I often joke about this point and say, is this the third day, fourth day, what day is it? And more, I mean, I sort of know it's the sixth day. I mean, I do know it's, I think it is the sixth day. But it's actually also true that the farther I get into the Sashin, the less I know what day it is. And the more whatever's happening could just continue. And I hope it does continue in each of us. So we're like one of those mountain streams that divides into two parts and partway down the mountain and rejoins.

[01:02]

Okay. You know, and also I know exactly, I could say something like I know exactly what I'm doing. Because what I'm speaking about is rooted in my experience, develops from my experience. At the same time, of course, as you can see that I'm going to say, I don't really know what I'm doing. And at the same time, you can also see that whatever I say also has something like, I don't know exactly what I'm actually doing. Because my expression is so clumsy. I try this, I try that. I don't really know what's happening when you're listening to it. You don't really know what's happening when I'm speaking.

[02:04]

This Buddha, this wonderful Buddha we have is, as I said the other day, 500 years old. And Stonehouse was teaching about the time that Buddha was made. And only 300 or so years before that Buddha was made, Dogen was teaching. Now, is what I'm teaching and what we're practicing Is it intact as that Buddha after 500 years? Is it as intact as that Buddha? I hope so. I hope even more so. Because Buddhism, especially Zen, is an evolutionary teaching. Revolutionary and evolutionary. And this Buddha evolves with us, I guess, but the teaching really is in its intactness if it's evolving with us.

[03:30]

We don't evolve in the world, we evolve with the world, and the teaching does too. But of course, each of us has our own struggle with the teaching. And I certainly have had my struggle with the teaching. But if you're really willing to struggle with the teaching and say, what are the shoes of our ancestors? When you really try on the shoes of our Buddha ancestors, then the struggle has some, you know, it's... Almost always fruitful.

[04:37]

Confucius says, it says something like, wisdom is to find the opportunity in adverse circumstances. So if something adverse happens, you don't think, oh, something adverse is that. We think, hmm, what is the opportunity here? This is the most fruitful and balanced attitude. Okay. No, I talked a lot about chi and chi whiz and so forth yesterday. There's an English expression, American expression, when you're...

[05:44]

What is that like? You say, gee whiz. Oh, gee whiz, yeah. Gee whiz, is that the way it is? So I said, gee whiz, and I don't know, it just slipped out, sorry. Sorry, I missed it. Okay. Sorry about all that. We just had a little private conversation here. I don't know about any kind of point. I don't know how to... Okay, so, you know, I had a lot of problems, resistance anyway, to Zen as horror. Zen as hara. And where do I end up practicing but in the home of the hara? Because it's Graf von Durkheim who interested... introduced really the concept of hara as practice to the West. We could call this the house of hara. That's also a bad joke because in music parks they have the house of horrors.

[06:49]

I have to stop myself. Yeah. I mean, I, of course, read the first half at least carefully, the second half not so carefully of Durkheim's book back in the 60s, I guess, whenever it was. And I understood it, and I thought, yeah, this is right. But at the same time, I didn't want Zen to be that... I didn't want that emphasis to be a strong part of Zen practice. Now I can speak about it in a much more acceptable to me way. I also had problems with the word natural. And that was very clear to me. From the very beginning that there's nothing that's natural.

[08:23]

But how to cope with that? Because Zen feels best when it's natural. And part of the attraction of Zen in the West is its naturalness, carrying water and firewood and stuff like that. Yeah. And you know, my main model as a child was Tarzan. I mean Tarzan. Tarzan, he swings in the trees. Well, I wanted to swing through the trees and heck with civilization. And I used to really do a lot of climbing of trees and buildings and stuff like that.

[09:24]

And when I found I could practice Zen, take my shoes off and go barefoot, I thought this was my religion. It was very important to me that it was a barefoot religion. But when, as some of us do, and sometimes it can be a quite important experience, when breathing breathes itself, and then you really feel it's something natural. But usually to get there, you have to first have developed the observing of the breath, which interferes with the breath.

[10:39]

And the breathing feels not natural when you're observing it. It gets... your mind and attention interfere with your breathing. But when you develop an attention which doesn't interfere, and you can notice then what you couldn't notice before, notice that breathing breathes itself, This feels like what we really mean by natural. But that's quite different from saying, oh, we all just breathe naturally. When in fact we don't.

[11:40]

What we call our, we all breathe naturally, is a breathing hooked to our emotions and our consciousness. When breathing really feels most natural is when it's joined to awareness and not consciousness. So this corresponds to what Sukershi would always say, it's through training that we find what really feels, or through practice that we find what really feels natural. But this is all a preamble. A foreword, yeah. to speaking about this sense of how we're in a situation.

[12:45]

And I'm speaking here in the tradition of our Madhyamaka Yogacara Tantric Zen practice. And it sounds really unnatural, I'm sorry. And so when I'm thinking about how to present something, talk about something, I'm always working around and against this feeling of natural and it's going to sound too artificial. You know, James Joyce and others have pioneered something like that, the idea of the stream of consciousness.

[13:52]

I'm not sure, but I think the concept basically parallels in the West the introduction of the idea of the unconscious. And often when you first hear it, you say, yeah, yeah, that's right, that's a kind of stream of consciousness. But actually, the way things actually exist is not as a stream but as a pulse. things are constantly, uniquely appearing. Stonehouse, my new buddy Stonehouse, he said the first, when he was starting practice period,

[15:07]

He said to the participants, the first rule in this practice period is for these three months Never put your feet on permanent ground. This is good. That's good advice. You get out of bed, is the floor really there? And then snap it. Like that. That's good advice. Somebody might have moved the floor during the night. Now, But it's much more natural for us to notice the stream of consciousness. And it feels kind of artificial to say it's a pulse, maybe let's say a pulse of awareness.

[16:15]

But let's not use the word artificial. Perhaps we should use the word artificial. Artifice. An artifice isn't artificial, it's an art. You notice it. In my teaching I'm always really talking about the art or handcraft of practice. Things aren't really a stream of consciousness.

[17:15]

The way things actually exist is much closer to the word a pulse. And Dharma practice is to make use of this pause of the pulse. And very much about Dharma practice is involved with waiting, patience, the pause. Or the craft of knowing how to let things gather. So, you know, our ordinary breathing, in and out breathing, In this speaking about teachings around through the concept of qi or qi, our usual breathing is called outer qi.

[18:27]

And the kind of energy of our chakras and so forth, it would be called inner chi. And I spoke before about outer awareness or outer attention and interior attention. Now these are, if you're practicing in this way, I'm trying to talk about these are territories you need to explore. Because in fact, if you look at anything, immediately there's all kinds of memory associations, etc. You couldn't recognize anything. And there's the object, of course.

[19:33]

Okay. Now maybe I can say, use the word still point. It's used in T.S. Eliot's poems and so forth, but it's a good word, still point. The way he uses it is not quite what I mean, but so forth. But if I would like to say the still point, in Japanese they say the ma point. Ma point. I'm not going to describe the whole thing about what ma is.

[20:37]

But just say I think you can get familiar with a feeling of in each situation there's a still point. Now let's speak about the mind, but before I go to that, let me speak about the mind of impermanence. A mind which always assumes impermanence. If you can realize this mind, you're much more likely to see the world as it is. In its natural, true nature. But to realize the mind of impermanence takes some practice. Because mostly what we mean by mind is consciousness. And as I've been belaboring in recent months, the job of consciousness is to establish a predictable world.

[21:56]

A predictable, chronological world. knowable world. And meaningful world. Okay. That all means permanence. That all means predictability. Knowability. So the world known through consciousness is basically permanent, implicitly permanent. And it's that defining of the world through consciousness, that authenticates and cultivates the world as permanent.

[23:07]

And it's part of what Dogen means by cultivating and authenticating the myriad things by conveying the self to them. Because it's the self Consciousness is the medium for self. And it's self which makes the world meaningful through consciousness. So we are always in effect authenticating the world as permanent. If that's your basic habit of mind, you really can't practice the Dharma. I'm sorry to tell you.

[24:08]

You can go through the forms, you can have a good time, you'll feel better. You can do well, go well. You can go through the forms. You can have a good time and you can feel better. After a while, actually. Not so bad. But to really practice the Dharma, you need a mind of impermanence. Stonehouse gave that as the first rule of the practice period. What is the mind of impermanence? It's a mind that always assumes at each moment impermanence. Assumes unpredictability. Let's say expects impermanence. All right. So each of us, moment after moment, is in a situation.

[25:18]

And how do we locate ourselves in the situation? One is what's in Japan called Akata or Katachi form. Akata is a form. The martial arts talks about it a lot. In Buddhism, or Japanese Zen, there is, again, nothing natural. Every posture is a yoga posture. Every position is a posture. If it's just a position, it doesn't have power. It's a posture. posture without power. When does a position start being a posture? No, you can just slide, you can come home, you're real tired, and you slouch down in a chair.

[26:30]

And if you're an American, you grab a beer and turn on a football game. At least that's what everyone in Europe thinks Americans are like. Those are only the people who vote for Bush. How is each... Whatever... Whatever situation you're in, to be aware that you're actually in a posture... And a posture in relationship to the mind. Oh, no, no. In relationship, if you're practicing, to the mind of impermanence. And in relationship to the situation you're in.

[27:52]

The ma-point of the situation you're in, where you can take hold of the situation. Where you feel the point at which you can take hold of a situation, where the opportunity in a situation is. Where time in the situation is maturing, ripening. When I was in the merchant marine working on ships, you know, you have to, various times, for various reasons, you have to let steel cables run through your hands.

[29:03]

You know, it's a big ship and sometimes it's tied up with ropes and sometimes with cables. And this ship is loaded with these cables. I can't remember exactly, but these holes inside the ship, you have to let the steel cables winch out. And they're going very fast through your hands. And I found it was better to do it without gloves than with gloves. Because there's these little hooks that stick out in cables.

[30:05]

You know, there's always little fish hooks like that stick out here and there. And if I had gloves on, I couldn't anticipate them. And they would rip my gloves right off. And if I had gloves on, I couldn't anticipate them. But I found somehow, you know, I could keep the cable bouncing and going through this thing, and my hands knew when those things were coming. It's like there's a little antenna here somehow, and when it'd come, I just would open my hands, and I almost never got cut, and you can really get cut out like that. And it's almost as if my hands were small antennas. I've practically never been cut, and you can cut yourself quite badly. And I wasn't born with it, it wasn't natural, but it's a talent that I learned by doing it. But I could put my hands on the situation after a while with extreme sensitivity.

[31:21]

Well, what I'm trying to say is there's some way in which we learn to put our mind in a situation with similar sensitivity. And part of practice is to put us in situations where we develop that sensitivity. Yeah. Now, You know, I know a lot of people, Westerners, who cook Japanese food. And I know a lot of Westerners who cook Japanese food. And that is often very good. And it tastes practically never like Japanese food. And all over Asia there are Japanese restaurants that are run by Koreans. of this miso soup I say Koreans.

[32:37]

Now, Korean food and Korean restaurants I like a lot, and Japanese food cooked by Koreans is okay too, but it doesn't really taste Japanese. Well, because they follow the recipe exactly. I presume. And I know Westerners do. But as I often say, they don't know what they're cooking toward. They don't really know what it should be like. So somehow it goes off in sometimes in a very nice direction, but... Well, these teachings are like that.

[33:39]

You can read about them, but unless you know what you're cooking toward, you can't really get what it's about. You don't know what you're So what I'm trying to do is see if during the Sashin I can give you a feel for what you're cooking toward in your practice. And I think that's a really good place to stop. Before your legs cook you. For some reason, it's much harder to sit during a lecture than it is during a period of zazen. Or it used to seem like that to me. And I've heard it from others, too. So, anyway, it's a good time to stop.

[34:44]

Thank you.

[34:45]

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