Oh, Yashan said, ring the bell. So Christian went right out and he started beating the drum and, you know. And Yudita was ringing the bell and everybody gathered. Yashan sat down and got up and left. And the temple director sort of ran after him. That was no lecture. What's the matter? He said, I am not a teacher of sutras. I'm not a teacher of Shastra's commentaries. I'm not a scholar. I'm a Zen master.

[01:02]

Actually, in the stories it doesn't say I'm a Zen master, but Sukhirashi always told it that way. And so Yashin went back to his quarters. This was a problem for Suzuki Roshi. And he had a long time in accepting his teacher. And Gyokujin was quite a different person than Sukhiroshi. If you've read David Chadwick's book, you can see some of the differences. I know the differences from Crooked Cucumber, David's book.

[02:11]

I know the differences from talking with Sukhiroshi. And visiting their temples. And Sukhiroshi is a kind of frail person physically. I think rather physically attractive person. Attractive enough that when he was young, his teacher told him, Gilgitin told him, you know, you're going to get, you have this disease, it's not coming out yet, where your bones grow irregularly. I knew somebody with that disease once. You end up looking like Frankenstein by the time you're about 40, you know. Mm-hmm.

[03:12]

And Sankrishni, you know, he was only about 13 or 14. He'd go in the morning, he'd look in the mirror. And his teacher was an archer and had a bow, supposedly that only two men in Japan could even pull. And you know the story about hiding the pickles? They had these really terrible, spoiled pickles, you know, and so the young monks went and, teenagers went and buried them in the garden. And two or three days later in comes Gyokujin with the pickles. Look what I found in the garden.

[04:20]

Let's have them for lunch. So they cooked them. They didn't know what else to do with them. They washed them and cooked them. And this big brood of a guy, Gilkey just started eating them, right? He said, I had my first enlightenment experience. It wasn't so bad. I just ate it and it was all right. Yeah, one, everything equalized by suchness, or at least the first taste of it. So what is Yaoshan saying? What is Sukhirishin Gyokujen saying? is that when you're a teacher, when you become a teacher, you're not a Buddhist.

[05:44]

You are Buddhism. What you do is Buddhism. If it's... You know the story, is it... of... When the teacher was sick, someone came and said, you're sick today, what are you doing? He said, sun-faced Buddha, moon-faced Buddha. Whatever you do, you're that kind of Buddha. Suzuki Roshik sometimes would give lectures which actually he just read the Lotus Sutra. In a bad translation and his English wasn't very good.

[06:46]

And it was kind of boring. This was his Buddhism. Zen. If he doesn't give a lecture, that's all right. If he gives a lecture, that's okay. If he doesn't give a lecture, you study his not giving a lecture. I'm not a teacher of sutras. I'm just living with you, that's all. I share my address. Mm-hmm. In this way one should study.

[07:49]

I'm not saying this is the best way. I'm saying that this is how we study Zen. You meet the lineage through the present teacher. The teacher might not be so good, but somehow often it works. So this first crafter practice is how do you Manage a relationship with a teacher. How do you make it work? And it's not a guru. A Zen teacher is not a guru. It's not really about devotion. It's maybe about deference. Deference is to defer to... It's like respect.

[09:07]

Like respect, yeah. Deference is you give way, you yield to the other person. Yeah, it's a deference, a root in English means to carry together. Mm-hmm. So it's not devotion, but it's deference. To honor, respect. And trust. It's the feeling of doing something together. And this emphasis is so great, the teacher can do, you know, everything is arbitrary.

[10:15]

So it's not a matter of like, oh, the tradition is such or the sutras say this. Whatever the teacher does, that's the way it is. If you don't like it, leave. Because there is no absolute truth anywhere. It's just us together discovering it. There's no, oh, they used to do it, even at Crestone. Who cares? And the teacher can change the teaching. You can present a teaching upside down or right or left or whatever. Sideways. So Yuan Wu said, actually, something like, call forth the mind where there's no before and after.

[11:35]

And I presented it, as he said, call forth the mind of no before and after, no here nor there. Oh, then I didn't get it right. Yuan Wu says, the mind of know before and after, and I added know here and know there. And I presented it as his teaching. If you want to be scholarly about it, too bad. Because in the tradition where if I'm a teacher, I'm Buddhism, I'm not a Buddhist, Yuan Wu is part of my lineage. Sukhiroshi is part of my lineage. So I can say it the way I want to. I'm sorry, this is just the way it is.

[12:45]

So you look it up and say, geez, he's got it wrong here. I'm sorry, I like having it wrong. If anybody wants to kind of climb over the melons, After I've died of engorgement it means overeating. Yes. Somebody can sort it out and say, well, he got this from Yuan Wu and he got that from Dogen. That's all right. My job is to adjust the teachings to the circumstances, which is us right now. So we've run out of time. Then we're speaking about the first craft of practice, which is the relationship of teacher and disciple.

[14:03]

Teacher and practitioner. So I'll tell you one more story. Sure. Yashan went to study with Matsu first. And Matsu ended up... Well, first he went to Shido, then he went to Matsu, then he went back to Shido. These two great Ur-teachers. And one day, Shido came in and Yaoshan was sitting. And Shido says, what are you doing? I'm not doing anything. And Shido said, well, then you're just sitting idly. You're sitting idly. Leisurely sitting, not sitting idly.

[15:16]

Hmm, Yashan said. If I was sitting idly, then I'd be doing something. He said, well, what is this not doing something then? And Yashan said, not even the hundred sages know. And Shido wrote a poem in praise of this little dialogue. Shido also, one of his famous sayings is, the way is what appears before your eyes. Then you're sitting idly.

[16:23]

What are you doing? I'm not doing anything. Can you imagine not doing anything? Then you're sitting idly. If I was sitting idly, I'd be doing something. So, what is this Not doing something. Even the hundred sages can't know. All the Buddhas can't know. What does this tell you about Zen practice? Thank you very much.

[17:30]

Mō nā mūjhīṁ sē gāndhāṁ, Hō māṁ mūryā sē gāndhakū, I praise you to guide them. I praise you to give them up. I praise you to destroy them. I praise you to use them. Satsang with Mooji

[19:17]

I know you must trust me. I do wish to help you. I know you must trust me. Thank you very much for letting me practice here with you. And with this phrase of Yuan Wu, the whole essential being or whole entire being appears before us

[21:16]

nowhere else, ready-made for us, as if ready-made. This one great potential turns smoothly and steadily like water poured into water. The equalization of one suchness. We're in some kind of mysterious territory with a phrase like this. Imagine each of us have a life, a life we're living. And what would be anything close to one entire or essential being? that somehow appears as us and nowhere else.

[22:55]

Somehow it makes me think of some lines of Rilke, which I'm sorry you don't have the German for. It goes something like, Ah, women. That you move here among us. Even grief-filled. And no more protected than we are. And yet you can bless us like the blessed. And yet you bless like the blessed. Ones who are blessed can also bless.

[24:25]

That you bless like the blessed. Do you have the same word in German, blessed? Meaning blood and meaning bloom? Oh. Mm-hmm. In English, blessed, the root is to be sanctified with blood or also to bloom like a flower, the etymology is. To be sanctified. Yeah, I should have brought you the German word, I'm sorry. But German words are very heavy. I picked them up and I can't even get to the door with them.

[25:32]

By the time I get to you and ask, what was that? I say... But this is an image close to Bodhisattva or Kuan Yin, Kuan Kanon. Yeah, Kuan Yin, Kuan Kanon. That you move here among us. Even grief-filled. And no more protected than we are. And yet you are able to bless like the blessed. Mm-hmm. Okay, so let me go back to the craft of practice, which I'm speaking about.

[27:02]

Parallel crafts of practice. Yeah, it's where I think... gate we're entering now, practice. I think that the idea of the, as I presented it the other day, or yesterday rather, some sort of complete freedom of the teacher to do what he or she wants. To even change quotations, the text. Mm-hmm. But I think the reason it doesn't sit well with us or fit well with us... Yeah, but, you know, because there is this kind of freedom in teaching, in Zen teaching, so...

[28:35]

I don't want to pull back from my statements. So I think that we have some, me too, have some objection to it because We want that the condition of freedom is law. I think the grammar behind our thinking, cultural grammar, is that freedom is possible only under the law.

[29:37]

And I'm not a cultural historian. According to a historian? But I would say that we think that we have to have law because I think we feel that without the law, we would simply be selfish. There will be uncontrolled selfishness. uncontrolled will to power. But these ideas come from, and we believe, come from Freud and Nietzsche.

[30:41]

And they're rather, I think, benighted view of human beings. And darkened. In a darker view of the people. Yeah, and both Freud and Nietzsche were trying to escape from the stultifying corruption of the of the Habsburg and Prussian empires. Stultifying means to disempower. Corrupting. trying to hang on to a dead world.

[31:55]

So they seemed to take their view of human beings from that world and it was also their way to escape. So I think there's a wide assumption among us that people reduced to self-interest and self-power, an interest in power. But I think we can shift from thinking that people will always be selfish to rather thinking people will always try to find satisfaction. And I think even the wider satisfactions of our shared being with others

[33:16]

So what makes an imagined teaching situation work as Zen conceives of it? is the satisfactions that flow. The satisfactions of the teachings that flow from yourself. And in this case, in a sashim, flow from the forms of the sashin. Yeah, from each other and from the senior practitioners. And hopefully from the teacher.

[34:36]

And when that flow of teaching and of satisfactions in the teaching, when that flow continues, there is Yeah, it's potentially and should be a very healthy situation. And the measure is the flow of the teaching and the satisfaction in the teaching. If we imagine something like the kind of several monasteries I saw in China, which were token monasteries for tourists, So they're fake?

[35:55]

Yeah, they're just... Token is... Token means a substitute. Yeah, like a bus token is a substitute for money. Mm-hmm. Yeah, they seemed to be populated by vagrants and prisoners in monk's robes. with a few undercover policemen dressed as monks. In such a situation, you need the law, because the satisfactions of the teachings are few. But here we are free to go and free to stay, I hope.

[36:59]

And so within that we have a certain freedom in how we develop the teaching. This is this sense of face-to-face teaching. The Buddha is here in the teaching, in the lineage. So this first craft is the face-to-face teaching which makes us face ourselves. And that's a craft because this is a new kind of relationship that we have to learn how to develop.

[38:01]

And I'm trying to learn it too. Thank you for your help. Okay, the next craft is stillness and sitting. No, developing stillness is not the whole of sitting. But at the stage of the practice I'm speaking about, where these crafts flow together into one entire being, then here I want to emphasize the stillness of sitting.

[39:17]

A stillness that fills us to our edges. And what's interesting here is the preciseness of the posture becomes extremely important. It's because of this emphasis on stillness that Zen emphasizes, more than any other school of Buddhism, the preciseness of the posture. To discover a deep physical, mental stillness.

[40:28]

If only for moments, again, these homeopathic doses are enough often. So if it's only a few times in sashin, it's still very good. It comes to some stillness where there's no before and after. As long as there's comparisons, there's no stillness, very little stillness. So the preciseness of the posture, which is really not something I can correct from outside walking around the zendo, I can see when it's unlikely that your posture is precise enough.

[41:33]

But the exactness of posture you have to find from inside. And at this point, Sukhiroshi used to say, sleepiness is the greatest enemy. So, I mean, naturally we're going to be sleepy sometimes, particularly sitting all day. And staying up late after Zazen giggling in the back kitchen. Just the time when we should be most still. Think of all the people in the zindo already sitting.

[42:45]

But Sukershi used to give a number of lectures, I remember, once about the enemy of sleepiness. And knowing that he slept sometimes in zazen. We had to try to understand why he said it was, along with Dogen, the worst enemy. Why he said it. We had to try to understand why Suzuki Roshi would say, along with Dogen, why sleepiness is the worst enemy. But you kind of have to go through sleepiness because you don't want a conscious sitting.

[44:00]

If you can't fall asleep in zazen, you also can't find stillness. Mm-hmm. Perhaps you know the mind just when you go to sleep. When involuntary breathing appears. And usually there's some physical sign of this shift from waking lying down to sleeping. Again, we all know I think we all know how easy it is usually to tell when a person's actually sleeping or pretending to be asleep.

[45:15]

We can feel the consciousness in their head. lying down. And in the Zendo I can see when there's too much consciousness in your posture. But, you know, if you've hitched your... hitched your awareness to your breath, It can follow, it sometimes will follow, breath from voluntary to involuntary. So awareness and not exactly consciousness will follow breath into the sleeping, dreaming mind.

[46:17]

And that sleeping, dreaming mind fills us, stretches out in us, stretches out in the bed. And calls to us what might be. And what we dread. Dread is to fear. But anyway, that experience of the mind's conscious mind spreading out into sleeping, dreaming mind.

[47:30]

It's quite similar to this shift from a mind that's rather conscious in Zazen to a mind that fills the edges of us, fills us to our edges. And strangely, mostly appears when our posture gets this kind of preciseness. Now the posture kind of It takes care of itself and suddenly our energy and awareness can completely relax.

[48:32]

Perhaps I should say, effort and awareness can relax. Because our posture has become a kind of mental energy. So we could say that this is, we could call this the appearance of big mind. And our edges become gates.

[49:35]

Which also call into us everything that's above and below. And everything that's bright and Not dark, but maybe night. And we feel filled and transparent. Now, in this mind, certainly investigation as noticing without thinking Without thinking. I remember someone got lost, a woman got lost at Tassajara once.

[50:43]

And she could have taken two or three paths. One would have taken her straight into the middle of 350,000 acres of wilderness. Acres. Acres. Well, less than hectares. Oh. Quite a bit less. At least half. Now you're getting precise. Well, 700,000 acres would be, you know, very big. It'd be a big chunk of Germany. Yeah. It's not so important.

[51:54]

It's large. It would take days and days and days to walk to the other end. It's a big part of central California. So she could have just walked straight in that. Every year people get lost and die in there. Or she could have taken a path out to the coast. I mean, excuse me, out to the inland valley. Or she could have taken a path toward the coast, which ended up back at Tassajara. So I was one other person who followed her tracks. First we had to figure out which were her tracks, because a whole group of us had gone hiking.

[53:07]

Only two or three people got lost, but only one really got lost. So we figured out which were her tracks. And at some point, there was still light enough to see which path she'd taken. I don't know why I'm telling you this. It's just an anecdote. Anyway, we saw which path she took, and it was the one that went back toward, over several miles, to Tassajara. And we came down this pass. By the time we got on it, down the edge of this cliff, it was really utter darkness. Lungtan blew out the moon, the sun.

[54:19]

And the path often had, you know, it wasn't a path anybody used much, and often it itself had slid down the mountain. So I remember walking, I had to just feel, I couldn't think. And this side was a huge drop and this side was the edge of the side of the clip. So I discovered that if I thought, hey, it's safe on this side, I'd start leaning this way as I was walking.

[55:29]

And of course leaning to the right was wrong. Because I kept falling when I leaned to the right and tried to walk. So I could only walk by feeling without thinking. And investigation is a lot like that. Something like a blind man who can only feel. So even seeing becomes touch.

[56:40]

Hearing becomes touch. Smelling, tasting even become a kind of touch. And touching itself becomes something soft. And the sign of this kind of practice working is when the world starts feeling soft. And it accompanies this sense of stillness, settling in us until there's no

[57:46]

There's no noise or disturbance. Because there's no outside anymore where noise or disturbance could arise. Anyway, it's that kind of something, that kind of feeling. So stillness has this catalytic or alchemical effect on us. And it's on the other side of stillness where investigation, which is noticing without thinking, begins to open up a world that we don't understand, that we can't fully explain, but it seems completely familiar to us.

[59:12]

It's not other. Oh dear, I only got to the second craft. Oh no, I sort of overlapped on the third. Mm-hmm. You know, there's a point in life where we take responsibility. We see our experience as our own. and take responsibility for our experience.

[60:23]

Like perhaps the first time we cross the street on our own as a child. There's various moments in which we recognize our experience as our own. And we take responsibility for it. I think these are thrilling moments. And then there are also moments when we recognize we can change. that our life can change that the streets that we cross or the streets that we follow you know we follow them but they seem to come from behind us and

[61:28]

reach ahead of us. And we walk these streets responsibly, something like that. At some point, we see that it's possible to find a path that becomes a way. Or the streets that come from behind us now arise from within us. And we can somehow, and the future comes to us. This is a sense of entering the way, entering a path.

[62:42]

Dogen tries to explain it or suggest it by saying the future moves from time... No, Dogen tries to express it by saying time moves from future to present. And time moves from present to past. When we have this experience of the future coming to us and our coming to the past, This is also Yuan Wu's one entire being. Okay. Thank you very much. May our intentions equally pierce through every being and every people with the true merit of the Buddha Path.

[64:19]

Sujong Mohen Seigando Mano nojim se gandha Homo noyot se gandhapur Utsurok mojot se gandhapur The Libra Beasts are tireless, I pray to guide them. Die Begierden sind unerschöpflich, ich gelobe sie aufzugeben. Die Darmatoren sind unermesslich, ich gelobe sie zu durchschreiten. Der Weg des Bruders ist unübertrefflich, ich gelobe ihn zu verhelfen. Satsang with Mooji

[65:40]

Re-ma-ken-no-shi-ju-ji-su-ru-ko-to-e-ta-ri Ne-ga-wa-gu-wa-no-rai-yo Shin-ji-tsu-ni-yo Geshi-ta-te-ma-tsu-ran I don't know. If you noticed or you think I'm bawling like a cripple, you're right.

[67:18]

I think we need one of those places for special parking to put over my cushions. Nobody else park there, please. Yeah, I seem to have somehow put my left knee out of joint. It's happened before. I injured myself. fooling around as a kid, well, 19, 18, jumping down an entire flight of stairs onto a stone floor being chased by a policeman.

[68:19]

There's nothing serious. It was just a spring riot at my college. But I was carried out to the crown, to the hospital, like a hero. My one moment. It was my one moment. That's what Andy Warhol says. He was right, you know. Anyway, ever since, every now and then, it used to go out every time I bowed.

[69:29]

And as I came up, I had to kind of flip my leg to have it back in when I was upright. Anyway, you don't have to explain any further. And then it's been quite good, but a few years ago at Creston it went out for, I don't know, it took me some months to get it to work again. And something's been wrong with it the last couple of months, but it worked. Today it's sort of stopped. So lunch was an experiment to see what I could do.

[70:33]

And I found I couldn't sit Caesar. Caesar is sitting like this, you know, and you're like... But I can sit cross-legged, so everything is fine. Except limping around my rooms upstairs, Marie-Louise says, now you finally do look old. Thanks. I'm going to play it for all it's worth. To play it for all it's worth means I'll make the best of it to get your sympathy. Okay. Anyway, it'll get better eventually.

[71:49]

So, hey, let's go back to body, speech and mind. Yesterday I tried to speak about the mind of body, speech and mind. Now again, these are ordinary words. Why are they so difficult to talk about in this practice? Well, it's a recognition of the relationship of body, speech and mind through the yogic, within the yogic practice of meditation. Now, what's the background of that? Well, What's a Buddha?

[73:00]

We could say a Buddha is an independent being. Yeah. A Buddha is one who what our human life is arises from. A Buddha is one from whom what our human life is arises. In other words, a Buddha is one who doesn't just take what life is from his surrounding or her surrounding culture. Buddha is someone who does not take life as it is in his surrounding culture. A kind of pre-cultural identity or primordial identity.

[74:06]

So if that's the image of Buddhism, then how do we get there? Or how do we approach that? Okay. Okay. Now, if you don't take your forms from the outside society, how do you know what to do? It makes me think of that kind of bad joke of a little kid who sits down on a bench next to what seems like an old man. And they have a little conversation and the boy finds out the man says he's not married.

[75:08]

And so the little boy says, then how do you know what to do? Well, so that's a, we understand that. That's what we understand. But how do we know what to do? If there's no rules or God-given rules or something cut in stone that tell us what human life is supposed to be. Well, We have to accept, Buddhism philosophically, shall we say, accepts at least, that what is must be okay.

[76:25]

Since there's no outside to this, I try to be so philosophical, but, you know, anyway, that's what I feel like today, maybe. I'm sorry to be so philosophical, but maybe that's what I feel like today with a broken leg. Okay. All philosophers are motivated by broken legs. Okay. So if... there's no outside to what is, then is is all we got. And if is is all we got, we might as well think it's okay. It's the better alternative. Mm-hmm. Okay. So, but we can look at our own life and see, yeah, most of our human life is not so okay.

[77:51]

But if everything that is, is somehow okay, then how do we adjust our life to this life? entire being. Okay, so that's basically the question Buddhist philosophy and teaching faces. And somehow the secret is tied to this strange word, speech. How do we adjust ourselves? How do we speak to ourselves?

[78:52]

In what mind does true speech occur? It's this kind of question that is implicit behind the teachings. And we learn to speak through others. I mean, Sophia right now is learning to speak through others. But although she learns to speak through others, what she speaks is particularly individual. And speaking is almost always intersubjective. We speak to others.

[80:11]

And we usually speak information, the doors over there, things like that. So language as a whole is primarily social, shall we say. But speech has a big part of being your own power. You can speak the way you want and we speak to ourselves. And what are we going to say to ourselves? So if we, again, assume that the entire, let's say that, sorry to use such a phrase as okay, the entire being is okay somehow,

[81:24]

So when we say that the whole being, excuse me, should I use an expression like okay when we say the whole being is okay? then somehow we have to come into attunement with the entirety of being. Yeah, so the first step would be, of course, how do we get into attunement with ourself? Mm-hmm. Well, body and mind have to somehow be woven together, first of all. And as I've said now several times, the secret of the Eightfold Path, if you see how these eight relate to each other,

[82:28]

And they can't be in the sequence of one to eight until your views are transformed. And you can't transform your views until you have some access to them. And you can't get access to your views until you bring mindfulness into your life. So mindfulness is way down the list. So what do you bring this mindfulness to? Now recently I've been saying versions of this fairly often. But I want you to really get it as an image in your mind.

[83:51]

So the Eightfold Path can be folded into your daily life. And hopefully your daily life can fold into the eightfold path. So what do we bring mindfulness to? And what's the vehicle of mindful attention? The vehicle is breath. And this breath attention is brought to speech. The third of the eightfold path. And that speech then through mindful attention, begins to affect our behavior, livelihood, and so forth.

[85:07]

And by entering the middle of the Eightfold Path with mindfulness, mindful attention, we can eventually transform our existence through the Eight in sequence. we can finally transform our existence through the eight in its order. Now the same sense of speech, this uniqueness of speech, is found in this teaching of body, speech and mind. And I, of course, in the first part of this practice month, went over some of this. And next year if you all come for the full month we won't have this problem.

[86:20]

But it's not a bad problem. I can repeat myself. Yeah, but it's still... But since I can't repeat myself, it's all right. I mean, it's because it's different. Okay, so... In this third ten-day period, we're speaking, it includes the sashin we're speaking about, mind. But I want to put that in the context of body and speech. Okay. Now, so a teaching like body, speech and mind is the attempt to Okay, we have some formulations, some formula.

[88:11]

Like the Eightfold Path or these three, body, speech and mind? then you can sense the dynamic of speech inseparability from body and mind. But we also want to try to bring some... turn this into a teaching. So that you can really see the dynamic of it in yogic practice. And we don't mean just some dictionary definition of body, speech and mind.

[89:18]

Okay, we mean some definition which arises through their unison and yogic practice. Now again, I emphasize how, I don't know if all languages in Asia, but certainly yoga culture and Japanese and Chinese don't talk about the material of the body as the same as the body. In English we have one word for both. I think in Japanese the word for the stuff, the substance, is butai. And the word for the intermediary between material and mind, the aliveness is karada.

[90:39]

But you don't treat karada as the body like you treat stuff. but you... but you treat... Sophia hasn't fully learned that yet. Or she pretends she hasn't learned it yet. Because she'll bang on the couch or something and then bang on my head just to say no. No, no. Okay, so body, speech and mind is also equated with heart, throat and head.

[91:49]

But again, It's equated with it in a way to point out a difference. So heart is body. Like we say, I open my heart to someone. Or my heart goes out to someone. And throat against speech. Halfway between. And head means the crown of the head or the jewel that's here or this little bump. Kopf meint die Krone des Kopfes mit diesem Juwel da oben, mit dieser Beule.

[93:00]

That the Buddha has. Die der Buddha hat. And Kai has, and he's trying to earn it. Und die Kai hat. I'm trying to imitate Kai.

[93:15]

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