before we approach the uncarved block. And I'd like to make... see if I can make this... simple and accessible to you as a practice. But first, I'd like to hear anything you have to say about anything. Yes, Simon. I don't know what the world is. You're not alone. There is perception. There is a body. And there is a lot of life in the body And the body reacts to that what happens

[01:29]

And there is nobody who cares. It just happens. Okay. But there is a feeling that there is something like home there. Home. Yeah. And then one notices that one sits some place and feels cool, happy. And you're with Dijon.

[02:48]

To display Dijon. Okay, thanks. Yes, yes, Alexander. I already told somebody in the break. It seems to be that in the koalands very often there are images from nature. And when I was just standing outside and nobody else was there yet I just felt the light and the shadow and I felt very connected. And it seems to me that this at that time was much more present for people who lived then this connection to nature than it is today.

[03:57]

But it can be for us too, as you just proved. It's just such a beautiful entry. Thank you. Okay. Yes. The world is my construction. The world is my construction. You're an engineer, right? Yes. You're an engineer. I'm a philosopher. I know. For example, Schopenhauer says you can only recognize an object if there is also a subject that recognizes the object. So the world is actually in the world. Was that to be said? No.

[05:19]

I said, one can only see or notice an object when there is a subject doing the noticing. So, one can recognize a world, You can only know the world you present yourself. And in our group yesterday we talked about many worlds because each had their own world. So there are a lot of words, many words, many words. That's my answer. Well, let me agree, but also say that yes, Each of us has of course his or her own world.

[06:43]

But through Zen practice we begin to have a very similar way of knowing our different worlds. So, if through Zen practice you notice your world as a succession of appearances, Even though your world is different than mine, if we both know our worlds at each other through a succession of appearances, something very mutual happens. So there's different worlds, but how we know the world can be similar. And that pretty much defines what Sangha is.

[07:47]

Okay, thanks. Yes. When I heard this term, the uncarved block, when I heard this expression, I was asking myself, what is the carving? Just what I am questioning. What is the carving? And we can ask, what is the un-carving? You were going to say something? Yeah. Uncarving means taking back the carving.

[09:03]

Something like that. Thanks for taking out some polarity from yesterday evening. Thank you for talking about polarity last night. and talking about the relationship between lay practice and non-monastic practice. And I thought about nobody is nun or monk only. Even you. I'm not as nun as I'd like to be. I try.

[10:05]

So that goes into my thinking about yes, but this is not maybe now the topic. But it helps to see the spectrum more, I feel, than polarity. The polarity between lay and monastic. Yes, not so much the polarity of the spectrum. And to talk about practice more than people who are led on it. And the koan may be also to find success by connecting to states, states of minds, instead of the monks who are talking. This is separating me often from what is transmitted.

[11:06]

Well, you know that, I don't know, in 1800s or something like that, the Japanese monastics or Japanese priests began to marry. There wasn't the stricture about not marrying before that. There wasn't so much about at all about being chased. It was about not having the burden of a family.

[12:25]

And so first Jodo Shinshu priests started to marry. And there much more. They have no monastic practice really. They're much more like... And at some point Zen priests started to marry. So Suzuki Roshi was married before he came to the United States. And he had three children, I guess. And so he was very clear when he came to the United States, that although he grew up in a temple and his father was a Zen teacher, and he practiced at both Eheji and Sochiji monasteries,

[13:32]

And inherited, his temple was, is now his son's, his son's was a small monastery. But he was very clear when he came to the United States that his life was at least as much defined by being a lay person as being a monk. And his small monastery and rather large temple was really like a house, a family, which he could pass on to his son. He didn't like the tradition of passing temples on to your son. And he actually tried not to do it.

[14:55]

But the village simply would not permit it. That we'll only accept your son as your successor. So when he came to the United States, and he came very specifically because he thought Buddhism needed a new field to recreate itself. And again, very aware that he was both a lay person with monastic training. And so when he first arrived, I mean, yeah, I'm just telling you some anecdotes. I'm just telling some anecdotes.

[16:10]

The Soto headquarters gave him money to buy western suits and things like that. But he didn't buy any. And he left Tokyo airport wearing his robes. There's wonderful pictures of him out on the approaching the plane waving a bunch of flowers in his robes. And he never stopped wearing his robe more than a decade he lived in the United States. So when he first arrived, the tradition of being a mendicant, he got his big straw hat out and went out and walked the streets of San Francisco begging. No one knew what to do with this guy wandering around the streets in a big straw hat.

[17:30]

Are they filming a samurai movie? But it was the beginning of the experiment. He realized it didn't work, and it was, in a way, the beginning of the experiment in the United States. Shall it be monastic, or shall it be lay, or shall it be some combination? But it was actually the beginning of his experiment, namely when he found out that this battle did not work, should we be cloistered, should we be suffering, or should we have the combination of both? I started practicing with him in about 1960, I guess. And by 64 or so, he was saying to me, people aren't getting it. I have to, I think we need a place where I can live with people on a daily basis.

[18:43]

So I took that as a command and I started hunting for a place. And I found Tassajara. And once we started Tassajara in the first practice period. And please understand also that I was really committed to, I wasn't a monk, I wasn't religious, I was an atheist. didn't want anything to do with religion. I mean, when I went to college, They wouldn't feed me because I refused to wear a tie in the dining rooms. I had no money, so I didn't eat very well out in the street.

[19:47]

But they finally agreed I could wear a scarf at night time. So I was really quite anti-institutional. And just before graduation, I refused to take my degree. I didn't want to start with any kind of head start. So when Sukershi said, we need a monastery, I thought, oh God, what have I got myself into? But I saw how it transformed the Sangha almost instantly. And then what happened when we... started Crestone, and then what happened when we started Johanneshof.

[21:03]

So this has been my experience. Not what I expected, but it's been my experience. And Suzuki Roshi was himself, as I just said in relation to Iris' comments, Aware that he was in the midst also, it just didn't come from me, he was in the midst of an experiment. What's lay practice? What's monastic? If we pretend they're the same, this is a big mistake. If we pretend they're the same, that's just idealism. But if we accept that they're different, I think we can develop a lay adept Sangha. by understanding the differences and then by developing as much as possible as I said earlier practices within the lay sangha that aren't really different from monastic practices

[22:28]

Because so far... The tradition has been entirely monastic until now. As far as I know, no lay lineages have ever survived. More than a generation or so. So I'm very interested. Let's try. Why not? So thank you. Someone else? Frank, you didn't say anything last night. He thinks I forgot him.

[23:35]

I won't say what I didn't say yesterday. Promise? I can say what I... Oh, you're actually... But I can't say what I did during satsang this morning. You did during satsang. Yes, yes. This is exactly what I want to confirm. All right. I counted my breath. Wow. But I didn't get very far. Until two or three. Once until four. And I know I can count up to ten. But when I count my breaths, I do not get to ten.

[24:37]

Ever? Well, I try. Or I stop trying. There is a world which I entered this morning where it's not really important how far I get counting. And then there is a world where it's really important to count correctly. Our advisor, our consultant has reminded me. And both are possible, and that's what we are trying here in this project. And I'm curious what happens in the encounter of these two worlds, which I think are unusually close.

[25:39]

I'm curious what will happen with these two worlds that approach each other or come Extremely close. And I'm happy that I can count until ten. But I'm also happy that I don't have to count to ten all the time. Well, consciousness knows how to count to ten. And to say the ABCs and so forth. But Zazen mind doesn't know how to count.

[26:56]

It takes time to give Zazen mind a kind of different structure than Consciousness. I often practice counting to zero. Or sometimes I get to one. But zero is something close to the uncarved block. Okay, someone else. Yes. Thank you. I can speak English? Yeah, I know. You happen to be disguised as an American.

[27:59]

I'm relatively new to Buddhism. And I find it intriguing to learn about the discussion about the monastic and the lay life. And I think it makes a lot of sense to realize that in history the monks were the monks because They had to be in a certain place and they had access to certain information that the rest of the population didn't have. And that's different today. We don't have those limits on geography and information access anymore. And I thought if anywhere something like this experiment would work, it would be in Germany because Germans get so much vacation.

[29:26]

It's true. In America, it's much harder to get a week off. When I chose coming to Europe, I said, the Germans have the most vacation. On the other hand, too, I think it's very important to draw on the lay people. I noticed I'm from the Catholic background, and the priests are realizing they need to have the lay people to support their practice because there's so few of them. And I think it's important that you also take the lay people with you, because I come from a Catholic background and the priests there also need the lay people because there are just so few priests. And if you read people like Jack Cornfield and who was the other one?

[30:35]

Eckhart Tolle, yes, thank you. And about this higher consciousness and that then, now I have lost the thread, excuse me. In order for us as a people to reach that, the human population has to draw in the lay people. And to get access to that experience. Zen practice has always been conceived of as for lay persons. But in actual practice, it was developed and continued by Mönch.

[31:40]

And I think we now, as you're pointing out, have a chance to change that. Yeah. Okay. Someone else? Yes. For me, it's a significant difference in how much time I have in my body. For me the essential difference is how much time do I spend with practice. So it seems to me that it is really a question how much time and attention can I give to practice. And it needs way more discipline if I try to do that on my own in a surrounding that does not support practice. So for that, to practice together with others, that it helps a great deal.

[32:57]

And that in the monastery there is usually there is somebody who has more experience than I have. So what I just described, I feel, is the main difference between monastic practice and lay practice. And I feel from the methods, it's more or less the same. One could do that on one's own. Yeah, OK. Yes, Paul? I'd like to pick up on that, because I don't have quite the same feeling. For over two years now, I practice very intensely on my own.

[34:15]

From the outside, similar to what the number of hours down here, I sit every day, I study every day. But something different happens here and in Creston. I don't understand it, but I can acknowledge it. In Creston I took a fall in front of you. It was a great, beautiful fall. I mean, really, flat, splash, boom. I thought he was bowing. I don't understand, but it's all that came into me.

[35:19]

So I cleaned myself everywhere and so on, until I came to my feet. Can you say that again, please? As I got to my feet, there was like a dialogue within and my feet said, well, we didn't fall at all. But it opened up something very new for me, being able to enter practice by my feet. These are things which would not happen to me on practicing on my own. There is something different which happens here. It happens with Ottmar in a certain manner. It happens with everyone else here. It's not the same. And that's very much why I take as much time as I do to come here. It's just different here than at home.

[36:33]

In the conversation with Ottmar, in the conversation with you. And that's why I take as much time as I can to come here. Yes. I would like to add something to the topic of lay practice and monastic practice. About 25 years ago, I decided very clearly for myself for a labor practice. And at that time I knew clearly that that was also kind of a renunciation of monastic practice or participating in monastic practice And when I... I developed and tried techniques for myself How can one go in a pure practice, a path without any connection to monastic practice?

[38:02]

And so I tried out various methods and techniques how I could find my way and practice in the last second. So, for example, techniques while driving a car or while doing housework. And I changed my work. And when I discovered Johanneshof I discovered what a great support it is to have this connection to monastic practice. So in our conversation it feels to me that maybe this is a field of further exploration

[39:04]

How do we actually practice as lay persons who are without contact with monastic practice? For a longer time. For a longer time. Yeah. OK. Well, I can't respond to all the subtleties that have been brought up. But let me say that I think one of the things we have to do is shake off the conceptions we have from our Western culture What a monk is, what enlightenment is, and so forth. Okay. As I said, it's, I think, fruitful to look at what we're doing as a profession.

[40:36]

And I don't feel left out of the world because I'm not a doctor. Or even because I can't speak German. But I kind of miss the jokes sometimes. So if we think of it as a profession, then we can support the more professionals among us. And we can benefit from the more professionals. Now, that changes how we view practice too. Because if you think that practice is some kind of inherent thing in you that can come out, you have an idea of Buddha nature.

[41:51]

And that was a big Chinese mistake. The Chinese took on the idea of Buddha nature because they wanted to believe that while developed Indian Buddhism denied Buddha nature. So if we look at it as a profession, we can all benefit in as we do that science is a profession and we benefit from chemists and physicists and so forth. Lawyers, doctors. Okay. Now, it's also the case that monastic life is not the ideal life in Buddhism. Excuse me? No. In Buddhism, monastic life is not the ideal life.

[43:14]

I think in Catholicism, in some kinds of Catholicism at least, the monk is the ideal human being. The monk in Asian cultures is a significant... definitive kind of human being. So the culture supports monastic life as one of the definitive forms of life. But in Western society, secular society, we do not see the monk as a definitive form of life. In America, it's very clear with the transcendentalists, Thoreau and Emerson, it really started.

[44:22]

I think Emerson said, Christianity? Just a form of consciousness. And we secular persons can know that consciousness just as well as anyone else. Yeah, and I would say that's both not true and more true than we might think. So even for monastics in China, Korea, and Japan, People would go to a practice period for three months and then they'd go somewhere else for six months.

[45:35]

They didn't just live in the monastery unless that was your profession. So it's not considered the ideal form of life. It's something you do because it benefits you. Okay, so now let's look at some aspects, if I can, before we have lunch. Some aspects that I'll just pick at random. I don't know if there's any such thing as random, but let's say it that way. Inactimate rituals. Oh. Darstellungsrituale. Darstellungsrituale, vielen Dank.

[46:36]

This enactment is always there. Really? You translated enactment rituals for me in Hanover in 2010. But that's long ago. I couldn't repeat it, but now I can. And Beate was there. Yeah. An enactment ritual is, for example, when I get up and I'm going to be away from my cushion for very long, I fluff it. When you fluff my cushion, it looks like you really do a good job. When you come in, when I come into the room, I bow to my cushion, and then I turn and bow to you.

[47:41]

Now these are enactment rituals. Now, you'd be a little confused, Tom as a lawyer, if he went into his office and bowed to his desk. Then he sat down and he bowed to everybody else in the office. They'd think, whew, that old dog has had a bad influence on him. He'd have gone over the edge. But, if you can see the value of enactment rituals, which is not unrelated at all to, again, Peter Dreyer's pointing out the importance of the pause for him.

[48:48]

The pause which allows for appearance. The body-mind of Samantabhadra, which is in the midst without moving. So if you get that feeling and I find I definitely have embodied this practice of completeness You complete whatever you do. And that completeness is also a feeling of returning it to the way it was before. And so before I go to lunch and because we won't have a session this afternoon I will return my cushion to the way it was before I came as much as I can

[50:00]

And I might ask Neil's help to get it really fluffed. The jazz is always on me, I don't know. No, no, no, no. It's on me, absolutely. Because there's no really, to fluff up, there's no really German word for that. No. You know, like a rabbit with fluffy ears or something like that. So there's no fluff in German culture? Yeah, there is, but it has other connotations, you know. You think like a stuffed animal for children, something like that. Yeah, yeah. That's fluffy. What it's like. He's my friend. I graduated from stuffed rabbits to stuffed pillows. But I can do that at the airport.

[51:21]

I can have that feeling standing at the airport counter. And I really find it makes a difference. I don't intend a difference, but there is a difference. I come up to the counter and I stop for a moment. And I feel the person and the situation. It may only be an instant. But the person comes alive because they feel returned to completeness. Okay, and then the same all the way through the process of getting your ticket. checking your bags and all. And I have a feeling when I leave the counter, Und ich habe das Gefühl, dass wenn ich den Entscheider verlasse, that the person who was there, who was helping me with the ticket, und dass der Mensch, die Person, die da war, die mir mit der Boardingkarte oder sowas geholfen hat, now just ceases to be the clerk, die hört dann auf, einfach nur der Angestellte dort zu sein, and just becomes a beautiful human being standing in front of me.

[52:50]

Die wird dann einfach nur ein schönes menschliches Wesen, das vor mir steht. That's a little bit like the unconnected block. Now, this... Doing something like enactment rituals... Which you might pick up or get a feeling for by being in Johanneshof or Kirsten? Won't really... take hold in you unless you recognize that it's a pedagogical technique. It's another way of learning and knowing which is not doesn't really fall into the word understanding.

[54:08]

Das nicht wirklich in die Kategorie oder das Wort verstehen fällt. But more... thoroughly falls into the word incubating. That sense is usually translated in Zen texts as cultivating. But I think incubate is a much better word. Because cultivate you're doing something. And to incubate you are letting it happen. And that's clearly implied in the In the Koran, scholars plow with the pen. Every situation that appears before you, as Simon says, what appears before him, Or as you mentioned yesterday.

[55:18]

And I said to complete that which appears. We might also say to allow incubation to happen. Or just now appearing and allowing that appearance as if it was plowing you. Now those are kinds of things which are difficult to kind of get a feeling for as a lay person in an ordinary professional life. But if you get a feeling for them, there's no reason at all You can't bring them into your lay life.

[56:26]

Yeah, like you were three months in a monastery and then you're somewhere else. Or one week in a sashim. I think in the old days we had a good time at a house distiller. Really? We didn't know what we were doing. We all gathered there and we got a bunch of pots and pans and we created a miniature monastery for a week and then we dispersed it. And some people resented when we got Yohannes off because They couldn't all come and everyone could be an Eno. There were these professionals down here who did that at all. Okay. Now... Frank wasn't here yesterday afternoon.

[57:33]

He had something he had to do. But his place was left empty. Now, I could look at his place and I could feel his absence. It's not quite the same as feeling his presence. I could feel his absence. And that is a conceptual consciousness. My eyeballs can't see him but I can have the conceptual consciousness that that is his space. Okay. Now I said yesterday about the Japanese house, which...

[58:34]

returns to space. And that's easy to, I think, fairly easy to grasp. Here's this house, you begin taking the walls out and so forth, and pretty soon you've got a pavilion, not a house. And the Japanese, actually, the Ise Shrine, every 20 years, They take the whole thing apart and rebuild it. With what do they do that? They take the Ise Shrine. They take entirely apart every 20 years and rebuild it. They return it to the space it was. Okay. Now in this koan it says communion with the source is your practice.

[59:48]

Basically it's saying communion with the source is the monk's practice. Lazily watching the white ox on the open ground. Not paying attention to the auspicious rootless grass. How do we pass the days? Okay. The face of your parents. The face of your original face before your parents were born. What practice is this? And this koan links it to monastic practice. The monastic plows by letting the ox do whatever. And the ox, as is the tradition in Zen, represents the mind, the mind that appears,

[61:11]

And does what it wants. Comes to tan or not. Now we have these beautiful flowers here. In this vase, this sacred vessel. On this bench, which we inherited from when it was an anthroposophical kinderheim. And it's very much the type of bench that when you're a Japanese wood joinery carpenter, you have to do as part of your test to prove you're a good carpenter. and you come into a room and there's pieces of wood and then how quickly you can make a table like this and fit it all together And so clearly we can see the leg appears here as a circle.

[62:32]

And there's an opening in the middle so you can use it as a handle to pick it up. And this clay here turned into a fired pot. And glaze, and you can see the drip of the glaze. And there's the flowers. And the flowers were... You know, not too long ago, just seeds. And now they're, you know, in full bloom. And I used to practice direct perception with the flowers on my table in the morning at breakfast. And if I while I was eating and doing things if I joined them as completely as I could without thinking I found that almost always it changed slightly during breakfast.

[63:49]

One flower would be here and then later a little bit there. So I could feel the impermanence, etc. And the interdependence of if this is sitting on the floor and the base is sitting in there. And the interdependence with the potter and so forth. And often with Japanese pots, they glaze it in a way you can actually see the hand of the potter where the glaze isn't touching the clay. So the potter doesn't have to sign it. His hand is just there. Okay, so now not only can I see that this is, as I said, the... The ingredients of our world are change, impermanence, interdependence, intermergence, and no ground of being.

[65:36]

I can, in seeing all of this as constructs, as you said, I can deconstruct it too. Unstart it. And I can feel the empty space. As I could feel the empty space, which was Frank yesterday, the absence of Frank. And that conceptual consciousness, which is also unconditioned space, which Frank is now filling and articulating and constructing. So Frank isn't just there, he's also turning this space into Frank. Now, if I get in the habit of this, which is a monastic yogic skill, in every object or subject I teach,

[66:57]

with or without a subject that I see, I simultaneously feel the unconstructed space, not only the beautiful person standing in front of me at the ticket counter, but the space she or he is constructing at that moment. That as a monastic pedagogical technique begins to change how you are in the world. And what is the world is also unconstructed space. So, this koan says, while communion with the source With unconstructed space.

[68:39]

With the white ox on the open ground. So we see flowers, but there's also a white ox. This communion with the source It says in the koan, transcends any concept of progress or appropriation or improvement. das übersteigt, transzendiert, jedwedes Konzept von Verbesserung, Fortschritt oder so, so dass Sprache und Symbole verschwinden, and a light shines forth. This we can practice as laypersons or monastics. Das können wir als Laien und als Klösterbewohner praktizieren. Thank you very much. Danke euch sehr. Thanks for translating.

[69:42]

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