Jonas, Shuso, Sama, how are you feeling? So-so. And Dagmar, are you sick? Yes, a little bit. Oh, okay. Doesn't sound too good. No, I'm so sorry to disturb you. Oh, it's, I'm, you know, I'm not disturbed. I'm just worried. Yeah, so those of you who joined our practice period for this mid-practice period session, thank you for coming. And those of you in the practice period, thank you for welcoming the additional participants for the Sashin.

[01:02]

I mean, Sashin is a practice that grows out of intensification of monastic practice. But it also is a practice which grows into lay practice. And becomes in effect a foundational practice or preparatory practice for lay practice. practice in lay life. And we could say that sashin is a kind of offering. An offering ritual or an offering ceremony.

[02:19]

In which we offer ourselves our own forms to the forms of the Sashim. And that is what practice period is too, but now for the practice period participants we can more intentionally offer ourselves to the forms of the practice period and the sesshin. Those of you who have just arrived can join us in this and join yourselves into this offering. Yeah, now I'm still, you know, I'm saying some words.

[03:33]

And I will try to make these words more real as we go along more actionable so we're offering ourselves our own forms into the schedule and to the chanting and to the meals and to the sleeping time and to walking between the buildings and in this you have this you can have this feeling of offering yourself

[04:39]

Now you already are a field of forms. Just notice yourself. All the time you're creating forms. Thoughts to amuse yourself or thoughts to disturb yourself. thoughts about inadequacy or thoughts about superiority, likes and dislikes and impatience. These are all forms. And the most common form are forms of self-referencing. In Tibetan preparatory practices, there's five basic inner practices you offer each 100,000 times.

[06:03]

And there's the Vajra Guru mantra you offer in your lifetime supposedly 10 million times. Ten million! This sounds like a big number to us lazy Zen Buddhists. You probably make an offering to self 10 million times in your lifetime. Which is a form. A form you are generating for yourself. Selfish reasons.

[07:21]

More generating because it's the habit of the way we function and our language and culture function. So if we are an activity of forming mental and emotional and psychological patterns, could you say that again, please? if we are a field of forms, of mental forms, psychological forms, emotional forms, held together in various ways by our circumstances, but also held together by our ideas of

[08:23]

self and self-worry. And across the scope of Buddhism, there's some shared effort to try to create a way to release yourself from these self-forms. And Sashin as a form of offering is such a practice. And I don't You know, it's somewhat irrational to me, irrational. How did people figure this out?

[09:31]

How many million years have we been around? I guess we have time to sort of try out various things by trial and error. And we discover ways to feel our mutual space. Yeah. And one way to, and of course, in practice period, is one way to begin to know our mutual, our individual space and our mutual space. Und die Praxisperiode ist eine Art und Weise, unseren individuellen Raum und unseren gemeinsamen Raum zu kennen. And as you become more sensitive, you hardly have to be sensitive, you notice you have a shared space with each person.

[10:39]

And sometimes that shared space, or we can call it mutual space, has a negative cast or a positive cast. Or it has an open, connected feeling or a rather disconnected feeling. And practice period and sashin make us more aware of this. And by the end of our five-day sashin, And one reason sashins are five, minimum, usually seven days, is it takes some time to get a feel for this mutual space we have all together and with each other.

[12:08]

And to respect this mutual space. And notice that it's clouded or interfered with, inhibited by likes and dislikes. In fact, we're all living in a mutual space. Different cities, for instance, different villages have different feelings somehow. There's a mutual space in villages and cities. And one of the aspects of practice is to bring this more into your attentional field.

[13:20]

So moment after moment we're faced with in a Sashin in practice period with the schedule and doing things usually together and doing things according to a schedule, and in a particular, in a way particular to what you're doing, the chanting in Japanese or chanting in Deutsch. So you're, in effect, by deciding to come to Sashin, You're kind of letting go of your personal forms and personal habits.

[14:56]

And for these five days kind of offering your own forms into the field of changing forms. You know, when I listen to give you an idea what I mean by form, during the chanting in the morning. When you're chanting in Deutsch, I can hear your chanting more clearly than when you're chanting in Japanese. And so instead of just chanting a sound, you're chanting a sound, when you're chanting in your own language, you're chanting a sound which has a meaning for you.

[16:12]

So the sound has a form, a beginning and an end, and a timbre, etc.? Timbre, I don't understand. Timbre? Tempo? No. Tembre. Tembre. Okay. It sounds like the same word to me. Timbre. That means when you cut down a tree, you get out of the way. Klangfarbe, danke. Okay. Also, wenn du... Der Klang hat ein Anfang und ein Ende und eine Klangfarbe. Okay. So that... When you give the form of, you're adding to the form of the sound, you add the form of meaning, and it comes more precisely into the field of chanting. Then you add the form of the sound, the form of the meaning, and then it comes more clearly, more precisely into the field of reciting.

[17:25]

And I've always been taken by the statement in the Lankavatara Sutra. And I've repeated this often because it's been an opening for me to practice this. that the bodhisattva hears the syllable body, the word body or name body, and the phrase body. And this was almost as revelatory to me as the three bodies of Buddha, Dharmakaya, Sambhogakaya, and Nirmanakaya. And it suggests... a way of being in the midst of activity that assumes a slowed down awareness which is remarkable.

[18:48]

I mean, as you're listening to me now, or Nicole, to hear the syllables independent of meaning. That's what the sutra means. And to hear each word as a name only, and the horizontal power of that reaching... in all directions, the vertical power of that reaching in all directions. Before the verticality of the name becomes the horizontality of the sentence. and that each of these is a body, is considered to be a separate body. So in the sound of the syllable before, I never would have thought of this.

[20:35]

It took the sutra to show me this. But when I first read it in the sutra, Yeah, I've been practicing quite a few years by then and I recognized I already had a sense of this at least. So in the syllable body, you feel the body of the world, the speaking, in the sound. Before that body kind of morphs into the body, which is naming tree, horse, love, etc.,

[21:44]

Bevor dieser Körper in den Körper des Benennens übergeht, zum Beispiel Baum, Pferd, Liebe und so weiter. Noch bevor diese Worte dazu werden, ich liebe das Pferd unter dem Baum. So who, when you hear a few words, can hear it in that kind of slowed down, slow motion? Well, it is slow. We do live in this slow motion even though it's too slow for our consciousness. So we need to sort of learn, a practice becomes a learning to tune in the station of slowness.

[22:48]

Praxis ist eine Art zu lernen, sich in den Sender der Langsamkeit einzuwählen. To tune in the world which exists at wavelengths which cannot be conscious. So the syllable gains form when you add it, turn it into a name. And the name gains form when you turn it into the meaning of a word, as a word in a sentence. And now I'm not exactly suggesting you try to practice this.

[24:08]

It's outside the realm of ordinary intention. No, not intention, outside the realm of ordinary effort. But it is in the realm of intention incubated over time. So I use this example just because it occurred to me. of what I mean by we're constantly making forms which now we can offer into the forms of Sashin. One thing I love about the Oyuki meal practice, especially in Sashin, and and practice period, is for me the Oryoki meal has a beginning and an end, but no middle.

[25:18]

The middle disappears into a kind of timeless connectedness. I start and then next thing I know it's over. So in between consciousness doesn't really notice all the little different details. But you do it clearly. Consciousness doesn't really notice the end. Oh, you were done. Okay. Well, I was sort of done. I'm never done. Overdone. There's a kind of... You're the... you disappear into the flow of the details of the orioki practice.

[26:31]

And it becomes a kind of timelessness. And it's like Dogen says, the whole practice period is not really 90 days. It's something that starts and ends, and in between there's no time, or it's not the usual time. So this most effectively happens when you keep offering your self and selves to the forms of Sashin and just do it. Maybe we can, you know, it helps to have mental postures to introduce the offering. Maybe today let me offer you a phrase.

[27:44]

So the phrase can be, now inhabiting my attention. I don't like that grammatical structure. That's fine. But for me, you know, I say something, I don't know where it came from, and I sit and I look at you and you're challenged. How do I say that? And I don't mean to offer you a form which challenges you. Oh, well, do I? No, well... Okay. So we start... Afterwards we walk to the Hudson House or to the Johannes House. Maybe we should have Johannes House. No, I guess not. I heard some heads.

[28:48]

Anyway, we can say now... now offering, now inhabiting my intention, now inhabiting my attention, I walk to Johanneshof. Or now inhabiting my attention, I bow on the cushion. Jetzt meine Aufmerksamkeit bewohnend, verneige ich mich zum Kissen. Now, inhabiting my attention, I sit down for Zaza. If you get, I often say bring attention to, but maybe I think inhabiting attention is more instrumental, more effective.

[29:50]

Inhabiting my attention, I bring my spine, upright spine, into zazen. Inhabiting My attention, I inhale. Inhabiting my attention, I exhale. Inhabiting my inhale, I release my exhale. So you're discovering yourself in a field of forms and noticing when you have energetic holdings in your body or noticing when you have energetic self-referencing habits or habits of always having preferences.

[31:13]

by offering those forms by wanting to offer those forms you notice those forms and they more and more disappear into the field of forms What in Dzogchen I think is called the vast expanse. Everything all at once, the vast expanse we offer ourselves into. It starts with offering our own field of forms into the field of flow of forms. And as I've been speaking in the practice period Yuan Wu calls this vast expanse calls this inconceivable reality

[32:39]

And he equates the inconceivable reality with being the inexhaustible treasury. Now this is an extraordinary pairing of ideas. We can accept in a non-theological reality that reality is inconceivable. dass die Wirklichkeit unbegreiflich ist. Or a vast expanse.

[33:58]

Oder eine unermesslich weite Ausdehnung. But to also conceive of it simultaneously as an inexhaustible treasury. Aber das gleichzeitig auch als eine unerschöpfliche Schatzkammer zu begreifen. That inexhaustible reality becomes our treasury. Die unerschöpfliche Wirklichkeit wird zu unserer Schatzkammer. How do we get there? Wie kommen wir dahin? Yeah, practice the sheen. Praktiziere das Sheen. Enjoy yourselves. Praxisperiode. Genießt euer Dasein. Danke. God bless you.

[34:53]

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