Did the fire this morning in the corner help at all? Or is it just the sound was psychologically reassuring? What? Oh, that helped. Oh yeah, that probably helps most. So should we continue building a short fire in the morning? Hmm? Oh, well, we could have duct tape and audio tape. Is that what you mean? Well, I mean, I'm serious. Yeah. Because if we didn't know... What about you, Ruth? You were right there in front of the fire, threw the little black cloth, and you don't. Is it too hot? Oh, okay. Great. But there was a difference this morning. You all started chanting right from the beginning. Didn't hunt around. Maybe it's just a matter of paying attention and not having everybody dragged slowly into the chant.

[01:05]

Okay. Hmm. It's funny, I want to thank you for doing this brief service for Arnett this morning, Arnett Knighton. We didn't get exactly how to work, worked out how to fit it right in. No, what you did was fine. I thought we might as well stop at that point. But I liked that you went right on. So we did the lineage too. But it's my fault that it's not worked out. We don't do memorial services or services very often. But, you know, Heidi called me up, and Arnett's mother is only, I don't know, in her mid-70s and lives in a, in 79 maybe even, and lives in a,

[02:15]

you know, fleabag hotel down in Market Street somewhere, San Francisco. Nobody knows, nobody even has the money to cremate this young man. So they're trying to get, she's trying to raise that money and stuff. She wanted something done. So she intuitively made herself an altar. She doesn't know much. She's half Jewish, half something, regular, Protestant, I guess. Anyway, And so she made herself an altar and called me and asked me, please do something. Something needs to be done. So it's an interesting idea, actually. Was she making the altar for herself or for Arnette or? What is it that motivates us to do something or to want? Why does she feel better that all of you who she doesn't know and you don't know him, now she feels better that we did this?

[03:19]

Strange, huh? Well, what I've been talking about the last couple of days is... really is the vipassana side of inner seeing, the insight side of Buddhist practice. Now, in Zen, vipassana and shamatha are fused together, and one way you're experiencing that fusion Because sasin is an institution or practice that's developed to fuse vipassana and shamatha. Now mostly we are just the subject of sasin. You know, sasin, if you follow the schedule and do the sasin, the sasin starts doing you, or you...

[04:33]

just are surviving. Or maybe surviving. I'm sorry. I feel so terrible that you do all this stuff. Oh dear. But even as just surviving, there's a intimacy with which you are thrown into yourself that can be deeply satisfying. And you also become familiar with yourself in a larger context and even larger space, with a kind of many perspectives often on things. And things you hadn't connected or relative, so much comes up, just appears.

[05:42]

So it's something about, you know, if you constrict your time, somehow if we constrict our outer time and space, you open up your inner time and space. I mean, it's such a shortcut to getting access to what maybe we could call your inner time and space, or your mind robe, as I said yesterday. I thought the R word was going to be robe, and it turned out to be reality. You had me guessing there this morning. R and R. The R word. And Bugs Bunny. Jeez, I mean, what is this machine coming to? I think Steve should have stopped this morning at the point where the kid said, put it back on.

[06:50]

I would have still been contemplating that. Take it off. First I thought, maybe there's huge South African rabbits that I've never heard of. Australia possibly, but South Africa... So I want you to put it back on too. Last session you were talking about ancient skulls. Bugs Bunny's head. Steve's giving lectures in the morning. Or something. Thanks for the recap. The recap. Yeah. Hmm. So anyway, we, in Sashin, even as the subject of Sashin, we become... Do you understand what I mean?

[08:10]

Subject. We become familiar with ourself in the kind of intimacy and depth of connection, connectedness, that we don't... It's not usual. And... So, anyway. But I'm assuming in this sesshin, and most of you have done quite a few sesshins, that you can begin to practice within the sesshin this vipassana kind of practice. So you're not just subject of the sesshin. I shouldn't say just, because Because the first few years even of doing sushins, in which you come to know yourself in a larger space, with more perspectives and with more intimacy, and even a wider familiarity,

[09:22]

of tremendous value, it's worth doing sashina once or twice a year just for that. It will deepen your history. I mean, you have a history, but the more your history is present in your life, the more your life lives from and is the fruit of your history. So if you do such things enough, there'll be a softness and a kind of absorbed quality to your life that people will recognize. I mean, you'll sit down on a train somewhere and people start talking to you in ways And if they were particularly... How do you pronounce that? Anyway, particularly insightful, they would say, oh, why am I talking to you this way?

[10:29]

Oh, I see, you're a person who's a veteran of eight or more sushines. Yeah. Not battle-scarred. Sashim-scarred veteran. As you limp down the train. So I've been talking about, you know, in this sense of seeing the localness of things. Another word I could use is to see the discontinuity. We're emphasizing discontinuity, not continuity, because I want you to step out of the continuity of self and out of the continuity of making sense of the world. If you're rather seeing the discontinuity and taking some refuge in that, or ease,

[11:41]

And one thing I emphasized in teaching in Europe this year a number of times is finding your seat. And this is, of course, the first koan in the Shoryuk. And here I'm not speaking in this session so much about finding your seat through your physical and mental, physical presence and state of mind, but rather finding your seat, and in effect finding your seat in each appearance, in each perception, in each form that arises. Now this emphasis on finding your presence, your virtue, your power, being empowered by each arising appearance, is not really the jhanic shamatha side of practice.

[12:54]

Although, again, in Zen they're just two sides of the same thing. But still, this is more the vipassana side. generally translated insight, and it's okay, but I prefer inner, an inner seeing, or innermost seeing, or seeing from inner, seeing from a state of concentration or a state of calm, or seeing from the recognition that what you see are thought forms. You're not seeing objects, you're seeing your perception of yourself. Now, this is just something you keep reminding yourself of. And the reminding yourself of it is insight practice. And it's how you mature yourself in Buddhism and as a Buddha. Now, one of the reasons that... Bugs Bunny would be a hard practice.

[14:01]

although Steve's point was very good. But as a practice, it would be quite difficult because you're not already Bugs Bunny. You're already Buddha. And we have this capacity. It would be an effort to establish yourself as Bugs Bunny. Yes. Much harder practice than this, you know. You need more than just the sheens. Yeah. But as a Buddha, we do need certain things, like this sashin. You need certain experiences. You need to put on Buddha's clothes, put on Buddha's teaching. But you barely need to get it on and you can begin to feel this dimension, these dimensions of ourself that we call Buddha. Now, again, that

[15:06]

There's a cautionary side to this, because you can take a person, you can have a malevolent, the opposite of beneficial, something that causes evil or causes bad things to happen. You can have a malevolent identity, that intuited or manifested secondary psychological processes or manifested excluded knowledge or excluded identities in society. And you could have the whole society or individuals very caught up in this malevolent identity because you can... So, in a way, Buddhism is the same, is a similar process because these malevolent identities are also what we already are. or they can be initiated, even if they are barely there, they can be initiated.

[16:14]

So in a society... I think it's a mistake, this is sort of an aside, but it comes up when you start thinking about how the process of becoming a Buddha works, that in a society, just to... Recognized excluded knowledge or the Dionysic or the underside of society, what's usually excluded, just to recognize it is not enough if the recognition is practiced as an excluded identity. It has to somehow be included or recognized and acknowledged within the larger identity So what we're trying to do in practice is recognize these, because the level of excluded knowledge and excluded identity, or a society which has got parts of it which aren't acknowledged in the primary identity of society, is a very potent and mixed up thing.

[17:32]

I mean, I think what's happening in America right now is the media in general and the Buddhist media is trying to take, is to make Buddhism Western. And if possible, without changing. So it's a kind of protective, a defense mechanism in which society is trying to make Buddhism Western without changing. And if you're going to practice Buddhism, you have to change in various ways. So, and in this realm of excluded knowledge, spiritual life is also there. So spiritual life and other things get all mixed up. So the excluded parts of your own personality that come up in Sushin are very mixed up with spiritual life too.

[18:33]

are in the realm, same kind of excluded identity that much of our spiritual life is. One problem with practicing in the West these days is there's so little acknowledgement of spiritual life in ordinary life. So you end up being closet spirits. No. Closet Buddhas or something. Who's that knocking at the door? It's my closet spirit. So how are you going to mature your Buddha identity? So I can try to give you some of the traditional teachings about this. It's okay.

[19:38]

Here we are in Sashin. Let's come back to that. That's what we're doing. And you are in the midst of dealing with sitting in one place of such a restrictive time and space, so many restrictions on your outer time and space. And in the midst of the sitting, There's so much, there's, I hope, a growing intimacy, a variety of intimacies, of familiarities, senses of yourself. Senses of something that's happening that you call you. At the same time, to get through the session and to get through each period, you kind of have to find something you can latch on to or connect with, a kind of feeling or sense or idea or...

[20:48]

It can be a physical sensation or a kind of mental thought, feeling. Anyway, it's something you'd probably come back to or find you identify with it, kind of pull you through. Then there'll be usually, for most people, some periods, sometimes only five or ten minutes one day, and sometimes several periods in a row of tremendous clarity that you can feel the clarity physically, and it's also present mentally and emotionally. It's a good taste of power, dimension in our lives that we don't usually know again. And the more you can kind of locate yourself in discontinuities or in each particular, you actually allow each particular to empower you. And just in your sashin, in bringing yourself to particulars, not as a way of studying, though that's important, but as a way of taking refuge in whatever it is.

[22:05]

Painful? Just painful. You just enter the pain. If you want the bell to ring, you just enter the wanting the bell to ring. And in Sashim there will be I think there will be a lot of pain, not just the physical pain, but things that come up will make you squirm. And everything, in fact, everything has a dimension of pain or suffering to it. And that's just the way life is. I'm sorry, I can't be helped. And maybe that's what Heidi is doing, is her altar here, to recognize...

[23:10]

suffering. And she's seen a lot of it. I could tell you some of the stories, but since it's on tape and since she's, I've mentioned her name, but she's seen when she was 16 she had somebody's head blown out with a gun in her lap in front of her. And that's only one of many things she's been through. But probably this altar is some sort of recognition and maybe coming out of living with us since she was, from when she was, I don't know, 14 or 15 until she was 20 or so. Maybe this being in a Buddhist household made her want to have some physical recognition like wearing the robe or putting on an altar, a place to set, to face yourself.

[24:21]

It's important for her. Now we say in Buddhism that everything that has form has three marks, and they are pain or suffering, impermanence, and impersonal or that things aren't entirely personal, not quite personal. So if you... Now this is the realm of taking refuge in and also studying how things appear, because the study of how reality appears to you is essential for developing your practice in yourself. So we say that it has three marks. Impermanence, yes, you can see it's changing. Second, whatever comes up, you also see. Now you see all three of these marks and everything, and you kind of practice with it.

[25:24]

And if they're not there, you can make a list of five marks if you want, or you can say, sorry, I've only got two marks or one mark. It's all suffering. It's all permanent. No, that would be a second part. Anyway, generally, you can make your own list, but the tradition is that whatever list you make, it comes down to it's impermanent, it's changing. Anything that appears has that quality. It also has the quality of pain, leading to pain, having arisen from pain, presently causing pain, maybe causing pain. suffering so And third that it's you coming up. It's you perceiving it, but it's not just you it's bigger than just you and So we say impersonal. It's not just you You're part of something happening You can say oh that experience happened to me, but it's not just you

[26:26]

Now, here you're in Sashin again, and most of you, some of you go to some other life in a week or two, and some of you, all of you have had other lives than this, will have, and so forth. And, as Steve said tomorrow, there's a way in which this is illusion or play. But, if you have to do your life, it's not very playful often. And when I was driving up here, Rick and I, I was listening to the radio, and one, there was a long piece on cancer that went on for about 20 minutes or half an hour. For a radio, quite an exhaustive, looking at the large percentage of

[27:38]

particularly breast cancer. I think one in ten American women, one in nine American women get breast cancer. One in twenty or twenty-five German women will. No one knows why there's a difference. In different countries it's different. In any case, then there was a piece on Cambodia, and it was a live broadcast, or very recently live, in which, as I'm we're driving along in the snowstorm, and not too bad, though, coming up in northern New Mexico, we could hear people dying. We could hear people screaming as their cot was moved in a provisional hospital because they were ambushed on the road by the Teme Rouge. This is weird, you know? I mean, never until this century could you hear somebody dying or screaming in pain without being able to be present and doing something about it, you could respond.

[28:43]

So it makes you kind of impotent. Because here's a... You have this... You read about it, you see it on the TV, if you watch TV, and riding along in northern New Mexico in the desert, practically, you hear somebody screaming. And you hear the tales of these women being ambushed and the children... So this play, this illusion, this play is in us, where we can begin to find some movement. And I would say that you can find, in the way I'm speaking about now, in the Vipassana emphasis, this Vipassana insight emphasis in practice, is you can find it in the Four Noble Truths.

[29:52]

Now, in the same way as I said, if you're practicing, you see the three marks, you can also see on every appearance that arises, you practice seeing the Four Noble Truths. So every appearance that arises, you see its dimension, its dimension, I don't know, as suffering. And then you see its... it's that it's caused, that it's interdependent. And then you see all this simultaneously or successively, but on each appearance. Then you see it is stopped or independent or nirvanic. And fourth, you see it as the path.

[30:58]

Now, when you see it as stuck, which is very close to seeing discontinuity, you're seeing each thing in its absolute locality, localness, in its independence, this is the door to ease and joy. And this is one of the Four Noble Truths. everything, that there's a freedom from suffering, or that there's this stopped realm. That's the best I can say. It's a realm that emphasizes space rather than time. So, when you see... when you practice this. Now, if you have satori, shall we say, let's hope, you might, you might not.

[32:12]

Satori will enter you into the stopped world. And satori will sometimes enter you into a profound and continuous connection with suffering, your own and others. But satori will not mature you in suffering. And Satori will not enter you into the world of causation. So in order to become a Buddha, to put on Buddha's clothing, you need to mature yourself through all four of these Four Noble Truths. And again, that practice is to see simultaneously that each appearance is caused, interconnected, interdependent.

[33:14]

That you see. And you get in the habit of reminding yourself of it. So in the Sashin, you're subject to this and all this stuff is coming up and things are coming up for you. At the same time, you see it as caused. And then sometimes you see it as stopped when you, for instance, have ten minutes or three periods of a kind of clarity where time seems stopped. But that flavor isn't just there in that ten minutes or those two or three periods, it's there on each appearance. So you remind yourself it's there on each appearance. Feel things in their interdependence and in their independence. And you begin to be able to make that shift from seeing something that arises as interdependent and as absolutely independent. Nothing else in the world but this one thing.

[34:25]

And you see, and when you see it as suffering, you're opening your heart to this human world. And although we can't do anything about somebody suffering that we hear on the radio, you need the practice, the Buddha practice, of opening yourself up to the suffering of this world on each occasion, on each appearance. At the same time, you see the causation. And you have to learn to live in the world of causation because you have to find a way to live in the ordinary human world in which people have to have jobs and eat and health insurance and so forth. So you have to be able to get your act together in the world of causation.

[35:32]

And then the path. And when you enter the path, when you see that this seeing suffering, seeing the stopped world and seeing causation or the interdependence, interdependence and suffering on each thing, and you see that there's a realization of these three or coming together of these three in the path. And that's really, in the deepest sense, taking refuge in the sangha, taking refuge in the lineage, taking refuge in the possibility of those of way-seeking mind. And you know you're on the path when you find that whatever your deepest desires are frustrations sufferings longings whatever most you hope for others and yourself you begin to find you can express it and act on it when you when this kind of feeling begins you're entering the path and this feeling actually begins to open the path and describe

[37:06]

And again, this is taking refuge in the Sangha. So I think you can explore, I think I've talked long enough, but I think you can explore for yourself this heart world of recognizing the suffering of each appearance. you can recognize it in your own way. And each of us has his or her own way and each of you have a way particular to you that helps you in practice. And you also can explore on your own this sense that everything is interdependent, caused, complex, mixed up. I mean, you can be in awe of the complexity and you can be also overwhelmed And somehow you have to find a way to find your own way in this complexity, in this world of interdependence.

[38:23]

And in the stopped world, you may get some taste of it. It's a shink. And the sense of this coming together as a path where you can realize yourself and your life with others and this world most fully, again, this is something I can give you some... I can mention like this, but it's up to you to feel your own details of. And if you can practice in this session subject to your subject of the sashin, everything that comes up, of trying to struggle with the schedule and your physical pain and so forth, if in the midst of it you can begin to see each appearance in terms of the Four Noble Truths, this actually becomes a vehicle, a sashin carriage that you can put together, that you can bring into your daily life.

[39:34]

Wherever you are, whatever you do, these four perceptions, this way of observing each appearance through the Four Noble Truths, exists in all circumstances. But Sashin can give you a chance to really get a feel of that. And through the feel of that you can bring it into your daily activity. They are attention.

[40:21]

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