Each of you, thank you for coming to the Sesshin. And I think, although we may not be so aware of it, each of us actually, in effect, comes for each other person. So kommt doch jeder von uns für jeden oder jede andere. You can't do a Sashin by yourself. Man kann ein Sashin nicht alleine machen. The idea, I mean some people might say, oh I'm doing a Sashin by myself, I'm sitting seven days and... My hall or something. That wouldn't be a sashin. That's just more zazen or... You might have a good experience, or I don't know, but it's not a zazen.

[01:05]

A zazen isn't just more zazen. Sashin is something we do with others. As most of you know, the word sashin means something like to gather the mind. But it's interesting. It's not to gather your mind. It's to gather your mind in the midst of other minds. Sashin is an institution. It's not a building or something like that, but it's an invisible institution.

[02:07]

Und es ist eine Institution, also nicht ein Gebäude oder so etwas in diesem Sinne, sondern es ist so etwas wie eine unsichtbare Institution. It looks like not much at all, nothing. Es schaut irgendwie wie nichts aus, wie gar nichts. If some outside person says, well, what are you doing? What's a sashin? Well, a whole bunch of us sit down together. What do you do? Well, you sit down together. What else do you do? Well, we eat two or three times a day. Well, that's good. That's nice of you. Do you sleep? Yeah, we sleep. In fact, sometimes during Zazen. As you know, not too good. That's better to be able to sleep in zazen than not to be able to sleep in zazen.

[03:27]

Some people can't relax enough out of their usual mind in order to sleep in zazen. So maybe the first step is to be able to sleep in zazen. And then to figure out how to wake up in the midst of that. It would be hard to say, to explain to somebody what a Sashin is. You just sit down, you don't do anything, and you eat and sleep. You must be a very lazy person. There must be something better to do than that. But it's actually some, I think, extraordinary creation, I believe, by the Chinese.

[04:51]

No one's written, I've never found a history of, institutional history of the Sashin. I think it has something actually to do with not just monastic practice, but lay practice. Und ich denke, es hat nicht nur etwas mit der Mönchspraxis, sondern auch mit der Laienpraxis zu tun. I don't know how far back it goes. Und ich weiß nicht, wie weit die Sashinpraxis zurückreicht. But let me try to say something about what is the institution of a Sashin. Aber lasst mich versuchen, etwas darüber zu sagen, was die Institution eines Sashins ausmacht. And again, you can't do a Sashin by yourself. Und wiederum, ihr könnt ein Sashin nicht alleine machen. You could try sitting in a barber shop with a lot of mirrors. If you looked to the left, you'd see an infinite number of you sitting to the left.

[05:54]

And to the right, another infinite number of monks that looked a lot like you. Und auf der rechten Seite wieder eine unendliche Zahl an Mönchen, die so aussehen wie du. But this would be like trying to get married to a mirror. Aber das wäre wie wenn man mit einem Spiegel verheiratet wäre. Marriage requires another person. Verheiratet sein, das bedeutet, dass man eine andere Person braucht. Sechins require another person. Und Sechin braucht auch andere Personen. Quite a few other people, really. And actually quite a lot of others. About 25 people just to do that.

[06:56]

So Sashin is designed to be done with quite a few people. Yeah, so most of you know the... What? basic understanding of Sashinas, at least as I present it. But let me review it a little. Let me say first, you know, I said it's a Chinese creation. So, let me explain that a minute. China and Japan are body cultures.

[08:04]

India, even though it, I don't know, of course, India, Buddha's time, but India, even though it's developed yoga and the chakra system and so forth, All in all, it seems to be more of a head culture than a body culture. China is profoundly a body culture, Japan even more so. And China, as you know, was a highly urban, literate culture. People already had an education. Already had a world view. Yeah. Much like us here in the West.

[09:09]

So Buddhism had to find some way to come into a culture that already had an established worldview. And Buddhism had to find a way to get into a culture that already established itself as a world. And it chose to infiltrate the culture through the body. Infiltrate, some people don't like the word, but it is something that's got to get around, outside our usual cultural habits. And Chang has enough of a body culture to really have chosen the body. And the Chinese were trying to put together all these great teachings they received from India and to put them together as practice.

[10:25]

Yeah, and... if possible, to put them together as body practices. So somehow combine all these extraordinary teachings in body practices. So again, let's look at the form of a sashin. First of all, we get up before, if possible. Now, again, let me say, some of you, certainly some of you, will become teachers of Zen. Yeah, and you shouldn't continue a sashin just as a kind of bunch of rules.

[11:36]

If you do, if you understand it that way, you'll think, oh, there's such a thing as a three-day sashin. Und wenn ihr das tut, dann werdet ihr irgendwie auf die Idee kommen, da gibt es so etwas wie ein Drei-Tage-Seshin. That's just sticking three days together with the word seshin, and it's not a seshin. Und das bedeutet einfach nur, drei Tage zu nehmen und das Wort seshin draufzukleben und das seshin zu nennen. Aber das ist kein seshin. Or the rules will wander because you don't understand the logic. So now I'm speaking about the logic of the institution of a sashin. Okay, we get up before dawn. Why do we do that? Well, one reason is To declare our independence.

[12:44]

Independent of the sun. The sun gets up because the sun gets up. We get up because we get up. Yeah. The sun does what it wants, we do what we want. Yeah. Because in this way of viewing things, everything is center. And then dawn happens in you. It makes the day more your own possession. Yeah, and then we also mix nighttime mind and daytime mind. Yeah, as you know, the basic idea.

[13:52]

We're born with the three minds of waking, dreaming, and non-dreaming deep sleep. And wisdom is to add a fourth mind. A wisdom mind. But how do you discover this wisdom mind? What are some of the potentialities of this wisdom mind? A mind we generate. Not just a mind we uncover. They're not so simple that there's a fourth mind hidden and we're uncovering it. Yeah, we're generating this. And one of the aspects of it, it might be, it can be inclusive of or overlap with the other three.

[14:56]

The minds we're born with don't know each other very well. And you'll discover if you do some sashins, there starts to be an overlap between waking, dreaming and non-dreaming deep sleep minds. This in itself is an extremely profound thing to do. Without some kind of intentional conscious practice like this, Ohne intentionaler und bewusster Praxis davon ist diese Möglichkeit, dieses Potenzial, of a fourth mind is somewhat accidental.

[16:00]

Or maybe we all learn to touch parts of it, but to actualize it would be unusual. So sashin is a chance to one of the things Sashin is about is to to taste and to actualize this fourth mind. So Sashin as an institution is designed for this purpose. So we get up early enough, and of course, morning Zazen is like that too. Und wir gestehen also früh genug auf, und natürlich ist das Morgensaßen so wie das.

[17:09]

Why, Morgensaßen is usually the most... that influences us the most. Yes, we're mixing the minds of sleeping and waking. But normally, on an ordinary day, you go to work or you do something and you... re-establish your habitual conscious mind. The schedule is such that we have a chance to not re-establish our usual mind. So the purpose of the schedule, as I said this morning, is its predictability.

[18:11]

But it's not predictable from our habits. The purpose of the sashin is to interrupt your habits. So to you, for example, from the outside, it might look Japanese. But in Japan, it's meant to interrupt Japanese habits. Well, it's not from a Japanese point of view, they say. I can't be Japanese in a Sashin. So the schedule, whatever it is, should interrupt our habits. And it also gives us another way to establish Continuity.

[19:37]

If you want to do a sashin well, establish your continuity in the schedule itself. Not in your thinking. And part of the reason for the schedule, why so many details are scheduled, you don't have to think about what I'm going to do next. But probably still some of you do think about what I'm going to do next. What am I going to do in the break? What am I going to do at dinner? What you're going to do at dinner is, you know what you're going to do at dinner. You're going to sit there and be trapped behind your orioke bowls.

[20:39]

If you had to go to the toilet or something, it's impossible. You're trapped behind your orioke bowls. So it's a waste of time to think about what you're going to do at dinner time. So you can sort of, yeah, really, just see. Don't think about what you're going to do next. Let something tell you what you're going to do next. Yeah, you're going to follow the schedule. That's the most important thing. But try to have no plans. Don't plan for your break. Let the break tell you what to do. The feeling of the time, the day. So we're mixing our minds.

[21:52]

And the schedule helps us not fall into our habitual mind. You shouldn't depend just on the schedule to do that. You also have to recognize that you don't want to fall into your habitual mind. A sashin should always be extraordinary. I don't care how many sashins you've done. If you've done a lot of sashins, you think, oh, I know what sashins are. Yeah. you've turned Sashin then into something ordinary.

[23:02]

So the Sashin schedule, the institution of Sashin, should be so designed that even if you've done hundreds of Sashin, if you're smart enough, wise enough, you don't let the sashin fall into its own habitual pattern. You keep it from being ordinary. You let it be extraordinary. Only in that way can we also find out how extraordinary each of us is. Come into the not yet predicted.

[24:02]

Come into the unknown dimensions of ourselves. unknown dimensions of our non-self, outside the usual territory of self. But then you need some real confidence in the continuity of the schedule. And the sea anchor of the body. Not an anchor which touches the ground or tied to the dock. But the kind of anchor a ship out in the middle of the ocean needs to use.

[25:07]

Because you want to, by breaking the habits of ordinary consciousness, we begin to kind of float free of our usual way of orienting ourselves. And then there's going to be some pain. And there are three main sources of the pain. One is simple discomfort. Cramping, your muscles get cramped up. A lot of that is just the skill of learning to sit well. Okay, that's, you know, that pain you can, with more sashins, you can begin to relieve.

[26:29]

Yeah, but there's always going to be some discomfort if you sit in one place. Okay, now there's another kind of discomfort. I don't know quite what to name it. But it's, you know, the example I would use is, if you put your arm on the table, sir, on a chair, Und das Beispiel, das ich benutze, ist, wenn ihr zum Beispiel euren Arm nehmt und ihn auf einen Sessel oder einen Tisch legt. Then you left it there for four hours. Und wenn ihr ihn dort liegen lasst für vier Stunden... After a while it starts to hurt. You want to move it. It's crazy to leave your arm in one place on the table. But if you fall asleep, you can do it. What's the difference? The difference is the mind that's in the arm. And eventually in Sashin you get so that you can, well we could say, mix enough of night time mind into your daytime mind.

[27:58]

And after a while, you can just, if you're used to sashim, you could just put your arm down on the table and leave it there for four hours and have a conversation with somebody. And they say, why don't you move your arm? Is it dead? Oh, no, it's just doing a sashim. You can put your whole body down. Yeah, you have to do something. It suddenly becomes necessary for you to wait. Or in my case, for instance, to hold the baby, Sophia. So if I can't do something, I can just go in his eyes and hold the baby for an hour or so. I need a little cooperation from the baby.

[29:09]

But basically, I should stand there or sit there for an hour or two. And when I stand there for one or two hours, I can sit in the Sesshin Mind, and then I stand there, and these one or two hours are relatively quickly over. It's a way of understanding Bodhidharma's wall gazing. It's not just that you gaze at a wall. Wall sitting means you become a wall. You can sound strange, but become a wall. It means a kind of profound actually or quite thorough relaxation.

[30:15]

But usually you can't get there unless you go through quite a bit of pain. For some reason there's a barrier between the consciousness and an awake mind that's similar to sleeping. And that barrier... is some kind of pain or boredom. So when you can begin to mix the mind of non-dreaming deep sleep, that still mind, blissful mind, into your daily awake mind.

[31:31]

It requires some kind of inner physical stillness in the middle of activity. It's a kind of inner pace you find Sashin is designed to introduce you to that. Yeah, and then there's another kind of pain. A karmic pain. Now, if we were really doing a sashin in a more monastic tradition, and this is the best example, that I can give you, then you would hold your hands in this posture all day long. Now, if you're a young monk, they try to make you do that. How do they make you do that?

[32:32]

They just make the sleeves of your robe so long that they sweep the floor if you have your arms down. So if you don't want to Sweep along all the time. You have to lift your arms up like this. So we can call this a clear hold. There's nothing... Why should this be painful? Yeah, you can do it. It's not painful. Maybe two or three hours later, your back really, usually your back, really starts to hurt. I can remember when I had to do this. Living in a heiji. You have to always walk like this. And your back, really, you do anything.

[33:57]

I'm down just for a moment. Back up. But I realized it was a battle, a kind of battle between the karma in my back and this posture. It's extremely simple. It's the genius of the Chinese to say, okay, just hold your hands in this posture. And you'll transform the karma in your back. Now, a great deal of our Karma are conscious, intentional acts that are stored in our body, interlaced physically with our muscles. And you may notice that in the way Wilhelm Reich was one of the first people in the West to really notice this.

[35:01]

That you, like if you get a massage sometimes, Strange memories come up when they massage your back. A lot of memories, karma, is in your musculature, in your skin. In connective tissue. Bindegewebe. And if you hold your hands like this, eventually it feels like there's knives all through your back. One month or two months later, your back just softens up and relaxes. Like butter melting or something.

[36:24]

Yeah, it's a little messy, but you know. So sashin, we don't Emphasize the monastic side of Sashin particularly. But the effort to sit all day long and have some posture and walking meditation in the halls. It's designed to bring you into conflict or confrontation with this physical karma. And you will begin to, you know, you start out sitting straight and pretty soon you're some other way. It's not just tiredness. habits that shape our body.

[37:46]

And I've often shown you this, if you do this like kids do. And then you tell somebody you point to a finger and say, move that finger. And they move the opposite finger. That's obvious then, you have a mental body. You're not experiencing your body from inside, you're experiencing it from looking at it. Oh, that's the left side, but it's actually the right, but I see it as the left, so I move the right. Just say it anyway you want to. In Zen, this is technically called a thought sheath.

[38:50]

Part of Zen practice is sheath. Sheath is like the sheath of a knife. And zeshin is also designed to break open the thought sheath. Break open the mental body. That also can be a source of pain. We hold ourselves mentally. Yeah. Not only because it's shaped by our karma, but it's shaped also by our need for continuity. Before we establish continuity, mentally.

[39:54]

So we're trying to break how you establish continuity. And that can be scary and opening. And as you do start to crack it, this mental body Begin to open yourself to some somewhat new world. Yeah. So that's enough on the institution of Sashin.

[41:06]

Yeah, and I won't go into it much. But it's useful when you said to lift. kind of inner lifting of your body. And I would suggest, for example, you lift from your, for example, left sit bone up to your right shoulder. Imagine an invisible line lifting through there. Yeah, and then lift to your ear. And then lift to the crown of your head. And then lift from the right sit bone to the left shoulder and ear and crown of the head.

[42:15]

And then lift from the perineum up through the middle of the body. Up to the crown of the head. And then lift from the tailbone or coccyx up through the backbone. Up through the top of the head and down to your nose or between the eyebrows. And then imagine your legs practically sort of like two wedges. Like a sculptor might take clay and make the right leg and then a little wedge and then the left leg and a wedge, the other.

[43:27]

At least if you're sitting half lotus. If you're sitting full lotus, you have to imagine it a little differently. But the point I'm saying is, imagine the space of your legs. And then imagine it as one space. And if you try this lifting up from, as I'm suggesting, something like, you can experiment with your own versions. And you lift up again, like from your left. sit bone to your right shoulder and so forth.

[44:29]

What do you do when you do that? Well, you improve your posture. Yeah, you'll sit more upright and straight. But you're also folding mind into your body. Sort of like, you're a cook, like, isn't it phyllo dough or pastry? You keep folding it over? Yeah. Or is it a croissant or something? Didn't the Viennese invent the croissant when the Turks were defeated or something like that? Well, it's a different kind of dough. Oh, different kind of dough. I knew I could ask him that. It's the shape of a crescent moon, though. Folding mind into the body this way.

[45:31]

And we're also transforming our... freeing ourselves from the habit of how we view the body. And experience the body. And you can begin to open up the space in the body, sort of like you might open up envelopes here, inside out. Not like a big paper bag. Not like a big paper bag. You're not a barrel. But opening up little envelopes here and there in the body.

[46:32]

And you come to a new kind of sensation of unity of the body, of completeness. That's free of your usual habits of experiencing the body, tied to a view of the body. Then you can let this new feeling of the body, this new singularity, evolve on its own. Yes, that's enough for today. Thank you very much.

[47:33]

We humbly ask you to read Jesus Christ through every heart, with all your spirit and spirit. Amen. Amen. Amen. I don't know what to say. I don't know.

[49:26]

We didn't get a seat to operate and one of the tiles in the rear opened quite a bit, so I set it in. The only thing I had to keep is the steering wheel, and I knew I don't have it, and I'm dying to have it coming. There were always two or higher edges, so I tied it up to the square of five. Yeah, yesterday I spoke about... Hi. Hallo. Hallo miteinander. Yesterday I spoke about Sashin as an institution.

[51:31]

Gestern habe ich über Sashin als Institution gesprochen. Yeah, today I'd like to speak about See if I can speak about Sangha as an institution. Each of us has a very particular life embedded in the circumstances of our life. And probably... Some of those circumstances come up to view for each of you during the session. And you probably find yourself, your position in relationship to your circumstances being questioned or shifting. And yet if you practice something like I suggested yesterday,

[52:43]

imagining a line between your, say, left sit bone up to your shoulder. Yeah, which for some reason is different than if you go straight up. It's different if you go across. It opens up your... Your posture. It opens up your interior space. And if you bring that line up to your ear, that also opens, makes your interior space interior more spacious. And if you bring that line up to the crown of your head, it opens up

[54:00]

Yeah, it opens up this space even more, but also changes your energy. If you do that from both sides, and then lift up to the middle of your body, and up your backbone to your nose and eyebrows, And then continue down. Yeah, you change each of us. I think if you do this, each of you will change the spaciousness of your... And your energy. Or your aware energy. What did we translate that? Vagarnity. Vagarnity. Sounds... Okay. And that changes your relationship to your circumstances.

[55:30]

So now we have some quality of Sangha, Dharma. You know, as you can well imagine, being a young father. Being a new young, a new father, a father again. I'm watching little Sophia quite carefully. Mm-hmm. It's interesting to see how she puts together her sense fields and her consciousness. And what's striking right now is how consciousness and balance are very closely connected.

[56:31]

She can't stand up without holding onto something. She can stand up holding onto something, but not without holding onto something. And that seems closely connected to be able to putting forefinger and thumb together. Und das scheint irgendwie eng damit verbunden zu sein, die vier Finger und den Daumen zusammenzubringen. We try to feed her, but she insists on feeding herself. Also wir versuchen sie zu füttern, aber sie besteht darauf, dass sie sich selbst füttert. So you put the spoon near, sometimes she'll let you put the spoon in her mouth. Und man gibt da, ich gebe ihr also, wir geben ihr den Löffel, aber manchmal lässt sie uns auch den Löffel in den Mund stecken. Yeah, but... Usually she grabs it. And she puts it in her own mouth. Mostly pretty well. But sometimes upside down. And sometimes when she grabs it,

[57:31]

The food goes across the room. Or somehow, I don't know, she keeps getting it behind her ears. We don't have anything like that. But that's mainly because she can't put her thumb and forefinger exactly together. Anyway, she's constructing a consciousness. Partly just any human being's consciousness at this point. Yeah. But it's also consciousness being shaped in our culture. And we're practicing here. And we each have our particular circumstances. And we have our particular circumstances are mostly within

[58:44]

the consciousness of our culture. And now, as I described Sashin yesterday, we're trying to find a territory of Awareness and consciousness. That's somewhat free of our personal habits. Our personal circumstances. And our shared culture. And we're coming into... actually coming into some new kind of shared consciousness. Yeah, that's what Sangha is. It's an ancient, ancient. awareness or consciousness. But it's always a new shared consciousness.

[60:04]

It always has to be re-established, re-established in each individual life. Established for the first time in your life but re-established in ways that Buddhism has learned to establish it. We're trying to learn how to establish Dharma and Sangha consciousness here. Yeah, we're doing pretty well. We know something about what we're doing. But we don't completely know what we're doing.

[61:13]

There's a big element of finding out. Just like in the circumstances of your own life. You do your life, you... Lead and follow your life. But you don't always know where it's going. You can't always lead it. Sometimes you can only follow it. Sangha is also to put that leading and following of your own life in a larger context. Yeah, maybe I'm a Dharma teacher and a Sangha teacher. Yeah, I might teach music or carpentry or something like that.

[62:15]

Just trying to teach you, share with you my experience doing this for some decades. So, of course, to some extent I'm trying to show you, teach you how to practice. What is practice? I'm trying to introduce you to practice. And I have a lot of cooperation, I mean, a lot of help. Everybody who lives here is trying to introduce themselves to practice and introduce those who come to visit to practice. We've got a lot to learn, but we're a little better than, somewhat better than amateurs. I think we may forget how extraordinary and precarious what we're doing is.

[63:40]

Establishing a whole new world. a way of being, a way of envisioning the world, a way of experiencing yourself, in a culture where all of it is pretty new. There's more intimations of this practice in you And in the culture as a whole. Yeah, it might not be possible. But somehow, we've got a room here. Windows and a garden, somehow, and here we are. At least we have a location to try this out.

[64:41]

And we're taking pretty good care of the building. And there's a Japanese word I like, kyogai. Which is in Zen used to mean consciousness. But it really means something like place consciousness. As my teacher in Japan, Yamada Mumunroshi, said, only a sparrow knows the kyogai of a sparrow. Only a sparrow knows The place consciousness of a sparrow.

[65:42]

Sitting on a wire, sitting on a roof. Mm-hmm. jumping out of the way of my car driving. But there's a Dharma place consciousness. That's also the place, this building. But it's also you. You are a Dharma place consciousness. And you're a Sangha place conscious. I always think of this, very often think of this sign I told you about outside of Munster. Leaving a... seminar in Münster that Beate had organized I come to a place where there's always a stow someone had written on the wall you think you're in a stow but you are the stow

[66:57]

So you think you've come to a Sesshin, but you are the Sesshin. I'm grateful for the presence each of you, as I said, brings to the Sesshin. Somehow we find a Sangha presence. Or a Dharma presence. And if we're lucky, the Sashin and the schedule and the atmosphere of each of us, we can continue the Kyogai of this Sashin. also can only be known by participating in it. Yeah. So as a teacher sharing my sharing, teaching, practice with you.

[68:30]

Again, I should show you something about what is practice, how to practice. And once you have a feel of it, an interest in it, I should help you develop an intent to practice. That's my second job as a teacher. If you made the mistake of arriving here, of somehow Being interested in practice. Yeah, my job now is to get you really interested. Help you develop your own intent to practice. I hope I'm succeeding.

[69:44]

And if I succeed, then my job is to practice with you. Yeah. To practice with you. That means I Accept you and trust you. Practice with you is to trust you. Then my job is to Teach you how to teach yourself to practice. We could say that's lay practice. How to bring practice into your own life. And there's no strict rules about that, of course. Each of your life, each of you have a different life. And your circumstances are always changing. So you need to find out how to make your own life practice.

[70:52]

That's what I mean by I teach you how to teach yourself to practice. Yeah, that's the fourth aspect. And the fifth aspect is I to teach you how to teach others to practice. Because, strangely, there's something about this practice, this bringing of this new worldview, into your life, requires that you be willing, be open to

[72:24]

making it possible for others to practice. Now, this isn't a sense of proselytizing. I'm sorry? Proselytizing means like... Ah, that doesn't mean making proselytes. We're not trying to make more people Buddhists. Yeah. How do I say it in words? Hmm. It's a kind of affection. So if there's one or two or ten, it doesn't make any difference.

[73:34]

And it's actually probably not so good to have a psychological teaching process that you need to teach psychologically because that's a kind of indemnity. but rather that that you yeah people insist or they ask or they and we're all and somehow there's always a the possibility of practice going on So you're willing to do it. I'm not explaining this very well. Because it's also, there's some danger involved. Because once you start on this path, you're promising people the gift of Dharma.

[74:48]

And you can't let them down. But you can't refuse either. So it's a kind of extraordinary territory. So we have to teach our self how to practice. And we also Another fold is to teach others practice or share practice. And you're always going to be seeing people. So the best way to teach is really...

[75:49]

by your own practice. And I suppose sixth as a teacher, the sixth aspect of being a teacher is teaching yourself through teaching and giving away teaching Completely. Not hanging on to teaching. And that means being willing to die. So all this is about continuity. About how to continue the teaching. Yes. There's no teaching if we don't continue the teaching.

[76:59]

It's like you can't do a sesshin by yourself. We can practice to some extent by ourselves. And we as... As individualistic Westerners, especially want to believe, and deep down we do believe it's possible. But that's really like believing it's possible for a baby to grow up by itself. We're not babies. But we're... ...practices a... ...a... interaction with others.

[78:16]

And thus, practice exists at all. So, if we want to have sashins, we have to have someone to understand this institution. And I think that the very large percentage of Zen people think of sashin as more zazen. I see people organizing three-day sashins, one-month practice periods and things. Which is understandable. And yet, if we understand it that loosely, it won't continue.

[79:17]

So I think Sangha, I think lay practice requires a mixture of practice. of monastic-like practice and lay practice. It's like the house of Dharma has a number of doors. And one door, one of the rooms of the house is monk-like practice. Now I'm not making a distinction between really monk and layperson. I'm making a distinction between the kind of commitment to practice. I think what we need to recognize as a Sangha is that the Sangha can't really exist if we don't have some people who commit their whole life to practice.

[81:03]

We can have monk-like practice without lay people. But you can't have lay practice without also some kind of monk practice. This was a very big decision for me. Because I'm committed to lay practice. Sometimes it was clear to me that I couldn't have done it without Suzuki Roshi. And I could do it only because Suzuki Roshi was there, available. And I thought, this isn't the best job in the world. Yeah, it's not even maybe a very good job.

[82:16]

In fact, by most measures, it's a lousy job. But there's also good things about it. Look who I get to live with. Yeah, this is really great. And it's pretty nice here. But I decided someone had to do it. Unless some people make this decision, there won't be lay practice. Someone has to take care of this place. For there to be a Sashin. Mm-hmm. So if we're going to have a place and practices like Sashin, which really to get the logic of a Sashin practice into your body, so you really feel the difference between whether you get up before dawn or after dawn.

[83:39]

It's not just about making a long day. It's not just about more zazen. Yeah, it takes time. And to sustain a teaching takes time. And to evolve a teaching takes time. Now, I'm not saying each of you has to make a commitment. To practice only. Because there's various rooms to this house of Dharma. some people we need some people to make that commitment and we meet need and some people if

[84:56]

If practice and the teaching is to evolve, need to practice and develop their practice in the ordinary circumstances of life. And one isn't better than the other. I suppose actually being a lay person is better. Being a monk-like is sort of like being the housekeeper. So the essence of Sangha... You know, the word Sangha just means group or something like that.

[86:13]

In Hinduism it means the seekers around a guru. And in Buddhism it means... Why was that funny? Because I said the seekers around the guru. Okay. We're not practicing Hinduism, though. In Sangha, in Buddhism, has come to mean the community that supports practice. But the essence of that practice For each individual. Is the acceptance of each person you meet as they are. But also the awareness of how they could be and the awareness of how they want to be and the awareness that they could be a Buddha.

[87:32]

So it's kind of a fourfold presence rooted initially in accepting knowing the person as they are. And from your side it means being willing to be known as you are. Not like at a job putting your best foot forward. Your best face forward. That's why, you know, Sashin we don't wear makeup and I hope none of you are primping before you come to the Zendo. In Sangha it's just, Sangha practice is just to be open to be known as you are. And to be willing to be seen

[88:33]

And what kind of Buddha you are. Or aren't. As Sukhiroshi said, we're always showing everyone what kind of Buddha we are. So that's this reciprocal practice of knowing and being known and also supporting practice over time. And supporting the conditions that allow the teaching to be sustained and to evolve. And that comes back to evolving in us. To begin to discover the teaching in ourselves, through the actual circumstances of our life, as they appear in zazhin, and in the interior spaciousness of the body.

[90:03]

And in the wide spaciousness of our gathered together minds. Thank you very much.

[90:26]

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