Uli, Tenzo-sama, we're supposed to stop at 15 minutes. Well, it says on the schedule 5.30. 6.30 is dinner. 6.30 is dinner. So we can go up to 6.29. Okay, 6.30 is dinner, so we have a little time. Okay. Does anybody feel they didn't have a chance to speak before and would like to say something? For me, meditation widens my inner space and my perception changes. And this is... This happens even stronger in Sushi.

[01:09]

And quite a while ago, when I did this more, it felt sometimes like eating crushed cookies without eating them. Just looking at them. It was like being on drugs without drugs, which I felt was really amazing. I can do... It's less expensive. It's less complicated. And now when I sit, I must say I'm a very lazy sitter. But when I sit, it's often that my body remembers this posture, this whole hearing the noises more and all this.

[02:12]

And I learn through meditation to be able to... integrate more the opposite sides. It gives me some sort of base. Is it true that Mahakabe started sitting Zen before you? No. No? About the same time? I started earlier. Oh, you started earlier. But I remember... I mean, I was in Pune before he started. But I think he started sashims then before you. No, even that I did. Oh. He is more, I mean, he is, of course, maybe more sashim. Oh. You know, he is more, we have worked with him.

[03:20]

That's just more advanced. Really? It means it's more sashim. Yeah. I'm glad it's a joke. No, but I remember when you first did Sechins, it seems to me Mahakabe really wanted to do them, and you were like, this is a little too much or something. Well, I mean, I came from this Puna world. Which is a little different. Yeah, which is quite a bit different. And what I also wanted to add is that coming here or sitting with you and what is a very... A fundamental experience I had with Zen? That everything gets very pure and very to the very clear and Very clear and kind of short.

[04:35]

And also very sort of true. It just gets, everything gets pure. And you cannot do just happy, blah, blah, blah. Can you put all this on our webpage? And it's loud too. But it's very solid. I remember one sushi where I thought my ground gets... I mean, I lose any ground I can stand on. Or there is no ground where I can stand on.

[05:35]

And it took me a long time to integrate that in my life and to come back again to a sushi. It was a little scary at first. Okay, thanks. Someone else want to say something? Yes. Because it wasn't mentioned yet, Maybe for me the main factor why I sit is that I don't know why I do it. And I could name a number of arguments that were put up before, but they do not really say it.

[06:40]

That's what I wanted to say. You don't know why you sit. But it's very convincing why you don't sit because your wife has started to sit, your daughter has started to sit, your son-in-law has started to sit. This is a very convincing posture. Yeah, I'm going to try this out too. I don't know why I sit, you know. Actually, well, I do and I don't, yeah. Mostly just because I like it. Hauptsächlich vielleicht, weil ich es gerne mag. Yeah. So, I don't know if we need to talk about this more, but I don't want to interrupt somebody if they want to say something.

[07:51]

Okay. So we have... clearly we have the experience that sitting practice makes a difference in our life. And I think that it seems like most of us would agree that the You know, in English, the word institutional is kind of a bad word. But, you know, a sashin is an institution. It's a long name. inherited practice from my, think about, I don't know, I don't know, early in Chinese history.

[09:13]

Yeah, so we can say that it's an institution which, it's a way of doing things that that is helpful to our practice. And we did, as most of you know, many of you know, for instance, we did sashins at the house distiller a long time ago, in the 80s. So it helps to have some kind of room where you can do it. It helps to have pillows and a kitchen and so forth. So at some point we went from the House de Stille to here.

[10:26]

And I, you know, I've been doing this, as you know now, a long time. And I've inherited traditions about doing this. Und ich habe Traditionen geerbt, wie wir das tun. But I'm still exploring what does it mean to what kind of institution should we have. Aber ich erforsche immer noch, was bedeutet das, welche Art von Institutionen sollten wir haben. We don't want it to be too institutional. Wir wollen es nicht zu sehr institutionalisieren. Or too formal. But there's a certain feel and atmosphere that is particular to Zen that is passed along through the generations.

[11:35]

And it particularly emphasizes things like the food we eat, how we eat and that we carefully prepare food and so forth. Thank you, Uli. And a very important part, in a way as Carolina implied, is actually the garden. Thank you, Akbar and others. And Vimalakirti, the legendary lay teacher who had a small room where thousands of bodhisattvas could be.

[12:44]

And from Vimalakirti we get the idea of a genkan or a mystery gate, a room which has all dimensions. The entryway of every house is called a Genkan in Japanese. So it literally means something like mystery gate. It's simultaneously the inside and the outside. That's what we call in America, in Colorado particularly, the mud room. In America, it's where you take your boots off, but in Japan, it's where you take your boots and your shoes off.

[14:09]

And I like to make a parallel to we're calling our entry an entrance. But unfortunately the etymology doesn't support me. But it's a nice sound and trance. So a genkan, if it's well designed, anticipates the house, it draws you into the house. And And it's an expression of this in-betweenness, this liminal space.

[15:27]

And have all of you or some of you seen Doris Dury's movie Cherry Blossoms? Yeah, I hadn't seen it. Marie-Louise and others saw it two or three years ago when it came out. But she sent me a New Year's Christmas card with a little note, and I thought I should write her a note. So living in a monastic schedule, one of the disadvantages is you don't get a chance to go to the movies. Here the movies are, for some reason they are in German. And the American movies are in Deutsch, dubbed.

[16:43]

In France they're not. And in Cresto, any real movie theater is about 300 miles away, 200 miles away. So I buy quite a lot of films every year and watch two a year or three a year. So I've been carrying cherry blossoms around. They haven't faded, so I decided to watch it the other day. I thought it was an extraordinarily beautiful movie. I'm going to suggest it as a film for the mid-practice period ceremony at Celebration at Crestone. There's a tradition in practice period in the middle about we do something, we have a little party or we watch a movie or something.

[18:11]

Yeah. And so, anyway... And there's a Budo dancer. And what's his name? Tadashi Eno, I think his name is. Tadashi something, yeah. Who's the, I guess one of the main proponents or creator of Budo dancing. I noticed that he teaches or performs in Göttingen and Hannover once a year or something. Go see Gerald and see Tadashi.

[19:12]

Okay. And his organization is called VUMA. Emptiness and in-betweenness. And one of the things they do, and you can see it in this movie, this young Japanese Budo dancer speaks about it. is that she dances with her shadow. So she sees her shadow and then she dances with her shadow. And she says, the shadow, it's not me, but it's me. And that's the feeling throughout the movie.

[20:33]

And your shadow doesn't maintain your body shape. And so the feeling of moving or dancing with your shadow, maybe it's not so different from the feeling of moving within Charlotte's golden thread. Now, it's come into my mind to say something that I think is a little too esoteric, but maybe I'll say it anyway. I'm sorry.

[21:34]

I apologize. In advance. It's like these letters thanking you in advance. I think, well, that presumes I'm going to do what they want. It's very common in English to get letters thanking you in advance. What do you mean? I'm not ready to be thanked. I'm not ready to be thanked. You know, it reminds me of Ivan Illich, who you know is a good friend of mine.

[22:39]

He spoke very often about what he considered the misunderstanding of the story of the Good Samaritan. He said it's usually understood that who has to be or who should be your neighbor. And I think, as he would put it, Jesus was... asked, or he was, I don't know, was, who is your neighbor? And Jesus, I guess, said, no, no, I don't know the Bible, the person you choose to be your neighbor. And he speaks of the outsider who sees the

[23:42]

injured person. I really should, before I talk about this, I should have got the story straight. Anyway, I'm doing my best here. Supposedly, a priest walks right by this guy and then an outsider, a non-priest, sees this guy and his billet says, There was a turning inside him to the person and then he went and helped. And Illich emphasized, it's the free choice of who your neighbor is. There's nobody supposed to be your neighbor.

[24:51]

It's the free choice of who your neighbor is. Und Illich hat betont, dass es da niemanden gibt, der dein Nachbar sein sollte, sondern dass es deine freie Wahl ist, wer dein Nachbar ist. He said it's a choice, it's a kind of proportionality, what fits. Und er sagte, es hat was mit Proportion zu tun, mit dem was passt. And knowing Ivan very well. Und da ich Ivan sehr gut kannte, I'm quite sure he would agree that it's very similar when you put your hands together and you create a mutual space. Every time I bow, I choose to make this mutual space with you. And that choice is the power, not you're supposed to.

[25:52]

So with each person you make a choice to be a friend. And with each person it's specific and unique. Yeah, okay. Okay. Now what I'm speaking about is our relationship to the phenomenal world. And of course our sensorial experience of the phenomenal world.

[26:53]

And the key to all of this and all of Buddhist practice is the experience of appearance. The experience of appearance. And you've heard me speak about appearance a lot, especially the last few years. But we have the concept of a Buddha and of enlightenment and of a Dharma. And you could almost call Buddhism Dharmism.

[28:04]

You could call it Dharmism. And we call ourselves the Dharma Sangha. And the word Dharma basically means appearance. So even though I have spoken about it often, I can never use up the word appearance as something to speak about. So I want to to not speak too much about most of this. I want to find ways when we have more time to speak about it tomorrow. Is that our meal leaving?

[29:22]

Yeah. Oh, OK. Thank you. Or our meal arriving or starting to arrive. So today I'm trying to basically get us on the same page. Speaking about a random, randomly about a few things. But I think if you can get the feeling for dancing with your shadow, Or moving in relationship to your shadow. Or moving in relationship to the felt sphere of the body. the felt sphere of the body-mind, and the depth of our, as Paul said, unfathomable, ungraspable being.

[30:44]

And the, since I've been, you know, since I was speaking about Western lineages that led to what we're doing. Let me mention Heidegger again. And the lineage of Nietzsche and Husserl? Husserl. Husserl. Husserl, not E-R. Husserl. R-L. Husserl. This is hard for me. My face is shaped by English. It doesn't do those things. Yeah.

[32:05]

But sometimes I call them, along with Michael Murphy, broken lineages. Because they got so far, in many ways they needed meditation to take the next step. But You wittingly or unwittingly echoed Heidegger. Because he grew up in a world that was given. It was taken for granted that there was a world before this moment. So there was a world there, and we're here in it. Or there was a God-given world. God gave us the world. But Heidegger was part of a generation, including Herr Dr. Konsey, In which they realized the given world was gone.

[33:27]

And Dr. Konze, who created or brought to Western attention Buddhist Sanskrit, I'll try to be quieter. And did you spend much time with Kanzi when he was at the Zen Center? Yes, I did. We would come up, Rick Levine and I would drive up from Tassahara for one day during practice period. With Rick Levine? With Herr Dr. Kanzi. Yes. When I first came back to Japan, Sukiroshi said, I want you to study with Kanzi.

[34:32]

When I came back from Japan, Suzuki Roshi first said to me, I want you to study with Dr. Konze. And I first thought he was talking about Kanze, which is the main school of no chanting and dance in Japan. And first I thought he meant Kanze, the main school of no words. What? No, Kansei Kaikan is the main no school. And I did have, in some ways, quite a bit of contact with it in Japan. But I think I could do a little Budo dancing with my shadow, but I could not do no dancing. Yeah. I could start a number of jokes here. So I at some point realized he meant Herr Dr. Edward Konze.

[35:34]

And this led, actually, I got the University of California and Don Allen to publish the sutras in 15,000 lines and 25,000 lines for three years. The Prajnaparamita literature in 15,000 lines and the other in 25,000 lines. I'd met Dr. Konsei before I went to Japan. And I introduced him to Suzuki Roshi. And when I came back from Japan, when I introduced him to Suzuki Roshi, he sort of tested Suzuki Roshi.

[37:00]

With the emptiness of emptiness. But Suzuki Roshi passed the test. But when I came back, Konsei was very much into astrology. Chinese astrology and Tibetan astrology based on Mount Sumeru and Western astrology. So I think it was after I came back from Japan. I got Tsukiyoshi and Dr. Konze together again. And he looked at Suzuki Roshi.

[38:08]

And he said, pointing to me, he was born in March. He knew I was born in March. And he said, if Zazen can calm down a person like him, born in March, you've done a good job. He said, when I first met him, I must have not looked very calm, but anyway. So this is all to say, Konsei went to school with Heidegger. The same generation. And basically, he said, and Konsei said this too, he mentioned several people, but he mentioned Heidegger and himself. are a generation in which the given world was taken away from us.

[39:34]

And he said, that's what attracted me to the Majamaka Buddhism and to emptiness. So the question here is basically, there's appearance. What's before appearance? A given world or a no world? And what does the Heart Sutra say? I'm teaching appearance all the time, the practice of appearance. But what does the Heart Sutra say? No appearance. Oh, I have to quit. But what he's saying is not that there's He's saying that the Heart Sutra is teaching us that there's only the appearance of appearance.

[40:52]

And that's one of the deeper definitions of emptiness. Now what can be only the appearance of appearance? There's not even appearance. There's no substantiality to appearance. And there's no priorness to appearance. There's only the appearance of appearance. This takes a little time to absorb. Okay. Oh dear, that wasn't what I was going to say. It was esoteric. That was only noteric. So maybe I'd better stop while I'm ahead. So what I was going to say about what I said was sort of esoteric, I'll say tomorrow.

[41:58]

This is like the Mark of Zorro. None of you have seen the Mark of Zorro, have you? Of course, they see it in Germany too. He makes a Z. And then every episode, he's going over a cliff with a horse. Next week, episode 17. And you find the horse landed on a ledge or something like that. Well, so tomorrow we'll talk about esoteric Mark Zorro. Also morgen sprechen wir über das Zeichen von Zorro. Das esoterische Zeichen. I like words that start with Z. Mir gefallen Worte, die mit Z anbringen. So why don't we between now and tomorrow as much as possible and between now and the rest of our life practice with or see if we can develop a sensitivity to in-betweenness.

[43:43]

of knowing form and the nothing, the non-form simultaneously. And what I was going to say about your What you said is similar to Heidegger. With entities taken away, with the given world taken away, Heidegger said we're not talking about being because there's no entities. We're talking about the how of being.

[44:52]

Okay. Sorry. Thanks. Entschuldigung. Vielen Dank.

[44:55]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_75.52