Yesterday, I guess, in the afternoon, we had what I'm told in German is called, or could be called, something like a fire event. Is that right? How do you say it? Just about a fire-abend. Feierabend. Feierabend. Feierabend. I'm glad you see my incompetence every day. Gestern hatten wir, wurde mir gesagt, dass wir gestern Nachmittag etwas hatten, was ihr auf Deutsch Feierabend nennt. Feierabend. Feierabend. I guess it means a celebration evening or maybe a celebration afternoon. And I was told that it means a holiday evening or a holiday afternoon. Yeah? Yeah, no, I just, I said it as best I could. Okay, so a celebration afternoon.

[01:03]

It doesn't also mean something like I've had it for the day, I'm finished. I'm going home. Okay. Is it true in Switzerland and Austria too? What? You don't have it in Austria, I see. We have it, but we don't see it. Oh, this is good. Okay. Well, maybe, you know, somehow, maybe all the practice is a kind of celebration life, celebration day. Vielleicht ist alles in der Praxis sowas wie ein Feierleben oder ein Feiertag. Yeah, so I've been talking about, come on, 55 in the Blue Cliff Records, and also actually, come on, 88, looks like 55, 88, in the Shoryuken.

[02:08]

I've been trying to bring some words into our attentional activity, attentional space, like aliveness. Now, enlightenment may be something like a press release for Buddhism. You know like, here's a new electric car, you don't have to charge it.

[03:15]

The battery never has to be. It's a lifetime battery. This is enlightenment. Except there's a lot more going on than that. There's the road maps, you know, riding in the car. So there's letting out a continuous path. Insofern es gibt sowas wie das Herausgeben eines kontinuierlichen Weges. Letting out a continuous path, that's not good. It doesn't exactly fall only under the category of enlightenment. Dieses Herausgeben eines kontinuierlichen Weges, das fällt nicht direkt in die Kategorie der Erleuchtung.

[04:20]

Enlightenment does make practice easier. But that's the most you can say for it. I mean, and even in Japan, a young person has enlightenment, oh, they're ready to teach. Nonsense. They're ready to practice. And then there's the, like I repeated the best I could, that dream yesterday. There's a waiting in the garage for something to happen because you feel something could happen, but so you just wait in the garage and maybe for years. And all these koans, hundreds of koans, are not explained by enlightenment.

[05:24]

And all these koans, hundreds of koans, cannot be explained with illumination. It is as if one would stand in the garage for every single one of these koans, sometimes in the living room of the koan or in the kitchen of the koan. And you want to trust particular cause which catch you or befuddle you. The fuddle might be even more important than catch. And the fuddle means confuse you? Yeah. Okay. And just, you know, maybe much of your life you might stand in that koan. Like somebody who has a favorite writer, Conrad or Proust or Goethe or something, you might stand in the space of that writer in various ways all your life.

[07:06]

And as a book, when you read a book, I mean if it's a book worth reading several times, each time you read it, it unfolds, it opens up in new ways. And you can look at a drawing of Matisse or somebody, a simple drawing, and you can look at it over and over again, and quite different from the hotel room art. Oder du kannst eine einfache Zeichnung von Matisse, die kannst du dir immer und immer wieder anschauen. Das ist ganz anders als zum Beispiel die Kunst, die in Hotelzimmern hängt.

[08:09]

Yeah. And software programs, the more you use them, there's all kinds of stuff built into them. It's, you know, it's a maze. Oder Softwareprogramme. Jedes Mal, wenn du sie benutzt, dann entdeckst du noch neue, neue... And so, you know, you couldn't make a butterfly even if you wanted to. Or a housefly even. And a housefly, looked at carefully, Under a microscope, it's quite amazing. Well, there's a sense in when you're starting from infinity, not from zero. There's a sense that Allness is offering.

[09:27]

Allness is always offering. Nature, you know, I don't know, nature, whatever that is, nature offers us butterflies. Standing in the garage in a dream can offer us butterflies. experience that wasn't accessible before. So what I'm speaking about here in this koan 55 and Shoyoroku 88, seeing Buddha is not seeing, is how to stand in the midst of your life so life itself offers you what you, offers you realization.

[10:43]

Now, again, what I'm trying to speak about, and I've been speaking about it for a few years, is how struck I am by the real differences between East Asian and Western culture. And we can make some simplistic, useful, I think, distinctions. East Asian culture tends to be more holistic. Our culture tends to be more, again, to gross a distinction, but more analytic.

[11:49]

And they've done studies which show if you take an object that's familiar to Westerners, And you put it in a different context, which the Westerners still recognize. If you take an object which is familiar to a Japanese person, and you change the context, they suddenly don't recognize it anymore. These are real differences. And, you know, our culture is our nature, and then there's our second nature, which is culture. Everything is second nature to us. A baby before the first few months of its life can recognize and hear all the different sounds of all the different languages in the world as far as people know.

[13:11]

Yeah, but a Japanese baby up to about six months can hear the RL distinction that's in Japanese. a problem when you're speaking Japanese. The distinction isn't clear for us Westerners. But after the Japanese baby is a year old, they can't hear the distinction anymore. What's interesting is that people who grow up in a mixed cultural thing like in Hong Kong, they often can shift between the Western view and the East Asian view.

[14:19]

We're all from Hong Kong. I'm mentioning this for a couple of reasons. One reason is it gives us a chance to make a shift to another way of noticing. And it's the shift from one distinction or one view to another And it doesn't matter so much what the two views are, it's the shit that's important that is the dynamic of enlightenment. That's what all this shouting and striking and all, it's all about creating a shift when a person least expects it.

[15:21]

What was that? A butterfly. But also because this way, this more holistic way of looking at things, is the background of these koans. It's the assumption of everyone who's a protagonist or a player in these koans. And I think it's East Asian. I don't think it would be Indian. I think the koans are East Asian, not Indian Buddhism.

[16:39]

Yeah. We will have our own Buddhism. our own shifts. So this poem, 55, begins with secure and intimate within the whole of the holistic, the whole of relationality. Is the site of realization? That's an observation and a... I mean... A westerner wouldn't say, if you're just secure in the whole of everything, you're going to, yeah, this is where you're going to really get enlightenment.

[17:47]

But we wouldn't think of it that way. And the dynamic here is a kind of trust. Okay, so go back to aliveness. Maybe we could say attentional aliveness, but maybe we have to say contextual aliveness. Because it's the engagement with the context, which is immediacy in Zen practice, and it's the engagement with the context, which is met by secure and intimate with the whole of relationality.

[18:59]

We might trust in fate. But trust in fate is somehow... I have a fate and my fate and infinity. But this is not this kind of trust. It's a trust that infinity, which has produced all this, heaven, heaven is a word for infinity in Chinese thinking, which produced all this, has given you your aliveness. We may have such a trust in fate, but fate is a thinking of, I have a fate and then everything will be fine because of my personal path or something. But that's something completely different.

[20:03]

Here it's about a trust in infinity. And heaven is a word in Chinese for an exclamation for infinity, for all that which this living thing has produced. So in the background of these are koans, Chinese koans. Yeah, maybe not today's Chinese, but Chinese of the Tang and Song dynasties. What's the dynamic of trust? The trust somehow in this complexity The complexity of your bodily, you know, if someone said there's more going on in one second of your body, that more going on than all the things anyone has ever said and written in human history.

[21:03]

the complexity of your own body, as someone said, that in one second more individual things happen in your own body than all the words that have ever been written or said in human history. I mean, this is a very poetic calculation. There's no algorithm for it. Yeah. But again, as Yamada Mumonrishi, my teacher while I was living in Japan, said, a Rinzai teacher said, the most important single thing for a Zen practitioner is to trust that everything is working right now to make this moment possible. But as Yamada Muman Roshi, my Japanese Zen teacher, said, everything works together in this moment to make this moment possible.

[22:12]

Is this fake news or can we trust this news? Well, it's the news of the first line of this Quran 55. Well, maybe we can... Philip Whelan used to say, the poet who practiced with me for many years, used to say, if you don't believe it, fake it. Fake it till you make it. Yeah, something like that. Philip Whelan, a poet friend of mine, used to say, if you don't believe it yet, just do it. So can we kind of imagine this trust? And when I say bring an intention, have an intention to bring attention to your breath. Even that simple statement, and I say it because it's easier to maintain an intention than it is to maintain an attention.

[23:20]

But in koan culture, yoga culture, the intention is also rooted in a trust that somehow, if you have the intention, that makes things work toward the intention being realized. And even more important in the overall dynamic of practice is commitment. When your intention becomes a commitment to make this practice your life, there's an alchemy or chemistry or something like that that draws practice into you from everything.

[24:51]

You don't have to be in a cave high in the mountains with snow all around you and a tiger eating out of your rice bowl. Sounds good, doesn't it? You can just be living in Munich. Yeah, it's okay. Nothing wrong with Munich. It may be more dangerous than the Tide. Okay, so I'm trying to look at the aliveness which is rooted in, attentional aliveness rooted in the context. And what happens when you make an intention or even a commitment to be located primarily or all the time, most of the time, in an intentional contextual aliveness?

[26:04]

And to inhabit that aliveness, you know, moment after moment. I mean, it actually, and I think it could be measured if anyone tried to, it alters your basic neuroplasticity. Shifting your perceptual schematics changes you it in very fundamental ways if it's repeated. And this repetition has nothing to do with enlightenment, although enlightenment makes it easier.

[27:21]

Practice is a whole field of life, not some kind of great experience. And it's this field of life, this field of aliveness I'm trying to speak about here today and this week. And here how intention, commitment, aliveness, context, function within you over time. Through time, as time. And the other word I'd like to bring in is

[28:23]

Noticing. Simply noticing. Now, we think we have to notice something or do something about what we notice. But in a culture which trusts allness or infinity, you don't have to do anything with what you notice. You just notice. Because you're, and I'm just, you know, I'm saying this with clumsy words, but because your activity of noticing is happening within a contextual activity, a context of activity. your activity,

[29:40]

So your activity of noticing is happening within a context of activity. And that requires a kind of belief or trust. Because if you think you're in a world of dead objects and it's just a container and you have to do it and make it happen, you don't get the context working for you. Or you have to trust God. not seen. Maybe it's the forehead eye that trusts not seeing or not seeing.

[30:52]

So Aliveness, which is also a noticing. And these are things you can do. You can bring attention to aliveness. You can bring attention to noticing within a field of trust. Noticing within knowing that everything is an activity. zu bemerken innerhalb des Wissens, dass alles Aktivität ist. And you're putting your noticing in a field of activity, not in a void, not in a zero.

[31:57]

Du stellst dein Bemerken in ein Feld von Aktivitäten hinein, nicht in ein Vakuum oder in eine Null hinein. So all these koans are saying, here's some things you can put into the field of noticing. And then let the dynamic of noticing do its work, do its own work. So according to the Suram Gama Sutra, which is an apocryphal sutra, but very useful, Anyway, so, but it's very important for Zen practice, the way the Lankavatara Sutra is. And quite a few koans are rooted in Suram Gama teachings. And the koan 88 of the Shoyoroku very specifically is.

[33:16]

And Shwaydo in the koan says... Seeing not seeing is the eye of the teaching. Seeing not seeing is the eye of the teaching. Well, if we don't get the context from which this is coming, you know, it just seems confusing. Analytically, it seems confusing. So the koan in the sutra tells the story of what the Buddha said to Ānanda, I see the incense burner.

[34:16]

What do you see? We should start some sutras that way. Hey, Shariputra! I'll sleep out there. I mean in here. Okay. Hey, Ananda. I see the incense burner. What do you see? I see the incense burner too. So I am seeing what the Buddha sees. Even an analytic Westerner could agree with that. But then the Buddha says, when I don't see the incense burner, what do you see? And he said, I also don't see the incense burner, so I am seeing what the Buddha is not seeing.

[35:23]

Now this gets a little harder to analyze. So seeing the Buddha's not seeing is the eye of the teaching. I think we need to immerse this view in the context of our attentional aliveness. And trust that a butterfly will tell us the secret. A little bird told me that you loved me.

[36:35]

Isn't there a song like that? And I believe that it's true. Thank you very much.

[36:46]

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