said that he was worried that with the invention of written characters that people were going to which which are outside you they were going to lose the inner characters that are part of you um the king of egypt thomas i think i said it And Buddhism has tried to keep an inner writing or inner memory process continuing despite the fact that we have memory stored in language too. And the whole, again, I've had given talks on dharanic memory, but the whole process of creating, sort of physically fixing non-graspable feelings, Just as you, listening to tape, the context of the seminar comes back.

[01:23]

That ability to bring the context of the seminar back with the thing is this kind of inner memory. And sometimes it's non-graspable feelings, sometimes it's images, sometimes it's things you can call images, but it's really a matrix of feelings. I like this staff, I've been showing it to people, because here they have, it's a lotus teaching staff, And here's the lotus embryo. And here's the bud. And here's the seed pod. But where's the flower? As a teaching staff, it means the flower is in you. And if the teaching is going, it's blooming in you, and you're storing that memory in yourself, or the flower is emptiness.

[02:38]

So this kind of experience you store in a new kind of memory you develop. And this matures your continuum. And more and more the teachings, the seeds of the teachings find a kind of cultivated continuum to grow in. So sometimes, again, coming back to it, you have the experience of your body filling the room. Now you may have an image that, well, that it's bumping into everyone else's, everybody's feeling my body. And that's partly true.

[03:49]

We can feel each other and you can feel... You know how when you start to go to sleep, you can be thinking of things and suddenly sleep grabs you and pulls you into sleep. Well, meditation can grab you and pull you into, as I said yesterday, this mind can pull you into concentration rather than dispersing. And if you generate a strong spatial body, you will pull people into it. And it's considered not appropriate to do that unless you have people's agreement. tacit agreement at least.

[04:54]

So, but what the teaching is that really this doesn't interfere. It penetrates everywhere, but doesn't interfere. Okay. So, So I think, why don't we sit for one or two minutes or something like that? And I will, after the break, we'll come back to this a little bit. How to stop interfering with thusness. Or how to open up thusness. How to stop interfering with your big mind.

[05:58]

For me, it means to meet each other in so many ways. To use the ordinary ways like our conversation. And also sometimes to swim together under the structures of society, of culture. To swim under and over and in the midst of. Swimming alone sometimes and swimming together sometimes.

[07:02]

Zheng Zhao said, heaven and earth share the same root. Myriad beings and I, the same body. Do we have a feeling for what Zheng Zhao meant? We see it in the eyes.

[08:32]

We know it in the eyebrows. She's getting better. Maybe since some people have to leave pretty soon and a few have left already, we'll sit at the end of the time and start right away now. Someone suggested that we have some report or playback from the groups, so let's do that first.

[09:37]

Anything you'd like to again bring into our larger attention? Jemand hat vorgeschlagen, dass es einen Bericht aus den Gruppen geben sollte und vielleicht sollten wir damit beginnen und auch mit dem was ihr noch zur Aufmerksamkeit der ganzen Gruppe bringen wollt. No? Just following his instructions. Okay. I feel that in our book the issue was very much how can we continue with practice and how can we organize it and continue with our practice. And how can we organise it?

[10:53]

Basically, how to organise, how to get a setting for continuing practice and to practice. And basically, it was about how we can really practice the practical requirements with Richard. And there were several suggestions, like to set up a sector in Germany, Austria, whatever, to rank the flag where you could live. But it went down to... Some more realistic, a bit more shorter, short term, immediate plan. Is that there was a strong wish to have you here in Rastenberg for one week? And what also came up as a possibility is to have a sitting day in Rostock for people in the area in Vienna to sit one day and would try to organize something.

[12:16]

This was a productive group. I have the feeling I'm helping you with English and she's helping you with German. So that was pretty good. Any other group have anything to say? Yes? We only talked about the koans. The serious group. We were the only ones laughing. Nothing really came out, but different opinions and approaches to stay with the case or pick out some parts of the commentary and later.

[13:35]

And so sometimes it became more clear, but then it disappeared. And nothing really came out. We didn't have any results, but it was just an attempt to work with the case and with different parts of the commentary. And some could start more or less with it. Sometimes it became clearer and then less clear again. The criminal story at the end with the black fox coat. And at the end we dealt with this criminal story with this white fox coat. The crow. Crow. Yeah. Yeah, I understand.

[14:36]

The point is, what's good is to go back and forth in this. You know, what's this, what's that. That's actually useful to do. I mean, you have to know what you don't know if you're going to know anything. And as I've said in other seminars recently, the koan has to be able to stop you and you have to say, hey, what's going on here? Or really feel stopped. If you can't experience that stopped, then you can't go anywhere because you're kind of thinking, well, I should know this, I'm smart enough or something. You've got to actually be stopped and say, I'm helpless. I'm helpless at least twice a day. My impression is it draws one to make connections in a different part of the text.

[16:06]

And you enter deeper and deeper this circle of thoughts. And sometimes you get the impression you have something really firm in your hand. Until you look a second time. Then it disappears. Yeah, I know. What you have is you lose the mind that understood the koan. Sorry? You lose the mind that understood the koan. One tries ever and ever again to step into and to step on the mind that understands the core.

[17:29]

That's right. Or let it step into you. Okay. Anyone else want to say something from the groups or from anything before we move toward finishing? I would like to see. Yes. I think what for me the koan is bringing up is very much also the trust in our own experience, like you said, the faith. And it's the faith to speak in an assembly, before an assembly, and to talk about experiences maybe no one else has.

[18:33]

And this is not easy. Yes, simply what brings up this core for me is the difficulty to present one's own experience and to have the courage to present the experience, even if you may only have this experience yourself and no one else will confirm it. That's just not easy. In response to what you said, I think not always, but often, residential seminars work better. And definitely more days work better than less days. There's time for an incubation to occur.

[19:38]

There's just some things, no matter how smart and gifted you are, or whatever, if you hear it on Tuesday, you won't understand it till Thursday. It has to join up with other things in you before it becomes clear. And that joining up process simply takes some time. And being with each other and finding out the common misunderstandings and understandings helps. And of course, sitting and staying in a practice mind. But, you know, it's also the case that practically that a certain number of people are necessary to make a seminar work.

[21:15]

What I've discovered over and over is the smaller the number of people, the more the people have to be all on the same level. It's kind of magical. I mean, if you have 12 people or 15 and you have two who really are very new, they have a much harder time than if there's 70 people. There's some kind of osmosis that happens among people if a large percentage know what's going on. And I see it in everything, watching how fast people learn how to sit, for example. If it's a small group, nobody learns full lotus.

[22:25]

If it's a large group, everybody learns full lotus real quickly. Not everybody, but... And the larger the group, up to 70 or 80 or something like that, I can talk to the level of experience I can talk to goes up. The smaller the group, the level of experience in the group I can speak to goes down. And so really if we do a small seminar, which often happens if you do a week or something, because not so many people can come, then I really have to choose the people who come.

[23:26]

to make it work. So there's those kinds of simple problems in doing it. But basically, for me it would be great to be here, or some here and other places, for longer stretches of time. But at present in Germany, for example, the week practice seminar, koan seminar, is the smallest attendance we have. So if we can only do one week in all of Germany and have enough people to make it work, it's hard to do many one-week things. Because it's just hard to get off from work and everything. Okay.

[24:41]

Now I'd like to speak again about this mind of thusness. Now, thusness again is a positive word. To talk about emptiness is rather negative. To talk about thusness, you can speak about the experience of emptiness without making it into an entity. And Suzuki Hiroshi used to say, we need to be able to experience, we're always experiencing things from our own side.

[25:48]

We need the experience of experiencing things from things own side. In other words, you experience the tree from the tree's side. And that kind of experience is also characteristic of this feeling of thusness. Now, this is also actually the medium of compassion too. Now, we tend to, because we're addicted to opposites in our thinking, in other words, we tend to think either-or ways. We like something or we don't like it. Or it's interesting or not interesting.

[26:59]

And that addiction is a big problem in practice. And it's one of the things that makes compassion difficult to understand because we know compassion isn't disliking people. So compassion becomes something that we try to fit into liking or loving. But compassion in Buddhism means just to know people in their beingness. And it's not in the category of liking or disliking. Someone I know said that he asked the question, do I feel compassion for my little finger? If your finger is about to get run over by something, you don't say, do you want to feel compassion for it or not?

[28:11]

You just pull your finger away. So compassion means you've come to the point where you feel about everything and other people like you feel about your little finger. It's no big deal to feel compassion toward your little finger. So we're looking in the wrong category in Buddhist terms when we try to think compassion is creating some kind of special feeling. Now what's usually talked about as detachment in Buddhism actually means non-attachment. Detachment. Detachment. is actually non-attachment.

[29:20]

I don't know if you can make that distinction. No. Detachment is... Oh, good. Because detachment, at least in English, sounds like you're fighting with things. I'm pushing this away and I'm not connected with this. It has a sense of struggle with the things of the world. In this sense of non-attachment you feel completely connected with everything but at the same time detached or non-attached. I can't say more than it's a kind of simultaneity of completely caring and not caring.

[30:23]

From one part of your being, you completely are engaged in doing everything possible. And another part, whatever happens is okay. And it's not a struggle with, oh, I'm not supposed to not care, etc. I mean, not caring isn't the right word, but I don't have language for it. So these things are connected, non-attachment and not being addicted to either-or thinking. And not being addicted to either-or thinking is called equanimity. It's not in the category of liking and disliking, it's in the category of maybe we could say neutral feelings, often it's called neutral feelings, but it's much bigger than either like or dislike.

[31:47]

It means you you're able, for the most part, to not have your thinking bounce back and forth between yes, no, good, bad, and so forth. And this is another kind of thinking. It is thinking. Dogen says, think non-thinking. He means... Non-thinking is a kind of thinking. But it's not thinking that occurs just in the mental space created by our language. And it's not in the realm of decision-making of either-or decisions. So also part of this is this not substantiating.

[32:56]

Now I'm trying to give you a picture here of the things that this word Mount Samara was supposed to work on. So when you stop substantiating, you stop having thought coverings as your first initial perception about things, I remember some years ago I described it as driving along the highway, as I did just the other day coming down here. It's so foggy, you can't see anything. If you have your taillights ahead of you, somebody's ahead of you with taillights, you can follow that car.

[34:10]

But if you get out ahead of that car, you can't drive at all. Now, I'm not saying that thusness is fogginess. Thusness is characterized by everything feels very clear and you feel a very engaged seeing. And there's so much engagement in seeing, there's actually discussion in Buddhism, can you see all the particles or molecules present? And in this vein, a monk asked young men again, what is every atom samadhi? And a monk asked him, the greatest samadhi, What is every atom samadhi?

[35:21]

And he said, food, rice in the bowl, water in the bucket. But again, I won't go into the answer, but among other things, he's pointing out a kind of activity, but he's also talking not just the cup, but the liquid in the cup, and there's a sense of an engaged seeing. And this engaged seeing is also involved in a kind of memory of really remembering or feeling everything that goes on in the room, not just little things that you happen to be paying attention to. Everywhere focused attention. But it's not in the realm of attention exactly because there's not effort involved. Now related also to this, and I'm just throwing these out now, and you can egg your way along with them, is one-pointedness.

[36:47]

No. And one-pointedness is related to this engaged seeing and hearing and so forth. For example, if I can look at you and just look at you without any effort, there's no difficulty, I can just look at you. And no other thoughts come in. You're just nice shapes and colors and And I can stay that way pretty much as long as I like. And in meditation, the skill you develop, you find your mind just settles on things and stays. But what's one of the effects of that?

[37:48]

If I can bring my mind and just see this, one is one-pointedness. One is this single thought, which also means avowal. Again, the Eightfold Path begins with views. And views are vows. And if you can come to one vow, or bodhicitta vow, or some deep feeling of an intention in your life, A feeling intention that doesn't exclude anything. That covers everything. One thought that covers everything like Mount Sumeru. This one thought also develops a continuum. And the other is this one taste.

[39:18]

One taste, the taste of the immeasurableness or beingness of each thing. Or when you take away the dualism of subject and object, what you experience is thusness. Now, in other words, practice here is to begin to find the physical world and emotional world and so forth, which is a subjective world from your point of view, An objective world when you externalize it. And you've begun to ride the ox backwards. And you no longer see yourself through others' eyes as if you were outside your body.

[40:24]

And you don't see things always as over there. You drop that subject-object and what replaces it is what we call thusness. Which is also related to this practice of unfindability, not finding. And the experience is, when you feel like you're swimming in this, kind of swimming in this thusness, and it's much like you pointed out with the khan, sometimes your mind understands the khan and sometimes your mind slips out of it. And sometimes your mind slips into this thusness and sometimes it slips out of it. But through practice, through noticing and internalizing the memory or bodily feeling of this experience, And by becoming more familiar with non-attachment and the good habit of not substantiating and the ability to settle, to practice one-pointedness,

[42:03]

And to have one taste and one vow, one thought joining, giving the continuity of your life. When you come into that mind, you feel like you're understanding things, feeling things from the other side. You look at a flower and it feels like you're the flower looking at you. No, this is not a completely rare experience. It happens to people. Something like this happens to people. I often say something like this happens when you're sunbathing. But the practice is to recognize this feeling, internalize the memory of it, and have it as the substrate in all your feelings.

[43:10]

And then actually you swim under the structures of your society, In the midst of them and over them. And there's a feeling even among us, although we're each in our place, that there's a kind of swimming going on. This is also in the six functions of self, which is the first is to establish separateness. and the second to establish connectedness the first is like our immune system which knows what belongs to us and what doesn't and the second is the inseparability of connectedness and separateness And to know how we're connected.

[44:25]

And the third is to know how we supply continuity in our life. And which for Westerners is mostly referring to our story, referring to what kind of person we think we are, find we are. But when you look at it from a Buddhist point of view, the fourth domain of self or function is discontinuity. You allow the discontinuity that Mount Sumeru did. Fourth domain of self or function is discontinuity. You allow the discontinuity that Mount Sumeru gives you. You feel all forms stop and suddenly you feel this swimming in thusness.

[45:29]

Instead of having substantiation, we have cohesion. We give cohesion to things, but we don't substantiate things. And finally, this presence is thusness. Now, if we look at these three phrases of young men, You can understand now that covering everything is thusness or one taste and so forth. And we've talked about how you come to that. And the cutting off myriad streams is non-attachment. And the many ways in which non-attachment actually creates connectedness. And then the third is not getting caught in the practices of non-attachment.

[46:51]

Not conceptualizing non-attachment or taking some pride in it or you're not attached to non-attachment. And then all of these things, the practices following the ripples, following the waves. So this is a kind of riff on attachment from a very deep point of view. And responds to your question earlier about it being reactive. Because your friends want you to substantiate. And you have a habit of substantiation.

[48:03]

We've discussed how there's a kind of energy in that substantiation from the conventional way of seeing things to the relative way. And you use that energy and at the same time you explore staying in this feeling of lessness and at the same time entering with people in the most ordinary way. Because the physical world can be turned into the objects as we usually know them. Or we can feel how they not only are interdependent, but interpenetrate. And we get an intuition into a deeper way our world is organized. So that's all in this little question.

[49:15]

We're not producing a single thought. Is there any fault or not? And it has these interesting little things about how to practice it. Or to give you a sense of another kind of communication. And although it can't be explained, it's there in this phrase, I say, looking up, he raises his eyebrows. And then it says he raises his eyebrows alone. And this is all a kind of way of talking about the Sambhogakaya body or the bliss body. So it's all because he looks up, he raises his eyebrow, turning his head.

[50:17]

He claps his hands. And this also has this feeling of mind over matter. My hand is there. I can have the slightest thought, my hand moves. We take that for granted, that I can just think something, an ungraspable thought, and my hand can move. This is an extraordinary magic. Or to really begin to feel as we went through the exercise once with your hand feel the presence in your hand independent from you. And that presence in your hand that looks at you.

[51:19]

And even awakening the eye in the palm of the hand that's in the many of the Buddha statues. And in this koan of Dao and Yunyan, it says, what is the many-armed Avalokiteshvara, the thousand-armed, great, compassionate one? What is the thousand-armed? And they say two things. Whole body, hand and eyes. And they also say, looking for your pillow in the dark. Which even is beyond a thousand arms.

[52:22]

Now, quite a number of people again have asked me about compassion. And I don't want to go into it in length like I did in Kassel. But this Mahakaruna, which is translated by the word compassion, empathy and sympathy and so forth, I think it's maybe most useful for you to practice with the four noble truths in relationship to compassion. In this sense, the first noble truth, that there is suffering. is to see each person in their simple beingness and capable of suffering. And likely to suffer.

[53:23]

And that's the ability to see them also as a person, the kind of person they are, and they suffer through the kind of person they are. And they also are immeasurable, and you can relate to them in their immeasurableness. And the second is to see the cause and effect. Now it's said that it's very difficult to see, it's not so difficult to see sense objects, this thermos, etc. It's more difficult to see the impermanence of this object. You have to join a certain kind of thinking and memory to the object to know it's also impermanent.

[54:40]

So impermanence is an example of seeing something that's slightly hidden. So impermanence and thusness and so forth are in the category of slightly hidden. You don't see it immediately. But cause and effect are very hidden. It's very difficult to really see the subtleties of cause and effect that make things happen. So the second window of compassion through the Four Noble Truths is to open yourself compassionately to the many causes and effects that are each person.

[55:47]

And the third is that there can be an end to suffering. So simultaneously with the first thing, you also look in your interactions with everyone, you realize that enlightenment is possible. You integrate into your way of viewing people the knowledge for yourself too, that with a slight shift, riding the ox backwards, everything is quite different. And the fourth is that there's a path. There are paths. So then compassion would be to have in your mind the paths that are possible for this person and yourself.

[56:59]

So if you want to practice compassion, you can use the Four Noble Truths as a way to develop how you are with yourself and with others. Which includes being in the weeds with yourself in the most confused way, in the ordinary way. And it helps you, I mean sometimes some people are pretty difficult to be with, but yet if you practice this you can find ways to be with anyone really. Particularly if you know your own immeasurableness. Now also here in this koan it says your basic mind has to be a mind that doesn't always see difficulties.

[58:11]

It says if you go on doubting you can't get a hold. But if you come with acceptance it's readily available. So a mind in which you throw open, as Fushan's poem is, he says, when you hold still, not even Buddhas and Zen masters can get in. But this is don't so much as put a tip of a hair in there. Water can't be poured on it. And he also says, throw open the oceans and seas. And the rivers and seas.

[59:23]

And the dragons and fishes have room to turn around. And dragons and fishes are these various sides of us that see different parts of the world. And it says here, when that gate of generosity opens, nothing can block it. Okay, so this koan wants you to begin to feel into how to read it. If it's not clear, at least it can begin to touch us in many ways. The blue ocean is wide, white clouds peaceful. Don't put so much as a tip of a hair in there. So let's sit for a little bit and then...

[60:51]

John Gebser said the present isn't just today's unit of time. It's ever originating. And this is much like the Buddhist sense of original mind. And Yan Men said, pick me out among the hundred grasses.

[62:22]

Recognize the emperor in the marketplace. This is also the wide mind of equanimity. That isn't fooled by a phony rooster. Mr.

[63:26]

I was struck by something I read recently that Jesus said to Martha, the sister of Mary Magdalena, that Jesus said to Martha, Magdalena's sister, I am life. And that for many centuries, until the mid-sixties or so, I'm told, meant traditionally a life through and in Jesus. And now it's come to mean, we say we have our own life, things like that. And I don't think life begins at conception. Something begins at conception, but not life.

[65:31]

Life is something we discover. Or we give life and are given life, but we don't have it exactly. And for me, to the extent that I know life, I've discovered life through practice. And I hope that practice helps you to some extent in this discovery. For me, practice is a path of discovery. And we don't know where it's going exactly. So, thank you very much. I'd like to end on a Christian note. Speak particularly in Austria.

[66:51]

Well, thank you very much, everyone. Especially thank my new translator. Deal. I said you feel that you're looking at yourself through the flower. Or you feel you're... Anyway, something like that. Wait till you have the experience. LAUGHTER Yes ma'am.

[67:52]

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