I am about to taste the truth of Tathagata's words. This is the fourth day. Yeah. Okay. I'll start Doxans today. I'm looking forward to meeting with each of you. So probably this evening I'll start. I dreamed that Rika told me that no matter how much I talk about this koan, she will never understand it more than a little bit. And I feel yesterday I came a little too serious. It's a weakness of mine. Despite the difficulty, Sasin should be really good fun.

[01:23]

And you laugh. What are we doing about doing this work? Self... What's Dogen say? Self... Something, self-something joy. Maybe I should be able to remember. And practice, you know, ideally... situation is such and the support such that you just do it. And, you know, in a way I was lucky because I just did it for some reason. I don't know what it was because I was

[02:24]

very rebellious person and never did anything until I did Zen. But now I have to teach Zen. So now I have to, I wonder sometimes, how can I, is it okay just to get you to do it or is it possible? And you know, I hate interfering with you. You know, you're all sort of great adults, and here I'm fiddling with your posture and all, and I feel like an idiot sometimes. Can you imagine what you'd feel like if you had to go into a restaurant somewhere in Germany and somebody said, now get up and show everyone how to use their fork? And you can imagine, you go to a German restaurant and suddenly someone says to you, please stand up and show how to use the fork.

[03:57]

Anyway, that's how I feel sometimes. I told you I'd read you the ten body controllers, so I might as well do it. The ten bodies of a Buddha are the body of sentient beings. Now just think about that for a minute. The body of a Buddha is the body of sentient beings. When we're not talking about a religion based on faith or symbols or metaphor, this means this is somehow realizable or practicable.

[05:04]

The second body is the body of lands. And the next is the body of results of actions. The next is the body of disciples. And the next is the body of self-enlightened ones. So-called pratyekabuddhas. And the next is the body of enlightening beings. Those who naturally enlighten others through their own enlightenment. And the body of those who realize complete enlightenment. The body of wisdom, the body of truths, the body of space. Maybe you should do something else. No, I don't understand what controller means in this context. This is the ten body controller means these ten bodies are the ten bodies of Buddhism.

[06:43]

What controls them? What is the central point that controls all ten? Now, of course, these lists are somewhat arbitrary. There was a style, I don't remember when, but there was a style at a certain point of making everything in tens, so lists of tens of all kinds of things. But except for the fact that they try to fill out the list to ten or limit it to ten, still this list is saying something. So we could make our own list of six or eight or something. And you probably could realize some of these. And under the category of those who realize complete enlightenment, There are ten more bodies.

[07:56]

And they're the bodies of enlightenment, of vows, the incarnated body. The body of practical application. The body of power. Of virtues. Of knowledge. Of non-attachment. Of nirvana. Of the universe. The body of the mind body. the body of meditation, the body of fundamental reality, and the body of reality. Now this is referred to in several koans. It comes up in this koan of Jyoti's finger. Now, You don't really have to try to understand something like that.

[09:11]

But it's useful to have it present. And it's useful also to remember that Buddhism is meant to be something you cannot reach the end of. Even if you achieve enlightenment, still, as we say in the vows, there's practice. Will you continue to practice these things after enlightenment? So if you're going to be in a practice or teaching in which there's no completion, And no matter how many lifetimes you lived, you won't come to the end of understanding. Then it's helpful to recognize that this being in a practice without end is in itself a practice. And so be comfortable with not understanding.

[10:30]

In this koan there's a story of a Mr. Ren. I don't know why. Maybe the layperson must be why Cleary translates him as Mr. Ren, but anyway. It's one of those funny Chinese stories where Mr. Ren baited a hook with 50 calves every day. What a grotesque job. Anyway, he tried to catch a really big fish. Day after day he fished, nothing was ever caught. But finally, I don't know, it took many years, ten years or something. Suddenly he caught a huge fish.

[11:52]

And the fish surfaced and looked around and couldn't believe it was caught and then started thrashing. And huge waves appeared, bigger than mountains, and etc. And finally Mr. Wren, you know, subdued the fish and pulled it ashore. And it says that there wasn't anyone in the whole land that didn't have a tasty part of this fish. Then it says, even though all your fishing poles are broken, plant bamboo today. So the sense of it here is, really that it's possible to change your culture.

[12:56]

And this kind of, you know, our culture emphasizes modesty. And this culture of this time in China seems to have emphasized humility. Or perhaps it's better to say humbleness. Yeah. The difference in German, I don't know. Yeah, okay. Well, it's okay. Thanks. So we tend to... We're taught to not... say we're good, to not imagine we can have really any effect on anything and so forth.

[14:04]

But in this culture, as far as I can tell from a distance, it seems to have felt, yes, you should recognize you can change your own culture, but you have to recognize that what you can do is modest. And story after story illustrates this point. There's another story that uses the ocean as an example, where a bird sees that the world is on fire. And so the bird tries to put out the fire. And it flies to an ocean and dips its wings in the water and flies over the fire and shakes its wings. And it does this repeatedly over and over again.

[15:06]

And of course it's impossible. The fire just turns the little drops of water to steam. But the fish can't put out the fire, but somehow empties the ocean. I mean the bird can't put out the fire, but somehow empties the ocean. And emptying the ocean, a beautiful land is exposed. So it's the same sense that you can put out the fire or create a new land, or you can plant bamboo poles that will eventually be fishing poles that will catch something that will change your whole world. And I actually, I think I feel about what we're doing here in the Sashin that way, I mean modestly or realistically, but still I feel we're doing something that changes our society.

[16:18]

I couldn't even say for sure for good or bad, but it feels good to me. And I don't know any other way to measure. And I don't know any other way to measure. Now how do you change society?

[17:36]

Of course you change yourself. Or you realize yourself. And Buddhism sees the world as encoded. The basic sense of the teaching is that There's a surface culture convention that we follow. But behind the surface level, there's a code which controls the surface. And so again in this koan, and often they're talking about the Confucius quote, the master of sources.

[18:37]

So part of practice is to free yourself from the code of your society and encode your own way of being. And code is like a recipe. If you put in different ingredients, you make a different soup. You change the code, you make a different soup. So you're stirring in, by doing sashimi, And practicing Buddhism you're stirring different ingredients into your soup. Maybe in Sashin you're turning yourself into the pot in which a soup can be made. And although most of the time nothing seems to be happening, it's like Suzuki Roshi says, it's like the full moon.

[19:59]

You see it and it's just the full moon. But when you see the full moon with a branch of a tree across it, it's very beautiful, or a cloud. So sometimes the full moon is beautiful and sometimes the branch across the full moon is beautiful. And if you practice zazen, even though nothing seems to be happening often, It may be the case that your life becomes like the branch across the full moon. You begin to see some beauty in the details of your life. So I'm trying to find a language with you to...

[21:33]

a Western language to speak with you about some of these teachings. Sometimes I lose the real understanding or thread of it, I think. Even though what I say might be correct, still some subtlety is lost. But I have to keep trying. Okay. So now what I'm emphasizing again is your hands. And you might spend one or two periods every day of the remainder of the session. Or even a full day or two, just concentrating on your hands.

[22:47]

In each period and even walking around and so forth. Now you might think of your hands as two psychedelic experiences you're bringing together. Now, I guess I'm exaggerating. Maybe I'm exaggerating. But I really would like you to exaggerate enough so you feel your hands as the embodiment of mind. Like you have two examples of your mind before you. Now, at this recent Lindisfarne conference meeting retreat on Rudolf Steiner, Robert McDermott, who's a good friend and someone I'd like you to meet.

[24:04]

Maybe you will sometime. Anyway, he's a professional academic philosopher and he's president of the College of Integral Studies in San Francisco. And he's committed to bringing a sense of a realization of spiritual life into philosophy. And he asked me at this conference, he said, why do I keep talking about Buddhism as a teaching about the body? And he said, I thought it was a teaching about mind and morality and so forth. And a teaching about ephemeral and immaterial things. Anyway, he said something like that.

[25:41]

And I didn't actually answer him very well. Even when he said it, I thought, you know, Robert, you're right. What am I talking about? On one level, I had a kind of moment of doubt. How do I say something about this? So I answered adequately enough, I think, but still I didn't feel it was as succinct as might have been good. So I'm definitely not being succinct now, anyway. Is this the same word in German? I think so. At least in biology there's a word like this. Succinct means short and to the point. Yeah, okay.

[26:48]

So anyway, I'd again like you to see your hands as treasures. and try to feel a physical continuity with your hands during zazen and during the day your arms and hands are almost like insects antennae picking up things in the world And I don't, again, think we, at least I didn't for years, realize how, what the arm, what the body was like, what the hands were like. And I'm still realizing it.

[28:02]

So I have to give you some kind of maybe crude examples to try to at least give you a feeling for what I feel and understand. Now your face is the most conventional part, the most well-trained, educated part of your body. And you can see it if you ever spend time with a child or adult who is retarded or mongoloid. Their face is not socialized at all. And they eat their food funny and stuff it in their mouth and they smile and grin and drool. It's great. It's a very free feeling.

[29:02]

But if you start doing it, you may be institutionalized. That guy, he's done too many sashims. Look what's happening to him. Yeah. So somehow this sense of... of keeping your consciousness in your hands, it would be good if you could also feel that your face disappeared. And even your head disappeared. Isn't there, there's a famous book written by somebody named Harding, anybody know it?

[30:08]

Man who lost his head or something? Yeah. On having no head, right? And he experienced, he's some English colonial, right, who experienced enlightenment of some sort? Isn't he? I think he is. No head, yeah, right. It's written in 1920 or 30 or something. Anyway, it's a classic book of one of the first examples of a Westerner who realized, and seems to me accurately, realized an enlightenment in an Asian tradition. It's fun to read if you can get hold of a copy. But there's some truth to it. You feel like your head is gone. You feel like all traces of self-consciousness are gone.

[31:28]

Now, mostly, when you exist in a mental, conceptual world, and you think about another person, No matter how nice and sweet a guy you are, there's always a certain degree of comparison going on. The nature of thinking about another person is almost always in terms of separation, comparison, and so forth. It's the price we pay for the brilliance of our conceptual culture. That's true in China, Japan and Asia too. I mean, yogic or not, all cultures are basically conceptual and mental.

[32:53]

So yogic culture has another kind of balance in it and antidotes to this conceptual culture. And I think largely, or at least one of the main reasons is because of the presence of Buddhism in the culture. So Buddhism tries to, in Zen Buddhism, tries to teach you various ways to, in effect, attune yourself with the world rather than compare yourself to the world. To find the pace of the world or enter the pace of the world, to walk with the world.

[33:54]

Now, Zen, I mean, Tibetan Buddhism developed... Mantra chanting is the kind of core of the practice. And I love spending time with some of these Tibetan teachers because they're kind of hummers. They may be talking. Humor. Humor? Humor? There's a little humor in the hummer. Yeah, I'm wept out.

[34:55]

I don't know what's going on. You know what a humor is? No. It tastes very well. Humor. Humor. Homer wrote the Odyssey and the Iliad. It's a lobster. Oh, Homer. I like Homer, yeah. Homer crema super. I've seen that on menus. Well, now I suddenly see this Tibetan teacher looking like a big lobster in his red robes. Don't tell any Tibetans I said that. Anyway... Should we stop?

[36:02]

I'll put my knees down and translate better. Yeah, please. Bitte. Okay. Because even when some of these teachers are talking about Dzogchen, which is pretty similar to Zen, they've done so much preparatory practice, which involves memorizing an immensely long... chants of various kinds. And the visualizations and hand movements that go with it. This one teacher I'm thinking of keeps trying to talk about Dzogchen. But every time he pauses, he says, and then he'll talk a while. And it's great, he just hums away, sort of like being a kind of living antenna.

[37:03]

Yeah, so every time he takes a break, he starts to hum, and he's like a living antenna. tuned into the potala. And I practiced chanting for about a year. I practiced because I knew it was one of the Buddhist practice, so I just took it on and asked Suzuki Roshi. He said, sure. Chanted mostly for that year because there was a lot of Jodo Shinshu schools in San Francisco at the time. For about a year I chanted Namo Amida Butsu, the name of Amida Buddha.

[38:10]

So if you just get into it. And sometimes when I'm driving from Crestone to Santa Fe, if I'm by myself, I chant the whole way while I'm driving. After about 100 miles, I'm... I hope the trip never ends. So in a monastery, the practice that's similar to that is a kind of turning your hand, in a Zen monastery in Japan, is turning your hand into a physical mantra.

[39:23]

Almost as if you could feel your hands humming, whether they were together or apart. Now if you practice with your hands in this way, you can actually begin to have the same feeling in any part of your body. And when you relate to somebody else at a proprioceptive or physical level, instead of a conceptual mental level, there's almost no comparison that goes on. It's almost by the nature of it a kind of attunement.

[40:39]

It's like when you're sitting sashin, you're sitting sashin, you're pared down enough, often raw enough, to feel certain things that aren't noticeable most of the time. And you can feel your own power or physical dignity from another person. You can feel a certain energy moving through your backbone from the presence of other people. It's your own power, but you feel it through a kind of attunement that happens with others when you're pared down. So you're actually feeling the other, you could say you're feeling the other person's mind on your own body and through that realizing your own mind.

[42:01]

At this point it's actually hard to tell what the boundaries of your own body and mind are. They're so intimately connected with each other. Now, one of the ways our culture attunes us on a regular basis is it's almost required that we eat with others. And although it's great fun to eat alone sometimes, generally you read or watch TV or something, even if you eat alone. They don't have any frozen dinners for eating alone. They're called frozen TV dinners. So generally, mostly, we eat with others.

[43:03]

It's the most basic thing we do every day, and it's almost required that we, again, we do it with others. And we could say that's one of the main jobs of restaurants. Again, as a sociologist, I think you could make a case for the rise of restaurants. I think they started in Paris, in Europe, as having to do with the development of democracy. In any case, I'm making the point that we do, that our society is encoded in a certain way where attunement does happen. Now when you start finding a physical continuity with yourself, that physical continuity almost immediately starts extending to the other people and to the phenomenal world.

[44:20]

So if you can imagine through practicing what it would be like to feel almost an electric hum between your hands all the time or a kind of field or continuity Because in Buddhist practice, our continuity is in our body and our body as space. And I'm referring to a quote I've given you quite often of Kant's. where he says something like the essential quality of human life or human nature is the continuity and integrity of self over time. Das ist die Kontinuität und Integrität des Selbstes durch die Zeit hindurch.

[46:08]

And when we start experiencing gaps in our self we start feeling a little crazy. Und wenn wir anfangen solche Lücken in uns zu spüren dann fühlen wir uns etwas verrückt. Das ist die Kontinuität und Integrität des Selbstes durch die Zeit hindurch. And when we start experiencing gaps in our self we start feeling a little crazy. But Buddhism is nothing but entering the gap. Where your self appears when you need it, but when it's not there, that's not where your continuity is. So we could say the essential human nature is the integrity and continuity of the body with or in space.

[47:08]

Now this is the fundamental change in perception that occurs through satori or through practice. And this is also something that can be realized through practice gradually. And to create the conditions for this realization and development of this feeling, you start practicing with your hands. So the posture, the exact posture, The precise posture of your hands, whatever it is, throughout a period of zazen is an essential part of Zen practice.

[48:23]

And some of these things are emphasized in precision because we don't emphasize mantra chanting, so we emphasize a kind of mantra practice in the hands. And you begin to feel, the more you do it, you begin to feel a wonderful relaxing physical continuity with yourself. Like you're all of one piece. And then the world itself begins appearing as familiar and all of one piece. Now you feel this maybe first of all or you begin to dimension it most clearly with your teacher.

[49:41]

Or with your fellow practitioners. And it's a kind of connection outside of personality. You feel it when there's no personality present. Just appears for a moment. Or you may feel this kind of continuity in chanting as if your body was your voice. So it's almost like your face and head disappeared but your chanting is floating out there. The physical world, so-called phenomenal world, becomes a phenomena of being like an infant, or as I said, more of the phenomenal world is like a musical instrument.

[50:45]

or a lover. Anyway, your sense of identity with and participation with and continuity with the phenomenal world can arise from such a simple practice of first developing it in your hands. And feeling deeply at ease in all of one peace. And at peace. No one has got hold of your nostrils. The culture hasn't got hold of your face or your nostrils. Your face and head have disappeared. There's only Jyoti's finger. There's absolutely very little self-consciousness. And then you really, as I said last night, what is your true body? You hardly know.

[52:11]

It is experienced as your body, but you don't know where the boundaries of your body are. You arrive at this attunement and continuity through the body. Through consciousness and bringing your mind and consciousness and attention and awareness to your body. At some point it snaps and And the body awareness takes over and you disappear. And Dogen's most famous teaching phrase is dropping mind and body. But this dropping mind, you don't drop your mind exactly, it's when you drop You can't drop something so intangible as mind, but you can drop the body-mind and feel it drop away.

[53:23]

Since it arises through the dropping away of the mind and body, it's still called a body. Because when you come to the most essential feeling of your own body-mind, When you come to that, when you feel most completely your body so that you feel all of one piece, at that very moment you don't know where the boundary of your body is. And then you could talk about the body of teacher and disciple. And then you can begin to talk about the body of disciples. Or the body of all the enlightened ones.

[54:24]

Or the body of the phenomenal world. Do you see what I mean? Do you see where these ten bodies come from? There's so much feeling of continuity that you don't know where the boundaries are. But the way Zen has developed, trying to teach everything through the posture, it arises through the mantra of hand practice. The two trigrams making a hexagram for the I Ching of joyous friendship is two lakes joined. And here we have again the wonderful shimmer of the ponds and lakes reflecting the landscape. And your own body exists in this way.

[55:38]

Your own body, mind, always in a kind of chanting with the enchantment with and chanting with the physical world, the phenomenal world and with all other beings. And this is the body of sentient beings and the body of lands. And I say this is how you actually exist. Okay. Thank you very much.

[56:03]

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