I'm very grateful to be practicing with each of you. It seems like we've been here for months. And yet it's only a few days and even less days until we finish. And I feel always like such an inadequate vessel for this practice. But I'm convinced, as I've said, that together we might make an adequate vessel for this practice. I really believe each of you has a big contribution to make to this practice.

[01:06]

And I say that not only because I believe in you, but also because I feel so deeply the truth of this practice. And I wish I could do better at making it clear. But I will keep trying. Last night I said, is there a truth of which even the sages of antiquity have not spoken? And even if we go back six or seven or a thousand years into China, Still the teaching was ancient then. We have dug up statues which you may know about at Mohenjo-daro going back about 3000 years from now.

[02:20]

Mohenjo-daro, yes. Which show people sitting cross-legged, and even one statue has the right shoulder bare and a robe over the left shoulder. And of course something like our human life goes back tens of thousands of years before that. And evolutionary life, excuse me, for the scale, is what, five billion years or so. Life as we know it wasn't always and won't always be. But right now, in all our haphazardness, We are carrying the edge of this evolution, evolution, human and

[04:02]

Natural. But we hardly know what our own life is. Yeah. But I think to practice is to give ourselves over to the deepest part of our life. Some strange contradiction in the midst of the considerable suffering of life to say yes to it. Buddhism is a thoroughly life-affirming practice asking, what is it? And I think in our present age we have quite a good chance to practice compared to other periods.

[05:32]

Our society is rather affluent and it's rather difficult to starve. So if we want to, want to enough, we can concentrate on this practice. This philosophical, intellectual and yogic practice. This method of knowing ourselves. Perhaps we need a little bit of the monk in this. And maybe a little bit more of the shaman. And by shaman I mean one who is willing to recognize, willing to live at the edge of society.

[06:47]

Now, we all feel we live somewhere at the edge of society. But most of us are trying to get in. I think it's wrong if we don't. And by a shamanic feel for life, I mean a willingness to be at the edge and not always try to get in. Yeah, and I say that, I may have said it before, but you need to be somewhat, feel yourself somewhat independent to know your own power. Your own power to discover the truth of our life. Again, I'm making rather big pronouncements here.

[07:47]

Yeah, I'm sorry. But I need to motivate myself. Yeah. And I feel we need a big scale for our little life. So anyway, in this time, if we want to enough, the opportunity is present to devote ourselves deeply to practice. To this life philosophy and study. and to the deep joy of just being alive. Well, let me try to

[09:54]

There's some things I want to speak about, but it seems we're not ready yet for it. So maybe tomorrow I'll try. I'm sorry, there's so many things I want to share with you, but it's just not possible in such a short time. So if I were going to give you a picture of Buddhism as I would describe it just now, it's an attempt to find the areas of resonance or contact

[11:04]

Confluence, flowing together. Of body and mind. Of ourself and other people. And ourself and phenomena. So this was the basic effort of the inner science of Buddhism. Now to try to bring together a bit of what I've been speaking about so far. Buddhism emphasizes a study of the mind. And also of our emotions. But these are much more difficult to study. As I said, we can only immerse ourselves in them.

[12:11]

We need a power of emotion to discover, we need a power of emotion to study emotion. So now that point of resonance was discovered to be a point. And what is the kind of point that unites things? Now this theme runs throughout Buddhist practice. And we can look at it in many ways. But the way I've been speaking now is this, as I mentioned the other day, the dhatus.

[13:34]

Now I'd just like to summarize this again, the vijnanas, the dhatus and the ayatanas. So you can get a feeling for this. Their relationship. Now it doesn't mean that you have to understand these so explicitly that you can practice each in their... But if you understand the general picture... And your intention is to practice, things begin to, just the intention, begins to let things inform you.

[14:42]

And as our consciousness evolves and our awareness evolves it becomes more palpable. As I've been saying recently, it's like if you see a water insect around one of these ponds, Flying in the air, you cannot see its path. But as soon as it touches the water, you see its path. And so, Through the practice of mindfulness, sustaining mindfulness, mindfulness itself, awareness itself, gets more palpable.

[15:47]

Or it feels like things get slower, or something like that. So these tiny moments, these fleeting moments, we feel them more clearly and specifically. And as I said the other day again, Buddhism is based on this relationship between concentration And insight. That's why we have shamatha and vipassana. And the most basic division all in all in Buddhist practice. And what shamatha does is develop your consciousness so that you can notice insights. And again, as I said, the purpose of this practice is to develop those qualities and virtues that allow you to notice and act on

[17:09]

fleeting moments, immeasurable moments. And so here we have this phrase of Dung Shan's I gave you, I think, the first evening, maybe. On a withered tree, In a timeless spring, flowers bloom. The other one of sitting by the window, leaves fall, flowers bloom. What else could there be but this? This emphasizes the mind of acceptance. But the timeless spring in which flowers bloom emphasizes the immeasurable timeless mind. These fleeting, immeasurable moments which turn us, however,

[18:33]

And that turning, Dung Shan likens to a flower blooming in a timeless spring. So all of this is to develop what we can call a palpable awareness. A settled mind. So various kinds of teachings have evolved, developed. To help us notice this and to help us practice this. So the dhatus emphasize noticing the channel of consciousness, the object of consciousness. channel of perception, the object of perception, and the mind that arises.

[20:00]

And these are called elements, almost like atoms or molecules. These basic elements are needed before there is consciousness and karma. And these elements, though, six senses times three is 18. Now the ayatanas emphasizes the field of mind and the two endpoints. But the two endpoints as entries. In other words, if I'm looking at a tree, I can emphasize just my feeling looking at the tree. And that's an entry into a field of mind.

[21:12]

And or I can emphasize the tree, feeling the tree from its own side. And that's also an entry into a field of mind. And again, I like this Simple comment of Suzuki Roshi. I've repeated many times. Sometimes when we look at a tree, we see a tree. Sometimes when we look at a tree, we see a poem. What's the difference? The ayatanas, they're a practice of this kind of difference. So here we have six times two, that's twelve. Now, the vijnanas, there's only six. Or eight. The Vijñānas is looking at the same thing from the point of view of memory.

[22:27]

And a field of being. And the structure of mind that allows perception and perception, the ayatanas and the dhatus to exist. And field of mind? The structure of mind. So the structure of mind which allows us to perceive, also accumulates memory. So we have a field of memory in the eye consciousness, a field of memory in the ear, oral consciousness, and so forth. And the seventh field That's the six senses for six vijnanas.

[23:33]

And the seventh is the particular structure of mind or self. that allows memory to happen in relationship to all of the fields of consciousness, fields of perception. And the eighth is the storehouse consciousness itself. So the vijnanas are expanded from six to eight so that we can look at the whole range of activity and memory. But this is just a way of looking at how mind arises and how it accumulates karma and experience. So this is going on at each moment as we look at something, hear something, smell something.

[24:48]

Okay, so this is looking at mind in this context based on the senses and memory. Now, the view of the mind has more mystery in it than just that in Buddhism, but for today I'll leave it at that. Now, if you're sitting sashin, and even now you sit without much pain, For most of us, there was a time, at least in the beginning, where we did feel a lot of pain. And if you're like me, it's always a bit painful. But in any case, most of us probably had the experience of a leg which is about to burst if we don't move it.

[26:08]

Hello leg, what are you doing down there? And we probably then also all have the experience of how our mind is in relationship to the pain. affects the leg. If your state of mind is unsteady and distracted, the leg becomes very painful. But if your state of mind is quite steady and calm, the leg is not so painful.

[27:10]

Then if you have an attitude to that calm state of mind, you add an attitude. Like perhaps, what leg? Who says I have a leg? There's nothing down there but some kind of foundation. Such an attitude, you know, some kind of attitude like that often makes the pain even less noticeable. Maybe you say, I give up on my legs. They can go to heaven ahead of me. Maybe you perform a little funeral ceremony for them.

[28:11]

Anyway, you can have some kind of attitude like that that affects how the pain is received by the mind. Okay, so let's study this. What happens? We have a leg. And that leg now perhaps is feeling painful. And your mind has the facility, the capacity to feel that pain, that sensitivity. And the mind also has the capacity to have a pattern or shape that arises from our character and will. that makes it able to absorb the pain or accept the pain and so forth.

[29:46]

No, the salient qualities, decisive qualities, that allow you to do some simple thing like notice the pain in your leg and and relate to it. The salient features are the stillness of the body, the calmness of the mind, and the clarity of the mind. No, if you're not still or clear or calm, you can't do much about it. It just hurts. And you only have two choices. Agony or movement. But if you have physical stillness and the surface of the mind is calm, And the patterns of the mind allow you to absorb the pain.

[31:17]

It's not so difficult. No, of course, practically speaking, you have to know the difference between when damage is being done to your body and when it's just this other kind of pain. But this is anyway a simple, this is a common experience for somebody doing sesshin. And you can clearly see the role that stillness plays. calmness and clarity play in the experience. Now the yogic skills involved here are yogic stillness, The yogic skills involved here are physical stillness, a one-pointedness, and a non-interfering observing mind.

[32:43]

A non-interfering observing mind is just a mind that observes without interfering. And one pointedness is this being able to rest your mind on something. Now again, The full realization of these takes some time. So your mind most of the time rests in calmness. But we have taste of these things all the time. And we learn a lot in just making the effort to realize and notice these practices.

[33:48]

And through our intention to realize these practices, I believe they begin to work at us at levels which we don't even notice they're working. And although We may still be distracted after several years and not able to practice what we think is one-pointedness. There's still some difference. Maybe our distraction is clearer. Maybe we know when we're distracted and when we're not. And this power of mind is beginning to rise in between the distractions.

[35:00]

So have confidence. It's okay to be a distracted Buddha. The Buddhism has this funny kind of psychology. It says there's ten realms. It's a kind of typology. It says there's the realm of hell. And hell means that you are confined in suffering in your life. And often, in a Buddhist sense of hell, in a hell you don't deserve to be in. A little bit like Solzhenitsyn Solzhenitsyn said, it's worse to be in the gulag when you're there for no reason you can figure out.

[36:27]

If at least you know why you're in this hell, you suffer with some kind of, you know... It makes sense, but if you don't even know why you're there, it's worse. Buddhism says there's four kinds of suffering rooted in the body. Birth, old age, sickness and death. And this is not all births are painful or something, but birth itself, suffering is rooted in birth, old age, sickness and death. Without these four, there would be no physical suffering. Now Buddhism The Buddha also listed four sufferings that are rooted in the mind or in our emotional life.

[37:51]

One is separation. To be separated from ones you love or separated from yourself even. And I think most of us have had the experience of being separated from someone we love and how painful that is. It's suffering that crushes the soul and not the body. And then there's the suffering of envy and And do we, you know, I think most of us have experienced that kind of suffering. And then there's the suffering of self, of the activity of self, of the skandhas.

[39:14]

The suffering through the activity of the self. Now, when you're... Hell might be, for instance, as described in some Buddhist noh plays. Two lovers who are true to each other, but within their society they cause so much suffering that a kind of hell comes upon them. Their world turns into hell through being cruel to each other. This could be considered a kind of hell in Buddhism.

[40:20]

A hell hidden in the heart. And then there's the realm, that's one of the first realms, then there's the realm of ghosts, hungry ghosts. And that means those aspects of our self which can't be satisfied. Hungry ghosts have such needle-like throats they can't swallow their food. So they're always hungry, but they can't eat anything. And there's this kind of psychological realm we have of hungry ghosts within us.

[41:28]

And the third is beasts. As we know, we say, you beast. You're acting like a beast. When we're just too much of an animal. When our anger is animal-like, we eat like an animal. And then there's the realm of asuras, demons, which are that part of us involved with power, seeking power. Some kind of strong... Some kind of businessman or movie maker who's always making deals and crushing people in the process.

[42:34]

That would be a kind of realm of asuras or demons. And then there's the next one is humans. And then the one after that is divinities. The Buddha was asked, are you a god? No, are you a saint, some kind of divine being? No, then what are you? Awake. Awake. We have this realm of saintly or divine beings. Now these first six are all realms in which we don't have choice. The next four, to bring it up to the numbers, and Buddhism likes so much, ten.

[43:44]

That's the realm of the disciples. Of Pratyekabuddhas. A Pratyekabuddha is a Buddha who is enlightened by accident. I think this is secretly all of our practice. Pratyekabuddha is like he sees a leaf fall and hit the pond and he's like... But that's again a little bit like the farmer waiting by the stump of the tree. You all know that story? A farmer is on his way home from the fields. And he scares up a rabbit which runs and hits a stump of a tree.

[44:55]

And the rabbit is killed. So he brings it home to his wife and they have a wonderful rabbit stew.

[45:01]

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