Good afternoon. Another rainy afternoon. The rain is permanent. So yesterday we spoke about the three main pedagogical concepts of enlightenment In Zen Buddhism. Original, initial and experiential. And in those three... As practice and experience we are thoroughly interrelated.

[01:06]

Okay, so what do I want to say today? You know, there's really no God in Buddhism. Okay, and let's not make enlightenment a kind of God. It's not an absolute experience of absolute truth. To assume there's an absolute truth to Perceive, to know, is a view of a theological culture. Now, you may actually, many of you may actually underneath have that view.

[02:19]

And it's a comforting view. But from the point of view of Buddhism, there's no absolute. The only absolute is that there's no absolute. So there's relative, there's permanence and impermanence, but that's a relative truth. Some things are more permanent. or less impermanent than others. But the absolute truth is everything is impermanent. Now really, to feel that, to know that, is important in our practice.

[03:29]

Although not all Buddhists and not all Zen teachers would be so rigorous. Yeah. So what do I mean to say that the experience of enlightenment is not absolute? If you have a culture with inhibitions, what culture doesn't? Inhibitions. Let's imagine that German, Swiss German and Austrian German our cultures with some inhibitions. Perhaps. Then in the festivals or all night partying or whatever, where there's freedom from inhibitions, There may be the experience of freedom from inhibitions.

[04:46]

But it's not an absolute freedom. It's a freedom from those inhibitions. No, that's true of any culture, any anthropological study will show you that. So if you probably look at the, what's the big festival in Germany? What is it? What is it, Maria? No, not the love parade. That's good. The love parade. What am I thinking of? Carnival. What? Carnival. Carnival, yeah. If you studied, what's it called in German, not carnival? It's called something else. Fastnacht. Fastnacht, okay. Say that you studied those.

[05:46]

I bet you'd see a lot of similarities between German, Swiss, and Austrian ones, but there probably are differences too. So the point I'm making is a simple one. That the freedom from a culture is a particular kind of territory. It's experienced as freedom, but it's a freedom in relationship to the way you have not been free. Okay. So I'm walking along in San Francisco near where I... was reading D.T. Suzuki. I'm going down some railroad track that went nowhere.

[06:50]

Stopped at a building, the warehouse where I work. And I threw down a I always have to say I didn't smoke because, you know, like Clinton, I never inhaled. Me and Clinton. Yeah, but it's true, I never... He claims he never inhaled marijuana. I inhaled marijuana, but I never inhaled cigarettes. But it was so harsh. You know, I'm a sissy. I thought, ooh, this is horrible. But I used to blow it out my nose, you know, things like that. So anyway, I'm walking along, and I discard the non-inhaled empty cigarette pack.

[07:51]

Ich gehe so dort entlang und schmeiße eine nicht inhalierte leere Zigarettenschachtel weg. Weggeschmissen. Auf die Gleise. In the warehouse, it's a book warehouse, I was in charge of, you know, I was sort of in charge of the warehouse and one of my jobs was sweeping the warehouse or getting it swept. Und in dem Warenhaus, wo ich arbeitete, war einer meiner Jobs eben das sauber zu machen, also auszufegen. And so when I threw it down, I realized no one's going to sweep it up. I thought it's much better to throw it down in the warehouse because then I'll sweep it up. This all is happening real quickly, but my next thought was, Why did I throw it down then? And I thought, because I have some... I think there's such a thing called the outside.

[08:57]

And... that somehow the outside is different from the inside. And that somehow nature or God will take care of this package of cigarettes. Yeah. So at that moment I realized I gave a reality to the outside which it really doesn't have. die sie eigentlich nicht hat.

[10:15]

Es sind Unterschiede, wie zum Beispiel, dass das dort weggeschmissene Zigarettenpäckchen eben nicht aufgefegt werden würde, aber solche Unterschiede nur. important experience for me. Because it precipitated a shift in almost all views or boundaries. And from then on I walked in a kind of boundaryless space. In which there were objects, but they were all temporary objects. They happened to be there for a while. The space was more real, if there's a sense of realness. than the objects.

[11:18]

Now, Of course there's intellectual content to this. You can get yourself to this view by thinking about it. But getting there by thinking about it wouldn't have given me the experience. It just would have been a way of thinking about it. It wouldn't have caused the shift in the reality of all boundaries. Okay. Okay. So the trigger was the reality of an outside that somehow is nature and there's an inside. Der Auslöser war also die Wirklichkeit des Außerhalb, the reality of outside?

[12:35]

The trigger was that there's a reality, that there's an outside which is real. Der Auslöser war, es gäbe eine Wirklichkeit, ein Außerhalb, das wirklich ist. I mean, Alan Watts said something similar once. He said, cities are just big anthills. They're not unnatural. They're just human anthills. The trigger again was the reality I assumed for an outside. But I've grown up in a culture which believes that, which has a public-private distinction. Some cultures don't have that distinction. As I've often said, until, I don't know, 25 years ago, the Tokyo airport was full of people in the summer in their underwear.

[13:37]

Because there was no public space you had to dress differently in. That's a western idea. We all know what we all look like in underwear. Heck, it's a hot day. Let's strip down in the Zendo for Sashin. They used to have little signs saying, remember there's Westerners here and they don't understand. And if you look at the architecture, Japanese houses do not have a precise inside-outside distinction. If this was a Japanese room, That would be sliding doors.

[14:56]

And then there'd be another surface. And then there'd be sliding doors there too. And then there'd be another surface with no sliding doors. And then there'd be a garden. And then there'd be a light out, a lantern out in the far end of the garden to show that the house extends to there. So there's a series of distinctions having to do with keeping the bugs out and staying warm and out of the rain and so forth. But this distinction right now, behind where you're sitting, Where this is inside the building and that's outside the building simply does not exist in traditional buildings. Okay. So in such a culture you're not going to have an enlightenment experience or a realization experience based on an inside-outside distinction.

[16:11]

Because the shift in views is going to be connected to the inhibitions or connected to the views of reality. With a shift from inhibitions or views that are taken as real. Now, if you listen to my way I'm teaching over the years, you'll find woven into much that I say implications or teaching based on no inside-outside distinction.

[17:20]

That's not the only thing you'll find, but that's one thing you'll find. Where do you think such a teaching phrase already connected comes from? Or more primitively said, space connects. These are all related to my experience of a freedom from this view of an outside reality. Now, you can start identifying lineages if you... If you can feel the insights in a teacher, you can read the story. And you can say, that's probably from Dung Shan's lineage and not Lin Ji's lineage.

[18:32]

Because even though there's a lot of overlap and the people studied with all the different lineages, some of them, certain kind of experiences open you up. To how things actually exist, but still conditioned by how you exist. discovered that. Okay, so let's go back to dear old Meister Eckart who's sitting here on the back. I mean, well, why not? Certainly, just as Paul Rosenblum called me this morning just before I came downstairs and told me that his mother had just died. And we talked about it the evening before, too.

[19:33]

And she seems to have, as is quite common, waited for him to get back from a retreat he was on with Jean, his wife. And he had, as he would tell you, lots of problems with his mother. But in the last weeks, as her personality has been stripped away, I think he would tell you that, as he said to me too, somehow the attributes, Buddha-like attributes, came out as her personality, you know...

[20:41]

disintegrated or Yeah, disease and death seems to happen sometimes. And I think it's not unrelated. As I've spoken before about in a big crisis, everyone feels united. Because we start noticing what's fundamental and shared by us. And then we start feeling freer. Nicer, more joyful, etc. We do.

[21:46]

Think if it keeps raining for months and we can't leave here, how happy we're all going to be. Well, maybe not, but... So again, this practice of original enlightenment is to notice this... fundamental way we exist and exist with each other and through each other. So, Meister Eckhart. He is often used as an example for universal enlightenment.

[22:49]

Or he seems to have had enlightenment experiences or views that are very similar to Buddhism. So if you're a Buddhist, you say, hmm, the Christians who are really enlightened are just like us. Can I tell you a funny anecdote? You're not going to say no, I know, so... Anyway, there was quite a well-known German scholar who was an expert on Meister Eckhart. For some reason he came to visit us at Zen Center in San Francisco two or three times. I got to know him and we got to be friends. And we discussed, Meister Eckhart, of course. And he brought his 14-year-old son once to Tassajara. He wanted him to see Tassajara. I said, fine, we can go down there. So it happens that I'd also agreed to or invited the Jefferson Airplane to come down at the same time.

[24:14]

We'd hooked up the generator and they were composing songs. One song was composed down by the swimming pool. And they had... They were all living in the stone rooms, which were the nicer rooms at Tassajara. So I'm walking along with this German professor, his name I can't remember, and his young, sweet, 14-year-old son. So we're walking along, talking about Meister Eckhart. And I say, then this is the fireplace room. The door was open.

[25:22]

There was one of the Jefferson airplanes flying. There was also a completely beautiful naked girl. I don't know if the boy had an enlightenment experience, but he stopped talking with us about Meister Eckhart. So back to Meister Eckhart. Although He's used to show that Christians and Buddhists have similar enlightenment experiences. Yeah, but I'm not going to look at the experience only. I'm going to look at the background of the experience. What is the background? What are the views that he had? He had the view that there's an inner spark, an inner spark of soul in each of us.

[26:42]

And that inner spark is... not separate from God. And that inner spark is uncreated. And this uncreated spark creates us. And we can trust this inner spark to open our path. Inner spark is more real than the teaching of the scriptures in the church.

[27:46]

Because of such views, he was charged with heresy. He also said things like, God is non-existent. But what he meant was, God partakes of none of the aspects of existence. But God speaks through everything you see, all the creatures of existence. are the voice of God. Conceptually this is very close to Buddhism. Sukhiroshi is speaking about an innermost request. And how we can trust our innermost request is not really that different from trusting this inner spark of soul.

[28:54]

And to say that each thing is non-existent is not different, too much different from saying each thing is empty. And he said things like, you don't flee from the world. You flee from self-will and selfishness. And if you don't free yourself from self-will and selfishness, Being in a monastic cell is not going to help you. You hardly have to change the words and it sounds like Buddhism. So if these are the views he has, he's likely to have enlightenment experiences very similar to Buddhist enlightenment experiences. So what is... Oh dear, we're always running out of time.

[30:08]

We're added an eighth day to the Sashin. Change your flights. We're not going to fly down. Okay. So what, I really, I can't do it. Okay. So here we got the bamboo again. How do we view this? Pretty bad. You can't see it, but I can. You can't see it, but I can. It's pretty bamboo out there. It keeps every day blows, gets wet and blows. We're viewing it as activity. We're viewing it as entitylessness. We're viewing it as whatness. So we don't... And one of the things that is emphasized in mindfulness practice is not the who-ness of us.

[31:28]

That's real hard to notice. It's... But the whatness of us. The whatness of the four elements. The whatness of the four postures. And we notice the interdependence. And that I'm perceiving, we are perceiving that I know that through perception, so it's mind. Also now if we go back to Dogen's continuous practice, Dogen's continuous practice is to complete that which appears. But in noticing, or let's say noticing that which appears, that noticing includes noticing its impermanence and its absence of permanence.

[32:32]

And maybe I should come back to that. And it's whatness and so forth. Okay. Now, say your view is rather something different. You're in a theological culture as we are. And wholeness is important. So you see at some point that the separateness you see, is a delusion. That we're all, everything is connected. But you're in a theological culture. So what do you perceive the connectedness? How do you perceive the connectedness?

[33:46]

You perceive the connectedness as oneness. And how many of us have not assumed that somehow The experience of the truth is an experience of oneness. And that oneness then also very easily becomes a wholeness. And the Bible becomes true. The teaching becomes true. Now, the two religions religions that use the Enlightenment experience strongly are Zen and fundamental Protestantism.

[34:53]

And as I said the other day, phenomenologically, The Protestant conversion experience is extremely similar to the Buddhist enlightenment experience. But they conclude oneness and wholeness. Okay. That's not what Meister Eckhart came to. So what I'm saying here, and I have to stop, is that You can come to the basic views of Buddhism philosophically and scientifically.

[36:07]

And we're in a different position than a priest in China or a Zen teacher in China who really, most of them didn't know much. So their experiences, if they had realization experiences, would be much more cultural conditioned than a more sophisticated or well-informed person. Und Ihre Verwirklichungserfahrung, wenn Sie denn welche hatten, wären also sehr viel kulturbezogener als die von einer sehr viel weiter oder feiner entwickelten Person? And the enlightenment experience is considered by Buddhism to be somewhat dangerous. Because the experience somehow gives you the feeling you now know absolute truth. But you still interpret this experience. So, while we could say Buddhism comes to its basic teachings rather philosophically and scientifically,

[37:25]

the teachings are also developed in relationship to what kind of enlightenment will come from the teaching. So, for example, the emphasis on what-ness is not particularly scientific or philosophical. But it's there because it shapes the depth of your experience. No, probably most of you don't know who Rachel Carson is. But she wrote the book Timeless Spring in 19... Oh, 60, what? Silent Spring, I mean, yeah. Silent Spring, that's a Buddhist book I published. Silent Spring in 1960s, early 60s.

[38:44]

Also, sie schrieb dieses Buch Stiller Frühling in den 60er Jahren. And she pointed out that the birds were silent in the spring and other times because of DDT. And this book literally started the whole... environmental revolution. I mean, if you think about it, it's obvious that everything's interconnected. People know that. But they didn't really think about if they spray the crops, they kill the birds. So it's easy to think your way to interconnectedness or interdependence. But it was just an idea. People didn't really believe it. So many of these things we may think our way to, but we don't get there.

[40:06]

But how do you make them teachings and practices that lead to realization? So I wanted, you know, that's, you know, I haven't, yeah, maybe tomorrow. Thanks a lot. Vielen Dank. Thank you.

[40:47]

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