Let's see during this session if we can chant together more, find a place to chant together more quickly. And since this practice period is honoring and challenging our shuso, let's ask Mark to be the one, the music teacher, who says, So let's listen to Mark's voice for this sashin and see if we can use his voice to all come in together with... Bill Kuang Roshi recently, or at some point, I can't remember when he said this, but told the story that Sukhya Rishi, when he was sick at some point, asked his jisya, or anja, probably anja, to go get a big stone.

[01:25]

Ha! Anyway, the story is that the guy, Hanjo, I don't know if it was a man or a woman, went and got this big stone and brought it back and Sakyusya said, well, put it on top of me now. So he put this big stone on top of Sakyusya while he was lying in bed. And Sakyusya said, this is much more substantial than my thoughts. Yeah. Yeah. So maybe sashin is like a big stone that we put on us that's much more substantial than our thoughts. Now I don't think we actually have any reason to, I mean, you know, I mean we can see the problems with thinking and we did a whole seminar recently on the nature, the aspects of thinking and the several ways.

[02:44]

relate to thinking, to the thought stream in Zen practice. But still, unless you really see how the world exists, from the point of view of Buddhism at least, that doesn't make the impetus to really work with your thinking or take this big rock of thinking off your... self so you don't need a rock anymore. I like this kind of weather, you know, because, again, it gives you the sensation, it creates some difficulty and gives you the sensation of being alive. And it makes the sashin quite cozy. So I'm going to try to talk about something I haven't talked about before.

[04:20]

But again, I'm working with these themes, including one I haven't mentioned too much yet, but I want to speak, if possible, about this controversy about sudden and gradual practice. And it makes a difference. I mean, because sudden and gradual don't just describe your practice, but how you conceive of the world and the mind. Which... So it's a kind of... What should I say? It's a... You teach and practice Zen differently if you think... Realization is sudden than if you think realization is gradual. A realization can't be gradual, in fact, but we'll come back to that. But I have some digressions, seeming digressions.

[05:22]

Digression means to look in another place. So we're going to look now at the ocean seal samadhi of Samantabhadra. Why not? So good a place to look, isn't he? If you want to digress, heck. So, now, Manjushri is the main bodhisattva for Zen, and generally Manjushri is here in Vizenda. This is also our Buddha hall, and we don't have a Manjushri, so we have a Buddha hall. So you each have to be Manjushri. Now Samantabhadra, who Mayumi Oda's silk screen of Samantabhadra we have in the main house, she's a goddess feminist, would not have Samantabhadra stand on an elephant.

[06:32]

Perish the thought. she has Samantabhadra's elephant riding on a bicycle with her. So they're both on a bicycle, which I guess is better than me riding an elephant, perhaps. But the elephant that Samantabhadra is always seated on, usually seated on, often in a Zen altar you have Samantabhadra on the altar along with Manjushri. And often the Buddha is accompanied by the Samantabhadra in icons and Manjushri and Samantabhadra. Now, the Samantabhadra sitting on an elephant represents the world. And you know the stories of a blind man and a blind man. takes hold of the leg, he thinks it's a palm tree.

[07:37]

And he takes hold of the horn, he thinks it's a spear, et cetera. So what is this world, as in Nanyue Huizhen's, what is it that came hence? What is it that came whence? when Wei Neng asks him this question. And he says, whatever you say will miss the mark. So if you think it's a palm tree when it's an elephant's leg, this is missing the mark, but this isn't what is meant. So what kind of world are we sitting on? Now again, I think most of us practice because our body likes to practice, likes to sit.

[08:42]

I don't think we would sit unless there was some kind of, even in the midst of the pain of sesshin, some kind of satisfaction. But as I said yesterday, you know, zazen does not make, doing zazen does not make you a Zen Buddhist. no more than boiling water makes cooking. Zazen is just Zazen. What you bring to it makes it Mahayana or Theravadan or Zen. If you want to do more incisive practice that really doesn't just give you some kind of sense of well-being, but a deep opening, a feeling of opening into a knowing of the world.

[09:47]

Then this ocean seal samadhi, samantabhadra, this ocean seal samadhi is a name for the world in Buddhism. Now if we call it time, we call it space, we call it material, there's a lot of problems with that. How do we, you know, I don't want to go into them, but there's a lot of problems with these words. So let's take a Buddhist phrase, ocean seal samadhi. as a name for the world that you are now sitting in, practicing in, breathing in, and see if we can, by finding fresh words or Buddhist words sometimes, it helps us.

[10:51]

For instance, I would define, as I did the other day, time. Let's define time as the way objects get out of the way of each other. Make any sense? I mean, time is passing, but time is also space. Can't have one without the other. So time is also the way events push themselves into the future. So karma means that any event now is partially constituted by previous events. So the previous events give a karmic push to the present moment. So time is the way the past pushes into the present and the present pushes into the future, into the next moment. But you're part of that push. And the question is, are you an innocent benefactor or victim of this world?

[11:59]

Or are you truly a part of this world, not just living in it. So we go back to this each moment, each moment. Now again, in the Chinese definition of time, we'll go back through that again, time is goes from this moment back into the past and comes back to the future, come back to the present. In other words, time is understood as what now when you think of, in your experience, not some kind of scientific idea, in your experience, time is the recollection of the past and then how that influences you. Does that make sense? Yes. Okay, so time is that kind of thing which, when we think about the past, that we call that time.

[13:06]

But when that meets this present moment, the emphasis is on the spatial aspect, not the temporal aspect. Now, when you emphasize the spatial aspect, I want to really get this through, you're talking about a kind of opening into the present not the present is something you pass through to the future. Now as I said yesterday, the difference whether you think in terms of every moment or each moment or each successive moment, continuity, or what did I say, each moment continuity, each moment continuity, or every successive moment continuity.

[14:10]

And you can see if your experience, how you give verbal shape to your experience. Now Zen practice particularly for reasons we could discuss, having to do with Chinese culture, et cetera, I think, but has taken language, although it's a teaching outside the scripture, has taken this wado, turning word, phrase, practice, to take language out of the context of, to take words and phrases out of the context of language and bring them into the interface with the world. to check up, to frame your interface with the world, and eventually to do without it.

[15:11]

So if your body likes to do zazen and it develops a feeling of well-being for you, this is fine. But it's not necessarily Buddhist practice, and you're not going to be able to really help others unless you go deeper than just doing it, doing what you're supposed to do. Because you happen to be here. Now, zazen is understood in this Samantabhadra practice, and Samantabhadra we call the bodhisattva patient practice or something like that. But what that really means is that you, we don't have any words for it exactly, is that you're facing, when you sit and you don't identify with your thinking so much, you're in effect facing a mirror in which you are observing yourself.

[16:27]

Now when you're thinking, you're not observing yourself. You can observe your thinking up to a point, but when you start observing your thinking and not being identified with your thinking, then you are observing yourself manifested in your thinking. Now when you think of each moment continuity, You can lengthen this each. This is the point I'm making yesterday and today. You can open up this each. You can stretch open this each. This is your choice. And sashin is a, we could say a sashin is a practice of making a week-long each, or having a chance to just sit here.

[17:34]

And most of the pain and difficulty is because your mind is constantly digressing, divagating, I guess, wandering, floating, drifting. So we create this schedule so you sit down outside your thoughts, basically. As soon as you start moving and following and doing this and doing that, you're inside your thoughts. But to sit, you may have a lot of thoughts going by, but more and more they go by. They come and go, and this means you're outside your thoughts. So she needs to give you the physical sensation of being outside your thoughts. Because most of the time you are, again, shaping your walking.

[18:38]

What are you doing? I'm heading from the dormitory to the kitchen. And your thoughts are shaping that walking. You're really in some kind of line between the dormitory and the kitchen. And you may stop and notice something, but then you think, oh, I'm noticing this, or that's the mountain, or there's a tree, or there, look, the cat is stuck up in the snow of the tree or something. And as our physical activity is paralleled by thinking, we're constantly reifying thinking. And this is not Zen Buddhism, this is not dharmas, this is not Buddha's life. It's natural, it's normal, it's kin. It's this fantastic tool we have of thinking, having taken over our identity so we forget we're the Buddha.

[19:43]

And when your thinking parallels your physical activity, shapes your physical activity, and so forth, you're reifying constantly by every physical action, you're reifying your identity physically as well as mentally with your thinking. So this radical practice of saying, sit down here for seven days and see if you cannot respond to your thinking. Just let it come and go. And you can get the hang of it. It's not that hard. Some of you may find there's even whole periods where you suddenly are outside your thinking and it's very refreshing. You suddenly feel a kind of power, presence. Some of you may feel it for only ten minutes, but it can change your life.

[20:52]

And some of you who are more experienced may, it may be quite common, part of every period of zazen, part of most of your daily life. So this sitting outside your thinking we can call a samadhi. Your thinking may be going on, but you're sitting outside it. You're not identifying with it. So not identify with it. I usually define samadhi as mind concentrated on itself, but there are many samadhis. And we can say that when you are outside your thinking, even though thinking is going on, like in the mirror, things... are being reflected but they're not the mirror. The mirror is outside what's reflected in it.

[21:56]

So you're sitting and you're outside your thinking and we could call this an outside thinking, outside of thinking samadhi. And this outside of thinking samadhi has its own continuity and begins to weave its own fabric of being. In other words, your thinking and your physical identification with thinking and your actions weaves a particular fabric of being. And for most of us, we think this is what the world is. If you start getting outside your thinking and being able to stay there for any length of time, this is not just like being outside of the house for a little while and then you go back in. It can be like that. But being outside the house begins to weave another kind of house or another kind of fabric or whatever metaphor, image we want to use.

[23:10]

Okay, so a goal of Sashin, an aim of Sashin, the structure of Sashin is to take each of you, plop you down on your cushion, you know, in such a way that you're likely to be, by the nature of the sitting, the schedule, the length of the periods, likely to be, even if you don't want to be, forced outside your thinking. So, and this being forced outside your thinking enters you into a samadhi. Now, it's useful to know it's a samadhi, and it's useful to know it's a samadhi, samadic process. It's not just a state, it's a mode, an own organizing process. Now, if you don't know those things, you think, I mean, if you don't understand, for instance, now I'm talking about tenets now, a way of understanding your practice.

[24:20]

If you don't really understand and see the value of being outside your thinking as a real place to be, not just a relief from thinking, a vacation from thinking, but a place in the world, You won't know how to emphasize it. You won't really see, feel this walk on your chest, or you won't feel how to breathe and feel into this outside of your thinking place. This is a kind of teaching that affects how you do your zazen. Now this outside your thinking is also a, as I said, is a samadhi and is a mirror in which you begin to experience yourself.

[25:28]

Or it becomes a kind of loom in which you begin to weave yourself, weaving the strands of Buddha nature. So we could say that sitting at zazen is, as you begin to be outside your thinking, you also find you're potentially sitting at a loom which you can begin to weave, reweave yourself. This is a profoundly psychological process, not that it's exactly, as you know, there's no psyche in Buddhism and so forth. but it is an effective way we can weave, reweave our story, reweave how our energy, vitality function.

[26:35]

You're reweaving the world. It's like some mythological story. You're re-weaving yourself and re-weaving the world by beginning to sit outside your thinking in this samadhi which we can, I'm likening to a loom, but I can also liken it to a mirror. Because you're beginning to see yourself in this weaving. You're beginning to see your imminent nature, your potential nature. In other words, this is now a mirror in which not just the exterior world is reflected, but the interior world is reflected. Now, again, we chant in the morning at mealtime and at lunch, Samantabhadra, blah, blah, blah. That's a nice word, not so difficult to spell.

[27:43]

But now I'm trying to give you a sense of what it really means in Buddhism, why we have such a thing as a bodhisattva sitting on an elephant called Samantabhadra, whose presence in us is this mirror ocean seal samadhi. And zazen and sashin is a practice informed by this ocean seal samadhi. Now again, for us Americans who have a history of, as I've been saying, transcendentalism and pragmatism and so forth, William James and Emerson and Thoreau, and for Europeans who have an intellectual history of Heidegger and Holderlin, is that how you pronounce it? and Rilke and so forth, you both, I think both Americans and Europeans, and we share a lot of the same cultural history, philosophic history, we have something they didn't have.

[29:00]

I mean, when William James talks about the great intimacy, the intimacy of them, the well, I forget his phrase, the overwhelming intimacy of the material world or something like that. But what he didn't have is yogic practice. We have yogic practice and in a way, as I've been pointing out, we're not just continuing Suzuki Yoshi's lineage, we're continuing these broken lineages in America and Europe, which can't really, I don't think, come together until you yogic practice opens up what they intimated. It's like you have an experience of beauty of this moment in which something blossoms from a feeling of reverence or sacredness So we have that intimation, but we don't know how to open ourselves to a continuous flow of beauty.

[30:11]

And you can open yourself to a continuous flow of beauty, not because it's nice or it's a good thing to do, because it happens when you discover, what should I say, perhaps your interior location. Now how can I kind of describe, try to make this clearer? Okay. When you're doing zazen, And you can begin to sit still, mentally and physically, be still mentally and physically, which immediately changes your pace. And by understanding the jnanas and the skandhas,

[31:15]

which you should have a clear understanding of each and begin to practice the skandhas and the vijnanas. And what you do when you become aware of the skandhas and the vijnanas is you slow down the process. In other words, you're just simply looking at the ingredients. I mean, it's like cooking in slow motion. Throwing a bunch of stuff in the pot, this goes in the pot, that goes in the pot. The viñanas and the skandhas are absolutely no more complicated than the ingredients of a spaghetti sauce. So I said to somebody recently, name the ingredients in the spaghetti sauce. Named 15 or something. There's only eight viñanas. That's simple, you know. If you can make a spaghetti sauce, you can understand the viñanas. It's half as complicated as any good spaghetti sauce. This is a no-brainer. So as you begin to look at yourself, you are sitting there on your cushion in a retort, in a beaker, cooking.

[32:29]

And at the Ino and Kanto, and the practice here is good, we're always notching up the heat a bit on the burner, on your zafu. There's a little, I don't know if you've noticed in the back of your zafu, there's a little dial. Sometimes we adjust medium. So you begin to notice, Buddhism says, hey look, We don't have a God. We don't have a permanent nature. We don't have some inherent nature. There's this bunch of stuff. And each moment, all these ingredients are poured together, which are called you. Don't get in and think, oh, I can't do anything about myself.

[33:38]

I'm a poor, you know. No. I mean, you know, each moment, all these things are being gathered and poured together. And let's look at the ingredients. There's various ingredients we can name. Buddhism, the wisdom of Buddhism is, let's look at the ingredients. First of all, basic ingredients. Body, mind, breath. Those are the first three ingredients. Thinking, the fourth ingredient. Then we go to the next level. Perception. memory, associative thinking, feelings, and so forth. We look at the next level as we call the skandhas and the vijnanas. And by looking at them, you begin to feel space around each.

[34:42]

You feel a space around hearing. You feel a space around seeing. It doesn't all just run together. And you begin to, in effect, slow the process down and watch how one is poured into the other and what the soup becomes like. If you add this ingredient or more of that ingredient and less of this and so forth. You're cooking yourself. And as you know, my common thing, I say you either cook your karma or get cooked by it. And you want to change the cooking process from a karmic process to a dharmic process. And you can change the burner, you can change the pot, you can change the kind of cooking with the same ingredients.

[35:43]

Something has a choice. Please let's not get into who is choosing. Another time. Okay. Now, each moment continuity. So we're not every moment, we're each moment. We've got that much, okay? Each moment. This moment. This moment thus. Each moment. Okay? Let's slow down. Each moment. Now, each moment is a physical location. Right? There has to be a physical location. Body, place. I'm looking at the altar, the new table. Looks nice. Thanks for setting it up. Don't you think it looks nice? I like Gisela's... Gisela made that beautiful... incense burner, and it used to be hidden behind the powdery incense burner.

[36:49]

You couldn't see it, but now it's there. And it's got such a lovely glow in the glaze. It's revealing itself. Maybe it's like in our practice, when you stop and each moment reveals itself, it's not hidden by successive moments. Okay. So, but we're not talking about a simple location. We're talking about an interior location. Because, okay? Here we are. I'm sitting here, platform, slate floor, newly grouted slate floor in the hotel room. Looks nice. And all of you lovely persons, Not people, persons. That's the exterior location.

[37:55]

But all this comes into me. As it's all coming into you. And that gathering in process, the word I used the other day was concrescence, which means a growing together. There's a growing together of all this. Each one of you, the floor, the air, the light, the... Drawing of the warmth out into the cold. The Zendo's instinct, when it's warm outside, the thermometer says the same temperature. But when it's warm outside and the Zendo is drawing heat into it, it feels different than when heat is being drawn out of it, even though the temperature is the same. When heat's being drawn out of the zendo, heat's being drawn out of our body as well, even though the thermometer says the temperature's the same. I always find that interesting. Something the thermometer can't measure, which direction the heat is going.

[38:58]

So there's a concrescence, a growing together of this This moment is an exterior location, but it's enfolding in me. It's bringing up memories, it's bringing up, it's happening at a feeling level or an emotional level, it's happening at emotions tied to the service of self, or it's happening in emotions which are our deepest way of thinking about the world, and so forth. That process you can participate in. And practice is to open you up to that each. So it becomes an interior moment. Now that enfolding process is dharma. The more you are present in the enfolding process, this is a dharmic and not a karmic process.

[40:03]

When the preceding event primarily shapes this event, it's a karmic process. When you stop and each opens up into the present as space, it's a dharmic process. Do I understand? That's why we have these two words, dharma, karma. So we can call it an enfolding. And then it unfolds. It unfolds into the present, we express it, and it unfolds into the next moment. This enfolding process determines also, because the next moment is partially this moment, what your next moment will be. So you're really transforming or participating in your future at a micro level, at the only level that it's real.

[41:05]

I mean even if you have big plans and ideas, those big plans and ideas only take root through the tendrils of this enfolding and unfolding. Now this process of being, participating in the enfolding and unfolding of each moment is really only possible to you, fully possible, when you are, know the ingredients of the skandhas and the vijnanas. Now it's called ocean seal samadhi. Oh my goodness, I'm sorry. Didn't have anything to say today. It's just the way supper is going to get out of the way of the schedule.

[42:11]

Okay. So you are seeding, we could say, seeding your future in each enfolding moment. And it's called the Ocean Seal Samadhi because this enfolding, when it's done in the wisdom of awareness or awareness-wisdom seals the world.

[43:13]

Like a seal. Whatever this event is, the way it's enfolded in me seals it. Do you understand? Because the way this is enfolded in me is how it happens for me the next moment and also for you. The way I enfold this moment affects you. And my enfolding this moment in a way that affects you positively is the practice of generosity. The bodhisattva practice of generosity. Now this interior enfolding and outfolding, unfolding, is not just... a human thing, the tree, those big pinion trees out there, have a location in the bird.

[44:19]

Does that make sense? The tree isn't, in other words, the tree isn't just sitting there. It has a location in the bird, enfolded in the bird. And because that tree's location is enfolded in the bird, the bird relates to the tree a certain way. And knows, the bird knows where to find the seeds or worms or whatever it wants.

[44:54]

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