Well, the planetary clock today offered us the first bit of snow, wet water snow. And there's lots of little birds around now flying in in the trees and grasses. Do you know what they are? herds of little birds. These are all expressions of our earth clock. In its elliptical orbit and axial declination.

[01:01]

That means that the angle is wrong. Yeah, and of course the planetary earth clock is also embedded in us. And you certainly see that it is when you have jet lag. So that's all to say, I think I should continue to speak a bit about time. I think we could even call the practice of Zen the craft of space and time. And since we're so much in the midst of it here, putting a practice together as we practice together, putting a practice period together as we practice together.

[02:20]

We have a chance to look at this more vividly than we would otherwise. But someone also asked me to say something about Is there some difference between, what is the difference between a lay ordination and a monk ordination? Well, from the point of your personal practice, there doesn't have to be any difference. I mean, as in the lay ordination, the ceremony, we only give usually the five precepts. But you can sneak a peek at the additional five and practice them too.

[03:28]

So from the point of view of practice, it's not much difference. It's what your intention is. But it does, but there's a difference in the relationship to the Sangha. Punyamitra, who's called Buddha Mitra in our lineage chant in the morning, Punya Mitra, der in unserer Lehrlinienrezitation morgens Buddha Mitra genannt wird.

[04:31]

Supposedly never spoke for decades and hardly touched the ground. And Buddha Mitra chose him as his successor. Buddha Nandi chose Buddha Mitra or Pranayamit as his successor. Anyway, and he said to him, you are more akin because Buddha Mitra lived with his parents. You are more akin related to, more akin to your mind, to the mind than your parents.

[05:47]

And I would say that is maybe part of the, one of the causes for many of us to practice. Somehow the experience of the world, our direct experience of the world, is more the cause of us or the feel or future of us than who our parents happen to be. And that may become more obvious as we get older. So I would say a person who decides to be a monk, a monkette or a monk, feels that clearly, that they're more akin to mind than to their birth culture and parents.

[07:11]

Did you say more akin to mind now? More akin to mind than their birth culture and parents. So that's one... That recognition, I think, is there for somebody who decides to be a monk. And second, I would say that the priority of their life becomes the realization of mind. By the way, is this the dimmest the lights can be?

[08:12]

No, it could be dimmer. Nicole and Mahakavi are getting a 2% dimmer. So maybe we can have it more dim for Zazen. This is a little bright for a lecture, but it's okay. So then I would say the third aspect is the person who decides to be a monk and not remain a lay, primarily lay practitioner.

[09:20]

We've been speaking about the durative present. So the durative present becomes for a person who is a monk the dharmic present. Their first priority is to establish the present as the Dharma. And fourth, I would say, the decisional contact of their life becomes the Sangha. They make the decisions, basic decisions of their life through the Sangha and for the Sangha. Yeah, but still, you can be practiced nearly the same way or the same way as a lay practitioner.

[10:30]

And fulfill the real obligations we have to our children, our spouse, our work, etc. I mean, there's no human life without such things. And sometimes, you know, you have your life work and your family, but secretly inside you feel how to establish a dharmic presence. Man kann seine Arbeit im Leben haben und so weiter, aber dass man insgeheim, innerlich sich die Frage stellt, wie kann ich eine dharmische Gegenwart herstellen.

[11:38]

What I'm speaking about today, I think, if I can, is establishing a dharmic presence. Worüber ich heute gerne sprechen möchte, wenn ich das kann, ist die Frage, wie man eine dharmische Gegenwart herstellt. Okay, now, Suzuki Roshi told a story years ago about Morita Roshi, who was the abbot of Eheji in the Meiji period. Morita Roshi. Mm-hmm. And when young, when Morito was only, you know, 13 or 14, his father was quite ill and couldn't take care of him. So his father sent him to Eheji. And this boy said, well, what should I do at Eheji? And his father said, well, as a new monk you pick up the branches and sweep up the leaves that the senior monks have collected and put them in the garbage.

[13:08]

And you ring the bell. And the boy said, well, how should I hit the bell? And his father said, well, you should bow. At a heiji, you bow when you hit the bell. And you hit the bell so you open up a path to the Buddha. Or you give birth to the Buddha. Now, I remembered, I just re-read this story recently, as Sukiroshi told it. You know, my filing system is over, my room on the floor is my Anja has discovered, and I just found it, and so I started reading.

[14:14]

And I remembered the story as you hit the bell and a Buddha appears. But it's much more... instructional or structured to say a path for the Buddha appears. Or you give birth to the Buddha. So here's this young boy and he's hitting the bell for the first time. And to his teacher, his father, one of his teachers says, you know, first you have a posture.

[15:28]

A posture of bowing or being ready to bow. And as we know, you release, you don't hold the stick, you release the stick into the unknown. You may even drop it sometimes. I remember I was in an archery contest once in Japan and this guy got up and he turned his arrow and he lifted his bow and he raised it and put the arrow in and then the arrow fell off. For us Westerns, it looked totally ridiculous. It just falled down. But he was ranked quite highly because his patterns were very good.

[16:46]

So you kind of let the stick hit the bell. No Buddha is going to be born if you hit the bell. So this boy hits the bell. And perhaps he felt a path to the Buddha open up right in front of him. Or perhaps he felt a Buddha being born Or a bit of him even. So what's interesting to me about this story from a yogic point of view is that the advice of his father was a bodily posture and a mental posture. war, dass die Anweisung seines Vaters eine körperliche Haltung und eine geistige Haltung war.

[18:06]

Well, when he hit the bell, als er die Glocke geschlagen hat, I don't know in that time what the bell was like, but I used to hit the same bell. It's a very big bell, you know, like that. And you have to hit it with a log. And it still has to be extremely precise. And you hit it 18 times during the first period of zazen. It'd be nice to do it here. I don't know how the neighbors would like it. You don't ignore the sound. And the clock in the zendo neheji had some kind of little click sound. that, I don't know, when it went just before the hour, or maybe the hour, it had a little click.

[19:15]

They told me that little click should occur between the first hit of the 18th hit And the last hit is bong, bong. And I said, you must be crazy. But I secretly bought a watch, something like this one. And I figured it out very carefully, and I always got it, bong, click, bong. And the bell? Yeah, it's about as far away as Johannesoft here.

[20:18]

Anyway, so this boy hits the bell. And the abbot at that time of a heiji Says to Ivo, I mean says to his Anja. Who hit that bell? And Ivo, I mean the Anja said, I don't know. So the Anja went and brought this young 13-year-old boy to the Abbot. And the abbot expected some sort of well-trained, seasoned monk to appear, and here this kid appears. So, I mean, he was so impressed with this young Morita that he took care of his education until he became a famous Zen master himself and later a head of Eheji.

[21:46]

So this can tell us also something about gestational time. Or seed time, we can say. Because the boy's father planted a seed in him. Conditions for this seed are your bodily posture and mental posture. And perhaps when he hit the bell, disappearing into the hitting of the bell with no mental instructions, Releasing the mental posture into a feeling of the Buddha path appeared.

[22:51]

Maybe he had a little taste of the path of the Buddha at that moment. And it stayed with him. And I think many of us have little experiences, some periods of zazen, sometimes when doing chanting, that can or that do or can stay with us. And that seed is then in gestational time. And that seed became gestational time also in the Abbot of Ahagi at the time. And this abbot of the time helped develop this young boy.

[24:04]

So again, I'm now speaking again about this concept of durative time. There's no physical dimension to talk to the present. It's an immeasurable moment of interdependence. But it's an immeasurable moment of inter-independence as well because there's not only oh my dear something's wrong with my watch it can't be that way um um

[25:07]

Because the durative present within, as I said, this planetary clock we are also a clock. That's a splitting cell. It's a clock or carbon clock. Radiocarbon 14 is a clock. Radiocarbon dating and all that stuff. Yeah, no, I think I said that wrong, but... That's all right. In any case, everything's a clock. Okay. And you have to tune in your own clock within this planetary clock.

[26:32]

So it's your bodily clock and the electrochemical activity of the brain and the body. Yeah, and the metabolic pathways of the body. Which Chinese medicine is very involved with. And I guess there's six pulses, three in each wrist. And I think there are six pulses, three in every wrist. Twelve pulses. And you can begin to know something about the body and how it's functioning through those twelve pulses.

[27:41]

Well, we don't. We need some way to sense that, but we are that. And that's what I'm calling our bodily time. Which more and more through the mind and the breath you can begin to tune into and then there's what I'm calling contextual time like the bell and the bell tower and the zendo and hitting the bell and then there's seed time or gestational time These are what, maybe, see I'm still trying to develop how to talk about these.

[28:50]

And I know you, I think you spoke about it in your last seminar. So these are the three, we could say, conditions of time. A bodily contextual and gestational. And then, let's say there's expressive time. Maybe your 12 pulses are expressive time. Vielleicht sind deine zwölf Pulse so etwas wie ausgedrückte Zeit. Oder deine körperliche Energie, deine Gesundheit, das ist ausgedrückte Zeit. Aber ich habe auch über die angehaltene Zeit oder die zeitlose Zeit gesprochen.

[29:52]

Time. A kind of spatial architecture. Now I'm trying to... Right now I feel I don't want to talk. It'd be too long for me to continue. So I will try to make this very brief and I'll come back to it in the future. But this expressive time that articulates the durative present, one sign of a well-seasoned monk, is they can put the incense in the incense burner and it's straight from all angles. And it's only put in deep enough not to fall over and burn the temple down.

[31:14]

It's not shoved way down to the bottom. So there's all these little ways of doing things that suggest you're sensitive to the actual physical things of the world. And when we bow to our cushion before we sit down, you're creating a kind of Zafu door. A door to the world of Zafus and And it's a real door. It's just nobody can see it. It's a real door. It's a spatial door. You're giving order to the durative present.

[32:24]

And someone asked me, in fact, Marie-Louise asked me about what is the relative and the absolute and all that stuff. Well, that's another lecture. But they're just two categories that help you notice how we exist. And five aspects of those two categories. All right. Well, creating the, turning time into the invisible architecture of the Zafu door. And you bow into that door and then sit down. Or you turn around and bow into the Zendo and then sit down. Or you bow into the Zendo and then turn into Kinhint. And for the well-seasoned monk, this is...

[33:59]

You really live in this spatial architecture which turns time into space. And that's one reason I'm so excited about what Mathieu is doing. And Leo now helping him. And I think of Zaha Hadid who is the Iraqi British Arab architect. Is it D or deed? No, as a woman. Oh, D, I see, it's a woman, not deed.

[35:07]

It is a woman, yes, very definitely a woman. She got the Pritzker Prize and so forth. And she designed something in Berlin that goes over the Autobahn somewhere. Anyway, she says that architecture has an energy. And the rooms of a building have energy. And the particular space, the environment of the building has energy. And the weather is an expression of the planetary clock.

[36:12]

Bringing us a little snow today. And so she feels, and certainly in Zen it's the same, very similar idea, that if you live in a building, the energy of the rooms and the space and the garden and the environment and the trees and the birdsong are all part of the spatial architecture. The spatial architecture. And the spatial architecture you create turning time into space. Which allows you to stop in the durative present. And I think of what Matthieu is doing as a kind of honoring Hugo Kugelhaus and Wolfram Graubner.

[37:26]

Who calls, Kugelhaus calls a building a field for the development of the senses. And like these beams here, there are two beams laid on top of each other with this zigzag pattern. And where these two beams appear in the duksan room, They stick out into the duksan. You can see them there. So the construction of the building becomes transparent.

[38:28]

You see how it supports itself. And you see it in the stairway going up in the Hudson House. You can see where the beams that support the building are sticking right there in the stairway. And Matthew told me yesterday, I don't know if I got it straight, but a good Japanese carpenter The old English word for architect was high crafter. One whose craft was high. So high crafter Mathieu He said that a good Japanese carpenter, builder, uses the face of the wood toward the face of the tree.

[39:39]

Is that right? The preferred primary face is the exterior. The exterior. Toward the exterior of the tree or the exterior of the tree. No, from looking at the tree from the exterior towards the tree. I see. So looking at the outside of the tree. Yeah, that's the preferred face. And then the other preferred face is the weathered side of the tree, the side that faces the weather. Okay. Yeah. Did you get that straight? Can you say it? So that's bringing the growing time of the tree into the building, the time of the building.

[40:58]

And as much as possible, Zen practice tries to acknowledge an act within this time transformed into space. So you live within the dharmic space of time. Now if that isn't totally crystal clear, I will go work on it a little bit more into the future. Because we're doing it here. Thank you very much.

[42:02]

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