Well, I'm happy to have another opportunity today. We failed yesterday together. I'm more me than you. Yeah, so I can try again. Yeah, sometimes I don't. I sometimes think, well, it was too much. I'll just go in a different direction. I think I'll stay more or less more in the same direction. Yeah, I spoke... I tried to use the example yesterday of the medieval facades, the whole building, the proportions of the building. Gathering attention. Because I know Japanese culture pretty well. Japanese formal language, and there's many levels of the language, the difference between the levels is attention.

[01:22]

The more formal levels have more complex endings and require more energy and attention. So the language doesn't say any more, but it gathers your attention. in a way more informal language doesn't. And now you just might have noticed my putting all my robes together and sitting down here. Now, imagine if I came in here in a spandex jogging suit. I'd look very cute. But I could sit down in an instant, no problem.

[02:24]

So, why don't I come in here in a spandex? Blue or shall I green? Which do I choose? Pink. Well, because, you know, I'm doing this, and this requires a certain kind of attention, energy. Now, in business, especially in the East Coast of the United States, you really... I don't know so much right now, but in general, you have to wear a suit and a tie to work. It requires more attention to wear a suit and a tie, etc., than other jobs. forms of dress available to us Westerners.

[03:28]

I'm going to have to look up the history of the male tie, necktie. They wouldn't put my picture in the high school yearbook because I refused to wear a tie. Everyone had evidence. Anyway, and then when I went to college, they refused to feed me because I wouldn't wear a tie. And finally they went along with a white silk scarf and long hair. Now I wear nothing but ties.

[04:29]

Huge ties. And I have no hair. I don't know what happened. And ties are really dumb. They cost a lot of money. I mean $100 or $200 for a tie. And then one spot of butter and it's finished. Here goes another one. So it requires attention. You can't drag this darn thing in your soup. Yeah, and you have to, when we eat with the Yoyoki, you know, silk, you can't wash these, they spot. So you have to really be careful. This is all about attention. The flow of attention. Yeah.

[05:31]

Now you could, if you wanted to debate this, you know, in the most creative business world in America, certainly California. And they may well wear spandex to work. Or black turtlenecks like Stephen Jobs. But they compensate very clearly by bringing attention to the body itself. Most of these companies have gymnasiums in them and sports facilities of various kinds. So there's a tremendous compensatory attention on the body itself. A fat businessman is not acceptable in California.

[06:34]

Anyway, So I'm just talking about attention. And attention is the most precious treasure we have. And maybe the most powerful transformative tool we have. So I'm starting with some basic assumptions or, as far as I'm concerned, facts which Buddhism emphasizes. And again, this is that attention is our most precious treasure.

[07:43]

and most powerful transformative tool. Every culture brings attention to things. Buddhism brings attention especially and first of all to attention itself. And what are we? We're some sort of person, I guess. Person means mask, you know, persona. But we're thinking, we're dreaming... Masks. Masked by our culture. And shaped and strengthened and formed and so forth.

[08:53]

Our activity. Our bodily activity. physical presence, all of these things we know through attention. These things are expressed through attention. Noticed and expressed through attention. And our activity more than anything else carries our attention. Embodies our, literally embodies and thus carries our attention. So it's through attention that we form our life. And it's through attention wisdom brought to attention that we can reform our life.

[10:10]

All that I just said is basic to all Buddhism, all Buddhist practice. It doesn't make any sense unless you understand it like this. Okay. Now, As I've often pointed out, your views shape your attention. As I've said... My mother used to say, I wish I had a nickel for every time I've cleaned up spilled milk. Do you have that expression in German or anything? Well, I wish I had a nickel for every time I've said this.

[11:18]

I have nickels. When you have the view that space separates, your attention and perception Confirm this. So attention flows from views and flows through activity. The most powerful course of this activity, like the course of a stream or something, I mean the most powerful course, like the banks or course of a river, is activity. So every time you have an outwardly directed impulse, Input.

[12:26]

Impulse. Our good practice is to turn that around and direct it towards your immediate activity. So every time you think I could, as I said, turn on the TV or go outside, you turn that impulse around. I mean, sometimes you do go outside, but you turn that impulse around to your actual activity. And if you do that, not to distract yourself, if you do that and stop the Going outside is a way of distracting yourself. And then you do go outside, you'll be more present to the activity of the outside. You'll carry your activity, no, you'll carry your attention the activity of immediacy.

[13:48]

And that then will awaken you to the activity of the outside. And that's very, very similar to why Buddhists make traditional Asian Buddhist outfit, outfits you in energy and attention. This is very similar to why Asian clothes equip you with energy and attention. And that explains a lot about the little details of the ceremonies we do and the Yogi practice and so forth. Now, what I'm trying to do here is also speak about how attention flows. Now, remember the little gatha or... statement I made last night, subtly entering the flow.

[15:09]

Kind of iconic Zen statement. Yeah, but what is the flow? It's the flow of activity and attention. That's what it means. Now you may want to do something else. You may want to goof off. Goof off? Goof off. Goof off means, you know, just fool around. Sounds good. But if you want to reform yourself, you bring attention to your activity. And goof off now and then. Okay. So like, I mean... Let's look at Japanese cuisine.

[16:25]

Because we're sort of eating in a sort of half-Japanese way here with the yoyoki. There's one activity and one assumption that's behind all of Japanese cuisine. The activity is that the delivery point is chopsticks. And the assumption is that the food is mixed in the eating, not in the cooking. I don't know any other major cuisine, or certainly international cuisine, which is mixed in the eating and not in the cooking. French and Chinese food is clearly mixed in the kitchen.

[17:29]

cooked in the kitchen, mixed together, and then served. And the way we eat lots of things on one plate comes from Russia, I believe. The Japanese still stick to eating one little thing at a time. Okay. Okay. So, if the delivery point is the chopstick, you can't serve a T-bone steak. There's no way you can eat it. You're not allowed, supposedly, you're not allowed to poke things with your chopstick, and you're not supposed to use your chopstick as spoons. But we don't know how to cut vegetables, so you have to use your chopsticks as a spoon.

[18:42]

But if you grow up eating all your life with chopsticks, You've had a thousand experiences with a carrot cut that way. And when you pick it up, it squirts out. Splashes in the soup. So when you're cutting, you're cutting parallel. Because that's the only way a chopstick can pick something up. And you don't stop and think, oh, it takes too damn long to cut it.

[19:43]

I'm going to just cut it. Because you know, then it's going to splash in the soup. Yeah. It's very very very rich. Sophia, she's trying to learn how to use chopsticks. You can't quite get it, so they give her, in the Japanese restaurant, they give her a rubber band to put around the one end. And then when it slips out, it really slips out with the gummy. Okay. And you don't serve shelled peas.

[20:49]

It affects the whole cuisine. Everything has to be cooked or prepared so it can be eaten by chopsticks. They don't even think about it. If you go to a western style restaurant in a Japanese hotel, they have the funniest ideas of what western utensils should look like. For us, our utensils are a shovel, Yeah. A saw. And a pitchfork. I mean, I'm not really trying to be funny, you know. Anybody else want to translate?

[21:56]

And the dish is an extension of the table. But with a chopstick, the dish is an extension of the chopstick. So the dish is part of the utensil which you eat. You pick it up and... So the chopstick influences everything. And it influences things like potters. The two or three most famous potters of the last century in Japan were cooks. Because behind the restaurant, they made dishes for their dishes. If you make a particularly interesting thing and you want to serve it a certain way, the chocolate, you make a specific dish.

[23:07]

pottery bowl and then that is what you put your food in. And it influences the farmer and the person who delivers the food because if you're not going to cook it or you're just going to present it, it has to look pretty good. It has to be pretty good shape. You can't hide it in the mixing in a big pot. As far as I know, the most expensive restaurants in the western world in London and New York and Los Angeles are Japanese restaurants. Because the presentation requires a a way the food is brought to you that it's flown in from Japan every day.

[24:34]

It's really expensive. In London it's about $600 a person. And in New York, it's $1,000 a person. Yeah, it's kind of crazy, but it's also that all these ingredients are flown in from Japan, so they look the way they're supposed to look when you're eating in Japan. So each thing you have is a little air ticket, a little baggage claim attached to it. Cut off the baggage claims and eat. Okay. So, but it does, when you go to Japan, you shop, the apples, the vegetables, all are fantastic. Many of, most of them, because they're going to be presented just like that.

[25:36]

You can't hide them in the cooking. So the farmers take a lot of care. Because what you see is what you get. Okay now this is just an example of a cultural decision to Mix the food in the eating and not in the cooking. And to eat with chopsticks. So those two things put them together. The kind of attention that requires... flows to the potter, to the farmer, to the cook, etc.

[26:40]

And it results in literally hundreds of different things people eat, many more than we do, because each thing is separate. So you think of, oh, another separate thing, or let's serve this one uncooked. Mm-hmm. As you can tell, I like Japanese food. But that's not why I'm speaking about it. It's just because we're eating sort of a Japanese way. We have to think about how do you get this food served and then able to be eaten by chopsticks.

[27:46]

And we do very well. Sometimes our carrots are pyramids, but on the whole, we do very well. Yeah. Okay. So you can see here how attention flows in activity. And if you change the view, it begins to change you change the view from which attention flows, it will shape everything in its course, in its path. Okay, so you're bringing in practice certain views into your... Yeah. mind and activity.

[29:03]

And on a more or less regular basis you try to let that view in the form of attention flow through your activity. And it can fundamentally change your activity. Eventually you can find you can switch to the views you were born with and see how that activity flows that way. Or you can see how attention flows through the view that there's no thingness. That there are no entities. It's not just flowing through activity.

[30:03]

There is only activity. So as attention shapes activity, activity also shapes attention. So practice is a form of views as the source of attention and activity which helps that flow of attention. And you can find yourself in a rather different world than you were born in or than you're used to. And that can be sometimes a little disturbing or disorienting.

[31:03]

Okay. So we need to take care with the source of attention. And wisdom or the Manjushri position is put to pull all that attention in. And when fully done, we call that the Sambhogakaya body or the bliss body. Hold it into your attention. Into your breath. Now, the little statement I made last night. Which is, you know, based on my talk yesterday.

[32:08]

And based on also Koan 55 from the Blue Cliff Records. Where Dao Wu is with Yuan Qian. They're going to visit a parishioner's family. One of them has just died. A very common thing for a Chinese or Japanese Buddhist monk or priest to do. And Yuan Qian goes up to the coffin and knocks on it. Alive or dead? And Da Wu says, remember Da Wu, Da Wu and Yan Yan and the sweeping and all that stuff?

[33:09]

Those are our ancestors. And Da Wu says, I won't say. I won't say. So he asks, Yuan asks, why won't you say? I won't say. So after the memorial service, they're walking back to the temple. Johan says, Why won't you say? I'm going to hit you if you won't say. He says, even if you hit me, I won't say, I won't say. So he hits him pretty hard. I guess there's blood and so on. These guys were serious about this stuff, you know? So Dawud says, you better clear out, the Eno is going to be really pissed off that you hit me.

[34:18]

So he goes to see another teacher and tells him the story and the other teacher says, I won't say, I won't say, oh God, I'm an old Buddha. Okay. So subtly entering the flow. The flow of attention and activity. Responding to the 10,000 circumstances. Responding to myriad things. Although there is not a single thing, there's no entities. There's no thingness. Although there's not a single thing, directly, each thing is... taken up.

[35:31]

And in this line, the word thing means the object of attention or noticing. directly is taken up and asked, what is it? So it's not just passive. Everything you notice, what is it? This is a dynamic of this flow of attention. Even though there's not a single thing, each thing is taken up. And then where concepts don't reach, nothing is hidden. It's concepts, cultural concepts, views, which hide the world from us or reveal only part of the world to us.

[36:41]

where concepts don't reach, where you don't reach for concepts for explanation, and where even the subtlety of the flow can't be caught in concepts, then nothing is hidden. Okay, thank you very much.

[37:36]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_71.24