Let me repeat something that I've often repeated of Dogen. To cultivate and authenticate the 10,000 things. by conveying the self to them, is delusion. But to allow the ten thousand things to come forward, and cultivate and authenticate the self is enlightenment.

[01:07]

And we could also say is the practice of wisdom. And as you all know, I'm emphasizing the craft of the practice of wisdom. Now if I simply put up my hand like this, now it's a fist. And now it's an open hand. Now it's a fist again. Just to observe that from the point of view of wisdom is the practice of the craft of wisdom. So there's a fist. Now, where did the fist go? And I mean, it sounds ridiculous, I know. But if you're noticing relationships and not entities.

[02:26]

No, an entity, I mean, I know this is... I've been living with this for 78 years. I guess it's my hand. Oh, okay. I've never been able to get quite straight which is the right and which is the left because when I turn around it switches. But it's fingernails and palm and so forth. So I put it together as a image which I identify with this hand. But it's actually a bunch of parts which I call a hand. Now, are there beehives around here? Do people raise bees around here?

[03:41]

Well, a beehive, I mean, what I've read anyway, has 10,000 to 60,000 bees in it. How many? Ten to? Ten thousand to sixty thousand. Yeah, and it can be a ten or more kilometer radius. And the female worker bees live about a month. And they can supposedly, I never counted, but I read, they can visit 500 flowers or whatever in a single round trip. So from the point of view of Buddhism, the beehive or the bee colony has a diameter of 20 miles, 20 kilometers.

[04:50]

And it's creating structure all the time. So again, if we don't think about entities, but we think about relationships, then the existence of the beehive is this 20-mile diameter. And as many thousands of bees creating patterns, structure. It's... the sense that your heart is the circularity, your circulation system. And when you examine the heart and try to get an image of the heart in your interior practice,

[06:16]

It's not just the heart, it's the circulation system. Okay. But if we try to grasp this beehive, it's a pattern that's all around here. with a 10 kilometer diameter or something like that and its structure is not graspable so we could say well it happens in space but that's not the way we think of it I mean, it and everything else creates the space which it is.

[07:29]

And it's not really in space, it arises... Space doesn't produce it, but we can say something like emptiness produces it. The fist disappears into emptiness. It arises because emptiness, movement, etc. is possible. Now, I'm not expecting you to enjoy or make sense of what I'm talking about. But we have to try such simple exercises. Over and over again.

[08:38]

And you have a lot of chance. Your hands are flipping around all the time. You pick up a pencil and you put something down. And you can maybe each time you do it you can have a feeling of the hand arising from its absence. You want to somehow get into yourself the experience of things arising from emptiness. I've been defining emptiness as defining wisdom in Buddhism. As interactive interdependence. And we can also define it as the realization of emptiness.

[09:58]

That you somehow embed it, embody it in yourself. So right now I have the feeling of speaking with you as you are all arising right now from emptiness. And what I'm saying arises from emptiness. Yeah, I know a bit about Buddhism. But the combinations I'm putting together in words right now is I've never done before. And they're arising through a field of possibilities. A field of possibilities we can call, because it has no inherent nature, we can call emptiness. ein Feld von Möglichkeiten, dass wir, weil es kein inhärentes Wesen hat, können wir das Leerheit nennen.

[11:18]

Now my poet, teacher, friend, Robert Duncan. Mein dichter Lehrerfreund Robert Duncan. Yeah. He said, if you... if you want to know the universe, as it exists in your experience in it, you must learn to read it as a text. And if you're going to come to know it and know yourself, if you are going to come to know the universe and know yourself. Now, this depends on your caring about it.

[12:21]

An American philosopher named Haugeland said that the trouble with artificial intelligence is it doesn't give a damn. He doesn't care. And we need some kind of authentic intentionality, authentic caring to make sense of the universe as a text. And the tapestry of our living with each other and living in this phenomenal world. And that's much the part of allowing the 10,000 things to come forward.

[13:31]

How do you allow the 10,000 things to come forward? Again, I point out often, 10,000 things is not many. I mean, shouldn't be translated as many. Even I don't like the translation as myriad because for most people myriad means many, but although it actually means in its etymology 10,000. 10,000 has a boundary. It's knowable. We're not in a general infinite universe of many, many. We're in a knowable universe. I mean, as we're part of it, we can assume it's knowable in some sense.

[14:46]

So if you take a statement like this, to cultivate and authenticate Also, wenn du so eine Aussage nimmst, zu kultivieren und zu authentifizieren. We've translated that for decades. And we always have trouble. Well, we do. Sorry. Haben wir uns auf irgendwas geeinigt, was auf authentifizieren zu verwirklichen, oder was haben wir gesagt? Well, I mean, you know, the Japanese word is one, meaning something like to know, but it actually means to cultivate and authenticate which is knowing. So if we take this phrase as something to investigate as wisdom,

[16:11]

You want to think about what does it mean to... Are you cultivating things by conveying the self to them? Is most of your thinking self-referential thinking? When you look at something, do you think I like it or I don't like it or it belongs to me? That's all self-referential thinking. One of the four wisdoms is impartial wisdom where you just see things without preferences. They're just there. They're just here. Can you remove your preferences from things?

[17:41]

If you see things through your preferences, you only see a topography of self. You see things that stick out into the self being conveyed to them. So if you're a serious practitioner of this statement of Dogen's, you do simple things like developing a noticing a kind of inventory of how often your thoughts are self-referential. If you don't see that topography you're not going to get anywhere. And you cultivate the world, the 10,000 things, to cultivate is to plant, to develop the 10,000 things through the fertilizer of self.

[18:47]

They're all growing in a little picture frame on your wall called the self-frame and everything is appearing in the self-frame. And then you authenticate them as real. Oh, this is really what it is. So Dogen says, just simply reverse this. Allow the 10,000 things to come forward. Now, what kind of mind allows the 10,000 things to come forward? Now, I gave you six kinds of mind yesterday. Consciousness. Awareness. Dreaming. Non-dreaming deep sleep. A field of an attentional sphere. And Samadhi.

[20:29]

So Buddhism works with these six. And most definitively through the attentional sphere, awareness and Samadhi. And Sukhirashi says, consciousness is very useful to present wisdom to yourself. But to... But practice is primarily to notice the world, not think about the world. I don't mean we don't think about the world sometimes and it's not useful.

[21:31]

But as I said yesterday, the primary dimensionality is to incubate, not to understand. So to allow to notice things and allow that noticing to incubate the world is to let things come forward. And Zazen practice then is to create that attentional sphere of awareness until you really know Zazen is entering an attentional sphere which allows the world it doesn't think about the world but is attentive to the world.

[22:49]

Okay. So now let me, the second half of the lecture yesterday, we ran out of time. We ran out of shared planetary orbit time. Was uns ausgegangen ist, ist die gemeinsame Planetenorbitzeit. The orbit of the... Yeah. Yeah, that's shared orbital time. Okay. Die geteilte Erdendrehungszeit. Okay. But we haven't run out of bodily time. We're right here in the same bodily time. Okay. Now what I want to do is to give you another example of the craft of practice. And this is the development of the shift from noticing things as entities to noticing them as activities.

[24:11]

Yeah. So you noticed relationships. That's the start. The hive and the colony of bees is the relationships, not the thing made of mud or And the beeswax and the shaped mud or whatever it is, beekeeper's box, doesn't exist unless this activity, this field of activity exists. Unless these relationships exist. And the hand is useless unless its activities exist. Okay.

[25:27]

So first you develop a sensitivity to relationships. As I said, we've talked about here, this is the mob ward. It's the place which you step over into Zazen. And it's the place that you eat during Sashin and practice period. Which is a place of relationship of the server and you. In a place of relationship where you eat with the Buddha because of the Buddha bowl. And this sense of a transition in space itself. Like right now there's a between Jonas and myself there's some kind of in-betweenness.

[26:30]

And that in-betweenness is always changing. And if I get too close, Jonas might say, you're too close. But I can push the edge of that closeness or pull back in various ways. There's a structure to space itself that we feel. So this concept of ma as in-betweenness is a way to notice relationships. It's a Japanese word, ma. Okay. So now next you want to, noticing relationships, you want to, let's change the pointing word to activities.

[27:49]

So the word relationship is just to get you to point to something that's hardly contained in the word relationship. The moon and the tides, it's all relationships. So now we're using the word activity instead of relationships to point to the same interactive interdependence. Okay. Now, if we talk about activities, that this stick is an activity, I carry it, and Sukhiroshi gave it to me, and it

[28:59]

Originally it was represented as a back scratcher. Because people didn't bathe much, so you sat around with flies and you had a fly thing. And it represents the backbone, the spine. And sometimes I think it's one of those New Year things where it spins out. And somehow it's burned there, probably by incense or something. And you can see it was once a forest. You can see the pattern of the wood lived in a tree with birds and insects and things. So as soon as you start seeing things as activities, you need the metaphor of a field or a sphere.

[30:25]

When you see a tree as an activity, it's a sphere of activity. The trunk and the roots making it return to stillness all the time. in the wind. And it's a realm of shade and birds and insects and so forth. And this you kind of have to practice too. I have many, many times stood in front of a tree, I mean, really many times, felt my own activity in relationship, my perceptual activity is part of the tree.

[31:39]

And felt the stillness of the roots and trunk in my own body. And the space of the tree, my own space, Until I am unable to see a tree except in this way. And I keep doing it until I never see a tree except in this way as a field of activity which I'm in the midst of. This is the craft, the craft of wisdom, the craft of practice. And I have to care because I want to know the universe, as Robert Duncan says, as it is.

[32:44]

So we've gone from relationships to activities to the field or sphere of activities. And from the field of activity we go to The next pointer word, possibilities. Now, what do entities do? If you see the world as entities. They rob us of our future. Entities are predictable. If you habitually think basically in entities,

[33:59]

The future is just predictable and horrible. Might as well go to some other planet. It's boring, depressing. It's the same old stuff. It's going to be the same in the future. But when you see things as activities, everything is a field of activity. Many possibilities. I mean, possibilities that you can't imagine, but you know are there, you feel. So now we have, from entities, we have, instead of entities, we have fields of possibilities, spheres of possibilities.

[35:07]

And how do you function in a field of possibilities? And how do you function in a field of possibilities? Wie handelst du, wie funktionierst du in einem Feld von Möglichkeiten? You allow the field of possibilities. Du lässt dieses Feld der Möglichkeiten zu. And that mind is called samadhi or an attentional sphere. Und dieser Geist wird samadhi genannt oder eine Aufmerksamkeitssphäre. And you function through also a kind of authentic intentionality. So there's a vow to allow. So the vow is an intention. And allowing is to let things come forward. And now we have Dogen's A single hair pierces myriad ten thousand holes.

[36:23]

In the field of possibilities. It's your vow to know things as they are. Which brings the 10,000 things together in some kind of incubatory space. Which we call wisdom. Now, I intended this to be a real simple lecture. I guess it wasn't quite so simple as I wanted it to be. But maybe it was simple. It was just a little dense. Or maybe it wasn't dense at all. There's big spaces between all the possibilities. Vielleicht war es auch gar nicht dicht, sondern mit großen Räumen zwischen all den Möglichkeiten.

[37:36]

Ich hoffe, ihr habt das Gefühl davon mitbekommen.

[37:38]

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