Well, thank all of you, each of you, for coming to join our ceremony today. Somehow, on this day we do what's called a Jukai ceremony, taking the precepts. I've never given a lecture before. So I don't know. How can I speak with... the ordinees as well as with those of you who know very little perhaps about Buddhism. Now, the word Jukai is a Japanese word and it means taking the precepts. Yeah. Receiving the precepts.

[01:19]

Taking them. And holding them in your life. The emphasis is not so much following them, but holding them. holding them in your activity. And noticing when you follow them and noticing when you don't. So they become inform our activity, inform our living life. Now, believe it or not, Buddhism is not really a religion. I know I'm sitting here in these robes with bells and incense.

[02:20]

It looks like a religion. I suppose in a societal sense it functions as a religion. But as a teaching, a philosophy, a practice, it's not based on a belief in God or theology. That's what has made it so fairly easy for, in Europe and America, for particularly Catholic monks And other Catholics to adopt the practice. Now, for those of you who don't have, you know, the idea of Buddhist practice, Zen practice, meditation practice is new to you, the simplest thing I think I can say to give you some, I hope, feeling for the difference

[03:38]

a practice rooted in a posture can make. By the way, way back there, Tanya, can you hear this guy? I mean, when I think of it, I say, it doesn't make sense. What does a posture have to do with our life? We have an identity, we're born, we go through our life. Yeah, and that certainly makes sense if we think of life in terms of destiny or... some kind of permanent identity. But Buddhism is rooted in a pre-Buddhist Indian recognition.

[04:53]

That we're born with three sort of given realms of being alive. Waking mind, sleeping mind, or let's say waking mind, dreaming mind, and non-dreaming deep sleep. And the impulse which led to Buddhism, and much before Buddhism, was why are we, what are these different realms? Why doesn't consciousness fully know dreaming mind?

[06:17]

And is non-dreaming deep sleep completely inaccessible? Of course, there's some overlap. They all happen in our... But consciousness only partially extends into, yeah, for all we all know, into our dreaming life. So there was some kind of scientific sense. Can there... Can there be a way to know these three minds or bring them together more? Someone discovered that meditation does this to a large extent.

[07:28]

It's almost as if someone said to themselves, 3,000 years ago or so, I don't know the answer. I'm just going to sit still until I find out. Yeah, and if we imagine such a possibility, sitting still, they found... that mind and body weave together in a new way. And we can say that this Jukai ceremony is one significant recognition of this. No, we all have big experiences in our life.

[08:39]

Yeah. I mean, the biggest experience is we're born. But after that, the experiences we have become more and more our own. Yeah, and you may remember, I don't know, the first time you crossed a street or say, something like that. Yeah, and, or some meant insight or bodily experience of independence. And if you look back at those the memory of those moments, those re-cognitions, often you can feel in your memory a kind of shining or

[09:48]

light around such memories. The details are often quite clear. They stay indelibly in our memory. In Buddhism we would say this is some kind of Yeah, enlightenment experience. And I think we've all had various experiences enlightenment experiences which usually we don't recognize as enlightenment experience. I know in my own case that there were certain realisational experiences and bodily experiences. I would say that now, in retrospect, which I didn't, which I, maybe I can say that practice is something like

[11:08]

I don't know, adding water to your life. Or another medium in which you find yourself living. And these realisational experiences we, I think, all of us have to various degrees, We don't have any way to anchor them. We tend to forget about them or brush them off. And practice does something like give us this medium in which we can begin to anchor our experiences. Which even lift up or

[12:28]

Almost like our life is also a boat. Our life lifts up or floats in a new way. So these experiences we have begin to make sense often after we start practicing meditation. Meditation not only leads to certain experiences, but it also makes sense of previous experiences. Again, going back to posture. Okay, so as I say, it's very difficult to sleep standing up. It's much easier to sleep when you're lying down.

[13:42]

And so the posture of lying down, reclining, is a posture in which the mind of dreaming and non-dreaming deep sleep appears. So there's an interplay between practice and the teaching. And this interplay... Some of us come to practice, come to Buddhism mainly through practice and some mainly through the teaching. And this interplay of the two begin to merge. Become intimate with each other. And becoming intimate with each other, they begin to develop. As if your boat, the vessel of your life,

[15:06]

It begins to take sail in a new way. It begins to take sail not just in consciousness, but also in an awareness that's wider than consciousness. So much of practice is how to enter into this awareness that's wider than consciousness. Yeah, maybe it's some contrast between intelligence or rationality and wisdom. Vielleicht geht es doch um einen Gegensatz zwischen rationaler Intelligenz und Weisheit.

[16:20]

And you're... I don't know. I'm overstretching this poor metaphor. Also ich überdehne hier etwas die Metapher. But wisdom begins to be the breeze. The wind of wisdom begins to... can't reach the sail of your boat. It's not that you're not conscious or rational. It's just that you feel a wider sense of being and that becomes part of our life. So in some way, the posture, the reclining posture, In which the unconscious and dreaming and non-dreaming deep sleep are present.

[17:29]

Are lifted up into this meditation posture. And particularly when you sit still. It's not just sitting, it's sitting still for some lengths of time, 30 minutes, 40 minutes. It's the sitting still, whether you want to or not. Which takes the practice out of the realm of consciousness and personal decisions. And I think all of you who do practice have discovered that. Yeah, I've discovered that kind of new person begins to be present in us through practice.

[18:39]

I mean, whatever our usual person are, old person is still part of our life too. This particularly, we feel this often, particularly when we do Sashin. Sashin is when we sit for seven days. You know, there's breaks, don't worry. We sit for seven days. And you just follow the schedule. And doing those, a number of those over a few years, really can and often does make us another kind, a wider person.

[19:45]

A wider and, yeah, maybe wiser person. And it's interesting, because through a Sechin, we not only are different after Sechin, We're also, it's retroactive. Because we're different before Sashin, too. Because the practice... of Sashin and meditation and mindfulness reconstruct our memories. No, that's not quite true. Reorganize our memories. discovering connections within our experience that weren't apparent before.

[21:16]

It doesn't change our experience, it makes it more vivid. And new associations that we didn't feel before become apparent. And the simple ability to sit still most of the time for seven days. It's not really so difficult. Human beings can do it. And it helps that there's quite a few other people around you watching. Okay. But it also gives you the simple strength to face things that we don't usually face. In fact, in the first few sessions, there's a kind of rehashing, to mix up again, of our memories, experience, and so forth.

[22:24]

Yes. What else you got to do for seven days? All this stuff comes up. After a while, that tends to, third or fourth Sashin, maybe this tends to clear up. It's a kind of psychological review of your life. And you can't get busy and not look at it because there's no busyness to do. Nobody rings the bell. You just have to sit there. So it puts your life together in a new way.

[23:59]

And in a way, I mean, we can say this Chukai ceremony is a recognition of that. I've decided, you know, you're saying to yourself, you feel in yourself, I I recognize that I'm putting my life together in a new way. A way that feels more complete to me now. And a way that feels more connected. More connected, in fact, to my past. And my family, those of you family members here. And my family. And other people in the world. It's a kind of satisfaction, maybe deeper than happiness. So you... Okay, what's the first step? How do I bring this interplay of practice and...

[25:02]

the teaching together. Well, I'll start with what it means to be in the simplest sense a human being. As I said, Buddhism views these precepts as being more ancient than Buddhism. And Buddhism, as I said, uses these praises that are older than Buddhism. They are kind of elemental common sense. And it's the basis for practice, for being a human being. And the basis also for Buddha's activity. So mostly our activity calls forth a you or a me. You know, a Buddha is not some kind of great human being in the past.

[26:37]

There certainly were great human beings in the past. But what we're emphasizing is what made them great, if they were a Buddha, was Buddha's activity. And this Buddha's activity can be your activity. So the ceremony of taking the precepts is to enter into Buddha's activity. So the feeling that Buddha's activity, step by step, enters your life more and more. And our intention, our intention, our decision that we hold through the precepts makes this possible.

[28:01]

Yeah, this is, dare I say so, this is a magic day. It's also an ordinary day. And there's also an interplay of this ordinary day and it's also a magic day. in which nine of us are going to make this decision to lead the life that calls forth Buddha's activity in our relationship with others and phenomenal world and ourselves. Yes, there's a kind of light, can be a kind of light around this day. Yeah, you know, I'm going to give you a Japanese name.

[29:18]

Why a Japanese name? Well, because I don't know how to give you an English or German name. It's like when you translate American Indian, Native American names into English. red feather shimmering lake I don't think any of you want me to call you red feather shimmering lake some of you might like it I had a friend who called himself for many years bird brother Yeah. But actually in Japan, at least there's a 2,000-year-old tradition of how to give these names. Yeah, and I know how to do this, so I'll give you a Japanese name. And in kanji characters, it's Chinese and Japanese.

[30:23]

And it'll be something that has a presence in you and will have some meaning in the Sangha and maybe it will free you from the sense of any name or how even each moment is a kind of name each moment calling forth Buddha's activity Thank you very much.

[31:14]

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