Yeah, what I'd like to... Oh, good afternoon. Guten Nachmittag. What I'd like to do today is if possible give you another version of yesterday's talk. Yeah, so certainly in these winter branches, what I've been trying to do is give you a feeling for where Zen comes from and what Zen is based on. So you can recreate, have a basis for recreating your own Zen practice. Now this isn't just an epistemological exercise simply because I think it's nice that you know these things or it's useful to know these things.

[01:01]

But because to do this is a basic position of Yogacara Buddhism. In other words, Asanga is, I guess, the fourth century. We can say Yogacara starts with Asanga. Let's say that. And we could say, yeah, so that's about the fourth century of our common era. Yeah, the C for Christ became the C for common. So it's politically correct. How correct? It's politically correct. Politically correct, yeah. Okay, so you could say, well... Buddhism has come to this point in the 4th century.

[02:17]

Let's start our practice from the 4th century. Let's start our practice on the development that's occurred up till now. Which is the understandable view. You're studying botany. You don't go back to... Who's the monk who categorized plants and things? Linné? Linné? No. Mendel? Mendel, yeah. We don't go back to Mendel and start over. But that's what the Yogacara school says. If we're going to practice Yogacara, we should go back to Buddha's time and start as he did. But of course this... This going back and coming forward again is within the constraints and illumination of Madhyamaka and Nargajuna's teaching.

[03:45]

And so that, in other words, one of Nagarjuna's arguments is the unconditioned is not unconditioned If it's realized through conditioned means. In other words, There's no such thing as the unconditioned if the path to the unconditioned is conditions. No, I'm not going to go into that. But you should understand that the contradictions and problems within that are a dynamic within practice.

[05:04]

In other words, of course, whatever we reach is through conditions. Anders gesagt, was immer wir erreichen, und was immer wir erreichen, ist durch Bedingtheiten. Also wie kann man das Un- oder Nichtbedingte erreichen, und so weiter, also wie gehen wir damit um? And you might think that your own thinking is not so great, or so. But if you look carefully at the contradictions in your own thinking, you'll see they fall into a pattern, something like that. Now, this has been, you know, strangely or perhaps not so strangely, at the center of my practice. im Mittelpunkt meiner Praxis.

[06:14]

I did two big brochures for raising the money for and developing an interest in Tassajara. I don't remember what I called the first one, but the second one I called an unconditioned response to a conditioned world. And I also tried to carry that out in the brochure. In other words, I printed it on a big piece of paper. And I folded it in an odd way. So it was a square. But you couldn't open it exactly right. So I imagine some guy getting it, Sam. I imagine some guy, let's call him Sam.

[07:32]

He can't figure out, it's so big, he calls Mabel. So Mabel comes over. Would you help me with this? Like folding a sheet or something. So Mabel and Sam together say, geez, where's the beginning of this thing? My idea was to get somebody bodily involved and if possible needing help with the brochure. This was somehow my attempt to give an unconditioned response to a conditioned brochure. And my sense of the unconditioned response was to practice in a place like Tassajara. And Tassajara was in the middle of 250,000 acres of wilderness. I mean, that's short of Siberia.

[08:45]

There aren't many places like that left on the planet. Then when I left And when I left the Sahara, I thought I would never find a place like this again, but then I found Cresto. So you can see my sense of the unconditioned response to a conditioned world. Requires some place to uncondition yourself. Physical place, not just an idea. This is also the attempt to go back to the earliest times. Later Buddhism becomes primarily epistemological.

[09:46]

And really Prajna wisdom begins to take precedence over Samadhi and Sila or morality precepts. So one of the shifts into Mahayana. It's a shift from emphasizing samadhi and shamatha to emphasizing And as you can see in all my talks, implicitly, first of all, I am not emphasizing much how to get rid of afflictive emotions. Sometimes I do, but basically that's not a big emphasis for me.

[11:18]

Even though it's been at the center of my life and practice to free myself as much as possible from afflictive emotions. So the shift in the Eightfold Path The Mahayana position is that the views that are a problem for us are consciousness itself. Educating consciousness is not the solution.

[12:27]

The problem are theoretical and linguistic structures, masks. So the emphasis, if we call it world views instead of right views, it's a shift from afflictive emotions, an emphasis on psychology and so forth, to our main problem is our cognitive constructions. And as I said before yesterday, if we can free ourselves from our deluded worldviews or delusions, problematic cognitive structures, it becomes much more possible to solve our personal, emotional, psychological problems.

[13:42]

Now in early Buddhism, the objects of the world have boundaries. The objects of the world have boundaries. In early Buddhism. Now we have a shift, something like from earliest Buddhism It's a shift from something like earliest Buddhism to the Abhidharma, to the Prajnaparamita, and then from that into both Yogacara and Majamaka, with Majamaka supplying much of the structure of Yogacara.

[14:45]

So, now, in our practice, we recapitulate that. Now, recapitulate, I never like too much, because capitulate means to offer your head and surrender. So you're reincorporating maybe. Incorporate being body corpus. Yeah, re-embodying or something. So we could call it a Madhyamaka re-embodying of early Buddhism. Okay. Okay. So we start with, you know, before even early Buddhism, we start with sort of symbolically the Buddha sitting with no Buddhism under the Bodhi tree.

[16:09]

So we sit with as little teaching as possible in the beginning. It's very hard to do these days because all you guys have read too much. And you've practiced the 18 German schools of Tantra. No, I mean... Yeah. So how do we start from a... blank slate. Well, yeah, sashin helps, you know. About the third day, the slate gets blank. Okay, now... And that's how I started.

[17:12]

Being also a kind of skeptical, scientific kind of guy. Skeptical of everything. So I just started sitting there and seeing what happens. And, of course, over the years I've depended on and made use of scholarship. But if I can say, neither modestly nor immodestly, for the first 20 years or 30 years of my practice, I've been way ahead of the scholarship. It was very hard for me to make use of the scholarship. Except for information.

[18:19]

Why was that the case? Because I took a shortcut. I took a shortcut from starting to only practice and seeing what happened. But in recent years, scholarship is catching up with me and surpassing me. Excuse me, I must ask you, scholarship, how do we translate that? Scholarship is like people who study and do research. Scholars. It's about research mainly? Yeah, in English we have something like a PhD or professor, and above that is the scholar and the research scholar. I see. So that's more about research than being learned?

[19:20]

Yes, that's right, in the way we use it. A person who does original research. Okay, thank you. And for some reason... Excuse me, may I just finish my sentence? Now, I think that was probably... It's not just me. It was a problem for everyone. You had... Some people got fooled by the scholarship and limited their practice to the scholarship. But in recent years, Some scholars really are speaking from understanding and not from study.

[20:27]

But again, this is the emphasis of Yogacara. If you're really going to understand the epistemology of Buddhism, you've got to start with the practices from which these teachings do and should arise. So what a Zen teacher likes, or what the Zen monasteries in Japan for instance like, is to get a person who knows almost nothing and sit him down. And if possible, keep them from any study for the first few years, at least two years.

[21:28]

Now, yeah, I don't think we should do that, but we should understand we want to start with as unconditioned a mind as possible. So we start with just sitting. And again, in this Mahajanaka Nagarjuna... style, as unconditioned as possible, developed with the dictum of uncorrected mind, or don't, I have a problem with the word dictum because it means to speak, and if, I don't want to speak, so I didn't want to use dictum because it implies speaking.

[22:55]

That's just between you and me. That's why I was hesitating. Don't translate that nonsense. It starts with this recommendation, as I do, with uncorrected mind. And then to kind of developing non-thinking And then thinking non-thinking. And as I said yesterday, developing awareness in the midst of consciousness. In this way you're recapitulating re-embodying the development of Buddhism. So you're developing samadhi first and then beginning to introduce the teachings. And for another example of this Mahayana shift is that For example, the Eightfold Path more or less morphs into... Can I use the word morphs?

[24:20]

Well, you can't use it. Does anybody understand it? No. Did you see the Terminator 2? All these Japanese toys, which are a human being and then become a monster and then become an automobile, that's morphing. Morphing is just the change of shape, flowing change of shape from one picture to another. Okay. Yeah, so... The Eightfold Path more or less morphed into the Six Paramitas. So you get the Buddha practice morphing into a Bodhisattva practice. But there are differences. Maybe I should do a topic section called the Six Paramitas. If you think it's candid. No.

[25:24]

Well, you said mmm, no way. Yeah, because... Yeah, yeah, yeah, just translate. Yeah. Okay. So we go from, as I said earlier in the day, from a temporal world to a more spatially conceived world. To a kind of sense of an infinite space, a boundaryless space. So you don't anymore have the idea of a beginning or a creation. It's beginningless and timeless. Then that becomes a kind of infinite consciousness. And that becomes kind of then nothing at all, emptiness.

[26:31]

And then that becomes teachings like with associative thinking and without associative thinking. Because, you know, you can see, even if you go to a world, a spatial world without boundaries, then you have to deal with it. You're alive in it, and there's thinking, but then there's thinking without thinking, and so forth. Weil man kommt dann zu dem Problem, dass man lebt in einer Welt ohne Grenzen, aber ihr seid ja nun irgendwie doch da, und dann gibt es Denken, und dann gibt es Denken ohne Denken, und so weiter. And you go from seeking to finding. Und ihr wechselt über vom Suchen zum Finden. There's no, in later Buddhism, there's no holy grail. Es gibt im späteren Buddhismus keinen heiligen grail. There's no Harry Potter after the pot, I mean the grail. Es gibt keinen Harry Potter nach dem pot, also nach dem grail suchend. You know, I think of the... I told somebody the story the other day of the story that Harry Roberts, this white man who was trained as an Indian medicine man or shaman... Not Harry Potter, Harry Roberts.

[27:46]

And Harry was a... A friend of mine, he lived at our center for many years. And he told me, if you go to a medicine man and you say, you know, you're a young buck, that means a young male Indian. And I want to study with you. I hear you're a great medicine man. And I want to study with you and I heard you're a great medicine man. Well, bring me six flowers and come back. If the guy for a moment hesitates to go get six flowers, he's finished. If at that moment he reaches down and picks up anything, six blades of grass.

[28:48]

Ah, well. Okay, go over there and sit down. I have to get much older before I can do this. I have to get much older before I can do this. I might become venerable. Do we have a circumambulate around you? Yeah, that's good. I can't even see it anyway. My eyes won't work. So, at the moment of seeking has to be finding. Otherwise, you're in some kind of temporal world. Do you see the difference? That's where sudden enlightenment comes from. It's not something... If you don't get that seeking and finding are the same instance, you're never in the state of mind that's going to realize sudden enlightenment.

[29:56]

Yes, so this is the, let's call it the Mahayana shift. And particularly the shift into Zen practice. And so you get a shift again from Objects as having boundaries. And even a kind of opposition between them. And that opposition between them creates possessiveness. Because you think you can get it and possess it. So from this point of view, then there's greed and desire and possessiveness and attachment and so forth.

[30:57]

And when objects cease having such clear lines, opposing lines between them, and objects have shifting boundaries, the distinctions of the world flow, they are fluid. Now this isn't philosophy. You cannot know this from outside. You can't know this from thinking. You can only know this from recapitulating practice. uncorrected Zazen mind, until the boundaries disappear for you. For example, a simple example.

[32:35]

You see a tree. And that seems to be some kind of unit. But then there's three trees. And three trees are some kind of unit. And then there's you in the trees. And that's a new kind of unit. So what you perceive is a shifting of, there's the tree, there's the tree in me, there's the tree in the three trees. This is real simple, but you feel this shifting of relationships. And then, you know, so you're going from And I can describe it in this way because it actually happens in this way, but not through these words. It goes from a sense of each thing excludes the other things, exclusive objects, Each thing excludes something else.

[33:53]

To each thing includes, to an inclusive sense of each thing. Each thing includes something. Other things and all other things. And that goes with each moment is different. And then different bodies. And then a real sense that you're a different person here in Taisho than you were a few minutes ago outside having tea or whatever someone said. So at each moment you're other than you were before. So you begin to have an inclusive definition of yourself.

[35:00]

An inclusive definition. An inclusive definition. It's not the same easy word like inclusive. And exclusive, it's not so simple. Well, you get the idea. I hear some of you, I'm told occasionally, I really know English well until I talk to somebody other than Baker. Because you learned a very special vocabulary and other than that it doesn't occur in the newspapers. So in a perfect example of that naturally expressed And a perfect example of this is expressed in the most natural way.

[36:08]

And Suzuki Roshi once said, and as you all know, he was very forgetful. And he lived upstairs in this Kafkaesque tower. Which was really a little tiny stairs and went up to a room. Yeah, not as wide as these two lights. Where he lived with his wife. Really teeny. Not even that wide and it had one little window somewhere. The stairs that came down from the tower. And he'd come in to give a lecture and sometimes he'd want to read something. You know, a koan or something out loud to us. And he, in English, so. He would then not have, he would look, and he wouldn't have his glasses. And he used to tie his glasses on his string.

[37:19]

So we'd hear him go upstairs, boom, boom, boom, boom. And we'd hear kind of, after a while, boom, boom, boom. And he would say, and then one day he said, you know, these glasses belong to you. He would say, these glasses are your glasses. But you know about my tired old eyes, so you let me use them. That's a perfect Mahayana position. He doesn't possess the glasses. Only when the glasses were invented in the 14th century in Italy or something like that. There's a whole cultural history around them. Industrial, etc. So he's just borrowing them from the culture. So it's a, you know, he just said it quite naturally, but it's a basic sense that the boundaries between objects are flexible.

[38:32]

Or flexible. Fluid. Another example I remember, I've told you this before, but I had a Hamada cup. And Hamada was a living national treasure of Japan. And he brought the craft pottery to the intention of Japan and the world. To the attention of Japan and the world. So anyway, he came to America once and... San Jose, if I remember correctly, and made some pots in some sort of seminar.

[39:41]

So he gave me, so someone, not him, gave me one of his cups that he made in America. And the And one of the presents I gave Tsukiroshi was a Hamada vase that I admired for several years. I in fact told the shop, I said, you know, I love this vase, but I simply can't afford it, but anybody wants to buy it. Let me know and I'll try to raise the money. So about three years after, I've told that other people, they usually forget, but this guy, Honami-san, remembered. So after about three years he told me, you know, somebody does want to buy that.

[41:02]

Yeah, I said, okay, well, okay. And I made a deposit and I bought it. It wasn't that expensive, but... But it took me a while and I bought it. And I said, well, thank you. This is wonderful because really I wanted to give it to Sukershi. And he said, do you want to know who is going to want to buy it? And I said, I didn't want to take it from anyone. So I didn't want to know really. And of course he said Suzuki Roshi. So I had this Amada cup, not a vase, but a cup. And I've told you all this to say it was pretty important to me, this cup.

[42:03]

I used it and drank from it. And one day Sally, my daughter, and the one who's now 44, knocked it on the table on the floor. And it broke into quite a few pieces. And I remember I was surprised myself Because my reaction was completely, oh, now it's something to clean up. Has not one... second of, oh God, it's broken.

[43:07]

And I was surprised because I thought I'd say, oh God, Sally, why did you do that? But no, it was just like, oh, now we cleaned it up. Now it keeps potters like Hamada, gives them something to do, make another one. That's why it's not made in cast iron. And to get it repaired, and eventually I had it repaired. So when we do this practice, it begins without our knowing it to work inside us and change our views. There's a few more things I would like to speak about. But I think that's enough for this week and today. Yeah. Yeah. I think we've understood quite a bit.

[44:33]

Atmar made clear how he in fact uses interbeing really as an index to his own experience and Thich Nhat Hanh's teaching. And if you understand the Abhidharma as a process of indexing the Alaya Vijnana, and bringing it to the fore and evolving the teachings within us, And if you understand the Abhidharma from the point of view of practice as a treasure map, we've accomplished a lot this week. Thank you very much. May our intentions be the same for every being and every place.

[45:56]

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