Today, Marie-Louise is in an all-day wildfire training. And she didn't do it last year. And since wildfire is the greatest danger to our future, and she's been instrumental getting us prepared. It's good she's gone, but it's also a Saturday, and so I have to take care of Sophia all day, which is okay. It's odd for a practice period, but, you know, it's what it is. And somehow I thought the lecture was at 3.30. I wondered why you came to the cookie so early, and Dennis, you were here early. And then I was wondering why someone is practicing the Taisho drum on a day there's a Taisho. I thought, could it be?

[01:02]

Oh my goodness. Okay, so see if I can say something that might be useful. Day after tomorrow we have the Shosan ceremony, which is, you know, a kind of parallel to the Juso ceremony. And the Shusso ceremony was, you know, it was quite good, and your questions were good, and from your practice, and Nikko's responses were good. But it is a koan ceremony, so it starts with a koan. So more traditionally, your questions would have been second- or third-generation questions. Nicola Busciuso's answers, responses would have been more in that vein. So what do I mean by second or third generation questions?

[02:03]

Well, if I ask, if somebody comes to the kitchen here in the main house and I don't know who it is and they're asking for Peter, I might say to them, who are you? And that would be a first generation question. But if somebody I know well is in front of me and I say, who are you? Well, this is at least a third generation question. Okay, so, or if someone says, what is appearance? That would be, let's say, a first generation question. If someone says, a cat appeared in the road. Are they both in the same continuum? Okay, that would be a second generation question. That makes sense? You've already figured you're asking a more developed question than just what is appearance.

[03:03]

Or you might ask, if a cat is in the road, what is the Buddha doing there too? Now that would be maybe a third generation question. You know, something like that. And, you know, we could go to a fourth generation or something like that. Now ideally, the person, the doshi or the roshi or the, whatever he is, is answering the questions, he or she should be giving to a second-generation question. Ideally, he gives a third-generation answer. Or, if the questioner really isn't dealing with basics, you might bring it back to a first-generation question.

[04:10]

Or you might respond, the doshi might respond, in the continuum of the person, Independent of the question something like that. I don't know it's but it's usually so for instance if someone asked Are the cat and the road in the same continuum a cat appears in the world is it the same continuum and then or asked say What is the Buddha doing there? You know I could answer well the Buddha's always wanted a pet and That would be a fifth generation response. So, you know, it's something like that. And, by the way, I mean, since from Doksan's this morning, I think I should review a bit this practice of appearance from the Sashin lectures and the practice period, Teisho's lectures.

[05:20]

And I also feel I appreciate how a number of you have used Dobson during the practice period and Sashin to open up your own practice or to investigate the teachings in relationship to your own practice or and so forth. This is very helpful to me because it My lectures and the Teisho will then more include you, and I always learn something. So, thank you. Okay. So, to give a more experiential response to the question, a basic question, of why appearance as a practice? Well, if the world is interdependent, impermanent, and interpenetrating, what door, what practice unites these three?

[06:35]

And really it's the most basic overall practice is the establishing a continuum in breath, body and phenomena. Okay. So you establish a bodily location through zazen, then you establish a continuum within breath, body and phenomena and not in discursive thinking. And third, you establish a, what could we call it, a resonant appearance continuum. Continuum of appearance in which you yourself are an appearance. So your body as location bodily mind as location.

[07:38]

You have a sort of, let's say, an identity continuum established not in thinking, but in breath, body, and phenomena, the continuity from moment to moment. And you have a experiential continuum in appearance itself. Now, from subatomic particles to mountains there's a wide range of appearance. Subatomic particles are outside of our perceptual range and the mountain changing is, you know, We see all the rocks around here, which at one point fell off the mountain and stuff, but still, it doesn't change in our time frame too much.

[08:40]

But change or appearance is like an ocean, from subatomic particles to mountains, geological strata, and so forth. And we're swimming somewhere in the middle of it. And our swimming in a particular place in this wide, resonant sea of appearance doesn't make the ocean smaller. But we are swimming in the same, let's call it a resonant continuum of appearance. It joins us into how the world exists, appears, etc. within our own continuum. Now, the example of the road and the cat is, the cat of course is a subjective continuum, and the road is a non-subjective continuum.

[09:47]

And then, does the Buddha appear in your mind? And what path is the Buddha? You can kind of play with those relationships if you wanted to ask questions within a traditional teaching framework. Okay. Now, I also spoke about the, well, I don't know, I called it a lot of things, the language of each situation or the morphology, morphology is the study of form, the morphology of each situation or something like that, syntax, grammar, language, morphology. In other words, in each situation, how is appearance appearing?

[10:51]

And I've used the example very often of establishing an initial mind, a practice of establishing an initial mind when you come in a doorway, a threshold, as I said the other day. and you get the feel of that and there's a physical feel of it and you can enhance and develop that physical feel if when every time you come in a door you stop for a moment and assess the situation or accept the situation so probably you've been thinking about something I don't know you you don't want to fall on the stairs or you know whatever and you get to the door the Zen dog here for example or the kitchen I don't care and you stop and you make a shift basically, an intentional shift using the physical location. And that's like doksan. You come in the door and you put your shoes and you step back.

[11:57]

The architecture of the hotawan, Dharma lamp hut, the architecture of the building shapes the approach to doksan. it also can be a shift into the mind of doksan. And commonly, if we can ever afford to develop the grounds here, we'll have, for instance, pathways, as I've mentioned before, that don't go directly to buildings necessarily, but go toward the building, but then go to the side, and then toward the building. And then we might have a little unnecessary three steps, They might be regular or irregular, but they would, they require you to change your pace. And, and, And if the path is going to a building, the Zendo, doesn't go directly to the building, then that's some interesting feeling.

[13:04]

Maybe you're not going to the Zendo, then it turns and you go to the Zendo. This is all kind of basically what Zen gardens are about, to play with your sense of space, place, and proportions. And that's partly to get you to shift from consciousness to awareness and things like that. So, you come to Tok San, you turn around, you have to step up backwards. That's already a little bit odd. And leave your shoes facing, so you can run out if necessary, facing the door. and you step up backwards, and then you have to turn around, then you have to go down the hall, and then you bow to the room. So there's a threshold right there.

[14:04]

So you don't just step in. Most people just sort of step in, and some people... I won't explain all the funny things people do. They... Sometimes people come to the long door, and they knock. In San Francisco, I was given this big Buddha, Manjushri, rather, that's in the Zenda, the Green Gulch. It's a life-size, a little bigger. And I used to have it in the Doksan room in San Francisco for a while. And so when people come in, they would see that first. And they'd go over and bow to it, and they'd sit down, and they'd get rid of the Doksan, and it was a statue. And I'd say, I'm over here. Anyway, that was always fun. And so then you step in the room, cross the threshold, and hopefully, if you're attentive, you've used these as steps to prepare to come to dosa.

[15:12]

And then you say, oh, look, there he is. My goodness. Let's see you bow. Then you come up. And Most men will do a bow. A lot of women won't do a bow. They don't like bowing to men, which is understandable, you know. I like bowing to women, but, you know, it's all right. I try to wear dresses and make myself look unisexual, but it doesn't work, you know. So anyway, that slide goes on. But when you come in here, you use the doorway, the threshold, to shift from consciousness to awareness, and to shift from a mind involved with particularities, like not tripping on the stairs, to a mind which knows the field, a field mind. So you shift to awareness and to a field mind,

[16:15]

And then you do whatever you have to do in the room. Okay, if you get a feeling for that, if you use the feeling that you incorporate, corporate means body of course, incorporate, then this is a kind of preparation for the thresholds where there's no doors. As I said in the last teishala, sashim. Because there's an infinite number of beginnings, all folded and enfolded and outfolded and so forth. Where does appearance start for you? Okay, now one of the aspects is to establish a sensorial continuum, and the main way to establish a sensorial continuum is to see the world in terms of six objects.

[17:31]

Okay? That's visual objects, Sound objects, smell objects, taste objects, touch objects, and mind objects. Okay, so a bell is six objects. It's not just one object. It's a sound object. It's a visual object. And the metal of most of these bells smells, so it's a smell object. You put your tongue on it, it has a weird taste, like cheap silverware in a diner. And so it's got a taste, and of course it's in the mental, it appears as an idea, an idea about it, a concept. So, in other words, if you're going to actually deal with appearance, If I say a bell is a single object, that's completely a conceptual generalization. It's not a perceptual fact. As a perceptual fact, the visual bell is different than the sound bell.

[18:38]

So you get in the habit of thinking of every object as six objects. So we just say in Buddhism, the six objects. Now, again, this is a little hard to get used to, you know. Suddenly thinking of alarm clocks in the morning. That's not a clock. That's a demon or something Anyway so But if you again if you Recognize that in the sensorial continuum there are six objects Related to each sense So you can start to feel the world, you're articulating the world, you're creating a language. So the sensorial word, I don't know, sensorial unit for each object is divided into six parts.

[19:48]

Now also, this means that you hear the world as a field, which is different than seeing the world as a field. And you can smell the world as a field. You know, maybe I shouldn't say this, but in Kenyan, I'm not in Kenyan, in Doksan, during Sesshin, when no one bathes for a week, I have quite an interesting experience. Everyone who comes in smells rather strongly and rather differently. I say, it's coming down the hall now. And someone comes in the door. Because each of you is a different smell object. And we try to deny that. One of the nice things about being in someplace like the Near East is everything smells. Probably in China, everything smells in the markets. Here, everything is antiseptic. They run around spraying everything, I think.

[20:50]

Nothing smells. I loved it when I was in the Near East because of the sounds and the smell. The sounds continuum and the smell continuum. But in the Western world, we've eliminated several sensorial continuums. I don't know if that's an advantage. I mean, it's true that sometimes some smells are unpleasant, but overall it's a wonderful topography. But in any case, eliminated or not, still there is six sensorial continuums. And then you can feel also, as I said, this stillness and activity. And you yourself want to be located in stillness.

[21:54]

in stillness that returns to activity, and the activity returns to stillness. This is probably the most basic dharmic vocabulary, dharmic yoga, dharmic awareness to develop stillness and activity. and you feel the stillness in yourself, and you feel the activity or the readiness for activity. And I, you know, it's not just for situations like this or any situation you're in, but as I say, if you really want to practice with the perceptual objects as activity, if you relate to the activity of a tree, you very rapidly find yourself relating to the stillness of the tree, because the activity of the tree leaves, wind, etc., and the stillness of the tree in the trunk stays in one place, its roots are inseparable.

[23:16]

But if activity and stillness are inseparable in the tree, they're also inseparable in persons. And it's much clearer. You can feel a practitioner usually immediately because the stillness in the person is dominant and not the activity. There's a pace to the breath, body. So there's a kind of pace of each situation a language of each situation that you begin, the Dharma language, a situational dharmic language you begin to have a feel for in each situation, maybe like a musician might have, comes into a room, everyone's already playing, you immediately can feel what piece of music they're playing, and then you can join in the playing within a few moments. So it's a kind of music of stillness and activity, which is what music is like, but also, as I said, of perception and cognition.

[24:31]

And ideally, cognition constantly returning to zero because every change of state brings vitality. So there's more vitality also in a practitioner than in most people. You can feel a vitality in the person because they keep returning to zero. And returning to zero is mimicking or paralleling or a symmetry with or something like that, correlation with sameness and uniqueness. Because everything is appearing once and for all, once only. And you don't get that unless you also return to once only or return to zero. So there's a kind of, again, this may sound awfully complicated, but it's simpler than English or German.

[25:35]

I mean, I can learn this. I can't learn German. But so it's a much simpler language. in a very fundamental language though, of each situation as appearance and your own appearance within the situation, knowing the pace or music or feel of each situation. And appearance also, the more you know... The more you feel these shift, there's a kind of momentary chaos and a momentary integration going on. And that's also true of one's brain states too. a kind of ground state, and then it's changed by a situation.

[26:37]

There's a moment of chaos, and then there's a new kind of symmetry established. So there's some kind of parallel with how the body and mind work and establishing a kind of situational vocabulary or language of appearance related to cognition, perception, activity, and stillness. and related to the sensorial continuum of the six objects. Now again, none of this is hard to understand. None of this is hard to put together. It just requires you confronting your usual habits, or noticing your usual habits, and over time developing new habits. And it can start as simply as establishing the habit of an initial mind of field and awareness every time you go through a door.

[27:46]

That's easy enough to do with a lot of doors in your life. And that really opens you up to feeling stillness and activity, the perceptual, sensorial continuum. and the waves of appearance in each situation, and you're relating to them more and more intuitively. Okay. This is the last tesha for this practice period.

[28:49]

There might be others someday. Deeply I resist to deeply penetrate.

[29:16]

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