I'm working with this physiotherapist named Harold, spelled with two A's, which is the German spelling, and he's German. And he's been here for about 12 years or so in the area. And he says, I'm doing quite well, he thinks. But he said, two things don't do. Don't fall again, on your right side especially. And he said, don't try to put your arm above your shoulder yet. But anyway, and it's springtime, it seemed like, for a while. So I asked Brian to open the doors. Now I thought today maybe to speak about the obvious and hiddenness and the role of hiddenness and continuing on the robe chant.

[01:14]

Christian, thank you Roshi, made this for me and I like wearing it. It's a physical object, you know? And he made it, all these stitches. But most people looking at it wouldn't know he made it. And also it's a, it's a, It's been given to me by him. And that givenness is part of this object. But it's hidden. It's not obvious that the givenness of it is part of it. And

[02:23]

When I discussed the fact that when I first started teaching in Europe, nobody had raksus, and yet we said, now I open Buddha's robe, so we switched it. At least it's still mostly, I think everyone in Europe's mind, in our Sangha. And so it's interesting, you know, there's a little bit of a problem because when we say, now I open Buddha's robe, we've actually put this object on our head. And there's a particular way to put this object on your head. You put it with the open side to the front.

[03:30]

And I'm trying to show you something about the relationship of objects, the importance of objects in Zen and Buddhist practice. And the main reason why there's such a difference is because Asian and yogic and East Asian and tantric culture doesn't separate the world into the human and non-human. And since it's so built into our language, it's very difficult to find, the distinction is so built into our language, it's very difficult to find ways, words that don't, underneath and hidden in those words, an implicit

[04:46]

assumption that there's a difference between the human and non-human world, a difference in kind. And if you look at Western philosophy, Western philosophy up until very recently, Kant and everyone assumes that philosophy is about the human world and the non-human world is sort of like it's there, sort of a platform or something. Yeah. So it's, I remember when I was first practicing again, and Suzuki Roshi, it was very nice of him, there was a group of people who had practiced, who'd been with him for about a year, I arrived toward the end of the first year, I guess it was, of his being in America.

[05:50]

And he said that he wouldn't give lay ordination to anyone who hadn't been there a year. So he postponed the date for a few weeks so that I fit into the year. And so I received a Roxy, you know, like wearing a sweater or something, you know. And the first thing I was told was, like you put it there and we put it on the morning and I had to treat it a certain way. When I, in my, if I traveled with it, it was always on top in your suitcase. It's never under other things in the suitcase. So there was all these basically hidden aspects of the object which were not, you had to have, you had to be told

[06:58]

And they weren't just told, they were meant to be felt, they were real. I mean, this object has almost no reality to it except all these hidden aspects. I mean, it doesn't keep you warm particularly. Kind of a nuisance sometimes. But when you practice, and you say, now I open Buddha's robe, you've put this on top of your head, which means you have to balance it, which means, really, you kind of lift your spine up and have to arrange your neck and head so that it's likely to stay there. And so... hidden in this raksu is a certain kind of posture.

[08:03]

If we're going to wear it on our head, not on our shoulders, it requires a certain kind of posture. So hidden in this physical object, so-called physical object, is a posture. Now, It's made, we know it's made, and usually you make your own, so you really know it's a made object. Then it is in turn given to you, even though you made it. And then it's also owned by Buddha. So you have something, some symbol of Buddha in your possession now. And, yeah, you can sort of say, well, but still it's been described that way for one or two thousand years.

[09:12]

So there's some weight, provenance, some weight to the fact that it's considered to be Buddha's robe as well as your robe. And you kind of own up to it, maybe. Anyway, you own it. And you are also taking care of it for Buddha. And so, now, we're talking here about the coded and the hidden. And I decided to speak about this because, I don't know, mostly to beginners, you don't talk about the coded and the hidden, but there's very much in Zen Buddhist practice that's coded and hidden. And Buddhism assumes that most things are hidden. So by making some of the practices

[10:19]

coded and hidden is a way to introduce you into what is most of the world. Now, this philosopher I'm fond of these days, Graham Harman, speaks about the dimensions, the aspects of the world that are withdrawn. And I think sheathed is better, like sheath for a knife, sheathed. Or I think just seen and unseen. Because there's a great, most of what the world is is unseen. And Western thinking has mostly developed relationships to the seen, the sensorial world. Now it's interesting that there's a huge shift in Western philosophy to phenomenology, which emphasizes perception as being the way we evidence the world.

[11:28]

But that shift also was very much toward the perceptual world of humans. So the seen and the unseen, I mean, when you're born, The first thing almost every parent does is they count your toes and fingers. Jeez, oh good, there's 10 toes, there's 10 fingers, we're on the right track. And then your heartbeat is checked and stuff like that. But then nowadays they use a sonogram or they use... screening techniques to see if there's a hole in your heart, which happened. A baby that I was, Rene Dayton's child, had a hole in his heart when he was first born. And they have to decide whether it's going to close up naturally, which this did, or it needs attention.

[12:36]

So there's a process of screening which goes on and attempt to make sure the digestive tract works and all that. But that's all hidden. Now, nowadays we have equipment that allows you to sort out, notice some of the hidden. But at 99% of the baby is molecules, cells, all kinds of chemicals, et cetera, all of it hidden. But it's totally present. and the child may not realize, find out, nowadays they might find out when they're older that they have DNA which is gonna result in their very likely having a fatal disease or something. So the hidden, when you have a culture which doesn't, which, you know,

[13:47]

It's all one spectrum, one tissue. The Taoist particularly, you know, in Chinese poetry and in the Taoist way of thinking, the whole way you're creative or spiritual or realized is by letting yourself into the tissue which connects everything. So this is just not in our language. It's a little, you know, requires belief or guesswork or something. But it really, if once you get used to it, you feel it's nuts to think that the tree isn't in your, tree's just another version of you. Different arrangement, the same ingredients. So when you develop a sensitivity to relating to the hidden, because you know that most, every object is mostly hidden from us, and what its use is, or what will happen to it, or how it will affect somebody, oh look, it's a bat or a rat or some...

[15:19]

Animal in the wild animal market in China, hidden from us in animals, is now the coronavirus. Sometimes we don't want to keep things be hidden. And the bird flu and, you know, mostly flu strains seem to come from birds. So that to practice within a feeling for what's imaginal, shall we say. I mean, if I'm going to put this on top of my head, now when I don't do the full chant and things, because I just took my raksu off for some reason, I'm putting it back on, I always touch my forehead.

[16:26]

the crown of my head and my forehead again for Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, or the Dharmakaya, Sambhogakaya, and Nirmanakaya, which I remind myself of those imaginal objects, entities, things. So when I say Buddha, Dharma, Sangha, I feel because I'm used to functioning within the hidden, or what's not just this physical object, but this physical object with all the hiddenness which goes with it. Now, for laypersons who don't have a Rahksu, I always feel it's a little funny to ask them to do this, if a Christian seems to have decided to say, Buddha's robe, meaning the physical world, really, and mind, meaning intentions and feelings,

[17:41]

we now open these fields beyond form and emptiness. But the person who's entered the Sangha formally through Jukkai, puts this on their head, and the object then requires this hidden aspect. Hidden in this object is a particular posture. And hidden in that posture is an imaginal Buddha. That's real for a practitioner. And for us who are not familiar with this kind of coded practice, or hidden-looking behavior, we need to remind ourselves of it because at the center of tantric, the tantric dynamic of Buddhism, which Zen is a tantric form of Buddhism,

[18:55]

So sometimes I think maybe, I don't know, I haven't figured out what to do, but for the person who doesn't have a rakshu and they chant, now I open Buddha's robe and mine, maybe they should, now I open Buddha's robe and mine, but that's a little kooky. So, I don't know. But it makes a difference to have this object, which then requires a posture. And the posture required is a posture in which it is more likely that you might achieve realization. And, of course, it's obvious that you... This is sitting on the main lotus chakra. And Buddha is seen on the altar on a lotus.

[20:08]

Now I hope in Buddha's robe and mind feel far beyond form and emptiness. This is Agatha's teaching for all sentience. So the fact that Zenkiroshi made this and that it's made, it's an object. It's not just an idea. It's also, it's more than an idea, an imaginal posture. And in its being called Buddha's robe and put on your head, it becomes an imaginal posture of Buddha, which you inhabit by lifting up through your body.

[21:21]

And you start, we start every day with this posture. using a physical object which is also us. Now the bowing and the service is coded the same way. As much as possible you go straight down and then your elbows come to the floor first So you try to come straight down, which is easier for younger people. And then you come down with your elbows touching first. Now, if your wrists touch first, does it make any difference? Not really. But the idea is you're teaching attentional posture.

[22:27]

Can you... Hold to every moment of your posture while you're bowing. Now, an important experience for me, and I've mentioned this occasionally, was Charlotte Selver, who I met basically at the same time as I met Suzuki Roshi. I was sitting in her seminar with Alan Watts. And Alan Watts was an influence on Charlotte Silver, and Charlotte Silver was an influence on Alan, and Charlotte used to teach at Zen Center for years. We were close friends. But I'm sitting there, and she said, she asked the group to stand up, but she didn't say, stand up. She said, come up to standing. And I've been a different person ever since then. because when she said, come up to standing, I found myself not going between A and B from sitting to standing.

[23:36]

I found myself going up through a whole series of postural changes, come up to standing. And somehow I heard those words in a way which was actional. And I've never stood up since without coming up to standing and discovering lots of postures along the way. And then finally you settle into the posture, the standing posture, which then you can begin to notice if your feet are this way or this way or this way, how your spine is and so forth. So in the same sense of finding some way to describe the bowing we do every day, most days, that brings the molecules, the particles, the granularity of attention into the granularity, the cellularity of the body.

[24:52]

without it having to pass through a me and a you and worries and things. It's just a body, an object, coming into this posture. And so your elbows touch first, and then you raise from here, your hands. So your hands stay flat. Now, why do your hands stay flat when you can Because you imagine, imagine old body again, you imagine the Buddha is standing on your hands. So when you do this, you lift and you lift the Buddha on your hands. And then you stand up in that imaginal Buddha. Now, in Japan, they don't teach it like I'm doing it, and I have to decide, should I say these things or not say these things?

[25:55]

Because the whole emphasis, particularly in Zen, is you find it out for yourself. That is hugely part of realization, to find it out for yourself. But my experience is no one notices it. Almost. So it's coded. When they say, your hands, you lift from here, it means the code is, hey, why do you do that? Because the Buddha's standing on your hands. Why is the Buddha standing on your hands? In this imaginal... Because when you then stand up, you stand up into the imaginal realm. Imaginal body of the Buddha. I mean, what was the historical Buddha's own body was imaginal. Your body is imaginal. It's all made from your experiences and etc. And now you can bring the wisdom of a Buddha's body, an imaginal body, into your activity.

[27:00]

So you stand up into this body and then you bow to a Buddha. And when you bow to the Buddha, which you now are, it's like two friends greeting each other. Or two roosters, unfortunately it's roosters, in the morning, you know, waking each other around the same minute. and you're bringing your hands up through this chakra field, and you're gathering the energy of the body, which is articulated spatially as well as physically, into your hands, and you're bringing it up through to this chakra, to here, and then up into a kind of shared space

[28:10]

And then that shared space disappears into the field, just greeting somebody on the path, but also into the Buddha on the altar. Now, it's very important, and I pay a lot of attention to what Buddhas we have, because some Buddhas have been constructed so that they enhance this feeling. And traditionally, when a sculptor makes a Buddha, he has a realized person, if you can find one around, to come and say, yes, this Buddha works. And many Buddhas, I have some here, in fact, have the ashes of former owners in them. because it's not meant to be just an object.

[29:16]

It's meant to be an object that has a kind of personal identity of its previous owners. So the bottoms you can take out and, you know, and I had an interview trying to find some ashes from me later and say, which one should we put them in? Okay, put a little bit there. But that would be the custom. You don't usually do it before you die. Rather difficult. So you have to depend on others. Now if you get used to this, And you're not saying, I'm such and such a person. But just right then, you just disappear into the bow.

[30:17]

And sometimes we say in English, well, I don't know exactly what the word is in Japanese, but you plunge into the bow, disappear into the bow. And the word start, as I said the other day, means to leap into the unknown, to... flinging yourself into the unknown. And it's also related to startle, to be startled. And startle is related to caper, and caper is related to playfully, playfully being leaping. So there's a kind of playful throwing yourself into the unknown in this successional identity. For at that moment you can throw yourself into the unknown. And then lift your hand. And then step, lift yourself up into the Buddha.

[31:19]

And that's all hidden. Using objects and their potentiality for hiddenness. To enter yourself into the Well, the dynamics really of realization. Everything. Everything is present. Thank you very much.

[32:17]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_90.57