It's my great pleasure to be sitting sashin with you again. And to find you sitting beside me. flown in at ruinous expense from Berlin to transfer. And I can't promise to say anything interesting, but... Some of you are way back there in the corner. That's okay, but tomorrow people can sit here too. And to be here with our Buddha, our new Buddha, this is nice too. To be entering, and I feel it, you know, to be entering Sashin.

[01:21]

I started feeling it, of course, yesterday or so. But entering Sashin, what is entering Sashin? I don't have to say too much to you about Sashin. Because so many of you have done so many Sashins. And of course you know that Sashin means to gather people. gather the mind. Yeah, and that sounds good. And it's good to gather the mind and be more present within your own presence and to be more concentrated but I'd like to look at this what are we doing entering a saschin with more sense of

[02:43]

of entering as a craft. Handwork, well, Geistwerk. I don't translate that. Or, uh, heartwork. Herzarbeit. Yeah. Or hand playfulness. Hand work and play. And having a good time here. Because I'd like you to have a good time in Sashin. I said to someone recently that who said Zen is, who said something like, well, Zen is supposed to help us.

[04:17]

And Zen isn't supposed to help us. I mean, Zen is nothing. Zen is just a tool. To say Zen is supposed to help us is like saying a hammer is supposed to help us. A hammer, if you use it, can help you put in a nail. In that sense, Zen is a tool that you decide to use. So we have, of course, a great, I think, that's why I'm doing this, a great opportunity to spend these days in sitting, and these days of sitting with each other in our Johanneshof Sendo.

[05:24]

So much work has gone into just today with the flowers and incense. And the clean floor and the clean windows and all that green stuff out there growing. So entering this sesshin.

[06:25]

I think I've used the image of cooking and broth quite often. And of course you're entering into your own soup here. But we're also entering into our sashin soup. So I have the opportunity to practice zazen this week. And I also have the opportunity to practice Zazen with each of you. And also each of your zazen bodies, meditation bodies.

[07:25]

Each of you, I'm practicing with each of you as a person and each of you as a meditating person. And I can feel you, you know, as we enter into Sesshin. I can feel you already as meditating persons. And this is not something you can produce at home. We can only do this unless you had a big home with a room and altar and flowers. We have to do it here. And you invited everybody to come. So, again, entering this sashin broth.

[08:45]

Sounds okay to me. Now, there's some... There's a lot of teachings that are... that are experiential and context dependent or they can be taught orally, verbally But only in particular kinds of contexts. Only in perhaps the sesshin, this sesshin. So I would like to speak about perception separated from cognition.

[10:08]

Yes, I'm trying to talk here about entering into this sashin soup stock. And we speak a lot about, I speak a lot about not identifying with your thoughts. But now I want to give you a particular way to practice not identifying with your thoughts.

[11:10]

Dignaga was one of the principal Yogacara teachers. Excuse me, what was that? Dignaga. Dignaga. I'm not sure I'm pronouncing it right, but that's... Yeah, and he was a teacher of Dharmakirti. And he lived from, I don't think they know for sure, but about 480 to 530, something like that. And he defined perception as cognition separated from conception. As he defined perception as cognition or knowing separated from perception. Konzeption.

[12:29]

Also getrennt von kognition, also von erkennen, und konzeption, das ist ein Wort, was wir im Deutschen nicht so haben, also ein Konzept bilden. You know. The former concept, right? Yes, separated from conceiving, from forming concepts. We don't have conception in Germany. Well, you do a lot of it. Yeah, but we don't name it. Oh. Oh, now you must have, you have no distinction between perception and conception? We don't have the word conception. We have perception, of course. Naming? Yeah, namensgebung. Okay, so say naming, that's all right. Good. Also namensgebung. It's interesting what we overlook. Now, I've given talks in the past about direct perception. And you may hear what I'm saying here and think, oh, this is like the lecture of 1986, if you happen to remember, on direct perception.

[13:43]

But if you think that, you're conceiving. Why don't you just use the English word? Yeah. Because from my experience, I'm talking about direct perception today in a way that I've never spoken about before. Now, Dignagos, what does he mean when he says, The way he puts it is to remove conceptualizing from perceiving. And to remove it means it's an act, it's a... a craft, an action, to remove it from conception.

[14:52]

And why bother to do this? Okay, so Sashin Zazen practice gives you a chance to observe yourself. To study yourself. But there's already a problem with observing yourself. Because there's an observer. An observer makes three things. There's the object of perception. There's the senses. And there's the observer of the process. So there's three things. So it separates you.

[15:53]

Now in English we have related words, we have perception. We have app perception. I can tell you what it means, if that helps. Aperception means to perceive with full knowledge of the relatedness of the perception to past events and things like that. To aperceive means to perceive with the awareness of how it relates to your past and other things. And then we have another word, percipience. Percipience means to know perception as a power.

[17:09]

Okay, so let's just take the floor. I look at the floor. And I perceive the floor. Quite a nice surface actually. And it makes lots of little talks while we're doing kin-hin. Now, if I turn my perception of the floor into a conception, Wenn ich also meine Wahrnehmung vom Fußboden in eine Konzeption, also eine Konzeptbildung verwandle, dann halte ich sofort damit die Wahrnehmung an, damit ich sehe einen Fußboden. in the bandwidth within the bandwidth of perception.

[18:22]

I refrain from turning it into a conception or naming it. I remember in the 60s people used to... I mean, I'm sure it's in the 90s here, but in San Francisco in the 60s I was there when it was the so-called psychedelic revolution and all that stuff. And I was even on the editorial board of the psychedelic review. I tried to get my name off it, actually, because I never did anything. But there were a lot of articles and conversations about when you were taking psychedelics, the floor wasn't a floor anymore. It was all kinds of things going on. And there's some similarity to this, what Dignag is pointing out, is to not allow your perception to become a conception.

[19:42]

Okay, so let me change the topic a little, seemingly at least. I would like there to be more, I would like this session to be a particularly silent one. And not silence which is the absence of sound, but silence which is the knowing of the absence of sound. So what do I mean? This morning when I did the three bows before I walk around and say good morning,

[20:58]

We didn't have the three bells. And when we do a practice period at Crestone, we, during Sashin, don't have bells. Or rather, we don't have some of the bells, particularly the bells for chanting. And if you're there for the whole practice period, when Sashin comes, you experience the absence of the sound of the bells. It's like sometimes I arrive at Crestown, say, and I don't know the schedule. And say the wake up is usually at 3.40. But they sometimes change the schedule for some reason.

[22:11]

So at 3.40 I wake up. And I'm listening for the wake up bell. Is there a wake-up bell or not? Or can I sleep another hour or two? And I listen very carefully. And I hear the absence of the wake-up bell. That's something very specific. It's quite wonderful, too. And then I start hearing Gisela or David or somebody or Atmar ringing the bell. But it's very far off.

[23:11]

And doesn't get any louder. So then I'm hearing what? My memory of the wake-up bell. It never gets nearer, but I can hear it, so I think, oh, okay. I guess there's no wake-up bell, but I'm hearing it anyway. I talked about this a little bit in Crestown's practice period. And I used the example of being in New York and feeling the absence of my aunt. Because I used to visit her always in the village and she's dead now and when I passed through the village I really felt her absence.

[24:19]

It's a kind of silence. And it's a kind of silence to listen for the wake-up bell, which isn't there. So this is more what I mean by I'd like this seshin to have a silence. Not a silence that... We create by simply not talking. But a silence that comes from inside us. That appears from this sashin soup. Mm-hmm. And maybe prevents us from talking.

[25:28]

Or we hear the silence. It's not just an absence of sound, but it's a silence we hear. Because what we're trying to get to here is not just a practice in which we observe ourselves. But a practice in which we let ourselves down into a soup which starts to cook us. Jeanette is a cabbage and Gisela is a carrot. Dieter is a potato. We're all floating around here. Peter is broccoli. But the more that we can find a silence, the broth will be quite clear.

[26:33]

Because we want to, you know, we're really, this is a kind of, this is a transformative practice. But the trouble with the word transform is you think you're trying to become Supergirl or Superman or something. Yeah, or a Buddha or something. But really we're just entering into a soup which is transforming us or could transform us. Yes, but actually it's just that we just swim into this soup, But we don't know how it's going to transform us. We almost don't care. We just enter into the soup, that's all.

[27:34]

And we see what happens. And part of entering into this soup is to let this clear broth of silence appear. And entering into a perceiving separated from cognition or separated from conception. Okay, so here this is something new. Not new to your experience, I'm sure. But we have no kind of clear word for it in English.

[28:35]

We have apperception, as I defined it. And we have percipience, the power of perceiving. But we don't have perception separated from conception. And that's a very fundamental Buddhist idea. And it can't be taught exactly in sutras. It can only be taught in a context where you can have some experiential confirmation. They can only be taught in a context where you can feel your way into it. And I can't, you know, I can say sort of like this and then you might do something with it or feel something with it. And the silence is a silence that kind of emerges in each situation.

[29:52]

And allows us to perhaps feel our world rather than think our world. Not feel emotionally, but feel cognitively. I'm not asking you just to be emotive or emotional. I'm asking you to know without conceiving. Now the logic of this, I'll just give you the logic of it for the heck of it. The logic of it that's typical of Buddhist thinking.

[31:00]

The floor is a property-bearing object. Buddhism likes to define simple things carefully. And it's very interesting when you look carefully at simple things, something amazing is there. So, This stick or this floor is a property-bearing object. Property-bearing means it has a lot of aspects. That's like the first step. Second, all of these things cannot be perceived completely. Secondly, all these things cannot be fully perceived.

[32:09]

And although this stick has a lot of properties, it was Suzuki Roshi's, it is brown, it has many kanjis carved on it, it cannot be perceived completely. And if you perceive it and then conceive of it and say it's a stick, you cut off the process of perceiving and you give yourself the delusion you've perceived completely. This is a serious delusion. And it allows you then to turn it into language. So again, one of the truisms of Dinaga's logic about perception.

[33:24]

What is a truism? A truism is just something that's like a truism of Zen as everything's changing. A truism of the Nagas is that perception cannot be expressed in language. is that to really directly perceive something, you have to refrain from turning it into language. And in us type of human beings with a language-based consciousness, this doesn't usually happen naturally. You have to make a decision as part of your practice to reverse the process and refrain from turning into a conception.

[34:39]

So, although it cannot be perceived completely, although an object cannot be perceived completely, you perceive it more fully if you don't turn it into a conception. And you create a situation where knowing knows itself. You don't need a witness of the knowing. And when we create a conception, we witness the knowing. Oh, I know that's a floor or a stick. Then you're out of the transformative soup. And there's no sashimi broth here anymore.

[35:41]

I'm sorry all these food images. And they might make you hungry. So if we want to enter the sashin broth you want to try to in silence feel this flexible world, not a world turned into conceptions, but a world in which you feel the power of perception, There's a kind of bandwidth, like in a radio or TV.

[36:54]

And you're always tuning in each moment. Tuning in without a witness. Tuning in and knowing is knowing itself. This is one definition of non-duality. You don't have to have an observer of your knowing. So there's always the senses and the object and they, in the process of knowing, duality disappears. But if you conceive of it, you turn the duality into three things, actually.

[38:03]

You have three things immediately. Then you're really no longer in this Sashin soup. So if you really know that nothing can be perceived completely, But you can stay in the process or in the situation of knowing. This is also part of the process of not identifying with your thinking. Of changing thinking into an experience of knowing. A knowing where there's not a witness of the knowing.

[39:13]

So we can't say you're observing or studying yourself exactly. But you're more into an intimacy of knowing yourself. An intimacy which goes beyond studying or observing and allows us to be in what we could call a Buddha broth. And if we can find a silence, a silence we can hear, we'll enhance this process of knowing without conceiving.

[40:18]

Maybe you could have the image of letting yourself down into this Zendo soup stock. Oh, you know, this is expressed in various ways. In one of the koans it's exposed in the golden breeze. Exposed in the golden wind. Exposed in the golden wind. And maybe some kind of image like this is better than this logic of Dignaga's. It's the same, maybe the image is more effective. To let yourself down into feeling this world without conceiving it.

[41:52]

Perhaps this is to gather ourselves into the mind of everything. And maybe it is that we gather in the spirit of all. Yes. Okay. Thank you very much.

[42:25]

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