of reach into the roots of mental and physical restlessness. Fashin's a great way to do it and you feel differently.

[32:35]

You feel different. And a resilient mind and some physical skill and a mind that doesn't need anything. These three things help a lot, and they're a kind of skill. The mind that doesn't need anything is more of a realization than a skill, but certainly a resilient mind and the physical skills of sitting and dealing, handling discomfort. And I find in myself, often I interpret Pain is what really, if I face it, is just discomfort. If I look carefully, I'd really rather move and my leg kind of is uncomfortable. I mean, sometimes it's a lot worse than that, but often I just interpret discomfort as pain.

[33:39]

It also helps to not have the pain spread through your body. In other words, if your knee's hurting or your back, you just let the pain happen in your back. but you don't let it spread throughout your whole item, unit. But still, I would say practice is analysis, embodiment or enactment, meditation and mindfulness. And with Sashin is primarily a embodiment-enactment practice. But there's other ways to embody the teachings, enact the teachings, so Sashin is not necessary. I mean, maybe in April no one will come, we'll see, after what I'm saying now. They'll say, oh, we're going to find some other way to enact practice.

[34:44]

Sashin does help meditation, mindfulness, it gives us also an opportunity to analyze and observe. But I think if you see practice as analysis, embodying that analysis, and the way meditation and mindfulness help develop the ability to both analyze and embody, then you won't necessarily think that Sashin is the quintessential Zen practice. It's just a shortcut, a crash course. And we're trying to create a Buddha field here. We're trying to replace the habit body by the sesshin body. And when the cooks are cooking, they're cooking for the sesshin body, not the habit body. Although we make some concessions, macaroni and cheese, that's for the habit body.

[35:48]

emotional food. We have to have a few days, I told Dan, we always have to have a few days of emotional food. Scrambled eggs. And the sheared eggs this morning, they were quite good. Baked eggs. But at Tussauds they used to treat them like hot dogs and they had a lot more ketchup in them. That was good, too. I don't like ketchup, but, you know, Tassajara Sashin, ketchup and a baked egg, it was quite unusual. So we reintroduced sheared eggs recently. Last year, was that the first time we had sheared eggs? We didn't have them in Sashin's here for quite a long time, ever, I think, until fairly recently. Okay, I said sesshin body and habit body.

[37:16]

I think you have the sense. Now I'm just trying to, what I'm trying to do now As I said, the last couple of times I haven't felt I've been able to say what I wanted to say the way I'd like to say it. And so this morning I took a little more time, because generally I have about 45 minutes or an hour to sort of sort through ways of speaking about things. Because I have some feeling, I'm quite clear in my feeling, but I have to find some kind of Mirrors, words that reflect what I feel. So today I took this morning and sorted a little more. Still, I don't know if I can be clear, but I have more things I could say. If you're prepared, it's 5.30, 6 o'clock. No, I won't go through.

[38:18]

So right now I'm trying to get a sense of vocabulary. And this is, you know, I think fairly easy for you to get habit body, sashin body. Even though it's quite radical in our culture because we have the idea of soul, self, person, you know, fate, the acorn theory that we're somehow born a little acorn and everything that happens as we grow up is predictive based on this kind of early form, and Buddhism just doesn't have any truck with that, or very little. So if we have a habit body and we have a sesshin body, the implications are quite radical. It means there's quite a lot of bodies that are possible.

[39:18]

Now the Sashin body is not the enlightenment body, although it can be close to an enlightenment body, but what we've done is create a practice here which can strip you of your habit body in 72 or 96 hours. I mean, maybe not, but it does loosen it at least. Maybe it cracks open a bit. So you need some way to function, you know. Otherwise you might say, I'm just a blob on the floor. And people have had near-death experiences where they, when they clinically go, what's it called, straight line or flat line? Flat line. Flat line. that they feel that they're just a blob on the floor or something and it gives themselves shape.

[40:24]

I don't know, I've never had a near-death experience that I know of except in several sushis. But that kind of image is something like the feeling in Buddhism. So we don't want you to be a blob on the floor. after your habit body is shed. And these are phrases. Dogen means something like that when he says, drop body and mind. Drop it into the schedule. And then the schedule gives you some body, some form, carries you. Anyway, to whatever degree this happens, or we could describe what happens to us in these terms, some such idea, yogic practice concept, is behind how a Sashin is.

[41:33]

Now let me try to, let me use the Oryoki practice to give you an example of, well, let me just start out. If you only knew the details of hara-yogi practice, which of course the newer people do, but all these little things you're supposed to do. And I guarantee you that most of you don't, even if you've been doing it five or six or eight years, don't know all the details yet. So it's, you know, it's not as, as I said, it's not as complicated as life, but it's complicated enough. And it's up to you, what can you notice? Okay, so, but if you... Now, if it's well taught, if somebody really knows the ryoriki well, teaches it well, the details itself imply what I'm calling the yogic practice concepts behind it.

[42:44]

Okay, but what are some examples of the yogic practice concepts? And this is... Not done in Japan, you don't explain things this way, but I've, you know, I've become compromised in the West. And I'm willing to explain things. Anyway, so, one of the concepts is, which we've talked about a lot, two hands, doing things with two hands. So we always try to have the feeling of two hands in everything we do. And the sense of the body as a field, an empowering auric chakra field. So you move the bowls into the body and out. And as I've again pointed out many times, you just go to a Japanese restaurant and you can see this yogic stuff going on, or a Chinese restaurant where there's fairly native, or haven't lost this sense of the yogic body, people, there's no handles on teacups.

[44:06]

Why? So you have to use two hands. And it's not because they're so undeveloped and backward. They've never thought of a handle. And they will hold their teacups here. And then they'll hold it, they'll drink and they'll hold it here. And what's here? The chakras. I mean, you can just sit in a Japanese restaurant and watch people doing it. But we don't think of it because we don't see the body as an auric field. Am I making sense here? So it's really quite another way of looking at things. So that kind of Now, once you see the sense of two hands and an auric field that's activated by using the Yoyoki, then all the details fit together. You see the glue behind the details. Now, if I just ask you to take your hands and put them like this, you know?

[45:11]

and do this, you don't have to do it, but if you did do it, you can start feeling a little putty or rubbery feeling between your hands. Now, if I don't tell you to do that, you don't notice it. But if I tell you to do that, you may notice it, and then you may understand that the whole of the orgy is based on this, that feeling. The whole orgy is based on beginning to feel that field through the way you treat objects, And also, since we're talking about a physical passage in this physical world, as I said earlier, I believe, the one detail of the oki leads to the next. You put this flap down, and you put this, and then this, and it's all one continuous movement. And as I mentioned, I believe, in the Sushina, you'll have saw recently, If you're in a Japanese restaurant, you watch folks.

[46:14]

I mean, as I gave you the phrase the other day, abs are already connected. Didn't I mention that? Already connected. It's something I mentioned quite often. But if you... I was sitting in a... Last time I was in Japan, I was... I like to go to a place called Colorado Coffee. Kisaten. It has nothing to do with Colorado. It does have something to do with coffee. and you can get a facsimile of plastic eggs. Plastic eggs are in the window, and you get something similar in the restaurant if you point, or if you can speak Japanese, you can ask. And then I would watch, like a flaneur. A flaneur is somebody who watches crowds but doesn't get caught up in them. And if you watch these Japanese folks, and they all It's like a kind of sort of dance, you know. One person lifts up his cup and everybody else tends to lift up their cup or they lift up something.

[47:18]

And one person does something else and they all sort of do something. It's kind of, they imitate each other. And you think, jeez, these people are like, you know, robots. What's wrong with these people? Until you get the feeling that they're creating a field. And the physical gestures are simply an excuse to create a field in which then a different kind of communication occurs. And they develop a physical rapport. And we don't do that. If we do this, if I went to coffee with you and every time you picked up something, I picked it up and you'd start thinking. So, and I'm not saying we should all become, you know, Japanese. just somewhat like the orioke, like we're doing here. We all do the orioke together, and we relate to the servers a certain way. So the servers, the other people that are eating, we all start creating a field that goes on into our sitting.

[48:22]

And we begin to open up, and I... Excuse me for saying similar things again. I'm sure if we could wire us all up with, you know, wires and stuff, you'd see that our left and right brains and metabolism were all reflecting each other's. This has actually been studied, but I'm quite sure with or without studies that it's the case. So how do we embody already connected Now I don't think we do it like the Japanese, but this is something that we will find out as we develop Sangha. Okay. So, well another, just one other example. When in the, in the meal, in the Oryoki

[49:26]

meal practice, we do a lot of bowing, a fair amount of bowing. But there's an inner bow as well that, I'll explain it, but generally you start to feel it. When we lift up at the bowls at the end, you know, you bow, this is, you know, thus we bow to Buddha, and then there's bing-bing, and then you lift up the bowls. Generally, when we lift up the bowls, we don't bow with them, but as you're holding them, you lift up your back toward the bowls. Inside. You lift up like this, and sometimes to acknowledge that, you pull the bowls in as the back lifts toward the bowls. And this is a bow, but it's an inside bow, it's not externalized. But there's lots of things like that that you begin to feel with your body. You lift up the thing and there's a kind of lifting feeling that comes through holding the bowls.

[50:31]

It's like you're meeting the bowls. So we live in a physical world and in a yoga culture, it's always trying to get us to relate to objects as if they were us. And one of the truisms of yoga, yoga culture, is that the macrocosm and microcosm are interrelated. There's interdependence at every manifestation. So earth, wood, steel, fire, clouds, we want these to pass through us. We want ourselves to pass into them as this is our world. Dogen says something like, we should treat things as if they were our own eyesight.

[51:55]

He means to be very careful with your eyeball. He means treat an object like it was your eyeball. Treat things with that kind of care. And even in the West, in the Middle Ages, they thought of eyesight as an I-being. And you generated what you saw. It wasn't just there passively waiting to be seen. You generated what you saw. And that's very much closer to a yogic sense of things. Okay. So as this, what I'm calling, I don't, you know, Using creating terms like yogic practice concepts is an experiment.

[53:02]

I'm seeing if it's useful to say something like this. But okay, so we can see that there's yogic practice concepts behind the oryoki, which make the oryoki hold together. And there behind Zen practice is an enlightenment seed, prototype. Enlightenment as an experience, if we did a phenomenological analysis of enlightenment, it's a prototype or model, a pattern for all of Zen practice. Now it's clear to me that this was well understood and thought through in the teachings of the Tang Dynasty folks who are our main teachers, founders.

[54:05]

But whether they talked about it in lecture like this, I'm sure they talked about it in transmission, because it's part of transmission practice when you acknowledge somebody to be a teacher. But whether it's talked about in the General Assembly, Sangha Assembly, I don't know. You know, there's no record, but anyway, I'm talking about it. And one reluctance I have of talking about it is because I don't want practice to be understood as dependent on an articulated enlightenment experience. Because not everyone will have them. So, but if we talk about enlightenment, invariably people start wanting it. So it's very hard to talk about it. As long as you have that feeling of wanting it, well first of all, wanting it is going to prevent you from having it.

[55:08]

Okay, I mean it's, at least it'll help in preventing it. From the mind you have to come to practice, you have to come to a mind that's simply satisfied to practice, simply satisfied to be alive. If you're simply satisfied to be alive, that's pretty close to enlightenment anyway. But let's talk about enlightenment as a archetypal or prototypal experience, or an epiphamatic It's not in the dictionary, but an epithematic epiphany. And you know, when I read various poets or writers, novelists, sea painters, at least the ones I like, I can always sense what kind of enlightenment experience lies at the root of their art.

[56:27]

Picasso, I see one kind. Matisse, I see another kind, and so forth. Verust, we already talked about. Joyce, it's clear. Ezra Pound, it's clear. Now, what's the difference? They didn't develop it. They tried to recover it or express it or mature it through their writing. but they didn't try to make this the basis of their life usually. So what the Sangha should do is create an enlightened life in which some of the Sangha have very articulated enlightened experiences, some have other kinds of experiences, some have Maybe if we think of, let's not, I'm on the edge of saying too much, but anyway, if we think of a receptacle body, receptacle means to repeatedly receive, recept is to hold, to keep re-holding, receiving.

[57:46]

A receptacle body, like a vase is a receptacle, a receptacle body, which we generate through practice. Like if we bow and we have the feeling of stopping for a moment with both coming and going disappearing, almost a kind of disappearing, every time you do that you generate a receptacle body. Now if I try to continue that image and say, how do you fill up the receptacle then? Well that happens, you know, all at once. Or it happens incrementally. Or sometimes the receptacle gets so big it doesn't need to be filled, or it includes everything. So I don't know how to do it yet, but I want to find some way to measure our practice, measure in the sense of understand and accept our practice as

[58:54]

valid and accept our practice allowing its authority in our lives without the idea of the measure being enlightenment. And the problem is The main problem is we compare ourselves to each other. He does or she does or he doesn't. I mean, I can't talk with you as long as you compare yourself to other people. I can't really talk to you frankly about practice as long as half of you are comparing yourself to each other. It's very, very difficult to do. Because it creates a dynamic that distorts everything. So I can only talk to you when you're all enlightened and then I can tell you you don't need to be enlightened. That's good, I like that.

[60:00]

When you're all enlightened I can tell you you don't need to be enlightened. So let's start there tomorrow. Should I stop now? Hmm. Hmm. If we have the idea of relative and absolute, probably overall the most basic yogic concept practice in all of Buddhism, most precisely formulated by Nagarjuna, found in the Sutta lineage teachings of the five ranks,

[61:09]

and so forth and just part of all the koans. And we could actually divide the world into, as the Yogacara do, into the imaginary, the world you imagine, the relative and the absolute, and we've discussed these three ways of looking at the world. But let's leave the imaginary out for now and just talk about the relative and the relative in the sense that the relative confronts the absolute. If we understand relative and absolute, let's say habit body and sashin body, form and emptiness. When you understand form in relationship to emptiness, this is another kind of relative. When you understand relative not in relationship to emptiness, then it's imaginary. So as soon as you say relative in the true sense we mean in Buddhism, you don't just mean your ordinary life, you mean the ordinary life informed by the Absolute, or wisdom.

[62:22]

It's exactly the same dynamic as your posture. This is my body, or somebody's body. It's on loan to me, I guess. But there's no me to loan it to, but here it is anyway. And which is Buddha's posture and which is my posture? I'm accepting my posture and I'm informed by Buddha's posture. This part's Buddha's posture, this part's, you know, we don't, you can't say. So this posture right now is informed by Buddha's posture and the acceptance of my posture. And that's a kind of rubbing together, a kind of face to face. You can feel when it's more your posture and when it's more Buddha's posture.

[63:26]

And you can feel that difference and it's communicating something to you all the time. And as I've said in the Dogen seminar, sometimes the Buddhist posture takes hold, takes over your posture, and you feel a tremendous brilliance and clarity. Epiphany means bright, to shine, and the P-H-A part, the root, epiph, P-H-A, it means to shine, or it also means beacon, like a lighthouse, or banner. So these words have this, you know, we know there's wisdom in them, Just come to that moment that shines. Okay, so there's this dialogue of accepting your posture, informed by the ideal posture or Buddha's posture.

[64:34]

At the same time, if you're practicing, you're informed by relative and absolute all the time. Sometimes, as I said last night, the slate floors bang up in our face. The connectedness is so connected. Jowls and jaw hung on the wall means we're beyond speaking. Okay, so we can divide ourselves, we can divide ourselves, we can divide our world in various ways, and the way you divide yourselves is very important. If you call yourself mind and body or soul and psyche, these are all, as soon as the shoe starts to fit, you make some division and it starts to influence you.

[65:42]

So Buddhism is very careful about how it divides things up. One of the most basic divisions, I mean we wouldn't use for instance in Buddhism, we wouldn't use id, ego and superego. Because it's a useful division, but they never come back together, they're always fighting with each other. Buddhism tries to make divisions in which each item of the division includes the other aspects in which they come together. It's a skill, part of the teaching skill of Buddhism is how you divide things up. Because once you divide them up, can they come back together? That's the big question. And does the division let them come back together or does the division make them separate, make them more separate? This is crucial in our thinking. So one of the ways we divide the person up is body, speech and mind.

[66:47]

You can think of body, speech and mind as the way we find ourselves and express ourselves and speech being body and mind coming together and being expressive. But speech is also a receptacle. In other words, when you listen, it's also the speech function listening. You understand? Speaking is an activity, listening is an activity that's just, it's the same activity. One takes the form of listening, one takes the form of speaking. And in this division of body, speech and mind, Zen emphasizes the body as the leader. Now if you want to ask yourself some very basic, I mean, we can ask ourselves a very basic question, which I've been asking myself for the last

[68:00]

some weeks. Why does Zen not have guided meditation? We've got lots of guided meditation around. I mean, we have massage with music going on. We have tapes that you buy with ocean sounds behind and voices telling you nice things to do. And then you have much more seriously prescriptive, prescriptive pre-write, prescriptive practices in most of Buddhism of what you do with your mind. That's very interesting that Zen, among all the Buddhist schools, has almost no prescriptive meditation practice. We tell you something, you know, follow your breath, count your breath, but basically we don't tell you where, we just, these are entry practices. Why don't we guide you?

[69:05]

Well, there's a lot of reasons. One reason is that we don't want to tell you where you're going to go. It's much more interesting. Zen Buddhism, I think, assumes the evolution of consciousness and awareness. And a lot of Buddhist schools assume they already know what consciousness and awareness are and they're going to tell you what they are. This is a big difference. But I think the main reason is that Chinese Buddhism trusts the somatic intelligence. Chinese Buddhism trusts the body as a form of wisdom and intelligence. So the image is not prescription but gestation. And this... Again, the tathagatagarbha is the womb embryo environment, the womb embryo. The phenomena of this situation is the womb embryo, which is always both seed and gestation and fruit.

[70:17]

So there's this activity between body, speech, and mind, this activity, this relationship, not just body and mind, but body, mind, and speech, the various ways they intertwine. And one of the pains, one of the reasons we suffer in zazen, in sashin, is because we have a homogenized body. Our body is very interwoven with karmic stuff and mental images and stuff. It's very, you know, and Sashin wants to kind of separate it out. So your body hurts as it's being pasteurized or un-homogenized or something. Curdor. So another basic division is Buddha-Dharma-Sangha.

[71:33]

Buddha-Dharma-Sangha is a way of dividing person or witness, phenomena, and people. So if you practice with Buddha-Dharma-Sangha, And you're always confronting phenomena, not just as the three-dimensional container we have the habit of seeing it as, but as Dharma. And you're confronting other people as Sangha. So this is a kind of process of great doubt. We could talk about the ingredients of enlightenment or an epiphany. We can talk about practice as creating the ingredients, but you need a spark. You need something that brings the ingredients together. And that's doubt, or this rubbing of wisdom and delusion, samsara and nirvana, relative and absolute.

[72:43]

So our practices, our wisdom practice to generate a wisdom body, if we try to really look at what's going on in Buddhism as I understand it, when you see people, you also see Sandra. When you see a person, you also see Buddha-nechi. This is a dynamic. When you see phenomena, you see it as the usual container we see, but we also begin to see it as Dharma. The Chinese, for example, didn't see space and time as abstractions, but as a continual convergent, as an opportune moment, an instantiation to make, you know, an instance of. As I said in the dogma, an actualization. Time and space pour into each actual moment, actualized, actualizing moment. So if you begin to experience each moment as a convergence in which you're part of the convergence, then you're more experiencing phenomena as Dharma.

[73:59]

So in this generating a wisdom body, we confront our habit body with phenomena our witnessing function and other people as Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. That's one way to describe the practice, yogic practice concept, concepts behind how Zen practice is developed and taught. Thank you very much. I want to say to them,

[75:26]

Things are not as easy as I thought they would be if I was to go. Now I'm not the only one who wants to get rid of this delay. Well, I don't know if I'm going to be able to do this. [...] God bless you.

[77:02]

God bless you. I am almost as good as a Spanish-training and perfect normal. He did it in his forever great meaning when I traded it with even a hundred thousand million culprits.

[78:02]

I have made it to see and listen to him, to really remember and accept. I like that he was able to taste the curious appellate by the time of his words. This morning I thought we, up until the, in the service, up until the chanting the lineage, we found a soft penetrating tone that's quite good for chanting. Now I'm not just trying to teach you about practice to the best of my experience, but I'm also trying to share with you, I don't know, maybe you're not entirely willing to have me share with you, but I want to, I feel it's important to do so, share with you the

[79:25]

my sense of the development of practice here in the West. And there's no question that the... It seems a little strange to me, but it's clear that when one... Now, I'm speaking about sharing in general. When you suddenly find it's more important to help other people practice than to just work on your own practice. This is a very big step in practice. And in fact, sometimes one's own practice suffers. Some of you are a little too helpful and we should restrain you so you concentrate on your own practice. But still, it's a strange thing when you give up developing your own practice to help other people. This is before you can teach. You're just helping people practice.

[80:29]

You know, it might be just making beds in the dormitory so they can be here. There's something... When that happens, another kind of practice starts happening underneath. We can't entirely say what practice is. but we can feel it and we can see it's functioning and it's developed. Now I've practiced in an informative way with a lot of people. I would be embarrassed to say how many people have come through the San Francisco Zen Center when I was there, Dan was there, Rhonda was there. It was a large number of people. And quite a few people have come here, and Dharma Sangha in Europe is, you know, a few thousand people connected all together.

[81:38]

The point I'm making is, you know, and among those numbers of people, because I've known their practice in an informative way, there's, believe it or not, at least a couple thousand, at least, people whose practice I know pretty intimately, pretty well. And then there's a few hundred I know very well, and two or three I know almost as well as my own. The point I'm making is that's just been the life I've had the last nearly 40 years. Nothing special. But I can't ignore that. In other words, the actual experience I have with people practicing. There's three important things. My own experience of practice. My experience of Sukhirashi's practice and understanding of it.

[82:43]

The extent that I did. Acceptance of it. And the individuals I've practiced with over the last, again, nearly 40 years, the weight of this is much greater than what Zhaozhou said or Dogen said. Do you understand? I can't really look and say, oh, Dogen's right. I have to look and say, what your actual practice is, is right. So I'm trying to, and in this sashin for some reason, again I blame it on Dan, in this sashin for some reason I'm taking another tack, trying to feel what the practice, what is distinctive

[83:46]

about the practice of all of us here and during the years I've been practicing in the United States and Europe and what's distinctive about particular to my practice and to again my understanding of Sukhyoshi's practice. Now I have to combine that with with dropping technical terms in Buddhist technical terms, which, you know, they don't hold our experience. They're mostly—I mean, some technical terms have become words we use regularly, like dharma, karma, zazen, samadhi. But for the most part, I'm trying to find terms in English, necessarily, which reflect, contain, direct our experience.

[84:56]

Now, every time you make a term, it's like putting water into a river's course, a stream's course, and off it goes. And then you make another two or three turns and the river splits up into tributaries or distributaries. So in other words, what I'm saying is, by trying to find words in English that define our experience, and you trying to find words for your experience, will reshape Buddhism. There's no question about it. because if you divide something up a little differently, a little bit like I said yesterday, those parts relate.

[86:10]

As soon as you divide something into two or three, you have a multiplicity of relationships, you know, combinations of A and B and B and C and A, C and so forth. Just three, A, B, C. So you immediately open up other ways of looking at things. Just the distinction we can make between awareness and consciousness in English, as I use it, is a significant... can have a significant way in which we describe... For instance, it's common to describe in Buddhism that what you want to develop is a unified consciousness. that arises from satsang practice and mindfulness. So you want to develop a unified consciousness that's present in activity and at rest. And at rest includes meditation, sleep and so forth.

[87:11]

But see, I would express it that we want to come to a cohesive consciousness which is permeated by awareness. Now to speak about consciousness permeated by awareness is also to speak about a unified consciousness, but you raise a different way of looking at things when you say that the consciousness is unified by the permeation of awareness, which is a distinction you don't find in the literature. The distinction I make, because it's the best way I can describe the fruit of meditation The refinement of the practice, because prajna, wisdom, is a functioning,

[88:20]

a concept-less functioning, we could say, it's a functioning that develops in its functioning. And its functioning is our having a test show together here. Its functioning is our living here together. And its functioning is a kind of conversation between people who practice, among people who practice. And I think a good case in point is The Blue Cliff Records, Heianroku, case 48. In that, there's a guy, Minister Wang, some government official. He goes to this temple regularly, and he goes to see Ming Zhao, I think his name is. There's another character called Elder Lang. In Cleary's translation. It's a kind of literature, these stories. Here they are. And Minister Wang, who's something of an adept himself, comes to visit.

[89:38]

So Elder Wang, poor old Elder Wang, is making tea. And he is just about to serve tea to Ming Zhao. And he drops the teapot. horrible. So he says, now if I can remember, he says, anyway he drops the teapot and he says, so Minister Wang says to him, what's under the stove. It's a kind of teasing. You know, teasing points at something. For instance, if Rhonda and Henny said they were going to go to the hot springs here, I'd say, oh, you Canadians, you can't stay away from hot water.

[90:50]

Then if Frank wanted to go too, I'd say, oh, a wild goose with German wings, you know, or something like that. I mean, it's just stupid comments. But such teasing points to a kind of sameness underneath separateness. The fact that Henry and Rhonda are both snowbacks. People who come across from Mexico illegally across the river are called wetbacks, so I call them snowbacks. Anyway, so Zen has a kind of dharmic teasing, we could say, in it. So that's what's going on. Minister Wang says, because he dropped the tea, right? So he says, well, what's under the stove?

[91:55]

And Elder Lang says, the spirit god who holds up stoves. Completely ridiculous. So Mr. Wang says, then why did you drop the tea? Why did something hold up the tea? And Elder Lang says, An official for a thousand days lost in an hour. So he admitted defeat and Wang was so disgusted he shook out his sleeves and he left. So we're not telling this kind of story to make fun of poor Elder Lang. I mean, Elder Leng could have just said, I'm sorry, I dropped the teapot. It might have been better.

[93:00]

But Dongshan went in to see Shui Dou, who was working in the kitchen. This is in the same, come on, this story. Famous story, though. Dongshan goes in and sees Shui Dou, and Shui Dou is sifting the rice. And, uh, Sure he does. Dung Shan says, what are you doing? Well, it's obvious what he's doing, you know. What's wrong with you? What are you doing? He says, I'm sifting the rice. And Dung Shan says, do you sift the rice to get rid of the grit or do you sift the grit to get rid of the rice? This is a kind of teasing. Do you sift the rice to get rid of the grit or Or do you sift the grit to get rid of the rice? And Tung Shan says, and Shredo says, both go on.

[94:20]

In other words, you sift the rice to get rid of the grit. Or you sift the grit to get rid of the rice. And so Dungsan said, I mean Shreya said, both gone. Both are gotten rid of. So then Dungsan said, what will the Sangha eat? And Shredo turns over the bowl. Now, in my opinion, Shredo's second response was a little too much like the first. In other words, getting rid of both is quite good response. But to turn over the bowl is maybe too much the same. That's okay. It's good, too. Then there's another story that I like. Some guy named, I think his name is Seven Masters Ming.

[95:26]

Maybe he must have had seven masters, I don't know his story. So anyway, Seven Masters Ming had been on a pilgrimage and he came back and some old adept said to him, you know, there's a whole thing about A famous example in Buddhism of at night you trip over a rope and you see it and you think it's a snake. So is it a snake or is it a rope or is it just fiber or is it molecules? What are you perceiving? So this old adept says to Seven Masters Ming, I wish one of you was named Seven Masters Ming, I could say. Well, there's Brian, Seven Masters Ming. We need some colorful names like this. Crystal Peak Rhonda.

[96:28]

The mountain looks like a crystal peak today. Fit of peak? No. So this old adept says to seven masters, me, if an old piece

[97:02]

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