Well, in English, if I say I enact something, I act pretending that it's true. I try out, try it out to see how it feels. Tibetan Buddhism, we could say, is largely a practice of enactment. When you, for example, if you... In Tibetan Buddhism, if you imagine a deity... And you choose a particular deity for yourself.

[01:19]

You choose one you feel you have enough connection with to begin to enact. And you choose one you feel you have enough connection with to begin to enact. enough connection with to begin to enact. So you study or get informed about the qualities of this deity. I'm not a Tibetan Buddhist practicer, but I've worked with visualizations. Then you shrink it down to something teeny and you enlarge it to something that fits your body and you enlarge it bigger than your body and so on. And you more or less pretend that you have those qualities. And eventually you might embody it, but enactment comes first.

[02:32]

Is it like identification? I mean, you would try to identify with it, but the act of trying to identify with it is enactment. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Okay. I'm surprised the word is so hard to translate to German, but... Because we say it's to play. To play. And to play is also like playing Lego, so it doesn't have a serious aspect. Let's play it being Buddha. Yeah. Yeah, well, Shakespeare talks about playing your petty part or playing a particular role. The petty part? Now, you've all heard me, I think, or some of you have heard me speak about the bracelet that's three sizes too large, right?

[04:02]

I'll just use it again, I'm sorry, as an example. Now, there's a poem, a line from a love poem, a Chinese love poem. It's often used in Zen koans as a capping verse. It can be used as a capping verse. A capping verse, something that catches you? When you study a koan, you try to find some line from an advertisement or a poem or anything that captures some essence of the koan. Okay. So the verse line is, she says she's not in love. But the bracelet on her arm is three sizes too large.

[05:36]

It would be like wearing your lover's wristwatch, and it keeps falling off your hand, but you want to wear it. Now you can read that and just conceptualize it. And just say, oh well, she must be in love because she's wearing someone else's bracelet that obviously must be a male's bracelet. Now, but just to conceptualize it and get the understanding doesn't mean much. There's a big advantage in studying Zen if you're a little dumb.

[06:45]

Because you don't quite understand it. So your only choice is to enact it. And so the understanding penetrates you while the smart person just sort of, oh, I understand that, and he or she goes off to something else. In general, if you want to practice Zen, You should never trust your understanding of a line or of anything. You should trust your experience of it, but not your understanding of it.

[07:50]

So if you enact the line, Wenn ihr also diese Zeile spielt, then you sort of imagine what it's like to have a bracelet on your arm too large. Dann könnt ihr euch wirklich vorstellen, was das auf sich hat, wenn man ein Armband anhat, welches viel zu groß ist. Every time you put your arm down, you have to open your hand or it falls off. Yeah, or you always have to keep your arm up. Yeah, and the whole sense of a bracelet is that it binds you to someone. So she's not really ready, this is a secret lover, because she's not ready to tell anybody.

[08:54]

So she says she's not in love. So you can see she's kind of got it up under her kimono sleeve. And sometimes she can't even bend her, because it's stuck on her elbow. Which also says she's bound to the society. She feels bonded to her lover, but she feels bound by the bracelet to hide it. So if you enact it, in a koan or in a commentary, it might say later, I'm just making this up, it could say later, always holding the arms up.

[09:56]

Or it might say, yeah, we'll just say always holding the arms up. And you'd, what the heck did that come from? You wouldn't know what that's all about. And you wouldn't get that from having just understood, oh, she's in love with somebody and she's hiding it. Understanding that she's in love with somebody and hiding it doesn't lead you to the idea you have to keep your arm in the air. But if you enact... the line.

[11:04]

If you come later in the koan, 10 minutes later in reading, and see the arm up, you, oh, that refers back to the bracelet on her arm is three sizes too large. So do you see the difference between enactment and understanding? And in general, if you read Chinese poetry, and I think it's useful to recognize that the Tang and Sun Sui dynasties were a kind of modern period. In other words, when we read their poetry, it feels like something familiar to us.

[12:07]

And I would say one of the reasons we're studying Zen now is because somehow our modern period, what we call modern, is similar to their modern period. It's a kind of modern period. Like recent, Japan was a kind of modern period. In their taste of things, as you can see, how much it's influenced our architecture. Oh, the traditional Japanese. Yeah. How much Jugendstil and Japanese taste go together.

[13:12]

But if you go to China, recent China, it's not modern at all. We can love a Noh play or a Kabuki play. Have you ever tried to watch Chinese opera? What the hell's going on? That's not modern by our feeling. Okay, so if we go back to the title. You were talking about inner aches. It seems to me like feel it or imagine the story.

[14:21]

Yeah, that's to enact it, to imagine it. Imagine it? Well, imagine, yes, imagine, but... If you try, imagine what it's like to be... But it's more than just imagine. You're actually kind of feeling it out with your body, as if you were an actor. But it's not an act like playing with other persons together? No, no. No, well, yeah. It's like pantomime, isn't it? Because you really have to make it. Yeah, you have to kind of do it, at least in your mind. But you're doing it in your mind, you're not just imagining it in your mind. We have an expression, to slip in a roll, but then still the roll is like a sock. It's not you, kind of. Yeah, what is a roll? You are trying out a roll. That's okay.

[15:22]

To slip into a roll may be good. This is a very, very important idea in Buddhist practice. And although in Zen we don't do much visualization of deities and things like that, the practice of enactment is in how you read a koan. Now, the sutras are not generally meant to be enacted. But the Chinese Buddhist literature is meant to be enacted. Yeah, it's basically Andreas has pointed out. So if we get this, just this much, we've gotten quite a bit. So if you read Chinese poetry, for example, if it's well translated,

[16:30]

You'll find that it makes most sense if each line is meant to be enacted, to be felt through. What? And the last thing you said? You know, whatever I said, it was okay. I don't know. In this not-yet-arrived moment, how am I supposed to know? Okay. So, like a Chinese line in a poem might be, as the moon approaches the bed... You then feel the night is passing and the moon is coming in the window and approaching the bed. This is meant to really be kind of not just thought about, but felt, you know. And then you feel, and it might then say, and the dust is not disturbed.

[18:12]

And then you feel the moon, of course, it's implied that eventually it goes across your face. And the dust is not disturbed. So I just made that up. But it's certainly about language, but each line is meant to open into a physical situation. Okay, so if we really want to practice this poem, you start out thinking about merging. Merging, disappearing, I talked about merging with your location and place.

[19:35]

I gave you the practice of making yourself the sixfold object. So when I give you something like that, I'm suggesting by the example that you might get an experience of merging that way. Because if you're sitting, And you bring your attention to each of the senses. As you notice yourself through the senses. One of Suzuki Roshi's instructions was, extend the six senses...

[20:39]

to each object. Now, the word vijnana, if we translate it, means to know things separately together. And again, this is this, where I look at you, and this is a seamless picture. And as I pointed out, Wittgenstein also pointed out, there's nothing in the scene that tells me it's seen by an eye. And in fact, if there's anything like truth in this situation, it is that it's seen by lots of eyes. So that's what we could call a wisdom observation.

[21:45]

When I say it's a wisdom observation, you can begin to get a sense of what Buddhism means by wisdom. Okay. In addition to, if we look at the senses rather than the mind, The senses also participate in giving us a kind of single picture. the senses also participate in giving us a single picture, one picture. A seamless picture, kind of. Yeah. Now, the basic, basic, basic, basic teachings of the jnanas and the skandhas One more grundleg. Is to separate, to peel consciousness into its parts.

[23:11]

Now you're all familiar with the five skandhas and you practice them continuously, right? But the skandhas is simply a way to peel this consciousness that you see into five parts. So I'm aware, as I'm looking at you, the consciousness in which I see you is a construct. Who's constructing it? Well, it's constructed by the way we function. But I am constructing it. As I say, you can watch the skandhas come together as you wake up in the morning. First you're sort of conscious.

[24:46]

When you fall back asleep. And then you hear some sense that the birds are a milk truck or something. So perceptions start happening. Maybe they're isolated perceptions. Once they're consistent impressions, you know where you are. Sometimes I wonder where I am. Oh, yeah. So once you have consistent sensory impressions, consciousness more or less locks in. And then you start having consistent kind of logical thinking.

[25:50]

And then planning and gewissens lock in. And then you're really in consciousness. And that was a construct. You could see it being constructed. If consciousness is a construct, it can be deconstructed. So that is central to the Sandokai. Sandokai is about the advantage of deconstructing consciousness. Deconstructing consciousness but remaining aware and not asleep. Normally when you deconstruct consciousness, you fall asleep.

[27:00]

So practice is to be able to deconstruct consciousness and stay awake. And what happens when you deconstruct consciousness is another kind of awareness comes in. Okay. Now, every text establishes a background and a foreground. Okay, so what I'm doing now is using the text to reflect on what background, what must be the background of the text.

[28:06]

Okay, so some of the background of the text is, as Maureen said, I think yesterday, about the yin and the yang. Okay, so some of the background of this text is Taoist ideas. And all Chinese texts and Chinese poetry, one of their jobs is to reference other texts. Not only use words that everyone knows, but to use words that call forth other texts that everyone could know. Sondern sie verwenden Worte, die einem andere Texte in den Sinn kommen lässt, die die meisten kennen sollten.

[29:21]

I like to see you struggle. It's really cute. I'm in total admiration that all you people can speak this language. Sometimes I feel like Kobenji Naroshi who said, there isn't enough time in one lifetime to learn German. So I'm sitting here like a little child and all of you people are able to speak German. Yeah, okay. So part of the background of this text is the understanding that consciousness is a construct.

[30:33]

Anybody who reads this with any possibility of understanding it has to know that consciousness is a construct. So this poem is telling you how to deconstruct consciousness in a particular way. And what happens when you do that? Okay, now... It's like you create a vacuum. You take out the constituents. The other time when you deconstruct consciousness, it's called dying. And the relationship between dying and deconstructing consciousness is quite intimate.

[31:37]

Und die Beziehung von der Dekonstruktion des Bewusstseins und dem Sterben, die ist ziemlich intim. It's one of the reasons dying is often called entering nirvana. Und das ist einer der Gründe, weshalb Sterben auch oft das Nirvana-Betreten genannt wird. And deconstructing consciousness is entering enlightenment. Okay, so now we're deconstructing consciousness. You create a kind of vacuum. And instead of sleep flowing into the vacuum, some other kind of mind flows into the vacuum. Did you get the picture? It's something that happens. And that's the background of this poem. Now I, in the last two or three years, have emphasized a lot the importance of shifting continuity out of thoughts into the breath, body, and phenomena.

[33:15]

Okay. So now what this poem is emphasizing... is now that you have established continuity in phenomena, as I started out speaking in Saturday evening, To establish continuity in phenomena. To use this week as a chance to establish continuity in your location in this place. That's me asking a question.

[34:22]

So translation stops until she gets her question answered. I don't understand what it means, continuity in phenomena. Body and mind somehow make sense. The phenomena that I know is I know through the mind and through the perceptions. So if I establish continuity in my breath, I feel a sense of continuity just in breathing. Dann habe ich ein Verständnis oder Gefühl von Kontinuität in meinem Atem.

[35:35]

All right, so I am not right now establishing continuity in my thinking. Das heißt, in diesem Moment tue ich die Kontinuität nicht in meinen Gedanken aufbauen. I'm not even establishing continuity in my words as I'm speaking. Nicht einmal etabliere ich sie in den Worten während ich spreche. I'm establishing a feeling of continuity in myself. In my breath, which is part of these words, and in a certain hum that I let the words come into. And I can change that hum. And actually I find myself tuning, this isn't exactly conscious, it's some kind of streams flowing in darkness. But I've been doing this long enough.

[36:37]

And my practice is what's called holding to the one. Now this is a little aside. Holding to the one is a very classic name. It's a name for a very classic Zen practice. Now, Zen practice had to be particularly sophisticated in China. Because it was... Practice for the elite of the society.

[37:53]

The highly educated literati. Who were very busy. because they were the people who really ran the government and so forth as well as writing the poems. So basically a simple practice that was very sophisticated had to be developed. A practice which simplified a complex background of practice. simplified without being reductionist.

[39:07]

So now earlier Buddhism had all these... Earlier Buddhism was elaborate, many stages and so forth you had to go through. That was certainly true in early Japanese Buddhism. So you had these professionals at it. In the Tendai schools and so forth. And you had aristocratic practitioners who were really believers, not practitioners. Believers, and there was a lot of ritual involved and so forth. Now, when Zen came in, it actually appealed to the bourgeois, educated bourgeois, and the warrior class and so forth.

[40:13]

Because it didn't have all these rituals. So it tried to develop very direct, let's call it direct practices that did away with stages. And holding to the one is such a practice. Holding to the one means you can mean a lot of things. The main thing I'll point out now It means holding to or staying within a continual awareness. So you can bring your awareness to your breath. And this can be a way of shifting out of the continuity of finding your continuity in thoughts.

[41:48]

We're supposed to eat at seven, right? And Angelica and I coordinated our watches last night. So I only have two minutes to answer Marie-Louise's question. If our watches are still coordinated. Okay. So we can bring our attention to our breath. We can also bring attention to attention itself. So holding to the one means you learn to feel in your body a continual awareness. Yeah, not an awareness of anything, just an awareness.

[42:52]

And whatever appears in that awareness, you let appear in that awareness. Okay, so now I'm speaking. Since I have to talk quite often, I observe my talking, but without feeling separate from my talking. And I've noticed without thinking about it that actually not only do I find continuity in my breath within the words, But I feel a continuity in the sound of my voice. And I notice that I can best find a way to speak with you about such a topic as the Sandokai.

[43:56]

When I'm sort of implicitly chanting it with you. Even though you're not chanting. We learn what it's like in the morning. To find a common voice. There's a particular voice we all suddenly feel. So I find a kind of continuity when I almost feel like I'm chanting with you, though you are chanting silently. So that's sort of entering a field. And when I enter that field, I feel I can talk with you. If I don't feel that, then I feel my words aren't going inside all of us.

[45:31]

They're kind of falling off somewhere. So that would be finding continuity in the breath. And that's close, though, also to finding continuity in the body. Because I also find a continuity in the physical movement of the breath. In the sitting here. In giving each of my organs room. And one of the practices of the four foundations of mindfulness. To make mindfulness a foundation within yourself. I feel when I'm sitting, I sit in a way that makes space for my lung.

[46:38]

Thank you. And when I... You can't get stuck in the lungs here. Rachel needs to be stuck in the stomach. Yeah, stuck in the stomach, right. Okay, so... It is another sign. It was not a gong. That's because she can't hit this one because we're... Okay. So... When you practice, you begin to feel not only each organ... But the space an organ takes throughout the body and the way it flows and affects the whole body. So in some funny way I feel like I'm taking care of each organ as I'm walking or sitting or something.

[47:39]

Giving it space, letting it function. So that's finding continuity in the body. And I'm not talking about anything special. I'm just talking about what happens if you practice mindfulness for a lot of years. Okay, so then continuity in phenomena means that what I'm looking at also carries my continuity. What's coming from the so-called outside. So if you're working with the vijnanas, as I say, you walk on one of these paths, you smell the path as well as see the path.

[48:53]

And you find your continuity in how you're located in this surrounding, but not in your thoughts. Okay, so that we can end. You can see what I've been saying. Where we skip down a little bit. And after merging with principle is still not enlightenment. They start telling you how to practice. Each sense and every field. Interact and do not interact. So that's to know each sense, just to smell the path without hearing anything.

[50:02]

Or just to walk on the path hearing the auditorium of sounds. Okay, so this is to separate the senses out, experience them separately and bring them back together. That's just like seeing consciousness as a construct, separating it out and bringing it together. This is how we actually exist. But we're usually not mindful enough because we think. You can't think this. You can enact this. You can be mindful of this. If you think, each sense and every field just merge.

[51:03]

If you practice mindfulness, then each sense and every field interact and do not interact. and otherwise they remain in their own states. Now we're talking about finding them separately and a different kind of merging than the automatic merging of thinking. So, again, to finish, we could talk about just noticing merging, noticing difference, and noticing connectedness and... and sameness.

[52:26]

Okay. So if you enact, feel out each of those things, merging, difference, and let's call it connectedness and sameness. Okay. Feel yourself shaking hands with all this. Reading this slowly. Reading slowly enough to enact. A poem like this can change your life. It's meant to be read that way. It's meant to come into you at a certain kind of pace. And each of you have to discover your own pace in relationship to this. It might be a line a day.

[53:29]

A line a month. Or it might be One afternoon, several lines suddenly unfold for you. I'm sorry we didn't get very far today. We're still on the title. Thank you. It's really fun to spend the afternoon with you, though. This is really fun. Now we have our blind quick shot. I was afraid to do the bank time voice. Because he's got so many German students who only understand German if they hear English, that you can have a book, English and German, like a... like a poetry book, you know, where you have the English word and the German word, one page by one page.

[54:56]

That's what we do. Maybe Christian or somebody like that could do it. Maybe you. I need oil, otherwise it sounds terrible. Yeah, now I think it's a good time to go through the text itself. I brought two pencils just in case. And I put this statement of Shakespeare's on the board. which he has some French lords say in the play Henry IV.

[56:04]

And Harold Bloom states this is one of the most complex plays statements of human life in the whole of Shakespeare. Bloom is the main Shakespeare scholar in English today. And it's not the same as the Sandokai. Maybe it has a flavor of a similar insight. But it's an insight which doesn't, again, have an understanding of practice.

[57:17]

But specifically, the web of our life is of a mingled yarn. good and ill together we can't separate and our virtues would be proud if our faults didn't whip them not. And our crimes would be sad or despair. Our crimes would disappear if they were not loved by our virtues. I like Hegel's statement that Shakespeare made his best characters free artists of themselves.

[58:37]

Which is an interesting idea. It means that the characters Shakespeare created were bigger than Shakespeare. He started writing them. Maybe he had some idea they fit in the plot. Dresden, they were bigger than the whole play. I think anybody could have said this, but I think Michel Foucault said it, that writing writes writing. To play with that, when Trudy Dixon was dying, who edited Zen Mind and Beginner's Mind,

[59:49]

We were very close friends, and our expression of our love for each other and friendship was the book, Zen by Beginners. And we were very close friends, and our expression for our affection or love was that we wrote this book together. And we did that together. I actually asked her if she could help me with it. And as a gift for her, I made it into her book. She would write me a letter or send me a tape. Because she was at the latter stage of her illness at age 29. She died of breast cancer. Just when my daughter and my wife and I had to move to Japan. She sent me a tape and a letter and things like that.

[61:09]

So I would take something she said, her letter, And I would respond by a typewriter. That's an old-fashioned word, you know. And that would produce one letter. Then I'm handwriting another letter. And that would produce another letter. Then I would dictate into a tape recorder, and the tape would just start again.

[62:12]

It was after wire recorders. What's that? Before tape, they had little thin wires. So I would send her a tape. There would be three different letters, depending on the medium in which I decided to write to her. It was funny, she sent me a tape and it came by mail. And while I was listening to her voice talking to me, actually about Castaneda, a telegram came saying she died. But anyway, Shakespeare was able to produce characters who freed themselves even from Shakespeare. And freed themselves from the plays to roam in our society as archetypal human beings.

[63:39]

And then finally, we talked about dreaming and how to work with dreams. Keizan Jokin, who is Dogen's disciple. We chant his name in the morning when they do the lineage. Keizan Jokin. He says, without relying on today's situation, How can one speak of last night's dream? It's a very different way of looking at it and saying, how can you understand last night's dream unless you understood the week before? Or what happened the day before?

[64:40]

It's a very different way of looking at it and saying, how can you understand last night's dream unless you understood the week before? Khe San says, how can you understand last night's dream unless you see how it proceeds into the future? Okay. Are we okay? Okay, we'll have another seminar. Today's Tuesday, right? Yeah, and we're here for about a month. And so tomorrow we'll have another seminar. And Thursday I thought we would have a little different afternoon. When I do week meetings with Linda's farm association friends of mine. We usually take an afternoon off or a Thursday off often.

[65:49]

And take a trip with them. But when I do these think tank meetings, Michael Murphy at Esalen several times a year. We try to change the rhythm and have one afternoon where we all go to a restaurant together or something. So I thought we might do something. Unfortunately, it turns out that I have something I really have to do Thursday in the afternoon. But I would suggest that if you want to anyway, You have some time off for study or something? Or if you'd enjoy it or don't know this area.

[66:54]

There's some very nice restaurants on canals and waterways around here in Mearn and other places. So I would suggest that maybe the schedule I suggested Yes, we have the walking meditation. And then we have a slightly longer small group or discussion together. Then the latter half of the afternoon is unscheduled. And if you want, some of you or all of you, you can go do something together. Continue your discussion in the conviviality of a tavern. You can continue your discussion about the co-existence of life in a restaurant, in a good mood.

[68:13]

Good mood, all right. Twenty years of good mood. Okay. And just a little bit on what I was saying this morning, although Marie-Louise mentioned to me that when she was practicing with the Doans, our new amateur team of Doans, Wait till Yohannesov sees how good the amateur team is. Chanting is quite good. We're all starting the chanting at a good spot. So when I first started doing Dohan work, And I'd been observing it very carefully while he did it.

[69:32]

And at one time he asked me just to do it, so I just got up and I'd been memorizing it or paying attention to it, so I got up and did it. We sat together every day, all of us, so it was just a small group, so it wasn't too difficult. But I had one sort of question of him. Because of something he'd said. And this is what Marie Louise repeated to you. And I said to him, you know, at what point do you start speeding up? And then I asked him, from what point does one start to accelerate?

[70:35]

So, I observed him doing it like this. Like this. Yes. It was not clear what he was saying. Pretty soon she'll give the German translation first, and then I'll say the English. And he said, oh, you don't speed up. I said, you don't? Well, you're supposedly a Zen master, and... I knew in my senses he went faster. But I didn't say all that. I said, really, there's no point at which you speed up?

[71:36]

No, it's always the same speed. No, it's always the same speed. Okay. So I said, all right, yes, sir. Okay. Tomorrow morning you'll see me. Where? I would rather like, I teased Virva a little bit about doing the ceremony, doing it this morning. I said, that's very good the way you did it. And the sound, you really had the sound good, and that's true.

[72:45]

Yeah, and the way you do it, it's the way we do it when someone has just died. Usually service takes 20 minutes. This morning it took 30 minutes. Other than that, I don't think anyone died. It was very good. So I tried to go the same speed. And I found that the group speeds you up no matter what you do. But you feel like you're going the same speed. Of course, in traditional societies there was no idea of speed. Speed is an idea that comes in with railroad trains. Yeah, before that you'd have things like Godspeed. I forgot what it means, you know. Godspeed?

[74:03]

That means do things with care. God takes care of you. Like if you go by horse, the horse takes care of you. And you got there faster if you went by horse than by walking. But that wasn't violent with speed. Wait, I have to think back. Oh, screw it. Now I've lost it, sorry. I'm sorry. It's back there. Now the last one from you. Now I got it. Okay. So in any case... So... there was the idea of proportion. You got there in proportion to what a horse can do. So when you do the mokugyo, you do it in proportion to what's happening.

[75:04]

So when we're not together, I go one speed. As we start getting together, I go the same speed, but it's faster. So he could have just said, just go together. Er hätte auch sagen können, geht zusammen oder sei im Einklang. It's a mistake to come in and think, okay, now is when I speed up. And sometimes you can't speed up. And when somebody has died, you go slower because it's actually hard to speed up. I remember I was in a little village in Austria once, staying in a hotel.

[76:36]

And I heard a traditional German marching band. And then I heard a very traditional Austrian march music. Playing traditional German, you know, blablabla. And then you heard traditional German songs. The kind of thing you see on television sometimes with people in costumes singing and old people applauding. That's what you sometimes see on TV with dirndl and so, where old people sit and then clap. except it was going very slow and I immediately knew someone had died and pretty soon the whole village came through all dressed in the village outfit and pulling I think they had the coffin I don't remember but it was very beautiful

[77:37]

Again, to try to give you more feeling of how this teaching is embedded in the body. Everything is a kind of origami. You know what origami is, right? Paper folding. The paper folding, I'm pretty sure, comes out of Buddhism. If any of you get a lineage chart, even a simple one for lay ordination, if you unfold it, you're going to have a hard time folding it back together. I tried to do that with the first brochure I did to raise money for Tassajara.

[78:46]

So I made this big brochure folded rather funny. So you get it in the mail, you open it, and you say, where's the beginning here? So I imagine the wife usually opens the mail So Maude opens the thing. Who? Maude? Maude. That's the woman's name. So Gretchen or Maude says, Henry, come over here. Help me open this. So Gretchen and Heinrich, you kind of... So I thought I'd get them physically involved with it, and then they might read it.

[80:05]

So the robes, even the okesa I wear, if you don't take it off a certain way and use your body, your whole body, you think, how the heck does this go back together? Um... One of the things that Cleary says, which I think is correct, is you can think of darkness and light as in a Sufi teaching, as intoxication and sobriety. Is it like poisoning, intoxication?

[81:23]

No, it's being drunk. So the darkness of what Shido is talking about is a kind of intoxication. Intoxicated, blissed out. And light is a kind of sobriety. Anyway, that's a kind of entrance. It's good to be sober some of the time. Okay. So let's look at the poem. And you have the Cleary poem, right? Did I? We zeroed it. Let's say Thomas Cleary at the bottom? Yes. Okay. So Marie-Louise will sort of translate as I go along.

[83:00]

Okay. So we talked yesterday about the title. Let me see. We're going to end at six. We're eating at 15 minutes early, right? At quarter to seven, right? Yeah. Okay. So the first line here after the title. is the mind of the great sage of India. Now we're trying to do or practice this text, not understand it. So we can presume that we have already spent a little time on the three words of merging difference and unity. The Tibetans have a way, I believe, before you read a text of preparing yourself, offering incense and so forth. And doing certain visualizations.

[84:02]

And Zen doesn't ritualize it quite that much. But ideally, if you're studying in a practice situation with your teacher, you'd have a nice cloth that you'd wrap your book or text in. And before you went to study, You would light a stick of incense. And you'd circle the book in incense three times. And you'd bring it to your head. And then you'd feel some kind of, you'd spend a moment feeling some kind of honoring Shido.

[85:08]

And try to bring up the presence of Shido in your mind. So you'd think, well, Shido, he lived from 700 to 790, I believe. And Chido lived from 700 to 790 approximately. And what was it, on Christmas 800, just slightly after that, Charlemagne was crowned. We wouldn't think of that in America, but you guys might think of that. And I've read that Charlemagne's genes are probably in every European. Even in a few Americans.

[86:21]

We left after Charlemagne's genes started to circulate. So you feel some connection with Shido. Who's the, you know, disciple of the grandson, grand dharma son of the sixth patriarch? Wei Ning. Wei Ning, yeah. So you're right at the beginning of Zen in China. Bodhidharma was only six or eight generations earlier. So these people are really immersed in, yes, then Buddhism is in China.

[87:36]

And it came from the West. Okay, so you kind of put yourself in a state of mind to read this text. Also, versetzt ihr euch in einen Zustand des Geistes, um diesen Text zu lesen. You're not reading it like a cereal box in the morning at breakfast. Also, ihr lest es nicht wie die Beschreibung auf einer Cornflakeschachtel während dem Frühstück. So the first line then is, after the title, is the mind of the great saint of India. So this puts you in a, it's just a historical statement. And it's intimately communicated between East and West. Mm-hmm. So you know this too.

[88:50]

You know that Bodhidharma came from the West. India is thought of as being west of China. And so again, your poem starts from the beginning. Recounts the historical situation. Oh, no big deal. It started with Buddha. But already there's something a little funny here. Because it doesn't just start with Buddha as a historical person. It says the mind. Denn es fängt nicht an mit Buddha als historische Persönlichkeit, sondern der Geist. And it doesn't call him the Buddha. And it calls him the great sage of India.

[89:52]

Yeah, that would be like saying the great poet of India. You may not be able to be... I was trying to think of an Indian poet. You may not be able to be a particular Indian poet. But you could be a poet. So the mind of the great sage of India. What is the mind of the great sage of India? What is the mind? Okay, so now you already have something to start with. What is the mind? And then the next line is intimately communicated between East and West. Mm-hmm. Okay, so this is a mind that can be communicated.

[91:08]

And it can be communicated. How is it communicated? Intimately. Dogen speaks about face-to-face transmission. I mean, a lot of people think I have to study what the Buddha said. From the point of view of living Buddhism, this is maybe interesting, but not living Buddhism. It's better to go study with Suzuki Roshi. Or some actual human being. Even if they're not such a good teacher. We have the idea of spring branches. Or winter branches.

[92:21]

Winter branches look dead. But they're waiting for spring. So a certain teacher may look kind of dull. Sekiroshi didn't look like an exceptional teacher. He was obviously an exceptional person. People thought he was a great person in Japan. But people, you know, had to be beat over the head before they recognized somebody as a great teacher. Just like it's hard to recognize a teacher in our own culture, you know, it's just the just the Lutheran minister down the road.

[93:24]

You have to be ready to imagine a Buddha is possible in this age. If you can't imagine that, you're not really practicing Buddhism. So when Suzuki Roshi came to America, though, he encountered spring.

[93:54]

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