Just a few months ago this was a schreinerei. And this morning it was a zendo. And now I guess it's a dharma hall. And when it's a zendo, this mat is folded halfway up. And when it's a buddha hall, the mat is folded down. And you understand what that's an example of. Emptiness. And the other day the Buddha offering tray was forgotten in the kitchen.

[01:08]

So Uli offered an invisible Buddha tray. But I don't know how she did it, but she forgot to take away the invisible Buddha. Yeah. But is remembering the Buddha tray, the offering tray of food, which the Buddha is not going to eat, is any different? Yeah, well, clearly the Buddha tray is a pattern of in part of the pattern of what we're doing.

[02:17]

But the real food you're actually offered too is part of the pattern of what we're doing. And feeling that pattern as reality a kind of reality is our practice. Rujing Dogen's teacher Dogen's Lehrer Rujing quoted Yunmin, who said, this world is so wide. Why, at the sound of the bell, do I put on the seven-stripped patchwork robe?

[03:29]

Warum lege ich beim Klang der Glocke das siebenstreifige, geflickte Gewand eines Mönchs an? And Ru Jing answered his own question. At the sound of the bell, I put on a dense web But in the original, in Chinese, the seven patchwork, seven strip patchwork robe like I have on is also a kind of web. So there's a pun there. So he says, I put on a web, a dense web of connections. And this dense web of connections is also form is emptiness.

[04:43]

So we're trying to find ourselves in the midst of this. Let me say that As I said the other day, it's a miracle for me that we're here doing this. Or as close as I get to miracles in my life. I never expected, I don't even think I hoped for the chance to do practice periods in Europe and in Germany. And if it is a miracle, it's a miracle of this Sangha. From Davos and Alpbach,

[05:44]

Two conferences I came to in 1983 or something like that. And the people at those conferences, including Gerald, started getting me to practice in Europe. I remember sitting on the steps in that big hall. You said you wanted to talk to me, so I said fine, but we sat down on the steps and talked in that big hall. The entry. Yeah, and then he showed up in America and I said, oh, here's trouble. Responsibility. That means responsibility.

[07:15]

Thank you. And then Maria Lach in Haus der Stille. And then the upside-down oyster, whatever it's called. The pregnant oyster in Berlin. The upside-down oyster. The pregnant oyster. Look what it was pregnant with. You know. Pearls. Two years later it crashed and it gave birth. Did anybody hurt? I hope not. Did they rebuild it? No. It didn't happen the night I was there. I would have gotten quite a big reputation. Oh, trash! There was a Korean Zen master who came to Tassajara to visit, and really, Koreans shout and etc.

[08:19]

a lot. And this is true what I'm saying. And he was sent. emphasizing upon you, and there was an earthquake. Of the few earthquakes we've ever had, our hair is shaking. Yeah. And then, what, about 17 or 18 years of Johanneshof? So this practice period is we, this sangha.

[09:22]

You can't do a practice period with one person. It takes a number of persons like us. and a kind of we can't exactly explain it but alchemy that happens when people practice together in a certain way and chant together and have a kind of repetitious Life for three months. So inevitably we'll be talking about what is practice period. But much more importantly we'll be discovering ourselves, each of us, what is practice period.

[10:23]

And Dogen says, if you examine it carefully, you'll only find 90 days. But he also says, as I mentioned the other day, The days and months of the practice period are the true body of the Buddhas and Buddha ancestors. How can that be? What did he mean? I mean, he wasn't just joking around. The days and months of the practice period are the true body of the mind and body of the Buddhas and Buddha ancestors.

[11:50]

And notice he doesn't say the enlightenment of the Buddhas. He says the mind and the body. Maybe we won't discover that. But maybe we will discover it. Or have a taste of it. Or feel how it's actually genuine. And in the first days, weeks of practice period, often it's a kind of churning up, churning up? Like... Yeah, yeah.

[12:54]

Hey, your mouth was pretty good when you said that. I've been through that, yeah. You've been through, really, a kind of churning up, a turning of the soil. What did you say? Turning of the soil. Plowing. Or like sanding, or sanding the floor. And it makes us rather vulnerable. Yeah. And open to ourselves sometimes painfully. But there's usually some kind of security that comes with it. Someone said it's sort of like being a child again to be here.

[13:56]

Someone's going to feed you and you can just enjoy the flowers. Until you have to do the feeding. But there is some kind of return to the pace of the time of childhood. So there's a kind of security that begins in practice period. But the edge is maybe rather sharp, even so. Usually the security increases through practice period and the openness through the edge remains a kind of openness.

[15:00]

An openness to ourself and openness within the practice of others. And I think that chanting And service has something to do with it. I mean, every day we chant in the morning and chant in the afternoon and at lunch do we chant? Yeah. Yes. Crazy. And then we chant the same things usually. Yeah. But you know, somehow the Catholic monasticism is pretty much the same.

[16:06]

And other forms of monasticism seem to have discovered the same pattern. The content of what's chanted may be different. But the pattern is very similar. Chanting in the morning, chanting in the evening. It somehow is a psychological tool that I don't think we could arrive at by analysis. Yeah, but I think it was discovered just by chance or by intuition. That it is a kind of tool of psychological purging.

[17:22]

Do you know purging? Das ist eine Art psychologisches Werkzeug, das fegt das rein. Chanting together somehow is also turning, somehow we don't know why, turning of the soil. Das Miteinander rezitieren, das ist diese Art von dem Boden umwälzen. Wir wissen vielleicht nicht warum, aber es wälzt den Boden um. Yeah. Now the other day I, seminar I guess, sometime not too long ago, I said the reason, maybe I put it in a letter, the reason we practiced together The reason we have these rituals, and by the way, I don't know if this pattern works for us right now. I don't know if it worked for Sashim, but maybe it works now. On the one hand I feel a little funny sitting up on a platform but on the other hand it lets me feel you in the back more.

[18:41]

But I said anyway, going back to what I was speaking about, that the the essentials of the rituals of Zen monastic practice and this we should explore in our doing practicing of the rituals first of all to They're just ways of doing things together. Cooking, serving food, eating. Chanting the good night bell, etc. Some way to discover kind of the fact of our mutual love.

[19:43]

mutuality and aliveness. The fact of our mutuality and aliveness. I mean, usually for various reasons, a lot to do with the culture we have and Emphasis on individuation and so forth. We don't experience the mutuality that is actually present. Except sometimes in an emergency or something when we're all united by the emergency. So now the emergency is practice period. So one reason is it's a way of doing things together. Another is to notice the world as dharmas.

[21:26]

To notice appearances, the world as appearances and as dharmas. So you can begin to... explore the rituals as a way of noticing the world as appearances. Now, mostly practice period, we don't try to understand, we just do it. It's a very old institution within Zen practice. And Dogen and Rujing couldn't praise it more highly. Rujing says it's in the 90-day practice period that you create the form of true practice.

[22:45]

Wow. Okay, Rujing, you say so. We're going to create the form of true... What is true practice? And he says, and carve a cave in emptiness. And he says, and carve a cave in emptiness. carve a cave in emptiness. So it's a way of doing things together.

[23:51]

It's a way of noticing the world as appearances. And knowing those appearances as dharmas. The way the world is put together. Interpenetrating, interdependent. So somehow practice spirit is long enough to give us a chance to really embody and embed that. I almost feel sometimes like during practice period I sink into the phenomenal world. I mean, this is the image I feel sometimes. As if from the shoulders I was just part of the phenomenal world.

[25:05]

And my Our head is sticking out above it. What happened to my body? And then sometimes my head sinks in too. Where am I? Lost. Yeah. Now, a third reason, what I'm saying is, we just do practice for you. We don't try to understand it, we don't try to expect anything from it, except the true body of Buddha and things like that. And but to have a conceptual sense of what, in this case, the details are about.

[26:11]

I think it's helpful. And it's certainly part of how someone like myself and others here have done practice period organize this tradition in this particular location. So the third aspect of the rituals is to deepen our awareness. Deepen our individual awareness. As if you could, like you look into a lake or something and see into the and the water's clear, you can see deeply into the lake. Somehow practice allows us to more and more look deeply into the present.

[27:14]

Yeah, and the fourth reason would be to... behind the rituals is to deepen our mutual awareness. And I would order, and I would add a fifth, and maybe a sixth, That I didn't mention before. And the fifth would be ordering the durative present. Okay, so... Dirt?

[28:22]

Durative. Dirt. The dirty present too, no. A lot more sense. The duration of the present. Thank you. Excuse me. Really? Well, all the work we do, the present gets kind of dirty sometimes. Yes, with all this work we do, the present gets a bit dirty sometimes. As you know, we have this, you know, the knife edge of the present, right? It's immediately past, gone. It's not yet the future. And the present has no dimension. It's, you know, And as we've discussed many times before, the present only has a physical and sensorial and mental duration.

[29:34]

I mean, strictly speaking, the present doesn't exist. A pattern exists. And you either have a passive present or a proactive present. Yeah, I don't know how to, a good word for it. There's reactive and active. You must have the word proactive. Yeah, I would just say proaktiv, but I don't know how understandable that is. What do they say in German, proaktiv? It's good, okay. You don't have it? You can say pro... Yeah. Oh, really? That's interesting. Because, you know, in medicine in America, you want a proactive relationship to your health. It's... Mitgestalten.

[30:39]

Yeah. Ja, mitgestalten. Das ist ein Wort dafür. Ja, mitgestalten. Okay. Proaktiv. Well, we'll start using it as a technical term. Proactive. It's not pretty. It's not a pretty word? No. Okay. Pretty active. Ziemlich aktiv. You want a pretty active present. Schön aktiv. Okay. Yeah. So the ordering of the present. Das Ordnen der Gegenwart. Organizing or giving order to the present. That's all right. Giving order to the present. You're both in purple there. You've given order to that row. For example, if when we... The Orioki is a proactive dimensioning of the present.

[31:48]

So wie das Orioki zum Beispiel eine... Okay, so let's, we have to establish certain things. The present doesn't exist. Wir müssen hier bestimmte Dinge einfach mal feststellen. Die Gegenwart existiert nicht. Die Gegenwart existiert, weil du existierst. You make the present passively, reactively, or you make the present proactively. Du erschaffst die Gegenwart passiv oder aktiv oder mitgestalten. Okay, so when you put your Setsu, that's the cleaning stick. Wenn du deinen Setsu, also den Säuberungsstab, in the bowl, when we're going to get ready to clean the bowl, in die Schale legst, wenn wir kurz davor sind, die Schalen zu säubern, we could say the passive way is you want to get it in the bowl, you stick it in the bowl.

[32:57]

Da könnten wir sagen, dass die passive Art, das zu tun ist, du willst den irgendwie in diese Schale hineinbekommen, also steckst ihn da halt rein. But the passive way You know, this is not, as typically, this is not hard to understand, but slippery to get a hold of when you first hear it. So you pick up your Setsu stick. Now the way we traditionally do it is you put your left hand at the base of it and you pick it up. And then you put your left hand at the base of the bowl. And then you aim the Setsu at the hand that's outside the bowl.

[33:58]

And then you aim the Setsu at the hand that's outside the bowl. And then you place it that way. Now what's the difference? One is you're just getting the Setsu in the bowl. The other way you're ordering the gestural, physical present. Can you say again, gestural? You're ordering the present through gesture. And gesture in English means to carry the body.

[35:03]

And maybe we can say, as I said the other day, this is a kind of behavioral school you're in. I think in America there was Mrs. Porter's behavioral school. And Mrs. Porter taught deportment. Deportment is how you do things politely, etc. Okay. Okay, so this is Dickie Baker's deportment school. All right. Kind of like that. So the difference is when you do it this way, picking it up with two hands,

[36:10]

You're relating the two hands together. And then you're relating the two hands together again when you place it in the Buddha bowl. And the Buddha bowl is as I think all of you know, is shaped like it is with no base for the monks because it's thought called to be or represents Buddha's skull. So as this is the mind and body of the Buddhas and Buddha ancestors.

[37:17]

And when we chant in the morning, we chant the names of the Buddha ancestors. Here you're eating out of Buddha's skull. But this is also Just a bowl, and we're making a distinction about it from the other bowls. Now the yoga of this is, can you hold in mind the distinction between the three bowls? Can you hold in mind the distinction between the invisible Buddha tray and the visible Buddha tray when you're offering? It's a kind of body-mind grammar of the physical world. It's a way of talking through the physical world or talking to yourself. And it's a way of relating bodily time to the physical world.

[38:36]

So after a while, every movement is a gesture. That gives bodily order to the present. And discovering that will change your life. Doesn't mean you have to artificially go around like a... I suddenly saw myself at the airplane counter taking the pen from the thing, placing it and, you know, kind of, you know. But I guarantee you, if you have that kind of presence at the counter,

[39:36]

you might get upgraded. Because people notice something that you've given them space to be alive in in another way. Yeah. So the Fifth reason, concept behind the rituals of Zen is to give a bodily yogic presence to the durative present. And the future is built on the foundation of the present.

[40:54]

And the fruit of the past fruits gives blooms in the derivative yogic present. And the fruits of the past And the present becomes the deep space in which you live. And the sixth is embracing emptiness. But I have to give some other teshos, so we'll talk about that. Now we have to figure out, is this a good order of the room for Tesho? Maybe these curtains should be closed next time. But I think the back curtains open all okay, then I can just look at the nature.

[42:07]

I don't know, it might be more concentrated if it was. Let's explore these things. That's what we're doing in this practice period. Establishing new present together. And using these ancient tools we've inherited. Thank you very much. I don't know what to say.

[42:59]

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