I hear this is the last lecture, at least for a while. So I should have something to say. But, you know, let me just comment. We come down in the morning and we put on a Buddhist robe or a Buddhist raksu, if you have one. And let me say something else. We come down in the morning and we put on a robe or a raksu, if we have one. And we put it on our head, you know, this chakra. And we say, you know, a field far beyond form and emptiness.

[01:04]

Yeah, I think you feel something. I mean, the Dharma, Buddha Dharma is somehow not in the categories only of form and emptiness. But it also is that metaphorically, the robe we put on is the robe that the Buddha gave Mahakashyapa. And that the Bodhidharma gave Hoike. Yeah. Well, I mean, nobody thinks it's the same robe, but it'd be quite old, tattered. But there's that feeling. Do we continue this? I'm always asking, you know, being in the last third of my life, I'm always asking, what do we continue?

[02:18]

I do it because it's my habit and because it was my way of being with Suzuki Roshi. Yeah, but should we continue? And you know, continuing it is to continue, as I said yesterday, an institution. If we have a simple thing, like putting the Okesa or Raksu on our head, And chanting, you know, beyond form and emptiness, etc. You think, oh, you're just putting a piece of cloth on your head and you're chanting something, yeah, kind of nice. But who makes the robes? Someone has to make the robe.

[03:40]

You can make it, of course. But what does the robe look like? Yeah, how's it made? Yeah, how do you put it on? Yeah. Who gives it to you? Who decides whether you can wear it or not? All of those questions result in an institution. So, to what extent we're continuing a practice and we're continuing A location for practice. And we're continuing an institution or developing an institution. And developing an institution. Yes. What makes this building different from the other buildings in the village?

[04:51]

Is it the sender? Is it the row of windows? Is it that we put robes on in the morning? Is it that we chant? We chant the 28 Indian Patriarchs, knowing that it's a made-up list of people. Somewhat true, but made up. We have a certain way of behaving. There's a certain atmosphere of practice that I discovered living with Suzuki Roshi. And discovered living in Eheji and Daitoku-ji and Anti-ji and so forth.

[05:55]

And it's quite specific. I think it's probably somewhat a little different from other Zen Buddhist groups. I mean, people sometimes come here or come to Creston and they say, Oh, it feels like Zen Center felt in the 70s. So somehow there's some atmosphere here that's been carried from Sekiroshi and Japan and San Francisco and... Crest down to here. This atmosphere is the atmosphere of our practice. And the fact that we've been together 10 and 20 years, you know, I look at your faces, I say, hmm, you used to be young. So did I. I mean, sort of, yeah. But it's not just atmosphere of practice.

[07:31]

It's shaped by considerations we have to call an institution. One of the reasons I wear and take the so-called high seat in the morning and wear golfing clothes in the afternoon is because I want you to be faced with the question, is there any difference?

[08:35]

Maybe we should just have like the afternoon discussion all day. Yeah, I think I can give a taisho without a teaching staff. Which, as you know, is originally supposedly a back scratcher. Because those guys in the old days, it was hot, sticky, and they never washed. Running water and baths are, you know, luxury. So they had itchy backs a lot. And they had fly whisks to get the flies off their sticky body. It's also the backbone, the spine. So this was Suzuki Roshi's. This is all institution. This was Suzuki Roshi's. I don't know who owned it before that.

[09:38]

But it's likely a few hundred years old. But it's a few hundred years old. Why should anybody throw this away so it's passed along to somebody else? One of you may get this if you promise to be good. Or good enough. No, I don't need it in my grave. So, what is an institution? Now, I noticed that people who have done psychotherapy

[10:52]

I feel different than people who haven't done psychotherapy. I've had other people make this comment. This person ought to do some psychotherapy. That someone says, such and such a person ought to do some psychotherapy. And they don't, in the cases I'm thinking of, they don't say it because the person's obviously, you know, kind of anxious or neurotic or something. Sie sagen das nicht, weil diese Person offensichtlich eine Angststörung hat oder neurotisch ist. But because they have no awareness of their own personality. Sondern weil sie kein Gewahrsein ihrer eigenen Persönlichkeit haben. Their awareness is out in front of them. I mean, their personality is out in front of them, but their awareness is hidden somewhere. Ihre Persönlichkeit ist da direkt vor Ihnen, aber Ihr Gewahrsein ist irgendwo verborgen, versteckt.

[11:56]

You know, I think my own experience is that there's three kinds of actors. You may wonder what I'm talking about. I do too. Yeah, and one kind of actor is just bad actors. You can tell they're acting. And then there's good actors. Good actors who seem to really be the person they're portraying. Yeah. Big movie stars often just play themselves over and over again because they're so nice or pretty or charismatic.

[13:02]

But celebrity actors, but good actors actually seem to be the person they're portraying. But there's another, a third kind of acting. At least what I see. At least what I see. Which is an actor who projects... the person they're portraying, sort of in the space around them, almost, as somebody used the word recently, holographically, and you feel the presence of the actor, but you're entirely caught in, present within, The person they're portraying.

[14:05]

It's a kind of double whammy. A double what? A whammy is a supernatural spell you can put on somebody. A whammy. So watch out, I might give him whammy. But a double whammy refers to Little Abner and Mammy Yoakum. But you don't know about that. That's only for Paul and myself and Gene and Alan. He knows about double whammies, right? Mammy Yoakum, she had this power to give people not just one whammy, a double whammy, and they were kind of like... So Mammy Yoakum had this ability to give people not just one whammy, but a double whammy, so to speak.

[15:10]

Oh, it's a double spell. So in that sense you've got the actor, you feel the actor's presence, and yet you feel... the person they're portraying present at the same time and fully engaging you. Now I thought, and that's often what you see particularly in no plays, That's an uncanny ability to do this. Hmm. Hmm. And I thought of it because I was thinking about what is it about a person who's done psychotherapy and a person who hasn't.

[16:12]

Yeah. A person who's done psychotherapy, and I haven't tried to really notice which kind of psychotherapy, but just I can feel when a person has probably done No, enough psychotherapy to affect them. You can feel, at least I can, I think I can, feel their presence, awareness within their personality. And it's interesting. It invites you into their personality instead of feeling you the person with them. It invites you into their personality in a way a person who...

[17:13]

hasn't done psychotherapy excludes you from their personality. So independent of doing psychotherapy to solve some problem or mature your personality or something like that, Psychotherapy seems to... develop a person's awareness. So in a way, they are the personality, but they also are aware they're acting within their personality. And this is such an important dimension, I think, important dimension of contemporary life that I would say it's probably good just to do psychotherapy to develop awareness within your personality something like doing therapeutic work as a way to be

[18:49]

more engaged consciously in this interactive, intersubjective life we have. Now, in a somewhat similar way, Now we get to sort of the point. I can tell the difference when someone's done koan work and when they haven't. Koan activity, koan engagement, koan work, something like that. Okay, so now I ask myself, what is the difference? Because I'm not talking now in this last lecture of this Winter Branches Seminar, so much about particular koans and their details, but I'm talking about koan work.

[20:08]

And what do I mean by koan? What's the center? The dynamics, the key to koan work. It's questioning. And turning words, wisdom phrases. And what are the skills required? And for questioning, an opening to questioning. You don't have to be a physicist to ask basic questions. I think of the case of, you know, after Isaac Newton had published his work in, you know, gravity and apples falling and all that. Some Protestant Anglican minister named Bentley wrote to Isaac Newton and said, you know, if you're right about gravity

[21:32]

And it's attractive. If it's only attractive, then the universe will collapse. Newton said, hmm, I didn't think of that. So you can ask a question which stumps Newton. So he said, well, Newton responded and said, well, if the universe is infinite and matter is evenly distributed, then it won't collapse. Good. A nice thought experiment, but it happens to be wrong. And it wasn't until Einstein that this question was answered. Okay. So... We can ask ourselves the question, what is reality?

[23:07]

Does it have a beginning or end? Yeah. You don't have to be a physicist to ask this question. Koan work allows you to ask this question. Questions that seem, you know, kind of... Nothing but the big questions. But why shouldn't we ask the big questions? No, you can take, if you want, what I said the other day. I don't know. What did I say? I never saw. I said... It's unreasonable of you to think that I should over and over again reach into the ball of reality and with sticky words pull out something new.

[24:13]

I could only do it for you. And it always turns out it's for me. Now, where does that come from? I never read that. It comes from, yeah, working with Collins, Collins thinking. And you could make that into a koan. Introductory word. Baker Roshi said, it's unreasonable of you to think, you know, blah, blah, blah. And then you could... Use that as the basis for what is reality. Reaching into the ball of reality with sticky words. No. But where is reality? I mean, is it a ball of reality? A kugel of reality. Yeah. A canoodle. There's a koan actually where young men takes the high seat.

[25:46]

And he says, what is it to hear sound and realize the way? This is case 126, I believe, in the Katoshu. A collection of a few hundred koans is used in Rinzai training. Kato shu. Entangling vines. Kudzu, I guess. He said ascending the high seat. And this time it's not Mr. Who, it's Young Man. And he says, what is it to hear sound?

[26:49]

and realize the way. What is it to see form and enlighten the mind? And then he said, raising his hand, Avalokiteshvara got some euro. Oh, but Avlokiteshvara didn't have Euro. Deutschmarks. Avlokiteshvara got some Deutschmarks. Then he went and bought a sesame rice cake. Then he lowered his hand and said, oh, it turned out to be a canoodle, a dumpling. I don't pronounce it right, but she knows me for years. Thank you. Knudel in English means something else. Does it mean that in German, too?

[27:58]

Knödel? Knödel means to neck kiss. No. No. Let's knödel. In America, I'm out on the first date with this, you know, and we knödel. That's how German culture gets mixed up in America. Excuse me, but dumpling, has dumpling, doesn't have another meaning to it? No? No. A dumpling sometimes means a fat person. I thought it meant a little duck. No, not a little dump, no. A little dump has another meaning too, but we won't talk about that. All right, here, okay. Now, sometimes people comment on this koan and say, well, you know, Young men really liked sesame rice cakes, sesame seed rice cakes.

[29:17]

Yeah, it's sort of nice to know that young men liked sesame seed rice cakes. I mean, that's nice. I mean, we don't know what Mr. Who liked. Except that he ate spoiled pork and perished. At least that's one theory. Okay. And some people say when he raised his hands, he was indicating the... transcendent, the fundamental. And when he lowered his hand, he was indicating the conventional. And some people say it comes from the Avanthapsaka Sutra when some Bodhisattva raised his hands and showed the multiple worlds and then lowered his hand and showed the conventional world.

[30:27]

This is not koan work. This is just thinking. Whether young men's gesture was somehow resonant to the similar gesture in the Avatamsaka Sutra. Or not. Quite irrelevant. What is the case is gestures have some meaning. And it goes beyond... feels far beyond form and emptiness.

[31:45]

It goes beyond form and emptiness. So when I'm speaking with you and I make a gesture, it can't be reduced to some kind of theory. But, yeah, rice cakes and dumplings. The gesture and what he said and seeing form and enlightening the mind, hearing sound and entering the way. Also diese Geste, was er sagte, Klang zu hören und den Geist zu betreten, Form zu sehen und den Weg zu erleuchten. These can enter our life. Das kann unser Leben betreten. And Cohen work is to let these enter our life and function in our life. It's something mysterious.

[32:45]

Yeah, another story is that supposedly this patriarch said to Nanyue when he came to see him, He asked you a normal question. Where did you come from? From what place have you come? I came from the place of National Teacher Songshan. And who is that which has come? And Daniel said, words describe it, but they miss the mark. That's a good Zen answer. Words describe it, but they miss the mark. And the sixth patriarch supposedly said, do practice and realization have anything to do with it? Yes, inseparable from practice and realization, but undefiled.

[34:03]

Yeah, words describe it, but they don't hit the mark. Questions. You can find words for questions, sticky words. But they don't hit the mark. But where is the mark? If you have the confidence of koan work, it's in your situation. If you have the idea of common in much of the Far East, that our immediacy is the microcosm of the macrocosm, that this microcosm

[35:18]

where we live, is just a version of the macrocosm. And all Taoist medicine and stuff is the microcosm of the cosmos is in us and all that stuff. But aside from that, if you Do koan work. You need a profound trust in your immediate situation. You're asking questions of what? And it doesn't have to be from, it can be a question from your own life or any question. And you need openness to questioning. Which is this trust that somehow answers and questions are

[36:37]

thoroughly interrelated. And you also, to do this kind of questioning and using turning words, you need an underlying You need to ideally develop a mindfulness, an awareness that's always present. I say it's like maybe I've unfortunately never been pregnant. One of the things I've missed in this life. But I can imagine if I were pregnant I'd always be aware that there was a baby inside me.

[37:44]

And I'd be doing other things but I'd be aware of this baby. And when you do koan work you need to be aware that your mindfulness has to be, it's like a baby Buddhist in you. Or you have an awareness that's mature and present in all your activities. Without this underlying awareness, stream of mindfulness, you have nothing to introduce the question or turning word into. So koan work and fruitful koan work goes along with a developed, mature mindfulness practice. And then there's a kind of trust in the many surfaces of immediacy.

[39:10]

So you can ask a question like, what is reality? And you can have the trust and feeling that the answer or response... A satisfaction is somehow possible from your immediate situation. It's a wonderful, empowering feeling. Somehow I think of fish. I mean, or the ocean. The ocean covers 70% of the Earth's surface. And it's all connected.

[40:11]

90% of the world's living space is underwater. And it stretches in all directions, up and down. On average, I read, of 3,800 meters. But we are limited to the earth and maybe a few hundred feet up and down. I wonder if the... squid they're quite smart and colorful feels empowered by this vast living space in all directions the macrocosm is But if you do koan work, through questioning you develop the trust in questioning, trust that the

[41:22]

Many layers of your immediacy have everything you need. And so you question your mind, your body, your activity, and the immediacy of phenomena. And it changes your sense of location in the world. You have a location which seems to have everything in it. Like Yamada Mumanroshi says. Words may not hit the mark, but the questioning does hit the mark. And you can feel it when it's hit the mark.

[42:49]

So it's tremendously in koan work Not the particular koans. Koan work itself is tremendously empowering. You feel everything you need is always in front of you. And if you didn't feel that, you can't ask the questions with any confidence that produces any results. So you feel your location includes everything and reaches everywhere. And this is also one of the ways we find ourselves in this location free from anxiety.

[44:00]

And this is the fruit of koan work. Which is not just doing zazen. Okay. Oh, dear. I have to stop, huh? No. Annette always says no. But that's because you have your legs up, so you don't mind. Everybody else says no. I mean, yes, stop. Thank you.

[44:57]

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