Now, two or three people told me it was too much history. Some of you don't think so. It was very interesting. It was, okay. Well, for me, to try to understand what we're doing, I find I need to be aware of the historical circumstances which support what we're doing. And what I find bizarre, these strange things like D.T. Suzuki rescuing Dr. Konsei, etc., And most of this has never been written. It's just you have to know it from somebody who's been in the middle of it.

[01:03]

Yeah. And I think it's important also to realize the degree to which not just Western historical conditions, but Western lineages in poetry, philosophy, art, etc., sondern westliche Lehrlinien in der Dichtung, in der Kunst und so weiter. Music have led to what we're doing. I mean, I think you're not just practicing Buddhism, if you are, because of the influence of Suzuki Roshi or the Dalai Lama or somebody from Asia. You're also practicing because Western lineages have led us to the point where Buddhism makes sense.

[02:15]

And that's important because we can be wild and independent. But you're thinking in language. And when you're not thinking in language, you're thinking in larger modes of mind and body, which are supported by our culture, even if subliminally or something or other. So I should say something then about what I think at this point, unless you bring up something you want me to speak about. I should say something about what Zen Buddhism is.

[03:34]

Because perhaps the main point of what I said earlier was that Suzuki Roshi came to America. And what he found is those who wanted to practice were men, women, and people, persons of all age. he found in effect that the ideal of Mahayana Buddhism was possible in the West.

[04:44]

And he found that so many of the people who stayed the course, so to speak, were couples. And why did couples stay the course? Now, it isn't always the case, but often it's been that it helps people create stable, long-lasting relationships to mutually practice. What's the result of that? That you begin to have a lay Sangha. The Sangha almost by definition is monastic in Asia. Okay, a lay Sangha.

[05:49]

And that's just what we have here in Europe, is a lay Sangha. And a lay Sangha results in a different kind of relationship for people. Sangha as a... One of the ways you integrate your life with others is where we're doing is something new in the West. Okay, so then the next step is you need a practice that lay people can do. Okay, now there's lots of aspects of this that we can talk about.

[06:57]

Because some aspects of practice can be very challenging to your usual way of viewing the world. So some of those have to be modulated so they're not Too disturbing. Because, I mean, sometimes I call Buddhism a large population urban shamanism. Because it's not shamanism based on particular location and local plants and things like that. But it's a shamanism, I'm just using the word shamanism. It's a shamanism rooted in a particular way of, in meditation. In a particular way to be mindful in the world.

[08:18]

Now, how do you integrate that with your life as a businessman or a doctor or a professor or a scientist or something? Okay, now I think many people, people who continue to practice, find out that daily practice or several times a week practice, sitting practice, actually makes a difference in how they do their lives. The day just feels a little better if you've sat that day. And perhaps you find also that when you make decisions, when you have to make decisions, come to intentions.

[09:33]

Meditation practice makes that more deeply rooted in your life. And more fully arises from all aspects of your life. Yes. How would you describe a shamanic experience, in a way, when you say Buddhism is a... And I feel, I can feel what you want to say, but it would be helpful for me if you clarified that a little more. Why don't you tell me, Deutsch bitte, you know how to speak. My old best translator, I mean my young former best translator. That's a slip, I'm sorry.

[10:35]

If you have a feeling for what I want to say, what do you feel? If you have a feeling for what I want to say, then what do you feel there? Yeah, that the practice experience enters a territory I don't have a map for and that it also is outside my thinking. And that way it's also sometimes a little scary or mushy In the sense that I don't want to be esoteric.

[11:48]

That's not bad. Thanks for answering your question. An urban yogi. Yes? I would like to know if there is a relationship between growing intuition and practice. I would like to know if you, Roshi, see a relationship between growing intention and... Intuition. Intuition and practice. What do you mean by growing intention? Supporting intent... Intuition. What do you mean by growing? Increasing. Yeah, I would say simply that if you're an adept practitioner, Ich würde einfach sagen, dass wenn du ein fortgeschrittener Praktizierender bist, dann wird alles Denken intuitives Denken. It's not like it pops out. It's just that the surface is gone and you think intuitively from the body.

[13:12]

Es ist nicht so, dass es hervorspringt, sondern es ist einfach so, dass die Oberfläche weg ist und dass du immer intuitiv aus dem Körper denkst. and of course that requires you a certain kind of trust in how we exist that's wider than consciousness And that sense of a trust in a wider sense of the world. Yeah, I would say, we could say maybe the word we could use for it is shamanic. And I'm using the word shamanic partly because I don't want to explain. Because I want to stick some word in this thing that we'll deal with slowly. Weil ich einfach ein Wort in diese Sache, mit der wir uns befassen werden, langsam das Wort da anhaften möchte.

[14:26]

Aber ich habe diese Zeitschrift runtergebracht. Weil als ich heute Morgen in der Pause oben war, da hatte ich das einfach zufällig auf meinem Tisch und ich habe das noch nicht angeschaut. And I like gardens and stuff and I wanted to show some of these pictures to Otmar. So I just opened it and I was looking at it and then I read. Excuse me. This is a garden here. You can't really see it, but... And actually, you don't have to look at it, just the feel.

[15:40]

In a house in Stuttgart. This is a garden in a house in Stuttgart. And it's a huge garden around a modern house. And it has these stones as the path quarried in Germany. And it's done by a garden designer who's a Japanese monk. And there is his picture. Okay. Looks like a nice guy. Yeah. And so he says here, der sagt hier jedenfalls, er und der Schreiber dieses Artikels, der Autor, seit ältesten Zeiten,

[16:57]

Japanese have had a deep love for nature and have idealized a return to nature. Now, that's a cultural form of Buddhism. And it's schmaltzy. And it's not really true. Okay. But it's the way the culture understands Buddhism. That's not bad. Nothing wrong with it. The advent of Zen Buddhism also led the Japanese perspective on nature to evolve even further. To evolve even further. Zen attempts to see Buddha in the natural world. Well, a little more schmaltz here.

[18:09]

And to understand unchanging truth It's sort of true, but how is it true for you? I can't inoculate you with the Japanese love of nature. And anyway, the Japanese relationship to nature is actually pretty exploitive. So, above all else, Zen is about treating nature with respect.

[19:13]

That's true enough. The philosophy in which the Japanese garden is based. Yeah. And the Japanese garden is... where we become aware that we human beings belong to nature. Buddha nature said to dwell in every natural object. Anyway. So a designer does not create a garden. A Buddha doesn't dwell in every natural object. He sits on a stone out here. I mean, a statue doesn't. But my question is, how is this sort of true and it's rooted in practice?

[20:14]

We have to understand the source of this in practice. If we're going to practice with a shamanic sense of the world in which we are interrelated, But this sort of everyday cultural kind of stuff, description of it doesn't help. So a designer does not create a garden. but rather discovers the Buddha nature of the elements in a garden and expresses them in his design. Now, this is related to how we experience appearance as a Dharma. So, you know, we can understand where this is coming from.

[21:44]

So before commencing work each day, Masuno, that's the priest, Masuno, always takes a moment to calm his breathing and meditate. Is that all you're meditating? Just a moment. I can't do that. And in this way he becomes one with the garden elements. Yeah. And it goes on. They'll feel the connections and blah, blah, blah. But I am pretty sure it's true that he probably does meditate every morning.

[22:55]

And out of his experience meditating, It appears to him where to put a stone, where to make the path, and so forth. So he's letting meditation design the garden. We can say maybe he can say the garden designs itself or something. I want to read this. Just because here is this quite famous actually garden designer. Who, for him, his Zen practice is inseparable from his designing gardens, even in Stuttgart.

[24:14]

I'll say, okay, so here's a person, priest or layperson, I don't care. Because he happens to be a Zen practitioner, has discovered how to make decisions through meditation rather than usual thinking. Okay. Okay, so I think in Western Buddhism, we may be able to find a way as laypersons to integrate practice in our life. So our thinking is a flow of intuition. Mm-hmm. Okay, so I said that the conditions Sukhiroshi found for practice in the West had led to a much stronger emphasis on a lay sangha in the West than has been true in Asia.

[25:45]

I mean, you can talk about all of China. I think Chairman Mao said the whole, all of China is a sangha. Who said that? Chairman Mao. Yeah, but we know what kind of sangha that was. Yeah. So you can extrapolate it to everybody. But practically speaking, a lay sangha is something new. And it helps us develop a wider mind through others as well as through ourself. Now let me go back to this human space, a term I started using recently and I rather like.

[26:59]

We are born in a human space from a woman, from a man and a woman. a midwife and so forth. And immediately the human space, the parents generate the child, infant grows up in. And you have neighbors and school and so forth. And learning language, you're immediately in the human space That's in the language. I mean, it's an immensely complex human space with endless potential that infants can learn. Like magic. Yeah, it's... Dogen says the bird flies and never reaches the end of the sky.

[28:18]

Language is this human space that nobody, even Shakespeare, never reached the end of. And yet it can be learned by an infant. And as I said, we die in this human space. So what we are as human beings is inseparable from the human space, and I'm using that instead of saying a cultural space. Now, when Frank was sitting next to these two people he didn't know, and this is first Sashin, He found himself knowing these, he found himself in a human space he and the other two were creating.

[29:30]

Yeah, and not just the three of them. There was, I don't know how many people in the Sashin, but there were a number of people. And he was in a human space that Edo Shimano Roshi was creating. And Edo Shimano Roshi was creating a human space that to some extent, to a big extent, he inherited from his teacher. And from a lineage of teachings. And Zen is called mind-to-mind transmission through a lineage. So the three of them, Frank and his two fellow sitters, created a human space in which Frank had the experience of knowing these two people outside of usual ways of social commerce and language.

[30:47]

Did you say social karmas? Commerce. Okay. Yeah. And yet that human space the three of them created Somehow outside of language. Was supported by the whole articulation of the Sashin. And Ada Roshi, if we want to be taken... mind and transmitted mind. So our mind is also others' minds. Just in meditation or whenever you want, meditation is a good time to do it.

[32:18]

Take an inventory of your thoughts and observations and feelings. And notice what a large percentage of them you immediately think of someone else. You're integrating it, but it came from someone else. Something you read or something somebody said or what your father always told you. Joe Biden in the debate the other day with that woman, Nene Palin, I think. He kept referring to his father.

[33:31]

And his father said, and it was clear, well, you know, these things are largely prepared, but clear that he felt it. His father would say, champ, if you fall down, you always get up. And it was clear that he had the feeling, I mean, of course these things are always prepared, but he had the feeling that his father was a kind of, so this kind of winner, who always stands up when they fall down. And this word champ, so I have already translated it as winner, this is the short word for champion. So it seems like some of the key moments in this man's life were, you're a champ, you can do it. So our mind has arisen within this human space, largely created by others. Yeah, and usually we form a human space and then we try to turn it into a career.

[34:42]

But often, unless you have the luck and the skill of good friendships and intimacy, Your human space as mind gets kind of stale. That's not a flow of insights, intuition and so forth. So part of the skill of Sangha is opening up this human space, mind as a human space with others. And this human space as mind flows into us from others and out from us with others.

[35:51]

And part of Sangha is finding out how to do that It's sometimes the hardest to do that with your spouse. Although the connection between two people usually started with this flow, but then it's very hard to keep it alive. How do you keep this flow of being in love alive? And it's not just being in love with another person. But the experience of mind we feel when we have this resonance with another person. That's a capacity of us as human beings.

[37:02]

And we can begin to taste it in practicing with others. And in a sangha we can with some kind of courage and trust, begin to open ourselves into it. So now we're talking about a mind larger than our own. And not just because it's Not waking mind or not just dreaming mind. But a mind that, first of all, overlaps our three birth minds. sondern ein Geist, der zunächst mal unsere drei Geisteszustände, mit denen wir geboren wurden, überlappt.

[38:17]

Und der dann irgendwie ein Geist wird, der ein gemeinsamer Geist mit anderem ist. And we may find ourselves occasionally in unbelievable sync with another person or other people. And we find it extraordinarily refreshing and confirming. Even if we only taste it in bits, the bits are seeds which develop in our practice, not just with those we practice with, but with every person we meet.

[39:26]

And the way this is developing in the West outside of monastic resonance is an aspect of new Buddhism in the West. Okay. And it, you know, it takes a certain kind of trust and courage because you have to be willing to notice subtle things and that's part of mindfulness practice to not just gloss over subtle differences and those subtle differences hidden between obvious cultural stuff

[40:44]

can open up our habits of mind. Okay, so if we're going to practice in the contemporary lay sangha and with every circumstance, every person we meet, We need to have a teaching which allows the lay person to do this. So that's what we should talk about if we want to tomorrow. Okay. Let's sit for a moment. Let's take a seat. Rilke is a poet, a western poet, a German poet, who from a western lineage anticipates some of what we're doing as practitioners.

[43:17]

And although meditation practice may not be necessary in order to practice, I want us to at least have a taste of it. So we can taste of it, feel of it. so that we can taste or feel it.

[44:17]

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