Even though this is a rather small Sashin, we have good conditions for a Sashin. An altar, a room, nice weather, We don't really need nice weather, but, you know, it's a bonus. Then we have some other bonuses. Otmar as the Ino. Advaita in charge of the kitchen. Yeah, and the new translator, Maya. Yeah. And all of the rest of you having two or three jobs at once?

[01:05]

This is about the minimum number of people you can have and actually serve in the Zen Do and things. Or you could have three people. One cooks, one serves, one eats. This is about the size of Sashin when I first two or three years with Sukhara Shiva, about this number of people. So it looks like everyone in the Dharma Sangha is voting to do sesshins at Johanneshof. Yeah, but let's ignore them and do our sesshin here. Can you hear her well enough?

[02:19]

Are you speaking loudly enough? I don't know. Maybe a little. I'll speak louder. Okay, good. Thank you. I always think it's a very strange thing to do, a Sashin. To plunk our... Do you know the word plunk? To plunk, just to put your... That's to plunk something down. To plunk ourselves down in the middle of our life. In the middle of your... Things you have to do in the middle of your feelings and thoughts. Things you have to do in your thoughts. And it made me think of a story I heard of, was reminded of recently, of Suzuki Roshi.

[03:21]

And I remembered a story with Suzuki Roshi. It might be in this new biography of Sukershi, Crooked Cucumber. Which is in English, only came out in English recently, but is now being translated into German. Yeah, I don't know whether it's in that book or not, but something reminded me of this story. He went to Stanford University to give a lecture, I think it was. And I think he was substituting for some professor. Yeah, but when he got there, he looked at everybody, and then he sat, moved the furniture, and sat down in the middle of the room and showed people how to sit.

[04:41]

And some people say that Before Suzuki Roshi came, there was almost no Zen sitting in America. And by the time he died, thousands of people were sitting. So anyway, the story made me think, what is this sitting? Does it make any difference? It'd be good to be able to say, oh, it's just to sit, just sit. But just to sit isn't so easy.

[05:55]

And you can just sit for years and maybe you're uncomfortable most of the time. So what is the sitting that Tsukiroshi meant? Well, he did definitely mean when possible sitting with others. And sitting with him. And sitting in the context of a regular schedule and sometimes sashin. So I'll try to give... find some way to say something about this sitting, that allows us just to sit.

[07:16]

So here we have this sashin. And in Sashin you let the schedule take precedence over activity. So I suppose that's the most dramatic difference from your ordinary life. And you have this funny schedule, traditional schedule. And you let that take precedence over any ideas of activity you have. And then in sitting, you let stillness take precedence over movement.

[08:23]

As much as possible, you give precedence to stillness. And you let your breath, your attention to your breath take precedence over thinking. So as much as possible you're bringing your attention by counting or following, whatever, To your breath. And... Or... Or following. Thank you. So that's, you know, that's what sitting is. Giving precedence to a schedule, even if it's only a 30 or 40 minute period.

[09:51]

Giving precedence to stillness. And giving precedence to your breath. It's a kind of door you push yourself against or into. We could call it maybe a one-objectness door, one-objectness. One way of translating one-pointedness is also one-objectness. So I think I'm trying to use one objectness now to give you a feeling for this one pointedness.

[10:53]

Sounds good. Invented words. Yeah. Well, it's invented in English, too. Invented in Sanskrit, too. So... Because we're trying to make language work for experiences for which there aren't words. Now, if you work with a koan or a phrase, as I always recommend, this is also a process of one objectness. So the teacher may just tell you to do something, and because of your feeling for him or her, and your own spirit of practice,

[12:26]

You may do what the teacher says. By how strongly you believe this will work. And that kind of effort, that kind of energy is necessary to practice. And the phrase I've been giving you very often, I mean the practice instruction I've been giving you most often recently, To bring your attention and energy equally to each moment. That turns each moment into a koan or a phrase. To bring your attention and energy equally to each moment. And again, this energy equaling each moment is the feeling of being ready to act.

[13:55]

You have to feel, even if you're not doing anything, you feel ready to act. So it's very helpful, I think, to understand that even in the stillness of zazen, there's a readiness to act and at the same time a freedom from acting. There might be a big explosion or something outside the sender. We all hear it. But maybe none of us do anything. Sometimes this is described like the flame of a candle in a wind, but the flame doesn't move.

[15:02]

So I mean, if it's necessary, if it was a car accident, we would go out and help. But it was just some huge noise. We just hear it, and no, nothing happens. So this kind of stability or steadfastness of mind is still sitting. And this stability is... Steadfastness. Steadfastness means? Steadfastness of sitting. Sometimes I like to think of words you might not know.

[16:26]

Yeah, it's more fun this way. So this is already the craft of practice. And I'm always emphasizing, I've discovered it's useful to emphasize the craft of practice. Because most of us are lay people.

[17:33]

Beate mentioned to me yesterday or the day before. And this is Beate. I hope she doesn't mind my repeating her story. She spent three months at the practice period last year at Creston, or this year at Creston. And after coming back to Europe and going back into her job, I think she said she enjoyed her work or had a new feeling for her work. And people appreciated, people she worked with appreciated what she did and herself in a new way. And this is not unusual.

[18:46]

You know, it happens often after practice period or sometime at a place like Crestone, you find this to be the case. And you don't have to have any better understanding of Buddhism. Of course, your understanding is much better, but that's not the point. The point is somehow just being put into a situation, a developed Buddhist life situation,

[19:49]

Es geht darum, in eine entwickelte buddhistische Lebenssituation hineingestellt zu werden. Let's us find another way to be in the world. Eine andere Art zu finden, um in der Welt zu sein. Or let's at least taste another way of being in the world. Oder eine andere Art in der Welt zu sein, zu schmecken. And it may not taste good all the time. But something happens. Okay. But that's when you are practicing as a monk, like a monk. And so you just do it. And surprisingly, it has some effect on us. But in your lay life, your ordinary, usual life, I think we have to understand practice more deeply in order to bring it into our everyday life.

[21:01]

So I'm speaking about this one objectness. Or I'm speaking about sitting in a way that you can understand the process of sitting. Okay. So first of all, again, sitting is to give precedence to the schedule over activity. Even if you have lots of things to do, for 40 minutes, say, you sit.

[22:08]

Now, something happens during the sitting. Of course, you're alive for those 40 minutes. And they might seem like a few minutes, and they might seem like an hour and a half. That in itself is interesting. But right now I'm not speaking about what happens during sitting. I'm just talking about your intention to give precedence to a schedule or 40 minutes over activity. That act of giving precedence pushes you in a door that you can't quite yet see the shape of.

[23:18]

pushes you into a door that you can't quite yet see the shape of. And giving precedence to stillness over movement. So during the 40 minutes, you have an intention not to move. That intention itself is important, whether you move or not. Mm-hmm. And then you give precedence to breath over thinking.

[24:38]

Okay. So, now, if you can spend, if you can stay with your breath for 40 minutes, Or 20 minutes instead of 10 minutes. Oh, this is good. But whether it's 10 minutes or 20 minutes or one minute is different from the object or the intention to give precedence to breath. So I'm trying to give you a feeling why the Eightfold Path, the second of the Eightfold Path, is intention.

[25:39]

Ich versuche, euch klarzumachen, wieso die zweite Aussage des achtfachen Pfades Absicht ist. The second of the Eightfold Path is not sitting. Die zweite Botschaft des achtfachen Pfades ist nicht sitzen. It's intention. First is views. Okay, so I want to give you a feeling for this intention, and then sit, a feeling for this intention, and sitting as an embodiment of intention. So when we sit in a saschin, You're embodying your intention to sit.

[26:57]

And to give precedence to sitting over activity. And thinking and movement. Mm-hmm. This intention or this kind of intention, realized or partially realized, has its own power. And in a sense, what I'm trying to say is you're turning your sitting into objectness. In other words, if you give precedence to stillness over movement, you've created an object which is

[28:18]

The intention to be still. This is a little harder to explain than I thought it would be. Because you have to understand that intention in this sense is an object. There's a Ruka poem I like. There's a Rilke. Where he says, go out into the evening and lift your mind away from the worn doorstep and lift your mind into a tree and put that tree against the sky.

[29:41]

So, I mean, what Rilke is saying here is the tree is outside your door, but it's not an object until you go out and look at the tree. And to shift your gaze from the worn doorstep of your life, and to shift your gaze from the worn doorstep of your life, to look at this tree and to place it against the sky. So the tree's there, but it's waiting to be an object.

[30:49]

and waiting to be an object in contrast to the usual things we're distracted with. You lift your mind into the object. So here, what you're doing when you're sitting is you lift your mind into the intention to sit. You lift your mind into giving precedence to stillness. And you may sometimes be still and sometimes you're not so still. But you keep lifting your mind into stillness. And lifting your mind into your breath.

[31:56]

This act of lifting your mind into stillness is sitting. There's a word, I think it's osculation, osculation, I think, yeah, osculation. Okay, this I don't expect you to translate. Okay, it's an ancient method of listening to the organs to diagnose the person's health. So sometimes this process of lifting the mind is divided, is analyzed into two parts. One is like a bird catching the wind and sailing.

[33:35]

And the second is like the bird then flapping the wings. Or it can be to bring yourself into the position of listening If you want to hear something, you become still and you listen. But first you have to become still and then you listen. So your sitting is not just dead sitting. It's like you come into the position of listening, and then you listen. You listen to your lungs, or to your breathing, to your inner organs, to your heart.

[34:42]

You can actually do that. That can be practice. And you get to know your body very well with this inner listening. And you get so you can hear other people's bodies too. But also, I'm using this as a metaphor, That there's this position of listening and then there's the feeling of listening. This is also what's meant by one objectness or one pointedness. So your whole posture becomes The object of your absorption.

[35:58]

This is also like the readiness to act. Or the feeling that each flower you see is the Buddha. Or each person you see is the Buddha. And you can't think yourself into that feeling. But if you find yourself in this one objectness, it's a kind of welding or welding, like welding metal. or you find a feeling of unity. And this practice of intention as one objectness, which is a way to describe just sitting,

[37:13]

not doing anything else. So this practice of sitting as one objectness is to taste the unity of mind and the unity of mind Mind is the unity of mind. And the more you taste or feel the unity of mind, it's like the unity of mind is simultaneously a door. And when you feel the unity of mind you get pushed through the door of the unity of mind.

[38:27]

And at first it's a revolving door. You go through it and you come right back the other side. Was that a department store in there? But each time the revolving door is a little slower. And at some point you suddenly find yourself for a while on the other side. Usually our practice isn't quite deep enough to stay there too long. And even if you've wandered a few yards or meters away from the revolving door, It's wind or maybe it has a long hand that reaches out and grabs you.

[39:38]

Or there's a kind of attractiveness. Oh no, the department store is on the other side. And you're carried back through the door. But this unity of mind as the one objectness of zazen is a door which can locate you in another way of being. die euch in eine andere Art des Seins lokalisieren kann. So please, in this session, let's practice the one objectness of zazen, the one objectness of the intention to sit.

[40:41]

giving precedence to this unity of mind, or giving precedence to this intention to sit, for this week at least, Precedence over usual activity, thinking, and movement. You'll find yourself at the edge, and maybe a little over the edge, into a new way of being. Thank you for letting me say this. And thank you for helping me say this. You're welcome. God bless you.

[42:08]

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