Guten Morgen. Well, of course, I want Doorstep Zen to be somewhat different than we've been doing. Yeah, and I know I have the inclination to have it be different. Und ich weiß, dass ich dazu neige, das anders haben zu wollen. Aber lasst uns einfach schauen, was wir daraus machen können und auch was ihr gerne hättet, was daraus wird. I did notice, I don't think I mentioned it here, but I did notice when I went back to Crestone six months ago, is that what it's meant to me to...

[01:03]

had the role of a teacher. And the responsibility of a teacher. Which I would put in the role by Suzuki Roshi years ago. But discovering what the responsibility was took me a long time. But in any case, what I've noticed is that when I meet someone, I have a feeling, if this makes any sense, I have a feeling for that person's interiority. And what do I mean by interiority? And here, I'm There's some difference in my deciding to explain what I mean by interiority than I would normally have done in the past.

[03:03]

And I'm being sensitive to the attentional bandwidth Yeah, I'm sort of jumping around here. But one thing that I have noticed, shifting to another thing I've noticed, is that... In effect, to practice Buddhism in the West, you also have to create a new practice of the cultural difference.

[04:15]

There's a kind of implicit assumption in most of us that Buddhism can be practiced in Asia, it can be practiced in the West, and that is not necessarily true. Now I'm happy to have some questions or discussions about that at some point. But let me give you a kind of example. When I first lived in Japan, I would signal a taxi.

[05:20]

Just as I signaled taxis in New York. The taxis never stopped. They would go by me and sometimes the driver would go. He wasn't gashowing. And it took me about two and a half months before the taxi started to stop. You know, in Japan, I lived in... Gary Snyder gave me his... The poet Gary Snyder gave me his house, and he moved back to... He moved to the States. And I lived... And the address was 31...

[06:23]

Nishinoyama Cho, Shichiku, Ichikichi, no, not Ichikichi. Shichiku, Kyoto, Japan. And the address was very complicated. What? You didn't say it. There's no reason you should know my Japanese address. Anyway, Nishinoyama Cho is the Western Cho, etc. It's like that. But it was the 31st house built in the 1700s in that district. And of course, there have been hundreds of houses built since then, and they were numbered 3,740, and they might be right beside 31. So in Japan, you're supposed to know where you're going, and if you don't know where you're going, you shouldn't go there.

[07:41]

So taxi drivers know people who don't know how to signal a taxi don't know where they're going. Yeah, but why did they suddenly, after a couple and a half months, why did they start stopping all of a sudden? Well, I realized that I was in Japan. I was not in a Newtonian space. At some point I realized that I wasn't in a Newtonian space in Japan. Newtonian space is to say that as a kind of code for seeing space as a container and seeing time as an outside universal continuity.

[09:03]

Yeah, but... So one of the differences... Well, let me continue the taxi example. So then I noticed the taxis were stopping. So then I tried to observe what I was doing. und dann habe ich versucht zu beobachten, was ich jetzt anders mache. Well, if the taxi was way over there, I kind of put my hand like the space was connecting us and I was scooping the taxi toward me.

[10:05]

Na, zum Beispiel, wenn das Taxi von da hinten anfuhr, dann habe ich jetzt angefangen, meine Hand so leicht auszureichen, als ob der Raum zwischen meiner Hand und dem Taxi uns verbindet, und ich habe das Taxi so wie hereingeholt mit der Hand. And if the taxi was nearby, my hand was sort of like, can you notice my hand? And I have two of them. If you may have noticed that the Oryoki is a two-handed activity. You never, you can do whatever you please, but traditionally you don't just take one thing and move it. Your other hand is always part of it.

[11:09]

Du kannst machen, was du willst, aber traditionell betrachtet würdest du nie im Oryoki einfach eine Sache nehmen und die mit einer Hand von da nach da stellen, sondern deine zweite Hand, die beteiligt sich immer an der Aktivität der Bewegung. So, if I pick up the Setsu, the cleaning stick, I put my left hand, I pick it up with my right hand, I put my left hand at the cleaning tip, and I put my right hand at the other end, and then I pick it up and put it, then I put my left hand at the bowl and aim the stick at my hand. If I take it with my right hand, for example, then the left hand is in contact with the end of the staff and then I transfer it to the other hand and then take the right hand to the other end. And when I put the Setsu into the first bowl, then my left hand is so that with the right hand I point to the left hand with the Setsu.

[12:20]

Now you may think this is some kind of crazy formality or some kind of nuttiness. But if you do think that, I'm sorry to tell you that you live in a cognitive world. And the teachings of Zen are assume you do not live in a cognitive world. Now, mindfulness is about being mindful, right? Supposedly. And mind is a useful English word. But a more useful practice description would be attentional attunement. Now, I'm always looking for English words, that's all I know is English, English mostly, English words which allow one to do

[13:44]

Zen really isn't a practice, it's a craft. And everything is about how you do certain things. Ich kann ja nur Englisch sprechen und ich suche ständig nach englischen Worten, die sagen, was man tut, wie man das tut, worum es geht. Die Zen-Praxis ist eigentlich keine Praxis, sondern eher eine Craft, eine Handwerkskunst, eine Fertigkeit, die man erlernen kann. I guess what I'm doing here is already perhaps a little different from when I used to teach, I guess teach them. Well, I'm sort of trying to teach this, show this, but mostly I'm just telling you, you're going to get it or not. If you don't, that's your problem. It used to be my problem.

[15:12]

It's no longer my problem. So as I said, I used to, when I met somebody, okay, interiority, and then I'll come back to the taxi. You are sitting there. You all know that. And you probably also know with enough phenomenological sensitivity. that actually for me you're all sitting inside me. All I know of you is my sensorial apprehension of you.

[16:15]

and my epiphenomenal or metaphenomenal mind. I say what you said. Do you want to explain it? Maybe. We don't know. I'm going to explain things. Okay, we don't know anymore. Your epiphenomenological or metaphenomenological, your metaphenomenological what? Mind. Mind. Yeah. In other words... The brain, the simulating brain can probably imagine a hammer. To hit something, you know. But the simulating brain cannot imagine a Victorian house. The Victorian house is created by the mind, which is not the brain.

[17:47]

I mean, the brain is part of it, but you need what happens in culture to create a mind. Okay. Okay, now, you may, again, many people want Buddhism to be a kind of belief, you just do it and it's great. But it's actually an extremely complex, subtle philosophy. And if you grew up in an Asian culture, much of it is just... You know how to signal a taxi.

[18:58]

Okay. So if we're going to continue Buddhism in the West, which is my main objective in life, or subjective in life, If we didn't understand, if we don't understand Buddhism in its essential articulations, Yeah. For example, I mean, all kinds of groups do six-week practice periods with shusos, etc.,

[20:11]

And there's nothing wrong with practicing for six weeks. But it's not a practice period. And the person who is susho in it is being short-shrifted. given the short end of the stick. You know, part of today's... We're not supposed to be critical of anything. I accept that all these groups are doing something.

[21:29]

But if I say, aren't they actually continuing practice into our multi-generational future, I have to say, no. Yeah, and you know, I know that I've seen Zen teachers who would say, talk about oneness, which is a delusion, But their teaching was based on allness, not oneness.

[22:35]

Though they allowed for the less discriminating to believe in oneness. So in many groups in Asia, there's two levels of intelligence, what's really going on and what you do so most people feel okay. And what I see now is many groups do these six weeks or, you know, shusos where people don't even live together, and there's no common intelligence in the group that this is actually damaging to Buddhism.

[23:49]

Everyone goes along with it because everyone goes along with it. And there's no real leadership. And this is always a problem. How do we, all of us do it together and yet all of us do it actually through leadership? Und das ist immer eine Schwierigkeit, weil, also klar, wir machen das schon alle zusammen, aber wir machen das alle zusammen mit einer Führung. Ohne eine Führung darin, wenn alle im Prinzip alles machen würden, dann würde das sehr verschwommen werden.

[24:58]

So I guess one thing I'm going to try to do in these... I remember years ago I used to... If I said, you know, Buddhism is actually atheistic. There's no God, even implied God, in Buddhism. And quite a few people left. And sometimes they left during the seminar but usually they just didn't come back to the next seminar. But I know Christians, and even Tibetan Buddhism even, one of the main leading Tibetan Buddhists, I won't mention his name, says, I can't believe in reincarnation, but I like it.

[26:08]

And I know Christians who say, I don't believe in God, but I like it. That's different than believing. A friend of mine has been a Buddhist for most of his life and I won't tell you anything more about him. He's a Westerner. He said to me the other day... How did he put it? What is this pussycat zen? He said, where's the roar? Yeah, I mean, at some point, if we're going to continue this practice, we have to actually know what we're doing.

[27:22]

Okay, interiority again. So, everything I'm seeing here actually is an interior experience of the sensorium and mind. And I do know that you are objective in ways that can't be part of my subjectivity. And I know that I am in the midst of my subjectivity, which I am giving attentional attunement to, And at the same time, I know that you are objectively present in ways that are not part of my subjective attunement.

[29:06]

And at the same time I know that you are also present in a kind of objective way, which is not included in my subjectivity. the person who's actually practicing feels that interiority more than the exteriority. And acts and feels located in that interiority and with the mystery of the objectivity which goes beyond that subjectivity. So it's very common for most people who know something about phenomenology to recognize that last hundred years or so, people in the West and philosophical West have recognized this phenomenological reality, this phenomenological relationality, not reality.

[30:45]

And for all those who are familiar with phenomenology, it is so that in this stream of philosophy, in the last decades, this aspect of the... They know about it, but they don't do it. Okay. Sounds good, whatever you said. I try to just repeat. OK. Did she just repeat? Yes. OK. See, I'm in a fog of objectivity which is leaving me all the time.

[31:51]

Okay, fleeing, fleeing objectivity. Okay, so the practitioner needs a kind of rigor. And not convenience. The practitioner says, I will not be satisfied with my aliveness, period, until I experience interiority. Not just know about it, experience it. Bis ich das, was mit Innigkeit, mit Innerlichkeit gemeint ist, tatsächlich erfahre. Nicht einfach nur darüber weiß, sondern das wirklich erfahre. I remember Sukhya, she used to watch and he would say, okay...

[33:08]

I kind of teach these people, but now I've decided to teach this one person. The others I'll be nice to, but I'm only going to teach this one person who has the rigor of making it happen. So all of the people think they're teaching him, but he was not. Am I scaring you? I hope so, a little bit. Suki Roshi once said at a certain point, I teach, but in reality I teach this one person. I am nice to everyone else and do something with them, but in the teaching I really care about this one person. And when I influence you with fear, probably already a little bit. So now I feel like I'm exposing how mean a person I am. But maybe it's also to some degree also compassion.

[34:13]

So as I started to say in the beginning when I meet someone I have an experience of their interiority And in relationship to my interiority, which is not really mine, Then I decide, can this person actually does actually have the commitment, potential commitment and capacity for practice or not.

[35:24]

And then I ask myself the question, does this person really have the potential and also the connectivity that has to do with practice, potential commitment and Capacity for practice. And then I offer them implicitly, without saying so, five or ten years. And do they have the capacity to make use of that offer of five or ten years? If I feel that, I stay available for five or ten years. But I realized when I retired, I'm not doing that anymore. I don't have five or ten more years.

[36:34]

And nobody would want me to be the teacher in ten years, 93 years old. Okay. Okay, so I'll go to the taxi and then we'll take a break. The lunch is at one? Yeah. Okay. You're supposed to be making lunch, I thought. She will be surprised. She's got a whole lot of cut up celery. Something like this. So what's going on with this text? Because, again, English, a culture creates categories.

[38:04]

And you use the categories as if you know what you're talking about. We use the category consciousness. I'm conscious of that. We use the category mind. But for the last 50 or 100 years even, entire scientific community discussing this can't figure it out. But we use the word consciousness. But at the same time, in the last 50 or 100 years, an entire scientific community has not been able to find out what it actually is. And yet we use these categories as if we knew what it is. We use the word nature. What do you mean by nature? You mean outside, you mean nature, or you mean the, what do you want to say? Well, nature. The green stuff. The green stuff. Now you know what you mean.

[39:07]

So as Alan Watts even used to point out, a city is as natural as an anthill. It's not nature is outside the city. The city is nature. So nature is something that we, I mean, part of the ecological crisis is that we don't understand what nature is. Yeah. So we use these categories. But if someone said, do nature, well, I don't know how to do nature exactly. You have a bumper sticker, do nature. Okay, so for me to say something like attentional attunement, I would have to be, say, because we don't have categories.

[40:30]

We have not categories for what I'm trying to talk about. So I'd have to say something like non-cognizing, non-conceptualizing, attentional attunement. And then I'd have to say something like non-cognizing, attentional attunement. And then you'd have to try to, as a practitioner, you'd have to try to see if you can unitize that as an action. So you brought attention to things and then you felt yourself tuning yourself to that attentional bandwidth. And then you felt yourself tuning yourself to that attentional bandwidth.

[41:31]

And then as soon as you thought about it or named it, you cut it off. Cut it off. And sobald du bemerkst, dass du jetzt drüber nachdenkst und dem einen Namen hinzugefügt hast, Sobald du das bemerkst, trennst du den Namen wieder ab, sodass du gar nicht dazu verleitet wirst, das, worauf du dich einschwingst, das in irgendwelche Vergleiche hineinzustellen. And to get really that into your habit takes several years of doing it moment after moment. Und das wirklich... Knowing about it doesn't mean much at all. Again, let's look. Dogen says, probably the most important word in Zen Buddhism is fishiryo. And that's translated, usually in the West, virtually always, as non-thinking.

[42:57]

You can't practice non-thinking? How do you do that? So they don't know how to translate it, so they say, well, it's different than thinking, let's just call it non-thinking. But it actually means something more like noticing. A noticing which is con-noticing, you actually begin to discover noticing itself is a form of knowing. And it becomes a form of knowing by not thinking about it. So if Dogen says this is probably the most significant word in Zen practice, once I recognized his saying that, I took it on as a project for ten years to develop the skill of noticing as a form of knowing which is not cognized or not thought about.

[44:47]

And when I realized that Dogen says that this term, Kishiryu, is probably the most important word in all of Buddhism, when I realized that, I made it my project. Probably for about ten years, I taught myself the ability Okay, so now from a yogic point of view, you're born incomplete. I love the word Rin, which is the Japanese word for Saga. We are Genrinji. Black Forest Sangha. And gen means black or dark or mysterious. And rin means forest.

[46:05]

So the word for sangha is forest. And this is very Chinese and Japanese that you only know how to be a tree by growing in a forest. A tree growing on a craggy cliff all by itself like on the California coast, you see, from the point of view of Buddhism, that's not a tree. It's just some kind of weed that got, you know, shaped because of me. No, you may have the idealism to think you can do this by yourself. If you do have that, you better discover... the practices which let you do it by yourself.

[47:27]

It's not just I do it by myself. It's not just I do it by myself. So in a forest the tree is learning how to be a tree that lives with all these other trees. And if thinking is a kind of decisional process not necessarily confirmed by your very thin conscious screen of confirming image.

[48:29]

The network of filamented fungal roots of many plants, not just trees, is a kind of decisional process, a kind of thinking of the forest. dann entdeckst du, dass das ganze Netzwerk, das ganze Zusammenwirken der all dieser Filamente und Pilzgeflechte und so weiter, all das, was da im Wurzelreich miteinander zusammenwirkt, all das ist eine Art Entscheidungsprozess. So the tree is learning how to be a tree from other trees and learning how to be independent on its own at the same time.

[49:39]

Simultaneously be independent and also a forest. The forest requires each tree to be independent. In einem Wald müssen die einzelnen Bäume auch unabhängig sein. We are multigenerational beings. Wir sind generationsübergreifende Wesen. You are your ancestry. Du bist deine Vorfahrenschaft. And your future generations are already present in you.

[50:46]

Und zukünftige Generationen sind jetzt schon in dir gegenwärtig. And this practice is a multi-generational practice. And we don't see it like we don't see climate change. Raindrops falling on your head. Yeah, it's nice, it's wet. But in 100 years, it's 50 feet of water in New York City. We don't feel that on the raindrops on our head. In 100 or 200 years, it's probably a population of about 20% of what we have now. We don't think in terms of these meta-objects which extend in all directions in space and time.

[51:53]

We don't think in terms of these meta-objects which extend in all directions in space and time. A styrofoam cup is going to outlive me by 500 years. But will our practice, will we understand and realize practice sufficiently that it's here in 500 years. And practice, Buddhism is going to have to become different in the West and in this contemporary world as well as the West.

[52:54]

So back to the taxi. So the person in a yoga culture signaling for a taxi Does not feel he or she is signaling an empty space. They feel they're... They imagine, but it's more than just an imagination, that there's actually a connecting medium between us and you are manipulating it by your posture. Jemand in einer yogischen Kultur... Do you remember? That sounds good enough. Thank you. Very good. dass die Person durch ihre Bewegungen manipulieren kann.

[54:29]

But to begin to tune yourself into this attentional medium, dich auf dieses Aufmerksamkeitsmedium, dich da einzuschwingen, you tune yourself by experiencing the right hand and left hand always in tune with each other. When you do things with one hand, when you pass somebody the salt with one hand, you are concretizing your cognitive world. So zazen is a form of tuning yourself.

[55:37]

Why it makes a difference if you miss a few days of zazen? Is you get out of tune with phenomenality as well as yourself. Poets write poems when they feel themselves momentarily or a while in tune with phenomenality. Poets write poems when they feel themselves momentarily or a while So tuning starts with your hands. We're a two-handed being.

[56:38]

And Suzuki Roshi when he first came to America, the first thing he said, somebody says, what do you notice about America? He said, surprising everyone, that you do things with one hand. It's weird. Yeah. Again, if you pass something to someone, you're passing yourself, and you know you're passing yourself, and you use both hands and you turn your body as if there's a light here.

[57:41]

Otherwise, you're just in a cognitive category. So the orioki is a practice... So... Oriyoki is a practice to tune yourself biologically. And zazen, daily zazen, is a way of bringing yourself in tune with your breath, your body, and your interior core.

[58:43]

So a practitioner is probably going to get it quicker to the taxi driver when he signals the taxi driver that he's in tune with Kyoto. And most of the teachings are coded because they're outside categories. So we signal for the taxis of the texts and they just drive right by.

[59:52]

We signal for the textual taxis of the teachings and they just go right by. We look at them cognitively and they say, you don't know where you're going, I'm going to... Okay, that was too long. I'm very sorry. But when I got here, I thought, geez, I'm still jet-lagged. I don't know what I'm going to say. Actually, I noticed at 7.50 this morning that the jet-lag ended. I was feeling it. I was watching my attentional bandwidth and suddenly I arrived here.

[60:55]

It was exactly 7.50. No, 6.50. 10 to 7. So when I come back, let's sit more generally in a circle, and I won't sit up here on the platform. And I'll be interested in listening to what you have to say. Okay. Thanks for translating.

[61:38]

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