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. And the subject, I believe, is the heart and mind teachings, right?

[01:04]

Whatever we call it. 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. Like a mantra. Like a mantra. though it's become and is mostly studied now as a kind of heart of the teaching, to be the essentials of the kind of distillation of the basic teachings of Prajnaparamita literature.

[02:30]

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. So we could also call what I'll try to do in this seminar, another title for this seminar,

[03:42]

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, I would try to speak about certain terms or ideas that are going to be necessary or part of the seminar.

[05:01]

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. However, if you pay attention to a list of terms, you get almost everything.

[06:11]

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, it's two words, well, it's about five words in German, right? Geist. Heart and mind, whether it's in Japanese or English or German, is and can be understood as an image.

[07:25]

Or a mandala. Now, I want to... A mandala, most simply, it's a circle. But it also means the way things are deposited. So I'm now defining for you the term mandala. 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.

[08:43]

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. 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.

[09:47]

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. So be here now has been a useful kind of slogan for people. So we could call it a first generation 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.

[11:13]

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. Und ich möchte es noch einmal sagen, das hört sich sehr leicht an und ist auch sehr leicht zu sagen, aber es ist ziemlich schwierig, das auch zu tun. Aber die Hauptschwierigkeit liegt vor allem darin, dass wir so eine Art Hinweis brauchen und vor allen Dingen eben eine Erlaubnis. So 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.

[12:31]

Now you see, the establishment of the immediate present is rather different than be here now. 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.

[13:49]

Now, what do I mean by reading the present as text? 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.

[14:57]

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, 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...

[16:05]

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 two are on the same spectrum 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.

[17:29]

One is that everything changes, everything, except uncaused space. That's important. 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.

[18:30]

And you'd have to accept this third axiom of Buddhism, perhaps, if you were 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. 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.

[19:41]

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. 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.

[20:46]

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. 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, leave 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,

[22:54]

But not every aspect. But those aspects that contribute 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.

[24:02]

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. I'll try to give it to myself and see if I can share it with you. 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.

[25:08]

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 at Winterthur, 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.

[26:14]

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. You got that. She knows what not to translate. Okay, so there are certain images in your life through which your energy flows. Okay, 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.

[27:35]

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 sucks right 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. Und die Übung der Achtsamkeit jetzt in einem etwas komplexeren Sinne oder auch im Sinne von Sassen stellt jetzt eine Möglichkeit dar, wirklich eben diese Komplexität des eigenen Lebens zu integrieren.

[28:41]

Und das macht man eben oft durch Bilder oder Metaphoren. Now, there's many reasons why it's done through images and metaphors, which I might go into during the seminar. 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.

[29:55]

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. 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, you know.

[31:28]

Wind blows them off. How do you get rooted in this heart-mind tree? Now, although you don't, 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. 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,

[32:31]

they are 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. Man untersucht jetzt einfach nicht nur die tausend Aspekte nur von Blättern. And not notice what's happening in the roots of your mind, heart, body.

[33:48]

Und dass man dabei nicht bemerkt, was jetzt in den Wurzeln dieses Herz, Geist, Körpers oder Baumes vor sich geht. Now, once you've got the idea of how to do this study, it's not so hard. Und wenn man erstmal eine Vorstellung davon bekommen hat, wie man das jetzt untersucht, ist es nicht so schwer. And it's hard after you die. But it's quite easily as long as you're alive. 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.

[35:02]

And a basic Buddhist practice is to sense the mood of the day or the music of the day. This is not outside you this day. 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.

[36:21]

It's one stroke. It's actually six strokes. And as I pointed out a number of times, the word simple means one fold. 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.

[37:25]

And the third stroke is bringing it across. And then the fourth stroke is you push it down a little bit and then lift into the air. So there's six strokes altogether. And the 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. 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.

[38:35]

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. The example I often use is the number pi, which simply describes the circle, or is part of the description of the circle. 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.

[39:36]

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 for your, a vehicle for your being that allows complexity and simplicity to fold into each other.

[40:36]

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 that go with a range of thoughts.

[42:03]

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 mandala. And all of this together could be called the body-mind mandala. Or you could call it the heart-mind mandala. Now, the first is you have to study this mandala. Well, first you have to study this territory, and then it may become a mandala.

[43:08]

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. This is mindfulness practice. More subtle or more developed mindfulness practice than just paying attention. Now, for this more developed Zen practice, daily exercises and direct perception as an exercise are as important as doing Zazen. Okay, now you can use, I can give you, there's various exercises... ...with concentration... ...and there are exercises in reading the present as text... And seeing the dimensioned present as a mandala.

[44:42]

But they're also kind of stepping stones, a path to what's called simultaneous vision in Buddhism. Simultaneous vision means that there's an integrated vision so the realm of zazen mind and big mind and small mind you can see simultaneously. Now this might be a little too much for two days. But if we can get Sunday to the point where you can sense and understand how it's possible to see simultaneously in an integrated way, we'll have accomplished quite a lot.

[45:59]

And one version of it is being open, having a mind that's open to thoughts and perceptions and simultaneously open to the body. And when you can begin to activate this image or mandala of the heart-mind you can enter it at different points. you can enter another person's territory through sensation and not just through thoughts or the leaves.

[47:00]

You can also enter the roots. Your roots are all touching as well as your leaves are touching. Now, this is pretty basic stuff and taken for granted by ordinary people in Asia. Some of it's taken for granted. But anything can be misused, exploited, etc. So all of our cultures have great ideas in them and then we misuse them. Now, the last thing I should talk about is what's called Doronic memory. And what's why we're going to practice chanting this sutra to some extent?

[48:30]

It's thought that chanting something with physical concentration that's not a reading mind produces another level of memory. Were you able to translate? I folded that one or two more times just to see how you do. Anyway, I'm also just playing because you have to play with these things. It's not real serious. Okay. Now, sometimes you feel suffering. Something disturbs you. And it reaches often into, very commonly, it reaches into kind of reservoirs of suffering in the same territory.

[49:43]

You tap kind of past suffering. You tap, like tapping water, you tap past suffering. And we don't tap past joy so often. And but it's there. But we don't know how to tap it or have access to it. And part of this simultaneous vision is the ability to be unblinkingly within suffering and at the same time to feel joy. Now, we put many structures on our consciousness. And why we do that, we could spend a lot of time on why we do that.

[50:44]

And some of the structures we place on consciousness are helpful and a lot of them are coercive. And the structures we put on... One of the main things that we do in putting a structure on consciousness is we define out awareness, which is actually a larger territory of existence than consciousness. And one of the main ways the structures of consciousness lessen our ability to tap joy is that we think everything has to have a meaning or a reason or a cause.

[52:07]

And suffering is in the realm of reasons, cause and so forth. True joy is not in the realm of cause, it's spontaneous. So it's stored differently. And when you feel joy, you think, there's no reason for this. You know, there's no, I mean, what's the meaning of this? It's... And so you put it down, you know, with the structure of your consciousness. Now, it'd be great to loosen those up this weekend. And one of the ways to do that is to recognize that karmic memory is the contents of experiences. And Dharani memory is the states of mind of previous events or events in your life.

[53:21]

It's the memory of states of mind. And those states of mind also appear in your body as sensations or little aches. And the jewel in the Buddha's statue is the Buddha's hand. It represents the reproducible states of mind, the little aches of a reproducible state of mind.

[54:21]

So one of the... we could say when you can read the text of your own body, When the states of mind of your, when memory as states of mind is enfolded in the present moment, there's an advantage to being older, and we call that wisdom. But if you can't, in the sense I'm talking about, read your text of your experience, you're just older. You might look wiser, but... So, Duranic memory is one of the gates of Duranic memory is considered to be the state of mind that's produced through concentration and chanting.

[55:38]

So, it's only one of the entries to Duranic memory. or memory as mandalas now one sense of this again is when you receive a teaching that you don't fully understand but you can have the physical sensation of it you can store that memory until it unfolds And then you come to understand the teaching. So we could say that karmic memory tends to be infectious or infected. It infects the other things it touches.

[56:39]

Doronic memory, which is a special memory created through practice, is fertile memory. And it's meant to create the fertility of your experience, the fertility of the present. So that when you hear a teaching, you don't understand it, but it has a fertility that works in you, that you can keep in your body, even though you don't understand it. And that's called a dharanic memory. So to live in your body-mind mandala, to live in your heart-mind mandala as an image that you can feel around you, is to inhabit the territory of your physical and mental existence.

[58:01]

Okay, that's enough, right? That's the best I can do tonight. So tomorrow, when there's more time, we can take little parts of this and unpack it. And we can unpack it pretty much the way you want to. Because all these experiences, everything I'm talking about is already in you, but it's scattered in you. You don't know how to access it usually. And if any of you are familiar with Buddhist texts, the basic style of teaching is the dialogue. A dialectic.

[59:15]

And that's because we unpack things better together than by ourselves. And that's why I like to work with Ulrike. and with the Vernies and with many of you I've seen before and my good friend Bill in the back and my new friend sitting beside Bill okay and I'm looking forward to having a good time with you guys whoever comes tomorrow what time do we start? It depends on you. I thought at 9, but I don't know what to do.

[60:19]

How long? Does it take anybody as much as an hour to get here? Yeah? Do you like getting up at 7? 6? So why don't we start at 9.30? Is that all right? And if you really understand the idea of teachings, we could start at 11.45. Because all I'd have to do is give you the physical sensation and then it's just a matter of hanging in there with it. Okay, thank you very much. You're welcome.

[61:05]

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