Well, the snow we've been waiting for and dreaded, dreading and anticipating finally is here for a visit. And maybe it will stay. And please don't think the snow is something extra. He added to the air. The snow and the water and the air and the movement are all our spirit. Maybe our spatial texture. And someone said to me that... what made them decide, oh, maybe I could practice with this guy, was that when he said, space connects.

[01:16]

Now, I presume that... there was an implicit or explicit feeling that space connects, belongs to a different world view. Yeah, and Not only does it belong to a different worldview, but it makes, I think, when you feel the difference, it makes you realize what you just took for granted is a simple fact. is actually a cultural view.

[02:29]

And this basic view that space also at least connects is a basis for understanding Buddhism. Without that recognition the sense of a Dharmakaya or the sense of your skin boundaries disappearing wouldn't be accessible to you. So now we have I can say maybe not just space connects but There's a texture to space.

[03:49]

And now we can say that space connects, but also that a texture, a... How did we say that? Creativity. Creativity. Creativity. It's not a fabric, no. Well, it is a fabric. A text means to weave. A text is a weaving. What's great about it, this is we see a cultural, you know, just something different just between German and English. It makes it clear we don't know what we're talking about. We create categories, we create models and formulations, but even between German and English they're a little different. So maybe I could say the texture of immediacy.

[05:02]

And by text I mean not only weaving, but the sense of text as something you can read. So I'm always, you know, throughout this practice period, I'm trying to speak about what we're doing here. And, you know, I would say that all in all, at least what we're doing here, my body knows. I say my body, but actually it's Suzuki Roshi's body and the lineage's body and your body and so forth.

[06:09]

As the snow doesn't belong to itself, it belongs to the air and... temperature and so forth. I can say my body, but there's much that makes this corpse alive. stuff wouldn't that be great if the skin would disappear and you'd just see bones I don't know if that's closer to reality but you know it would be different okay so Yeah, a text you can read.

[07:22]

A text den ihr lesen könnt. And so although my body knows what we're doing, you know, where do I find the source of what we're doing? Obwohl mein Körper weiß, was wir hier tun, wo finde ich dennoch die Quelle dessen, was wir hier tun? Again, what makes this stuff alive, much of it is from Suzuki Roshi. Und nochmal, das, was das hier lebendig macht, vieles davon kommt von Suzuki Roshi. And in the sense, the true sense of lineage, it means Suzuki Roshi is also sort of here. And the lineage is sort of here. And we're always sort of here in this mutuality of a... shared body, or a shared texture of immediacy.

[08:33]

So someone else also asked me about continuity. And the end of the Hōkyō-Zanmai, the most, let's say, pretty close to the most profound statement of the founder or person who's considered pivotal figure and or founder of our lineage and he says if you achieve continuity This is called the host within the host. These are the last two lines of the Hokkyo Sanmai. So now we have Buddhist terminology, Zen terminology here, host within the host. So that takes some explanation.

[10:31]

Not only what host means, but why we have such terminology. Yeah, you know, the... First noble truth is there is suffering. As our Shuso emphasized the other day. And the second noble truth is there are causes and results. Und die zweite edle Wahrheit sagt, es gibt Ursachen und es gibt Ergebnisse. Now we, from our cultural perspective, think that because there's causes and results,

[11:33]

We can understand things. And if you understand things, then you can free yourself from suffering. That is not the meaning at all. It simply means there are causes and results. Now, if you look at your actual experience, do you think you can understand the causes and results? Yeah, a little bit. But here, even in a session or a practice period, much is coming up, which you say, where the hell the heck did that come from? Why am I like this? Why am I here even? I'm going to talk to Catherine and see if I can rearrange this. Yeah. It's simply there are causes and results and we don't understand them.

[12:58]

Dark matter, dark energy. Now in general, people try to create myths about, explanatory myths. Amaterasu was shut in a cave because something in the sun, you know, and so she stamped her foot and people got mad at her and Japan was born. Who was that? Amaterasu? Yeah. And I excuse... And excuse me for saying so, but from a Buddhist point of view, the story of Christianity is the same. It may be a more useful story, a more sophisticated story. But from a Buddhist point of view, these stories are just models, just things we, you know, baby rattles.

[14:02]

And I think we have to put up, so we have, you know, the big cause, you know, God. Nun, also wir haben diese große Ursache, Gott. But we also nowadays, most scientists and so forth, don't believe in God. Aber heutzutage glauben die meisten Wissenschaftler nicht an Gott. But they believe in science. Aber sie glauben an Wissenschaft. We're going to figure things out. Dass die Dinge herausgekommen sind. There's going to be a unified field theory. Wie die vereinheitliche Feldtheorie zum Beispiel. This is sort of like believing in God. At least from a Buddhist point of view, we know a lot more about the world we live in than they knew back in Dung Shan's time.

[15:24]

Nun ja, wir wissen wesentlich mehr über die Welt, in der wir leben, als zu der Zeit von Dung Shan. So let's try to put ourselves back in Dung Shan's time. Und lass uns mal versuchen, uns in Dung Shan's Zeit zurückzubegeben. What do they have? Was hatten sie da? The rhythm of the days. Den Rhythmus des Tages. And an interesting historian named Demos, D-E-M-O-S, has recently written a book in the last few years saying there was a big shift in America from the rhythms of the day and the week and the seasons, where you thought you were in a secular situation. to when there was a shift from the early days in America to seeing time as heading into a future.

[16:29]

And my own opinion is this shift into future-oriented time has a lot to do with electric lights. Just imagine if we were here. And we had no lights. Thank you very much. for the lights. But imagine we had no lights. We'd be in here with whale oil. And we wouldn't feel too good. There aren't many whales around here.

[17:39]

We'd have a little light. But, you know, evening Zazen would be pretty dark. And getting between the buildings would be kind of fun. Even more fun than it is now. Yeah, so you'd notice the dew in the morning, you'd notice the crepuscularism. Do you have that word in German? Crepuscular means the granular light of evening. So we'd notice the shift into the sandy light of evening into night. And we'd live in that process. There'd be no way out. And there'd be no outside it.

[18:54]

The urbanized world and newspapers and all in those days didn't exist. You mostly just knew what was in front of you. And what was in front of you had a certain cycle to it. Days, weeks, seasons. The air, water turns to snow when the temperature is cold enough. So what you have and what I'm trying to express is a kind of texture of time or immediacy. The objects of the world become the utility of the objects.

[19:58]

Objekte der Welt werden das... Utility, the usefulness, the usability. Ja, werden zur Gebräuchlichkeit der Objekte, also der Gebrauchbarkeit der Objekte. Objects were not the objects of accumulation so much as something you had them because you needed them, you used them. So objects were part of the texture of activity. Of activity. Of immediacy. And this little teaching staff I have, Very similar to one that Sukhiroshi had and similar to another one that he gave me. And it's got some writing on it and it's got a little guy sitting Zazen down back here.

[21:16]

And it has the history of being a back scratcher. Because you're sitting in the hot weather and it's itchy. And it's also the spine. The spine in zazen. So it's an essentialized object. Which brings various things together in it. So as we have the skull of the Buddha in our eating bowls, we have the spine of Zazen. as a teaching staff. This is the texture of immediacy as objects. Now I'm trying to probe into something to what we're doing. Yeah, and we took this wall out and the door that was there.

[22:35]

Only a week or two or three before... practice period started. Yeah, and then we moved the entry over there and put the door over there. And that entry conceptually in Buddhism is called the genkan. And it means mystery gate. I've talked about this before, this part, mystery gate. And it comes from the Malakirti's hut, which is a mystery gate because he could it was only I don't know four square or ten to five six tatamis or something equivalent but all the bodhisattvas from all realms could join in there and I hope you I mean it's hard to notice but I hope you've noticed there

[24:00]

everywhere in this room, between us, sitting on the floor, standing. It makes me think of, like in Microsoft Word, when you turn on paragraph, those little paragraph signs, pill crow or whatever they're called, appear throughout the text. I get rid of them as fast as possible, but they're invisibly there in the text. Reverse P. I found out recently it's more traditional name is Pilkrow. Yeah, so there's a lot of invisible things here. I'm not promising you they're bodhisattvas, but there's a lot of invisible things. Okay. So as I've said, we shape our activity by the architecture.

[25:10]

Our movement by the architecture. We shape it also by the activity. Whether we're doing service or doing the meal. And we shape it by the location. The altar and the Buddha or the servee. There's a server and a servee, an employer and an employee. Sounds all right to me. So you enter the space of the servee in one way and you enter the space of the Buddha in another way. And the bells of when I come here or go to the altar or the Doshi goes, they're kind of like sound gates you pass through.

[26:32]

Now, what I'm trying to do here is... Get us out of entity thinking. The snow is not an entity, an extra in the air. If the snow is extra, the air is extra. None of it's extra. It's all extra. something that's letting us live here on this planet. So the word shunyata means fullness, really, not emptiness. So it means fullness, so full there's no boundaries, there's no way to make distinction.

[27:40]

So we can say, simply as experientially, empty. Now, I hope you've noticed that five-day weeks are much shorter than two days less than a seven-day week. Yeah, there's a Nenju ceremony every other day. And a four-and-nine-day every three days. No, why is that? I mean, that's what I experience. I mean, just five-day weeks. Well, I think we could say it's also because the routine, we're all in a similar routine.

[28:54]

Supposedly, grandfather clocks, you know what they are? Grandfather clocks, if you have them in a house, several, they all start swinging together. And supposedly, women in a college dormitory have their periods together. They tend to start being together. And I know the best I can have a period anyway, I'm having it with you. Anyway, something mutual is happening here in the routine. And, you know, I don't know what the, obviously don't know what the word routine, you've got the dumbest teacher going, you know, what the word routine is in German.

[30:15]

After 25 years, I don't know what the word routine is in German. You should fire me. But clearly in the word routine in English, there's the word route. Route a path. So a routine is a passage, is a path. And when you live in Dung Shan's time or Yuan Wu's time, the compiler of the Blue Cliff Records. Yuan Wu said, if you want to realize, you must come to the limit of time. You must come to the limit of time.

[31:29]

What a funny thing to say. So the routine is a passage, just like if you're living in the dark and the weather and the seasons. It's all routine. It's all a passageway that you don't fully understand. So let's again go back to Dung Shan's time. He knows there's causes and conditions. But he knows mostly we don't understand what's going on. He doesn't know anything about dark matter and dark energy, but by implication in a sense he does.

[32:34]

He knows we don't know. He knows we don't know. that the categories, the models we make, the explanations we make, are only little fractions of whatever is going on. Only a few pieces of a missing pie. Only a few pieces of a pie you can't find. So what have you got? We can't make certain.

[33:37]

There's no truth, absolute truth. There's nothing we can be certain about. What can you know? What can you discover as a reference point? Continuity. Your experience of continuity. Now, if I go that direction now, the great Yogi Bear, he said, when you come to a divide in the road, Take it. He also said, if I may, his wife said, you know, you always said you wanted to be buried in Philadelphia, but now you really like New York.

[34:50]

Where do you want to be buried? And his wife said, and he said to his wife, surprise me. Anyway. So which road should I take here? Continuity or the texture immediacy? I mean, she added 10 minutes to our satsang this morning and only a few people noticed. She should have added 20. I loved it. I was sitting there thinking, because I had just come downstairs and I knew what time it was, I was thinking, Well, I think she's forgotten, but this is nice. I'm sitting here. So let me come back probably to the... Achieving continuity.

[36:09]

And just speak now about the texture of immediacy. That's something I've been trying to bring to some kind of as much as I can since the beginning of the practice period. So our movements are shaped by the architecture. And we reshape the room through our uses. And then the movement is also shaped by our activity. And as I said, by location. And by also interpolations.

[37:26]

Something interjected into the situation. Interject means to throw into. We don't have that word. Interject means to throw into. I seem to be a specialist in words that Germany doesn't have. And interpolation means to polish in betweenness. Interpolation means polish in between. Inter, in between, to make what's in between shine. Interpolation. Isn't that great? Yeah, to make the in-betweenness glisten. Is that what you said? Glisten. Okay. Okay. Now, Bill Redvine Porter He said that Zen monks dominated Chinese Buddhism because the Zen monastic

[38:51]

just produced more and better trained priests and monks than any other Buddhist schools. But trained in what? I would say trained in the texture of immediacy. Because what's assumed here again, is that everything is interdependent. And inter-independent. And also even inter-metabolic. Because it's not just a process of everything leaning on each other.

[40:05]

Everything is affecting and interacting with each other. So I used the word the other day of coordinate, coordinate. And quite a while ago I talked about giving order to the durative present. So the this process of developing this Buddhist monastic, Zen Buddhist monastic life we're living a version of now, was to recognize this inter-independence, And to co-order it.

[41:07]

Not subordinate, which is hierarchy, but co-ordinate. To order at the same level. So we... We come in at Vairachana Buddha and Sambhogakaya Buddha. And the Soku and the Doan do the clackers and the bell overlapping. So the basic concept here is to create a texture of immediacy that's coordinated overlapped and underlapped and as

[42:18]

a process of immediacy and the texture of immediacy and a process of establishing continuity and I think this continuity this texture of continuity immediacy that we experience means five days is a lot shorter than seven days More than two days. Excuse me. I don't excuse you. No, go ahead. We must come to the limit of time.

[43:38]

That's enough for now. Thank you very much.

[43:41]

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