It's wonderful you joined us. Gisela. And you put on your robes. That would make Buddha happy. So I feel I have quite a few things that would be good to talk about. At the same time, it's the end of Sashin. I don't know if I should say much more. And for an amateur Sashin, we've done pretty well. The serving's got better and the cooking's gotten better.

[01:02]

And the Eno's gotten better. Yeah. Yeah. But we have another Sesshin coming up, so I can continue then. But not all of you will be at the next Sesshin. So I'll have to say something today. So I don't know. People have been asking me about how to... you know, how to make this easier. I don't mean to make practice easier, but how to make... how to... how to... how to act within these teachings.

[02:18]

Did I really say that? Pretty much. Yeah. And someone asked about the threefold refuge, Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. And there's so many ways to speak about these things. So I'll see what way I find to do it today. Now I've been talking about, of course, merging yourself in the particular.

[03:23]

And this is a reversal of direction. Usually we have the experience that there's an object and our senses notice it. And then from that we think about it. Now, to immerse yourself in the particular is to reverse that. You notice that the mind has noticed something. and you bring your senses to it, in that sense we call it a six-fold object. You bring your senses to it, each sense,

[04:48]

And as I say, and Suzuki Roshi used to emphasize, you bring each sense to it, even though you can't smell the floor, you have a feeling of smelling the floor. And... Even if this floor doesn't have a smell, one of its dimensions is then its lack of smell. But probably if you get close enough, or even from a distance, there's a smell to this floor. And By immersing yourself in the particular, you kind of wash your karma.

[06:08]

If your karma appears in your mind, it's reinforced by your consciousness. When you bring yourself, your attention to the world itself, it's a little like the rainwater falling on the earth. It reappears in spring, it's purified. So somehow our karma is something like purified when we immerse ourselves in the particular.

[07:14]

So we spend a lot of time in Zen practice to create a kind of ritual which brings you into the particular. A lot of you have a general idea of how to do the Oryoki, for instance. Yeah, but you kind of do your general idea. You don't do it in a real particular way. But you don't have the particular... But you don't do it in a real particular way.

[08:15]

If you lift up your bowl, you lift it up and put it away. I don't know how to express this, but you don't lift it up like it falls into a little groove. And everyone else's balls fall into the groove. A groove is a little ditch. A little ditch, yeah. It falls into a little air ditch. Also, erhebt es nicht so hoch, als ob es in so eine Art Luftloch reinfallen will, Luft... keine Vertiefung, ja? That's right, exactly, yeah. And you both sort of, you can feel it in that, there's a little stop or pause. Ihr könnt es spüren, da ist ein kleines Anhalten, eine Pause. It's not a continuous motion. Es ist nicht eine kontinuierliche Bewegung. There's always a little pause.

[09:20]

In Dharma practice, there's always a little pause. And we all find, since we're eating together, a little pause together, and then we put the bowls away. And Matt, you know, I have my equipment for the lecture right here. I've been watching people and they sort of put it away like that. Now, when you do it that way, what is that? It's a mental action. It has to be done mentally. Half and half. It takes two movements.

[10:21]

And it uses the fingers. You notice, as I've said in tea ceremony, we tend to pick up things this way. Because that tends to use awareness, this uses consciousness. So the way we tend to pick up any of the mats we spread out for bowing, for instance, in Cresta, You try to let the mat do it. You could do it in one gesture, which is something like this. The custom is in three parts. That doesn't require two hands.

[11:26]

So you can do it. You can't one way. So it's just... And there's something slightly different about that. But what's also interesting is I've been doing that, I always do that for 40 years. And I sit right beside people and they don't do that. Maybe they think I'm crazy. Or maybe, I'm not going to do it that way, that's crazy. But I think actually you just don't notice or you think, oh, there's a way. What the hell does it make you do? A certain amount of impatience is natural. Zen stuff is driving me crazy. Anyway, and I don't like to point out lots of things that

[12:27]

You do as part of it that I notice people aren't noticing how it comes from the objects, not from some kind of rule. But I don't like the feeling in meals or any other time that everyone has these huge telescopes trained on my hands, exactly what I do. I start making mistakes right away. But at the same time, if I've been doing this with somebody for years, it's always surprising to me that they don't notice.

[13:48]

Some people seem to notice right away, though. Even if they don't notice, they feel what makes the logic of the object This is also to immerse yourself in the particular. So here I'm now going back to talking about dharma. This sense of dividing things into parts, really, to momentary parts, is the essence of Dharma. Mm-hmm. So we could say maybe we could also speak about a threefold object.

[15:05]

This, say, this microphone. It's on one hand just independent. If we just look at the object on its own, let's say, on its own or something like that. then it's twofold. It's independent and interdependent. But in terms of my perception, it's independent. Whether I notice it or not, it's doing its work. And then if I notice it, it's independent. Maybe a receiving object. I'm receiving the object. Yeah, I'm receiving the object.

[16:10]

So maybe we could say receiving attention. And then giving attention. I can give attention to it. Now this stick, which I like so much, it just sits on my, usually just upstairs on my shelf. Mostly it's quite happy being left alone. Sometimes it gets dusty. But when I have it like this, we can say I'm receiving attention. I feel it. It's quite strong. Now, if I give it attention, as I've often pointed out, it has a lotus blossom, a lotus embryo, I mean.

[17:29]

And it has a lotus bud. And it has a lotus seed pod. And it has a lotus bud. Seed pod. Don't you have seed pods in German flowers? I assume, but they don't tell their own names. Oh, they don't. Okay, anyway, this is a seed pod. And then where's the bloom? It's left out. And of course the bloom is the use of the staff. The bloom is all of you. So when I use the staff, I should make you all bloom. So when I give it attention, the staff gives me back a lot.

[18:48]

So part of this practice, this Dharma practice, is not just receiving attention but giving attention. And this is the act of Someone said to me, perception is creativity. All perception is creativity. But receiving attention is a kind of passive creativity. When you give attention, It's a more active creativity. Now the way you soften the edges of dharma, the way you develop your practice,

[19:57]

is this giving of attention. So let's take our posture. Dharma practice is to know our posture in parts. It's typical of Dharma practices. To give some instruction like I did of knowing the space of each part of the body. To feel the mind of the backbone, the mind of the spine. To notice your breathing. So this is a kind of, you could say in contemporary philosophy, a kind of deconstruction. There's contemporary philosophers debate about whether Japan doesn't need deconstruction philosophy because it's already deconstructed.

[21:09]

Aside from such a debate, we can understand this dividing things into momentary parts as a kind of deconstruction. And what happens when we do that? Or how do we reconstruct? We reconstruct through giving attention. We could say that the body when it comes back together is Buddha. So dividing things into parts is Dharma.

[22:25]

Then maybe the reconstruction is Buddha. So we need some, not just Dharma, we need some feeling of this, of Buddha as well. And the practice here of the bodhisattva, this bodhisattva practice is the reconstruction practice, we could say, is the practice of the paramitas. So you try to be generous. You see to the extent you can that you can practice generosity. You're reconstructing a Buddha. And you're constructing yourself in a way that you feel much better about yourself, in fact. So even if you don't feel generous you know this is the work of practice.

[23:40]

It's kind of good to feel generous. It's kind of good to give something away, what you really want. I gave my favorite rock away once. I've been trying to figure out who I gave it to so I can get it back ever since. So it causes me a little pain. Yeah, I kind of like the little pain. Where is that rock? They don't appreciate it, I'm sure. It would be better if I had it. Even such thinking like that is a kind of practice of generosity. And you practice, the first parameter is generosity, the second is discipline. Which means the ability to put practice into effect.

[25:05]

The ability to have an intention, the ability to practice wisdom. The ability to practice wisdom. To develop an intention. When patience is... you're not in a hurry. You have the patience to let things speak to you, as I say. You let things tell you when to act.

[26:06]

You let the path cooperate with you to find the way. And then the next is energy. And energy really means, again, I think the key to it is the readiness to act. The readiness to give attention. And then the last two are zazen or meditation and wisdom. And again, all of these things are, from the point of view of practice, a kind of dynamic.

[27:08]

If you practice generosity, Don't get involved in an argument with yourself about honesty. Don't get in an argument with yourself about honesty. I'm not really generous, so I shouldn't practice generosity. I'm only going to be really generous when I really feel it. Look, that's okay. But you know, if you're mad at someone, you shake their hand, even if you don't want to. Something nice happens when you shake their hand. Maybe not always. Maybe you rush in and wash your hand afterwards. But generally, something happens, even if you do actually shake hands. Well, this is a practice.

[28:24]

You practice in ways you can, seeing if you can be generous. And finding a way to make this choice of practice. That's discipline. And then patience. The patience of the path. And somehow that produces energy. And then we have a new power in meditation and in recognizing how things actually exist. So this practice of the paramitas is the perfection of the bodhisattva path. It's sort of interesting in our morning meal chant.

[29:25]

We say... I think it's interesting, too, we say... I don't have my reading glasses. And then we say... Shouldn't you say... If it's V, well, it's V. No, we make it like a W. Oh, you make it like a W. Yeah. Then should it be written with a W? No, we make it either like an F or like a W. Oh, I see. Oh, you can say it both ways? Yeah, if it's Sanskrit. Oh, okay. All right. So anyway, we take refuge in Buddha, Dharma, Sangha. And then immediately we divide them up into all these bodhisattvas and names of Buddhas. So someone asked me, why are there three jewels? But there's not just three, there's hundreds of names of the Buddha. And the Bodhisattvas.

[30:45]

And then there's the four unlimiteds. Or four immeasurables. Again, to practice, it's very similar to the beginning of the paramitas. To practice as you can, not force it, friendliness. Friendliness, kindness. And another one is empathetic joy. What's empathetic? Kind of feeling with people joy. To see if you can feel joy in other people's success. This is like the practice of maximal greatness, the development of a Buddha mind.

[32:18]

You notice someone you're feeling a little competitive with, or you didn't know you felt competitive with them, but then something good happens to them, and you think, well, why did it happen to me? So you actually say, I should be... You search in yourself to see if you can find some joy in their success. This is a good thing to do. It softens us up. And the other two are compassion and equanimity. So if you want to Find a way to open yourself to practice.

[33:29]

And to open yourself to what happens when you practice the Dharma. When you take refuge in the Dharma. which means to have faith in this practice of looking at things in their particularity. You have faith in or trust in immersing yourself in the particular. And now, in a like manner, you have faith in or trust in immersing yourself in the paramitas. And immersing yourself in the practice of friendliness.

[34:35]

Of empathetic joy. Of compassion. Compassion is to feel joy through others. I mean, empathetic joy is to feel joy through others. Compassion is to feel how people actually are, particularly how to be able to suffer with them. What's compassion? To suffer with them. And more deeply, then I think you discover how compassion more thoroughly when you are willing to suffer in their place.

[35:49]

You feel a real willingness to be in their place. And finally, of these four, equanimity. To feel like the Buddha here is all gold except for his hair. The Buddha's clothes and body are both gold. A kind of sameness comes through. This feeling of sameness. This feeling of mind on everything.

[37:03]

Of bringing yourself equally to everything. And it's the opposite of desire. In the middle of the twelvefold desire. sequence, path of origination, co-dependent origination, is desire. is preference. And here we're trying to bring attention equally to each thing, whatever it is. Of course we have interests and preferences. But in a deeper way, this practice of giving attention, we give attention equally. So through the paramitas and the four immeasurables, you can see the practice of taking refuge in the Buddha.

[38:21]

All of Buddhism is about How we exist here. Yet each of us is independent. Yet each of us is connected. And it's not so much felt as separation, but as spacing. Spacing. How are we spaced in this room? Is that an English word?

[39:22]

Yeah, how you're spaced, it means, oh, let's put three people on that wall. So it's a kind of connectedness and spacing of the parts. Anyway, it's some kind of feeling like that. And how does this connectedness flow? How does this connectedness flow? It flows through the parameters and the four immeasurables. And recognizing this flow through the Dharma, and flow through empathetic joy and compassion and equanimity is also to then I would say that we could say that's taking refuge in the Sangha.

[40:37]

It's knowing each person in this way and in particular knowing each person through the Dharma, which recognizes our larger bodhisattva body. The Dharma opens up into the bodhisattva body of the Sangha, And the Buddha body of you yourself. So we can think of the Dharma as understanding the world. And the Sangha as other people. And the Buddha as yourself. Or the potential of yourself. And please, if you want to understand it as the potential of yourself, that only has power when you understand it as the potential of each person.

[41:50]

When I bow When I bow, when you bow, you bring your forehead down. Then you bring your forearms down. And you bring your shin bones down, your knees and shin bones. These are three parts. You also have a feeling of plunging into the bow, disappearing into the bow. And as you plunge into the bow, as you get up, you feel you're lifting up the Buddha. Sometimes we say on your hands. So the bow is made up of parts.

[43:03]

Forehead and forearms and knees and shin bones. And your attitude, your feeling, plunging and lifting. And yet there's one bow. Taking refuge in Buddha, Dharma and Sangha is somewhat the same. We can in fact have different experiences. The world is in parts. And we can notice it in parts. And we can decide what parts we notice it in.

[44:04]

Wisdom is a teaching of noticing what parts to notice. So we can notice other people. Also können wir andere Menschen bemerken. And we can notice the world. Und wir können die Welt bemerken. And we can notice ourselves.

[45:05]

Und wir können uns selbst bemerken. This funny thing, connected and yet separate and yet together. Dieses komische Ding, es ist verbunden, getrennt und dennoch irgendwie verbunden. So we can notice each person. And the world and ourselves. And we can notice them through wisdom. And this is to take refuge in Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. Sashin isn't over yet. And I guess, should I do more Doksans this evening? But it's been a wonderful Sesshin for me. So I won't talk to you too much anymore. Thank you very much for the way you practiced here.

[46:08]

We constructed something here. Is it Buddha, is it Dharma, is it Sangha? In any case, I take refuge in it. Thank you very much.

[46:27]

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