So in practice, there's always a sense of whatever you think or do, whatever your insights are, you engage yourself in them. You find a way to engage yourself in them and feel that engagement is also an implication. You're mixed up in it. You're not free of it. Yeah. Is it possible to say all that? I guess. You don't want to? I do. OK. You want me to say it again? Anyway, so if I pass a card to somebody, I'm not just trying to get the card to them as quickly as possible. Now there's this story, which I've told you before, and I think it's good to repeat certain koans together.

[01:06]

Daowu and Yunyan are... Yunyan is sweeping. So Yunyan cleared. And Daowu comes by and says, hmm, too busy. And Yunyan says, you should know there is one who is not busy. Yunyan says, you should know there is one who is not busy. So Daowu seeing, as they said, a seam in the conversation, or a seam in the situation, says, oh, so there's a double moon. And Yunyan holds up the broom and says, is this a double moon? So this Dao playing with, is this a double moon, is, you know, are you saying the one who's not busy is like a permanent identity, a soul, or something like that?

[02:31]

Is there a ground of being, independent of being? And of course in Buddhism the teaching is that there is not. So the broom is the moon at the same time. So when you are doing the passing the cards, for example, the feeling is, even though it's done in a hurry, the feeling is you're also doing it and you have time, all the time in the world, and you're not busy. So I'm not just passing the card to you.

[03:45]

I'm saying, this is a sutra. Now I'm recognizing your ability to read it. If I just pass it to you this way, I'm just giving you a card. If I give it to you this way, that little extra gesture recognizes you. So the Buddhism is full of these little gestures, which are superfluous in one sense, but in this case is a way of recognizing you. This is you, Christina. Now, Laman Pang is famous for his phrase, drawing water and carrying firewood. And it's often said, Zen is carrying water and chopping firewood or something like that.

[04:53]

But people forget the first part of it. which is wonderful, subtle, marvelous activity, wondrous, mysterious power. Subtle power, mysterious activity. Subtle power and wonderful, mysterious activity. So it's not just that it's chopping firewood and carrying water, but this is also subtle power and mysterious activity. And this is the sense in Buddhism that the activity of the world, your everyday life, is the opportunity to awaken.

[05:59]

And the sense is also that all the information you need, all the opportunities you need for realization are right here in this situation. And they're in your everyday situation wherever you live. But how do you make the situations work for you? Mm-hmm. So it's not just a simple matter of being mindful, though that's of course very important. But you're mindful in a way, in this kind of practice, so that you recognize the non-duality of things.

[07:12]

So if I'm passing something to Christina, if that's my activity at this moment, I try to use that passing of whatever it is as a way to recognize our relationship. Mm-hmm. Sure. Does this also apply when I pass out the cards or only when I collect them? Oh, any time. Everything. You do. And you can pass it any way you want, but the feeling should be there of passing it to another person who's also you. Now I feel a little bit like I'm going a little bit into territory that's a little too, maybe I shouldn't talk about anymore.

[08:33]

not because there's nothing secret about it, it's just that it's... I don't want to drain the energy out of the situation by talking about it too much. Okay. Anyway, the sense of this is that if you can bring your energy into the physical situations of your physical situation, your physical activity. You open up channels in the physical world that the situations begin to teach you. Okay, and that's part of what and why I retain the Oryoki eating bowl practice.

[09:57]

Because as you get better at it and more familiar, you'll find you can... There's a kind of deep way in which you can relate to the physical world. I talked about this some in the lecture in Hamburg the other night. which is that getting into the middle skandhas of feeling, perception, and impulses, where your karma is being formed, where your karma is still at the seed level,

[11:03]

Where you can either be cooked by your karma or cook your karma. But I don't want to repeat all that, so... So in short, there's a kind of way in which you keep, in the simplest sense, keep bringing yourself back to your actual situation. And on the one hand, try not to leak in each situation. And at the same time, try to find ways to be able to express yourself fully in each situation.

[12:33]

As if all your intelligence, all your energy and all your compassion could be in each situation, no matter how ordinary and mundane it is. There's no one moment that's more important than another. So if you can keep that feeling that there's no one moment more important than another, Usually we rush by things trying to get to what's important to us. But in practice you have to keep stopping and recognizing and reminding yourself of the one who is not busy. And keep reminding yourself to engage yourself and acknowledge the way you're implicated in each situation.

[13:51]

And recognize that each situation asks for your full intelligence, compassion and energy. That's the basic view, basic attitude of Buddhism. Mindfulness and so forth are just ways and attempts to express that. Und Achtsamkeit sind nur Versuche, das auszudrücken. It means in some sense you always feel stopped. Das bedeutet in gewisser Weise, dass ihr immer den Eindruck habt, ihr seid angehalten. Each moment feels like your last moment. Und jeder Moment fühlt sich wie euer letzter Moment an. Or each moment feels like the most important moment of your life.

[14:54]

Und jeder Moment fühlt sich wie der wichtigste Moment eures Lebens an. You don't have to have a mathematical problem to solve or a great poem to read. Each situation is as fully engaging as a chess game or a mathematical problem or a poem. There's nothing lacking in any situation. I'd like you to be able to feel that with your stomach. Now this is one aspect of the kind of thing that's not taught verbally, usually taught just by the nature of the situation that the experienced practitioners and the teacher keep presenting.

[16:01]

So yesterday we were talking about shaved heads and earrings. And maybe I could add football games. Vielleicht könnte ich Fußballspiele zufügen. What's the main football every four years called? The National Cup? World Championship? World Cup? Is that what it's called in Germany? Weltmeisterschaft? Yeah, the Weltmeisterschaft. It's the only time that everybody in Europe has their eye on the ball. Every place you go, you walk down the street and everybody's watching the feet of somebody.

[17:02]

All the television sets are showing this ball. All of Europe has their eye on the ball. This in itself is an amazing event, to heck with the game. Perhaps such a event occurs because any group of people need to all have their eye on the ball. So when you do something like that, in a sense you have a highly articulated space. This last year what happened in Italy, but everybody in Europe watching it. Now this room before we came here was quite different than it is now.

[18:17]

It's quite an articulated space from when Steve and Neil first arrived and started setting it up. And they were able to visualize this from their experience in practicing and put it together. Now each of you has probably gotten quite a test to your little square meter. And when I step in between in the back to straighten his posture, you probably get quite nervous he's going to step on my Kleenex. Because I'm suddenly in your highly articulated space. Well, as a game becomes a highly articulated space that as soon as the players are in that space, they all know what to do.

[19:46]

And that articulated space can be articulated by people kicking a ball around, according to certain rules, can be so compelling that the whole world watches it. And that's of course what a city is, like Hamburg or New York is a certain kind of articulated space. But instead of watching a ball, we in Buddhism are watching our ox. And there's an ox walking around in this room.

[20:50]

In fact, 50 some oxes, and you're all watching it, though you don't know quite that you're watching it. So we can say that Da Wu goes up to Yun Yan and says, you're too busy, you're not watching your ox. And Yun Yan says, you should know there is someone watching the ox. And so Dawu says, oh, so the ox is different from you. Is this different from you? Now, if we look at a farmer's field that was once a forest, The forest isn't there.

[21:54]

But maybe there's a couple sprouts and several insects. Perhaps those several insects and the two or three sprouts are the possibility of a forest. There's a story used in Buddhism sometimes about a bird that wanted to put out a forest fire. And it kept flying to the ocean and getting its wings wet and then flying over the forest fire. And of course the forest fire didn't go out. But the bird was so persistent that it emptied the ocean. And a beautiful land appeared.

[22:54]

So that's the feeling of practice when you're in your daily life. These little sprouts, you hand somebody something across the desk, and they say, why do you turn it around? Or you have some feeling of their standing in your own body. This is tending the sick and tending the Buddha. Tending, taking care of. Taking care of the sick and taking care of the Buddha. What would be your reaction or what would you say if you sit in the restroom and you ask for a bill and the waitress doesn't come because she's too busy?

[24:31]

And you're giving the example of my getting annoyed at the waitress. Well, that's my bad habit to expect the waitress to come. And Herman, you asked a question yesterday about why do cultures not... Why do cultures educate this fourth space out of the children? What? Yeah. Well, it would be easy to say... tempting, perhaps, to say that we're afraid of that or something like that.

[25:35]

And I guess my feeling is is that It may be true that it's more convenient for parents and society to put a lot of handles on their child and their children so you can get them to do things. but that to me that looks at society too much as if it were always just selfish and I don't think so I think society and human beings are both unselfish and selfish

[26:54]

And much of our selfishness and unselfishness is taught by our culture actually. And our culture creates situations which develop us or inhibit us. So I think that really you can't have children know something if the adults don't. So I don't think the adults teach it inhibit the children or or inhibit the children because how can I say this I don't think the adults are preventing the children from knowing something if the adults themselves don't know it so I think that all of us create culture

[28:26]

So denke ich, dass wir alle Kultur hervorbringen. Das ist auch eine der Bedeutungen von Buddhismus, dass der Buddhismus einerseits eine religiöse Praxis ist und andererseits auch Kultur schafft. And the sense of this, from the Buddhist point of view, is to create a culture in which the adults know this, then they may not educate it out of the children. And I think I went too far to say all cultures do it, because actually it's not quite that simple. Okay, I think that's enough for now. Thank you very much. A little mishap the kitchen had last night about the meal. The gruel being spoiled or too spoiled to eat reminds me of the lore I used to hear from Sashin cooks.

[30:08]

Like, well, we don't have quite enough soup, so put some lentils in it and then they won't eat so much. So the little misfortune in the kitchen last night, where the crew was a bit spoiled, so that you couldn't eat anymore, reminds me of such sayings from Sashin chefs. Oh, we don't have enough there for everyone. Let's put in a few lentils. Then the people don't eat that much. Or on the third day, if you have tomato soup, you have to make an extra five gallons or something. And so forth. It's rather hard to predict when people are going to eat a lot or not, and so forth. And you're caught in the bind of not wasting food is one rule of Sesshin. And the other is making sure always people have more than enough.

[31:11]

I'm surprised you're not a nervous wreck, Mark. And then Frank came up yesterday and said, I know that you want people to, only people who participate in the Sashin to do the cooking. So I'm willing to come to one period of zazen in a lecture when they need help in the kitchen. So he's there right now, so after we can ask him to cook. But I consider them participants anyway.

[32:19]

I want to know how you guys are doing sitting on chairs. OK? Anybody else want a chair? I think if I had a bum leg, I would also sit on a chair and sashi. A bum leg? If I was a gimp. No, bum leg means your leg doesn't work or something. Sorry. Sorry. But I've sat in chairs at various times and it's not the same as sitting on the floor.

[33:25]

There's a quality of going into zazen which is similar to going to sleep. In German you say, you go in to sleep. We say we fall to sleep or go to sleep. Well, there's a, like, if you spend all night long lying in bed, You'd get some rest, but if you didn't actually go to sleep, you wouldn't feel rested the next day. It's funny, you know, if you go to sleep even for an hour or two, you'll feel more rested than if you lie down for three or four or five hours.

[34:43]

So this going... over into sleep is quite similar to going over into zazen, again as we say, where knowledge doesn't reach. So in a chair it's quite difficult to go into zazen in that sense. You might fall off the chair. Fall off the chair? Could you do it at the same time?

[35:56]

Maybe we have to strap some... Because your muscles have to have a certain kind of alertness to sit in a chair that keeps you in a certain state of mind. So in a way, you could say that, in fact, there's a koan that's sort of about this, which implies that you should study that state of mind just before you go to sleep to know how to enter zazen. In other words, how do you go, as this koan says, where knowledge doesn't reach? When you go to sleep, ordinary knowledge doesn't reach into sleep. And your ordinary knowledge can't reach into zazen.

[37:19]

Now sometimes you'll find in zazen that it may happen even when you're most tired or you're kind of given up, a kind of clarity will appear in your posture or in your mind. A certain kind of humility is necessary to know this life of ours. And that humility sometimes arises when you feel crushed or given up or like you've failed. Or in Sashin on the third or fourth day you may feel peace, you know, and then something, some other awareness occurs. And part of practice is actually to come to know that, like you know that little turn when you go to sleep, and you know that little turn when you go into zazen, you come to know the turn where you normally would feel crushed or defeated, but it's just actually another way of perceiving.

[38:55]

Shall I do it again? As you know the turn as you go to sleep or know the turn as you go into zazen. You know the turn where you feel crushed or defeated and yet some other kind of vulnerability and awareness appears. And you don't connect that anymore with feeling defeated. It's just another way of being, of perceiving. Ulrike mentioned to me the other day that translating the lectures during Sashin is more difficult than the lectures like the Hamburg lecture the other day that was a public lecture.

[40:08]

And she says, you can explain it better than me, but that there's a, the kind of mind that goes into zazen has a harder time translating than the kind of mind that's present in public lecture. And I'm struggling right now with how to resolve something. I want to practice with you in a certain way, and I can't exactly figure out how to do it. And you saw that yesterday with my struggling to figure out how to say certain things. And as a teacher and your friend, I want to share my own inabilities with you as well as what I might know about Zen practice.

[41:32]

Hmm. I mean, Suzuki Roshi's dream was, when he came to America, was to found a lay practice, basically. He didn't mind us being ordained, but basically wanted a lay practice. Suzuki Roshi's dream, when he came to America, was to found a lay practice. He wasn't against ordaining people, but basically he wanted a lay practice. And this is the case here in Europe. You see, if you go back in Indian history quite a way, way back, they had the idea that the world was born from a golden egg or something like that.

[42:52]

And later they got, they anthropomorphized these things into names like Brahma and so forth were the creators. And that... Then they said that Brahma was born from a golden egg. And so forth. And what Buddhism did is took these kinds of ideas and took the... And they inherited to some extent the Hindu idea of a universe which was like a self, a big self.

[43:54]

And they tried to change these ideas over time to match with their experience from meditation and to match with what they understood. We're learning from the views of the Buddha and the teachings of Buddha. And one idea was that this sense of a creation at the beginning was moved up to be always in the present. Buddhism developed phrases which occur very commonly in ceremonies where you say, from beginningless time. In Buddhism there's no a priori. So in Buddhism there's no beginning creation moment.

[45:02]

Creation is here. And this The idea of a golden egg, it got shifted into the idea of a womb embryo present now. And when we even chant, now we open the Buddha Tathagata's eating bowls. This relationship of the eating bowls to the Tathagata is relating it to the Tathagata Garbha as this eating bowls is a little act of creation.

[46:05]

Now I may want to talk about the idea of the Tathagata Garbha, which is also a way of talking about Buddha nature. Do you have a Buddha nature? What is Buddha nature? Etc. Maybe I should talk about that in this session. And since several of you are making such a great effort to translate the Heart Sutra into German, I would also like to talk a little bit, one or two lectures on the Heart Sutra. But in any case, whether I can do that in the Sashin or not, still you face the problem as meditators, as practicers of Buddhism, is how do you bring your experiences of meditation into your daily life?

[47:22]

And how do you bring some idea like this, each moment is an act of continuous creation into your daily lives, at your office or wherever you work. Let's call all of your workplaces an office. Now, I sat with Steve for a moment this morning when he was teaching Ruth how to do the service. And I pointed out that we generally hit the mokugyo with a little bit of a circular motion like this, you know.

[48:59]

And Steve mentioned we also hit the bell that way with a kind of circular motion, which as he says releases the sound. And whenever I say something like that, you know, you do it this way, or you hit the bell this way, which I could have said as well as Steve, I wince a little. Do you have the word wince? Yeah, you kind of feel unpleasant. Yeah, something like that. And the reason partly is that Really the power of learning these things, finding out these things, is seeing it in the language in which it occurs, which is a language of physical acts, and not to see it through it being pointed out.

[50:14]

And when it's put into language, you often, by it being carried into language, the language stops it and takes its power away. For example, the first day I met with you, the evening when we had the general instruction, I had to talk about certain things and joke about things, you know. I couldn't talk about what I'm talking about now. And there are things that I can talk about now that I couldn't talk about then, but there's also things I can't talk about now for similar reasons. And there's things that you need to talk about with yourself that you can only talk about in Sashin sometimes, for instance.

[51:47]

I said last night something like this immediate situation requires all your respect, intelligence, compassion, energy. Now, is that any different from saying, be here now? In some ways it's no different from saying, be here now. But that's also like, say, you fill a room with wheat and a little salt and butter and some other things.

[53:15]

Then you bring somebody like me who doesn't know how to bake into it and say, be here now. Everything that can be made from wheat, all breads and so forth, cookies, all the forms of bread, everything you need is there to make every form of bread. But if you don't know how to cook, be here now doesn't help very much. All you've got is a bunch of hard grain. Mm-hmm. So you have to know how to cook your situation, how to cook, be here now.

[54:20]

If you want to know yourself, you have to have the capacity to know yourself. No, dear. Now, I'll try once more to say something about these gestures like passing the card. I think a dancer would know that a certain I'm not a dancer but I've been known to go to a disco now not as often as I used to but you don't have to translate that I'd like to get as holy as the Dalai Lama in a disco see if we

[55:38]

I got Suzuki Roshi to dance one. He was quite good. He got a lamp shade and held a light bulb and he flashed it one of the early light shows in the 60s. But I think, I'm imagining that a dancer would require a certain state of mind to produce certain movements. But I suspect the emphasis in dance would be to create the state of mind that allows the movement. And in Buddhism, it's the direction as the opposite.

[56:53]

You create the movement or the posture for the purpose of creating the state of mind. Now, what you're doing when you're practicing and you go into zazen, and you go into the narrow band of thoughts we exist in usually, And sometimes you break out of that narrow band of thoughts and you feel yourself in a different way.

[57:57]

And whenever you do that, you're beginning to create interior space. Now I don't like words like inside and outside, but provisionally I will use a distinction between interior space and exterior space. And our culture doesn't emphasize much creation of interior space. And when we do define the interior, we generally define ourselves from outside in. And Buddhism emphasis is more to define yourself from inside out. I think Xuanzhi asked the question, what world will you put your body and mind into? Now that's I think a peculiar question for most people because you don't think you have that much choice.

[59:27]

What world will you put your body and mind into? So in practicing zazen again, you're creating interior space. And you may begin to notice, as I said, that when you feel crushed or defeated or giving up or kind of shitty, sometimes there's another kind of consciousness that appears out of the stuff, the mess. And then sometimes in such a situation, if you can suddenly feel the structure of your breath in your body, again, as if you had a breath body,

[60:28]

your karma or what's coming up takes on a different kind of clarity or strength. Okay, I mean, let's try to say, say that you open a letter and it's bad news, terrible news. If you have created interior space, you can let that information come into you. And simply notice how it affects everything. you can notice the associations that come up and through your practice of knowing and being able to traverse the five skandhas you can just feel it without thinking about it

[62:04]

Or you can just name it and identify it and hold it in your body. Anyway, the first thing you may just let yourself on quite a few levels absorb it. and you let yourself absorb the whole thing on many different levels. I could give you various examples, more examples of sheaths, like a knife sheath, sheaths of energy or different levels of energy in your body.

[63:16]

But if I do that, the reason is only not to explain something, but to resonate with things you already know. See, now some forms of meditation practice give you lots of training in specific things. It's rather more programmed than Zen practice, and you learn various territories to explore. Now, Zen practice is similar, except that it tends to be quite unprogrammed, but the exploration is similar, but you do it more on your own. If you practice a long time, it's almost an endless number of times where

[64:26]

something will occur you've overlooked before, and you'll begin to notice, notice something that happens that you've not noticed before, and a whole kind of interior territory opens up from it. Now let's go back to this letter with the disturbing news. after absorbing it in your feelings and thinking and in your body and so forth you suddenly at one point find yourself breathing into it in general you don't though you can initiate it it initiates itself for some reason begins to find its own territory within you.

[65:46]

And suddenly you see this bad news as an opportunity. Now people can say to you, oh, this is, you know, everything's bad is good and so forth. But to actually feel it as an opportunity is different than knowing, oh, something bad should be an opportunity. It opens up like a landscape. Or you can feel a kind of strength appearing in this bad news or in some memory that at first is disturbing and then you find a kind of strength or light appearing in this memory.

[66:52]

These are just examples of, I think for Zen practitioners, of a developing interior space. Now, these are all would fall into the preparatory stage of practice. Now, as you create more interior space, this interior space, you need to begin to join with exterior space.

[68:31]

That's again why your everyday life as a layperson and why Mahayana Buddhism emphasizes everyday life so much You're not trying to create a special way of life that you live in and protect that special way of life. Yeah, you're trying to get familiar with yourself, intimate with yourself in terms of this interior space. And then to find ways in which this interior space meets with, resonates with, joins with exterior space. Thank you. That's one thing this Buddha is trying to demonstrate, this bodhisattva.

[69:34]

And it's interesting you see that he, she has put her hand here in front of her chest. And she's relating her hand to her body. Now It's characteristic of, and usually not taught explicitly as I'm doing it, to relate your gestures to your body. And again, I can use the Oyoki as an example. If I'm putting the... Well, it's too complicated to try to remind. If I take something, I'm either pushing it out from my body.

[71:09]

I'm not just putting it out there. I'm pushing it out from my body. Or I'm pulling it into my body. And if you know anything about Japanese, and I don't know about Chinese, but Japanese tools, you pull them into the body. The saws pull in toward you. The planes move toward you. You don't plane away, you plane into your body. These tools and this way of working arises out of a yoga culture. Which relates everything always to the body.

[72:16]

I mean in the sense if I'm passing you the card, my body is passing you the card. I got a letter from my sweet daughter the other day. who's 28, older than some of you, I think, and who lives in Portugal. And she's a painter. And the Portuguese painter who she works with or sort of half studies with gave her some advice the other day. He said to her you should paint all physical objects as if they had a soul, as if they had a being. And you should paint all human beings as if they were things.

[73:34]

I think that's very good advice. It would be a kind of Portuguese Buddhist advice. So this gesture of cutting illusions delusions is an outward gesture. And this gesture of which the flower arises with the sutra on it is an inner gesture and related to the jewel that's here and related to the chakra that's here. So in general, again, movements are away, toward, or in a circle, and return to the body. Okay.

[74:35]

And this is actually pretty general cultural knowledge in Asian countries. People are not conscious of it as Buddhists are, but they just do it because it's part of the culture. So, like when you take the... When you pick something up, you generally move it into the field of your body and then you put it down. You just don't move it from here to here. You move it into the field of your body and then you put it down. Gosh, should I tell you these crazy things? Because I can just see you at your office, wherever it is, sort of, somebody hands you a thing.

[76:00]

And I mean, these differences are so powerful. If Milton Erickson, for instance, was able to walk into an auditorium and hypnotize an entire audience. Because he could move his interior space right into the whole audience. And just generally done by talking about something that seems irrelevant and you keep repeating something else. And if you don't have much interior space, you are very susceptible to such suggestions. Now this is also, you know, this is also just a capacity of human beings to develop rapport with each other.

[77:28]

And it's part of Buddha's teaching between the teacher and the apprentice and between the other apprentices to know how to create a rapport which allows certain teachings to occur. And we're all in effect doing this by sitting all sitting together and following the schedule together. And now Westerners immediately have the sense that you're gonna be manipulated by these things or it's some sort of con game, et cetera. But it's not a con game.

[78:40]

It might be a consciousness game, but it's not a game if it's awareness. Now, again, you know I'm making a distinction which is familiar to most of you between consciousness and awareness. And when your body opens up Often when it has this sort of feeling crushed or defeated, awareness comes up in your body. Or when you begin to see outside the narrow band of thoughts that you usually identify with, And you begin to feel the background of your mind, not just the foreground, awareness arises. Now, what you look for in a student is when they are no longer identifying with the cohesive stream of thoughts.

[80:03]

And what you see in them is their consistency, their continuity is at the level of awareness, not thoughts. Maybe I should stop or maybe we should take a break or maybe we should go for a walk. Let me see what time it is. Well, not too bad. How are you doing? Good. Happy birthday. I promised I wouldn't tell.

[81:10]

I told her earlier that I told Neil, and that as I came in and we finished the chant, now we'll listen to the Thagata's words or whatever it is, everyone is going to burst into happy birthday. And she said, no. Okay. Okay. You know, one tradition of giving Zen lectures is to give them so long that people get so exhausted that pretty soon they're hearing with their third ear. You know, so I'll stop in a moment. Now, again, in this sense of the Thagatagarbha as each moment is...

[82:19]

as Nanchuan says, a singular transcending road, the singular transcending road, singular transcending road, that can't be transmitted by a thousand sages. This is a statement in a koan in response to someone who says to Nanchuan, Heaven, earth and I are the same root. Myriad things and I are the same body. And Nanchuan points to a flower and said, people these days see this flower as if it were in a dream.

[83:51]

This is a pretty well-known koan from the Blue Cliff Records. Mm-hmm. So here is the sense of the womb embryo, tathagatagarbha. Heaven, earth, and I are the same root. The myriad things and I are the same body. Now in this way of viewing the world, the world as Robert Bly in a book tries to express it called Iron John, has a kind of consciousness that's not our usual kind of consciousness, but it's not dead.

[84:55]

This same Daowu I talked about yesterday, Daowu and Yunyan in the sweeping, Went to pay a condolence call to a family where someone had died. And when they went in, he was with a sort of disciple named Yuan. And Yuan tapped the coffin. He said, alive or dead? Not good? That's a good question. Most of you wouldn't think of asking it. Alive or dead?

[86:18]

And Daud said, I won't say. So he said, well, why won't you say? And Daud said, I won't say. So they started walking after they left this house. They started walking back to the temple. And Yuan said again, if you don't, why won't you say? If you don't, won't tell me, I'll hit you. So Da Hu said, I won't say, so he hit him. These guys were serious about these questions. And later, after Dao died, he went to another teacher and told him the same story. I think his name was Xuan.

[87:23]

And Xuan said, in response to the story, he said, I won't say, I won't say. And at this point, Yuan, of course, was enlightened. And at this point, Yuan was enlightened. It took a few years. But this world we live in isn't quite alive or dead. Maybe we could say it's sort of like an ocean. And each thing you see is like a piece of cloth maybe that floats to the surface of the ocean. And when you look at it with your usual eyes, you just see this piece of cloth floating on the ocean. But when you look at it with the eyes where knowledge doesn't reach, you see the whole ocean. And the sense of this heaven, earth and I are the same root.

[88:38]

And the myriad things and I are one body. And that we usually see this as a dream. And the same koan describes it again as the singular transcending road that can't be transmitted by a thousand sages. So I'm wasting my time here. Plus I'm not a sage. But it starts right here. And you have to enter it. No one can transmit it for you. If you can begin to see the world where knowledge doesn't reach, that's maybe a good way to say it.

[90:00]

Then the things that float, this has floated up to me, the microphones floated, the Buddha has floated, you've floated up. And sometimes we think of it as simultaneity or chance. But the more you can recognize myriad things and you are one body, the world floats up to you and you float in it in different ways. If you want to be complete you have to complete everything you do. I'd like to be a complete person but you don't do anything completely. So part of this yogic knowledge that's like in the orioke bowls is you do each thing with a feeling of completion.

[91:11]

Now, if I lift my hand up and put it back down, That's not complete. It's nothing. That's not complete or not complete. But I've done it so it feels complete. Do you understand? And you try to do each thing so you begin to have the feeling of completion on something. So, complete. Complete. And if you get in the habit of doing that, after a while you feel complete. It's real simple.

[92:26]

So if you want to know that the world and you are one body, it's not the only truth, but to know that truth, You have to find a way that in each action you feel that the world and you are one body. This is actually what's meant by the practice of Buddha Nietzsche. And that is what is meant by the practice of Buddha Nature.

[93:20]

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