Well, thank you very much for coming and joining us again this afternoon. Since I'm only here this day, it's nice to be able to talk with you. Gerald said he'd like to stay on the rest of the week or the rest of the next days and attend the other seminars. And if I could understand, I would too. I should apologize a little bit, I think, occasionally for not knowing German. But I know I could never learn German well enough to teach in German. And I have to admit, I like the silence of not understanding. So it leaves me in a world of mystery.

[01:19]

I just go in an ordinary restaurant. I don't know what's going to happen next. So I like that. So I've given you a kind of, we'd say in English, a crash course in Buddhism. But I think if you... I hope that it... It works around the whole topic of focusing. And in this workshop I would like to go a little slower and pay more attention to things and not cover so much territory.

[02:20]

But I'd like to start out with some questions. Yes. For me it's still an open question to identify with my breath. You mean open in the sense of... I don't understand it. I can't find an access to it. Yeah, I mean, again, in a similar way, it's good to notice that. In fact, you are your breath. I mean, among other things, one of the things you are is your breath. And I think as Klaus Renn pointed out yesterday, the Jewish view is that spirit brings alive this stuff.

[03:50]

And as Klaus said yesterday, from the Jewish point of view, the spirit brings matter to life. And it is not an accident that the words spirit and breath are the same word. Inspire, expire, it's all in spirit, breath. So the question I think in all religions probably is, how do you come in contact with spirit, breath, as yourself? And we would say that what you have here is a koan. We even call it, we have a technical, a kind of technical term for it, the genjo koan. It means a fundamental problem that arises in your everyday life. And that we can't seem to solve with the resources we have available to us.

[05:11]

But at the same time, you know it must be solvable. So you keep bringing it, you hold it in front of you, you keep bringing yourself to it. So if nothing else happened today, except you took on this koan of breath identification. You know, one reason I don't mind presenting you so much, Because it's not just that practice works in small doses. This is a system, a teaching, pedagogy, that's been developed over time. Two and a half millennium.

[06:22]

And you can pick up any part of it, and if you pick it up with focus, It leads to all the other parts. So if you took only one thing from today, any one of you, this breath, staying with the breath and identifying with the breath, All this teaching of Buddhism will open up from that one thing. So it means to keep this kind of conundrum, contradiction. It's so easy to bring my attention to my breath.

[07:25]

My breath is obviously me. Why can't I identify with it? And you just keep bringing that question to yourself while you bring your attention to your breath. And this bringing an intention to something which is not understandable is also called the sudden practice because it tends to create an explosion or it tends to create an enlightenment experience because it you can't get through, so you just keep pushing and then, oh yeah! Aha! Again, I apologize for such a long answer. Okay? Yes? How do you personally find the right time for meditation? How do you find the right length of sitting, your personal length of time, so that it's still effective and not becoming an escape?

[08:50]

Thank you. You want the length of time to be somewhat impersonal. And what I mean by that is you want to pick a length of time to sit which is a little longer than you'd probably sit naturally. But not too long. And I think it's not good to sit many periods a day on your own. It's better to sit one period or two periods. And you're practicing with a group? Yes, you can sit more periods, but... And what's a period?

[09:52]

twenty to forty minutes. So if you want to seriously study yourself through meditation practice, let's say you want to practice a non-being practice, not just a well-being practice, by Non-being I mean a wide sense of being that you can't identify. So you want to do two things. You want to sit a specific length of time, not longer, not shorter. Again, all these rules are meant to be broken. And it's your practice. You can do whatever you want.

[11:07]

The Buddhist police haven't found their way into your room yet. Oh, he's sitting too long. So you can do what you want. But in general, you want to sit a specific length of time. And you want to sit a specific time. a number of times a week, in a place in your house where you don't do other things. Not in the same place you read magazines, for instance. So some corner of your bedroom or something like that. And if you start sitting when you want to, when you feel like it, that can be very effective, but basically your ego controls it.

[12:07]

And if your practice gets so it threatens the ego, the ego will tell you, boy, is this boring, it's so much more interesting to do something else. So you've got to get through the boredom barrier. Basically, you sit 20, 30, 40 minutes a day. Whatever you decide. Five or so, five to seven times a week. And usually... It has more effect on us usually in the morning than other times. But again, it's up to you. And if sometimes we feel like sitting more, it's fine. And if you want to skip occasionally, anyway. Something else? Yeah. We like to come back to the breath.

[13:29]

If we realize, if we feel something in the body, we say, bring your breath towards that area to be more aware of what's going on. That's good. And what's actually happening? You said, breath is spirit, and spirit is breath. And we do both. We bring the spirit and the breath towards that area. Well, let's not try to define spirit, soul or anything like that. We have an observing consciousness. And we have different kinds of observing consciousness. We have various ways in which we observe.

[14:31]

can identify kind of centers to our experience. And some we call soul, some we call spirit, some we call ego and so forth. And this is how Buddhism looks at it. So you can Without labeling so much, just notice what happens. When you bring your attention to your breath, what you're doing is physicalizing your mind. Your... your... Your breath is this wonderful medium that's both physical and mental.

[15:42]

And when you bring your mind to your breath, you're actually beginning to physicalize your mind. So you can feel your mind physically. Then you can bring that physical feeling of attention through the breath to something else that's coming up. And it's definitely a skill. You can increase your skill at doing it. Okay. I won't attempt to speak to what's coming up at this moment. Okay. Someone else? Yeah. I see many overlappings between what you say and the Christian contemplation.

[16:53]

Yeah, could be. Could you say something towards that? I don't know enough about Christianity to speak with much clarity about it. Although I've been in a lot of Christian Buddhist dialogues, in fact I'm supposed to In December, join one with His Holiness in India, but I decided not to go. It's just too much traveling to go to India to talk. Even though I've participated in these dialogues quite often, I really only know Buddhism from the inside.

[18:12]

And I know when most people write about Buddhism, they don't know what they're talking about. So I think if I said much about Christianity, People would know I didn't know what I was talking about. But I did have looked into it to some degree. There are certain ways of reading and letting the reading absorb and certain ways of contemplating that are very much similar. But the world view is different. And in the sheer technology of meditation, there's no comparison. As far as I know from Christian scholars, there's no comparable in any period

[19:16]

developed meditation skills like Buddhism has. So I traveled once with brother David Steindl-Ross, who's an old friend of mine, We drove across the United States. And we stopped at one monastery and convent after another. And all of them but Everyone except one cloistered convent had men and women practicing meditation, Zen meditation. And so it seems that a lot of Catholic, not so many Protestants, but a lot of Catholic monastics are adopting that. Not the worldview, but the technology of Buddhist meditation for their own.

[20:23]

But as Thomas Merton said, he's a... Do you know who Thomas Merton is? He wrote, he was the kind of most... He was kind of the spokesperson for Catholic monasticism in... United States for many years. He said that he feels closer to a Buddhist who meditates than to a non-monastic Catholic. He found that something about Buddhist meditation and Catholic monasticism produces a similar kind of person. So I'm just quoting him, I don't know. Although I know when I meet Catholic monastics, I often feel they have a physical feeling that's similar to when I feel this guy, for instance.

[21:40]

Yes. We said this morning that you talked about silence and there is something going on step by step in the silence and I would like to know more about that. What's happening in the silence? You say silence, I said stillness. Ja, ich sagte stille. Silence and stillness. Are the same in German? Schweigen und stille.

[22:44]

Pretty close. Schweigen und stille, ja. We can mean it's still, meaning it's quiet, but it actually means no movement in English. Im Englischen heißt es, es ist still, aber eigentlich heißt es keine Bewegung. Bewegungslosigkeit. So in meditation we notice we can come into a tremendous physical stillness. And then that sometimes is then accompanied by a deep silence. And a deep silence in which is not disturbed by sound. I would say that then you're identifying with the field of mind that hears rather than the hearing.

[23:45]

Now, Buddhism is a pedagogy. It's not the truth. It's a teaching to let you meet the truth. So you're quite right. Various things happen when you are in the midst of silence or stillness. Buddhist meditation practice and teaching is to get you there, but then let you find out what happens. And that's what makes the practice interesting. And in a way, Zen emphasizes this more than other Buddhist schools. Most Buddhist schools give you a map of what's going to happen. Zen tends to give you a map to where things start to happen.

[25:03]

And then leaves you on your own. Because we don't know. I mean, you might discover something we don't know about. Or the word enlightenment in Sanskrit, one of its qualities of the word is enlightenment. that which happens to you completely alone. A totally unique totally personal experience that's not in the categories of other people's experience. So basically, anyway, you get there and you see, oh, look, all this stuff's happened. Don't think about it too much. Yeah. Yeah. I want to come back to the identification with breath.

[26:27]

I want to know if you identify with breath, is there still an observer? That's an interesting question. Deutsch? Ich wollte nur noch zurückkommen auf die Identifikation mit dem Atem und freue mich ein bisschen, ob es noch einen Beobachter gibt, wenn man mit dem Atem identifiziert ist. The historical Buddha, who seems to have been quite an extraordinary guy, but that shouldn't intimidate us. He was just a person like us. But he does seem to have been quite a... you know, talented or big guy. Probably about this tall. You don't have to translate that.

[27:27]

He was asked, are you a sage? No. Are you a saint? How do you say saint? Yeah. anyway like that and they asked him these questions he said no so they said well who are you what are you awake Now, this is probably an accurate answer. In other words, if you are really concentrating on your breath, what is your name? Ingrid. and you were really concentrating on your breath, and someone came up to you and said, Who are you?

[28:53]

If you were really concentrating, you might just say, Breathing. It would require shifting into borrowed consciousness to remember you were Ingrid. So the Buddha, my feeling is, this is a real story, he was in the midst of just being aware, and he said, aware. Yeah. Now is there an observing consciousness? Is there an observing consciousness of awareness? Is there an awareness of awareness? Yeah. It's no big deal though. It's a big deal if you think there's some permanent entity that

[29:58]

That's always the same. That's the real you. But there's no real you. There's just various observing consciousnesses. What we understand in Buddhism through observing the mind is that mind has this mind has certain capacities it has movement or direction hence it can have intention and it can arise through the senses and it can also have structure When you teach a little kid to say, in English, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and what's the first thing we teach children?

[31:08]

The alphabet and to count. In Japanese, ichi, ni, san, shi, etc., like in Japanese. One, two, three. We're teaching them mental structure. If I can separate, that's one, that's two, that's three. That's mental structure. And we structure the child's mind. So I have a sense of here-ness and there-ness. That's mental structure. Whatever this mind is, it's capable of being structured. And you cannot only give it these categories of one, two, three, you can also create a category that observes one, two, three.

[32:10]

That's all. And that category that observes can fold back into the one, two, three, and then zero. In other words, the observer is a capacity of the structure of mind. Okay. What you want to do through meditation practice is to create states of mind in which the observer easily disappears.

[33:11]

But the observer can pop back up again. Okay, so let me give you a simple meditation experience. You're practicing zazen. We call it zazen, which means sitting absorption. and we call it zazen, which means sitting, being absorbed. And at some point, often by accident, you find yourself in a state of mind, a samadhic state of mind, in which there's virtually no thoughts. And it usually feels often, particularly if it sustains itself, quite good. And then you say, boy, I've been practicing a year, and this is the first time I've had a real clear samadhi. And as soon as you think that, samadhi is gone.

[34:18]

But that's only because you're not skillful. So when you create an observer of samadhi, when you're a beginner, you can't sustain the samadhi anymore because the observer interferes with it. But when you become more skillful at meditation, you can create a samadhic state of mind. You can generate them almost instantly, in fact. And you can create an observer which doesn't interfere. Because you can physically hold the somatic mind and you can gently create an observer.

[35:19]

Does that make sense? So you can have an awareness of awareness and it can either absorb in or go... The two main tools of meditation practice are... It became red. This morning he gave me a black one with a red top. Now I get a red one with a black top. You're trying to cause me to have an enlightenment experience, right? One pointedness. You guys are clever around here.

[36:20]

And the other is non-interfering. Observing consciousness. Those are the two main tools you need to develop. One pointedness. Einspitzigkeit. Einspitzigkeit. What is one-pointedness? They want to know what it means. Okay, I'll try to tell you. This is my job. Das ist meine Aufgabe. To try to explain these things. Okay, if you concentrate on this.

[37:24]

If you can bring your attention to rest on this. Like bringing your attention to your breath. Let's take this physical object. Now, actual fact you'll find that you can bring your attention to it and it drifts off. Then you bring it back. Then it goes off. So that's the first stage of developing one-pointedness. The second stage is it tends to stay there and then goes off, but it's easy to bring back. And the third stage is it goes off sometimes, but it comes back by itself. And the next stage is you place your attention on something and it just stays there, just like I put that bell down and it stays there.

[38:41]

That's one pointedness. It's the main yogic skill in meditation. Okay. But you don't want to force your... What? Fearing, observing consciousness. I'll come to that in a moment. Okay? Now, if I bring this stick up and you look at it, we would call this something like a stick arising mind. And you think, oh, that's just a stick. But it produces a stick arising mind. If I hold this up, I'm being very traditional and Buddhist.

[39:58]

It produces a flower-arising mind. It's a slightly different mind than the stick. And you'll feel a little different if I sit here like this all afternoon than like this. That's a bell arising mind. So all minds arise through the object which generates them. Okay? That's a kind of given. All right. Now you're concentrated on this and you've been doing this long enough that your mind is resting on this.

[41:01]

Okay, now you're all focused on this. And I take this away. And you're still focused. What are you focused on now? Not the bell, not the flower. You're focused on the field of mind itself. So now the object of your one-pointedness is mind itself. Understand? And you can feel that. Now, when you When the object of focus is mind itself, that's also a somatic state of mind, then I can bring this stick up into it without disturbing the mind focused on itself then I can observe the stick.

[42:10]

But I'm observing it now from the concentrated state of mind. That's basically the teaching of the Eightfold Path. To develop the concentrated state of mind which then studies the world. On another way, the concentrated state of mind is called shamatha. And using shamatha to study the world is called vipassana or insight or inner seeing. Is it a translation? What's the translation? Inside or inner seeing. Now, again, Buddhism is quite simple. This is quite simple, what I've just told you.

[43:22]

Stick, concentrate. Buddhism is very simple. What I've just told you is very simple. It's just skills that our culture hasn't taught us. I mean, if you're not a car mechanic, try to fix your car. Your car is a lot more complicated than this. I'm a Buddhist mechanic. Okay? Okay. Now, this mind which observes without being, is the non-interfering observing consciousness. To observe without interfering. Like to observe samadhi without interfering with the samadhi.

[44:31]

And it's the best, if you really want to study the mind, you can't interfere with it while you're studying it. So you've got to be able to hold it still and not interfere with it. So there's these two skills. Yeah, something else? Yes. And I would like to come back to two words you used to be connected and to be separated. Are these two similar virtues where you have to find a balance? Or did you support the connectedness more because it's missing in our culture?

[45:43]

Or is the being connected in terms of, is it higher located and you can't get enough of it? I don't think it's too useful to think in terms of higher or lower and stuff like that. But if you look at simple things like, you look at the alphabet, you have A, B, C, etc., You could make them all with pieces of wood. You could nail them together. But if you take something like this, you can't nail it together. Because it's held together by a sense of the space of the character.

[46:45]

Okay. there's two main ways the human beings can function. We can emphasize independence or we can emphasize interdependence. Asian culture tends to emphasize interdependence. produces our democracy, our individualism, etc. Buddhism emphasizes inter-independence. And it's very interesting that Buddhism came into Western culture along with the communal movement of the 60s. So there's a big emphasis on seeing Sangha as some sort of communal or community.

[47:46]

But in fact, Buddhism in Asia is about freeing yourself from your culture and your group. In Asien, der Buddhismus, der Versuch, euch von der Kultur zu befreien. So there's two main ways. We can either think of things as separate units, or we can think of things as connected. Wir können also das Ganze betrachten als Dinge sind getrennt oder Dinge sind verbunden. So in Western culture, Buddhism is going to emphasize connectedness. In Asian culture, it's going to emphasize independence. What's interesting to me is how powerful ideas are. You start a small difference. Okay, let's, us guys all think of things this way. And that decision begins to structure our mind.

[49:06]

And you keep developing that and you suddenly have a civilization based on certain ways of thinking. So what interests me in the adventure I see of the late 20th century, very late at this point, is the coming together of these two civilizations which developed from the two different alternatives and how to divide the world up. And also you have to look if you're going to study the separation connectedness you have to look how continuity establishes connectedness or separation.

[50:13]

So I've given you these three things to help you notice your own experience. So they kind of let you peer in to your own experience. Is that enough? Want more? I can come back if you want to. Ich kann dahin zurückkommen, wenn du willst. Of course, the Irish, they're not part of either culture. I have some really interesting... I have a lot of energy from what you are saying. Some opposite... And some observations have come to me, primarily about focusing.

[51:17]

As a result of resonating with Zen, as I'm hearing. So maybe I can share those with you. The first and most exciting thing for me about the resonation The most important and most exciting thing about resonance for me is this freshness and this ability to apply focusing. It seems to me that what focusing is, is a sense of our culture in the Western world, which is very, very complex.

[52:25]

And Gendling, in one of his observations, noticed as a behavioral scientist noticed that traditional societies did not focus or need to focus as he defined them. It seems it is something evolutionary, that Western man in his confused and highly demanding society, it is a response that is inherent in him. To solve problems.

[53:30]

Perhaps particular Western problems of Western civilization. What I find really powerful What I find very powerful is this ability without formal structure, without having to understand anything about the concepts, you can immediately focus. People can experience it because it is so inherent inside the psyche. And I feel that there is something very powerful about focusing discovery because it comes not when we try to push away confusion,

[54:35]

or disconnectedness. But when we actually stand with that disconnectedness, in that wonderful description you had earlier, Of immediate consciousness. And focusing from standing on the edge of your pain or confusion. And not trying to fix it. And not trying to fix it. or to be positive with it or to manipulate it. Something happens. It's like a spontaneous act that allows me as an organism to get forward and to start living to my potential. And it's something about the immediacy of it.

[56:19]

Because I stay with the bit that I'm usually ashamed of. And then this sort of grace comes in. And I feel, just from hearing it all, very excited about focusing. And I think you would find it really interesting to synthesize it with Zen. I think Buddhism could also learn from focusing. I think Buddhism could also learn from focusing. It seems as if But I only got all of this by hearing all of what you said.

[57:40]

And so that is the whole wonder of synthesis, because there's nobody's right or wrong. We're all just trying to get out of the swan, the wild. Okay, you've convinced me. He's convinced me. Klaus gave me two books of Gendler's, well, one about Gendler and one of Gendler's books. Is that his name? Gendler. Gendler, yeah. And I looked through them at lunchtime. And they're quite exciting. The thinking is very clear and...

[58:41]

A wonderful texture to his thinking. And I have your two books, which I'm going to look at. I've looked at a little. You didn't sign them, so I brought my pen. And my daughter is in Williams College, so you can sign this one for her. Oh, thank you. You're good for focusing, I can tell you. Okay, now we're supposed to stop at seven, is that right? And you guys have long sessions. As soon as I leave, all the sessions get shorter.

[60:00]

But while I'm here, you make these long sessions. You're working me. So let me say what I'd Oh, sure. Can I ask one more question? And it comes from what Iris was saying earlier. The difficulty because, I don't know if I'm right here, but it's the difficulty of taking Zen which arises out of the Eastern and bringing it into the Western tradition. that there is, is there difficulty there or is there something that arises out of, the problems that arises from that? I don't think there's any problems

[61:00]

having to do with Zen Buddhism itself. The problems are how it's applied. although I'm talking about Asian culture, etc. Actually, I think Buddhism has nothing to do with Asian culture. It's just a human knowledge. It actually arose out of an Indian yogic tradition. And it's funny that Asia thinks of India as part of the West, And we think of India as the beginning of Asia. And it looks like there's certain insights that were discovered in India that went up into Europe and went into Asia.

[62:10]

And there may be, you know, I sometimes describe, Buddhism as a large population urban shamanism. And I, in the past, actually just because you're Irish, I've spent at various times a fair amount of time in Ireland. And as a visitor, though only, my experience of it is quite different than the rest of Europe. And it's kept itself somehow in touch with a certain shamanic mystery about things that much of Europe has lost. But in any case, I see that some...

[63:11]

Buddhism has a lot to do with certain basic shamanic insights, which normally are tied to specific geographical locations, villages, etc. And it looks like way, way back the yogic tradition had to make a decision between psychedelics and meditation. Yeah, and meditation. And Buddhism comes out of the tradition which chose to study yourself through meditation rather than psychotropic. And it developed a way to bring these insights into extremely large urban populations.

[64:24]

And back in the, you know, In the 7th, 8th, 9th century, China had the largest cities in the world. London was a little town compared to Peking. So because of the large population that rice culture permits, They had very large populations, urbanized, and they developed Buddhism, maybe in a similar way to what you're saying, to solve some of these problems. Now, the only thing I would say that might be a little different than what you said is that focusing or bringing your attention in the many ways it can be done and non-focusing at the time of focusing

[65:50]

are still all controlled by the views of the world you have that lie behind them. So it's... Buddhism assumes that focusing really works best when the views behind focusing are accurate to how the world exists. So practicing mindfulness or focusing in Buddhism without focusing developing and accurately assuming consciousness, can liberate you within your own culture, but can't liberate you from culture itself. Oh, sure. I notice, and it's the thesis of the book, that what happens, it's what I'm giving tonight, it's what, when we focus, something transcendental,

[67:31]

with a careful use of that word, seems to happen. And even put that in brackets and say that it seems that you meet the more And this more has a sort of quantum quality to it. That is beyond time and beyond space and beyond the qualities of yourself and the confusion and the conflict of your ego. In fact, there is a group in Focusing who would interpret this enlightenment when you described the act of enlightenment. I saw many similarities with what Jianlin describes as

[68:47]

the felt ship, which is this act, this spontaneous act, almost a grace, if you want to use those words. But I do feel that this more that we contact in this process is somehow not contaminated or influenced by our culture. That has not been done. Well, I don't know enough about focusing to get into the discussion in depth. But Buddhism would say, in a similar kind of way, use these experiences which seem culture-free To then study how you put your culture together.

[70:19]

And then to transform your culture. Because then if your enlightenment experiences and your culture work together, you go to a third stage. From the Buddhist point of view, to just have enlightenment experiences, it's nice, but it's a big candy. I mean, bonbon, that's going through the sound barrier. Bonbon. Can I just say, I really resonate with what you just said. And one of the critical things about the attitude focusing is to take an action step, once you have shifted or enlightened.

[71:23]

I mean, Protestant conversion experiences, as William James and others have catalogued them, are basically phenomenological descriptions of Enlightenment experiences. But occurring in a Protestant Christian context, they're very different in effect. than in a Buddhist context. Okay, what I'd like to do, I'd like to take a break in a moment. And after the break, I would like to... mainly just concentrate on showing you what the five skandhas are about. And we'll just have basically one topic. And I think if you get a sense of how that works, you'll understand a lot about Buddhism, because it's the main... It's what differentiates kind of...

[72:43]

What makes your practice adept practice? It makes it a real skill, not just to develop a feeling of well-being. So let's take one of Johannes' famous half hours and come back at 20 after 5. Thank you very much. Thank you for translating. Anybody have anything you want to bring up before I start?

[73:56]

Because it will really influence the microphone. It's basically what you hear later. Yeah. Yes. It's a huge theme, so I'd like to mention it and leave it open when it's appropriate. It's related to creativity, individuality, evolution. And the history of the world. And in my experience in Zen cycles, there's a reluctance to indulge into the personal journey too much.

[75:16]

And something you haven't said to my delight is you have talked about letting go of the ego. And for me, It's sometimes a point of doubt. How much of it is good to be creative, also as an artist, also with soul searching? It's my impression that traditional Zen teaching does not encourage that and just says, go beyond. Does not encourage what? Getting very much involved in a personal journey. There's even a skepticism towards art and creativity as being an ego trip.

[76:31]

It's real good. That's correct that there isn't the same kind of emphasis, for sure, on your personal journey in Zen and in Buddhism. There is. There is not. But I don't think that has so much to do with Zen. It has to do with the culture in which Zen has developed. Basically, we could say Zen is based on a concept and experience of original mind.

[77:50]

A non-conceptual, pre-conscious mind. non-cultural mind. And that's why Buddhism can come into the West in a way, in a different way than most Asian teachings or some other cultures' teachings would come in. So I think when Zen is well understood and well taught in the West, it will actually enhance our personal journey. But it's not the case, at least in Japan, and China too, I would say, that Zen is somehow separate from creativity. In fact, if you talk to almost any artist, Japanese artist or craftsperson, they think somehow they're practicing Zen through their art.

[79:05]

Yeah, okay. Now, I don't know if we should go until seven, but I'll tell you what I'd like to do between now and when we end. I don't know if we should continue until 7 o'clock, but I would like to briefly explain to you what I intend to do next. give you a little story of two hands and discuss with you the five skandhas and speak about how we can know a Dharma.

[80:16]

Because Buddhism could be called Dharmism as well as Buddhism. But first I'm still open to any comments or questions. Okay, two hands. Now, I tell you this story just because I think it's a way to see how the... We have a... We actually don't have a mind and body. We have a mind-body and a body-mind. And in a culture which emphasizes... the body-mind, that physical and mental actions are also

[81:23]

actions are considered to be both mental and physical. And it really struck me. Once Suzuki Roshi was asked, my teacher, whose book is Zen Mind Beginner's Mind, was asked, what do you notice, when he first came to America, what do you notice in America? And I don't know what people thought when they asked him the question. Like the buildings are big, or the weather is hot, or I don't know. But what he said was, You do things with one hand. For instance, if Gerald says to me, would you pass me the bell?

[82:40]

I'd say, oh, okay, here. He thought that was very funny. Because the way it's done, the way he would, the way yogic culture does, tends to do things, is to involve both hands. For instance, so he says to me, please pass me the bell. So I pick up the bell. And then I turn my body to him and hand it to him. And what's the difference? The difference is I'm using the bell as an excuse to pass myself to him. So, and you can practice as somebody says, pass me the salt.

[83:51]

Pick up the salt and pass it to them. Yeah. If Gerald asked me to pick up the bell or I decide to pick up the bell, I know that it was going to produce a bell-arising consciousness. And this is already me. So I bring my attention to it with both hands. And if it's inconvenient to use both hands, still this hand is part of the movement. So I pick it up and I hand it to him. And there's also the feeling that there's a light here. So I'm doing...

[84:52]

being stingy if I just hand it to him this way, because I don't bring my energy and my light to him. I mean, so Zen has little teachings like, don't just turn your head, turn your body. And you can feel the difference if I just look at you and I turn towards you. You feel it. Now, the Japanese and Chinese tend not to put handles on their cups. And of course, they're a third world country and undeveloped, so they've never thought of putting handles on their cups. Yeah.

[86:15]

Well, that's not the case, of course. They want you to use two hands. And they want you to feel the heat of the tea or coffee. So it's not the handle isolates you from what's in the cup. So it's a very different cultural assumption. If it's hot, you should feel the heat. So usually cups have a little tiny rim here that allows you, if it's real hot, to pick it up like this. And go in a Japanese restaurant. And if people are drinking tea like this, they're probably third generation Japanese. If their parents were Japanese, they're probably still drinking, holding the tea this way.

[87:23]

And what's this? A chakra. And you can watch. They'll pick up the tea and they'll hold it here. It activates this chakra. Which is an area of consciousness. So you're bringing this into this area of consciousness. Then they drink their tea. And then what do they do? They hold their cup here before they take the next sip. This is a chakra. I mean, we don't notice it, but it's a very developed system of the mind-body. Now, if I'm going to pick this up and put it here, in this kind of culture, I would pick it up bring it into the field of my body, and then put it down.

[88:33]

I would not just... put it from here to here. From a Buddhist point of view, that's treating it as if it were dead. When you do like this, you empower yourself and you empower the object. I saw it. you with your wonderful little baby a few minutes ago. And Kaya is empowering him. He's bringing him her into his chest. And probably if he's passing the baby to the baby's mother, he might actually do like this rather than like this.

[89:35]

So you could treat objects as if they were babies that you were bringing into your chest. So that would be in yoga culture, Zen yoga culture, a practice of what we could call focusing. So you can build into your culture meditative and mindfulness practices. Okay. Shall I speak about the five skandhas now? Is it all right? This is number one. This is the first scandal. You think Zen people don't enjoy themselves? You think Zen people don't like themselves and enjoy themselves.

[90:39]

Hungry? What color will it be inside? Blue. I'm coming back here. I'll just list them first. Consciousness. Formations Impressions It's the hardest one to translate.

[91:42]

It means that which gathers things together. It can be impulses or intention or how things cluster together. Perception. Feeling. And form. That's a very simple list. And it's called the five skandhas. And since there's no translation for it, we just use that. And Skanda literally means heaps or piles. It means five accumulations of things. five collections of things.

[93:05]

And for those of you who recite Buddhism and know the Heart Sutra, The Heart Sutra begins with form is emptiness, emptiness is form. And then it says no form, no feelings, no impulses. That means there's no five skandhas. But first we have to understand what the five skandhas are before we can say there's none of them. Now, what this basically does is repackage the world. It's a repackaging of the world in terms of mind. Now, what's not in this list? Intentionally not in this list.

[94:15]

Self. So self is not in the category of real things.

[94:18]

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