Well, it's a pleasure to have another day with you. This was great. Yeah. I said I thought I ought to speak about the five skandhas. And maybe I will. But... More important, I think, would be to give you, if I can, a feeling for the dynamic of these two minds that we notice between zazen mind and our everyday mind or usual mind. You know, ways that relationship has been articulated and developed.

[01:05]

And so that we, you and I, and anybody who practices, can notice this relationship. I think of something my teacher in Japan did. I lived in Japan for four years and off and on for 35, something like that. And my teacher there, teacher, friend, mentor, more mentor than teacher, I used to hang out with him. He was a great person named Yamada Mumanroshi. And he had a little beard and kind of hair. So sometimes I'd let my hair grow a little. He looked too young, too young. And he seems to have had Alzheimer's or something like that when he, no one spoke about it, when he was quite old.

[02:11]

He always said he was going to live to be 100 and I was going to live to be 120. He nearly made 100. I don't think I will make... even as old as he did, perhaps. But anyway, the last time I saw him, you know, he was eating, and he was, you know, got some food. He got it to about here, and then he forgot while it was there, you know, so he had to kind of push his hand. And the last thing he said before the last couple of years, he was like that. He never seemed to be bothered or panicked by not knowing what was going on. The last thing he said was, I've forgotten everything I didn't need to know. And then he never spoke again for the next two years. Anyway, one of the things he said was, the most important single thing to recognize, realize, feel, know, how everything everywhere is all at once.

[03:18]

working to make this moment possible for you. Everything everywhere is working all at once to make this moment possible for you. Yeah, it's a way to feel with your heart and actions what interdependence means. for us personally, not just as a philosophical idea. Now, I'm going to put the four marks and five dharmas up, but you can stay there or move, but don't think you need me to. By the way, when you're sitting, and I sit down, if you're already sitting normally, you wouldn't, okay?

[04:25]

Because I don't want to disturb your sitting. But when you're at the top the same time, then we either... The four marks of the Dharma, in other words, Dharma is the sense that things have momentary appearance. Now, this is quite simple.

[06:09]

But when something appears, you know, there's a beginning. Nothing appears. And then it has a manifestation for a while. It's a duration, the way we look at it. And next, it dissolves. And you know, you can see that in a soap bubble or a flower. And so why disappearance? Because things do, even if it's a mountain or a stone, very slowly it disappears. It dissolves, shall we say, you know, what word to use. Because the disappearance is your action. you actually wipe the slate clean. So if it's a mountain, you've got to do it yourself. You can't wait for the mountain to disappear. But anyway, this is the sense that we notice that everything appears, lasts for a moment, and disappears.

[07:15]

And you can maybe first experience that just in your own noticing that you can't When you focus on something, you're actually focusing and retreating or coming back from it, focusing again, etc. So even in your perception, it's a process of noticing, letting go of noticing, coming back to noticing. So that's just a way to say that, in fact, everything has these four marks. Or for everything, we could say it has these three marks, but for the practitioner, they have four marks. Because this means you recognize the process. You participated in the process. Well, don't fire down these. And these are teachings primarily, and this one is from the Lankavatara Sutra, which is the sutra, I don't know what it was exactly, but the sutra is supposedly Bodhidharma, the transitional mythological figure between Indian Buddhism and Chinese Zen, supposedly brought the Lankavatara Sutra

[08:48]

to China. And it's a sutra that I've studied here, partly because it was available in English translation when I was starting to practice. But it also happens to be a crucial sutra. So here we have periods. Naming. Discrimination. Right knowledge, you're looking like that. You have suchness. This is quite similar to the Four Marks, except here it's more experiential.

[10:11]

Things appear. So in the teaching, you would try to get used to things appearing. And there's various ways to do that, of course, like getting in the habit of stepping in the door and shifting your state of mind, you know, is to begin to notice appearance. You can do it just by closing your eyes and opening them, closing your eyes and opening them. Notice things appear. And at each moment you open your eyes, they're usually slightly different. It's a person. Or, if I just look at Shell, how do you pronounce the K? In this case, Shell. If I look at Shell, and then I look away, and I look at Magnus, there's an appearance there. Now, normally, you'd think that we're all in this container space again, but actually, it's...

[11:19]

You begin to experience it. I'm letting you appear, not because you're just there. You're appearing. Then I look at you, and you're appearing. There's a participatory thing going on. So there's appearance. Then we name it. So let's take the example of an airplane. You're doing it, Josh, aren't you? sunbathing or something. Sunbathing is a little like meditation. Worshipping the great sun god, O-Tan-Pi. And sometimes, you know, you're there for a while and, you know, you hear, if it's a beach, you hear people here. Stony Shore, you hear people down the way. Seacoat. Yeah, everything's floating in some kind of space, and then your sun burns, because an hour passed, and then it seemed like ten minutes.

[12:26]

So that's something like, it doesn't wind it away. So, you know, say you're lying there on the rocky shore, or a yard, and you hear an airplane. You can just hear it, like the music of the spheres. Just hear your own hearing of it, or you can name it. Oh, that's an airplane. I'll probably fly to Stockholm. And when you notice you're naming it, you can kind of peel the name off, as if the name were a sticker. So you can play with the experience of, oh, that's an airplane, and then just hearing it. You're not thinking about it, where is it going, etc. So, if you play in this way, you're beginning to, like I said, someone like Shakespeare can hold tens of thousands of distinctions and make use of them.

[13:40]

Well, you can't make use of, you can't hold distinctions unless you have an experiential sense of distinction. So you have to play with making this distinction. So it's quite useful, actually, to play with... Oh, that's an airplane. Taking the name... See if you can shift just here. You still know it's an airplane. I mean, it's a Piper Cub. Piper Cub... Is that a cop, you know, Kate Piper Cub? That was the whole play when I was a kid. Piper Cub, if it's gonna crash into the Zendo, you'll say, well, that's not just a sound anymore, that's so close, I better get out of the Zendo. So some part of you, some corner of your mind still knows it's an airplane. But you're not identified, you're not discursively thinking it does. So that's one way to play with naming. There's an appearance, Then you tend to name it. Then we discriminate.

[14:45]

This is the process we go through all the time. But we don't see it so fast. But here we're trying to slow it down. So you can feel it's actually different layers of mind. It's like if you look at a face. The face can have layers of intelligence, experience, beauty, and you can feel those layers. But it's just a face. And what Robbie was bringing up yesterday, what is this folding out and folding in? Well, it's not so easy to talk about such things. It's quite simple. It's just a face. practice it. There's layers of experience and beauty, intelligence. Okay. Then right knowledge is where you say, this is all impermanent.

[15:50]

Right knowledge is where fundamental truth comes in. At discrimination, you could say you're at the point of the conventional cure. So here, we're trying to make a distinction between conventional truth and fundamental truth. So then how do you play with this? One way is, for example, just peeling the name off. In other words, you're applying a kind of discrimination, but a discrimination to notice impermanence by peeling the name off. then it's just a sound which is disappearing. So, when you can do that, there's suchness. Now, suchness is a word, which also means wisdom. Blessedness, suchness, if you know anything about Zen, you hear this word. So, suchness is...

[16:53]

realization. So it's kind of interesting. Here we've got suchness in some ways is the highest form, most actualized form of experience. So here, with five steps you get to it. But, it takes time. before you kind of, I mean, I would say, you can hear this and you can get feelings for it, Alan, but to actually develop it, just to develop that always you feel things as if you're, this takes a few years. I'm sorry. I mean, I might have taken a trip. And it takes time to notice the process of naming and then discriminating about the naming. Now naming also is a two-edged sword. You can use naming to cut off discrimination.

[17:56]

Naming is the first step of discrimination. But if you just name, as I said before, naming cuts off discrimination. So at the point of naming, when you use naming to cut off discrimination, that's right knowledge. So these two experiential lists of the Four Marks and the Five Diamonds are, you know, I can say a background, or I can say a foreground for entering into the experience of the Five Skylines. So I just read this 40 words of seeds that you can explore and see it, you know, now that you know, see such a simple thing. But Master Buddhism is really quite simple. It's just actualizing it, which is not so easy.

[18:58]

And the reason it's not so easy is because our identity has been formed in conventional truth. very hard to let loose the identity that you formed through conventional truth. And feel and be open without fear to an identity that seems to be a form of your fundamental truth. But if you form your identity, your sense of yourself, your sense of your big self, through fundamental truth, it dramatically changes your relationship to suffering, anxiety, everything. Well, right knowledge is the knowledge that discrimination is only a conventional truth.

[20:04]

So you interrupt it at that point. So this is a process of, maybe it's like NLP at some level, it's a process of interrupting the natural process. So I look at this, it's a bell, you know, and I discriminate it, I like it, I've had it a long time, I don't want it to break, you know. I mean, these kind of bells, when they're good, take a long time to find a good sound, and they're brittle. So if you drop a bell like this, because it's very porous metal, it cracks like a teacup. Because I guess they create some kind of crystalline structure in the metal. Okay, so let me explore... Before we get to the five skandhas, I'm not absolutely certain we can, but let's see.

[21:19]

Let's explore further what Ravi brought up yesterday. Because what Ravi brought up, this turning outward and turning inward, is really... an aspect of or an expression of the relationship between the mind you discover in Zaza and the mind we our usual everyday mind. I'm glad you finally said Why? Because I think that was what impressed me the most with that concept. Yeah. Was how to get the two to work with each other. Yeah. And if you can get them into a relationship with each other, then they develop actually. The relationship develops these and integrates it into our usual life, our daily life. Well, let me try to talk about it the various ways.

[22:25]

One way I will say is that my teacher's most basic zazen advice was don't invite your thoughts to tea. Yeah, makes sense, I think. When you're doing zazen, you can have a distinct feeling. that, yeah, I don't have to invite my thoughts to tea. I can hold back from identifying with my thoughts. And this advice allows you to begin to feel the difference between the mind which does invite thoughts to tea and the mind which doesn't invite thoughts to tea. It also may, if you kind of stay with it, you recognize, well, this is peculiar. I'm not going to invite my thoughts to tea, but the advice to not invite my thoughts to tea is a thought.

[23:30]

So it's too late. My thoughts are already having tea. But yet there's some difference in experience when you invite your thoughts to tea and when you hold this feeling of not inviting your thoughts to tea or coffee. but not to a schnapps. I'm not inviting my thoughts to a Swedish schnapps. I've never heard this advice. But you guys have indulged me, I must say. I expected you to be great people because he told me. And I believe him. But I didn't expect the food to be so great. And I've never seen a place where almost every meal I've had is Nouvelle Cuisine. I mean, in America, it's just not the case. Certain restaurants take on the signature of Nouvelle Cuisine, which, as you probably know, comes primarily from Japanese sous-chefs in France.

[24:33]

Anyway, the... Maybe a few restaurants, I mean, restaurants will do it, but the average restaurant just doesn't do it. A place like this never had Nouvelle-style cuisine. So it's great to find a kitchen in, as the Germans use the word, in a suite. Okay, so don't invite your thoughts to tea. And you notice actually there's a different feeling between the mental formation, the thought of to not invite your thoughts to tea and inviting your thoughts to tea. So you begin to see that actually although we call them both thoughts, they're actually mental formation and one is an intention and the other is discursive thinking. So just from such simple advice, you can begin to feel the difference between discursive thinking and intentions, which take the form of a thought.

[25:37]

But an intention can just take the form of a physical attitude. And it has no grammatical identity except a feeling. So they tend to be aphoristic or phrases that you can feel. Locate yourself in the feeling of it. Okay, so that's all kind of interesting stuff to notice through this advice. Don't invite your thoughts to tea. Okay. Now, another phrase for this term, another way to... another way this... distinction between and relationship between zazen mind and our usual mind is the terms host and guest. And host and guest is used a great deal in the koans as a teaching device and in particular in the most classic koan text, the Blue Cliff Records or the Higien Roku

[26:49]

Host and guest is a standard teaching device. So you can see that the host and guest relationship is implied in don't invite your thought to tea. You're the host and you... You don't want to be a guest in your own house. You're the host. So the feeling of host and guest In the koans, they talk about taking the host position or taking the guest position. And I think you can maybe have a feeling for the difference. So in the host position, there's a sense of being at home and being sealed or being, you know, you're the host. And this also parallels another, what he mentioned, which is generally characterized as gathering in

[28:02]

actually the literal translation is grasping, but grasping, taking hold of something, in English has, you know, more negative connotation than positive. So it's more, it can be more descriptively described as gathering in and the granting way. Now, this takes, and this is also a way to talk about the dynamic or relationship between zazen mind and our usual mind. So, sometimes it's talked as an attitude within is, you know, the gathering in way is you're not Buddha. You're not Buddha. You're not Buddha.

[29:06]

The granting way is you're Buddha. You're Buddha. You're Buddha. So, oh, you too. Excuse me, I didn't mean to leave you out. We're all Buddhas. You're not Buddha. So this is a way of relating to people. I mean, normally it would be the teacher relates to the disciple. You don't do this in a strong way unless you have permission to do it with a person. But a disciple, or somebody who gives you permission to treat them a certain way, and in a context of trust. If there's no trust, you can't do it. So, the granting... way is to support the person in whatever they feel and do and a good teacher like Sukershi gives you a tremendous feeling of support like you feel like from inside somehow he acknowledges you in your weaknesses and faults and whatever at the same time he has an expectation of you

[30:30]

And I mean, we can look at this also as one way to put it is You know, as a kid, maybe you have some idea of, you hope there's a certain kind of people in the world, a certain kind of person in the world. Maybe you hope your parents, your mother or father is the ideal mother or father, and you find out they're, you know, maybe they're pretty good. It's really wonderful to meet somebody who really likes their mother and father. I get so tired of hearing people... I can't see my mother. I can't talk to her. But it scares me to meet somebody who really has a good relationship with their parents and not dependent or mixed up. I hope my kids have a relationship like that with me. We'll see. But you hope somebody out there is really the way you hope a human being is. Most of us give up on it after a while.

[31:33]

And I really hate the kind of atmospheric popular psychology that everybody ultimately is selfish. I think it's just not true. But anybody, if you write a book about somebody nowadays, a biography, you've got to have a certain amount of this guy was wrong, this guy was selfish, this guy was, you know, at the end he was really trying to... Otherwise, reviewers don't take it seriously. It's called, what do you call it, hagiography. Just a... H-A-G-I-O-R-A-P-H-Y. Which means a biography that's written that just compliments. I thought you meant a hagiography. Yeah, a hagiography. Well, that's, you know, it's kind of closely related, maybe. I don't like books that much, actually. And trees, even. I often use trees actually as an example of practice.

[32:36]

And I say, one is you want to not call it a tree, you want to call it treeing. Because it's really actually quite important to, in the way you speak to yourself, you change your language. So you get in the habit of treeing instead of tree, which is a unit, an entity, tree. And And trees are also great to feel the space of the tree rather than the form of the tree. Begin to feel how the tree occupies a space. And to begin to feel that, first of all, and then see how it opens. That would be like Matisse, feeling how the tree grew in from its own space or something like that. So you imagine, I really would like a certain kind of person to exist on this planet.

[33:43]

And if you haven't given that up as an adult, at some point you have to realize, excuse me for being obvious, that if you want such a person to exist, it's got to be you. It's got to start with you. If it doesn't start with you, how can you expect anyone to be that one? But you also accept your fact, well, hell, I've accepted that it ought to be me, but, you know, and you have a certain pride in accepting that, but whoa, I'm letting myself and everyone else down. That's, you know, realistic, maybe. So your teacher has the feeling, I expect you to be that person. And sometimes they decide, as my teacher did, to really emphasize, you're not Buddha, you're not Buddha, you're not Buddha. And, you know, what he did was, you know, we had a Zendo, a little smaller than this room,

[34:52]

And we would, if this was where the altar was and Buddha, we'd sit and we sat in the middle and sit. We'd all go out and he had an office door like in the corner there. And we'd go out through the office door. There was another door there. We'd go out through the office door and we'd bow to him because he'd wait for us. And as we filed out, The bell would ring, and he'd go out, and then he'd be there. And then he just started at one point doing that. So as we went out the door, we'd bow to him. He'd bow to us, and then we'd go do our day. Because I worked at the University of California, and I had to go home and have breakfast with my wife and daughter and so forth. One day, he bowed to me, but he didn't look at me. And, well, that was a little unusual. it'd be like you toast with somebody. You toast and then they actually look away every time you toast. Well, I thought it was kind of funny, but then I noticed in the next weeks he stopped looking at me.

[36:01]

So... After a while, after a month and a half or two months, I decided, well, this is his problem, not mine. He's going to do this. I want to study with him so he can treat me however he likes. That's his problem. I'm just going to stay here. And after about four months, I guessed it would be a year. And for a full year, he didn't look at me. It was always no. You're not here. You're nonexistent. You're not real to me. Again, I just treated it as his problem. And suddenly, at the end of the year, I walked in and he bowed to me. And I kind of guessed he would be here after a while. I don't know, you know. I've never dared do that with one of my students. I think they'd leave after a few days, if not a week. But I was desperate, willing to hang out with this guy.

[37:10]

So that's like how you can articulate you're not Buddha, or you're Buddha. How do you, in other words, one way it's done, too, is you interrupt people's societal identity. You know, sometimes people come into doksan with me. You know, doksan is the, it means to go alone. And you meet the teacher, the teacher's sitting in the kitchen and there's some formalities, bowing. Then you sit down and you're just there. There's no rule. What do you do? Some people come in and they say, how are you today? How are you? Because they want to establish a social identity. And there's no societal or social identity strictly speaking in them. So the minute they do something like that, I mean, I sort of cut them off or I'm polite.

[38:16]

How are you? How's your family? You know, things like that. Have a good trip. Yeah, like that. I mean, there's nothing wrong with doing that. It's perfectly acceptable. But you should also know another way of relating to people. So this is really hard. At Crestone, in the practice period, I've had some serious good students, one who practiced a long time with another teacher and then came to practice with me, another then-teacher. Wasn't satisfied with His other teacher was dead. He wasn't satisfied with how his own practice was. But when he came to Crestown, the fact that I didn't, particularly for him, he'd been doing it a long time, so I was rather strict with him, didn't acknowledge any societal, social, or cultural space with him. He couldn't handle it. As soon as the practice period was over, he left. Never seen him again, barely. Because it's quite hard to have no societal space. But when you get used to it, there's another kind of intimacy that occurs, another kind of connectedness.

[39:28]

It's like what I said about the four elements yesterday. You begin to feel yourself in terms of solidity, I mean simply. earth, fire, water, air. But you feel, you know, et cetera. Well, what is that characteristic? Those are the same elements that everyone has, the world has. So you begin to identify yourself with the ingredients that are the ingredients of every person. And we can feel that with baby, but we often can't feel it with adults. We look at a baby, we feel, but you look at an adult, At what point does the... So sometimes you can imagine each person as a baby, instead of trying to open up that feeling, and then with adults. Okay.

[40:32]

I should probably have a break soon. Okay. Because you've been sitting since nine, right? On the floor, sorry. So let me stop there and we'll come back. Let me ring the bell four times. That means you don't have to sit. This is the nirvana posture of the Buddha. And so just you can stay in the position you are. But four times means there's three and then there's one. So there's not much time for zazen.

[41:15]

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