This is to bring language into your body. So when you're speaking you feel the vibrational quality of your body. You feel the languages in the pace of the body, not in a mental pace. So your language doesn't get faster than your body. Pretty soon it's just mental talking and not physical talking. Physical talking would be more the practice of bodhisattva. Because also then you're letting the other person feel your words, not just hear mentally your words. So we could say bodhisattva practice, if we're talking subtly, somewhat subtly, about the functions of bodhisattva, would be to use language in a way that it can be physically felt. And language that's physically felt is usually truer. It's more rooted in you and the situation. So these languaged objects of perception have an energy from the language as well, and that energy can be used to change them.

[01:10]

So if you take neither here nor there, no here, no there, here and there have a power in them from the language. But if you take them out of language, and use them in a way that destroys the binding power of language, you're using the energy from the words to counteract the energy of language. That make sense? You remember that Dr. Seuss line? I don't yet. I'm ready to remember it though. They say, today is gone, today was good, today was fun, tomorrow was another one. Every day from here to there, Funny things are everywhere. Dr. Seuss. Dr. Seuss. He's a great Zen master. He's quite good. So that from here to there felt to me like... Yeah. Okay.

[02:16]

So what you do, again... What is your name? Kristen. Kristen. Spelled with a C. Is you just try to imagine neither here nor there, or no here, no there, or no before and after. So if I'm with Dan with no before and after, and I can really kind of And it's not so hard to do. You can let that slip away. You feel a tremendous presence. Sometimes movies have a powerful feeling because they take away before and after. So if you, say a movie opens with waves rolling in to the shore, right? It looks like waves from some cosmic time. If you're at a particular beach, you may not feel that. It's just waves coming in. But as you see it in a movie sometimes, before and after are gone, it's just waves.

[03:18]

But to really have it become a wisdom view that's lodged in us as an antidote to our deluded views, non-wisdom views, takes constant repetitions. So if you took on, say that you personally took it on now, for the next three and a half months, you decide to, as often as you happen to remember, say to yourself, no before and after. Or no here and there. It'll have a big effect on you. Because it begins to take you out of the language scheme of our culture. And you begin, if I sit in this room, when I have a feeling, when I start speaking with you, and I come into a feeling of no before and after, and no here and there, that's when people come up to me and say, geez, you answered my question, talked right to what I was saying.

[04:32]

How did you know what I was thinking? I didn't know what you were thinking. I didn't sort of read your mind. I just was speaking without a feeling of separation. Something else happens then. Okay, I think it's about time to take a break. And then we'll really define the bodhisattva. No now, no then. No here, no after. We'll see you then. Thank you very much. She called just before I was starting to come back here. Marie-Louise said she's very fussy and she was being changed. She said, could you calm her down? She put the phone to the ear and I said, no. And she...

[05:34]

I can't understand where this voice is coming from, and she stops immediately, supposedly. Oh, yeah, okay. Just at the end of... Just before the break, I heard Gary continue something I'd started a little bit about. I said, already... separated, and the antidote to that is already connected. So I heard you say something, and you said maybe I could say something about it when we started, but maybe you could say something about it. Gary, maybe you could share with people your observations about the phrases. I didn't know I was positive. Isn't that what this is all about?

[06:38]

Well, Hiroshi has talked about different practices in Zen and one of the practices which is, I guess, particularly characteristic of Zen is his turning phrases. where it's not a mantra that you just repeat all the time, but when you think of it, you say something already connected with an antidote to this. More importantly, I think, is that you feel it as you say it. see somebody or something or you know when you walk outside and notice a tree and you feel and it helps to say that I think to yourself already connected and you try and feel that feel that and over time I've you know I've found my instances with these to be very useful for me in terms of

[07:51]

changing my view. The interesting thing to me is also that many of these things, like another one is just now is enough. Intellectually, we all don't have any difficulty really knowing it's true. It's like, well, it has to be. This is it. And so, if we begin to use these praises, we can begin to come into that, and then we engender that kind of feeling. Okay. You could go on a little longer if you want, but it's all right. Thank you very much. My dream of teaching is that At some point, whenever something comes up that I've taught before, I can turn to Russell and say, Russell, would you expound that, please? Paul, would you do that? Dan, would you do that one?

[08:53]

And then I don't have to do anything. I can say, oh, this would be the completion of transmission. Be careful. I may start doing that. If I have to do it, you have to do it. Anyway. Yeah. I was thinking about this example of turning towards the pond and the fog stopped. If you take out here, if you don't set up before and after, then it doesn't seem like you can say the fog stopped because I tried to look at the pond. Causality is taken out. And I'm wondering what you can say about turning to the palm and the frog stopping when here and there, before and after, are not set up.

[09:59]

I think that we've got words that are making problems here. There's an immediate situation. the immediate situation has... You come more thoroughly into the immediate situation if you don't set up here and there and before and after. But within the immediate situation, there's still differentiation and there's still causation or there's still effect. So, I mean, if we... you know, if that's what happens when, I can't remember his name now, turns his head, but yet it only happens when you don't set up here and there, then we have to say that within not setting up here and there, some kind of causation exists. So let's look at the fact of the case, not the words. So, because it's more subtle than when there's no here and there, there's no

[11:14]

there's no before and after, then there's no causation. That's just in language, that's true. In fact, when you set up a realm or field where there's no here nor there, causation still exists. Or a kind of effect. Something's still out there. Yeah, well, I mean, somehow the frogs are connected to your chin. If you want to call it causation, you can call it causation, but causation's just a word, too. And causation is a word that functions in certain, usefully functions in certain logical ways of talking about the world. But to say that turning your chin is an example of causation is an example of an effect, but it's tying an event to a theory about what causation is, I would say. Yeah. I was, I think, looking for a... trying to find a... outside of that usual language, outside of the language of causation, a way of talking about such an experience.

[12:20]

Well, that's what you'd have to do. Or you'd have to say there's another kind of causation. Or connectedness. I don't think... I mean, I would say connectedness. I wouldn't say causation. Because if you say causation, you bring in all of the apparatus that goes along with the word causation. Say incredible synchronicity. Something like that, yeah. Sounds like a title of a movie. The Incredible Synchronicity. Where we're frolicking in the particular... And the frogs are stopping and singing. Yeah. Katalin, what did you want to say? Oh, but there were other right nows. Yeah, okay. So if you think of something, please don't. Gary is not that big.

[13:22]

So there's so many things I'd like to speak about. I'd like to practice with you. But we have only 45 minutes or an hour or something now. It's funny, at the beginning of the seminar, I always wonder, what the heck can I talk about? But once we've established some sort of field, then there's so many things we could talk about. And I've refrained from talking about the paramitas in some detail because so many of you are here, quite a few of you were here from the April Boulder seminar where I spoke about the paramitas as a practice. For the whole seminar, mostly, isn't that right? But I... So here... But I should speak about the paramitas, so I will now. But so far we started out looking just at the first paramita, the practice of generosity, and what the practice of generosity means.

[14:51]

If you ask what kind of generosity, what kind of acts of generosity, what kind of What real gift can we give? The mind of generosity. And what is the mind of generosity rooted in? The mind of generosity, rather than acts of generosity, is rooted in the aspiration for enlightenment. Now, we're talking about Bodhisattva practice, we're talking about an aspiration for our enlightenment. Our, all of ours. And an understanding that it's not just simply that...

[16:00]

while the liberation body may be the same, the functioning of enlightenment in the world is different if you're enlightened with and through others and not alone or just through the teaching. So it's not just that you have an aspiration for enlightenment and out of compassion you practice with others. There's actually not an alternative. enlightenment of the Bodhisattvas is only realized with and through others. And it's not just with and through a teacher. It's with and through others. And that's one of the distinctions made between Tathagata Zen and so-called ancestral patriarchal Zen. And this is another kind of interesting way to look at it, though practice is a... a... Zen practice is a unison of these two.

[17:22]

And so what do I mean by that? The phrase you used, Sarah, the teisho of the body, the teisho of the actual body, that's Tathagata Zen. Because it means, or there's a phrase, Hoshin something or other, I can't remember the phrase right now, which means letting, in the state of all at onceness, or in the mind of all at onceness, the Dharmakaya teaches you. The world teaches you. That's Tathagata Zen. That means the Tathagata is a name for Okay, the Buddha is not is-ness, not existent. The Buddha is thus-ness. Thus-ness is understood as coming and going. Is-ness has a sense of continuing, existing. So we wouldn't... I mean, sometimes we might say is-ness, but really, is-ness is delusion.

[18:29]

Thus-ness is more a natural way to use language from the... or... adopt these words and turn them into technical terms. And how you describe practice to yourself influences things. So... Tathagata Zen means you practice in such a way that the practice itself teaches you. like writing writes writing. The act of writing writes writing. So you can emphasize the context of practice itself. And a teaching like Uncorrected Mind or Shikantaza are characteristic of Tathagata Zen. Ancestral, or more commonly called in the past, Patriarchal Zen,

[19:33]

sounds too patriarchal now, means that you realize through a teacher that your experience comes through the interaction with a teacher. So if we take these various ideas, and these ideas are not meant to be exclusive, though the Rinzai school tends to emphasize so-called ancestral Zen, the lineage as the primary source occasion, dynamic of enlightenment. The Dung Shan school tends to emphasize, also emphasizes lineage and the teacher, but in a way that the practice illuminates you. I mean, I'm not trying to say this is absolutely perfect. I'm just saying the best I can in the time we have. So, now the, I suppose the view of the Dung Shan school is, which is actually as a teaching method somewhat earlier than the Linji school, I believe.

[20:47]

The Dung Shan school would probably feel that the Enlightenment Lineage enlightenment, we could call it something like Tathagata lineage enlightenment, is more thorough or deeper because it's through an all-at-onesness. It's more in the way of looking at things. And it's more your own possessions. it's not like through a teacher, it's through yourself, but in the context of the teaching, the teacher, and so forth. Am I making a little bit of sense here? There are really small differences, because both Linji and Dungsan schools are a mixture of Tathagata and ancestral Zen.

[21:51]

But there's a little difference in emphasis. I mean, for example, in Tathagata, And you see the difference in, for example, in the Dungsan lineage, you're not given a koan. You find a koan. And in the Linji lineage, you're given a koan. And you pass through a series of koans, which the Dungsan school speaks deprecatingly about as step ladders in. But this is just political things. So the gongshan way is, when I give a lecture, my job is to present some koans. They're not saying, oh, this is book so-and-so, but I speak about what I'm teaching in a way that's a koan, and some of you might get it and some of you don't. But it's up to your alertness to discover the koan in my tesho.

[22:54]

So then you take a tesho that's more through your own power, or suited to you, then I decide to give you a koan now. I give you this one. But I might be very good. Some people ask me to give them a koan. It's actually kind of a hard job. It's easy to give them beginning koans. And it's easy to give a person koans suited particularly to them, but to give them many koans suited to them is not so easy. Because often it's one or two or three koans that are really powerful for a person, and the other koans are refinements. I don't know if this is interesting to you, but it's part of the fabric of the teaching of Zen because you always end up with an emphasis. You can't do everything. So each lineage, each school has a different emphasis. And lineages within schools have emphases. So we could say that Bodhisattva Zen emphasizes the tathagata side of practice, that you realize... No, excuse me.

[24:04]

Bodhisattva Zen emphasizes the... not lineage, but practicing not just in the... Tathagata Zen emphasizes practicing in the context of the world. Bodhisattva Zen brings these two things together and says, yes, you realize with and through people, other people, but you also realize in the context of the world of people. So they're somewhat similar. Again, I'm trying to put these things together as a picture. And it's not good to get caught in one. Linji is this way. Tungshan is this way. Orissata is that way. They're a kind of field where you can emphasize. Yes. Can you describe a little more or differentiate a little more between realizing with and through others and realizing in the context of others?

[25:05]

That's the same thing. I thought you were saying... No, they're not different. Okay. Okay. Were you emphasizing the difference between with and through other people and in the context of the world as a whole? Yes. Yeah. So practically speaking, though, it helps to have a teacher. Practically speaking, it helps to have a sangha. So the layperson in a business or professional situation, without the background of a sangha and a teacher, would have a hard time practicing the paramitas. He wouldn't even know anything about them, he or she, in the midst of his professional or her professional life. So, if you've had pure bodhisattva practice, you drop the person down in the middle of New York City and they become a bodhisattva. No, they probably need a little time to do zazen and so forth. And... So... Yeah.

[26:14]

Okay. Now, one of the keys here is to understanding this, I think, is to recognize, to see that, because all, you know, the, if you just use words, you can say, the teaching, the Srivaka, who realizes through the teaching, is realizing through the path of the Buddha. So that's, you know, the bodhisattva is creating a path. Well, he's realizing through the path. He's not really creating the path. But it's not, so you still create your own path. So if you follow someone's sincerity, they went from sincerity to sincerity, and it's a different path than someone else's, the way they sincerely move through their life. But the bodhisattva... I don't know if this is useful, but for some reason, I'm just trying to create a picture as I see it, that earlier Buddhism is related to the historical Buddha and to India and to the Buddha.

[27:23]

It was very important where the Buddha was, and stupas are very important because of the relics of the Buddha and so forth. One of the differences in Mahayana is they stopped looking to India, stopped looking to the historical Buddha, and so where do they look? They have to look here. So they also then enshrined sutras, because the sutra became the Buddha instead of the historical Buddha. So sutras themselves became more important, because they could be anywhere. You could move them around. And Sukhiroshi kept the Diamond—wasn't it the Diamond Sutra?—on the altar. He had a large bound and brocade. That was like a Buddha on the altar, but it was the sutra. And in a way, we should get one, some sort of nice version of some central sutra, and they should be on the altar with the Buddha. That would be a very Mahayana thing to do. So if you don't look toward India and look toward the past, because you're looking toward the historical path as if the path is universal,

[28:31]

that there's one truth, there's one enlightenment. The Mariana is a shift too. There's not one truth. It's not just in the path. It's not just the way the Buddha did it. We have to find a path in our particular society. And that's what I was speaking about earlier. Hmm. So in each situation and with each person you practice with, there's a somewhat different path and that path is mutually created. So that means

[29:36]

You're not looking towards some universal path or historically true path or path that the Buddha followed. You're looking at a path that you and I can follow in this particular society. From that point of view, a person who decides to be a doctor who goes, what are these doctors called who go to other countries and... Without borders. Doctors without borders. That would be a kind of bodhisattva activity. They may be jerks who are interested in I don't know what, but it's their form of ambition. But the basic concept is a bodhisattva concept. Or just to be a doctor anywhere. Whatever you are, how you're a businessman, how you're a doctor. So there will be particular bodhisattva paths in our society And now I'll go back to where I was. When I was speaking about Dan, Dan's been practicing a long time, I've been practicing a long time, many of us have been practicing various lengths of time, sometimes pretty long.

[30:43]

And yet, we don't make it work as quickly as a similar practitioner in Asia would, I think. Work, you know what I mean. Don't take it too seriously. Because the wheels aren't greased, or something like that. the distinctions like between who and what aren't there. If you practiced the Four Foundations of Mindfulness without understanding it's about what, you wouldn't get very far. You might get more mindful, you might get more alert, but you wouldn't end up with feeling this... way in which everything is practicing the Four Pali, where our body is everything all at once, because the who separates us. So we're trying to find what I'm trying to do by sorting through language and not using Sanskrit and Pali words, you know, I don't try to use the word kalesha this morning, but usually I don't use any such words because they have no coin in our language.

[31:55]

We can't spend them. They sort of stick there in a drawer somewhere. They open the drawer and there's samadhi, kalesha, etc. And you know, what the heck are you going to do with them? You close the drawer again. They don't function in our language much. So some have become virtually Western and English words like dharma, karma, and so forth. But then they're often corrupted. I mean, you find in Cosmopolitan Magazine the article about karma. They have no idea, you know. Or tantra. You know, Tantra is one of the most misused. It seems to be an excuse for what you can imagine. One second, though. Sorry. But can you wait one minute, Charles? I want to try to see if I lose my train here. That's all right. So what we're doing by taking a long time to practice. And I've taken a long time to practice. I mean, I've been practicing. I mean, Dogen died when he was 54 or something like that, didn't he?

[32:57]

Man, Dogen at 30, I couldn't touch, you know. So, and I'm 65, you know. So we're slow, so I'm slow, it's okay. But our slowness is part of creating a path in our society. And so when we make our little discoveries of saying what, which, you know, the what-who relationship would not have the same meaning in China. They don't have all the psychology to establish who, and they don't have the same kind of emphasis. They don't have a language that says it reigns. Where's the it that reigns? Our language requires a doer, so we have an it that reigns. There's no it that reigns there. So you have a different situation, different language, etc. So we have to find those very small differences, like Dan speaking about opening up how we have to think of time when we read Dogen as time.

[34:14]

as ripening time and not generalized time. If you think of it as clock time, you don't understand what Dogen's talking about. You have to see that Dogen thinks that we all live in different times, and those are simultaneous but not the same. If you don't make decisions like that, you can't get what Dogen's talking about, or what any of the Buddhists are talking about. Your infancy is different time than your adulthood. And your middle age is different than my middle age, and so forth. No branch is the same to raven or to wind. But I think together, we're creating a bodhisattva path. And so the Bodhisattva is particularly linked to his contemporary society. He or she is not looking back toward India or the way the Buddha did it, but the way we do it in our society.

[35:20]

That's one aspect of a Bodhisattva, which is different than thinking of a Buddha. A Buddha has a more timeless sense. Bodhisattva is very much in our society creating a path with others, and that creation of a path with others is the root of the practice, the development, and the enlightenment. Yes, Charles. You really answered my question. Oh, good. I'm glad I tried you. why someone from an Asian culture conversation yesterday could more easily progress along the path of mindfulness and whether it's, my thought was it's that concept of I, just as in our group we talked, we were all individuals struggling individually or its mindfulness, and I thought perhaps a person from an Asian culture would feel more linked, less identification with the eye, and therefore move... I think that's true.

[36:25]

That's true. But there's... I would say more Westerners are practicing seriously. And one of the reasons is... I mean lots of reasons. It's new and it's interesting and it's fashionable and movie stars do it and all that stuff. Because probably it's actually more productive for us. They may move faster, but it's more productive for us. Because we have to struggle against our culture. And we have to be renunciant in another way. We have to renounce our culture in a way they don't have to because their culture is already glossed Buddhism. And I think of Kaz who's going to be here next week. He says, the best thing to be in Japan is a Christian. The best thing to be in America is a Buddhist. Because you see the culture if you're a Christian in Japan, you don't see the culture. So most Buddhists and good teachers in Japan are enlightened within their culture. They're not enlightened free of their culture. They're like the artists.

[37:27]

Yeah, they're more, they're something like that. And so they, although I'd say the enlightened, the artist just tends to be enlightened outside his culture. but only in a particular way. But it's similar. But most Japanese teachers cannot really function with Western. And they come to the West and they set up some kind of Japanese way of doing it, and it just drives us bonkers. But there are some Japanese teachers who... Suki Roshi is one, Yamada Mumon Roshi is one, and there's a few who can work with Westerners. And you can see a development in them. I think in the early days, Mumon Roshi, for instance, wasn't so good at working with Westerners, and he threw some Westerners out. But he got the hang of it. But he was definitely a kind of communist. He was pretty much outside. He was at the top of Japanese society, but outside it. So, yeah. So we have an advantage in that we have to practice forces us to look at our society and reformulate our thinking.

[38:37]

Okay, does that sort of respond to it? Okay. Catherine? Oh, I'm very glad to hear that. Let's hear it. What part are you going to share, Dan? Would it be fair to characterize or generalize what distinguished Suzuki Roshi was perhaps that his love of the practice of Zazen allowed him to separate himself from the culture? Absolutely. He loved the culture. He loved Buddhism more than he loved being Japanese. And that freed him from the culture. But he also loved the culture. So somehow there was a wedge. And he always dreamed, I can't really practice Buddhism in Japan because people don't see Buddhism as any different.

[39:44]

They see it as too weird or the same as the culture. And so he felt it's got to have a new place, and he had this dream from childhood. It's going to happen in a new country. He also had the vision that Buddhism in Japan would be reformed through Western Buddhism. I think he was right. Yes? About who and what? Yeah. In the Western culture, we have a lot of the who, but the majority of the people are wounded in that aspect of who. Are wounded in the aspect of who? Yes. Yeah. That's true. As we go, if we are to take a Buddhist path and forget the who, there is a part that is never addressed somehow. Mm-hmm. Yeah, no, that's true, but that's a different seminar.

[40:48]

Come next week. No, that's one of my own... Fully next week? Well, let's not set up before and after. Yeah. Well, that's one of my pet peeves to grind. I think the, just to put it in simple, encapsulate it, I think the teaching of Zen is don't think is really detrimental. Because we have to mature our Western psyche and our Western identity. And don't think it doesn't happen. So I think we need also, though, to have shifts between who and what.

[41:50]

It doesn't mean we don't go back to who and practice with who. But in this particular practice of the fourth foundation of mindfulness, it doesn't work as a who, it only works as a what. But there's other practices where we need to really look at, and I think in Zazen you need to practice with Zazen, do Zazen in a way that's particular to Westerners and not typically Japanese. Okay? How is it different? I said that was for the next seminar. Well, one way it's different is you don't teach, don't think. and you emphasize not inviting your thoughts to tea as a way of being open to your thoughts for something like a couple years at least, where you, in fact, recapitulate your personal history. But you recapitulate it in the chicken stock of zazen mind into the beef stock of consciousness.

[42:51]

I think maybe you could just say it as, don't think, and then go ahead and think. Well, okay. This is the way you do it when you start teaching. That's okay. Sounds all right. You can tell yourself that. I actually would not teach don't think. I would teach don't identify with your thinking. And when your thinking stops, how refreshing it is. But when we meditate, we do not... I mean, we cut our thoughts. Not me. You don't cut your thoughts? No. I let them do whatever they want to do. You really do? Absolutely. I never interfere. Well, then you do a different practice than I do. I guess so. What do you mean, we? Well, then I've been hurt. Yeah, no, that's, I don't know, I'm not going to decide, ask you who told you, but... Well, count your breaths, you know, that's kind of a thought, isn't it?

[43:58]

Yeah. Now I'm just, what you were saying, what do you mean, we, it just sets from a joke which made me think of this, excuse me, this joke of two people, one person with an American flag is saying, my country, right or wrong? And the other guy says, what do you mean, wrong? Anyway, yeah, let me, let's not get too far diverted here. No, what I do is a practice. And when I said I spent seven years or so, not or more, not doing anything, I really meant that. I didn't do anything but take the posture. No mental effort at all. Maybe sometimes I learned to count to tens or things like that, but basically it was a tiny percentage. Because I wanted to see what happened when I didn't bring any baggage in it all any ideas anything I couldn't trust that my whatever idea I brought in like don't think wasn't based on oh this will improve me or this is the right way to do it I didn't want any thought this is the right way to do it this will improve me this will make progress I wanted to take any idea of progress or attaining I wanted to accept whatever it was even if it was nothing at all well that would be good right I wanted to accept anything and even if it was lousy

[45:27]

So I never tried to improve. You must have had a nice time. I did. I missed out all the time. Well, not all. After a while, I got more blissful. But what I did, in a sense, try to do, and I could see was happening, I wasn't watering the plants of mine. I wasn't, you know, they were being cut off from their nourishment. And eventually they stopped. And that's a different kind of stopping than when you do it intentionally. But, you know, I'm the lazy Zen type guy. Then I can't say that this path, the way I've practiced, I think I can share some fruits of practicing, but I can't say the exact path I took would be for you. I started practicing when there was virtually no Buddhism around.

[46:29]

And so, you know, you really had to... And there wasn't any cultural support or other people who did it or something, you know. And there were a few of us. But mostly there was Suzuki Roshi and a lot of beginners. And we're all young and beginners. And now you have a much more rich context here. And Suzuki Roshi just said, go ahead and just sit. Now did he know what you were doing? Oh, now you're beginning to wonder. Hey, maybe I've got it all wrong. No, no, no. Yes, it's okay. She knew what I was doing. Okay. So the paramutism. The first is the mind of generosity, which I define as the mind of openness.

[47:33]

Now here I'm trying to give you, which I've spoken about before, in the last six months or so, a sense of the dynamic, what I would call the dynamic of the paramitas, how they work as practice. We spent the whole seminar, really, on what it requires to practice and realize a mind of generosity. We have to stabilize, be able to stabilize a mind of generosity. That's, I thought, the best way to speak about that is to speak about the most basic way to stabilize the mind is through, as a teaching, is through the four foundations of mindfulness. And I said that for a bodhisattva, the greatest gift a bodhisattva can give is his or her state, mode of mind, and the aspiration for enlightenment. And the aspiration for enlightenment as a... As an intention, an intention which you know is realizable.

[48:46]

The key here is knowing it's realizable. If you don't really believe it's realizable, it doesn't have any bodhisattva power. Or minimal. You know, in Vermont, if you ask somebody directions, and they say, I'm sorry, you can't get there from here. doesn't give you much confidence on your drive. So you have to have some assurance you can get there from here. So the aspiration for enlightenment with the sureness, the faith that it's possible. So that is, I like, a first challenge to you. Do you have the faith it's possible? If you don't have the faith it's possible, we can stop here. So now you have to work with, do you have the faith it's possible? And the second gift is then to, third or whatever, the mind of enlightenment, the aspiration for enlightenment, the mind of generosity, the aspiration for enlightenment, the aspiration and the showing the truth of it, not just believing it's possible, but showing the truth of it.

[50:06]

Okay. Now, we could have spent some of the seminar on the difference between sudden enlightenment, original enlightenment, achieved enlightenment, and so forth. But we'll leave that aside. This is based primarily on original enlightenment. And a subset of original enlightenment is the idea of initial enlightenment. But that's... I won't try to speak. So we have the mind of generosity and the aspiration for enlightenment, the aspiration that... Okay, that's enough. Then the second parameetha, is usually translated as discipline, but as a practice it means to be able to receive.

[51:14]

The first one you can understand is to be able to give, to be open to giving, and the second is to be able to receive. The reason a person disciplines himself is to learn the piano, is to learn. So discipline is about learning. Discipline is about being able to receive. Sophia is definitely going to have to have some discipline if she's going to receive from her parents, receive from society, and whatever. So the second is to receive. And what I'm trying to get to here is something you can feel in the midst of your relationship with people. So it has to have a kind of integrity that you can feel in an all-at-oneseness. Okay? The first is a feeling of openness, of giving, of not feeling boundaries, of feeling already connected, like that. And the second, and with the knowing that this practice is with and through others.

[52:21]

in the context of others, okay? The second, then, is to be open to the other person, to wait for the other person, to receive without a sense of hierarchy or anything, a sense of equalness, of... What's the word I'm looking for? Non-differentiation or... Something. Equalness has too much of a kind of democratic political overtone. The word I'm looking for, I can't find it right now. Okay. And the third that makes both work is patience. So you have a feeling of going out, of giving, of no boundaries, a feeling of receiving, and the patience to wait. And here, patience is this ripening time. You don't just try to force bodhisattva precepts on somebody.

[53:24]

You wait until they ask, or you wait until they ask two or three times. Or you are just present with... And you don't try to give some teaching to somebody. You're more open to receiving a teaching than to give a teaching. So that's a kind of position. I think you can feel it. And you can practice that in every encounter with a person. You can... Just like you can... not set up here and there. You can set up, in this case, not set up differentiation, or you can set up non-differentiation, or you can set up a feeling of generosity and find little ways to practice it. It's always good to find little ways to enact it. Get money away, do stuff, whatever you can. Okay? Um... So you set up in each counter, you have the feeling of openness, you have the feeling of waiting, of patience, of being open to whatever the person is saying, this extraordinary person in front of you.

[54:36]

And so there's this context of openness, receiving, and patience. How do you maintain that? With energy. So the fourth paramita is energy. You have to bring energy. You have to have a Then it means you have to establish the kind of mind which is nourished from the situation. If you need a supply of energy from your night's sleep, it's going to dwindle during the day. So this kind of energy means the energy that arises from the situation itself. Otherwise you're going to run out of energy. Is the open itself creating? If you're actually open, yes, you're receiving and being nourished by the immediate situation. Okay. And the fifth and sixth are meditation and wisdom. And here it's very clear.

[55:39]

And you need, like Gary said, wisdom phrases. You need to bring wisdom into your practice. If you try to find a way to speak through the body so bodies can hear each other, that's wisdom. That's bringing a wisdom into the encounter with another person. And meditation, you try to bring all of this, it's rooted in meditation, you try to bring the mind of meditation into what you're doing, to not set up before and after, is to bring the mind of meditation into it. Because the mind of meditation is characterized by no before and after here and there. So, in a way, we can say the practice of the first... for generosity, receiving patience and energy, depend on meditation, arise from meditation.

[56:46]

But then they in turn transform your meditation. So all of these are affecting each other. And they are rooted in wisdom and they're the process of realizing wisdom in swimming in the context of other people. and creating a path of realization for yourself and for others. So that's basically, I would say, that's the kind of shape of the Bodhisattva, the function of the Bodhisattva. So a couple of things I meant to mention yesterday was... I didn't use the word sensation, which might be helpful. The second foundation of mindfulness, pleasurable and unpleasurable, is the territory of sensation. It's not the territory of emotion or thinking.

[57:47]

It's the territory of sensation. Sensation is pleasant and unpleasant. And the sense of the Dharma is also the sense, which I've often talked about, of junctures. Like we've had these big storms, and the example I use, you wake up in the night and you hear the storm, and you feel it, the dark rain on the roof, and then you go back to bed, and someone back to sleep. Then somebody in the morning, you say, did you hear that storm? And they say, no, no, I slept. Was there a storm? They didn't have a juncture with the storm. They don't feel it. You had a feeling of the storm, you know, the rain. There's a moment. It only lasts so you can feel it in one second and go back to sleep. But those kind of junctures occur with people. They occur with yourself. We suddenly have a feeling of knowing somebody, liking someone, accepting someone. Those junctures are dharmas. And those junctures don't just happen in extraordinary moments. in the middle of a storm, they're always happening.

[58:48]

That sense of junctures rather than a continuity is part of the idea of dharmas too. Juncture with teaching, where the teaching suddenly becomes clear. An insight is a juncture. You know, it's interesting, I think it's in the Dhamma Sutra, but it's one of the lore of Buddhism, is that there's understanding when you cry. So Subuddhi is... hearing this teaching they burst into tears. That's a juncture. We all know those junctures. Something happens. We feel our heart open or we feel some deep ease or clarity. Those are all junctures. But the sense of Buddhism is Those junctures, stuff of the world is junctures.

[59:50]

Okay. So why don't we sit for a minute and then this is enough, I think. If you have some question, I'm happy to respond or try to respond. It's certainly been... fun and good for me, and pleasant to be here with you these days. I'm glad we had an extra day, and not just starting, much we started Thursday evening. Junctures, connections, some sort of ease in the world. And out of that ease, your liberation body or bodhisattva body begins to grow or take form.

[61:05]

I think so. I find it so. Find it like this practice. Oh, thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you. What could I do without you? Today, Pete Van Donnel and his wife are going to join us. And they, somebody moved here from Aspen, actually.

[62:11]

And they're building a house in town. And he's a a specialist in real estate law, land law, environmental law, and so forth. He was a kind of environmental real estate attorney in Aspen, and he's retired to, sort of retired from being a lawyer, but he's volunteered to be our lawyer and help us with the land and figuring out these surveys and everything. He's a very nice guy and his wife is quite interested in practice. I don't know our practice, but interested in practice in general and spiritual life. Anyway, they're nice folks and they've been promising. He's also a golfer. like Ram Dass. Some people really get into golf. And he was able to come today because some kind of benefit tournament was canceled.

[63:17]

He's had a rain check to come join us for lunch for a long time. And I talked to him the other day. He said, you know, I could come to lunch Sunday. So I said, okay. So he'll join us for lunch today. But he was a really nice guy, so I think it's okay. He'll feel like he attended the seminars.

[63:35]

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