So I have to figure out, feel out where to start. And what we can accomplish in, I don't know, today and tomorrow. I think some of you leave before the Sashin. Yes, because it would be good to find a way to look at what we started, the five ranks, Yeah. And maybe one of the entries could be studying together the Sandokai. Which we do have a book of Suzuki Roshi's lectures on the Sandokai in German and English.

[01:20]

Although I think the way it's translated and presented in English too is significantly mistaken. But the way it's mistaken can be interesting. Because I think it shows... how the dynamic of practice is easily missed. Now, it seems to me you did a gallant, gallant?

[02:23]

Yes. Oh, you know that? Gallant. Gallant. Oh, that's not too difficult. A gallant job of facing the five ranks squarely in their circles. With the circles and? Facing them squarely. And, you know, it's actually the five rings are not usually taught except during transmission. Because it's rather difficult and rather abstract, I think you noticed. Or it seems abstract. When you begin to see it's not philosophical, but a kind of narrative. Wenn ihr aber erkennt, dass es nicht philosophisch ist, sondern narrativ oder erzählend, dann wird es leichter.

[03:38]

Now, what do I mean by narrative? Was verstehe ich jetzt unter diesem Narrativ? For example, we just had fun at Haus der Stille because everybody was an amateur. When we had... do everything from the beginning. So the altar there is rather crowded. So people, when they took the top of the incense burner off, they tried to find a place for it. Or they tried to find a meaningful place for it, like it looked good sitting there. Yeah, but that's not the way it's done. The way it's done is just to assume that most people are right-handed. So no matter how unbalanced it looks or crowded it is, you simply take it off with your right hand and put it down slightly to the back, whether there's space or not.

[04:59]

Because it's just about a narrative, how the body would do it. In a way we could say the robes are like that. One of the things I've been emphasizing a lot, and I guess I should keep emphasizing, is the importance, in fact the absolute significance of shifting your continuity.

[06:00]

Out of your thoughts, into your body. And in fact into the physical location. Your actual physical location. And the place. So one of the reasons we do something like seven days or 30 or 90 days of practice. is that we really stay in one place and don't leave that place. So your physical sense of location has a real chance to become identified with a place. Maybe three years, three months, three days in a circle might be good.

[07:18]

Same idea. Yeah. And your robes are the way the robes are designed. They're conceptualized as a kind of, I don't know what I sometimes say, a bed you're inside of. And wearing robes is sort of like trying to make a bed while you're inside it. And as you can imagine, it's sort of difficult to do. But when you finally get it made, you feel located. So when I first sit down here, I'm sort of not just arranging my robe, what I'm

[08:22]

The robes are a way in which I locate myself. Through the robes settle mind and body in this location. And then my mind in my voice. And in the feeling of our mutual and shared presence. and in the feeling of our mutual and shared present. This ability, skill,

[09:40]

and reversal of our usual way of identifying ourselves, and reversal, are essential for making sense of a practice like the five ranks. or the teaching of the Sandokai. Now Shido, who wrote the Sandokai, was the grandson in the Dharma of the so-called sixth patriarch. And he lived from 700 to 790. Er lebte von 700 bis 790.

[11:04]

And Matsu, who was also a grandson in the Dharma of the Sixth Patriarch, but through a different disciple of the Sixth Patriarch, These two are called the two gates of elixir. And all of the Zen schools come out of these two men. Three come from Shido. And two come from Matsu. And one of the ones that comes from Matsu, that person is also a disciple of Shido. So I'm telling you something about these guys.

[12:09]

Sure, so you understand these are real guys, real people. And they're not just trying to talk about the truth as they know it. They're also speaking from a particular historical situation. First of all, they're at the very beginning of Zen in China. In the sense that if you continue practicing, you'll be the grandson in the Dharma of Suzuki Roshi. And they're that close to the six patriots. And Shido knew the Sixth Patriarch.

[13:29]

But he died shortly after he met him. And they're at the very beginning of Buddhism coming from India into China. And beginning to take a Chinese form. And they're at the beginning of a shift in what Buddha is. A shift in understanding what Buddha is. What the world is even. So, in a similar way, we're trying to cope with what this world is. Auf ähnliche Weise versuchen wir auch, damit zurechtzukommen, was die Welt ist.

[14:39]

Yeah, I mean, I can supply you with some basic ideas during this lecture. Ich kann euch mit ein paar grundlegenden Ideen versorgen während diesem Vortrag. But I'm afraid to continue it, we need about ten days together. Now I can present as much Buddhist practice as I can in a lecture or a few lectures. But that forces me in a way to always give somewhat beginner's lectures. So, I mean, to really look at the consequences of shifting your sense of continuity. Out of thinking.

[15:44]

And to really get across to you how important that is. And for you to recognize, feel the difference between practice when your sense of continuity is not in your thinking and practice when your sense of continuity is in your body, breath and phenomena. So you have a taste and understanding of it. Because what we need to get is your practice, your actualized practice to be consonant with your understanding.

[16:58]

with your understanding. Usually your understanding runs ahead of your practice. Sometimes your practice runs ahead of your understanding. But if it's too far ahead, you don't recognize it and it kind of melts away. And so the five ranks in the Sandokai are ways to try to bring an understanding in conjunction with practice. I think the thing for me to do now is to speak about maintaining the one, keeping to the one.

[18:28]

Holding to the one without wavering. It's in Chinese, four characters. And it's a kind of phrase you can feel, visualize, repeat. Okay. Now, this holding to the one without wavering. was an attempt of Chinese Zen Buddhists to develop a practice without stages. Now, this was partly influenced by Taoism.

[19:30]

And the word Sandokai is actually a title of an earlier Taoist work. So they were trying to also bring together more somewhat indigenous Taoist ideas into Buddhism. So if we can understand the Sandokai, we can understand a lot about where our practice actually is right now. Okay, what does maintaining the one without wavering mean? It means to develop the ability to maintain a concentration On awareness itself.

[20:51]

Okay. So I might be aware of this. So I might be aware of the microphone. But whether it's the microphone or this staff or you, I'm aware of awareness itself. And I'm aware of awareness itself while various objects appear in that awareness. Now I'd like to go back to the lecture I gave the other day of mindfulness as a way of thinking with the world. Some of you were here and some of you weren't.

[21:57]

So... So I have to repeat myself a little bit at least. Mindfulness, I describe mindfulness as a way of thinking. You bring something into your attention and you don't think about it. Discursively or analytically. You just hold it in your awareness.

[23:00]

And you use the world as sort of a washboard. Because everything's changing. And the world itself changing begins to think through what you're holding in mindfulness. So instead of your mind doing the thinking, you let the world changing around and through the object of attention To begin to inform you. Okay. Now, there are a lot of reasons for this. One is to get out of your culture. Buddhism appeals to us now

[24:00]

Because it's relatively culture-free. You may think this all looks kind of Japanese or Asian, but it's actually quite culture-free. These robes looked funny in China, too. If you see pictures over several centuries, the non-monks, the lay people in the pictures, all have different costumes of the period. But in every century the monks look the same. Because they just wear this costume all the time. So now I'm wearing this costume and you guys are wearing the clothes of this time.

[25:29]

Some of you are halfway in between. I'm kidding. Buddhism doesn't make any sense as a serious practice unless it's culture-free. So being in a monastery or a cave or a hermitage is a kind of physical manifestation of being culture-free. Okay, where are you mostly located in your culture? In your language. I mean, France is a country. France is the language.

[26:44]

Germany is a country. German is the language. In Denmark, they speak Danish. This is an obvious connection between the physical place people live, the language they speak, and their culture. We in Buddhism, we need to rename the world. Wir im Buddhismus, wir müssen die Welt neu benennen. We gotta stop, in a way, using the names of our culture. Wir müssen auf gewisse Weise aufhören, die Dinge mit den Namen unserer Kultur zu benennen. This may be sort of unpleasant for you. Das mag vielleicht unangenehm für euch sein. Because you like being part of your culture. Denn ihr seid ja gerne Teil eurer Kultur. And your parents and your friends are all part of your culture. Und eure Eltern und eure Freunde sind alle Teil dieser Kultur.

[27:47]

Well, this is a choice you have to make. You need to find some fundamental way of living at least that feels more fundamental than the ways of a particular culture. But it's not, it's so bad. Because through practice, your culture becomes the way in which you express yourself, but not the way in which you identify yourself. So everyday life, the practice of everyday life. carrying water and chopping firewood. Yeah, somehow in most societies you had to carry water into the house if you're going to cook or wash.

[28:48]

You had to chop firewood if you were going to cook or stay warm. So that's everyday life. So when you can be in everyday life in this fundamental way, it's culture-free. So the practice of everyday life means to be in your situation in such a fundamental way, it's almost true of any way of living. The beginning, sorry. So the practice of everyday life... means to be in your culture in such a fundamental way that it would be little different from the everyday life of anyone in any culture.

[30:05]

So already everyday life has a kind of special meaning. It doesn't mean just living here in this village in any old way. Yeah, I think you have the sense of what I mean, though I don't feel I expressed it as clearly as I might. So again, when you're thinking, when your attention doesn't stay with your breath, And almost always goes back to your thinking. It means your sense of identity is in your thinking. Your sense of continuity is in your thinking. And continuity is like a current.

[31:07]

And it sweeps experience into the stream of the current. So you accumulate a historical identity dependent on where your continuity flows. And the more the accumulated experience of your life has come to you through the continuity of thinking, it sediments you in a particular kind of life. It's very difficult to change that. So Buddhism is a dramatic possibility of changing that.

[32:43]

To transform how you accumulate experience. Who you are is the experience you've accumulated. If you even change that a little bit, you've changed the world. The world you live in, the world you know, the world you remember, Now, in fact, your continuity is, even if primarily in your thinking, it's also in your body and phenomena. Yeah, otherwise you couldn't live. So you've been accumulating experience with let's call the implicit current of location.

[33:57]

But this is mostly implicit and unnoticed. When you start to practice mindfulness, Wenn ihr aber anfangt, Achtsamkeit zu üben, und ihr anfangt, eine Kontinuität zu haben, die in der Achtsamkeit fließt, das beginnt, diese unbemerkte Erfahrung und Geschichte aufzurühren, So the shift of continuity out of thinking and language into breath, body, phenomena, location is as dramatic a change as you could possibly make in your life.

[35:10]

You don't lose much. You gain a lot. But it feels like you're losing the world. And you really have to have the kind of warrior mentality or courage to face losing the world. And even if I tell you you're not going to lose much, still the closer you get to it, the more you'll find yourself not able to do it. The closer you get to it, the more you'll find yourself not able to do it. Okay. So the five ranks is about shifting your continuity. The Sandokai is about shifting your continuity. Shifting to where the... How can I put it? Okay. Okay. Now, one of the significant things about maintaining the one is that the real effort is to do it all the time.

[36:45]

night and day. So in a way what Zen did is say, okay, you have a lot of practice based on stages. Okay, we can take away the stages. And conceptually this makes deep sense in terms of how the world exists. But you're going to need the stages unless you practice this mindfulness of the one continuously. And mindfulness then became a Zen practice. Not a way to achieve some calm, nice state. But it became the dynamic of Zazen. the way the deep stream or spring, the way the deep spring of zazen is turned into a river in one's life.

[38:22]

Now, in Buddhist terms, this is called transforming the laya-vijñāna into mirror wisdom. This is why mirror is such an important image in the five ranks. Because you've turned not just consciousness into wisdom, consciousness is editing and selecting. I should go over all these points again and again so that you really get it clear. So you really see that the nature of consciousness is to function through editing and selecting.

[39:57]

Okay, so when you bring your attention out of consciousness, you're out of language. You're out of your karma that's accumulated through consciousness. And in mindfulness, a mindful awareness, something closer to the totality of your accumulated experience is available. because awareness doesn't edit and select. So we speak about branching streams flowing in darkness.

[41:20]

Hakuin says that the light of the mirror wisdom is pitch black. It means you're functioning outside of consciousness. Sounds scary, maybe. But it's fun. And it's possible. Are you ready for it? You want to find out how to do it? Tune in tomorrow. And we'll turn on Darth Vader. On the dark station. Just kidding. Not so bad. It's a kind of brightness, actually. So as the five ranks say and the light and the Sandokai says in darkness there is light but don't see it as light.

[42:40]

In light there is darkness but don't see it as dark. This wider way of functioning by moving out of language and culture into the fullness of your experience is the teaching of the five ranks in the Sandokai and is rooted in a new conception of what a Buddha is and what enlightenment is. and that it is rooted in a new idea of what a Buddha and what enlightenment is. Thank you.

[43:33]

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