You know, I'm always experimenting with what can be taught. Because I can't teach what can't be taught. So I have to discover with you what is being taught when I teach. Also muss ich mit euch entdecken, was gelehrt wird, wenn ich lehre. So, we don't have much time to sit around and talk about it in the Sesshin. Und wir haben nicht viel Zeit, herumzusitzen und darüber zu sprechen im Sesshin. But if, I'll start Doksons this evening, and if something in the Teshos has come up for you and makes sense or doesn't, I'd like to hear it maybe. You can educate me a little.

[01:01]

Yeah. What Mara said, quoting Nagarjuna, I believe, where does walking start? I mean, he said more than that, but what he said was brilliant, quite wonderful. Of course, it's Nagarjuna as well as Ottmar, but... Mm-hmm. And I gave you the statement from the Diamond Sutra yesterday, I think. Not abiding anywhere.

[02:03]

Give rise to mind. No, I didn't emphasize the word give yesterday, I should have. But there's a lot. I mean, such a statement can change the world. Not abiding anywhere. Is that possible? What does it mean? This has to be investigated. And again, I've been speaking about investigating Suzuki Roshi's teaching. And I always like the word investigate because it's related to, in English, I'm not sure, in vestige, which means footprint or mark, to find the footprints.

[03:16]

Vestige. Yeah. So to investigate... Not abiding anywhere. That can be a lifetime. And then... Give rise to mind. In other words, first don't abide anywhere. And within not abiding anywhere, establish the location of mind. Then mind is your location. So in various ways we're speaking about this during these Sashin lectures.

[04:24]

And I'm experimenting with what can be taught about this. And I find I'm going back to some of Suzuki Roshi's earliest teachings that I received. And I guess I'm doing that because I just did that in San Francisco. At Dan's mountain seat ceremony at Crestone I was invited back to the 50th anniversary of the San Francisco Zen Center. So I guess my feeling when I went back, they wanted me to give a couple lectures. And none of you were there, but some of you have, since it was live streamed and archived, it's never happened to me before,

[05:29]

Some of you have seen the... the lecture thing heard and seen a bunch of us walking down Laguna Street for quite a long time. I think, I haven't seen it, so I don't know, but I think that's what's there. In any case, so my feeling was to, I don't know, was to bring back Sukhiroshi's teachings to the Zen Center that I received 50 years ago. Yeah, and one of the earliest teachings I received also was the teaching of the three bodies. The Dharmakaya, Sambhogakaya, Nirmanakaya bodies.

[06:57]

And I was pretty, I mean, he gave this lecture and wrote, he sort of diagrammed the three bodies on a flip chart. And on one level I was just interested and kind of cool and I went home. And then I walked back later. and copied it all off the flip chart because on another level I was completely astonished. Amazed.

[07:59]

Kind of in wonder about it. Because what he was presenting was not a theory. It's a theory, yes, but he wasn't presenting it as a theory. He was presenting his experience. And he was presenting his experience as if it could be mine and our experience. And it not only suggested an extraordinary development was possible for us human beings, In a way that changed my conception of human beings. I ought to have been astonished and amazed. You know, one afternoon your whole conception of a human being has changed. what else should astonish you?

[09:13]

So, but not only was this extraordinary development possible, but it was a presentation of of identity as layered as not just a matter of a development over time but a concept of simultaneous time or performative time. In which there can be a morphing in any one moment into different layers of being.

[10:19]

That was a good afternoon. And I've been investigating this since then. And also, as I've been pointing out, investigating this idea of putting your mind in your hands. Okay, so let me kind of give you some kind of physical look at the process of investigation. Because One, as I said, I didn't know how to follow his instruction. And I didn't know what he meant by mind. But he did bring bring attention to my hands as part of practice.

[11:55]

And he quite often spoke about the mudra and the shape of the mudra and the feel of the mudra and so forth. And he emphasized it as the sort of essence of sitting and the barometer of sitting. So through that I was discovering the mind in my hands. In the sense that the mind was already in the hands. Yeah, so you start out with... You've got two hands, right? I mean, most of us do. And you put them together. And then you lose your thumbs. They disappear.

[12:58]

You don't know where they are. They're kind of a galactic distance apart. And then you wonder where they've gone. And you're kind of like, where are they? Then they reappear. So your thumbs reappear. And your hands appear. And so this brought me to the concept of appearance. At the center of what's meant by Dharma practice. So the concept of appearance led me to the practical experience of appearance appearing.

[14:05]

And an appearance, of course, not graspable, momentary. Momentary and not graspable. So this is a process of following the footsteps, investigating. So it's a little bit like you have two things. You know, what is it and how is it, you know? Or the mind and the object simultaneously arising. And you sort of like investigate the layers. And pretty soon you find actually they can, unlayered, you have something like this.

[15:22]

Yeah. And then they start interlacing. And just from the first start, you wouldn't have known all of this was going to happen and all the mudras would appear. But through investigating the seed, Yeah, the flowers and fruits appear. And you find, like, you have two hands. And I often point out that one hand can can feel the other hand.

[16:24]

So one hand can be subject and the other hand can be object. That's totally amazing. I mean, amazing to me. I'm always amazed every day. Which one is the subject? Which one is the object? But then you can shift it. Something can shift it so the left hand becomes the subject and right hand becomes the object. What's going on when you just make this within the spectrum of mind from object to mind appearing that you can make this, something makes this shift. And what makes this change in this spectrum from mind to object? When you have an experience of you making the decision, you think there's a self which made the decision to turn the right hand into the self.

[17:30]

But if you just... use your left hand or right hand in some circumstance where you usually use the other one, that hand becomes the subject just by how you use it. So it's not some agency of self making the decision, it's just how you use it makes the decision. So when does the emphasis of awareness... When is the emphasis on awareness an activity of self or just an activity? So you can study actually in such a simple way

[18:35]

what you mean by self, that you believe is self. Yeah. Okay, now this morning during Zazen, I said you can have an overall feeling And you can And I call that overall feeling a kind of treasure, an inexhaustible treasure. A treasure you can't use up. And in the case 92 of the Shoyoroku case, The young man calls it the jewel hidden in the mountain of form.

[20:01]

What is that? Is it some other kind of self? Bodhisattva self? And in case 93, Shih Tzu calls it the wish-fulfilling gem that is realized through the mind, M-I-N-E, of thusness. In other words, the experience of thusness is like a mine, a gold mine or something, that generates a wish-fulfilling gem. Yeah.

[21:15]

So when you can carry this overall feeling of this intact or integrated feeling as a density of attention maybe you're something like a Bodhisattva. Maybe you're carrying, calling forth a somatic layer of experience which actually you function differently. Maybe it's like a different person. It's this kind of experience and this kind of teaching that arises from hey, do we have simultaneously three potential bodies of realization? And how do we realize that? Mm-hmm. Well, yesterday I said I was going to take a walk with you to a cafe.

[22:40]

And I really want to take that walk, sort of, you know, footing and flooring our way to the cafe. But let's do it tomorrow. Okay. Thank you very much.

[23:15]

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