Sometimes I feel a little frustrated trying to make use of these days, this nearly week fully, this week fully. Yeah, the schedule itself doesn't give me much time, as I said earlier. And this week, every spare moment, practically, I've been meeting with people. And, you know, to speak in the way we've been speaking. Maybe to get a little farther out than I'd like to. I don't think it's far out, but it sounds far out, so you might think it's far out.

[01:02]

Hmm. So the way I try to bring teachings to you is to embody them in awareness and then see what happens when I'm in the room with you and our awarenesses begin to create a mutual body. But forgive me for being a little overly explicit.

[02:05]

But it takes a certain amount of time to embody teachings in a way that they can be transferred to you. So if I had more time, I would feel more comfortable in what I'm bringing to you. Now the problem with that is, is that my lectures have just become more compact. Maybe they're already compact enough. But one advantage of their being compact is lots of the teachings slip past your consciousness.

[03:09]

They lodge in you as seeds. Which is the understanding of what a Teisho is? A kind of layered exposure to the teaching. Now the only place I have, in a way I'm speaking about our meeting last night, If you hadn't noticed. The only play time I feel I have time enough is in the practice period at Creston. But I give less lectures in Creston. A whole three months, then I give them every couple days, but still it's less than in, say, two of these seminars.

[04:46]

But I can say much less because the Sangha body developed during the practice period is doing most of the work. It's just like, I think, in Sashin, I can give only one lecture a day, and it's more teaching than in this week with discussion and lectures and so forth. Okay. So... So in Sashin we develop, let's call it a Sangha body, a mutual body.

[05:53]

And that's actually, you can demonstrate that with science and measuring metabolism and so on. But it's physically... palpably noticeable, I think, by almost everyone who does the Sesshin. So let's assume there's such a thing as a mutual body or Sangha body. Okay, so that's one of the three treasures. So then there's two more treasures. Buddha and Dharma. So if there's a Sangha body, a mutual body, there's a structure to that body.

[06:55]

And okay, then there's a Dharma body and there's a structure. Dharma body, yeah. That's, you know, Dharmakaya. Dharma body, there's a structure to the Dharma body. And there's a structure to the Buddha body. Now, what the Abhidharma teachings are trying to do, and then developed further by tantric Buddhism and Zen Buddhism and so forth, is trying to bring into relief. Do you understand that? Bring into relief is to take something that's a flat surface and raise some of it up. Oh, relief in that way.

[07:56]

Yeah. And engage us in the structure of the Sangha body, the Buddha body, and the Dharma body. No. We can best define something by what it's not. I can say what this is not. It's not Neil. We know that. That's clear. But if I try to tell you what it is, I can't. It's a stick, it's a... Back scratcher? I mean, what is it? You can really only define something by what it's not.

[09:04]

It's very difficult, impossible, to actually define something by what it is. Because what it is ultimately is empty. So I can say what the Sangha body is not, is it's not a social body. And as I've mentioned in the past, this is sometimes hard for people. Now, when any one of you becomes committed to this practice. You become, to me, a treasure. One of the three treasures. Well, now a fourth treasure. You're the fourth treasure. But you become considerably less special to me. Because special is sort of some kind of subtle sense of ego, of importance of social body.

[10:25]

So if we're like practice talked about last night, having more of a practice here, That really means we want to establish more of a Sangha body here. So when I bow at the bowing mat, I have a shared body with the person who's... whatever your job is, ringing the bell.

[11:27]

We're a shared activity. The jisha, this person, what do we call this person's job? Dohan. Dohan, okay. Dohan covers a lot of territory. The dohan and the jisha and the doshi, the doshi is the... person who does the ceremony. Make one body. So it may look like I've got somebody, you know, the incense is so much too heavy for me to carry, so I've got, you know, this guy to carry it for me, you know. I'm getting old, you know. And Peter confessed to me recently, it's getting heavy for him too, he's also getting old. But what it's about is it's just a little chance for the three of us to develop a Sangha body. So it means we establish it's like our individual body disappears into a shared body.

[12:42]

It doesn't mean you feel that way all the time. It means you learn You develop, you begin to embody this feeling in addition to your separateness and individualness. Everything around you is equal. Everything beside you is equal. That's also suchness. And emptiness. And it's also being in front of a tree or a person and finding it exactly the same.

[13:46]

You're in the midst of a lived activity. You, the tree, the person, etc. They're all equal. So first you develop this rather mechanically. Every time we meet each other, we bow. And you know the bow is actually a kind of bringing our presence and the chakras together. into the heels of our hand, the way you can feel a kind of elastic, rubbery feeling between your hands. And you bring that here, and then it's like it pulls this chakra into your hands, and you lift it through all your chakras. And you lift it into this heart position and then you bring it up into a shared position.

[14:55]

And then you bow into that mutuality with the other person. It's kind of like being in love. A little instant of being in love. You disappear into another person. And then you come back. You draw that back in. Now in computers, sometimes, I don't know, I only work on Mac Buddhist computers. Well, as you know, Stephen Jobs and Stephen Wozniak were both practicing Buddhism with computers. with Kobenchino Roshi when they developed the Macintosh.

[16:07]

And you know Steven Jobs and... Steve Wozniak. Wozniak, yes. They practiced Buddhism with Kobenchino Roshi when they developed the Macintosh. Okay. So I don't know, it must happen on IBM computers too, because they imitate Apple, right? Sorry? I know, he's an IBM type, you know. But actually, the operating system of... what do you call the other kind? PCs. PCs, was copied from Apple, anyway. Yeah. So it may be the same, but when you click something, the whole thing can collapse into a little thing and disappear into a dot.

[17:08]

When you click the dot, it opens back up. It's the whole thing. pours into a little hole. Of course that exists because it's possible electronically and software to do that. But I actually think it exists because that's an experience. that actually comes out of practice. And one of the secrets of the Silicon Valley, which most people aren't aware of, I discovered the other day, is most of the people who came up with the really creative ideas were also taking a lot of LSD. So there was a 60s and early 70s.

[18:09]

background interested in Buddhism and psychedelics, etc., which was actually rife among the people, rife means everywhere present, among the people involved in what became Silicon Valley. So this, what in the 60s with the background, the psychedelic background, also the Buddhist background, that was so far with all already present, spread or latent, that I'm not suggesting any of you drop acid. General psychedelics interfere with practice. Okay. So I think that these things which we can do through software and electronics, many of them actually come, it's not that we're talking about picking up analogies from computers, but rather the computers picked up analogies, visual analogies, from inner so-called spiritual experience.

[19:46]

So you do something like bow and it's like this little dot from which the Sangha body appears. And you'll begin to find that there's things you can do and the sangha body will just poof, disappear. In the sangha body. No, when you're in the sangha body, you can do something, have a particular thought, and poof, the sangha body's gone. So it starts out mechanical, you bow when you see something. And maybe it's a few years, ten years, before really you feel each chakra as you bring your hands up.

[20:59]

Because it takes quite a lot of practice before each chakra is developed. But we don't want to emphasize the chakras in Zen because we want them to develop. We want to hold Kundalini back so it develops in the whole process of realization. So I say that again? Partly, please. We want to hold Kundalini back. We want to hold it back, yeah, I understand. It manifests in the process of realization? So that it begins to manifest through the whole process of realization, not some particular practice. One of the problems of being a teacher in the modern Sangha where everybody has shopped every spiritual practice.

[22:15]

And so they lose the sense of the reality limit. Bhutakoti is the term. Is that how you pronounce it? Bhutakoti? It's in the Prajnaparamita Sutras particularly. So it means the ability to feel the reality limit of any particular practice. For example, if you think space, separates.

[23:22]

And you think that this world is somehow a container. And say you free yourself from the intellectual understanding of it, intellectual idea that it's a container. But in fact, you still feel that way. It's not just you act that way conventionally because the people you're with act that way conventionally. You act that way conventionally because basically that's what your body believes. So the term reality limit means You can tell the difference when you conventionally act as if it's reality, a container, and when you really act as if it's a container.

[24:30]

There's a difference. There's a difference. It's not intellectual. Between acting in the world as if it were a... believably acting in the world as if it were a container. And only conventionally acting in the world as if it were a container because you're with people that think that way. To be able to feel that difference in your body is called a reality limit. And the Eightfold Path is supposed to awaken you to feeling reality limits so you can find the difference between wisdom views and deluded views. Now, when you started practicing Zen, did you think it was simple?

[25:35]

Well, I'm making it sound not so simple. But when you stay with the practices, without a lot of ideas, it actually unfolds quite simply. So at first, Christa and I, the tone and I, But she's not Krista, she's the Doan. If she thinks, I'm Krista being the Doan, I hope I do it well, she's in the social body. If she disappears into the Doan body, if she's about to hit the bell and it's wrong, it's better just to continue.

[27:01]

It's better to be a wrong Doan than a right Krista. So, when we bow, she bows ideally just the way I do. And when she does that, When the Jisha walks beside her, he walks through this Dohan field she's created. And then we offer incense together, blah, blah, blah. And when I go to the altar, I feel if the presence of the person who set up the altar And what is the practice of setting up the altar? The practice is to align your hara with the nose of the Buddha.

[28:25]

So you feel the body, what this image of the Buddha is, flows into you and you flow into it. Once you have that feeling, then you set the incense burner. So when I go up, I try to straighten it, sort of. I'm trying to maybe straighten the body of the jisha who did it. Or Goan, or... Once we awaken, begin to feel this mutual body. The nourishment of it.

[29:39]

I have to confess I'm addicted to it. 45 years I've been doing this because of this addiction. So an essential part of this lecture is the presence of the Jisha from beginning to end. If the Jisha leaves without the permission of the Sangha body, and it worked out, then the whole situation is slightly disturbed. But I already know in my body that the Jisha is going to leave a little early, and this is okay. No, it can't though. So, If we practice more, if we have more of a Sangha practice here, it means we develop a Sangha body here, which you've got to realize, when you come here, it won't be a social body.

[31:02]

There's time for a social body to be present, but we know it's just a conventional way of behaving. So the more we are each other's treasure, And the more I take your practice seriously, the more strict I'll be with you whenever I see the social body appear. But you have to give me permission to do that. I feel really permission to do that with very few of you. But last night was a kind of experimenting with maybe the wider permission can be given.

[32:15]

No, I have to change the topic. Because I only got a minute or two. I only have a minute or two. When Thich Nhat Hanh says, you invoke the name of Avalokiteshvara or Manjushri, that's indexing whole practice and body to the word. And the etymology of index is to enter into pointing out. To enter into showing, teaching.

[33:18]

To enter into teaching. And in the Greek part of the D-E-I-K, dex, is to throw and give a direction to the throwing. So in English we call this the index finger. Do you call it in German that too? It's the finger you show. So... So the concept of indexing is very important in the Abhidharma. Dharanis, you know, we chant Dharanis in the morning. Dharanis are linked, indexed syllables. We may not have any meaning on the surface, but each one points to somewhere, to the inner structure of the sandal body or the dharma body.

[34:46]

So we're trying to reveal through these practices the inner structure of the Dharma body. So I call it interdexing, maybe interdexing, sort of indexing. Now, somebody, I guess Stephen Jobs, recognized that people often like listening to the radio better than they like listening to a particular song they put on their So, what is one of the main features of the iPod? Shuffle. And they even have the iShuffle or something.

[36:12]

They have an iPod that does nothing but shuffle. Okay. You shuffle? You don't shuffle. You shuffle a deck? Yeah, but it's not... Yeah, I understand. Okay, so... It's the same as listening to the radio because you don't know what song is going to come up next. So there's an element of surprise. We call this fishing with a straight hook. You don't know what you're going to catch. Okay. So indexing is something like, what do we call it? My pod?

[37:15]

I pod? Me pod? Well, let's call it seed pod. Because the Alaya Vijnana is where the seeds are kept. So let's call it the seed pod. So you learn. You teach awareness. the Eightfold Path. You teach awareness. And so awareness embodies the Eightfold Path. Now, you know that most people notice that at their job they're a somewhat different person than they are at home. So we can think of right conduct and right livelihood as two different things. stones dropped into a pond.

[38:29]

And you can think of the teaching of the Eightfold Path is the teaching of eight different stones that you drop in the water, and each one spreads out differently. So in your speech, you drop the right speech into the pond, certain ripples come out. But your speech and your conduct might not be actually in harmony. So when you drop the stone of speech in and the stone of conduct in and say the stone of livelihood in, you have three things.

[39:41]

circles of ripples. If they flow together smoothly, you have realized the practice of the Eightfold Path. Smoothly... harmoniously. If they bang against each other and create waves, you can see that there's some problem in worldviews. There's a conflict And where the ripples bump against each other is what we call the reality limit. So the Eightfold Path is to bring mindfulness in such a developed way into each of these eight territories.

[40:51]

That you can see the worldviews present in each one, the inner structure of each one. Maybe at work you're a creep. Maybe it worked. You're a creep. But at home you're a loving husband. But they don't really work together. Or you're in a situation that calls forth one kind of behavior. But you have precast habit energy. So you've got lots of you speak to me about the way your mother was or father was or something, you know.

[42:14]

But that's what I would call precast habit energy. Sometimes we have a situation and that's one stone, you drop it in and ripples come out. But you drop in your precast habit energy or psychological habits that aren't appropriate to the situation and then you get a lot of ripples. So the Eightfold Path gives you a chance to see this. When you actuate it in awareness.

[43:16]

No, that's... a beginning of what I want to say. Thanks for being patient in the midst of all this nonsense. But you know, you all know it's sort of true. Okay, thanks.

[43:45]

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