Some of you may not have read the koan Tim, I think. This koan we're talking about. Is that right? Although we're not supposed to read during sesshin, if you want to read it, please do. But it's not necessary to read it. Most of what I'm talking about is underneath the surface of the koan anyway. But the koan is not a koan that engages us, as I've said, as a story. It's a moment in time or a stopped moment. It's the territory of living in the immediacy. I mean, Longya, the story, the previous koan, is about the moment of

[01:03]

Pat Munger's mind at a particular moment. But anyway, this poem has no story surrounding that almost. He's run away.

[02:07]

I've known people to make a mistake of lying down for a moment. Maybe he's under a tree somewhere. Oh, I'm sorry. He's gone. I missed him. Now this Akaan, as I said, is about the, emphasizes the kind of, not just a practice of realizing the Dharmakaya, but finding out how we exist.

[03:22]

And as someone said to me, until recently they viewed or often viewed zazen as a tool to perhaps realize enlightenment or know yourself better or something and now they feel more that zazen is just one of the places We live our life. Now that's an essential shift if your zazen is going to be a rich experience and something that you are able to continue. I mean, a tool is quite useful and zazen sometimes is a tool. But like we fix a car with a wrench, but you don't use the wrench every day, you use the car.

[04:35]

The car is the real thing and the wrench is the tool. But then the car is a tool too, to get to work or something like that. So zazen is both a tool and You know, if you just have the idea of a tool, you think that real life is somewhere else. And the same idea with practice. If you think that, I mean, it's like practicing the piano or the violin. If you're practicing this one thing and then your performance or when you really play the violin is something else, that's something funny. Actually, when you play in a performance, it's also practice. I think so, isn't it? Yeah. Our fineness to you, I have to ask. Noguchi, the sculptor who threw home, really, we got these lamps up there, told my daughter once when he found out she was painting and he said to her, never practice.

[05:49]

Everything you do is art. Always it's art. So if we practice with the sense that it's for something else, where is that something else? I don't know anyone who's ever discovered it. And as Cohen says, He talks about Xiaopang lifting up, as I said, the corner of his robe, his vestment. It's a kesa. So here I'm talking about what we mean in Buddhism by meditation.

[06:53]

So this is My okesa, your okesa, Buddha's okesa. What is this okesa? Well, we call it Buddha's robe. So what does that mean? It means it's Buddha's robe. And you can say, you might say, well, That's not Buddha's robe, but his robe is a different piece of cloth. But actually this robe is made up of many different pieces of cloth. There's one, there's another, there's another. The whole akese is by definition many pieces of cloth sewn together. So you can say, well, these are sewn together and Buddha's robe is separate.

[07:59]

But our Buddha's robe and this robe are sewn together by my actions, my practice, I hope, and so forth. So it's not understood in just a... You know, in English we have quite an interest in puns. how words overlap and mean two things at once. You know, I once did a benefit for the Zen Center in San Francisco with the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother and the Holding Company. That was the first group that Janis Joplin sang with. She sang with Big Brother and the Holding Company. And I got these three groups to do it. We called it a Zenefit group. It was a pretty bad pun. But anyway, it was a big poster saying, Zenefit. Anyway, in English we like, at least some of us like, these overlapping words.

[09:07]

But in Buddhism, for some reason, I mean, I guess it's just that it's based differently. There's the same kind of almost punning interest in overlapping physicality. So as a lot is made of overlapping characters, one character that has qualities like another character, they may mean something entirely different as benefit and Zen. But maybe it's not so different. That's the problem. two characters which are quite different in meaning, but if they have similar shapes in it, or can be reduced to similar shapes, there's some sense that there's an interrelationship. It's a kind of punning, physical punning. So there's a great deal of that.

[10:11]

And so I'm talking about the okesa, the robe, Buddha's robe, to give you a sense of the robe in this koan. I mean, now, if you really think carefully about it, you would come to the same conclusion without my explanation. But... But in practice we feel this is Buddha's robe. And although I feel somewhat funny sometimes wearing it, you know, as I said yesterday, looking at what we're doing, still I feel when I put on this robe I've put on Buddha's body. And it's a kind of enactment of the Buddha. And the sense of enactment, as some of you know, is the center of tantric practice.

[11:20]

You enact something to realize it. And enactment is very much a big part of Nungshan's Zen lineage too. So, There's a sense of the okesa which we, and he lifts a corner. And this is a corner. And the corner is, it's all, and when you've ever seen us put it, watched us put the robe on, those of you who don't wear it, you do it with your whole body. You do it with your head and your shoulder and your arm. It's like trying to live in a tablecloth. And you hold the corner and you do this. And you feel as you do that, you're folding it into the Buddha's robe. And that physical enactment is part of yogic culture.

[12:30]

Here our runaway psychotherapist seems to be appearing. We thought you'd run away. or lay down for a moment. Maybe I should run away. It feels like a very good idea, actually, right now. Wouldn't you be surprised? Where is he? Must have taken a nap. No, I can't find him anywhere.

[13:35]

He's unpredictable. So anyway, there's this sense of lifting the corner. He's folding this robe into the Buddha's robe. And that folds your mind into Buddha's mind by doing it. This is this kind of physical practice that we have in yogic culture. So when he says, you know, where's all yesterday's commotion gone? Of course, by taking the corner of his robe He's saying, it's right here. It hasn't gone anywhere. Everything is folded together. And this is a culture which produces origami, you know, that paper folding.

[14:37]

And the robe, basically, is a kind of origami. But instead of my ending up looking like a swan, I look like an ugly duckling. Excuse me. So he says the commotion is right here. This is the whole sense of this koan, that there's nothing separated from just this now. And yet, he says, he answers, he responds, no connection. So the gist of this koan is no connection. I like the word gist. It means the gutsy essence.

[15:42]

It means essence, but actually it means trajectory. The trajectory of something that goes up and comes down. Do you know what trajectory is? Like when you shoot an arrow. The curve it takes is the trajectory. So gist and jet and trajectory are the same word. So it's the kind of the essence in motion of the koan is the sense of gist. So what is the essence in motion of this koan? What is its trajectory in you? I was, by the way, grateful to feel the sashin is established enough already that I could start doksans this morning. So, the gist of the koan is no connection, and yet, of course, the commotion is right here.

[16:50]

Sometimes there's commotion, sometimes there's not commotion. But what kind of mind is there here? Anyway, this is the sense of this koan. So I should go to the... Again, let me look at these words, awareness, contemplation, meditation, mindfulness. We use them, they're necessary, but they all have a kind of, they're like frosting, or they're something, if you contemplate an ant, say. You may be feeling the ant inside yourself, but still, you're rather removed. And what we mean in practice here, in this kind of practice, And even if I say words like the immediacy, the now, it's so 60s, you know, it's so new age, newage, that it doesn't have any meaning to be in the now.

[18:05]

I mean, maybe some, but it's pretty thin. So, again, what is this koan pointing at when it says Avalokiteshvara's door, which is the sounds, to know the sounds and echoes, even of spiders and clams? Hey! Or to know the sounds and echoes, to know spiders and clams? Now, these aren't careless images. So we have to find some other word, maybe engaged awareness. And again, to talk about these things, I have to struggle with the words engaged awareness, but still, well, engaged is like when you engage the gears of your car.

[19:18]

And when you engage the gears of your car, put in your clutch, you move forward. And also if two armies are engaged in conflict or you're engaged to be married. So we have something like here engaged awareness. And clutch, it's a wonderful word. It means really, I mean, you're clutching at a life raft as you're about to go under, or clutching at your, you know, something you're afraid of losing, your possessions. But really clutch means to hatch. A clutch of eggs is a group of eggs that are all incubating at the same time. So there's a quality of this engaged awareness that's very much like everything incubating at the same time.

[20:25]

So engaged awareness. You're interlocked with what you're aware of. Now this isn't just engaged awareness in the present, it's also definitely, and again, our language doesn't allow it to come out, but it's engaged with memory. Not the past, not your past, not what happened to you in the past. Not your patterns, not your talismanic conditioning. Talisman I should explain talisman a Talisman is like a rabbit foot It's something that you keep a special stone In German yeah, okay, so a Talismatic patterning I mean those patterns with which you invest some magical safety neurotic patterns

[21:37]

Talismanic teleological. Teleological means as a result. So you feel there's some kind of good result happens if you do this pattern, this behavior or something. And many of our actions in the present are shaped by, our past is really a kind of talismanic conditioning through which we find a certain safety. And we carry these patterns around us like rabbit feet, you know. With the rabbit gone. So we want the whole rabbit in this memory. So it's not the past, but it's memory. And it's memory not of only what happened, but all the possibilities that could have happened. And all the levels of memory. Memory. Because the alaya-vijnana, which is what I'm talking about now, the alaya-vijnana is called storehouse consciousness, but it's the storehouse not only of what happened, but everything that could have happened.

[22:49]

All the possibilities that didn't come together. For instance, in the simplest sense, one of your past histories is that of a Buddha. You have had the experiences of a Buddha. You just haven't linked them together. You've linked through your ego, through yourself, through your history, certain things. You know, like the bouncing ball they used to do when I was a kid. They'd put songs on the movie screen and you had to follow the bouncing ball and the whole audience, movie audience, would sing. It was crazy. Do they do it anymore? Have any of you ever seen that? Sarah has. She's an old lady like me. I mean, old man, no. They'd put the words up in the music, and they'd say, follow the bouncing ball, and this bouncing ball would go, tu-ra-lu-ra-lu-ra, tu-ra-lu-ra... So you've got a bouncing ball in your past.

[23:53]

It's kind of connected some dots and not other dots. But the alaya-vijnana means... By your actions now, you create a different bouncing ball that connects things in your past unused and used, known and unknown. So I use the word non-consciousness because unconsciousness is all those things related to your conscious mind that's repressed, related to... But there's a lot of vast amounts, infinite amount, really infinite amount of non-conscious material that you don't relate to, that you filter out, that you edit out. So engaged awareness is a very specific kind of practice which is engaged in the words in Sanskrit include the idea of memory, but a memory of the present, a memory that occurs in the present rearranging the possibilities.

[24:54]

And that's why the laya-vijnana is called revolving the basis. I said yesterday, you find yourself on a new basis. But the vijnanas are, and there's the same word, cultivate is also the root of chakra, and the chakras turn this way and this way, and even this way and this way. So this yogic experience, and we were talking about the now, in yogic practice, we're talking about something that's revolving and revolving in you that you're engaged with, that you're interlocked with. And you're going the same direction. Ulrike and I took a walk the other day and ended up on one of the sand dunes of these mountain slopes. There were really these benches, ledges that we are camped on here, really sand piled up against the side of the mountain with trees struggling.

[26:05]

So anyway, we were sitting on this sort of sand dune, and these red ants were running around. Really not red, they were amber, translucent amber ants. They were like amber beads rolling on the sand in the sun. Tiny amber beads. And so I was, I watched one of them in particular, And she was, I don't know, he was, I couldn't get that close. He or she was running around on the sand. But for me, I didn't feel like he was running around in me, which would have been fine. I felt I was suddenly the ant. And the bent grass, brown bent grass under which it was running back and forth was huge. Huge. And the sand, each grain of sand was like shifting boulders under my feet that I was balancing on.

[27:15]

And the ant was completely unpredictable. I mean, I got so I could kind of know where it was going, but it was, you know, what the heck it was doing. But, you know, I was interlocked with it. And interlocked in the present is unpredictable. don't know what's going to happen. There's no talisman to protect you. But it's actually quite safe too. There's only one ant and one of me. There have been a thousand ants in a Hitchcock movie or something. Anyway, when I talk about this beautiful Translucent, amber, and... I'm not describing a spiritual experience. I'm describing something every child knows. You know, sitting out somewhere. Then you're called to lunch.

[28:20]

What does that do? But it's something we tend to forget. And it actually represents another kind of mind. In the Vijnana, the mind of Vijnana actually has two meanings, the conscious mind we know and the mind that we don't see that underlies it. So here we have this mind pointed out much more in a much more realized way, of course, in our practice of clams and spiders and sounds and echoes.

[29:21]

So this mind doesn't just reach to the ant running around, but also reaches to the clam down there in the lake or ocean bed sand, which you don't see, but our mind or the clam's mind interconnected, like folding the robe back to Buddha. This folding the robe back to Buddha is also the mind of the spider and the clam. And this is Avalokitesvara's door. This is the door of really feeling interlocked, not just compassionate, not just connected, but interlocked, inseparable from, engaged in the same unpredictable path. And so with that kind of mind, all the unused, used, known and unknown possibilities memory of memory this is a big idea of memory of everything that's happened to you the unnoticed things can find a new basis or revolve on your basis this is the mind that sometimes we can define as knows how to know

[30:48]

What do I mean by that? Or I can say it another way. The mind that in the midst of finding everything different simultaneously finds it familiar. So whatever happens, everything is different, moment after moment different, moment after moment unpredictable, and yet somehow deeply find it familiar. So this is Avalokiteshvara's door of engaged, compassionate awareness, or we could say maybe vijnana awareness, that you're interlocked with, incubating on each of the levels of consciousness, each of your senses. And simultaneously, not just the simple present, but simultaneously not the past, but all the possibilities arising in memory from your existence.

[32:05]

Anyway, this is what this koan is trying to point out. Kind of engaged, incubating, immediate awareness. Maybe we can make up a new word for it. It says in the koan when you come to something like when you come to the when you know the source of motion, when you know the source of stillness. This is also pointing to this engaged awareness memory.

[33:15]

And I like to think that we're, this is not a Zen do, it's a hen do, I mean a hen house. And we're all sitting on our thing, hatching an egg. But the egg isn't the zafu, the black zafu, or the red and black zafu, the red zafu. All red is yours. Red and black? All red. All red. She's going to have a red chicken. It's not just the cushion. You are the egg. We're a whole clutch of incubating eggs. Peck, peck, [...] peck. Pecking in, pecking out. I hear you. Even the sound of spiders, dripping rain.

[34:30]

Thank you very much. Our intention is equally a trade that we have in place with the destroyed world. We're going to get rid of everything we don't like about the [...] world. Sir James, you don't really need this kind of a gun, do you, sirs? I'm very happy you are able to serve the country.

[35:33]

It is not a game, sirs, as long as it serves the law. I'm happy that you are able to speak what you believe to speak, sir. The only thing I will do right now, my brother, is to serve the country, sirs. I am prepared to refine the law before I step down. Well, we have heard some of the stories, some of the stories of Christ, but I don't think they brought it up until we've seen it. It is rarely that we're even in a hundred thousand million kalpas that I get to see and listen to, to really know where I get set.

[37:42]

I will taste the truth of God Tagetai's words. Well, I hope this morning I can give a sufficiently muddled picture of practice so that you can find your own way in it.

[38:53]

And I see we have an old fox in the back here. You too, Ralph. We have two foxes. They recognize themselves immediately. They're both bad boys. recently reincarnated adept. It's nice to see you, Dennis. Now, we're still looking at this koan, 81. By the way, I've been told that some people can't hear what I say at the hot drink. Is that right? You can hear. I asked Geralt, he says, well, I can hear, but I said, Geralt, you're sitting right beside me. Okay, anyway. Yeah. Yeah.

[40:04]

Well, picking up where we left off yesterday, more or less, I was talking about the okesa as an example of looking at things with an awareness which includes many aspects. This okesa as connecting to Buddha. And also, of course, this okesa being the possibility of being worn by you. And some people in the past and in the present have asked me about wearing this okesa, if they can wear it. And I don't know, it's not very modern. And... But if you know what you're doing, I think it's one good way to incubate your egg.

[41:08]

But if you don't wear the okesa, then you wear, as we do in the morning, opening Buddha's mind as well as Buddha's robe. So you incubate your okesa in Buddha's mind. You incubate your egg in Buddha's mind. Yesterday it was snowing, right? Today it's... I think we did a meteorological computer check to find the place on the planet which most demonstrated daily change. So all this... Ah, come on, now we have Manjushri's door. When you enter by Manjushri's door, all conditioned things, earth, trees, tiles, stone, help you to awaken your potential.

[42:13]

Now there's no connection here. Let me try to come back to it. But let me just say, just talking practically about practice. Some people, I notice their commitment is quite good. And I'm not talking just about you, but in general. People's commitment is good, but in the details they're rather indulgent. Their commitment to practice doesn't extend down into the minutest details. So sometimes it almost feels like they're an animal inside a Buddha shell or something. The Buddhist shell and the commitment is good, you know, that's actually good. But the details are not so good. And the real problem with that is that the outer shell gets too rigid. There's less life in your commitment. But if you bring it into your details and have to be realistic about what kind of person you are and what actual life is, this way and that way,

[43:27]

then your commitment becomes more realistic, if your commitment grows from the details rather than covers the details. Oh, it's good to have the feeling that everything you do is Buddhism. Then it means you have to look at what you do and look at what that means Buddhism is. So Buddhism is some artificial construct that you put over yourself like a robe, and then kind of in small details, pretty much do what you want. Doing what you want is okay too, but then recognize this is Buddhism. And develop your sense of Buddhism and your commitment accordingly. Another thing I've noticed is that in serving the meals, and we were talking yesterday about overlapping, and the sense of overlapping is very basic.

[44:38]

And it has to do with shifts. For instance, if I take a short nap I've discovered that sometimes as I go into sleeping, you know, five minutes or ten minutes, go into a kind of sleeping, an image will appear. And I'm not yet asleep, but the image is sort of there, some kind of... But the minute I step into the image, I go to sleep. So noticing that kind of shift, if I want to take a very quick nap, just a few minutes, I create an image and once I feel the image, I step into the image and it immediately puts me into a kind of sleep. So you can, by studying those kind of shifts, you can use those shifts.

[45:41]

I mean, you can't exactly do it because it's somehow something you can create the conditions for, and quite often it will happen. And the bowing, as Rocio pointed out, and going to the toilet. You know, one day I hope we can put little altars outside between the toilets. Because it's one of the most fruitful practices. I know it sounds strange, but, you know, you're somewhere and working or reading or something and you have to go to the toilet and it takes you over. I mean, it depends how long you wait. And then you go. But if you're really in a hurry, you still have to stop and bow. Hmm? Then you go in, come out, stop and bow. And what you're doing here is shifting levels.

[46:44]

And some of the servers, you know, when you're serving, I mean, there's one server who has served me several meals and only bowed with me once. And that was by accident, I'm quite sure. Every other time, the bowing finishes the serving. But the bowing has nothing to do with the serving. The bowing is another level that's simultaneous with the serving. So you finish the serving, and then you bow. And I get a little sad when you don't, because I like bowing with you. But really you're bowing not to me, or bowing even with me, but you're bowing to bowing in the sense you're bowing to this shift in levels. So when Svantsa says no connection to Shaotan, he's not saying exactly there's no connection, he's saying that isn't the only connection, because the connection

[47:59]

Xiaotang is pointing out, is the co-extensive connection of interdependence. This is related to this, is related to that. The horizontal connection. But there's a vertical connection. In a simultaneity of minds and conditions that are present Now, Dogen in his Ehei Go Roku, Shobu Genso, which is his most famous teaching, is in Japanese. But most of his Go Roku, all of it, I don't know, is in Chinese. And Gi-an even brought his go-roku to China to his Dharma brother, Yi Yuan, and his Chinese Dharma brother, and had him check it.

[49:12]

And then somebody in Eisai's Linji lineage read it, and another famous founder of a Linji school read it, and all of them wrote laudatory comments for the ehe-ko-roku. Go-roku and ko-roku are the same. It's And it's combined, the G becomes a K. So these were the records of his daily lectures. When he was writing the Shobo Ginza, I read, he gave about 15 lectures a year to students, not many. But when he stopped writing, he gave something like 70 a year. More than two a week. I must give more than 70 a year. They're not Dougal's talks, but anyway.

[50:13]

And in one of his talks, he says... The going... To stay in the temple your whole life, to stay in practice or stay in a particular place or a particular lineage, to stay in the temple your whole life is the going many places. Going is the... I don't remember the words exactly right now, but he says that the traveling to many places is actually also staying in one place. And that staying in one place, he calls something like not going through many. And he says this, the secret of this, and then he gives the same statement from Archon, is found in the statement, Bodhidharma did not come to China.

[51:21]

Second Patriarch did not go to India. The only study is to discover your original face, your true face. And then he quotes the same Xue Feng who occurs in our koan. A monk asked Shui Fung when he became abbot of his temple, when you were with Deshan, what did you learn that you came to rest? And Shui Fung says, I entered with empty hands and I left with empty hands. And Xue Feng is quoted in this koan as saying, Xue Feng carries the ultimate jewel in his chest, and whenever he meets someone, its shine increases.

[52:32]

So I'm trying to acquaint you here with this finished, hopefully, maybe we finish this koan. At least my talk's on it. Um... acquaint you with the context of this koan, which includes, you know, this statement, Bodhidharma did not come to China, and the second patriarch never went to India. Of course, the second patriarch never went to India, and everyone knows he never went to India. So it's a reference, it's a kind of Zen thing. It's like, you know, Sutra, she never... came to America, and if I hadn't gone to Japan, I never went to Japan. But there is a story that in some ways is behind this, which is, as you know, Wike, supposedly quite an extraordinary person, when he went to see Bodhidharma, Bodhidharma wouldn't see him, and he finally, after standing in the snow, cut off his arm.

[53:45]

I have no idea whether it's true or not, but anyway, this didn't enlighten him, it just got Bodhidharma willing to talk with him. Yeah. The second conversation, no. So he talked with him. But his enlightenment story is they were climbing a mountain together, a peak going somewhere probably, And Bodhidharma turned to Vike and said, where are we going? And Vike said, oh, just go right straight ahead. Please, that's it. And Vike, Bodhidharma turned to him and said, if you go straight ahead, you won't take a step

[54:49]

So here we have another shift in levels. Bodhidharma's, Vike's talking about following him, and it says that Vike always talked about nature and mind, but didn't get the essence of truth, the truth. So he's just, I'm with you, Bodhidharma, go ahead, I'm straight, that's it. If you go straight ahead, you won't take a single step And this isn't really different than bowing in the meal service. You do the service and then you shift with your stomach, with your breath, with stepping into a dream. You shift. And hopefully you can sometimes feel the shift. And you bow. And the jewel in both our chests increases its shine.

[56:01]

Hopefully. Maybe so. So I don't know what more to say about this. Maybe some of you, I think some of you have found out and probably, hopefully, especially those of you in the practice period have found out there's many things that you can't find out by your intelligence or your mind or your deep feelings or anything.

[57:17]

There's a kind of redundancy that's necessary. A kind of... kind of being in a... a kind of intimate... Things get intimate. I don't know what to say. I think I should stop. When Bodhidharma transmitted to Wee Kye, as the story goes, he said, inwardly I transmit the seal of the truth of the mind of enlightenment.

[58:26]

Outwardly I transmit the robe for religion. And these two go together and express how we act. Now, in Dogen's case, three of his, the three monks who dominated Eiji after he died were Gikai and Gien and Eijo. And they all had been dharamashu, bodhidharmashu, bodhidharma school monks. And that's rather like being today Yamabushi, doing fire summaries, being up in the mountain, believing in natural enlightenment through nature and so forth like that. And bodhidharma, I mean, Dogen was...

[59:27]

got these guys to all accept the Buddhism as he was teaching it. But a certain flavor continued. And this flavor continues in the sense of a practice in which you begin, that you find a way to be open to situations and know how to let a situation happen through you while acting in very specific ways. So this teaching is presented as an overlapping that connects on a horizontal level and connects and opens you to vertical levels.

[60:53]

So we do things, as some of you have noticed, when the serving, the serving kind of overlaps. One serving starts and another starts. And this, doing things this way, and when you have your Oyoki bowls, the bowls are a little too small, too big for the space and the cloth and things are, it's a little clumsy. But this whole way of getting you used to how things overlap, is also getting you used to seeing that earth, trees, tile and stones, conditioned things are also simultaneously empty. Simultaneously differentiated and simultaneously undifferentiated. Undifferentiated isn't the right word. So again, this koan is, Ehe Goroku emphasizes, not going anywhere, being in the wilderness of the present, the unpredictability of the present, and yet finding, as I said last night, I think the cohesion, a new kind of cohesion in the way you exist.

[62:23]

And in practice you can begin to feel that cohesion in your sitting and in your activity, how your arms move. Since this is something you really have to find out for yourself, I can only give you some suggestion and so I'll stop. Thank you very much.

[63:11]

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