Where there's not the differentiation of the letters, you enter the spell of awareness. Now, why is consciousness so attractive, you have to ask? Why does it fool us into thinking that's all there is? We're held in the spell of consciousness without seeing the spell that holds consciousness. We're enchanted. means to sing together. You don't have to translate it to me.

[01:08]

So these are our mutual spells, awareness and consciousness. And we're very used to the spell of... Zen practice and Sashin practice and this critical point practice is to bring us into to break the spell of consciousness and bring us into the spell or the rapture of consciousness Awareness. To be held rapt or in rapture means to be seized.

[02:11]

And To be wrapped up. And what I would like us all to know is not just the spell of consciousness, but the rapture of awareness. and how its silence or its emptiness or its stillness also pervades consciousness. Then we could say with Ramakrishna and Dogen that through practice we set our sail In the entire body of Buddha.

[03:12]

In the golden wind. Where do you think that golden wind is? Thank you very much. O my God, save me, O my God, save me, O my God.

[04:18]

I will try to save you. Your desires are very bad. [...] CHOIR SINGS Thank you for watching.

[05:46]

One day, one of the world's most famous, [...] Thank you for sitting so long and patiently through my lectures.

[07:12]

And thank you, Christian, for translating so much. And, oh, by the way, the other day I said the gate of the entire earth was a quote of Shui Do, and it was Shui Fung, I'm sorry. In Japanese, there's Seppo and Secho, and I learned the names first in Japanese, and sometimes I mix them up. I'm really mentioning it for the tape. I imagine somebody in an autobahn looking it up as they're driving. Sometimes I actually do that myself. I drive when I write. pad I can prop up on the steering wheel.

[08:23]

I'm not recommending it to anyone. And some of the things I've said, particularly about self, are parallel to or quotes from Anne Klein's book, The Meeting of the Great Bliss Queen. We discussed it in the practice week and I don't know if it's in German. But at least in the way I'm I talk about practice. I would have to say that her book is the best book on practice in English that fits in with what I'm talking about.

[09:29]

But at least in accordance with what I'm learning, her book is the best, at least in English. And it's most in line with what I'm also learning. I mean, half the book is on feminism. Which I'd like to imagine I'm an expert on. Her interest in feminism brings up the same concerns with the relationship between the Western self and the Buddhist idea of self. The same concerns I have. Okay. Now I've been speaking about, we can say, the rapture that's just on the other side of consciousness.

[10:42]

And to quote Chuan Tzu, one of the two founders of Taoism, at least to the extent that Taoism has founders, he lived in the third century B.C. Anyway, he talked about We have to practice mind-fasting in order to know the emptiness of infinite possibilities. And Sashin is the kind of actually tradition coming from that view of mind fasting. Fasting like you don't eat.

[11:59]

Break fast. And the Sashin is also in a tradition of spiritual fasting, so to speak. Mind fasting is when the tree withers and the leaves fall. So we may have some taste of this clarity and rapture that's on the other side of consciousness. Mm-hmm. Now, Zen is not just some experience that shows us this other side of consciousness. But this experience to some degree, is essential to practice.

[13:06]

Okay, now... Again, I'd like to apologize for giving such complicated lectures this session. If you come to the next session, you'll just hear the conclusions. It'll seem much simpler, but you won't participate as much in it. Yeah, but also I... I'm hoping Sashin practice will concentrate you and simplify you. And maybe my lectures will awaken some of the complexity of all our parts. Mm-hmm. All right. At least I would hope that that might be so.

[14:27]

So what I've been talking about, trying to express succinctly in this sashin, is What, in effect, would be the image of practice a teacher has to have? A teacher has to either have a clear image or a thorough intuition of the whole of practice in order to guide practice. A teacher must have either a clear picture or at least an intuition to be able to guide the practice. And I say that just because you will meet teachers that actually don't have much intellectual grasp of practice at all, but they have a thorough feeling and knowing of it in their body.

[15:52]

we need to have a pretty clear idea of practice. Otherwise, we will, as Sukhriyash used to say, end up to be Christians and Jews who practice zazen. And he didn't mean that negatively. He meant that if Buddhism is really going to be a good partner with Christianity and Judaism, It must be clearly understood. Yeah. So what is this image? I'll try to summarize what I've been saying the last days.

[17:16]

If a 15th century merchant said to his ship, you can sail west to the east, we would know he didn't think the world was flat. So, we can... by studying the lineage and the koans and the sutras, we can begin to see what kind of world Buddhism imagines. And Dogen Zenji says that this vision and understanding is best realized through another person.

[18:31]

And he actually says, through five or six people. He means... your teacher, and five or six of the lineage that you feel an affinity for. And one of the things that koans do is try to give us enough feel for a number of our ancestors. And as we feel a kinship with our genetic ancestors, who are thousands, but still we feel a kinship which is mostly in our mind,

[19:34]

And we can have a kinship in our mind and body with our Buddha ancestors. So it's good to take several of these people and get to know them well. Get to know their understanding. And Zhaozhou was one of the people who was most intimate with Suzuki Roshi. Okay. Now I'm using the word awareness as an experiential synonym for the territory of big mind, Buddha nature.

[21:02]

Absolute nature. Emptiness. And that's a lot of work to put on the shoulders of this non-graspable emptiness, I mean awareness. But, you know, maybe awareness is up to it. In any case, you remember that philosophy is not the equivalent or description of practice. Now we need a vision, an ideal vision of this awareness. And we need a taste of it. And we need to recognize that the path is through realizations.

[22:06]

And that the path is through familiarity. So we may have a vision of the world and its oceans, but we still have to set sail and discover how to set our sail in Buddha's... And we have to know the waves and currents of our emotions, psyche and so forth. in our views and our centuries' views of self and so forth. So we need vision, taste and realization.

[23:17]

Now, is it near or far? This sailing west to get to the east. Remember, Samantabhadra is the bodhisattva who enters without taking a step. And from the practice week you remember the meeting of Nanchuan and Zhaozhou. When Zhaozhou, at 18 years old, realized the mind of the way. And the way, dao means way, but also has the sense or meaning of the entry to the way, the entrance. Mm-hmm.

[24:41]

So, Jojo asked Nanchuan, what is the way? Nanchuan said, ordinary mind is the way. And Jojo said, ordinary mind? Well, can you aim for it? Can you aim for it? It's a natural question. And Nanchuan said, if you turn towards it, you turn away from it. And Jaja said, thanks a lot. It's not recorded that he said that. So Zhaozhou said, well, if I make no attempt, then how do I know I'm on the way?

[26:13]

And also a very straightforward, normal question. And Nanchuan said, knowing is false consciousness. Not knowing is insensibility. When you arrive on the way without doubt, it is a vacant hall. And some of you had the experience of the sashin, the zendo, somehow being empty. He says, when you arrive on the way without doubt, it is a vacant hall, vast and empty.

[27:16]

How could there be affirmation or denial? How could there be affirmation or denial? Samantabhadra enters without taking a step. There's an old Japanese poem which goes something like, do not be fooled by mind. It is mind that hides mind. There is no other mind. Oh, mind, do not mislead us. Yeah, okay, so I don't know if we've improved the situation in here. But we're trying to point out a mind that's not our usual kind of consciousness. But pointing out itself is consciousness.

[28:38]

So you need a taste, a vision. And a familiarity with your waves and currents. Okay, if it's not far away, is it discovered or developed? I mean, Plato's model is it's discovered. And even if it's discovered and developed, is there possibly something new? I would say there's all three. And I would say there are all three.

[29:47]

Okay. It's discovered the way we discover the mind that, as I say, wakes us up without an alarm clock. Oh, we discover the mind that some people discover like in a hiking or mountaineering accident or car accident. There may be quite torn apart, but often there's no pain, there's great clarity, and they do things really precisely. So this mind is a capacity of ours. It's also the mind, I think, that knows how to die if we don't interfere with it.

[30:51]

We don't have to use this capacity more than once or twice in our life. So I have faith that it's there. Okay, so this mind is discovered. But it's also developed. And how is it developed? Its access to it is developed. Acceptance of it is developed. An understanding of it is developed. And it's also developed in just the way consciousness is developed. Consciousness is educated. In fact, most of what we've done most of our life is educating consciousness.

[32:08]

How to retain information. How to think clearly and so forth. Well, awareness can also be developed to do more things than just wake you up with an alarm clock. Aikido and tai chi and so forth, they develop aspects of this awareness or big mind. And Buddhism develops similar and different aspects. So this awareness can be developed. And it can be matured. Okay. How else can it be developed? It can also be developed in its relationship with consciousness.

[33:36]

the simultaneous presence and interweaving of consciousness and awareness is developed. And further developed in the relationship between mind and body and mind-body. And this is all called practice after enlightenment. And if you have the modesty to not think you're enlightened, don't worry, a little taste is enough. Enough to get started. And since there's no waiting in awareness, why wait for enlightenment? Let's get started right away. That's also practice. The practice after enlightenment, before enlightenment, Because we're compassionate, we Buddhists, and we want all of us to do this together.

[34:59]

Okay, and how also is it developed? It's also developed in that it's, as I said, a partnership of selves. The conventional self of Buddhism which partially has to be developed in relationship to our societal and personal self. There's an old Norse god called Mimir. who guards the well of memory. So I just say that because I was thinking of the Western self as being involved with getting past the guard of memory.

[36:08]

the guard of memory. Maybe Mir Mir protects the unconscious and conscious. In any case, we have to develop the Buddhist conventional self in relationship to our societal and personal self. But the Buddhist conventional self is actually the other part of the Buddhist conventional self. Buddhist self based on awareness. Awareness and consciousness are also developed as self through Buddhist teaching of empathy, sympathy, compassion, wisdom.

[37:28]

So from this point of view we can understand Buddha's teaching is that teaching which transforms awareness and consciousness into a Buddha. Okay, so we all know this. Why do we forget? I think we all know it, intuit it, taste it pretty well. But we forget. We remember and forget. It's like we wake up on this ship in the middle of the sea of life and death. And we think we're in a hotel room or our mother's house shall we go along as if that were the case but then aspiration won't let us alone and we wake up again and see the sea and see the sea in which we're all in the same boat

[39:07]

And then maybe we hoist our sail. And then we forget again. And I think until our aspiration is mature enough, we keep forgetting. But our inner requests are... Our spiritual aspiration keeps waking us. You know, there's names for self in Sanskrit and Tibetan. which mean things like the two-filled continuum, meaning full of the possibility to ruin yourself. full of the possibility to enlighten yourself.

[40:21]

Another word for self is produced creature separated from power. No, produced creature with power. And another one is creature separated from power. In both cases, the power means to enlighten yourself. We have this power. And our aspiration, I think, won't let us alone. But we need the support of each other. I need the support of you. So let's do this together. And is there something new? Sukhirashi said, each of us has his or her own enlightenment.

[41:42]

So I'm We are meeting each other's enlightenment all the time. We may make a mess of our enlightenment, but we are meeting it all the time. Again, Sri Krishna said, everybody is always showing us their enlightenment. We would call that statement in Buddhism a sharp sword. Oh, I want to say one other thing.

[43:03]

Every time we chant the lineage, you're going to think I'm crazy. Maybe not so crazy. But anyway, I hear it sometimes a hundred years from now. So I imagine, you know, somebody chanting Daniela Daioh show. Hessen and Hessen Daioh show. Becker and Becker Daioh show. Yeah. I hope so.

[43:55]

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