The question I'm trying to bring into our Yeah, short weekend on the Sangha. Yeah, it's of course some information about Sangha. And some experience of our own Sangha. But it's the definition of the fundamental definition of Sangha, is to see each person as Buddha. Now we have trouble with that because we think of Buddha as a who. But, you know, like when Matsu is asked, what is Buddha?

[01:06]

He's not asked, who is Buddha? I mean, this question, you know, I don't think exists, at least in Zen Buddhism, it doesn't exist. Who is Buddha? So the question is always, what is Buddha? And as you mostly would know, Matsu answered, mind is Buddha. Oh, okay. Now, just at this simple level, this is worth thinking about what kind of teaching are you in the midst of? If you ask that you're in the midst of a teaching that doesn't ask who is Buddha,

[02:06]

Yeah, I mean, if we did ask, who is Buddha, we'd say, oh, it's a historical person, blah, blah, blah. What? It's not who. It's not. I can't say. What is the who that made Buddha Buddha? But we ask, what is it that made this historical person Buddha? So you can apply this to your own life a lot. I mean, stop always asking who is doing it. Ask what is doing it. As I say, ask yourself, notice the difference between asking yourself what is breathing instead of who is breathing. I'm not saying we should entirely ignore the who-ness here. the you-ness of your life.

[03:38]

But you also want to know the what-ness of your life. With the whole entire being. is right before you and nowhere else. And that already is a practice you can be in the midst of. Not it's over there when I've practiced more. Or it's back down there in the snow at Johanneshof. Or it's, I don't know, wherever and whenever and whatever the whole entire being is before you. This deep

[04:39]

knowledge or acceptance of this is the practice of and the root of the doctrine of sudden enlightenment. So this whole entire being is And nowhere else. It's not in front of some other person better than, you know. Already this is some kind of knowing that we're all Buddhas. Not the who is the Buddha, but the what-ness. So for a while, forget about who-ness, and let's concentrate on what-ness. You know, do it for three months, three months of what-ness, then you can go back to who-ness.

[05:53]

You have three months. You'll still remember who you are. Okay, so we're going to have three months of whiteness. Promise? Well, you know, if you want. While we're practicing Having our three-month practice period at Creston, you can have your three months of hotness wherever you are. And the whole entire being will be before you. And continuing what Yuan Wu said, And nowhere else. It is ready made for you. This great intact potential is like water being poured into water.

[07:08]

It is one pure suchness. We can say, or it is one pure suchness. It's not one pure wholeness. So you can be released for a while from the prison of, yeah, the virtues, but also the prison of wholeness. Seid doch eine Weile mal erlöst von dem, ja, den Tugenden, aber auch der Gefängnishaftigkeit, der Wehrtheit. Into these ten directions which all come toward us. In den zehn Richtungen, die alle zu uns kommen, auf uns zukommen. Yeah. In their pure suchness. In der reinen Soheit. Okay. Washeit. Now, Jan Wu also says, use God. perception without dwelling in perception.

[08:12]

Now, if you know these are qualities, not just philosophy, but qualities of the Buddha, of the what-ness of the Buddha, maybe instead of just thinking they're common sense or philosophy, you'll find a way to practice it. So really, again, how do you each get a feeling for using perception without dwelling in perception? Now this goes back, you know, into the, you know, 2,000 years or 1,500 years ago, this way of trying to be... Meet the world.

[09:33]

Meet the inseparability of the world in which we live in. Now we can also use the Zazen instruction I gave you. The other day I think mostly in the prologue day. Bring attention to your posture. And that attention is also the mind. So you're mixing the mind, like a soup, mixing the mind into the body. As I said, it's not like looking at the bell, it's like ringing the bell. Since we are some sort of human being, we can wring ourselves.

[10:43]

It's like we are ringing ourselves when we bring attention to the body. So again, if the Buddha is one who is awake, Doesn't mean he's got his eyes open. Doesn't mean that somehow he's conscious, he or she. The body itself, too, is awakeness. So when you bring attention to the body, you're not waking up like from being asleep. You're waking up the body itself. By weaving mind and body together.

[11:59]

By bringing attention to the body. And finding your posture through the way attention most... is present throughout your body. The way attention articulates the body. So that's the first part of this Zazen instruction. And as Nico reminded me, letting attention also attend itself. You start with the intention to sit and to bring attention to the body. It's like the ten ox-arting pictures. At first you get the ox and you bring him somewhere. And then you let the ox do what it wants to do.

[13:15]

Pretty soon the whole moon is there. And a kind of light, a kind of moon is in your body. In Dzogchen they say How do they put it? Let the mind rest in perception. Let the naked, unadorned mind rest in perception. until there's nothing but light. And this is also something we experience in meditation. But what is the naked, unadorned mind? It's the mind that is, as Dignage says, shaken off. conceptions.

[14:27]

You can only see the fact, the actuality of the mind when you've shaken off all concepts. Now, this is something discovered by a lineage. It's not discovered easily by you yourself. At least I could have never discovered that I can rest in perception but shake off conception. I might have had some experience of perception free of conception, but I would never understood, hey, this is the front door to knowing the Buddha in myself and others.

[15:40]

And probably not if I didn't have the fairly mature practice of megapixel mindfulness. I couldn't have noticed. That experience felt lighter and clearer because it was resting in perception but not conception. Even the ability to notice such a thing depends on some maturity in your practice. And it took at least for me teaching to... understand the importance of that difference and stay with it.

[16:58]

So when Dignaga says use perception but don't dwell in perception, It's his way to express using language as a... as a craft of teaching to express Dignage's ideas To have valid cognition means to have perception without conception. Sounds like safe sex. Well, maybe it's like that.

[18:20]

And there's even a word, pratyaksha, that we have in Buddhist tradition, a word for a non-conceptual perception. Now, mostly I can just leave you with the feeling non-conceptual perception. Hmm, that sounds kind of boring. But what if you really kind of get the idea that if there's non-conceptual perception, maybe the Buddha appears in this territory of non-conceptuality? So maybe in yet the next three months of your what-ness, try to feel in the territory of your experience non-conceptual perception. And as I say, it only takes a moment

[19:50]

of knowing something like this, of actually experiencing something like this. To know it forever. Philosophy, you don't know it. You barely know it. If you have an experience of it, a momentary experience of it, it's built into your life forever. And then your practice can develop by developing, noticing, opening up this experience. So let's go back to zazen instruction. So you're bringing attention And sort of ask, you've got the ox of attention located in the field of the body.

[21:08]

The ox of intention starts wandering around, nibbling here and there. You know, Nanchuan, isn't it? Nanchuan said, you know, somebody asked him, where will you be after you die? Where can I see you? I asked Suzuki Roshi the same question just before he died. And as you maybe know, he took his hands out of the covers and made a circle. And then within that circle, bowed to me. And I think Nanchuan said something like, look for the white buffalo down by the river. So you're bringing attention to the body. The body... It becomes more and more attention itself.

[22:35]

And other people feel the attention of our body. People say, you know, scientists say, well, you know, the eye is just this sort of object that receives light and blah, blah, blah. But if you look at a baby's eyes or your own baby, something's coming out of the eyes. It doesn't feel like, oh, it's just kind of receiving capacity. When somebody who's really alive looks at you with their eyes, it can be scary. So, as we can see in a baby or a person who smiles at us, something comes out, attention comes out from the body. And awakens the attention in others too.

[23:59]

We can call this attention to attention transmission. Attention to attention, transmission. So now you bring second part of this Zazen instruction. Or this can just be finding your posture walking along the street. Find a posture that you feel most alive in walking along the street. And often, when you simply do that, you immediately feel the top of your head start being sensitive or active.

[25:01]

And is it also the case that when you do that, when you feel the most alive, your shoulder starts to become more sensitive? Just walking and walking. When you feel that, you're awakening thanks to the Sambhogakaya body. See, when I'm talking, we should have Tibetan horns and gongs and whatnot. The subtle yogic space with the fine yogic mouth. Okay. So. Now you bring attention, as I said, to attention itself.

[26:16]

To the field, or let's call it the space of mind. So now attention, and I said not to the contents of mind, but just to the space of mind. Now we're using words here to kind of shape, we're using concepts, to sort of shape our attention. So, you know, as I said, you know, when you, if you're just walking along the street and you really bring, in the sense that all postures are yoga, and you begin to feel some sensitivity here, actually, you have awakened the Sambhogakaya body

[27:27]

just when you're walking. And when the wholeness of you disappears, and the whatness of you appears, the kind of, we can say, whatness or suchness of the Sambhogakaya body, When that appears in your activity, that's called the body of transformation or the nirmanakaya body. These teachings are not so far away in some mysterious Buddha of the past or something. They can be on the streets of Bad Säckingen or even Goreville. And the more you recognize it and find yourself committed to this practice, Because the Buddha as a realization of you yourself is not much of a Buddha.

[29:06]

It's okay, you know. It's okay, you know. Be happy. But the Buddha that's awakened through and with each other, this is what we really mean by Buddha. And this wider field of being that we all are together articulating comes into us. the whole society to some extent knows this. But they have other interests, other goals, other intentions. So the Sangha within the larger Sangha of the whole society makes this their fundamental goal.

[30:11]

Which is that the inside of our life is a vow. Yeah, one of our vows, our basic vow, of course, is to stay alive. And that through practice we decide to be alive in a certain way. In a way to be alive in a way that's guided by or articulated through the Sambhogakaya body. The Sambhogakaya body that we discover Well, maybe on the streets of Goreville, but more likely in the Zendo. With others. But also... But the sense of it being also the Nirmanakaya body is when it's discovered with others.

[31:44]

And these three bodies of Buddha are at the center of our Zen practice. Okay, so now you're bringing attention to the space of mind. And the next, in a way, sense of it is you're bringing attention or attention is finding itself in the field of awareness. And that field of awareness begins to occupy a territory that sometimes is the same territory that dreams occupy. when we're asleep or half asleep.

[32:49]

But then the wholeness of dreams, wholeness of most dreams, is kind of loosened. And we come into a new space of mind, an intact great potential, a potential of mind that mind itself has to show us. And which mind itself knows even when we don't know it. So this field of awareness begins to be something that is part of us.

[34:01]

It's not just an experience in Zazen. More and more it's just part of our capacity. And we find it's not awakened so often on the streets of Goreville. It's awakened more often when we're with other practitioners. And really simply, the more experience we have of its awakening within the Sangha, The more this field of awareness becomes the field we live in with everyone, And if we go back to what Dignaga said, we only see or know mind itself when we've shaken off all concepts.

[35:20]

The field of awareness becomes mind itself. and knowing mind itself, we begin to know We can feel others' minds. And actually our awakened mind can awaken other minds that are receptive. And for minds that aren't awakened to this kind of mind, capacity of being. Others are nudged in this direction. And there's a kind of wider field of being, not just a field of awareness, but a field of being.

[36:21]

That we actually unconsciously or non-consciously are developing in the Sangha and becomes part of our life with others and with each other. And this is technically called mind-to-mind transmission. Unadorned mind meets unadorned mind. Hi.

[37:33]

See, I don't know how to tell you these things or talk about these things without, yeah, really going away. I'm sorry. Well, it's nice to see you again. Oh. I think you all know this. This is something that happens and we get to know through Zazen. And it's the vows to make this our life that allow this to mature in our Zazen and in our life. Why don't we sit for a few minutes and then we'll have lunch?

[38:32]

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