So I'd like to work with, again, the two quotes I mentioned to you. The nature, Sukhiroshi, the nature of thinking mind is to limit reality. To make reality easier to understand. What we know about through thinking is only a shadow of reality. When we don't depend on thinking, mind, we will know things. understand things as they really are.

[01:05]

Now, as I said this afternoon, we have to imagine whether we really think this is true. And if it's true, do we want to do anything about it? This shadow of reality we know through thinking. Okay, and the other quotation? is from Yuan Wu, again the author and compiler of the Blue Cliff Records. Once we have understood and realized and enlightened to the teachings,

[02:10]

Wenn wir die Lehren einmal verstanden und verwirklicht haben, erleuchtet worden sind, zu finden, wenn wir den Kern der Lehre erkannt haben, dann sollten wir fortwährend üben und uns konzentrieren, ohne Pausen, and develop the womb of sainthood. Mature the womb of sages. Now again, we have to ask, what does continuously concentrate mean? That, although I spoke about this afternoon, it takes a while to really know that.

[03:35]

And what does it mean to not depend on thinking mind? Okay. Now, I'm bringing these two quotations up again because I'm emphasizing the way in which Zen practice is really about a thoroughness in practice. A good teaching in Zen is, again, sort of like Chinese boxes or Russian dolls. teachings are nested inside each other. And they only open up through the thoroughness of your practice. Yeah, practicing what you

[04:36]

what you can see of the teaching as much as possible without any idea of where you're going. Okay. They wanted to practice the basic teachings. They wanted those in those early days. Long before Suzuki Roshi and Yuan Wu. In the 5th, 6th and 7th centuries. in the 5th, 6th and 7th century, they tried to establish an epistemological base for Buddhism.

[06:05]

How we know what we know. For if we're going to be free of suffering, which is the primary... goal of Buddhism. We have to know the causes of suffering. And how can we know the causes of something unless we know things as they really are? So in those centuries, they tried to really... It was actually a school called the Nyaya School. Tried to establish, can we really know things? And the idea was, you know, what's called a pramana, a valid cognition. What is a valid cognition?

[07:22]

At least in relationship to my lifetime, I've been practicing, studying Buddhism for a long time. And I'm still amazed at how far out Buddhism is. Extreme. Yeah. And... And I want to share with you my sense of how extreme it is or far out.

[08:22]

But at the same time, I don't want to scare you off. So you think, oh, this is too far from my ordinary experience. Yeah, so I'd like us to... to also be able to see, maybe tomorrow and the next day, how this is not so far from our ordinary experience. And yet the thoroughness with which you look at it is makes it somewhat far from our ordinary experience. And certainly a new dimension of our ordinary experience. And a transformative dimension. Okay, so they wanted to practice, you know,

[09:23]

the knowing that everything is impermanent, and interdependent. And later, in Uddhāsin and Mahāyāna, they wanted to know how everything is actually interpenetrating as well as interdependent. But first they had to look at just how do we know anything. sense perception. What is sense perception? Well, you know, I think in our ordinary activity we wouldn't, you know, wouldn't, so, wouldn't

[10:42]

Without a teaching, we wouldn't be so thorough. In trying to sort of validly know what is a sense perception. And as most of you know, Vijnana, which is in a way the teaching about sense impressions, The word vijnana means, we can understand it to mean, to know each thing separately together. That means to know each sense independent of the other senses. For it was early on seen that when you bring the... senses together, one sense usually dominates.

[12:08]

And it's the visual sense for us particularly which dominates. So a practice for us, if you want to practice this, is to kind of separate the senses and try each one separately. You can try each five of the five physical senses and mental the sixth, you know, on five or six different walks or all on one walk. Okay, so how do we... First of all, if all knowledge is rooted in sense perception.

[13:21]

Let's take time to pause for each particular phrase. Now, this kind of pause is at the root of mindfulness practice and the root of dharma practice. So I would like to emphasize that you just get in the habit of a kind of pause. How long should each pause be? Well, you know, that's your choice. have your own choice about that.

[14:36]

But there is some kind of measure to it. You know, one way is to breathe each object. If you get in the habit and you pause for a measurable length of time. After a while, your pauses are just a kind of Silence in the middle of activity. Like the one who's not busy. In the midst of busyness, there's one who's not busy. After a while, a pause is sort of like a stillness in the middle of activity.

[15:40]

But when you're practicing it, when you take some time, Pause, I would say pause until the object comes into a kind of clarity. Pause until the object It speaks to you. Or you feel the object from its own side. Now, this is just a practice which arises from your asking yourself, What are the objects of the world? What is the reality of this world?

[16:41]

Well, you can look in books and so forth. Yeah, that might be somewhat useful. But since the way you know the world arises from sense perceptions, It means, yes, just study your own sense perception. It takes time to notice our own sense perception. So, first of all, you'll just use naturally some kind of... pause while you notice something.

[17:48]

If I pick up this bell, I see it visually, see it right away. But actually to feel it, the light on it, the The march where it was tooled. The firmness of its shape. Yeah, that's thickness and so forth. Shininess. The dullness. All of those things take a little time. It doesn't happen immediately. You have to rest on it or pause with it for a little while.

[19:00]

Let's say a few seconds. And at some point, it feels clear. You've comes into a kind of clarity and you can feel an ease in yourself looking at it. Okay. So let's assume there's some kind of practice of pausing to allow your sense impressions to take form. Let's assume there's some kind of pause in practicing to let your sense impressions take form. Okay. Now, what would be discovered doing this is that the name of the object or the conception of the object interferes with your direct perception.

[20:18]

Now the word immediate In English means no middle, immediate, no middle. Yeah, no in between. So, I mean, strictly speaking, I guess we could understand immediate to mean... to know something, to mean direct perception, without any conception. Now let's go back to the sweater on the airplane. You're sitting zazen, you hear an airplane again.

[21:23]

Now, in this early Buddhism, they spoke about a conception as an enclosure. An enclosure which generalized the perception intended to make the world uniform. So how can you take the sweaters off the world? In the sense that if you hear an airplane and you call it an airplane and maybe it's going to Basel, you're putting a conception on it. But if you practice meditation much at all, You know that you can very quickly take the sweater off the airplane.

[22:47]

And again, what you hear is the sound and the air of the sound and the ear of the sound. And this would be called a direct perception, which means a perception with no without conceptualization. And one of the measures of a direct perception is that you can't language it. Even if you, not only do you not language it, in other words, as soon as you take the sweater called airplane off the sound,

[23:55]

The sound immediately, very quickly, moves out of the realm of language. And if I try to tell you what I hear, I can make some suggestions, like you hear the air, the nature of air itself. Or you hear the music of the spheres, the cosmic hum, I don't know. So... So even if you want to language it, you can't really describe it in language.

[25:02]

Of course, on the one hand, this is an exercise. For most of us, it will be an exercise. We'll try this out sometimes. Maybe it will occur almost naturally in meditation sometimes. Yeah, maybe sometimes sitting in the... park or something, you might have some feeling of this. But the practice these ancient folks were recommending these ancient folks, these ancient persons, were recommending, was a continuous immersion in what I would call the rawness of the present.

[26:13]

Now, we could say a weak... pramana, a weak valid cognition, is knowing something by inference. Like where there's smoke, there's fire. So you don't see the fire, but you see smoke, and it's up on the mountain, and probably there's a forest fire. But really, the main sense of a pramana is the fire burns you. The concept doesn't burn you.

[27:13]

The concept fire makes it, you know, we have to learn to deal with fire, build this building so it's safe, etc. So understanding something about from fire influences how we build this, how do we take care of this building. But those conceptions, although they may protect us from fire, don't burn us. But fire burns us. And when you take the clothes off the present, when you take the conceptions off the present, There's a kind of rawness to the present.

[28:23]

It's a little like, it makes me think of a peeled orange. You know, you take the peel off and this white stuff's kind of stringy. So you feel like you've peeled, taken the peel off, the skin off the present, the skin off the world. Yeah, but then next comes First the sensory awareness. Then there's the awareness of the mental awareness of your sense impression. And then there's the awareness of the concepts and then the words. So there's a kind of process of knowing the world.

[29:43]

Now, the purpose of this is not just so that you can come up with a valid cognition and say, hey, I really saw this bell once. The purpose of this is to enter you in a different kind of soup. A soup in which you The first level, you don't know what's going on. In the sense that knowing what's going on means you have a conceptual framework. So as much as possible you're not depending on thinking. You're knowing things free of conceptions.

[31:01]

And you have what we call a double perception. You know the object and you know the mind perceiving the object. Now that's also very basic, pre-Zen Buddhism and so forth. before Zen Buddhism. So we can say the ground of our practice which leads to statements like Suzuki Roshi's and Yuan Wu's is the taking for granted that all All valid perception is a double perception. That you perceive the object and the perceiving mind simultaneously.

[32:05]

dass ihr das Objekt und den wahrnehmenden Geist gleichzeitig wahrnehmt. And you feel both in your body. You have to think it or remember it. You feel it. Und ihr fühlt beides in eurem Körper. Ihr müsst es nicht denken oder euch daran erinnern. You feel yourself perceiving. Ihr fühlt euch selbst erinnern. Now, you see the language problem there, you feel yourself perceiving. No, you feel perceiving itself. You feel the content of the perceiving only. you feel the content of the perceiving only. Then you may, in addition, have a mental awareness of your emotions, your reactions.

[33:27]

And then only at that stage do you introduce concepts, and then names. First your own concepts, your own way of conceptually viewing it, and then the culture's way, or the language's way, names and words. I think I lost it. Okay. So, first you just have sensory awareness. And then sensory awareness actually combined with... Sensory awareness in this case means awareness of both the awareness and the object. Then you have a mental awareness That you're perceiving something.

[34:31]

And then you have a mental awareness of your reactions to it, your emotions and so forth. And then there's some kind of conception. And then you have words and a context of language. Now, I was playing around with this or practicing this on the train the other day. And I was just looking out the window as... pretty much without any conceptions about what I was seeing. It was just stuff going by and kind of rubbing against me. And one of the things I, this is an aside, but one of the things I find in reading good writing in the original language, the words tend to scrape you.

[36:00]

I mean, the words... are like sandpaper, they're kind of rough on you. A good writer has a way to write so each word has its own texture. And when I read anything in translation, it's lost that rawness, it's lost that texture. And sometimes, as far as I can tell, it's extremely well translated, but it's no longer raw. It doesn't scratch you. When you take the skin off the...

[37:08]

It tends to scratch you or it's unpredictable. You have to find your own kind of place in it, a way to be in it. Sometimes I think I should offer for each seminar a different meditation practice. Like somebody who's really interested in wines can say, for this course you should have this wine, and then for this course you should have that wine. So for this seminar, I would suggest, as I did for the last Sashin, there's a particular meditation that goes with it. And that meditation, which I'm working with in relationship to this what I'm speaking about the last two or three weeks.

[38:41]

This meditation, which is part of what I'm working with the last two or three weeks, is to bring the magic wand of attention to the top of your head and then lift your backbone, your spine, up to that spot of attention. And then bring your breath to your heart. And you can really begin to feel it piercing your heart. And then let that circle around through your perineum and up your backbone and across your head. Your ordinary breath is called your outer chi.

[39:47]

And in that sense, this inner breath is called your inner qi. Not energy, but could be, inner qi. What is qi? Inner qi. Inner qi. like awarenergy. One of my words is awarenergy. You can't, how do you say, well anyway, okay. The third aspect of this meditation is to bring your sense of location or attention to the back of your eyes. And then feel a kind of melting. Let the self melt. A kind of melting into the space around you. Perhaps like melting into your lover or into space or something.

[41:28]

Your sense of body shape or body boundaries melts, dissolves. So these three two-fold steps as a meditation instruction are really, I think, to practice them, you have to have some experience of meditation. But they, I think, as a practice, open us to what I'm trying to speak about here in peeling the skin off the present. To find a mind-bodily location In a sense, your own body has been peeled off.

[42:54]

And you can settle more into this very early practice of freeing yourself from that, of loosening yourself from conceptual skin of the world. So if we start out in these practices of basic teachings, We start out with this effort to know each particular, to pause for each particular, as I say, and notice how you yourself, before, you know, just notice what happens. Notice the role of your name of the object, history with the object, is part of your perception.

[44:12]

Notice when you pause for a particular, just notice how the conception and your history with the object is already there. And your reactions, like and dislike, How it affects me and so forth. At the very beginning of Buddhism is to take off that conceptual skin. of personal preferences and so forth. Doesn't mean you don't have personal preferences and likes and dislikes, of course. But it means your fundamental immersion in the world is free of such conceptual... And your initial touching other people through the senses is free of those conceptual forms.

[45:26]

And Sangha practice should have that as as the basis of Sangha practice. But we have a sense of each situation and person free of concepts. This then becomes the basis for or the starting point for Okay. I think that's enough for this evening. The rawness of the present. Thank you very much. As you've... Oh, good morning.

[47:32]

As you've, I hope, noticed, for those of you who are new, we've put in new windows in much of the building. We kept these three windows as a kind of museum piece. They were among the better ones and to remind us what they were like. But of course, if we're going to open that one, we have to open the inner, the outer window, too. It's okay as it is. It's made a... Plus the insulation, it's made a remarkable difference in the... look, feel, and warmth of the building.

[48:47]

In the converted attic where I live, it was, no matter what I did, it was impossible to keep it warm. And now I have to keep turning the radiator down. So it's nice. I mean, it's important that we take care of the building, so... happy we're doing it and so many people are helping us do it. I often wonder how to enter into a field of practice with you?

[49:51]

Of course, many of us, most of us are already in a field of practice together. And how do we make space in this field for new people and less experienced people. This is a question I'm always trying to answer and never answering completely. Again, of course, even sitting together, being in this building together, we're already in some kind of field of practice, of knowing together.

[50:57]

But then how do we, how do I, how do we together articulate this so it renews and gives our practice some further direction. So we get together you know, often as is possible. And we make up some subject that might be useful to talk about.

[51:58]

So, again, we have this topic, fundamental or true intentions. Now, last night I spoke about this very early Buddhist attempt to give coherence to the knowing of the world. Now you may not think it gives coherence after hearing it, Perhaps it seems to take coherence away.

[52:59]

But, you know, bear with me on it. Bear with me on it. Be patient with me. I presented it partly because it's kind of a root, historical root of, you know, virtually all the practices of Zen Buddhism. And I also am saying that I want us to understand, at least for me, I hope for you, that the practice of Zen is a way to practice Buddhism. It's not some sort of separate school. It's at the center of the practice of Buddhism.

[54:19]

And as you know, Buddhism is not a revealed teaching. There's not a book we can go back to that comes from another dimension that tells us what the truth is. So this effort to establish what is a valid cognition. is also an effort to establish the authenticity of the Buddha's teaching. Because if our practice is rooted in

[55:26]

each of our valid cognition, then probably this teaching is true. So it means that you make this teaching true. It's not true in some absolute sense. It's true because we find it to be true. So how do we go about finding it to be true? Well, it is a kind of science and a kind of philosophy more than it's a religion. It's a philosophy tied to practice. And I think what I've read is ancient Greek and Roman philosophy was also tied to practice. Like Buddhism, Greek and Roman philosophy tried to transform the way we perceive.

[56:59]

And the theory of the philosophy was inseparable from the way of life, the way of being. So you couldn't propose anything, I suppose ideally, that you also couldn't practice. It wasn't a thought experiment, it was a life experiment. Well, to that extent, anyway, Buddhism is exactly... the same. So Buddhism is a particular way to try to answer, I'd say, three questions.

[58:15]

How does everything actually exist? How do we actually exist in the most satisfying way? And how do we exist along with others? Now, although many Zen teachers at some point in their life have retired for often 10 or 20 years before they, if ever, started to publicly teach, The key, key to practice and Dogen certainly thinks the key to practice, is discovering how we exist along with others.

[59:21]

And the first step in that is, along with the immediate people you live with, and with the sangha. The development of practice, fully understood, fully realized practice, is inseparable from the development of the Sangha. This living here in this place, this funny old building that we're trying to take care of, is a basic experiment in the truth of this teaching.

[60:32]

Can we live together here? In a way that supports each other's practice. In such relatively ideal circumstances. If we can't, how can we expect the rest, you know, the problems in the world to be resolved? And the Buddhist idea of how society evolves is small numbers of people living together and discovering how to live together and practice together, hopefully in the light of realized wisdom, and then that, if a few people can do it, maybe the whole society can do it.

[61:45]

I completely believe that's true. If you can feel good for a few moments in a year, You can feel good for the whole of the year. Good meaning in a good sense, some kind of satisfactory way to live. And a clear mind that's at ease. In a similar way, if a few people can discover how to live in some kind of enlightenment or wisdom, Then it is probably also possible for society. And the reverse is even more clearly true.

[63:04]

If a few people can't do it, probably society can't do it either. And as I think we all know, our civilization hasn't progressed far enough that it's even very easy to live together in a family. And I don't think that's just a familial question. It's also a civilizational question. Okay. Now, Sophia, the other day... Well, let me come back to that.

[64:24]

I've never been separated from Sophia for any noticeable length of time by her. And she can't really figure out what's happened to me. It's been three weeks now. At first she was quite sure I hadn't left. I was just out a different door. And then she began to... She realized I was somewhere and I had to fly. She knows what flying is. So my English conversations were there for the first four or five days after she found out I wasn't out a different door.

[65:33]

The conversation would be, fly, Papa. Fly, Papa. And now, then it became, come puppy, come puppy. I felt like a dog. And now, yesterday I was told by Mark that she's announced that I was in the clouds and trees. Now, I don't think this is just that she loves her father, which I hope it might be the case. I think it's that her world for more than two and a half years has been almost completely, Marie-Louise and I. So her world is disturbed.

[66:40]

She can't grasp why the territory of her world is now disturbed. And she wants to restore her world. Wanting me to come back is she wants to restore her world. Well, I think practice also is something about restoring our world. Not restoring our world to infancy or childhood. Although the motivation to do that may not be so different from restoring our world to wisdom.

[67:42]

And if you, I don't know, A couple weeks before I left, so a couple months ago or a month and a half ago. Sofía nearly fell down the stairs. But she caught herself and was okay. A little damage, but not too much. Well, what saved her? It wasn't her thinking mind.

[68:47]

I think we can say it was her intention to stay alive. Where is this intention to stay alive located? Well, I think in her, you know, it happens so quickly, of course. You slip on something on the stairs and start tumbling. The intention has to be something, has to be at a cellular level. Yeah, I'm trying to make some distinction between intention and intentional thought, let's say, and thinking thoughts.

[69:52]

I'm trying to make a difference again. Let's take the intentional thought and... Now it's interesting, with the immense richness of English language, a vocabulary of something like 600,000 words, there's no word for distinction between intentional thought and thinking thoughts. That certainly tells us that this distinction hasn't been important for English speakers. English speakers.

[70:55]

Anyway, but So I don't have a word, but we have maybe this clumsy distinction. I'm making between intentional thought and thinking thought. I have to use the word thought because I... I think our mental formations we notice, we call thought. Now, I would ask you all to notice something. Feel out your own intention to stay alive.

[72:12]

Which is a reinforced decision all the time. Every time you drive safely, you're reinforcing the decision to stay alive. And we're trying to teach Sophia that her first job, her first intention is... to stay alive. Her second intention is how to stay alive. In what way should we stay alive? Auf welche Art und Weise sollten wir am Leben bleiben?

[73:22]

Buddhism says it's a teaching for those who make the decision to know that to stay alive means to know how we actually exist. Buddhism says that. is a teaching that says to stay alive is to know how we actually exist. To most fully stay alive is to know how we actually exist. To know how things actually exist. And to know how we exist. exist along with others in the fullest sense. So you can understand these basic teachings, again, like the Eightfold Path and the

[74:28]

six parameters and so forth, as ways to both discover and express answers to these questions. Now, Let me go back again to this host mind, guest mind distinction. Which in the Blue Cliff Records is probably the main teaching device in the Hundred Koans. And one that Suzuki Roshi talked a great deal about. But again, as I pointed out recently, it's implied in this simple instruction, don't invite your thoughts to tea.

[75:49]

Now, when you practice that repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly. It's funny how in our culture religious mystics, religious practitioners practice. But most other practitioners professions, including scientists and philosophers, really seems to me don't practice. So we're taking what in our culture is left for more mystical type people, or artist perhaps, to bring a sense of practice into our ordinary life.

[77:04]

And practice is Often, simply repetition. Doing something so often, you begin to see the uniqueness in each situation. And last night I spoke about a weak... pramana, valid cognition. And I forgot to mention, maybe I mentioned, or I may have forgotten to mention, what I would call a strong pramana is when you, on each moment, find the world unique, singular, and new.

[78:12]

And so in the deepest sense, a valid cognition is when new knowledge is revealed. Yeah, new to you at least. And if you keep finding knowledge new to you, you'll find knowledge no one has ever known before. And that's also a little footnote of where Zen is at. That for Zen, Buddha is the beginning, not the end of our practice.

[79:26]

As we say, we may be born in the same lineage, but we die in different lineages. Already each one of you is extraordinarily unique. No one else. on the planet is sitting where Susanne is sitting. How easy it is to be unique. And each of you is sitting where absolutely no one else is sitting. And in somewhat similar way, we're capable of knowing things no one else has ever known. But for the most part our practice in this direction is a practice of knowing things for the first time for ourselves.

[80:43]

So if you open up by repetition the practice, don't invite your thoughts to tea. Yeah, and as I say, for those of you who are new to practice, You can immediately get the sense, oh, yes, I can, you know, I know what it's like to not get distracted by thinking, you know. It's easy to imagine sitting or experience sitting without getting caught up in your thoughts. But it takes a while before you really begin to feel that the mind which doesn't invite the thoughts to tea is actually a different mind.

[82:13]

And you begin to know that particular physical feel of the mind which doesn't invite the thoughts to tea. Let's call this mind the host mind. And you begin to notice that, since you do it over and over again, you're actually a sort of a different person in the host mind. And you find that you actually talk to yourself differently in the host mind than you do in the guest mind.

[83:30]

In the guest mind, you're talking to yourself in thinking thoughts. And in the host mind, you're talking to yourself in intentional thoughts. And you find there's a different quality to those intentional thoughts. They're certainly more bodily based. And you find out that the same kind of thoughts that can wake you up at 6.02 in the morning without an alarm clock. So you begin to find that Intentional thoughts are a different way of thinking.

[84:43]

So now you've just from this simple instruction discovered not only two minds, guest mind and host mind, and two different ways of thinking about yourself. and about the world, you also begin to discover two different bodies. We can say a guest body and a host body. And the guest body is something like outer chi. And the host body is something more like inner qi. If you feel your aware energy, your vitality in a different way,

[85:43]

You have a different feeling for your physical and mental location. So now in the context of this seminar, we can speak about maybe an intentional mind which occupies pretty much the same territory as a host mind. And Zen practice, all Buddhist practice, is rooted in vowing. And intentions. And the fundamental of mind that arises through intention. Now, why is this so? to be continued after the break.

[87:14]

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