I've been practicing Zen for quite a while and I often wonder what I'm doing. And recently I was in Germany in a pension and there were various folks there and I'm sitting having my breakfast and reading some books. and wondering, what am I doing? You know, the emphasis in Zen is we're just like everyone else or not different. And yet I'm sitting there with books and I've just finished meditating. What am I doing that's different or what is Buddhist practice? Now, when I was just introduced Veggie said I was in the Soto Zen school. And technically, I suppose that's correct.

[01:05]

But both Suzuki Roshi and myself really think of our, thought of ourselves, and I think of myself, as practicing Buddhism. And Zen comes, yes, I'm practicing the emphasis of Zen. And I'm interested in Zen independent of whether it's Soto or Rinzai. Now, I just drove in from the mountains. And from seeing my grandson, I have a grandson who's nine months, no, 11 months old. And I've been playing with him the last couple of days, getting to know him.

[02:08]

He lives in Portugal, usually. And someone told me they saw a bumper sticker which said, ask me about my grandchild. So I thought maybe I should tell you about my grandchild. Anyway, he's a little guy and he's very inquisitive and he's doing shouts and hollers and raises his arm, does all those things, you know. And I wonder, what is he doing? What's he doing that's got to do with Zen Buddhism or meditation or all those things? Now, I just walked in here. And if Zen is not a theology, if Buddhism is not, especially the emphasis in Zen, is there's nothing outside this system.

[03:17]

There's no gods or creators. And if there's nothing outside this system, then there's just this moment. And that sounds very Zen to say that there's just this moment. And my little grandson, he's very much in the moment. But if we look at this If Zen is only this moment or what we have is this moment, right now we have this moment together. What is this moment? How do we, we have the problem of how does the eye see the eye? How do we see, how do we observe what we're doing? Now, my little grandson, his name is, you know, in Europe, you can't be Tara Molly Moonbeam, which was the hippie name of a little kid I knew once.

[04:30]

Their last name was Beam, and they named their kid Tara Molly Moonbeam. But anyway, in Europe, you can't do that. There's only certain authorized names. So they tried to choose a name close to an American name, and they came up with P-O-M-A-S Thomas, but it's pronounced too much. So this little kid has some moment And Sukhya used to say, you hear your own sound when I'm hearing something. When you're hearing me, you're hearing your own sound. But you're hearing something you've learned. But if you're practicing Zen, you're hearing something you've studied.

[05:35]

Now, so I asked myself, looking at this little boy, is there some way in which what he is doing is already Zen or not Zen, or can I relate to him in some kind of Zen Buddhist way? When my daughters were a little older, I would, you know, they'd come in and they'd say to me something like, Dad, it's raining out. And I'd say, what's raining out? And they'd say, it's raining out. And I'd say, oh, it is. Would you go out and get me that it? And they'd say, oh, dad, quit being so zen. All right, rain is raining. But there's so much that is implied in our language that something's outside the system doing this. It's raining or something is doing us. Now, you know, in Japan, in the traditional

[06:49]

society, if you ask a Japanese person, I'm building a wood joinery building at Crestone right now, and there's not a clear outside-inside distinction. And if you ask a person, a Japanese person who lived in a traditional house, um, um, Jesus, cold in here, don't you heat your house? And they'd say, well, They might say, if they thought the way we do, well, I'm not, why should I heat the house? The house isn't cold. My body is cold, so they heat your body. And they have all kinds of techniques for heating your body. They'll about you with your hands, a heater under the table, a hot bath to go into, and so forth. Now, what I'm trying to do here and what I'll try to do during this seminar this weekend is, you know, one thing that I think is happening in Buddhism in the West is we can't talk about Buddhism with each other unless we find some similarity or some way in which there's a resonance.

[08:01]

But when we find some similarities, experiential or philosophical, I think there's a tendency for us to build on the similarities, so we sort of build Buddhism into some kind of Western construction with one of the doors facing Asia. And we have to find the similarities, that's absolutely true, but we don't want to forget the differences. Because it's through the resonances and similarities and differences that we will, I think, be able to create a Buddhism that's neither Asian nor Western. Some adventure. I feel this is, you know, what I'm doing, I'd say, a great adventure of this age. Anyway, I find it so.

[09:07]

Now, another little incident, an anecdote. I was in Hamburg a while ago on a bank holiday, and there's a lot of bank holidays in Germany. And people were pushing strollers and prams about with kids. And what I noticed was, I don't know what, something I've noticed before, but what really, why it struck me that day, but I guess I saw a number of parents doing the same thing. is when the baby was young enough, was so young it was not yet speaking in sentences or hearing in sentences, the parents, if it started to cry or fuss, as kids do, parents pick it up or lean their body toward it or cooed, you know, things like that. As soon as the kid could speak in sentences or hear sentences, The parents kind of stiffened their body and said, keep quiet.

[10:18]

You're disturbing people and so forth. And they just talked to the kid and told it to start behaving a certain way. And the child could fuss or cry for 10 or 20 minutes, and the parents kept this stance of telling the child what to do. Now, language is sure effective, and even little Kumash, as soon as he learns some gesture like, you know, you want your Kenji, well, boy, you jump right up, and you know what he means, and he does it. When he learns language, it's so effective. It's going to dominate what he does. But the way the parents were speaking to these kids, and the pattern was quite clear. I mean, if there was an older boy and a younger boy, say, in the same family, the older boy had been told to stop crying, and the younger boy or girl was, if they were, again, pre-sentenced, they...

[11:24]

they were immediately picked up. It must have made the older boy or girl feel pretty pissed off because, you know, this little kid got all the attention and they were crying just as, I mean, even louder. And I realized it must be a, not just Western or Asian, it's, you know, it's what human beings do, but it must be a cultural command. It was so clear the parents made this break. It must have been the culture speaking through the parents, saying, now you are going to respond through language. This sure changes the relationship to the parents, almost makes the parents partially institutions, part of society. But what I think is probably most dramatic is it makes the child, I think, start talking to itself.

[12:31]

And loses, I think, gains a complexity, but loses a subtlety. Now, if we say again that all we got is this moment. Okay, here's this moment. You've got one, I've got one. But what is this moment? I mean, if we try to take an inventory of it, well, I'm sitting here and I'm speaking and I'm hearing an echo. So all of that is part of this moment. So if I take an inventory, let's say at least there's form. So in addition to this moment, there is... the form of my sitting here, the form of my speaking. And let's say if we want to be inclusive and philosophical, let's say then there's form and the absence of form or emptiness.

[13:41]

Because we're not sure that our category form includes everything, so let's make a category which we can call Traditionally, right now, empty. So what I'm trying to do here is look at Zen Buddhism or look at Buddhism starting with just this moment. Where do we start from if we don't have an outside system? What is this moment? Or how do we discover this moment? Again, how does the eye see the eye? I mean, say that you were given the task of producing Buddhism on your own. Well, already it's impossible without teaching, and teaching is compassion. Teaching is our relationship with people.

[14:43]

Already what I've been talking about is teaching. If I sit down here and say, what is this moment? This is teaching. I mean, as soon as we're observing something together, this is a cultural artifact or teaching or wisdom. So there's some kind of form here. And how do I study this form? And if I watch, again, my grandson, Tumash, what form is he exhibiting? Now, if one of you had a tomato and you threw it at me, or gently threw it at me, I should catch it. That would be, you know, I'd better catch it.

[15:46]

So, clearly, if you throw something to me, you're out there and you've thrown something to me and I catch it. And that necessity to see something I, you know, we have to emphasize in practice, to see that the outside world is there and our senses have to tell us it's there. But the problem is, the sense is very effectively, let me drive the car here. Let me catch something if you hand it to me. And it gives me a sense that there's an outside. But the question then is, do I develop myself or identify with that outside? Or do I identify with actually what I'm hearing when I'm hearing my voice and you're hearing my voice, is you're hearing my voice, but you're also hearing your own sound.

[17:02]

You're more hearing your own sound than you're hearing my voice. This is, you know, straight Buddhism. Kompo Buddhism. Practice is to remind yourself of that until whenever you hear anything or see anything, you know you're hearing and seeing yourself. This is called also the meeting of the three. There's the, you know, all right. Here's this glass. That's an object. My hand is the sensor. perception and that's one and that's two and a feeling of coldness in a certain way it affects my state of mind occurs that's the third that meeting of the three to always be aware of the nourishment and the non-duality of the meeting of the three right now we're in the midst of the meeting of the three this is a kind of technical buddhist term

[18:09]

And the more you feel that... You know, sometimes Buddha is called omniscient, meaning all knowing, as if it meant all knowledge. But for practice it means more to be in a continuous state of always knowing. And the more you have that feeling of this, we can use as a technical phrase now, the meeting of the three, the more you have that sense of the meeting of the three, I mean, it's almost like I feel this going down here and up over you and around you and back. There's a texture because always this meeting is occurring if I'm actually perceiving and knowing I'm perceiving. So I'm not only seeing the contents of my mind, I'm seeing my mind itself. Because when I look at you, looking at you points toward you, but it also points toward the mind that arises through seeing me.

[19:20]

Do you understand? Every word you hear points at the mind and it points at what it described. So we kind of swim in this... this meeting. And the more you are in this meeting, which is also called nonduality, you have a sense that what you know or what you see or hear is known. So you begin to have, the more you develop the habit, and this is just a practice, you can keep reminding yourself, the more you have this habit You have a sense of continuous nourishment in what you're doing. Continuous sense of being known and knowing.

[20:20]

Now, we make a distinction between, again, inside and outside. They asked little kids what thinking is for or what the mind is for. And kids said, well, for thinking, et cetera, and for keeping secrets. Because one thing we recognize if you, you know, right away is that I can't really know what you're thinking all the time. I can have some sense and you can't know what I'm thinking all the time. So the mind is a way of keeping secrets or having an area that's interior. And these little kids in Hamburg as they grow up or in any city, anywhere, beginning to talk to themselves, they think that interior consciousness, that interior talking to yourself is some kind of inner consciousness because it can be secret. But in Buddhism that doesn't mean, that's not inner consciousness.

[21:26]

That's just borrowed consciousness. That's a kind of exteriorized consciousness that you pay attention to, but it's based on outside perception. It's based on, it's created through looking at the world from the outside and seeing it inside. I don't know if that makes sense, but it, anyway, it's an outside brought in. Now I remember again, going back to Fikiroshi, he said, there's no outside. And I think if if I if I if I conceptually feel that There's an outside and inside. And there's an outside to my grandson, Tumash.

[22:32]

There's an outside between us and an inside, inside him. If I have that view, which is common, I will, whether he speaks sentences or speaks anything, I'll be reinforcing that all the time. But let's imagine that he does not yet think in terms of outside and inside. Maybe he feels he loves doors and things. I think he's going to be an engineer. But he beelines it to every door he can find, opens it, shuts it. And if he can't quite shut it, he gets his leg, and he leverages, and he pushes, and he gets his bottom on something, he pushes. Then once he got it closed, he When he's doing all this stuff, maybe he feels there's some kind of radiant, crystalline field around him that he's reaching into. I mean, in meditation, if you meditate, don't you sometimes lose a sense of boundary?

[23:42]

You don't know where your hands are and so forth. Of course, when you don't know where your hands are, Sometimes your legs, particularly if they're numb and asleep. Sometimes your whole body disappears. Now, has your whole body disappeared? Feels like it. Of course your whole body hasn't disappeared. Well, anyway, and somebody sitting across the meditation hall still sees you sitting there. So what's disappeared? I would say, trying to be technical, the object-bearing continuum disappeared. In other words, that continuum of mind, which can support objects, disappeared. So you can now perceive through a non-object-bearing continuum, which doesn't support object, but you still see everything.

[24:50]

Everything is actually quite bright and clear. So it's possible, so there's a phrase in Zen, among myriad appearances in the 10,000 objects, something like that, there is not a single thing. Now, what does it mean, there is not? This is a very accurate statement. It means when you're in that state of mind, which is a non-object-bearing continuum, You cannot say there's a single thing. Now, if I feel that, and can feel that in my body and mind, maybe too much feels left. Because there's an incredible entrainment going on all the time. Between child and mother, but also between child and granddad maybe.

[25:55]

I don't know if I feel like a granddad, but it's fun to play with this little kid. So my guess is that if I played with him a lot, he would start feeling that he's reaching out into an inside of which there's no outside. So what I'm trying to point out by using this grandchild is that learning starts right away. We can't say that there's this moment. If you're sitting in your moment and you think there's an outside and inside, that's very different from sitting in this moment and thinking it's all inside. So there's no way to be free from teaching.

[26:56]

It starts instantly. And teaching is difficult. You know, Robert Bly has a new book out, I think, called Sibling Culture, something like that. He says, in sibling culture, you don't want anybody above you and you dismiss everyone below you. And I think that's characteristic of a lot of our democratic equality tendency. And it makes it hard to study and to learn and to practice. And one of the ways to practice with the idea of a Buddha is to practice with a sense that your perception is coarser than the Buddha's. It may be finer than it was two years ago. I mean, maybe I can look at you now and I can say, geez, it feels quite clear to see you.

[28:01]

And I see you more clearly and with more ease than I would have five years ago or ten years ago. And I can feel some maybe gratitude for that. but I don't pay much attention to that. What interests me more is I also imagine that this perception of clarity is less fine than it could be if I were the Buddha. And I don't, when I say that to myself, I'm not putting myself down. I feel drawn into that greater clarity by perceiving that, sensing that my state of mind is less fine, refined than the Buddha. Now we could say that Form is a bridge, or form is movement.

[29:17]

If everything is changing, one of the basics of Buddhism, everything's changing, absolutely everything's changing. And Dharma means what holds, what holds for a moment. So, one of the ways we can hold a mirror up to this moment is through posture. And we could say maybe that dharma is a bridge and karma is a ditch. Karma is a word for form that leads to samsara. And dharma, the word for form that leads to nirvana. And each moment, I mean a dharma is, if I were to define it in practice terms as usual, I would say a dharma is that unit of experience in which you feel complete and nourished.

[30:30]

So if you have a sense of each moment having a sense of completeness or of nourishment, then I would say, in practice term, you're experiencing a dharma. And that experience can be present in anything you bring your attention to. And attention is this alchemy, this vital force of attention and intention that you bring to your backbone, to your breath, and so forth. If you do this, you bring your attention. You have an intention to bring your attention to some part of your body. This immediately is teaching. This immediately is form. We have this moment, but I've divided this moment up into intention, attention, and the object of which I'm directing the attention to. And you're brewing an alchemical soup every time you shift that.

[31:33]

So you are a participant in this moment which has actually a very wide inventory. Everything you sense, everything you think. And yogic, I mean, Buddhism is a response to Indian yogic culture or a development out of Indian yogic culture. Zen is the Chinese way of making Indian Buddhism its own. And if everything is changing, then movement itself is a kind of chain. So if you take a posture, this is a posture. I'm sitting in a posture.

[32:38]

And the posture is made up of many parts. My backbone, back of my neck, how my heel feels in relationship to how it's flexed so energy goes up my leg and into my back and so forth. And if I change my right heel or change my left heel, I change my whole body. So already this inventory of this moment also includes how I flex the left heel instead of the right heel. And energetically, then it's already quite different. So each one definition of yoga is a movement that goes from a less developed place or lower place to a more developed place or a higher place. And it's a kind of bridge. Now you may change where it lands. while you're in the middle of it. But in each dharma, a dharma is a moment where you can stop.

[33:40]

It looks like everything's continuous, but there's a feeling of being stopped. Like a wave, when a wave is making, when the water's making a wave. Why, how it's making the wave is because the water wants to return to stillness. So sometimes the lake is still in the afternoon, sometimes it's rough in the morning, sometimes we do meditation so that later in the day we'll find a period of calmness. This is a natural way to practice, but Zen practice is to find that stillness that makes the wave return. If a wave didn't want to be still, it would just disperse, the water would fly all over the place. The shape of the wave is determined mathematically by its desire for strength. And our mind is like that.

[34:42]

So even in the midst of activity, there's a stillness of the wave. So that's the sense that a posture, a yogic posture, is a posture which allows you to feel that stillness in the middle of activity. We could say a karmic posture would be that posture which doesn't let you, which blocks that feeling of stillness and makes you feel more unnourished, more raveled, more whatever. That's why I said karma is a ditch and dharma is a bridge. A bridge you can stop and enjoy the view and continue. There's always, even if you're stopped, there's the next moment.

[35:48]

So one of the ways we study ourselves is through posture, because your body is a handle on emptiness, or your body is the physicality of the world is in a way the way you take hold of the mind. I mean, that's a basic yogic idea, that all mental phenomena has a physical component and all physical phenomena has a mental component. And the easiest way to Study the mind and emptiness is through the body. So it's almost like the body is a mirror handle. And the posture, having a sense of the posture, of posture, why Zen emphasizes posture so much, allows you to begin to study this moment and this mind. And perhaps we can say knowing the difference between a yogic posture and a dharmic posture and a karmic posture.

[37:08]

Karma is a kind of wiring diagram. To be aware that each moment is a kind of wiring diagram from actions in the past and also generating. It both carries the current from the past and generates And how you are in that wiring diagram and how you discover that posture which, as I said, nourishes you or makes you feel complete or brings you with a sense from a lower place to a higher place. Now another posture, or mental posture, and mental postures are attitude, view, breath. And what attitudes you have, I mean, for instance, if Tumash has a feeling that only inside, this is a mental posture, we could call it.

[38:20]

So one aspect of Zen practice, which is pretty much unique to Zen practice, is the use of phrases. Whatever phrase you have, however you describe yourself, you let those words, not as thinking, not as syntactical stuff, but as reports from the frontier of your meditation. I mean, all thoughts are not thinking. If you're sitting and you feel, God, it's warm, this is not really thinking. This is just a report. You could just feel warm. You wouldn't have to think you're warm. So the idea of language in Zen is to return a word to its source. It means the word forms enough for you to notice something or direct some intention or attention through the word, and then the word dissolves again. And it doesn't go into this thinking that produces a conceptual discursive mind.

[39:25]

So one posture to study this moment is your physical posture and all the nuances of those physical postures. Another is your mental postures, which for the most part initially are language. Certain phrases come to you. Now let's go back to the tomato. You've thrown this tomato to me. I, like too much, have realized how effective it is and necessary it is to see all of this happening as externalized. And unless somebody teaches me otherwise or shows me otherwise, I start working on who I am as if it were all out there. As if I was a tomato. instead of recognizing that I'm the perceiver of the tomato.

[40:31]

And so one practice, the sense of Zen practice, is to remind yourself of that until you are always working inwardly. And boy, energetically it's real different. If you're not working on who you are outwardly, And you know, I mean, you still catch tomatoes, you drive cars and all that stuff, but your work is, your work at discovering the world is inward. It's almost like your energy is all flowing inside of you and when it comes out or spreads out, it doesn't leak. And this is sometimes characterized in Zen and other characteristics in practice as hara, power. So when I hear you cough, cough again, it's loud, not everybody heard it.

[41:38]

Here, it can be amplified. When I hear you cough, I hear my own sound, but even more subtly, I hear my hara, I hear my vitality. So, what I've tried to do here is just speak about Buddhism in a kind of mosaic related to this moment and how you and I might identify this moment and study this moment, take an inventory of this moment. Again, with the... seeing the problem of how does the eye see the eye, how does the mind see the eye, the body know the body,

[42:42]

and discovering how to use language in a practice sense, and discovering how to use your posture. Because that's all you've got. You've only got this form. I mean, if there's nothing outside this, all you've got is what you can notice, or what's here. form and emptiness and the more you notice the form the more the boundaries of that form dissolve and you begin or extend you begin to have a sense real sense that it is form and emptiness emptiness and form and that arises from the teachings that simple teaching really that allow you to notice how you exist at this moment what is this moment

[43:46]

For example, it's understandable that this right now is a completely unique event and non-repeatable. This moment will never occur again. With this group of people, with me, even if we take a break and I come back, it's going to be different. That's no big deal to say that. But do you view it? How do you... I mean, because everything about... ...in presence of absolute uniqueness and non-repeatability is actually quite hard to be present in, and you cannot think about it. The nature of horror is that you can't be... think about it or be proud of it exactly because it's non-dual.

[45:02]

And as soon as you have any kind of thoughts about it, it's not there. So there's, I think, what happens when we allow children to only, you know, because the government can't hug you. Your school system can't hug you or coo at you, you know? So the parents say, hey, if you're going to be a good citizen, you've got to learn to respond to language because that's how the government and the school system is going to talk to you. Well, I think we have to teach our kids that for sure. But. Can we allow them to know that and not lose the subtlety of talking to themselves through the infinity of this moment, which is not language? And to let that... You know, there's a word for self in Japanese, which means self which moves through everything.

[46:07]

Like that which takes care of you when you're sleeping. That which takes care of you when you're driving. Or the awareness that allows you to get up at a particular time. There's a self-benefit self. There's a conscious self. There's a non-discursive conscious self. There's an awareness self. There's a self based on your vitality without any thinking, just being present in what makes you alive. And letting that take care of you. So a yogic posture, mental and physical posture, would be that state of mind and body right now which allowed you to feel and be present in the absolute uniqueness and non-repeatability of every moment.

[47:20]

And when you're not there, it's just underneath pressing, like light coming through the cracks in the floor. And this is to work with your specific moment. without anything from outside, except enough teaching to give you a sense of how to hold a mirror up through posture and language, through form and emptiness, to how you exist at this moment. As a particular person and as a Buddha. Okay? So tomorrow and Saturday and Sunday, I'll try not to be so general and try to give you some more practices of looking at this inventory and teachings that help you, I hope, help me anyway, discover in a nourishing way how we exist.

[48:53]

It's a pleasure to sit here with you. Thank you very much. Trouble with sitting. Once you start, you don't want to stop. I hate to get up now.

[49:19]

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