That was in the car with me. Fun to see you all. That was my former wife I just picked up at the airport. Very unusual for her to travel. She doesn't like to. Yeah, so I felt I shouldn't ask someone else to do it, so I anyway picked her up. It was my pleasure to do so, but I also felt it was my job. Okay. Yeah. This will be the, I hope, the last lecture on the taxonomy of enlightenment. Taxonomy. The classification. I don't know how I got into this.

[01:03]

It's your fault. I didn't. And I usually hate to talk about enlightenment. Because it just brings up desire in people, a lot of people. Or failure, why haven't you, etc. So my intention anyway is to try to demystify enlightenment. I can start out by saying President Bush is enlightened. Strictly speaking, born-again experiences, Protestant conversions, phenomenologically very similar to enlightenment experiences. So I think with the sense that what enlightenment does, which is make a shift in your views,

[02:11]

And convince you of the truth of that shift, you have to say that President Bush isn't darkened, I mean enlightened. I think we... In darkened, there's a word actually, benighted, benighted. Oh yeah, you have the same. Umnachtet gibt es. Yeah. In America we call him shrub. We call him shrub in America. Or... But what I'm pointing out is the dangers of enlightenment or the fact that the experience, the phenomenological experience, can be misused or misdirected as well as an opening experience.

[03:23]

So my intention is to demystify enlightenment to some significant degree. Point out that, you know, although he wouldn't call... him, I hate to say his name, enlightened. It does point out that this very similar experience can have a very different direction. And so a lot of Zen teaching is about making sure the direction of this experience is genuinely opening and fruitful. You know, this is... What was that about?

[04:33]

The war in Iraq is not separate from these things. There's a lot of Protestant Christian theology behind why the United States is in Iraq, more than oil. And it's similar thinking to the background of Herzl and the founder of Zionism. And related to the sureness of the truth of the Bible. And that sureness is related to the born again or protestant conversion experience. Okay, so again I can say the enlightened experience is universal.

[05:59]

In the sense that it can be the experience of anybody in any culture. But the content is not universal. So I suppose in emphasizing that I'm trying to un-theologize enlightenment. That it's some kind of pure experience that in itself can almost be worshipped. Okay. And I'm trying to make enlightenment seem more commonplace and more accessible. And I want to be able to say that without diminishing the fact that this is an experience which can change your life.

[07:28]

Seal the teaching and open up the teaching to embodiment and realization. Okay. Okay. Now, more fundamentally, I would say, what I'm speaking about is the interplay of view, let me put it this way, of view and activity. So let me try to say some things to try to make that clearer. I mean, yesterday's lecture, I liked and enjoyed because it was, you know, I got some things... you know, out here have said that, yeah, they're important to me.

[08:45]

Yeah, but I was also dissatisfied with the lecture because I didn't ground it sufficiently in practice. Yeah, but, you know, I can't be perfect, I'm sorry. So, yeah. Okay, so let me start with, we say to people, we who talk about Buddhism, bring your attention to your breath. Now that's an activity. And we just say basically the teaching and the recommendation and foundations of mindfulness bring attention to the breath.

[09:58]

Yeah, and to say that with more detail or Accuracy to bring, and the intention to bring attention to the breath. Now, when I say bring the, now here I'm trying to talk about the craft of practice. Yeah. Okay. When I say have an intention to bring attention to the breath, now you don't just have the activity of bringing attention to the breath. You also have the view, and intention is a view, the view to bring intention to the breath.

[11:18]

Okay, so you have the view to bring attention to the breath. And the view is a mental posture. So you're actually working with the activity of attention and the... and a mental posture simultaneously. And the teaching here is not to bring attention to the breath occasionally or during zazen. Okay, but to bring attention to the breath continuously 24 hours. I watched Sophia the other day.

[12:18]

I had to drive her here from Freiburg, I guess, and she wanted a bottle, so I gave her a bottle, and it was too hot, you know, and it didn't seem hot to me, but it was hot to her, and et cetera. So she's holding it. And there's her car seat, baby seat. And she falls asleep. And she holds the bottle the whole time. That was interesting. I was watching her in the mirror. So her intention to hold the bottle stayed present even though she was really asleep.

[13:25]

My daughter just got married. I have to tell this story. I think it's on the bulletin board in the office or something. When she was Sophia's age, she was sitting in her car seat beside me. She's now 27, so it's quite a while ago. And she falls asleep and she's swinging her head around. You've heard me tell this story. And somehow she's almost hitting the dashboard, but then pulling away just in time. Sun's up. I said, Elizabeth, watch your head. She says, you watch it, I can't see it. Okay. So anyway, so Sophia doesn't drop the bottle.

[14:50]

And then after a while she wakes up and when it's cool enough, maybe she's kind of checking it out. And sometimes I suggest that you hold something while you sleep. And you're trying to do that when you hold something or keep something on your forehead if you can't sleep on your back all night. See if it's there in the morning. And this is a way to learn to hold an intention through sleeping hours. And it also helps being able to bring attention to the breath while you're sleeping. Mm-hmm. Okay, so the teaching then is not just to bring attention to the breath during zazen, but, if possible, throughout the 24 hours.

[16:02]

So, the intention is there, although you may only be partially successful, the intention... If the intention is held, that's a big part of the success. Oh dear, we really have to add an eighth today. Oh dear, we really have to add an eighth day. I can see already. Okay. I always think it's going to take five minutes. Anyway, so... So when you practice bringing attention to the breath, first of all, just very simply, you're bringing attention to activity.

[17:14]

The activity of the breath. It's clearly an activity. Because we have the tendency to have the mind move into some sort of past, future, a time that has a sense of continuity or permanence. Okay, so now one of the things I've pointed out very often is that if you cannot just bring attention to the breath now and then, but pretty much continuously, and the background of the whole of these lectures is why Dogen says practice should be continuous.

[18:22]

Why, if you want to do realization practice and not just well-being practice, you really have to have the inventiveness and intention to actualize your practice in some way, not just in Sesshin, but from now on. Now, as Dogen says, continuous practice, which actualizes itself, not just gives you a feeling of well-being, It's continuous practice which actualizes itself. Sorry to point it out. I'm happy to point it out. Okay. And what I pointed out often is if you can get close to having your attention on the breath continuously,

[19:51]

That becomes a dynamic shift in the dynamic of the self. And then without going into it in detail... The self isn't an entity. It's a function. Necessary function. As an entity, it's not necessary. And Buddhism is about the self as an entity, not as a function. Buddhism is about the self as a problem. When it's an entity, it's not a problem when it's a function. No, that's not activity. That's not function. Just practice, that's a view.

[20:59]

So what I'm saying is how in the pedagogy of Zen there's an interplay of view and practice, or view and activity. Oh. Intention and practice. Intention and practice. Or how wisdom informs our practice. We're not just practicing any old way. We're practicing... through wisdom. And within that practice, the views of wisdom are present within our practice. So when you bring a view into your practice, that view is in dialogue, resonance, or dissonance with the views of wisdom.

[22:25]

Now, when Dogen says... A single hair pierces myriad holes. He's giving Ejo, in this case, a view. Ejo brings into his practice. And that view is interplaying with interacting with the views of his culture and the views of his Buddhist teachings. Now, koan phrases don't work, really, except in continuous practice. And so... Too many of you try to understand a koan while you're reading it.

[23:38]

A real koan can't be understood that way. It can only be understood if you take portions of it, shards of it, and incubate it. And some of you, you know, you get a taste of a corn. You know, your practice is mature enough, you get a taste pretty quickly, or you have a taste because you incubate it a bit. And as soon as you get a little taste of it, then you try to get the rest of it by understanding it and analyzing it. This is a big mistake. In the old days, the teacher would just bop you on the head. I can't do that and you'd probably call the emergency services.

[24:42]

Bob. Hail Bob, remember that? Okay. So, to many of you, it's like you're sitting on an egg And it's getting warm, so you take it out and say, I wonder what's in there. You can't open it up too soon. We have a term, pecking in and pecking out. But that doesn't mean you sort of listen for the egg pecking and then you say, oh, okay. Picking in and picking out is what teacher and disciple do. So let the egg incubate.

[25:53]

Do you understand the image, pecking in and pecking out? Because chicks start to peck and then... And this is enlightenment in the context of teaching. Now that's part of the taxonomy I haven't gotten to yet. Okay. So, one of the functions, necessary functions of self, as I say, is the establishment of continuity from moment to moment. And if you practice bringing attention to the breath continuously, at some point, You give up finding continuity in your thinking.

[26:57]

And it's almost like a rubber band. A sense of continuity tied to thinking finally snaps away. And then continuity is just in your activity. A gummy band, yeah. Let's form a rock group called the Gumi Band. We'll work in German, but we'll work in English. And the third thing that

[28:09]

the continuous practice of breath does. The first is it engages you in activity. And you start to see, feel activity all the time instead of having a tendency to try to make things permanent or predictable. Und ihr kriegt die Tendenz, also Aktivität überall zu sehen, anstatt dieser Tendenz, also Vorhersagbarkeit oder Permanenz zu sehen. And it shifts the need for the sense of continuity in the world, psychological and... perceptual, out of thinking, into the breath. And the third thing it does is it brings you, this is all fairly similar, but brings you into the pace of Let's use the euphony of the pace and patience.

[29:24]

The pace, don't worry. Don't worry about it. I didn't even pronounce it right. Pace and patience. Okay. Because the world, everything breathes. Or we can say it's something like that. Everything breathes. But you don't notice the breathing of other things until you notice the breathing of yourself. Yeah, so let me tell an anecdote right now. One I haven't mentioned for a while. Way back sometime in the Yeah, early 60s.

[30:39]

I was walking across the University of California, Berkeley campus. And I was at that time a program coordinator for the university, putting together educational programs. Mostly on public topics. But I knew the buildings quite well, and I'd been working late, and there's a whole lot of people around this one building. So many I couldn't get in. So, you know, being a somewhat curious person, what the heck's going on in there? So... I know the building well, so I knew if I went over there behind the bushes and there was a ledge, I could climb up into the window.

[31:41]

So I climbed up and found myself sitting on the windowsill with a very good seat. There was a little tiny guy in the middle. A lot of hair and a little beard and half of Hawaii around his neck. No flowers. Beautiful talking, you know. Everybody was listening. I didn't know who he was. This was before the Beatles. Yeah, so I... found myself when we all went out the door. From where I was, I got carried out the door. Sort of right near him.

[32:43]

And so I, yeah, came out the door and I suddenly was standing right beside him and there was a car waiting for him and they were talking about Somehow getting him to Canada. I think that's the conversation. So I'm standing there. I wasn't just wondering, going to Canada. I wasn't thinking about anything really except... Yeah. And then the thought popped into my head. This guy's pretty good. And I thought, where did that thought come from? Then I realized I'd actually coordinated my breathing with his. And once my breathing was in coordination with his, the thought popped in my head, he's pretty good.

[33:49]

So, yeah, I thought that was interesting. And so then I turned to somebody and said, who is this guy? It's the Maharishi. It was his first visit, I think, to the United States. But so, being consistently with my breath, in some funny way we could say open the eye of the body. I didn't notice his breath. My body noticed his breath. And my body synchronized our breaths and then I knew something about the man.

[34:53]

Now, I could never have got to that point unless my breath was continuous breathing. my attention was continuous with my breath. And somebody can tell you something like that, but it's not the same as finding out through the, let's call it, the eye of the breath. And when you've established through the continuous practice of attention to the breath, And awakened, let's call it, again, the eye of the body, it isn't just that another person, you can feel them more fundamentally through their breath and palpable physical presence than you can through their talking.

[36:11]

So we could say the posture of a practitioner His or her breath is always saying, hey, how's the translation going, baby? Yeah, who's paying attention here? Not my thinking. My breath notices who's with me and who's not with me. So it's a kind of hand and eye that's feeling the world, but it's coming through the breath, carrying attention. So now, when I speak about feeling the activity of things, Of the bamboo.

[37:26]

It's not just felt, because I can see the bamboo wiggling around. It's somehow because there's a bamboo... and the breath eye of the body, feel the simultaneous stillness and movement. The stillness is it's rooted in the ground and the leaves are moving in a relationship to its rootedness. Excuse me, the last part. It's moving in relationship to its stillness. Otherwise it would just blow all over the place. So it's always moving and coming back to its stillness. And that's the experience in the breath too.

[38:28]

Feel the breath as both your stillness and your movement. Oh, it's too late now. Now this Buddha, I'll talk about this Buddha for a minute. This Buddha is... I can see the activity of the bamboo. I can't see the activity of the Buddha. I can think it. I know that we offer incense to it and so forth. But for me, when I see that Buddha, I see activity. Now, I'd like to come back to this more fully But maybe tomorrow. So if I talk about this stuff again tomorrow, you are going to have to imagine what the final lecture is like, because it would be on the imaginary eighth day.

[39:54]

And I'm sure the lecture you imagine will be better than mine. So this may be a good way to... The eighth lecture. Okay. Now, this Buddha is one that has been full of activity for me, as some of you know. Believe it or not, he used to sit in a restaurant. No, he sat in a shop. next to a restaurant where I always ate in the 60s. And I always liked it. And I often went to the restaurant with folks and sat in a chair at the end of this table where I could look right into the window and see the Buddha.

[40:56]

So I could have this fun experience of talking to everybody, fooling around and eating good Japanese food, while I could feel the stillness. I was kind of fooling around here, but yeah, like that. And I've always liked this Buddha because its hands are not in the center. And you know I'm fanatic about getting the altar centered. But I can't move those hands because they were... I've studied it. I can do some computer work on it. And then I used to sit this way with my fingers because I imitated this Buddha.

[41:57]

So it has the activity of my sitting this way sometimes for a couple of years. And I liked the fact that it was off kilter because it made it more human somehow. And the Buddha disappeared and the shop got closed and I moved away and blah, blah, blah. Then I was in San Francisco years later giving a lecture about Hotel, conference. There was this Buddha in a shop, in a lobby. I remember it was in the window and I walked by with a State of the World conference. I walked by and I thought, I know that Buddha.

[43:07]

So I went by and looked. So I went in the shop. And for sure there was the guy who owned it who had it in his own house for 20 years, I guess. He said, yes, I bought it from that shop years ago and liked it and kept it in my house because I liked it. So I said, you know, Destiny is calling. But actually, I said, this is way too much money. I can't afford this kind of Buddha. And that's what I thought back in the 60s, too. Yeah, surely. It had the same stand back in the 60s, too. Buddhas like this don't come out of Japan anymore because

[44:09]

Because Japan doesn't let them out. So this is probably brought by a soldier in the Second World War. So I came back to here. After about two weeks, I woke up in the middle of the night. We had to get that Buddha. So I, in the middle of the night, called. He said, I've been waiting for your call. I want you to have that Buddha. And he lowered the price considerably, but still it was expensive. And you know, Melita loaned us the money for it, you know. And at that time we thought it was 350 years old and it had been antiqued to make it look old, to make it look 350 years old. But then Charlie, in his rambunctious youth, Took a flying leap and knocked the Buddha off the altar.

[45:44]

Broke into a lot of pieces. Yeah, it was kind of disturbing. So then we hunted for somebody who could restore it. And we checked museums and And we found somebody who we thought was the best. And he took off the antiquing, the fake age. There was the original gold. And then he had the wood checked by a laboratory in Italy and it's 500 years old, not 350 years old. So we got it restored and the man who restored it said that It's made of, I think, seven pieces of wood fitted together, so it doesn't split with temperature and things.

[47:00]

And he said he doesn't know any work that he's done in Europe of that period, which is as sophisticated as the way this is made. If you look at the chest, you can see that there's the original gold, some of it, and new gold, and there's a line because people have rubbed it for years. They rub the body and then they rub themselves to make themselves healthy. So you rub the heart of the Buddha and then you rub yourself. You can see where it's been rubbed. Okay, so it's easy to see the activity of the bamboo. But the oldest, most permanent, long-lasting thing in this room is that Buddha.

[48:13]

Except for your genes, brother. And Yet, as I've just described, for me, it's full of activity. But it's not visible unless I have the view and knowledge about it. So to see the impermanence or Interdependence of the bamboo is easy. It's just sitting there in front of me, moving around. But to know the impermanence... And activity of the Buddha, I have to have a view that allows me to see its impermanence. So we see the activity of the world, and we also need wisdom views to see more deeply into the activity of the world.

[49:17]

Those two interpenetrate and it's very closely related to the pet gachi of enlightenment. Okay, so it's time to stop. I think it's time to stop. The eighth lecture minus one will happen tomorrow.

[50:04]

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