Well, I'm very glad you're here. And I don't take it lightly that you're here. I know that for most of you it's a pretty big decision to come to a Sesshin. And even those of you who have made the decision on the spur of the moment, still, it's a pretty big decision to come here. And let me try to tell you a little bit of what I'm trying to do. Of course during this week I would like to help you establish your practice. Establish yourself in the practice.

[01:03]

And I should say establish non-self in the practice. And I want to give you some feeling for more than just your practice, some feeling for practice in general. And if I can, I want to give you some familiarity with koans. And that's fairly difficult to do, actually. Because Koan, maybe it's like trying to present in a short time what a hundred-year marriage is like.

[02:27]

It takes a little time. And I think it's rather difficult to do in this kind of context. So I have to take koans that would work in the kind of time we have. But also, what I'm trying to do is practice with you. And understand this practice with you. In other words, one of the things that interests me about practicing with you here in Europe

[03:30]

is I'm discovering practice with you. In the United States, where I'm practicing with fewer people and people I practice with regularly, It's a different kind of discovery, the kind of discovery you can have when a few people are together. And I like being translated. In fact, I was just in Holland, and the Dutch are a little bit proud about They know English quite well. They don't want to be translated to. And their English is pretty good. But I missed being translated.

[04:46]

Because I learned quite a bit in the feeling of trying to say it so she can understand it so the concepts are clear enough that she can translate the words and so that you can get a feeling for the concept and the words. Also, ich werde gern übersetzt, weil ich dann so ein bisschen ausprobieren kann, was ich sage und das Konzept dahinter und wenn ich das dann erkläre und sie versteht das und sagt es dann nochmal, dann könnt ihr vielleicht eher so ein Gefühl entwickeln. And Günther is here in the purple shirt. He's translated for me a number of times too and might help as he already has sometimes during the session.

[05:49]

And quite a number of you have come to my seminars here in Europe, a number of them. And some of you have practiced with me for short or long periods of time in Colorado or Santa Fe. So I'm going to try to give you also some teachings that I've been developing how to talk about certain things here in Europe. And I'll try to develop them in the context of the Sashin. Now, this is being taped so professionally. The main reason is because David knows how to do it.

[07:10]

Since he knows how to do it, we might as well do it properly. And also I'm told that some people find the tapes useful. To follow after the, if you come to the session, to hear them again afterwards so you can follow the lectures in another way. And every now and then I meet someone who I've never met before, who's been listening to tapes, I don't know where they get them, tapes of my lectures in cars while I drive around Europe. So I guess it must be useful to somebody. So partly for that reason we're taping. I've actually never listened to a tape of mine.

[08:30]

So maybe a minute or two only. And I couldn't stand it. So I thought, I've heard that before. So really, from that point of view, it's something you're telling me. It's not something I feel that they're useful. But for me, I'm taping them because I often actually say things or work on something that I'm discovering with you. And it's often dependent on being here with you. So it's helpful to me to later be able to have somebody give me a transcription and I can see, oh, did I say that?

[09:49]

I'm telling you this just as a way of emphasizing that for me, practicing with you and doing this first sashin in Europe is a process of discovery for me. So am I speaking loudly enough for you in the back? Okay, so during the Sashin, we will continue to have the schedule where we have had today. and the schedule that's posted. But I will also try to keep a feeling for how the schedule is working for you. And it's possible I might modify it at some point during the session.

[11:01]

Now, I want to talk about today and during this session. probably in some ways during the whole Sesshin. The practice of Sesshin itself as in some ways it's a kind of instance of Buddhist culture. Now you may... After two meals and a number of bells and so forth, you may have decided, I'm just teaching you Japanese culture.

[12:06]

That I had a Japanese teacher, so I don't know any better than to tell you what he told me. And that's not true. Please don't think it's true. But I really would like to give you a feeling for this practice of sashin and practice of objects. Now, just practically speaking, making food for these three eating bowls is a little bit difficult. In fact, all in all, I think it's nearly impossible for Westerners to do.

[13:17]

Because even when I've been practicing with people who've been cooking for this type of meals for 15 or 20 years, The chopsticks don't always work with the soup or with the vegetables. Today it was pretty good. And you could eat most of the meal with your chopsticks. But still, some pieces were quite hard to pick up. And I'm in no way criticizing the kitchen.

[14:19]

Because it's something that if I go to Japan, immediately there's no problem. If I go to a monastery in the West where they've been cooking for years, always there's some problem. So it's something that... You really have to get a feeling of from childhood, I think, actually. Such a simple thing as how to cut vegetables so that in your spatial imagination they fit in chopsticks. So, so etwas Einfaches, wie zum Beispiel, wie man Gemüse zurecht schneidet, das ist also in dem Raumverständnis, das man von Essstäbchen hat, dass es da irgendwie reinpasst. So while that's difficult, while it would seem simple, some of the things which look difficult are actually simple if I can give you an understanding of it.

[15:42]

Now, considering that Most of us knew of this. I thought the serving went pretty well and the food was good. But it will take a while until we get it just right and get the taste right and so forth. And for us, the taste should be, should fit in with the sashin, but also should fit in with the kind of diet you're used to. Because it's like my lecture or anything else.

[16:53]

It can't be too strange or then you feel estranged. So I think that we have to develop the diet a little bit here so it tastes a little bit like sauerkraut maybe sometimes. Ja, vielleicht müssen wir den Küchenfahrplan hier so verändern, dass er irgendwann dann so ein bisschen die Sauerkraut schmutz. I know in Creston, since there's quite a few German students, the diet keeps going toward these flavors that are quite unfamiliar to me. Also ich kenne das schon von Creston, da praktizieren nämlich etliche Deutsche und da geht die Geschmacksrichtung immer so in eine Richtung, mit der ich nicht sehr vertraut bin. So I keep saying sometimes, we can't have these flavors all the time, because if Americans come, they'll think it's quite strange. So we have the problem of German flavors, American flavors, and Japanese flavors. So somehow we'll come to a resolution here.

[17:54]

Okay. There's a koan. A monk comes to see a teacher. And the teacher says, where have you come from or something? He said, well, I just had my lunch. The teacher says, have you washed your bowls? Or go wash your bowls. Another one, a similar one. Where have you come from? From down the mountain. Have you eaten?

[19:17]

This is a kind of normal conversation. Somebody comes here to the center and you say, where have you come from? I came from down the mountain ways. Have you had anything to eat yet? Yes, I have. Did the person who brought you food to eat have eyes or not? So there's two koans. And one last famous one. Every time Gute was asked a question about Buddhism, He raised one finger. No matter what happened, he raised one finger. What is Buddha?

[20:19]

Have you eaten yet? Et cetera. Et cetera. Okay, so I'll leave those three koans with you, and maybe I will talk about them during the session. Now, I've been giving you the example several times, for some of you several times, because you've been to quite a few seminars recently, of concentrating on this. And I'll make it brief so I don't bore the ones who've heard me say this often, but I have to say it fully enough so those of you who haven't heard it can pay attention.

[21:27]

Because it's very simple, but it's worth grasping clearly. Because I think that if we're as Westerners practicing, we have to have a conceptual grasp of the territory of the teaching. How are you doing? Okay. At least you only have to translate once a day now. Okay. So you concentrate on this? Until you have no other thoughts in your mind except this.

[22:30]

And so you're concentrated on a single object. Okay, take it away. You're able to maintain the concentration now on a field of concentration which doesn't require an object of concentration. So here you have an object of concentration. Here you have a field of concentration. And you bring it back in, and now you have a field of concentration not disturbed by the object of concentration. You can maintain the field of concentration with the object in it or taking the object away. So now, at first you knew the object of concentration through concentration. And now you know the object through the field of concentration rather than through concentration.

[24:04]

This can also be called investigating calm abiding mind with calm abiding mind. Or investigating the object from which calm abiding mind arose with calm abiding mind. Okay. Got that? Can you keep it clear? Okay, now, this is not limited, this way of thinking and acting is not limited to meditation practice.

[25:06]

It's also involved in the eating bowls. Or it's also, sometimes some teachings are called the meeting of perspectives at objects. In other words, do you know the painter Giotto, G-I-O-T-T-O? Well, art historians usually say that he's the first painter, at least in a developed way, to use vanishing perspective. And you understand what vanishing perspective is? You put a point in the back of the painting or on the surface of the painting, which when you draw lines to it, it looks like it's in the back of the painting.

[26:11]

I visited somebody's house, a huge house in England. A friend of mine brought me. And this house had 8,000 acres outside of London. And I went with this funny American poet named Jerry Caron. And we got to this big house. And Jim had been asleep. And most Americans, when they visit big houses in Europe, they say, well, I mean, they try to act like it's normal.

[27:16]

And Jim had been asleep. And Earl said, well, we're here, Jim. And Jim opened his eyes and looked up. He said, this is Chris's house. This is Chris's. This is bigger than my fucking high school. How do you translate that? So anyway, we went out behind the house and two miles away on the lawn was a great big rectangular pond Perfectly rectangular.

[28:42]

And you realized that after a moment, if you thought about it, that it had to be built like this. To look rectangular from the house, because they had to be much wider at the far end. Anyway, that's vanishing perspective. In reverse. So vanishing perspective in reverse is not an unknown teaching in Zen. And I will try to give you a couple examples of that later on in the Sesshin. So, there's another phrase used in Zen, the meeting of... the meeting of perspectives of teacher and student.

[30:02]

And this is sometimes stabilized in the physical world. One of the characteristics of Buddhist culture is that in almost every way no clear inside-outside distinction is made. in their architecture, in their way of perceiving, thinking, acting, and so forth. So I think what I'm trying to talk about here I would like to show you how the practice of Sashin and in particular the way we do the eating bowls is not Japanese culture but Buddhist culture.

[31:39]

And I talked about this song in the October Sashin last year in Crestone Mountain Center. Again, stimulated for the same reason, because I had a large number of students there who didn't know much about Sashin. Now, I told this story already to a number of you, but I was in Paris in a bathtub of a friend. And it had a very hot faucet. And so hot that when my arm touched it, it was really burned. But I've never seen a faucet that hot, so my mind told my arm it must not be true. So my arm believed my thinking mind and proceeded to touch it again.

[33:04]

And got really burned again. I felt like kind of a fool. I mean, you're not supposed to get burned in the bathtub of a faucet. I thought I must just be clumsy or not used to these European flash water heaters. But when I told the story to my hosts when they came home, they both pulled up their sleeves and they both had burns. So I don't know if I felt a little better, but anyway, I felt differently.

[34:17]

Well, after my arm got burned twice, I then naturally, or at least thoughtfully, turned on the cold water until the faucet was cold. And then I checked it with my hand. With my thoughtful hand, I checked it and made sure it was cool. So my hand under the control of my thoughts now knew it was cold. But my arm did not believe my mind anymore. It wasn't about to be fooled. A third time. So every time I would move so that my arm would get close to the faucet, my arm would jump and would not get near it.

[35:33]

Even though my mind and my thoughtful hand knew it was cold. The point I'm making is that in this story and what Buddhist culture clearly assumes, all Buddhist culture going back in India, that the body has a mind of its own. The body isn't just under the control of the mind, the body is a mind of its own. So we don't have a simple thing of like joining body and mind because body is part of mind. But you're joining body-mind and you're joining mind-body. Body-mind and body-mind or mind-body and body-mind.

[37:01]

And we need some way to recognize this body-mind independently of this mind-body. I know it's hard to translate these things. So, Japanese and Chinese have developed a culture which requires you to use both hands. And they've developed a culture which requires you to use both sides of the brain to speak a language, to speak and write a language. And I told you the story already, of many of you anyway, of Suzuki Roshi saying, when he first came to America, what he noticed is that Americans do things with one hand.

[38:14]

And he certainly would have noticed it here, because I've watched all of you do things with one hand this morning and at lunchtime. You're drinking from the bowl sort of like this. Or like this. You put it down. And when you give the offering water, you kind of go like this. And to somebody embedded in Buddhist culture, I tell you, it looks very, very strange. Now Zen is called the teaching outside of words and letters.

[39:29]

And that means words and letters in a wide sense. But Zen is also taught through objects outside of words and letters. The meeting of perspectives at objects, again, is a phrase in Buddhism. Now, there's another Zen saying, immeasurably great people are turned in the stream of words.

[40:37]

And Rumi is, I've quoted this to you a number of times, some of you, And this quote comes from Rumi, this Sufi poet Rumi. He says, when the ocean is calling you, don't run to the language river. Again, the Zen saying, many immeasurably great people are turned in the stream of words. So, in fact, what you're doing in practicing zazen in a sashin, you're using the body, the mind, the body-mind to settle, let's put it simply first, you're using the body to settle the mind.

[42:01]

And you're using the mind to settle the body. That's the simple sense of it. You've decided to come here and that decision and following your breaths or counting your breaths and so forth settles the body. And then the settled body settles the mind. And certainly some periods you come in, you just sit down, and the settled feeling in your body calms your mind. More subtly, more accurately, we should say the body-mind settles the mind-body, and the mind-body settles the body-mind. So if you want to activate the body-mind, use the body-mind.

[43:09]

Just as if you want to activate the brain, develop a language system that uses as much of the brain as possible. So much of the teaching... There are many people like this. This happens to be of this type, a rather good one. One of the first questions in looking at a tea bowl is, where is the front? It's rather hard to find the front. But to use it, you set it down, pick it up with a fence of a front and a side and so forth. And typical of a culture which emphasizes multiple identity, you want the

[44:29]

manifestations of identity to manifest multiple identity. So first of all, you don't know where the front is. Bodhidharma didn't know who he was. So from the outside, you can't tell where the front is. Also von außen kann man nicht sagen, wo vorne ist. Aber wenn man innen reinschaut, sieht man einen Kreis. Und dieser Kreis hat ein Schriftzeichen darin. Ich fühle mich also wie ein Bergarbeiter. And the circle has a character in it so obviously there's a top and bottom of the character so you should be able to read it so this becomes the front. But there's nothing on the front that's centered.

[45:54]

And yet if you look at it What really determines the front of the bowl is not the kanji, really, but this cross. Can you see the little cross from back there? OK. Well, you're a potter back there. Maybe this is just for you, this lecture. Anyway, so the cross is there for when you pick it up. You pick it up and the cross is right, it's your body. So the front of the bowl is in your body. It's the same, maybe similar sense to, although there's two large Buddhas here, the altar in this room has to be the middle.

[47:19]

You can certainly use this as an altar. But if you use this as an altar, then you change this space, so the room is only here. Because the altar isn't the altar, the altar and the room are the altar. So this two altars creates two rooms, actually. The way this cross creates a teabowl and a front to the teabowl and a front in your... So the altar is actually determined by the feeling of the altar, not the location of the altar. So the sense of form as feeling is essential in practice.

[48:32]

as I was saying in Holland, that the corpse is not the body. Now, in our language, the body and the corpse are the living body and the body of the corpse we both call body. And St. Augustine calls the body built, sustained, mared, and so forth. So, in... we use the word body in English as a Buddhist term, doesn't mean the body, which it can also be a corpse.

[49:56]

It means the aliveness of the body. The dead body shouldn't be called a body in Buddhist terms. So the way the word body is used is to mean the aliveness of the body. Or the... in Castaneda's language the assemblage point the aliveness which assembles the aliveness so that aliveness shall we say assembled aliveness is done by the thoughts

[51:07]

So this assembled aliveness is done by the feelings too, independent of the thoughts. This assembled aliveness is also done by the body. And these are all bodies. And can you be at the different assembly points of the bodies, of these various bodies, just the ones I mentioned? Now, we do that, but we don't notice that we do it. And by not noticing that we do it, we don't do it. we don't develop it as practice and as consciousness. Okay, going back to this tea bowl for a moment.

[52:20]

And actually, if you line... If you put yourself right in a line with the character, the cross is a little off. So that's a little, I mean, I... It may sound to you like I'm overdoing the correspondences. That may be. Most Japanese people wouldn't notice these things. But the correspondences are so consistent and pervasive throughout the two cultures that I don't think I'm overdoing the correspondences.

[53:25]

And also this way of thinking is so commonplace that nobody takes it, it's not that big a deal. So the kanji, kanji is a character, the kanji gives you a sense that that's the front. But the bull is also saying, don't be fooled by the kanji. That's not the front. Because the thought is read, and that's not the center. This cross is... felt by the body, and that's the center, because the body-mind takes precedence over the mind-body.

[54:38]

Tea ceremony is a part of Zen culture, as our eating bowls are part of Zen culture. And when you see something like this, there's some saying, I can't remember it now, but I'll get it straight before the end of the sashin. Which is something like throwing away mind and body, he throws a road out and walks on it himself. So when you throw a road out yourself, It's you yourself establishing the road you're walking on.

[55:46]

And you feel it physically. So this little cross, when you see it and recognize it, you kind of feel it. Also dieses Kreuz, wenn man das sieht und wahrnimmt, dann kann man das richtig spüren. And then just for the heck of it, there are at least five levels of decoration going on in this bowl. Ja, und da jetzt noch ein bisschen weiterzutreiben, das sind ungefähr vier oder fünf verschiedene Zeichnungen da drin. There's the glaze and there's no glaze. Glaze? Glaze. Ach so, das ist also Klausur und dann gibt es Stellen ohne Klausur. And then there's a design on top of the glaze that you can feel. And then there's design put on top of the design rather willy-nilly or rather irregularly. And these little dots then just put, other little dots are put on top of the little dots.

[56:51]

And then there's no particular way in which the groupings of dots are related to the Xs, the crosses. Then as a final kind of statement, on top of the non-glazed part where there's also no design, The potter has taken his finger and put a little patch of color on top of the non-glaze and on top of the glaze and on top of the design. While the others are done with brush, this is done with a finger. So when you do it with a finger and do it with a brush, that's already two levels. So there's levels in the way you do it as well as levels in the way the design is put on and the layers of design.

[58:03]

And the absence of design and the absence of glaze. And how do you know it's done with the finger? In addition to the fact that it looks like it. Because there's five of them. One, two, three, four, five. So the potter says, hey, I'm here. And then this interior design is quite unrelated to the exterior design, which has other levels going in. Now, we talked about the background mind and the foreground mind with a lot of you I have. It's establishing a background mind which works on koans, for instance, or turning words. Which is different from and has its own past, present and future which is different from the foreground mind.

[59:17]

So this green here is a design that's actually unrelated to the red on top of it. It's unrelated the way those leaves of the trees are unrelated to the wall of the room. The wall of this room has its own past, present, and future. and the trees have a different history and yet we see them right there together through the window so the design of the trees is not related to the it's a different level So this tea bowl is a good, one of the reasons this is a good tea bowl, because it's made from different levels of mind of the potter.

[60:32]

I'm certain the potter did one design and then changed his state of mind or waited a little while, not because it wasn't dry, but because he wanted a different state of mind when he did the design on top. And it awakens different states of mind when you use it and look at it. You must admit I've discovered quite a bit in this people. But one quality of a good tea bowl is you keep discovering things ten years later. So you don't get bored with it. And practice, I hope, will open you up to discovering the tea bowl of your self and non-self endlessly. And our constant aliveness is endlessly fascinating once you get out of the mind that reads the kanji.

[62:04]

I'm sorry, I'm going to do a little riff, as I say. We started at 4.30. Oh, dear. When I don't need to say, I always talk too much. And also, what is your name? Lisa. Lisa from the kitchen came to, because I said I might talk about the Yoyogi bowls and I haven't got there yet. Lisa from the kitchen said I would talk about the Yoyogi bowls and I haven't got there yet. So I'll try not to take too much longer.

[63:15]

Because I know your knees have stopped hearing. So please sit comfortably. Because I would like to finish at least part of this because we're eating with the eating bowls. And it's important to understand in practice. So Suzuki Roshi said that he was surprised by the way Americans, and I'm sure he would have added Europeans if he'd been here, do things with one hand. And part of the reason I said is that Buddhist culture wants a culture that uses the body as intelligence. So it doesn't want to give the body simple questions like what is the sum of two and three?

[64:44]

And we would think in our culture that if someone always gave you, and when you were a senior in high school, they were still teaching you two plus three, you'd think there was something wrong with the curriculum. But when we're presented with something that's quite articulated on the physical level, we think it's too formal or something artificial or something. And we resist it. Because we want it to be simple and convenient to do. That we can do it without thinking. And not without the non-thinking, but without thinking.

[66:00]

So, you can see it in these robes. These robes are far more complicated than your clothes. And they're, I won't discuss it all, but they're based on a different concept of the body than our clothes. It's not that they're more complicated, it's that they are a different concept of the body. So, if an ordinary coffee cup, it's great when it's just an ordinary coffee cup. If you want a cup of coffee, you don't want to be bothered with the cup. But at the same time, we get served three plus two over and over again.

[67:12]

And we never get served algebraic equations. Or solid geometry. And I think in a Buddhist curriculum, you should be served a body intelligence that's more than two plus three. If you're really going to use the body-mind to settle the mind-body, So again, the Japanese and Chinese have developed a complex language system which requires body memory to remember all the characters.

[68:17]

So that's why... Go ahead. So if you ask an Asian person, Japanese or Chinese, Korean person, a character, they often will do it with their finger. Because you simply can't remember 30,000 characters with your brain. Okay. So, when, if I pass this, excuse me, if I pass this to Ulrike, The sense of passing it in Buddhism is I'm not passing the tea bowl. I'm passing myself using the tea bowl as an excuse or a bridge.

[69:19]

So if I'm passing myself, it means I'm passing my energy. So I turn my body toward Ulrike and pass the energy of my body or a feeling of light to her through the teabowl. And you direct this energy with both hands. Just like in karate or something, you can study creating a field between two hands. There's a sense in yogic Buddhist practice that there's a field there and you're directing it like a little searchlight. So a bowl like this has to be picked up with two hands. That's why it doesn't have a handle. They want you to have to use two hands, so the culture just teaches you to do it, and you just take it for granted.

[70:24]

The culture wants you to use your body in doing things. So they don't give you handles. And when you pick up, if I'm going to pick up that tea bowl, And it's interesting, in one place I happened to have a wine glass. You can't pick up a wine glass with two hands. It's totally strange. It doesn't work. But this bowl, to pick it up, I have to pick it up like this. And it's probably going to be hot, so I can't hold it that way for very long.

[71:46]

And anyway, that's a clumsy way to try to drink. So I have to transfer it to my left hand. And then I have to transfer it back to my right hand. Holding the edge, the two edges. because the two edges are the handle and often western potters imitating Japanese pottery don't understand that and they don't really put the rim down here so then you burn trying to because there's no handle So that's the handle, and then you can drink with one hand. But by this time, because you've already had to transfer it back and forth, Your left hand is naturally involved.

[72:50]

So usually you'd use your left hand too when you drink. Now in these eating bowls, You have to hold them with two hands. And I have more complicated ones than you do because I'm a nicer person. No, I don't know about that. Anyway, I have more complicated tea bowls, these eating bowls than yours are. And they are very, actually rather difficult to manage.

[73:51]

And they're meant to be difficult to manage. First of all, to even get at them, I have to use both hands. And then to put this away, I have to use both hands. So it's picked up with both hands and then usually turned in three and you have to use your thumb. You roll it across your thumb to make threes using the width of your thumb. Then you pick up the rest of it. And I will, there's quite a bit I can talk about, as you might imagine. And I'll leave the Dharma details till later. And how the Majamaka Sutra and the Wayan Sutra are part of this.

[75:08]

Wayan Sutra. Then you pick up this, and again it requires two hands. And even when you pick it up again, again it requires two hands. And you do again another level. Instead of picking up the top, you put your hand underneath it. So you have a sense of another level there. And then you pick it up. And then it goes into threes again. Anyway, you probably don't have to translate that. I don't know if I got that right. Well, for now... And I often, by the way, when I'm telling you this, I will make mistakes. Because if I do it slowly, I often don't know how to do it because it requires a certain rhythm to do it.

[76:14]

Because the knowledge of how to do it is in the rhythm of doing it, not in my brain. Much like when you try to say a poem, sometimes if you stop in the middle, you lose it. You have to kind of say it with its physical rhythm to remember the poem. So then you create a table. Because the earth is not the table, you create a table. Then I actually have a little folding table here. Put it down. And if you notice, my bowl has no bottom. So it makes it quite difficult.

[77:17]

It's easy to knock over and things. So I have to use one of the small bowls as the bottom. Then that's a sliding bottom. So it requires your mind to do it because the bowl doesn't do it for you. Because this is seen as body-mind, not as body-physical corpse. It ain't that. And it's actually called Buddha's skull. And, yeah. Why? So you're supposed to, as originally perhaps a skull, you're supposed to only serve simple foods in it.

[78:35]

So to eat with this not only requires two hands, which activates your whole body-mind, It requires awareness to use it. And then, to even complicate it further, they give you your portable table. But then they make the portable table too small. So you have a bowl with no bottom and a sliding base on a table that's too small. And when you put them down, they don't quite fit. So you have to get it sort of just right. And when you put these out again, all of this is related, as this little x is, is related to your chakras.

[80:06]

It's related to energy points in your body. And it's related to, if this is an object of concentration, which represents one state of mind this way and another state of mind this way, I can demonstrate those different states of mind by how I handle this ball. And my teacher can demonstrate a state of mind the way he puts a bowl down. Or change the state of mind as he picks the bowl up. Or the student then can demonstrate a state of mind on the object also. Demonstrate a state of mind isn't quite right because you're not into demonstrating.

[81:17]

But just as there's a grammar to my sentences, And there's a grammar to your sentence. And if the grammar meets, we have a conversation that's intelligible. But in a culture which has calculus and... algebra for the body-mind, there's also a grammar and syntax at the level of body-mind as well as the level of mind-body. So this is what's said to be the meeting of perspectives of teacher and student at objects.

[82:28]

And if you don't understand this, you can't get a large number of the koans, really. Because sometimes the words you use are used as objects not as meaning. Because the words are also an object as the bowl is an object. And I could show you koans to illustrate all these points. Okay, so when you put the bowl, when you take these out, you put them at this chakra. It's just not anywhere, it's at this chakra. That's like when I have told you guys, if you want to activate your hara, open the refrigerator door from your hara.

[83:34]

Sometimes I think you think I'm joking. I've come up with some fanciful example. Because I like refrigerators or something. But really, when you're opening a door, if you're working with your body-mind, you open things, you sense your energy, and it's first of all sensed when you're... The first area to develop the sense of it is your hara or your stomach. So chakras are not just activated by some inside movement of the energy. It's also activated by, because we don't make such an inside-outside distinction, but by your physical actions.

[85:01]

So when you open this, and it's designed to do all these things, you open it, you hold it right here at this chakra, You open it and then you slide it down till the chopsticks appear. They could do it a simpler way. If it was just a bag for your chopsticks, it could be done a simpler way. It's done this way because it's the movement of the chakras in and out. And the swastika has been used in Buddhism from ancient times. And one swastika goes this way and one swastika goes this way.

[86:05]

And this movement is one swastika and this movement is another swastika. But you see, they've had 2,600 years to work these things out. But there's no reason we shouldn't be aware of them in this week. This is a highly, this is a kind of initiate semaphore practice. Okay, so you put it there and then you take the chopsticks out. When you take them out, you turn the handles to the center.

[87:09]

Let's see, no. You take them out and you turn the handles toward the side. But it's all done with a sense of a line in the middle of your body. Actually, it's common beginning instruction for working in a Zen monastery. You can watch monks do it, actually. If they're sweeping, say, they'll hold the broom just in front of them vertically and then they'll start to sweep. Or they'll actually hold the broom and actually run their finger down their front to their navel. And then the broom is your backbone. But the inside-outside distinction, just like the cross and the bowl, is there. This is so hard to translate, I'm sorry.

[88:32]

So when you do this, this angle, everything is done from this center line. When you take out the chopsticks, you hold them and your fingers are on this center line. And in this case it's like this. And then you put them down with the handles off a little differently than you do it. Right. There's different styles of doing it. You take it out and you put the handles off the little table. But so the center of the chopsticks is in the center of this line in the middle of this bowl. Okay.

[89:32]

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