This is, as you know, the last Teisho of the practice of the Sashin. And tonight we'll have open Dokusan. And tomorrow there's, I guess, a brunch and then I guess... all or most of the Sashin participants will leave. And in the afternoon, I don't know, 2.30 or something like that, we'll have a Buddha opening eye ceremony for these two Buddhas. I mean, during the Sashin they haven't been blind, and they've been squinting. But officially we're telling them, this is probably where you're going to live for a while.

[01:03]

But we will tell them officially that they will probably live here for the next few months. eye-opening ceremony and then we'll and as part of that somehow I have to figure it out we'll do a Buddha's enlightenment day ceremony December 8th and also tomorrow just because you'll probably see him. Hans-Peter Doerr is a physicist and an old friend of mine who's been trying to visit each other for a year, and tomorrow seems to be the only day that's possible. And he's in his 80s and not too well. So anyway, I... couldn't refuse his, because there's no other time, meeting him for a conversation at least.

[02:43]

Maybe Marie-Louise can meet him. I told him I'd meet him anywhere, but I'm in the middle of Buddha's enlightenment ceremony. And on the 10th, I guess, we'll have a house meeting of the practice period and discuss how this all went. But before those of you in the Sashin leave, I'm happy to hear from any of you or pass along to others how you think this all worked. Because we'll have to decide on the basis of this experience whether next year we have a Rohatsu Sashin combined with the practice period.

[03:56]

Usually they're not combined. Yeah. So... But I feel it's gone quite well. I mean, the... The practice period participants didn't make you Sashin participants feel like, who the heck are you? So far I've only heard positive things. You seem like nice people. Yeah. I mean, the room may not be big enough for all of you. Maybe next year if some miracle occurs and we have the Zendo built in the next room.

[05:13]

It will be a 44-seat Zendo, I think. Crestone is a 48-seat Zendo. But that's as much as we can do in this room. But if we did have a Sashin, we could just extend into this room, which will be the Dharma Hall. But maybe it's better to... I don't know. We'll discuss it together. But I thought this year, because the Sangha has done so much to make this all happen, we should include as many people as possible. Okay. Now, yesterday's talk, Teisho, quite a number of people

[06:17]

more than usual, commented that they particularly liked it. And I was a little surprised because I thought it wasn't much alchemy there, it was just information. Not much alchemy. There, but just information. But somebody said, well, there's some alchemy hidden underneath. Okay. So what it made me realize is that one of the problems with my only being here six months a year As we don't have as systematic a presentation of the teaching as we could. And that's also, of course, inseparable from a lay practice. Primarily lay practice. Because most of you are practicing on your own and sometimes with others.

[08:02]

And it's hard to develop a systematic approach unless you practice with a sangha and with a teacher. Yeah, yeah. And what I'm calling a systematic approach develops out of a basic attitude toward your sitting posture. So let me try that, because I realized also in speaking yesterday that there are a lot of blanks not filled in in what I said. And I think that what first we ought to recognize is that as an adept Zen practice, this is much more a science than it is a religion. And in fact, Bob Thurman is, you know who he is, I guess, professor of Buddhism at Columbia, and I was in college with him.

[09:38]

Yeah, he said... He says Buddhism in China was really a kind of Max Planck Institute disguised as a religion. Because you could get away in the society with looking like a religion and then you could do what you wanted. And that's more or less what I think too. Okay. So it's really a process of exploration. It's a kind of experimental process. observing science, evidential science.

[10:44]

And you are your own experiment. So I'm thinking I'm on the wall having a test tube drawn in front of everybody's seat. So first, the basic is you have ear posture. And the concept of the posture is a don't move posture. And then you begin to notice a different kind of mind develops through this don't move posture. Und dann entdeckst du, dass eine andere Art von Geist sich durch diese Bewege-Dich-Nicht-Haltung entwickelt.

[12:00]

And the mind, this zazen mind develops through the attitudes of patience and acceptance and patience and acceptance. Und dieser zazen Geist entwickelt sich durch die Einstellungen von Geduld und Akzeptanz. And And you begin to notice that there's a difference between your usual mind and your zazen mind. And ideally you then notice that a non-discursive mind is what allows zazen mind to develop. Now a discursive mind leads to more discursion. Discursiveness. Yeah, it's a mental track that you get on. Almost a mental diarrhea sometimes. Yeah. It can't be stopped.

[13:19]

Okay. Now, developing a non-discursive mind, a mind that... accepts and is patient and so forth. It becomes a body mind. So what you... I mean, a discursive mind is primarily mental and not much involved with the body. And what you're beginning to open yourself to is what we could call body-based minds.

[14:24]

So the first step after you begin to notice the difference between Zazen mind and ordinary mind, is you begin to notice that difference and develop that difference. In that sense, it's again a kind of science. Okay, so now... So then, if I'm trying to make this systematic so you can keep it somewhat clear in your future... Is that this non-discursive mind eventually coalesces, gathers itself, melds. And is the non-discursive mind coalesces, that actually is hard to translate, and während dieser diskursive Geist nichtdiskursive, oh, Entschuldigung, nichtdiskursive, ja, genau, nichtdiskursive Geist zusammenschmilzt, you can begin to feel it in your body.

[15:58]

You get to know a bodily feel of a mind. And the bodily field of a mind begins you to open up to other body-based minds. Which tend to be excluded from your experience because discursive mind and mentality exclude, pretty much exclude genuinely body-based minds. Of course your discursive mind will die with you when you die. So it's happening in your body. But it's defined through itself primarily and not so much through bodily experience.

[17:23]

So you're basically creating a mind that didn't exist when you were born. Also schafft ihr damit im Grunde genommen einen Geist, der nicht existierte, als ihr geboren wurdet? You're born with the possibility of body-based minds, but it depends on your culture and your teaching and so forth whether you develop them or not. So, again, you start with this posture. Now, don't move posture. And as the body really comes closer and closer to stillness, it's, you know, if I'm looking at this,

[18:30]

Pretty hard for me to see it unless it stops. And if my body is moving too, I can't see anything. I feel like a grandfather clock on the loose. Yeah, anyway. But if the body becomes still, you can begin to see the mind moving. And if you really develop a still body, it begins to make the mind still. So the first and most basic agreement... condition of this science is that you develop a still mind within a still body. And that still mind is then really developed through becoming a non-discursive mind. And that non-discursive mind, as I said, coalesces or begins to be a bodily known.

[19:56]

I'm sorry, it's hard to translate. Yeah, it's hard for me to think. It's hard for me to think about it. Is that a word for it? For which? It means it... It comes together. It conjoins, it melds, fuses. Yeah. And that, again, then kind of joins into the body. Now, the more you can find yourself residing through zazen in a body-based mind, let's keep it like that, Je mehr ihr euch im Saasen verorten könnt, dort wohnen könnt sozusagen, desto mehr in einem körperbasierten Geist könnt ihr beginnen, den körperlichen Unterschied zwischen zum Beispiel euren drei Geisten, mit denen ihr geboren wurdet, zu spüren.

[21:43]

Waking, dreaming and non-dreaming deep sleep. And there's a physical bump between them. And when I expressed, talked about the three minds of daily consciousness, there's a bump between the minds. And there's a little bump. I bump a node. A node is a knot. You go over a bump to go to sleep. And you can get to learn that bump in your body and breath and so forth. Because really, in this case, you're a kind of scientist of the mind in your own experience.

[22:46]

Now, a teacher has some kind of, if you've done this long enough, has some experience direct experience and experience with others and can notice when a practitioner is at the stage where he can really develop non-discursive mind. Er kann das bemerken, wenn ein Praktizierender sich an der Schwelle befindet, wo er wirklich den nicht-diskursiven Geist entwickeln kann. Und wann das zulässt, dass er oder sie den nicht-korrigierten Geist entwickelt.

[23:48]

Oder Gewahrsein zu bemerken. so let me yesterday I was punished because I was told I was bad because I talked so long bad boy so I'll try to be try maybe I can be you'll see okay You know, I mean, just let me, a teaching example occurs to me. One time I asked Suzuki Roshi, he had an office next to the Zender. And there was a couch in the Zender, a couch next to his desk and chair. But it was in his office, not in the Zender. In his office. Yeah. Next to the Zendo, the couch was... And I often sat on the couch with him and talked to him about this and that.

[25:01]

Anyway, I asked him about some particular question about breathing. And he began to say, well, and then he said, when I asked him about breathing, he said, you know, some people think they are sitting still, but they're actually moving inside. And... And I thought to myself, that's not what I asked him. But my relationship with him was simply to trust him and accept him. So I sort of trusted and accepted these words he said. Also habe ich diesen Worten, die er da gesagt hat, vertraut und sie akzeptiert.

[26:19]

And I looked at his body simultaneously because I trusted his body too, accepted his body. Because it's there, it's presence, right? Und ich habe gleichzeitig seinen Körper beobachtet, weil ich auch seinem Körper vertraut und das akzeptiert habe. Das ist ja, das ist ja da. Yeah, and I noticed while he was speaking about the fact that some people think they're not moving, they are inside, he'd established a very rhythmic, even-paced breath. So I joined his breathing pace and actually learned a particular kind of breathing pace from it. And then in Zazen I tried to as much as possible not move inside as well as outside.

[27:31]

And establish a breathing, a pace of breathing that fit with the situation. And he'd answered my question. Now, it doesn't have to be this subtle. But if you live with somebody for years, these kind of things are more normal. Yeah, and I basically saw him all year round, almost every day. Yeah, so... Yeah. But it's also that, not just a teacher, it's doing this study in the context of a Sangha.

[28:36]

So I'm trying to, again, clearly trying to find a way we can continue this practice as lay people, as lay practitioners, within the context of a Sangha, sometimes or a lot of the time. Now I could go on. I started saying, notice awareness. Now what I decided in my own scientific exploration, I noticed there were certain, once you establish non-conceptual and non-discursive minds, body-based minds that did much of your thinking for you, I began to recognize that this wasn't exclusively only in zazen.

[29:52]

I could feel a bodily-based mind present during consciousness. And as you know, I emphasize consciousness SCI and conscious means is the same as to cut scissors SCI. And I could see that consciousness cut itself off from the body in being discriminating, a necessary discriminating mind. But I could feel a body-based mind activity sort of in between and around the activity of consciousness.

[31:06]

And at some point I realized it was always present, kind of like I said yesterday, a guardian angel. And then I decided, okay, I need a name for this. I'm going to teach and practice with others and try to talk about what I'm discovering. And then I decided that I need a name for it when I teach it and share it with others and discuss what I discover there. So I decided to use the English words awareness and consciousness. Awareness, the etymology is more like to watch, to guard. And to be wary. And And that's not as good as the etymology of consciousness, but it works well enough because there's a kind of watching over you.

[32:25]

Awareness kind of watches over us. So again, as I said yesterday, this allows us this Finding yourself in a body-based mind allows you from that point of view that experience to develop the five skandhas and the vijnanas and the relationship between the birth minds and this fourth mind awareness And so forth. So I won't go any further because we don't have time.

[33:26]

But I did want to say I can squeeze a couple things in. One thing in. Because I've been wanting to speak about wados. Turning words. Because I think that's the most useful practice for us as laypersons. At least the way I'm presenting practice you really need to work with ideally anyway to some extent with wados. And as I quoted Da Wei the other day, he was the disciple of the compiler of the Blue Cliff Records.

[34:27]

And Hui Zhang, who was his actual friend, but has been presented in history as if they were rivals. They sent each other students. He also studied for a while with Yuan Wu. And the cases he compiled led to the Book of Serenity. So these two figures who are at the root of our Soto and Rinzai lines Linji and Soto minds, Sao Dung, yeah, emphasized using phrases. And Fui Chang in the context of uncorrected mind. And I would say that The phrases initially, traditionally came from the koans.

[36:10]

But the phrases in the koans came from people's practicing together. So the phrases can come out of your life. They don't have to come from Koans or from me. And there's really three main categories. Ones that emphasize a view shift, a world view shift. Ones that are metallogic. A metallog is like good morning. Good morning is good morning. That's all. It's irrelevant whether the morning is good or not.

[37:11]

Good morning is itself good morning. If you want to say something else, you have to say, this really is a good morning. You can start going around saying bad morning to people. Bad morning. So some koans are metalogic, are metalogs in the sense that if you say just this, That kind of practice is just this. So practices which are suchness or are emptiness are metalogic, are metalogical, metalogic wados.

[38:22]

But as we've been talking in the practice period, just this is it is more of a teaching, a pointing at. And But most of the koans I present to you are view shifts, because I think that's where we get the best entry. Now, when a phrase comes up to you, either from a koan or from a lecture or from your experience, it has a kind of power, maybe like, I love you. I mean, when somebody falls in love, I mean, occasionally it does happen, sometimes your friends recognize it before you.

[39:47]

He looks like he's in love. But you're thinking, well, what is this funny feeling? I don't know. I remember Michael Murphy said to me, when he had a son, he never had any children, he had a son. A few days after the... He was born, Mac was born. Michael was saying to me for two or three days in a row, I have this funniest feeling, I don't know what it is. And then later he said, And I'm in love is a metalogue. It is, you know, this, whatever, you don't know what to do with it. You say, okay, I guess I have to live with it. Well, when a wado, a turning word for you, really takes hold of you, it's like that.

[41:01]

You feel it's entered into your situation as part of every situation. So I guess as an ending Teisho here, what I'm doing here is recommending you work with Wados and you explore ones that arise out of your own situation. Yeah, like a breath air me arose out of exploring the phrase now I am it. Now it is me. So Cohen's your own phrase can develop out of a traditional phrase.

[42:25]

Okay. This is my way of saying goodbye. Thank you. We were forced to eat in every place and everywhere.

[42:44]

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