You practice meditation, you may notice some kind of itching or sensitivity here. And if you study when that appears, if you investigate when that appears, it appears, well, there's several times, but one of the things you notice, usually it appears when comparative thought is suspended. And when there's a sense of non-duality or a kind of union, There's even a kind of, sometimes a kind of feeling of fire. And sometimes people speak to me, you know, about wind,

[01:04]

when, particularly in Sashin, when desire arises, future desire or sometimes the memory of desire, So why does this come up in Sashin? Well, you might imagine it's because you've got nothing better to do and you're bored, so why not think about that? Yeah, it's the only vivid memories you have. Maybe there's some truth to that. But it's also true that when you begin to have less duality in your experience, there's a kind of fire that almost burns you.

[02:30]

Or you feel differences, you feel more mutuality, you feel differences dissolve. And that's often accompanied by this feeling here. So this is often, as it is here, represented by a flame. So this is the mind of body, speech and mind. Yeah. And this is closely related to the precision of posture. Body, speech and mind are so carefully aligned that when the body is aligned physically body, speech and mind are more aligned.

[03:48]

And so when you really have this kind of invisible backbone coming up through your body from the base of your spine, When you're standing, it can feel like it's coming from your heels. When that feeling is there, and more likely to feel when your body is lined up to permit it physically. You create this kind of physical situation where you feel this more and then that spreads to the mind.

[05:10]

And the mind manifests itself as this physical feeling. Yeah, I mean, we can try to ask why, but it's just the case that it does so. So it's one of those things that you can kind of measure your practice, because the more you can feel that while you're speaking or observing something, you can tell that this unity of body, speech, and mind is happening. And sometimes the pain of zazen The pain of long sitting has a similar effect.

[06:25]

And it's also a kind of flame which dissolves, burns up distinctions. And it's sometimes, for many of us, the way we first come into this stillness which is the absence of distinctions. Through the noise of pain. I remember once, 1950, 1957, I think.

[07:37]

Sadly, we sailed into the middle of a hurricane. I was on a ship and sadly there was a German sailing ship with many young people that sank. And we were one of the ships sent to the site. If you're old enough, you might remember it was kind of big news at one time in Germany. Anyway, normally you wouldn't sail into the middle of a hurricane. But you go through all this noise, And then suddenly you're in a big, very calm circle where the ocean itself is flat.

[08:50]

Man fährt durch diesen ganzen Lärm und dann kommt man in einen großen Kreis, wo der Ozean selbst flach ist. Sorry to use such a tragic image, but it feels sort of like that when you go through the pain of sitting and suddenly you find yourself in this calm expanse. Okay. So I've talked about what I'm trying to do is give you these five crafts of developing face-to-face teaching within the Sangha and with a teacher.

[09:55]

And the process of teaching begins, or practice of face-to-face teaching begins, when you decide to learn from everyone you meet. Whoever it is. You don't discriminate. Every person is a chance to learn something. This is also the discipline part of the six paramitas. And every situation is a chance to learn something. This attitude opens up face-to-face teaching. Now we've also talked again about the alchemy of stillness.

[11:04]

Opening up big mind, the expansive mind, which you can investigate with a non-thinking noticing. Now that is brought into the whole of your life through the general practice of mindfulness. Now with those four crafts You can bring in wisdom teachings. And the wisdom teachings aren't just from Buddhism, but in the maturing of these four or five crafts, in this sense of a wide mind and mindfulness,

[12:15]

You can begin to bring in any question that has depth for you from your own life. Or I can work on how to heal this leg. In that kind of field I can bring attention to my leg in a way. I'm not saying it'll heal it, but usually it works. So it can be a little thing like fixing an upset stomach. Or... Yeah, or... catching a flu before it gets too bad.

[13:40]

Or transforming or improving your relationship to your spouse or your child. Or trying to create a different mental field for the job in which you work. And you get the ability to hold that different mental field in the middle of your working. So this is not wisdom from Buddhism, but functional wisdom arising from your life that you can bring into your life through these five crafts or through the eightfold path. There's more I'd like to say because I really haven't touched as fully as I'd like this teaching of body, speech and mind.

[15:04]

Yeah, but this is homeopathic enough. And it's time to stop. Thank you very much. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

[16:13]

Amen. Vare manken no ji ju ji suru koto etari, negawa kuwa nyorai yo shinjitsu niyo geshi kate matsuran.

[17:22]

Thank you. Well, I'm pretty sure this is the last day. At least I'm making an assumption that this is the last day. And we've been squeezing ourselves for seven days into a little black square. Like chess pieces no one moves. It's all checkmate. Maybe we all turn into queens.

[18:31]

No, no. Maybe we all turn into queens. And for what purpose, who knows? But it's interesting, we have some experience, don't we? And I, yes, not too wisely, I picked last year body speech and mind for the topic. And in the beginning I thought, oh my gosh, geez.

[19:33]

How am I going to... That's what I thought. But then we made some approach. And now at the end of this month I... I'm actually quite surprised by how endless this topic is. I suppose it shouldn't have surprised me. For Kukai, the founder of tantric Buddhism in Japan, who I believe is more or less a contemporary of Padmasambhava.

[20:47]

For Kukai, the mystery of body, speech, and mind is practically the whole of his teaching, or at least it's the center of his teaching. For Kukai, this mystery of body, speech, and mind And Dogen grew up in the teaching of Kukai and of the Tendai and Shingon schools. And these teachings are folded into, along with others, into Dogen's teachings. Okay.

[21:59]

Now, but I'm, you know, pleasantly surprised how all in all accessible these teachings seem to have so far be to you. Im Moment bin ich überrascht, wie alles in allem diese Lehren für euch zugänglich waren. Now I've got to, at least I should probably, try to say something this last teisho. Jetzt muss ich oder sollte ich zumindest etwas in diesem letzten teisho sagen. That brings it to some kind of shape or conclusion or... halt or something. So I have to start somewhere. So let's start again with this idea of investigation. Dogen uses the word all the time.

[23:14]

And I don't think until we examine it in our own practice, we can easily understand that investigation is not thinking. And that it's not so easy to understand why investigation isn't just some kind of, or noticing isn't just some kind of distraction. No, you're sitting and you start noticing this and that and you just get distracted and you get carried off by your thinking. So this noticing without thinking, which is investigation, needs some teaching to settle itself in us. Okay, the transition I made was that when you begin to experience, sometimes experience stillness in your practice,

[24:44]

you're not just experiencing stillness, you're changing the potentiality of mind. For when you stabilize the mind of stillness, it doesn't react to things. It has the quality of something like involuntary. Or like I said, when your breathing becomes involuntary.

[26:07]

Consciousness isn't affecting your breathing now, you're just breathing. Can we get to the point where our mind is something like that? Where it's not affected by consciousness. We can say that's the other side of this experience of stillness. Now, surprisingly, when we have this experience, it changes how we know ourselves. Even if we don't have the experience very often, it still changes how we know ourselves.

[27:14]

And when, by continuing to practice, And we are practicing mindfulness. And mindfulness, let's say, is a field of attentiveness. And one of the contents of that field of attentiveness is how we know ourselves. Things we take for granted. So if our knowledge, if how we know ourselves changes, and we are practicing mindfulness, that new way we know ourselves begins to be reinforced from diverse sources.

[28:28]

So the experience in zazen changes how we know ourselves. And if we continue the practice of mindfulness in our activity, that new way we know ourselves, you know, this possibility of of stillness, say, begins to be reinforced in other ways. We begin to see this is not just a dimension of our zazen practice but it's a dimension of the world. We could say something more technically like our experiential horizon And what's within our experiential horizon changes.

[29:47]

Or you find that why you love nature changes. or why you enjoy taking walks in the mountains or the forest, is actually because it precipitates or gives you a taste of an experience that you had much more clearly in Zazen. And then when you go back taking a walk in the forest or in the mountains, or in these country fields, you find that this of this natural world, that the ones being moved by are loving this natural world.

[31:04]

is rooted in something that's fundamental about our mind. So the natural world is beautiful, of course. But why do we find it beautiful? Because some historical periods people haven't found the world beautiful. But let's say we find it beautiful because it awakens our own beauty. Or the natural world's been trying to awaken our own beauty.

[32:36]

But it doesn't really come home to us so clearly until we have its correspondence in Zen practice. So knowing that, in some tantric practices, in some Taoist practices, nature itself becomes the way to generate certain minds. Okay. Okay, so let me go back to noticing again. So when you feel quite settled in your practice, And you come into this kind of involuntary mind.

[33:50]

Things tend to appear in this mind. Yeah, but they don't. They just appear. They no longer carry you off. You no longer get involved in them. But you can investigate them. Yeah. And strange, rather strange things appear sometimes. Like sometimes we have dreams that I think most of us sometimes have dreams which we don't see any. It's not something we ever imagined.

[34:54]

It doesn't seem to be rooted in our own historical, personal history. It seems to rise out of nowhere, out of itself, out of some vastness. Well, this mind of Zazen is somewhat rather like that. But now it's not dreaming. You're quite awake. Yeah, you're awake within this mind. So you can notice something. Mm-hmm. And like maybe in a dream you can, say, notice some scene appears and you can decide if you had lucid dreaming experiences, you can focus on a window, go through the window and observe the room on the other side of the window.

[36:17]

Maybe some of you don't like to amuse yourself this way, but, you know, it's something to do. So in zazen you can do similar things but much more clearly. And you begin to find yourself in a world that, yes, maybe it arises from your own imagination or experience, but somehow it seems much vaster than your own experience. Now we're not trying to explain it at this point.

[37:19]

And if you, much as I love science, if you try to explain it, If you take a scientific view toward it, how can this really has to be my own experience, something like that. You severely limit or even kill the whole process. So if you just let it happen, and the key or gate to this is the practice of uncorrected mind, Yeah, because uncorrected mind, this practice sets the stage for this kind of, for this vastness.

[38:38]

I can't say it's a field of mind anyway, because it's more vast than a field. So you have some... Some knowledge now or feeling of yourself as a kind of vastness. You're not doing this really because there's some point to it. Oh, isn't it interesting to find out what's through the window in that little house that was way over there somewhere in mental space?

[39:42]

Get all that? It's not because it's so interesting to find out what's behind the window. In some far corner of, let's call it mental space. But rather it just gives us a taste of our own vastness. It seems as vast as the world itself, the universe itself. That's a new kind of knowing of ourselves. And it brings us into a new kind of respect for ourselves. Now it also seems to have the fruit of when you get so that you can stabilize this involuntary space.

[40:50]

You're more likely to have things like teaching dreams. dann wird es wahrscheinlicher, dass du Lehrträume hast. Or teachings that you receive in meditation. Things as far as you can tell you never knew, but yet... They appear. And they appear, more likely appear, when this zazen mind is not ordinary consciousness and not personal. It doesn't feel like it belongs to you.

[41:55]

Now, the ordinary teaching of zazen sitting, zazen practice, I don't emphasize it much. I tell it to people sometimes, but usually people don't do it, and I don't often always do it. I said, when you first sit, you rock back and forth. and forward and coming to your center and you make then you make little circles and make the circles smaller and smaller and then settle And then when you finish zazen, you start the circles again and make them bigger and rock back and forth and get up.

[43:15]

But there's a symbolic quality to this. which is that you're pulling the world into these smaller circles and going back into the world with the larger circles but the circle is meant to remind you to bring this vastness of zazen experience into your daily life. So what I'm trying to touch on here to some extent is how to bring the vastness of this experience into your daily life. Central to all adept Zen teachings.

[44:21]

and the basis of the five crafts of practice I gave parallel crafts now again let's go back we have these words body speech and mind And they mean something to us. And Sophia is learning all these things. What body is. She hasn't learned what mind is yet, but she's learning what body is, of course. The way she's going to learn body and speech is fine. Mind, how to understand mind, is quite a lot more problematical.

[45:37]

They asked, I've told you this many times, it always amuses me, they asked a bunch of little kids what the mind is for. Yeah, most of them thought it was to keep secrets. They may be right. But our body reveals our secrets. Okay. But we have to translate, we have to find new definitions for body, speech and mind in yogic practice, Buddhist yoga.

[46:42]

Okay, so I gave you some, already giving you some suggestions. Heart, throat and head. And a particular understanding of heart and throat and head. And it's also means mantra, means mudra, mantra and mandala. And it's also related to nirmanakaya, sambhogakaya and dharmakaya. Now, how that all those, this would be, you want to stay here another month or so.

[47:57]

We could work some of this out a little bit. Isn't it wonderful that Buddhism is an endless practice? No one lifetime can reach the end of it. All of our lifetimes can't reach the end of it, together. And as I like to point out occasionally, what are we, about 40 people here? Is that right, Ino-sama? Forty? Thirty-five. So, fifty-five more would bring us back to Buddha according to the lineage, our lineage. Ninety people bring us back to Buddha.

[48:58]

Fifty-five. Fifty-five more. That's not many people to play telephone over 2,500 years. Mm-hmm. Yeah, and they didn't reach the end of it. What are you doing? You must be sitting idly. If I was sitting idly, I'd be doing something. Then what the hell are you doing? The hundred sages don't know. Hmm. But just for historical accuracy, lineage is pretty accurate back, oh, 1,500, 1,600 years earlier than that.

[50:19]

It's not clear. But that's still a long time. Okay. And body, speech and mind are also the, let's call it the locators of karma. Körper, Rede und Geist sind auch die... They locate karma. Locators, I said. Yeah, but what is... It's where karma is located. Ah ja, das sind auch die Verortungen, die Orte des Karma. I mean, in English we can use the word more widely. It's the acts of body, the acts of speech, and the acts of mind, mental acts, which create karma.

[51:21]

The axe is axe, isn't it? The axe is the top. Axe? Axe. The axe, yeah, that's good too. Manjushri, you know. Cutting, cut that karma. I like that. Mm-hmm. The axe of karma. I like that. The axe of karma. Yes, as good as the time in Berlin when I was being translated and... I kept saying calm, abiding mind. And the audience got stranger and stranger. And I found my translator who must love computer games or something.

[52:23]

Was translating it as karma biting mind. I finally said, what are you saying? He said, well, karma biting mind. It sucks to die, yeah. The karma biting mind. Now we have the axe of karma. It's good. We're not going to get very far today, I can see. So, the act, the acts of body, speech and mind, also, they generate karma, they accumulate karma, body, speech and mind, and they...

[53:36]

And they are shaped by karma? They accumulate and are shaped by karma and express karma. So naturally... Buddhism would like to do something about that. Okay. Yeah, it was such a short time, we only got five minutes or so to know exactly how I can say this, but let me... Yeah, go ahead.

[54:41]

Let's just go back to, see if I can find an entrance, to before... the mind of no before and after. The question, the thing is, can you make this your fundamental, primary and initial mind? and initial. So your initial mind is a mind that is Well you could say neutral. But it's a mind of let's say pre-distinctions.

[55:42]

Or pre-personal. Or pre-psychological. It's what In early Buddhism it would be called something like detachment. But it's actually a mind before attachment or detachment occur. And this is a mind you learn and learn, taste, embody in zazen. We could say perhaps you, to stretch the language a little, embody in mind and in speech.

[56:48]

I like to test our translation. Body and speech and mind. A mind before speech, body, body and speech arise. A mind in which body, speech and mind themselves don't arise as distinctions. So we can again hear Dogen saying dropping body and mind. Sukhirashi trying to speak about it by calling it big mind. But now that we're more adept, and we are, than Sukershi students were in the 60s and 70s, we can have a better understanding of something like hold to the mind before thought arises.

[58:13]

Or a mind that might be pre-personal or pre-self. And everything appears in it. But it appears again... Yeah. Yeah, before any grammar of meaning is attached. Yeah. You find yourself living in this space.

[59:28]

And not only do things appear in this space, But you appear in this space constantly collapsing it. Taking some specific action. But now it's sort of like I tried to express it by saying we invite the sky into the trees. The trees become an expression of the sky. Mm-hmm. Anyway, this practice of body, speech, and mind is to...

[60:34]

allow such a mind to be grounded in our experience. And so all of this stuff is always our actual experience. Everything appears before our eyes. Appears within us. And then takes the form of body acts or speech acts, mental acts. Yeah, if you want more, come back again. We'll try to get our tuning forks out and see if we can find the right note that we can sing of the Dharmakaya together. so that we can sing the Dhammakaya together.

[62:22]

Thank you very much.

[62:24]

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