Maybe I should give some kind of beginning, as Atmar did this morning, too, to the koan. And... And since this... It's a day or so less than the winter branches. We have to figure out, I have to figure out, how this such a complex event as a koan can be brought into these few days. Because, I mean, ideally koans are simple and yet they're also part of the whole of Buddhism.

[01:02]

And this is one of the simpler ones, seemingly. And I think bringing it into the whole context of Buddhism from which it arises is a little too much for... most practitioners and for just a few days of a week. Because if Zen practice is going to work in you at at the depth of the whole of your life, then some intuition about or feeling for this koan and its setting, it's a kind of jewel, but the setting is what makes the jewel shine.

[02:36]

then you need a feeling for this choir and for the setting. Like the setting of a ring for a jewel. This jewel and its setting. And it's the setting which makes the jewels shine and makes the jewels shine in the whole of your life. So I think, although we can't expect to, and I think we're going to have some resistance to the... What can I say?

[03:54]

The evolution of the nuances which lead to the simplicity of the koan. The evolution of the nuances which lead to the simplicity of the koan. Yeah, so Atmar, Ikio, Roshi this morning really looked at the, gave us a sense of the koan of these two protagonists from the inside of the koan. But from outside the koan, which I mean where does this koan sit in the tradition in which it arose, there's three protagonists.

[04:55]

There's Yunyan and there's Dawu. And there's the one who is not busy. And that's kind of a third protagonist. Now, we assume that Da Wu and Yun Yan are born of a mother and father. And often it's thought that they were born of the same mother and father. But who are the parents of the one who is not busy? And is the one who's not busy Buddha nature?

[06:19]

Is the one who's not busy a bodhisattva or a Buddha? What is its genetics and what is its dynamic? And is the one who is not busy equally known by Daowu and Yunyan? Und wird der oder die, die nicht geschäftig ist, auf die gleiche Weise von Dawu und Yunyan erfahren? Now, the English translation says that Yunyan says to Dawu, you should know there is one who is not busy. So the assumption in that should is that, what's wrong with you, Dawu?

[07:22]

How come you don't know the one who is not busy? Of course, we can assume they're just partly playing around. Now, we can't assume they're playing around just because maybe two real people are the basis of this story. We can't assume they're playing around. We can't assume they're playing around, which would be based on the assumption that these are two real people.

[08:22]

Okay. But we know they're at least imaginal people. And we know the koans were put together primarily in the Song Dynasty based on Tang Dynasty protagonist. So you can see these stories as, yes, maybe based on some germ of truth, but really novelistic stories. And as in a novel, you can write somebody was fooling somebody else or playing around.

[09:25]

And the genius of novels, and novels have transformed Western culture, is that you feel yourself in the protagonist. Each century extends their sense of the world, often through novelists. And these are written in the Chinese poetic tradition, also with the feeling of extending these people into your own experience. So they're not really meant as some kind of conundrum to puzzle out.

[10:42]

Insofern sind es nicht irgendwelche Rätsel, die dafür da sind, um sie zu lösen. They're meant to extend your experience, so you feel yourself in these two guys, and now the third protagonist. So you don't have to think, oh, would Daowu just have said this to tease? Yeah, novelistically, he probably did. And we have to deal with the conundrum that our lineage goes through the dumber one. But our lineage clearly goes through both of them, so don't worry.

[12:06]

Okay, all right. So what are the parents, again, of this, the one who is not busy? Well, I think we have to assume it at least has to be Zazen. Well, there has to be some sense that it's possible to know one who's not busy. It seems completely natural to me, you know. Of course, in the midst of busyness, there's one who's not busy. There could be. But I know lots of people and lots of people very well who, when they're in the midst of a kind of crisis at their job and they're nearly burning out, and you say, well, just turn to the one who's not busy, they say.

[13:31]

Well, I won't say what they said. In actual fact, most people don't really believe it's possible especially in the midst of anxiety and crisis, that there is one who's not busy. Thank you a lot. Tatsache ist... You don't know what my job is. Tatsache ist, dass... But, you know, I have to look at my own experience to try to look into these things. And my own experience, too, before I started doing Zazen. And I remember I have an older half-brother, Fred, who's dead now, but he was ten years older than I am.

[14:48]

And one day, you know, when I was... I don't know how old, 8 or 9 or 10, and he was 18 or 20. He lived with us for a while. He lived with my grandparents mostly, but he lived with us for a while. And I remember he said to me once, I've been practicing seeing if I can suppress a cough. And he implied and said something like he feels a cough coming and then he concentrates on the feeling of the cough coming and then sometimes he can stop the cough from coming.

[15:57]

Now, I mention this anecdote not just to tell you an anecdote, because it's an anecdote, really, about a small enlightenment experience. And I think it's important in our practice to realize that transformational realization is possible. And I find it important in our practice to recognize that transformative realization is possible. That you probably, I'm sure all of you, none of you are here, I mean all of you are here because of some kind of accumulation of at least small enlightenment experience, maybe some big ones. Now I don't think you should spend the next Zazen period trying to manufacture memories of small enlightenment experiences.

[17:07]

But I think you should know they happen and have happened to you, I'm sure. You know, in Western culture, pride goeth before a fall, hubris. But in Buddhism, the culture of Buddhism is... In Buddhism, the culture is that modest, non-comparative pride is good. You can take a certain pride in your experience. Not because it's better than someone else's, but just because you accomplished something or you noticed something. If you know that we have these small enlightened experiences, these incremental enlightened experiences,

[18:26]

Wenn du weißt, dass wir diese kleinen, diese schrittweisen Erleuchtungserfahrungen haben. Then it's probably, if you don't think about it, things will appear where you notice your life turned at that point. dann tauchen wahrscheinlich Dinge auf in dir, wo du bemerken kannst, dass es da bestimmte Punkte gab, wo sich dein Leben gewendet hat. Or kind of like a stone was put in a stream, and the stream of your life then goes around that stone, and that stone becomes one of the ways you sense what the world is about. I think people get lost. And they don't really know what's normal, what's normative, what's my life is. I'm getting old, I'm retired, what should I do, etc. And then they get a pet.

[19:50]

And the pet gives them a sense of normal. No matter how anxious or sort of lost they feel, the pet needs to poop, needs to eat, needs to be taken care of. Needs to sleep. Yeah, needs a certain amount of petting. And it gives us a kind of sense of, hey, something's normal. The dog or the cat is showing me normal. Well, you can look into your life and see there's certain things that have happened to you that make you feel, oh, that was real, that was normal.

[20:51]

A new kind of normal. So how does the one who is not busy become a new kind of normal? Can the one who's not busy not just be kind of integrating experience of some sort or calming experience, but actually be a kind of pylon, pylon? Kleinland is what, in a race, the boats or the airplanes go around a kind of gate. Okay, yeah.

[21:53]

Or skiers, they have to go. Yeah. Okay, and what was the sentence? I don't know. These experiences, or the one who is not busy even, can be like a kind of pylon, which our life, we can feel going around that, or taking that into consideration. Slalom is a What's the word? It's a little fast. We're a slower one who's not busy. Yeah. We're on a snowboard going uphill. Yeah, okay. Okay. So of course, as I said, zazen, what is zazen?

[23:03]

Zazen is the physical posture, as I always say, of some kind of sitting. And the mental posture of don't move. And the mental posture of don't move, our body begins to know that somehow it's possible to be still in the midst of busyness. So going back to what my brother said, I'm trying to stop a cough, see if I can stop a cough. And what I intuitively recognized at that point, no big deal, but it stayed with me till now.

[24:07]

And that's one of the signs, indications of a small enlightenment experience, is it seemed like nothing. The bus was late, but you felt okay. And it stayed with you all this time. And this is one of the... How do you say it? The bus was late. And what I intuitively understood when my brother said this was it's possible to feel the mind with an attention to the mind itself, separate from the attention of the cough. So I got actually pretty good at stopping coughs and sneezes and headaches and things like that.

[25:15]

And so bin ich ziemlich gut darin geworden, Hustenreize oder auch Niesreize oder sowas zu unterdrücken. But what was most important was that I got a feel for the mind that's present before the headache or before the cough or before the sneeze. Aber was viel wichtiger ist, dass ich gut daran geworden bin, ein Gefühl für den Geist zu entwickeln, der vor dem Husten aufsteigt oder vor dem Kopfschmerz oder dem Niesen. And that probably led me into Zazen. Actually, this little comment my brother made probably led me into Zazen. Okay. So we're supposed to stop, I guess, at some point, right? What time were you supposed to stop? Quarter to six? Oh, good. We have another bit of time.

[26:28]

Thanks. Okay, so what I would like to say is something about... I would say that the one who is not busy is what I would call the fourth posture of zazen. Was ich sagen möchte, ist, dass ich würde den oder die, die nicht geschäftig ist, die vierte Haltung des Zazen nennen. Okay, so obviously if there's a fourth, there's probably the first three. Und wenn es die vierte gibt, dann gibt es wahrscheinlich auch die ersten drei. What are the four postures of Zazen? And I'm positing it, presenting it, positing it this way. Because I think it helps us understand the succession. And I think it helps us experience the transitions. So first of all, the first posture of Zazen is, of course, the physical posture.

[27:42]

Yeah, and, you know, I want everyone who wants to practice to be able to practice. I really think it helps free us from mental and emotional suffering and all kinds of things. So I'd like all of you to, but you know, if you want to play the piano, you have to have a piano. It's really quite difficult to play a piano. Okay, so your body in a sense is the piano. And it needs some keys and some, et cetera. And you need to discover the keyboard. Well, your posture kind of opens you to an inner keyboard.

[28:43]

So, I mean, many people, you know, and especially nowadays, sit back-legged and not cross-legged. Back-legged is seso, with your feet like that. And it's quite, you know, it's, you know, for many people quite a lot easier. And if it's quite a lot easier, why not do it? But if you really, I don't know, so the physical posture, but let me discuss the physical posture first. You're folding your legs together, ideally in half or full lotus. And Suzuki Roshi used to say, just through like a throwaway, he'd say, and you don't know what's right and left.

[30:05]

But it was a throwaway comment so that you didn't have to worry too much about how good your posture was. But it is quite important, actually, if your right foot is on your left thigh and your left, if you can do both, I've never been able to do both except in very hot water, is on your right. When I look at my legs, I see 50, a half a century of failure. But I've had to accept it. So that's okay. All right. But when you do kind of have this sense of the left and right is mixed up, your arms almost get mixed up into this

[31:11]

really a somatic column. So you kind of disappear into this somatic column. So first of all, there's just the posture. How do you sit? Cross-legged? Where do you put your hands? Right or left on top, etc. ? And Rinzai and most statues put the right hand on top. But our lineage puts the left hand on top. Okay. I kind of like the left hand on top. I've tried it both ways, but... Calm down that right side. So the physical posture is more of like describing a lamp from the outside.

[32:32]

Before you turn it on. But when you turn it on, it's not the same lamp. And it's attention which turns on your posture. So, You know, the Arapachana Sutra from the historical Buddha's time, about breath. Anapanasati? Both. Okay. This Arapachana Sutra and this Anapanasati Sutra. Anapanaya. Yeah. Emphasizes, which I ignored the detail when I was younger, as I've been saying quite often recently, each inhale, each exhale.

[33:51]

And it's not just, again, breathing, which is just generalization. Your attention is on each inhale and then on each exhale. And it's not just the exterior experience of inhale and exhale. It's the physical experience of the inhale. And then it's the physical experience, the movement, et cetera, of the body that goes through the exhale. And then it's the chemistry of the inhale and the chemistry, the metabolism of the inhale and exhale are different.

[35:04]

So the repeated sensitivity to each inhale in and out, becomes really, it's amazing, these simple things, becomes the basis for the sensitivity to the whole metabolism of the body. Now, you know, if you, again, you read these early sutras, they say, now that, now here the posture, it's physical, now you turn the light of attention on, and it's physiological. And really, is there a distinction between physical and physiological? Actually, you can feel it. You can feel when your body, if you've got the physical posture sort of together, and you can see when...

[36:12]

attention becomes an interiority. And when attention is interiority, the light of the whole body is turned. And being able to make this attentional distinction between the inhale and the exhale, becomes the basis for noticing the world in perceptual units called dharmas. Now maybe we can go into this at some other point, but it's really... All articulated Buddhism depends on noticing the world as dharmas.

[37:44]

And mental enlightenment experiences or emotional enlightenment experiences, small and large, can shift the direction of your life, widen your experience, and so forth. But it's the physiological posture of Zazen which transforms you biologically. Now, as Atmar said this morning, in Daowu and Yunyan's time, in the compiler's time, they didn't know anything about neuroscience.

[38:51]

Except intuitively maybe. But now we know. Neuroscientists are telling us all the time that Zazen, regular meditation, and mindfulness practices make us a different kind of body, make us a different kind of human being. But now we know, and neuroscientists say this all the time, that Zazen or regular meditation makes us a different kind of human, a different person, a different kind of human. And a bodily mind which experiences and knows the world differently than you would have otherwise. So if you do practice as much as possible daily, some sitting practice, you will change biologically.

[40:10]

And you may not notice it much because you still feel the same mental informative brain stream which tells you you're the same. Because I feel a little better. I know somebody in Colorado recently who started Zazen, he was practicing for quite a while, and then he decided, I don't see any change, he wanted to quit. He told his family he's going to quit. He felt a little guilty about leaving breakfast early and stuff like that. And his family and his two kids said, don't stop, you're so much nicer now. But he felt the same brain stream of continuity and didn't really recognize yet that he'd actually changed.

[41:16]

So that's the physiological posture. Which you can have some confidence in if you do it. It's changing you physically, physiologically. And the third posture is what I would call an imaginal posture. In other words, as you sit, and every day it's slightly different. In some times your spine really kind of is in a very relaxed way in place and you can feel energy in your body certainly. And sometimes your body sort of locks in and just feels relaxed and satisfied.

[42:40]

And sometimes you're sitting in a sashin and it's horrible. And you're thinking of ringing the neck of the person who hasn't yet rung the bell. It's a different kind of ringing, in English at least. It's not the same in Germany. No. In any case, and then sometimes all the pain disappears. What the hell happened? So you begin to learn those things.

[43:42]

You begin to feel in the mind, maybe a cough can be suppressed, but you begin to feel in the mind that slight change where suddenly the pain is so it's somewhere, but who cares. Or you feel when sometimes your whole posture works better and then you feel really great all day, you don't know why. So you begin to learn these little things that sometimes your posture is this way, sometimes your posture is that way, but you're guided by the feel of the ideal posture, the imaginal posture. So that imaginal posture becomes our kind of guide. Some days it's present, some days it's barely present, and so forth. So this third posture of zazen is the imaginal posture, the feel of the posture.

[45:04]

Okay. So the fourth posture is the realized posture, zazen posture. In any posture. You've discovered a feeling of stillness in various ways in your zazen practice. And now it's just part of how you are, like it's your nose or your elbows. It's just part of how you are. You can feel this imaginal posture. In every posture.

[46:18]

You know, if you're in a meeting with a bunch of people and you're slouched way back, you can look at the person, that zazen posture is not in their body anymore. And there's koans that suggest this, like somebody says, oh, I sat with my legs stretched out. It doesn't mean just that he or she is relaxed. It means he or she knows the zazen posture and yet has stretched their legs out. So one of the rules for a monk, for instance, is you don't lean on anything. You don't lean on the doorway or something like that.

[47:36]

But if you do lean on the doorway, you can feel that the person knows they're leaning on the doorway and has decided to do it to make you feel relaxed or just something. But they... easily shift into this imaginal and articulated tzazen posture in any posture. Und wenn so jemand am Türrahmen lehnt zum Beispiel, dann hast du so ein Gefühl, du kannst spüren, dass die Person nur am Türrahmen lehnt, damit du dich vielleicht entspannen kannst oder sowas. Aber dass sie jederzeit und ohne Probleme wieder zurück in ihre aufrechte Saasinhaltung kehren können und dass sie ihre Saasinhaltung in jeder Haltung spüren. Now another example of, you know, a practice in a Zen monastery in Japan, at least. Because you have to do a lot of sweeping.

[48:36]

And, you know, sometimes it's dumb. You sweep the same spot every day and it's not even dirty. But sweeping, you hold the broom. And then you draw a line right down here, front, and then up, and then you hold the broom, and then you start sweeping. And the lotus posture is sometimes called the vajra posture. And the lotus posture emphasizes the legs are sort of like lotus leaves. It's a maa spot which lifts you above the muddy water. And the vajra posture emphasizes the spine. So the broom is felt as the spine. So the broom is felt as the spine, and then the whole world lifts through your spine.

[50:03]

So this is partly in this koan. He says, what broom is this? What moon is this? Now what spine is this? You should know there is one who is not busy. You should be able to see it in my spine, Dawul. Du solltest das in meiner Wirbelsäule sehen können. Okay, says Da Wu. Okay, sagt Da Wu. Okay? Thank you very much.

[50:58]

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