So anyway, I think we should stop. And I don't know if we can talk more about this or I can say something tomorrow about it, but my basic feeling is it's worth the experiment. But we should keep our eyes open and be aware of the problems. And if we're too smiley, maybe we should frown occasionally. I used to watch people going to see Suzuki Roshi. And they'd go in and they'd tell him his problems. And he would have this huge frown. Really, completely kind of commiserating and hurt, feeling hurt by what they were hurting with.

[01:20]

Then they would leave and they'd feel all cleaned out. And he would start smiling again. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you again for translating. You're very welcome. I must say I did find it very funny. Yesterday we thought we talked too much so we cut out the discussion and way up in my room I could hear... It's usually when I come in at this time you're all very silent. So what should we talk about?

[02:32]

Now you're silent. Okay. You can start, it's all right. You told us about to give the energy to all that appears, and in meditation the same. What about thoughts? You know, there's coming a thought. Give it some energy. Give the thought energy. Whatever is there, that's your reality. You're not discriminating reality.

[03:40]

Now, it may come up that I'd like to stop thinking. Then give that energy. This is some kind of craft you have to get a feel for. So then you might think, I think I should think that I should stop thinking so I can give stop thinking energy. I can't translate that. Yes. Can you give some samples on practicing trust? Samples of practice of trusting. Yeah. Deutsch. Kannst du ein paar Beispiele geben, über Vertrauen zu praktizieren?

[04:45]

I'm a living sample. Ich bin ein lebendes Beispiel. Next. That is true. You are. It's sometimes a A sample is called a remnant. You know, a sample of cloth is also called a remnant, just what's left over. So that's me too. Why don't you go in the store and show me a sample? Okay, so what else? I want to ask, what do you name energy?

[05:54]

What do I name? Is it what you name energy? I don't think it's physics. The question has a background, but I don't… it's too difficult. Well, give me… can you give me some of the background? Yes, I can. In the group I work with, we noticed that we used the word energy in body work and so on, in psychotherapy, mixed up with physical ideas and, and, and, um, phenomena of psychology, of feeling and so on. We noticed that and then we said, oh, it's different, something different. It's not, it's not physical, it's not physics. We don't use anymore the word energy but only metaphors. because there is a relationship inside and what we really, the sensation we really get.

[07:25]

And so I was puzzled when you said I spoke about energy and I wanted to know, is it physical or is it physics? Can you give me an example of a metaphor? You might be able to. Something like that. I feel full of power or I feel emptied or sucked out. That would be another example. If people say, I feel full of energy, we understand it as a metaphor for... Yeah, well...

[08:31]

In a sense, every word is a metaphor. The word tree is a metaphor for tree. The royal presence is leaving. We all feel lessened now. Oh. Yeah, I understand your question. And I don't know any other word to use.

[09:35]

I suppose if I were talking to one of you more specifically say just one-to-one about practice. And I would say speaking about how you might move from one skanda to another, I might ask for something more specific than the word energy. But I mean energy in a pretty commonplace way. And somewhat related to the idea of energy and physics.

[10:38]

But also, as one might say, you went out for shoveling snow and you started out with a lot of energy and at the end you were exhausted. Or you might say, oh, wonderful. Um... Or you might say, God, I had no energy this morning and then I went out and shoveled snow and afterwards I felt so much more energy. But I also mean the sense of qi or qi. something you can direct, an energy you can direct mentally.

[11:39]

And one of the ways that my sort of adopted daughter ended up doing Kung Fu. First he arrived with an empty plate and then a knife. As she was going to Mills College... And she was kind of bored with all... academic work, and she's a very physical person, though a very slender little girl, actually.

[12:46]

But she grew up in a very tough way, which is one of the reasons we rescued her and helped bring her up. So a friend introduced her and she went around visiting various karate and judo schools. And one of them she... felt good about. So she decided to ask if she could study there. And so they asked her, well, look, you know these things boxers hit, the punching bags, big punching bags? They said, go over and hit that and hit it with your energy.

[13:48]

So she went over and went, boom, and the thing flew off in the air and they said, okay, you can study. And that's some kind of energy that's not ordinary energy. I'll tell you one little anecdote just for the heck of it about her. She was kidnapped once. She was just walking along the street and two men in a van pulled up and grabbed her into the van and drove off. She told me after some of what happened. Well, she was screaming. There's a little crack in the wall of the van where there's a thin window or something. She was trying to break the glass and holler at it. And she was trying to kick the two guys in the back of the head.

[15:01]

She was 18 or 17. And kept trying to grab the keys out of the, you know, leaping forward through the seat, trying to grab the keys, and they kept trying to throw her back. And about 30 miles outside of San Francisco, they just opened the door. So the police called Virginia, my wife, and they said, we have your daughter here. And he said she'd been kidnapped. And Virginia said, is she all right?

[16:02]

And the police said, we're worried about the two guys. So she's got this kind of fierceness. So that's energy too. Okay, what else? Yeah. Is there anything like religion or God? We do these bows in front of Buddha and I feel something like that while I'm doing this So do I And otherwise we only talk about scientific experiences about the mind Yeah, it's true.

[17:12]

It's okay. It's okay. Royalty has its prerogative. I think what we're doing as... in Zen practice, is best assumed to be something like a laboratory. Now, Bob Thurman would take the view, he's professor of Buddhism at Columbia University.

[18:28]

And he was the Dalai Lama's first Western disciple. He would take the view probably that the religion and monastic forms were a disguise to protect these laboratories within Asian society. He would say that these practices and the monasteries were practically a kind of shield to protect these practices, to do them in secret. I understand. I mean, in other words, if you have some institute in a society, and it's, what do you call it? Well, let's call it a religion, because there's a way that it can be a religion in the society, but it's hard for it to be a scientific laboratory to study mine.

[19:45]

For instance, a friend of mine wrote two books on basically Buddhism, but he used all Christian terms and had a Catholic publisher publish them. And the Catholic publisher didn't know they were really about Buddhism. That's so smuggling Buddhism into the... Yeah, but that doesn't satisfactorily answer the question to me. That doesn't satisfactorily answer the question for me. He knows, actually, if he'd given me a piece, he'd have to give you all a piece, and then he wouldn't have any.

[20:55]

He smiles. Yeah. I find it easier to teach this way. And partly I have just... I've adopted these things because they came along with the package. And I, again, don't think I'm smart enough to decide what we should keep and what we should discard. But Sukhyoshi was pretty strong with me that he did not want Buddhism to become a kind of sophistry.

[22:01]

What sophistry? The Sophists were people who argued about... So he used to have to do these big funerals for the old Japanese folks in San Francisco. And he was quite insistent that I go to these funerals. So I'd go and sit way in the back up in the balcony area and watch these funerals going on.

[23:02]

And he wanted me to go to Japan to get a feeling for the religious side of Zen. And I grew up in a rather aggressively atheist family. Kind of academic, scientific type people. But I've developed a feeling for the religious side of practice, but I just let it be a feeling and let us do it rather than trying to explain it. And I got a feeling for the religious side, but I practice it more and leave it with this feeling than I try to explain it. And if you go on, if you went on with this practice, at some point we would discuss it more between ourselves. But in a primarily Christian country, I don't feel any need to explain that side.

[24:15]

We just do it. Now, Sorry, I don't know really how to answer this, so I'll try to only say a little bit more. There's no God in Buddhism. There's no outside point from which things are created or affected. There's no Archimedean point. Do you understand what I mean? Archimedes said if there's a point, you can move the earth if you have... Well, there's no Archimedean point in Buddhism.

[25:27]

And there's no, you know, if you think of things in terms of substance and entity, there's beginnings and ends. So we tend to think there was a beginning to things. Like there was a beginning to Janus. But was there really a beginning? Because there's you and et cetera, et cetera. So from Buddhism point of view, to say there's a beginning is simply a bad habit of our mental apparatus. And you get into infinite regressions. Almost immediately. Who created the creator, who created the creator, etc. Yeah, so Buddhism says, well, there's just no beginning. As a position, this is... just as arbitrary and maybe a little better.

[26:47]

Okay. So there's no creator god in Buddhism. But is there an immanent god? Is there a subjectivity to the world? In other words, does the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics, quantum physics, At the very smallest level where things are not predictable, is that a kind of... Is it a kind of subjectivity that the particle is choosing its destiny?

[27:52]

There's actually a lot of thinking about this going on. Whitehead, the American philosopher, was thinking about these things. And nowadays, Hartshorn and a number of other people are all trying to think about these things. Okay. So, So the question here is, is there a Buddha head, like a God head? Now, Herr Dr. Konze, you know who that is, right? Konze, who was the... basically created Buddhist Sanskrit, contemporary Buddhist Sanskrit.

[28:58]

He was a Buddhist scholar. Do you want another anecdote? Where does one anecdote end and the other begin? He was my teacher in the States, Dr. Konse. He wrote a lot of books. And he translated the Heart Sutra and stuff. He was, as I said, the first person to sort, I believe, Buddhist Sanskrit out of ordinary Sanskrit. Still, most of the Prajnaparamita literature is If you read it in English, it's his translation. But he was also part of a group of people who went to Heidelberg, and I think he was a contemporary of... Heidegger.

[30:10]

But before the war he became a communist. And he was part of a small group of people who actually got, he told me, four million guns stashed in basements around Germany to fight against Hitler. And he was, at least he told me, he was a communist in order to oppose Hitler. And they had a deal with Stalin to suddenly... take over with Russian help. And Stalin betrayed them and joined Hitler at some point. So they all had to run. So I think this is interesting that you have some scholar like this who was involved in this kind of activity at one point.

[31:22]

And he says that what he would say was... himself and Heidegger and others all came to the mentality that the end of the world was coming. And for much of the European world, the end of the world was coming. And he said, Heidegger, that became a fascist, and I became a communist. But he feels his study of the Buddhism and the Prajnaparamita literature came out of his sense of the world coming to an end, and so he began studying emptiness and so forth. But during the Vietnam War...

[32:23]

And then during the, the reason I tell you all this is that during the Vietnam War, many people, particularly people, a lot of the people practicing Buddhism, wouldn't serve in the army. And so, the government wouldn't permit it because these people didn't believe in God. And you could, but, so you couldn't be a conscientious objector unless you believed in God. Okay. But Konsei established, and I think in some testimony to the Supreme Court, I believe it was, that Buddhists didn't believe in God, but they believed in a Godhead, a Buddhahead. So after that ruling, you could be a Buddhist conscientious objector thanks to Herr Dr. Konze.

[33:53]

Okay, so what do you mean by a Buddha head or God head? I think there's two main ideas in Western thinking. One is a pantheistic idea that everything that is is also God or the world soul. And there's an idea called panentheism Panentheism. Panentheism.

[34:54]

Yeah, you don't have the word. There's pantheism and panentheism. And panentheism is... is that God is both imminent and transcendent. The entire universe is God, but also God is not exhausted by the universe. No. Okay. In other words, God is everything that is, but he's not limited to everything that is, he or she or whatever. Well, I don't know, you know. I don't have an answer to these questions.

[36:05]

This is too much for my feeble brain. So I only speak about what I understand moderately well. I do have some feeling about this presence that we share that we can call Buddha. Ich habe ein Gefühl dafür von dieser Gegenwärtigkeit, die wir Buddha nennen. And it's not just the same as your Buddha nature. And I know enough about Buddhist cosmology to know how that could fit in. And there have been various positions in Buddhist history on this. So my simple solution is I just bow every morning and offer incense.

[37:10]

If you'd like to do it with me, I appreciate it. But whether it's a religion exactly, I don't know. But it seems to have the same, a very similar effect on people as practicing other religions does. The question doesn't come up, do I believe in Buddha? Do I experience something I would call more than human that we could call Buddha? Yes. Would you please tell us? tell people never to ask me this question again? I'm just kidding. Okay, next. Cheers. I have a question from the text form this morning.

[38:29]

What is meant by the ten directions of the entire world? Which are these ten directions? North, south, east, west. North, east, south, west. Eight directions. And up and down. And the point of this idea of ten directions is they point toward us, not away from us. So we think of the south as being over there. And the whole idea in this ten directions is the south is coming this way, the north is coming this way, and so on. So ten directions means the inclusivity of everything that you can think of in spatial terms. So in the morning we say, all Buddhas, ten directions, three times. I mean, this is a big statement.

[39:32]

And that's to put us in, and each of those is equal. All Buddhas is everything. Ten directions is everything. Three times past, present, future is everything. All Buddhas, ten directions, three times, all beings. Is that what we say? All bodhisattvas, mahasattvas, wisdom beyond wisdom. We say all beings somewhere. All Buddhas, ten directions, three times, all beings, bodhisattvas, mahasattvas, wisdom beyond wisdom. So just that little statement in the morning, I should have just said that to you. Yes, did you want to say more? No. OK. Yes. In the beginning of this speech you said that the Dharma is a piece in units.

[40:42]

The dharma is a sense of things appearing in units. The sense. You want me to say something about dharmas? Yes, sir. Dharmas were thought of in very early Buddhism as very similar to atoms. The smallest possible unit. And as you know, the word atom means can't be broken. But in fact we did. And Another anecdote I can tell you. And the same became very clear in Buddhism soon, that dharmas are infinitely dividable. So dharma migrated in practice terms, yogacara and zen practice terms,

[42:04]

migrated into being a unit of experience. So it's the smallest unit of experience. And I think it's rather interesting that they actually give it a length of time. I can't remember something like .0047ths of a second or something like that. And not knowing this, some contemporary psychologists have done tests at how quick we can perceive something. Like if they show you something going left, right, and they flash it so fast, all you can do is just point left, right. This seems to be very close to the same length the time the Buddhists came up with.

[43:19]

So I could define practice as bringing your attention and energy to each dharma. I could define a dharma as that which you can bring your energy and attention to. So what I usually say is the measure of a Dharma, if you want to get a feeling for Dharma, use the sense of completeness and... So if you say, take a walk, walk in a way so that at each moment you feel nourished.

[44:22]

we think we could define that each moment that you feel nourished as a practice dharma. Or each moment, as I said, sitting here, I feel complete at this moment. Is there a duration to this complete feeling? It's extremely short. But it's replaced by another moment of feeling complete. So Dharma practice is basically to break things into experiential parts, the smallest parts you can just experience something. When you do that, you make everything, win all things of the Buddha Dharma. Now, if you get in the habit of doing that, of just experiencing everything in its particularity.

[45:57]

So Dogen is definitely saying this. to complete just what appears, genjo, and koan being understood as the particular is the universal. Is the universal. Particular universal, so to say. So again, I look at this flower. Or just the yellowness. Or whatever it is. And I have no other occupation, no other mental occupation. When I hear something, I just hear it. Now I think that the Shinto... How are we doing for time here? Okay. Okay. the Shinto animistic practice, shamanistic animistic practice of Japan.

[47:18]

I don't know what you say in German. I'm getting good at my German. Okay. What did you say, animalistic? They have an interesting... In Shinto and Buddhism, seeing is knowing. Or hearing is knowing. And this is more what knowing is than accumulated knowledge. But just as you, if you want to accumulate knowledge, you have to study a text or something, you have to allow seeing to be knowing.

[48:41]

You have to allow seeing to be knowing. These flowers, which every day look totally fresh, they're not different every day, are they? They look nearly the same. Must be the good atmosphere in this room. Maybe there's a pyramid over there. Keeping flowers fresh and razors sharp. So if I just look at this, and I let myself kind of dissolve in the looking, so there's no dualism. This kind of allowing seeing is in this way of looking at things, understanding, is what is knowing.

[49:52]

So let's say it's a very rainy night or windy night. And instead of... thinking, oh gosh, it's windy out. Then going back to sleep. You let yourself, as you maybe do, be absorbed in the windiness. So if the more you... Let yourself be absorbed in knowing like this. Another kind of knowing surfaces. So this is also something related to the sense of dharma practice.

[51:02]

To let yourself be non-dualistically absorbed by each moment that appears. And it perhaps was supported by the view that not all knowing is thinking. And... Yeah. And again, coming back to, you know, somebody said earlier that we were talking about being in love. That being in love is a kind of focus, exclusive of, I think you were saying, focus and we don't mean such exclusivity when we're talking about practice. But I think my impression is that when people feel in love, yes, they're focused on one person, but everybody starts looking better.

[52:08]

There's a general improvement. And there are practices where you work with the wisdom that arises through looking at the one you love. So there's just looking, and that itself is a knowing. And then there's the holding hands and the knowing that arises from just holding hands and things like that. And just holding hands is different from just looking and so forth. Yeah, it is... Lessons in love from Buddhism.

[53:32]

So how are you guys doing? Well, we're in the months now of holding hands. We haven't fully explored yet holding hands. So there's this kind of feeling in Buddha Dharma practice. Just looking. Just listening. And letting yourself feel complete in that looking and listening. So the sense of that is this is the basis of how we function. Conceptual thinking is on top of that. But conceptual thinking gets disembodied unless it's rooted in this dharma knowing.

[54:37]

Does that sort of answer your question? Sorry to have a second question now, which is dualistic. So I have this visual field, I have the sound field, there is the sensual field, there is the emotional field, there is the mind field, and all that appears, all those fields appear dharma by dharma. Yes. Is there anything beyond this? Is that not in German? What do you mean by beyond? So I need to question if that is all. Now the question is, is that all?

[56:10]

The world is not limited to Buddhist view, and it's experientially so. And there's this koan which I've talked about a lot, number 21, and I think it's 21 in the Blue Cliff Records. And I actually start my book with this quotation, a quotation from that poem. In the eyes it's called seeing. In the ears it's called hearing. What is it called in the eyebrows? So, but... There's emptiness in form.

[57:48]

And you're always trying to... you're functioning through form. And your attention is a kind of form. So it's thought to be beneficial to keep bringing the form of attention to what appears at each moment. And you try not to discriminate. You try to accept what appears. And at first in this practice, what appears is rather coarse. Just what you hear. Or just the flowers. But more and more it becomes more and more fine. And more and more a kind of presence itself.

[58:53]

So this is the deeper practice of mindfulness. And this practice opens us up to that which you can't quantify in the senses or in conceptuality. In conceptions or perceptions. Mm-hmm. And so you begin to have a kind of mystery of presence that you are living and that would be a little different than saying energy. And the term in Zen Buddhism, great function, means to function through that which is greater than perception and conception.

[60:06]

Now that... Approach your second question, sort of. Oh, it's fine, okay. But the trouble with all is that all, it's that some measurable idea, that there's this and then there's that, that we don't know about. Okay. Okay. So I said I'd tell you another anecdote. Talking about kamis. Not kamis, but kamis. Kami is the idea of a deity presence in Shintoism.

[61:11]

And one of my kind of real insights was when I saw, we used to go to the, in Kyoto we used to go to the Kamigamo, Kamigawa, Jinja, Kamigamo, Jinja, anyway, yeah. I forget the syllables. But anyway, so I once asked, this was for the kami of Kyoto. And the kami is this sense of a deity. And they have a temple for this deity. But the temple is just a dance platform. And you can't, the only way the deity becomes present is you go onto this platform and you start to dance and the deity, you can begin to feel the presence of the deity. So what is the deity? I said.

[62:24]

They said, it's the watershed of Kyoto. So I thought this was great because, of course, Kyoto does depend and the site was chosen because of the good watershed. It comes down and makes the city possible. So the source of the deity, the source of Kyoto, is this deity called, that's a watershed. So I thought that was pretty far out. And it's interesting that you can, and that you think you can dance yourself into this presence, a kind of

[63:40]

Waterhood, Buddhahood, Godhood. But we do have feelings like that. But in old Japanese culture, it's a kind of pantheism, I suppose. But to finish this, A friend of mine was asked to go and speak to a group of engineers and a utility company that run the largest nuclear power plant in the southwest. And for two years he went once a month and talked to these people about anything he wanted to. And he told them stories like, similar to, that I just told you about the Kami Gamo Jinja.

[64:48]

And he talked about the intuition, the physical intuition we have that we can influence things at a distance. Like if you watch athletes playing basketball, they throw the ball and then they go... There's a physical intuition that you can influence. Like I throw things at the wastebasket and I go... It curves up and goes down. Okay, so he was talking to them about things like this. And afterwards one of the guys came over here and said, and he had a beer. And he said, you know, The nuclear power plant has a presence.

[66:00]

He said, my friend said, it does. We don't tell management, but we all know it has a presence. And it gets kind of irritable around 4 o'clock in the afternoon. My friend is, you know, he's not exactly pro-nuclear. He says, it does. If you guys... You guys are running this nuclear plant trying to wonder whether it's irritable or not? And they said, look Teresa, we know it's a woman. And my friend, yeah, she has a name.

[67:02]

And he's, my friend said, would you, no, no, I can't tell you that. So they said, so my friend said, well, fine, let's have another beer. And then they went to another table and they had a few more beers. He said... He said it's Rhonda. Rhonda. We've discovered why it's irritable at four o'clock. Because there's a changing of the shifts at four o'clock and she gets anxious. So what we do is, as we're leaving the room, we all turn back and say, we'll be back, Rhonda. And then she's much less irritable. This is us human beings.

[68:25]

So, Okay. Maybe we should stop. Is that a good time to stop?

[68:49]

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