I think of the occasional teishos, this would be only the third, I'm giving during this practice period. I think of them as footnotes or maybe sitnotes. to our practicing together while I'm assuming that Otmar's teshos will carry the directionality of the practice period. Now, so, if I were to give a name to this, what I'm We'll see what I talk about, but what feels like I'll talk about.

[01:01]

Yeah, I would say maybe it's something like strategies of identity and identification. then I would say that this is something like strategies of identity and identification. Or strategies of self and less self. So I wanted to go back to the koan 15 of the Shoyuroku and Yangshan's that I mentioned during the Sashin. Now, often these, and I myself have done it myself, have called these koans dialogical anecdotes or dialogues.

[02:21]

Anecdotes. Mm-hmm. And... And... Yeah, and that is really, I think, a misleading way to characterize koans. Because it feels like then it's a space between two people and their two persons and their conversation. But it's a much more many-logical or multi-logical space that's created. And it even says in the koan that the thousand-year-old shadowless tree and the bottomless shoe of the present and the

[03:48]

And the mastery of the moon over a thousand peaks. And the robe and bowl. And the valley and clouds. And the master and disciple. All these are our venerable ancestors from the past. Now, I don't know what the original says in Chinese, but... Still, it is the case that such anecdotes or stories or images such as the shadowless thousand-year-old tree

[05:12]

These images, when you feel them or embody them, become like, yeah, animate us. They're kind of like... the saying of a particular teacher or the look of a particular teacher might hold us in the lineage, articulate us in the lineage. die beleben uns oder animieren uns. Das sind dann Bilder, die sich in uns einprägen, vielleicht auf eine ähnliche Art und Weise, wie das Aussehen oder der Blick von einem Lehrer in der Lehrlinie uns in der Lehrlinie halten kann.

[06:15]

Now, it's pretty obvious, but let me just say it. What would a shadowless... thousand-year-old tree be represent? Well, of course, it's an experience of phenomena of the world around you as timeless. And the bottomless shoe of the present is, you know, you're completely connected to within the present. So, These are part of the multilogue that's going on between Guishan and Yangshan as this whole koan represents to us.

[07:28]

And these pictures are part of this multilogue between Guishan and Yangshan as it is presented to us in this anecdote. Now, some neurologists, some I've read, feel that the self is a non-negotiable part of us. Did you say neurologist? Yeah. Okay. And that the self can no more be thought away than our existence itself can be thought away. And this is not the view of Buddhism.

[08:31]

The view of Buddhism is that because the self, as this particular neurologist I just quoted, because the self is a construct, the construction process can be diverted, altered, transformed. Now, while it may take a little time to wrap your mind around these ideas, Although all of you have had, most of you have had a lot of experience in trying to wrap your mind or in fact wrapping your mind around it. And also establishing the reconstruction process in your activity.

[09:39]

Now, okay, so we have one of the basics we've talked about. That everything is an everything, everythingness is also and primarily an activity. And the self is an activity. And it's a self under construction. It's a construction under construction. You really have to get that as a fact in yourself. and begin to notice that your self is constantly under construction.

[11:03]

In simple things you read something and it changes how you see yourself a little bit. Or you find out something about your family that you never knew and it makes you view your life and personhood a little differently. Oder du findest etwas über deine Familie heraus, was du zuvor noch nicht wusstest. Und dann sorgt das dafür, dass du dein Leben und deine eigene Person ein bisschen anders betrachtest. So I've been for some years trying to look for another word than activity. Und seit einigen Jahren halte ich nach einem anderen Wort als dem Wort Aktivität Ausschau.

[12:08]

So this morning when I was musing about this, I used capacitivity. Well, we can do these funny things. In German, you can make... Words so long, no one, unless you're German, can pronounce them. In English, we can squeeze words together and not be able to know what they mean. Okay, so capacitivity. Or maybe adaptivity.

[13:10]

You don't have to worry about it. Okay. Now, some of the other ingredients in this story are the elements or ancestors in this story. Or is silent... discourse before thought. So we have the ingredients are like Guishan and Yangshan and the fields and people in the fields and the pole. And the pole is also a hoe for farming, but it's also the spine and it's the probing pole to find the depth of something. So another ingredient, another kind of one of the actors or another protagonist or something like that?

[14:23]

is silent discourse before thought. So you have to, when you feel the presence, the image of these two guys One of the ingredients is silent discourse before thought. This is like hold to the moment before thought arises from the other koan we discussed. And this is called hidden activity. That means it's always going on. It's a hidden activity, but always going on like a stream flowing underground.

[15:44]

And the introduction has the other ingredient, another ingredient, which is spontaneous revelation without clarification. And Now, when you're working with a colon like this, you have to factor in these other characters. Spontaneous revelation without clarification. Spontaneous revelation without clarification. That means to trust things, to know what intuitions you can trust. And that's also the working of the laya-vijjana, as the first is the silent discourse before thought.

[17:06]

And then we have two examples. Saluting at the front gate. And walking down the hall. And that just represents our dharma practice, bowing to each other, bowing at the altar, so forth. And that kind of activity, finding yourself in the moment-by-moment dharmas, Und diese Art von Aktivität, dieses Dich-Finden in den Dharmas von Moment zu Moment.

[18:16]

With others. Turns your silent thinking or silent knowing before thought into a discourse with others and with things. This is the logic of this koan. You know, there's a funny popular song which is, it was only a door in an April shower And I met my million-dollar baby in a five-and-ten-cent store. Bing Crosby. You don't even know Bing Crosby. My million-dollar baby in a one-euro store.

[19:22]

And some of the other characters in our koan are Zen Master Ping, And not Bing. And Toji. And a few other performers in our choir are Zen Master Ting and Toji. And it goes on to say she was selling China. Does that automatically mean Chinaware? Yes. And then it says that she sold porcelain. But calling it China in America in those days was to say something exotic, Chinese. So here, all of these ingredients are necessary in this little popular song. It's a door.

[20:36]

It just was a door because it was raining hard. He opened a door and it was an April shower. April represents love. And he didn't expect to meet a beautiful clerk that he was going to marry because it was a five and ten cent store and she was a million dollar baby. Er hätte nicht erwartet, dass er darin eine Verkäuferin findet, die er heiraten würde, weil das so ein Zehn-Pfennig-Laden war, aber das war ein Ein-Million-Dollar-Baby. So all of the words are part of the context, the dialogue, the multilogue. So sind all diese Worte Teil von dem Zusammenhangsgefüge, Teil von dem Dialog oder dem Multilog. Yeah, I'm sort of using a funny... example, silly example, but the Quran is like this too, that all the parts work together like in a poem.

[21:38]

Yeah, it says that later, love, it is a popular song, and then it says in the song, love comes along like a popular song. Yeah, so the song describes itself. Okay. Okay. Now if When we're noticing things, the act of noticing, I mean, if our living is a... In order to live from moment to moment, we have to have a way to function.

[22:56]

Um, von Moment zu Moment zu Leben müssen wir irgendwie funktionieren. And to function we have to establish some sort of continuity. Okay, so the usual way we see functioning established is when we notice an object And we see the object sequentially. Now I'm looking at this sort of like contemporary neurologically way, philoneurological way. If you notice something, if you notice an object, You have to be able to somehow relate to it in successive moments.

[24:00]

Now, in Buddhism, in the Lankavatara Sutra, it calls this process the five dharmas. There's appearance and naming. And discrimination. And then right knowledge or wisdom. And then suchness. Now, again, in practice, these are kind of real basic. You establish this in your own perceptual, sensorial activity. Now you can't really understand this from outside by just saying, oh yeah, this makes sense, appearance, naming, etc.,

[25:16]

But because what really this is about happens only when you embody and internalize it and find it happening in your moment-by-moment activity. So you need some yogic skills here. You need the yogic skill of a moment-by-a-moment awareness. Nowadays, I notice when trains stop at stations, even though very briefly, two or three people will get off and have a smoke and get back on.

[26:28]

So instead of smoking, what we do, an appearance and you stop and you pause in the appearance and have a little breather. And that little stop is like the thousand year shadowless tree. And the bottomless shoe of the press. It's not just that, of course, there's time passing, but your experience, because you're not emphasizing succession, temporality, you're emphasizing spatial stopping, it awakens in you moments of revelation when the world stopped.

[27:40]

Was that too long? Mm-hmm. Okay. Too long for me to... Okay. Although the thousand-year shadowless tree, there's no time, no sun going by... emphasizes your, well, of course, as I said, there's time, but because your mind and body is not emphasizing succession, the next thing, aber weil dein Geist und dein Körper nicht die zeitliche Abfolge betonen, also das Nächste betonen, Deshalb findest du dich nicht nur räumlich verortet, statt dich zeitlich zu verorten. kind of moments of revelation when it felt timeless, the world.

[28:53]

Because in you, in your accumulated memory, the Alaya Vijnana, what's accumulated is not only the past, present and future self-narrative. But moments when you stepped out of that past, present, future narrative And felt a timelessness, an eternity. Something like that in some moments.

[29:58]

You felt universal or you felt everything is in its place and nothing needs to change. That history is part of your history. But it's not awakened unless you have these pauses under the shadowless tree. Aber das ist nicht erweckt, es sei denn, du hast dieses Innerheiten, diese Pausen unter dem schattenlosen Baum. And if you're located in, another kind of conflated word, circumcentering immediacy. immediacy means we sometimes try to call experience in Zen non-duality

[31:01]

Unmittelbarkeit, das bedeutet so viel wie, also im Zen nennen wir eine Erfahrung manchmal nicht dualität. But a more useful, experienceable word, I think, or concept would be no in-betweenness. Aber ich glaube, ein besser erfahrbares Wort wäre das Wort keine, nichts dazwischen. An etymological translation of immediacy would be no in-betweenness. So your bottomless you of the present means you're really located without any feeling of in-betweenness. You're just located in immediacy. I sometimes call you, as you need to practice Zen and so we need to work with images and work with phrases to weave it into your daily life.

[32:23]

A phrase could be no other location mind. Or the image could be Yangshan and his pole's spine. So the teaching of a koan like this, this particular koan, is find yourself, develop the skill of moment by moment awareness. and develop the attentional awareness stream and interrupt this three-time self-narration

[33:45]

And just feel yourself, even when you're not stopped, feel yourself disappearing into your spine, into a kind of somatic disappearance. So we need maybe a metaphor would help you. So you're anchoring yourself with this image of the spine pole. And where are you anchoring yourself? You're anchoring yourself in immediacy, in the circum field. And that's where you feel you are. You feel you're a location. And your path arises then, because the ship or the boat or whatever we're imaging has to have a direction.

[35:17]

arises through silent discourse and spontaneous revolution. entsteht dann aus dem stillen Dialog, dem stillen Gespräch oder der spontanen Enthüllung. Which is characterized in the koan as dancing in the garden and wagging your head out the back door. Was in dem koan beschrieben wird als im Garten zu tanzen und den Kopf aus der Hintertür herauszuschütteln. So our usual way of doing it in order to deal and function within a continuity, we identify that the observer identifies with the object your observing function, and locates itself in the self-narrating time, past, present, future narration.

[36:39]

And this constantly reaffirms, re-concretizes the sense of a real observing self. real observing self. Okay, since I'm running out of time or I ran out of time let me just go back to the five dharmas and this requires to be located in the dharma appearance practice and you feel yourself Noticing an appearance, being part of an appearance.

[37:51]

And there's an immediate tendency to name it. And then it becomes discrimination. Now the practice of naming, the Buddhist practice of naming, stops with naming and stops the discrimination. Die buddhistische Praxis des Benennens, die setzt hier einen Stopp. Du endest den Prozess mit dem Benennen und beendest damit die Unterscheidung. And Hishiryo, similarly, is to notice without thinking about. Und auf eine ähnliche Art und Weise ist die Praxis von Hishiryo besteht darin, zu bemerken ohne zu denken.

[38:52]

Because if you've been since infancy practicing naming, doing naming, but also practicing naming, That has created neurological pathways and territories, realities that just simply exist in you bodily. So to bring wisdom into your life, you have to actively interrupt this process. Over and over, just naming without thinking about or noticing without thinking about. So that's bringing right knowledge or wisdom in instead of discrimination.

[39:56]

And the fifth dharma is suchness which is no in-betweenness. And the fifth dharma is so-heit, and that is no in-between-being, nothing in-between. Okay, that's enough. Was it a little too complicated? I thought it was going to be simple. No, it's a little too complicated. I thought it would be easy now. I'm sorry. Anyway, I promise not to give any more lectures for a while because I won't be here. I promise you I won't give any more lectures because I'm not here anyway. Thank you.

[40:46]

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