Observing the mouse and observing yourself observe the mouse. I'm in a way trying to demystify the observer here. Also, ich versuche auf eine Art, den Beobachter zu entmystifizieren. Also, wir haben so eine große Idee von dem Zeugen, dem Beobachter. And yeah, it makes a big difference between us and cats. But in fact, it's very little different from observing the mouse. What we seem to be able to do is to have multiple simultaneous observers.

[01:07]

Or multiple kinds of attention. For some reason, we're of an order of complexity that we can do this, which the cat can't do. Okay, so we observe the mouse, or we observe the cat, or we observe ourself, but we can also observe ourself observing ourself. And we can observe that observation. What kind of person are we? And that observing of the observing is amplified by memory. So if I just look at you in front of me, I'm just observing you.

[02:38]

And I can have memory involved in that or not. Well, excuse me, there has to be memory involved in that. I wouldn't know you had a sweater on or were a woman or anything. Yeah, I would think maybe you were from Venus. Somebody made a fortune who lives in Marin County writing that book. Men are from Mars and women are from Venus. Yeah. Somebody I know knows him and he's got a huge house and a yacht and everything. He has a couple of sequels to that. Yeah. Anyway... But it's, I don't, okay, so if I observe you, there's memory involved.

[03:45]

The minimum necessary. Okay, but if I notice my observing you, then lots of associative thinking comes in. How long you've been practicing Zen and so forth. But it's still an observation. Now, yesterday or this morning when I spoke a bit after service, I said this is I started to say anyway this is memory space not the space of physics it's memory space and attention space we don't know anything here unless memory is playing as part of it

[04:45]

And what we bring attention to shapes the space. So a good architect, for instance, tries to control or influence what you bring attention to when you are in a building. So this is a little riff on attention. It's just a kind of introduction to this practice of observing attention. Okay, so say that I'm eating. Okay. Yeah, and I'm chewing my food attentively. Traditionally in Zen we chew each bite 20 to 30 times. So sometimes I count.

[06:13]

But mostly it's an old habit, so I get to 22 or 23 and swallow. And I'm noticing the different textures of the food. Und ich stelle fest die verschiedene Konsistenz des Essens. And my tongue, I try to keep my tongue out of the way. Und ich versuche meine Zunge aus dem Weg zu halten. I mean, it's a very dangerous place. Es ist ein sehr gefährlicher Platz für die Zunge. And sometimes we do bite our tongue, you know. Und manchmal beißen wir ja auch auf sie. I should say the tongue is quite afraid, you know. But something's paying attention to the tongue.

[07:20]

The tongue is doing quite well staying out of the way. Places a piece of food, gets out of the way, and comes home. and then the server walks in and I say oh look at those feet and so then my attention goes to the feet and then it might go to who belongs to those feet Or how should the serving be organized? Then I'm resting and I've finished eating and my tongue is at the roof of my mouth, which is the resting point for the tongue in yogic practice. because it inhibits the flow of saliva, when the mind is in its more emotional realms, feeling realms, and it also connects certain channels.

[08:33]

Energy channels. So my mind may come back to my tongue. Now serving an entirely different function. Now it's part of the chakras. And maybe my tongue now feels like a yellow column. Where did that come from? I bring something brought my attention to my tongue. Something turned that attention into an image of a yellow column. Did I think of that? Where did it come from?

[10:03]

What created that object of attention? Because I know when the server came in, they brought their feet in, which gave me an object of attention. I know when I'm chewing, the fluid is an object of attention. We could call that situational attention or something like that. And then sometimes my attention would shift to the person who's serving. And then more associative thinking, karma, and so forth come in, psychological thinking. And maybe my attention disappears.

[11:04]

It's so caught up now in thinking that I don't have any experience of attention, I'm only thinking. But if I'm chewing, I have the experience of chewing and paying attention to the chewing. If I want to. But you can also pay attention to your thinking. If I hear a mosquito buzzing, then my attention can be completely, where is that buzzing going? Oh, he's stopped, he's landed. He thinks this is an airport. Oh, I feel him now. Now I'm smart enough to know from experience that by the time I feel him, he's gone.

[12:15]

So there's no point in slapping an absent mosquito. Okay. Now that kind of attention is very different than the attention that disappears when you think. I'm very aware of the attention to the mosquito. I'm not so aware of my attention to my thinking when I'm in the midst of thinking. And even while I'm thinking, my mouth is still chewing perhaps. And I'm chewing with... Attention, at least I'm chewing carefully.

[13:43]

I'm still doing my 20 to 30 chews. What's paying attention to the counting? So here's this sort of hunt for attention. Attention is the secret of our life, you know. Where you put your attention is the life you create. So it makes sense to study your attention, observe your attention. Where your attention alights Where it rests.

[14:43]

Where it gets carried away. Where it seems to function without attention. You will begin to see the relationship between awareness and consciousness and knowing and And the witness or the observer. And attention and awareness and consciousness and witnessing flow back and forth, change roles. Which one is you? This is part of the effort where they say, hunt for the self and see if you can find it.

[15:53]

But it's more interesting, I think, to hunt for, effective maybe, to hunt for attention. Where your attention alights or rests, and when it turns into an observer, and when that observer is amplified by memory and associated thinking, And it's interesting that when you bring attention and it just rests on something, That's when it can suddenly shift to a wide attention.

[16:55]

And then this wide attention begins to know things you didn't know you knew. And this wide attention begins to be an interiority or interior space. So the shift from a shallow attention to a wide attention is very important to get to know. Okay, here I'm trying to teach the craft of practice. The geistwerk. And the The craft of just being alive.

[18:17]

The craft of studying yourself. Of how we exist. If you want to do it, the tools, the provisions are here. Forget about Buddhism. Just observe your attention. Thank you very much. I don't know what to say.

[19:36]

I don't know what to say. [...] Die damals sind grenzenlos. Ich gelobe sie zu beherrschen. Der Weg des Bruders ist unüberträglich. Ich gelobe sie zu erreichen. Satsang with Mooji Satsang with Mooji

[20:38]

Kwa rei ma ken man chi, chuk chi suru koto e tari, me kawa kuwa nyo lai. Nō shin jutsu giyō geshi tate ma tsuran. I know a God of God, durchdringender und vollkommener Dharma, findet sich auch in hunderttausend Millionen Kaibas nur selten. Nur da ich ihn sehen und anhören, erinnern und annehmen kann, I hope to continue to learn the truth. Good afternoon.

[21:55]

Maybe we should do a session in which everyone gets to translate one lecture. Yeah, so it's possible. In this session I'd only have to give three lectures a day. It'd be quite interesting. In October in India. Are you coming? Oh, good. You can give the first lecture. I mean the first translation. Russell Smith, who was... director of Crestone for several years, came to Johanneshof for a month this summer. And he liked the translation so much.

[22:59]

He doesn't understand German, but he loved the translation. He thought in America we should pretend there was somebody who didn't understand and we translate away. The other translation could be in Czech or something like that. Yeah. Sometimes our life is like a folded up piece of paper that we write on thinking it's one surface. And if you practice zazen and mindfulness, this piece of paper opens up.

[24:17]

And you see it wasn't one surface at all. Some of what you wrote is folded over there, and some is over here, etc. Mm-hmm. So we can understand practice perhaps as opening up this piece of paper and finding the real surface of our life. Things as they actually is. That's what Sukhiyoshi should say. Things as they is. And I would correct his English and say, no, no, Sukhiyoshi, things as they are. And he'd say, no, no, things as they is. Oh, okay. The is-ness of things or what-ness of things.

[25:35]

I think a sense of the way is when you feel this piece of paper opening. You feel... that something in your life is becoming unstuck. You don't maybe know quite what, but somehow it feels like you can't function in your sincerity. Sincerity. Maybe, like Maya, you could speak a little more loudly. I mean... I try, yes. Okay, please. Um...

[26:38]

I think many of our problems are that we can't act on our sincerity. I give up. I think we want to be sincere. And we feel ashamed of ourselves when we're not. Yeah, but we make so many excuses that are disguised as rationality. Vanity or attachment. I see we're all taking, you know, doing our own lecture. Everybody's giving everyone a chance to translate today. Vanity, attachment, fear. First.

[27:45]

The sense that we all have... Das Gefühl, dass wir alle unsere eigene Buddha-Natur haben, ist eine einfache und eine komplexe Idee. Ich denke in Kassel das nächste Wochenende nach dem Sashin, sollte ich vielleicht über Buddha-Natur sprechen. Because Mahayana Buddhism and especially Zen is grounded in the idea of Buddha nature. historical development of this idea and the development of its practice is quite surprising. It doesn't come from where you think it would. It's something very practical that you already know.

[29:03]

But you need to see how to put together. So maybe it's worthwhile to develop this for our practice. But right now I'm speaking about trying to be true to a feeling of path. A feeling of confidence. Of honesty to your own sincerity. And to be, excuse me for sounding a little schmalzy, but to be sincere takes some confidence.

[30:14]

And selflessness. No. I don't know exactly what the echo says now, but in the early days the echo, that's the response of the doan or the doshi to the sutra. Doshi is the person who feeds the surface. Whoever's leading the service is called the doshi. Sometimes the doshi is the roshi and sometimes the doshi is you. The chanting, the Heart Sutra, for example, is dedicated... to the realization of the six powers.

[31:19]

And the six powers, as Sukhiroshi described them, are the power of seeing and hearing. That would be the first and second. It means to see and hear the teaching that we just chanted, but also to see and hear everything chanting this sutra. The sense of it is that everything, even right now, I'm really saying, chanting the Heart Sutra. Yeah. So it means, the seeing and hearing means with all your senses to hear the chanting. And this third power is to understand what you hear.

[32:33]

Understand, or maybe we could say to have a feeling of knowing. I mean, sometimes you may be in a situation and you know It's deeper or more emotional than just understanding. And then the fourth power is to understand what's really meant. So you have a feeling of knowing what the Heart Sutra says. But you then also understand its source, where it's coming from. To understand it as if you could write it yourself. This also means to understand other people this way. Or to understand your situation. You can be louder but slower. Louder doesn't mean faster. Am I speaking fast?

[33:55]

No. Oh, okay. I mean, maybe I am, see, I don't know. No, no, no, it's just me. This is again this, we can understand this as this teaching of one mind. Or the unity of mind. Or the one objectness. And Zen is, Zen Zen practice and teachings developed separately and in relationship to each other.

[34:59]

I mean, the practice is pretty clear. But as it develops and... becomes mature, exactly what teaching informs it makes a big difference. So there was much over several centuries, there was much trying to develop a way of expressing the teaching that incorporated all the main teachings of Buddhism into something that can be practiced. Because Zen always says this only makes sense if you can practice it. So this idea of one mind.

[36:13]

But you have to be careful not to understand this as some kind of God or oneness. Or some generality like there's one mind out there. Hey, I'm grooving on the one mind. This is not the idea. But we have a tendency in Westerners to think that way because of our religious tradition. In Buddhism, everything is discrete moments. Reality is not a generality. Perhaps it's an actuality. Each moment a chance to act.

[37:17]

This is why it's called a Dharma teaching. So on each moment you have a chance to realize the unity of mind. And on each moment that you realize the unity of mind you develop a path. And it begins to be like a kind of wind behind your back. And this unity of mind begins to push you and help you enter each situation with decisiveness. So each object gives you a chance to discover the unity of mind.

[38:32]

An object is whatever it is before you. As we spoke, this room or a picture or the entire wiring and electricity diagram of this building. Or right now, all of you are an object. In other words, I'm not perceiving just you or just you. I can't do that. I mean, I can separate it out. But even if I separate it out, it includes the activity of separating it out. Like if you look at a forest, And you concentrate on one tree.

[39:35]

The feeling of the whole forest is still there. So even if you look at one tree, the... Objectness is the forest. Expressed now in the tree. So if I'm giving a lecture here, I have to feel the... Excuse me for calling you an object. But I came up here to, you know, Roseburg a few days ago on the car train from Lorac. How do you pronounce it? Lorac. Lorac. And while I slept in a little room, this four-wheel drive was bouncing on top of the train.

[40:49]

Full of the cushions and the altar and the bell, stuff like that. I'm a traveling Sashin preacher. Call me up, I arrive on the car train. You don't go too many places though, so I come here. And then you were put in front of me. So you became an object of mind. And the Sashin has been a practice of discovering the unity of mind which includes your mind. This is the path and this is my practice.

[41:50]

And this is what we're doing in the Sesshin. Some of you are resisting it. And some of you are secretly participating. And most of you are participating whether you want to or not. You think you're taking a break on your pillow, but you're not. So the six powers are like this. We look and we see, we hear, And then we have some feeling of knowing the situation.

[42:55]

And then we widen that to know it from all sides. What really is making each of you suffer. Or what is really making each of you and me sit here in this sashin. Trying to find my own sincerity. which we can also express by finding our own relaxation. If you can be relaxed on your cushion, you have accomplished a lot. And you must admit among the various possibilities,

[43:56]

Being relaxed is better than most Why don't you choose it? Because you don't have this freedom So we want the freedom to choose relaxation. In the same logic, it's much better to be happy than not. But most of you don't realize happiness is a choice. You can be in the middle of a horrible mess. Think, ah, this is a horrible mess. But I'd rather be happy than sad. I'd rather be happy than anxious and nervous. So I'll change this mess. anxiety into energy.

[45:08]

And relax. And let the path unopen itself. Yeah. trust that each dharmic moment some opportunity will come. And if you've developed a habit of on each dharmic moment to bring your energy, to understand causation, And to enter into the causal process. Not being lazy. But if there's an opportunity, you do something. If you develop this habit, then you know... Whatever comes, I'll do my best. But right now, I'll relax.

[46:11]

There's nothing to do. Maybe I can die right now, comfortably. It's a good practice, actually. I've suggested it occasionally to first people. When you go to bed at night, say, oh, maybe I never wake up okay. Maybe I die during the night. No problem. I think I'll relax. This is good. Then when you wake up in the morning, you think, whoa. I mean, I tell you, Zen is quite simple. It's like this, you know. Just to be able to be relaxed on your cushion.

[47:12]

And to be sincere with yourself. Not indulge yourself. Indulge, indulge, indulge. No one indulges himself here. To give in to the easy way to do something. I'll have four cookies, no, six. This is indulging yourself. Sorry, I turn there. So again, working with attitudes. And one of the things I learned late and is that people's, each person's primary reality is an emotional reality.

[48:19]

It's like we're always in love or not in love. And this is our truth. And if you don't understand that people are, first of all, The reality is emotional and not rational or even practical. You misunderstand people. In the end people are not particularly idealistic. But if we know this about ourselves, we can start to work with our own emotional nature to deepen it into compassion and deepen it into really caring about things in their true sense. It also means to see the Buddha as an exemplary human being.

[49:33]

Not as a god in a religion, but just an exemplary human being. Exemplary in his or her joy and compassion. And the path is also to feel these qualities of joy and compassion that are in us, actually in us. But we don't always know how to act on them. And when you've developed, when each of us has developed a real feel for practice, I'm afraid it makes us sick, a little bit sick if we don't follow that feeling. Because often that feeling is our truest sense of sincerity or accuracy. And when we're not being accurate in our life,

[50:43]

We suffer. But the piece of paper of our life is so folded up we can't read what's written on it. So just maybe the sense of openness is good. To work with your attitudes. With your feelings and your emotional feelings. Like when you're out, when you're walking meditation in the afternoon. I'm always a little jealous of you guys. I'm sitting in my little room and you're walking along. I think, what lucky people. And when you walk like that, you can feel space just opening up.

[52:01]

Not space like a container, but space that you're producing and the past is producing. It's a different feeling when you're walking in Kinhin on the same path. When you walk by yourself, the space opens up in a different way than when you walk with others. This is also, you know, surfaces of being in love. surfaces of space or our activity of being in love. So you can just try to develop a feeling of openness. This is also generosity.

[53:04]

Openness is to give everything away. And really to implant small emotional attitudes in yourself is good. The first of the six paramitas, the bodhisattva practice, is generosity. And this is not just to give gifts. But the attitude with which you give gifts. And the attitude is your main gift. Like when you look at a tree. I hope this doesn't sound too funny.

[54:05]

But you give each leaf back to itself. Now we're in this unity of mind, this one mind. The tree is an object of mind. The leaf is an object of mind. And you can bring a surface of the mind to the leaf as the leaf is giving you a surface of mind. And you can have a feeling, ah, I give each leaf back to itself. Not to be possessive of its beauty, but just to give it away. It makes space for the next moment. And to give the whole tree away. Yeah. Hmm. And to give each leaf to everything all at once.

[55:17]

Now this simple attitude which I just told you to give each thing away All at once. Or to give each thing away to the totality of everything. Or better, to give... each thing away to an all-at-onceness. There's a timelessness in all-at-onceness. Simultaneity. Everything all at once. And this is also this Wayan teaching of the mutual interpenetration of phenomena. And one of the gates of this interpenetration of phenomena to realize it in yourself is

[56:23]

Generosity. Openness. Is the attitude of giving each thing away to all at once. Yeah. It's surprising how refreshing it can be. So with your friend, you give your friend back to herself. Or himself. And you give your friend to all at once. Your friend becomes resplendent. Resplendent. The first test. Resplendent means shining and brilliant and splendid. And the body of Buddha is also often called the resplendent body of enjoyment.

[57:40]

of enjoyment. And if you give your friend to all at onceness, you may feel a taste of this resplendent body of enjoyment. And taste a little bit what we mean by Buddha nature. Or everything as it is. Is-ness. Mm-hmm. When you give everything away.

[58:44]

On each moment. And yourself too. This is entering the practice of selflessness. Not now I'm free of my ego. This is probably not true. But on each moment you feel give myself away. And self comes back and you say, oh, thanks for coming back. Now I can give you away again. So you feel very lucky. Self keeps coming back. It gives me a chance to practice generosity. Form keeps coming back, so we give it to emptiness. So form is very necessary for us to find emptiness. So your very sufferings are necessary to realize freedom from suffering.

[59:57]

Yeah, in this open space. In which you feel relaxed. At ease. At ease at this moment. Comfortable with yourself. Sincere with yourself. Sincere with your own sincerity. So again, going back to these six powers, we see and hear things. Smell, taste, touch, etc. And then we understand, we know, we have a feeling of knowing.

[60:58]

And we extend that knowing to the source of this situation. And then the fifth power is to know your mind and the mind of others. And this is not so difficult to do. I mean, it sounds difficult if you try to know the mind of another person. This is very difficult. slippery and delusive. But if you understand these six powers and understand this unity of mind, the unity of mind contains our mind and others' mind. Mm-hmm. And the sixth power in this Buddhist list is to know things as they is.

[62:27]

to know Buddha-nature, everything that appears just now, understood through the unity of mind, in the wide absorption of mind. This is Buddha nature. And this is feeling ourselves on this path. As I said the other day, each leaf has its own wind. There's not one wind blowing through the trees, there's a thousand winds. So when we say one wind Because we know there's a thousand winds, one wind means Buddha nature. So we know the one wind or one mind of Buddha nature. And in our sincerity or our heart, we enter into this one mind, one wind, one path.

[63:35]

And we let this stream carry us. And we stop making excuses why we can't follow this practice. That we know as our own deepest nature. If you don't know it as your own deepest nature, Don't follow it. But if you know it as your own deepest nature, you have to follow it. It's the only kind thing to do to yourself and for others. If it's your own deepest nature, how can... Why would you deny it? So let's open this piece of paper.

[64:53]

Folded up piece of paper. And see how our life is written on one surface, one mind. And let ourselves answer this. And let it take us as it should, moment by moment, into our realization and into what Dogen calls self-joyous mind. So it's not a bad thing The result is not bad. The result is quite good for you and for others. So I think you can trust this path as you can trust your own nature your own true nature. Thank you very much.

[66:15]

Thank you for translating. uccho muhen se gandho manho mujhin se gandan O manmuryo seigangaku Butsudo mojo seiganjo Die fühlenden Wesen sind halloos, ich gelobe sie zu retten. Die Begierden sind unauslöschlich, ich gelobe ihnen ein Ende zu bereiten.

[67:21]

Die Dhamma sind grenzenlos, ich gelobe sie zu beherrschen. Der Weg des Buddha ist unübertrefflich, ich gelobe ihn zu erreichen. Ujjoh jenjenhiyo wa yakusenwa nyonyo hayo koto katashi Vah-eh-mah-ken-ah-jee-jee-jee Soh-ruh-vuh-koh-toh-eh-ta-ree ga-wa-ku-wa-no-rai-no-shin-ji-tsu-yo-ke-shi-ta-te-ma-tsu-ran

[68:41]

The truth of the Tathāgata can only be found in the Tathāgata. So we have another precious day together. Oh, sorry, precious. Yeah, what did he say? Right. Exhausted. That's what I was going to say next.

[69:46]

So turn it around, please. We have this intimate communication. Why don't you just go ahead and give the lecture? Since you know what I'm going to say next. This is the sixth day. We have one more day, is that right? Yeah, I might get confused. I know to some of you, each day hasn't been so precious. Mm-hmm. Yeah, but that's only to one part of you it hasn't been precious. I think somewhere down in your body, up in your body, you feel the preciousness of these days.

[70:53]

And for me too, you know, I've done quite a few sashins, as you can imagine. I can't keep up with Eric Hino, but you know, I'm trying. And I started way before him too. But whenever I do a sashin, it's, you know, I'm not just saying this, it's almost like I haven't done one before. I mean, in another sense, my body knows how to do Sashins. But still, I feel somehow uncovered and and born in each sesshin.

[72:31]

It's funny because I know things I have to do after sesshin and so forth. But that's only one part of my nature. Another part is just here. As if I'm always going to be here. You know, I look in my closet next door. Why does that make you laugh? Yeah. And you know, I have various coats and jackets and pants and things like that. Like one coat I got in a store in Hamburg that Frank Basendahl recommended five or ten years ago.

[73:39]

But I also have my robes in the closet. They're both a kind of dream. In other words, I remember, I mean, I see in my mind when I got the coat in Hamburg, and I see in my mind when I got these robes, or initially received them from Sisyphus. So I feel I have two closets. One is a modern closet and one is an ancient closet. Because these robes go back so many centuries.

[74:48]

And I feel honored to be able to wear them. And I feel also that my wearing them should honor them. So I sit here and practice with you and talk with you once a day. And I sit here and practice with you as if I'm going to be practicing with... Practicing with you every day the rest of our lives. This is my feeling. But I don't express it much because I don't want to put any pressure on you. And anyway, Johanneshof isn't big enough for all of us.

[75:58]

Well, we could buy the farm next door, so... Yeah, but I have to confess that I don't know any other way to practice. If I'm going to honor this robe, I must practice with you as if we're going to do it every day. Because these robes go back many days into the past. So it's also unusual for me, you know, to speak about the robe. I don't know quite why I'm doing it. Maybe just because just recently I did the transmission with Paul Rosenblum. His Dharma transmission is Buddhist name is Tenryu.

[77:13]

Tenryu. T-E-N-R-Y-U. Tenryu. It means heavenly dragon. We try to give ourselves colorful names. Yeah. That's the name Suzuki Roshi gave him. Because he practiced with Suzuki Roshi in the 60s. A Tassajara. And I think some of you have met him, but most of you have not. And he was going to be a Buddhist scholar and was studying Sanskrit at the university. And after meeting Suzuki Roshi, we even asked him, oh, you understand these sutras, please teach me something.

[78:19]

But anyway, after meeting Sekiroshi, he decided just to sit, and he stopped being a scholar. So we two have also been practicing together for many years. So anyway, this is the most important thing for me is this Dharma practice with people. And in particular with those of you who will continue the lineage. Because my only duty in life is to have at least one disciple. Everything else is interesting, but not essential. So I'm speaking this afternoon also from reading Ru Jing's teachings, Dogen's teacher.

[80:00]

Yeah, and he was Dogen's teacher. So this is... Dogen's report on the teachings. And Kaz Tanahashi, again, some of you know. has done this new book called Enlightenment Unfolds. He's a very intelligent man, Kaz. His title is a kind of political statement. Because it's not sudden enlightenment or gradual enlightenment. It's enlightenment unfolds. So he introduced this more subtle way of looking at enlightenment by calling, naming his book this.

[81:12]

So it's interesting to read these, for me to read this report of Ru Jing's teachings. Because I only know them from listening to Suzuki Roshi give lectures. And again, I guess I'm presenting a kind of problem of how to practice together Yeah, when I met Suzuki Roshi I rearranged my life and marriage and job and everything. And I'm not saying this to recommend you, if you were even interested, to do the same.

[82:26]

I'm just telling you what I did. As not necessarily the best thing to do, but, you know, it's quite a basic thing to do. So I rearranged my life so I could attend all of his lectures. And when you attend somebody's lectures over many years, all of them, Piece by piece, a picture begins to emerge of the teaching. So when I read this written down stories, yeah, I remember, oh yeah, that... He told us about that part one time and this part two years later and so forth.

[83:34]

So it begins to weave piece by piece a kind of fabric of teaching together. A fabric you can almost put on. A fabric you can almost put on. So you see, I'm talking again about the robe. In the morning we chant, now I open Buddha's mind. But actually what you're chanting in Japanese is, now I open Buddha's robe. But I changed it to mind in English and German because most of you don't have robes. And since the robe is described as a field far beyond form and emptiness, this is also mine.

[84:35]

Now I open Buddha's robe, field far beyond form and emptiness. The Tathagata's teaching for all being. So I'm trying to kind of like speak about this robe. You know, Guishan was one of the, I think, great Zen masters and someone Sukershi admired.

[85:38]

And he and his disciple Yangshan formed one of the five schools of Zen in China. No, he didn't exactly form it, but their disciples, continuing that lineage, became a school. So Guishan was taking a nap one day. Shukriya, she told this story quite often. And this story is also repeated by Dogen in this book, Enlightenment Unfolds. So Guishan is taking a nap. Yangshan came in and was rather worried to wake him up. Mm-hmm. And Guishan then turned his face to the wall.

[86:56]

And Gangshan said, Oh, don't, excuse me, you don't have to be so formal. I'm your disciple. So Dogen says, all of this is quite interesting. He's taking a nap. This is quite interesting. Dogen calls this one of the miracles, one of the great miracles. Yeah, taking a nap. Life is simple. Like that. So then he turns and faces the wall, another miracle. If you think about it, it is a miracle. We could face the wall or turn our head or whatever. So Yangshan said, oh, excuse me, don't be so formal.

[88:01]

I'm your disciple. And Guishan said, oh, I just had a dream. Can I tell you? And Yangshan leans over like that. And then Guishan says, please interpret it for me. So, Yangshan immediately goes and gets a bowl and a towel for him to wash. For what? For washing. And... Yeah, when I was young, I don't know if you had this in Europe when your age, when I was young at my grandmother's house, my grandmother would bring me a bowl up to the room with a pitcher and towels and stuff like that, because there were not so many bathrooms around in those days.

[89:14]

I don't know what you do with such a big bowl nowadays. Serve soup in it or something. But they have a sort of big, the ones we had had big lips, I mean big edge. It would be funny to serve soup in it. I suppose they're useless now. Maybe as a monk's hat. Yeah. Yeah, so he brought him a bowl like that with a towel. And just then, his other disciple, another disciple came in. Jichan.

[90:16]

Jichan. Yeah. Kyogen in Japanese. Kyogen in Japanese. Yeah, and he said... Oh, said Guishan, Yangshan and I have just been intimately communicating. This is an important matter. And Jichang said, yes, I heard it from the next room. Ha, ha, ha. So Guishan said, will you interpret my dream then? So Qichang went and got a cup of tea and brought it to him. So this story is, you know, we can then say it's about how we help each other.

[91:34]

Just to have the energy to be ready to help. Someone reminded me today that, or yesterday, that the... Dalai Lama says his religion is friendliness. I see someone from previous times, I guess, put his holiness picture up there. It's cute. Cut out, yeah. Also jemand hat da seine Heiligkeit als Foto angeklebt. I actually just wrote him a letter and mailed it today and faxed it the other night. And I should have told him his picture is on the door of the Haus der Stille, Zendo.

[92:35]

I forgot to mention it. And as I've told you often, Ivan Illich and I, he's Catholic, agree that Religion is a search for ultimate friendship. Yeah, so we could say that Buddhism is the practice of friendliness and the search for friendship. As we are friends here doing Sashin. We'd have to be some kind of friends or we wouldn't go through all this suffering.

[93:41]

Compassion means to suffer together. So come to a saschin and suffer together. Why is it funny?

[94:08]

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