We're talking about an actual fact here. And so you begin to only think What's possible? Or something close to that. So say you're like you're a kid and you're living in the city like I did and much of the time you don't have mountains to climb. Like when you're a kid and you don't have mountains to climb. So you're wondering if you should climb a building or jump between two buildings where there's an alley. Your mind says, well, I probably can do that, you know.

[01:04]

I can, probably. Your mind might say, oh, I can do that. But your body says... But your body says... Yeah. The body is very clear. That's way too far. Or it might be not very wide. You know, you can practically step across it. And your body says so. Piece of cake. Your body knows immediately. Or it might be a little farther, and you think, well, with a tailwind... Tail wind is like an airplane. Okay. So you're thinking your body knows. So it's something like this, how the body participates in thinking.

[02:06]

Like we might consider, yeah, we love practicing here. Let's buy all the local farms. Except they're not for sale. Let's tear this building down and build a new building. Now the jump between this building and the new building, how do we know how to do that? Should we do it? Yeah.

[03:06]

Or should we just fix up this building? Or should we move to Russia? It's a long trip, but you know. The Dharma is worth it. Now, even in this kind of thinking, The body can know whether it's possible or not. This kind of unison of mind and body, I don't know. any way to come to accept through zazen. And strangely enough, or maybe not so strangely, as mind and body begin to sing together, the phenomenal world also begins to sing in us.

[04:16]

This may be a more romantic point, but now maybe you can see its possibility more. Now Zazen also brings us to this place where there's no hot and no cold. This is a kind of space inside the unison of body and mind. It's a physical space. I mean, it couldn't get to it only through mental formations.

[05:29]

To know it physically, I think you need zazen. Mm-hmm. And this develops just through sitting still. Your body wants to move. Your mind wants to move. But you stay sitting. Because everybody around you is sitting too. At least that helps. Mm-hmm. Pretty soon you feel this space. Und ziemlich bald spürt ihr diesen Raum.

[06:41]

And again, you know, if... It's... First of all, just sitting within... Finding... Well, okay, if you... Example I always use. If you just put your arm somewhere for six or eight hours... And you're awake. Your arm wants to move. It'll even start hurting. I cannot please move my arm. I don't care if everybody else is sitting there with their arm not moving. We could have a zazen where everybody puts their arm on the table first. Who moves first? Who moves first? But you can do it if you fall asleep.

[07:50]

So it's a different... It's really a matter of the mind in the arm, not the arm. And we find this place in Zazen. And the pain of zazen really confirms this place where there's no hot nor cold. This freedom from likes and dislikes. So the pain becomes a shortcut. Or the realization of the second foundation of mindfulness. So, and strangely enough, this true freedom from a mind of likes and dislikes

[09:06]

opens you to textures of the world and sub-textures of the world. that are hidden by the pendulum of likes and dislikes and the activity of self-centeredness. A kind of hidden world appears to us. And we somehow, there's some intuition about the hidden that we like.

[10:12]

It's common in tea bowls. In what? Tea bowls. Tea bowls? Yeah, for Japanese tea ceremony. Oh, that's interesting. It's common in tea bowls, this practice of hiding. For example, you're supposed to hold the tea bowl a certain way and know where the front is. And yet the front is only indicated at the bottom of the inside of the teabowl. And that's covered with dark green tea that you can't see through. So you have to kind of intuit where the center of the tea bowl is.

[11:26]

And the design outside intentionally hides the front. And it's not just where the front is because when you have the tea bowl, the front, you turn it two small turns. Then when you drink, the inside appears. Don't worry about it. When you have a tea bowl, you hold it like this. But when you actually drink, you turn it. Two little turns. And you turn it and you drink and you say, oh yeah, I had it wrong. Somehow we like those little things. Intuit something much deeper. Speaking of the hidden. You know, a sweater I got years ago in Colorado somewhere.

[12:27]

It was a half-price sale, so I bought two sweaters. And last year, shortly after I arrived from the United States, this sweater disappeared. and I hunted for it now and then called a few restaurants the dentist's office but it was gone Then when I went back to Colorado, I thought, maybe I didn't bring it. I hunted a little bit there, you know. But it was found by Geraldine Berta hanging over a chair here for the last three or four days. Yeah, this is better than a tea bowl.

[13:58]

Okay. So Zazen also allows you to observe body-mind formations. Now part of this is dependent on developing a regular mindfulness practice in ordinary life. But it's also dependent on things like following thoughts, moods, etc.

[15:00]

to their source. So you can feel the trigger of when a thought first arose. Or a mood, or a headache, or a cold, or the flu. And that's a tremendous skill, actually. It's not so hard to learn. To really feel the arising of each thought. And the more you get to know the arising of each mood, emotion, thought, physical sensation, illness, happiness.

[16:07]

You begin to feel the space from which they arise. The sense of a formless space from which formations arise. And then to really feel that as an established thing, this formlessness from which forms arise. And then to really and then to feel or establish the feeling of this formlessness, which is always constantly producing forms, you immediately understand the necessity of the teaching of form and emptiness. This is a direct experience of

[17:24]

emptiness. And we can call it something like original mind. Or original heart. It's not so different than the muses of a poet or of a painter. To not think your poem or painting, but to feel where the home arises, or the painting arises. Yeah, and now there's a few other basics of zazen that really are the transformation of body and mind. So you begin to enter the world of activity with a different body and mind than you're born with.

[18:26]

with a wisdom body or dharma body. So there can be many fruits of Buddhism, including how the insight and enlightened experiences function in Buddhist practice. insight and enlightenment experience function in Buddhism because enlightenment is also a human experience, not a Buddhist possession. But the development and maturation of a dharma body or wisdom body, may be opened sometimes, often, through enlightenment experience.

[19:56]

It's only fully established through zazen practice. So if you want this to be part of your life, you'll practice sasin. Yeah, that's at five o'clock. Well, these important matters have to be set aside now. For other important matters. So part two comes up tomorrow. Part two will come up tomorrow. If I don't exhaust my translators.

[20:57]

Okay, thank you very much. Vielen Dank. Mögen unsere Hatsichten gleichermaßen jedes Wesen und jeden Ort erstrengen mit dem wahren Verliebnis des Buddha-Rigas. Shujo muhem se gandho, mono mu jim se gandha. Oh, my God, you are cool. BUSUDO MUJYO SEGANJO The leading deities are countless. I praise them for saving them. Their desires are indestructible. I praise them for reaching their ends.

[21:59]

They are endless. I praise them for dominating them. The path of the Buddha is unsurpassable. I praise them for reaching it. I believe the truth of the Tathagata is to be found.

[23:51]

Sometimes I, speaking with you, have some feeling of trying to make some particular teaching aspect of Buddhism clear. Today I just feel like, you know, kind of, I don't know, chatting with you. Your practice is always... pushing my own boundaries of, you know, yeah.

[25:41]

Boundaries of what I can talk about bring to the surface of our practice with some clarity. And the development of this place, too. And also the corners practice itself gets you into. Corners, you know, you get Like the problem of trying to make clear the dynamic of acceptance. the dynamic of acceptance combined with intent... which loosens the knots of the world... and through changing the directionality of the mind...

[27:16]

changes the direction of situations. And, yeah. And something, some kind of, something like solutions open up. Change the directionality of mind away from busyness toward more silence. Toward less baggage and so forth. And, you know, I said the development of this place and also something I've been trying to do the last couple of weeks is find a way to make the third payment on the Creston land.

[28:52]

We're buying about 90 acres surrounding Crestone on the mountain side. How much is that? An acre? And it's kind of like a horseshoe around Creston. And so 90 acres now, there's another 50 we'll buy if we get these 90 purchased. We'll end up with about 230 acres altogether. Yeah, so far we've paid about $65,000. That's what, about 130,000 Deutschmarks, something like that.

[30:22]

140,000 Deutschmarks, maybe. And we've got, that's about a third of what we have to pay, or more than a third. Yeah. Just sharing with you what the Sangha in the United States is trying to do. Because if we can own this land, the center there will have all the land up to where the mountain becomes a park. Denn wenn wir dieses Land kaufen können, dann besitzt das Zentrum das Land bis dahin, wo die Berge ein Nationalpark werden. Und ich glaube, das ist das Wichtigste, was ich in meiner Lebenszeit für Crestone tun kann. I want to ensure its continuation as a practice place.

[31:40]

As a seamless monument. I should explain what that means, but maybe I will. You know, sometimes I'm asked or implicitly asked, how is Buddhism a religion or why is it a religion? Yeah, I don't, you know, I have various ways to speak about that, but they take time.

[32:42]

Simply, it's not too easy to answer. The word spiritual implies that something gives us a feeling of something different than our ordinary life. Zen approaches from the other direction and says, Our life is, whatever spiritual means, that's our life. But that's covered over, not easy to understand. But that's covered over, or not easy to understand. So we don't have to actually do anything.

[34:10]

The world, whatever spiritual or religion means, that's already the world. But there's nothing outside this world. But in some funny way, we are outside this world. Buddhism is, how do you get back in? No, at least that's one way to... Maybe a useful way to think about it sometimes. Yeah. So the other day I said that scientists say the brain is the most complex entity that's been discovered.

[35:25]

But I said that's not really true. I said something like that the statement that the brain is the most complex entity ever discovered is what is the most complex. That the statement itself is more complex than the brain. Yeah. That someone can say this is what's really, truly complex. Yeah, so in a sense, our behavior... This is making a little leap here.

[36:26]

Our heart's an anatomical organ. Our heart is an anatomical organ. Our brain is an anatomical organ. But as I said, you know, the caresses and pats we need to develop the brain of Sophia and each other I mean, I don't dare pat you too much, but, you know, a little bit. But it kind of develops. Yeah. Okay, yeah. And now we're all embarrassed here. Okay. We can think of behavior itself as an anatomical organ.

[37:37]

Let's call behavior an anatomical organ. I won't try to explain the the analogy further. So I would say in this sense that Sangha is an anatomical organ. The multi-generational Sangha. The lineage. If culture and behavior are what makes our life possible, if it's our relationships with each other in the world, which is

[38:56]

our human life. If it's relationships of ourselves and others and the world which makes our life possible. then those relationships are the single most important thing to understand. These relationships are the most fundamental and complex thing we know. Yeah, for sure. Okay, what are these relationships? Sangha is about these relationships. Sangha is within culture and outside of culture. It's a kind of culture, Buddhist culture. It's a kind of culture.

[40:06]

within culture and within usual culture and outside of usual culture. And it's a multi-generational culture. It reaches its fullness can only be approached through several generations. That's why it's so important for me, that's what my job is, to see if I can assure its multi-generational continuity. I assume I'll fail because the likelihood of finding the disciple is small. And even if you find the disciples, most lineages, there's thousands of lineages in each generation.

[41:39]

The next generation, there's three or four. We say we're born in the same lineage and die in different lineages. Because of circumstances, most lineages don't really continue. But still, although I surely will fail, I surely must believe that I won't. I'm going to fully intend that I don't. Yeah, so here we are speaking about it. This multigenerational anatomical organ.

[42:49]

Now, you know, we have this koan, which we discussed, I believe, last week or sometime, the seamless monument. The emperor of China at that time became, for various reasons, was friends with a Buddhist teacher. Der Kaiser von China in dieser Zeit war aus verschiedenen Gründen ein Freund eines buddhistischen Lehrers. It makes me think of the story of fishing with a straight hook. Da muss ich an diese Geschichte denken mit einem geraden Haken fischen.

[43:56]

Some Zen teacher was always fishing, not with that side, but with this side, fishing with a straight hook. Never caught anything, but he kept fishing that way. And after 14 years of fishing that way, various people Taka, what is wrong with this guy fishing with a straight hook? Which makes me think of a temple in Georgia in the Soviet Union near Belize. Near Tbilisi, former Soviet Union. Tbilisi is the city there. I went hiking in the mountains. This is before the wall came down. And found these summer camp kids

[45:15]

And then I met these people in a summer camp and they sang all American rock songs. And then we looked at this old Christian, ancient Christian church. And there was a little hole in the floor. And they used to let food down there because somebody for 18 years lived in a cave underneath the temple and they let food down this hole to him. And of course he became famous. Now everybody knew about this nut or saint who was living for 18 years under the floor of the church. He turned almost anyone into a saint or a nut, you know. Living 18 years in a hole under a church will turn anybody into a saint or a nut.

[46:36]

Okay, so this guy is fishing with a straight hook for 14 years. So one time the emperor heard about it and he actually came to see this guy. And he said to him, what do you expect to catch with this straight hook? He said, I caught you. Okay, so maybe Buddhism is like fishing with a straight hook. So this guy knew the emperor. And he became known as National Teacher Chu. And he was known as the national teacher Chu.

[47:54]

The emperor asked him, you know, because Chu was quite old. What shall I do after you're gone? What shall I do? And Chu said, build me a seamless monument. Because usually the monuments are based on, you know, these shapes of earth, fire, water, air, etc., the elements. And... So the emperor said, but how do I build a seamless monument? And the emperor was, I mean, Chu was silent for quite a while. Yeah, just waiting.

[48:57]

Then he said, you should ask my disciple Tangyan. He knows all about this. So after Chu died, the emperor called Tangen to meet with him. And asked him, how do I build? What did he mean? What do I do? How do I build a seamless monument? And Tangen said, south of Zhou and north of Tan, there's enough gold for the whole country. Under the shadowless tree is the communal ferry boat.

[50:12]

But up in the Crystal Palace, no one knows what to do. But up in the Crystal Palace, no one knows what to do. So, of course, if there is such a thing as a seamless monument, Chu could have explained it to the emperor. So when he said, oh, but talk to my disciple, we can understand the seamless monument is the multigenerational sangha. that continues this teaching. Under the shadowless tree, the communal ferry boat means the timeless Sangha.

[51:16]

The government, the Crystal Palace, doesn't really know what to do. And there's enough gold or resources to make the society work. But if we want to understand the truth of how we exist, this is the seamless monument. It's like if someone asked me, why does the Dharma Sangha want to buy all that land around Crestone? I said, well, you know, Probably our society is going to survive.

[52:46]

But under the shadowless mountain, Crestone Mountain, the true boat of the, the true communal boat is, I don't know, something, I have to say something like that, right? And up in the White House, they don't know what they're doing. Particularly this White House. This is the very shadowed bush. But if I wrote that to a potential donor, I don't think they'd understand what I meant. What am I talking about here? Let's see if we can go a little further, though.

[53:49]

Okay. So if we understand, I was using the example again the other day, we can only know our cosmos. Within the horizon of the finite speed of light. We can only know our world within the horizon of the light of the mind, perhaps. And in general, culture simplifies us human beings. I mean, I see young people now, and I... It's unbelievable how simple they think the world is.

[55:12]

And they actually know it and they show it in their frustration. And they're seeking various kinds of distractions. So I mean I think that the particularly nowadays the commercialized simplification of our life is Real bad. So if the world we know is the world we know, What are the limits of those knowings?

[56:27]

So Zen Buddhism and Buddhism in general are asking us, what are the limits of knowing? So I know I started to practice feeling the limits of knowing. I started to practice through feeling the limits of knowing. I just had various experiences that I knew more than language or culture suggested. And so I began, why doesn't my culture say something about this? My tuition of what our life is was much bigger than our culture or my education let me understand.

[57:29]

Was there a door? I think in any culture one has this experience. Buddhism tries to be a door. So what are the limitations? Well, you know most of them. We talk about them quite often. First limitations are views. Views that aren't about the way the world actually is. Most classically, the implicit sense of permanence. So you begin to notice such senses of permanence, implicit permanence in your own thinking.

[58:58]

And I'm convinced that the reason it's so difficult for any length of time to be present with one's breath Because of the need for some kind of continuity and implicit permanence we find in language and thinking. When you're actually free of the implicit view of permanence, it suddenly becomes very easy to be present with your breath all the time.

[60:19]

Yeah, we think for other reasons too. Various desires are formulated in our thinking. And we can talk about that too, but let's come to that later. The second would be perhaps the language itself, which the job of language is to bind the world, to create a coherent world. Grammar, syntax of language, forces, everything you name into a particular kind of world. It takes the name of any object or whatever you call an object and limits its...

[61:40]

description to what will fit into the syntax of language. So a second aim of practice is to feel the world, know the world, through language but also independently. It's one of the reasons we sit. When you start knowing the world, the sense world in your body, Without names. Okay. On third, I'd say, again, well, by the way, culture, I like to use the word bundling.

[62:56]

Culture bundles the world. It tries to make it something cozy and nice. And bundling also meant to be meant in New England and Wales to go on a date with your clothes on in bed. I don't think you had this practice in Germany. But in New England, you know, they didn't have much heat in the houses. It was cold as heck, right? Yeah. And a courting couple wanted to be alone.

[64:05]

The courting couple. And it was freezing cold. But no intimacy was allowed. So they let the couple get in bed with their clothes on, with a board between them. And it was called bundling, and I suppose the parents were watching. I don't know if really that's what language does to us, but maybe. And culture does something similar. Again, its job is to create a coherent world. And a world that serves a certain purpose. And then there's the mental she, the mental body we live in.

[65:20]

Which you, through practice and through zazen, can crack open. Where it seems to fall away. And what Dogen means by dropping body and mind. And then there's the limitations of consciousness itself. And we know that through seeing that we dream and how awareness functions in a wider sense than consciousness. And then there's a sense that the senses, the five or six senses, are only slices of the pie. There's a lot of the world pie in between the senses.

[66:26]

It's a little bit like, you know, you might be at the ocean. Yeah, the ocean, the smell of the ocean comes into your nose. The sound into your ears. Maybe the water on your feet. But no matter five or six senses, knowing, thinking, this is not the ocean. So one of the limits of knowledge is the seamless world the senses gives us. The world appears through these categories,

[67:29]

The senses. The job of our mind, then, is to make it coherent. But Buddhism particularly notices this. And says, through the vijnana practice, we should study each sense. Separately and together. And through knowing the senses well, we know the limits of the senses. So when I started feeling that And that I think the intuition we all have that the world is more than is presented to us by our language and culture.

[68:51]

And more than fit into the five senses and mind, And more than language or culture can grasp. We know that now because anthropology shows us so many different cultures. That was a much harder thing to know in... in China of the Tang Dynasty and Sun Dynasty. They didn't have much anthropological awareness of other world views. So it took a great subtlety on these parts to recognize that they lived in a limited world view.

[70:12]

And they discovered that, I'm sure, through the yogic practice of meditation. Somehow this sitting, which opens us to what we're emphasizing this week, this place where there's neither hot nor cold, This place free of the pendulum of likes and dislikes, which creates a self-centred world, that place is an actual through zazen practice, that place becomes an actual mental structure.

[71:32]

Again, if you forget the reality of how our mind works, Mentality is structured. Yeah, remember that the first thing we teach children is to count and to say the alphabet. One, two, three, four, five, et cetera. If I can't say one, two, three, if I can't have that mental structure which makes you there and you there and you over there, I can't think about things.

[72:33]

So Yuan Wu, the compiler of the Blue Cliff Records, said the secret of daily Zen practice in everyday life is to have a mind which also doesn't set up here and there. Because here and there is a mental structure. And again, using Sophia, unfortunately, as an example, she's in the process now of learning here and there. And very quickly, those here and there and so forth become pleasant and unpleasant. And then through our influence they become likes and dislikes.

[73:47]

And then she's in trouble. How can we lessen the trouble? So when you learn to sit without moving, you're actually creating a mental structure. And as I said, the pain of zazen really establishes that mental structure. A kind of invisible mental structure. It's visible if you look, though. Because you can see within that structure what you can feel with your body. Likes and dislikes don't operate.

[74:51]

So the maturing and development of the second foundation of mindfulness and development, is really to use that as a way to study our emotional fabric. Most of us are much more intellectually developed than we are emotionally developed. Our familiarity and able to work with our emotions and work with the emotions of others, relate to the emotions of others, is much less developed than our working with ideas.

[76:05]

So part of practice then becomes, and you can use the second foundation of mindfulness, to really see our emotional fabric. and to make the patterns clear. And so forth. So through something like again establishing this structure I'm calling it. This place where there's no hot nor cold. And again, the Japanese word for consciousness in Buddhism also means a place. Establishing this place allows us to see the limits of knowing. And the profound way of entering that for Dogen and from my own experience is, believe it or not, this simple zazen posture.

[77:46]

It's like you begin to see the sea of language and culture begins to recede a bit. Things begin to appear with tremendous clarity. And you really do begin to feel and know the world in a way not so limited by the way I said through this rooted in this simple ability to learn to sit without moving and really establish through that a place in yourself

[78:52]

A free of this pendulum of likes and dislikes. That's as much as I can say today. But this practice is something that's, as I'm saying, multi-generational. Even if you do zazen, you can't really discover it all by yourself. And this anatomical organ of the multi-generational sangha is one of the most precious things in the world. That's why it's called one of the three treasures. That continues this way of knowing the limits of knowing and frees us into a wider world of knowing.

[80:16]

which looks the same as this. It's a kind of hiddenness that's everywhere visible. Thank you very much. Thank you. May our intentions equally penetrate every being and every place.

[81:04]

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