Every time I get dressed up or put on robes, I wonder what I'm doing. And of course I wouldn't be doing it if it weren't for Suzuki Roshi. I never would have thought up this myself. In the most bizarre moment of a high school fantasy. But... Yeah, you know, for Sukhiroshi, of course, it was somewhat different because everyone wore kimonos in his time. But still, to put on a koromo and an okesa was different. So he must have felt the same thing to some extent. What am I putting this on for? You know, and partly, of course, it's my, I'm wearing my commitment. I'm wearing my life intentions. But also, I'm also, you know, maybe I'm, yeah, I'm, it's a way of channeling Suzuki Roshi.

[01:15]

And lineage is a kind of channeling the lineage. Because I can't just, you know, understand Suzuki Roshi. It's a kind of channeling of the lineage of not just Suzuki Roshi, but the whole lineage. And this area of Buddha nature. Now Sukhirashi used this phrase and his kind of wonderful English because, you know, he was trying to construct his experience in English and construct in English, what he would say to himself in Japanese. And in this one lecture I was looking at recently, he spoke about, you need the support of something big around you.

[02:20]

Well, that sounds good, but what the heck does it mean? And then he spoke about, you don't leave the area of Buddha nature. Leave the area of Buddha nature. Where the heck is it? I don't want to leave the area either, but where is that area of Buddha nature? Well, we've been trying to talk about, or I've been trying to speak about, the relationship, conceptual relationship and practice relationship between the four jhanas, the first four jhanas, and the rupadhatu, And of course the jhanas are mental, I think it's easiest if we say they're mental forms. It's the rupadhatu, the world of form. Now we have to consider why do we call this the world of form in contrast to the world of desire, kamadhatu, this world we live in.

[03:32]

this world we live in. And he speaks about, you know, in the same day show, he speaks about monkey mind, and, you know, the monkey follows this, and then that looks more interesting, he follows that, and so forth. And it sounds like he's criticizing, putting down sort of monkey mind, you know, in some senses he is, but mainly he's pointing out the contrast between monkey mind, and jhanic mind, or zen mind. Jhana means zen, basically. The contrast, so to know the contrast, and we talked about that also in our own way, is speaking about knowing the contrast between inviting, not inviting discursive thoughts to tea, And feeling the difference between the mind that doesn't invite and the mind that does invite.

[04:41]

But know that contrast. If you didn't have monkey mind or discursive thoughts, you couldn't know that contrast. So you make use of that contrast to locate the feel of the mind that doesn't invite. And locate yourself there. Okay. Now say that you could think of ten people, let's say ten people, that have loved you. Or ten people you can imagine loved you or love you or could love you. Say they're all around here. We invited them all. Each of you can invite ten. We'll have quite a crowd. Hard to have before a nine-day dinner. But, you know, so each of you has ten people. Might be these ten.

[05:43]

I don't know. These twenty. But ten people feel the presence of ten people who love you, who give you support. Imagine they were here for a few days. you would feel some kind of field. You'd feel yourself being accepted. And you would almost be like a elixir or something, a kind of field of connectedness, positive connectedness. Now again, I'm trying to get at what Suzuki Roshi meant by feeling something big around you. That would be something big around you. Ten people here for several days who love you, accept you, and so forth.

[06:45]

Now I spoke also last to Tesho about Locusing, like focusing, but in this case, creating a locus. Locusing with your breath a location. Feeling yourself as a location. A location in which you're supported. Now we could create a little truism here, which is, feel if you accept everything that appears, if you accept everything around you, you'll feel more accepted and you'll accept yourself more. So the more you can be in a situation in which you feel accepted, connected.

[08:03]

You'll feel more connected with yourself. Now, we have, I think in the seminar I attended, several of you mentioned versions of that and feeling like you're in a situation where everything is stopped. Stopped. And we spoke about the feeling where everything feels in its own location, feels everything is almost in a timeless sort of realm. What you're really emphasizing there, when you feel that, is you're giving more emphasis, as I said, to the field than to the objects in the field. And so the objects feel located in the field, and the field has a kind of sameness. And what you've really done is you've shifted the experience of time as succession to time as space.

[09:08]

And the more you do that, the more you'll taste what it's like to be a child again, not childish, but in the time of children, that big space of childhood. I mean, I would say that for most of us, half of our life, even when you're as old as I am, I mean, maybe a fourth of my life was the first 10 or 12 years of my childhood. It's not by any usual measure, but experientially it is. And it's not the childishness, again, it's the feel of time unfolding, infolding, outfolding into space. Days, afternoons, mornings are very big. So in many ways this, and in this particular way, the time that long, wonderful time of childhood is really a shift from time as succession to time as space.

[10:31]

Now if we're going to, if one of the teachings, one of the teachings, the main teaching is interdependence, we need to find ourselves located in interdependence. And I've been trying to find ways to speak about this in recent times. I talked about bodying, that's just crazy, like, and some sort of angelic bodying forth in the body of the world. a feel for the body of the world. And I spoke about making the shift from, because also, like maybe the first step, case in point, is to practice impermanence. And as I said, impermanence is not much of an entry, as I said, because it's a generalization and it's a condition.

[11:41]

Things are impermanent. So let's bring our practice attention, as I said, to the two words momentary and appearance. Now, if you do bring your attention to momentariness and appearance, and you allow everything to appear, and this is a skill you can accumulate and incubate and develop, evolve, all those things. You make it a habit, as I say, that you inhabit. And if you notice each thing as an appearance, without discriminating about it, first of all it's an appearance.

[12:53]

First of all it's an appearance. And what appears with appearance is mind. On every appearance, mind appears as well as the object of appearance. So this is, again, a very basic strategy of dharmic practice. Is to find, make use of the word appearance as a way to bring attention to each object as appearance and the mind that appears on the object as the object. This is doable. And it's the realm of bupadattu. the world of form. The world in which mind and location give form to each other, something like that. Now, if you get in the habit of this, inculcate this habit of the mind

[14:11]

appearance, the appearance of the mind of appearance, the mind that... Then there's this quality again of sameness. Every object has a quality of sameness. Now, Nicole spoke in her last Shusote show, last Shusote talk, about, you know, coping with getting used to, practicing with, that all of our lives will be incomplete. That we live in a kind of chaosmos, not just a cosmos, a chaosmos. Everything is, you know, even the 900 million years ago, well, that was just the other day, 900 million years ago, I guess the gravitational dynamic of dark matter weakened enough because things were slowly separating, the universe was slowly separating, and 900 million years ago, or some length of time, suddenly it started accelerating very rapidly so that if we could live long enough, you'd look up in the sky,

[15:43]

and there'd be almost no stars. It'd all be far off. And that shift occurred when the slow acceleration made gravity too weak, and then the so-called dark energy began pushing. What is this mysterious place we live in? But right now things are more or less together. The agenda looks pretty much like it did this morning. I mean, I worry sometimes the incense burner isn't quite in the middle. But things are mostly in place. And when you practice the appearance of mind on every object or you discover that that's the case, it's not something you're making up. this experience of sameness begins to give you a feeling of kind of a relational consistency in the world.

[16:48]

There's a momentary wholeness. It's only momentary, but there's a momentary wholeness, and that wholeness is its own dynamic, calls forth a wholeness in you. Call forth your own shadows. Because if there's no transcendence, you're in the middle of your own shadows as well as your own light. There's no way to transcend out of the shadows. All you can do is accept, include. Everything comes along with you in this wheel of time. So now, what I'm trying to say here, we've got this, at each moment, a field of appearance in which you're also an appearance.

[17:52]

You're appearing the appearance, but you're also an appearance within the field of appearance. And let's call it a field of appearance or a field of immanence, not transcendence, but an immanence, a field in which everything appears There's no way to actually, it's always receding, it's always contracting, expanding. There's no way to actually capture it at all. But for a moment, we feel a certain wholeness. And that wholeness is a dynamic of acceptance. And what does that acceptance consist of? Well, One of the most difficult points, one of the points you want to work on, like the contrast with discursive thinking or monkey mind, is empathetic joy. Empathetic joy, one of the Brahma-viharas.

[18:59]

Can you practice empathetic joy? It's the opposite of, what's that German word? Schadenfreude. How do you say it in German? Schadenfreude? Schadenfreude is to take pleasure in other people's difficulties, sufferings, weaknesses, stupidity. This is not the area of Buddha nature. Schadenfreude comparative thinking says to hell with Buddha nature. Empathetic joy. Can you practice empathetic joy? Which is acceptance. It's the dynamic of acceptance. And you can discover how real your, oh, the concept of acceptance, but how real acceptance is, is when it's easy to take joy in other people's

[20:04]

success even when you want that success yourself or You feel they've taken some success away from you. You still can take joy. I Mean that's why being a bodhisattva so damn difficult. I mean excuse my language Difficult, but not so difficult because everything I'm saying is doable We're not talking about a god heaven some other world right now in this field of eminence in this field of eminence of interdependence It's possible to practice empathetic joy. It gives you a chance to practice it. And, I mean, it's de rigueur, the definition of a bodhisattva, one who can practice, practices naturally and easily empathetic joy. We can look at the other paramitas and the other brahmaviharas and so forth, but, well, empathetic joy is enough.

[21:06]

It gives you a chance to bring attention to the dynamic of acceptance and the awakening of the field of imminence as appearance. Now if you feel, as some people have said to me every now and then, sometimes they feel a less sense of self. Sometimes they feel more sense of self. You feel less sense of self when you feel empathetic joy. You feel more sense of self when you feel some kind of possessive feeling or comparative feeling. I mean, your stomach may tell you you don't feel so good because lots of your thoughts are these comparative thoughts, a lot of sense of self. Okay, but sometimes you feel less sense of self Now, Sukhirashi would call that an area of Buddha nature.

[22:15]

Less sense of self, you're in an area of Buddha nature. And in this Teisho of Sukhirashi, he clearly says, discover how to feel and hold that sense of an area of Buddha nature. This is very interesting. Not you have a Buddha nature. You're within an area of Buddha nature. an area of interdependence, and that interdependence, that causal locusing and nexus, yeah, is enlightenment or isn't enlightenment or makes a Buddha or doesn't make a Buddha or makes a Buddha nature or doesn't make a Buddha nature. Dogen says the adept practitioner practices if the universe all at once was he or she, him or herself. You practice with everything at once and with all beings, Dogen says.

[23:18]

Well, I'm just trying to, you know, see if I can find some words for this and the feeling that Sukershi has given me of what he means by this. So the first step is you accept this field that appears, which always feels, it appears within your realm, within your ability to be present and have a certain stillness which allows acceptance to occur, etc. So each of our field of acceptance will be a little different. And so there's a dynamic of accepting and assembling. There's a process of accepting and then sort of your immediate location is assembled within your senses and cognition and so forth.

[24:29]

And then it's absorbed. Absorbed. So it appears, is assembled, is absorbed and accepted, or accepted and absorbed. And if all of those causal connections really are rooted, really are acceptance, not schadenfreude, etc., comparative thinking, then you can begin, your whole location supports you. You feel you're in, you are in the area of Buddha nature. You are in the body of the world, which, as Dogen Enshiku, she points out, is also the body of the Buddhas. Our lineage, our ancestors, which we are always channeling,

[25:39]

to some extent. So we accept We create a location. We're always creating a location. In fact, there's no other choice. We're creating a location and we're accepting that location. And we can see that we don't accept it or we can't accept it. And the more you can accept it, the more it requires the skills and craft of practice like the Brahma Viharas. And the more it's accepted, you yourself transform it into an area of Buddha nature.

[26:40]

It becomes, it's a field of causal, you know, etc., independence. It's a causal field, but the causal field starts causing Buddha nature. Let's look here, she says, really, very clearly, be strong enough not to leave the area of Buddha nature. This is the basic teaching of the four jhanas, and the world is rupa dhatu. Thank you very much. May our intention equally penetrate.

[27:41]

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