As you know or noticed, perhaps, I drove Sophia back to school yesterday. And the fact that she's in boarding school for the first time gives Marie-Louise and I a chance to do practice period and practice period together. And because she is now in the boarding school, it allows me and Marie-Louise to have a practice period for the first time and also to have a practice period with each other. I am already located here in this practice period. So it was a little strange excursion to be out there driving along. In the dark, rainy tunnel of the night.

[01:02]

But I got back here. just in time to hear the goodnight bell being calmly rung. And of course, over the many years, I've had to leave practice period from Tassajara and Crestone now and then. But there I'm going back to Sahara and Crestona, returning to what's obviously a wilderness quite isolated from the rest of California and Colorado.

[02:05]

But although this is a rather remote, in some senses, part of Germany and Europe, It's not isolated in a wilderness like Tassajara and Crestone. But I had this strong feeling of returning to an insulated, isolated, insulated place. An island-like place. Insular is island. Oh, that insulate. And isolated is what you say in German for insulate.

[03:08]

Too much information to us. Through this little Dharma island floating in space. And here the, excuse me for doing it again, the nowhere, which is now here, it's the same spelling. The nowhere is also now here. Nowhere is created by us, by our practice. And no one seems to be leaking this sense of locus, that location.

[04:17]

This locus we've established. Now I'm trying to also talk about what's going on here. Ich versuche auch darüber zu sprechen, was hier vor sich geht. And what's going on here in relationship to your practice, of course. And what could be your practice, can be your practice. Okay. Now, being... coming on the road yesterday. I was struck coming down this road. It's a road which goes nowhere for us.

[05:19]

We only cross the road. We don't go anywhere on the road. So inevitably, you know, I started thinking about the chicken. Why does the chicken cross the road? And of course you know why a duck crosses the road. From the 1900s, there's a joke, an anti-humor joke, because there's no punchline. Why does the chicken cross the road? Maybe you don't tell this joke in Germany.

[06:30]

Well, I never heard about it. You never? Everybody in the English-speaking world knows it. And then there's versions. Why does the duck... Well, of course, it's the chicken crosses the road to get to the other side. Yeah, so there's no punchline. It just crosses the road to get to the other side. And why does the duck cross the road? Because it was the chicken's day off. Because the chicken has a day off. And why does the turkey cross the road? To prove it's no chicken. Chicken means to be scared, you know. It wasn't chicken. And why does the dinosaur cross the road?

[07:33]

Because there are no chickens then. And why does the chicken cross the Mobius strip? You all know what the Mobius strip is? Mobius band. It was discovered by a German mathematician. German mathematician in 1858 and that's when you take a piece of paper and twist it so it's one side. Engineers find it useful for various reasons and mathematicians find it fun.

[08:41]

But why does the chicken cross the Mobius strip to stay on the same side? All of that arose and I arrived here last night and thought, we just crossed this road, we don't go anywhere. Us and the cows. And it says in the Phokyo Samay of Dongshan, the jewel mirror Samadhi, it says, complete in the five aspects,

[09:41]

It doesn't come and go. And complete in the five aspects is to reside in the five senses. Yeah, and this takes a little investigation. Complete in the five aspects. To find yourself located in the five senses. And here we're talking about I mean, many things at once, actually.

[10:57]

If the basic teaching of Buddhism is interdependence. And probably, you know, we should add another word to my various words for interdependence. So let's add co-interdependence. Well, you have co-dependence, right? Yes. Okay, so co-interdependence. Sorry to cause a... I should learn German, but I can barely speak English the way I want to. Interdependent. simultaneously with others.

[12:10]

Interdependent simultaneously through others. That would be interpenetration, the Hua Yan teaching. And the Hokkyo Zanmai and Sandokai are both teachings of interpenetration. So that if you're going to practice these things at the pace at which they require, you have to really get it complete in the five aspects. and not calling it the five senses, but meaning the five senses, shifts the emphasis from your sensorium

[13:15]

to the world that appears through the senses. Okay, so the world appears through the senses. Okay, so it's five pieces And a pie that has virtually an infinite number of pieces. So you become very aware that you are noticing five pieces of the pie of actuality. Also wird dir ganz bewusst, dass du fünf Stücke des Kuchens der Tatsächlichkeit bemerkst.

[14:35]

And you are putting those pieces together with some kind of complete sense of a complete picture. Und du fügst diese fünf Stücke zusammen mit irgendeinem Gefühl von einem vollständigen Bild. Okay, so this little phrase has in it the practice of the visionaries. And the vijnana again means to know things separately, together. That's what the word really means. So you know the five aspects of the world separately, together. So in a little, this is, that's why this, the koans, the practice of meeting and speaking, which we're doing now, the practice of meeting and speaking, which is really based also

[15:47]

on the 90-day practice period. The mind of the 90-day practice period which doesn't leak its location auf dem Geist der 90-tägigen Praxisperiode, der seine Verortung nicht ausfließen lässt. Also kann ich in unserer Begegnung und unserem Sprechen darüber auf eine Art und Weise sprechen, wie ich das in anderen Zusammenhängen nicht kann. Because we're establishing a pace of the mind that appears through the pattern of practice period. Yeah, so when I'm fiddling around here trying to figure out do I enter that

[16:56]

bowing mat from this side or that side, and the bell is right there. I'm trying to discover our location. So we know we're establishing a pattern. I got the whole thing when I saw Suzuki Roshi wipe the side of his eating pad, whether there was water on it or not. I remember seeing him do it when I saw him for the first time. I immediately thought, this is another form of Japanese nonsense.

[18:23]

There's no water there, he didn't spill anything there, and yet he wiped first there, and then he wiped there. And my first resistance to his, what's this about, allowed me to make the shift. Okay, well, he's doing this. And I suddenly saw that he's giving the pattern more reality than the substance of the bowls and so forth. I don't know, in English anyway, substance basically means something that supports itself. Substance. But nothing supports itself, everything is interdependent.

[19:31]

So to emphasize interdependence as if there's a reality, it's in the patterns, the relationships, not the things. So we're establishing here in the practice period relationship. And there's you know there's a phrase in Japan which a home of food And of course in East Asia, home food is always rice. Yeah, but the concept of a home food

[20:33]

Which Tsukiroshi used to emphasize was if you have some home food, potatoes or rice or something, then the other ingredients, the nutritional, etc., can be related to the home food. The flavors, the colors, the nutritional relationships are patterned through a relationship to the home food. So we're trying to establish a kind of home food location. Yeah, a location that repeats itself.

[22:06]

And from that repetition, we begin to feel relationships in a new way. The relationships are at first repetitious and boring. But when you shift more from what you're doing to the relationships that start appearing... More from what you're doing, too? When the relationships shift into what you're doing, they begin to fold into and open up the world.

[23:10]

pondering all this as I came back last night, and I thought maybe we should put a little sign up where we cross saying, Nunc stands, the now which stays still. And I thought maybe we should put up a small sign that says Nuuk Stans, and that stands still now. Yeah, and then I thought instead of Quellenweg, maybe we should say Weg Stans, the way, the path which goes nowhere. This is the way my mind works. I don't know. Sorry. So I was pondering this during the night. And I woke up kind of editing a number of phrases. And I decided on among similar phrases Und unter ähnlichen Sätzen habe ich mich für einen entschieden.

[24:36]

Architecture is the address of God. Die Architektur ist die Adresse Gottes. And I thought, that's true. Architecture is the address of God. Die Architektur ist die Adresse Gottes. Now that's probably, you know, about your legs and, you know, you need another address and then, you know. But I'll say a little bit about it. because inspired architecture is about the ideal human beings and the ideal way we want to live and so what is human beings conception of God has to be based on an ideal human being Und die menschliche Vorstellung Gottes muss auf der Vorstellung eines idealen menschlichen Wesens basieren.

[25:48]

Now, dragonflies in German are not called dragonflies. No. What are they called? Libelle. What? Libelle. Libelle, a beautiful something? What does it mean? No, but belle is in it, I guess. I don't know, it doesn't mean anything other than libelle. Libelle, anyway. If a dragonfly had a god, it would have to be part dragon and part fly, right? because even if you imagine that God is beyond the human it's still related to the human so inspired architecture is the address of God Then I realized what I meant was the present is the address of the Buddhas. In what sense is the present the address of the Buddhas? Now, the durative present.

[26:50]

Not the conscious predictive present. Not the self-referencing present. But the present of the complete five aspects. Okay, so as many, many, maybe all of you know, my first real practice was the phrase, no place to go and nothing to do. And I don't know quite where I got the phrase. It seemed to have been the antidote to my disease of going and doing.

[28:13]

Yeah, I had a job and a new baby, and I was a full-time graduate student as well, and somehow this phrase appeared. Ich hatte eine Arbeitsstelle und ein neugeborenes Kind und war gleichzeitig auch ein Vollzeitabschlussstudierender. Full-time graduate student. I did that one. A father of a new baby. All good. That's all done. All done, yeah. Wasn't all done then, I'll tell you. Damals war das nicht alles schon fertig. It was mostly not done. So my medicinal antidote was no place to go and nothing to do. And every time I thought that I have to go somewhere, I'd say, no place to go, fundamental.

[29:16]

And every time I thought that I have to go somewhere, I'd say, no place to go, fundamental. And every time I thought there's something to do, I'd say, fundamentally, there's nothing to do. And it couldn't be just a phrase. It had to be, I really, each time I said it, I believed it. That fundamentally, that was what, that was how it is. And I learned many things from this. First I learned repetition. And then I learned appearance. Because you can't respond to going or or doing unless you see it appear.

[30:26]

So then I learned the density of an attentional mind which resides in the contents of the five senses and the six senses. a mind that resides in immediacy and notices what happens within that immediacy. And I discovered also that I had to notice within the pace of the breath And the breath became a samadhi door between phenomena and the five and six senses. That's not 11, that's five bodily senses and mind.

[31:40]

And it's really the six sources, because mind not only accompanies the five senses, but mind is a source of experience as well as hearing is and so forth. So if you want to study the parts of you which may or may not fit with the parts of the world, And when you study the five senses maybe and the six sources. So again, Dongshan says, when the five aspects are complete, It neither comes nor goes.

[32:47]

The path stops. You're in a kind of stopped time. In which the present, the durative present becomes the address of Buddha. This is actual experience that Dongshan is trying to share with us. Thousand years ago. Not so long ago. Just now. Yesterday. Thank you.

[33:42]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_74.89