I just looked at the news this morning and it's not clear yet what scope this catastrophe in Japan will have. Those of you who have an outside life may have followed this, but those of you in practice period may not know, we're talking about 10,000 missing or dead people in Japan. And also, it's not clear how the situation in the nuclear power plant will develop. According to German newspapers, Chances are that there might be a major fallout. I don't know how you would say that in English, but that there may be a core meltdown, which would be disastrous.

[01:04]

According to German newspapers anyway, which seem to be much more pessimistic than American newspapers, I found out, according to German newspapers, This may have the scope of the Chernobyl disaster or worse. So yeah, that's a serious and very sad event that will, without a doubt, it will change the world. It will change the world as we know it. You know, when I hear about this in particular, about catastrophes, all these things that happen, I do ask myself, what do we do about the world?

[02:08]

What's our relationship to catastrophes like this? We have to find some relationship to it, even if we just choose to not look at it, because it may be too sad to look at. even then that's a relationship to an event like that. And we will definitely, I don't know about up here, but most of humanity will have to deal with the effects of such a thing. So what's our relationship to a disaster like that? What do we do about the world? That's, I think, was the theme of the last teshu that Bekaroshi gave before he... I think it was the last teshu, before he got sick and then left.

[03:10]

And in his teshu, he pointed out the koan responded to this question of what do we do about the world? Responded with, well, what do you call the world? And... I think that this kind of sensitivity to how to act, first of all understanding what we are acting towards, is from my feeling much in the spirit of our practice. We have to we have to first of all look at what we're dealing with. And I think, you know, our idea of compassion certainly is not a standard action. You know, something, oh, this is compassion, so we can just do this particular act over and over again.

[04:16]

We just always give another person a lot of cookies, and that's compassion. It doesn't work. Some people may not like cookies. There's a story I... I was reminded of a Western European, I don't know what they were, some kind of Red Cross organization. Not the Red Cross itself, I think some autonomous help organization. And, you know, they wanted to help while Yugoslavia at the time was in crisis. And I think it was before the war then. you know, they had this good intention, oh, we want to help, we want to help over there. And what they did is they sent thousands and thousands of mattresses into a particular area in Yugoslavia at the time. Now, it turned out that that particular area where they sent the mattresses, the main pillar of their economy happened to be a mattress production site

[05:23]

So what they ended up doing is they destroyed the entire economy of that area, and the unemployment rates increased dramatically, and they seriously harmed the area. You know, the mattresses were there. Of course, people would want the mattresses for free rather than buying the local mattresses, and many people got unemployed. Thanks a lot. So yeah, an act of compassion is certainly not a standard thing to do. Just because we're well-intended may not always mean that our actions are appropriate and sensitive to the context that we are acting within. You know, and I don't know. I don't know about what do we do. What do we do about such a terrible disaster over there? Some of us, when we go home, maybe we will end up donating a lot of money or helping in other ways to support the situation there.

[06:35]

And that's a personal relationship that we may then choose to take according to the resources that we have. But then also from the point of view of our practice, we have to ask ourselves, what's the relationship of Zen Buddhist practice and teaching to suffering? Linji said, Linji the founder of the Rinzai school who lived in the 9th century, I think. Long time ago anyway. He said already, there is no stability in the world. It's like a house on fire. It is not a place where you can stay for long. He says the murderous, right, how does he put it?

[07:37]

the murderous demon of impermanence hits instantaneously and it makes no difference between upper and lower classes and between the old and the young. Yeah, so that statement, you know, it tells us here already without power plants exploding and I don't know about tsunamis, but without this global effect that disasters nowadays can have to our technology too, without all of that, he already had this clear insight into how things exist, saying that this is not a very stable place. It's like a house on fire. Jeez, we live in a house that's on fire. And when he says that the murderous demon of impermanence makes no difference between, you know, let's say the young and the old, then too that means that there is chaos.

[08:52]

There is no such thing as Death or impermanence should hit this person, so it will. There is just... It can seem arbitrary, and it is arbitrary. Just a tsunami hit, ten thousands of people disappeared. No difference between whether they... Whether it's time for them to die or not. It just is as it is. So, yeah, we... And in our practice, we just have to accept that. That's essentially what we do. We look at how things actually exist, and then we accept that. And Linji goes on saying something like, I don't know if I get the exact wording right, but he says something like, if you want to be anything like the Buddhas and Buddha ancestors, do not seek outside.

[09:58]

But yeah, let's stay there. Let's first of all say impermanence is something we have to accept. Okay, and then what do we do? Well, quite modestly, I have to say, what we do is we chant. We chant the sutras. And then we say we offer the merit of this chanting to all sentient beings. Okay, is there merit in your chanting? Do you feel that? Do you feel, do you feel, yeah, there's merit in my chanting and I am offering that to all sentient beings? And what does that mean to offer something to all sentient beings? Who are they? Where are they? How are you going to offer something if you don't exactly know who they are and where they are?

[11:08]

Quite difficult. So does that have any meaning or is that just, I don't know, does that exist in English, a farce? Yeah? Something you just say so that it feels nicer? I don't know. And then, you know, these syllables, what are we offering? Are we offering a bunch of Japanese syllables that we do not understand and also Japanese people do not understand? Is that going to help with difficult events? I don't know. Probably not, unless, you know, I mean, in my view, if we don't have a magical worldview, then chanting... the syllables itself will not help, will not improve, will not improve how people suffer. But then what do we do? What do we do?

[12:10]

Well, chanting is our practice, and chanting is a manifestation of our practice and of our spirit. What is our spirit there? when we say we offer this, then it's a generous spirit, it's a giving spirit, it's a selfless activity. It seems to not be directed at anything except itself, right? I mean, what is it directed towards? Okay, we chant the English sutra and that we can since it has semantical meaning, we can do something with it in our minds, but the dahi shindirani, it's not directed at anything outside itself. So what is it? It's plain activity. And if we investigate in this way, if we...

[13:15]

if we come here to the service and then we chant, and we cultivate a spirit of wholehearted, plain activity, then maybe that is a way of doing something about the world. I don't know. But I do know that if I look at my life and look at how I was helped, Then I must say, I was helped, I think, mostly by people with spirit. I think what really helped me, and that may be different individually, this is just what I can say from my own experience, what helped me most oftentimes was not so much a gift, you know, like I have oftentimes, particularly also from my parents or other generous people, I've been given things I needed, or money or something.

[14:20]

And that has certainly helped a situation. But how have I been helped in my freeing myself from suffering? How am I helped? Mostly by being inspired by people, by direct contact with people. And so maybe cultivating, hopefully, cultivating the spirit of wholehearted and plain activity, selfless activity that we are willing to just give and offer. Maybe that is something we can do for the world. Yeah, and then You know, with these teachings I'm grappling with some, when we say these things, offer it to all sentient beings and to me that already implies some sense of, you know, big word here, interpenetration or connectedness or something.

[15:45]

What does that mean? It has to become true in our experience, otherwise it's nothing. If it's not true in our experience, it's just not true anywhere. I have to say that I'm quite impressed with what we are doing in this practice period, we too had to deal with a lot of difficulties, sickness, death. I'm impressed because so far what we have been doing is we have just kept our single-minded way and we have just made the situation work somehow. Every situation, you know. I mean, today, not even Christian is here. Somehow we're just making it work. And I always like how when somebody else gets sick, which happens often, when I come to Eddie and say, Eddie, this and this person is sick, and Eddie just says, uh-huh.

[17:10]

And then he disappears into the office, and five minutes later he comes out with a new work list. And we made it work again. Yeah. And I don't hear much complaint. It's kind of great. I, although, you know, there's certainly reason to complain where sometimes what the tea cook, the cheating and the Jikido and help with breakfast. So we're not, we're not so many people, but we do make it work. And we somehow in this practice period, I find have a impressive spirit of, um, not complaining. And I think Christian has spoken about a world without complaint. And I think one thing that follows from such a world and such a practice is to constructively engage with each situation. And that is not nothing.

[18:13]

That is quite an attitude to be willing to just whatever the situation is, you constructively engage with it. That kind of attitude is rising mind. That kind of attitude is an enactment of acceptance. You know, acceptance is then just It's already there. If you say, okay, this is the situation, I'm just going to work with it, it's already accepting it and then with a rising mind feeling, seeing what's the best that we can do with it. And ultimately, that's just in general how we have to live our lives. There's no choice. If you want to be anything like the Buddhas or Buddha ancestors, do not seek outside. I forget who that is.

[19:33]

I think Dasu. And I wouldn't know how to pronounce that name either. D-A-Z-H-U. Daju. Yeah. Thanks. Daju says something like, again, I'm not sure that I remember the exact words, something like, the entire treasure house is already within you. You know, it's all ready-made for you. It's all available. And again, he too says, there's no need to seek outside. If it's all already there, and you know, actually that was, to kind of pick that up, that was the real thing, the real point that I was trying to... communicate with this last talk I gave that it's all available.

[20:35]

You know, everything we need to make practice work is three things, is intention and practice and patience. And that there is no secret, that there is no missing link. If we have these three things, our practice will mature. Okay, yeah, and then I also did say that patience is not patience and that intention is not intention, but that we actually need to clarify and purify these things. But still, they are accessible. It's not like all you need to make your practice work is great enlightenment. Yeah, okay. No, it's intention and practice and patience. And I find that quite useful to rely upon because when we have such teachings, teachings that maybe go beyond the horizon of what we are familiar with, the horizon of our experience, you know, let's use interpenetration as it is implied in

[21:50]

in offering the merit of our chanting to all sentient beings, then there may be the feeling of, yeah, but I can't do that, I don't understand it, I don't experience it, so something is missing. And it may be true that we are not aware of it or we are not experiencing it. But in order to mature an experience like that, nothing is missing. It's all available to us. Yes, in the service, one way of describing to myself what my intention is in the service is I say, I just fully express myself.

[22:57]

I just fully express myself. And I offer this activity to all sentient beings. I just fully express myself. What self? We're back to the question, what self? The narrative self? Not quite, no. At least, yeah, no. But then what self? Maybe Dogen's self, you know, the self. Spoke about this yesterday too in the seminar. The self which is actualized and cultivated by the myriad things coming forward. That's a transformed self, right? That's not. We have the narrative self, and then we have this, this, what is also oftentimes in Buddhist par, par something, language.

[24:01]

What, parlance? Parlance, referred to as a self, the self that covers everything. It's a transformed self. It's, we also say, I think it's a statement by Dogen, which Koyo Roshi, Dan Welsh, has practiced with a lot, and also quite eloquently knows how to speak about the, it's like his little hallmark. The entire universe of the ten, the entire universe and the ten directions is the true human body. The true human body is the entire universe in the ten directions. Do you experience yourself that way? Is that yourself, the entire universe in the ten directions? One thing I do in approaching such a statement is I look at its opposite too.

[25:10]

I look, okay, if I can't say fully yes to that, if I can't really say I am, I am just assuming that I am the true human body. I have to start somewhere. So I am the entire universe in the ten directions. If I can't say fully yes to that, it's not in the scope of my experience, then I see if I can say no. What if I say the entire universe in the ten directions is not the true human body? You can try that out. How do you feel about that when you say that? The entire universe is not my body. I don't know what happens for you, but what happens for me is that an ever so subtle and kind of silent, but very tender little voice in me says, that is just not true. You know, there's something like when you feel that way, you have lost your path.

[26:12]

There's something tender, a little tender spot on me that I can notice that does not agree to separation. Maybe I cannot always fully experience connectedness, but there's a tender little spot on me that does not fully agree to separation. So transforming the self. This other sense of the self is... which is a sense of self which is inclusive like the entire universe. Nothing is outside of it. Nothing is outside of it. It's all inclusive. And this other sense of the self I think it's oftentimes also described and can be experienced just as a location. There's a poem by Pessoa, and I also think that this is an accessible way of how to approach such an experience.

[27:26]

The poem goes, When I think and feel, no, wait, actually, there's another line. Many lives inhabit me. When I think and feel, I do not know who thinks and feels. I am just the place where thinking and feeling happen. Now that's the sense of the location. I am just the place where thinking and feeling happen. And maybe you can try to focus on such a shift, saying, I am just the place where seeing colors and hearing sounds happens. And that has consequences.

[28:34]

I want to give you an example where I noticed that the other day I, I don't know, I think before some lecture I had to leave the Zendo quickly to probably get the recording machine or something like that. I just had to leave it quickly and was then going to come back. And I put my slippers next to the stairs. And now this was a time when all of you guys also wanted to enter the Zendo. And for a moment I was thinking about, oh, do I have to put my slippers away, my shoes away, or can I just leave them here and everybody else will have to deal with my shoes being there. And my first impulse was, oh, it's not important. I can't just leave them there. and I can get the recording machine. I was not in a hurry. I still had a bunch of time to get that thing, so there was no reason to not put them away. I found that moment pretty interesting. I was wondering, well, now why would I not put them away?

[29:39]

And I realized that something in me thought it's just not important. It's less important to put them away. It's not meaningful. And that assumption, I found, is a way of limiting myself big time. When I then put them away, and while putting them away, was quite adamant about the fact that the entirety of my aliveness is present in this very activity. And that this very activity of putting my shoes into the shoe shelf is no less important than any other activity I have ever been engaged in. When I did that, I felt much happier. So it's like that. We shouldn't, I think, make such distinctions of, oh, this is valuable and this is meaningful. This is insignificant. When I think that way, I know I am identified through self-referentiality.

[30:42]

Is the entirety of my aliveness present in whatever I do? Is putting on my robes, which I do fairly often during practice period, put them on and put them on, is that any less important than anything else? If it is, I think I am limiting myself. Okay, so this limiting myself is the last thing I want to speak about. I have come to see this within what I call three horizons. And what I see there is that there is something like a way of being a self that is limited by my emotional and mental habits, by just my worldviews and everything I have become due to.

[32:09]

Karma. Just say it generally. There's this feeling of being limited in some way, which is also creating suffering. So there is the limitation of my habits. And then there is something I call the horizon of my longing, which is beyond the limitations of my habits. The horizon of my longing I can also say my inmost request, the horizon of my longing includes maybe a kind of freedom, a kind of spontaneity, a wider sense of being that I not yet am, but that I long for. So this is the horizon of my longing, which can be present within the limitations of my habits.

[33:15]

And then there's, I think, even beyond the horizon of my longing, my longing still being a horizon that I can intuit. I can still anticipate I have a feeling for the kind of freedom I'm longing for. Beyond that, there is the potential of a sharp and pure unrestricted awareness. There's a potential that I cannot think my way to and that I cannot even intuit really in its full sense. So there are these three and these three are in dialogue. There's the potential of our mind, our unrestricted mind. There's the potential of unrestricted mind. There is the horizon of our longing which moves in the direction of unrestricted mind.

[34:21]

And there is the limitation of our habits. These three are in dialogue all the time. practices to investigate that dialogue and to let it happen, I think, mostly. Limitations of our habits, one of our habits is to exclude impermanence, to push it to the side, to ignore it, to not want it, to try to not give it a place in the world. But it does have a place in the world, we can see. Okay, so impermanence we have to accept. Now, how do we practice with it, though, except for we don't want to just resign, you know, we don't just want to have a sense of resignation and we have to accept that.

[35:33]

No. Practice this offer is always more full-blooded than resignation. So, So transforming the self is also to drop the idea of a lifespan. And when we drop the idea of a lifespan and when we When we free objects and ourselves, everything we see and hear, when we free these things from their name and from their imposed duration, then we also free ourselves. We drop the idea of a lifespan. Then time is not that which flows incessantly, like Linji says, the murderous demon of impermanence, that flows relentlessly, maybe, in just one direction, but time becomes the manifestation of being.

[36:50]

And impermanence turns and becomes unique appearance. That's its other face. And permanence, when turned, becomes unique appearance. The difference is that unique appearance we can engage. And permanence we have to accept. Unique appearance we can engage wholeheartedly and for the benefit of all sentient beings. Thank you very much.

[37:36]

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