Tonight is, I think you know, we'll do the Riyaku Fussats ceremony. Which is a... Oh, well, the full moon is making the announcement. So, the ceremony is, as I think I said already, I think it's the second oldest ceremony in Buddhism after the ordination ceremony itself. And... It's a reaffirming and reviewing of our precepts. In the light of the moon. When nights were most lit in those days.

[01:04]

Yeah, and before all our Buddha ancestors and Bodhisattvas. So it's meant to be an example, a centralization of this. And suggest or, as I used the word the other day, sign, suggest or be a sign for practicing the precepts and renewing our vows. Now, although I write down some notes over the years, I've had various ways to do that. That poking around, trying to find ways to say things.

[02:41]

Still, whenever I give a talk, almost all the time I feel like I'm entering the unknown. Really, something like Ru Jing says, carving a cave in emptiness. Carving a cave here and hoping you'll all join me and around the fire, if we have a fire. There's a little, when I was thinking about the Jakob Saat Samri, I remembered a little old Chinese poem.

[03:42]

tying my boat to a tree below the city walls I listen to the sound of the bells I listen to the sound of the bells of the city Ich höre auf den Klang der Glocken aus der Stadt. No, you could do that in Bad Säckien. Das könnt ihr in Bad Säckien machen. I don't know if anybody does, but you could. Ich weiß nicht, ob das jemand macht, aber man könnte. And then the next lines are... The moon is bright on the wide river. Und die nächsten Zeilen sind... And along the banks, many people are singing. Now, I doubt if you tied your boat up on the banks of Bad Sekiem, you'd find many people singing along the river.

[05:01]

Most of them don't even know it's the full moon. There might be occasional sort of poetic types. But again, you can imagine in those days when It was dark inside and light outside. Everyone would go out. And enjoy the river. Yeah. I have a relationship with all of you. Each of you. And it's not the same as, you know, I didn't meet you on the subway.

[06:04]

I have a different kind of relationship with you than that. And it's not exactly an ordinary friendship. Hmm. Um... It's different than friendship. I mean, in fact, maybe if we weren't practicing together, we might be acquaintances, but not close friends. And for me, anyway, the relationship with the Sangha, with my fellow practitioners is... I find more intimate than closer than my relationship with friends usually. And I really cultivate and love my friendships and have many good friends.

[07:07]

But friendships are usually gene-based. Gene, like DNA, gene-based. I think there's a lot of genetic stuff going on when we become friends with someone. And friends are also usually experience-based. You have some experience with them. And almost always societally based. But our Dharma friendships are way-based, path-based. Quellen way-based. And that's a different kind of connection.

[08:24]

I both accept you, but I also expect something of you. And that's a delicate balance for me. And I need permission from each of you to expect something from me. And somehow together we expect something of each other. A shared vision or shared worldview. A shared path. And not just a shared personal path, but a shared path in the world. Yeah, and we have an expression in English, cut from the same cloth.

[09:48]

meaning we're somehow fabricated, made from the same stuff. We're cut from the same wood. You say in German? Yeah. Well, you're much tougher in German. We're just flabby little cloth. In German we say we're cut from the same wood. Yeah, timbers. In English. Oh. I'm going to try to shake up here. Yeah. Yeah. And now Christina has to someday go back to work. And I guess they're going to expect you have to now form yourself not just by the path, but also by what the company, corporate work expects, right?

[11:01]

So you can see her hair going out too slowly. But I hope your job doesn't require you to dye it. As much as possible we should look old if we're old, look beautiful if we're beautiful, or both. So because we practice together, And particularly because we practice together in a practice period which, as you know, I'm much exploring, trying to, as we're creating it as we're going.

[12:02]

And I think you may feel the tension in me between practicing with you in terms of your own practice or also practicing with you in terms of Buddhism. Of course you have to practice through your own practice. But I would be failing you and the lineage and the teaching if I didn't also try to expect us to find a way to practice through the tradition, through the teachings of our lineage.

[13:27]

And certain words, like continuity. And if I think you must have found out in your discussion yesterday in the seminar. Continuity or say non-dual. Very simple words but they hide a wide tradition and detail of practice. Don't forget, in those days in China, most of what we're doing was developed along with northern India. And in China, where a lot of what we do was developed together with North India?

[14:44]

You know, there was no science. There were no... physics or biology or etc. to absorb the attention of the best minds of China. And there was no... So there was a huge effort by many generations. The energy went into intelligence, went into developing Buddhism. In many ways it's parallel to or even ahead of our own Western philosophy. So I think we need to try to find a way into this immense tradition that we can practice.

[15:58]

Okay, so we have this practice period, which as I said is based on trying to develop together an interlinked continuity. die, wie ich gesagt habe, darauf basiert, miteinander eine wechselseitig verwobene Kontinuität herzustellen. A cloth or a tight weaving. Wie ein Stoff oder ein dichtes Gewebe. Because we're together here, in no other context can we see the patterns of the weaving so clearly. Now, one of the things I... Yeah. Sorry, I'm sorry to bore you with details. But one of the things I... can see, I can maybe point something out with.

[17:22]

It's how we bow to each other. And also maybe I should mention the custom is to, as much as possible, I've told you this before, many of you don't do it, to stand with your feet a width of your hand apart. And as you can imagine, it's the first thing I notice in Dokusan. There you're standing, and what do I see? There's your ankles. but such simple things are if we're going to kind of we body and mind together You should at least know where your feet are.

[18:27]

Let's start at the bottom and work up. You have to take some kind of checkpoint. You could say, all Buddhists stand with duck feet. and if you prefer to have that I'll accept that as your way of practice here comes duck feet to duck on flat flat flat but anyway the custom is you stand with your ankle is that far apart as your hand is that far from your nose.

[19:27]

In Japan it would be closer. As Suzuki Roshi used to say, we measure our body with our body. So one of the things is that... Often both the doan and the server, for example, bow ahead of the person you're serving. The doan and the server bow? Both. For instance, if I'm bowing as a doshi, Sometimes the doan hits the bell because it's supposed to hit the bell and I'm not even ready to bow.

[20:34]

And we need a sight-based mind, S-I-T-E. As I say often, no other location mind. But I think sight-based mind, in English at least, has a little different drama. But I think, let's say, a place or situation in English can make this distinction between site and location, where it has a different description.

[21:37]

Yeah, and Christine and I, I'm usually served second. So she sort of has to wait for the second served person to bow because the second served person knows when they're ready. And But sometimes, by the time we're ready, we're kind of, you know, we finally get ready and we bow, the server's already gone. So then we bow and nobody's there. This is not a sight-based mind. Or at dawn, I mean, as Doshi, I sometimes, sometimes intentionally, but sometimes accidentally, am out of rhythm, and then I awake to see what the dawn does.

[22:50]

I go bong, and I'm not ready. It's perfectly acceptable. And I have to accept it. But it's wrong. It means your consciousness You're located in a conscious observer. And a conscious observer is following a program. Why doesn't the doshi bow? He's supposed to bow now. But everything in Buddhism is tied to what a person does. The third round, as you know, the third round is just whatever length of time the elderly doshi takes to get there.

[23:58]

So I'm... I've been talking a lot about the entity-based worldview and activity-based worldview. If the server bows according to an inner program that now I'm supposed to bow and the person they're bowing to isn't bowing back, This is really a... They're in an entity-based condition of mind. They're following a conscious observer's program, a conscious program.

[25:08]

Now, see if I can, I don't know, I've been wondering how to say something about this that's actually practicable. And to make you realize this is not a small matter that you don't have a sight-based mind. Of course, we all slide out of a sight if you do are in a sight-based mind. We all slide out of that sometimes. We relax into conventional reality. But we also have to have the experience, feel that we're following a program of what we're supposed to do. And slide out of that into a sight-based mind. An unpredictable world where you don't know what the heck's going to happen next.

[26:28]

A stone man might get up to dance. As Dogen says in various places, the damn Doan might start doing somersaults. He doesn't use the word damn, but you know. I remember once walking, carrying the incense for Sukhiroshi. The young man hitting the densho. who was hitting it and getting ready to do the roll down and Tsukiroshi would go in the Zendo and Tsukiroshi just walked right past and I just walked past and the donor bang, bang, he didn't know what to do Tsukiroshi went about, you know Ten yards, ten meters.

[27:41]

And he didn't know what to do hitting the bell. So Sankarshi did a somersault. No, he didn't do a somersault. But he turned around laughing and went back. So thinking about how to... I always look at 3.40. It's always the same. Some inner clock says, better check up here. Sorry. Yeah, and that's when I just get going. Okay, sorry. But I'm not going to stop now. I shouldn't. I'll try to stop within a reasonable length of leg time. Fine sight. Yeah. I'm learning all these interesting words.

[28:58]

You know when you're trying to go... You wake up in the middle of the night for some reason and you don't go back to sleep easily. And... And so you just lie there in bed. Waiting for the wake-up, waiting for Christina, waiting for the wake-up bell. And it actually may be pretty boring. I mean, it's kind of boring, and then you're worried about how you're going to survive the next day being exhausted. So you kind of hope you'll go back to sleep. And sometimes you do. And often, actually often I think we think we've been mostly awake, but probably we've been mostly asleep. But then say, while you're lying there, you're thinking about somebody or something.

[30:06]

And then, while you're thinking about some person, you suddenly have a you start having a visual image of the person. And then suddenly, but you don't even notice it suddenly, you're in the person's office or room or something. And now you're dreaming. And maybe the person's in another room, but somehow you're in the same room and you can hear him or her talking. Now you've made a shift into dreaming.

[31:08]

And now you have a, you know, even if it's lucid dreaming, Even if you have a lucid observer, the lucid observer can't just change everything. Maybe it can make you wake up, but mostly the lucid observer can interfere with the dream or make some suggestions, but the dream has its own own stuff going, its own dynamic. So I think we could say that lucid observer is based in awareness. And the observer who doesn't let you go to sleep

[32:19]

Is based in consciousness. And so we can call it the conscious observer. And it's just in English. I don't know if you do fall asleep in German. I know you stand up when you wake up in the morning. We get up and you stand up, right? You just sleep in. You sleep in. You fall asleep? Is it the same as falling in love? We don't fall in love. You don't fall in love? I knew that. Never fall in love. Again. Never fall in love again. Anyway, we in English speak, we fall in love and we fall asleep and we disappear and we change our lives and it's a mess.

[33:32]

Anyway, it's a kind of disappearing into sleeping. Well, When you fall into sleep or disappear into sleep, you're in the dream and you are the dream. It's you're dreaming and you're in the dream you're dreaming. Du träumst und du bist in dem Traum, den du träumst. This is non-duality? Das ist non-duality. This is the condition of non-duality. Das ist die Bedingung der Nicht-non-duality. All right. Okay, so what good is that to know? Wofür ist das jetzt wieder gut?

[34:38]

All right, so... Okay. Okay. Um, tying my boat up to a tree. No. Maybe, what I said the other day, okay, before yesterday, was you establish the basic structure of adept practice by developing the ability to bring attention to the breath. Okay, so you bring attention to the breath, body and phenomena. And now what I'm suggesting to try to look into the practice of non-duality You find yourself inside the attention you're bringing to breath.

[35:56]

There's not a conscious observer outside the attention to breath. The attention to breath is within the attention to breath. This is a kind of slippery to try to speak about. Because our words aren't designed to describe such things. Yeah, but I'm trying to find ways to talk about our lineage teachings. When Dung Shan says, I am now it, it is not me. Now, normally when you're in a conscious-based observer, Normalerweise, wenn du in einem bewusstseinsbasierten Beobachter bist, dann bist du du und es ist es und es ist nicht du.

[37:16]

Now, Dongshan is saying, it is still it and not me. Dongshan sagt, es ist immer noch es und nicht ich. But in another level, aber auf einer anderen Ebene, I am not it, but it is now me. We can say he's in a lived field. As the lived body in the lived field. We can say he's in the field of non-duality. There may be an awareness observer, but there isn't a conscious observer. You're inside the attention of the attentional sphere you're in. So it's living in a world where it's all inside, no outside.

[38:35]

And our usual conceptual thinking can't get us that way. We have to slide into it experientially. So what I'm calling a lived field, we could also call a sight-based mind. Maybe in English, an S-I-G-H-T based mind is conscious that S-I-T-E based mind would be non-dual. So just to stop at this point, what we're speaking about is a... The horizontal lineage.

[39:51]

The lineage as we're practicing it becomes a lived non-dual field. and something like that is what we're trying to discover a taste of in practice period to discover the routine as a passage a passage into a continuity that flows into a non-duality And I think one way to practice this is to maybe say to yourself in English or Deutsch, inside the breath.

[41:07]

So through the practice, as I said, you find yourself breathing the body. And you find yourself breathing your body. your breathing appearances. And that is a very basic and necessary continuity to establish. At least for adept practice. And now I'm suggesting you Open that into inside, inside a breath, inside breathing the body.

[42:18]

Inside breathing appearances. One second, do you mean the appearances breathing or do you mean breathing the appearances? You're breathing appearances and you're inside that attention. You're not outside the attention, you're inside the attention breathing appearances. Du bist in der Aufmerksamkeit, in der du atmest. In der du atmest und ersch... Ja, wie macht man das im Deutschen? Hat jemand eine Idee? There's no outside. What? There's no outside. This is good.

[43:29]

I like it. Austrian Switzerland. Well, we get a multilingual German world here. And if you all explore how to say it, maybe you'll explore how to practice it. And tonight we'll say realizing the mind of Buddha. Realizing the wisdom mind and compassionate mind of Buddha. The enlightenment mind of Buddha. In awareness there's no boredom. It's the conscious observer that's bored.

[44:30]

You can feel when you're inside the dream of the lineage which you're making manifest. It's all unpredictably appearing. Everything appears unforeseeable. Okay.

[44:53]

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