I hope this koan seminar, for those of you who are continuing into the session, will be at least some kind of preparation for the session. Or a way in which you can enter Sesshin with a little more of not being such a contrast from your daily life. And in a way so you can enter more of a blank slate. I think if it's not such a contrast you can come into Sashin with less on your mind. In order to give a talk on a koan or about anything, I have to do a little bit like Matsu, I have to make waves.

[01:29]

I have to take up some story or some issue and present it to you in some way. But really my sense of practicing with you is to give up form, give up our forms. But in some ways, sometimes you have to take on a form to give up a form.

[02:50]

So tonight we'll do the lay ordination for the three representatives from the Vienna gang. Do you think I should give them all the same name? I think I'll call them all Richard. I'll start calling myself Michael. And this, I think in this story yesterday of Matsu and Baizhang and the whisk, and do you identify with or detach from this action?

[03:56]

I'm not sure exactly what I said, but I think I said that Bai Jiang said, that Matsu said it the first time, and it's Bai Jiang that said it the first time. And that's an important point in the story because there's such a reciprocal and reciprocated relationship between the two of them. And that's a... a pretty developed stage to get to with your teacher and your fellow practitioners.

[05:01]

Where there's a kind of movement in you like the ripples on a pond from the wind. It's both ponds. The ripples appear in both ponds. And then, of course, Matsu's shout cuts through that. So... So anyway, we'll do this ceremony this evening. And I have to present also the lineage papers to Neil. I don't remember why, but we did this ceremony and you got your raksu. And I wrote on it and everything, but I didn't do the lineage papers.

[06:16]

I didn't have one or something like that. I don't know. I failed anyway somehow. So I'll make your lineage papers. Maybe I'll give that to you in the ceremony tonight too. No, I have these lineage papers all kind of printed up with Japanese characters going from Suzuki Roshi, from the Buddha through Suzuki Roshi to me and to the new initiate. So there's lay ordination and there's priest ordination, if you want, and then there's transmission itself. And when we do transmission, we write out the lineage ourselves.

[07:36]

With writing all the names from Buddha to yourself. And taking a red ink and writing a line of blood, a kind of line of blood through all the names. Written on quite a big piece of special called plum cloth, kind of plum cloth paper. This big piece stretches like from me to Gerd. And you make three of them, each one a different pattern of how the lineage connects together.

[08:37]

And it goes from one lineage from Buddha to the sixth patriarch. And then it spreads out in two lineages, one Linji lineage and one Dungsan lineage. And they go separate paths and they join at Dogen. And then from Dogen they go up until Suzuki Roshi and myself. It takes quite a while actually to do this. And there's various teachings and ceremonies that are part of it that take some time to do.

[09:54]

I'd like to say I guess it's important to do it. If you're so inclined. But even though I say I guess it's important to do it, I also know that there's almost no other way to gather a new essential body. At least it's a big help in holding the teaching clear in your new body. And And in a deep sense having the permission and freedom to teach.

[11:33]

So I'd like us all to participate in this ceremony this evening, as much as possible, of course, as if you were taking the ceremony yourself. Some ceremonies have a lot of spontaneous elements and can be developed or changed by the participants. But this ceremony is done pretty much exactly the same way all the time. And you could memorize it if you'd like. But each time the question is, can you take something that's exactly the same every time it's done and make it new for you?

[12:54]

So you're taking on a new form as part of giving up your old form. And the degree to which you do this, of course, is up to you. But even if you even have a slight inclination to do it, or occasionally you wonder, have a kind of funny poetic intuition about it. It means that you somehow you feel a looseness from your usual self and form. In a way, when I did this myself, I was quite lucky because it's completely against my nature to do something like this, wear these robes and everything.

[14:24]

If any of you, and I think fortunately none of you did know me before, but if any of you did know me before... You would realize that for me to walk into this room dressed like this and then do three silent bows before an altar is a complete abandonment of everything I knew before. I had to give up everything to do such a silly thing. And now when I do it, I don't even know what space I'm in.

[15:27]

I just do it. But for some people, this teaching of wearing robes and stuff is not such a good teaching for them. They do it with a certain pride or as if they were taking on a better identity than they had before or a better identity than others. Even then, it doesn't mean it's a bad thing to do because this is still something rather difficult to do. So there's some good teaching in it anyway. But when you have a feeling that it's a better identity than you had before or a better identity than other people's identity, then it's really not such a good teaching for you.

[16:31]

But if it's a way of giving up your form, usual form, then that's good. The point is, as lay person or ordained layperson or priest, the point remains the same. How do you give up your form? What do I mean by giving up your form? I don't know how I'm using form to talk about it. And it's also important to take care of our form. But we could have a lighter relationship to it. It's like hitting the mokugyo. You hit it so that the stick is very light in your hand. Really, at the moment the striker hits the mokugyo, at that moment you should let go of the stick.

[17:54]

And take hold of the stick again after it touches the Mokugyu. So the mokyo is almost floating in your hand for a moment. I mean the striker is almost floating in your hand. So some kind of feeling like this is that you let go of yourself in every action. This is part of what the pointer introduction to this koan of Matsun Bajang means. And the experience of letting go or having beginning to let go of your form.

[19:21]

The form of self and the form of your world. It's still there, but your relationship to it is on a moment by moment is much looser or lighter, as I said. And you know exactly what you're doing, except at the same time you don't know exactly what's happening. I'm not trying to drive any of you crazy. I'm just trying to give you a feeling for something. It's almost as if you moved among the objects, the familiar and unfamiliar objects of your world in a new way.

[20:24]

As if the objects of the world gave you your form for a moment. So here we're talking about, you know, there are processes by which you change yourself. That's good too. But here I'm speaking about a process or a way in which you let go of yourself and let everything change. I'm not saying we can accomplish this easily. But it's not so difficult to get a taste of it and begin to move a bit in this world. This world that's quite free, in which you're always sightseeing,

[21:37]

And it's not like you have to look at the pond and the ducks and wonder what they mean anymore. The ducks and the pond immediately embrace you and you don't need any discussion. Die Enten und der Teich umarmen euch unmittelbar und es bedarf keiner Diskussion. And even now the ducks in the pond are right in the middle of you. Und selbst in diesem Moment sind die Enten und der Teich genau inmitten von euch. Or whatever occasion you bring up or comes up. Everything happens right in the middle of you. Because your boundaries are quite flexible. And that feeling of flexible boundaries is also, you get to know in zazen.

[23:06]

You can have certain attitudes of giving yourself away in the midst of mindfulness practice. But to have a direct experience of your boundaries loosening up and sometimes disappearing really probably takes a yogic sitting to realize this or touch this. So following the softness in your practice, as I said, letting go of the noticeable and noticing more and more what almost can't be noticed. And with this kind of sensitivity, or even we could say freedom from sensitivity,

[24:10]

You start feeling your mind or consciousness or presence, a touchable presence. Beginnt ihr euren Mind und euer Bewusstsein und eine berührbare Gegenwärtigkeit zu spüren. Isn't limited to your body or either inside or out. And this feeling is not some kind of delusion or illusion, it's actual experience. You can believe what you experience. Mind and body and the presence of mind and body is not just so simple as what you see in the mirror.

[25:31]

It's much more subtly realized through a mirror relationship with the world. And then breaking that mirror. Now you may notice this turning of fall to summer to fall may make you a little sleepy or seem to make you start to psychically hibernate. And some of you have noticed, a few of you pointed out to me, and I could see it in the seminar, in the groups in the afternoon, that

[26:46]

that sometimes all of you together or some of you felt like you couldn't think or you felt like the energy was drained out of your body. This is both an individual experience and a group experience. And then other times there was a lot of fresh energy in yourself and in the group. And of course this is part of the process of studying something like koans. Something like a koan which reaches inside you and takes hold of your energy. Your nostrils begin to belong to the koan. Something has a hold of you. Sometimes when something takes a hold of you, you stop, you don't feel any energy. Mm-hmm. And often that energy, you know, when something's taking hold of you or could move you or turn you, we feel a kind of loss of energy at that moment.

[28:26]

We shouldn't deny that, and yet we also need to have some kind of maintaining our presence within it. It's a kind of awake dreaming. It's like when you're dreaming, you're processing, often you're processing something. And sometimes you have to sleep a little extra time in processing something. And sometimes you need to sleep. Sometimes you want to sleep two or three extra hours and you're processing something, we could say, unconsciously. But that processing can go on in your daily activity too, an awake activity.

[29:29]

And it does you daydream a lot or you feel only half awake, maybe half awake and half asleep at the same time. And partly zazen is this kind of processing time. You get up in the morning and we get up early and you're kind of, we could say, processing between sleeping and waking. Now we're about to do a week session between summer and fall. And you're always also doing a saschin somewhere in between, you know, being a layperson or being a monk. Or looking at your story spiraling, leading into your ordinary life.

[30:44]

Or looking at your story in which the spiral almost reverts itself and turns into a Buddhist life. Looking nearly the same, except everything is being turned maybe the opposite direction. Turning away from the course of ego and more into a course of finding yourself in each person and situation you meet. So finally this turning turns the world and turns you. So as you can more give up your, I mean, even in your ordinary daily activity, there can also be a way in which you feel you've given up your form.

[32:15]

Coming back to your form and giving up your form. You could almost leave the big presence that doesn't have boundaries that you feel in zazen sometimes. Can almost start dreaming with the world. Dreaming in the world while you're awake doing your things. At first I think you may need koan, seminar, sashin or something to do this. And I think we feel that to some extent this week. That while we're doing our day, we're also allowing ourselves to dream. And we can find, we find that I think to some extent we're dreaming together. This is another way to understand Sangha, perhaps, those who dream together.

[33:39]

Mixing their dreams together. This is a very powerful alchemy. So in this kind of situation, we have the taste of it or support of it in the Sashin and Koan Seminar. But when you get more sealed and experienced in practice, you can dream with others and with the world in your ordinary activity. And you can recognize a good potential practitioner, a good student, is that you can feel them, even though they don't know it, you can feel them dreaming with you.

[34:43]

Yeah, so in these stories, Dung Shan and... Longya and Baichang and Matsu are all dreaming together. Sharing, in a sense, sharing one mind and helping each other. Just as you might help yourself inside, you let somebody sort of outside you help you. You can't say who's helping who and who's etc. Do you identify with this action? Do you detach from this action? It's quite loose. We've loosened up our form. But sealed we don't lose our form, but we let go of our form.

[36:00]

Thank you for joining me in this week. Thank you. May our intention...

[38:16]

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