It's nice you people who weren't here earlier today came. That's a sign. I'm recovering from a But I feel well enough to see what happens this evening. Okay, the four foundations of mindfulness. This is our topic and there's no reason we shouldn't keep it as our topic.

[01:03]

Yeah, it's... Satipatthana Sutra taught in the so-called Satipatthana Sutra. And it's the most basic, early teaching of Buddhism. Yeah, basic practice of Buddhism. And all later forms of Buddhism assume the practice of mindfulness. Now, it's called the Four Foundations of Mindfulness. of mindfulness. And mindfulness is the basis of all Buddhist practices.

[02:08]

Zazen's sitting meditation is a kind of solidified mindfulness. But it's also called the four awakenings of mindfulness. And in that sense it emphasizes that one can awaken Through mindfulness. The word Buddha means one who is awake. But it's not automatically awake. Or even awake through the through enlightenment. It's awake through the practice of awakening.

[03:26]

The craft, as I said earlier today, of the practice. And supposedly the Buddha said, no one really knows what the Buddha said, but supposedly the Buddha said that this satipatthana practice in itself was sufficient for realizing enlightenment. I happen to agree with the Buddha. Yes. I probably almost always agree with the Buddha. But I don't know if exactly always, because we are in a different culture, different time, and Buddha is the beginning point, not the end point of our practice.

[04:35]

Unless you understand Buddhism in some kind of god-like, mythological sense. Certainly, we experience things that the Buddha But he certainly laid the foundations for our practice. More than that, but we can put it that way. Now, The quality or nature of a Buddhist practice is its thoroughness. But these practices are really pretty simple. But done thoroughly And following through their implications.

[05:57]

then the teachings come alive. And this thoroughness and following through the implications also means to incubate the teachings. Yeah, and I can't speak for the history of this concept of incubation. But it certainly, at least up until recently is assumed in the Chinese culture. And the simplest example of this is the way sutras or texts or commentaries are entitled.

[07:17]

The title is not just a name. It's assumed that if you incubate the title it will open up like a seed to really produce the whole text. No, that's an exaggeration. But still, if you really incubate... I'll try to... Make clearer during the seminar what incubate means. In the simplest sense, it just means to repeat and live through what comes up in the repetition.

[08:21]

And it assumes the world and our activity is interactive with, is interactively... And most teachings are described as something you hold before you. Well, you could say hold within you. But hold before you is more accurate though it's not why not hold it back of you or something like that. But in this case it means hold before you in your attention to the world. And that's a little different than holding it within you.

[09:32]

Now, if we took the title of the seminar, Four Foundations of Mindfulness. And we assumed that the title was meant to be incubated. Even using the English words, you would wonder, what the heck does this mean? What is mindfulness? What is mindfulness? what would be four of them?

[10:36]

What are four of them? How many mindfulnesses would I name? In my experience, what am I mindful of? And are there any examples in which I find Mindfulness, whatever I mean by that, is the foundation of something in my life. It's expected, assumed, that if you really did that thoroughly, much of what I'm speaking about this evening would already be be clear to you, or you'd have the taste of it. And another way this practice is... It's...

[11:38]

of incubation is manifested. If you try to give your teacher's lectures for you, your or the teacher, In other words, you say, gee, what would I say if I was speaking about the four foundations of mindfulness? And you kind of have a basic feeling of what would be talked about. Then when the teacher speaks, you say, oh, look how different that is from what I... would have said. Look how it's similar. So a lecture like this is called traditionally a taste show.

[12:57]

So in that sense there would be two Teishos that came together. Now I'm just giving you this as an example of the thoroughness that's expected of a practice like this. The practice of the four foundations and awakenings of mindfulness. Okay, so what are the four foundations? So in Ordnung, was sind also diese vier Grundlagen der Achtsamkeit? Mindfulness of the body. Die Achtsamkeit des Körpers. Mindfulness of feelings.

[14:15]

Die Achtsamkeit des Fühlens. Mindfulness of mind. Die Achtsamkeit des Geistes. And mindfulness of mental objects. Und die Achtsamkeit der mentalen Objekte. Now, this evening I would just like to give a kind of overview or general look at this practice. Also from the point of view of... Yeah, the contemporary use of the word. Because mindfulness has now become a kind of contemporary word. And I don't know how it works in German, but in English, mindfulness is quite a useful term. Not all the transliteration of terms are so useful.

[15:21]

And while there's no exact equivalent of the word mind, believe it or not, in Sanskrit or Pali. But mindfulness has become, mind is a very useful term. And mindfulness is also And of course we teach mindfulness to our kids and so forth across the street. One of the funniest examples I know of this, a story I told a few times before.

[16:30]

I was with my family in a taxi in Tokyo. And we were just driving along in the really unbelievably mad traffic compared to anything we know in Tokyo. And, you know, I must have been in my, oh, gosh, it was 40s or something like that. And I was in my 40s or something like that. Anyway, yeah. So we're driving along and this sweet old man who seemed old to me then, he must have been at least 70. And I thought it was very sweet because on his tape machine in the car he had a recording

[17:31]

of the cicadas in the rice fields, rice paddies of his hometown. So there he's driving along in Tokyo, listening to, here's how it goes, I forget the sound. And since I spent a lot of time in Japan in this little house up on the beach in the middle of rice fields and I knew these sounds very well interspersed with the the cries of the frog-hunting hawks. And at the same time, also connected with the sounds of the frogs and the creaks that the frogs make.

[18:46]

Okay. So I was kind of sitting in the taxi, blissed out, you know. You know, we're going along and we come to an intersection. A great big street. And he stopped and he looked. And then he drove into the intersection. And I woke up from my bliss and was, I've never seen a taxi driver do that in Japan. In Japanese culture, you always go forward. You always push forward. In Germany, if the light turns orange, you better watch out, the cars are all ready to go. In Japan, it's just the opposite.

[19:55]

If the light turns... starts to turn red, the cars are still going into the intersection. But when it starts to turn green, they take their time about leaving. It's just the opposite of what we Germans, I'm half German now, do. Or half Austrian, excuse me. It's just my father. No, no, it's all right. So anyway... So cars just push into the intersection and if the light is red and they can't get through, nobody backs up.

[21:02]

No one ever backs up. So this guy stopped and looked and listened and drove. It was so unusual. I said to the taxi driver, I said, I've never seen a taxi driver do that. Well, he said, well, I learned to drive in Berkeley, California. My father was a professor at the University of California and I lived there from age 4 to 16 or 17. You learn to drive in the United States, you certainly learn to stop, look and listen. Und wenn du in den Vereinigten Staaten lernst, Auto zu fahren, dann lernst du, stehen zu bleiben, zu schauen, zu hören.

[22:13]

Why did I tell you? It's just a funny little... Und warum erzähle ich euch das? Das ist eigentlich nur eine witzige Anekdote. But even our habits of attention are... Yeah, are cultural. Aber sogar unsere Gewohnheiten der Aufmerksamkeit sind kulturell. So if you're going to practice the... Four foundations of mindfulness. You actually have to also notice your own habits of attention and go beyond them or change them. So now first let's just look then this evening at the mindfulness of the body. And in a way it should be called bodyfulness of the body, not just mindfulness of the body.

[23:16]

Because it's the body itself giving attention. We can say there's no mental activity without the body. So we can say that the body is the basis of mental activity. Well, you can't really say that in Buddhism because the body is a lot more than just a platform or a basis for mental activity. But let's first think of it as, yeah, let's think of it anyway for now as the basis of Yeah, thinking, emotions, etc.

[24:34]

So let's give attention to this basis. And what's the first way we give attention to this, to the body? Uh, Aufmerksamkeit dem Körper zu schenken. Well, we don't really give attention to the body itself at this point anyway. We give attention to the activities of the body. Wir schauen uns also zunächst einmal nicht den Körper selbst an, sondern die Aktivitäten des Körpers. So you bring attention to just what you're doing. So bringt man seine Aufmerksamkeit genau auf das, was man in dem Augenblick gerade tut. Walking, picking something up. Gehen, etwas aufhegen und so weiter. And again, a story I've told very often.

[25:35]

Suki Roshi, my teacher, was asked, what do you notice most about Americans? Suki Roshi, my teacher, was asked, Was ist das, was dir am meisten aufgefallen ist an den Amerikanern? Ja, er sagte, ihr macht alle Dinge mit einer Hand nur. you know, if I pass the bell, can I go like this? And so then after he said that, I watched him, and if he passed the bell, he would first pick it up, with two hands or the feeling of two hands and then before giving it to Eric in this case he'd bring it into the space of his own body his own chakras actually and then turn his body towards her

[26:42]

And if you know this, you know a lot about the tea ceremony and many of the Japanese arts and crafts. Then you know a lot about the Macintosh computer. Yeah, you know, because... McIntosh, Steven Jobs, and Wozniak were the first to pick up on what the Xerox laboratory developed. Which was the mouse. And Both Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs were practicing Zen with Kobunshino Roshi. And they really had a feeling of you do this with two hands.

[28:00]

One hand sort of the visual part of the brain and the other the thinking part of the brain. And some people prefer everything to be keyboard. And some people say that's a bit faster. But there's something different, at least in my experience, when you do use two hands. Yeah, and the Japanese writing system uses two different parts of the brain, both lobes of the brain. with our suits as one side. Yeah, and he's Chinese, et cetera. Okay. So there is this sense of... if you're going to give attention to the activities, you give it with the attention of the mind, but you also give it with the attention of the body, and your body is involved in simple acts like

[29:23]

passing the salt or passing the bill. And you tend, in most situations, to turn the body as well as, you know, not just use your hand. And I've often pointed out these dumb things It's why Japanese and Chinese cuts don't have handles. Now, it's not that they're not smart enough to have thought of handles. It's that they really want you to feel the warmth of whatever cold or whatever is in the cut. And you can see when Western potters imitate Japanese potters, they often don't make the cup so you can hold it when it's hot.

[30:46]

So there's built into the culture this attentiveness of the body. And what's also clear here, the body is not thought of as an entity. A discrete unit apart from its attributes. The dictionary definition of entity. In Buddhism, there's no discrete units. In early Buddhism, there's the emphasis on interdependence.

[32:08]

And in later Buddhism, the emphasis on interdependence and interpenetration. Things are only provisionally separate. And as you know, a body in Buddhism is not the corpse, not the stuff of the body. The word body means what makes this stuff alive. So you develop the habit of attention So entwickelt man die Aufmerksamkeit den Aktivitäten des Körpers gegenüber. And the most fundamental activity, well, yeah, noticeable activity of the body, ist der Atem.

[33:27]

So we bring attention to the breath. And not just breathing. but the inhale and separately the exhale. Then you begin to really articulate the activity to the body and the breath in conjunction with each other. And you know when there's a long breath. And when there's a short breath. There's statements in koans like, let the heron's legs be long and the sparrow short.

[34:41]

The heron, a long-legged bird. Sparrow. A sparrow. A sparrow. A little bird. Yeah. Any old bird. An emphasis on the particularity of each perception, each noticing. And attention brought to the particularity of each person. Notice. Now, it's assumed in this yoga culture that there's really no natural. And as we talked about earlier today in the dialogue between nature and nurture.

[36:08]

Buddhist yoga culture is almost entirely on the side of nurture. The self and the mind are all structures that we can develop, mature, change, transform. And practice is about how to do this. And the basis is always this development of attention. And first of all, bringing attention and the activities of the body together.

[37:10]

And bringing attention and the body together with the breath. So this, you know, is the foundation of the craft of Buddhist practice. And breath is the basis of lots of spiritual practices. In fact, the word spirit and soul and psyche are all related to the word breath. So in this practice, you're at the center of what at least Buddhism considers as being and becoming.

[38:17]

So I've mentioned now attention to the activities of the body, which not directly but implicitly are undermining any sense of the entity-ness or body. semi-permanence of the body. And you're developing the power and muscle, muscle perhaps, of attention. By continuously bringing it together with your activity, the activity, and the breath. Now Bodhidharma seems to have defined mind and it seems to be that Bodhidharma has defined mind as separate or beyond language and thinking. He said, bring the attention of any sense to something, to a flower, to music.

[39:57]

And language can describe that attention in only a limited way. Finally, the music is the music, or the flower is the flower, and you can't say... The language can't go to where attention can go. And so he says, when... where language won't reach, or thinking won't reach, you see the mind. This is anyway quite a good definition of mind. And attention is the most instrumental manifestation of the mind and its functioning.

[41:11]

More so than thinking. And thinking is most powerful when it's filled with attention. But from the point of view of Buddhist practice anyway attention is more fundamental than thinking. And as you can rest your mind in, say, music or, you know, something like that. You can. Yeah, and we tend to rest our mind in a kind of discursive thinking. You can also simply rest your mind in attention. And you can bring attention to attention itself. And one of the aspects of this beginning practice of mindfulness of the body

[42:24]

is to feel the clarity of attention in each nose in the breath and in the activity and this is an effect bringing attention to attention and feel the clarity to have as a quality of your moment by moment With it. Clarity of attention. A stableness of attention. A feeling of completeness in one's attention. This takes, even if it's quick, it takes the feeling of rush rushing out of living.

[43:50]

So attention in a sense then again rests in attention. Rests in the clarity of attention. And this has its own pace. And Now the last aspect of attention to the body, it's not the end of mindfulness of the body, but it's the end of what I'll say tonight. At least that's my plan. You know, the other day, Sophia actually two or three months ago, wanted to come into our room.

[45:05]

Sophia is now four. She turned four in March. And her behavior is not yet as wise as her name. But sometimes her comments are pretty good. She said to Marie-Louise, tonight I want to get in bed with you. She tells me, Richard, my dad, Richard. Okay. Maybe because she has no brothers and sisters. So she said, I'm going to come and get in bed with you and Richard. Maybe they said, well, why? She said, I'm a little scared of my dreams.

[46:08]

And then she said, but it'll probably be okay because when I opened my eyes, the dreams were just air ghosts. So I like that, air ghosts. Pop and the dreams are gone. Yeah. So what is she, what happens when The air ghosts disappear. Well, she's got the predictable world she knows. The floor is still there where she left it when she went to sleep. The dark of the night at the window is the same.

[47:09]

So she comes back to a predictable world. Now certainly our mindfulness practice is not meant to give the world this predictability. Even though the world is certainly, at least provisionally, predictable. And luckily so. And the job And usefulness of consciousness and the limitation and delusion of consciousness is consciousness tends to emphasize, notice the predictability. Which very quickly, emotionally becomes

[48:20]

predictable sort of permanence of the world. So what this practice of mindfulness is meant to do is in some ways bring us back, as we talked earlier in the day, to the sensorial world as a reference point, as a shared reference point. baseline of mind. And yeah, more predictable than one's dreams. So, This mindfulness is actually establishing an underlying sensorial mind.

[49:35]

When you look very closely with developed attention at the physical mind, world, physical body, you see that it's not predictable. But it becomes a kind of continuity without having to be predictable. And it's discontinuity in the kind of continuity. So the last aspect of mindfulness I'll discuss. Mindfulness of the so-called four postures. standing, sitting, walking, and reclining.

[50:41]

And what is the potential of these postures. Maybe I should leave that talk for tomorrow. Because you've been sitting and standing already for nearly an hour. And you can begin to incubate this evening. Because you can begin to bring mindfulness to reclining. Yes. I assume all of you will go to sleep tonight. Or at least hope to.

[51:43]

That's an interesting study. What is, you know, there's deep sleep and non-dreaming deep sleep. And there's dream sleep. And there's waking mind. The three minds, in a sense, that we're born with. that don't fully know each other. And practice, the fourth mind, is ideally supposed to, is meant to be able to bring these three together and extend them. But what about a fifth state of mind? Lying in bed unable to go to sleep.

[52:55]

What exactly is that state of mind? Two hours awake in bed is an equivalent to... Thirty minutes of sleep? These are the kind of things we study in Buddhism. So tonight you can be mindful. See how far attention can allow you to go into sleeping without keeping you awake. And the more refined your attention is and not connected to consciousness you can go farther farther into sleep and feel yourself go to sleep.

[53:58]

And if you can do this, you've developed the yogic skill. And if you can do this, you've developed the yogic skill. And in the morning you can see what happens when you shift from sleeping and dreaming into awakeness. So you can begin on your own. The giving of mindfulness to at least one or two of the four postures. Thank you very much. Thank you for translating.

[55:20]

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