All the ways in which they can avoid practicing with me. Yeah, I like these people, so it's okay. But it's basically boring for me. I have no interest in doing that, really. So in Germany I don't have to do that. No one would ask me to do such a thing. All that is to say that every now and then Marie-Louise tries to get me to learn a few words. Even if I don't learn the word, could I please pronounce it correctly? So I pay attention.

[01:04]

I get two or three words pronounced correctly. And out of the three, I know the meaning of two of them. And then she says, well, since you know that, let's give you a fourth word. And then I immediately feel something very heavy is happening. And I feel myself sinking back into English. I simply can't keep straight. three or four more distinctions. I can barely keep the first several straight. And I say, please don't give me more information. Isn't that true? Yes. So I think something like that happens with the five ranks. It's rather dense. And why is it rather dense?

[02:18]

First of all, for some reason, the Rinzai school, there are many within the Rinzai school, have taken it as the highest stage above any koans in understanding practices. have seen this as the highest level, that is, already above the koans, as the highest level of practice. And that is emphasized in particular by Hakuin Zenji, who has formalized this koan system, which is mostly used in Rinzai. But I'm always speaking about the five ranks. When I speak about a sense that this moment is simultaneously awareness and consciousness, That's really no different than speaking about the seeming within the real or the real within the seeming.

[03:40]

What's the seeming, Dieter? The bias or the seeming? The relative within the absolute or the absolute within the relative. So what was he saying? Seeming within the real or the real within the seeming. What seems to be the case and what's real. Mm-hmm. So when I speak about moving toward less distinctions or moving toward more distinctions, this is the five ranks. Sometimes the five ranks are drawn as a kind of straight line across, half black, half white. But I think it's more useful when they're drawn like a circle with a circle inside it that is moving in a direction.

[04:45]

So you have a little new moon on one side, a white or a new moon of black. And that would be like moving toward more distinctions or moving toward less distinctions. It's really that simple. Now what makes it complicated? And these verses of the old sleepy grandmother can barely see her face in the mirror and so forth. Okay. We have several ideas of Buddha.

[06:17]

Buddha as a practice. Okay, so the early Buddha, as I said the other day, is the awakened one. And this was understood both awakened in the sense of realizing enlightenment, And awakened in the sense of awareness. And in this context, mindfulness is particularly emphasized. Now, this is not something I've ever... talked about exactly, so I'm going to have to sort of feel out how to say it. Because there's lots of ideas in here. Is this the idea of awareness?

[07:20]

the idea of enlightenment, the idea of a Buddha, the idea of practice. These are all related to each other, but not exactly the same as each other. So there's a number of shifts that occur through practice, through overtime. Okay, so one is from an individual person who realizes enlightenment. And then you begin to have an idea of where did enlightenment come from. And you begin to have the idea that it must have already been there.

[08:35]

Or it's possible for anyone. When and how is it possible for anyone? So then you begin to have an idea that enlightenment is everywhere, everywhere at once and at any time possible. If that's the case, then you have this idea of a cosmic Buddha or some kind of big idea of everything at once is Buddha. Okay, then if everything all at once is Buddha and also enlightenment, how do you as an individual practitioner relate to that? Zen practice particularly developed a pedagogy of how you practice if enlightenment is possible at any moment.

[10:06]

If enlightenment is possible at any moment. how you practice if enlightenment is possible. Now there's another idea of Buddha as the practice of maximal greatness. Greatness, Größe, or great is fantasticness? Yes, fantasticness, absolutely fantasticness. Here we have again a movement away from enlightenment as a state or a thing. As a state of thing.

[11:24]

Or from enlightened, as if it happened in the past. To an activity of enlightenment. Enlightening instead of enlightenment. So instead of saying an enlightened being, you might say an enlightening being. What time are we supposed to end, by the way? Four or four-thirty or five or seven o'clock? Five. Four-fourty. Okay. We'll see what happens. We'll see what happens. Okay.

[12:26]

I was thinking four, and I always thought I'd gone over, but then I'm going to see. No. No. Okay. Okay, so you have a... You have a shift to the sense that Buddha is not an entity but a practice. And Buddha is a mode of being, not just a being. So now what's the difference between a mode of being as a Buddha instead of a person as a Buddha?

[13:33]

Okay. So if Buddha is a mode of being... Would you say in this sense you understand being as a... deriving from a verb, from to be, or more like a sentient being? I don't know how it sounds in German. I can do both, but then it gets two directions. I can also mention both at once to keep it... Tell me the distinction. A being in German... can either be derived from to be, and then it's something derived out of a verb, and on the other hand it's like an animal or something like a sentient being, then it's a thing, you know.

[14:35]

In English it's the same, I think, being and being. Yeah, with us it has the two. So it's more like the verb or being, becoming. Okay, if Buddha is a mode of being, Perhaps Akash, at certain moments, is in the mode of being a Buddha. And sometimes he's not. We've noticed that. And Marcus might sometimes be in the mode of a Buddha and sometimes not. And both Beatas take turns. Okay. So, all right, yeah, that's it.

[15:39]

Okay, so if we add up Akash when he's in the mode of Buddha and Marcus and two Beatas, we almost have a full Buddha here sometimes. And so a Sangha can manifest the presence of a Buddha. While you wouldn't say any one of the individuals is a Buddha. Now do you see that's a rather different idea of what a Buddha is than the historical Buddha, Shakyamuni. So some of you, I've often spoke about the koan of Daowu and Yunyan and the one who is not busy. That's Ungan Donjo who we translate, who we chant in the morning.

[16:45]

In the midst of being busy, there is... knowing the one who is not busy. This would be knowing a Buddha mode in the midst of knowing an ordinary way of being mode, the usual way of being. Okay, the more you move toward less distinctions, the more you're moving toward a Buddha mode.

[17:52]

Okay, the more you bring together the movement toward a Buddha mode and the movement toward an ordinary person mode, the more you bring those together as one activity of being, This would be the bodhisattva mode. Thank you. You're welcome. Now, this is kind of crude, what I'm saying. So you have to... Make sense of it yourself from my words. Okay, so let's go back to maximal greatness.

[19:08]

What's a practice of maximal greatness? Okay, I'm sitting. I know I can sit a little more straight than I'm doing. But I accept the way I sit. At the same time, I feel like it's a little better. That's a movement toward maximal greatness. So that's a kind of Buddha practice. So I know that I'm as... Sometimes I'm fairly kind in how I speak.

[20:15]

I accept that without a sense of praising myself. At the same time, I realize there's a certain unkindness in the way I speak, too. But at the same time, I can realize that a certain unkindness I could be kinder, I could be more generous. So that accepting without self-congratulation, if you're always putting yourself down, then you can't practice this maximal greatness. It's a practice of noticing, yes, I was quite generous in what I did. But I could have been more just.

[21:25]

So that is a kind of movement, a development always. So that kind of practice is the activity of a Buddha. That's another idea of Buddha. Then you have the shift from the Buddha as the awakened one to calling the Buddha Tathagata. Okay, now. Yeah, yeah. So much of what I'm saying overlaps. I'll let you make the overlap though. So have I lost you? Shall I stop? So now Tathagata means something as primitive as coming and going.

[22:30]

But it's considered to be in Mahayana the highest name for a Buddha. The one that comes and goes. And then that's combined with an idea called Tathagatagarbha. That everything all at once is a womb functioning through the one that comes and goes. That everything becomes a womb, becomes fertile for one who comes and goes. When Dogen says the entire universe is the true human body,

[23:44]

Okay, now I said yesterday that part of Buddhist practice is to rename your activity, rename the world. Like I say in English, instead of saying tree, you say treeing. Instead of saying Mara, I say Bodhisattva. And instead of Mara I say Bodhisattva. Thor Suzuki Roshi said, we're all showing what kind of Buddha we are. That's to rename Beate. What's Beate doing today? Yeah, she's showing us what kind of Buddha she is. This is applying a practice of maximal greatness to her against her will, perhaps. Well, she was minimally great today.

[25:14]

But it's a step in the right direction. Okay, so what's the importance of the shift from the awakened one to the tathagata? Okay, you have a shift to an activity. Okay. So what is this activity?

[26:16]

It's this sense of establishing duration. It's the sense of the genjokoan to complete that which appears. It's the sense of the five ranks as I just presented it. The movement toward more distinctions or less distinctions. So then in practice, the pedagogy would be how to transform all the movements and distractedness into these two movements. Yes. Okay, so when Dogen says... that the entire universe is the true human body.

[27:32]

He's renaming the universe. Instead of calling it the universe, which is kind of dead, let's call it the true human body. That's just a version of the Tathagatagarbha teaching. To say this is the womb embryo is the same as to say this is the true human body. Okay, so then you also have an idea of a lineage Buddha. A Buddha which has passed through the generations. Or a Buddha potential which has passed through the generations. Which is actualized in some generations and not in others. And as you know that's sometimes called winter branches.

[28:46]

Sometimes you can't tell a difference between a winter branch and a dead branch. But when spring comes the winter branch blossoms. So some lineages look like winter branches for several generations and then certain conditions and you have a Buddha or an enlightenment blossoms. And now you begin to have an idea of Buddha as something that appears and disappears from generation to generation. Or that appears and disappears in you, depending on your life and practice and so forth.

[29:55]

So these different, these developing ideas of what enlightenment is and what a Buddha is are reflected in the five ranks. Okay, now when I speak about inverting the alaya-vijnana, In other words, yesterday I spoke about instead of your continuity and the current of continuity being in consciousness, through practice you shift the current your sense of continuity and the current of continuity out of consciousness. Practically speaking, you're transferred into breath, body and phenomena.

[31:17]

And then that gives you the basis for transferring it to awareness, mindfulness itself. That transforms how the alaya-vijnana, the storehouse consciousness, functions. Okay. So, develop Zen practice. Seize practice as transformative. Transforming the activity of our life into a Buddha activity.

[32:37]

Not just our activity like how I pick up this glass. But at a very fundamental level, how I accumulate experience. And how I mature and realize myself through and with others. And this is also called bodhisattva practice. Okay, so what the five ranks tried to do was tie together in one teaching and practice. Yeah, the four wisdoms and the three bodies of Buddha and the idea of the Tathagata and Tathagata Garbha and the Alaya Vijnana transformed as Buddha nature into one kind of encapsulated practice.

[33:59]

And that makes it quite difficult to understand. Because you're not just working with this shift from less distinctions to more distinctions. You're working with a number of teachings, the three bodies and the four wisdoms, etc., coming together through this. But it's not so hard to understand. There's no harder to understand than... the direction toward less distinctions and more distinctions. But until you have sufficient presence of mind and body, To feel yourself located and at home.

[35:21]

in this movement toward less distinctions and more distinctions, until you feel at home there, you can't understand the practices that follow from that. Because these practices can't be understood mentally. The nature of the five ranks is you can't understand it until your practice is pretty developed. Like you can't understand really what I mean by transforming the alaya-vijjana into mirror wisdom. Until you've effectively shifted your continuity to body and breath. As long as your sense of continuity keeps going back to your thinking.

[36:56]

As I say, one of the major koans is why it's so easy to bring your attention to your breath for a few moments. Nothing could be easier almost. But how difficult it is to keep it there for an hour or 24 hours. As long as you can't do it easily, It means you have a need to establish your continuity in thinking.

[37:57]

So you're seeking permanence through continuity in thinking. Once you really don't implicitly seek permanence and continuity, Your whole sense of your whole experience of time shifts. Yeah, now, I don't want to make this a black and white situation. That until you can be present, feel your sense of continuity continuously in body, breath and phenomena.

[39:13]

There's no hope for you. It is true that until you can, that's quite natural, certain practices are just not open to you. But I would say that since practice is truer than not practicing, if we define practice as coming closer to how things actually and how we actually exist. Small tastes tell us everything. Even if we don't consciously know it, small tastes let us know, feel this different world. But we don't notice it so much as long as we keep finding our sense of identity and consciousness.

[40:41]

But outside of our consciousness, even outside of our consciousness and outside of our consciousness, and knowing it's outside of our consciousness, Practice begins to work in us. And if you continue, it continues. And it begins to shine through the seeming. And that's another way to understand the five regs. Is it the more you practice, the more the absolute shines through the seeming?

[41:53]

And we don't notice it, but others notice it. In short, a little practice goes a long way. Yeah, I think that's enough for today. You want to say something, actually? Go ahead. I have a simple example, but I don't know exactly what it means, and I would like to tell. Because I practiced with the Yogi's, and Gareth told me to do a little different. So it's just to put the cleaning stick in the Buddha ball and then do the stick in the second ball and pick it up.

[43:19]

And I always hold it in my hand. And it was immediately clear for me, for my consciousness, for my feeling, yes, it's true, that's a better way to do it. So now the tricky part comes. doing the Aoyoki and I feel... I actually don't think a lot during Aoyoki. That's very good. It feels more for me like a field of kind awareness. So now I noticed after, I don't know, five, six, ten times, I can't reach this point where I make this mistake. But always immediately after doing the mistake, I noticed that I was doing the mistake. So I thought, well, why I don't get the point where it starts. In other words, you don't do the mistake.

[44:22]

I had the second or the third ball in my hand, and then I noticed, oh, shit, I did it wrong again. Oh, yeah, that's a double mistake, yeah. I'm sorry. And so it's very interesting for me to study the mind in this sense, why I can't easily reach this point if in consciousness it's totally clear how I would like to do that. So, okay, the first result is quite simple, it's a kind of habit. I have it in... it's a kind of body consciousness what takes over. But what was funny is that I immediately after it always went back to my consciousness and could see, oh yes, I did the mistake. And so I experienced quite a bit with it to reach this point. And then I noticed when I go not immediately when it's...

[45:26]

started but I go a little bit before it so before I take the cleaning stick and if I get it that I then can remind me of this then I can hold it and the question I mean it's a little thing but the question that really brings up for me if you shifting from consciousness to awareness or to you know to body and phenomena where can you learn new how do you then learn new things or how do you understand the direction I want to go to I mean you You mean, how do you learn new things if it's already... You have the continuity, or you're always maintaining the one, or this.

[46:33]

Do you mean, how do you learn new things if the old things are embodied? Yeah. Is that what you mean? Yeah. Can you say all that in Deutsch? I had studied this at the Orioki and Gerhard had made me aware that I was making a mistake and that I should change a small thing, which immediately made sense for me. So from my consciousness it felt better to do it that way. And then I noticed that I always skipped this point and made the same mistake again and again. And a short time later, however, I noticed that I had made this mistake. And that was somehow interesting for me, why I always ... a minute later I noticed it, but I missed the exact point to make it right. And then I realized that I can manage to do it right if I, so to speak, get into this process of mindfulness a little earlier.

[47:42]

And then I can remember it. For me, the explanation is quite simple now. At some point you have embodied it and you have it in your body and it is a habit how you do certain things and they are very difficult to change. But for me the question is now, if you are to anchor yourself completely in it, That's a good brief. Deutsch, bitte. No, it's good you trust that it's coming up. Well, I think this is actually an important point. And you know that Plato mistrusted poetry.

[48:50]

And Plato's sense of in the cave and the darkness has nothing to do with the darkness of Shido's Sandokai. I think probably I'm not in any way an expert on Plato or Greek times, etc. But Plato seems to have been present at the time and part of the process of in the establishment of consciousness. So I would say that before Plato's time probably what we mean by consciousness was not really known to people.

[50:22]

Now, you see, what I'm saying is that consciousness is a cultural creation. Okay, let's just try to keep it simple. When you teach your kid to count, to say the alphabet, you're teaching it consciousness. You're teaching it to make a separation between here and there. This one, one, two, three, four, five, to keep things separate. I often give the example of a little South African, I think South African, might have been Australian, maybe Australian white blonde girl and little black aboriginal girl.

[51:50]

I saw this on television. And they took this as some documentary. And they had a stump with about 40 or 50 things on it. And they brought the two little girls up and showed them the stump. And immediately, as they showed it to them, they just pushed everything off. And they asked the two kids to put them back. The little white girl went... She put about three things on. She had no idea how it was before. The little black girl just went, boom, [...] boom.

[53:04]

And it was all like the same, like she'd taken a photograph of it and could see how this branch was in with this and this was stuck together. She just put it back together. That's a different kind of consciousness. But maybe this little black girl couldn't do geometry or what we call logical thinking. Anyway, my simple conversation here, I would say that the ability to do logical thinking and so forth occurs about the time of Plato. So it's not just that we developed geometry and all that stuff. We developed a consciousness which could do geometry.

[54:05]

And I noticed, you know, when I was in the monastery in Japan, we had to learn a very complicated schedule for the whole monastery. I mean, imagine that we have all the rooms in this building, plus the farmhouse next door and the farmhouse over there, and about seven or eight more buildings. And each one has different drums and different bells. And they're going all day long. So when you hear this drum or that bell, you know, oh, that's such and such a time and such and such an activity is going on over there.

[55:22]

And while it's going on over there, While this is going on, you can hear something going on over there, and you can hear them interlocking, and it's a different activity over there. And it's all interlocked. So you can feel in sound the different buildings and activities. This is the Chinese system that the Japanese inherited. And one of the beautiful things I remember seeing when I was there Und eine der wunderschönen Dinge, die ich mich erinnere, dort gesehen zu haben, was when it's very snowy, dass wenn es sehr viel Schnee hat, you can't hear the bells, kann man die Glocken nicht hören.

[56:37]

Because this is up toward Manchuria and deep snow, sometimes a story deep. Also es ist irgendwo in der Nähe von irgendwo und da ist der Schnee richtig tief. I said it's near somewhere from somewhere. Manchuria. Okay. And you have monks up on top of the buildings standing on the curve of the roof in the snow, swinging their sleeve to indicate that a drum started to another building where there's another monk signaling a monk down below. Because in the old days they didn't use clocks. They used this system from dawn. From dawn? Yeah. What's dawn? Starting when the sun rose. So the first time when you're a monk, you have to memorize, learn this whole system.

[57:37]

And you don't have these little charts that you follow. You have to learn it in your body. And if you make a mistake, you get, excuse me for saying so, severely punished. It's a little medieval. You really get whacked with a stick hard. Well, yes. Or you're put out in the hall on a hard floor to sit CESA for hours. Or you have to go and stand with your bowls like this for an hour without moving your arms. Your arms are like this and someone's standing next to you with a stick. I mean, it's pretty... You think, Jesus, I'm just an ordinary westerner.

[58:51]

How did I get myself in this mess? Okay, so I simply said, I am not going to go out and do these bells and drums in all these buildings until I really know it. So I took about... two or three weeks longer than the Japanese took to learn. And they test you by saying, I don't know why I'm telling you all this. So say that you are learning it. Every two or three days, all the monks get together.

[59:58]

Not always, 180 monks, but there's a group of monks in your room get together. In building such and such, what do you do? And you say, and what happens in this? And pretty soon, actually the monks are crying because they can't do it. But they learn it by sound. Aber die lernen das mit dem Klang. Also die lernen das mit dem Klang und mit dem Rhythmus im Gebäude. So und so, da passiert das und das und so. Und die können... They embody it. I could not do that. I simply didn't have the capability. I had to conceptualize. So I had to see every building and see the drums and see the patterns. Then I could know.

[60:59]

So I knew another Westerner who'd gone ahead of me and he got beat all the time because he never, he didn't have the ability to learn it the way the Japanese do. But the feeling I sent him ahead to take the heat and teach me what to do. Okay, but once I learned it, I really had it. I learned it in consciousness, conceptually. And so I could do it perfectly. It took me a while to learn it.

[62:15]

So I think even today, it's not just Aborigines, I think Japanese actually generate a different kind of consciousness than we have. So I think when the West, we have developed a skill at a very highly developed form of consciousness, quite separated from the body. So in practice, we're going another direction. Okay, and I don't think Plato understood practice. I think Western culture hasn't understood practice.

[63:16]

What I see myself and many somewhat contemporary Western philosophers What I see in Western philosophy, people like Whitehead and William James and Heidegger, is their ideas have come to the point where they want practice, but they don't know how to take it the next step because they don't know what practice is. So I think our own lineage leading to practice is in Western philosophy and poetry as well as in some encounter with Asia. Now you're getting fast. I'm sorry. I think our lineage which brought us to practice is more in the West than it is in Asia.

[64:22]

Okay, good. Okay. All right. So, I'm sorry it's taking so long. Okay. But to go back to your example, how I would analyze that. The Oriyoki is a practice related to the body which has a sense of completeness in a bodily narrative And your body knows that when the narrative is most accurate. So when Gerald pointed that out, it just felt more complete to you or more accurate. So at the level at which you have a body-mind, it made sense.

[65:43]

But our body is variously permeated by consciousness. And so at some levels your body has a habit which is separate from this more complete level of body awareness. So in your hands, for instance, Sorry. Your hands are permeated by consciousness.

[66:44]

But this consciousness can be deluded consciousness? Diluted or diluted. Diluted. Or it can be more... I don't know. It's too hard to make these distinctions. But you can feel in your body different kinds of consciousness. And the trick with doing the orgy... is to remove as much consciousness as possible from the way the body does it. And then you remove habits that are for various reasons of how you've used your hands. I'm sorry, I'm talking about something I haven't figured out how to talk about.

[67:55]

Let me give you an example. I often talk about using two hands. But if you ever notice people in the tea ceremony, they pick things up this way. Why is that? Because there's less consciousness in that. When you do that, there's more consciousness. If I hold this this way, it activates consciousness based on more distinctions. If I do that, it's less conscious. Try it, you'll see the difference. So often things are picked up just using the whole hand rather than the fingers. Notice in the Yoyogi, we tend to pick up the stick this way rather than this way.

[69:16]

If you pick it up this way, you don't have the sense of what the Yoyogi is about. Or at night, if you're not getting your pillow or the glasses, you tend to reach out in a different way at night than you do when you're conscious. So when you walk through the halls after we end, and you move your sense of walking in the halls to your hara, Out of your shoulders and head and so forth. Even to keep your hands this way. You move with a different kind of body awareness than usual consciousness. Then he moves you with a completely different body consciousness than with your usual consciousness.

[70:38]

Okay, jeez, I'm sorry, too much talking. I'm sorry, I talked too much. We begin our journey in the same way as Jesus Christ in the north.

[70:56]

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