So, as is obvious, I'm trying to teach you or present to you what I know about Buddhism. What I know about Zen practice. And I don't know if it's the right way or best way or anything. It's just what I know. And I don't want to think about too much, whether it's... You know, it's just what I know, so that's what I'm sharing with you. And I don't want to make any... too much effort to change it or develop it because I'm not smart enough. I'm still unpacking, as they say, my time with Sukhyoshi and my time in Asian practice centers and so forth.

[01:03]

But given that, we're trying to make a place here in Creston, which is as open as it can be, and where together we can open up this teaching. But apart from that, we try to create practice places here in Creston and to unpack the teaching here. Now, Sukhyoshi said, you know, let's not view practice as something that already exists. As if it were something we find in the refrigerator. And we take it out of the refrigerator and make use of it.

[02:21]

And when we're done, we put it back in the refrigerator. You said it's better to view practice as a garden. And garden is our life. And before it comes up, we can't see anything. It's just empty. So, you know, if practice is the joy of cultivating our own garden, then the different schools of Buddhism, different refrigerators, are not so important. Because we're interested in discovering the seeds and putting them in our own gardens. So we're trying here to understand the seeds of practice.

[03:32]

But for me, practice is something that's embedded in doing, primarily in doing. And in that way it may look rather monastic or like some special school to you. But to the degree that it's embedded in doing, it also can be done in our ordinary life. But doing always has some particular look, so, you know, it does look a certain way. Yeah.

[04:33]

So, again, since we are discovering our practice here together, maybe I should say something about our serving in the meals. Because like all things, they think everything is animated and shaped by concepts or ideas. And they are either implicit or explicit or mixed up. The basic sense of meals for us is that they are meals together. We're not all going off with different plates or bowls to different corners.

[05:36]

We're eating together. And unless you have servants or a traditional old-fashioned wife, it's necessary that we do things together. Und wenn man keine Diener hat oder traditionelle altmodische Frauen, dann müssen wir das miteinander tun. Yeah. So the meal is divided into four parts. Das heißt, dass das Essen in vier Teile zerfällt. The preparation, the serving, the eating, and the cleanup. And we do that together. We share that. And particularly, each is given equal weight. So that's why we serve the way we do, because the serving is given equal weight with the eating. We're not just there to eat and get nourished as fast as possible, but rather to serve each other as well as eat together.

[07:02]

So the serving is designed to, if possible, be efficient and reduced to the simplest motions. But primarily it's designed to have a chance to serve each other. And to, it's a kind of speech. So while we're serving, we stop and just do serving. And then when the serving's over, we start to eat. And there is the practice of, you know, the Dharma practice probably reduces most essentially to doing one thing at a time. Discovering satisfaction and nourishment in doing each thing in its own time and space.

[08:21]

This is a kind of precept, maybe the most basic precept. The world exists in individual instances. And to practice the Dharma, we discover these individual instances. And the meal is conceived that way, by being in separate bowls. And I think this idea has influenced all of, this then approach may have influenced all of Japanese cooking, which is cuisine which is quite different from other cuisines. Because French cooking and Chinese cooking, everything is mixed in the cooking.

[09:31]

In Japanese cuisine, the emphasis is more on mixing it in the eating. So you have many separate things and you decide how to mix them. And just to continue, you know, the sense of bowls is the bowl is not an extension of the table as our plates are, but it's an extension of the chopsticks. It's part of the eating utensil. So there's these kinds of ideas in the way the serving occurs and the way the meals are prepared and things.

[10:46]

We can change that, but it's, I think, useful to see that these ideas animate and shape the way we eat in Zen practice. And usually the first bowl, which is called Buddha's skull, human beings make good bowls for some reason. Like deers don't, but humans do. It's usually some simple unmixed food, and then the other bowls may be something more mixed. So anyway, this is not something we have to imitate at home, but I think it's interesting to see the background of these things. Now I'm trying to put the precepts which pretty much look like the precepts of any teaching in the context of Zen practice and Buddhist practice.

[12:29]

And if we don't see it in this wider context, it's hard for us to understand why they are so important and how to practice them. This morning I said in the midst of of change, we find our staying. And in that staying, even our breathing becomes still. And in the midst of staying, we discover change. And the three times become a single point.

[13:49]

Now this is a basic Mahayana understanding and I'll try to give you some some some explication of this. In this case 92 of the Shoyaroku, which I mentioned yesterday, Yanmen quoted a famous text from an earlier time. There is a jewel, he said, between heaven and earth, in the midst of space and time, hidden in the mountain of form, there is a jewel. Within space and time, heaven and earth, hidden in the mountain of form, there's a jewel.

[15:06]

Yeah. Now, this is quite interesting poetic statement. But why bother? What does it mean? What use is it? A mountain of form is a jewel. This is not a mining operation. A kind of quarrying. But a way to practice. So after making this quote, he said, take up, hold up the lamp. Of course, in those days, you know, they didn't have, it's obvious, but it's helpful to remember, they didn't have electric light.

[16:17]

They didn't have large quantities of whale oil and things like that. So, since they, like us, got up before dawn, we're not really before dawn, but usually we're before dawn, It was dark. Places weren't lit ahead of you. And when I was living at a heiji, it's still interesting. One of the first things that happens is one of the roshis goes around the place with still a lamp with a candle in it and somebody carrying incense. And you walk around. It's quite dark, and you see this thing going.

[17:20]

It's rather romantic. But maybe I've thought of trying it, but you'd think it was a ghost. What is that? So he says, holding up the lamp. Going into the zendo. Bring the triple gate to the altar. Holding up the lamp. Carrying the triple gate into the zendo. This is the same... This is... This is... What he's doing is speaking about a practice called one-mark samadhi.

[18:37]

Or one-practice samadhi. No, the triple gate is just, you know, there's... Temples have often a gate, which is the big central part, and two small gates. In Japan, the gate is called the Sammon, which means the mountain gate. But Sammon can also be three gate, triple gate. And sometimes there's a series of gates. And then there's the gate of physically entering and then there's the gate of your practice and so forth. So it has this kind of multiple meanings. So it means how do we bring multiplicity together in a single practice?

[19:49]

Supposedly, of course, this couldn't have happened Because Manjushri is not a real person, and also because this is a practice developed much after Buddha's time. But in any case, supposedly Manjushri asks the Bodhisattva Manjushri, Ask the Buddha. What is one-mark Samadhi? And the Buddha said, supposedly, the Dharma Datu has only one mark.

[20:52]

And when the dharmadhatu is an object, we call it one-mark samadhi. Okay, now the dharmadhatu means the realm in which everything arises. The realm of the dharmas. Now, again, this is not understood in some fixed way, like there's a realm out there and there's all these dharmas in it, like this is a huge refrigerator. It's where the dharmas arise. So... It's not a thing out there which contains the darkness.

[22:15]

It's a realm of arising in which we are also arising. Again, you close your eyes. And you open them and everything appears. Where did it come from? I mean, you knew it was there before, I know. I know you're not that dumb. But what about when Julius was first born? Yeah, I remember when my daughter Elizabeth was born. We had two midwives and her older sister and me and some other people were there. And we didn't put those drops in the eyes that you're supposed to put in, in America anyway, legally. So she could see immediately. So she was halfway out only and she opens her eyes and looked everywhere.

[23:18]

That's great. I wondered if she was making a decision whether she should go back in. But she looked around. Where did this all come from? And it is like that with the whole everything, moment after moment. Each moment is independent, and yet there's some pattern that connects. And this practice emphasizes the uniqueness of each moment, not its predictability. And this is the moment in which enlightenment can occur. And this idea of enlightenment as sudden can become some kind of materialistic idea. And there's some danger in this, but this unique moment is every moment.

[24:30]

So can you let yourself into this unique moment without having the habits and trance of thinking making you see everything as predictable or something you want to control? Now the main problem I see with people sitting is they don't actually relax in sitting. If I say, don't do anything when you sit, They do not doing anything. And as long as you're doing not doing anything, there's something stiff about your sitting.

[25:52]

But it's such a deep habit in us. But actually, Zazen should be a vacation. Yeah. So we have this posture and these rules really just so you can take a vacation on your cushion. A vacation in another kind of time. Mm-hmm. Now, there is something, in fact, you know, even contemporary sciences emphasizes, points out, you know, that, well, there's this differentiation, and then there's less differentiation at the molecular level, and there's virtually no differentiation at an atomic level.

[27:02]

And as far as their analysis can take them, they think it was all one little point, big bang point. And it exploded into lots of differentiation. And so some kind of idea like this is implicit in Buddhism. Or that at higher dimensions, where things are folded together, there's a sameness. Now our senses have been developed to externalize the world. So if Charlie jumps at us out of a tree, we can duck.

[28:14]

And we have proprioceptively, physically, reinforced this three-dimensional world. But it's understood, because there's so much meditation done, it's understood and accepted in Buddhism that this is just a picture of the world, a picture of part of the world. And if we function only through this three-dimensional picture, we function rather poorly. We may avoid Charlie jumping on us, but we won't understand why Charlie jumped. Or something like that. Okay, so there's, first there's the world of separation. Then there's the world of ecology, of interdependence.

[29:52]

So we can see everything is separate. And we can see everything is interrelated. But that interrelationship still has... is time is sequential. This happened, there's cause and an effect, and then there's a further cause, and so forth. So, but the world doesn't exist just in terms of time, it also exists in a simultaneity. Now, at the level of simultaneity, we can't perceive it. We are it, but we can't perceive it. Because we know things through separation and sequentiality. But we can know it in the sense that... we can know that it must be so so how do we practice that this practice is one mark samadhi we could say maybe bringing the big bang in on the lamp bringing the triple gate in on the lamp

[31:34]

What is this lamp? Zazen is also one mark samadhi. Holding the sense of simultaneity is one mark samadhi. To practice this feeling of all at onceness is one mark samadhi. And it's a practical thing, too. It's all practical, but we can make it look more practical. Like just again this example of we are here in this room. And there's some a quality that we all feel now, that's shared by all of us. And this is a palpable, as I said yesterday, a feeling reality.

[32:42]

But if you think of it, if you bring it into what we say in Buddhism, bring it into the secondary, the secondary means differentiated thinking. It's completely not graspable. It disappears. And then I see you, and I see you, and I see you, and I don't have much sense of this feeling that's in this room if I return to what we call the first principle. This is a long attempt of Buddhism to find some language for this. For the garden before the plants arise. Maybe the gardener has to look at the garden and feel, well, beans over here and asparagus here and so forth. But at that point he's just holding a field.

[34:08]

And this sense is also to bring vipassana and shamatha together. For instance, the insight that the realm of everything arising is this feeling of arising or this understanding of arising. And at the same time, so that understanding is vipassana and concentration is shamatha. So that understanding is vipassana. And concentration is shamatha. So to bring that understanding that everything is sameness has a quality of a jewel hidden in the mountain of form.

[35:12]

And to concentrate on that To hold that as a physical sensation of concentration is what young men means by bringing the triple gate in on the lamp. is what I meant in saying, in the midst of staying, we find change. And in that change, three times become one point. So with this kind of practice, you're moving out of the secondary, out of differentiation, into a time of all-at-onceness.

[36:15]

Or of simultaneity. Of all of us here at this moment, all at once. And to know that is called one-mark samadhi. There is differentiation, but you are holding a samadhi. And the feeling of that is called suchness. To know the suchness of this particular unique moment. Not in comparison to anything else. This is the basic practice of Mahayana Buddhism. And particularly the basic practice of Zen. And all differentiation comes from this. So there's a pulse into differentiation and back into non-differentiation.

[37:27]

This is also the teaching of form and emptiness. This is the mind in which everything appears. I open my mind, open my eyes, and all of you appear. I close my eyes, and you are all absorbed back into a single point. This is also the pulse of wisdom and compassion. When everything is absorbed into a single point, we call this activity, not some philosophy, this activity is wisdom. And when it opens up into connectedness, opens up into differentiation.

[38:31]

We feel the connectedness tangibly because it opened up from our own mind. So the connectedness isn't just between you and you and you. It's also because all of you are arising in my mind. As all of us are arising in each of your mind. So this is a profound connectedness. And we call this compassion. So this is the activity of compassion and wisdom. With this feeling, the precepts are quite easy to follow. The precepts teach us how to discover each other in differentiation.

[39:46]

How to really practice non-attachment. Interdependence. And emptiness. And this is maybe the best way to practice with your breath too. When you exhale, let the world disappear. When you inhale, let the world reappear. So you know this pulse on each breath. the world appears and disappears if you practice this you'll be quite ready for dying at some point you'll breathe out and yes, the world will disappear but don't wait till the last breath this practice should begin now

[41:14]

The world appears and disappears. This is the practice of non-attachment. Thank you very much.

[41:34]

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