I'm sure the thought has occurred to some of you. It's really not so difficult. It's actually boring sometimes. But you're quite interesting so you shouldn't get bored. One person left the first night at two in the morning before we got started. I didn't tell you that until I didn't want to depress you. I hope he or she is having a good time. But probably she feels uncomfortable, unfortunately.

[01:08]

As you, most of you know, I consider having to be translated actually a help and understanding, not a hindrance. And I consider the translator giving a lecture in his or her own right. So I don't feel that Ulrike or Neil should speak as if they were making a commentary or some version of what I'm saying. So I wouldn't want your voice to be lower than mine or something like that. You're giving a lecture and I'm giving a lecture and we're sort of doing it together.

[02:26]

And although I miss, of course, lecturing with Ulrike, because I've been working together with her so long, still I've been practicing with Neil a pretty long time now. It feels longer than it's been actually. And it's a good feeling to feel it, feel what I'm trying to do through someone else. So we have father translator and mother translator. And I wonder if it's any different when it's the father tongue instead of the mother tongue.

[03:30]

Maybe I have to become more feminine when you're the translator. Or maybe you have to become more feminine. I don't know if I can do it. I don't know. See if I can shake into it. Okay. I think today will be mostly notes. Notes on what I'm trying to talk about. Notes, because I don't think yet at least put it all together. Now maybe why I spoke about one-pointedness yesterday Is it I'm influenced by the early Theravadan atmosphere of this place?

[04:40]

And all these Theravadan Buddhas who are sitting here on all these tables with their ornamented chakras. And one-pointedness is actually a technical term central to Theravada Buddhism. And yesterday I kept talking about silence. I thought, well, it's the house of stillness. That's probably right. And stillness. Stillness. One of these statues, one of the top looks drunk, actually.

[06:01]

I hope you're not offended. Frank is not sick. He looks quite soused. He's sort of out there somewhere. It happens to Buddhists sometimes. Just from breathing. And then Buddha below him has this mudra I've never seen before. No. Maybe he was once holding something. But he's actually got both hands in front of his stomach and he's holding sort of space. But even if he was once holding something, I would say that this is actually a mudra in which you can actually feel this chakra out here.

[07:07]

Good. And sometimes in the statues they show things that they don't talk about. Wow. And anyway, I often wonder what I'm talking about. We have an advantage here in the West is that we don't have rules about what you talk about between monks and lay people and so forth.

[08:08]

And I'm just trying to understand these things and I want to share it with you. Now a term like ekagata, I think it is, but anyway, one-pointedness, even though it is a technical term in early Buddhism, the way I'm using it is in a much wider sense a characteristic of Zen Buddhism. So there's actually a problem in using technical terms from western Buddhist books to translate these terms. Because they may get... translated in ways that limit their understanding to the particular school from which the term is identified.

[09:36]

So one-pointedness does not mean like a peak, a place. It means, maybe just using English literally, it means bringing things to a point. But it also means Being able to hold things in a place. And it also includes the initial application of attention. And it also means the sustained application of attention. And it also means the ability to hold a field of attention in place.

[10:54]

So maybe we could call that wide-pointedness. Maybe English is good enough. Wide-pointedness. I almost said one-bluntedness. And one-pointedness in Zen also means samadhi. Why is it characteristic of Zen to take a term or a practice and use the skill that it implies in all the ways that skill can be applied?

[12:02]

Can I start over again? It's also characteristic of Zen to take a technical term and then to use that term in the full range of what is implied or can be applied through that term. And this term one-pointedness also can mean detachment. Now in a way you might say, what's the point then if this term can be used to cover almost everything? But it doesn't cover almost everything. It doesn't cover joy and bliss, for instance. And I would say that joy, bliss-joy and one-pointedness are the two main tools of meditation technique.

[13:09]

And I would say that this joy and bliss and one-pointedness are the main tools that we use. So I'm trying to give you a sense of what this tool is, how to use it, and its usefulness. Now, a few minutes ago, I was in the sender to see how you were all doing.

[14:31]

And I found Eric Eno beating you. But doing quite a good job, Eric. It's nice to hear the stick actually. Did it feel okay to those who were hit? The stick is a little bit like a club. But I like sticks which are a little thinner and more flexible. But it works. And when Eric came from this side to hit Ruth Winter, who asked, I asked him to go all the way around and come from this side.

[15:43]

And sometimes I, you know, I... I feel a little funny asking Eric to go all the way around. Ruth is right here. But I'm trying to give you a sense by doing this of the absoluteness of the arbitrary. But I'm trying to give you a feeling by saying this, of the absoluteness of the believer. Everything is actually arbitrary.

[16:46]

And you have to learn how to hold the world in place. If you're going to practice and move in and out of consensual reality, you've got to know how to hold your world in place. One-pointedness is part of holding the world in place. I'm actually also trying to teach you another way of thinking which we could call maybe precise thinking. In contrast to average thinking, which is averaged thinking. Does that make sense? Thinking is always averaging things. Precise thinking is thinking in details and seeing the relationship among details and respecting those relationships as also a detail.

[18:16]

And also the connection and the relationship and the details among each other... The relationships in themselves are a kind of detail, a larger detail. In other words, the whole pattern is also a detail. And the Oyokis, the eating bowls, are a good example of that. And I love the way some of you use them. You're quite free, just follow the general pattern, but you do within that pretty much what you want. And why shouldn't you? You're quite free to do whatever you want. But there's also a logic that holds the whole thing together. And seeing that logic is as important as seeing the specific things you do.

[19:38]

See, we're also here again trying to give you direct experience at holding the world in place when there's no rule book or God to guide you. This is also one-pointedness. Now, I would like to say something that's obvious. You live within your own life. That's pretty obvious, isn't it?

[20:49]

But somehow I feel a need to say it because it catches something different for me. Sometimes Within the obvious, hidden by the obvious itself, is something mysterious. That it's so well hidden in the obvious, you can't say it in any way that's not obvious. So, of course I don't know if I can convey what I mean since what I'm saying is so obvious. You find your life within your life. You find your death within your life.

[22:02]

You die within your own life. That's also obvious, but is it really obvious? Death is not something that happens from outside you and robs you of your life. Even if you die by accident except for the moment of the accident you die within your own life. Dying comes from within you and you participate in it. You may participate in it by denying it or taking medicines to hide it and so forth. Or fighting with it. But you participate. So the more you know that, the less you're afraid of your death because it's coming from within your own life.

[23:15]

As I said yesterday, the basic subject of our practice is existence. And facing the... mystery of this through the attitude, what is existence? What the word emptiness means is basically that life is inconceivable. Whatever you use, logic, language, or some techniques of psychology, they cannot actually grasp life. So it doesn't mean you don't use forms of language, psychology and so forth, but you also live within that and also live within the inconceivability of it.

[24:28]

Thank you. So if our life is within our life, if you discover your life within your life, what does your life consist of? Your life consists of your experience. So you discover your life within your experience. And your experience isn't over yet.

[25:33]

So you continue to discover your life in your experience. Okay, now if you discover your life in your experience, how do you look at your experience? Not only look at your experience, but find yourself in the midst of your experience and locate yourself in the midst of your experience. How do you place yourself in the middle of your experience? And the more you see that you locate your life in the midst of your experience, you see that you're not only in a world that has been given to you.

[26:43]

This is probably the maybe most significant difference between Buddhism and a priori religions. On a priori religion I mean a religion which is assumed a god created the world. And so that you have to follow his, usually his, rules about this world. Because he created it. So presumably he knows the rules. And you have to believe in him also because after all he created. Now, I'm speaking rather lightly about a lot of the world's religions.

[28:04]

And I actually think that most religions I know about are valid and powerful ways of being alive. I'm simplifying the picture in order to make a contrast. When you look at the world, when you discover the world in your own experience, Your experience is not limited to the world you've been given, the definitions you've been given. Okay, are you still with me? Oh, okay. You are? Okay. If the world since the world that has been given us doesn't fit our experience exactly we have dreams.

[29:47]

Dreams fall outside the definition, so dreams allow something, another world to appear that's not in our primary definition. And we have primary and secondary and tertiary psychological processes to cope with differences in the way we perceive. And of course we have consciousness and conscious and unconscious territories. Okay, so it's like you have... This bundle of experience. And you put a definition of the world in the middle of that bundle. And within that definition of the world you put further distinctions of the shared consensual world and other definitions.

[31:09]

Let's keep the picture simple. You have the large bundle of your experience of the world. And you have the definition of the world you put in it. And some of it that doesn't fit goes into unconsciousness and into dreams and so forth. And then that changes the way you experience these, these become another kind of experience and you are living trying to organize this. And part of the problem, the suffering we have in a sâshin is that sâshin begins to break down the way we usually perceive external, internal. And you'll begin to feel physical discomfort or fidgetiness at the point where your boundaries start to change.

[32:22]

When your boundaries start to change. So, you're sitting and you begin to come close, though you don't recognize it, to a change in boundaries. And before you even recognize that's what's happening, you start moving your hands or you shift your legs. Which reestablishes the external, internal boundaries you're familiar with. That's normal. That's normal. And you can't get beyond that point really until you develop one-pointedness.

[33:38]

You have to have some place to locate yourself to allow boundaries to change. Now, I'm speaking to you. I have a clear, and most of us usually have a clear sense that I'm speaking and you're not speaking. And when you're speaking, you have a clear sense that you're speaking and that I'm not. This is one of the basic senses we have that we're a separate person. And that there's an external and internal. Although some of you may have the experience that when I'm speaking, you have a feeling I'm speaking your thoughts.

[34:44]

So you can see by that that the external, internal sense of who's speaking and who's not isn't actually so clear. But very basic to us is the sense of external, internal. And that's part of our sense of self. Maybe this is kind of demanding and it shouldn't be so long today. But if you can't, you know, it takes a certain amount of energy to try to say something clearly. A huge amount of energy actually. And it takes a huge amount of energy to hear it also. Particularly when you're not sure it agrees with what you already know and don't know.

[35:55]

But if I can introduce you to this way of looking at things, perhaps you'll evolve it yourself. Now, the so-called external world, what we call the external world depends on an observer. If you change the observer, you change what we call external and internal. And if you look at cell biology, you can see complex organisms develop through different entities living within other entities, making a larger identity.

[37:27]

Or that at a molecular level we're separated and at an atomic level we're just one bunch of stuff. You know, listening to the German and the Hartsutur chanting, Since I can't follow the words really yet, mostly I just hear it. And it sounds much more like a mountain stream than English. There's more wet sounds and dist sounds than it is. There's quite a lot of hums and so forth.

[38:44]

And there's more hums, though, in English. I tried to listen to English the same way, and it sounds like... people talking in the distance. Maybe that's just because I'm familiar with English talking. But the German sounded more like being up fairly close to a mountain stream. And there were more high-low contrasts rather than even going up and down. You could do an interesting experiment. I think I'm going to suggest to my daughter. You could record a lot of sounds from nature and then record, say, German, French and English and put them on a computer and see how they match, correlate with sounds in nature.

[39:53]

My daughter likes to think up science experiments. Okay. So, in this koan 37, it says something like, if he can see within the light of a spark, let's see, something like, let me say it again, The emperor and empress are visible in the marketplace if you can see within the light of a spark.

[41:06]

Now, is that obvious to you what that means? Let me give you a little early Buddhist background. As I said, this lecture is a series of notes. And mostly I'm enjoying being with you so much. giving me a chance to be with you. Okay. In early Buddhism they attempted to find within experience the atoms of existence. And they used the electron microscope of Zazen. When I look around, I see all these bases you've created for the electron microscope.

[42:24]

But no matter how complicated the base gets, you're still looking. I like that. Okay, and what they discovered, like modern physics did, that when they got down to the basic unit, it didn't hold its existence. Was that stable? Yeah, that it, like an atom, could be further divided into many particles. Further and further divided. So, the early Buddhists thought that each dharma had its own mark. And what was discovered, of course, and what Mahayana Buddhists emphasize, is that each Dharma does not have its own being, does not have its own mark.

[43:40]

Now that's why this tantric Mahayana text of the Heart Sutra, it's a tantric text of this late Prajnaparamita, It says that Avlokiteshvara saw that the five skandhas in their own being are empty. So the emphasis shift from finding the intrinsic permanent mark of each unit of experience but rather to find the smallest perceptual unit of existence.

[44:52]

And as I said, that was actually calculated by the Buddhists as being one hundredth of a second or something like that. And it actually correlates fairly closely to modern psychological experiments which try to measure the length of the perceptual moment. And some people can shorten and shorten that moment. Okay, so the spark in the light of a spark means the smallest perceptual moment.

[45:59]

And to see the emperor or the empress in the marketplace, presumably in disguise, means that when you perceive In that kind of detail, you see the Buddha. Or what we could say, putting it another way, when you perceive in that kind of detail, what you see, we call the Buddha. Okay, so this is not a religion of belief, but a religion of direct experience. And how do you have that direct experience? How do you look at this experience that your life is within? Well, you look with this spark.

[47:05]

With this ability to stay still within the moments of your life. As I said last night in the poem, there is a vast stillness in each breath. And in fact, there is a knowledge in that stillness. And that stillness is also one-pointedness. So in your zazen and in your sitting during this sashin you are trying to in the midst of the movement of your experience and your breath Discerning moments of stillness.

[48:26]

As I suggested, you're trying to stay within that. Or finding your ease within that. Right. Then you may find, as I said, even though the moon is riding behind the clouds, the whole, the entire road is bathed in light. And in order to complete the design, the thread must be cut. You have to have the ability to sit here and not care what anyone thinks. Not compare yourself to what you should be doing or what others think you should be doing.

[49:28]

But just sit here for this week free of any kind of external influence. Now I'd like the first three or four days of the Sashin to belong to you. No theater city. Then the last part of the sashin, probably starting this evening, I'd like to more directly share the sashin with you. So probably this evening I'll start doing dokusans. And I'd like to see all of you at least once. Just to see you. And then after that, if there's time, whether you come or not is up to you. I suppose I can stop here.

[50:45]

I think I can end here.

[51:14]

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