Well, if you hadn't noticed, this is the last day of Sushin. I know maybe some of you are like the woman who wouldn't come out of absorption. But since none of us are Manjushri, probably we're easily disturbed. Now, well, some people, few people feel this sesshin is perhaps too easy. There's only one time where there's three periods together, mostly. So you can't really get warmed up there in only two periods. Still, the overwhelming majority seem to think this is quite hard enough.

[01:01]

Hard, I don't mean hard, I mean that it works. It doesn't have the... It's not debilitating in a negative way, and it... And it feels like any other Sashin that any of you who have spoken to me about it has done. And I, you know, I feel good about your practice.

[02:06]

Most of you have created a territory in yourself and in your life in which to practice and study yourself. And each of you seems to have the personality that belongs to you. I'm always surprised. Each of you is quite different, and yet seems like that's a perfect personality, seems like to me. This is a good Buddha opportunity, each of you seems to be. And your own opportunity too. Let's not give everything over to Buddha. Keep a little for yourself. But perhaps not everything. And of course in... Speaking with you I am aware of how can we practice together and how can I speak about practice too, that helps you continue practice on your own.

[03:44]

And also how will you, how will we continue this practice through others, with others? You know, every temple in Japan is called a mountain. When you say mountain, you mean a temple, even if it's in the middle of a big city. So I feel that each of you, or many of you anyway, will continue, even wherever you live, whatever the circumstances, to some extent as if you were in your own little hut or, as we first spoke, on your own mountaintop, even if it's in the middle of a busy city.

[05:07]

By mountaintop, I don't mean, you know, Up above everything, I mean, a stone on the top of a mountain, as Sukershi used to say, is something different than a stone somewhere else. By analysis, it's different. I mean, the same, perhaps, but it feels different. So what I mean by mountaintop is you'll find each thing unique. And again, feet and hands on the same level. And again, feet and hands on the same level. means, represents that you found your own authority, found your own seat.

[06:28]

Nothing is above you. But also nothing is below you. This is not so easy to find your authority with nothing above and nothing below. And by yourself, as someone pointed out, through yourself is also finding your own concentration. When you're concentrated, you're most satisfied probably, feeling most complete. And it's also when you're most singular. So this is being a mountaintop, even in the middle of a busy city.

[07:38]

How to live this life with others. Through ourself. Now, some of you, you know, I hope that some of you will continue this teaching and pass it to others. But it takes a long time for practice to mature in you. Usually, we actually know almost everything fairly quickly.

[08:39]

And we, maybe after a few years, we begin to know we know most of the resources are here. But still for it to mature into clarity and into a deep surety, it takes, you know, the maturing of your life at the same time, your whole life. So I think some of you will just informally actually be continuing this teaching, this practice through yourself and with others. Some of you may decide to go through the initiations of practice but perhaps not wear robes or be a priest.

[09:44]

And some of you may decide to do the initiations and also have the bewilderedness or I don't know what, to make your practice visible. I hope you don't always have to do this. Practice is always visible. This is just a little exaggerated. But if you like cloth, this is quite a mess.

[10:56]

Getting dressed every morning is like making a bed. And then walking around in the sheets. But they don't let you sleep. Now I'd like to tell you a story. When I first went to Japan I... Gary Snyder is a friend, said, why don't you take my house? He was moving back to the United States. This was 1968, and I got to his house, and there was an old lady living there.

[12:02]

At least she seemed like an old lady to me. I was, I don't know, maybe I was 35. She was 68. And she did no chanting, and we could hear her doing the no chanting from upstairs in the house. Coming down every morning like a kind of song down the stairway. And she appears in Gary's poems as a poet, as Osaka-san. And so I said to Gary, you know, I'm a little worried about this woman.

[13:19]

What if she, you know, she lived in the house and she came along with the house? I said, what if she perished? What am I supposed to do? And so I said, please give me some addresses of family or something. So if something happened, if she became sick, I could get in touch with her family. And he said, well, I don't think she's going to perish anytime soon. And also, it's just a funny family situation. But I think he gave me the name of somebody. So I, you know, we started living with this woman being upstairs. And slowly I became aware that the treasure of my life was living in my house.

[14:46]

Or was it her house? It wasn't clear. I paid the rent, but... And I began to find out some interesting things about her. And I can tell you a few of them. Some of them probably I won't tell you. But I discovered about her that, which most Japanese people don't know, because at this kind of life, they don't talk about. Even other family members don't know often. But she, her father was a lawyer and maintained seven complete households. He had four legal wives and three non-legal wives.

[16:05]

Er hatte vier rechtmäßige Ehefrauen und drei unrechtmäßige. And each house had a house and gardens and people and, you know, etc. Und jeder Haushalt hatte also einen Garten und, ja, Bedienstete. And if you can imagine the father arrived in a palanquin, what that is, you know, this hoi, [...] you know, like this. And we would spend about two weeks in each household and everybody would have their heads down as he went by. And she... Sounds like you liked that. Liked which? The seven households or the... Well, I don't want to go into detail.

[17:05]

One thing when priests from Japan came to practice with us in America, they used to say, it's so wonderful to be in America because you can see Suzuki Roshi. In Japan, when somebody like Suzuki Roshi, who was quite Anyway, priest, everyone who was bowing down, you never saw. Thank you. So, I mean... I wouldn't, not that you would treat me that way, but I wouldn't like it because I like your faces much too much. And I'd have to start wearing white tabbies on my feet and things. So... And then she lowered herself and her family opposed her marriage to the chairman of the Fuji Bank because he was a business person.

[18:28]

And she was one of the first women in Japan to go to college and she studied French literature, read Proust and things like that. And after the war, Second World War, she had enough of male domination and all this stuff, and she split for Kyoto. And this is unheard of in Japan. I've had quite a number of strong women as teachers, and she was certainly one of them. Anyway, she came to Kyoto with Admiral Shimizu's widow.

[19:30]

Admiral Shimizu was the guy who went down off Japan, off Guam with the Japanese fleet. Eric, do you want to translate? Anyway, these two women arrived in Kyoto after the war and there was no food, no work, no... in pretty bad shape. And they took up residence in an abandoned Buddhist temple in the mountains. The Shimizu-san was one of the persons who started the Animal Protection League of Japan.

[20:55]

I'm sorry. You know, my father was sometimes called Shimizu. Because he was a Schmidt? Well, Admiral Schmidt, okay. Admirable, anyway. We'll get past this part of the story in a moment. ... And unfortunately, she loved animals too much, and soon she was... Nakamura sensei left the temple.

[21:59]

I'll explain why. But after a while, this woman soon accumulated so many dogs, hundreds, that she was living on all fours with the dogs. Yes. Unglücklicherweise, also... This woman liked animals too much and lived on all fours like a dog. And she was put in the mental hospital. She was put in the mental hospital. Anyway, through some circumstances that I don't need to explain, she ended up living in this little house, which was then passed on to Gary.

[23:31]

So she taught tea and no chanting and had no visible means of support because leaving her husband she was cut off from her family. I found out that a friend secretly sent her money, a little money every month, but pretty soon we took over her support. And we just lived with her and she became my daughter's grandmother really. And she practiced Zen with, I think it was Roshi at Shofukuji. And it turned out she was well known in the Zen scene in Kyoto and tea and chanting are no world.

[24:46]

And she began teaching me about Japan. Actually, there's nothing I do now physically that isn't... I don't feel her presence. And she helped me build the connections in Japan which allowed me to develop the San Francisco Zen Center. So when we moved to the United States when Sukhiroshi was ill. I invited her to come with us and she decided to. And so in the States, we lived in a sort of old Victorian building in San Francisco and we put tatamis on the floor and fixed it up so she had one room in the back where she lived.

[26:25]

Then we moved across Golden Gate Bridge to Green Gulch, and we added some rooms, two rooms for her to the house. And then the house we'd had together in Japan was torn down, and so I saved as much of the doors and various parts as I could and shipped them to the United States. And then I used those parts to build this little addition. So she had a familiar place to live.

[27:29]

And then I used those parts to build this little addition. So she had a familiar place to live. And then we built, actually, in the succeeding years, we built a whole house, tea house for her. And we built the house for her because she taught tea, but also because she, although it wasn't apparent, was one of the people who made it possible for the Zen Center to develop. And then when I left, she stayed on because we had no place to give her to stay. And she felt obligated since this building had been built for her to stay there. And a few years, a couple years ago, she, now being at that time 92, decided to go back to Japan.

[28:46]

So when I was just in Japan, just before this being here, I found out where she was, and she'd been put into an old people's hospital. And it was, I was struck dumb. It was pretty painful for me to see her. Because here's this person who'd been such a treasure in my life, in the Zen Center's life, in my family's life. And she, because her family doesn't know what to make of her, can't see her, they've just, no one's taking care of her.

[30:18]

She's literally been abandoned in this place. And I don't want to go into more details about that, but it's not a good situation. So she's treated as if she was old and crazy, but as soon as I talked with her, she's completely coherent and present, as two years ago she was totally alive. Yeah. When my father died, I said to him, just before he died, I said to him, you gave me health and intelligence and honesty, but you never told me your story.

[31:25]

And he said, I couldn't tell it to myself. So I feel with Nakamura sensei she took her stopped using her father's name, her husband's name, Hosaka, and now it goes by Nakamura. And so Nakamura, I can tell her story. And the person she's closest to and also speaks Japanese well is my daughter Sally. So I asked Sally if she would go to Japan and spend some time with her.

[32:29]

And it's the last thing either of us can do for her. Because abandoned in this bed, 24 hours a day, she's really losing it. So Sally created some space and then yesterday I got word that she Got all the cheap tickets on planes were sold, but she suddenly got a space, so I went to Hamburg in the evening last night and arranged for her going to Japan. So she's going to spend two or three weeks starting this Monday with the sensei. It's funny to me that somebody who is such a gift to anyone who knew her, by the people she gave life to physically, can't see her.

[34:00]

And it's a kind of too common tragic irony. And if I could, I would bring her to America or something, but it's too late now. The family pride wouldn't legally let me bring her. Anyway, because this just happened, I thought it might be... Interesting to you, because I often talk about Suzuki Roshi, but Nakamura Sensei was clearly a teacher in every immediate sense for me.

[35:19]

You know, when I saw her and I went into the room, she didn't know I was coming. And she... The word for happy is ureshi in Japanese. And she looked up and she said, ureshi, ureshi, banzai, banzai. And... So I went to see her every day. And I'd like to tell you lots of stories about her, but we have to talk about something else now. But I see her staring out of this bed all the time now. the word for the word tantra means loom weaving, thread, loom and the Brahmin caste I believe started out as thread makers

[37:11]

And sutra, sutra means thread. And so this sense of in practice of following the threads of attention Like fairy tales, there's so many fairy tales where you follow a thread back to this something. And you follow the threads of our thoughts back to their source. Now I wanted to talk more about this, maybe dynamics or the craft of shamatha practice. When you follow a thought back to a source or in a sense like in psychotherapy, a kind of internal free association, you're entering a kind of mystery that has coherence.

[38:45]

Actually, the word mystery in English means to minister to yourself from below, something like that. And the 15 incidents in Christ's and the Virgin Mary's life or the incidents in Christ's life, Jesus' life, are considered the mysteries which are subjects for meditation. And in the end, you're a kind of subject... There's a kind of mystery in our practice which is the subject of meditation. You can only think and analyze so much.

[40:00]

As in last session, we can talk about analyzing that you put the Damasio back in the back part of the tray and why that's the only alternative except chaos, which chaos is also okay. So there's two choices, chaos and analyzed order. Both are a kind of order. In between it gets mixed up. But there's much when you meditate that can't be analyzed or ordered. It can only be observed.

[41:09]

So if you follow, it's a mystery why things come up. Something comes up? Is it part of the loom, part of the weave, or is it just by chance it came up? Whether it's happenstance or causal, you shine the flashlight of attention on it. Now these things may be in any of the vijnanas. And we use the word visualization, but really it's also oralization, hearingization. Or proprioceptualization. Hey, that's better, huh? And so it might be a sound you observe or follow. Now, part of the teaching here is that if you ignore, well, all cultures, I would say, either ignore or partly relate to this original mind.

[42:59]

Nun, alle Kulturen ignorieren oder zumindest teilweise lehnen sie diesen Ursprungsgeist ab. And when you ignore it or only partly relate to it, you create a system of perception which prevents you from noticing original mind. So we are taught this system of perception from childhood. It's internalized very early. Now uncorrected mind is a way to get around the system. Your personal system and also the culturally inculcated system. culturally inculcated system.

[44:12]

So when you follow attention or the threads of attention or the threads of thought, You begin to see into the weaving of your fabric. And you begin to see the weaving process itself. And you begin to see the pattern and the seams. And the fabric becomes also more and more transparent. And it becomes cleared up. And the... mental consciousness, mostly a fabric of thoughts, as it becomes calmer, you can begin to then see into the other jnanas.

[45:31]

And when mental consciousness, thought consciousness, clears up, you can also then begin to see the seventh, the bridge, your ego structure embedded consciousness of views. And that opens you then to your storehouse or alaya-vijnana consciousness. So in this shamatha practice you also practice in the Zen way with each vijnana settling it and clarifying it. And each helps the other. And again, you don't know exactly where this is going, you in your own particularity, but you just follow what comes up, trusting the mystery of what comes up.

[46:59]

And as I said yesterday or so, it's considered a kind of, we use the word visualization, but visualization based on the body or through the body. And you begin to discover a body that couldn't be photographed. And yet you can... And yet you can feel this body that can't be photographed. And you can feel it as a whole.

[48:01]

And again, this is very much Zen's own way of kind of visualizing the body as a bodhisattva or Buddha. But here we're just working with your own body and into the weavings of it as it comes up in this mystery of meditation. So your breath is part of this, the vijnanas are part of this. Particular, the four elements, of course. The skandhas. Just the particularities of what appears. And then feeling of the whole, the... I don't know what to say, a kind of essence.

[49:12]

There's no object. It's just the essence of the whole. It becomes an object of meditation. And here you can move into the four formless meditations. I mean, there's an essence to the sound, Vijnana. And then that can disappear or melt into limitless consciousness. So anyway, it's this kind of process of following the particularities into their source till you begin to see your own weaving, your own fabric. And that fabric has immense differentiation. It never ends. And at the same time it's emptiness.

[50:32]

It dissolves into emptiness. There's a poem in the Mumonkan 24. It's sort of something like, an immortal appears in colored clouds. A fan of scarlet gauze, this is the poem, which hides her face. Dass ihr Gesicht verbirgt. And the poem goes on to say, it is absolutely necessary that you gaze on the face of the immortal and not on the hand or the fan that's hiding the face.

[51:41]

Und es heißt dann, es ist absolut notwendig, das Gesicht anzuschauen, dieser unsterblichen, und nicht auf ihre Hand oder den Fächer. So through this meditation practice we can discover our story in a way that can't be held in any conceptual way. Through that story, through that fabric, we look at our face. Our personal face and our original face. Unser persönliches Gesicht und unser ursprüngliches Gesicht, das weder Geburt noch Tod kennt. Spring is in the plum blossoms, entering a painted picture.

[52:45]

May our intention equally penetrate every being and place.

[53:06]

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