Such a good translator. She sounds good from this side of the language. And also we're practicing together, so it helps me to explore how to teach Buddhism in general when I can work with somebody who I'm practicing with and also trying to translate teaching. So I thought the beginning of a seminar that is Saturday and Sunday, right? Till Sunday evening or Sunday afternoon or something.

[01:00]

And the subject, I believe, is the heart and mind teachings, right? So I thought I might talk about... Well, first, so I thought we might, those of you who are coming to the seminar, I thought we might do some chanting practice. Because the heart and mind, the heart sutra or the heart and mind sutra, is originally an incantational text. Incantation... Like a mantra.

[02:16]

Though it's become and is mostly studied now as a kind of heart of the teaching. To be the essentials of the a kind of distillation of the basic teachings of Prajnaparamita literature. But it originally is to produce a state of mind that allows you to understand the teaching rather than to be about the teaching. So what they try to do, and it's typical of Buddhist practices, is they try to use the teaching to produce the state of mind that allows you to understand and absorb the teaching.

[03:38]

So we could also call what I'll try to do in this seminar another title for this seminar could be about how to inhabit the territory of your own physical existence. And I'll try to give you some practices which I hope will help you inhabit the territory of your own existence. Of your own physical existence. Now, what I thought I'd try to do this evening is, while for a large number of you this is an introduction to the seminar,

[04:43]

I would try to speak about certain terms or ideas that are going to be necessary or part of the seminar. And this is a territory I've been working with since I've come to Europe. So some of the terms I will try to discuss with you this evening are I've been finding ways to work with during the last few weeks. So for those of you who happen to be in Berlin or Vienna, the seminar will be different, but some of the terms are the same. But I'm also going to, of course, for those of you who aren't coming to the seminar, try to make this useful to you, not just a list of terms.

[06:11]

However, if you pay attention to a list of terms, you get almost everything. Sometimes if you want to look at somebody's book quickly or directly, go to the glossary in the back and see what terms they translate. Okay. So heart and mind... are two words. In Japanese, they're one word. And heart and mind in English or in two words, what's about five words in German, right?

[07:17]

Geist and... Heart and mind, whether it's in Japanese or English or German, is and can be understood as an image. Or a mandala. Now, I want to... A mandala, most simply, it's a circle. Im einfachsten Sinne ist ein mandala einfach ein Kreis. But it also means the way things are deposited. Man könnte es auch so auffassen, dass es eine bestimmte Art und Weise darstellt, wie Dinge aufbewahrt werden. So, I'm now defining for you the term mandala.

[08:23]

So, the way things are deposited. In the sense that would be like if you had a glass, if you were a chemist, and you had various substances in it, and what settles out first and is deposited in various ways, the first level of deposit would be a mandala. The second level of sediment or structure or whatever it happened to form would be another mandala. Now During the 60s, a lot of Buddhist sediment was deposited, at least in the United States. And, you know, sometimes I think, geez, this stuff causes a lot of trouble, this sediment.

[09:38]

And other times I'm very grateful for it. Tonight I'm grateful for it. For instance, one example of this Buddhist sentiment is be here now. Be here now, you know, it's maybe a revolution in thinking for some people. And it's a phrase that sticks in your mind like a commercial or something. Like the pause that refreshes Coca-Cola. In that sense, that's a kind of mandala, the pause that refreshes and advertising tries to use it.

[10:40]

So, be here now has been a useful kind of slogan for people. But if we, so we could say that's a first, we could call it a first generation slogan form of mindfulness practice. Okay. Perhaps a second generation form of mindfulness practice would be how to bring concentration to your activity, mental and physical. Die zweite Generation der Übung der Achtsamkeit wäre jetzt, wie bringe ich wirklich Konzentration zu meiner geistigen und körperlichen Existenz?

[11:42]

Or how to inhabit the territory of your physical existence? This again is fairly easy to say and for you to hear, but it is quite difficult to do. But most of the difficulty is actually in the level... We need a clue of how to do it, and we need permission. So another... another aspect of mindfulness or perhaps a third generation of mindfulness or be here now would be mindfulness as the establishment of the immediate present. Now you see, the establishment of the immediate present is rather different than be here now.

[13:02]

It allows you, the language or what is pointed out in the phrase allows you to practice differently. So we could say the phrase, the establishment of the immediate present is a mantra or dharani or even a mandala. Or an image. And another generation of this mindfulness would be reading the present as text. Now, what do I mean by reading the present as text?

[14:04]

The simplest way to give you a feeling for it is when you, the example I've used is when you read a poem that really affects you, the poem reads you. Does that make sense to you? You read something and you feel yourself being read in the process of reading the poem. Okay, how do you allow the present to read you? And how do you read the present? So that's a specific idea or teaching that I've just presented. Another idea that I'd like to suggest is the idea of a teaching. Now, teaching is, if I present something to you that has a topographical stability,

[15:27]

Which is also a definition of a mandala. So if I present something to you that you feel a physical end to, or you can have a kind of physical feeling for what's been said, that it's... that there's a physical sensation that goes with what you've just heard, that's called a teaching. Okay. Now another idea in Buddhism and an experience in Buddhism that I want to introduce is that thoughts, how do I put it, that mental activity and physical activity are on the same spectrum.

[17:10]

All thoughts have a physical dimension to them. And all physical sensations have a mental or thought dimension to them. Now that's taken for granted in Buddhism. I suppose I could add it to one of the basic things that Buddhism depends on. One is that everything changes, everything, except uncaused space. That's important.

[18:12]

And second, that there's a distinction between minds and most simply big mind and small mind, we can say. And maybe the third would be there's nothing mental that isn't physical and nothing physical that isn't mental. So these three things would represent growing subtlety in practice. And you'd have to accept this third axiom of Buddhism, perhaps, if you are going to inhabit the territory of your own physical existence. The first instruction my teacher gave me was put your mind in your left hand. And I'd gone to a pretty good college in the United States and no one had ever told me that. It hadn't been part of my education.

[19:33]

I didn't know what he was talking about. But he was such a sweet, luminous guy that I thought, you know, I'll give it a try, but I didn't know how to do it. And I'm still trying. Okay. Now, another, when I was... Just starting to practice Buddhism, I also read a lot of poetry. In fact, Ezra Pound got me sort of into Asia and to Buddhism. And he talks about imagist verse. Imagist verse or verse, poetry, imagist poetry. And in 1912, 1913, he had a magazine called Vortex.

[20:56]

And I had a hard time sort of getting what did they mean by an image in the poetry, because there often wasn't an image that I could identify easily in the poetry. But I should have gotten a clue from the fact that cubism was developing at the same time and they were breaking up the image. So an image for Pond and those folks... was a topographically stable pattern through which energies could flow.

[22:03]

And it makes me think of a in math there's a term an image which is a range of points within a given function. For a gardener, well, read out the gardener for a moment. The term mandala is also translated as fragrance. And for a gardener, if you looked at a particular flower, and he looked at the flower in such a way he saw what was growing beside it and what time of year it was, the season, the dirt, all the aspects that are associated with the flower,

[23:13]

But not every aspect. But those aspects that contributed to the fertility of the flower is a mandala. So it doesn't have to be... It's not every detail. It's just those details that contribute to the fertility or the life of the flower. So not everyone can see that, only a gardener can see that. So again, there are mandalas in your life. How do you see those mandalas? So you could understand Buddha, Dharma, Sangha as Buddha meaning you have to do it completely alone.

[24:28]

And Sangha is meaning you have to do it completely with everyone else. And Dharma is meaning you have to know how to do it. So I'm going to try to give you the heart-mind-dharma teaching this weekend. Or I'll try to give it to myself and see if I can share it with you. Okay. So you can see that for Ezra Pound writing images poetry, the image was not a picture. And for us practicing Buddhism, a mandala is not a circle.

[25:30]

A mandala is an architecture. When I watched His Holiness the Dalai Lama at the Kalachakra ceremony with the monks who were making the big mandala, A few years ago it was a winter tour, wasn't it? Recon. Anyway, they make the mandala flat on the surface. But somebody who knows the mandala well and can check it can walk into it like it was a several-story building. And can spatially say, oh, that right there shouldn't be that way because it's there and it's actually turned this way and so forth.

[26:53]

You got that. She knows what not to translate. There are certain images in your life through which your energy flows. Your existence is bigger than your life. I mean, excuse me, your existence is bigger than yourself. The self is too small a vehicle for the complexity of our life.

[28:00]

So you try to set sail and try to put the complexity of your life in yourself and a lot of it falls overboard and becomes the unconscious. And sticks to the bottom of the boat. So you have a terrible time sailing this boat and sometimes the boat shuts itself down. And the sail is stuck in the mud, you know. So the practice of mindfulness in the more developed sense that I'm talking about and Zazen is meant to give you a territory to integrate the complexity of your life. Now this is often done through images and metaphors. Now there's many reasons why it's done through images and metaphors, which I might go into during the seminar.

[29:26]

Now your dreams are a territory, an imaginal territory that doesn't belong to your unconscious only and doesn't belong quite to your conscious. And if you begin to inhabit the territory of your physical existence, dreams begin to belong to your conscious realm. And if you change the vehicle of your life the way unconscious factors work in your life is different. So heart and mind is an image, something like this. This area right here in your chest is the soil. And your body is... I'm just using an image to try to give us some access.

[30:54]

And your body is the roots and... What are the little tiny roots called? Oh, thanks. And the dirt. And the thoughts are the branches and the concepts and the leaves. And you don't want to always live in the leaves. They're always falling off. And lightning strikes.

[31:56]

The wind blows them off. How do you get rooted in this heart-mind tree? Now, although you don't For most of us it's not so easy for us to feel the physicality of thoughts. There are many practices which allow you to begin to do this. And the roots of the tree are equally important with the branches and leaves of the tree. They live in different environments and have a different language or medium of understanding. So, but you can notice, although it's hard to notice the physicality of thoughts, you can begin to notice that with a certain set of thoughts, a certain range of thoughts,

[33:00]

They're often accompanied by a certain mood. And that mood is often accompanied by a certain physical posture, physical sensation, something like that. When Dogen says Buddhism begins with studying the self, he means studying it in the way I've been just describing. You study the self as it's rooted in the body. You just don't study all of the aspects of leaves. And not notice what's happening in the roots of your mind, heart, body.

[34:19]

Now, once you've got the idea of how to do this study, it's not so hard. And it's hard after you die. But it's quite easily as long as you're alive. If you're sick and nearly dead, it's easier. If you've got a lot of problems and stuff going on, then it's great. You can study it quite easily. So nearly dead is a good time to start. So you begin to notice that, well, right now, I would say, there's a certain mood or feeling in this room. And there's a certain mood to this day with the rain coming and the thunder.

[35:33]

And basic Buddhist practice is to sense the mood of the day or the music of the day. This day is not outside you, this day is inside you. And there's a certain mood or music of your or muse of your particular psychological feeling, emotional feeling. So that would be kind of the beginning territory of this study. It's like when you do the character for, the single character for one in Japanese or Chinese.

[36:55]

It's one stroke. It's actually six strokes. And as I pointed out a number of times, the word simple means one fold. So making something one isn't the same as one. So the character for one starts in the air to the right and the first stroke is in the air. The second stroke is you touch the paper at a sort of 25 degree angle. And the third stroke is you lift it slightly to the middle of that little splotch you made and bring it across. And the third stroke is when you just pull the brush out of the small clump you just made up to the right.

[38:06]

And the following strokes are that you bring the brush down briefly and then back into the air. And this sense of starting in the air before you touch the paper is... if you don't, it looks different. So it's good to start your practice of studying yourself in the air with the thunder and lightning. And what I want to get away from here is the idea that Zen is simple. You're the most complex, precious stuff we know about on the planet.

[39:07]

You're not simple. And the attempt to make yourself simple causes a lot of problems for you. Again, the simple example I've been using is pi, which is 2r times 3.14. So on the one hand, it's just a relationship of the physical circle. On the other hand, if you translate it into Arabic numbers, in our number system, it's 3.14 blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[40:12]

So from one point of view it's simple, from another point of view it's complex. And that's true of you and Zen. So how can you look at yourself without a coercive simplicity? It's like looking at a mountain from a distance, it's simple and beautiful. And up close it's complex. So this is a little teaching. Simplicity and complexity are two aspects of each other. You want to find a territory, a vehicle for your being that allows complexity and simplicity to fold into each other.

[41:14]

Okay, so dreams are images outside the self, shall we say, that allow energies of your life to flow through them. So I will probably this weekend try to give you one or two practices that allow you to enter the buddhist dreaming practices. So, how are we doing here? So you can begin to notice certain feelings that go with a range of thoughts.

[42:43]

You can begin to notice a certain mood and then a physical posture. And then you can begin to see that there are certain sensations, physical sensations, that go with feelings, posture, thoughts, and so forth. Altogether, this would be called the body-mind... We could call this the body-mind mandala. Or you could call it the heart-mind mandala. Now, the first is you have to study this mandala. First you have to study this territory and then it may become a mandala. In other words, you get sort of familiar with the territory, you begin to notice how your body is or what sensations you have that accompany certain images or thoughts and so forth.

[44:15]

This is mindfulness practice. more subtle or more developed mindfulness practice than just paying attention. Now, for this more developed Zen practice, daily exercises in direct perception as an exercise are as important as doing Zazen. Okay. Now, you can use... I can give you... There's various exercises and...

[44:58]

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