It's nice to see you willing to come to a lecture on such a beautiful day here in Hanford. So, as usual, we have a title. The Field of Mind. Maya, you translated once or twice for me a long time ago, right? I think once, just once. This is a good experiment. So I'd like to use this title to speak about some things that have been interesting me, for the last months. And into this wide teaching of Buddhist practice, we need some kind of window into it.

[01:01]

I think of Suzuki Rishi. There's a new book out called Crooked Cucumber. Es gibt ein neues Buch von Suzuki Roshi, die... Crooked cucumber. The bent gherkin. Gurke, ja. It was the teacher's nickname for him when he was a boy, a young monk. Es war der Spitzname von Suzuki Roshi, als er ein kleiner Junge war. And some of you may know the book, though it's already only out in English so far, but presently being translated into German. And it's quite, I think, a good book. It's a very realistic picture of this ordinary and extraordinary person

[02:02]

Anyway, he was my teacher And once he went to, I believe it was Stanford University he was asked to give a lecture about Buddhism And I think he was meant to substitute for someone else. I don't remember exactly. And he got there in front of this class expecting an intellectual conversation. Can you hear us back there? A little bit louder? Okay. Yes, okay. And I think he talked for one or two sentences. And then he just sat down on the floor in front of the class and proceeded to show them how to sit.

[03:27]

If someone wants to come in here, there is some space here. If you don't mind sitting with a window dividing you in half, you can sit here. And this amuses me, that here he went to Stanford University and proceeded to just sit down with people and show them how to sit. And he, it's said that, some people have said, there was no sitting meditation before he came to America. And after, by the time he died, literally thousands of people were doing sitting meditations. I don't think he would have done that actually if he were giving a lecture in Japan.

[04:37]

So he saw something in America, in the West, which made him decide, yes, just to show sitting is what I should do. And I suppose for me, too, I can't imagine my practice without sitting practice. And what happens when you work with the posture? Now, I don't want to be saying to you that you can't practice Buddhism unless you do sitting meditation. But it's much, much easier to get a feel for it if you do sitting meditation. To just sit down in your life and then settle into your sitting.

[06:03]

And then see if you can relax. Because we could say, I think accurately say that all of Buddhist practice depends on the ability to relax. So I think if you've ever tried sitting meditation, I think you'll see it's not so easy to relax. Also, wenn ihr je schon mal Sitzmeditationen praktiziert habt, dann wisst ihr, dass es nicht so einfach ist, sich zu entspannen. And I would say that the fruit of relaxation is the field of mind.

[07:10]

Und die Frucht der Entspannung ist das Feld des Minds, des Geistes. Someone said to me, you sit down and you feel quite satisfied maybe and then something comes in and destroys your satisfaction. If you can ask yourself, why is that? If you can feel that there's no real reason that you shouldn't be relaxed, practice arises with asking yourself that question. Now, somebody named Vajrapani says that when the mind is in meditative equipoise, it doesn't conceive of anything.

[08:26]

and only observes the joyous, clear mind. Now that's a... I think for me a statement like that is a challenge. to be able to sit down in meditative equipoise and not conceive of anything and only observe clear, joyous mind. That's nice, you know. I mean, it's quite nice. But the fruit of it is also nice.

[09:42]

If you spend even moments a day in what Dogen calls self-joyous samadhi, It makes a big difference in our life. Imagine if you had no happy days in your life. Yeah, you'd probably be pretty discouraged. You wouldn't even know what discouraged meant. Because you'd just be bleh. So, if you can imagine what a few happy days promise us, and perhaps a recognition there's no reason why this isn't possible more of the time. Actually, sometime each day, feeling this, just resting in clear, joyous mind,

[10:51]

makes a big difference in how you function. So if you can just sit here while we're sitting here now with a simple feeling of not having to And not having to go anywhere. The more you can touch that feeling, we could call that primary reality. And as soon as you start having utilitarian ideas, you're in, we could call, secondary reality. Well, most of the time we're in secondary reality. Now, I think it's useful to name, create a name, not primary reality.

[12:27]

and because maybe if you have that feeling you could value it and if you touch this primary reality occasionally begins to cut through the layers of mind And we feel more and more stabilized and rooted. I was reading some comments of Matisse, the painter, recently. And he has something like imagine something like a scene.

[13:42]

And each scene has the potential of being a picture. But it's not turned into a picture except through the functioning of the painter. There are certain colors and so forth. And shapes. But there's also the feeling of the painter about these forms and colors. So Matisse says he doesn't really paint what he sees. He doesn't paint the tree, say a tree, but he paints the way he sees the tree. It's almost like he says he takes a bite out of the scene and the bite, well chewed, becomes a picture.

[14:47]

So it's more like if he were to take a bite into the scene and then it would be a well-peeled... Well chewed. Yeah, gut gekaut. Gut gekaut, yeah. What will it, well chewed, what? Becomes a picture, becomes a painting. Ja, dann wird dieses gut gekaute ein Bild. And he says, this is how a painter teaches us ways of seeing. Well, this is not so different than Dogen's famous title of one of the sections of his teachings. The Genjo Koan, which is, Gen is what appears. Joe is to complete what appears.

[16:01]

And knowing the relationship, koan in this case means knowing the relationship between the universal and the particular. Okay, so I started out saying that when we can relax the field of mind has a chance to appear. Now I think you have to recognize that in yogic culture, in Buddhist culture, there are no entities. There are only functions. So the mind isn't an entity. So ist der Geist keine Ganzheit.

[17:12]

It's a function. Es ist eine Funktion. You want to come in here? Oh, please. Sounds good. Okay. But we don't have any... I don't know if we have more cushions here. Oh, there's a chair back there. And one there, too. Sorry. I don't even recognize you. Yeah. It's nice to see you. Okay. Anyway, I think you have to ponder this difference yourself between an entity and a function.

[18:19]

If you think of the self as an entity, it's pretty hard to work with it. And as I repeatedly say, if you think of self as the three functions of establishing separation, connectedness, separation, connectedness and continuity, You can begin to see yourself functioning in you. So mind, let's understand mind as a function. So the word genjokoan describes the functioning of mind.

[19:39]

So the field of mind, if we take this as a title, is to notice the mind functioning ist zu bemerken, wie der Geist funktioniert, oder dass er funktioniert. As a field. Dass er funktioniert als Feld. Okay. Okay, so we're going back to, let's go back to the word relaxation. Lasst uns zurückkehren zum Wort Entspannung. So you sit down and you notice that you can't relax. You can't? You cannot. You cannot, okay. I think some of you may sit down and just totally... Yeah, but I think usually it takes a while to relax. I can remember one of the times when I...

[20:44]

first experience, the first stage of relaxation. I've been sitting quite a long time at that point. And I thought that, yeah, I felt relaxed enough. And one day my tummy, my stomach went... That was good, yeah. It didn't look any different actually. But it felt different. I've let my mind somehow out of my stomach, out of holding my stomach. I mean, no one could have told me how to do it because I had no idea I was doing it.

[22:05]

But one day, you know, just sitting, having less of a diffused state of mind, and relaxation has something to do with your mind becomes less diffused. Also Entspannung hat etwas damit zu tun, dass euer Geist weniger diffus ist. And some concentration arises naturally, not through effort. Und dass eine Konzentration aufsteigt, ganz natürlich, ohne Anstrengung. And this concentration is also a kind of relaxation. Und diese Konzentration ist auch eine Art von Entspannung. then the mind becomes freer to just rest on whatever is present.

[23:13]

It's more possible just to bring attention to something. And you can bring attention to mind itself, not the objects of mind. So when you can bring attention to mind itself rather than the objects of mind, you're closer to experiencing the field of mind. the spaciousness of mind. Now another phrase I've been contemplating the last few months is one of the initial statements in the Pali Abhidharma canon. It says, when a healthy, conscious attitude... Now, I'm giving you these statements again to give you some sort of, like, something to... Buoys, buoys...

[24:49]

But you sail a ship around that guides you into a harbor, a buoy, you tie your ship to? We actually, it's spelled buoy in English, but we pronounce it buoy. Oh, girl, I don't know. Translate that? Yeah. Okay. Because I think if you have these statements, that if you look at them carefully, and think, well, these people, these were intelligent people, deeply embedded in practice. They probably meant what they're saying. What are they saying? To complete what appears. First of all, what appears? I'm looking at you. and I hear the movements of you and I feel my own energy and some kind of attention to being here present with you what's the boundary of what appears and what's my own relationship to what appears

[26:26]

Like Matisse being present to the picture that's in this scene. And then as he tries to, Matisse tries to complete, to discover the picture, we can try to complete or integrate what appears. So that's a statement that I think is worth working with, to complete what appears. You can ignore this and live quite a happy life, I hope. But this, in a very simple sense, is about how we are living. Each moment appears. You're a participant in that moment.

[27:51]

Completing it or diffusing it or whatever. And these moments are also called in sort of technical language function events. These are not just passive moments, they're function events. And you're never separate from them. Particularly the more you find it dissatisfying to live in generalizations. The idea that things are entities is a kind of generalization. So let's come back to this first statement of the Abhidharma Pali teachings. When a healthy, conscious attitude arises,

[29:03]

Okay, now we immediately start thinking of that, oh, yeah, be healthy and conscious all the time, great. Then we think, oh, that's not possible. And psychotherapists say, well, that's not good. Because you have to suffer and accept you're suffering and you're not healthy all the time and you have to accept you're not healthy all the time, etc., But that's thinking in generalizations. This just says, when a healthy, conscious attitude arises for a moment. Die sagt einfach, wenn eine gesunde, bewusste Haltung auftritt im Moment. Belonging to a world of sensuous relatedness.

[30:16]

Belonging to a world of sensuous relatedness. You don't have to retreat. You're not in mental space. You're in embodied space. You feel, hear, smell and feel touched by the world. So when a healthy conscious attitude, you don't have to translate, but when a healthy conscious attitude arises belonging to a world of sensuous relatedness permeated by serenity permeated by serenity linked or joined to knowledge

[31:21]

then the conditions for practice are present. That's already a big order. But that doesn't mean you should give up. What's great about it is it's doable. It's a big order, but it's possible. And really, if you fulfill this little statement, you're about 80-90% of the way there. So permeated by serenity. This also just means relaxation. joined to knowledge, knowing how things exist.

[32:43]

Knowing how things exist means having spent some time in primary reality. Wissen, wie Dinge existieren, heißt, einige Zeit in dieser primären Realität verbracht zu haben. Not always putting utilitarian ideas on what appears. Nicht immer nutzbringende Ideen auf das aufladen, was auftritt. So I'll give you a couple of practices. Ich gebe euch ein paar Übungen. And one basic practice I will describe, but in a way that I hope you can get a feel for it. Okay, the first is just to bring your attention and energy equally to each moment. And again, I mean, you don't have to do this, of course.

[33:47]

It's your choice. Making the choice, though, is already, we would say, an initial enlightenment. meaning if somehow you come to that moment where just for a moment that you can say okay I'll bring my attention equally to and energy equally to each moment. In the midst of your many complexities, you see that for a moment. That moment, if you continue, opens, is actually a route of enlightenment. You can think of it as floating like a little clear bubble in your mind and body.

[35:10]

A little enlightenment bubble. Mostly you are ignoring, you push him away and then... You sit and you push them down. They can be all in front of your eyes and you just look between them. And you've had many of such experiences in your life. It's one of the ways to understand that Mahayana view that we're already enlightened or already in an enlightenment process and this ability to make a decision yes I'll practice Is one of those little bubbles.

[36:18]

You may not know you've made one of those little bubbles. But I know you have. And it floats around. in your mental space, waiting for you to open up into the field of mind. Now to bring your... Okay, so say you make this decision. From now on, as much as whenever it's possible, Whenever I think of it. Or whenever my body thinks of it. Whenever my body bodies of it. Hey, okay. I'll bring attention equally and energy to each moment. werde ich Aufmerksamkeit und Energie gleichfalls zu jedem Moment bringen.

[37:39]

And I think you can feel what, it's hard to explain, but what bringing attention to each moment means, as well as energy. Und ich glaube, ihr könnt fühlen, was es heißt, Aufmerksamkeit in jedem Moment zu bringen und gleichwohl auch Energie. Energy means you feel, perhaps the way to explain it is, you feel ready to act. You don't have to act, but you feel ready to act. This sounds like it takes a lot of energy. And it does, you know. At first especially. Because your story-based mind is trying to do things.

[38:41]

But if all you actually have is this moment, The moment that appears and you may complete. It's good if you can bring attention to this moment. Whatever this moment is, you're going to have to decide. It's a picture you're painting. With your senses, your body, your energy. So you bring your attention and your energy to each moment. And when you get in the habit of it, And when it becomes a habit, it gives you energy.

[39:48]

At first it seems like it takes a lot, but pretty soon it gives you energy. It's one of the best longevity pills. Okay. Okay, the other practice I'd like to give you is just to bring your attention to your breath. But I want to explain bringing your attention to your breath. So I want to give you some confidence. Yeah. I want to give you some confidence. She's going to translate for me the first four days of the Sesshin.

[40:49]

Yes. We're starting a Sesshin at the House of Stille tomorrow or Saturday morning. Sunday morning. But she can only translate until Thursday after that. I don't know what I'm going to do. Any translators in the audience who'd like to come to Sashin for the last few days? Mr. Ibarza, well, he's the translator for German-English. Okay. What are you doing when you bring your attention... Thank you. What are you doing when you bring your attention... Attention to your breath. Now as I point out often, it's one of the easiest things to do in the world. To bring your attention to your breath.

[41:54]

Any one of you can do it right now. Ah, my tension from my breath, right? That was easy. Yeah. But I bet you can't do it for five minutes. And if you can do it for five minutes, I bet you can't do it for an hour or a day. Why is that? This is interesting. And practice is rooted in asking yourself obvious questions like this. Why am I not relaxed all the time? What's the problem? Okay. Why can't I bring my attention to my breath all the time?

[43:24]

Actually, they're closely related. Okay. Now, I would say the main reason you can't bring your attention to your breath for, you know, the 24... The 24 hours. Is that your sense of continuity is in your thinking. Is not only who you think you are is in your thinking. but your sense of reality as continuity is in your thinking. If you suddenly had your thinking interrupted, and you didn't know who you were or standing on a corner you turned to the right and you couldn't remember where you were when you were facing the other direction you'd probably have an immediate anxiety attack which would be quite natural

[44:44]

So, in Buddhism we would say that's a subtle belief in permanence. Permanence. That you need to establish continuity as a kind of permanence to rely on. Dass es wichtig ist... You need to establish continuity. Ihr braucht Kontinuität herzustellen. A moment-to-moment sense of continuity. Ein Moment von Moment zu Moment in diese Bauerhaftigkeit investieren. and in our mentation, in our thought stream, the more, from a Buddhist point of view, and I think in fact, you're quite fragile.

[46:08]

You can't let the complexity of life or the unexpectedness of life come into you. Okay, so the point is here not to stop your thinking, but to stop identifying with your thinking. So what happens when you bring your attention to your breath? And again, attention is a mental activity. That's also a physical activity. When you bring attention, your body is involved. And you're bringing this to your breath. And as I would describe it, you're physicalizing your mind. And you're bringing your mind into your sense of continuity into your breath, your body and phenomena.

[47:35]

Okay, that's a huge change. That's alchemy. That's virtually a kind of magic. When you can bring your sense of continuity out of your thinking into your body and into the immediacy of the present you're energetically, psychologically living in a different world. you can still think about things. Thinking is very useful. But you don't find your continuity in your thinking.

[48:38]

You find your continuity in the present situation. And you can see it when people intuitively understand this. If you're particularly upset by something. You might go chop wood. Here are washed dishes or something. She wouldn't wash dishes like that. Smash the dishes up. Let's not have any politics here. Okay. Take a cold shower, a warm shower then. Because it's an intuition that we want to establish some physical continuity.

[49:42]

And Buddhism isn't that different than that intuition. Buddhism isn't different than that basic or simple intuition. But it's giving you a skill or a practice A way to bring your attention, your sense of continuity into the embodied present. Into your breath, body and phenomena. and phenomena and then we could say the field of the present arises and the field of the present is also another face of the field of mind

[50:47]

And then you have the possibility of tuning yourself to the field of present and the field of mind. And then you have the possibility of tuning yourself to the field of the present and the field of mind. And this would be realized activity. So I've tried to give you a picture of Buddhist practice. From the point of view of the craft of just being alive, of finding yourself in the integrated present, integrated in you through your own realization or through your own relaxation through your own acceptance of yourself in the immediate situation

[52:40]

as not the whole of your life, but where your life is rooted. That would be the field of mind and the field of the present. Das wäre das Feld des Meins und der Gegenwart. But this isn't possible as long as you're distracted or ill at ease. So to notice these kinds of practices or potentialities to notice these kind of practices or potentialities even in small moments as the way we discover these teachings and bring them into our life.

[53:45]

Okay. I think that's enough for this evening. or for this millennium? Well, it's almost over, so it's only for another few months. So why don't we take a break or stop And after ten minutes or so, if anybody's still here, we can have some discussion. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Yes.

[54:52]

Say it in German first, yes. Can you speak more loudly, please? together with this old idea, it has been going on for a long time. Especially in the atomic physics, it is exactly the same, the field and the circle. Okay. He found the title very interesting, and he's interested whether it has anything to do with how science comes together, and the physicist, because of the field, which is the same word as in science and physics, whether this comes together in this title.

[56:12]

Yes. Yes. I think so, but I also think it's better to say no. Okay, now why do I answer that way? Yes, I think that much of contemporary science, particularly physics, has direct analogical at least, parallels to Buddhism. Analogous. But the why I would say no is you have to be careful because science is taken by most of us as definitive of reality.

[57:39]

And I think what's happening is more subtle than science presently describes. Okay. Well, if I look at you again here, we're sitting in this room. It's not useful for me to think of this as the space that physics describes. Except in, there are certain senses where it is useful, but in general it's not. When I'm looking at you, what am I seeing primarily? I'm seeing memory. This space is primarily for us human beings, memory.

[58:52]

If I remove all the elements of memory from what I'm seeing, I can't see anything. So it's useful to see that, to see what I'm seeing is all my feelings and associations about colors and shapes and people and so forth. It doesn't matter what physics says. What we're seeing is memory space. Now if you see that, you can begin imagining the possibility of moving out of memory space. And you move yourself closer to, let me give you another statement that I've been working with recently.

[59:54]

And I give you now another statement with which I recently started to work. Dignaga who lived I think 480 to 540 this common era said perception is knowing without conceptualization. He said Perception is cognition or knowing without conceptualization. I think if you hear that statement, imagine it's possible, that's a shocking statement. How can there be knowing without conceptualization so Dignaga who is one of the roots of Yogacara teachings which is Zen roots of Yogacara teaching which is Zen made this bald statement as fact

[61:18]

Okay, then it again challenges us, how can we have perception without conceptualization? This means to move out of memory space And I've already told you how to do that. To bring your attention to your breath until you find yourself in embodied space. And not in the continuity of the stream of thoughts. Okay, now embodied space is also not exactly what physics says.

[62:33]

But now if we think, I think that I like the... statement at the Big Bang, which is one of the most preposterous things we've ever heard. All of this was, you know, everything that caused Milky Way was... If you can believe this, you can believe anything. If you can believe this, you can believe anything. But if you look at the way things are expanding, it looks like that's the case. So this did not expand into space. If you think it did, then you think of space as an entity. It created space as it expanded. And that's the experience of embodied space.

[63:56]

You feel you're in an elastic kind of space that you yourself are generating. Ihr fühlt euch in einer Art elastischen Raum, den ihr selber hervorbringt. It's not just a simple matter as the Big Bang created space. Each particularity creates space. Es ist nicht, dass der Urknall einfach Raum geschaffen hat, aber jede entity, ganzheit, einzelne Ganzheit kreiert. So this is what Dogen meant also by saying to complete what appears, knowing the relationship of the universal and particular. This is his way of talking about this kind of sense of being in a fluid that we are densifying or And you don't get that when you're in mental space.

[65:19]

That was a long little riff, I'm sorry. But you know, I think on the autobahn there's a good example of the difference between embodied space and mental space. In this case, America is more mental space. Germany is more embodied space. Okay. So if you're driving along the freeway in America, if the next exit is Hamburg and the exit after that is Bremen, Hamburg is at the top of the sign. Because mentally it's the first, we read from top to bottom. So that in America you put the next exit on the top.

[66:25]

In Germany you put the next exit at the bottom. And Americans are always getting lost. Particularly when they think Umleiten is a village. Which I did once. I left some place that said Umleiten, so I tried to go back to Umleiten. But it's actually in a sense of physical space, the first... name you come to is at the bottom. That's at the bottom. If you folded the sign down, like it was a map, you'd come to that first. So it's more, you see what I mean?

[67:26]

Just a moment. So, something else. Yes. You mentioned three functions of self. of self. You won't find this in any Buddhist text. He wants to know more functions of the mind. That's a little more complicated.

[68:31]

This is komplizierter. Because mind is such a wide word, it doesn't even exist in Buddhism. It's an English word. But it's a useful term for Western Buddhism. Okay. Let's think of mind as functions. Or the field of mind is a bunch of ingredients. Okay, so what are the ingredients? One ingredient of mind is attention. Another would be concentration. Another would be motivation.

[69:34]

Another would be sensation. Another feeling. Another memory. Um... Yeah, okay, and perhaps knowing or something like that. So, if you begin to notice these different ingredients, Okay, now let me put that aside for a moment and speak about three freedoms. One freedom would be the freedom from a distracted state of mind.

[70:38]

Another freedom would be the freedom to observe what you care to observe. Another freedom would be the freedom to attune yourself. Okay. If you have these freedoms, which I just mentioned, you can actually begin to notice how this moment is put together from memory to motivation, caring, so forth. In other words, the idea of function is not separable from the idea of ingredients. So this moment isn't, again, a generalization.

[72:01]

It's made up of ingredients. But to be able to pay attention to the ingredients and bring them together in an experience of unity is a yogic skill. Now, this experience of the unity of the ingredients or a unity of these various functions could be a technical definition of mind in Buddhism. So you can't say what mind is or where its boundaries are.

[73:01]

But it's an experience of the unity of this moment. Of thinking, feeling, sensation and so forth. So practice would be to begin to notice these ingredients. And the basic teachings of Buddhism, like the five skandhas. and the Vijnanas are just ways of saying, hey, these are the ingredients. Let's separate this moment out into its ingredients. And then when you bring them back together, That experience of bringing them back together is mine.

[74:08]

That's a little complicated answer, I'm sorry. Yeah, yes. It's interesting because I'm now concentrating on my... and occupied myself with the breath, breathing. Then there is a lot of pain in my heart. that is more apparent to you when you bring your attention to your breathing?

[75:13]

I'm doing zazen. As soon as I hear that I should bring my attention to my breath, then I immediately feel the pain in my heart. I'm sorry. Yeah, but isn't it, for me anyway, it would be good to feel the pain. And I think as soon as you, if it's there, you know, as soon as you do bring your attention to your breath, you begin to be less involved in a diffused or distracted mind.

[76:22]

And other things have a chance to come up. that we normally distract ourselves from. So there's two good things. Yeah, I think. One, you get to know this pain. And two, you make a bigger field, a bigger space to feel this. Mm-hmm. It happened already once to me that my heart opened completely. It was incredible. And I can't forget that. And I want to have that all the time and I think my will is that which is hindering it Be patient But, you know, it's like your tummy

[77:34]

Sometimes your tummy, you know, it may go... This is a translation we agree on. But then it comes back up. But once you know that, it begins to happen more and more often. And same way, sometimes our heart literally feels like it cracks open. But often we're not ready. So it has to sort of go back together. But once you know that feeling, And you continue, it's a kind of promise. And if you continue to practice it begins to permeate our life.

[78:59]

And many things open up. Since it happened, I withdrew from the other people. I don't have any friends anymore. And my relationships deteriorate. I'm sorry. It took me a while. Yeah, so usually, ideally it has the opposite effect. So, you know, this is something to study. Yeah, and I try to spend some more time with people, you know, and find out how to

[80:07]

bring this openness practically into your life with others. One practice I've been suggesting to people recently is just when you're with someone Yeah, like I can take any of you people right in front of me and I can look at you and I can notice that my looking at you has comparative qualities. You're younger than I am. And handsomer. And... And... And those are distinctions between self and other.

[81:16]

And as soon as I notice I'm making these comparative distinctions, I can dissolve the distinction. And it's the great treasure to notice the comparisons. Because the comparisons allow me to dissolve. And that's also what form and emptiness is. Basically, if I say that I'm teaching form and emptiness, because emptiness, again, is not a generalization. Emptiness is a function. It's the function of dissolving form into emptiness.

[82:28]

So if I'm looking at you, I notice I'm making comparisons. Because I bought some blackest suspenders today. And I think I like red ones better. Where did you get them? But if at the moment I dissolve that comparison, And I feel everything is without suspension. And I start dropping, if I drop this self-other dualism, that can start a little landslide, emptiness slide. landslide, and all the categories begin to dissolve.

[83:55]

And suddenly I may find myself in a quite category-less space. And that's exactly what form is emptiness means. It's not emptiness is somewhere like space, some kind of generalization. Each form is emptiness. And each form is its each emptiness. So if I dissolve the self-other distinction with you, It's one kind of feeling of emptiness, it's different with you. In other words, the absence of categories with you is different than the absence of categories with you.

[85:01]

I think this is a little hard for us to get because we assume generalities. We assume a world of continuity. Yes, it does exist in that way. but more fundamentally exists moment by moment appearing and in that moment by moment appearing each moment has its own emptiness and each moment has its own form that appears and we complete and let go of So to practice this letting go of the distinction of self and other, on each particularity,

[86:14]

is also to open up your heart. But you need the other person to do it. Otherwise you get stuck in some kind of space where we lose touch with ourself. Okay. Anything else? Should we stop now? Yes, oh, please. No, that's fine. We don't have to. Buddhism is based on Buddha and that he reached enlightenment and we are also searching to reach enlightenment. Tibetan high teachers and masters realize enlightenment in their own way?

[87:37]

Buddha had no teacher at the end. He sat at the Bodhi Balm. How long is a personal teacher necessary? For example, in the Tibetan tradition, also in Zen, they teach about incarnations. And very high Dalai Lama, etc. have not yet achieved Buddhahood. That is, it is said that there is a life of Buddha. But if you look at the tradition, then the Buddhahood is in so and so many Kalpas, because only one Buddha appears in every Kalpa. How long is a personal teacher necessary? Because the living masters today, living Buddhas, have not achieved... Maybe you can say it in English.

[89:05]

Or I can help, it's easier if I help What I want to say is that let's say in the Tibetan tradition a personality like you call his holiness or like the Buddha, living Buddha, the Dalai Lama for example he himself says that he has not, if you look deeper inside to the teachings you hear or one years, he has not yet reached the highest realization of Buddhahood because only one Buddha in one Kalpa is possible. So through incarnations he still grows according to the aim of complete Buddhahood. So what is my question is, how long is it necessary to have this relationship between teacher and disciple? I don't mean the relationship to the self completely in every

[90:13]

I mean, how long is this relationship between teacher and disciple? And why did Buddha himself in the end set alone? What is this loneliness or what is this emptiness? What is it that takes kalpas to fulfill this aim? Well, from the point of view of Zen Buddhism, from the point of view of Buddhism as a practice, You're looking at Buddhism from the outside, not from the inside. Yes.

[91:21]

From the inside, the Kalpas, the historical Buddha, they don't mean anything. Mm-hmm. There's only this. That's what I've been saying. You can say he's nuts because he sees the Buddha or he's highly enlightened because he sees the Buddha. You know, this is the point of you. So please don't... Oh, I'm sorry. No, I get your answer, okay. From the point of Zen, okay, let's leave Tibetan Buddhism aside. From the point of Zen, there's only this.

[92:27]

That's all the Buddha had too. And that whatever the Buddha is, not as a physical body or a historical person, has to be present now. Now if you think of the Buddha as an entity it's impossible. You're basically in comparative mind. It's much more useful to think of Buddha as a function. And we have to function in our society as a Buddha. Now that's possible to imagine. Okay. He may not always function.

[93:15]

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