Sangha, the practical Sangha. How we practice here and continue the practice, sustain the practice, sustain the teaching, and sustain the teaching in a way that it evolves. This is the challenge of Sangha and the Dharma in every generation, every country, but of course particularly right now in the West as Sangha, Dharma, and Buddha taking root here. And, you know, you're the roots and the flowers and the branches. But it's practical.

[01:01]

For me, this building is like an instrument. Not a musical instrument, but anyway, an instrument of practice. And as I said in the first days, it makes a difference to practice here, in this sendo, and in this remote place, which for me is the It has a big wall around it of dryness. Those of you from California and Aspen may not notice it, but, boy, if you come from dripping wet Europe, boy, is it dry here. And my body reacts to it for a while. After a while, I don't notice it. So we're not only remote, we have this invisible dry wall around us, not plasterboard. And I'm amazed and I want to thank our Sangha here in this area and especially in Boulder for their extraordinary generosity in helping us.

[02:15]

By helping us, we're all us. By this land, most of what we can see here looks like we're going to be able to do it. It's one of the chanciest things I've ever done, we've ever done, because we're not a very big Sangha and it's quite a big expenditure, about $150,000 for about 150 acres. And then plus these 80 acres. So because, and as most of you know, I think it's the most important thing I can do in my lifetime to ensure the continuation, most important thing I can participate in, I'm not doing it, to ensure the continuation of this as a practice place, which I see as my main job other than having successors to continue the practice.

[03:26]

And there's a very, you often chant the lineage of the temple as well as the lineage of the person. And as you know, the names, as we said yesterday, of the teachers are often the name of the place, very commonly. It's a very place. Zen has a very place-specific character. Traditional lineage, Zen does. And when you make a place sacred, which means dedicated to a single purpose, sacred and for practice. Of course, practice can occur anywhere. That's true. But I think you can see, feel, that there's a difference to have a place from which practice which occurs anywhere can branch out from and return to.

[04:28]

So I'm, you know, we... I have two more payments to make, but I think it looks like it's going to be possible. A couple of weeks ago I wasn't sure. But somehow it looks like we have confidence now we can do it. And it's really been the generosity of our immediate santa which has made it possible. So we'll end up owning all the land up to where it looks like a national park will start. So we'll have this little spot here on the planet. There aren't many spots like this left on the planet. A little spot which can be committed to Dharma practice. And I think it's isolation.

[05:36]

Isolation in this... This mountain beside us is good. I mean, I think there's actually a relationship between wilderness and original mind. The sense of this place opening into wilderness I find very important. But I also want to speak about something we're calling the Sangha wheel in Europe. And it's really been the doing of, idea and doing, both of Marie-Louise, who really likes being here, actually likes being here better than being in Europe. Likes practicing and living here. And she's been disturbed that, and she wants to see this continue, of course, and she's been disturbed that the financial situation here is so precarious.

[06:40]

The last two or three practice periods we've got in the middle, not sure we could feed everybody for the rest of the practice period. And that really comes down to more than anything else, I mean, that most of the people who want to practice particularly for long term, give up other means of making money. So, last year I think we had, I don't know how many people, 15 people in the practice period or something, and three paid. So, that doesn't really work, unless the three have to be very rich. So, well, part of it is what Marie Louise recognized. I'm very impressed that she did this. is that the fact is, in Europe, we also maintain a center not like this, but somewhat similar. If you go in, it feels the same, the service is the same.

[07:44]

We have a similar bowing pillow in the middle. I want many things to be similar so it feels familiar. But the Sangha there, which is, depending on how you count, you know, 200 or 2,000 people. But the group that comes most often is 100 to 300 people. Comes fairly regularly. They meet... And the Sangha has changed, you know, for some years. I'm speaking about this not... for the sake of information, but just to share with you what I think is the actuality of making practice work and having a sustained presence of teaching in a few people. And the whole idea of Sangha is society will evolve through small groups.

[08:50]

More than through individuals. And the larger society will evolve through small groups within it. And if small groups can find out how to live together in ways that are... that work, the whole society might be able to. So in Europe, it took me a long time before I did Sashin's there, because I knew once I did Sashin's, I think I've said to you, I couldn't leave Europe, or I couldn't leave Europe until I had a successor, because you can't start people on practice and abandon them. So at some point after I'd been there, teaching there regularly every year for some years, I don't remember how many, maybe three years, four, five, six years before I started doing Sashins.

[09:59]

Once I started doing Sashins, then a Sangha developed, primarily, interestingly enough, in the German-speaking countries. I have no idea why that's the case, but anyway, that's what happened. And pretty soon I began having people who did a lot of Sashins saying, can't we have a center? So I looked at quite a lot of people to show up with centers from the places we look at. Four or five of them turned out to be ex-Stasi headquarters. You know what Stasi, that's the East German secret police where they torture people. The vibes in those buildings were, ugh. But they were cheap, you know. I turned those places down. And then Graf von Durkheim had who wrote the book Hara, which is one of the pioneer books on Buddhism as a physical practice. I think it came out in the mid-60s. I knew him, and he actually sent students to me, and he had given a couple lectures with him and so forth.

[11:08]

And when he died some years ago, the folks there wanted us to buy his place, his meditation place. And I put it off looking at it for a year or so. My problem is if I see something that's good, I decide, okay, let's do it. So my way of avoiding that is I try not to see things that I think we should do. I avoided looking at that Kuan Yin statue we have. in the main house for two or three years because i don't i heard about it i don't want to see it because we can't afford it i don't know but once i saw it okay let's go for it so finally two people and primarily got me to look at this place and so we bought it about five and a half years ago What Marie-Louise noted is that, in fact, all the people who ran the place were Crestone practice period graduates.

[12:16]

In fact, the people who were committed to live there and stay there, all, invariably, had been at Crestone for at least one practice period. And it's during the practice period that they made the decision, okay, I will commit myself to taking care of the place in Europe There's one person that that's not true of, but he's been trying for two years to get proper legal papers to come to America to come to a practice. So with this recognition, how do you get the larger Sangha in Europe to recognize that Crestone is part of the European Sangha? That was Brie Louise's idea, so she wrote this letter herself, said, you know, I don't know anything, I'm just the wife of this guy. But let's face it, Dharma Sangha Europe needs Crestone, and Dharma Sangha Europe should support Crestone. So she wrote this letter out, and so far 12,000 Deutschmarks have come in.

[13:26]

And the idea is that it will support the people who come from Europe. Because before they didn't pay in Europe. They lived at Johanneshof. The center's name was called... The former name was Johanneshof. And we've kept it because everybody knows it as that. So the people who live at Johanneshof long ago stopped paying because they ran out of money and they just lived there and take care of the place. So... When they came here, they had no money to pay. But it was necessary. They wanted it. Good for the practice here, et cetera. So this year, I think, for each person who comes from Europe, there's enough money to pay their airfare and $800 to the center for a person. And it looks like, if we calculated right, that will carry the finances of the Crestone practice period. So, I mean, this is a big step for Crestone here in such a remote place, where there's no way to earn a living, and there's no reason the number of people who practice here should keep trying to support the people from Europe who practice here.

[14:48]

But how to make that happen took a kind of... good sense of how to describe it and not, because some people immediately were kind of like, what do we have to do with America, you know? But anyway, it's worked quite well and there's been a lot of support and feeling and also financially. So our sangha is now institutionally and financially integrated more with the European sangha. And if so many of the people who come here are from Europe, actually, because it's the only place I really do public teaching except what Gary and Tim talked me into doing in Boulder. It's good if that's who are often here, that there's some way to financially make it work for Crestone.

[15:51]

So anyway, that's what I meant by I wanted to speak about the practical Sangha, which I think these are two big steps, the sort of completion of what I think should be the physical site of this practice place, and its relationship to the much larger European Sangha. who, in fact, if they want to sustain their Sangha, seem to need the experience of practice periods here at Cresta. Now, when I speak to you about something like yesterday, you know, this Quran that Mark brought to our attention, sitting alone on Great Sublime Peak, I said something about it, but I really... I think I have to say some more. Because... Hmm.

[16:55]

Hmm. Hmm. Because I want to give you a realistic taste of Zen. For some reason, as I'm saying, and I think of this stick, you know, which most of you have heard me mention before. But it's a lotus staff. And at the bottom is the lotus embryo, bud. I mean, not the bud, the embryo, actually. It's in the water. That's where my hand is. And this is the bud. And this is the seed pod. And where's the bloom? The same is true of, you can look at the iconography of the Kuan Yin, it's the same. The bloom is you. The bloom is you're looking at it. And so is that simple or is that complex? We're complex people and actually Zen is probably more complex than most of you realize.

[18:06]

We want it to be simple. But here, somebody made this stick. They made it a certain way, and they made it so, which is not so different than when I come in here and bow. There's a whole tantric side to just a simple service, how I bow, come up, lifting myself up into the feelings of Buddha. And doing that, three bows before I sit here and talk with you. And, you know, I notice I, you know, I've practiced long enough. I can go back and forth between ordinary circumstances and reading a magazine and being in the session if necessary, you know, or being on the phone. At this point, I've had to be in contact with Johannes Hoff a number of times.

[19:06]

I don't like doing it if I'm not careful. I then can't, I lose the ability to be in the sashim, really, or give lectures. If I open my email, I'd probably be finished, and I couldn't really participate. It draws out another mind. I open my email every two or three months anyway, so there isn't too much danger there. But I do have to be, I notice, even though I've been doing this a long time, if I'm really going to enter the mind of the sashin, this mind we gather together, sashin, I have to stay as carefully as possible within the mind of the sashin. Briefly, if I'm going to know, know.

[20:12]

Anyway, that's enough. And what did I talk about yesterday? Small things. Maybe the alignment of the spine, the declination of the vertebrae. Or The hum in our chanting. Or the turnings in a dream. Often a dream turns on some odd object. One presence of one person or some kind of word or statement. And our more subtle mind is like that too. Now the Abhidharmas, one of the earliest forms of Buddhism, thought that

[21:28]

If you could construct language carefully with a strict definition of terms, you could get a language that represented actuality or better represented actuality. Majamaka and Yogacara and Zen feel more that the naming process itself is a problem and And the linguistic, basic linguistic structures are a problem. So that's, we're in that tradition and Zen carried that, evolved that in its own way. So we have, again, this rather simple koan and this encounter of jibo. Again, I'm going to see if I can give you a feeling of what I'm talking about here.

[22:37]

Maybe it's helpful if you think of language, the word I used yesterday was gesture. Think of it more as gesture than of meaning or content. For example, if I say good morning to you, that's really a gesture. It's not about whether the morning's good or not. Or if I say hello, Gregory Bateson called those metalogues. But let's just think of, if I say good morning, good afternoon, this is a gesture more than a statement of meaning. A greeting. So I think you can look at these cons as one aspect of it is it's a greeting. It's a certain technique of greeting. Now, if I take, I used the term yesterday, the mind of small things.

[23:46]

And in using that phrase, I was trying to give this a kind of mantric quality. So you could take a phrase, mind of small spaces, mind of small things, whatever you want, mind of small things spells most. So you say most or mind of small things. If you used it as a kind of mantra that you repeat, it can make you stay with, rest with small things. And one kind of basic practice here where we're trying to enter These small things, which are, you know, my vertebrae, the vertebrae, which I inherited, is part of my speaking right now and how it is. Not my thinking. That's something, too.

[24:50]

That's okay, too. But these small things you can begin to feel. Perhaps you feel someone else's vertebrae, the presence of their vertebrae. Now, so the practice here is if you want to kind of enter into this ultra-linguistic or meta-linguistic world, other than linguistic, this would be ultra. Meta would be, meta-linguistic would be how objects and all things are a kind of language. You can... pause on each perception, pause on each thing you notice, and give a, you know, like take the stick, if you look at the stick, you let yourself look at it and let a kind of, give it a space, give it a feeling of space, its own space.

[25:50]

So there's almost like a little field around it or circle around it. And if you practice trying to get out of a conceptual world by giving each thing its presence, You drop that incense burner in your head and you won't be present any longer. That big head of yours. So it has a presence, it has an affect in this world, sitting here in the senda. You could... And certain objects have more presence than others and the altar is to kind of create a number of things, not too many, which have a certain presence and light. So you can, you know, you can practice with that, giving each thing a little pause and space.

[26:55]

Each person. That's also sound. Have that feeling of each person. Okay. So let's go to Jibo, I guess. Let's take that one. When Jibo went into this hermit adept's cave, Jibo, the hermit adept, knew the question already. What about before a word arises or a thought arises? He knew that already. He wasn't surprised. And Jibo knew this gesture. It's a famous gesture in Zen. So the hermit adept, what he did, Jibo knew. So it's a kind of greeting like good morning or something.

[28:01]

Don't try to look at this as content. Look at it as gesture or a greeting. My daughter, Elizabeth, is... Some of you know, she's 23. She just graduated from college a while ago, a year or so ago. And she decided she really wants to do music. She's wanted to for a long time, but thought she should do intellectual things, etc. But in the end, her love is music. You know, I can't... sing two notes in succession that seem to have any connection with each other, but somehow she has pretty much perfect pitch. She can hear a song once, really, and can sing the whole thing. I don't know. I know the first line of about a thousand songs and not the second line. So she's found two extraordinary teachers through kind of mentor relationships she's developed.

[29:07]

And one of them is a very, very good singer, an older woman. And she teaches her singing. Elizabeth sings quite well. Was the kind of main female singer in her college. But these teachers, one of the teachers said, she's very musical, but very ignorant of music, so she doesn't really know much about music. Well, she's a son and plays the piano. This other music teacher is really especially unusual, and she's... She felt, well, you hunt all your life for such teachers, and you find two of them through this... person who's helping her. And he teaches her to just sing, to make a sound along with a drone, along with a hum, a tone.

[30:12]

So she goes to see him and he will produce different tones which She just tries to sustain her own voice with the tone. And in contrast to the other singer, which teaches her to sing, but that's already very far from the foundations of sound, this other guy, this first male, is teaching her kind of the sound itself before its song. And she's, this may sound so silly to you or simple to you, but she's finding it absolutely extraordinary and she's quite joyful in it. This kind of entering into sound. Now, if somebody, she meets somebody, say some hermit adept musician,

[31:18]

And as she goes in the cave, she hums a particular tone. And he hummed back a particular tone. That would be more like this encounter. Like two musicians might do who knew a similar way of sounding together. Now I'll go back a little bit to, excuse me for jumping around, to what I see these dockets of self-experience, in other words, roots of self in Sophia watching her. I didn't bring my watch. Am I time running out? No. Don't give me an absolute answer, give me a relative answer. I'd see that this communicative self, let's talk about the communicative self or reciprocated self or coordinate self or something, in these little games going back and forth.

[32:46]

And if I kind of think about how that accumulates history, personal experience in contrast to an autonomous self or a separate self, a self which accomplishes or does things. All of them have to go together, but which one really takes hold of the world? And I think if I can support the sense of a reciprocated self, rather than a separate self which tends to then want the world to be permanent because you have to have somewhere to locate yourself. Now we fear, we often fear in the West that some kind of reciprocated self becomes dependency or becomes a group self or some kind of where you lose your individuation.

[33:50]

But I don't think so. I think that could be a problem. There could be one outcome. But I think a sense of a reciprocated self leads into a feeling of a pleated world, a proportionate world, a world in proportion. where you end up with a kind of long chain of reactions, a rapid exchange of reactions and gestures and emotions as part of... I have a scroll in the Hotawan right now. It's a very typical, it's a nice one. It's a couple hundred years old. And I think it was Nakamura Sensei's that my teacher in Japan and a grandmother and mother Japanese mother who lived with us for years in California and it's got a guy sitting down there and he's pounding mochi looks like he's pounding mochi mochi is rice and you pound it and you make a paste and you have it at New Years in particular he's pounding mochi and he's kind of this thing and he's got a thing and he's pounding it and there's a little hut

[35:11]

And right on the... beyond the hut there's a little stream that goes across the school this way. But there's a tree right beside the hut on this side with the hut and then there's trees that disappear in the mist, appear in the mist and then reappear, same tree, like the same tree, top of a mountain and then another mountain, and then there's the moon. If you look at it, the mochi being pounded in the moon of the same shape. What's the real subject of such a scroll, so typical of Japanese and Chinese scroll? Proportion. Living in a world that's pleated together. I think what happened in October, September 11th, is about a world out of proportions. Sangha is about a world in proportion.

[36:17]

And developing a self in proportion. A self which develops in a reciprocated way, with coordinates in the physical and mental world. Or personal world. Sentient world. Now I have another one, which is a pine tree to a woman looking like she's, I think, heading for an assignation with her attendant figure, stepping out on the beach. And the pine branches weave right into the wave. You can't see where the waves start and the pine branches stop. You can't see where the top of the tree ends and the cloud begins. Now, is this an artistic convention? Yes, but it's also a way of seeing. It's rooted in a way of seeing. Zen is a lot about such a way of seeing.

[37:21]

In a pleated, proportionate, folded together, unfolded and outfolded world. So a koan, like Baijian being asked, what is the extraordinary affair, is not, it's too simple to be just about, yes, sitting alone on Great Supine Peak. It's about the koan is showing you a process, a convention of interchange. a kind of special gesture-rooted, gesture-based language. How do two people show each other they have the same tone, which in a way puts language aside and lets some kind of communication happen?

[38:36]

I think for most of this only happens when we meet somebody we could fall in love with. There's often, you put aside, and there's just some feeling. But that feeling, that's the capacity of human beings. It's not just something that happens when you happen to find somebody who's got the right genetic resonance and odor. But that sense of finding a certain tone with each person, knowing how to find a tone in which one's understanding and sense of recognizing the world, accepting the world, transforming the world is present. So many of these koans are really about showing you a kind of use of a process rather than content.

[39:38]

As I said, Jipo already knew about it. So you can ask. The secret of one finger is that it's repeated. The secret of one finger is repeated in various circumstances. What is being pointed at? What is being lifted up? May our intention uniquely penetrate every human place.

[40:26]

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