I've often wondered why and people, persons, people like Steffi Graf and Agassi marry each other. Now, that may not sound very Zen to you, but I realize that I want to speak, and what I do speak about in practice is the craft of practice. So while of course I would assume Steffi Graf and Agassi are married because they spend time together, because they share professional interests and of course experiences as top players in the world.

[01:11]

But I also think it's because they share an interiority. And because I feel, and I'm speaking with you here, and particularly those of you I know well and who practice, because I do feel we share an interiority. Then... At least that's my experience. And I find I'm motivated to speak to your interiority. Yeah, I don't feel I'm speaking to you really about Buddhism so much as the interiority that arises through the practice of Buddhism.

[02:39]

So, I mean, let me, I have to give you some examples so that we can see if this makes sense. One of the basics, you know, there's certain conditions, basics that particularly we as Westerners have to establish in order to practice. And if Zen practice is a craft, it's for sure a bodily craft. Which really means, how do you prepare the soil so that roots, the filaments, etc., of a practice are able to reach into the dimensions and dynamics of your own life?

[04:01]

That means the soil has to be ready to receive. Where you plant something makes a big difference. So the soil has to be prepared And all of these years, more than half a century now of practicing, I see more and more clearly that While the teaching may be nearly the same in East Asia as well as here, the soil for practice is prepared differently than the soil in the West.

[05:05]

So how do we describe a practice so that it fits our soil? Well, I mean we can't say too much in just this short talk this evening. But there are sort of key practices that may not be emphasized in the same way in East Asia, Chinese East Asia, as here. But we have to emphasize them here because, just as I'm saying, that's also part of preparing the soil for the teaching to take root. And one of the basics is to recognize, I get back to these things, sometimes I get bored with myself coming back to them, and then I think, maybe you're getting bored, but then I don't actually get bored, I find it exciting, so here I go.

[06:45]

Which is that practice depends on your knowing, first of all, that mind appears on every appearance. And this is itself exciting. I mean, it means you're looking at things around you all the time and you're used to seeing them in a certain way. And now you have to add the recognition, because you actually already know it, the recognition that mind is also inseparable from each appearance. And many things appear through noticing that mind appears inseparately from each appearance.

[07:51]

Now, in many ways, contemporary Western Buddhism is very conceptually similar to Western phenomenology. Western phenomenology more or less, on the whole, accepts the sensorial world as a given. It's clear that the world that we live in The sensorial world is known through our senses, but the way in which knowing it moment after moment is simultaneously an experience of mind and an experience of an object.

[09:14]

That isn't emphasized so much. And part of the reason is that we in the West emphasize understanding primarily. But understanding is kind of like a one-time event and you have to be smart enough to understand something. But again, if practice is a craft, Then it's a kind of physiological chemistry. You change bodily, neurologically. Through repeating a practice within and as the uniqueness of each moment.

[10:36]

And I call that incubation in contrast to understanding. So you have to incubate a practice. Which, if we continue this botanical analogy... It makes a difference when you water it and how much sun it gets and so forth. When you see practice as a physiological craft, understanding is really pretty extremely interesting, but dynamically pretty superficial. So we're... I think I've made clear enough what I mean by incubation.

[11:41]

Okay, now, again, if it's a craft... It makes a very big difference if the translation from Sanskrit or Pali or Chinese or Japanese really allows you to practice with the new term. If you're a car mechanic It makes a big difference whether the carburetor is from a Pontiac or a Fiat. They just don't, you know, you really have to know, hey, this is a Pontiac carburetor.

[12:44]

But so many words are translated into generalities which you can't practice. And one of the prime examples And the most ubiquitous, extensive forerunner of Buddhism in the West, is the idea of mindfulness. It's everywhere. And even the Buddhist version of it, the Buddhist Western version of it, as bare attention, is not really so useful.

[14:00]

Or accurate. Now, Paul and I just had a friend die of walking pneumonia just after you had dinner with him and he flew to Japan and died. Three days. Three days later. I just invited him actually to live at Crestone or Yanisov if he wanted. But maybe it's a good way to go. I don't know. But through Paul's worry, I asked Hans Jorg, who drove us here, who happens to also be an ambulance doctor, so he arrived with some equipment. And I told Paul, if this is walking pneumonia, I've had it about 20 or 30 times in my life because it's just a cold for me.

[15:23]

And so Hans-Jürgen arrived in my hotel room. No ambulance, but you know, a stethoscope. And your conclusion was, I'll be around for a while. Okay, so I intend to stay around for a while. And the word shmirti in Sanskrit or sati in Pali, which is the word that's translated as mindfulness, actually means something like to stay around for a while.

[16:40]

Okay, so how can I say something about it? Because we tend to think of everything having a direction and purpose or something like that. We know that's not the entirety, but that tends to be our first sense of things. But there is process with no goal. Excuse me. I mean, you are a process.

[17:42]

My continuing to live is a process. And the goal of this process is the process continues. I don't have any goal beyond this process continuing. But actually, if we feel this feel, E-E-L, into our life. A process without a goal is very different than a process which is just processing. Yes, there are purposes and goals. But more fundamentally, and we don't even know what it means that we're here, it's also the case that it's just a process. Okay, so Now, a river, for instance, is heading toward the sea.

[19:03]

But the word river, in English at least, comes from the word ripa, which means the banks of a river. And the banks of the river don't head for the sea. The banks of the river stay in place. So mindfulness is sort of to turn you into the banks of the river. To turn you into an observer which holds in place. It's fine to practice mindfulness as on giving close attention to this and close attention to that, but that's actually

[20:09]

not what the crafter practices. And we do benefit from that kind of attention to the world. But practice as a craft is really about attention to attention. And then to let that incubate and see what happens without any goals. Okay, so let's go back to mind. Now, if I'm making this too complicated, I'll try to stop. Because I would like to kind of give you a feel for this because I feel I'm within your interiority.

[21:21]

So let's see what I can do. So if you practice mind on each appearance, now I'm describing that as if whatever I see outside myself, I also know conceptually and begin to experience mind on each appearance. But of course, if what I'm experiencing is mind on each appearance... Then really that's not like something outside me and mind appear. It's all happening in some kind of interiority. So now it's not just

[22:24]

that each appearance is accompanied by a partner called mind, but each appearance is actually an interiority. Now, when you develop the incubatory process of zazen, of sitting absorption, you more and more develop an experience of the world as an interiority, not just as mind out there appearing, but the whole thing is an interiority. It doesn't mean it's some Barclayian or Berkeleyan idealistic idea of there's only mind only.

[23:43]

I know you're all out there. But what I know is only what my mind shows me. So I know essentially I can only know you what I know through my mind and so you're really actually a mystery. I don't know that apart. So I know that my interiority of all of you is an interiority within the capacity of my senses and is simultaneously a mystery. So now, when I look at the world through practice, I see the world as my externalized interiority. because if you do zazen regularly enough, you begin as a habit, as a habitation, you begin to settle into

[25:23]

a stabilized interiority. And because it's your own participatory experience, It can begin to have an imperturbability of staying in place which can help the world stay in place and help you find your own location even when the world around you is changing. So that's the dynamic that mindfulness is, the dynamic of smriti and sati is meant to establish.

[26:39]

A holding in place. And that's part of it. Recently I did two seminars at Rostenberg. And I took, again, these very basic early Buddhist teachings. Anapathasari. Anapanasati and Satipatthana, and emphasized that it really starts with Anapanasati, which is to, before you do the so-called four foundations of mindfulness,

[27:41]

You establish your own aliveness as your intentional sphere. Anapanasati means to the full-mindedness which knows the movements of the body. Now, in a world where we're talking about activity and everything is an activity and a craft, these teachings are not descriptions, they're instructions. So they are instructions about how you start a process of noticing how you exist.

[28:55]

So you start the process of bringing attention to the movements of the body within the breath, and you develop the muscle of attention and the subtlety of attention until your whole body is permeated by attentiveness from toes to the top of your head. So this kind of attentionality, which turns your body into attention itself, is also what is really meant by sati and smriti. So then the body becomes the incubation of, we could say, mindfulness.

[30:14]

And the incubation of mindfulness as the body in your world and in your life. Now I was hoping I could say something about non-conceptual knowing. Ich hoffe, ich könnte etwas über nicht-konzeptuelles Wissen sagen. But you can come back tomorrow. Aber ihr könnt ja morgen wiederkommen. And it will be particularly non-conceptual because I'll be on the way to Zurich. Und das wird ganz besonders nicht-konzeptionell sein, weil ich dann auf meinem Weg nach Zürich bin. All right, I think that's enough to say. Ich glaube, das ist genug, was ich gesagt habe. Does anybody want to bring anything up? Or should we take a break and then if anybody's still here... Okay, let's take a break and then if anybody's here in ten minutes we can have a little conversation.

[31:52]

Were you... Were you able to hear anything? Perfect, yeah. Oh, really, with her? Yeah, that was very good. Thank you. George was having a little problem with his hearing, so I was concerned. But she speaks so clearly. It's fantastic. Yeah. She's been training me to try to speak clearly, too. You didn't go away. That's because I hear there's a garden party coming up. So what would anybody like to say? I would like to ask a question, and I would like to ask it in German.

[33:07]

I noticed that you have translated everything, but not the term of mine. And I asked myself what the meaning is, how you understand the meaning of mine. I noticed that everything was translated but the word mind. And I would ask you how you understand mind and how it could be translated. It can't be. It's... Well, let me say, first of all, for some reason, I don't quite understand, but I understand that it makes sense to translate Geist or something like that as mind. But the experience in Germany has been that everyone feels better to translate mind as geist.

[34:16]

Austria is the only place where we translate it as geist, as mind. And since I'm linguistically impaired, and I really am, you guys have to decide. But it's interesting to me that you experiment with it. And there are many... Well, first of all, no word can translate exactly. Except at a very general level. Like which carburetor? Well, I put a Porsche carburetor in my Pontiac.

[35:18]

It didn't go a bit faster. But to experiment with the words is what you want to do. So there's actually some differentiation. For instance, one translation of mindfulness is to inspect. Of various possibilities, I chose to translate it as to hold in mind for the experience of incubation. for the experience, the potentiality of incubation, the process of incubation.

[36:23]

And so if you're practicing and you have various possibilities, The practitioner tries them out, and you see which ones lead you down the wrong path and which ones seem to hold some sense. Buddhism is entirely based on the recognition that everything is interactional. Interdependent. Okay. But as a Westerner, and one who's somewhat imbued in science,

[37:23]

I would translate interdependence as most of you know as also interindependence. and inter-emergence. But the Chinese wouldn't do that. Because for the Chinese, as I've been speaking about recently, everything is governed by a heavenly order. So things can be interdependent, but the interdependence is always going to establish a kind of harmony. As my body is always right now trying to return to what it thinks is more harmonic.

[38:38]

But actually, I always enjoy being loose. It's an interesting perspective. What the heck? So I never make much effort to get healthy. Long live less. This is true. I'm not just joking. Yeah, so the body, though, is the process of this healing. is to try to return to some harmonic situation. As cancer, 15 years ago, prostate cancer, destroyed some of my harmony. And I still, after radiation treatment, cannot fold my legs very well. So you understand the idea of establishing some kind of balanced process.

[40:06]

So interdependence fits in with that concept. And what I've noticed, it took me years to really see it clearly, is that Chinese Buddhist teachings are located in this assumed process which is trying to harmonize everything. But Indian Buddhism, for instance, from Dignaga on, is a much more complicated answer than you wanted. We're much more into what we would call chaos theory, inter-emergence, everything making something new always.

[41:20]

So one of my efforts is... in recent months to see if I can locate where there's an assumed directionality toward harmony in Chinese Buddhist teachings, which I can take out of the practice so the practices grow in our Western soil. And Chinese Buddhism clearly intentionally, semi-intentionally, ignored the developments of Indian Buddhism. Or a translation of interdependence could also be inter-emergence.

[42:27]

So my point is, I really don't know how to translate mind. But mind in English is a very useful, inclusive, but deceptive translation. So we all, I mean, whatever I say, what I'm hoping is you practice with it, try it out in your own interiority. Okay, someone else? Thank you for last night.

[43:42]

That was great. He arranged for us to see the Mahabharata last night. It was riveting. He's supposed to be doing the sound, but they only had a drum, so he had nothing to do, so he finished it. Also er soll dort den Ton machen, aber da sie nur eine Trommel hatten, hat er nichts zu tun gehabt. So wie geht es? second row seats right in the middle, which we were embarrassed to be in. And then who should sit directly behind us but Hannah and Christoph? And they bought their tickets six months ago. I didn't say that. It's still the early dawn.

[44:43]

Also auf mich hat diese Frage nach dem Main schon viele Jahre, vor 20 Jahren interessiert. Also, I for 20 years was and am interested in this question of mind. Because also in Taoism this is a big question. And now in the time of fasting before Easter, the Christian time, I also had a fast for 42 days. Whoa! I think you must have lost a little weight. That's the first thing you noticed, Manuela.

[46:02]

I know. I said, you've lost weight, haven't you? Good. And the experience I had when I did this is closely related to the topic that you were starting with. Because when fasting there is kind of another program going on within the body. There is a more direct experience and thoughts are quite reduced. Except about food. That's the only thing you always think about.

[47:08]

Well, it's a good substitute for some of the other things you might think about. Well, it's this experience, this physical experience, which then works without concepts. But then there is a bodily experience that works without concepts. So this was very interesting for me. Well, I think one of the basic ideas, as I said, is that mind appears on every appearance. Another basic we have to bring into our incubate into the details of our biological life Everything is an activity.

[48:18]

There are no entities. Now, you really, I mean, at least from the point of view of Buddhism and my understanding of science, So this glass is on one level a useful entity because it holds the water. And it is for a few moments or for a month or I don't know what, some duration, an entity. And I have to think of it as an entity, and if I washed it for Hannah and Christoph, I would try not to break it.

[49:23]

But I remember when my daughter broke a Hamada cup, Hamada was literally the most famous potter of Japan. A national treasured potter. But partly trained and inspired by a British potter named Bernard Leach. It's not important, but there is this interdependent resonance going on. So I had this Hamada cup, which you don't need to know that it might be worth quite a lot of money. And anyway, somebody had given it to me when it wasn't worth so much money.

[50:32]

And my daughter knocked it off. I always use these things, and my daughter knocked it off my desk. And I remember I had no bad feeling at all. Zero. It was just, oh, now it has to be cleaned up. But the entirety of my reaction, now it has to be cleaned up and maybe repaired. And I realized at that moment that practice was working. because it really was an activity it was made to be cleaned up so Hamada could make another one but it takes some intentional training to get there

[51:44]

It starts with the conception that it is an activity. And then it starts with the activity of every time you think of an object in an activity, you cut it off. Literally every appearance, you cut off any perception of it as an activity, as an entity. And then eventually you start it just as an activity. I'm picking it up, I'm putting it down, I'm washing it, somebody made it, blah, blah, blah. It's not an entity, it's an activity. Now, there's a fairly thorough misunderstanding of non-conceptual practice. And it's often in Shikantaza, as one word for one example, that is often translated as doing nothing.

[53:01]

But it's impossible to do nothing because everything is an activity. So non-conceptual practice is a particular modality of mind where you don't conceive of things Where there's another kind of, I say, connoticing, connowing, noticing, going on. So, to... feel the arrival of a non-conceptual modality of mind, physically, like you feel when sleep takes you over. So when you've been meditating a long time, I mean, regularly,

[54:08]

You actually become physiologically different. And you notice the shift into non-conceptual mind. It's a physical experience. And when you have the skill to establish a non-conceptual modality of mind, which is connoticing, Then we can define that as Shikantaza. And he gets there by fasting. I get there by slowing if we do but I think we share an interiority this is not possible I'm giving more lectures

[55:36]

I mean, we're having a discussion and I'm just talking all the time, I'm sorry. But it really, it's hard for me to say something which I know it's too simple and then it misleads you. So one more anything and then we party. So if practice is a craft and you are very skillfully preparing the ground, so that means you have an agenda. Yes. Yes.

[57:09]

He was speaking in English. Oh, well, I didn't know what you said in English. I just translated my question into German. I'm multilingually impaired. I'm multilingual in English. This is kind of true. So say it again. So the question was regarding goallessness. And if practice is not, then you have to be skillful. So you're setting up this incubator, but at some point you have to drop your agenda. When do you drop your agenda? Okay. Having an agenda is not necessarily in some conflict with not having an agenda.

[58:29]

occurs at a different level of contextual integration than a non-agenda. Yes, so I have to agenda to have some water because of my itchy throat and so forth. But the basic stance of practice is that underneath or within, there's always, for a mature practitioner, a feeling of stillness. No, I'll just give you a very simple, quick, as quick as I can riff on trees.

[59:41]

Okay, a tree is an activity. I call it treeing. There's really no such thing as a tree. There's only treeing. Okay, so now, but you have to... incubate and embody that activity of treeing. So it's very good to be a tree hugger. It's just to go and just dig a tree. No, dig a tree. Look at a tree for a while. Until you really feel it. And of course, if it's an activity, it includes insects, the bark, birds. That's all the activity of the tree. And the leaves and the moving and so forth, the environment it creates. So you feel that environment in your body.

[60:51]

And once you get familiar with that, really familiar with that, it's your family, familiar, not only are things not entities, they now become a field of activity. So each of you is a field, as I am too, and our fields are kind of overlapping. grok, or incubate, or embody the field of activity of the tree. It's clear. It's all put together by stillness. Because the leaves are moving in relationship to the stillness of the trunk and the roots.

[62:21]

As an ocean wave is trying to return to stillness. So when you start viewing everything as an activity, you in a way don't have to be taught stillness only by zazen, because every non-entity is an activity rooted in stillness. So then you begin to I really feel the stillness in each activity. You even feel the stillness in the agenda.

[63:23]

So you establish agendas, or I establish a posture the best I can, and then I let the priority, the real priority, of stillness take over. The mature practitioner is always arranging things so stillness can take over. It's rather nice to feel your stillness. And it's really nice to feel your silence. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. And thank you for my old, young Rostenberg friends. Thanks for trying to save me.

[64:14]

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