I started to speak about earlier what I called the relic stream. Or the material stream of Buddhism. And I implied or started to say that Sukhiroshi certainly visibly and physically brought us sitting practice. But I didn't really say what I meant by the material stream. But I meant something like you ring the bells yourself.

[01:02]

And when Europe was more Catholic, from what I know anyway, the bells rang, the bells of Christendom rang out the time But church towers were also fire towers. And so the fact that the bells rang in the middle of the night meant that someone was up there observing if anything caught a fire. So the bells indicated the presence of a person. And in a traditional monastery in Japan, one that's big enough at least, There's different bells and different drums and different instruments for different buildings and different activities.

[02:36]

So throughout the day you can feel, oh, While we're here, I hear the drums start way over there. That means that's that building and a particular activity is starting. You're in the physical presence of the world, the activity of that part of the world. I notice when I type on my computer that if I am going to type K-N-O-W to know something I often type N-O Which isn't what I mean.

[03:49]

But sound is more physical than thought. So I type the sound of the word know before I type the meaning of the word k-n-o-w. So even, and I could give other examples, but even in something like the mental activity of typing something, thinking about what to say about something, Even as the thought, the physicality that's in the sound reaches my fingers ahead of the idea of K-N-O-W. Then is the sound, so to speak, the physicality of the sound, my fingers reach rather than the idea of this K-N-O-W, of knowledge.

[05:05]

So, Snooki Rishi really brought us as much as you can without transporting a monastery. The material stream of this tradition surprisingly the soil of which practice often most fully flourishes and blooms. And surprisingly too in this material, this traditional stream, We can find our seat, but also it's where our own individual and personal practice often also most fully flourishes.

[06:16]

What is the material stream? Of course it's things like Bells, Zafus, Zabutans. A way of giving a lecture of a Tesho. Yeah, and the whole idea of always face-to-face teaching. Yeah, I'm always struck when I'm in Zurich. How Protestant it is. With these huge clocks. That's a mental event. The bells are a physical event. So the bell tower becomes the clock tower.

[07:26]

No, it's a more mental... Protestant, if you look at it, it's a shift to a more mental world, is the Reformation. Mm-hmm. So we're concerned with the physicality of the mind. And as I've often said, one of the first things that really struck me is when, sorry to tell the story again for you, is when Sukhiroshi, somebody asked him, what's it like to be in America? I don't know what answer the person expected, some touristic, I think you say in German, touristic answer. But he said, oh, that you all do things with one hand.

[08:31]

And pass the salt. Oh, here. Then when he said that, I started watching him, and he would pick up the salt like this, and he'd turn his whole body, and then he'd pass the salt. And in a way he's giving himself, passing his presence, not just the salt. Makes me think of that teaching movement you mentioned the other day, Julio. Yes. So when you see that, it's obvious why Chinese and Japanese folks don't put handles on cups. Because it's expected that you do things with two hands. And as soon as you do things with two hands and in relationship to the body, you're actually relating to the chakras.

[09:51]

And he particularly brought us, kept for us, the orioke practice. And the way we wear robes. And how you use your whole body to take them off and fold them up. It's all a kind of origami practice. How you fold the robe, how you do the eating bowls. And it's many aspects you really can't learn. Somebody has to teach you because the folds are like making this. You almost can't do it by yourself. Thank you. Even with directions. You have to have somebody sit down face to face and show you. You fold this and then you do that and so on.

[11:07]

So we make our own raksas. This was made for me by Otmar. And he said, never again in raw silk. It's hard work. He really did feel he had to bring this material stream of our practice as well as the physical practice of zazen and mindfulness And it's in the physical or material stream where you can most clearly see the difference in worldviews. So that's it.

[12:22]

I just wanted to finish that since I mentioned it before lunch. Now, Giulio, maybe you could say your question again. I wonder how... What is meant about realizing that apart from a world of permanence there is also always existing at the same time a world of impermanence? Or it's more saying the world of impermanence is not really existing, only the world of impermanence exists? Deutsche Bitte, again. It's definitely saying that only the world of impermanence exists. But the world of permanence is used energetically as a way of realizing enlightenment.

[13:38]

Could someone bring me maybe Yosef the flip chart here somewhere? Thanks. Hello? Look, Jerry. Okay. To think the world is permanent, which is our kind of natural habit, it's not just Western culture, you know, it's the way human beings need to function. Also zu denken oder zu glauben, dass die Welt beständig ist, ist nicht nur eine natürliche Gewohnheit, es ist nicht einfach nur westliche Kultur, es ist auch eine Notwendigkeit, so zu funktionieren.

[15:16]

Yeah, the job of, one of the jobs of the self is to establish a sense of continuity and hence implicitly permanence. One of the tasks is to create a feeling of continuity and thus implicit consistency. But within impermanence is established the sense of emptiness and form. But form as relative or interdependent. These are kind of slippery ideas.

[16:36]

We have to have a context where we can feel them. So let's call this the imaginary world. And this relative. And this absolute. So what happens when we practice is that we, no matter what you think about it, you still really function as if things were implicitly permanent.

[17:51]

Which is called the world, the imaginary world. This is the Yogacara teaching. Now, we can take various things by imagination or we can call it delusion. Think things are permanent. Okay. It also means everything that's in your world that would not exist if you died today. All the things you thinking about doing tomorrow, etc., you die today and all those things don't exist anymore. So this means the sense of permanence, the sense of a real future, you know, that we do it.

[18:56]

A future we identify with, not just plan for it. Eine Zukunft, mit der wir uns eben identifizieren und nicht auf die hin wir planen. Okay, but then you start to practice. Dann fängst du an zu praktizieren. And practicing you have more of a sense of the world is interdependent. Ohne dem du praktizierst, hast du mehr ein Gefühl von der Welt als voneinander gegenseitig abhängig. And even interpenetrate. Und sich auch gegenseitig durchdringt. So, you know, we start here and then we're practicing and pretty soon you're over here. And you have a sense, again, of an ecological way of looking at things.

[19:57]

But you can't stay there because your friends and your job and whatever, it draws you back into the world that you imagine, mostly a mental world only. And then you go back again, you know, like that. And you go back. And each time you go back, over a period of some years, This gets more and more difficult too. It clearly doesn't compute for you. You don't feel it in your body. And then it pushes you to break into the Absolute. Good luck. But this is really understood to be a part of practice and kind of the energy of this movement actually can result in enlightenment.

[21:14]

Ushi, you had something you... Oh, you can say it. It's okay. This morning I thought, what for is this, all this, you know, identification with everything and the world good? Isn't it enough just to be Just to be alive. Just being. Just being. No. German, please. German, please. The answer was no. As I say, Sophia taught me that nine isn't a number.

[22:41]

Now she's speaking local Black Forest dialect. Nay, nay, she says all the time. I don't know if that's dialect, but she says nay, nay. Okay. but I also take your question statement to mean do we need all this stuff I'm presenting you don't mean that oh really well I took it as meaning that so I'll respond to that even if you don't Well, I mean, I certainly didn't articulate practice now the way, I mean, the way I do now when the first five or ten years I was practicing. And even if you didn't mean this, what I'm saying, it's always a question in my mind, what the heck am I doing talking about all this stuff?

[23:58]

And my practice was, you know... My basic feeling. Yeah, my shift to really feeling fine all the time, not having moods and so forth. Occurred a long time ago. So, yeah, so why am I talking about all this stuff? Well, if you come to a Sashin, I only give one lecture every day. If you come to a practice period for three months, I talk only once every two or three days.

[25:03]

I mean, in one seminar like this, you might get half a practice period. Mm-hmm. Well, in a practice period I can go at the pace speed at which, God's speed, at which people can practice it. So I can go pretty slowly. Because we're all going along together. But here I have a feeling of, in a way, debating your future. I'm debating in myself the problems I see with a teaching.

[26:12]

And I'm presuming that at some future point you'll say, geez, that doesn't make sense. And then maybe what I've said will come up. And as I've practiced, you know, things I've realized, the more fully I practice them, then I have things come up. But does this make sense? And I've taken on the sort of task to put into English as much of Buddhism as I understand. experienced and understood.

[27:17]

Again, because there's enough of us that we all enter from different places. But what I hope when I speak is that the one or two things that catch you, you stay with. But I want to create here a text and texture of practice that you can kind of feel goes in all directions. Let's go back. If you can just be, that's enough. That's not so easy, though.

[28:19]

If you can just be at ease. Deeply at ease, that's enough. You find your ease sometimes, if you're a sitter, you find your deep ease sometimes in sitting. And it gives you a sense of really being alive. Even a measure for what aliveness is. But then you find through practice obstacles to that ease, and even deeper kinds of ease.

[29:19]

Maybe find you, in the end, there's some dis-ease, which is because you identify yourself in the world a certain way. Vielleicht findest du auch also eine... So if you can just be or just find your ease or make that your practice, that's enough. Does someone else want to bring something up? Yes. How do you feel about this practice of getting involved in the immediate reality now?

[30:30]

To get into the here and now-ness, I had I came up, what I had is to take every breath as a first breath that I found helpful. Mixed up a little bit. Mixed together. Because breath helps to store it. Yeah, okay. Try last breath. Okay, this is the last breath. It wakes you up too. But yeah, exactly right.

[31:35]

You take something like that and bring yourself to it. That's really at the center of our practice. Okay. Can you hear him in the back? When I have in my head the theme Buddha nature and now it's about speaking and the right way of dealing with terms and ideas, The idea evolves.

[32:37]

Who or what is speaking? Is Buddha nature speaking? Is Richard speaking? Is Richard Baker Roshi speaking? Oder alle zusammen, or all together of us. Danke. You're asking, what do I think about that? Well, in a way, I hope that Richard Baker isn't too separate from what I'm talking about. But the extent to which I am Richard Baker, when I feel that or have some identification with that, yeah, I've... some kind of social sense of being with people in normal, usual circumstances.

[33:56]

Yeah. And when people ask me, are you Baker Roshi, you know, for example? I don't... I'm not trying to give a Zen-y answer when I say, which I usually do, oh, sometimes... Because that's actually what I feel. Yes, sometimes I guess I'm somebody called Baker Roshi. But do I feel I'm Baker Roshi when I'm speaking to you? I actually never think of myself as Baker Roshi. I think of myself sometimes as Richard Baker.

[35:01]

Sometimes I think of myself as Dickie Bird. There was a morning when I was trying to jog and I'd get tired, so I used to be able to just go out the door and run ten miles without even thinking about it. I mean, without any preparation or jogging experience. Now after about 100 feet, my body's feeling like lead. It did get better. And I found myself saying, come on, Dickie Bird, you can do it. But Baker Roshi, I don't know about. But I do know that when I'm speaking with you, I have a very strong bodily sense. And I really sort of suspend thinking.

[36:04]

I'm not thinking much while I'm speaking. I suspend my thinking and I have a sense of breathing with you. Yeah, a conspiracy. Conspiracy means to breathe together. Anyway, I have a feeling of some breathing with you. And letting that tell me what to say. And within that breathing, I'm sorry to tell you these things, but I said even giving a lecture has part of this material stream, this physical stream of Buddhism. And this sense of breathing with you sometimes has a lot of variety, a lot of...

[37:06]

territory to it. So in this, the background of this is for instance I would say that consciousness is actually a feeling. Awareness is a feeling. Emotions are feelings, of course. Feeling is at the root of our thinking. And I think thinking has more power, depth, consequence... when it's rooted in feeling. The more thinking is divorced from feeling, the more inconsequential the thinking is. So for me, I... Yeah, but when I'm Richard Baker, I don't do that.

[38:41]

I mean, I think it's not polite. It's a kind of invasion of your friend's... person in privacy. And the difference is whether you take the Buddha position or the Bodhisattva position. If you take the Buddha position, then you always, as much as possible, and it is possible, stay in a mind of, you know, pretty much imperturbable mind. And traditionally, you lead a fairly protected life when you do that. You read about some teachers and you realize they couldn't... survive without a temple around them, people feeding them and so forth.

[39:47]

And they're probably not married. But if you're married and you have a job and you have to argue and establish something and make somebody else feel bad, you can't do that and maintain a certain kind of mind. So the bodhisattva position, which is more fundamentally what Zen is about, we say being in the weeds, you you try not to sacrifice your state of mind, but you don't protect your state of mind.

[40:53]

And you find yourself able ideally to return to your sense of stillness. So I mean, what do I mean by return to stillness? Yeah, a couple of examples. If you look at a tree, And the leaves are blowing around. Maybe it's a pretty big storm, even. But if you look at the leaves carefully, if you feel them with your own stillness, You can feel the trunk of the tree in the leaves. You can feel the roots in the leaves.

[41:58]

And the leaves are always returning to the stillness of the trunk. In fact, otherwise they blow off. So even when I'm Richard Baker whoever that is I still most of the time feel this trunk or rootedness often in my breath. You're not saying this because we're trying to do this together. I'm just trying to share and make clear what our actual experience of practice is. Anybody else want to bring something up? Yeah. I'm still at the drawing.

[43:00]

What I find quite difficult is to keep trying to get into your own world and to experience again and again that you are being pulled back from normal life. This attempt to do it over and over again, at the end of the day, is what leads to enlightenment. For example, we do not strive for enlightenment, but rather buy it. Is my trying to move from the imaginary to the relative world, being pulled back and moving in again, is that which eventually brings me to enlightenment, although I don't sort of hunt for that? That's right. That's right. And if you have a gaining idea about it, it interferes. It's the dynamic that occurs when you perceive one kind of world and you perceive another kind of world, and what happens when that... Is this pain or this torturing pain or this suffering necessary for that like it is said in Christendom?

[44:40]

Well, I don't know about Christendom, but, yeah, suffering is suffering. And I always used to, when I, around the Zen Center, people always used to say, anything bad happens, they say it's good practice. I think that's nonsense. Suffering is suffering. But there's no question that, for instance, the suffering or extreme discomfort that one feels in sitting posture It's a real shortcut to a certain kind of imperturbability. Because in the midst of every cell in your body telling you, move those legs, what the hell are you doing here? When you just, you know, stay there.

[46:21]

You're not going to die, probably. It's not sure. But then suddenly, like magic, it can all clear up. And you find a little tiny area of mind which doesn't turn all this discomfort into suffering. And you lose it. And maybe for some people it happens or just occasionally in a sashin for one period or ten minutes. But if you continue, suddenly this little sliver of mind, you can establish yourself in it.

[47:22]

And you don't let physical pain flood you. Does that make sense? It's just physical pain somewhere. It hurts here, but it doesn't flood your whole body. Yeah, so that's a kind of shortcut to recovery. Finding a mind that isn't easily disturbed. But certainly the, I would say not suffering, but to actually suffer the world, to experience the world in the sense that suffer means to experience. And the word zen actually means to absorb, or absorption. So, I mean, you absorb your life, you absorb the experience of what happens in this world. And that's certainly a mature... It's a mature issue.

[48:46]

But you don't have to go looking for suffering. So... Until now my body was an important teacher for me and I learned to listen to it. And now it is like you said, sometimes what my body shouts or calls at me not to listen to it.

[49:47]

And it is difficult for me to believe that because I lose a security and a certainty which I had before. That was my greatest sort of certainty or security. You mean when you listen to, don't listen to your body because it's telling you to stop sitting because it hurts. Is that what you mean? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. For example, my leg gets numb and everything's telling me, move it. I've had that experience. I'd heard about some Tibetan teacher when I was younger who sat so long he lost the use of his legs. And they just would pick him up and carry him to different locations. A little bit like those poor people you see begging sometimes on little trolleys.

[51:05]

And I used to think if I knew a doctor friend He could remove all the nerves from the waist down and I could get a little trolley and I could push myself. Anyway, but after a while I learned not to listen to my legs but to listen to my backbone. Aber in einer Weile lernte ich, nicht auf meine Beine zu hören, aber auf mein Rückgrat. Mein Rücken sagt mir, bitte bleib sitzen, zum Teufel mit diesen Beinen. Und ich höre schon noch auf meinen Körper. But if there's actual physical damage occurring, which some people do damage themselves, you should know the difference. Because some people do damage to their sciatic nerve and things, and it takes a long time to heal. Okay. Yes, Giulio?

[52:06]

I still have a problem with this permanence-impermanence. When I look at the chart, I feel that the Absolute means the coexistence of both. And to me, what draws me to Zen practice is that it's an empirical thing, and it feels strange to hunt for proof that everything is relative and then to deny all the obvious that there is permanence. There is not permanence. Tell me one thing that's permanent. Oh, Deutsch, Deutsch. It's permanent that we have to. . Can you give me one example of something that's permanent?

[53:38]

It's not, in a way, it's not fair. Oh, I'm sorry. No, because when you talk about relative, it's very subtle and very much about feeling and in the moment, you know, very slight. If I tell you that this is permanent, you know, you hear, oh, but I don't know, in 200 years the house is going to crumble, so obviously it's impermanent. And suddenly if it's about permanence, you know, it has to be permanent for all eternity. Yeah, that's right. I like it, I like it. Yeah, this is good. I like it. Well, you can decide that you want to view the world as permanent.

[54:48]

And if you make that decision you'll probably build in stone and steel and so forth. If you decide to emphasize the impermanence of the world, you'll probably build in a less permanent way. And to really kind of illustrate that, the Ise Shrine in Japan Which is the Vatican of Shintoism, if that makes any sense. And they, every 20 years, take the building apart and rebuild it. Because this culture emphasizes and illustrates impermanence.

[56:06]

And the main ritual act in ceremonies in Japan is to take grass, which represents impermanence itself. Every year the grass appears and disappears. Ten thousand grasses. You take grass and folded into something, like braiding or something like that. So it comes together and is an object.

[57:07]

And then at the end of the ceremony, you burn it. And it's clearly a kind of illustration of the four marks. It appears, it has a certain duration, and you burn it. If in 200 years this building is going to fall apart, it's impermanent. That's a fact. If the earth is going to disappear into the sun in so many hundred million years, it's impermanent. Now we can decide to establish a world of relative permanence. And it could be a very successful world. I don't say it's not. But it's still relative permanence. You can also then establish a world which emphasizes permanence. the relativity of permanence.

[58:20]

And if the emphasis is one way or the other, you have a different culture. But there's no scientist or anybody who really could say now that somehow there's permanence. So the question for us as practitioners is, even knowing everything is impermanent, do we still want to emphasize the permanence or do we want to emphasize the impermanence? In many things, I certainly try to emphasize the permanence. One of the deepest intentions of my life is to support those who continue practice.

[59:29]

Those who might play with my daughter's doll. But those particularly who will use Johannes Hof and particularly Crestone, I hope, in perpetuity, which means close to eternity. But when I live in the buildings in Crestone, and I'm trying to... We have now 250 acres. I'm trying to get a chunk of land which will be protected from the national forest encroachment and so forth. And if we can find the resources, I want to make the place beautiful.

[60:32]

Because I know that beauty survives. All the beautiful temples in Japan aren't torn down. It's only the kind of not so beautiful temples they tear down in the city. expands. And I picked a beautiful place because I know that people will want to protect a beautiful place. So everything I do is try to see can this place survive for hundreds of years. So that's some kind of relative permanence. But at the same time, living there, I think... Who's going to be playing with my dolls, my Buddhas, in my room in a hundred years? Probably some Jodo Shinshu Buddhist.

[61:47]

They won't understand Zen at all. Or maybe it'll become a conference center. run by Marriott hotels. So I think, oh, this might happen. So I do everything possible to design it that Marriott would never want it. So my effort to make it as permanent as possible is informed all the time by its impermanence. Now I think it's the permanent time for a break. But thank you for pursuing me, Giulio. And we can continue to. Would somebody do something about my numb leg?

[63:07]

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