Yeah, I'm sorry I wasn't with you this morning, but Tsukiroshi's wife, second wife actually, but the only wife I knew, who we called Oksan, which means wife, or Suzuki-sensei, because she was a tea teacher, died actually a day after my oldest best friend died. And today in San Francisco is a memorial funeral ceremony for her. And they wanted me to contribute something to be read, in this case by my, because I couldn't attend, by my daughters. Sally primarily, or Elizabeth. And so I'd write something last night.

[01:04]

But it was received, I understand, so we'll... She was... Excuse me, do you want me to translate? Why not? Sounds like a good idea, actually. I'm sorry that I didn't sit with you this morning, but Suzuki Roshi's wife, his second wife actually, but the only woman I knew, died. And after one day, after my oldest, best friend also died, And today in San Francisco there is a memorial service, memorial recitation or ceremony for Suzuki Roshi's wife, who we always called Okusan and that means woman. She made a big difference in the life of our sangha there and Suzuki Roshi.

[02:14]

There was always a little kind of unavoidable but not antagonistic, exactly, tension between the Japanese community and the Caucasian and American community. Because of the war and because of the way Japanese people were treated in California and relocated in camps. She was the kindergarten teacher at the

[03:41]

temple were Suzuki Roshi's temple. And maybe it was a kind of arranged marriage. Because Japanese temples, they almost think the wife is more important than the priest. They carry the continuity and, yeah, make it work. So it was kind of arranged that she would become his wife after his first wife was killed. Also wurde dafür gesorgt, dass sie seine Ehefrau würde, nachdem seine erste Frau ermordet wurde.

[05:03]

And she was a Christian. And so she came to San Francisco, I can't remember when, but early on. And she just accepted the Westerners, accepted the practice, accepted the Japanese congregation. She was just open to everyone and made everyone feel like they belonged. So she united the Japanese congregation with the Western congregation. And she often went to Tassajara, the monastery, and stayed there for weeks at a time sometimes. And I said she was a Christian.

[06:03]

But after Suzuki Roshi died, she said to me, you know, all these years I became a Buddhist, but I never told Suzuki Roshi. It's sort of the feeling, if you can't see it, there's no point in telling it. So I had to write something along these lines last night. And some of you, how many came? Not so many. Usually Friday is not so many people and Saturday is more. But you arrived and your daughter arrived. Okay. Yeah. And I wish I'd been there this morning because I wanted to see how Kenyan worked with more people with that new configuration.

[07:33]

As most of you know, but just to say that the Zendo now will be a temporary Zendo. And it will become a Buddha-dharma hall. And the other room, which the tatamis extend into, will become a Zendo with raised platforms for sitting and sleeping. And I'm surprised so far how well the space, the two spaces and the, what we call a Gaitan space where you come in, all flow together in an integrated way.

[08:55]

As I've often said, a concert hall is designed for the music of the musician. And a Zendo is designed for the mind of the practitioner. The silence and stillness of the practitioner. And the mutuality of the practice among each other.

[09:56]

So it's great that we were able to make that room more square that will be the Zendel. And we'll see how it works. You know, they build concert halls all over the world with specialists, etc. And some of them turn out well and some of them don't. The acoustics. So I'm praying, well, not praying, but I'm hoping that this turns out well. Now, we went a lot of places yesterday. And I can't recapitulate everything.

[11:03]

But for me, this is a practice, this is a sensorial adventure. In exploring what is most fundamental to our experience as a living being. And Buddhism assumes that mostly we have to live in consciousness. live within and through consciousness.

[12:05]

But the way consciousness presents the world to us on many levels is not fundamentally how the world exists. Someone said yesterday, I asked what, how do you, what's the, what experience had led you to practice and led you to continue practicing. And many people said something like a feeling of coming home. And one person said, although it made him feel sometimes more lonely and estranged from people who don't practice.

[13:27]

He also said, but practice opens up a new way of making decisions. And that was my experience from early on. Is that I would make conscious decisions and then I would make decisions that arose during Zazen practice. And I found the decisions that arose during Zazen practice What was I doing doing Zazen, making decisions? But anyway, I was doing it anyway. The decisions that arose through Zazen were more like the kind of decisions that you make when you say, I had no other choice, it was clear.

[14:32]

Yeah, the decisions were more true to the conditions of the situation that I was deciding about. more accurately reflected the situation I was trying to make a decision about. And that made me... Oh, my goodness, I... Why pass up the chance to make better decisions? But how do I get there?

[15:56]

Yeah, I mean, no, I don't know. And that's what we're talking about yesterday and today. Yeah. So Buddhism has worked out the basic answer to that question is the two truths. The truth of the practical way of living within the relative world. And can we live in the world also, which is more fundamental and occurs in a wider... knowing sphere than consciousness. Now these are very, to respond to think through, to respond accurately to the questions I've just brought up, just out of the circumstances of being alive, require us to explore the depths

[17:24]

an extent of what it means to be a human being. You know, there's something called blindsight. I don't know in German what it is. And some people who are, because of damage or because of the way their cortical is, they can't see but they know something about the visual field, but it's not processed consciously. I remember I read a long article her story about a woman who, she was European, Belgium, I don't know what, but she could,

[18:56]

could function as if she were seeing, but she had no conscious experience of what she was seeing. So she... Someone convinced her, the researchers, convinced her to come to New York, I believe, and she... learned and showed them and taught herself, and they taught her, how to live in the world as if she was sighted, though she had not conscious experience of it. And I assume the researchers or someone persuaded her to come to New York. And there she learned, taught herself, or she was also shown how she could live in the world in a way as if she could see, although she herself did not have the conscious experience of seeing.

[20:03]

Okay. But after, I think, I know how long, I don't remember, a year and a half or so of doing this, she said, it's just too much of a strain. I want to go back to being blind. And she returned to Europe and I guess is probably still alive and happily blind. Somewhat happily blind. But what this tells us which any mature meditator knows is the world is presenting us with lots of information that we know, but isn't conscious?

[21:05]

How do we have the confidence to act in this world, which is not conscious to us, but known to us? Wie können wir das Zutrauen haben, das Vertrauen haben, in dieser Welt zu agieren, die uns nicht bewusst ist, aber die uns bekannt ist? This is what the concept of the Alaya Vijnana is all about. And what the two truths are about. Okay. Now there's also, let's see how the time's going along here. I don't want you to be suffering.

[22:08]

Okay. Okay. There's also something called inattentional blindness. We just say that, the inattentional blindness. And that is like the gorilla in the middle of the basketball game. And a large percentage, meditators seem to see it almost immediately, but most people don't see it. Everybody thinks watching the basketball players.

[23:16]

And there I am looking like in a gorilla suit. That's why I wear robes, actually. You think I'm a gorilla. Okay. All right. So there are many things, and you can study this, we just don't see because, not because we couldn't cognitively process it, we don't see because... attention doesn't notice. And there's another kind of blindness called change blindness. You show somebody something And then you show it next time, slightly different.

[24:34]

They don't see the difference. They particularly don't notice small details that are different. But this is also the way language works. Und auf die Art funktioniert auch die Sprache. How memory works is generally we remember the gist of something, the gist, the essence of something, but not much of the details. Die Art, wie das Gedächtnis funktioniert, ist, dass wir die Essenz, den Kern der Dinge, das Wichtigste an den Dingen bemerken, aber nicht die Details. And this is something that Immanuel... Levinas, is that how you pronounce it in French? The philosopher? Anyway, points out.

[25:37]

Yeah, he's extremely interesting in a complex response to Heidegger. He has a very extremely interesting and complex reaction, answer to Heidegger. Reaction, okay. And I mention that only because it's wonderful for me that so much of contemporary phenomenological philosophy is really exploring the territory of Buddhism. Okay, so if we tend to remember the gist or essence of something, that then becomes a prior view to perception. And so the way language works to establish memory, which then works prior to perception, means that a huge amount is just filtered out because we see the gist or the essences and we don't see change.

[27:11]

What's extraordinary to me is that Buddhism has answers, responses to these problems. Problems when I was 25 or so in practicing in the 50s in San Francisco, no, I didn't know anything about these problems. I was just sitting there and trying to not move. Yeah. And yet here these problems which I began as my practice developed and evolved that came to the fore. And then I look at the practices and the teachings I've been involved in, and they anticipated the problems.

[28:28]

And in a variety of ways. Okay. So I will mention a couple of ways and then we'll have a break. And I will use two statements of Dogen. One is, he says, and I've been mentioning this for the last year or so, that Hishiryo, the Japanese word, may be the most important single word in Zen Buddhism. Das eine ist, er sagt, und das lehre ich jetzt seit ungefähr einem Jahr oder so, er sagt, dass Hishiryo, das japanische Wort, vielleicht das einzig wichtigste Wort im Buddhismus ist.

[29:45]

And Hishiryo means literally translated as unmeasurable thinking. And of course then you can say, what the heck is, can thinking be that's not measurable or cognizable? And then you ask yourself, what kind of thinking can it be if it's not measured? And in the famous koan in which Dogen quotes often, Yao Shan is asked, what are you doing? He says, not thinking. Now you might think that means he's not thinking.

[30:57]

But you're jumping to word conclusions. So he's then asked, how do you practice not thinking? And he says, and then he says, which is translated usually as non-thinking. So I'm suggesting we can practice, if we look at the craft of the practice of non-thinking, what would it be? My experience in trying to discover language which reflects the craft of non-thinking is to develop the habit, a habit as I always say that you inhabit,

[32:11]

besteht darin, eine Gewohnheit zu entwickeln, und so wie ich das immer sage, eine Gewohnheit, die du bewohnst, that you notice without thinking about. So you notice, maybe it's a kind of blind sight. You notice, but you don't think about it. So maybe it's a kind of entry into a person who is technically blind, but knows what the visual field is, but not consciously. Maybe we could say that to notice without thinking about develops the capacity of noticing without consciously processing.

[33:31]

So you're developing the yogic skill to notice the world outside of conscious processing. But because you also do have your eyesight. And you are able to cognitively process your experience, your sensorial experience. You can begin to know how you can integrate experientially a knowing which is wider than consciousness with consciousness. Okay, so something like that's going on.

[34:33]

All right. Is this crystal clear? I'm trying to make it crystal clear. Even diamond clear. Who wants a crystal when you can have a diamond? Sogar Diamanten, klar. Wer will schon ein Glas, wenn man einen Diamanten haben kann? But a diamond is a crystal anyway, all right. So the second statement of Dogon, I mean of Dogen. Und das ist die zweite Aussage von Dogen. Is he the Genjo Koan, which is often called the Koan of ordinary life? More literally, we can translate Genjo Koan to mean to complete life.

[35:33]

that which appears, knowing that that which appears is simultaneously infinite and particular. Now that's Dogen's effort to turn something very subtle into a craft of the craft of practice. And I see no reason why that's not a good point at which to take a break. Thank you very much.

[36:27]

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