The bell rings when I bow. I don't bow when the bell rings. That's a very big difference. I'm very grateful to... privilege to be able to practice with you and have this, do this sashin with you. You're, excuse me for sounding schmaltzy, but you're the treasure of my life to be able to practice with And I'm particularly sympathetic, empathetic with those of you who are new to Sashins. I wonder what it's like to, I still can remember, I think, what it's like to wander into a Sashin and suddenly bowing and spreading mats and climbing over your dining room table to get into bed, you know.

[01:16]

The town is, the board is like our dining room table. I'm sorry. But I must do this this way, so maybe I should explain a little bit. But I don't want to explain away the difference or make it, make our practice mentally predictable. A guy named Wei Yan said, I sketch my countenance in the tasteless void. Sorry to start out with something so zen, but let's start out that way. I sketch my countenance, yeah, in the tasteless void. I transmit my image on the surface of emptiness.

[02:20]

I transmit my image on the surface of emptiness. Yeah. Now I'd like to try to speak about to flesh this out, what did Huy Yan mean, at least as I look back into his meaning. So I would like to speak a bit about, for the new people and all of us, about Sashin as a physical passage. I'd like to speak about Sesshin, not to take away its mystery, but to show, to feel out something of our practice.

[03:26]

Now you could say that sesshin practice is like the hundred thousand vows in Tibetan Buddhist practice, a kind of preparatory practice. But that's only one aspect. But it's the aspect of, it certainly shares the aspect of breaking our, as I spoke in the Dogen seminar and spoken recently, our mental image. our body, our mental image of the body. You know, somehow we need to do this. To find our physical passage in the physical world. Now it's not the only passage in the world. And we're speaking, we speak about the way being on the way, but I think we usually feel that as some kind of metaphor or some kind of attitude or mental spiritual path and I don't think we really understand it as a physical path, as physical as this physical world and a physical path within us.

[04:51]

So somehow we have to find some way to step on this physical path. I think of, you know, isn't it football season now, I believe? They say that American men watch football to see their other body. Or to see their ideal body. So, oh, yeah, there I am. Anyway, I think there's some truth to that. So we have all these rules in Sesshin, and the important point is not to do it right, or not to try to learn it, but rather to feel it out and do it with others.

[06:05]

To do it right isn't to do it with others. So the feeling is to do it with others, to join others in doing it, and to join into a physical passage. You know, I first get a feeling of it, and I mention this sometimes, when I met Charlotte Selver. I've been thinking about it recently. She called me yesterday. She's 90. soon 98 and she's still coming up to standing or as she said to me once or sometimes she says now she says I only say come to standing but we have it on tape that she said come up to standing sometimes but certainly when I remember her saying come up to standing and I remember instead of standing up in her presence, I think her presence was the gift, as well as her language, I did not come from sitting to standing, I went through a path to standing.

[07:24]

And a standing which was then always finding itself. There was no point A to point B, but rather a passage I'm sorry to use such, you know, new age words, you know, a passage of discovery. So we're always discovering our posture. We don't have a posture. Yeah. So one thing that Sashin is trying to do, well, first of all, it's different. It's different for Asian folks. It's different for us. So you don't think you're coming into some, you know, Asian ritual. An ordinary Japanese person going into a sashin thinks, what are these mad monks up to? This is crazy, all these little details and stuff. I mean, there's some similarities, there's some familiarity, but it's mostly demanding and different and meant to be different.

[08:29]

Japanese people think Buddhism, strictly Zen, is hard and strange. Yeah, maybe we think so too. So it's different. And it's got a lot of detail. It has no more, nowhere near as much detail as your life. If some actor tried to portray you and studied what you did, my gosh, and they'd pick up, you did this, you picked up a cup this way, you did that, you know, et cetera. There would be a very large number of small details that are characteristic of the way you do things and characteristic of our culture. So we, in Zen, we have a very small percentage of the details you actually do things in but no longer notice, but sufficient detail to challenge your habits, your habit body.

[09:48]

And one of the things we're trying to do in Sashin is break your habit body. Usually takes three or four days. So the schedule is designed to challenge your habit body and you'll find, maybe, I can't make any promises, that after 72 or 96 hours, your body will do the sesshin more easily. It should get harder each day. It gets harder for the second day, third day, maybe fourth. After that, it somehow gets easier. And it's not logical that it gets easier. But it gets easier if it does, I hope, because you have dropped your habit body. which encases you, encases me. Now let me give my best, best example of our mental body. If you take your hands like kids do and put them like this, we could gusho this way, we could bow to the Buddha's name.

[10:57]

Okay, and then somebody says, touch that finger. Okay, and it's difficult to do. Why is it difficult? Because your mental body is mixed up. Your physical body knows where it is. Your left hand is still your left hand. It's just now on the left side twice. And being on the left side twice and your right being on the right side twice confuses our mental image so we don't know which finger to move. Because we're trying to move our mental body, not our physical body. This is very clear. We live in a mental image of our body. Otherwise we'd have no problem with this. So the dharmasagya can identify it by the esoteric gassho, you know, moving your thumb twice, you know. Dan doesn't believe I'm really saying this. Now, when we do the, when the service ends, for instance, as soon as it ends, the umpan goes.

[12:18]

That's the, umpan means cloud gone. That's that piece of cast iron out there that we hit. Cloud gone, the umpan. And again, the umpan is hit when the service is over. And the umpan is not a signal. It's something more emotional. has the number of hits, and the hits, the more sensitive you are, the hits catch, even though it's the same old bell, piece of metal, they catch the feeling of this particular day, this particular service, this first day of the Sishin, and they have some time, you know, rounds, And then something else happens. There's a physical passage from one thing to the next. You know, like... Yeah, I'm breathing this air.

[13:28]

You're breathing this air. If you go in the kitchen and the kitchen crew has burned something, the air is full of smoke. It's kind of difficult. We open the windows and try to air it out. So the air is full of smoke stuff. But it's not the air full of smoke stuff, it's the air stuff full of smoke stuff. What is air stuff? The air I'm breathing right now has recently been in your lungs, perhaps your intestines. So it's pretty fresh. It's been on a bird's wing. It's been in the leaves. It's been... It's moved the tree leaves. It's been so many places. Yeah, and water the same.

[14:36]

water in my eyes. Undoubtedly, at some time, it's been in a Japanese stream, Chinese river. And probably, you know, the water drop said to the air drop, let's go across the Pacific. They were in Japan. But just then, some critter drank the water and the stream, and then it ended up in a Japanese orange and went to Australia. So now this water drop that was looking forward to a Pacific trip to California is now in Australia. But after a while, this water drop, squeezed into juice, ends up on another Pacific journey and just entered the Zendo, in fact. Now, this is kind of nutty what I'm saying, but I'm trying to illustrate the physical passage of the water drop, the air drop, the air stuff.

[15:48]

We think, oh, the air is here. But this air is involved in a physical passage all the time and the circulation which purifies it. I mean, we're doing our best to impurify it, we humans, but the water falls on the earth into the dirt and comes out as fresh spring water. The air circulates in all these weather patterns and purifies itself. So breathing is a kind of physical passage, air stuff passage, air that's had many passages. Birds again, leaves, the heat of the sun.

[16:55]

So just dropping our body, mental body image, can be a little scary. Because it's one of the ways we affirm ourself and affirm ourself in the world. And so Sashin is to try to give us a feeling for physical passage. And you may need a mind, something like sunbathing mind. Again, you know, the feeling of sunbathing, I think probably anyway, where you hear various things, but they're in a kind of sphere, a kind of, surround.

[18:04]

And you don't have to act on them. You hear this, you hear that, etc. And Zazen mind, Sashin mind is a bit like that. We're in service, we hear the chanting, we hear things, but you're not identifying with any one of them. You're just letting them be. Because you're, like when you sunbathe, as I say, you're worshiping the great sun god, Otanmi. And there's something about the sun which does stop us and allow this surround to occur. And in that surround of sunbathing mind, shall we say, or seshin mind, we begin to feel a more physical passage from one physical thing to the next. And the orioke is meant to give us this feeling. Again, the orioke, you may think it's different than the way you usually eat.

[19:11]

It is. It probably is. But it's rather different for... somewhat similar. I mean, the chopsticks are similar to the way Japanese people eat. And conceptually it's similar because you're eating out of your hand and not off the floor. I mean, we Western people basically eat off the floor. The table's a version of the floor. And Asian people eat out of their hands, but they put a bowl between the skin And the bowl and the chopstick or the spoon are one utensil. It's part of the utensil. So the whole thing is a utensil instead of utensils to eat off the floor. So conceptually it's similar. But the conception comes from eating with the hands, which if I, again, don't go too far out, the hands conduct our aura. Now some of you, I know many of us come to, I did come to Zen practice because we want things to be more natural.

[20:23]

We have a taste for the natural, and I have to keep bringing this up, this idea of the natural, because it's so imbued in us. I know I was so relieved to find in the early Zen center with Sukershi that we could go barefoot in the church island. I've never liked wearing shoes. I always wear sandals because I prefer to be barefoot. So I have this feeling of returning to the natural, but it took me a long time to realize what I really wanted to do was return to an artifice that I could embody. Now it's very different to think that what you want is an artifice, something man-made, that you can embody rather than something that's more natural, that's there intrinsically. Because if you see that what you really want is an artifice you can embody, you can then study that artifice

[21:37]

and see what can be further embodied. I mean, you know, in Europe, everybody, they cut their meat with their right hand, and they then eat with their fork, with their left hand. And if you're brought up in the United States, it's very weird. You're not allowed to eat with your fork, with your left hand. What if those Europeans, they don't know the manners. And so we have Elizabethan manners. So we transfer our fork to our right hand and then eat the meat. And, you know, I live in Europe quite a bit now, 12 years at least, six months a year, and still it feels really weird. I think my father's going to reach out and hit my hand or something and say, don't do that. So it's natural for me to use the fork with the right hand. It's natural for Europeans, and you can watch them here, when we have a meal, use the left hand.

[22:43]

Those rude folks. But maybe it's more natural to use your fingers, just pick like the Indians. But if you watch Indians eat with their hands, there's a way they eat with their hands. It's not exactly, you know, a chimpanzee. So whether we eat with a fork in our right hand, left, what feels natural is also the artifice we embody. So we have these details, this schedule. The most important thing I always say is to follow the schedule. which contrast with your usual habits. And the difficulty of just sitting still when naturally our mental and physical restlessness makes us do things.

[23:49]

So sitting still, much of the pain you'll discover, because pain can sometimes just disappear like that. It's real physical pain, but it's tied up with our habit body. It's tied up with the mental image of our body. Now, you know, when we walk, you think, if I try to show you a different way of walking, you'll say, I walk naturally. And most of us do. We go heel-toe, heel-toe, heel-toe. And we walk around the Zendo. Some of us even have heels on our heels. And it goes clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk. So I can try to teach you a different way of walking. And some of us who have been practicing a long time still have this heel-toe way of walking. And we think it's natural. Why should you come to Sashi and start walking differently?

[24:51]

Well, the way we walk is aimed at keeping the head steady. This is our observation platform, and we try to walk with the observation platform steady. So we walk keeping this even, and we move our body underneath it. But there's another way. We could call it head walking. There's also hara walking, because for Yoga culture, which emphasizes a physical passage in the world, you don't want to head walk because that's mental passage. Like watching a tennis game, you know. You can have a stomach ache, you can be fat and drunk, you know, you can still watch the tennis game. You couldn't play the tennis game. The tennis player actually playing has to feel each moment, actually how his energy is in his body, his spine, how his feet are on the ground.

[25:55]

He's in a physical passage. Sports are almost always a physical passage. We've been very, I mean, I think photography has been one of the big problems. It's brought fashion to the masses, but it's, From the time we're infants, we see ourselves in photographs. I mean, imagine a time where you never saw yourself. Then clothes were mostly status for people who led a social life, but no one saw themselves. They didn't think about how they looked. Imagine if you never thought about how you looked. This immediately puts you into a more physical passage of the work in the world. But since photography, we think about how we look all the time, which has allowed a great number of people to make huge fortunes in clothing.

[27:06]

I heard the other day that there's 12,000 catalogs available, and the main thing most of the catalogs sell is clothes. Mamma mia. Now, there are portraits. And art historians speak about the realistic portraits of Zen masters. It's a tradition. It's called chinso or chinso, which is interesting. It's actually the name for the bump on top of the Buddha's head, which is supposed to be invisible. But they call the portraits of Zen teachers chinso. And they're very realistic. but they're not realistic, they're real. This is a big difference.

[28:06]

Which it's very difficult for us to understand that they're not realistic, they're real. Now why do I say they're real and not realistic? Because they're painted after, there are a number of reasons. First of all, it's very rare to have a portrait. You didn't see yourself very often. There were no mirrors, polished brass or something, you know, which wasn't very good for... Plus, even if you had drawings, it's not the same as constant photographs. I mean, I think most of us have probably 100 photographs from every year of our life or more. So we could do a documentary on any one of you that would take hours to show all the photographs. So we have to imagine a world, and I'm trying to bring us into a world which I think was also here in the West.

[29:09]

I mean, I find it... Proust is interesting to me. I mean, he had big influence on me. And Proust saw the contemporary world through realizing the Middle Ages through Ruskin. In other words, by understanding the Middle Ages, he was able to see into our contemporary society and see, as he said, a universe of value. of beauty, of everything appearing. Because he was looking at it from the human being he understood in the Middle Ages. And Suzuki Roshi, my teacher, our teacher, was connected to the Middle Ages almost. Japanese pre-Meiji Middle Ages through his teachers. So again, imagine...

[30:13]

a world in which you don't know really what you look like. So then you understand these poems like Dongshan or some teacher seeing themselves in a stream suddenly and having an epiphany because they suddenly saw themselves as an object. So these Shinzo We're going to do a little riff on them because they're interesting. You know, there was an emphasis in Buddhism on the footprints of the Buddha. And this whole emphasis in Buddhism is toward the actual physical place and the actual human dimension of life. So it takes popular forms, relics and all that stuff, but really I think it's to bring us to antidote to the human tendency to mystify, mythologize, and make magic, make superstition and so forth.

[31:20]

So Buddhism has always had this emphasis, okay, the actual footprints or the representation of the footprints. Someone was here. Or statues which have the ashes of previous owners of the statue in them. So it's not just an image. When you put the ashes of a living person in a statue, It's more real than realistic. And you know, at Sojiji they have a statue of Sekito Kisen, Shido, a mummy, that was My sekito who wrote the Sando Kai, Shido, we chant during practice period. Someone, a Japanese dentist and a monk adept, discovered or rescued this mummy of Shido from a burning temple.

[32:24]

I hope the Japanese didn't light the fire. But in any case, they rescued it. And ignoring the protestations of the monks, they smuggled it to Japan in 1911. Then it somehow got lost in the trunk until 1960. Someone discovered it in the trunk. And experts studied it for a while, and it's lacquered, and you know, because they had a way of mummifying people by, you start eating lacquer before you die. So I hope you don't, you know, put any in my diet. I'm not ready yet. Stiffen up quickly. Isn't it lacquer? Oh, that's a Dutch word. Um, So anyway, they found this mummy, and in 1975 they gave him to Sojiji, who keeps him rather secretly.

[33:26]

But he's dressed up in robes like mine, you know. But this emphasis on what's real, what's our image, So anyway, there's a tradition that after your teacher dies, somebody does a realistic portrait. It's realistic because you want it to be a real person, not some kind of divinity. But the person is dead, so it has no reference to anything but itself and a reference to you. So when you, because you don't see an image of yourself, you look at this picture and see yourself. You know how people start looking like their dogs? They start looking like their teachers. Well, I hope not. But they start looking like the people they practice with.

[34:28]

How fluid, really how fluid our subtle body is, our subtle image is. So in the Zendo, for instance, I see some of you kind of look around. When you look around, you're needing to check up through your mental body. Your physical body, your sense of physical passage, you just feel what's going on. You don't have to look around much. You don't have to check up where you are visually. So the Uriyoki, for instance, if you do the Uriyoki, you do it as well as you notice.

[35:42]

And if you do it for some years, you'll notice more, because it's in some layered detail. But one thing leads to the other. You open something and that leads to the next physical act, which leads to the next physical act. And it's one flow, a kind of choreographed movement, because the Yoyoki's trying to show you physical passage through something. And then we're served and And it's a kind of dance. It's a kind of choreography, including the servers, the serving. And, you know, I notice the difference. I just did a sashin a week or so ago. Two weeks ago. When was it, Eric? Three? Two weeks ago? Three weeks ago, Eric and I did it together. We should have flown on the same plane to come to sashin. Um... But it's kind of a valley zendo there.

[36:44]

It's a farmland valley. And we don't have time, so you sit on the floor. So it's quite a different feeling. We have, you know, the zendos, to eat in, the zendos, we can only have about 40 people or 45 people or so in the sashin because there's not enough room to eat. There's enough room to sit, but there's not enough room to eat. And when you're sitting down there and everybody's beside you and the servers are up here, it's quite a different feeling You know, the serves are leaning down, kind of trying to sit on the floor, serve you, etc. But here, I mean, it's almost like being in a valley of human beings. But here, the tan being up here, and the serve standing, it's almost like each seat is a little mountain. We're together, but we're in this little individual mountain. Makes a different feeling in the body. So we do the Oryoki together in order to join our friends in doing things the same way.

[37:57]

If you do things with other people, you open up our interdependent body. Okay, interdependence. One of the teachings of Buddhism is everything is interdependent. But it's not an idea. If you're going to practice, you discover a body that you experience as interdependent. So we could say the orgy practice is to awaken the interdependent body. And this is part of the genius of Chinese Buddhism. which is to realize that the power, presence, and teaching that's possible, one lifetime teaching through the sangha body, through generating an interdependent shared body,

[39:02]

That's part of why we do things together. And we're also, so we're joining ourselves to our interdependent body, even though we don't do it exactly the same time and we shouldn't, basically we're all doing it precisely the same way or as close as we can notice. One of the problems in Zazen often is you don't think anything's happening, but you don't yet know how to notice what's happening. One way our body speaks to us is through itches. It doesn't say, hey there, it says, hey, itch. And you can begin to feel, you know, the most gross forms are itching, but there's other things. So we join each other in our interdependent body and we join our physical passage in this physical world.

[40:07]

Our breath stuff, water stuff, our mind as physical mind, physical presence. So here you have a body or mind, let's say a body of mental passage, and you have a body of physical passage, and I'm not suggesting you end up in an orange in Australia, giving up your mental body so that you go anywhere the wind blows or the water flows, although a monk is called a wind and water person. Wind sweep means wind, water person. Because our base body, can I say it that way, basic body, basis body, is this physical passage, not just our body, but the body we discover through a physical passage in the physical world.

[41:22]

We also know our mental passage body, but through practice we also discover our physical passage body, if I'm making sense. And it begins to permeate our lives. So you can begin to feel for these words imperturbable body, interpenetrated body, interdependent body. This kind of imperturbability, interdependence, interpenetration, these are what are behind within the articulation of sashi as a teaching, as a practice, as a preparatory practice, as a realization practice.

[42:24]

So we just, if you can, for these seven days you give yourself up to the physical passage of the sashi, maybe in your joyful sunbathing mind, maybe it won't be joyful at first, Why not, though? You don't have to wait till the third day. Enjoy yourself now. Then there's precision, like when we do our gassho, it's one wrist from our... Some of you put your gassho up near your mouth, it's sort of like you might as well suck your thumb, you know? Similar kind of emotional feeling. It's not bad. Apparently it's like this. Some kind of... There's a kind of dignity, you know. When you discover this body of physical passage in the physical world, you find a kind of dignity.

[43:31]

Composure. This breath stuff, body stuff. So this is our chance to find this antidote to our mental image body in this physical passage body. Both are artifice. Both are something you're generating. Yeah, they depend on who you are and the place and the stuff. But still, to emphasize them, to generate them, to cultivate them is a decision. a decision you made partly intuitively or accurately by coming to Sushim. I mean, this is a wisdom teaching that's many centuries old and been developed through the centuries.

[44:37]

carried from body to body, person to person, carried in the bodies of people who practice together over generations, to awaken us to this physical passage body, which we begin to experience in contrast to our mental passage body. This opens us up to the emptiness in which both bodies arise. So now maybe I can say that Wei Yuan's statement again. I sketch my countenance in the tasteless void. I transmit my image on the surface of emptiness.

[45:39]

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