Sukhiroshi said, to stop your mind does not mean to stop the activities of mind. It means the mind pervades the whole of your body. It means the mind is inseparable from the breath. It means the mind fills the mudra of your hands. It means you can sit with painful legs without being bothered by it. Now, This is what Sukhiroshi said.

[01:13]

When it ended up being written down and printed out. But we have to, you know, even though we have the useful word mind in English, we have to wonder what mind means müssen wir uns doch fragen, was Geist bedeutet. And pervade the body, what does that mean? Und den Körper durchdringen, was heißt das? Now, one of the first instructions, I mean, personal instructions Sukhi Roshi gave me, was to put my mind in my hands. And I frankly didn't know what the heck he meant. Well, I tried to get my mind and I tried to grab it and put it down in my hand and it kept popping back up, you know.

[02:28]

I didn't know what to do. So let me... Dogen describes the same Zazen practice in the same way. But Dogen says very simply, Zazen is all your hands can hold. Now, we've gotten ourselves to a point in these four days now, the fifth day now, where we can discuss quite a few things. I say we can discuss or we can talk about quite a few things.

[03:45]

Because I think you're discussing with yourself, talking with yourself. No, I don't know if what I... the two or three things I think we're ready to talk about. And they're quite small in my mind, in my mind, yeah. But why do I think it's there? You fly. Yeah, but I don't know how big it will be on my lips. We might be here for a month.

[04:47]

We'll have to see. Okay. So let me say another way of looking at what Sukhya she said. Now, let's review a minute the conditions of the self, conditions for self. The bodily location. The sensorium. The experience of observing. The experience of agency, of being able to choose. And interiority and exteriority. And let's add the ingredients of self.

[05:52]

I would say memory. Incidental experience. Incidental experience. By incidental experience I mean experience but it happens to you out of context. Sometimes incidental experience is like a trauma. Something that happens outside your story That never really gets incorporated in your story. But always is present in and around your story.

[06:56]

Yeah, but it's not just all kinds of incidents happen that aren't necessarily in your story, that are your experience. Okay, so we have memory, incidental or personal experience. And personal history, which becomes your narrative. And culture. And imagination. And for practice, the imagined self is probably the most important. It's the imagined self that suffers.

[08:03]

It's the imagined self which makes mistakes. What's wonderful is to recognize that it's imagined. But what's wonderful also is we can make use of this imagined self, this power of an imagined self. And the imagined self, I mean the narrative self is sort of an imagined self, but it's tied to our history. Okay, so that's just a little review thrown in. Okay, so let's go back to interiority.

[09:07]

Now I'm speaking along the lines of Suzuki Roshi. To stop the mind is not to stop the activities of the mind. But to have the mind pervade the whole body. To be inseparable from breath. To... fill the mudra of the hands. And to allow you to sit with painful legs without minding.

[10:21]

This is no gaining idea, he says. No idea of gain. Now, Dogen says, the Buddhas of the path do not wait for enlightenment. The Buddhas don't wait for enlightenment. So here, what I've done again is state the default position of waiting. Waiting for nothing. Waiting which is not waiting. Which I'm calling Dharmic experiential patience.

[11:27]

Okay, so what I'm trying to do here again is I'm trying to define our practice from the point of view of Buddhist yogic culture. So now what I'm going to say is, to my mind, exactly the same as what Sukershi said, which I've presented to you now twice. And if I had 10 or 15 flip charts, I'd have it on every one. Yeah. And because, you know, these things, we've got to kind of get them into us as categories. And then really know what this category means.

[12:46]

Or not meaning, but to really be this category, these categories. Yes. Okay, so let me start my parallel with what Sukhirashi said. Zazen is to assume the posture of zazen. And to join it to the concept, don't move. And then to enter... And then to notice and become the interiority Now I'm trying to give you a methodical approach.

[14:06]

Okay, so in fact, when you do zazen, you sit down, there is interiority. Okay. Now, Dogen has a phrase, Ji-Ju-Yu Samadhi. And it's the key phrase for his definition of Zazen. And sometimes it's called self-receiving samadhi. Or self-joyous samadhi. Somebody even got like self-sporting Samadhi, you know, just sporting yourself.

[15:31]

Don't worry. Okay. But I would call it maybe Dharma receiving Samadhi. And then Dogen says, everyone, all beings, all living beings, live within this dharma. But they don't know it as samadhi. Because it does not come into their perception. Now, you kind of see the dynamic of this. Yeah, I mean, the way we exist is no different from how Buddha exists.

[16:53]

But the way a Buddha exists comes into his perception, his or her perception. There's not exactly his and her at this level, but yeah. Okay. Okay. All right. Okay. So... The practitioner assumes zazen posture and joins it to the concept and the intention not to move.

[17:54]

Then he or she enters the contents of interiority. Okay. Then the practitioner shifts from the contents of interiority to the space of interiority. Now, when you make this shift... You're making the shift to mind. It's this mind which is the space of interiority which pervades the body.

[19:00]

Which is inseparable from the breath. Which fills the mudra of the hands. And is the default position perhaps of patience. Where there's no gaining idea. No comparisons. And we can sit with painful legs without minding. Without minding in English. Okay. Now, when you shift from the contents of interiority to the space of interiority, the container of interiority disappears.

[20:08]

And mind pervades the body. Okay. Okay, clear enough? All finished? Sign here? Okay. You've got a Dharma document. Okay. Yeah, if we don't say it twice, no one thinks it's real. Now the ingredients of interiority are, and I sort of mentioned them before, memory. Culture, experience, personal history, narrative history.

[21:18]

And from these ingredients we construct self. And the imagined self. But the imagined self, well, it's got more ingredients than that. And as I've said, interiority is also simply a biological phenomena of living beings. And I don't know, maybe it sounds stupid, but you want to find out how to shift from the self of interiority to the biology of interiority. Okay, so here's some ingredients.

[22:21]

Now, so I've tried to define mind and I've tried to define samadhi. And I think I need to give more definition to Samadhi. Make it more specific and more accessible. And I want to define Bodhisattva. And Bodhisattva is supposedly what distinguishes often in people's minds, scholars, etc., early Buddhism from later Buddhism. And there's not such a sharp line between the two, but Mahayana Buddhism does emphasize the Bodhisattva more.

[23:32]

Now, a bodhisattva is often defined as or described as one who does not take enlightenment or doesn't go into nirvana at least. But they live to, as long as they're sentient beings, the bodhisattva will remain or something like that. But that doesn't help us much. That's like saying, I'm trying to search around here. That's like saying, this is my family.

[24:43]

And these are my three sons and three daughters. That doesn't tell us much. But then you might say, this is my eldest son and this is my youngest daughter. And what you might mean then to anybody who knows the culture, I don't know, medieval Europe or Japan or something. The eldest son is not like the middle son, say. the eldest son is the one who defines himself through his father or through the father's occupation or something. It's still the case. I mean, for many people. I know somebody who practiced with me for years didn't want to be a doctor. His father, he knew his father wanted him to be a doctor, and his father was a doctor.

[26:06]

So this person I practiced with was already 30 or 31 or 32, which is a little late to start being a doctor. But he was with his father, and as his father was dying, he said, I want you to be a doctor. So, It was quite an effort to get him into medical school and all, but he did it. All the medical school said, you're too old, we're not going to accept you.

[27:10]

I helped the process of getting him into medical school. So he defined himself through his father's occupation. He had to reimagine himself through his father's occupation. And maybe in traditional families, the youngest daughter is the one who has to live with the parents until they die. So the youngest daughter has to imagine herself through the lives of her elderly parents. Now I'm just trying to give you a feeling for what I mean by imagined self. Okay, what is a bodhisattva?

[28:18]

One who reimagines him or herself through the wisdom of the Buddha. You reimagine yourself. Wisdom is the seed of the imagination of a bodhisattva. So the bodhisattva, when you read the sutras, just remember that the bodhisattva is a... always described as an imagination of beingness which you can do.

[29:19]

So the Bodhisattva is not the middle son or something like that who is just a person. The Bodhisattva is not just a person who is like a Buddha or something. I don't know. The Bodhisattva Yeah, the Bodhisattva is one who can imagine him or herself. Or reimagine him or herself. Where there's no longer him or her. Can imagine himself no longer him or herself. How's that? As realizing enlightenment, as realizing the Dharma.

[30:38]

So this is key for us who are practicing. Can you imagine yourself as realizing the Dharma? If you think I'm not good enough or something like that, well, that's just one of these poor forms of vanity. I told somebody recently that that's how I started practicing. I went to George Field's bookstore with a painter friend of mine. in San Francisco. And I was taking my painter friend to a samurai movie. So I was standing at the counter where George Fields was.

[31:47]

and I was telling my friend about the samurai movie which I don't know why it wasn't all samurai movies raised up an imaginary sword they all do that I don't know why I thought it was interesting And George Fields looked up and was asking, he said, you should meet Suzuki Roshi. So I said, who's that? He said, he's the other Zen. Because of D.T. Suzuki, everyone knew about Rinzai, but no one knew about Soto. So he said, he's the other Zen. So that night I said, This sounds, might even be better than a samurai movie.

[33:19]

Let's go to this Zen lecture. And there was this little guy talking. And he was what he was saying. And I remember going to lectures in college of Tillich and of the head of the philosophy department, etc. And they weren't what they were saying. So more or less the next morning I went to... No, no. Then I went to lunch at work, a warehouse, the next day. And I always read all the time. So I was walking back from Blanche's, which was a place where you could have lunch on a canal filled with sewage.

[34:27]

Anyway, Blanche was nice. And I'm walking along and I thought, Well, I should start Zazen now that I've met Suzuki Roshi. And I thought, well, but I'm not good enough to do Zazen. Really? I'm not good enough to do Zazen. So then I opened this book of D.T. Suzuki's. to read while I was walking. And it said, to think you're not good enough is a form of vanity. It almost made me believe in a Buddha God. So, So next day I went to Zazen.

[35:40]

And I sat down in the dark. And someone came and tapped on my shoulder. And said, you're on the women's side. Yes. I've been on the women's side ever since. Okay, now, that was more or less the first topic. The second is, which we don't have time for, but the question keeps coming up always, how do I bring practice into my busy life? Well, your busy life has already started. But you have to start practicing somehow. So how are you going to start practicing in the midst of a busy life which has already started?

[36:43]

You have to create starting points. Okay, tomorrow. Thank you very much. Vielen Dank. May God bless you.

[37:29]

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