Good afternoon. At some point during the session, maybe tomorrow, I'll start doing doksans. And I would like to see everyone once in Doksan. And there may be time to see some of you more than once. Doksan means going alone. Going alone to see the teacher. alleine zum Lehrer hingehen. But it also means just going alone.

[01:03]

Aber es bedeutet auch einfach nur alleine gehen. Going alone together. Aber alleine gehen zusammen. Alone because when you talk about your practice, usually you leak. Allein deshalb, denn wenn man normalerweise über seine Praxis spricht, dann hat man ein Leck. you lose your energy in talking about practice. But ideally, and it should be possible to meet with your teacher or a teacher, and talk about practice without losing your energy. So in that sense, Doksan is going alone together. I think the first sashins in the West were done by, the first kind of public sashins in the West were done by Yasutani Roshi.

[02:38]

In the early 60s and maybe even the 50s, I don't remember. And he would go around. He was quite an interesting man and powerful teacher. And several of the lineages in America, Maezumi Roshi, Kaplo Roshi, and some others, are connected with Yasutani Roshi. And they did a kind of enlightenment sushis. Yasutani Roshi felt that Japanese Buddhism, especially Soto school, didn't emphasize enlightenment enough.

[03:51]

So he was a kind of renegade in the Soto tradition and emphasized enlightenment almost exclusively. Renegade. And they would have a lot of shouting and hitting with a stick a great deal of the time. They even broke a few collarbones. At least one I know of anyway.

[04:51]

And they had a few nervous breakdowns or crises. And afterwards they would have announced how many people attained sattva-raya. Danach gab es eine Ankündigung, wie viele Leute jetzt da Satori erreicht hatten. Not as bad as I'm making it sound. Also es ist nicht ganz so schlimm, wie es jetzt klingt. It actually was a rather interesting and daring, I think, introduction of Zen Buddhism to the West. Und ich denke, es war eine ziemlich interessante und auch wagemutige Einführung von Zen Buddhismus im Westen. And I'm telling the story just to say it's not clear really how to do this. Nobody does Yasutani Roshi's way anymore because there's just too much flack about it.

[05:58]

And all the Zen schools of Japan sort of said, no one needs that much emphasis on enlightenment. And it turned out that most of the people enlightened during the Sashins didn't stay enlightened. But some, it changed a lot of people's lives actually. So I'm, you know, it's obvious to you this, you know what you ought to do?

[07:10]

You ought to come sit a little closer. Do you mind? Do you mind? It's your husband. Thank you. Giving Sashin lectures is something I've been doing for many years. And they're different from other lectures I give. And when I first started coming to Europe in 1983, I think, I had to find out how to give lectures to non-initiates. The microphone's too close. And that took me a while, a couple years at least.

[08:43]

And now I'm finding one thing is giving Sashin lectures, it's different from seminar lectures, and giving them with a translator is some different experience. It's more different than I expected. And I'm talking about this mainly an illustration that somewhat different minds give particular lectures. And Ulrike has found that, she asked me today, If before lecture she could take a little break because she has to change her mind from sitting mind into a mind that can give a translation.

[10:02]

And it's for me being responsible for the session I have to constantly change my mind to see what the kitchen is doing and to feel each of you and to give a lecture and so forth. So while I think of it, if any of you would like to be hit by the stick Yeah, or with the stick. When you, if I happen to be walking around and you would like to be hit by the stick, and I happen to have the stick. And you put your hands in gassho.

[11:04]

I will assume that means that you're not praying and you'd like to be hit with a stick. Which means it could be to have your back straightened if I don't have the stick. And if you're going to be hit with the stick, if you're facing the wall, you lean forward 30, 20 degrees or so if you want to be hit on the shoulder, and you tip your head to the right or left. Generally the left and for the right shoulder first. And if you want to be hit on the back, then you lean farther forward. So you'd be hit either in here, if you want to hit in the shoulders, and across the back like that, if you want to hit on the back.

[12:51]

It's a rather nice feeling, actually. A little startling sometimes. And if I was carrying a long stick, I'd hit you once on each shoulder. And a short stick, two times on each shoulder. This is considered short. I mention it because someone asked me about it. So I'm also discussing this because I'm trying to understand what my relationship to you is.

[13:57]

I mean, I don't, I really shouldn't Start practice, start practice with somebody or start a person in practice and then abandon them. But maybe after this session you want to be abandoned. And I was quite careful in Japan to not start practicing with anybody. I lived there about four years. So I knew if I started practicing with people in Japan, I'd have to stay in Japan. So I didn't. Except Philip came over and joined me one morning Look what happened.

[15:05]

We're still wandering around together like an odd couple. I'm not sure I want this fate wished on you. But I have to think about or feel what I should do and what you want from me as a teacher and someone to practice with. And how I can give you some teachings which are useful to you in your daily life. That can be introduced and absorbed during the sesshin.

[16:08]

And used later as they come up in your life. So I have to listen to you selectively. For instance, if we were going to be together practicing for the next six months, I could listen to you one way. If I'm leaving in a few days, a week or so, then I have to practice with, listen to you differently. So how you feel, how we practice together affects my life. And I'm also trying to, I'm also in the process of deciding of how to continue practicing my own, how to continue my own practice,

[17:26]

in the next 10 or 20 or 30 years. Because this is a very strange business, you know. And I don't know, you know. My emphasis has always, I don't know why I'm telling you all this, but anyway, it's confession time. So I hope you all forgive me. Anyway, My emphasis, let's say, Theravadan Buddhism emphasizes monk's practice, which is privately monastic and publicly monastic. Does that make sense? Das ist also privat und öffentlich monastisch.

[19:08]

The Mahayana ideal is more complex, I think. Also die Vorstellung im Mahayana ist vielschichtiger. Mahayana practice is public for many people, non-monastic. Also Mahayana praxis ist öffentlich für viele Leute. It is public for many people and non-monastic. And at the same time secret. Was there a word missed there? And I've always emphasized myself the ability, the ideal of Mahayana practice being able to be integrated in one's ordinary life.

[20:30]

And that's part of the secrecy of it. Because it doesn't show necessarily in your ordinary life. And that's part of that expression, discerning the target in the words. and concealing ability in a phrase. And it's concealed in a phrase or concealed not because... It's concealed because there's no alternative to its concealment. At least that's the main reason.

[21:32]

And it can only be studied or practiced with somebody who is committed to the study and practice of it. So, as a result of being committed to the Mahayana ideal of ordinary life, I've started six or seven businesses. Had six or seven successes and one big failure. I've had lots of failures, actually. But only one business. And I've done practically every kind of life.

[22:49]

Except I've never been a criminal. At least in a simple sense of the term. But now I'm considering anyway, personally, concentrating exclusively on practice and having no other life. And it's actually a very complicated decision for me. So I just say that because you're actually part of the decision or this wouldn't be coming up. I mean, actually for many years now, my life has been nothing but practice.

[24:14]

But I concentrated on practice in a variety of ways. Anyway, it looks like for the next couple of years anyway, I'll just be trying to understand practice well enough and in such a way that I can make certain parts of it clear to people. Now I'm still trying to... introduce you to some basic ideas about practice. And I told you that yesterday that I another day before I noticed Suzuki Roshi offering incense and putting it to his forehead.

[25:17]

And if he hadn't done that, I wouldn't have noticed. It was a kind of clue. And likewise with the eating bowls, The clue in the eating bowls was the dumping of the washing water. The clue in the eating bowls. I'm trying to find a good word for clue in German. Maybe you can help me. The clue in the eating bowls. I could have helped you with that one. The clue in the dishwater.

[26:40]

You could write a Zen mystery novel. The clue in the dishwater. Because the way you dump the bowl is you pick it up with your left hand You put your right hand over this opening to say that this is a different kind of water than the soup and the food. And then you take the bucket, which is a kind of garbage pail bucket of some sort. And then you dump the water in partway. Und dann schüttet man das Wasser teilweise aus.

[27:41]

And then you touch the mouth of the edge of the bowl where you're going to drink to the bucket. Und dann stößt man den Rand der Schale, wo man den Rest dann später trinken wird, gegen den Eimer. And then you take the little bowl And you drink from the point that you touched it. And you dump about half the water in and you drink half the water. And this was such a peculiar little number that it made me think about the whole eating bowls. One of the other clues at a little different kind of level was that if you drop your chopstick or something on the floor, You're not supposed to pick it up.

[28:48]

Although one's inclination is to pick it up as quickly as possible and hope no one noticed. But instead you're supposed to wait and whoever's the watcher So Beate is functioning partly as the Ino in the Sesshin. Choosing the serving crews and so forth. Ino is just a title. And so if some of you have to, for some reason you have to leave the Sashin for some reason, because you're feeling unwell or something, let's hope that doesn't happen to any one of you, you would tell her you...

[29:54]

Because the quality of sashin is, on the one hand, you're alone on your cushion. But you're supported in that aloneness. The food is taken care of and so forth. And you're supporting other people's aloneness by your own sitting. So the aloneness is balanced by a mutuality that's very powerful. So for some reason you have to leave or come in late or something, you tell somebody, usually the person doing the kind of job she's doing.

[31:04]

But you could tell Philip or me if. But it's better one person, because when something's happening, I go to somebody and say, I don't want to have to go around five different people. Do you know where so-and-so is? Because as soon as you're gone, I start missing you. And it's also because if you're going to make sashin work, you want to be thrust into zazen mind. And there's a kind of alchemy to zazen mind. Maybe it's a little like taking a drug. And then you're under its influence for a certain length of time.

[32:28]

But here practice doesn't... The way practice works, you have to keep putting yourself under the influence. You keep having to make that choice and make that choice, and many things would prefer to take a walk to the lake. And how delightful and beautiful it would be to walk to the lake. But when you really realize Zazen mind, you don't care about the lake. All the mountains and valleys and lakes are in Zazen mind. And it's completely satisfying. So, in another state of mind, you can certainly take a nice walk to the lake.

[33:33]

But in zazen mind, there's already a lake. This is not actually very easy to achieve. It's harder than shamanism. And I say that because shamanism is mainly an Asian tradition. It comes mostly through the migration of Asian cultures, Indians and so forth. And it's a, and Shamanism and Zen and Buddhism and Taoism too share a common ancestor. There's some, there is what, what they mainly share in common. is that wisdom is another state of mind, not your ordinary state of mind.

[34:58]

And you learn things through this other state of mind that you can't learn in your ordinary state of mind. And the question, how do you enter this other state of mind? Which, we have to say, is also ordinary mind. And I say it's ordinary mind, that's also a kind of code. And I guess that's part of what I'm talking about today. So going back to the dumping of the water. You're taking the water you just washed the dishes with. And first you're offering it to the spirits and powers and Buddhas and so forth.

[36:00]

So on the one hand it's garbage water that you're offering to the spirits and the Buddhas. Two, you're putting it, dumping it in the bucket in this special way and then touching where you're going to drink. And then you're sharing this dirty garbage water with the Buddhas and yourself. And so you drink some. And you're drinking it from where you touched the dirty bucket. It's not really dirty, but on some level dirty bucket. So this is completely Huayen teaching of the mutual inner penetration and non-interference. And the whole Zen sense of making what's garbage spiritual and so forth.

[37:12]

So the more I, once I noticed that and saw where that came from, I began to wonder if all of the eating bowl practices weren't the same, but they only looked more normal. This one didn't look normal. Do you see why I called it a clue? No? It's probably my translation. A clue because, you must understand, because you're doing the serving so well.

[38:14]

I know you're really, for a bunch of people who didn't know this just a few days ago, I'm impressed with how well you're doing it. That's the last compliment you're going to get. No, I'll probably give in again. A clue, because if you just... Until I noticed that, I just thought this was a way of eating, convenient way of eating in sort of camping bowls that folded up together. And they are traveling. You tie that up in the way mine are, like this. And then you actually tie it around your waist.

[39:27]

So you travel with these eating bowls. So I thought they were like camping bowls. Then I realized it was Buddhist camp, but you wouldn't understand that. You'd have to know English to know that bad joke Anyway Anyway So by paying attention to the clue of the eating bowls, of the washing bowl part, I saw that the whole of the eating bowls were at the same level, but they looked like they were more ordinary. Does that make sense?

[40:46]

No. What doesn't make sense? Everything. Just eating out of the middle bowl and how they fit together and so forth. Well, let me give you another example. With the with the offering of the incense. This part looked like some kind of magical part or some symbolic part. But this part looked like just putting some incense on top of the fire. But this wasn't just putting incense on top of the fire, this was doing something else. Since I already had the sense that nothing in Buddhism is symbolic,

[41:48]

Almost nothing. Everything is practice. So this is not just a symbolic act, it's an act of practice. So then I began to see that there was a kind of field of power in this, in the way Suzuki Rishi did it. And then I saw that it was in all his actions, including the most ordinary. So he could say, revealed in a movement, but concealed in activity. Oh dear. How am I going to make this useful to you? There's the Zen statement.

[43:36]

Wondrous, miraculous power, wondrous activity. Marvelous, whatever. Wunderbar, yeah, wunderbar. Absolutely wunderbar. Okay, so miraculous power, wunderbar activity. Magische Kräfte und wunderbare Aktivitäten. Drawing water carrying firewood. Wasser schöpfen. Drawing water carrying firewood. Feuerholz tragen. And this is often quoted by people who want to emphasize Zen is just ordinary life. And they say Zen is carrying water and collecting firewood. Just doing the ordinary activities of life. And that's true.

[44:48]

But they understand it without the introduction. Miraculous power, wunderbar activity. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And it's easy to ignore miraculous power and wondrous activity. So studying Suzuki Roshi and noticing things like this, I tried to immerse myself in his activity. and to immerse myself in zazen mind without moving.

[45:49]

And you're all doing pretty well, I must say. Oops, another... It means You're not Buddha. No. So sometimes I'm a little too granting, I think. But anyway, you are sitting quite well. Now this koan I presented to you last night, this simple koan, which is in some ways a kind of criticism of Indian Buddhism.

[46:58]

There's often a little politics thrown into these stories. Because the Sixth Patriarch is speaking to two Indian Buddhists. And they were satisfied with his simple answer. They're arguing about, is the flag moving or the wind moving? And he says, to settle the argument, the mind is moving. But If you're practicing Zen, you have to ask, what mind is moving? And then you have to have, Zazen mind is moving. And Zazen mind is both still and moving. So the answer, the mind is moving, is only half the answer unless you know something about practice.

[48:27]

And when Dogen speaks about drawing water and carrying firewood, He talks about drawing water in the large sense, too, of sometimes you draw water in containers. And sometimes someone else draws water for you in containers. So drawing water is going on all the time and in that sense it's wondrous activity. And in the koan I gave you about Ihsan being awakened from being awakened and saying, I've had a dream.

[49:33]

Dogen says, to study this koan we have to study lying down, waking up, turning toward the wall, etc. And what he means by that is that each of these actions is a dharma. Is this what I called yesterday concentrated conscious thought? So you don't have to keep translating it. Maybe we could call it CCT.

[50:34]

Agreed. Okay, unless you want to use the German initials for it. So we have a new technical term, CCT. And it makes me think of the Soviet Union, CCC. Anyway, And the practice of CCT, which we could also call eightfold mind, as I described how the eightfold path is a mind, you test your divisions of the world with eightfold mind.

[51:36]

In other words, you apply this sense of concentrated conscious thought to each name or feeling or action. If you do this and you keep doing it and you hold it, as we say in Buddhism, if you keep the practice in view, if you keep seeing things with this kind of absolute precision, In this sense, something soft or fog, fog can be absolutely precisely fog.

[52:47]

So I don't mean sharp edges or anything. I mean very precisely a complete action thought through concentration. It's thought that if you practice this way you come close to how things actually exist. And the closer you come to how things actually exist there's a kind of alchemy of transformation that begins to happen in you. So in zazen and in sashin you're trying to develop a concentrated mind that's continuous through all your activities. that doesn't disappear at night, or at mealtimes or working in the kitchen.

[53:53]

And so these seven days are the chance to see if you can get the feeling of this concentrated, continuous mind. A kind of unassailable mind stream. Unassailable? It's a little bit again like... I don't want to talk too long today. It's hard for me to judge because of the translation. Go ahead.

[54:53]

So it's like, I'll give you another example, it's like trying to be part of the fabric, not just see the fabric from a distance. Let's take that tea bowl again that I described to you the other day. It's designed from seven points of view. One point of view is when you see it from a distance. The second is when you see it close up. The third is when you see it with liquid in it. And the fourth is when you see it from the drinking point.

[55:55]

Because when you have a tea bowl like that, you pick it, the front is determined as I showed you. But you drink from a point that's one third of the way to the side. So the front is one point and the kanji can't determine the front because it's under liquid, the character. But the cross appears above the liquid. And when you turn it one third, there's no cross there. But when you drink it and you bring it up, there's a cross inside below your lip. So you have the design from a distance and the design from close up and you have the design with liquid in it and without liquid in it.

[57:22]

and you have the design from the drinking position and you have the design of how it feels I should say design or it's known by these are different points from which the bowl is known known and seen these are different points from which the bowl is known and seen and these are different points from which the bowl is known and seen Okay. And then you have the way the bowl is known to the hands. And then you have the way the bowl is known to the lips. That's six. And the seventh is, then it has to have an overall design that hides all the previous six. So when you look at it just casually, it just has an overall design.

[58:41]

And you have to start using it and being with it before you see that there's actually six separate designs included in an overall design. I remember Mrs. Suzuki. I know Nakamura Sensei, who is a Japanese woman who lived with my family for many years and is a very, very good tea teacher. Suzuki Roshi had a potter who was a kind of disciple of Suzuki Roshi who was quite a good potter well known and he gave the potter and his son their potting names like a Buddhist potting name

[59:47]

the name under which they signed their bowls and they gave me this quite beautiful summer tea bowl and she took one look at it and said the potter doesn't drink tea Because she could tell it had several levels of design but wasn't designed from the point of view of the lips and how you use it in tea. So these levels are apparent to anybody who knows what's going on in these things. But your life is like that. You're actually designed from several points of view. Or you're known from several points of view. Like you often don't want to know how others know you. I mean the most casual conversation that you overhear your friends could be discussing you very casually in a friendly way but you wouldn't want to hear what they say when you're not there.

[61:32]

And we know the difference. If you come in the room we talk about you in a different way. Even though both may be equally loving, you wouldn't find them so. Although both may be equally loving, the individual being discussed might not find it so. In any case, there's many ways we are known There's many ways we can know ourselves. If you can discover the different points of view, yourself seen from a distance, yourself seen from close up, and so forth.

[62:34]

So it's like the fabric again being in the fabric with the threads and in the loom and then sometimes away from it just seeing the whole pattern. And if you can get a state of mind that can rest in the details of life Which part of what zazen mind is about. To find calmness and equanimity. Just in the details of how you're alive or what you see or what you hear. close up or far or right in the pattern of thoughts and emotions arising and the main practice of this the alchemy of this

[63:42]

is to enter a mind stream or generate a mind stream, in which you see the details of each thing in their CCT. And in Tibetan Buddhism, for instance, they say one of the two or three most basic practices is cultivating correct view. That sees things as they actually are. And that's what I'm talking about. So I'm talking about all this also because it came out of the eating bowls.

[65:10]

And the details of Sashin. Which if you can allow your mind to sink deeply into the details of things. free of generalizations, and free of those ideas or thoughts that don't stand up to the testing or the test of CCT, that you... Fourth thing. If you can stay with those things that stand up to the test of conscious concentration. Once I'm out of this stream it's very difficult.

[66:13]

Let me start again? Please. Part of this is a matter of energy. You don't need much energy at the level of generalizations. At the level of detail I'm talking about, you need initially a tremendous amount of energy. And Sashin mind takes a tremendous amount of energy. And initially you can't think and have enough energy to do Zazen mind. Only when you've shifted to zazen mind as your base, then do you have enough energy to also think.

[67:16]

So this is what I'm telling you is a kind of alchemy or shamanic practice. Which Mahayana Buddhism teaches that you can embed it in your daily life. It's a kind of walking secret monastic practice. That's in your everyday life of carrying firewood and drawing water. So the more you can test the divisions, your own perceptual divisions, Yeah. Yeah.

[68:22]

See, I changed the way I was talking for a while, because I knew it would take less energy to come back to this, which I knew would take more energy. I thought I'd give you a break with some... Okay. Just saying it takes a lot of energy, right? if you can immerse yourself in this kind of detail that's free of generalizations, then you will be released from generalizations like anxiety, fear, and so forth. Because fear and anxiety and suffering are usually at the scale of the larger pattern. They're only one of the ways of viewing the bull. The teabowl.

[69:30]

Only one of the ways of viewing the teabowl. The teabowl has anxiety because the lips of the person drinking are... the guy hasn't brushed his teeth. But the front of the tea bowl isn't anxious at all because the front knows you're not drinking at that point. The front of the tea bowl is quite relaxed. And the kanji, the character at the bottom of the tea bowl is quite relaxed because it's under the tea. So when you perceive yourself that way, only one or two parts of you may be anxious. And it doesn't spread throughout the fabric. So the point of this Dharma way of perceiving, is to get out of thinking and feeling in generalizations, including the biggest generalization of all, which is self.

[70:47]

I think that's enough for today.

[70:48]

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