Whereas I was saying in the early days of this particular doorstep Zen, we're in the midst of a huge wake-up call. But I'm here teaching and practicing with Germany because... I've been in Poland, Russia, Soviet Union, Austria, Holland, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, France, and I decided basically I would say that Germany heard the wake-up call of the Second World War in a way that makes people open to practice. And I am here with you in Germany.

[01:02]

I have been to many European countries. I will not list them all again. And I think that Germany heard the call for the Second World War and that it makes the German people open and ready for the practice. And Suzuki Roshi heard the wake-up call of the Second World War in East Asia. And he says his real practice started really when he came to America. We think, oh, this revered Zen master came from Japan already, No, he came to America, and it's America that turned him into Suzuki Roshi. So the context...

[02:05]

for Suzuki Roshi and the context for us are all part of what we're doing. And Suzuki Roshi had to decide how to create a context for practice. At first he didn't. He was happy to be in America, I think, but he didn't really think there was a context for practice. And as I've said earlier, in other contexts, he went to the movies with people and went to Golden Gate Park and had picnics and things like that. But at some point he decided it's possible to practice here. No, I'm trying to see how I can practice.

[03:37]

Give you a feeling for this, the shift. So, again, he spoke regularly about the, as I've been saying, the grasping way and the granting way. And he was emphasizing always that everyday life is our practice. And there's one koan which starts with something like one gesture, one phrase, one word, I don't know, something like that. And the commentary goes on to say, that's like gouging holes in perfectly good meat.

[04:54]

And the commentary says, gouging? Gouging? Digging out? Perfectly good meat. Yeah. I suppose the butchers would, if there was a lot of flies or magnets in the meat, they'd gouge it out. But this is gouging a whole lot of perfectly good meat. There was no refrigeration in those days. Okay. So what's being said here? The Dharma, a Dharma is defined, and I really wish we could really

[06:03]

focus on the practice of a simple thing like the four marks. There's birth. And think of it as midwifed by... Myriad things and I share the same body. So it's midwifed. And then it has a certain duration. Okay, so the second mark of a dharma is duration.

[07:06]

If you're a serious practitioner, you actually spend time noticing how appearance occurs in your sensorium and in your mind. So the first teaching of the Four Marks is to notice things as a series of appearances and not as continuity. This is, in general, I wouldn't say it's easier to practice in the West or Asia, but in this case it's easier to practice in East Asia because they do not see things as a continuity the way we do. Okay.

[08:18]

So you practice with seeing things as an appearance not causally related to the next appearance, paratactically related to the next appearance. Yeah, it means just side by side. If you think it's causal, you're immediately in a God space. A God space. A theological space. Because, yes, there is a relationship between this moment and the next moment. But at each moment there's indeterminacy.

[09:37]

It could go lots of ways. Each moment is a potential and you can't trap it in causation. I may die this moment, right? Causation means nothing. Excuse me. Und es gibt ganz viele Möglichkeiten und ganz viele Möglichkeiten in diesem Moment. Okay. So the serious effort is to keep noticing paratactic momentariness. Also das ernsthafte Bemühen ist, die Momenthaftigkeit in diesem Moment And then to know that as there's no duration to the immediacy, to the present, the experience of the present is a duration that you have sensorial and mental capacities for.

[10:44]

And so the present which you participate in is basically formed by your culture. And you can accept it, yes, that's the way things are. This is a box and that's a frog and that's, you know, this. But if you want to practice But if you want to practice Buddhism, then you want to experience your sensorium establishing the duration.

[11:56]

And I remember when I saw it for the first time. I sensed it, I knew it, I felt it, etc., for years. And one day I was standing by Hotolan, the little Japanese building. It's for Doksan in Kostok. And in the back of my mind has always been, since the present has no duration, why do I experience duration, has been a constant question in me for decades. The present has no duration, so Why do I experience duration? Okay, and I was just standing there and I saw a fly buzzing.

[13:12]

And it, you know, went like this and went back like that and I could see the building and the situation and I realized that That fly was flying within the duration of my sensorium. No. Okay. To have a physical experience of it made suddenly I was in charge of the present. I could expand it, contract it, and so forth. So I could hold ten things in the durative present, or I could hold a hundred things in the durative present.

[14:28]

And if I hold a hundred things, they... They're in the midst of the durative present interacting. Okay, so now what I have, what I call to myself is dur time, d-u-r dash t-i-m-e. So I have dur time. And Dora has dura, [...] And as a plastic cup will last 500 years. So once you begin to experience just through the simple practice of the four marks, do-er time, what I'm calling do-er time,

[15:35]

I can feel the presence of that Dura time. But I can also feel it in Gisela. Because I know she occupies her own Dura time. And that's one reason people, you know, you coordinate, you end up, if you feel connected with others, you're coordinating your breath with them. So again, there's no universal time. First you can maybe have some sort of experience of it, but you can actually have a conceptual, metaphorical view of it.

[17:00]

And if you just say no to universal time, No universal time. That's a metaphor. But it sensitizes your sensorium to noticing the different kinds of time we all occupy. So Dogen will speak about maturing time. And what he means is, in each person, time is maturing in its own way. So the important thing is to notice when a situation is maturing in a number of people or yourself and your friend or whatever, where it's the right moment to act.

[18:21]

And it's important to feel when time in you and in others arrives in a way and at the time when it happens. Okay. So this koan starts out with one gesture, one phrase, etc. And that's a kind of standard way to practice, actually. But if you plan it, it's like gouging out holes in good meat. You know, when we're taking photographs, some photographs really capture a situation in people. But if you go to a no play in Japan, which I don't know if you guys will when you're there, but you could not photograph a no actor and not find it in a fabulous posture.

[19:48]

So Gute's finger is such a moment. or holding up Maha Kashyapa, holding up a flower. So what this koan starts out to say is, in fact, you're communicating through each momentary circum... spectrum... circum... spectrum? Circum... circumstantial posture. Yeah, but again, the Quran says this is like gouging holes out in good meat.

[20:49]

But what's important then, emphasized in this koan, is that every moment is like that, whether you plan it or notice it or not. Okay, so Suzuki Roshi is saying, Zen is daily activity. If you're waiting for some good teaching, you're not a good student. Und wenn du auf eine gute Belehrung wartest, dann bist du kein guter Schüler. So, if these folks are coming to see him hoping the Zen teacher says something great, well, yeah, maybe he said some great things from my point of view. But basically he wants, he wanted us to feel the whole, all the activity was teaching. All the activity is teaching. Yes, and the town where Joshu lived was famous for its bridge.

[22:16]

This is another koan. And somebody came and said to Joshu, you know I came to see the famous bridge of Joshu. And all I saw was a stone bridge. And Joe Joe said, well, you didn't see the real bridge. And Jojo said, ah, you haven't seen the real bridge yet. What is the real bridge? And Jojo said, donkey's cross, horse's cross. In other words, it's just a simple statement.

[23:38]

The bridge is its activity, not the bridge. Do you think that's a bridge? No, it's the activity which is the bridge. So Sukhirishi was waiting to see when we could feel that ordinary activity was our practice. So then how do you enter into the ordinary activity as Dharma practice? And one way is to say the grasping way and the granting way. Now repeating it regularly, he's saying, this is my activity, the grasping way and granting way. He's not just saying, you should practice this device.

[24:56]

He's saying, don't you notice that I keep repeating this, and because I'm repeating it, my activity can be described as the grasping way and granting way. So if you're here to know your teacher's mind, your teacher's mind is expressed this way, so it's already there for you to feel it. Okay. Now, in general in East Asian yoga culture you don't have either-or situations. Everything is a spectrum.

[26:05]

Okay, so let's go to the Google cosmic camera. So at the height of the whole earth, we can call this the granting way. Everything's included. Now, the grasping way and granting way are described in a variety of ways because such devices are keys or codes to many things. It's a key that opens many doors if you know where the lock is. If you try to understand

[27:07]

oh, this teaching means such and such. That's like thinking the stone bridge is Joshu's bridge. Okay, so a high degree of resolution is the whole earth and its clouds and so forth. Also, eine hochauflösende Blick ist die Erde und... Yeah, so I tap in. I'm in, say, Crestone. I tap in Harris Street. And the kind of arrow goes, zoom, across the Atlantic Ocean and across to Europe, and it goes, zoom, and suddenly this garden appears. I said, thank you all. Mm-hmm. And lots of detail.

[28:35]

It's high, the other I would call high integration, this is high resolution. Okay. So now I can take that camera, as I said the other day, and go down past the categories of human sensorial experience At one level, you still have our neighbor's cows. You still have the path along the stream. And then you go just a tiny degree of resolution, higher resolution, and there's no names for what's there. It's still what's there. but it's not nameable by, or does not fit into the categories of the five or six senses.

[29:58]

Okay. So practice is, Zen koan, is attempting to bring the camera the resolution just a little bit outside what you can name. So what is the practice of the basic practice of the most basic way to formulate the practice of the metaphor of the granting way and grasping way. You say yes to everything that appears. Yes, yes. Yeah.

[31:11]

You're Buddha. So that's like the high integration of seeing the whole earth. But this no and yes is not a dualism or a contrast between It's on a spectrum. So you say, each person you meet, you feel they're Buddha, but Maybe a little improvement could be used. So every situation you treat, yes, this is perfect, this is fine, you're the Buddha. Okay. Then the other alternative is, no, you're not the Buddha.

[32:12]

What you've just done is wrong. Yeah, there's no hope for you. Yeah. I think of Sukhiroshi's teacher telling him, you know, you have this strange disease, because he was quite a beautiful young man, and he was told he had this strange disease, which I've known two or three people have had it, where your bones start growing, and you become uglier and uglier. Yeah. Was it Suzuki Roshi who said that? His teacher told him that. He said that this young boy was... He said, I usually believed what my teacher said, so in the mornings I'd look in the mirror and check. So there's a tendency in Doksan, which we're too psychologically involved in who we are, but in Doksan, somebody says something, you just say, even if it's good, you say, that's simply wrong.

[33:36]

And you don't have to figure out what to deal with the person, the teacher saying that to you. So what Suzuki Rishi was saying is He is always in the midst of looking at us all, sometimes in the high integration of we're potentially Buddhas, or the high resolution we just hardly know what we're doing. But this grasping, so-called grasping way, or gathering in way, are also identified with Manjushri and Avalokiteshvara.

[34:48]

Okay, so now you have a little new twist to this whole thing. So Avalokiteshvara is the one who hears the cries of the world. And Manjushri is the bodhisattva of wisdom. who just is in the midst of samadhi as much as possible. So now, saying no means, does this exist? No, empty. So that means you're practicing with, I don't need this, I don't care whether the door is open or not open, I'm just here taking care of my aliveness.

[35:50]

So then as you get more sense of what this gathering in way and granting way is about, You now feel you're practicing Manjushri's way by just doing zazen and hardly paying attention to anything else. And then you notice that you practice Manjushri's way by simply practicing Zazen and you're practicing Zazen and hardly noticing anything else. But the next moment you're walking along the street and

[36:52]

here or San Francisco and you're picking up pieces of glass that are broken, a beer bottle, you're doing everything, you know, you spend your whole day cleaning the street as the Avalokiteshvara, the street cleaner. You're giving money to every homeless person, sitting down with them and chatting with them and stuff like that. So after a while, you get the feeling Sukhriyasi is saying, this is my activity, and when it's also your activity, we begin to have a field where teaching can happen because we're recognizing that all of our shared activity itself is already practice. And what Suzuki Roshi says is, this is my activity and this is your activity.

[38:00]

And it is possible that a divided field develops in which everything is already activity. His feeling was, I know, until we get that sense... Excuse me, in which the teaching can take place. His feeling was, until we get that sense, he didn't know what to say for practice. Okay, I think that's about as well as I can explain, suggest what he meant by for several years emphasizing this one teaching device. The other thing he emphasized, a teaching device, was host and guest. What he emphasized very much was guest and host.

[39:19]

Basic advice he used to give us, which I have told you many times, simple. Was don't invite your thoughts to tea. Okay, so that's basically a teaching of host and guest. Because the mind that doesn't invite the thoughts to tea is host. Und der Geist, der die Gedanken nicht zum Tehen einlädt, ist der Gastgeber. And the guests are the discursive thoughts. Und die Gäste sind die diskursiven Gedanken. So he would teach the host about host and guest, which is embedded in all the Hekigan Roku koans. Und dieses Gast und Gastgeber ist eingebettet in all diese... Oh, the Heikigan Roku, Bloomcliffe Record. Bloomcliffe Record, go on.

[40:22]

But he was hoping we'd hear host and guest and realize that you can shift to being the host mind and not identify with the guest mind, the discursive thoughts. So... So you become the host. In zazen, you become the host. That's the gathering in way. Okay. And you really feel physiologically that posture. And you can stay there and then your thoughts just don't bother you anymore at all. They can come and go. They can be terrible. They can threaten you with insanity, which happens. The better your practice gets, you can be threatened that this is going to make me crazy.

[41:31]

The ego says, I'll show them. They think they can get away with this. I'm going to make them crazy. The temptation of the Buddha by Mara. And at some point you can just be the host. Yeah, but guests, you do have guests. Yeah. You have to participate in the society. So now the guests become the granting way. You invite your thoughts to tea. Sure, let's have a party. And now let's have lunch. Okay. I don't know.

[42:32]

I like sitting here. Maybe we'll skip lunch.

[43:01]

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