People are sneaking in here, right and left. Okay. What's next? No. Maybe, yeah. Okay. So please say something. I have two questions left from yesterday. Yesterday you said that we imagine that this knee observer is one Yes, the same or consistent, yeah.

[01:00]

But that there are actually various or different ones. How do I get to these different ones? In me, there's only one. Oh, no. It is quite stable. I do have it since my childhood or my youth, and it's quite stable. That's good. I'm glad to hear it's stable. But I bet your friends see some differences, different me observers. Anyway, yeah, so if you see only one, and maybe that's true for you. Maybe I'm wrong in what I say. Yeah, maybe we can find some examples of a difference. And what kind of differences are we looking for?

[02:23]

The most... easy to notice this difference, is when there'd be a difference in the decisions you'd make. For example, perhaps in zazen, you might come to a different decision about something in your life than you would in your usual mind. And I would say that such a difference is actually a real difference.

[03:26]

It's a different me observer. And the more you develop the me observer that makes a decision, shall we say, in zazen, That Zazen me observer will develop a different, you'll see, I think, will have a somewhat different history, somewhat different associations will be part of its history. Anyway, that's what I would say right now. Okay. Does anyone want to share something of the discussions you've had?

[05:07]

Yes. One question that came up through the discussion we had in our group In practice, is there something like renunciation, giving up of what I like, what I wish for? is practice just being aware of what I do. Whatever that is. Whatever that is, yeah. Is there a stage in the practice where there is a kind of renunciation of the daily routine?

[06:23]

And is there maybe a stage in practice where renunciation is kind of asked for, where I have to sort of force myself to give something up? Is that the bad news? Yeah. Yeah, I think in individual cases it's definitely the case. Is it always the case? For each person? What I would call contemporary denunciation. is the decision to free ourselves from societal and social definitions of ourself.

[08:04]

So I think our society very strongly asks us to define ourselves in a certain way. And to measure ourselves by certain... to define ourselves by certain measures. Like, do I have a certain kind of job? How do I relate in a hierarchy to my brothers and sisters?

[09:10]

Do I have certain academic degrees? Do I have at least an average amount of money? Do I have health insurance? I think Foucault, Michel Foucault, is quite right in his way of looking at this. Is it these institutional benefits that society offers us? We have certain kinds of permissions through education. The safety of a good medical system.

[10:14]

And the medical records we have and so forth. And the medical records would be Yeah, you fill out things and say who you are and define yourself. And the society is always asking you to define yourself certain ways. Yeah, which aren't, none of the stuff is bad. But there's also a hidden strategy to it. Which is to control us in certain ways. You know, democratic society, which can't, you know, like a king, a queen, just say, off with her head.

[11:25]

It might be under a certain kind of monarchy you have more freedom. Because, you know, you can do almost anything as long as you don't, you know... Go too far. If you go too far, off with his head. But in a democracy, it requires us to all basically buy into the social contract. And to define ourselves through others. And to watch others all the time. And I think... It doesn't mean you give up all that.

[12:51]

But I think we have to renounce defining ourselves primarily through such a social contract. You know, I'm a primitive person. And I... I haven't had health insurance, for example, for 30 years. And many people tell me I'm stupid and so forth like that. Or they tell me I depend on my genes, you know, I'm unhealthy. And that's really, yeah, probably too, I'm depending on my genes. LAUGHTER But in actual fact, I don't want to put any protection between me and illness or death.

[14:10]

I don't want any tiny bit of me to say, I'm safe. So for me, I always say I can't afford it. And that's, yeah, 75% true. And I could probably afford it. But I have not wanted to give myself even that much security. I want to live in a way, when it's time to perish, I say, okay. Yeah. I don't want to sound dramatic.

[15:18]

But, and I don't want you to be as primitive as me. I admire you stronger people who can feel the way I'm talking about and also have a health insurance. But I'm a person who has to walk around with a string of skulls to remind myself of impermanence. And I love having this in my pocket. And it's not like a rabbit's foot. A rabbit's foot? Yes, it is not like a talisman.

[16:32]

Because I carry this to keep me safe from feeling safe. Of course, a dead rabbit's foot shouldn't remind you too much of safety. The rabbit certainly's luck ran out. Yeah, so some kind of renunciation of the, of, yeah, as I said clearly enough, Ja, eine Art von Entsagung. Ich glaube, ich habe das klar genug gesagt. And to re-enter the definitions of our society with a feeling of simultaneously being free of them.

[17:33]

Und dann die Definition unserer Gesellschaft wieder, oder in sie wieder einzutreten und sich gleichzeitig dabei frei von ihnen zu fühlen. Ja, okay. Ja. Ja. Banal, when I do something, maybe I do it again and again, but in the light of my practice I now believe or am convinced that it is not good or that my practice is wrong or so. I also think of a more trivial kind of renunciation, like, say, to give up or not continue doing something of which, in the light of my own practice, I know it hinders my practice. Yeah, that's of course true. Yeah, that's true, of course.

[18:36]

So that means this kind of renunciation is, even if I have to force myself, is good. This means I do, I should renounce this then. I don't mind. My understanding so far has been that it also comes down to being true in the first place. To observe exactly what I am doing. That's a renunciation. So that's more of what we ourselves have been doing for a long time. Letting go is something natural. My understanding was that it should be more a kind of awareness of noticing what I do and not so much a renouncing and that this renunciation is or was kind of supposed to happen more naturally.

[19:50]

Well... That would be nice. Yeah, that's very true. But no, I think... progress in practice is inseparable from renunciation. But it depends which, you know, it's a fabric of choices. Just deciding to get up early in the morning is a kind of renunciation. For some people a big one. I renounce this soft bed and this beautiful person beside me. Or, you know, you give up smoking or something like that. And smoking is a real serious addiction.

[21:07]

But if we can't give up smoking, it's hard to take a person's practice seriously. Because you really need to isolate the emotional need that smoking satisfies. and first satisfy that emotional need in some other way. That's a kind of renunciation, but it's really a kind of shift in emphasis. I would call this something like a fabric of small renunciations. I mean, you brought this up the other day. You want to add something right now? Yeah, I want to say I do get up at five in the morning and for me it is renunciation.

[22:27]

And I also give up a part of my social life, like going out to dinner or to a restaurant or going to parties. Because then if I go to bed too late, I can't get up in the morning. All right. But it's worth it. It's worth it. Well, I'm glad. That's quite... Yeah. And then you... I mean, I... Again, I'm exposing how primitive I am. I noticed a bad feeling when I had a thought which compared myself favorably to another person.

[23:38]

And I needed that comparison. That's a difference for me between comparing myself favorably to someone else or unfavorably But I don't really need to. It's just an observation. I have shorter hair than you do. That's no difference when I compare myself with someone else in a favorable or unfavorable way. And I don't really need it when I say I have shorter hair than you. And whether that's a favorable or unfavorable comparison, I'll let someone else decide. But if I had a need to make this comparison, I found myself trying to stop myself.

[25:11]

And I kind of created a mind trying to be alert, kind of mindfulness, to be alert every time I would say something like that. And I told you this before, you know, some of you. And I found I would try to stop it so much that sometimes if I started to say something, I'd actually bite my tongue. So then I decided, okay, hey, that's good. Every time I have such a thought, I'll bite my tongue.

[26:23]

You should have seen my tongue. Actually, it would bleed in my mouth. several times a week. And it took several years, and even after a few years, every now and then I'd still bite my tongue. That's a kind of renunciation or a kind of effort to change one's behavior anyway. That's a way of saying, or at least an effort, to change one's behavior. Okay, something else. Yes. We had one point in the discussion, that trust, that when we are with it, the right thing will happen, even if we don't know what it is.

[27:31]

One point in our discussion was the trust or the confidence that while sitting the right thing will happen, even if we don't know what it is. Not why, but it. Yeah, yeah. It's good to have such trust. And practice doesn't really develop without it. But one thing I ask myself, Do we have to also intellectually find out which way to go or is sitting enough? Well, we have to think out what we're doing sometimes.

[28:48]

You know, I think some things need a practical intellectual decision on the basis of conventional mind. But I try to keep going back to how I feel, not what I think. And I go back to what I feel particularly in zazen. And if I then have some, if I give a sort of thought formation to how I feel, It might have a kind of intellectual form, but it wasn't arrived at intellectually.

[29:52]

dann hat es eine intellektuelle Form, aber ich bin nicht auf intellektuellen Wege dorthin gelangt. I try to never go against my actual feeling. Ich versuche niemals gegen mein tatsächliches Gefühl zu handeln. Okay, ja. The day before yesterday you said that zazen is kept alive when you bring questions to it. Now talking about or what you are talking about Zazen intellect and feeling. Does bringing questions to your zazen mean to think about them, like thinking about a koan?

[31:25]

I mean, what I'm talking about is questions from your daily life. Well, you can certainly bring daily life questions to your zazen. Maybe you have a job or you're a therapist or I don't know, certain conundrums come up. How can I actually help this person? Wie kann ich dieser Person wirklich helfen? How can I solve this, be in the midst of this situation at work where two people hate each other and I'm in the middle? Wie kann ich in dieser Situation in der Arbeit, wie kann ich mit dieser Situation umgehen wo zwei Leute sich hassen und ich bin mittendrin?

[32:30]

No, those kind of questions, I think, are useful to bring to Zazen. Yeah. But you can bring more fundamental or existential questions to Zazen, too. Like, here I am, one of the most extraordinary... Human beings are... as extraordinary as anything gets in the cosmos that we know about. Can I say you're about to have a baby? Yeah, yes, sir. I mean his wife. He's not going to hang on to a tree later in the garden. This is extraordinary. And, you know, this is us. How can we be bored with Zazen? How can we be bored with ourselves?

[33:45]

If we're bored, we're stuck on some kind of surface that we can't penetrate. How do we penetrate this surface of boredom? Yeah, that kind of question, too. Lots of... to think of lots. Yeah. Suzuki Roshi always brought up, what is my innermost request? That's a question that can bring life into our practice. But only if we're willing to listen to our innermost request.

[35:04]

And only if we have the capacity, courage, character to act on it if possible. There's no point in asking yourself the question if you're unwilling to listen. Yeah. There are some people who haven't said anything and some people who... You, can you... There are people who haven't said anything at all. You're hiding down there, I can see. You're hiding down there. What? Oh, I'm not hiding well enough.

[36:06]

Hey, you're just behind René. Not well enough. Oh, not well enough. We got a call. And it was... For me a question came up, we talked about how practice widens our life. We soon found out about the limits or limitations that we reach in our life or in our practice, in our conventional life. Yes. these inner postures or attitudes that in sitting you try to cultivate or develop.

[37:13]

I said that among my friends or my relatives I have really nobody I can talk to about this. I would like to know how you can talk about this without creating resistance. I sometimes got the response, for example, that, oh, this is really not the right thing for you. What, this Zen practice or doing something? This is Zen practice, yeah. Yeah, that's Mara. Mara is talking.

[38:23]

Mara appears as fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters. Well, I think in this kind of case you have to really become confident in yourself that this is what you, that this is a good thing for you to do, at least at this time. If you're really confident, Generally, everyone around you will accept or tolerate. In fact, they may resent it, but secretly admire it. Because they think it means you've grown up.

[39:27]

And often later another thing comes out, which is they kind of wish they could do it. That's what I wanted to say earlier. I meant to say about these small, this fabric of renunciations. Often we give up something and it comes back in a better form later. Oft geben wir etwas auf und es kommt in einer besseren Form später zurück. Like we start going to nicer parties with people we like better that start earlier. Zu besseren Partys gehen mit Leuten, die wir in Liebe mögen und im Frühjahr beginnen.

[40:35]

That's what this is. Sorry, just before you came, he mentioned he starts to get the atmosphere of a party. That's what I hope. We didn't say it in Deutsch, though. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the reasons I think something like having guest the afternoon free is good, I mean. It changes the structures, how we relate to each other. And we can feel what we've been talking about in the seminar in our more usual state of mind. For me it's that behind my sitting there is a big longing.

[41:53]

In the discussion, I noticed I want to get to this in a radical way, but I kind of lack the tools to get to it. Okay, you can ask yourself the question. what are the tools? It's good to really ask. You see a problem, you ask yourself a very simple question like that, like you just said. But I don't have the tools to get there. What are the tools?

[43:23]

Your own language offers the question. Ich habe da manchmal nur die Sorge, dass ich dann wieder in meine Gewohnheiten reinfalle. Ich merke das hier, dann setze ich mich hin und lese. Sometimes I'm worried then to fall back into my own habits. For example here, I start to read. Is there anything wrong with reading? Ja, die Gewohnheiten haben. It's just a habit. It's not such a bad habit. I hope it's not such a bad habit. I hope it's not such a bad habit. But if you're seeking more than hints in reading, that's probably not so good.

[44:47]

Nirvana is often understood as being a deep longing. And Nirvana is identified with death, so in some way it's a deep longing for the peace of death. But there are various images for nirvana which express this longing. If you know the hot, muggy climate of India, In Japanese, the word is mushi-atsui, steamy hot.

[45:58]

In Japanese, the word is mushi-atsui, steamy hot. One image of nirvana is a cool cave high in the mountains. Another image is an island in the midst of a flood. Yeah, I used to always feel, you know, like, that I went to the mountains when I did zazen. Of course, you in Switzerland, maybe you wish for it. Go ahead. I stick to this phrase, to become a true person in the Buddha's, Buddha ancestors' house.

[47:20]

Ich habe mich mein ganzes Leben lang darum bemüht, selber eine Person zu werden. Sucht und gebaut und so. I tried to, for all my life, I tried to become a person. I was seeking things and I built something. Und jetzt kommt es mir vor, wenn ich das alles wegwerfen müsste und Now it seems I have to throw all of this away and enter a different house, a foreign house. Yes, of course, it would be good if you think about permanence. Yeah, I will die, but then there will be this lineage in which I sit.

[48:42]

But that's only a trick that doesn't convince me. Well, maybe I'm being tricked, too. But I enjoy it. Yeah, I understand. Sometimes I think we have to respect our conventional life. But sometimes it doesn't completely satisfy us. Does anyone have an English Zammai or Zammai here? I have one upstairs I can go get. Thank you.

[50:04]

Thank you. Okay. Anything else? Yes. I'm not really sure what changes when I leave my conventional life and go to a monastery. I'm not clear about what happens when I leave my conventional life and enter a monastery. Is that not also conventional, but only in a different way? Yes, of course. But it is a different way. Again, let's say that you want to make a decision, a practical decision, to go to Creston.

[51:14]

Yeah, I mean, just so we have something to talk about. So you're not giving up your conventional life, you're just putting it aside for three months or four months. And when you get there, first of all, you're never ready to go. No, you're never ready, actually. If you wait till you're ready to go, you will never go. Because there's always things that keep us in our conventional life.

[52:16]

So you have to draw a line. And Buddhism makes it easy because we're not going for the rest of our life. We're just going for three months. But when you get there, you can't fall into your usual habits. unless you have fairly unusual habits. We get up at 3.30. And we have, I don't know, one, two, three, five periods of zazen a day. And we have various little ceremonies that are pretty boring.

[53:26]

Rene can tell you. And you have to do things that you think there's no point to this at all. And as long as you want there to be a point, it kind of drives you crazy. You have to get to the point where, well, if my heart's beating and my Breathing is, you know, there's enough air, I don't care what happens. We chant all day long, that's okay. As long as there's room for my heart to beat. So anyway, it changes your expectations, your habits. We don't do it as radically as would be tradition.

[54:43]

Because a lot of people would leave in a few weeks. Ideally, you make no phone calls, receive no letters, write no letters. But I find I can't really enforce that. No email. But still, it's an interruption of your usual way you communicate. Know yourself through your habits. Then after three months you decide if you want to stay for another three months or a year or two or something. My experience is if we have three-month practice periods, 50% of people will leave usually after the practice period.

[55:58]

The practice hasn't really taken. But if you have two practice periods a year, six months a year of practice period, My experience has been then 70, 80% of the people stay several years. They really get the feeling of it and they don't want to lose that by leaving. But we just don't. We just don't have the means to do two practice periods a year there. Plus it would mean I'd probably have to give up coming to Europe.

[57:15]

Or I could come for only six weeks sooner. But I also find it a beautiful challenge to live, practice in normal life. For me it is not necessarily a goal to live in a monastery. Yeah, it's good. There have to be people like that too.

[58:23]

Yeah, most of us are like you. And all of us, even if somebody goes for one or two practice periods, still most of their life is like you're talking about. And that's really what I'm talking about, is that what you're talking about. But you might find it makes a difference to come here, for instance. So the question is, how much does lay practice need a sangha? And how much does it need a Sangha which has some kind of monastic element to it?

[59:26]

That's the question we're asking right now. By the existence of this place. And you know, I've been doing seminars in various forms of teachings in Europe now since I hold seminars and various forms of teaching since 1983 in Europe. When people first saw me in robes, I lost a lot of students. I had a lot of people asking for me to do sashins, but when I started sashins, some of the very people who asked stopped coming. And then there were a number of people who asked that we have a place like this and then finally this place.

[60:38]

Yes, several of you are here in this room. And so we decided to get this place. But quite a lot of people used to come to several seminars a year, stopped coming. So most of you are people who are in fact voting for some kind of monastic element in their lay practice. And there's no question for me. In other words, you know, when we first started Tuesday morning, As usual, I'm happy to see you.

[62:14]

And I'm happy to see the people of you who are meeting for the first time. But I actually have really very little idea of how to proceed with the seminar. You may think, oh, he does this all the time, it's easy for him. Um... Yeah, and maybe certain kinds of public talks aren't so hard for me to do anymore.

[63:24]

But really, to do what we've done this week depends on you. And depends on your practicing together. And depends on quite a few of you having practiced a long time. I can't talk from the inside of you if you're all strangers.

[64:28]

And I can't fully talk from the inside of you, but I can try to talk from the inside. And I hope, mostly, we can start talking from inside ourselves. And I hope that we... And I simply can't do that in a weekend in Munster or Berlin or something. If there's enough people who have been practicing a long time, we can come close. But I think if you look at what I've been teaching, In a way, you can look way back into the 60s, even in the 70s, my lectures aren't that different.

[65:50]

I have a sort of rule, personal rule, that I don't repeat myself. or I repeat myself only enough to bring out some new point. So from my point of view, every lecture I give or seminar has some individual lecture, has something new in it I've never said before. So that's one of the questions I ask myself. But I think if you looked carefully at what I've been teaching since the 70s and then before and after Johanneshof.

[67:06]

You'll find that there's actually a significant difference. the statements might have the same thing, but there's lots more filaments around them. And that's because I'm taking refuge in the Sangha. Now, I suppose we're supposed to stop one of these days. What I wanted to... say.

[68:26]

What I wanted to say was that we don't want to bring just to our conventional life or our wider conventional life. Or we also want to bring attention to our Buddha life. Or maybe our deepest longings. And so I've taken the image from this samay-o-samay to sit in the meditation posture. is to transcend the deepest and most intimate teaching of the Buddha ancestors.

[69:55]

In this sentence, even the teaching of the Buddha ancestors somehow falls into conventional life. It's the me observer who's studying the sutras. And Dogen says, know that the world of sitting practice is far different from other worlds. Is that true? Clarify this for yourself.

[71:04]

It's not for me to tell you it's true or not. Clarify this for yourself. Activate way-seeking mind. Practice. The mind of enlightenment. Study the world at this very moment of sitting. Then he has this far out thing. Is it an acrobat's graceful somersault? Far out. Is it thinking or not thinking? They're sitting and letting go body-mind. sitting with the body, which is not the same as sitting with the mind.

[72:31]

What's he trying to say? Investigate this awareness. So this curtain over the Buddha ancestor's room. What is it made of? How do we open it? I think we feel its presence or hear it kind of call. Now, that's what I was thinking of speaking about this afternoon. Maybe it makes sense to come back to it tomorrow morning. I hate to stop, but it's... We're warming up.

[73:43]

We're warming up. Thank you. Thanks for translating again. You're welcome. Thanks for saying so.

[74:56]

Danke, dass du etwas gesagt hast. It wasn't that hard. Es war nicht zu schwer. I hate nor do I love nor do I stay in doubt, fight on or down, love.

[76:15]

If it's a child, it will be a child, and me, I'll be quite close to a skeleton. Nor it aches in the middle, nor it aches in the middle, nor it aches in the middle, nor it aches in the middle. Well, I feel anyway pretty engaged in how we understand our practice life.

[77:16]

Yeah, I must say that I wish we were in a three-month practice period. I'll take the linchpins out of your carriage wheels. The linchpins are... There's an old story about you don't want somebody to leave, so you take the pins out of their wheels of the carriage wheels. It's not too important. Yeah. Yeah. And now we have this, yeah, this eight of us are taking the precepts this afternoon.

[78:34]

And that tends to gather our day, certainly our day, into the moment when perhaps we'll feel the earth tremble. But I still want to see if we can pull the curtain of the Buddha and ancestors' room aside a little bit. So what we've discussed, discovered this week, is that mindfulness and meditation bring our wider life onto the stage of the present.

[79:50]

And that's a lot. Sometimes I call this the practice of well-being. In contrast to the practice of non-being. Not I. It's as I say, non-being, I feel I lose you. Yeah. Anyway, or we can consider the way mindfulness and meditation bring our wider conventional life onto the stage of the present, as the basis for realizing our Buddha nature.

[80:53]

discovering the Buddha nature, nor the Dharma nature. Perhaps in some ways we could understand, as it says, when Buddha is enlightened, the earth testifies to his enlightenment. And it's again said that the earth trembles. Perhaps we can understand this as, you know, the ground of our being trembling or something like that.

[82:16]

Now, Zeami, the... person who with his father pretty much created what we know as Noh theater in Japan. When you come to a moment in a, in this case through a play, through a theater. Where everything feels, feels where there's, you begin to feel each thing is unique.

[83:20]

Or somehow very particular and universal at the same time. Or you enter the time of the play and you find it discontinuous with your own time. or you enter the time of the piece and see that it is not discontinuous to your own time. I'm glad you have as much trouble saying it in German as I have in English. But as many times I've spoken in the past about the no stage has an invisible line down the middle.

[84:42]

And in the front of the stage, you're in the ordinary time of the audience. But when you step toward the back of the stage at a certain point, the audience knows, the actors know, that you're in a kind of more timeless space. But when you step back into the back of the stage, then the audience knows and the actors know that at that point you can begin speaking almost in a different kind of voice. And you're... past and future is present.

[85:51]

Your people involved in your life who are dead are now present. So again, Sami calls these moments when you feel this, some say, timelessness or uniqueness. He calls it hana. Hana means flower. Somehow this situation flowers for a moment. Now there's a koan, you know, which tries to say something about this.

[86:56]

Rather famous koan. And the main character is Manjushri. I don't know how he got... got there and come on from China, but anyway. The Bodhisattva of Wisdom. And Manjushri asks Wu Zhou, yeah, where have you come from? Manjushri asked Vujo, Vujo, Vujo, where are you from? And he says, oh, I just came here from the south. How's the practice going there? How's the sangha? And Wu Zhou says, well, many of the congregation, many of the mendicants are not, don't follow the precepts anymore.

[88:10]

And Manjushri says, how large is the congregation? Oh, sometimes 300, sometimes 500. And then Bujo says, how's it going here in the north? And Manjushri says, sages and ordinary people practice together. Dragons and snakes intermingle. I was just thinking about dragons and snakes intermingling. And how many are...

[89:17]

How many are there in the congregation? And he says, in front, three by three. In back, three by three. From your practice of the three minds of daily consciousness, maybe you have some insight into this. Manjushri, what's Manjushri saying? Well, he's not counting first of all. He's not separating them, the ones who follow the precepts and the ones who don't follow the precepts. He's talking about something more like an actual experience of you being right here in this group.

[90:39]

Yeah, now, you know, in general, you know, one is one, two is an addition to one. But three is many. As soon as you have three of anything, you start having much more complicated relationships among them. So three in a sense means many. So three by three in front and in back, three by three. But again, if you're standing in this group right here, what do you feel?

[91:49]

You feel, well, there's two or three people behind me, two or three people in front of me. Sitting in this group. And if you feel the people around you, behind you, one person actually might feel like three. In any case, there's a feeling of the people around you. Almost a presence with topography. If you look in the mirror at your own image, And you substitute the me observer with an ancient Buddha.

[93:03]

So you, oh, you see an ancient Buddha. Or you feel like an ancient Buddha is observing the image in the mirror. Three by three in front, three by three in back. Yeah, it's not the same as saying, oh, I'm an ancient Buddha. If you say, I am, you already have the me observer functioning. But if you just can see the image as if being seen by an ancient Buddha.

[94:04]

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