There's an expression, I don't know if it's, I can't remember, it's from a movie or starting of a novel or something. Anyway, on a clear day you can see forever. Yeah. What's a clear day? What is forever? It sounds like it means you can see as far as you can see. But it has some other kind of feeling forever. And What are these guys doing out here?

[01:02]

Are they time trials or drag racing? I guess they don't race. One after the other, they time them, I think. See how fast they can accelerate. Sophia seems to remember a green car when she saw it last year spewed out fire. Well, it's a nice clear day. And I wonder if the mind you had when you were doing walking in him Und ich frage mich, ob der Geist, den ihr hattet, als ihr Kien hingegangen seid, vermutlich ziemlich anders war als der Geist dieser Kerle. Nicht gut oder schlecht, aber anders. Wahrscheinlich macht es enorm Spaß. Trotzdem ist das ein anderer Geist. What is a clear day?

[02:16]

What is forever? And this morning I said, you have nothing to do. Oh no, I said you only have one thing to do. And that one thing, and that is to sit on your cushion with nothing to do. Yeah, sometimes when I start a Sashin or I'm about to start a Sashin, I think, yeah, maybe I shouldn't say anything in the Sashin. But just all of us sit here and see what happens for a week. I'm too like Yao Shan. Every time I'm supposed to lecture, I'll get up and get down.

[03:18]

And I just let the schedule and the atmosphere of the Sashin and the presence of the Sangha let that be Yeah, the content or the path of the Sesshin. Yeah, so I had that feeling this morning. No, but then I said something. I said, expressing that feeling, you have nothing to do except have nothing to do. Now does that interfere with your letting the path of the Sesshin path you?

[04:37]

Making the path? Or is it a kind of shortcut? Maybe it would take four or five days before you came to just sit on your cushion with nothing else to do. Maybe it would take a lot of boredom or a lot of pain. And finally, if you decided not to leave? Yeah, I guess I'd have to live through this or die through it. Maybe you'd give up trying to entertain yourself.

[05:48]

And just sit there. Or maybe it would take not four or five days, but a thousand years. It took, yeah, some hundreds of years before this as a teaching method, approach, was, yeah, secured by Zen. Yeah, it's said of one of the koans, it says, Nanchuan could hold earth and sky steady.

[06:51]

And yet had a road to go out on himself. Yeah, a line from another koan, secure and intimate with the whole of reality. A attained realization right there. secure and intimate with the whole of reality. Yeah, attain realization right there. As I've been pointing out the last few months, these short statements are distillations of whole schools of teaching and sutras.

[08:05]

Yeah. Secure and intimate with the whole of reality. What the? Sounds good. Also, sicher und innig verbunden mit der ganzen Realität. Das klingt ziemlich gut. Sometimes teachers say, don't think or stop thinking. Manchmal sagen Lehrer, denkt nicht oder beende das Denken. I think actually to say don't think is a bad instruction. But I wouldn't quibble with stop thinking. I wouldn't disagree with it. What if I said to you, stop thinking?

[09:10]

What would interest me is what you do with this. And how sincerely you approach this. What you'd find out. Maybe after several years you come back, I can't stop thinking. No, that might be progress. So these kinds of statements really are about what you do with them as you know, how you cook them in yourself. Yeah, so I said this morning, you only have one thing to do. And that is to do on your cushion, to do nothing.

[10:11]

Yeah, can we actually do nothing? We're breathing. Können wir denn nichts tun? Wir atmen? Yeah, and just to spend the day hanging out in your house or something, apartment, doing nothing, that's not what I mean. Einfach bei euch zu Hause oder in eurer Wohnung zu sein und den Nachmittag nichts zu tun, das ist es nicht, was ich darunter verstehe. You're thinking, worrying, walking, sleeping. Avoiding obvious chores. Mm-hmm. Hmm. I can't remember the name.

[11:36]

A teacher went back to see his ordination teacher. The ordination teacher's name was Zhang Yi. And he went back to thank him for ordaining him. And then he came in the room and he walked from east to west and then he walked from west to east. And then he stood still in the middle of the room. And Zhang... And Chong Xi asked, what does this state receive? And he said, the enlightened overnight guest.

[12:40]

Do any of you know the enlightened overnight guest? Again, I'm trying to speak about this simple instruction to do nothing. We can say, instead of stopping thinking, Discover the mind which stops thinking. Maybe what kind of posture allows you to think less and less? And to have less and less subjective emotions. And not a mind that suppresses subjective emotions.

[14:00]

A mind that includes whatever, everything. Ein Geist, der alles oder was auch immer einschließt. But, you know, doesn't get caught in the thinking. Der nicht im Denken verfangen wird. Yeah, I'd say that you have some kind of persistent thoughts about something. Some kind of anxious, anxiety or something like that. And you've thought about him as much as you want to. And you can't do anything about them, but they keep coming back.

[15:13]

You can't do anything about them, but they keep coming back. I mean, you can't solve the problem which is... Yeah, but you'd like them, you wish you could get them to stop. But the thought that you want them to stop won't stop them. Because these such anxious thoughts are... or worries are embedded within us. They are somehow embedded in our identity, our emotions and so forth.

[16:15]

So you have to find the mind which reaches to where they're embedded emotionally in your sense of being. So you have a chance to really use the the tuning of the body to discover the mind which doesn't think much. So you can use a sashin to find the tuning of the body the tuning of the posture Which doesn't think much. Which feels intimate and secure with the whole of reality. Which holds earth and sky steady.

[17:30]

And yet is a road to go out on yourself. Now there's no way I can tell you much about this. I can point at it. I can say, yeah, you have nothing to do. You have only one thing to do is sit on your cushion and do nothing. but you'll find you are doing something you're thinking about this or that but you'll notice that sometimes you think less or more Sometimes there'll be more pain, sometimes less pain. Sometimes there'll be more frustration, discomfort, sometimes less. It's very helpful to notice the tuning of the posture

[18:50]

which relates to feeling more frustrated or less frustrated. Yeah, maybe the tuning of the breath. Anyway, that's an opportunity of Sashin. Because, you know, you can, if you try to use the mind to tune the mind, it's almost impossible. It's very clumsy. And if you begin to really notice the mind of the body, let us say the mind of the body knows a lot more than and before then consciousness.

[20:19]

So Sashin also gives us a chance to begin to follow the mind of the body. The path of the mind of the body. A road to go out on. Ein Weg, auf den man hinausgehen kann. You're on the path, another line from Cohen, you're on the path all by yourself and it's solitary and dangerous. And it says more precisely, actually, which means both, though, that one who is on the path is solitary and dangerous.

[21:38]

Derjenige, der auf dem Pfad ist, ist einsam und gefährlich. And I'm using this statement to point out that we're all here together, but we're also solitary and, yeah, some kind of power in the process of being controlled and noticed. Where each of us, we're here together. But we're each actually on our own path. Solitary. Solitary. And... And one who is on such a path is solitary and dangerous.

[22:48]

And dangerous in this case means, yeah, you're making real decisions. There's real decisions here. And there's a danger you can go that way or this way or the right and more deeper way. And dangerous also it means in the sense that such a person you approach Maybe with openness and love, but also with caution. They're not necessarily going to do what's predictable or what you would like them to do. So we're here together and yet we're each in the midst of our own craft of the practice.

[23:49]

And each of us has to explore this ourselves. And one of the reasons we sit in Sashin Somehow our solitary practice is helped when we're practicing with others. And we can... enter in in a week like this into a more subtle tuning of the noticing of the mind of the body.

[25:04]

And through discovering, becoming more familiar with, the tuning of the mind of the body... Excuse me. Maybe I made a mistake before. Okay. Through... Through sitting in the Sesshin... And discovering and becoming more familiar with... the tuning of the mind of the body, you begin to discover minds folded within and covered up by ordinary consciousness.

[26:13]

Of course, that's in a big sense part of the practice of the five skandhas. But right now I'm saying that... You just, without any guide, accept the sitting and the sashin itself. Without any guide like the five skandhas, you're just noticing your own mind, feelings, emotions, subjectivity, etc.

[27:22]

And you're noticing what allows you or... To stay on your cushion. Or what comes up. One should also let all the psychological processes happen. But it possible happen in a kind of big space where you don't feel exactly identified with them. Or only identified with them. It's like, yes, it's you, but it could be someone else, too. So you're finding a kind of tuning of the states of mind through the mind of the body.

[28:36]

Okay. Yeah, coming closer to really seeing if this shortcut of, yeah, the guide maybe, the possibility of really doing nothing on your cushion. Also, ich möchte schauen, ob wir dieser Abkürzung näher kommen mit dieser...

[29:39]

You're sort of tuning the body toward less and less thinking, less and less subjective emotions. Now let me go back to the phrase that I use a lot, people mention to me a lot. Yeah, and then I'm going to stop. In case your legs are getting worried. The phrase, pause for the particular. Now sometimes I say, pause for the pause. Now, with such a phrase, which is really a distillation of a lot of teachings, there's a famous koan which asks, what is every atom samadhi?

[30:57]

That koan assumes a practice, something like to pause for the particular. Or maybe it's also a good shift to go to pause for the paused. Vielleicht ist es sogar ein guter Wechsel für pausieren, für die Pause. Now I'd like to say something like, no, I don't know how this works in German at all. I can only say it the way it works in English. Also jetzt sage ich etwas und davon weiß ich überhaupt nicht, wie das im Deutschen herauskommt. Im Englischen ist es so. To pause within pausing. Maybe it would be something like to sing within, in English, to sing within singing.

[32:20]

I mean, if you listen to Frank Sinatra, let's say, Or Bob Dylan. Yeah, I mean, they both, they don't just sing a song. You can feel they're singing within, they sing within the singing. There's a feeling of a Pause or space and experience within each word, each syllable even. And I said this morning to, on your cushion, notice what kind of being is there. Maybe your usual sense of body and mind is gone. But what aspects of being are there?

[33:23]

What qualities of being are present? And I added what aspects of non, what kind of non-being is on the cushion. I think if you only look for aspects of being, it's not you, it's you. It'll be different when you look for aspects of being and non-being. So maybe to breathe within the breathing. To feel a breath within the presence of breathing within breathing.

[34:43]

Now it is the presence of breathing within breathing Is that part of the breath? Or is that an observer? Or is it something in between, a kind of observer, awareness, or just part of the breath with awareness? This is part of the craft of tuning the body's mind. To discover the mind that's secure and intimate with the whole of reality.

[35:52]

Which does hold earth and sky steady. while a path to go out on appears. To do this within the tuning that is free of doing. To do this within the tuning and the mind that's free of doing.

[36:53]

You'll discover that this itself is a path and within this sashin. As you might breathe, find a presence within your own breathing. And then like the Mokugyo, The mokugyo has to find a beat that allows everyone to come in together. Mokugyo means wooden fish, and that's the thing we hit for chanting.

[37:54]

And we hit it and then pretty soon the clarity of the way we hit it, if it is clear, allows everyone to start chanting together. So see if you can bring a presence into your own breathing that allows all of you to come together. And then take it one step further. See if you can have a feeling of breathing with a kind of, yeah, preciseness or awareness. that would allow everyone in the Sashin to breathe with you.

[39:07]

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