That we continue after all these years to still chant in Sino-Japanese, yeah, something unusual maybe. And every now and then I think about just chanting in German or English. But by chanting in Japanese, and even though you don't know what it means exactly, except we chant it then in German... It takes knowledge that this is a teaching that doesn't belong only in our own culture and only in our own time. But of course, chanting in Deutsch, we are also indicating that it now has a home in our Western culture.

[01:19]

But when we recite in German, we also refer to the fact that this teaching now also has a home in our culture. I also apologize for not having a hot drink statement last night and during this session. And I apologize for not having hot drink poems for this session yesterday evening. But unless I use amplification, which I won't do, you can't hear anything I'd say in that room. But if I don't use an amplifier or a microphone, and I certainly won't, then you can't hear me in this room. Now, we did have sashins in Haus der Stille years ago, more than 50 people.

[02:33]

But we were all in one room. There were some problems with being that many people in that room. So this is a better problem. Anyway, But also the hot drink is something I just added to our tradition, our custom. It's not something Suzuki Roshi did. I got the sense of the hot drink from, you know, I practiced for two and a half years in a Rinzai monastery, Daitoku-ji in Kyoto. And they do a kind of hot drink in the evening zazen, at the end of evening zazen. But having a little statement to say, I don't know where that came from, but I started doing it.

[03:39]

So while for us it's become a tradition, it's for me just a custom. Yes, so we'll start again another point. And it was always rather a challenge for me. What the heck should I say? And just a few words that felt the sashin where it was at and what somehow what the lectures have been about. Und das ist auch immer eine Herausforderung für mich. Also was soll ich denn da sagen in ein paar Sätzen mit dem Gefühl darin, dass das etwas zum Ausdruck bringt, wo der Sashin gerade steht und auch was damit zu tun hat, worum es in den Vorträgen geht.

[04:56]

And we can't even talk during Zazen because of the space, but still, okay. Maybe I can sneak a hot drink statement into the teisho when no one's looking. Okay. No, I'm trying to locate ourselves physically, locate our experience as our body and not as our consciousness.

[06:15]

Now, it's such a fundamental... No. It's such an artificial, not fundamental, but unobserved distinction in our culture. And this is a kind of artificial, not fundamental, but an artificial distinction that often remains unexamined in our culture. And it is so obvious that we take it completely for granted. We say mind and body. Now, we actually don't have to say that, but we do say that. Now, again, I'm approaching this in various ways for some months now.

[07:19]

And I'm still trying to approach it. So if we say our physical body, In contrast to our mind, we also say the physical world. So we identify the physical body with the stuff of the so-called physical world. That's very clear in English. Is it clear in German, too? I find it clear. Okay. I don't know anybody else. Well, I mean, if you find it clear, other people must, too. I know you're unusual, but not that unusual.

[08:21]

Um... Okay, so as I said yesterday, if we can identify ourselves as a... Again, some people don't like the word physiological, but as a physiological activity and not a body in contrast to a mind. Jane Goodall was a quite nice woman who I'd met once or twice. She said her first teacher was her dog. Because her dog taught her what all the, as she says, the Dons of Oxford and Cambridge didn't know. Dons of the teachers of Oxford. That dogs are somehow dog forms of human beings.

[09:36]

And in my lifetime, scholarship for academics, said that animals don't use tools, they don't feel emotions, you know, etc. And this hadn't been educated into her. She was just kind of a volunteer to... to observe chimpanzees as a young woman. And she observed them feeling grief, using tools and all kinds of things. Yeah. So somehow we have to free ourselves from this

[10:36]

distinction between mind and body and stuff. You know, when you eat a carrot, you're just, when you eat a carrot, you're rearranging the carrot so it becomes part of you. So I'm suggesting that you, during the sashin, when you're walking outside... Do we do outside walking kin-hin during the five-day sashin? Yeah, etc. You... Feel yourself as a physiological event. And activity in the midst of all kinds of activity.

[11:56]

And if you emphasize the activity, you are establishing connectedness, which isn't established when it's mind and body. Und wenn du die Aktivität betonst, dann stellst du damit auch eine Verbundenheit her, die nicht hergestellt werden kann, wenn du Geist und Körper betonst. Now, Sashin is a practice of transitions. Sashin ist eine Praxis von Übergängen. From Zazen to Kinhin. From Zazen to Kinhin. From this building to Yohansal. Aus diesem Gebäude zum Yohaneshof. From sleeping to sleepy Zazen. From dreaming to a new kind of dreaming at night and then also in sasen. And then sometimes to seeing something ordinary like the mist and the...

[13:17]

these hay fields of the farms. And having a feeling, what am I doing? Or having a feeling of some feeling, whatever you're seeing and experiencing in sort of a new way. So sashin is also messing with your rhythms. Yeah, and you have your usual rhythms, and now in Sashin you have different rhythms.

[14:34]

And you have to submit yourself to these new rhythms. Morning service, noon service, evening service, etc. I doubt if many of you adept lay practitioners do a morning service at home or even a noon service for lunch. Just a minute, you say to your family, we have to light some candles here before we eat. You might do that symbolically. But really, this is something we, in sashin, submit ourselves to.

[15:40]

And if you are a mother or father, you have to submit yourself to what it means to be a parent for a child. Some people are able to have children, but not able to submit themselves to what being a mother or father or parent means. And this ability to submit yourself, to undergo, is the... basis or seed or soil for realizing stillness.

[16:51]

Realizing stillness. And I would say that maybe we could make a case for the most important thing you learn from Practicing Zen is stillness. I mean, movement is given to us through being alive. It's charming to see an infant learning to move and trying to learn to walk and trying not to fall down. So we're given movement by being alive.

[17:54]

I think of Oedipus, the riddle of the Sphinx. Oedipus? Oedipus, whatever you call it in German. It means swollen foot, actually, in Greek, I believe. What has four legs in the morning? You all know this. What has four legs in the morning? Two at noon and three at night. She doesn't know the riddle of the Sphinx.

[18:56]

Where's your classical education? Anyway, so Oedipus answers correctly. Means a person, of course. I'm in the latter stage. Pretty soon I'll have a cane. Of course, the meaning of this riddle is that Oedipus chooses to be alive by answering the question correctly, the riddle correctly. But he doesn't know what his fate is, but he does choose to be alive. So movement is given to us. Four legs, two legs, one, three legs. And that means, his answering, he accepts these stages of life as what it is to be alive.

[20:13]

Seine Antwort bedeutet, dass er diese Phasen des Lebens akzeptiert, als das, was es bedeutet, am Leben zu sein. But Dharma teaching, Buddhism is, stillness also can be your choice. Aber Dharma Praxis bedeutet, dass auch die Stille deine Wahl sein kann. And stillness is... If I say it's as important as movement, that doesn't make any sense. But it gives the whole of life a new dimension. A fuller dimension. For the adept Dharma practitioner, Stillness is as natural as movement.

[21:33]

If you're in a doctor's office, you have to wait. Or in a stow. Or in a long grocery queue. There's no problem. Just stillness takes over and it's okay. But it's not just physical stillness like listening for a mouse or a martyr at night or a waking child. It's a stillness which has no mental comparisons. There's no past, no future. What you had to do is, yeah, you still have to do it, but it's not present.

[22:36]

When you realize this stillness, and it really just appears as easily as movement, and allows the mind and body to I made the distinction, but I have no choice to re-sort itself. Now this whole bodily mind stillness, which becomes as natural as movement, is the really the, again, now, these stages of Zen. As I say, we don't point out the stages of Zen usually because it's up to you to make them your own.

[23:41]

But of course there are stages. How could there not be? And it's up to each of you to recognize those stages and make use of them dharmically. And if you're practicing in a Sangha context, it's also useful to share them with whoever your teacher is. And one of them is this realized birthright almost, stillness. Eventually it's just there all the time, even in activity. And this stillness then in turn becomes the soil and seed of non-duality.

[24:48]

What's translated into English, at least, is non-duality. The non-duality of immediacy. Again, I don't know what immediacy means in German, but in English it means no in-betweenness, in no media, no middle. Now, the huge challenge of our practice is to realize engaged immediacy. Realized immediacy, so you're kind of sealed into immediacy without distraction, you know, flying away from now and here.

[26:05]

verwirklichte Unmittelbarkeit, sodass du nicht in Abschweifungen davonfliegst, sondern unabgelenkt aus dem Hier und Jetzt. We have this English expression, the here and now. Wir haben auch im Deutschen diesen Ausdruck, das Hier und Jetzt. That for most of us is never here and never now. But practice and developed practice depends on being locked into inseparably to immediacy. This isn't just, you know, it's a nice idea. This is the basis for actually being alive. And it's not just that it's a nice idea or something, but that's actually the basis of being alive.

[27:23]

Maybe actually being alive. You're all alive. Authentically, most... most consequentially being alive? So the aliveness of the whole everything all at once flows through you and is you. It's just the way it is. And it opens you to this inner knowing I spoke about. And without developing this almost birthright of stillness, This stillness which is required for being sealed with immediacy.

[28:25]

It's only with stillness you can get under immediacy and come up into it. Nur durch die Stille kannst du unter die Unmittelbarkeit tauchen und mitten von ihr wieder auftauchen. That's where the action is. That's where it's all happening, man. Und in der Unmittelbarkeit, da ist die Party. Da findet wirklich alles statt. So I'll come back to that. Da komme ich nochmal drauf zu. How can I not help but come back to that? The non-duality of no in-betweenness. It doesn't mean other things are excluded. It's just that other things are other. bedeutet nicht, dass andere Dinge ausgeschlossen sind, und es bedeutet nur, dass andere Dinge eben was anderes sind.

[29:45]

And immediacy means, we could say, non-otherness. Und unmittelbarkeit, könnten wir sagen, bedeutet auch nicht-andersheit. Now, as I say, I'll come back to that. Because this Imaginal space and actualized space of locating, finding your experience located in immediacy. Der Imaginationsraum und auch der tatsächliche Raum, wenn du deine Erfahrung in der Unmittelbarkeit verortet empfindest. requires a lot of coming back to, coming forward to. It might require a lifetime, but it doesn't necessarily because it is realizable. Now there's three objective, I'm changing the subject seemingly, there's three objective dimensions.

[31:02]

Ich wechsele jetzt scheinbar das Thema. Es gibt drei objektive dimensions, you said. Yeah, height, width and depth. Drei objektive Dimensionen, die Höhe, die Breite und die Tiefe. But those are just objective dimensions when you focusing on the world as objects. The realized, adept practitioner realizes three experiential dimensions. which enclose and support and so forth the three objective dimensions and these three subjective or experiential dimensions are spatiality pace

[32:09]

And uncertainty. So we have an object has depth. But the spatiality of depth doesn't stop with the object. The spatiality is which all objects arise in. And when you experience this speciality as an inseparable dimension of your experience, It's also finally a realization, experience of emptiness. The spatiality becomes kind of a source space in which everything appears and arises.

[33:35]

And then there's this pace. In the spatiality, there's stillness. Otherwise, without stillness, there's no spatiality. That's kind of a stopped world. And in this pace, it reappears and reappears, reiterates. And there we feel the connectedness, the interdependence. We don't have to be taught it, we experience it, interdependence. So the spatiality and then pace and then uncertainty.

[34:44]

And we don't know what will happen. Unpredictable in the Profoundly unpredictable. This is to be alive. At least that's what I would say. And I think our tradition says. Yeah, thank you very much.

[35:26]

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