Well, I think it would be good if I said something about the background of this Buddha-nature idea. At the center of the idea is a word which some of you are familiar with, tathagatagarbha. One of those rich, almost completely vertical words, you almost never find it in a sentence. It stands by itself. Tathagata is a big word for the Buddha. Tathagata is a great word for the Buddha. And it means thus, thusness.

[01:03]

But Tathagata means also thus come and thus gone. So it means simultaneously coming and going. Without a sense of contradiction in that. Things are appearing and disappearing simultaneously. It's also really an extension of the idea of Buddha's relics. This has a sense that Buddha has gone into nirvana, but he's always appearing in everything as the teaching. The Buddha realized enlightenment under the bow tree and the morning star and all that stuff, letting things as they actually exist unfold within him.

[02:05]

So our practice is to let the world things as they actually exist unfold within us. Yeah. So the relics, the Buddha is just bones, but yet this presence of nirvana and of coming and going is how things exist. Nun, die Relikte, also auch die Knochen, ja, aber auch dieses Kommen und Gehen und dieses Existieren, wie die Dinge tatsächlich sind. Manchmal sagen wir auch weder Kommen noch Gehen. Und das betont die angehaltene Welt.

[03:07]

Now, garba means both womb and embryo. Okay. So, again, womb and embryo are simultaneously present. The seed is in the fruit. There's a similar idea, but a Chinese idea that Gary Snyder used in a poem. Making an axe handle, the model is not far away. Of course, that assumes that you're making the axe handle with the axe.

[04:22]

Now, a word... It's taken scholars a long time, I believe, to find what may be a Sanskrit equivalent for Buddha nature. And if there is an equivalent, it's probably a Buddhadhatu. Buddha means Buddha and Datu means realm. Now, the fact that the Sanskrit equivalent is, you know, been sort of hard to find suggests that at least

[05:30]

This is a new emphasis in Chinese Buddhism, if not a completely new idea. Now I'm speaking about this because it should be clear that this is not a revealed teaching. In that sense, it's much more like science. It's a process of discovery. And as I said earlier, we may discover things early Buddhism didn't know. So maybe Buddha nature is a new idea in Chinese Buddhism. And if it's not a completely new idea, which it probably isn't, it's at least a very different emphasis than what's made in Buddhism. And we'll certainly do this.

[06:42]

I'm not one to rush into adapting Buddhism to modern chauvinism. In other words, I think it's a kind of chauvinism to think that everything modern is best. And I really don't want to use psychology or science as a Trojan horse to bring Buddhism into the West. It's all much more interesting when psychology is psychology and Buddhism is Buddhism. There's much more power in that, I think. But still, we will find ways to develop and certainly emphasize Buddhism, that work for us where we're coming from.

[08:02]

But there's certainly a richness. I've never come to the end of the richness. To go back to this, to immerse myself in this teaching of Buddhism. Which is to immerse myself in a yogic culture. And to immerse myself in a different civilization. But that is also part of being modern. Anthropology and transportation and everything that's happening is really bringing into a realm of potentiality. All the cultures of the world.

[09:17]

And, you know, all or many spiritual traditions. Though again, I'm not one to shop around or to mix. Whatever I learn from anywhere, whatever insights I have, I bring back into Buddhism. And I find that's the most, to have a home base, a lineage stream. It's like if I shop too much, I'm taking a leaf from this tree and a leaf from this tree. But it's much more like grafting a leaf from this tree onto a developed root system.

[10:36]

To graft. I may still get a pair a beer now I may still get a pair but a pair now tied to the root system my practice, my practice of Buddhism. So, I never could have on my own thought of naming the world womb embryo. Because Tathagatagarbha is also a name for the universe.

[11:54]

Or the multiverse. Or the cosmos, the cosmetics. The ornamented universe. Cosmetic cosmos. Cosmos and cosmetic have the same roots. I'm just playing around. We're ornamented by everything as it is. Okay. I find if I say it's the world or the universe or something, it's like, what can I do with that? Oh, it's a nice word. But there's a practice in, if I name the world, womb embryo. And Buddha, Datu, means Buddha realm.

[13:07]

Yeah, and all realm, we know what a realm is. It's where the king rules or it's a room or it's the realm of, I don't know what, psychology or something. But realm in this yogic culture, realm means cause. It's as if we call this room a realm. It's as if the room was so subtly designed, it caused things to happen in it. So coming back to what I've been speaking about, if we don't think of the room as an entity, but as an activity or a process, then a realm is also a cause. So the Buddha Datu is the realm of the Buddha, but the realm that also causes the Buddha.

[14:11]

So that's a different way of thinking. I suspect if you were an architect and you thought in terms like that, you might design rooms a little differently because you'd think of every room as having a causal quality, as a good architect probably does. Certainly, the more there's an attention to detail, There's more of the proportions, etc., of a room or the certain way. The more such a room awakens, detail, proportion in us.

[15:38]

And the sense of proportion, in fact, in Western culture, was one of Ivan Illich's themes. Proportion was at the center of what Western culture was about for many centuries. I think Godspeed meant something about God be with you, not anything to do with going fast. Godspeed. Don't you have the expression? We have the expression in English, Godspeed. What does it mean? It means God be with you. But it's the word speed, which later came to mean, when you didn't ride on horses, meant how fast you got somewhere. That's a different theme, so... So Buddhadhatu means the realm of the Buddha, but also what causes the Buddha.

[17:03]

So Tathagatagarbha is thus coming, thus going, going and coming. is simultaneously a realm of potentiality, a realm where seed and fruit are side by side or inside each other. Isn't that the way it actually is? So what a... What a word for the world that we can practice with. To view everything you see as, this is a womb, a fruitful realm of potentiality. And the seeds are everywhere.

[18:04]

So, Potentiality lives here in the present. That's true. So Buddha nature is a potentiality that lives here in the present. Dharma, I mean Buddhadhatu, and Tathagatagarbha and Buddha-nature are all the same territory. Yeah, now we can think of, I spoke about breath joining awareness.

[19:15]

Breath connected to the body is more joined to awareness. And breath joined to the consciousness is more connected with thinking. And what happens when you practice mindfulness? Like, now I'm angry, now I'm angrier, now I'm really angry, but you're just observing the anger. You're creating a space of mind which observes the anger, which is not connected with the anger exactly. Again, we have the word Sokure detached but not separate from. So you're completely connected with it.

[20:29]

You're inseparable from the anger, really, but at the same time there's a certain detachment. What's happening here? Well, you are being aware of the anger, but not exactly conscious of the anger, or you're not caught up in consciousness of the anger. And you may find then ways of expressing your anger in awareness and not in consciousness. And if you notice yourself in this practice of mindfulness, this is the center of the practice of the four foundations of mindfulness. You'll find that although you're feeling your emotions completely, your breath is actually not getting caught up in anxiety and fear.

[21:42]

That's not happening. So we could say that we could describe mindfulness As a practice which joins attention and awareness that joins attention and breath to awareness. And you leave consciousness for thinking but not for the breath. It's a little clumsy what I'm saying, a little mechanical.

[22:49]

But I think it gives you a sense of the instrumentality or territory within these practices. Now, Someone mentioned to me at lunch about what happens with attention to the breath. You can bring attention to the body and you do in the practice of... or foundation of mindfulness. Attention is really already I mean you teach a child very early to have to bring attention to their body.

[23:58]

And when you teach a child, when a child learns, or however it happens, to not wet their bed at night, they've learned to develop awareness during the night, even though they're not conscious. then what practice does is develop this awareness so you can be aware of a lot more things than whether you're wetting the bed or not. Yeah, and when you practice the mindfulness of the body, bodyfulness of the body is a better translation. Because it's not bringing mind to the body, it's bringing bodyfulness to the body.

[25:03]

It's a better way to say it. So we already, as I said, Bring attention to our posture. And that attention disappears into our posture. Our posture itself becomes a way of being attentive. Now practice just takes the same thing we're already doing and really develops it much, much more.

[26:09]

So similar things happens. You bring attention to the breath. And after a while, after it really settles in the breath and the body, the attention disappears into the breath. And then the breath itself becomes a way to be attentive. So we could talk about Breathfulness. Or breath mind. Issan Dorsey whose book you know, some of you know his book. What's it called?

[27:10]

Street Zen, yeah. He said to me once, 20 years ago you told me to realize breath mind and it took me 20 years to do it. The point is that sometimes a simple thing like breath mind, if you stay with it as a practice, just one practice like this is all you need. Yeah, and one practice realized opens up many, many other practices.

[28:13]

So this, we could say breath mind, we could say breath aware. So breath awareness is a fruit of shifting attention from thinking to the breath and the body. And then breath becomes also a way of tuning. When you lose your attention or your posture or your sense of vitality. You can use breath to tune in the station again. But once you've got the station tuned in, you can forget about the tuning.

[29:17]

I think of a beach stone. A beach stone. A stone on the beach? Yeah, a stone on the beach. And we tune them in with water. And they're so pretty when they're wet. Take them home and they dry. It was beautiful. But we use breath to tune in the world and the world doesn't dry out. So I think you'll find with breath awareness, breath awareness, The world becomes vivid and bright the way a beach stone does when it's wet.

[30:34]

Maybe breath awareness keeps the world wet. I live in a wet world. But it's something like that. I don't know. Now this, I don't know how to quite say this, but let's see, the idea of womb embryo is the idea really of things folded within each other, an enfolded world. And one of the qualities of awareness is that it's enfolded. We can think of consciousness as an outfolded surface.

[31:35]

And an outfolded surface we can notice. We can notice and make comparisons and distinctions and so forth. And the word consciousness, I often say, has in it S-C-I, which is the root of scissors. Scissors of consciousness. Consciousness. So consciousness literally means to cut things together. So consciousness is what cuts things into parts to understand them and so forth. And let me in this context. So Tsukiroshi said, if you choose a teacher, you should choose a teacher that discriminates very well.

[33:00]

So to be free from discrimination doesn't mean you want some kind of dummy who discriminates. You still want somebody who discriminates well. So consciousness separates things into parts to understand them and to act in a certain way, like we do. When we dream or when you look at your dreams, you see a much more enfolded world. And part of the reason dreams are so perplexing Because the narrative of the dream is not on the surface, usually.

[34:20]

You're seeing certain surfaces of the dream, those surfaces which can appear to the kind of consciousness we have in dreams. Yeah. When you're looking at a dream, we're seeing those parts of the dream that will appear to the kind of consciousness we have in sleeping. But most of the dream is enfolded out of sight, of consciousness. But the whole of the dream the whole unfoldedness of the dream functions within us.

[35:39]

So the way in Zen practice you practice with dreams is you don't try to interpret it and you don't try to unfold it. And I don't mean you shouldn't do that if you want. You can do anything you want. It's sometimes nice to interpret a dream. But in general... You keep yourself awfully busy if you try to interpret all your dreams. You won't get anything done until lunch. So rather our approach to dreams is to leave them unfolded. Because when you unfold it into consciousness or try to by interpreting it, you can only unfold the parts that consciousness can be conscious of.

[36:55]

But the dream has a dynamic that's rooted in its unfoldedness. So you let the dream unfold in your activity during the day. So you wake up and there's been a dream. You try to really get that kind of Yogacara bodily sense of the dream. You try to get the jewel of the dream in your gut. And then you breathe into it as if you were watering a plant. And you kind of water it and bring attention to it, but not interpretation. And then you do your actions of the day, because your actions of the day are much more subtle than any kind of mental interpretation.

[38:15]

And then if you join As the dream does, or something does happen in your life, if you join that with intention, the dream can really begin to shape your life. Some dreams do. Okay, this was just my way of speaking about the enfoldedness of much of our life. Sometimes I wonder, for instance, if the Big Bang, let's go back to that, why not? Isn't some kind of unfolding of which our instruments measure only one part of it.

[39:31]

And what's happening is much more complex than our instruments can measure. Maybe the expansion is happening, but lots of other things are happening too. which are maybe the opposite of expansion or some territory we can't think. Which we can't think and can't even think about measuring, if we could measure. And I'm not saying that because I give that any serious consideration. But I'm saying it because that's how I see at least our human world existing. There's an enfoldedness that awareness is without being consciousness.

[40:42]

Now how do you practice with that in Zen? Well, you try to... It's almost as if you try to let your arm do what it wants to do without your consciously deciding what your arm should do. It turns out there's a kind of body therapy that some of you may know about. It's something like that.

[41:43]

Marie-Louise recently had some kind of pain in her shoulder. And it's persisted for some time. And someone told her that she ought to let her arm do what it wants, some advice like that. So she tried it first in the bathtub because her arm started floating. And she didn't know what her arm should do. But she was willing to let her arm do whatever. whatever it wanted to do. But how do you consciously or intentionally use intentional mind, not conscious mind? To say, okay, arm, do your thing.

[42:51]

Well, she tried to tune herself to some point where suddenly her arm just started doing all kinds of things. And the pain in her shoulder mostly went away. Did she tell you this? No. So I was so impressed. My wife's getting ahead of me. It's great. As usual. So I tried it the other day and I found it looked like I was being chased by killer beans. But you have to try certain things like, I don't know, Which vitamin pill are you going to take?

[43:58]

You don't think? Just let your hand do it. And if afterwards you drop the vitamin pill or one of them, you don't take that one. If after you've taken a vitamin pill or two, one of them you drop, then you don't take that one. You let your body decide. Now this is kind of primitive. But you have to find some territory to practice with these things to let awareness function and not consciousness. And I see this, as I said earlier before lunch, most explicitly developed in the martial arts. But it's a big part of Zen practice. It's called actually in the koans, great functioning.

[45:12]

And it means when you let the world function through you. You may also have to have the referee of consciousness hanging around so that you play the game right, if you're at work or something. But it's a little bit like you let writing write writing. The activity of writing starts writing writing. So, to as much as possible let some feeling of a greater power, sometimes it feels like a greater power. What is directing us? Now in some traditions you might feel that grace or some higher power is functioning through us.

[46:15]

It might be right. Just trust your experience. And then we'd more say something like the enfoldedness of the world is functioning outside of consciousness. And this practice is, more developed practice, is to allow this enfoldedness to function. You know, if you use scissors, you can cut a surface. But a piece of paper that's folded many times, you can't cut it without cutting the whole thing, and then the unfoldedness is lost.

[47:35]

So if you bring consciousness to the unfoldedness, the origami, the poetry of the origami falls apart. And there's images in koans that refer to this. Like if you have a spool of thread. A ball of yarn. You dye one end and the whole ball is dyed. So this is an image used in koans. When your intention, say, reaches the entirety of the unfoldedness of the world in you, The dye doesn't penetrate the whole spool of thread by consciousness.

[48:47]

It penetrates it through its enfoldedness. Then... Please once more. We're both unicorns. The dye doesn't penetrate the spool of thread through consciousness. But through its... very infoldedness it penetrates the spool of thread. So I would define from the point of view of practice, intuition is when a certain infoldedness breaks through the surface of consciousness.

[49:50]

So we could say again, practice is something like always letting intuition function as much as possible, continuously feeling intuition, and sometimes you function through ordinary consciousness. I mean, I think that consciousness, I mean, intuition is an idea that is in a culture dominated by consciousness. There's a raw body of the world, almost like a peeled away orange. We have the term in Buddhism, traditional thought coverings. Thought coverings are your body is encased in thought coverings.

[51:08]

And a lot of our back pains and so forth are thought coverings. I mean, you can see it, this little example I give, if you take your fingers and do this and do this. And then someone says, move that finger. And if you do it by thought, you can't do it. It's very difficult. Which finger? It's all mixed up. Well, this is just a simple mix-up. But if you feel your fingers from inside, you can move whatever finger you want. You do this and somebody points to the finger and you say, which one is that on the left or right?

[52:08]

I mean, that's thought coverings. There's a body underneath the consciousness-dominated body. So practice is also to release that body which is underneath consciousness dominated body. We could say the body of awareness. And when the more we feel And the more we feel that, the more we can sense some kind of, almost like guidance in our life. Okay, so I'd like us to have a break.

[53:11]

And if you're willing, and I hope you're willing because I always like it, we divide up into small groups. And it might be good to have an English speaking group if some of you are willing so that you two can participate. Unless we want a Hungarian-speaking group. Okay, and I'll let you... Who should be in charge? Who's done it most, breaking us up into groups? Are you good at it, Andreas? I don't know. You don't know? Okay. Or you can do it? Oh, how many people are here? 30? So maybe four groups or something like that? Four or five? If you're doing it, it's good if you stand up.

[54:15]

because some people won't count unless there's a...

[54:28]

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