No, I haven't forgotten that it would be good to have some practical discussion about lay practice. Perhaps so far I haven't been very practical. Maybe tomorrow I'll try to be practical. Yeah. Hmm. I'm trying to respond to this question of lay and monastic practice, partially in a historical context, to emphasize, one, to give us some understanding of our background,

[01:08]

of what monk and lay person mean in our lineage, but also just to emphasize that this Buddhist practice is the work in history of human beings. We could call it a received teaching, but it's also a teaching that we receive and develop. Now I have been saying that there isn't much difference between lay practice and monastic practice.

[02:29]

At least in conception there's not much difference. In fact, there's quite a bit of difference. But we have to look at the conception. I think if we understand that pretty clearly, then we can choose how we practice with clarity. Or we can feel that sometimes we're doing monastic practice and sometimes we're doing lay practice. Certainly, Suzuki Roshi. Although his father was a Zen teacher and grew up in monasteries and temples, still his life, he recognized, was in many ways like a layperson's life.

[03:39]

He had a wife and children and he had to take care of this temple in a way that's a job like pretty much any job. So what is the history of this? The history is actually quite related to this idea of an original body or original mind. And we can look at it in the term, just to try to look at it historically, we can use the term Zenji. Like Dogen is called sometimes, Dogen Zenji. And this is usually a posthumous title given, meaning Zen Master.

[04:50]

Although sometimes living people are called Zenji. But another meaning was... There were kind of mountain ascetics, probably the ancestors of the so-called Yamabushi. Yamabushi, I used to like Yamabushi folks in Japan. Yamabushi means yama, mountain, and bushi means Buddhist, mountain Buddhist. And it's a kind of sort of renegade shamanic Buddhist school. And they particularly like Fudo Myo or Achala with flames in his sword.

[05:55]

You know, he's kind of a wild-looking guy. Fudo Myo, or it's also in Sanskrit, Achala. Achala in Sanskrit, also ein wilder Kerl mit flammendem Schwert. Yeah, and I've always liked Fudo Myo. I have several Fudo Myo statues. Und ich habe auch Fudo Myo immer sehr gern gehabt. Ich habe einige Statuen. And they have these Yamabushi meat and they have fire ceremonies of various kinds and stuff. Und diese Yamabushi haben auch Feuerzeremonien in verschiedener Art. And for a while they were outlawed in Japan. And they've been more or less incorporated now into the Shingon, Tantric and Tendai sect schools. But from, you know, in the 700s, 500 years before Dogen's time, and 500 years before Zen came into Japan there were these guys called Zenji and they there was no Zen school exactly but they were a kind of meditation master

[07:01]

And there were sort of pseudo-Zenji, too. So this all developed... Let's see, how can I explain? You know, Buddhism came into Japan from China. So it depended on a considerable amount of education. You had to know Chinese, which is fairly difficult even for Japanese people. And you were expected, if you were a priest or monk, to be able to freely compose poetry in Chinese and things like that. It would be as if I required not only that you all know English before we practice Buddhism together,

[08:30]

Which are all pretty good in English, I think. But I also expected you to know English literature thoroughly and be able to compose poems and so forth like that. And then I also expected you to really know philosophical literature intimately. Well, I'm sure you could all do it in the next few months if that's what I expected. But it does leave some people out. And of course in those days, in 700, 800, etc., education was a privilege of the wealthy and aristocracy. So there was a lot of smart people out there who didn't have much education and didn't fit in the formal Buddhist schools.

[10:01]

But they liked to meditate. So they kind of created their own school of people who went out in the mountains and meditated and had various kinds of experiences. And this hookup, this connection of being in the wilderness, in the mountains and realizing some meditative power was ingrained in the Japanese mentality. Okay, so now, if you were a Chinese Buddhist, you were supposed to take, I can't remember exactly, I always forget, but for men, 250 precepts about, and women, 280, you know. Women are more complicated. Well, what if I asked you to take all these precepts in Chinese or English or something?

[11:08]

You all might decide I'd rather be a mountain Buddhist. Anyway, there was actually this kind of tradition in Japan. And, you know, Japan is not a vast continental country like China. It's insular like England. And several hundred miles from China, not just 50 or 20 like England. So it was quite insular. So anything some significant percentage of the population did affected everybody. So these folks who were sort of self-taught or, you know, outside the formal Buddhist schools had what they called natural wisdom.

[12:34]

It wasn't a wisdom received from Buddhism, but from meditation posture and practice itself. So when Dogen in the 1200s had gone to China and come back to Japan, and was establishing his lineage in Japan, He did not ignore the power of these mountain monks or natural wisdom practitioners. And he's one of the persons that broke with the Chinese tradition of having these 250 or 280 precepts.

[13:36]

And I'll try to explain this. Now, I mean, this is, within the Buddhist world, the Japanese position of taking the 16 precepts is quite unusual. Yes, in China they take the 16 precepts, but they also, if they're serious, in real monks, they take the 250 or 280. And when I went to... China and Japan with Thich Nhat Hanh, it took him a while to really believe that in Japan they don't take the 250 precepts.

[14:51]

For him, he's a very informed, totally intelligent person, but he just didn't believe that anybody could be a monk and not take all these precepts. Now, partially, Dogen understood monastic life as a form of these precepts. In other words, if you live the life the details that are embedded, if you live through the details that are part of monastic life, you are in effect following the precepts. So Dogen emphasized these details of monastic life as a way that we embody the precepts. So there's this kind of emphasis in our practice on having some time in a place like this.

[16:03]

And a place like this traditionally isn't just for monks, it's a place for lay people to relate to monastic practice. And so much so that there's not much difference even between monk and lay adepts. May I use my dear translator as an example? This woman is sitting beside me with short hair, and she's dressed in what look like robes, She looks something like a nun.

[17:15]

But you might have noticed that she's also pregnant. And she has a young son out there somewhere. Now never before in history probably has a Zen monk sat giving a lecture with a pregnant nun beside him. This would be quite unusual and scandalous. Yeah. But here it's quite natural. And that's part of the freedom we have in the way Dogen, although Dogen would not have had a pregnant nun in his monastery, it's still part of the freedom that Dogen brought to Zen Buddhism. So even this rotating the sutras, you know, the sutras are, in their books, traditional books, were like two boards and a piece of paper accordioned between it.

[18:59]

A little like our sutra cards in the morning except many, maybe hundreds of such pages. So it's useful to get the bugs out of these things and air them at least once a year. So there's a ceremony done where you take these things out of their boxes, open them up and the moths and dust flies out and then you put them back. If you don't do that regularly, at some point you open the box and they're all gone. They've been eaten by bugs. But it's part of the effort also to educate these monks, because most of these monks aren't very well educated.

[20:04]

Traditionally, it was difficult for them to read these things. But at least they could do this, you know. So you have some, you know, I mean, many, many volumes. I mean, it would fill this room of sutras. And very few people would have the education or interest to read them all, but you can rotate them. It's called rotating the sutras. But you do know a few phrases from them. Like form is emptiness and emptiness is form. You may not have studied the Heart Sutra, you may be chanting it, but you probably haven't studied all its details.

[21:16]

But you do know form is emptiness, and emptiness is form. And there's a kind of power in those phrases. So while you're doing this, you know a few phrases from the sutra, and you feel a physical connection with it and some kind of power in doing this. Yes. And in San Francisco Zen Center, Suzuki Roshi had a very ornate brocade Prajnaparamita Sutra on the altar as part of the altar. Brocade? The Prajnaparamita Sutra. Prajnaparamita. And sometimes when someone died, we would rotate that sutra as part of the ceremony.

[22:25]

Now the idea here again is to bring people into the Buddha field. Buddhism is not a missionary religion. In other words, it's not some religion where we say, this is the truth, and if you don't know this, you're going to go to hell or something. Everybody's living the truth. To various degrees. But there is the desire to believe this feeling as I tried to express yesterday, to, there was the understanding that, well, practice is a multi-generational,

[23:25]

mutually realized teaching. In other words, it's been developed over generations. And in this generation, it's mutually realized. Und in dieser Generation hier wird es miteinander verwirklicht. When we realize through the Sangha, not some individual experience. You may have some big individual experience, but unless you develop that through other people, you're just somebody who had a big experience.

[24:38]

So if we were to try to create a Buddha field here, for instance, we would try to relate to the local people here so they felt good about what we were doing. Not to convert them to being Buddhists. So maybe I should ask Gisela, who's friendly with everyone to God, knock on doors and ask him if they want to take the precepts. That might get us in trouble in the neighborhood, actually. But somehow it would be nice if we could share the vision of what practice is with people. without interfering or criticizing or changing or having any interest in changing their lives.

[25:51]

Okay. So monasteries attempted to create a practice which brought people of various abilities together in a Buddha field. It's not just some place for the specially educated or something. So let me try to speak of what is meant by natural wisdom. Now sometimes we speak in Zen of Tathagata Zen and Ancestor Zen.

[26:52]

Tathagata Zen means that through the posture and experience of sitting Meditation experience itself begins to teach you. And ancestral or lineage Zen means that you learn through the mutuality of experience with others. Do you understand? Actually Zen practice is a combination of these two. And it's hard to separate them. Tathagata Zen works because you've had a good teacher. And because you've had a good teacher, Tathagata Zen allows you to keep teaching yourself over many decades.

[28:04]

Okay. I'm going to be giving the precepts and raksus to a number of quite a few people at the end of this weekend. So let me speak in this regard about what I have been calling original body. Because for both lay adepts and monk adepts, the emphasis is to realize this original body.

[29:06]

Okay. So we can say original mind, but right now I'm emphasizing original body. Okay, so let me try to give you some idea of what I mean by this original body. Okay, now there's an idea in Buddhism of a thought shield. Thought shield. Now, how can I illustrate that? The example I have is if your arm goes to sleep. Okay, your arm, and this happens to me sometimes. If I'm sleeping and I keep my arms up here, I wake up and I don't know where my arms are.

[30:08]

And sometimes in unfamiliar hotel rooms and awakened suddenly I've knocked over lamps and everything else because I get up and my arms fly about. Like a rag doll, you know. So, okay, but say your arm is very much asleep. And you can't find it. But say at some point you can move your finger. As soon as you move your finger, you know where your arm is. That's because your arm is formed by thought, not by sense.

[31:12]

Does that make sense? In other words, if your arm was formed by sense, you'd have to find it through your senses. But as soon as you find it through one point like poking yourself or something Or moving your finger. Then immediately the mental image of the arm takes hold and you know where your arm is. This is quite natural. We have a mental image of our body that conforms to our body, our mirror image of our body. Das ist ganz natürlich. Wir haben so ein geistiges Bild von unserem Körper, das mit unserem Körper übereinstimmt. But this mental image of our body is not our true human body.

[32:14]

Aber dieses geistige Bild unseres Körpers ist nicht unser tatsächlicher menschlicher Körper. Yeah. Do you understand? Verstehe ich. Sort of. Okay. It's not hard to understand, but you have to kind of... What is he talking about? Es ist nicht so schwer zu verstehen, aber er müsste irgendwie dahin kommen. Worüber redet er? Okay. So what happens in zazen is you drop the mental image of the body. And when you stop dropping the mental image of the body, sometimes you can't find, as if your body was asleep, you can't find where your arms are. Or as I say, sometimes you don't know where your thumbs are. Oder manchmal wisst ihr nicht, wo eure Daumen sind. They're no longer touching and it feels like an airplane could fly between them. You don't know where they are. Sie berühren sich nicht mehr und es fühlt sich an, als könnte da ein Flugzeug durchfliegen.

[33:15]

So weit sind sie auseinander. Okay. So when you have this experience in Zazen, of the mental, the thought shield of the body falls away. And you begin to feel some kind of spacious interiority which is not limited to the shape of the body. Now, this experience is not so uncommon, so I think you may know this well or have some feeling for it. Okay. Now, this experience of dropping the thought shield of the body, It's also called the precept body.

[34:27]

Now, why is it called the precept body? Can any of you guess? Because this body can't break the precepts. In other words, if you have that body and that feeling which is no longer has boundaries and is quite open and Like the bell rings, you can sort of imagine your physical body getting up, but you'd rather it didn't. That body can't break the precepts. Well, one, it can't go anywhere anyway. It's just sitting there. It can't cause much harm. But also, if that body tried to steal something, immediately it would disappear. If that body, if you started thinking competitive thoughts with somebody or aggressive thoughts, that body would disappear instantly.

[35:46]

So if you had any harmful or self-aggrandizing thoughts, that body disappears. So it's called the precept body because it very naturally keeps the precepts. So you don't have to take all the precepts if you realize the precept body. This is this idea of natural wisdom. That there's this original, we say original, we don't have a word, but let's call it original body. Ursprung, yes. If we know the ursprung body on Quellen Way Yeah, this body can't break the precepts.

[36:57]

It's already observing all the precepts. So there's no need to take all these 280 precepts. So the ordination ceremony is acknowledging the precept body in Zen, in our lineage. And this precept body or original body that you confirm through your practice is the source of either realized lay life, adept lay life, or adept monastic life. Now some people may need to or want to clothe this precept body in Buddhist robes. Sukhirushi should say, I wear these robes because it helps me behave.

[38:07]

So in this sense, we may want to make our outer body the precept body, too. But what's most important is that we know this inner body of the original body or precept body. So this is what Sukhiroshi is talking about in these sections you have for study period. And why he speaks about zazen does not fit into the other four postures, walking, sitting, standing, reclining.

[39:09]

And why he says this posture precedes Buddhism. Yeah. That we're not Soto Buddhists or Zen Buddhists even. But at the same time he says everything you do is Buddhism but you're not Buddhists. This is also very typical Buddhist thinking. This is not a stick. This stick is everything all at once. That kind of thinking. So this is not a Buddhist, but everything about this is Buddhism. So this is this kind of Nagarjuna emptiness type thinking.

[40:22]

But it's also rooted in this sense that just the way we are alive is Buddhism. Yes, we're all alive and being alive is, if you really understand it, is what Buddhism means. But we're alive to various degrees. And to really come alive to our aliveness is practice. And we could also consider, if we want to explain this original body a bit, We could also consider it a kind of synesthesia. Synesthesia is a word which means to bring the senses, to bring hearing and sight together, for instance, and mix them.

[41:28]

And sometimes more technically it means like when you have visual experiences through hearing. But when you drop the thought shield of the body, The senses come together to create a kind of sense body. Not limited to the boundaries of thought but you feel your body extends throughout all of the senses. You feel your body extends to everything you hear and see. And to drop the thought shield and experience a body through synesthesia is also, we could call, original body.

[42:30]

If you would like some kind of explanation. Okay, I think that's enough for today. Well, at least for this morning. So this is an experience of how we exist and a vision of how we exist. And the vision and understanding opens us to the experience. And the experience allows us to bring the vision into our daily life. We sing of our intentions in the same way as every being.

[43:54]

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