I hope, Ralph, after the calmness of Thangarayogasthi, all this stuff going on in Sashin isn't too disturbing for you. And sometimes I come to the point of asking myself what I'm doing, what we're doing. And you've heard my Many of you have heard my reflections on this at various times. And it's not that I'm discouraged, I'm surprisingly undiscouraged in practicing. Sometimes I think I should be discouraged, given how ineffective it is, all in all, and how little And nothing, anyway.

[01:04]

So anyway, it comes upon me to reflect on what we're doing. And Dan Welch and David Chadwick being here made me exacerbated my thinking about it. David's writing this book on Suzuki Roshi, who unquestionably, I think, was one of the really fine people on this planet. But David said that in writing this book, thinking about this book, which he was partly asked to do for various reasons, I think he's a good choice, actually, of a person to write the book.

[02:14]

No one's written a book yet about him. But David, in talking to people, has discovered that many people who practice with Suzuki Rishi have in the end felt that they were failures at Zen practice, at Buddhism. And I think probably more people who, than who practiced with Sukri, she felt like failures. People who practiced with me in San Francisco and Tassara, Green Gulch, felt like failures. Now, I don't want to make anyone feel like a failure. And it's a kind of dilemma, you know?

[03:21]

And I can't wait till I'm 85 or 95 years old and so matured that I don't make anyone feel not so good sometimes. Now, Buddhism is a practice based on enlightenment. Already we have a double bind here. And you can ask me, you can ask yourself in your mind, Is he enlightened or am I enlightened or something like that? And if you ask me, I have to say, no, I'm not. And I have to say that partially because it doesn't occur in such categories as I am or I am not.

[04:40]

But if you ask me, do I have the confidence to teach a practice based on realization? Absolutely. And you wouldn't want it otherwise. Does enlightenment mean that your personality is perfected or that you're omniscient or something like that? No. Does it mean that your personality rests on a different basis? Yes. Does it mean the way you perfect yourself is different? Yes. Now, I could also, you know, what can I say?

[05:53]

How can I not teach what we see in the sutras and the koans? Someone has to do it, you know, even at least the best we can. I'm not interested at all in adjusting, as you know, as adjusting Buddhism to contemporary tastes or interests. However, I don't want to make anyone feel like a failure, and the way I understand Buddhism, it shouldn't make anyone feel like a failure. But in this world of change, practice is not a foregone conclusion. And I don't know... I think part of the problem is the metaphors we have for describing our own life.

[07:02]

So I'm trying to poke around and see if I can come up with better metaphors or more productive metaphors for practice. For the body, in Buddhism, is not something that is. It's something that's cultivated or sought. And it's not something adjusted to a norm by therapy or something. Not that I'm not saying all therapy is to adjust to a norm. And in fact, it's in one level to become supernormal. But that's not so important. That's a kind of byproduct if it occurs. But at least when you cultivate a garden, you don't teach a garden, you cultivate a garden.

[08:08]

You can teach gardening, but you cultivate a garden. And the body in yogic... Practice is something that you cultivate, something you discover. Now to look at basics, as we've gone over before, we have two minds that are accessible, more or less accessible, to consciousness. Waking and dream sleep. And we have the mind of deep sleep which is experienceable but not accessible to consciousness. And what all of yogic teaching and Buddhism states is that there's a fourth and inclusive mind

[09:11]

That is not in the categories of waking or dreaming. So it cannot be realized through the categories of waking or dreaming. Now if you don't believe this, have faith in this, you really can't practice very well. I mean you can't do the kind of practice we're doing and you So then practice has to be about conduct and the way you view the world and etc., which is also Buddhism. But the Buddhism of the sutras, the root of Buddhism, Buddhism of the koans is based on realization. So, what's the problem with realization? Well, I think we have to have a teaching which recognizes realization in a wide sense.

[10:20]

It's been too much identified with Protestant conversion experiences, which it sometimes is like, and some kind of huge experience. No, it's a turning around. But how does this turning around occur? Well, in a way you have to have the faith and doubt, the complete faith and complete doubt to feel or imagine the presence of a fourth way of being that you can't access through the ordinary doors we're familiar with. Now this is Samantabhadra's door. presented in this koan we looked at, the door you enter without taking a step.

[11:21]

So you can have, that's a kind of wado, turning word, koan, the door you enter without taking a step. Now it's very clear, if you want to sleep, a certain kind of immobility is necessary. You can't sleep walking around. I mean, Sometimes during Sashin you can sleep walking around. But in general we need for deep sleep a certain immobility. Well, uncontrived awareness or non-intentional awareness needs for you deeply to know this you need to be immobile. So we sit in satsang. And you sit in zazen before this door, which you enter without taking a step. I love the expression of that guy.

[12:27]

He says, one thing he says is, I think, you find, this is something the mountains, rivers, and earth teach you. He also says, I'm presenting these three doors to you, one of them being samantabhadras, as a provisional teaching. Like taking a broken stick to stir the ocean, so that the dragons and fishes know that the water is their life. So I have this broken stick, Sukhriya gave me, and I'm stirring, trying to stir, This fourth mind, this ocean, very effective. Very hard to stir the ocean with a broken stick. But we don't have much else.

[13:28]

Now if this doesn't make sense to you, if you don't feel this or intimate this, it's really hard to practice. And my job partly is to find ways to intimate this to you point out to you, give you a feeling for how this is already your own experience. If you can't touch home, and as a Yogacara teacher, my job is to find ways to touch into your own experience so that you feel the proximity of the Dharmakaya. But I have to be, you know, If I make you feel it, will you feel it on your own through practice? And Kukai, the founder of the Shingon school, a tantric school in Japan, understood grace in Buddhism to be that the experience of the dharmakaya cultivates the body.

[14:39]

This is the very same idea as Tathagata's net. that sitting in zazen, that zazen mind cultivates the body. Helps you discover the true body or Buddha nature, however we choose to describe it. But if I describe it too well, or it's too clear to you, you will immediately, I mean it's natural, it's our habit, you will immediately make sense of it in terms of your usual states of mind. And if you make sense of it in terms of your usual states of mind, conscious waking mind and accessible dream mind, you then, it comes under the sway, the control, the influence of your ego, yourself, your personality. Again, transmission is called no tongue in two bodies.

[15:46]

Or we could say no body and one tongue. These are expressions that attempt to take things out of our usual categories, but we tend to put them in our usual categories. Now, the memories which are most powerful for us are almost always non-intentional experiences, something that happened by surprise. Even falling in love is usually a surprise. I mean, you may intend, you may want to fall in love. Probably the more you want to fall in love, the less you will. You have to be ready to fall in love, I suppose. I don't know. But I think it's always a surprise when you deeply fall in love. If it wasn't a surprise, it's something... You know, it's not love, it's something convenient.

[16:58]

Another kind of love, perhaps. But this quality of surprise... we can say non-intentional experience, non-intentional awareness, uncontrived awareness, is a state of mind that's somewhat like being on the edge of falling in love all the time. I mean, when you fall in love, you hear birds you feel the sunlight in the breeze. But that's there, whether you're in love or not, it's there. But that kind of mind is not usually accessible to us. Now here I'm talking about cultivation,

[18:07]

and sudden enlightenment or a turning around realization. And you can ask, what's the difference between realization and cultivation? Well basically the kind of cultivation I'm talking about here in Samantabhadra's door is You put yourself in proximity to the Dharma. You put yourself in proximity to a fourth state of mind, or in proximity to something you know not but can intimate. Pessoa has a book of poetry, Portuguese poet, called the surprise of being. Being itself is a surprise.

[19:12]

But so in our contrived mind, it's no surprise. Now, from the point of view of this, what I'm talking about, uncontrived awareness, that non-intentional experience make the deepest memories. And when you see something or hear something that brings back some memory, it's not something you can intend. As I said to someone recently, if you, after the lecture, if you step outside and you hear the birds a certain way, it may bring back the first time you heard birds a certain way. But it's not something you can plan to do. Well, if you sit satsang and sit sashing, practice spirit, these things happen more often perhaps, but they happen anyway. But it's not something you can plan.

[20:14]

You can't even plan the calling back of this memory. This memory, which is of itself, is a memory of an uncontrived, non-intentional experience. But what you can do, and here's where cultivation comes in, is you can remember or feel the state of mind that appears when such a memory comes back. It's almost like a substrate, understand, to the memory. Now some scholars take the view that there hasn't been anyone enlightened in 300 years. or that in this day and age that enlightenment is not possible. And some scholars take the view that enlightenment's a lot of bunk, that it's a kind of carrot held by manipulative Buddhists on a very long pole.

[21:27]

You know what, do you have that image in German of a carrot on a pole? Yeah. Yes? Yeah. Yeah, okay. pole so long you can't see to the end of it. This we can call as carrot control. I don't, I don't, can't take either of those positions. I can't teach and live with the idea that somehow enlightenment is in some, the 10th century. Practice is Here. Enlightenment is here. The Dharmakaya is here. This day and age, how can you make such comparisons? There's no day and age. There's just us exactly here. Now what this koan is trying to point out is, you know, they ask, where has all the commotion gone?

[22:41]

Where has yesterday's commotion gone? We could ask that today. Or Ralph would ask, where has all today's commotion come from? But the rest of us would ask, where's all the commotion of yesterday's strawberry shortcake and so forth gone? As Schwanzer asked. And Zhao Peng pulls up his occasion and says, I hid a piece of strawberry shortcake under my earpiece. Now the purest way to teach is to just put a wall in front of yourself and to practice, to put a wall in front of yourself, to put a wall, to support a wall in front of your students with no thinking about it, no cultivation, just, you know.

[23:47]

Trouble is this can easily become a style, empty style, It also only, I mean, maybe only the best students and the luckiest realize. But in fact, it is a style. There are many other ways, additional ways of teaching Buddhism, but that has to be there as a basic. Somehow you have an intimation of a world hidden within the world that can't be seen because it's hidden within the world itself. So the practice of the Samantabhadra is the door which you enter without a step is the sense of this immediate proximity of the Dharmakaya

[24:52]

and also of realization, which you keep opening yourself to, unhindering yourself, and yet you don't know. Now, our personality can only sustain this kind of attitude for a certain length of time without getting very bored or very discouraged or something. So it really requires faith. I can't explain why some people have this faith and some don't. But if the faith is deep enough and the doubt is deep enough, since I know this is a fact of existence and non-existence, that it's not far away. I'm always close to this, said Damsha. How do you practice? I'm always close to this. But when we present this, I mean, the word change, there's a word, I believe in Chinese, which means not only change, but transmutation, transformation.

[26:08]

As we exist in this as we have this existence, which is the nature of change and possibly transformation and transmutation, how can there not be some danger or some yes or no? I don't know how to avoid it, you know. You know, you may want to fall in love all your life and have a friend who was in his 60s before he deeply fell in love. But it may or may not happen. And if it doesn't happen, you may think you know what falling in love is, but then you may not. And you may think you know what Buddhism is, and then you may not, and you may, etc.

[27:19]

There's some kind of inexplicable territory here. And you have to be willing to put yourself into this inexplicableness, into this mystery, into this bewilderedness. Bewilderedness in English literally means to be in the wilderness. To be lost in the wilderness. And one of the doors of Samantabhadra is a bewildered state of mind. So when you join your mind to your breath, bringing your attention to your breath, you are cultivating the subtle body. You're cultivating first of all a subtle breath, which is no longer just breath, but breath in mind that permeates the body in a way breath alone does not.

[28:25]

Now if you don't have that metaphor, that image, it's very difficult to really feel what happens. as you bring mind and breath together, cultivating a subtle body-mind breath and cultivating a subtle body-mind. But here's, that's the same exactly, but feels, etc., from a different basis. Now you can ask again, what's the relationship between realization and the cultivation of a subtle body-mind? Well, some degree, I think, I experience, I believe, some degree of realization is necessary before you can actually have the kind of intention

[29:39]

or willingness to sojourn in, to stay. To cultivate means to revolve in one place, to have the beginning and end on the same line, to have the beginning and end on the same line. To circumscribe yourself in the proximity of the Dharmakaya, The cultivating a non-intentional awareness requires some realization. And also the cultivation of a subtle body-mind makes realization, the turning around much deeper and more thorough. So I ask you to see if you have the faith, this kind of faith that's not in the realm of picking and choosing.

[30:52]

That state of mind isn't very deep. Necessary, much of the time. But in some instances, some areas of our life, practice, the intimacy of practice, intimacy of sitting down. And we're not really a whole group of people here. Each one of us is all of us. And so you're completely alone in a funny way. But yet you include everyone here. That inclusiveness extends. You can't say where that boundary is. But I ask you to cultivate or to see if you can have this kind of faith. To sit yourself down in this space of yourself.

[32:07]

And with an intention which is also no intention. I'm sorry to speak in riddles like this, but it's, I don't know what else to say. As it's an intention to have this uncontrived awareness or this non-intentional mind. Non-intentional mind is... So you can... We're subtle enough to have an intention to realize or to experience or awaken a non-intentional mind which makes the Dharmakaya not even a step away and which cultivates this body Now, this practice may not be something everyone can do or wants to do or should do.

[33:35]

That's completely understandable to me. And I don't think you can say one thing is better than another. And I think even if it's not what you want to do with the faith of 100%, still some kind of cultivation occurs anyway. at a psychological level, at a personal level, at a physical level. I'd like to use sort of Zen-type images like sit as if they were the precipices of immense cliffs all around your seat. I don't know, it's kind of corny to say that, but actually I feel something.

[34:40]

And at the same time in that, you completely accept whatever you're like, whatever you feel. It's not about repressing feelings or feeling. It's just you sit there. I know whether you're a schmuck or a glowing, you know, night insect. Still, the cliff remains. And maybe you can feel breath, mind cultivating your body, changing the basis, awakening the basis, cultivating in these tendons, you know, these areas that aren't about thinking but still something is being processed or occurring

[35:50]

these medicine making areas. Letting your garden grow. And we don't know how our garden will grow. Penetrate every place.

[36:25]

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