And we're making a painting that perhaps allows others to feel that enlightenment. Because one of the qualities of enlightenment Denn eine der Qualitäten von Erleuchtung, die Leute dazu führt, dass sie malen und dichten und so weiter, ist ein unverständliches Bedürfnis, das anderen mitzuteilen. It's almost like the wonderful attention we received as infants that allowed us to develop. That attention matures into looking at the world. And we could say that attention matures into enlightenment.

[01:18]

And it's inseparable from feeling yourself connected with others. So you're not trying with some mental effort. It just happens that you start being a brush. That A brush? A pencil, sorry. Yeah. I thought it was strange. Yeah. Yeah, anyway, that also, that opens up yourself to enlightenment and opens up others to enlightenment.

[02:29]

I feel so clumsy the way I'm saying this. All right. To do that painting, you have to understand the paints. You have to understand the canvas. Yeah, you have to understand the mind of each color. And the mind of each color in other people. So, one half of Buddhism, we could say, is about awakening us to initial enlightenment Fundamental enlightenment.

[03:30]

And the enlightenment experience. The other half of Buddhism is how do you paint this painting? How do you mature and evolve this experience? So it becomes your world and the possibility of a world for others. It's almost a kind of profound political act because you're making your world and feeling a possibility of a world for others. Weil ihr eure eigene Welt gestaltet und Macht schafft und die Möglichkeit für die anderen auch in dieser Welt.

[04:31]

So let me give you Mioe's poem again and another poem of his. Also lasst mich nochmal Mioe's Gedicht sagen und dann noch ein anderes. I go behind the mountain. Ich gehe hinter die Berge. Go there too, oh moon. Gehe dort auch hin, oh moon. Night after night, we will keep each other company. Nacht um Nacht werden wir uns gegenseitig Gesellschaft leisten. Where is that place? Wo ist dieser Ort? What is that location? Wo ist dieser Standort? Do you know that location? Und ihr kennt diesen Standort. Okay, another poem of Miojo's. Noch ein Gedicht von Miojo. My heart shines like an expanse of light. Mein Herz strahlt wie ein strömendes Licht. Mein Herz strahlt wie ein ausströmendes Licht. Es reicht so weit, dass der Mond denkt, es sei sein eigenes.

[05:33]

Thank you very much. God bless you. Bursts of blood, [...] blood. Thank you.

[07:34]

May God bless you and your family. May God bless you and your family. I'm sure there are a hundred thousand people who know what you're talking about. I'm sure there are a hundred thousand people who know what you're talking about. I'm sure there are a thousand people who know what you're talking about. The most we can do is really just be here together, practice together.

[09:25]

And with that feeling I just sit here and I move my mouth and try to create the feeling I'm saying something. Or I try to join in your own inner dialogue. And I, of course, want to speak to our practice where it's at. And that's all for all of us, just sort of basic sitting. Like when I say

[10:25]

and notice, develop the feeling of verticality in your posture. And it couldn't be more basic than that. The Diamond Sutra starts with the Buddha going begging and returning from his begging and then sitting down cross-legged and sitting upright. Maybe we should start rotating the Diamond Sutra in German.

[11:50]

Is there a good translation? We do it at Crestone. Anyway, it's to be understood that This isn't to be understood that this sutra comes out of this upright posture. But yet, if I say verticality, already there's some subtlety there. Like I said the other night, standing within standing, sitting in sitting.

[12:51]

When you're standing, there's also a standing within standing. A kind of, I don't know, I can say an inner posture of standing. I don't know how to say that, but you could say an inner posture of standing. But there's no inner outer really in this. A feeling of standing that joins the physical act of standing. And a feeling of standing which can be infused with vitality. And even power. Yeah, Kraft. And likewise, maybe I'll learn a few words. And likewise, there's an inner sitting within sitting.

[14:12]

And I tried to express that with this word, verticality. Yeah. So again, I have to apologize a little bit for trying to be both basic and bring up the subtlety of practice. I don't know why I always apologize. Trying to beat down your resistance. Or maybe I want you to like me. There's an idea called original heart that I'd like to speak to you about.

[15:38]

But I don't really know why I want to speak to you about it. But anyway, it keeps appearing in my mind for several weeks now. So we might as well have a little of it today. And this is an idea of Shunzei, a late Heian 12th century Japanese literature. Late Heian period. And his idea of original heart is like this idea of sculpting the sacred dragon within language. A feeling that there's something that happens when you put things together that's mysterious.

[16:54]

And it seems to be an influence of Buddhism within Chinese and Japanese culture, which seems to come from an influence of Buddhism. Yeah. Even the Japanese characters, Chinese characters, the way they're written, are written in a field of space. And from what I've read is the awareness of the space as an element of the character increased when Buddhism came into the culture. You're welcome. Thank you. So Shunzai's idea is we have a physical heart. And it's not much more than a physical heart.

[18:44]

And then society, in order to be larger groups than 30, it seems like primitive societies form groups of about 30 people. Different groups are about 30, but if there's more than that, they can't hold together. And I would say that groups don't get larger than that until ideas like trust and love develop. Although people may manipulate such ideas, still they have to be basic to a society that has any culture or civilization. Then Shunzai's ideas, this develops more and more through poetry and literature.

[20:04]

And Schoensee's idea is that it develops more and more, for example through poetry. That society, through literature and song and poetry, creates the heart we have. the way we appreciate the autumn leaves, or the brocade of spring flowers, is actually something that's developed through literature. Ist etwas, das entwickelt wurde durch die Literatur. Through poems, songs, stories. Durch Gedichte, Lieder und Geschichten.

[21:18]

So he's speaking about a constructed or generated heart. Also er spricht von einem konstruierten oder geschaffenen Herzen. Which he calls, strangely, the original heart. His sense seems to be that to really understand our heart, the real potential of our human heart, we have to come into the essential way human beings develop a kind of knowing. So we create what the heart is together.

[22:21]

That's all. So even our idea of original mind in Buddhism is not that there's some mind at the bottom of our self that's basic that we bring up. Although it's sometimes wrongly and I think superficially understood that way. We also generate our original mind. But I won't say more about that now. Okay.

[23:33]

So when we have our... when we practice here and sit together in Sesshin... And you... do period after period, let us say, practice this verticality. This verticality tends to disappear and become a kind of space. And in many ways, And in many ways through just sitting and just surviving sitting we come into a kind of concentration.

[24:56]

which many of you know, as kind of a wide, bright mind, a mind of some clarity and integrity, Well, I call it normal mind. Or it feels like the way our mind should feel. And it's a kind of relief. And then in various ways, people have asked me in this session, and many times I've been asked, How do you maintain this mind? How does this mind continue? Well, one of the first things you'll notice when Sashin is over, that there's a kind of leaking.

[26:33]

just going back into your usual situation, whether it's here or outside, a kind of leaking starts. Someone asked why we don't bathe. Because actually during Sashin, if you take baths, you usually restore yourself to your usual state of mind. So maybe we should have some motto, stinky body, clear mind. Yeah. And it's a relief after Sashin to restore yourself to your former cleanliness and usual state of mind.

[27:47]

Yeah. Well, I think it's very important to notice when you leak. Es ist sehr wichtig festzustellen, wann man beginnt zu lecken. And what causes you to leak. Und was dieses Ausströmen verursacht. Not everything causes you to leak. Nicht alles verursacht dieses Ausströmen. This is again an example that you need the craft of mindfulness to really notice what causes you to leak and what doesn't. This is one of the most important studies you can do. And the idea of being free from leaking is basic to all meditation teachings. So what's behind such a simple idea?

[29:00]

Well first you have to feel yourself leaking. I mean this isn't really a philosophical idea. It's a practice idea. And we can think of this story I told at the beginning of the Sesshin. The monk asked his teacher, how do we express silence? And the monk asks his teacher, how can we express silence? Where does such a question come from? So at the end of the sheen you find you have some kind of mental and physical sense and at the end of the sheen you will find that you have a mental and

[30:19]

a mental bodily quality and a bodily mental quality some kind of feeling that's hard to explain but it's surprisingly easy to lose And when it feels, when you're in the midst of it, really strong. And as if nothing could disturb it. And it can become something that's virtually undisturbable. And it's called iron person in the teaching. But right now we just notice we start leaking right away.

[31:29]

So notice This is iron man, this is fast rusting man. Yeah. You get washed and then you start rusting. Okay. But some of the things you say You can say without leaking. Some things make you leak. Some kind of activity makes you leak. Some kind of activity doesn't make you leak. This is something we have to study. Das ist etwas, das wir untersuchen müssen.

[32:38]

Or notice. Oder bemerken. What we find is there are some things if we do or say we leak. Was wir herausfinden ist, dass wenn wir gewisse Dinge tun oder sagen, dass wir ausströmen, it's better if we're silent about. Das sind Dinge, Now, what I'm talking about is that, what I'm trying to talk about is why his teacher lost these three coins under the bed. Yeah, why do I take such a hard topic? For simple love of all of you and your practice. Why else would I fail so obviously in front of all of you?

[33:46]

So let's imagine there's a sea of silence around us. A sea, an ocean. A sea of silence around us that penetrates everything. And this monk, you know, he's been practicing in this story, he's been practicing not leaking. And he notices more and more that there's a kind of silence that pervades his body. I'm calling it silence because I don't have another word for it. At least in English, when you sit still, still also means silence, stillness.

[34:59]

Oh, good. And we do, when we come into physical stillness, we begin to feel and generate this silence. The sea of silence. Now I can keep, what I'll do in this talk is I'll just keep mentioning the sea of silence. And hope you catch it. And hope it sloshes over you. But I can't really do more than mention it. So this monk, let's just presume he's asking this question. Because he begins to feel this silence building up in him.

[36:27]

It's a kind of vitality. And when you really enter into this field of silence, I can't explain it exactly, but it feels like everything happens by itself. Your walking walks itself. Your breathing breathes itself. Your speaking speaks itself. But yet this is still this sea of silence. Now, just to not talk. And many of us try to protect ourselves by not talking.

[37:30]

It's a kind of pseudo-silence. It's a kind of Silence by absence. It's not what I mean by silence in practice. This silence is that there are some things in that silence that that silence flows among us like an implicit love or implicit solidarity. In Poland it was called the Solidarity, wasn't it? It's interesting, it sounds like the word solid in English.

[38:32]

But it actually means a wholeness, a feeling of connectedness or wholeness. Yeah. And it also means health. And we can even speak about a kind of sea of health that surrounds us. As, you know, flus and colds are silently passed among us. Maybe that's a good example of silence. We're always passing flues and colds silently among us. How are you? Here's a cold. But we're also silently passing health among us. Physical health and mental health.

[39:48]

And a kind of vitality. And this verticality opens us up to a kind of horizontality. Now, again, these words, horizontal, vertical, they're used in Zen to try to express something. As I said, horizontal is when we sleep. When we dream, when we make love. There's even expressions, his or her career in Hollywood was horizontal. Maybe you have some expression like that in German.

[41:05]

So horizontal is dreaming, sleeping, a kind of intimacy. As I said, the painter who paints picnics. When Western philosophers have spent a lot of time with the idea of time and space. And once you make a distinction, it's hard. Here's time. This is a distinction, a cultural distinction. And once you make the distinction, you begin to see that some cultures emphasize one more than the other.

[42:15]

And in practice, you can begin to notice that you notice one more than the other. Very simply, as I said yesterday. When you're sitting. And you don't care when the bell comes. You're in a different state of mind than when you feel the tug of time. The tug of the bell. The tug of what you have to do next week. And this... And then you can feel going back to not caring about next week or the bell.

[43:23]

And a different kind of clarity comes up. And you can feel that when you feel the tug of the bell, you begin to leak. this spacious mind. And there are traditional practices of this, to work with this. So I'll give you one. It's kind of fascinating. Okay, so you're sitting. And you feel this spaciousness. And by intention, you extend this spaciousness. You feel a kind of sideways, all ways, all directions extension. And you imagine, just imagine, you enact or imagine.

[44:44]

Or pretend. Just pretending, or I guess the word enacting is hard to translate. But to pretend or imagine actually leads the feeling in the direction you imagine. You imagine this kind of spacious mind reaching the whole zendo. Invisibly or silently reaching the people beside you in front of you and so forth.

[45:47]

And then you extend that to the the greenery, the fields, the farms. And then you extend it to all of Germany. And even include Switzerland. Someone told me that the reason they have a speed limit in Switzerland is you don't notice how small it is. I shouldn't tease about Switzerland. I like going there a lot. and Austria, Italy.

[46:58]

We can begin to spread this over the whole world and even to the stars and beyond the stars. And then you imagine a huge piece of cloth that covers the whole cosmos. And then everything, every star, every atom, every country, every person is painted on this cloth. You fold it up and stars are on top of Germany and Switzerland. And then you fold it up and fold it up. Until it's so folded up it's very tiny. And then you pull all this space into your own body. Who cares about the bell?

[48:17]

Whoa! So you have this kind of glowing inside you. And then without unfolding it, you expand it. And of course everything is all mixed up now, folded together. So in this way you get a sense of everything interpenetrating each other. And you get a feeling of this extension of space. Being able to extend it from you and pull it back into you. It's a kind of Dharmakaya exercise class. I like that.

[49:27]

Dharmakaya. Dharmakaya, sambokaya, dharmakaya, sambokaya. You don't have to translate that. Oh dear. I'm sorry. And then you feel also the tug of tomorrow. And you begin to feel a certain elasticity of time and space. A kind of elasticity that draws you into a sequential mind. An elasticity of space extending, simultaneous mind. So time and space aren't philosophical ideas anymore.

[50:53]

They're a kind of elasticity of this way and that way. And you can feel the intimacy of this elasticity. So time and space become really more your own possession. You can feel it. An elasticity of space and an elasticity of time. It's the same elasticity. And this all occurs in silence. That's all I have space for, I mean time for. Sometimes I feel a little sad I'm talking about all this stuff.

[52:12]

You think, God, I'm going to be so busy practicing Buddhism. Spending time in space constantly. Reconstructing myself at every moment. Oh, dear. I didn't say that. Oh, my Buddha. Yeah. But you're only rearranging things. There's no new ingredients here. The problem, I mean, I love being in Germany, you know. And I'm becoming more and more, oh no, you don't want to claim me yet. Also ich werde mehr und mehr, aber ihr wollt nicht, dass ich behaupte.

[53:18]

But there's so much vitality in Germany. Also es ist so viel Vitalität in Deutschland. Sometimes it gets turned in a little bit too much to do things. Aber manchmal wird es ein bisschen zu viel in die Richtung tendiert, man muss jetzt was schaffen. If I tell you not to do something, not to sit and don't do anything. Wenn ich euch jetzt aber sage, ihr sollt sitzen und nichts machen. Most of you all try to do not doing anything. It's hard for me to give you... So, I mean, maybe to think of this as a big soup. You're not really... You're not really adding any new ingredients. You're just putting in the ingredients you have.

[54:22]

And you don't really cook it. Maybe you let it cook itself. Maybe it's like our hot drink, which is fermenting every night in this weather. Yeah, as soon as it's going to be lemon juice. Maybe the heat is attention. So when we sit in this posture... This is not a new ingredient. You just changed the posture a little. When you bring your attention to your breath, you have breath and you have attention. Or to your body, emotions. And so forth. You're just changing the arrangement of the ingredients.

[55:41]

And slight changes in the arrangements makes a big difference. Directing attention to attention itself instead of to the outside. So don't worry about reconstructing yourself. It's really just a shift, an arrangement. And let the arrangement cook itself. So you make slight changes in the arrangement. Like where you bring your attention. And then you relax and don't do anything. And see what happens. Buddha is very relaxed. We're waiting for you to join him behind the moon.

[56:54]

Yeah. Thank you very much. Oh, my God. We are almost at the end of our journey to achieve the goal of maintaining the object of the Polaris.

[57:59]

NERAWA KUWA NAKNORAI SHENJISUN YORGESHI TATE MAZURAN ANURAFUNAM So I've presented you with a lot of stuff. So I should try to bring it together. Now those of you who are half my age, Which is more than half of you.

[60:47]

Maybe most of you. Much of this world that Buddhism represents, you sort of accept it. Including the ki and chi of Buddhism and martial arts, for example. And probably many of you have been treated with acupuncture. But when I was... You know, 20 or so, acupuncture was considered, no one heard of it, but the little known of it, it was considered some kind of nonsense.

[61:50]

Took a treatment by the editor of the New York Times. In the 60s, I believe. He happened to be in China and they treated him for something with acupuncture and it worked. So he came back and wrote something in the New York Times about it. I think he saw an operation done without anesthetics. In fact, the person who called us the other day, John Burney, his mother was the person who got acupuncture legalized in the United States.

[62:58]

So what I'm saying only is that it's not very many people and very recent that much of what we're doing here has been acknowledged. It's only very recently. But I still think we need to acknowledge it in ourselves. Even the phenomena of qi or qi again. Which there's a group of people meeting once a year at Esalen who are trying to bring this together in a way that science or somebody can look at it.

[64:16]

A kind of think tank or maybe a chi tank. Yeah. So when, I think some of you are discovering that when, well, first of all there's this dialogue of accepting your posture and being informed by Buddha's posture. So I've asked you to open the information channel. And I'm calling that verticality.

[65:20]

And it's related to the word vertex, which means also the point at the top of the head or the point just above the head. Yeah. It has various meanings like that. And I think many of you are finding it makes a difference in your posture. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And some of you are finding that actually your body wants to move into verticality. On the one hand, we have to accept whatever our posture is.

[66:20]

But we also have to accept that our posture wants the Buddha posture. Our posture says, oh, we kind of like this. Strange way, it's better than an easy chair. Better than the couch. Yeah. that your body itself, once it becomes familiar with the Buddha posture, starts seeking the Buddha posture. And so maybe you can say verticality is the autobahn of the Buddha posture.

[67:25]

But you find there's a lot of stows along the way. Particularly in your back. But you begin to open this verticality and your body begins to seek this posture. Aber wenn ihr euch in diese Vertikalität öffnet, dann beginnt euer Körper diese Haltung zu suchen. Now, again, this goes beyond doing. Und das geht über das Tun hinaus. Now, if you want to do something productive, also wenn ihr etwas Produktives tun wollt, like tennis or something like that, dann müsst ihr euren Körper trainieren. But even at a certain point, you have to let your body do it. But we in Zen, we go right to the top.

[68:36]

We, from the beginning, let our body do it. None of this training stuff. That gets in the way. If you want to train yourself for some productive purpose, fine. And you need a little training to sit well. A few sashins. But really the secret is to let your body do it. So when you discover this verticality, you open yourself to horizontality. Horizontal comes from horizon.

[69:46]

Yeah, to know up horizon is the edge of what we know. But in Buddhism, horizontality means to go beyond the edge of what we know. Or extend our knowing beyond the horizon of consciousness. Now I'm speaking to this little Zen story. How do you express silence?

[71:00]

I don't express it here. Where do you express it? Last night, under my bed, I lost three coins. Now, this whole week I've been trying to talk about this story. Now, a story like this Some of you understood, I can tell, got the sense of the story right away through your practice.

[72:00]

But I think it's worthwhile for us to look at the subtlety of a story like this. How many Californians does it take to screw in a light bulb? At least two. Yeah, one to screw it in and one to share the experience. And how many Buddhist does it take to screw in a... Zen Buddhist does it take to screw in a light bulb? One to screw it in and one not to. Now, even a dumb story like this... Yeah, a joke like this... There's a lot assumed in a little story like that.

[73:10]

Yeah, if I said how many Icelanders screw in a letter, you'd think, Californians, it's different. You know something about that. And it's pretty sophisticated that so many people know that Buddhism has to do with One to do it, to do it, and not to do it. Yeah, it also has the basic pattern of a joke. Yeah, the presentation, the predictable continuation, and the unexpected third thing. So here's this little story. How do you express silence? This already is strange.

[74:29]

Now, let me say that all these stories, like all the light bulb jokes, have an implicit reference to all the other Zen stories. And even to one finger being held up, as I mentioned last night. It's called, I think, technically you'd call it intertextuality. It's all sort of Zen stories and Chinese and Japanese poetry refers to all the other poems. And there's a contextuality, too. The context of this monk asking his teacher,

[75:30]

Last night I mentioned the blind turtles and the emptying of time and space. When time and space are empty, who else is there? Now this, and then I said, throwing an old piece of driftwood in the ocean. Blind turtles gather around. In the night waves. Now again, these are kind of visual images of practice. Another little poem. Why pull yourself to the other shore, you know? everything's covered with a white haze who cares where the other shore is sit back and drift

[77:06]

Lehn dich zurück und lass dich davon treiben. A favorable breeze will come along. Es wird schon eine wohlwollende Brise Luft kommen. So this is again an expression of Zazen. Just sit there. Das ist wieder ein Ausdruck von Zazen. Einfach nur da sitzen. And blind turtles will begin to gather. Und dann werden die blinden Schildkröten schon sich einfinden. And Sukhiroshi used to tell the story as if they were one-eyed turtles. And he said that enlightenment is as unusual as a blind turtle, a one-eyed turtle, discovering a piece of driftwood with a hole in it, And swimming to the surface and putting its one eye on the hole and seeing.

[78:33]

And seeing the sky. Wow. Yeah. Okay, but there's got to be some hope in this story. So when you sit vertically, trusting the mind of Buddha, trusting this, the verticality of this posture, The gathering of all the acupuncture points. Blind turtles, one-eyed turtles, begin to arrive in your zazen.

[79:36]

And you're only a piece of driftwood in this sea of silence. Okay, so here's this guy saying, how do we express silence? Sounds pretty funny. And why does he ask this other guy? Now, why does he think this other guy knows and he doesn't? Well, I must feel that the other guy, his teacher, somehow expresses silence. Or he discovered this integration of silence through his teacher.

[80:57]

So he wants to, you know, he's received this silence from his teacher, that we can assume from looking at the text. So he goes back to the teacher and basically says, I've received this silence from you. And you express it to me. How can I express it? So that's the context of the story. And the teacher says, I don't express it here. So basically he's saying, He's turning back the expression, the question of the monk, his disciple.

[82:15]

Turning back. The question came toward him, he's sending the question back to him. So he's basically by saying, I don't express it here, he's cutting off expression, he's cutting off usual expression. This in itself is a kind of silence. If your disciple is someone who, I don't know if I can think of some good examples. If your disciple is someone who wants to understand things.

[83:22]

Yeah, and his wanting to understand things or her wanting to understand things is the very problem she has. So you can't say, ideally you don't say, you want to understand things too much. I do that, but Because I'm a lousy teacher. A good teacher would say, oh, I don't understand. Or send them to understand something that's useless. Because there's a silence. There's a silence in what's being said because what you really want to say is silent. No, you want your disciple to stay, but you tell him to leave.

[84:31]

Or you really want him to leave, but you tell him to stay. Because somehow you can't say it exactly, so you have to say the opposite. So the silence of what's really being said is present. Okay. So he says, no, I can't express it here. So he says, where do you express it? Persistent fellow. And he says, oh, last night under my bed I lost three coins. Now what the hell was this guy doing with three coins under his bed?

[85:57]

Counting his money. So three means something like This joke, one, two, three. It's up and down. It's like up and down. It's very basic. Yeah, it's like a father, son, and holy ghost. There's the source, and there's the continuation, and then there's... Returning to the source. Oh, there's the three bodies of Buddha. Dharmakaya, Sambhogakaya, and Nirmanakaya. And you don't have to translate that, do you? Okay.

[87:01]

Why not? No. Okay. Okay. And so that's also a reference to this story of among the three bodies of Buddha, which one does not fall into any categories. And Dung Shan says, I'm always close to this. I'm always close to this is the same as saying, very close to, I lost three coins under the bed. You get to assume the number three is important. Otherwise you could just say, I lost some money under the bed.

[88:05]

Or you could say, geez, there's a lot of dust under my bed. What's that joke from Dust? We come from dust and we return to dust or something in the Bible? Isn't there something like that? So the little boy says to his mother, you know, somebody's either coming or going under my bed. So there's three and they're coins.

[89:20]

Could have been three books, you know. I've lost a lot of books under my bed. I've never lost three coins. So what are coins? Coins are something you spend in the outside world. But here in this kind of horizontality, It's one of the reasons the Zendo is fairly dark when we do Zazen. Maybe we can think of the Zendo as being under Buddha's bed. And here we are, somebody's either coming or going. And Tathagata means the one who comes and goes. So this kind of, you know, I'm exaggerating, but this kind of imagistic thinking is part of Buddhism.

[90:31]

So here's this horizontality I'm trying to express, extending the horizon of consciousness, or beyond consciousness. And I think when you begin to really know this verticality, And your posture begins to ask you to be more vertical. And drinks in this verticality like a thirsty person. It turns into a kind of awareness. A kind of spacious mind.

[91:33]

And you begin to feel this sideways knowing. Now we have some facts here. There's something real about just the fine tuning of your posture. I think this is a fact for most of you. There's something to this vital energy, chi and ki. You begin to feel how Vitality, I don't like the word energy, vitality begins to infuse your body.

[92:44]

And most of you, all of you, begin to know this spacious mind. It's a fact. It's hard to express. But no one told you about it as a kid, really? I don't think anyone. And there's no college course in it. So you're discovering this on your own. You know, we have this Buddha here, 500 years old. Older than we thought it was when we first got it. But part of the restoration is a piece of the wood was sent to a laboratory in Italy, I believe.

[93:49]

I probably mentioned it to you already, but they said it was a tree cut down in 1490. You've got to figure the... Buddha was made some 10 or 5 or 10 or 15 years after the tree was cut down. Otherwise the wood would have rotted. So you're looking at this 500-year-old Buddha. Now, we have it because people have treasured it for 500 years. Most things disappear. For some reason, this object, not very big, has been taken care of for 500 years.

[95:06]

Think of the many people who've looked at it. And been changed by it. Or affected by it. And how they're affected has passed through thousands of people as well as in the statue. So when we're looking at the Buddha, we're looking back 500 years. So when we look at this Buddha, we actually look at 500

[95:48]

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