You all look like normal human beings. Why would you be doing such a crazy thing? And Ulrike, thanks for getting out of bed. You're welcome. It was fun translating with Neil too, but nice. Not just modesty. Maybe I'll have to do a special seminar for father tongue. You can translate. Okay. I think I've... I think I've given you enough sort of territory that we can begin to cover some territory.

[01:14]

And let me say something about Zen's kind of basic Zen Buddhist attitude toward maps in practice. I used to think... Well, I didn't... Let me put it this way. I'm continually struck by how characteristic of Zen is it is not to have maps. I think it completely makes sense once you get the non-picture. For example, the word Zen derives from, as all of you must know probably, derives from Chan, which derives from Jhana.

[02:54]

So wie ihr wahrscheinlich alle wisst, stammt das Wort Zen, also von Chan ab, und das wiederum stammt von Jhana ab. And one of the main maps of Buddhism is the four jhanas or four concentrations, absorptions. And sometimes translated as the four trances. So even though this word jhana Absorption or trance is where the word Zen and Chan comes from. Zen almost denies any connection with the four jhanas. Of course the connection is there, but Zen pretty much denies it. And what are they rejecting?

[04:04]

They're not rejecting really the fact of absorption or trance. And the word trance is dangerous because it has a lot of kind of hypnotic negative characteristics characterizations in at least English, so I use it with some four or five quotation marks. Do you put things in quotation marks in German when you kind of don't mean them? But what Zen is denying is that practice occurs in recognizable stages. So the feeling is more like if you learn a city through wandering around a city, that's very different than learning it through a map.

[05:44]

Now, you may get to know, you may, when you first say move to a new city, if you've ever done that, you may use a map to get yourself generally oriented. But if you live there, you begin to learn the city by going shopping or finding a dry cleaner or taking the wrong bus. And practice is a lot like that. You often take the wrong bus. What's funny? I don't know. Just normal things. How are you today?

[06:54]

Good. Much better. Oh, good. Or it's like you don't... If you learn a language, living in the language, in the country or in a family that speaks the language. You don't learn the language like a textbook. you're learning complicated forms at the same time you're learning strange words like winterschlaf. When you don't know the word for three, you know the word for winterschlaf. So you're not learning in any kind of stages. That's clear, right?

[08:06]

So if you're practicing zazen, you're learning advanced and beginning, and you're wandering around this city. Dharma city. You know, I've, as you've noticed, been a little sick during this session. And again, characteristic of the attitude of Zen practice, I don't exactly try to get well. I find it quite interesting to be sick.

[09:08]

and I mean in a sense I try to get better but I don't try to get better like I've got some grain of sand in my eye I'm trying to get out and I'm not trying to you know usually I don't take medicine I don't have nothing against medicine but I usually don't take it because it hides the grain of sand from me So I treat the grain of sand more the way an oyster does Oh, what an interesting grain of sand Maybe I can make it into a pearl So I try to concentrate on, I try to locate this disease wherever it is and then I try to sort of make it smaller and more content instead of like that.

[10:26]

So I'm full of pearls because I've had colds and flus quite a lot. I don't think anyone would want them in a necklace, though. They're pretty funny-looking pearls. Now, of course, After you know a city well, you look at the map and you say, oh yeah, yeah, right. So after practicing for some time, you can look at the four jhanas and say, oh yeah, I've been in that territory. And so ist es auch, wenn man Zen für eine Weile praktiziert hat und sich dann die vier jhanas anschaut, und da erkennt man manches wieder.

[11:38]

And one-pointedness is one of the characteristics of the four chanas. There's some scholarly disagreement about whether one-pointedness occurs only in second, third, and fourth, or in all four, but we don't need to know that. I mentioned that kind of thing only to remind you that a lot of thought has gone into this Buddhist practice and teaching. Now Zen also, a characteristic of Zen is to hide maps here and there in the city. So you don't have much of a map. And I give you a lousy map. A very sketchy map.

[12:40]

It says enter the city here and sit down. And you sit down. You sit down in the northern district. After three 40-minute periods, you find you're in the southern district. And you sit in that part. After three times 40 minutes, you suddenly realize you're in the southern part. And you don't know how you got there, but it looks different. And after that happens several times, once while you're sitting, you see a stone and you lift it up and there's a little map underneath. And when that happens a few times, you suddenly see a stone in front of you, you lift it up and what's there? A map. and you open it up and you say, hmm, Mount Sumeru.

[13:41]

I thought I was in Dharma City. It says I'm in Mount Sumeru. So this is Yunmin's kind of answer to this question that I gave you last night. This is a quite famous koan. And I'll repeat it again. When a monk asks, or someone asks, young men, umman, when not producing a single thought, is there any fault or not? Mm-hmm. Now Mount Sumeru is said to be the center of the world in Buddhism.

[14:55]

It's actually identified with a mountain in the Himalayas that you can circumambulate. It's quite a job to circumambulate it, but you can do it. And it's not as high as Mount Everest, but it's up there with the top peaks. And in some way, I believe the Tibetan astrological system revolves around Mount Samaria. And Mount Sumeru is said to be 80,000 leagues high. We don't know how high that is, but that's pretty high. 80,000 anything is pretty far.

[15:59]

And it's said to be 80,000 leagues under the sea. And it's said to be as winds can't touch it and rain can't wet it. Now, this is a brilliant answer of Umman's. Now, you don't have to be an advanced, adept Zen Buddhist to know it's a brilliant answer. But that helps. But it's also just as good a teaching and a non-diluted teaching for a beginner.

[17:06]

Because if you take this answer of Umman's and just put it in front of you, Mount Sumeru, It's very hard to know where it's going or what to do with it. It's like practicing with Mu, but it's different than practicing with Mu. I mean, of course we can say it's the same, but different is different, and It's a different practice. Mount Sinera, Mount Sinera. So everything that you... If you really take a question like that, which you can't... An answer like that, answer a question that you can't put your mind around, it just looms in front of you like a mountain, like a cliff.

[18:20]

It's said when you put this Mount Sumeru cliff in front of you you hear great noises on the cliff above you. As great pieces of it fall into the sea. And lightning thunders around. And still at the same time nothing touches. So if the beginner can take this practice like that, this is very powerful. Now, why that's powerful, you don't really need to know. But I'll try to give you some maps to show you why it's powerful. Are you still with me okay? To really make practice work, to really make the chemistry of practice work, you need to have a

[20:03]

Absolute certainty about practice. A completeness about your decision to practice. No, I don't know how to convey that to you in sort of reasonable terms, because it's not reasonable. It's like you don't know what existence is, but you exist. And even if you doubt that you exist you act with certainty that you exist. So practice is like that. You decide to practice with the thoroughness that you decide to breathe.

[21:14]

And it's really no harder than deciding to breathe. And it doesn't mean breathing is the best way to live. You're not making that kind of comparison. Oh, I think there's some other way than breathing that's a good way to live. You're just breathing. Now it can look, when I think about the fact that I often wear these funny robes, And I made this decision to practice Buddhism when I was 25 or so. And I gave my whole life to it. And I'm still giving my whole life to it. And you might think this was a big decision. Und ihr denkt vielleicht, das war eine großartige Entscheidung.

[22:40]

Aber als ich sie traf, diese Entscheidung, war sie eigentlich nichts Großes. Ich habe sie getroffen in dem Sinne, wie man morgens aufsteht oder sich entscheidet, zu Mittag zu essen. And this decision to practice is also the decision or the... I would say that the ability to make this kind of absolute decision to practice is the same or comes with seeing mind. Okay. It's so clear, like breathing, that someone can't come to you and say, you should not be breathing.

[23:44]

You just, no matter what they say, you're going to keep breathing. Okay. So that brings us back to one-pointedness. which I'm still trying to make clear. Now, one-pointedness is not to... The point of it is not to clear the mind. Okay, now let me stop there and come back to it a minute. Let me say something else about maps. Neil mentioned to me when we were in Berlin that the East German government modified the maps of East Germany

[24:54]

So I guess so that there were not only some things weren't on the maps or roads went different places, but they altered the scale of the map so that things looked closer together or farther apart than was actually the case. And that's quite sophisticated, actually. So the East German government allows a map marked highly secret to slip into West German hands. Isn't this mad? Then a West German spy is spying on an East German village and the map's all... Well, I bring it up because actually maps in Buddhism are a lot like that. But that's also the way you learn a city.

[26:19]

You spend a lot of time in one district. Like I know Kyoto very well, but I know certain parts of Kyoto extremely well. And I tend to know the rest of Kyoto sometimes from my knowledge of certain parts of Kyoto. And when I'm in another part of Kyoto I don't know so well, I orient myself by kind of referring back to the part of Kyoto I know. So inside of me, some parts of the map are highly detailed and in a much different scale than other parts. You understand the image. Well, what I'm saying is you can take one aspect of Buddhism and really spend most of your lifetime practice in that one area.

[27:47]

And you can begin to know the whole city, the whole Dharma city, from this one district. And Buddhism is also taught in such a way that any one practice leads to all the practices. So Mount Sumeru, rightly practiced, or one pointedness rightly practiced, leads to all the other parts of Dharma City. So there's no harm in going deeper and deeper into one practice. And in Zen this is sometimes called one practice samadhi. So in this sense Mount Sumeru is one practice samadhi.

[28:49]

One pointedness is one practice samadhi. That's clear? Okay, so... One-pointedness is not... The point of one-pointedness is not to clear the mind. Point of one pointedness is to see the mind. And you have to find a way to see the mind.

[29:53]

Now, the example I've often used is my experience as a kid of washing the dishes endlessly, procrastinating. I would spend hours at the sink. looking at the silverware under the soap suds with a glass. And my parents thought I was a bit nuts because they just thought I procrastinated and would never get it done. Dickie, are you still washing the dishes? Can't hear you, Mom. And the silverware looked great. I don't know why. But I realize now I was intuitively looking at mind.

[31:03]

And one pointedness allows you to do that. If you can begin to stay with something, you can see mind. Now actually mind can't be seen because it's not an object. But that's why I say you have to practice uncorrected state of mind. An unfabricated state of mind. must not so easy to do. But it's the only way, because as long as there's an object, you're not seeing mind, you're seeing the object.

[32:05]

You can impute mind from the object, but that's not the same as seeing mind. And to see mind is the same as the Zen expression to see your original face. Now, one-pointedness is also a tool of practice. So Mount Somero is also one-pointedness. Just this mountain. That's a German word I've learned which we don't have in English.

[33:08]

I think Peter taught me that first, right? From the Black Forest. He'd say during my lecture sometimes, Maybe that's one-pointedness. There's actually a practice where you... Not Samira. Okay. Now, some of you may have noticed that during Sashin, third, fourth, or fifth day, You sometimes don't know which bowl to pour your water into. Or you start to wrap up your bowls and... Wrap them up and the silverware is still under your lap.

[34:22]

Sometimes you look at the bowls and you can't imagine what stage you're in or where to start or anything. You're lost. Isn't that true? And the bowls are just complicated. You get completely lost in them. Yeah, you can learn a lot from this grain of sand. Mount Sumero is a grain of sand. Because on the one hand you can see that you've lost through tiredness and so forth of sesshin and the repetition of sesshin you've lost your usual clarity of mind.

[35:27]

You're wandering in Dharma City and you really don't know what the intersection is. So you can see that you've lost your clarity of mind. Okay, so on the one hand you can see how energy, sleep and so forth allow a certain clarity of mind. So one of the practices of samad, of sashing, is being able to maintain clarity of mind no matter how exhausted you are. That means that clarity of mind has to come from some other source than whether you're rested or not.

[36:31]

That ability to maintain clarity of mind under all circumstances, almost under all circumstances, is also one point of view. Okay, now there's another aspect to this, being lost in dharma city. Lost in the middle of your orioki practice. As you're not just tired, your tiredness or the length of sitting or the repetition outside your usual ability to distract yourself, you've begun to lose your ability to conceptualize.

[37:35]

Do you understand? Now, one of the main stages of practice is non-conceptual practice. And this is what the question of the person speaking to Oman means. When not producing a single thought, this is non-conceptual mind. Now I'm taking this con and working it over with you. to give you a sense of how koans are used. Now, yesterday and the last couple of days, I haven't been able to get through what I want, so I might go a little longer today.

[38:51]

So please sit comfortably. Maybe we will go as long as Mount Semero. Understood as getting rid of thoughts. Now, too many of you bring to me the idea that Zen practice is to get rid of thinking or get clear thoughts away. Let me say again, that is simply a mistake. That's a very simple idea of Zen practice.

[39:58]

Childish, I think, idea of Zen practice. In fact, you're sitting on this cushion, letting everything come up. You're deep in the wet, damp hole of your soul. And that's good. We're not trying to be spiritual. If we're spiritual, okay, but first we're soulful. So maybe this Mount Samara is also a volcano and you're sitting right at the opening and all the fumes are coming up around you. And a lot of them stink. Stink? I'm learning. Stink. It's said more stinky in German than... So non-conceptual really means that everything is changing.

[41:39]

That everything is empty. And if everything is empty and changing, it means that everything is in a state of indeterminacy. And you get that? Everything is in a state of indeterminacy. You cannot perceive indeterminacy with concepts. To perceive indeterminacy, you have to think. Think non-conceptual. So Dogen says, think non-thinking. So people think this means don't think. He didn't say don't think. He said think non-thinking. You have to pay attention. It's not the same as not thinking. So it means to perceive indeterminately, you need to perceive non-conceptually.

[43:01]

To perceive indeterminately, you have to begin to think, to perceive non-conceptually. Are you doing okay? Yes. I do feel like I enjoy this much better than being sick. You may get the Gerald Weishelder Prize yet. When she heard there was no money attached or anything in the order... that it was just an honor, she went right back to bed. So I promised her a medal. A little pin that says, emptiness.

[44:09]

Thank you. Okay, so when you can't figure out where you are in the midst of your eating bowls, you have lost the ability to maintain clarity of mind, but that is also simultaneous with and the door to and the beginning of thinking non-conceptually. So at that point you are finding a way to reestablish clarity of mind without it being conceptual. So you're beginning to grab hold of things mentally more gently. You're beginning to grab hold of the in-betweenness of things more than the thingness of things.

[45:22]

It's actually a different way of thinking. And sometimes you have to be pushed into it. Now you can't just run into the ordinary guy on the street here in Germany and say, let's practice thinking non-conceptually. I'd like you to lose your clarity of mind, thank you. We have to do this strange practice that pushes us rather unwillingly into a loss of clarity of mind to re-establish another kind of clarity of mind. This is also what umman means by Mount Sumeru.

[46:38]

Because Mount Sumeru covers everything, so it's not any ordinary concept. Now, this practice also means one taste. Now, as you practice any one of these, things thoroughly, one-pointedness, it turns into non-conceptual thinking. And non-conceptual thinking or one-pointedness turn into one taste. Now, what does one taste mean? One taste means that although you perceive the brilliant difference in everything you taste mind on everything. You see everything tastes of mind. So whatever you see, you see mind.

[47:59]

Simultaneously. This is also Mount Sumeru. So if you practice Mount Sumeru, Mount Sumeru, you begin to feel one taste, non-conceptual, one-pointedness. and this is also the vow to practice now what did I what I added last night to this koan first the koan is when not producing a single thought is there any fault or not And I added, when producing only a single thought, is there any fault or not? And I said, can you know a single thought at the base of your life? Is this something that can be known?

[49:12]

Because I added this because it's true. I added it also because young men's subtle answer to when not producing a single thought is to give him a single thought, Mount Sumer. So a single thought is the vow to say, to practice, to realize, to see the emperor with every, an empress, with every sentient being. And it also means the lineage. Because a single thought, if you really hold a single thought, I'm holding Suzuki Roshi's single thought.

[50:15]

who held Gyokujin so on Roshi's single thought, who held Dogen and Dongshan and the Buddha's single thought, can you hold a single thought in your life? If you hold a single thought in your life, you find the end of your life. In other words, your life has a beginning and end that's present in each moment. It gives your life a very powerful shape. And it manifests itself in each moment. This is also a one-pointedness. You begin to see how one practice can start to cover everything.

[51:41]

Now, whether the single thought at the base of your life is the vow to realize whole being with each person you meet, I maintain there is a single thought at the base of all your life. And it may be all broken up in rainbows and prisms and so forth, but there is one there. And part of sitting is sitting until it begins to appear. And you have something to say about what that single thought is. The thought that covers your life. then you can decide how to develop it, what shape to give it.

[52:59]

And Buddhism says, when you look at the single thought at the base of each person's life, the deepest form of that is the desire to realize whole being in yourself and not just in yourself, with others. Maybe that's not true, but that's what Buddhism has found to be true and all of Buddhism is based on that. Buddhism says we're the practice to find the deepest thought that covers everything through which we can realize ourself and which reaches every other person.

[54:09]

And you can discover anything you want but this is what Buddhism has discovered and tries to find a way for each of us to sit in the midst of. And the maps help sometimes. And you find in this koan of young men's, this map of Mount Sumeru hidden on koan 16, I think it is, or 18. But mostly you have to discover it in your own experience. Okay. Now, a couple of things. You know, I've been practicing a pretty long time.

[55:27]

Only a few moments. But also, I mean, I should remind you again that I'm the 90th person in succession from the Buddha. And there's 51 or 52 people here. It only takes 40 more of you to stretch back to Buddha. It means all of Buddhism can be here in this room. In each of our lives. And each of you are in a slightly different district of Dharma City. So Buddhism is pretty small.

[56:28]

It's pretty big and it's pretty small. You'll never reach the end of it, and yet it fits in each one of your lives. Now, what I was starting out to say is that I've been practicing a pretty long time, but my sitting isn't going to get much better any longer from just sitting more. In other words, my legs aren't going to get much more flexible. My ability to absorb the annoyance and pain is not going to increase much. After 30 years, I've gotten about as far as I can from that point of view. But what will change and does change

[57:30]

is my body sense. I change how my body is organized. That's the best way I can say it. That changes my sitting. Now, this is too big a topic to bring up at this hour. But what I want to get at is how the sense of location works in you. And how this sense of location is integrally related to one point of view. I also touched on it when I said, you know, we each have a distinct sense that we're speaking and not some other person speaking when we're speaking.

[58:58]

And one of the main ways we locate ourselves is our language and culture requires so much from our face. Your parents are always relating to your face. They may, while you're lying in your crib, tickle your tummy, but they're looking at your face. He started tickling his tongue. People will sit together, you know, and look at his face. Okay. And then school, all your life people are relating to your face. This simple repetition of relating to your face is one of the main reasons we locate ourselves in our face and our head.

[60:15]

It's not just because the brain is there. So one of the practices that you get in Sufism is they keep trying to push your sense of identity down into your heart. With zikrs and so forth, you try to push your... language and visual and your images and your feeling down into your heart using your head and so on. Buddhism says simply locate your sense of mind in your heart. Locate yourself in your chest body Now, part of the practice of one-pointedness is to be able to stay with a point.

[61:31]

Or to stay with this lecture at this point. And you're staying with the point in outer situations and inner situations. And if you can begin to stay with the point, you can then use that ability to stay with the point to move that point into your chest or into just below your navel. Okay, so one of the practices of one-pointedness for us, practically speaking, in zazen, in a sashin, is to keep trying to move your sense of location out of your face and head into your chest body. or into your gut. Now, one of the basic practices, for instance, is stated, seat consciousness at the door of the auditory sense.

[62:37]

seat consciousness at the door of the auditory sense. Okay. I won't go into that right now, but that is again a simple practice, but which requires your ability to move your sense of location to the door of auditory consciousness. Okay, I think that's enough. And, you know, my problem is I don't see you now. And many of you are ready to take the next step in practice, but I'm not here to do it with you. And partly, you don't need me, I just feel lonely and would like to do it with you. and partly you need me or at least you need a teacher you should understand the basic image of a teacher in Buddhism is of a bee and a flower the bee knows where the pollen is and he knows where it's not

[64:10]

And the bee doesn't bother with the parts of the flower which have no pollen. So you have to know how to use a teacher. Not worry too much about his or her poor leaves. Okay. now quite a lot of people ask me and every year more so ask me if they can be my student and I don't know if when people ask me you know what you're asking And if the teacher is quite an intrusion in a person's life, even if you know where the pollen is, ask Gerald and Gisela, they know.

[65:34]

Okay. And... Some of you, I talked about this in Berlin for the first time, I think. Some of you, this whole subject of student and teacher. And some of you have already decided that I'm your teacher. And you just haven't told me. And some of you I've decided already you're my student or I'm practicing with you and I haven't told you. When we'll both get up the courage sort of shyly to admit it, I don't know. And for some of you, it's a little bit like, you know, Ulrike used to bring students when she was a teacher to East Germany when there was an East Germany.

[67:09]

And if you can imagine one of these excursions when she had to bring students and keep them all numbered and in specific seats on the bus so the East Germans didn't get confused, She meets a very nice woman bus driver. You meet a very nice bus driver. And you really recognize each other as friends. But you can never see each other except once a year on these excursions. And I think some of you want to be, have a teacher-student-disciple relationship, sort of like that. That we recognize that we love each other or that we're friends, and yet we don't have to see each other because I'm in Germany and you're in Germany.

[68:30]

The Japanese actually have a word for when you fall in love with somebody and never tell them. But actually, being a teacher and having a teacher-student-disciple relationship is a mutual interaction that has to have some way to function. I mean, we don't have to talk about the other kind of relationship because it just happens. And as I say, many of you are ready for further steps in practice that would help if you were part of a lineage or part of a teaching tradition.

[69:39]

And as I have often said, there is no tradition for how to do this with intelligent laymen, with enough laypersons, with enough leisure to practice regularly. So we have to establish, I think, some kind of school or educational program in Europe without walls. Without walls because we don't have any building. So it has to occur somewhere. Now maybe, for instance, Gerard and Gisela could come to Europe for a month.

[70:50]

I haven't spoken to them about it. For a month or six weeks or two months. And stay in one city and meet with people three or five times a week. It would have to be mostly just with people in that city. Or maybe I could do that for a month or two. Or I could join Gerhard and Gisela and some other people and we could try to develop some kind of way to get deeper into this Buddhist language and practice. But, you know, it's really up to you. I don't know how to do it. If you guys can figure out a way to do it, I'll figure it out with you. Because I'm a little frustrated.

[72:00]

When I see you in Doksan, I can't really go the next step with you because I'm not going to see you for six months or a year. And practice which is realized mutually is considered deeper than practice which is realized independently. And you realize mutually with another person, it also makes it much more possible for you to teach. Because that mutual understanding reaches other people. Okay, so... Anyway, after the Sashin, I want to meet with... I'm going to meet with some people about the Dharma Saga and teaching in Europe.

[73:12]

And anybody who has time can join us in this discussion. That's also fine for you to just come to Sashin or seminars. That's fine with me too. But if we want to practice more together, which I think some people should, and I would like to, we should find out how to do that. And I can't expect... I mean, it should happen here, not... It shouldn't be necessary for everyone or many people to come to Creston.

[74:16]

And also it's interesting to find out how to do it here. Okay. Now again, coming back to the question of people asked to be a student. Briefly, I think there's four possibilities. One is it's just an agreement between us, spoken or unspoken, and we work together in the best way we can. And you are established enough in me And you have to help. Don't be modest. You have to help establish yourself in me. Some kind of modesty isn't necessary here. Yeah. And then I won't forget your practice.

[75:17]

It'll be happening in me even though I'm away from you. And this establishment is mutual. That's one way. The second way is you take lay initiation bodhisattva vows. And third is you take what we could call maybe lay ordination and you actually sew a raksu, a small Buddha's robe. Like Stefan has done. He has a raksu, which is a small version of Buddha's robe, which he made himself.

[76:18]

And fourth would be to be ordained like Geralt is, or I am. And within all these categories, there's some kind of development of practice together. And within all these categories, there's some kind of development of practice together. A shared vision and clarity about practice. Now I mention this and bother the whole Sashin with this question. Because especially during Sashin but also during seminars people ask me this question. And I'm also bothering you with it because I don't see you after the Sesshin. Most of you will split right away. If we all lived here near Hamburg, then we could get together next Wednesday.

[77:35]

So I can't do that, so I don't know what to do, but I'm doing the best I can. Okay, so I think we've come some ways in understanding one-pointedness better. And to allowing yourself just to be on your cushion and allowing this clarity of non-conceptual mind to begin to appear.

[78:20]

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