Thank you for all being here. I know you're scheduled to be here, but still seems like a miracle that you're here to me. And today I was thinking, lunchtime, sorry, thinking how grateful I am and we must be to have this place, somehow given to us to practice. A roof. Yesterday it was so warm, didn't we have the doors open? And we have several seasons every couple days here. And such fun. It's exciting. All these different things going on. The mountain throwing things at us. Yeah. Anyway, I was thinking how grateful I am that we have this place and keeps the storms out and yet we're not so isolated.

[01:08]

And then just then the roof started leaking just where I'm supposed to be sitting. And I thought, oh gosh, well, even the roof leaks. Hmm. They've been commenting on Shoyuroku 92, Young Men's Jewel. It's also in the Heikigan Roku, the Blue Cliff Records. It says, in the beginning, mastering, in the introduction, a little, you know, before the case, Mastering the spell of the language of sentient beings. Pretty good statement. Mastering the spell of the languages of sentient beings.

[02:12]

And this is supposed to be a teaching outside of scriptures and words and so forth, but here we're talking about mastering the spell of languages of sentient beings. Now this refers to, in the koan, the part of the case where it says, bringing in the triple gate on the lamp. Bringing in the triple gate on the lamp. And so I should try to explain why that's the case. And, you know, Sammon is the name for the gate of a temple. It's often the biggest building in the temple, you know. There's huge gates. It's great. There's one in Kyoto down in, it's not a Zen temple, though. It's a Jodoshu, Jodoshu, not Jodoshinshu, Jodoshu temple. It's got this fantastic gate.

[03:21]

We could never build such a thing. If we did, it would stand, it would be down on the road and stand higher than Bill's house, you know. These big things. Anyway, san means mountain, but it also means three. So we have the three gate and the mountain gate. The word can be translated and understood either way as triple gate, which reflects the teaching. And mountain gate which reflects the practice of being at the edge of the wilderness of what it means to be human or societal. Now there was a Chinese man of letters, poet, etc., named Xu Shi, who wrote a poem that Dogen liked a lot and wrote a whole fascicle on which goes something like regarded considered from one view an entire range considered from one view entire range from another a single peak high low

[04:51]

big, small, all its parts different from the others. High, low, small, big, all its parts different from the others. If we cannot know the face of Mount Lu. If we cannot know the face of Mount Lu, it is because we are standing in the midst of it. Anyway, this was his poem. A realization poem. It's not clear actually what it was, but it's taken as a realization poem. And it's very much like Crestone here. From one view, entire range. From another view, they say this is the straightest range in the world, where so many mountains are right in a row.

[06:09]

So from one view it's a single peak. or another, an entire range, all its parts, high, low, small, big, different from its other. If we cannot know the face of Mount Lu, it's because we face it from its midst. Kierkegaard said, trouble with life is we understand it backwards, but we live it forwards. That could be good. We understand it backwards but we live it forwards. Now how are we going to live our life forwards? Now someone asked me a while ago about the emphasis on Zen, on doing a single practice. I've also been speaking to that off and on during these lectures.

[07:14]

Bringing Bringing the triple gate in on the lamp. Already intimate. Already intimate. Neither grasp nor reject. As I said last night, I think Matsu said that. No, it was Nan-Yue said that. Two months. Neither grasp nor reject. But anyone could have said it. Neither grasp nor reject. The third patriarch, you know, his famous phrase, neither, the true way is not difficult, just don't pick and choose. It's the same statement. Then there's a contemporary Polish poet named, a woman named Wyszlaw, I don't know if I pronounced it right, Wyszlaw Zorbowska.

[08:21]

The farther east you go, the more consonants there are in the language, you know. Germany's bad, excuse me, it's bad enough, even though it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a form of English. I mean, English is a form of German. But you go farther east from Germany and you can't hardly read the, there's no vowels between the consonants from the road signs, you know. Anyway, in Japan it's all vowels, practically. Anyway, she says, the view from the window, she just won the Nobel Prize for Literature a while ago, says the view, in one of her poems it says, the view from the window of the lake is wonderful, but the view doesn't view itself. The floor of the lake exists floorlessly.

[09:24]

the shore, shorelessly. So this kind of consideration, you know, whether it's the Heart Sutra's version or whether it's Vishlava Zoborska's version of the floor of the lake exists floorlessly and its shore shorelessly, or Kierkegaard How do we live life forwards when we understand it backwards? Or Sushi and Dogen's extolling this Mount Lu, which from one view is an entire range, another a single peak. If we cannot know the face of Mount Lu, it is because we are in the midst of it. And right here, of course, we see Challenger or Kit Carson I don't know poor Kit Carson and the Challenger disaster but anyway that's those I guess and then we're actually which we cannot see we're on Creston Peak because I believe the river creek that comes down here divides us so we're on Creston Peak and we can't see the face of Creston Peak what about our life

[10:52]

Now the structure of mind is known through the constraints in which it functions. And the mind develops, is constrained by the environment in which it operates. And if we share an ecology with mind, phenomena, self, and the world, if the environment, the phenomena of the environment, the phenomena of us, are just two aspects of a shared ecology, how are we to understand? This is the question. Now, I sometimes use this example but I'll use it again now. If you focus on this stick, and you completely focus on this stick until you have no other object of attention, that's developing one-pointedness.

[12:17]

And it's a typical necessary meditation skill. So you get so you can and as I've said often you know you first of all you have to make an effort to come to it and pretty soon it gets you keep losing it and then pretty soon it gets easier to come back to it more and more easy to come back to the object of concentration and finally you don't have to make an effort to come back to it it comes back to it by itself and eventually it just stays on it And this will happen. You get a certain virtuosity in practice, proficiency, in which it does come back to it easily. You don't have to make an effort to count your breath. Your mind just stays on your breath. Or whatever you're doing. Stays in the present. And our body is, you know, the touch... It's touch which makes us most aware that we're part of the world.

[13:22]

Looking at it, it's out there and we're in here and stuff like that. But touch, it's clear that the world leads from us and leads into us from touch. So we begin to stay with this touch, this proprioceptive knowing of the world. Yeah. This is also bringing in the triple gate on the lamp. To be able to stay with the touch of the world. The touch of your own body, the intimacy of body, speech and mind. The touching, the touching of body, speech and mind. Yeah. Okay, so now you've concentrated on this and you're able, you know, you have certain skill and you're able to stay with it most of the time, right? Okay, so now I take it away.

[14:25]

And yet if you remain concentrated, now what are you concentrated on? You're concentrated on mind itself. The object of your concentration is now mind itself, no longer the stick. Okay. Now, concentrated on mind itself, continuing this little exercise, you can bring the stick back up into it and now observe it. through a concentration that arises not from the stick, but a concentration on mind itself, which is the true definition of samadhi, mind concentrated on itself. And from that mind you can now observe the stick, which keeps changing views. Now it looks like a single stick. Now it looks like the bud and the pod of a lotus. Now we could call that shamatha and vipassana.

[15:34]

Shamatha is the concentration on the stick, the ability to develop one-pointedness. And vipassana is the observation of the stick from the mind of concentration. When you develop a mind concentrated upon itself and then you review the contents of your life, of phenomena, of our shared ecology, of macrocosm and microcosm, we are practicing vipassana or inner seeing meditation or innermost seeing meditation or insight meditation, which I don't think is such a good translation, insight, but inner seeing. The word intimate, which is also intimate, means innermost knowing, the experience of innermost knowing. In English, intimate means the innermost experience of knowing.

[16:37]

Not just knowing, but the experience of knowing innermost. So we're intimate with our body, speech and mind, and with the world and with others. And it's a little scary sometimes, the intimacy we feel within the sangha, and it can be quite confusing for people until they are familiar with it, easily misinterpreted. Okay, now, so I've gone through this little exercise, and we've looked at the stick, which is, you know, I've shown you the stick before, but it's a wonderful stick. It has the lotus embryo here at the hand. So the embryo of the lotus is here in my hand, in your hand, because you've just loaned me this hand.

[17:37]

And here's the bud of the lotus. And here's the pod of the lotus. And of course, what's missing? The flower, the bloom of the lotus, which is you. And it's the same understanding of the kanon stick in the kanondo. The bloom is not there. Kanon's standing on the pod and holding the bud and the embryo. In Japanese soups you get lotus embryos, which are little curled up lotus leaves. There's a baby lotus waiting to come out, but it got stuck in a soup. Anyway. Maybe if you eat enough of them you appear on one in lotus land. Anyway. So we are the bloom, just as in the Kanon Do, that whole room is the bloom. This is the understanding of this kind of iconography.

[18:43]

The whole room is the bloom. The whole world is the bloom. Where do we place the boundaries? Samantabhadra and all Samantabhadras in the Hawaiian Sutra of all history touch us on the head, it says. If we're going to come into this touch, we have to start with that way of seeing the world. How is the world? How are you? already intimate. We have to start with touch which adheres to this world, brings the world into us and us into the world. So back to this one touch samadhi, or sometimes one suchness samadhi, or one practice samadhi. It comes from a, I don't know if anybody knows for sure, but the idea that it comes from Manjushri, You know, hanging around, the Buddha one day asked him, what is the one practice samadhi of the dharmadhatu?

[19:59]

Dharmadhatu is the realm of all dharmas. It's a way of saying the world, but the world understood in its own organizing units of dharmas, or experiential, we could call a dharma an experiential own organizing unit, or self-organizing unit. So the realm of the dharmadhatu, meaning everything, what is the one practice, what is the samadhi of one practice of the dharmadhatu? Then the Buddha supposedly said, the Dharma Dattu of one mark. I don't think in the Buddha's time they even had the word Dharma Dattu. But in any case, he supposedly said, the one mark of the Dharma, the one mark Dharma Dattu. The Dharma Dattu is one mark. This is a very interesting thing to say. Or for a teaching to be passed to us. And then it says, take this,

[21:04]

one mark as an object. An object means something you can touch or feel or experience. So suddenly the entire realm of the Dharmadhatu becomes an object, a one object. Now all of Mahayana Buddhism is in this kind of, in this statement. You know, let me just change my tone a moment here and say, you know, roofing leak or not, we're in a society which is immensely skillful, proficient, intelligent, and I'm, my own feeling, profoundly unwise. We're heading downhill fast through all our smarts, in my opinion.

[22:08]

And we have a chance, at the same time we have a chance, in this fluidity, in this openness of our society, to practice Buddhism pretty much the way we want. We can call the shots as we wish, pretty much. We're here. Mostly we can do as we wish here. And we can practice together, men and women. It's never been easier to practice. The society's quite affluent. Unless you want more loaves of bread than you can carry, you can get enough to eat and function pretty well. And we have water and air and food. You can have a spouse, you know. We practice together, men and women. You can even have a spouse. I don't know how many babies we want, but, you know, one or two probably even we could have. So there's such opportunities to practice now.

[23:19]

Still it's difficult to do. But I think... it's still an immense opportunity to rediscover Dharma in our society and reseed our society with Dharma. That's a small thing. It's probably like, you know, the bird that tried to put out the forest fire by flying to the ocean and getting some water on its wings and then flying over the fire and shaking its wings and going back. Supposedly this bird, it's a Chinese story, did this for thousands of years, trying to put out this fire. And it didn't put out the fire, but it dried up the ocean, and a beautiful land appeared where the ocean was. That's a good story. But, you know, I'm afraid that's more or less what we're doing, flapping our wings, you know.

[24:23]

Our Dharma wings with a few drops of water leaching through the roof. Anyway, so back to one practice samadhi. It came to mean one practice samadhi, also one suchness samadhi, the feeling of in the midst of... In other words, this isn't just a negative thing. In other words, if you say, do not reject, do not neither attach nor reject, It doesn't mean then it's negative. It means you move into a quality of sameness. You don't reject. You don't attach. So you move into something more subtle. That's what we call suchness, the quality of mind on everything you perceive.

[25:25]

So again, we're back to the object of attention is mind itself. suchness, suchness of mind in the midst of perception, activity, functioning. So it becomes one suchness samadhi, one practice samadhi, one mark samadhi. And it also became to mean seated meditation is the one mark. Zazen is the one mark. So Dogen, our ancestor, strongly emphasized Sazen as being one mark samadhi. And in this, again, as I started to say, the mind is constrained. You know, I'm flipping all over the place here. Einstein supposedly establishes that two clocks in two different frames of reference don't tell the same time.

[26:31]

So even with our radio clock in the kitchen, maybe this clock doesn't tell the same time. In any case, if you change frames of reference to Mr. Potts' pavilion in the tree in the pot, if we change frames of reference from one kind of mind to another, we do move into a different time. And you can understand it again as performative time. If you perform time differently, It's a different time. So we know that experience when time feels slow or quick. And mind itself has different frames of reference. And primarily our consciousness is shaped by our particular culture, training and so forth. So Zen says, let's make the mind free. Let's give it as few constraints as possible.

[27:34]

So let's have, again, unfabricated mind or uncorrected mind of Zazen. The basic posture of Zazen mind is uncorrected mind. Yeah. So then, how do you control or govern or stay present in this unconstrained mind? Well, you stay present through the banks of the river, but not the water so much. You let the water be it, but you notice the banks. Noticing the banks is noticing your posture. And you notice the current, the energy of the water. That's noticing your vitality. As I said last night, the eye of vitality. The world is not, the ground of the world is not order somewhere outside yourself, but your own vitality, the I of your own vitality.

[28:36]

It's a fact, your vitality. But can you really have that chutzpah, that courage to trust in your own vitality as the center of your world and this world? But this is zazen. So you take guidance from your posture. Take guidance from your energy. Practice uncorrected mind. Practice an openness of objects, of meditation. In this sense, zazen becomes the gate to unconstrained or open mind, untrained mind. So we don't have a, if you do this, then you do that, and then you progress to this, etc. These things happen, but we don't make them happen.

[29:41]

We just keep emphasizing mind itself. After the stick is taken away. Okay, now let me come back to this one-mark samadhi because there's a semantic brilliance here. Because we are human beings and we do speak in languages. And here we have Manjushri, here we have, young men, a single jewel in the mountain of form. A single jewel in the mountain of form, this is a semantic statement, it's words. A single jewel in the mountain of form, what's it mean? It's a semantic focus of concentration. So instead of the stick, now samadhi means to be concentrated on a single spot, technically, You can find it in early pre-Buddhist Indian text to concentrate in a single spot.

[30:44]

And this has been, you know, something people have done in prison. Now, Huey Newton did it in prison, I remember. And I knew a guy who lives in Taos now, who robbed a bank, who came to Tassajara in the early days. I don't think any of you would, Paul would know him, but He now runs a store for Dennis Hopper in Taos. But he robbed a bank. Supposed to get talked into driving the car by a friend, you know, like in the movies. And then he took the rap. He wouldn't squeal on his friends. So he spent several years in jail. He was married to a woman. He's now separated from her. But they were married for a long time. And they arrived to Tassajara with this camper. And they had decided to just live in this camper for a year or so, and they had six months of food in the camper. And you opened up the floor of the camper, and they had the whole floor of the camper just packed with food. In fact, it was a huge backpack full of granola.

[31:51]

So we were pretty poor in those days in Tushar. It was the first practice period. So we, you know, he stayed and we opened up his provisions. And it fed a lot of us, not for six months, but it fed us for quite a while. But he got into meditation because being in this prison cell, there happened to be a spot up on his ceiling. Nothing about Buddhism, but there was a spot up on the ceiling. And he would just lie there and look at it. He began to have these experiences. And these experiences, also Huey Newton had a similar experience, because they put him in solitary confinement for virtually forever. Open them up. So, one spot samadhi. Okay, now this one spot is this stick. Okay? But the one spot can be a semantic, can be a word, can be a phrase.

[32:55]

So the one spot, samadhi, we can take the stick away, we can take the spot away and say it's the jewel in the mountain of form. This is the one spot now. Or we can say it's the dharmadhatu, the single mark of the dharmadhatu, the all-at-onceness. of everything. Now you can say the Dharmakaya, which is the sense of all of this in its simultaneity coming together in you. So there's this macrocosm, microcosm has a shared ecology which appears in you. The whole ocean appears in a single drop. The whole cosmos appears in you. Where else could it appear?

[33:58]

And it's appearing in each thing all at once. It's all at once this is the one mark of the dharmadatta. Now, Mount Lu From one view it's a single peak. From another view it's an entire range. Bringing in the triple gate on the lamp. This is one mark samadhi. This is a semantic statement. Bringing in the triple gate on the lamp. But it can become an object of meditation. Everything you do, you're bringing in the triple gate on this stick. bringing in the triple gate on this stick. So this is very basic Zen practice.

[35:01]

And when Yan Men says this, there's a jewel hidden in the mountain of form, quoting Sheng Zhao, and he adds his own mastering the spell of the language of sentient beings, turning everything into one phrase, one mark, samadhi, bringing in the triple gate on the lamp. Turning your zazen Are you practicing seated meditation or seated Buddha? Practicing seated Buddha. This is a vision, an image, a semantic statement, a single mark. Just now, practicing seated Buddha. When you view the world and yourself as in a shared ecology, a single topology,

[36:12]

This is single or one-mark samadhi. When I view myself and you simultaneously as not different from the Buddha, is this true or not? Somehow it's got to be true. But whether it's true or not, it's also a semantic statement which can become an object of meditation. So now I hold mind itself as the one mark samadhi and I hold mind itself now in the vision that you and I and the Buddha share the same nature. This is my practice. You and I and the Buddha

[37:14]

share the same nature. This is bringing the triple gate in on the lap. Thank you very much.

[37:31]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_90.9