What happened to the red cloth over the skyline? It just came off. I think they thought the red cloth was not so… Oh, yeah, not so wet, not so sunny. Hot. Well, it's also the zendo is too bright, so it's better if we could put it back. It's much bigger, honestly. Someone should have asked me. Well, if we can tomorrow, work period, let's do it. Is it hard work? It's okay. Well, it makes a difference.

[01:05]

Too dark? No, it can't be too dark. This is too bright, it should be dark. We're trying to create the conditions for enlightenment and a little darkness is necessary. And pain. No, we're not having a translator here. Sit up straight. I heard my lectures have been stopping people's minds. That's the point. I mean, they're supposed to overwhelm your minds. or disguise the teaching. By the way, I noticed some of you are having problems or it feels like you're having problems or I'm having problems with the bowing during doksan.

[02:24]

If I feel you have some problem with it, I think, why is this wonderful person bowing to me? But if you don't have any problem with it, then for me it's just a way of bowing to yourself or bowing to the possibility of teaching or something. For some reason we can bow to Buddha, but it's hard to bow to an actual person sometimes. But don't think of me as an actual person. Think of me as a Japanese dummy dressed up in robes. Or maybe the easiest thing is just to do standing bows.

[03:46]

The traditional way is actually three bows, but we do it simpler with just one bow, but maybe standing bows is better. And also someone said that the reason Ulrike was having trouble translating is that my lectures during Sashina become very masculine. And she's obviously somewhat different from me. But in practice, men have to bring out their feminine energy to practice. And the most positive thing you can say about a good old male Zen Master is that he's grandmotherly.

[05:14]

I haven't reached that point yet. But I'm working on it. But to practice, particularly Sashin, women have to bring out their masculine energy too, I think. And also in the seminars which I've been doing in Europe for the last two months, A lot of you, quite a number of you have gone to them.

[06:30]

There I'm accommodating my teaching to you. But in Sashin you have to accommodate yourself more to me. Someone also said it's rather one way, in seminars it's two way, because you go back and forth. It's quite unusual in Sesshin to have discussion or questions. Because the discussion goes on inside you. And it's not so good to lose your energy by talking. But I'd like to have some questions. So Is there anything from yesterday or anything you'd like us to discuss?

[07:55]

Yes. How do I contain the energy when I'm in danger of losing it? It's too loud. Okay, since that's the main thing I may talk about today I'll leave that for now So anything else? Yes? Yesterday you talked, you were describing the moment form turns into emptiness I don't think it's quite right to say form turns into emptiness but but there are if I say to you

[08:58]

I'm in this dilemma of wanting to keep the discussion simple and yet not simplify. And I feel an obligation to transmit true Zen Buddhism to Europe and to transmit correct Zazen mind. And I think I feel that more precisely in relationship to Germany than I do say Ireland or Austria or Switzerland at the present time.

[10:39]

I couldn't say exactly why I feel that way, but it seems to be the case. So I have to do it in a certain way, which you may not understand yet, but I hope that at some time you do. But if I take any simple division, like I take this, this, and I divide it in half, if I make a division, it could be, you know, one third or half or various things. All I've done is take something and divide it once. Then it can be rolled up.

[11:48]

And once you make a division, there's many things you can do with the division. You can put the two halves on top of each other. and so forth. So it immediately becomes more subtle. So if you make a distinction like form and emptiness, or body and mind, you immediately have many combinations. And this is a teaching of 2600 years and people have spent a lot of time on this. So there are specific teachings and practices for form, For emptiness, for form is emptiness.

[12:57]

For form and for emptiness is form. For form is form. For emptiness is emptiness. And for emptiness is form is emptiness. And it's not complicated. It's just second and third generational. In other words, if I teach you to count your, or suggest to you that you count your breath, after you've counted your breath for ten years, you're in a different generation of counting your breath. This is something else, no longer counting your breath. So I believe what I was speaking about yesterday was the emphasis in practicing with a form to produce the mind of emptiness.

[14:25]

So in that sense you can have a form with an arrow pointing toward emptiness. And then there's emptiness with an arrow pointing toward form. which means contemplating form from the experience of emptiness. But there's various ways in which it's important to understand this idea of form and emptiness intellectually and verbally. and then keeping it in view in the light of your experience.

[15:28]

But then there's also, much more important, the direct experience of emptiness. So that's enough on that. Yeah. There must be a right effort, I guess. I find that sometimes when you say, now you can go for it, then I find myself trying hard. And then I get anxious or I find that I'm not in my sense. So trying hard is not right. On the other hand, if I relax too much, then I find that I need to be caught in my thoughts and get carried away. So, is there a right balance between trying hard and needing to actually practice? Anyone who does anything like poetry or painting or music knows that there's a craft of trying and yet not trying or if you try too hard it doesn't work and so forth.

[17:03]

It's just a skill like that that you become familiar with. So it's just Yeah. It's a question of being open to experimenting and trying it and becoming more subtle. I think the main mistake most people make is they don't know how to try. The second biggest mistake is they try too hard. Not too many people don't try hard enough. Usually those people don't actually know how to try. and don't understand trying at all.

[18:14]

Okay, something else? Okay. Could you say it loudly enough so even I could hear? Why don't you say it in German? My experience is that everything that is outside can come to me when I am a teacher. And when I am a teacher, I am a very civil teacher.

[19:18]

But it is necessary to have a personal teacher. It is always necessary to have a personal teacher outside. I'm still thinking about the relationship of the outer and the inner teacher. My experience is that every manifestation in the outer world can be teacher-free, as far as there is a relationship or resonance in the inner teaching. And my question is, is it necessary to have a personal teacher?

[20:22]

To practise Zen in the strict sense, yes. To practice Zen in general as a way of developing yourself, you don't necessarily need a teacher. But to realize the teachings, you probably need a teacher. There is a classification of Buddhas who don't have teachers. And they're called Pratyekabuddhas. And you're all welcome to be one if you'd like. But Pratyekabuddhas are Buddha persons who are enlightened by their own efforts or by accident.

[21:29]

But it is thought that they don't really understand how to teach others or to pass on the teaching. But there's several points to this. One is that the understanding, first of all, a general rule in the Buddhist world, is different, is different. You study one way, you have one kind of realization. You study another way, you have another kind of realization. And the understanding realized through another person, and with the mutual experience of another person, called pecking in and pecking out,

[22:33]

When the chicken is pecking out, the mother at the right time pecks in. But the mother can't peck in at any time. The chick has to be doing some developed pecking. And the mother doesn't pay attention to the first pecks. So the chick is sitting in there thinking, I pecked three times and my mother doesn't love me. It's going to die shriveled up in its shell. But if the chick is saying, I don't care if mom's out there or not, I'm getting out of here. When the chick has that kind of energy, then the mother says, oh, good, peck. You see what I mean?

[23:54]

So both are quite independent. Anyway, that understanding is considered to be different and more powerful and more functional. than the understanding realized through yogic practices alone. Now you have to understand that in Buddhism your so-called inner teacher isn't some kind of God-given critter that's been there from before you were born. It's a function of us as human beings that you've given a kind of identity to.

[25:22]

And you can change the identity of that inner teacher. So there's a relationship between you, the inner teacher, and the outer teacher. Es gibt also eine Beziehung zwischen dir, dem inneren Lehrer und dem äußeren Lehrer. We might say that real teaching occurs when the outer teacher's inner teacher is teaching your inner teacher. Und wir könnten sagen, eine Verwirklichung passiert, wenn der äußere Lehrer den inneren des äußeren lehrt. I said it the wrong way round. When your outer teacher's inner teacher is teaching your inner teacher, So when the inner teacher of the outer teacher teaches your inner teacher.

[26:37]

But I have the experience sometimes of students who do have an inner teacher, they've developed that capacity. And I can teach their inner teacher. And I can see that their inner teacher knows. But the student pays no attention to their inner teacher. That's very frustrating for me. But that's my job. So one more question and then I'll talk about something else. Well, falling asleep is the first sign of good beginning practice.

[27:45]

No, it's true. If you can't fall asleep in satsang, you're in trouble. If you can't fall asleep in satsang, you're in trouble. See, she's got her ideas about the way it is, and it's not... See, she's translating what she thinks. I'm going to have to start being stricter with my translating. Okay. But after that, then sleep is the main enemy of practice.

[29:07]

So, I mean, if you're sleeping most of the time or half the time or 80% of the time, it depends on the kind of sleep you're doing, though. There's some sleep that's quite alert. I've told some of you the story of one of my students who used to sleep. You know who I'm talking about? When he was head monk at Tassajara. I am not kidding. He's the head monk, right? The leading student. And I'd be sitting here and he would, honest to goodness, be like this. Like this. What's that ceremony you do where you wait for the cleaning?

[30:21]

The nenju. I wasn't there during Nenju's ceremony. But he had to receive the bows after you clean the zendo. About 65 monks come in and have to bow to the head monk. And every time, everyone that came in, the entire ceremony he was leaving. Well, we don't know. He's being very tactful. People are just bowing to his back.

[31:29]

So I decided quite early on that I should give him a hit. So I would sit there. And within about four minutes after the beginning of the period, he'd be down. So then I'd move my hand toward my stick. And he'd be immediately... And he'd be immediately... It's the absolute truth. I couldn't believe how fast he would get up. So I actually tried for several days, and I could not get to my stick before he decided to come up.

[32:32]

So finally, after about a week, I hid the stick behind me. And then I carefully arranged my robes. Then I moved my hand without moving my robes. Until I found the stick. But it really took me about four or five days before I finally got him. And I must have hit him quite hard quite a number of times. And he sat straight up for about 10 minutes.

[33:40]

Then he was right back in. He's a wonderful person. And he learned a lot from Zen. But he never achieved zazen mind. But he's now actually in Japan in a monastery. So he's persisting at least. Okay. So let me try to give you a better sense of this sasen mind.

[34:45]

And I hope it will be helpful for you if I put it in some perspective. And I'm also trying to put it in perspective. One, so you have a better understanding of it. And two, so that you know there's a lot of controversy about all this. There are different views about how this should be. which means that on the one hand you can trust and accept the teaching. It's one of the great achievements, I think, of human beings, this practice. At the same time, there are different styles and different emphases.

[35:46]

And in particular, as Buddhism meets its first kind of real civilization that's not Buddhist, the questions and experience you bring to practice are going to develop Buddhism further. So as I said, I'm trying to teach Buddhism so that you can make it your own. Some of you, a few of you said yesterday, when I said that, to be your own master. I wouldn't put it that way.

[37:01]

I would say to make practice your own. The idea of master is just a provisional idea that should disappear as your practice develops. A teacher is a good Dharma friend. Maybe your best Dharma friend. But as the practice develops, it's just your Dharma friend. Dharma friend is someone who can say something to you that you hear. And that sometimes can be somebody you meet passing on a street corner. And something they do makes you, yes, that's what I want to do or that's how I want to live.

[38:03]

Okay. The main controversies in the development of Chinese Buddhism from Indian Buddhism revolved centered around again two simple divisions between study and practice how much study, how much practice and between sudden enlightenment and gradual enlightenment. Zen as a school as we inherit it today is a Chinese school of Buddhism

[39:08]

that developed probably out of Tendai, Tendai school of Buddhism. You don't have to remember any of this, of course. But basically the Tendai school, in Japanese it's called Tendai, tried to take all the teachings of Indian Buddhism and sum it up and arrange all the different sutras and meditation practices. And the... And then Zen took from the Tendai school its way of developing practice. But the Zazen instructions I give you In which I emphasize this lifting back, not rising back, lifting back.

[40:30]

And having your stomach as free as possible. And the main position in zazen is your backbone, not your legs. And your tip of your nose in line with the tip of your navel. And your tongue at the roof of your mouth. And your teeth gently together. And so forth. And the way we practice with breathing. All go back to a particular treatise written on meditation in about the 6th century in China. In the Tendai school, and it was adapted almost word for word in Zen and Dogen Zazen instructions in the 12th century in Japan are based on it.

[41:45]

So these zazen instructions, while they seem to you fairly obvious once you've heard them, they've actually were developed over a long period of time and finally reduced to this fairly simple form which is then once they were formulated in this way have stood the test of literally millions of people practicing them since the 6th century with seeing no need to change them.

[42:52]

Now the development of Zen as a separate school revolved around its answers to the questions of how much study, how much practice, revolved around the question of how much study and how much practice. And whether enlightenment is sudden or gradual. Okay, maybe you could, if you moved forward a little and weren't behind me. And I'll move backward. You don't have to be polite and sit behind me. Now if you practice here, gaining some benefit from the practice and many things are coming up and you're concentrating, then this practice is basically a therapeutic practice.

[44:25]

And I don't mean therapeutic in a negative sense. It may be profoundly therapeutic. Okay. So... If you think about this for a while, you will wonder what does gradual mean. And why an emphasis on sudden enlightenment? And quite a number of you have asked me in Doksan, is the pain necessary? An obvious question. And I think Tibetan Buddhists, for example, mostly think it's not. But for the most part, Tibetan Buddhism is a gradual approach to enlightenment, and Zen is a sudden approach.

[45:45]

Yes. As far as I know, the Tibetans sit quite a lot too, and that must be also painful for them. Oh, of course. But in general, I think you can say that all the Tibetans I know sit in a more relaxed fashion, It's more casual in some ways.

[46:46]

And they emphasize that kind of moment of zazen which doesn't take long periods of time. You catch a little moment or sensation. So I could make a case for that too. Because this practice, as I said yesterday, working with small tastes like pills, is a very important part of practice. And Tibetan Buddhism uses more of that than Zen does. I don't know if this is interesting to you or not. I have a friend who has studied with many Tibetan Buddhists. And his description of Tibetan Buddhist meditation is that there's a lot of rituals and formulas and chanting.

[48:13]

And then you sit down for a few moments and you say, oh good, meditation's over. And then you say, oh good, meditation's over. Now that's exaggerated, of course. And some people like Trungpa Rinpoche began to emphasize meditation much more. But that was largely because of Sukhiroshi's influence and Sukhiroshi's students who began to practice with him. And even then, when they meditated long periods of time, it wasn't like a sesshin. So I'm not trying to get into an argument about different schools.

[49:14]

And of course, anything I say, there's exceptions. But Sashin, as we're doing it, is particularly Zen. Nobody else does Sashin like this. And in China it's done sometimes. I know of Sashins in Formosa. They're actually not even allowed to go to the toilet. They have to stay all day on their cushions. And in Japan, one of the monasteries where I used to sit, they'd sit for long hours, sometimes two or three hours. And they'd lift their robes up and sit on the tile floor in the winter so the cold would be on their body. So then you have to produce body heat to keep yourself warm.

[50:29]

There may be some value to some of that. But I think a large part of it in Japan is cultural and not necessary for practice. But I want to create a situation in Sashin Where you know you should stay on your cushion. But I don't want to be putting pressure on you all the time. I'd rather create the opportunity for you to pressure yourself. If I can create the general picture or general practice.

[51:31]

Now, again, I'm using English words, gradual, sudden. And I don't really know what the words are in Chinese or Japanese. Also diese Worte allmählich und plötzlich und ich weiß nicht wirklich, was diese Worte in Japanisch oder Chinesisch bedeuten. And what all the nuances are. Und wie alle die Feinheiten aussehen. So I have to go by my own experience. Deshalb muss ich mich also von meiner eigenen Erfahrung leiden lassen. Now, some schools, one way a sudden school is characterized, you see, you could think of gradual as you start at the bottom as an ordinary person and work your way up to Buddha.

[52:51]

Like you were climbing a mountain. And that's one view of gradual. Another is, one of the things that characterizes sudden schools is you aim at the top of the mountain. You don't aim at any lower, you aim at the top of the mountain. You either land at the top or you don't land at all. Now, Tibetan Buddhism is a practice in which the highest goal is the goal. But it's realized through deity visualization and many steps. Basically, it's the school based on an enactment.

[53:53]

In other words, if you act like Buddha, you'll become Buddha. So there's many ways to visualize Buddha, to imagine Buddha, to use your energy body and so forth. So do you see that? You aim it, you act like being a Buddha at the top, and you'll become Buddha. And there's an element of that in Zen practice, too. But still, even though they aim at the top and to act like Buddha, to become Buddha, the process is gradual.

[55:10]

In other words, if you keep acting like Buddha, Buddha sort of seeps in. So while Tibetan Buddhism falls in some ways within the sudden division, certainly emphasizing practice over study, Still, in contrast to within Tibetan Buddhism, Dzogchen and Mahamudra are considered sudden schools, and the other schools of Tibetan Buddhism are considered gradual. So Dzogchen, for instance, uses the deity visualizations and so forth for beginning students or students who aren't suited for this Dzogchen direct approach.

[56:22]

Students who are not suited for the direct approach. Okay, then let's take the idea of not gradual, but cultivation. Now, where the Zen school comes from, Zen assumes that understanding is not gradual. That understanding only occurs in jumps. Like you build up a certain energy and then, oh, you understand.

[57:39]

The jumps may be very small. Like you don't get somebody's poetry and you read a lot of his poetry, but you don't get it. Then suddenly you understand one poem and then all the other poems become clear. Or your kid doesn't get algebra or something and then suddenly they get it and then algebra seems okay. Zen assumes that the way the mind works, the way human beings work, is that understanding occurs in jumps. Now, yogic development of the energy body, that can be gradual or that is gradual.

[58:54]

And development of your personality is gradual. So, Zen practice includes the development of your personality and the development of your energy body. And that is gradual. Now, cultivation is different from gradual. So you can receive a little jump of understanding and you understand algebra. And then you have to cultivate the algebra to be able to apply algebra to many things. So that's not gradual, but it's cultivation. So Zen definitely emphasizes cultivation in understanding, but doesn't emphasize gradualness in understanding.

[60:10]

Is that fairly clear? Okay. Now, why pain? I can give you several reasons. If we were doing a just do it practice, and this place was my monastery, is that all right? Can I move in? And I was going to be here for the next six months with you guys. The cook isn't so sure. She's leaving tomorrow morning. Then I wouldn't have to tell you all these things. But I don't want to abandon you to all the thoughts I know you're going to have later.

[61:19]

And I wish that when I first started practicing, this could be expressed in English, which it couldn't at that time. So there are several reasons why pain is part of practice. One is it's considered to strengthen you. It gives you some power. It also develops compassion. And it's the first of the four noble holy truths, which is suffering. So some suffering or difficulty that you meet in your life, that is a kind of study of suffering, not just because you happen to have cancer or something terrible has happened to you or difficult.

[62:37]

But you choose or there's a willingness to suffer. Now, it doesn't just matter, it doesn't just mean that because you're sick, you're willing to suffer. But Zen is a religion in the sense in that it wants you to be willing to suffer with others. Und in diesem Sinne ist Zen eine Religion und möchte, dass ihr willens seid, mit anderen zu leiden. And willing to take on other people's suffering. Und bereit seid, das Leiden von anderen auf euch zu nehmen. Now Phil, by the way, is a poet as well as a Zen monk.

[63:37]

Und Phil übrigens ist auch ein Dichter, nicht nur ein Zen-Mönch. In fact, I guess Phil and Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder and Jack Carrick were maybe the first four beatniks. So this is a historical monument here. Which led to the hippies, which led to us. But Phil works with some other students of mine in a hospice for people with AIDS in San Francisco. And one of the things that makes this hospice successful Is it staffed by people who already test positive for AIDS?

[64:45]

And Zen Buddhists who test positive for suffering? So you're not going into these people's rooms thinking, oh boy, am I glad I don't have AIDS. This is terrible. Naturally, on one level you think that. But on a more fundamental level, you think, I'd be willing to switch places with this person. Or you've been willing to go through things so you can sit there and if you're willing, you can help them to be willing.

[65:48]

Okay. Another reason is that pain is very purifying. After Sashin, I think you'll find you feel cleaned out in some way. There have been many inner tears. Another reason is that wisdom and enlightenment are not born from curiosity. You're not wise because you kind of... It'd be nice to be wise, wouldn't it? You're wise because if you have wisdom in the Buddhist sense, it's because it's necessary to have wisdom.

[66:51]

Or enlightenment comes because it's necessary to have enlightenment. Because you've got yourself in such a situation, there's no way out except enlightenment. And that's what Sashin is supposed to do. Also, practice means to return mind to its source. Which means to free yourself from thought forms. When you hear sounds in practice, you hear hearing, not just the sound, you hear hearing. And then you turn that field of hearing, hearing, back to the source of hearing.

[67:53]

Now that's a very basic meditation practice. So you're returning mind to the source of mind. Returning thought to the source of thought. Pain is a thought form. And there's a little pressure in there to return this thought form to its source. So if you want to have a one-lifetime practice, the radical practice of Zen, You must understand that with the development of Mahayana Buddhism, the idea that enlightenment could be achieved in one lifetime, And the eye was a very radical idea.

[69:09]

And that enlightenment could be generally understood by non-professionals was an even more radical idea. And it finally developed in China that, for example, there were whole schools of poetry and painting. Which distinguished themselves from gradual schools of painting and poetry and sudden schools of painting and poetry. And the whole tradition of the amateur painter and poet who did real poetry and painting, because they had something equivalent to sudden enlightenment in poetry or painting. Then it was thought that they didn't have to struggle to write poems,

[70:12]

Everything they saw was a poem or anything they put together was a poem. I'm not saying that was true. I'm just saying those ideas developed in China. So even the amateur scholar or bureaucrat could also be a good poet. So this idea of enlightenment in one lifetime, enlightenment that was everybody's possibility, was a very radical idea. And first this emphasis had to be developed and given credibility within the whole of Buddha's teaching.

[71:30]

Then it had to be developed into specific teachings that anyone could do. And Sashin is one of those teachings. And it's very carefully developed, as I've been trying to point out. to allow you to generate the mind of zazen and to have forms that support the mind of zazen because they arose out of the mind of zazen. Okay. Okay.

[72:30]

So, the pain of sâshin is mostly the pain of your mind, your distracted mind, not physical pain. For example, if I put my arm here, if I put my arm somewhere, if there's a table here, just left it here. If I just left it there for eight hours, while I was having tea and talking to people and so forth. After a while you'd want to move it. It would itch and it would hurt. But you can go to sleep and leave your arm in one position for eight hours with no problem. So how can you create the state of mind which can allow your arm to stay there while you're awake?

[73:34]

That mind is zazen mind. So zazen mind is the mind of concentration joined with the intuitive mind of awareness Remember I talked about mind which intuition or insight arises in it. So if you can join concentrated mind and intuitive mind, you create a kind of womb mind. Okay. Are you still with me?

[74:42]

More or less? Okay. So this wound mind incubates all of your life experience. So you're not incubating necessarily a lot of Buddhist study. You're incubating your own experience. And you're trying to return that to mind source itself. And so it means you need to create a mind which has no exits and no entrances. Until that mind, in Zen we say freezes. And that mind is said to be like an incense burner, an old iron incense burner in an ancient temple. So ungefähr wie ein alter, eiserner Behälter für Weihrauch in einem Tempel.

[76:00]

Or a withered log that's forgotten the forest. Oder ein Baumstamm, der den Wald vergessen hat. Or standing at the top of a hundred-foot pole. Oder auf der Spitze eines hundert Fuß langen Pfahles. Now there are other minds that go with this. There's a kind of joyful mind. Or a grateful mind. Or an open, generous mind. Or I said the other day to take each step as if you were in the pure land. And quite a number of you have had what we call pure land mind. Where there's some sweet feeling in your body. Or there's a fragrant smell to the air.

[77:02]

Or sounds have a kind of beautiful quality. So you can have these various joyful mind or fragrant mind or concentrated mind. But all of these minds in Sashin are eventually meant to freeze into this one mind or womb mind. And if you can bring it to that point, like your breathing and heartbeat and your bodily functions, you go beyond them in some way. So what Zen practice tried to do in China is take all the teachings of the schools that emphasize study and all the teachings that emphasize gradual enlightenment

[78:16]

and the many practices of yogic practices and the absolute necessity for the thought of enlightenment and compassion and combine them into one practice That if you take somebody and just stick them in it, they don't even know what they're doing, you just stick them in it. And they really do it totally with sincerity. They can realize enlightenment in one lifetime. So in that sense, Zen is a sudden school and has developed Sashin for that. Now, sometimes knowing too much is a problem. I had a student once come to a Sashin in the late 70s. She knew nothing about Zen.

[79:45]

She came down from Seattle to... I can't remember why she came. She knew nothing about Zen. For some reason we let her in. I guess she practiced a little meditation or something. And I presented a koan in the first lecture. And not knowing anything, she naively and innocently at least took the koan and did what I said. And by the fifth day, she had an enlightenment. On the sixth and seventh, she sort of developed it a bit. And the night of the seventh she left, I've never seen her again.

[80:45]

She didn't complicate it, she just did it. And she had some kind of naive capacity to just do it. She was a very pliant, relaxed kind of person who also had this ability to concentrate. So Zen practice is supposed to work that way because it's supposed to be a practice for anybody. And Sesshin is kind of the epitome of Zen practice. So although Sashin practice is basically quite simple, a tremendous amount of Buddhist history and development and thought has gone into producing it.

[82:08]

And much of the teaching is in the practice. And I'm supposed to supply some of what you need. But basically you want to concentrate, stay on your cushion, till your mind settles inside itself. The mind returns to its source and gets kind of locked into its source. And there's no way out except to change in levels. Now, if you're really practicing Zen in a pure sense, that's what you're trying to do in Sashim.

[83:14]

But also you can think of Sashin in a gradualist sense. It'll make your practice better after, in the next months after Sashin, your practice will probably be better. You may get clues on how to develop your energy body. And one of the meditation practices is the boundary between self and others. And you in effect are... Sashin has built into it the practice of the boundary between self and others. So you can feel your boundary shifting and appearing and disappearing. So it may be a gradual practice of developing your personality in that way.

[84:34]

And working in the kitchen with people and serving food and so forth. So there's many reasons to do sashin. And there are elements of cultivation and gradual practice in it. But the main point of Sashin is to create the opportunity for sudden practice, sudden enlightenment. Because understanding arises in jumps out of necessity. And if you can come to the end of your suffering, or the end of your personality, Or to the end of your energy where you don't think you can go on any farther.

[85:40]

And then you can find that energy like you'd find it if the building suddenly got a fire, a lot of energy would appear. But that energy is there waiting. So if you can bring yourself to the edge of your personality or energy or mind, then you've created the possibility of understanding your life at a deeper level. So I would recommend that you practice both ways. that you take advantage of the gradualist and cultivate the way you can develop your practice gradually and to cultivate your practice and see the psychological benefits of cultivating your personality

[86:47]

and getting and developing or getting a taste of your energy body but then in addition keep your mind and spirit open from moving into that kind of concentration which brings you to the limits of your ordinary self. This is the adventure or courage of the bodhisattva practice. I apologize for teaching you so much.

[88:06]

I'll try to do better next Sashin. her intention.

[88:25]

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