I'm touched by you learning all these things, bells and chanting. It's the part of the practice I was most hesitant about bringing to Europe. And it's the part I struggled with most myself. And I guess I understand why it's so important. But at the same time, I really don't understand why it's so important. But it is an important part of the practice. And strangely, the area that keeps helping you develop in practice. I think it's some inadequacy in me that I don't understand it better, but at least I keep doing it, so I learn something.

[01:03]

Yesterday someone mentioned to me that I mentioned everybody and their nationality except one person, Coco Hartmann, our Swiss. I'm very sorry, Coco. I guess it's as different being a Swiss as being an Austrian. It's hard to even say that in German. The Germans tend to think that Austrians, Swiss and Americans all speak a German dialect.

[02:27]

Except English is badly mixed with French. When I talked about German culture yesterday, I wasn't excluding, but I didn't really mean, you know, Goethe and Bach and Hölderlin and Rilke and Schiller and so forth. Yeah. I meant... more the feeling I have practicing with you. And also I find it a little strange you people here seem to accept me.

[03:33]

Although I'm an American, you seem to accept me practicing with you and I appreciate that. So why I brought up German culture is, although Buddhism is certainly and has been developed by its practitioners to be a universal teaching, you still always have to start with the particular. First of all, your own particular, whatever that is. And then us of us who happen to be here. So in this sense, I'm trying to understand Sangha. Mm-hmm. And I started out with the kind of rough outer aspects of our life.

[04:51]

And I tried to melt them down into the sublime Sangha. And I tried to merge these aspects into the established aspects of Sangha. And Ulrike is... Excuse me for talking about you. Ulrike is thinking about whether to go back to... teaching is similar, I think, in some ways to many of your decisions. I mean, does she really want to live this peripatetic, do you know that word? It means walking around. This peripatetic life of living in a Volvo, driving around Europe. There has to be a garage at the end of the line.

[06:07]

And, you know, she sometimes, I think, asks herself, is this a way to live or a career? And... She also has tenure and medical insurance and all that as part of being in the German system. So it's a big decision to just start practicing and hope things work out and hope you don't get sick. And she thinks I'm a little crazy to live that way. And sometimes I tease her. I say, you're so conservative that if you are so careful with money, if she puts too much money in a parking meter, she won't drive away until the meter starts.

[07:16]

And I'm not the kind of person to put money in the parking meter that I'm walking along. Anyway, she's not like that. I'm just joking. Okay. What did you say? Yesterday, what she was laughing about is when I said that one of the umpans was a traveling umpan. She imagined I was going to, as I was driving, require her to lean out the window. Instead of using the horn, she was going to use... So yesterday I...

[08:34]

proved, I think, that I don't give prepared talks. And I'm still wondering if I should try to talk about what I was trying to talk about yesterday. I certainly exhausted Ulrike as translator. But part of the genius of Japanese-Chinese Buddhism is that it's made, developed a practice so that Nature as a living being is part of the practice and part of the teaching.

[10:00]

And, you know, this is an actually quite important point in practice, in Zen practice. But usually it's understood intuitively and through realization. And then explained in some detail when there are certain experiences that support the detail. So, I mean, I... I know some of you would like me to explain anything because you're trying to accumulate things hoping you'll understand in the future. That's actually not too good an attitude in practice. Just whatever you get is enough, that's all. But this koan brings this up and says, hey, this is important if you're going to really understand lineage and sangha.

[11:37]

So because of the koan, I feel some, maybe I should try to make this clear in some way. And Ulrike says to me, why do you make everything so complicated? And it's really because I don't understand how to explain things. Sometimes I feel like I'm trying to scratch my back with my elbow or something. I can't figure out how to do it. But it's actually quite productive for me anyway to try and for me to share my struggles in understanding things with you. Or the struggle to understand things so I can express them. Now, part of this sense, part of the way the Chinese have brought The Japanese have certainly continued the development to a fine point, but it's basically a Chinese thing.

[13:07]

Probably reinforced partly by Taoism. And in Japan reinforced by Shintoism. Which is to view the phenomenal world as a living being. As an extension of being. And so what happens as a result of that is your worldview becomes, to have your worldview clear and accurate becomes a very important part of practice. Because if your worldview is inaccurate, then you won't be communicating with the world. So I guess I'm going to try to make this clear in a kind of mechanical way.

[14:14]

And maybe after the session you can tell me whether it was useful or not. First let me say something about a way of looking at things. And then, again, it comes up in, for example, when Daniela hit the bell, at the point where we say, thus we bow to Buddha, And the clackers are going. And then when the clackers finish, you hit the bell twice. I know the bell twice. Now, the basic concept in...

[15:14]

that can inform you on how to do these things is overlapping simultaneities. Is it in the way yoga cultures look at things, Asian yoga cultures, nothing is sequential? Do you understand? Nothing is sequential. Everything is simultaneous. But of course, one thing does happen after another. So how do you express that one thing happens after another? although at the same time it's simultaneous. If you were trying to make a concept, you'd have to say it's something like sequential simultaneities or overlapping simultaneities.

[16:36]

For example, when the last server is going out the door, when do you start the clackers? You don't usually wait till they're out the door. But you don't also hit them when they're halfway in the middle of the room. Because when you hit it when they're still quite in the room, it's being a little rude to them. Hurry up and get out of here. We're hungry. You don't wait until they're all the way out of the room. Wait until they're just about ready to go out, and then you get the clackers. So in general, for example, we say, the clackers are going, we say, la suite bada, blue la suite bada. You don't have to translate this.

[17:43]

And then the clackers are just about to end and you start the bell. Because they overlap a little. And on the eating bowls too, you'll notice they build a little chaos into the traditional eating bowls. They give you a little paper lacquered table. No matter how ancient it is, it won't stay flat. So everything slides different directions. And then on the main bowl, they don't put a base on it. There's no bottom on it. So they give you another little bowl that you don't use to put underneath the main bowl to kind of make a base in which it slides more.

[18:47]

Mark, have you recently got a set of the bowls? And so you're experiencing this. Then they make the table a little bit too small for the three bowls side by side. Then they tell you things, while you're dealing with these bowls, you have to keep this damn wiping cloth in your hand while you're doing other things. While you're picking up one thing this way, you pick up another thing this way. So it requires motor skills that, anyway, it requires some kind of jiggling all the time. But This kind of built-in disorder is essential to the way the culture thinks about things.

[20:05]

It's an attempt to actually represent how things are, not how we want them to be. Okay, so imagine a... I'm looking out my window of my little room. And I see one of you across the pond. And I think to myself... I see you and I think you're in the present with me.

[21:09]

So, but if I want to, you're a little bit far from me and I can't, if I want to bring you a message, I have to walk across the pond and it takes a little time. So actually you're in my past or my future, depending on how you look at it. I mean, we are sharing some of the same world, Wir teilen etwas von der gleichen Welt. We're both hearing the ducks and birds and train probably. Wir beide hören die Enten und Vögel und den Zug wahrscheinlich. So we're not hearing all the same birds, but we're hearing some of the same birds. Wir hören nicht alle die gleichen Vögel, aber einige.

[22:13]

And you're certainly within my eyesight, my present eyesight. You're in my eye field, shall we say. Now, the word field is better to use than space, actually. Because space is just a kind of generalization. What actually separates myself from, say, let's call this person the pond woman. I'm not used to read a poem to me called The Lady in the Lake or something. Anyway. So what actually separates this pond woman and myself is a number of fields, perceptual fields.

[23:15]

Was diese Teichfrau von mir trennt, ist jetzt eine Anzahl von Wahrnehmungsfeldern. Okay. So say I go across the lake and bring the pond woman a message. Sagen wir, ich gehe über den See und bringe der Teichfrau eine Nachricht. And then she takes the message and brings it to somebody in Buchen, say. Und dann erhält sie die Nachricht und trägt sie weiter zu jemand in Buchen. And then that person in, I'm affecting your pronunciation, I'm sorry. And then that woman in Buchen takes the message to Berlin. And then the person in Berlin takes the message to somebody in New York City. Now, ten years may have gone by by the time the message gets to New York.

[24:20]

I can no longer see this person in New York. And if I want to travel to New York, It is definitely... It takes some bit of time. So, in a way, this person is ten years into... Its notes in my future are past, depending how you look at it, but not in my present. Mm-hmm. So if the person in New York is in the past, then the person across the pond is in the past. If the person in New York is in the future, then the person across the pond is in the future.

[25:21]

Und wenn die Person in New York in der Zukunft ist, dann ist es auch die Person auf der anderen Seite des Teichs. Because there's no difference between. It's just it's a shorter distance. One's a longer distance. Es gibt keinen Unterschied. Der Unterschied ist nur die Entfernung. Takes time for me to get to cross the pond and takes time for me to get to New York. Es erfordert Zeit, wenn ich mich auf die andere Seite des Teichs begebe oder nach New York. Okay. Now What about Angelica and Frank, who live here? They might walk across the pond, the bridges, and go to a particular tree on the other side of the pond. Where they might like to sit. And when they come back, the next day, is the tree, is it the same present, or in the same place, or is it a different place?

[26:39]

Well, strictly speaking, not only have they walked to the tree and back, but the tree has walked. Ganz streng genommen sind nicht nur sie zu diesem Platz und diesem Baum gegangen, sondern der Baum selbst auch. The tree has walked into a new tree. Der Baum ist in einen neuen Baum gegangen. So Dogen says something like, don't think it's just you that walk, also the blue mountains are walking. Und Dogen sagt so etwas ähnliches wie, glaube ja nicht, dass nur du umhergehst, auch der blaue Berg tut das. Okay. Now, suppose instead of, when I look across at this person, this pond woman, she's in the sense of my physically going over there at the moment I'm looking at her, she's in my past. By the time I arrive there, she's in what has become my future.

[27:52]

Okay. At the moment I'm looking at her from the window, she's in my present I-field. She's not in my somatic field. Can I say it that way, somatic field? She might be, but let's say that she's not in my somatic field. But say that the message I bring her is a somatic message. I go across the lake across the bridges across the pond and I deliver her a somatic message with my body.

[28:54]

So she's now in my present somatic field. Then she goes to Birken and then passes the somatic message on to Berlin and to New York. Now, the New York person is, if I'm here, is in my past. But they may, if they've actually received the somatic message, they're in my somatic present. So if I look across the pond and I see this woman and she's in, given the speed of light and things, she's in my eye-present field.

[29:57]

So when you look at a star that's thousands or millions of light years away, the light of the star is in your present, but the star is no longer in your present. And if you set off in a faster-than-light spaceship to get there, you'd be making a serious astronomical mistake. So the star is not in your present, though the light is. Okay, so the woman across the pond is just as much in a sense in the past as the star is. You're receiving some light, and she's in your eye field.

[31:10]

But knowing this, and knowing there's a continuity of a physical environment, that I pass her a somatic message which she passes to Buchen, Berlin, New York, this is exactly the same as the concept of transmission in Buddhism. That the Buddha passed a somatic message to us. And whether you're zigzagging across the planet. Or you're zigzagging across this lawn back and forth to the tree on the pond.

[32:11]

Or you're zigzagging to... from India to China to Japan to San Francisco to New York, it's actually the same thing. So if this somatic message is intact, you're as much in the presence of the Buddha as you're in the presence of the woman across the pond. In the sense that the eye field is one description of a present moment. So is a somatic field a present moment? And the eye field is actually separated by the distance of the pond.

[33:29]

But she's still in my present. And although the Buddha is separated from me and you by India, Japan, China, and so forth, They're in our somatic field. Okay. Anyway, that's basically the idea. This is why it says in this koan, oceans of lands without bound. And it doesn't say time, it says events from eons past, events of eons past. Both these physical lands and these events are present in this immediate here. So the koan points out this is an instrumental understanding, an operative understanding, not a symbolic understanding.

[34:50]

It's trying... emphasizing the perfection in action wisdom, and it's emphasizing not a symbol of the circle in the rhinoceros, but how the distant past and the broken handle of the rhinoceros fan are all immediately present, actually, when you take hold of something. sondern wie die Entfernung in der Vergangenheit und eben auch der zerbrochene Griff des rhinoceros-Fächers alle in der Gegenwart vorhanden sind.

[35:52]

Okay. So if you understand the communication problems in communicating in a real way with the person across the pond... Communicating a teaching now that will be present a thousand years from now is exactly the same problem, just a more extreme form of the problem. So we're discussing right now in this session what kind of present we share. We share a complex overlapping present. There's no singularity of a present that's here. That's a generalization. And inaccurate. Even to say there's space here is inaccurate. It's a convenient way of speaking. But we're actually in a...

[36:52]

complex overlapping fields. And we don't really know what's going on here. If the big bang theorists are right, all of this was smaller than a dot at one time, and has expanded to allow all this space for things to happen. And we don't know what it is. When we look out at the sky, everything is in the past. One of the consequences of the way Zen has been formulated within Buddhism It's these questions like I'm bringing up now of what is the world like or what are world views are built into the way you think about practice.

[38:15]

It's one reason Zen has appealed particularly to artists and creative people. It's because one of the characteristics, if you do psychological studies of creative people, there are usually people who can't get away from these questions like, what is life, what is death, what is space? They're always kind of bedeviled by these things. So now you maybe see better, who is it that, is there anyone who lives alike, dies alike, realizes alike, and so forth. Sukhiroshi used to say, each of you will have your own enlightenment. There's no one enlightenment out there.

[39:27]

Or one truth or one God or anything in this kind of Buddhist world. There's overlapping complexities. So again, we're sitting here in this sushim. In many different presence. Some of your presence are full of thoughts from the past. Some are about the future. Some are about what you're doing just now. Some of your presence momentarily include the person beside you. Or the person across the room.

[40:28]

Their presence may include you and does in some levels proprioceptively, but etc. And their presence may include you and does in some levels proprioceptively, but etc. So to notice this and just immerse yourself in these overlapping simultaneities or overlapping fields is one of the opportunities of Sesshin. OK. Now one of the examples, or an example I thought of in Doksan this morning, was the simple example of what if I learned, what if without studying German, I at some point just started speaking German.

[41:43]

Because I'm hearing it all the time, but I'm not studying it. I knew a friend, I had a friend who did study Japanese for some years. Actually an acquaintance named Donald Keene. So pretty famous translator of Japanese to English. And he couldn't learn Japanese. He just struggled with it for several years and made no progress. And then one day he was in the library and he took a book down. And he was reading it away and he thought it was English and he suddenly realized it was Japanese.

[42:47]

So maybe I'll start speaking German one of these days. I'll say, Ulrike, you're retired. I'll say, Ulrike, you're retired. I'm breaking out into sweat. Anyway, the idea is, what I mean by this example, is that a lot of the way you study Zen, for the kind of inner language of practice or your spiritual life is not in German or English. And there's no textbooks for it.

[43:50]

So you keep hearing it being spoken, but you don't know what's being said. And if you keep practicing long enough, suddenly you start understanding what's being said. But this same analogy applies to whatever we call nature. Nature is speaking to you all the time. This is the way the Chinese and Japanese look at it. The world is arising in your sense fields. And this arising of the world in your sense fields is speaking to you.

[44:51]

This wind is speaking to us. And so forth. And speaking the language of nature and speaking the language of the world as it is. Which is also as you are. But we don't know how to listen to it. And less how to understand it. So this emphasis on realizing each of your vijnanas independently and then bringing them together is part of learning how to listen to it. And of course, that's again the reason why In Japan and China, there's so much nature poetry.

[46:16]

And it's generally understood that the Chinese poet likes to use nature as an example. But it's no more an example than saying a Western poet uses a man or woman in another person in their poem. The person isn't an example. And the nature isn't an example in the Chinese poem. This is like so much of the poetic imagery in Zen is an attempt to get you to learn to listen to the spiritual language of the world. What arises in your own zazen And arises in your own perceptual fields.

[47:25]

Now, the wisdom is the ego of the Buddha. Our sense of intactness is realized through our ego. But if you instead You had a strong ego that you used to function with. But your intactness as a living being was not in your ego. And where would it be? Now, I don't want to get into it, but there's various ways in which you begin to experience intactness, which also allow you to keep yourself healthy and so forth. But these four wisdoms are teaching about how to experience an intactness.

[48:27]

That's not an intactness of the ego, rather it's an intactness of you joined mind and body with the world. So the... Perfection in action wisdom, what you could call a somatic message based on the five vijnanas. Based on the five vijnanas. And just to show you how thoroughly this has been thought through by the ancients, we chant the Sambhogakaya, Nirmanakaya, Dharmakaya Buddha. The Nirmanakaya Buddha, the Buddha in the world,

[49:43]

is said to be based on the manifestation of observing wisdom and the perfection of action wisdom, which is based on the transformation and inversion and realization of the first six visjanas. Now, I'm not saying you should learn all this stuff. I'm saying that I want you to recognize that your own sense fields, your own hearing, smelling, feeling, intuition, subtle movements you feel within you, are the ingredients of culture and Buddha. And the ingredients of your own development and own health and state of mind. And that the more If you really observe yourself and accept yourself, and listen to yourself, and are honest with yourself in a deep way, you won't have to have these teachings explained to you because they'll become clear by themselves.

[51:37]

Now, I'm almost done if you're getting impatient. Okay. So what's the difference between this woman across the pond who has received a somatic message and the woman in New York? The woman across the pond can still get feedback from me and from all of us. And the woman in New York can't get feedback anymore. Unless I have her telephone number. Then she's in an electronic present. Based on the convivial ear field. Is that this message is sealed in, how can I say it, is this somatic message is sealed in the environment?

[52:49]

In other words, and I'm convinced this is so. Suzuki Roshi tried to teach me what had been taught to him by his teacher and so on. Which is to understand things in a certain way. with certain attitudes that are in my sense fields and that receive feedback from the environment and that feedback is from you And from is the sound of the train and the sound of the birds and the smell of the breeze and so forth. In other words, the poetry of the environment is speaking with me. And what he tried to do, or did, I hope, I feel, is make it so the feedback he would have given to me now comes through the feedback I get from you and from the environment.

[54:17]

So it's almost as if we used computer language. The Buddha created a little program. Put a chip in a molecule of his ashes. built a stupor around the ash. But this chip is so, this program is so developed so that the Buddha said, if you want to hear me, you will hear me when you hear the environment. If you hear in a certain way.

[55:37]

You won't hear about my personal life, but you'll hear about my realization. You'll hear about how we exist in this world. So this koan of the rhinoceros fan, this is more or less what it's about. How do we hear in this world the Buddha's teaching? Even though we have a broken rhinoceros fan, The pure breeze still reaches us. So it says, even though you present it face to face, will she hear it in the wind? Even face to face, do we really hear the teaching?

[56:42]

And that's the identity of the Sangha. Here we are face to face. Let's hear the teaching. From each other. And from ananda. And in every sense yield. And from Ananda. And from Ulrike. And from each of you. Thank you very much.

[57:36]

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