This is, I believe, the sixth day, right? One more day to go. Four more Orioki meals. Trapped behind black bulls. Can you imagine if you're behind those bulls and you had an attack of diarrhea? How do you get out? People on both sides of you. bowls full of liquid in front of you trapped yeah I think it's a good time, this sixth day, to focus on, yeah, on one, any time, of course, but maybe sometimes any time comes up at a particular time.

[01:06]

Focus on this particular day, this kind of changeable weather, windy, and your particular mood and feeling from Sashin. And, um, where you're going, you know, after Sashin and after practice period. So like try to create a point in yourself that sums up how you feel in the Sashin and practice period and in this particular day and so forth. And that feeling, you know, I mean it's a good thing to do it anytime, but That feeling now can be used as one of those points or pauses like that kabuki actor to carry you through the remainder of the sashi. Now before I give a lecture, you know, I have a general idea of what I might talk about.

[02:15]

And I get that general idea in the Sashin, for instance, especially from watching your practice. I don't know why I say watching, because it's not about seeing, but anyway, watching, feeling your practice. And, of course, what I see and hear and doksan. And then, of course, the previous lectures, there's always a general... There's always, in a previous lecture, there's always things that usually, sometimes there's not. But usually there's things that imply a next step. So anyway, as I say, I have a general idea. Often I even talk about the general idea I have. But whether I do or not, my actual experience is I'm lost in the possibilities of the lecture.

[03:19]

I can feel the possibilities of the lecture, of what we might say now in our shared practice, but, you know, I really... I actually feel rather lost. And it's okay because... You know, sometimes it's not always a comfortable feeling. You know, what do I give? I don't know. Several hundred, some few hundred lectures a year. So, you'd think I wouldn't be lost every time, but I'm lost, you know, usually every time. And... as I say, it's not always a comfortable feeling, but it's a feeling of, I know no other feeling, almost no other feeling of such intimacy with, especially you. It's strange that this lost feeling, lost in the possibilities of a lecture, but that really means lost in the possibilities of what our mutual practice is,

[04:33]

this lost feeling should also be such an intimate feeling. Yeah, so today what I'd like to try to speak about is some kind of, what I could say is, you know, a relationship between the Dharmakaya body and the Sambhogakaya body. And the Dhammakaya is generally called the body of space. Space body. Not spaced out body. Space body. Or sometimes you can be more specific and say it's embodied all-at-onceness. Or everything all at once. That's useful. There are a lot of which I think Herbert Günther calls cover words.

[05:40]

In other words, they're words for something that's a deeply felt experience that you can't really name. And sometimes they're words or phrases for experiences that have no time duration but change your life. They have no language, but they change your life. Or whether they change your life or not, it's the same as changing your life because they're so deeply felt. And again, deeply felt is not... It's a kind of absolute knowing if you carry it far enough. And yet again, often there's no time duration, there's no language. So we have to have some word, cover word for that. And they occur in different categories. And then there's cutting through phrases. You know, and the cutting through phrase was also often physical, and then where you would, the teacher, and sometimes the disciple, would whack the teacher.

[06:44]

And it does stop thinking, you know, or shout. But it became a kind of habit, quats, you know, you shout, or anybody says anything, it gets kind of boring. Here comes quats again. So actually when you shout or use the stick or use a phrase, it should be unique, not repeated something, you know. It should come in the interior, not the exterior. It should come in the interior of the person who is receiving the cutting through phrase. So it means there again has to be tremendous mutuality. Sometimes we express that mutuality as elder to elder, elder brother to elder brother, elder brother to elder sister. One's not older than the other.

[07:48]

It's not senior to the other. Because there's so much, because it's so constituted from mutuality. So dharmakaya in some ways is a word like that. for an experience. But we can also, because we do have to also express how the sense of Buddha is not just the historical Shakyamuni or some particular enlightened person, but the always present potential and in fact presence of Buddhahood, of enlightenment in everything. So that's called Dharmakaya. Okay, so that's a useful word, you know, etc. But let's talk about the dynamic of the Dharmakaya or the functioning of the Dharmakaya. That's a little harder to do, but it's much more essential for our practice.

[08:55]

And I'd say it's simple, and I'm trying to give code words now, I mean, we're near the end of Sashin, so I'm trying to give you some language you can use without too much explication. We might say that the functioning of the Dharmakaya or the opening of the Dharmakaya in the way the Dharmakaya pours into us, let's put it that way, is when there's not wholeness, but the The non-duality of non-duality? That doesn't help much, does it? Hey, I'm trying. OK. OK, we have the experience of being a part and a whole. We're a part, and yet somehow we're a whole.

[09:59]

And you can't put that into words. It doesn't just fit into words. It doesn't fit into philosophy. But it's an actual experience. you're a part and simultaneously a whole. So there's a wholeness which is part and whole. Do you understand? So the wholeness which is part and whole we could call the non-duality of non-duality. Or the same intimacy of one and many. There's many things but somehow sameness at the same time. Or there's, again, Not one. And not one is not oneness. Or not two-ness is not oneness. So not one, not two, that's what we say. That's one of the most profound things you can say about Buddhism. It's not one. You say it's one, though. It's also many. It's not two, it's not many, it's also one.

[11:00]

But not one and not two can't be grasped, and it has no time duration, except it is timelessness. So not one, not two. So to allow yourself to be in this quality of not one, not two, is the dynamic of the Dharmakaya, functioning through the Dharmakaya, functioning as the Dharmakaya. Because all of these terms, for us Yogacara Zen Buddhists, have to have a practice for actuality. Now one of the strangest things of all, to me, but something I'm very familiar with, but it remains strange, is that changes in view change your body. If you have a change in view in the way you think, your body starts to change.

[12:04]

Now if I review a bit what we have talked about, we go back to some time ago we talked about the moment of death, which is a very important moment in Buddhism, not because it's your last moment. Why is it a very important moment in Buddhism? Why is it the quintessential moment? Because it's the moment when there's the dissolution of constituents. The necessary, necessitated dissolution, voluntary or involuntary, of constituents. If you're a practitioner, at the moment of death or at the time of death or preceding death, you begin to voluntarily dissolve the constituents. Mainly, let's keep it simple, the four elements, the five skandhas, and the visnyanas.

[13:13]

And you consciously, intentionally do this, but it's going to happen anyway, because you're going to die, which is the dissolution of the constituents, so you might as well make it voluntary. But, you know, many of us have trouble making a will let alone start dissolving the constituents. Now, it's pretty hard to actually dissolve the constituents unless you have quite a kind of wisdom sense and security in sitting practice and so forth. But sometimes it happens to you anyway. Someone, you know, you're feeling a little woozy and you go to a doctor. The doctor says, I'm afraid you have an inoperable brain tumor. The constituents begin to dissolve.

[14:19]

You think, oh, shit. You know. Scheiße. I'll tell you how much German I know. Okay. Okay. Or they tell you you've got cancer or you've got HIV positive or whatever. It's a, you know, it often opens a person to practice. Because there is suddenly the constituents. There's a dissolution of the constituents because our body... Our body is the whole of our existence. If your body dies, the rest is gone too. So no matter what you think in your consciousness, etc., etc., actually your body is the manifestation of the totality of your knowledge.

[15:25]

So when the body is shook, it shakes up everything. I mean, you know that. I mean, somebody can tell you, boy, you're neurotic. You don't like it. You tell somebody you've got inoperable cancer or something. This is much worse than being neurotic. So the body in Yogacara way of thinking, Zen way of thinking, is where we see the fullness of knowledge that a person inhabits. which includes all your views. Now, what I'm trying to do is work around to this funny idea, you know, funny fact, that if you begin to change your views, you change your body. And this is actually one of the functions of zazen sitting practice.

[16:38]

I'm sorry, it is meant to actually cause you a certain amount of pain Because pain, there's somehow the concentration and fragmentation that occurs through pain. And if you're sitting there after a while, you know, and it's interesting, again, as I say, you can fall asleep for six hours and your body can stay in one position. It's very hard to sit in a cushion for six hours in one position or sit anywhere in one position. We'll bring a big easy chair in here, big cushions, you know, for a lofty, softy. And you can just sit, like I say, sit back and enjoy yourself. Do not fall asleep for six hours. I mean, I don't think you could last an hour. So why can't you? You can do it in your sleep. What is it about ordinary consciousness that doesn't, that makes you hurt?

[17:46]

There's a, Gonpoppa says that, flat out he says, if you do not meditate, You simply, whether you like it or not, you will be subject to restlessness and conflicting emotions all your life. That's just a fact, he says. I wouldn't say it that strongly because I don't want to condemn all non-meditators to a dubious hell of restlessness and conflicting emotions. But Gampopa says flat out, only people who meditate actually ever get free of restlessness and conflicting emotions. So there's some kind of alchemy of concentration and fragmentation. You can survive the pain through concentration, but the pain also fragments you. You begin to, if it gets bad enough, you kind of, you don't know who you are, you start getting lost in this endo.

[18:55]

You start getting lost even whether you're upside down or right side up. Because it's beginning to knock out our body sheaths or our thought sheaths. So here I'm trying to aim at an explanation of this strange phenomena that when you begin to have resonance with wholeness, you begin to reverberate internally. Now the Dharmakaya is an experience of resonating with, we can use the word resonating, with wholeness. with all-at-onceness, with non-duration. All-at-onceness, how can all-at-once, it's all-at-once, have duration? It doesn't have duration. But you can resonate with all-at-onceness. This is also sometimes described as omniscience.

[19:59]

That moment is an all-knowing because you're acting through all-knowing, and that all-knowing can only be the implicit knowing of the whole body. And this, we could also call the big pause I mentioned yesterday, bodhicitta. we could say that bodhicitta, the thought of enlightenment, the movement toward enlightenment, the dynamic of the thought of enlightenment is this pause, where you pause for a moment. There's also a feeling I can, maybe I can describe it as you feel as if your internal presence You feel as if your internal presence settles on the whole of the present as presence.

[21:08]

You feel as if your internal presence settles on the whole of the present as presence. It almost feels then like an eternal present. And there's a funny experience too, if you really sit straight, it's almost like there's a big backbone out there. You find yourself sitting straight, and it's like the whole world, there's some kind of invisible backbone in the world that straightens up. I cannot tell you why there is such a powerful resonance and reverberation between us and the world in certain states of mind. But that's what the Dharmakaya and Sambhogakaya are all about. Coming into that residence. And what happens when there's enough pain and zazen and frustration, etc., many of you begin having, feeling your body change.

[22:13]

Now, I don't know if I should, you know, do a sasin where this happens with you. I don't know how I could prevent it, exactly. Easier schedule. No, 40-minute periods. Couches and Zendo. Somebody to wash your feet. And not bad. Didn't the Romans try something like that? But there's a certain responsibility if we create a zendo, a sashin that's demanding enough to begin to affect your body, you know, then you have to leave sashin and you're in the middle of a process, a process that actually can take months. So it's actually a complex question for me to what I should talk about in the sashin

[23:20]

how strict the Sashin should be. It's a little bit like, again, when you cease to feel, and I'm just throwing stuff out here, you know, when you cease to feel a representational world represented by the senses. in which you project yourself into it. You begin to have this feeling of convergence as if all the many causes, all the possibilities of the presence are converging in you. There's almost a geometric shift from projection to yourself becoming the focal point. And as your views change, they have this geometric effect on you. And again, your body sheath, I've spoken about that before, but the simplest way to describe it, so you get the feeling of a body sheath, the simplest way I've thought of it, I've thought of two or three ways, but the others require anecdotes, is when your arm falls asleep.

[24:36]

It's asleep, you don't know where the darn thing is. It's gone, and finally you, or your leg, and that happens more often than your arm, it's a sheath, So you don't know where the hell your leg is, and you have to get up soon. Lunchtime is over. Where's that leg? Sometimes both are gone. Actually, we have a palanquin up, right? And anybody signals, we come and get you on a stretcher. Anyway, your leg's gone, and you don't know where the heck it is. visiting some other dimension. But you find one toe. And as soon as you find one toe, the whole leg appears. Because what's appeared? The leg is still asleep. The image of the leg has appeared. You locate your whole leg from the image of the leg. That means your entire body is sheathed, sheathed is a casing, is sheathed

[25:46]

in an image of the body. And you're contained in that image of the body. And that image of the body, if that image is sick, it makes you sick. If that image is deluded, it makes you deluded. Another sad thing about culture's gone awry is the way we exteriorize the world is the way we interiorize ourselves. The way we view the outer world is the way we come to view the inner world. That's one of the huge problems of how we're so outer-directed. How we define ourselves through outer things, outer reactions of people, outer possibilities, and pretty soon there's no real inner. And you have to turn that arrow, as Sukhusha says, towards yourself.

[26:47]

And funny, when you turn it towards yourself, turn a view towards yourself, your body begins to change. Sometimes actually shakes. Some of you have these shakes, both visibly or invisibly. Things having to do with your heat, having to do with your energy in your body, in your back, especially in your backbone. begin to change. Your body is changing because your views have changed. And that's the sambhogakaya. The sambhogakaya is the body, when it begins to resonate with wholeness, when there begins to be an experience of wholeness, of all-at-onceness, that experience begins to make the body reform itself. The image sheath and thought sheath begin to reconfigure so that you know in your body connectedness, not separation.

[28:00]

And it's this bliss, the so-called bliss body, The experience is when there's this mutuality of wholeness with another person or with phenomena, bliss arises in you. It's a fact. Like I can say, I don't know, if you poke your eye, it hurts or something. You eat sugar, you feel good. Some people do. If you come into this mutuality like a... I don't know what the expression would be. It follows, kind of almost logically, that this mutuality in resonance with the feeling of wholeness So now you can know when in your practice you begin to have experience of bliss, it means you're beginning to taste, touch the mutuality of wholeness of yourself with others and with the world.

[29:21]

And this is again the dynamic and functioning of compassion. So again, compassion isn't a moral idea in Buddhism. That's the outer shape of it. Compassion is a way of functioning through a realized resonance with others and with the world. When you really do feel your presence, the wholeness of your presence, settle on the whole of the present as presence. Okay, so going back to the moment of death and the dissolution of the constituents. Again, remember that, and I didn't talk in the Sashin about, before the Sashin I talked about the different kinds of enlightenment, prior enlightenment, original enlightenment, initial enlightenment, those are prior enlightenments, sudden enlightenment, enacted enlightenment,

[30:45]

But that's the background of some of the things I'm saying here. So remember that your consciousness is the field of karma. Your consciousness at each moment, what we mean by consciousness, is constituted from your accumulated experience. That accumulated experience constantly reinforces your accumulated experience. So it's like you've got this pattern here and every moment brings exterior kind of information in and brings associations from You're passed in, and it keeps falling into the same shapes, into the same bucket, into the same patterns, into the same flow. And every time it does it, you reinforce your karma.

[31:54]

One of the ways you change that is the dissolution of the constituents. So the Heart Sutra is a remedy, a menu for death, a remedy, a prescription about how to die. here's the skandhas, here's the vijnanas, dissolve them. No form, no feelings is there. But also in any moment, if you have the feeling of dissolving constituents, and what is the focal constituent? Duality. The focal, all of the constituents tend to get their form and reification from seeing things in a dual way. self and other over there, here, and so forth. The denial of connectedness, the denial of the functioning compassion.

[32:57]

And so karma just keeps its hold on us. And the brilliance of this view is that if you at each moment lessen duality, you begin to create a karma-fluid zone or karma-free zone. And we were talking about Freud the other day. Freud didn't know about a karma-free zone. He didn't know anything about how to work with a person so they created a karma-fluid zone. So you just didn't have to understand your karma. You could transform and free yourself from your karma. So all these practices, the practice named non-naming, to practice peeling the name off things, is to create a karma fluid zone, to kind of dissolve the patterns. So your karma, your patterns have a chance to reconstitute themselves. Or shifting to a sense, shifting your sense priority.

[34:07]

If your sense priority, as almost all of it is, is a sighted world you shift to an unsighted world, to sound or touch. I use the example of washing your feet. There's less subject-object distinction when you simply are blind. not in a sighted world, where you don't shape your world, represent your world through sight. Except it's necessary not to fall down the stairs, and things like that. So what we've been discussing is these various ways, in fact, in the Sashin,

[35:09]

of creating this karma-free, karma-fluid zone, which allows you to open up, or what do I say, free of distinctions, which allows you to open up by taking distinctions away, by taking, at the moment of of establishing a duality, you dissolve the duality, this is one of the ways you open yourself to resonance with all-at-onceness, with allness. And that resonance generates the dharmakaya and generates the sammukhakaya and begins to actually transform your body. No, I think Shosan Ceremony is coming up, which is, you know, you've all asked me a question, right?

[36:18]

Sorry. But maybe I should say something about questions, because I noticed in Rhonda's beautiful Shoso Ceremony that there was a tendency to ask her unanswerable questions. And, I mean, you can't really... If somebody says... to me, for instance. What is emptiness? How am I going to answer that? You might ask, what is the entry to emptiness? Or something. Or, show me non-duality. No. These are not answerable questions, but they're askable if they arise out of your own experience. What is emptiness?

[37:22]

Emptiness is, as a practice, is to free yourself from distinctions. As a practice, it's to free yourself from categories, from the categories of conceptual thought. So let's take the classic question, a good one, in Case 98 of the Shoyuroku, A monk asks, among the three bodies of Buddha, which one does not fall into any categories? He's just asking, what is emptiness? But he's asking it from his own experience. When you ask a question that sophisticated, it lasts for centuries. We're still thinking about it. So why don't you ask me some questions that will last for centuries that I won't be able to answer. Okay, so here we can imagine this monk is practicing with the Dharmakaya and the Sambhogakaya as I have described it.

[38:26]

And he experiences this all-at-onceness. He experiences this openness to totality. through dissolving distinctions. But then he finds this begins to produce distinctions in his body. His backbone starts feeling different. He tingles up here at the top of his head. His bubbles begin appearing in his body. He's sort of monk mint gas. Oh, not that kind of gas. That's a sheen gas. Various things happen to him. So what does he notice? He notices that through the experience of opening himself to non-distinctions, he begins to have new distinctions in his own body.

[39:35]

His own body begins to have new categories of experience. So then he asks a question, because he's now involved in what is emptiness, what is non-distinctions. So he says to Dungsan, among the three bodies of Buddha, and we're presuming, and I'm sure Dungsan wouldn't have answered the question if he hadn't himself been practicing with the three bodies of Buddha. Among the three bodies of Buddha, which one does not fall into any categories? And Dungsan said, I'm always close to this. So Dungsan answered the question and gave him a practice to realize the body which does not fall into any categories. So the monk then, from then on, assuming he's an alert monk, which we have to assume after all these centuries, he practices from then on with, I'm always close to this.

[40:37]

Whatever happens, Now he's not practicing with non-distinction or non-naming or peeling the names off. He's practicing, I'm always close to this. I'm always close to this is very much like saying part and whole. Am I the part? No. Am I the whole? No. I'm always close to this. Not one, not two. I'm always close to this. So if you want to ask a question, you can ask whatever question you want, but as practice you try to find a question that flows from your own practice and flows in the direction you intuitively want your practice to go but don't know what the next step is. And you ask a question which, by doing that, creates territory in which the teacher or me can ask, can answer.

[41:46]

So the question should give the teacher some territory in which to answer. Otherwise, it's just kind of in the air. In other words, you create a question, but you also create a territory of practice which not only shows where your question comes from, without being long-winded, but also shows, gives a territory for me or someone to enter in in a practice way. Because I'm not interested in that philosophy. I'm interested in entering into your practice through the question. And you can't just ask a traditional question like, I'm not asking about the needle. What about many holes? Because unless you're Eijo, I can't give you Dogen's answer. So instead of saying pierced, I might say pissed. That's your question.

[42:50]

No, what's wrong with you today? I'm sorry. But if you, I mean, I remember Dan, I think once, when I was back from somewhere in Japan, You asked me some questions about form as emptiness. Sukhya Rishi had me at Tathāsara give some lectures, a lecture, a talk. So I did, and people asked me questions. Sukhya Rishi was tough with me. And I think you, maybe it wasn't you, said, what is something about form or emptiness? So I was trying to say something about form or emptiness, and Sukhya Rishi just shut me up. And he said, you don't understand. And then afterwards he took a walk the next day in the fields, you know. Didn't say anything. But, you know, it was kind of embarrassing in front of 60-some people to be told, shut up, you don't know what you're talking about. I couldn't have asked that question. So I, you know, I find if I say even the mildest things to you guys, you can...

[43:59]

But anyway, he was such a nice guy. And also, I always thought he was going back to Japan the next day, so I had to toughen myself up. So among the three bodies of Buddha, knowing the Dharmakaya, the dynamic of the Dharmakaya, functioning the dharmakaya, and its resonance within oneself, when all-at-onceness converges, when wholeness converges in your own body, begins to change your own body, changes body sheaves and image sheaves, is there anything that does not fall into categories? I'm always close to this.

[45:13]

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