You can't imagine how strange I find it to hear you all chanting this. It was strange for me to learn all this 30 years ago and now to be teaching it to people in Zurich. I don't know what's wrong with me. It feels pretty good to chant, though, don't you think? Now, part of the price of admission to this seminar is not only that you're willing to sit zazen occasionally, but also that you're willing to say something at least once during the seminar. Yes. Without my forcing you. There's always a few people who say, well, you don't have to force me, I'm hiding in the woodwork. Anyway, but it's nice to hear your voice, each of your voice, at least once.

[01:31]

Now, good morning, good morning. Oh. You know, one thing I've noticed is that women get into practice much easier than men. And Castaneda somewhere has an interesting remark saying that women are more willing to disappear than men. His example is that, for example, women are willing to disappear into a man's name when they get married.

[02:41]

Some women, and that men find it quite difficult, would find it quite difficult to disappear into a man's name, into a woman's name. Since I have sort of two plus two daughters, I don't like it that my name, which is now their name, would disappear into some other man's name. So I'm very supportive of the feminist position. So that's sort of a negative side of it, that it's always seemed negative to me that women's names disappear into men's names. But in a spiritual sense, there may be some positive side to that, that women are more willing to disappear into practice.

[04:02]

And this sutra that we just chanted This tantric version of the Prajnaparamita Sutra is part of the reason that Avalokiteshvara became feminine in China. Because the overall feeling of the sutra is a sort of homage to the noble, lovely feeling of woman feeling. And as a spiritual territory. And that's why there's this no eyes, no ears, no nose, partly because it means disappear. Now the sense of... One of the commentaries or poems that's written in conjunction with this sutra in China

[05:10]

is that it honors words but without names. In other words, language is seen as trapping people. It's spiritually. I mean, in a practical sense, in the sense of the way we make the world, language is part of making the world. But in this, as I was trying to walk around and stop yesterday, this stopped sense of the world, language inhibits the spiritual world. So the sense of words that you honor words but without names is that you transform language. And you transform language into... into... How can I say this, transform language?

[07:07]

You don't use language in the sense of names. You allow language without a naming sense to move into your presence. Now I started to say to move into your body, but that's not quite right. That's true, but it's more that it moves into your presence. So again this is called a dharani or a mantra. And dharanic intelligence or awareness is thought to be close to the chanting mind.

[08:08]

And so to get a sense of language not because chanting of it is magical, but that's how it's understood in a popular sense, but rather when you move language into chanting where you don't think about it, you're getting a sense of another way to use language. Okay. When you use language not in a thinking sense, but in a chanting sense, You're moving language into another kind of mind. Okay, now another way that language is given a spiritual reality is that you bring language back into the pictures, into pictures or into images.

[09:28]

Now, why use pictures? I suppose if you tried to look at it physiologically, it's because our brain is probably wired primarily in relationship to vision. I don't know if that's the case, but certainly culture uses the brain that way. I suppose if we had whale brains, we might not language for us might be entirely sound and not pictures. Supposedly, I don't know if this is current, but at least research of some years ago reported that whales gather once a year or so and each year have a different song they all know and sing together.

[10:47]

This is a little aside, makes me think of these wonderful bells here in European cities. In New York, some of the really big churches, small ones too, but some of the famous big ones, play tapes of bells. And you go into them and you complain, as a friend of mine did once. He was outraged that they did this. And they said, well, it's the same bells that are in the tower. And we hired the best bell ringer to come here, and he did the best job, so that's what we play, instead of letting an amateur hit do them every Sunday.

[11:59]

Well, there's a certain logic to that if the point is... to have the bells sound the best they could possibly sound. And they said that nobody notices the difference anyway. And you, my friend, said to them, you should teach them the difference. Because on a cloudy Sunday the bells should sound different than on a sunny Sunday. And even New York has its moods which should be reflected in the bell. Okay, so yesterday, again, I talked about... I'm trying to bring together a couple of things I talked about yesterday.

[13:22]

And for the one or two of you who are new today, I can't redo what I did yesterday, I'm sorry. Okay. But in this sense of a body-mind mandala, now I talked about that, I said that accompanying thoughts that accompanying thoughts are feelings accompanying, going with thoughts are feelings and going with feelings and thoughts there are physical postures and states of mind and physical sensations not yet translated into thoughts or not yet translated into feelings

[14:23]

And these create a kind of multivalent spectrum. And that this reduces a lot of personal and psychological tension, actually, when you begin to have a feeling of this. And because you are trying to fit everything, the complexity of life, through just one form of yourself, So that in this spectrum of body and mind, when you have some thought, a thought is just a stronger emphasis in one part of the spectrum.

[16:07]

And it's a little, maybe you could have the image of a sponge. You put a drop of water here and it spreads out through the sponge. So that when you have a thought come in, you feel it spread out through your feelings and through your sensations and through your body. And when you have a sensation, say, you can feel it spread out into thought and feelings and memory. And the example I've used several times because he's such a big name is somebody asked Einstein, where do you get your ideas from? He said, from my body. I have a certain feeling somewhere in my body and if I pay attention to it in a context it turns into an idea.

[17:34]

It strikes me it's a little like you have dirty water and you take dirty water and you dump it in dirt. You dump it into the schmutz of the earth. And it comes up as clear water somewhere else in the forest. In a way, if you pay attention to your body, things come up purified through your body. When you think when your intelligence is your entire body-mind mandala your thinking is different. Okay. So How do you begin to know the physical end of the spectrum of thoughts, say?

[19:02]

Or if you have an upset stomach, how do you know the emotional end or memory end of the upset stomach? Okay, the teaching in Buddhism is you take something like this and make it an image. Not the simple sets of an image, but the mandalic sense of an image where it's interrelated points that have a topological integrity, but they may not make a simple picture. So it's an interrelationship really between an image and a kind of feeling.

[20:03]

And when you can take a feeling and connect that feeling with an image, the whole thing you can call a mandala. Now you're following me? All right. And again, I think that... We feel this most vividly when it's kind of forced on us by, say, falling in love. And you may have an image of the person and a feeling, and altogether it keeps affecting everything you do. So the presence of another person has made this image feeling so powerful that it transforms you when you're in love. So if the Buddha is important to you as your partner or your spouse, which is rare,

[21:37]

But if the Buddha could be as important to you and you realized your spouse is included in the Buddha, then you could create the image, feeling of a Buddha and have it present in your life so that it transforms your life like being in love. And that's exactly where the Tibetan visualizations come from. Do you understand? In other words, the reason they teach you this visualization is you can hold this feeling image in terms of tone, posture, colors, and begin to live in the presence of that image.

[23:05]

Is that too hard? All right. Well, I'm also, what I'm saying is quite difficult, I'm sorry. I mean difficult in the sense that it's like that. How are we doing? Shall I finish this? No? No, shall I continue what I mean? It's the same question in English. You see, this isn't easy for me to do exactly, because I don't have any prepared text. So what I have to do to talk to you about this is I have to create the image I'm talking about with you.

[24:11]

I have to create the physical feeling of that image. Then I have to feel each of you as much as possible, which isn't really in the realm of possible or not possible, it just is. Then I have to include you in that feeling image, which is as real to me in my body as what I can see with my eyes. Then I have to feel your questions or feelings about it arising in this image feeling. Then as I hear your questions and my questions, I have to While I'm talking, I have to look inside this and begin to describe its architecture.

[25:24]

Or describe its aspects. And if I really did this well, you'd begin to feel this with your own bodies without my talking much. I only have to talk a little bit because it's also physically present in the room. And it will be according to the degree of your practice. And to what extent the holy, noble woman is open in you. you'll be able to hear or feel it more. So what I've just presented is kind of basic Buddhist teaching or way of teaching. And it really means I need a lot of help from you.

[26:29]

Your concentration and your presence allows me to... Imagine if the first thing Saturday morning I'd try to do this, you wouldn't have been ready to allow me to feel it. So if from my feeling and my own interior visualization of this, And from what I'm saying, trying to hit various acupuncture points in this visualization, I can create this for you. if it has the kind of feeling the way the fertility of the garden has for the gardener that produces the flower, then this is again called a mandala.

[27:43]

And the mandala means it's presented to you or you understand it in such a way that you can hold its presence with you. Okay, you see Buddhism says most fundamentally that everything changes. But the word Dharma doesn't mean everything changes. And the word Dharma is the main word for Buddhism. And the word Dharma means to hold. So the teaching of Dharma is in a world where everything's changing, how do you hold your world?

[28:51]

And when you let go of self in the usual sense, how do you hold your world and let go of self? And the teaching of Buddhism is the meaning of existence is in existence. In your existence, so how do you study your own existence? And how do you study your existence while you're letting go of parts of your existence? So there's various teachings about at various stages how you hold your world while you let go of another part of it. So, again, the teaching at various, on all the stages of the teaching, it's attempting to create for you a kind of mandala which helps you hold your world.

[29:56]

It's not explained that way in Zen usually. You see, Zen is taught primarily as a physical apprenticeship in monastic situation. Where a certain kind of... Ideally you have a certain group of people practicing together. that within that group connections are established within that group between the teacher and the disciple and between the disciple and certain other disciples.

[31:15]

And that the relationship between the teacher and the disciple, and not all the other people in the monastery, but a certain mandalic pattern within the monastery of people who work with you in being the teacher. So the reason a teacher has several disciples is not just because he needs to have quite a few to find the right one. But it's because a teaching context needs to be created. Which requires real connections with Dharma friends as well as with your Dharma teacher. For example, there's a story where a teacher, let's say, Rika, takes you and pushes you forward to me and says, ask him a question, ask him a question.

[32:41]

And so instead of... And when you come up to ask a question, I give you about five whacks. And I say, even if you asked a thousand questions, you'll never understand. And then she says to me, what kind of teacher are you? If you do this, you're going to drive all the students away and you're so harsh, it's just no good the way you're teaching. And she says to you, you're just fine the way you are. You're just beautiful. Let's go have a coffee. Okay. What's happening here is she is making me take the role of spirit to be tough on you. And when she criticizes me, she's really praising me. Because that's just what you needed.

[34:05]

But then she's taking the role of soul and saying, you're great, it's wonderful, don't worry. And altogether it's a teaching. So you can't take it as she's criticizing the teacher or something like that. And this is sometimes called the host and guest or grasping and granting ways of teaching. grasping and granting. And it's sort of in a way like a mother and father. A single parent has a hard time disciplining a child because then they're rejecting the child. So the mother can be tough and then the father can be forgiving and the father can be tough and the mother can be forgiving.

[35:18]

This is just a simple example. So the grasping and granting way, grasping is holding on to emptiness. No, no, no eyes, no ears, no, you know. Shut up, get rid of your self-importance. Then the other side is, you're Buddha. Everything is Buddha. Everything is yes. Everything is great. That's granting way. This precious human stuff that each of you is.

[36:19]

Okay. So Zen has been developed not to be taught the way I'm teaching it. Because Zen has two sides. One is a kind of nice, simple, friendly side for large populations. To make everyone feel better with a little zazen. And then there's a kind of elitist shamanic side where it says shape up and transform and get yourself enlightened. So as I said, I define Buddhism sometimes as a large population urban shamanism. A large population. Yeah, didn't grow up in Siberian or African villages.

[37:40]

Grew up in India and China. Okay, so Zen has been taught so that in the way I'm trying to teach it to you or at least present it to you or give you some hints, has generally been taught by saying, you and I choosing a certain number of us and saying, let's go really do this for several years together. And then a daily schedule is created where we can really concentrate. And a certain pattern of interactions is created between the members, the people living or practicing together, and the teacher.

[38:42]

So that, you know, brings me to how do you guys practice together? You know, I've been coming here once a year for a while. Thanks really to the Vernies who invited me to use this room and so forth. But each year more and more it's the same people who come to the seminar. And I started out teaching in Europe very slowly, going to a few conferences and so forth. And although I was asked to do sashins from the beginning, I didn't do any for the first four years about.

[40:01]

And last year I did a sashin for the first time. And this year I'm doing three sashins. Maria Locke is more than full. The one in November at House de Silly is getting pretty close to full. And the Vienna one, there's still some space in. But I can't do probably more than two or three sessions a year in Europe in a two or three month period. The next Sashin is in Maria Laach in the Waldhaus, that is more than full. Then there is one in November in the House of Silence near Hamburg, that is also almost full. And there are still some places in Scheibs, so in Vienna at the Sashin in June. But I can't really do more than two or three Sashins a year in Europe. And I somehow feel a particular quality in the practice and in the individuals here in Zurich.

[41:05]

And I'm concentrating on the cities where I feel that the most.

[41:13]

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