Well, I wanted to give a talk because it seemed like good form to give a talk before Graus and Gisela leave. And of course I'm thinking all the time about Johanneshoff Gisela suggested we should rename it, but I don't know what. Gisela Hoff? Or Dogen Hoff? I don't know. But anyway, Johannes Hoff, at least for some time. And what form we give it and how we continue practice there. And I have complete confidence that this is the right thing to do.

[01:05]

If we can to start. Jnana is often practiced there. And I have complete confidence that we will do our best to make it work. I don't have complete confidence that it will succeed. I think if you were going to bet on it according to what I've seen of Western Buddhism in America and Europe, you'd have to bet against it. I think. But still, I have confidence we'll try our best and that we should try and we should do it. Now, I've been thinking a lot about our chanting and And, you know, my awareness of how poor, you know, what a poor teacher of chanting I am.

[02:13]

But, you know, I noticed during the practice period in Sushin, for the most part, none of us can be heard. There's a few people. Mark can be heard a good part of the time. Gisla sometimes. But in general, I can't hear you. almost anyone. There's a few people in the practice period that I could usually hear, but most of you I can't hear. And so I wanted to say something about it. I mean, you know, essentially chanting is about syllables, about not the words and not the meaning, And it's about syllables as a physical act, as a projectile, as you hear my tongue hit the roof of my mouth. So I say, you know, A Diamond Sutra, because When we're doing the Diamond Sutra and we're reading it, I don't have anything to say when I'm up at the altar and back, because I can't read it.

[03:24]

So I say to myself, And in between passages, sometimes I do that. But when we're chanting, either together or in this melee of sound, And particularly when we're chanting together, our tongues are touching at the roof of our mouth at exactly the same time. So we're really talking, again, through this image I've used, a kind of wiring diagram in which our bodies are aligned because we can project this sound like a physical object. The meaning is really unimportant. It's about syllable, but not the sound as a unit so much as the physical making of the sound. And we should all feel it like an object. So if you're involved in chanting, you mean you should be chanting like you were throwing a baseball or something, a sound ball.

[04:35]

Because we want to feel the physicality of the chanting. That's this teaching of the sentence body, the phrase body, and the syllable body. And if we're going to succeed in continuing this practice in Europe and Johanneshof, we've really got to find the practice in our body and trust that knowing that flows from the body. And it's actually going to be harder, I think, for all of you, those of you who are there practicing in the United States who are German, because it's a lot harder to practice in your own culture.

[05:39]

It's considerably easier to practice in a foreign culture and a foreign language because you're not drawn in to the mindsets of the people around you. You're not so drawn in to being social, being friendly, thinking in the usual way, etc., The trick is to hold your practice in view. And this holding in view is akin to the development of background mind. But the basic practice, and in a sense the condition of mindfulness practice, which is essentially intention and attention, is the holding in view of practice itself, of the mind which is giving attention, of the intention to be mindful.

[06:44]

And to use that holding in view as a receptacle in which you hold various practices in view. So first of all, in Johanneshof, and I'm thinking, you know, I'm also talking about Crestone, and those of us who will, I hope all of us will go to Johanneshof, because I don't want it to be just a place for Europeans or Germans to practice, but also a practice place parallel with this one. We have to find, we should find a way, we need to, if we're going to make this practice work, find a way to hold the practice in view. And just holding it in view will create a mental space and a mind-body space of practice for other people.

[07:49]

So holding in view is akin, again, similar to staying in your breath. Or staying mindful. And holding in view as a practice depends on, or really is hard to fully establish until you can stay in your breath. Now the other day I spoke about karma, the practice of karma as a practice is to hold in view the law of cause and effect. So again, using the, trying to find a metaphor, often it's, a traditional metaphor is a, you plant a seed and later you get a fruit.

[08:54]

Depending on your intention in planting it and how you cultivated it and how you picked it, the fruit either falls in your head or nourishes you. But going again to this metaphor of a wiring diagram, each act, each minute or significant or big act is simultaneously a conduit of karma from the past, a carrier of karma from the past and a generator of immediate karma. So to hold this karmic wiring diagram in view, or to hold the so-called law of cause and effect in view, means to be aware at each moment of each act as the conduit of karma and the generator of karma.

[10:00]

And that awareness makes each act Dharma. And it also shows you our reality limit. It shows you what's possible, what are both the boundaries of each situation and the frontiers of each situation. And knowing that, and having that awareness of karma as the carrier and creator of karma, holding the awareness of each act as the carrier and creator of karma, this kind of awareness, we will need to start this new place. That doesn't mean that you can't be relaxed. At first, of course, there's almost not going to be possible to be any rules.

[11:11]

And we who are there, I'll be there pretty much from the beginning too, have to go along with the lack of rules. But inside of us, we still hold this vision, this wiring diagram, this awareness that each act both carries and generates the present and future. And if invisibly you carry this, it will assure or make more likely that we will have a practice there in the future. Now I've used a story

[12:23]

The story I've probably told most often is of Yunyan and Dao sweeping. I'd like to emphasize in that story, this time, telling it this time, the sequentiality and the simultaneity of the stillness. In other words, the story is, if you haven't heard it, is that Yunyan is sweeping and, you know, Daowu comes by and says, too busy. And Yunyan says, you should know there is one who is not busy. So Daowu says, oh, then there's a second moon. And Yunyan holds up the broom and says, is this a second moon? Now, in general, if you look at meditation in the psychological framework, people think of meditation as being something you do to achieve calmness.

[13:35]

Like sometimes in the morning, the lake, the lake might be quite rough. In the afternoon, it's maybe smooth when the wind dies down. You can say in the morning the lake was rough and in the afternoon it's smooth. And we do need periods, like vacations, where we're calmer. So we meditate to have periods of calmness. But that's not the teaching I send. If we meditate to have periods of calmness, yes that's good and that's therapeutic, but it's to give you the taste of calmness so you might discover the simultaneity of calmness. You should know there is one who is not busy now in the midst of this busyness. And again, the useful metaphor for this is water. Water makes waves, but each wave, the wave itself is stillness because if the wave

[14:48]

if the nature of water wasn't to return to a low point, to return to and pervade everything, and return to stillness, there would be no way the water would fly off somewhere. But because water is basically still, the wave keeps returning. No matter how much you splash it, it keeps trying to return to stillness. So the wave is still simultaneously with its being rough or stormy. Always water, everything you can say about water is that it's trying to return to stillness. So the stillness is always there. And what this koan is trying to get us to recognize It's not sequential stillness, like we'll do meditation later, take a nap or a vacation, but just now discover stillness in whatever you are doing, because the nature of the mind is to return to stillness.

[16:05]

It means you need to change what part of the mind, what attributes of the mind you identify with. Now again, in Johannesov, we have to carry this stillness in our practice, no matter how busy we get or anything. If you get busy and lose that internal sense of stillness, we'll lose the practice. That means to hold in view the one who is not still, the one who is not busy, to hold in view this stillness and to discover it The holding in view is both a way of practicing and carrying people into practice, but it's also a way to carry a particular practice like this knowing of stillness in the midst of whatever situation you're in.

[17:09]

So it's, I mean, rather easy practicing here. because we all help each other, and we're rather isolated from busy life and cars and things, and have these mountains and trees to help us. But Yanisov is more basically a village, a town. It's on the road. There's neighbors. And there will be little help. the practice will need to be so internalized in you, so embodied in you, incorporated, incorporated means like corpus, to make into a body, to make substantial, has to be so incorporated in you that you never stray from it. And if you do stray from it, you hold in view never straying from it.

[18:18]

At least you hold in view this vision, this path of seeing, this path of holding in view the one who is not busy. And if we do, people will discover their own one who is not busy coming there. I'm very serious about trying to make this practice work in America and Europe and Germany and so forth, and work within myself and within a sharing of practice with you. But now you have to do it in a situation not so conducive to practice. Maybe weekend practice or saschine practice, but not so conducive to daily practice.

[19:24]

Saschine practice is simple. I mean, it's silly. Practically, it's so simple. You sit down. If you get through the pain, you're forced into a situation of practice. Almost everybody's carried in practice. You don't have to have a vision of practice. You can have any religious view you want. Saschine will... I mean it's basically forcing you into practice. But to carry practice in a daily situation in your own culture is very difficult. I would say in America there's a handful of people who actually do it. Most everyone actually just starts mixing their culture and other teachings. practice in until they've got some kind of beneficial way of looking at life. But they don't find the isolate body of the one who's not busy. You can think of mindfulness and holding a practice in view as widening the wires

[20:36]

of the wiring diagram, of transforming the current. If you're practicing mindfulness or holding a practice in view, even holding in view the law of cause and effect, you change your own karma. Karma is not fate, it's disposition. So if you hold in view any practice, any teaching, and you hold yourself in awareness, or allow awareness, or stay in mindfulness, or in your meditation you can think of zazen mind when things come up as a transforming mind, much more active, much less passive, much less reifying, than ordinary mind, which basically reinforces your karma.

[21:42]

Zen mind loosens your karma, transforms your karma, restores your karma. So in a big sense, we have to carry this mind of the one who is not busy to transform the karma of Johannesov and transform the karma of the people who come there, as well as one's own. And by transforming the karma, I also mean just to create the space where one feels free of their culture. And if we don't feel free of our culture, we won't create the space for others to feel free of their culture and their personality and their narrative history, etc. And only will this transformative power of Buddha mind be present when you can carry this empty space of the one who is not busy. So much more is going to be called for from us in Johanneshaften than was ever necessary here.

[22:55]

This is easy compared to Johanneshaften. This is harder than doing a sashin, but this is easy compared to anasof. We're quite a few practitioners here, been doing it a long time. And it's not for most of us, many of us not, in the conditions of our own conditioning, our own culture. It's said there's, in Buddhism, one of the teachings is there are four kinds of food. Buddhism is very involved in eating, as you know. Tenzo is a very important job. And we eat in the zendo. When we do a memorial service, we offer food to the Buddha, to Suzuki Roshi, and so forth. So this teaching is called the four foods. And the first food is food.

[23:59]

And what is the qualities of aspects of food? One is it's selected. We have to select from various plants. We have to select at the grocery store. You have to select what you eat. And it must be prepared. And it must be edible. And it must be, a basic teaching is that it's measured. You eat measured amounts. That's why the, another reason why the bowls, there's a different bowl dish for each type of food because each dish is a measure of that food. One reason Asian people don't eat off a big plate like we do because there's a sense that each food is measured. So food is measured and then it has to be digestible and it has to be accessible.

[25:07]

And the second food is what's called the meeting of the three. Now this means, food means what nourishes you. So the meeting of the three. The meeting of the three means the sense organ, the object of perception, and the field of awareness that arises as a result of the meeting of the sense organ and the object of perception. I mean, okay, I have this stick here. If I take my hand and put it on the stick, the stick is the object of The hand touches the sense organ and a field of awareness arises where I can feel the coolness of it. I can feel a certain presence that arises from this. It's not just a stick and a hand. Something arises from the stick and the hand. This is called the meeting of the three.

[26:11]

And what this means is, is that when you are in the world and every perception is the meeting of the three, that you sense the object that's generated the consciousness, you sense the sense organ, and you sense the field. When you are in that kind of state, you feel nourished. So this is called the second food. And the third food is one-pointedness. Intentional consciousness that can rest on one thing at a time and isn't distracted. When it's distracted, you don't feel nourished. So you're in the world, we're eating the world all the time. You eat the food of the world and you eat the world through this meeting of the three and you eat the world through one-pointedness or are nourished by the world through one-pointedness. And the fourth is knowing through an objectless field of awareness.

[27:19]

As I talked, I think in Sashin, didn't I say, when you sense your body disappears, did I talk about that? Sashin? When your body disappears, what disappears? I guess I didn't. When you're sitting zazen and you feel like your body disappears, what disappears? I mean, your body? I mean, I'm sitting in the room with you and I look at you, and you may feel your body's disappeared. You don't know where your hands are, your shoulders, your stomach, your legs. But when I look at you, I see you, obviously. Your body has not disappeared. What's disappeared is the object-carrying continuum. In other words, it's the continuum of mind which holds objects within it. When that continuum disappears, it no longer will retain an object. So there's sayings in Zen like, among, within the manifold appearances, within the manifold things and myriad appearances, there is not a single thing.

[28:32]

I look at everything but there is not a single thing because my looking is not a seeing or looking but rather a being present with a mind continuum that does not register objects. This is the deep stillness of the one who is not busy. There is among myriad appearances and manifold things There is not a single thing. This isn't just some kind of poetry or philosophy. It's a very precise description of actual experience. Because the mind, object-bearing mind continuum has disappeared. You're no longer identifying with it. You're identifying now with a non-object bearing continuum, so the body as an object can't be held.

[29:35]

So awareness, the fourth food, is this non-object bearing continuum. Now, you know, sometimes in Buddhism, it's often in Western Buddhism, knowing is translated as knowledge. And the Buddha is said to be omniscient. But really, the Buddha is said to be all-knowing. Now, I use the word Buddha in the sense that The consciousness of the Buddha and the consciousness of you are one continuum. And I don't know if we talked about this here, but the way you practice with that is the sense that your consciousness, in whatever clarity it has, is always cruder or grosser than the Buddha's. But feeling that, it's not like you feel, oh jeez, I'm

[30:55]

You know, often in common psychology they say, you shouldn't think you're gross, you should think you're fine. But in this sense, it's not about thinking you're not fine, it's putting yourself in a spectrum, a continuum, with a more refined consciousness. And when you think, this consciousness I have may be clear, but the Buddhist consciousness is clearer, you're putting yourself in a spectrum where this deeper clarity or greater clarity can come in. You can feel that. So your own clarity is always developing in relationship to the possibility of it being clearer. So when we speak about the Buddha being all-knowing, We mean to be, let's take the example of the meeting of the three.

[31:59]

There's my speaking, there's your listening or being present here, and there's a field of awareness that arises as a result of that. That's different than being, this knowing is being different than being conscious. I'm conscious that there are eight people in this room and with me nine. I'm conscious of that, but that's not knowing. Knowing would mean that I am aware of the field of consciousness that arises among the nine of us And my sense of that knowing is the way things are. So my knowing, the nine of us being in this room, is an accurate knowing of the way things are.

[33:06]

So I feel a sensation of knowing, always touching the world. So the Buddha is one who's in a continuous knowing, not knowledge, as some kind of separate units or something you've learned, but a continuous experience of knowing things the way they are, and the world looks back at you and tells you, yes, this is the way things are. The more you have this experience of knowing and not of knowledge, the more you create the conditions and stabilize as a separate or subtle body, the simultaneous one who is not busy.

[34:20]

The simultaneous stillness is not just part of your body. It has its own body, just like your busy body has its own body. And it has its own past, present, and future. It's only its own history as a Buddha. its own history as part of this lineage. So the challenge of our starting Johanneshof is not for us to go there, but for us to go there as the one who is not busy, as the one who is as much as possible or holds in view this continuity of knowing. In this way we can bring the lineage of Sukhiroshi and Dongshan to this new practice place.

[35:30]

I don't want to make it sound impossible, but I do want us to recognize that it's difficult and we need to really be open to this challenge and wonderment of being able to practice with each other, with this lineage mind of the one who is not busy. And to hold this as much as possible in view, I think this is the greatest gift we could give to each other. Okay, thank you very much. May our intention equally penetrate every...

[36:27]

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