Thank you for being here. Even behind pillars. I mentioned that the Greek idea of friendship is the affection that evolves through a shared vision. Yeah. I like this. And, you know, I just, in general, I see Most people, particularly men, don't seem to have friends, at least in the States.

[01:05]

Most men I know don't have friends. They have friendship groups sometimes to find out how to have a friend. There isn't much sense of, well, who's an acquaintance, who's a friend, who's a good friend. The territory isn't very clear. And so the idea of this supposedly Greek idea of friendship has in it the idea of practice. Mm-hmm. And certainly I think one of the definitions of Sangha is that affection or connectedness that evolves through a shared vision.

[02:08]

And that's certainly what I feel we're doing, I'm doing, and that as practicing and evolving a sangha. Yeah, I mean, in a way I feel my practice is a kind of stream and a stream that's, you know, in a way I inherited the sense of a stream and Yes, the practice of a stream from my teacher. And I feel that stream widens when I practice with you.

[03:49]

And when the stream widens, like when we do this, I find I learn a lot, discover a lot, through the wider stream, when this vision evolves through a shared affection or connectedness, the evolution, the evolvement of the vision also deepens. I think if more married couples had the idea of friendship as the evolvement of a shared vision, The transition and transformation from being in love to living together might...

[05:02]

have more of a sense of territory and practice in it. So for me, the continuity of this seminar is now that you're here is carried by you as well as me and for me even carried more by you than by me because I find the continuity of what we're speaking about is more in you than me and it allows me to find the continuity through you.

[06:27]

No, you know, why do I tell you this? I suppose partly it's that I think if we have a sense of what we're doing together, we can do it together with... Yeah, better. Yeah, so I also have mentioned the sense of the... between the verticality of words and the horizontality of words. Yeah. I mean, it's an important transition when Sophia goes from names, things as names, to they become words. They go from names to becoming words. And then she can form sentences and phrases and so forth.

[07:37]

But there's a... a power when we return the words to names. And as you know, the practice of naming what appears is a way of interrupting thinking. So naming practice stops what appears from turning into a concept in part of a sentence.

[08:38]

And when words are in the service of a sentence, are sentenced by a sentence, that's an English joke. When a word is confined to the prison of a sentence, it loses its verticality. And when words lose their verticality, they also... hide the thinking that went into the word.

[09:43]

How the word came about, which you can often feel in its etymology. But it not only... hides our thinking, hides the thinking in the words, the thinking and experience in the words, it also moves us right into our usual way of thinking, our habit of the present. So now we have this really quite extraordinary word, Buddha-nature, which I can assure you was a controversial word in the development of Chinese Buddhism. I had problems with it when I was first starting to practice.

[10:50]

I remember I asked Suki Roshi one morning after service, Somehow he walked me down to the front stairs of this old wooden synagogue. It was a synagogue. Synagogue, yeah, I'm sorry. He went with me for some reason to the stairs in this old wooden synagogue. I used to go by it when I was, before I met Sukirishi, and it has these funny little weird towers, and I thought, this is a kind of Kafkaesque building. And the towers were about as big as from here to Andreas. And I never, I couldn't have imagined that my, excuse me, Zen master lived in one of those little towers.

[12:10]

But he did, he lived in this little room, but not 10 feet across. So anyway, he came for some reason down To the front of the building, we were standing on the stairs above the sidewalk. And I said, I have, you know, first I told him, I didn't understand the Heart Sutra. And then I said, what is this idea of Buddha nature? And I said something like, isn't this the idea of God or soul in sheep's clothing? Do you have that same expression? Yeah, wolf in a sheep's clothing. Isn't this what I'm trying to get away from, disguised as a nice little Buddha nature?

[13:11]

A lamb of Buddha nature? Yeah. He stood there kind of quizzically and said, just be patient. It takes at least a year or so before you can really feel your way into the Heart Sutra. And he implied that Buddha nature, whatever it might be, might appear through practice. And although we say everyone is Buddha nature, that appearance, that knowing,

[14:13]

appears through our practice. Yeah. Well, does that... Yeah. I mean, if there's a house here... the house is here, but you might not have the key to it. Or you might not know where the door is. Or if you're inside, you don't know what the rooms are for or which room is where. This morning I went out for a little walk walk, run in the gardens here. And the gardens are certainly here. But I don't know. I mean, I got kind of lost and it was dark and I was looking for a sunny path and I was in endless... paths in the dark.

[15:39]

But then there were these pro joggers who knew exactly where they were going. Yeah. I have more sympathy now for old people who jog. I used to compare myself with the pros. Now I compare myself with the, you know, the old people. Somehow I lost it. When I went through last year, the operation and the radiation, I lost a lot of vitality. It's... So now I feel older than I was. But I'm not perishing yet, don't worry. So these gardens are here, but how are they present to us? So, you know, there's this phrase, be here now.

[16:58]

Created by Ram Dass, Dick Alpert, I believe. But what is now? It slips right by. It looks right what? Slips right by. It has the feeling of time. So I'm substituting for now, I'm substituting here, present. So I'm making up a word in English, here, present, as one word. And in that sense, I'm trying to come back to some, I'm trying to stop our thinking by

[18:02]

A word which has more verticality than horizontality. What are we going to do here present? That sort of stops your sentence. What are we going to do now? What are we going to do here present? Okay. So, In what sense is here-ness present? So I'm truly curious interested right now in the physicality of here-ness, there-ness, here-ness. When this person walks out of the forest in his

[19:03]

shows us that we're not lost. And we have a sense of the beingness, pure being perhaps of this person. There's a here presentness to it. There's a physicality to it. And I think that the more we have an experience, find ourselves in a physical here-ness, there-ness, we are closer to a real sense of being. Yeah, I think we lose the sense of being, our own beingness, when we think our world.

[20:32]

When we lose the physicality of the world. The here-ness of the world. When we don't find ourselves in the pace of how things actually exist. In the pace of our breath body and breath mind. Okay, so again, we have this question, what is Buddha nature? And it's central. It's a central idea in all of Chinese Buddhism, almost all Chinese Buddhism, and particularly in Zen.

[21:34]

It's not so important in Jodo Shinshu and pure land Buddhism, but still somewhat important. So if you're going to practice Buddhism and you hear people talk about Buddha nature, we ought to know something about what might be meant. I wonder if they actually ring the bells by a person or it's done by a machine.

[22:37]

It must be done by a machine. Yeah. They took you off the ground. Yeah, I mean, in Buddhist temples, Not always, nowadays maybe, but usually an actual person is ringing the bell. If we set up in Johanneshof a bell that would ring every afternoon at six o'clock, say, it would really be a Yeah, I mean, it's still a bell ringing, but it would be a mental event. It would signal that it's six o'clock in the afternoon.

[23:38]

But if we have to have someone every day, oh my gosh, it's almost six o'clock. go down and physically ring the bell. This is very different. And it's like we don't in schools, you know, when I went to school, The end of class or the beginning of something is and it's all done by some kind of machine. When we signal the beginning of zazen or meditation or the beginning of a ceremony or something, We have a drum or a bell or a wooden board.

[24:40]

And we typically ring it or hit it. over 15 minutes approximately. And it's not exact. It starts at a particular time. And it goes for seven minutes, one hit for each of seven minutes. And then one hit for each of five minutes. And then maybe three hits to make 15 minutes. But that's when the teacher or the abbot who is leading the service comes in. And it actually shouldn't be three minutes.

[25:41]

The The Abbot, or whoever it is, should be a little early or a little late, because it should be arbitrary. It should be an event, a physical event in the world. These small things that are the physical stream of a practice. I sometimes call it the relic stream. You know what a relic is? The enshrined bits of bones of the Buddha, for instance. The sense of relics... It's the sense of the continuity of being and non-being.

[26:48]

And of course impermanence. But also the continuous presence of of the teaching, of the practice. So in that sense, a physical copy of a sutra is a relic. And Suzuki Roshi, my teacher, not only brought us the physical visible practice. And I can tell you two anecdotes about that. One is he was supposed to speak at Stanford in a philosophy of religion course.

[27:52]

When he first came to America, he was invited to do this. And somebody drove him down to Stanford, which is somewhat south of San Francisco. And he went in and looked at the class and looked at the teacher. And the teacher introduced him. And he looked at the class and he said, would you please all stand up? Please move all the desks to the side, to the walls. And then roll up your sweaters and stuff like that and please sit down. And then he sat down and 40 minutes passed and he got up and left. That was perfectly all right with him.

[28:53]

He wasn't invited back. But that was perfectly all right with him, too. Another time we drove up from Tassajara and we stopped at a school which was kind of modeled after... That school in England which let everybody run around. Summerhill? Summerhill, yeah. It was modeled after Summerhill. And so we got there. I knew the headmaster, the founder of the school. And he'd asked me if I would ask Suzuki Roshi to stop and speak about Zen. So we Drove in and we found a place to park.

[30:04]

And there were cigarette wrappers and coke bottles and stuff like that. They were all over the place. It was a mess. So this time when Suki Rishu, after he was introduced... He said, I want you to all go out and pick up the grounds here. So people got excited about it. They spent the whole day picking up the paper. It took forever to do it. And I don't know, I was there and then we went to late afternoon, and met, actually, by chance, Ruth Fuller Sasaki. So we had a good conversation with her, and she happened to know one of Sukhreshi's teachers.

[31:08]

And not too long after that she perished. But anyway, I remember the day very clearly. And a while ago, last year or so, Norman Fisher, who we practiced together for a long time, and he's a good friend of mine, He said, I met a woman up in Seattle. I think it was Seattle. And she said, oh, I've been practicing for many years now. And Norman said, well, how did you get started? She said, well, I went to this school in... In the south of San Francisco. And this little Japanese man, Tsukiroshi, came.

[32:16]

And he had us clean up the whole place. And I was so impressed, I started practicing right after that. Yeah. Gary Snyder, who I mentioned last evening, the poet and one of the pioneers of Zen Buddhism in the United States. His teacher at Daitokuchi was close to dying. So Sukhiroshi went, I mean, Gary went to see him. And the teacher said to him, Gary, there's two aspects to Zen practice.

[33:25]

One is Zazen. And the other is sweeping the temple. And no one knows how big the temple is. And that... sense of the physicality of our practice is inseparable from the idea of Buddha-nature. I think we should take a break soon. You've been sitting and so forth. Let me say a couple of things. Last night I spoke about what we mean simply by the body. And what I'm trying to do here is, if we're going to look at this concept, practice of Buddha nature, this

[34:37]

way of identifying ourself or of experiencing ourself because let's say that Buddha nature must be some way to Find our place in the world. Or a place in the world or in our experience. So let's look at some of the other ways in which we identify ourselves or experience ourselves. Now notice that when I say this, we identify ourselves What? Ourselves. And Dogen says to study Buddhism is to study the self.

[36:05]

And to study the self is to forget the self. And to forget the self, Sukhiroshi translates as to be identified by all things. So, Okay, what is to be identified by all things? Now you may think this is, you know, perhaps too philosophical. But this is what actually we're doing. And if I use the sentence to be, how do we identify ourselves, how do we identify ourselves? ourselves? How do we identify our activity?

[37:06]

Wie identifizieren wir denn uns oder identifizieren wir unsere Aktivität? Now, what if we could say, how do we identify our non-self activity? Man könnte auch sagen, wie identifizieren wir unsere Nicht-Selbst-Aktivität? That would have more verticality. Das hätte mehr Vertikalität. How do we identify our non-self activity? Wie identifizieren wir unsere Nicht-Selbst-Aktivität? Now, if you said that, as many times as you've said, how would we identify ourselves, I think just the repetition in ordinary sentences as how do we identify our non-self activity would make us somewhat different. So we're talking about... That we can choose what mind we live the world through

[38:24]

Even what body-mind we live the world through, and if we can make such a choice, then it means that we have to find some way to make the choice and evolve the choice deepen the choice in ourselves and our language is sentencing us to particular choices So we really have to, if we're going to practice seriously, get out of identifying ourselves through our thinking and begin to really have a habit of identifying our non-self through our activity.

[39:40]

So as I said last night, when we do Zazen, we... begin to have a different experience of the body. In many ways. But one of the most dramatic ways, dramatic when you... really notice it, is that the boundaries of your body change. And at first it feels kind of like, this isn't, you try to go back to your usual boundaries. This is too weird or this is just a dream or just imagination. But we actually feel... I mean, simply when you can't find your thumbs, your boundaries of the body have changed.

[40:57]

You're sitting and your thumbs are kind of like... Sometimes you... You're not supposed to look. Where's my thumbs? Little mirror, you know. And you say, my thumbs have floated off. Where are they? Seems like there's infinite space between them. And finally, after a little bit of searching, oh, they finally touch. And I told you, Sukhirashi, English wasn't so good at first. And he said that we should put our thumbs together separated as if by a piece of paper. So I spent a year or so learning to keep my thumbs separated. just not quite touching with a little bit of electricity leaping across the gap.

[42:09]

It was fun. It was quite a good skill I had there. But then I found out that he actually said, he said it later more clearly, pressed together with enough pressure to support a piece of paper. I was doing it wrong all along. Anyway, just when you can't find your thumbs already, the boundaries of your body are where? Already the Dharmakaya is experientially present. The body as space itself. And after a while you do feel like There's still a location, but the location changes and gets bigger or smaller.

[43:30]

So if meditation makes us wonder what actually is the body, and is it stuff or something more subtle than ordinary stuff? Again, this is not esoteric. It's just a fairly common experience of those who meditate. And first we want to say, oh, it's just a feeling or something. But really, isn't your whole body just a feeling? So we can't really, if you meditate, even answer clearly, what is the body? And is there a boundary between body and mind?

[44:38]

And what is the mind? And what is the self? And soul, spirit, etc. And even those words for us have all been conflated into some kind of psychological sense of self. So if we can't answer those questions really, how can we answer what is Buddha nature? So what I want to try to do is look at these questions Not from the point of view of the various schools, one or another school of psychology. And not from the point of view of Western philosophical traditions, necessarily. But what is the self, etc., from the point of view of one who practices mindfulness and meditation.

[45:53]

And what is our experience of self then in relationship to the tradition of meditation practice and Buddhist teaching. Well, let's see if we can follow this stream after a break. Thank you very much.

[46:14]

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