Somehow in this Sashin I'm mostly leaving you alone, trusting, I think, the Sashin to be enough, the schedule, the context of the Sashin. And I find myself trying to show you small places to touch the activity of Sashin and your own activity. And I suppose what I'm speaking about is something like decontextualized, sorry for the word, seeing, or deconceptualized seeing. Yeah, and it's, you know, it's found in little rules, like in the traditionally in Sashina, in monastic life, you don't look around. You don't sort of, what's going on?

[01:05]

But that doesn't mean you shut down. It means you, what should I say, proprioceptively look around. You feel around, but you don't look around. So gently your eyes straight down, you know. I get a little worried, though, about our deck, because if you're too decontextualized and not looking around, he might just walk right off into space, you know. So I'm thinking we should put some kind of, you know, and if we want to think about the relative, we have to think about insurance and things like that. But put some kind of railing over there, quickly this corner. But it's the custom in Zen and in yoga culture in general not to build in too much safety. But it comes in a conflict with our own culture here, customs, and insurance, and things like that. Laws. But, because, you know, when you do Kenyan, you're supposed to keep about, most of you know, about an arm's length from the person in front of you, but mostly you've got to feel their body pulling you along.

[02:19]

So we all depend on Matsu is called horse master, our Ino here, pulling us along. And presumably he knows where to turn. So you feel, you feel your way through the kinin. And I've often, you know, recently I've been saying, you know, check your mind, check your thoughts at the door. You know, come in with your feeling. Or let your body come in first and your feeling come in first to a room. And don't look around. See? I mean the somebody, the soku, that's the person. in charge of the meal, has to look around, things like that. But in general, we try to not look around, keep our eyes somewhat down.

[03:22]

But again, it doesn't mean you're shutting down. It means you are trying to change the way you perceive. Well, it's funny, you find it in Rimbaud and Allen Ginsberg, this sense of deranging, maybe even the way we perceive, see, etc. Because there is many of the themes in historical situations, historical lineages, which bring us to Zen, not in Asia, but in our own culture, and very often in art. And I think of the cave paintings. Lascaux was, what, about 1940, I think. But there were paintings discovered earlier in the Dordogne in southern France.

[04:23]

Great cave paintings. And they changed art history in the West. They changed the conception of culture, as much of anthropology has done. Because... We could see no history leading back to them or no history leading to these figures. And they were great painted animals of tremendous vigor and aliveness. We couldn't put them in art history. So Picasso went and looked at them. T.S. Eliot went and looked at them. It was a big event, these paintings. I mean, found in caves, as far as I could tell, I think it was ascertained in about 1895 that no one had entered those caves for 25,000 years. So 25,000 years ago, something out of any history we know produced these extraordinary paintings. I think it was part of Picasso, like looking at African art and so forth.

[05:35]

So somehow something stood out in our culture, outside of our culture, and in some way, an important way, Zen Buddhism, Buddhism in general, Zen in particular, stands out in our culture as some kind of, not exactly in Western history or perhaps any history, but just some capacity of human life, of human beings. And we have ideas like original mind and so forth, which is being somewhat, by some scholars, debunked right now. But yes, is there some kind of original mind, not there, but within our capacity to generate? You know, we can get metaphors from other places, like the Nobel laureate Prigogine showed that thermodynamics works only in closed systems.

[06:45]

Classical thermodynamics. My father, his specialty was thermodynamics. And if the energy goes in and out of the system, the results are not predictable, supposedly. Well, again, we have this, whatever that means for us, it is also true In practice, we somehow want to get out of a closed system. Being able to enter our story, but as I said yesterday, but to see it's a story, and perhaps being able to enter it with a new freshness and vigor, not trapped in our story. So we have this closed system of sesshin. What's the way out? Yeah, what are the possibilities?

[07:48]

Now, Mark brought up this koan, said he was a presenting to himself this Blue Cliff Records story about famous Baijiong. It's a real simple story. And since Mark brought it up, maybe it's an opportunity to comment on it. It's a very classical Zen story, so maybe it can also give you a feel for this practice, how this practice tries to... reach us, if we're going to have de-conceptualized seeing and knowing, reach us in some de-conceptualized way. So anyway, this monk says to Bhajan, what is the extraordinary affair? Great question.

[08:52]

What is the extraordinary affair? And Bhajan says, sitting alone on Dashun Peak, or Great Sublime Peak. And Hyakujo, Baizhang means, in Japanese you can see it clearly if you know Japanese, Hyakujo means, Hyaku is a hundred, a hundred fathom high, some hundred unit of measurement high mountain. And on Mount Baizhang there was supposedly a peak. a hundred fathoms high called Great Sublime Peak. And Hyakujo, as is common, got his name from the mountain he lived on. People were called different things at different times. While I live here, if we were in China, I would be called Mr. Crestone or something like that.

[09:59]

It's worth practicing here. Anyway, so, Yakujo is talking about the mountain they're on, talking about himself, talking about the Absolute, sitting alone on a sublime peak. So the monk bows. And then Yakujo gives him a whack. Do you really want to know what that's all about? Is it really used to you? Is it fun? Is it interesting? I don't know. But it's a classic Zen story. First of all, it's about the chutzpah, the confidence to ask such a question. It's really what the koan's about. Can you ask such a question? What is the extraordinary affair? Answer it with the commitment to enter it.

[11:08]

It's like, you know, could Evelyn only need Zen or, I mean, Frank in her life? But could she also go to sea with only a sea anchor? And then come back to port sometimes, maybe. So can you actually ask that question with the commitment to answer it? or even have the confidence, is there an extraordinary affair? What are the goodies in your life? What would be the ultimate goody? Would it be for you, for others? What is it? Would it be freedom from suffering? So the koan, first of all, is just simply about can you ask such a question?

[12:12]

It's not easy to do. In your life, in your personal history, in your story, can you come to the point where you imagine such a possibility, whatever it means, a great extraordinary affair? And can you say, okay, What is it? Now, one of the famous Chinese Zen masters of a long time ago, of more recent times, 1600s, visited Mount Wutai, which I visited too in China, but I just found it full of Chinese tourist officials trying to cheat me. But anyway, it was a remote place, so they're not so sophisticated out there.

[13:13]

And it's supposedly where Manjushri hides in the mountains or lives in the mountains, you know, something like that. Anyway, Jibo went to this, climbing around, found this cave, and there was this hermit in it. He went in and said, Ah, How is it when no thought arises? Oh no, this hermit adept just raised one finger. How is it before a single thought, before not even a single thought arises? He raised one finger. Again, it's almost corny Zen, you know? And then Jibo said to him, what about after thoughts arise. And the man, without saying anything, just extended both hands. Well, anyway, we've got something, whether it's corny or not, it's a classic Zen.

[14:21]

What does it mean to us? Supposedly, Jibo went and really had a good feeling for this guy and later tried to find the cape, couldn't find it again. So, he asks, what is the extraordinary affair? And Bajang says, sitting alone on Crestone Mountain, And Monk Biles. And Budger. Gives him a hit. Now, please understand in these taunts, there's a lot in this dialectical exchange, there's a lot of bantering, a lot of fooling around, playfulness.

[15:29]

So first we have the question. Now, what's the second part? The second part, it's a... What can I say? It's a... What we have here is a kind of play, a talking about. I don't know, if I start talking about it conceptually, it sounds like some kind of simplistic philosophy, but we certainly have here form and emptiness, absolute and relative. So the monk asks this and the bow is not a symbol or simply hello or something, but it's a gesture. And again, I was struck not only by what little Sophia's doing, but something I read recently that they now think that gesture and speech arise together, emerge together.

[16:47]

And I certainly... That's what I see in watching her. Signing in, gesturing in. Some kind of moving toward, at least already recognizing words. So you can think of the bow as a gesture of... Oh, I don't know. Can I eat too? I don't know if I can give you a feeling for this. Well, let's put it another way. Say that when Baizhang extended, when Baizhang was asked the question, say he extended his hands instead of saying sitting alone on the peak. What would be wrong with that? What would be wrong with it is from a Zen point of view, is that when the monk asks the question, he's extending his hands.

[17:57]

To go up to somebody and ask a question, say, what is the great, what is the extraordinary affair, is extending the hands. So, It would have had to been an amateur monk if Baijian responded, he would be called dripping with grandmotherly kindness or something, to also extend his hands. No. If you extend your hands showing the relative, you then show the absolute. So then the monk, by bowing, doesn't say anything. He doesn't cling to the question. He doesn't cling to an answer. He doesn't... That's what he said. That's all. So at that point, so what we have here is this rhythm of the question and the answer.

[19:02]

And by just saying, sitting alone on the peak is also actually extending the hands. He's saying something. So it's relative, relative. and then bowing and then giving them a little hit to say, okay. So there's a rhythm there of knowing each other. It's really a kind of gesture. The words don't mean much, actually. Now, I keep telling you, do things with two hands. And you know where that comes from.

[20:07]

Most of you know. Repeatedly, I've told you, Sri Krishi was asked, what's it like to be an American? He said, when he first arrived, he said, everybody does things with one hand. And so I paid attention to that, and I noticed he would tend to do things with two hands. As I often said again, you pass something, I pass something to Wayne. If I use two hands, I'm passing myself, not just the object. I use the object as an excuse to pass myself. And when you have a feeling of that, like in, even if you don't, you know, say that you can't, something's here and you can't do it with two hands, still, there's a gesture involved. This other hand is there. So that's also two hands. If you can't, if you pick up the... Now, on the trays, for instance, let me...

[21:11]

When you put the salt and pepper on, you know, or salt and pepper, no, I mean the gamasya. In the category of salt and pepper, the gamasya. It would be better, actually, if you turned the handles towards yourself and away from the person, so if they have the tray here, the handles wouldn't... And you always put the thing toward the back. Even now, sometimes I... Mark had no space to put them toward the front, and there's no space for the next person. This is just common sense, but much of this sense stuff is common sense, but common sense often rooted in the absolute, if that's making any sense. So if the person hands you the Gamashio, and you can't reach it with both hands because it's too far away.

[22:17]

This other hand's there. The gesture is two hands. If you really feel that, so when you do something with one hand, you can feel the other hand present. So the left hand does know what the right hand is doing, etc. They, after all, are connected. What you're feeling is in this hand, I don't want to belabor the point, when you pick something with this, this hand is all like participating. And the potential of what you're going to do with the hands is you can feel it in your hands. So when you are in a culture where that is part and parcel, that's it. You'll The koan, what is the sound of one hand, is a very different koan.

[23:18]

But if we kind of think, what is the sound of one hand, and does a horse, does a tree falling in the forest make any noise if no one's there? You know what Sukhirishi said to that when somebody asked him that? He said, it doesn't matter. So much for that speculation. But Now, I mean, Zen is an invention, a condensation, a creation of the Chinese. But Zen culture is more a creation of the Japanese. And if you look at tea ceremony, I don't know the history. I know tea ceremony goes back to China. They say the origins of the tea ceremony are in China. But I think if you looked, you'd see the Zen quality of tea ceremony is not in China, I would bet.

[24:25]

But I don't know. I'm just guessing. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, again, I'm trying to, believe it or not, I'm trying to say something. You have tea bowls, but you also have ordinary teacups in a Japanese or Chinese restaurant, no handles. It means you have to do it with two hands. I mean, the idea of handles is a very, from a yogic point of view, a very clumsy idea. So you have a lot of different varieties in the pot, because people still have to pick it up, and it has to be able to be picked up and not burn your hands. So different kinds of pottery conduct heat differently. And there's often a ridge below, so you pick up with the ridge and the edge, and you have a custom of not filling it up to the top, so the top part's a little cool. So there's all kinds of customs that make you relate to the cup, in a way, having to do with what's in it, and who serves it, and all that stuff.

[25:26]

So the cup is seen as activity. I remember, you know, I really got that once when I had a very nice cup that My daughter broke a lot of cups. Somebody had given me. And when it broke, I suddenly realized it's just an opportunity to make a new one. It's just an opportunity to repair it. It's an activity. It was given to me. My daughter broke it. Not Sophia yet. The potter had made it. He's got to stay in business. They have to be breakable. And you know Hamada, he's very funny, he didn't sign his cups. Somebody said to him, why don't you sign your pieces? Because he was the most famous craft potter, national treasure potter of Spain. Why don't you sign your pieces? Oh, he says, after I'm dead, all my imitators' best pieces will be attributed to me and my worst will be attributed to them. So it's about relationships, it's activity.

[26:36]

So, I mean, it was really a revelation to me when the cup broke and I thought, oh, the cup didn't break, it's part of an activity. It's a simple thing, but it was a real shift in my life. So, okay, you have T-bulls and they have a front and back usually. It's very hard to figure out where the front and back is often. Not very obvious. It doesn't say, you know, University of Connecticut over there in the front, you know, with a handle on the right. And then, you know, Nakamura-sensei, this Japanese woman who lived with us, there was a potter that she liked a lot. and who developed a red glaze that was unique. But he was a country fellow, didn't do the tea ceremony, but he made a tea bowl and gave it to me.

[27:42]

And when I showed it to Nakamura Sensei, she took one look at it and said, he doesn't know tea. And she said, because the lip of the tea bowl is not friendly to the lip. He doesn't drink, he doesn't practice the tea ceremony because when you practice the tea ceremony you hold a certain return and there are certain places which really welcome your lip. Now that's a kind of nuance. We don't think of our glasses as welcoming the lip at one point and not the other point. So here's what I'm talking about is small movements. Something outside of conceptualization. It's very hard to, you know, you really have to get into the feel of the tea, of the person who made the tea bowl, the pot, and you have to drink from it too. And you find out, oh, when you drink from it at this point, when the tea is down at a certain level, a kind of change in the glaze occurs there.

[28:46]

Do you want to know about it? Well, is this important? Actually, it is important. It's not just about small things, it's about small things that are outside of the frame of conceptualization, ordinary conceptualization. You know, I think we fall in love often with a person on a kind of intimacy of large spaces or something like that. And after you live with a person for a while, you find the intimacy is in very small spaces. And sometimes that's kind of hard to get used to. A different person appears in the small spaces of a relationship. I'm again trying to talk about the mind of small things or mind of small spaces. What's that got to do with great sublime peak?

[29:48]

Well, it would also be a mind outside of conceptualization, outside of a context. This is possible. You all know it, actually. You just don't probably know how important it is or how to stay there. Like you feel, ah, Yeah, maybe you feel nothing's the matter. You feel somehow complete, or nothing's bothering you much. You feel completely alive. Completely alive, yet at the same time, it really wouldn't matter whether you live or die. We could call that the absolute. So here you have these tea bowls, which you don't know what's front or back, but you kind of find out through the use of it what feels right.

[31:03]

And yes, you feel good looking at it this way, but when you pick it up and turn it, because you don't drink where you look, you turn it about a quarter turn, and then it feels good when you drink from it. Here it feels good when you look at it. Here it feels good when you drink from it. So, I think Zen brought this sense of the mind of small things into the tea ceremony. And even when we do the Oryoki, it's assumed that you remember where you drank from the soup. And you remember that spot where you drank from while you're getting seconds of serving or while you're cleaning it, so you can clean very easily that one spot. So part of the orioke is to keep track of where your lips have touched the bowl. You can also, because otherwise you have to do something much more precarious, which is to put the bowl vertically in the water of the other bowl and turn it and clean it.

[32:10]

And that's one of the more dangerous acts in the practice of orioke. Depends how sleepy you are, you know. But you can do both. But still, the sense of the orgy practice is to remember where you drank and remember where the server dripped a spot on it, so you can clean that spot. You don't have to, you're not going to get sick from there, you know. But it's a feeling of being aware of the object and its use and feeling the traces of its use. Dostoevsky used to give lectures, and this was one of his sticks. And when he gave lectures, he would kind of play with his stick.

[33:11]

He'd move the string and stuff. And I used to think, you know, here's this man who taught me how to sit still. He didn't do a very good job, but he tried. I think I told you one time, after about a year of my knees being up in the air, after a few minutes I had to He'd walk around every period with a stick and he would kindly come around 5 or 10 minutes or 15 minutes into the period because I would use that as a cue after the first few months to change my legs and put them up. One time he whispered to me, why don't you just go home and sit? You don't have to come all the way over here every morning. You can't sit, poor fellow. And I decided to stay. But when he was giving lectures, so he taught me to sit still, and he had this kind of in-place feeling.

[34:13]

I try to give it to Sophia, actually. When I pick her up, I try to... She's often very active. I try to place as deep a stillness into her as I can. Hold her body. I'll try to see if I can teach you that. Anyway, so Sukershu would move his fingers around and stuff, and I would think, you know, watching the lecture, you know, well, when you do extend your hands, when you're not sitting on a great sublime peak, when you are extending your hands and giving a lecture, there's a kind of words arise, thoughts arise. There's a kind of energy, and the energy is partly conveyed not only in the lecture, but in gesture and in movement. So he would notice, I know he was aware, that I would notice these little movements of his. And I violated a kind of teaching which most of you know now, because you're not supposed to talk about it, not that it's anything important.

[35:26]

But because I began to watch his small movements, I noticed that he, I've told you this many times, always went into a door with the foot nearest the hinge. He never told me. I just noticed it because I began watching these small movements. Just feeling it. And you can't think about it. You have to just kind of like let, kind of decontextualize. And then you notice there's patterns there. Gestures there. Rhythm there. So I said to him, he laughed and laughed. It's a custom in the monastery but you don't talk about it. I always tell you now, I see you try to do it and I try to do it when I remember to. But it brought me into small movements. A kind of field where you feel the field without thinking. And this was important for me in a con, because he gave us the con of Gute, one finger, you know.

[36:32]

Like this guy in a cave. When somebody was asking, he'd raise one finger. So he presented this con. He went through the whole Blue Cliff Records with us. I don't know. We did a case a week or so. Two weeks and gave two lectures a week, and Wednesday or Thursday evening and a Sunday morning. And he gave that koan, and I was concentrating on it. I learned to stay present to it, to whatever the koan of the time was, and try to absorb as much as I could before he went to the next one. And he was doing the service. It was the dawn. And he had the stick, you know, that you hit. And while he was holding the stick like this, he went like this. He just suddenly put one finger like this.

[37:36]

And I had a very wonderful, big experience. This is not philosophy or something. If I hadn't become aware of these, began to feel his small movements, I never would have experienced this koan. So it's not just some kind of idea, sound of one hand or this adept in this cave raising one finger. It's like the tip of a, iceberg. Most of it's somewhere under the surface of our action. So all the time you know you're sitting alone on Great Sublime Peak and all the time you're extending both hands. Once you know this

[38:41]

This is what we can't find any other word for, but maybe to call it the absolute. Once you know this, it's very easy, fairly easy, that the rest of your activity becomes extending both hands. Your own life story, your work, whatever you do, your daily life, your marriage becomes extending both hands. Thank you. Our attention meekly penetrated.

[39:32]

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