Of course I'm very glad to have this opportunity to practice with you. This Huynh we have together just now, this place we can call Huynh, We have together just now. Win is a place. Yeah, I'm referring to the first line of the Kenjo Koan, which you have. Which starts, I think, in the translation of causes as all things of the Buddha Dharma.

[01:06]

And sometimes it's translated if all things of the Buddha Dharma. I don't know if you can make these distinctions in German, as if and when. Okay. But I like... For us practicing, I like when. Now, this is the first line of this Genjo koan. Yeah, now various people have made many commentaries over the centuries on this ganjo koan.

[02:23]

Yeah, maybe I'll never get past the first sentence. Yeah, win all things of the Buddha Dharma. There are enlightenment, delusion, practice, birth and death, sentient beings and Buddhas. Now I'd like you to sit in the chair of each of these words.

[03:25]

As I said, I'd like us to be in a rather different time than the way we usually read. The time when, you know, people were lucky to have one book. So this sentence, when all things are the Buddha Dharma, Also dieser Satz, wenn alle Dinge Buddha Dharma sind. And I think you should feel the sentence. Und ich glaube, er sollte diesen Satz fühlen. When all things are the Buddha Dharma. Wenn alle Dinge Buddha Dharma sind.

[04:28]

When is that? Wann ist das? That's the Tani Roshi. in his commentary on the Genjo Koan, by Yasutari Roshi, Yasutari Roshi, he says the key to the Genjo Koan is, what is it? You bring this phrase to each word, what is it? Now, this isn't like studying in a university. You have to read so many books for a course. If I'm practicing with you, I don't want you to read maybe more than one sentence. And if you can't penetrate the one sentence, you have no point in reading the other books.

[05:43]

Yeah, because each word has its own time. Each word will yield to you in its own time. Then in your own time. So I'm also talking here, of course, about studying consciousness. When does consciousness arise? What consciousness arises in the word when? And each word of this sentence? So let's go through this sentence again until it's part of our truth.

[07:03]

When all things are the Buddha Dharma, there are delusions, enlightenment, realization, practice, birth and death, sentient beings and Buddhas. Now what kind of consciousness contains Buddhas as well as sentient beings? Does your consciousness contain Buddhas as well as sentient beings?

[08:09]

So we're also studying consciousness that contains, let's call it that, Buddhas as well as sentient beings. So this is the first, you're sitting down in this chair. This chair in which there's sentient beings and Buddhas. Now, this sentence doesn't occur in just one room. Each word is a chair. Or maybe a zafu.

[09:23]

And when you sit down on that chair or that zafu, a room appears around the chair. It might be a big room. It might be a room you can't even see the walls. Either because it's so big. Or because you don't have any feeling for the word. It's just foggy. Then you have to sit there a while. So, Delusion is one chair. You have to make sense of this.

[10:28]

Are you deluded? Is there delusion in your life? If you don't have any sense of it, the whole sentence falls apart. So what does it mean to be deluded? And enlightenment, realization? This is another chair. Maybe you have some doubts about delusion. Maybe you don't like to think of some parts of your life as deluded.

[11:34]

And what's the use of having such a thought? But then when you're sitting in the chair of enlightenment, you may have even more doubts. There's something slippery about the idea. And then practice. Probably you're clearer about practice than delusion or enlightenment. I guess that's good. Here we are. We're doing something we can call practice. And there's birth and death. We know that. And sentient beings and Buddhas.

[12:49]

You know there's no sense to your practicing Buddhism unless you can imagine that this world that we live in is a world populated by Bodhisattvas and Buddhas. Or it's a world that could be populated by bodhisattvas and buddhas. I would like you to come to a firm feeling that we live in a world that could be, at least could be, populated by bodhisattvas and buddhas. If you can come into that kind of consciousness, your practice has some possibility. your practice has the conditions which allow its maturing.

[14:14]

So, you know, if you think my practice isn't going anywhere, maybe you don't imagine a world populated, possibly populated, by bodhisattvas and buddhas. And then, so let's go back to the beginning. When all things are the Buddha Dharma. When is this when? Is this when now? When you're sitting in the chair of when? Is it now? As all things are the Buddha Dharma. So I'm trying to give you a feeling of slowing down into a teaching.

[15:38]

And not being in a hurry with yourself. Be willing to populate each word. to populate it with your own world. You know, as you reside in each word. You have the patience to reside in each word.

[16:40]

Maybe you'll have the patience to abide in your own sitting. Vielleicht hast du dann die Geduld, in deinem eigenen Sitzen innezuwohnen. You know, I mean, most of you know, not everyone knows, but I'm about to have a baby. Not here in this room, but me too. Vielleicht wissen das nicht alle, einige von euch wissen es, ich werde bald ein Baby kriegen. Yeah, I did a seminar in Boulder recently and people thought I was having my first baby. Boulder, that's northern Colorado, north of Denver. But no, this will be my third baby. But you can't count babies so that it's the first.

[18:02]

So it's unavoidable, since this is only a few weeks away, that I might speak about it. And since I speak about it, what I'm experiencing, of course. And one interesting thing, there's a book out in, it's written in German, but it's translated into English called Disembodying Women. And it's written by Barbara Duden, the Duden Dictionary family. And she's a historian, and in particular a historian of women's bodies. And it's an interesting book to read, even if you're a male.

[19:32]

Es ist ein interessantes Buch, auch für Männer. Even us males once had something to do with a woman's body. Auch wir Männer hatten einst irgendwas mal zu tun mit dem Frauenkörper. Anyway, it's quite an interesting book. And one thing she speaks about is something in English that's called quickening. And quickening is almost not used in English since the 19th century. And quickening is the experience, means the experience, when a woman knows she's pregnant. And the announcement of that by a woman was at one time a kind of legal definition.

[20:42]

Yes, everyone accepted. It's publicly known now. Now, Marie-Louise felt at some point something she called goldfish. Or running mice. Or butterflies. She had very kind of like, what's this funny feeling? So when she went to the doctor, the doctor said, oh, it's much too early for you to feel the baby. But until we've medicalized the whole experience of pregnancy, No one would have told her, oh, it's too early for you to feel the baby.

[21:43]

And one of the points that Barbara makes She says there's a dissymmetric complementarity. Is that possible to translate? A dissymmetric, unsymmetrical. A non-symmetrical. complementarity. They're complementary but they're not symmetric. Between the woman's body and the man's body. She means that women actually, if you look back in women's, she goes back several hundred years, descriptions of their experience,

[22:47]

There are things men don't experience. And so she describes this as a dissymmetric complementarity. And what struck me about it is that there's a dissymmetric complementarity between the yogic body and our usual body. So there's a difference between the consciousness of a yogic practitioner and an ordinary person. And there is a difference between you when you are practicing and you when you are not practicing.

[23:56]

And that difference is something we also have to study. For also there's a quickening of the yogic body within us. The feeling of a new life within us. Almost as if we were pregnant with the subtle body of a Buddha. I'm just trying to find some way to speak about our practice. And one of the problems I see with people practicing is their consciousness edits out the quickening of the yogic body.

[25:15]

And if you don't notice the quickening of the yogic body, in this way, at least in English, quick doesn't mean fast. It means the most intimate feeling of some kind of life. We have old phrases like the quick and the dead. It doesn't mean fast runners and dead bodies. It means the raw or bare emotions. Okay, so if you don't notice the quickening of the yogic body in your practice, if your consciousness doesn't allow this, the yogic body, the subtle body within you doesn't mature.

[27:01]

So in studying consciousness here this week, Yeah, we want to observe the consciousness we have. In practice, we always have to start with an inventory. An inventory of what you already feel. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Then we can begin to notice other possibilities of consciousness. But if you don't start with an inventory, you don't get it.

[28:03]

Now part of the conception of this practice week As you have a chance in the early morning to both sit and then to study a little bit, some dharma, some teaching, and then you we have our meeting like this, this Teisho. And it's fairly easy to read some sutra or a statement of Dogen's or something.

[29:04]

Or to listen to me, perhaps. And to have the feeling of understanding. Or that it generally makes sense. Well, it may generally make sense until you have to tell somebody else what I said. Or you have to explain what Dogen said in your own words to someone else. Here we have maybe a picture of Dogen's teaching. And then we have your mind or your sentences.

[30:11]

And we pour Dogen's teaching over your sentence. Most of it goes right between the words. Like a sieve. Some of it gets caught in a few words and comes out the other side as Christianity or delusion or self-satisfaction or something. So it's quite good actually to try to find ways to speak about this in your own words. And to hear others speak about it. This Buddhist process of studying consciousness is inseparable from studying interactive consciousness.

[31:33]

You study your own consciousness relating to someone else's consciousness. So this afternoon, that's what you have a chance to do. And then we meet together later in the afternoon. We try to see together how we can have some complementarity of consciousness. Then we want to see together how we bring together a complementarity of consciousness. Yes. So I'd like to add one more thing, which for those of you familiar with our practice and my teaching, I commonly make a distinction between consciousness and awareness.

[33:09]

And studying consciousness, I want you also to, of course, study awareness. Yeah, and we should study how we, the mind of dreaming as well. But now Dogen emphasizes not only consciousness and awareness, but also presence. Now, if you don't know the distinction we make between consciousness and awareness, someone in your discussion group who is familiar can explain.

[34:20]

Because you can't work with any of these things unless you have some feeling for it in your own experience. So I should try to give you today some feeling of what we mean by presence. Okay, so Suzuki Roshi, when I first started practicing, almost the first instruction he gave me was to put my mind in my hands. And every now and then I've spoken about this, that he said this to me. And I've told you my perplexity with what he said. I suppose in those days I thought of my mind as my brain.

[35:34]

So I kind of tried to visualize my brain in my hands or something. It was a kind of messy image, you know. Dripping, you know. Yeah. But I couldn't figure out what the heck do you mean, put my mind in my hands? I realized things like I thought my feet were down there somewhere. And I realized that was somewhat strange and contradictory. Why was there an down there and an up here in my body? Is it because my eyes are up here or my sense of being aware is up here? So after a while I tried to work on finding a body which didn't have an up and down, right and left.

[37:02]

At least where sometimes right and left and up and down disappeared. And I felt equally present in my feet as in my hands. Now to feel equally present in your feet as well as your hands is something like what Dogen means by presence. It isn't exactly consciousness. So you can practice with this by bringing your attention. Your attention is a factor of mind. Yes, so you can bring your attention to your hands.

[38:28]

While you're sitting. And you can notice each finger. And locate each finger. And then you can try to do the same for your feet. Locate each toe. And you'll find it's harder to do with your feet. We have less presence in our feet than we do our hands. Wir haben weniger Gegenwartsbewusstsein in den Händen als in den Füßen. And if you put your hands like this and, you know, like kids do, you know, they're not usually wearing robes.

[39:35]

And then you say, move the finger. And you move the wrong finger. What does that mean? It means you're not present in your hands. You have an image of your body, left and right, which you impose on your hands. So when I do this, I'm moving the image of this finger. I'm not moving this finger. And when I confuse the image, I can't move the finger easily. So we're in the image of our body, not really in our body. So we need to study the image of our body as well as our body.

[40:46]

Now to be in an image of your body would be also in Buddhism to be in thought coverings. Because you have an image of your body that covers your body. No, that's okay. It's quite useful. But that shouldn't be, from the point of view of yogic practice, the main way you know your body. Now, as I said, if you bring your attention, let's go back to your hands, you can bring your attention to your, say, right thumb. Sagen wir mal, ihr bringt eure Aufmerksamkeit in den rechten Daumen.

[42:04]

And it can feel like it's touching your left thumb. Und dieser Daumen kann fühlen, wie wenn er den linken berührt. I've gone through this before, but it's useful to notice. Also ich habe das schon früher gemacht, aber es ist gut, das nochmal zu bemerken. It's quite interesting, you can have your right hand touch your left hand. You can switch and have your left hand touch your right hand. One feels more presence than the other, depending which is the one touching. So if you have your hands together, You can fool around, practice, play around. You make your right thumb touch your left thumb. And then you make your left thumb touch your right thumb. And then you begin to awaken each finger. And pretty soon you can make your right thumb and left thumb equally touch each other.

[43:21]

Then a presence begins to fill the hands. the whole mudra begins to have a presence. We could say this is putting the mind in the hands. And when you're sitting zazen and you fill your hands with presence, This is a cultivation of the relationship of mind and body. So your hands begin to, the whole mudra begins to feel like a presence.

[44:25]

Almost as if something glowing. Now there's various practices you can do from this. You can extend this feeling throughout your whole body. Little by little. Nudging, do you know the word nudging? Nudging it up your arms. See where it stops. Nudging it a little more. Be patient. Don't say, oh, it's all. You have the feeling, maybe you've got the feeling strongly in your hands. Maybe you've got the feeling strongly in your hands.

[45:28]

Can you have that feeling of presence in your shoulders? Inside your body. Throughout your body. Surrounding your body. Now this is what Dogen means in addition to consciousness, awareness, presence. And strangely, if you really develop it just in your hands, before you spread it to the rest of your body, just this presence of the hand mudra straightens your whole posture.

[46:31]

Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you.

[46:35]

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