And I'm sorry to in a way to be disturbing you again with another lecture so soon. Because really the more you're in practice period the less you want lectures or any disturbance or something like that. So we have lectures on some kind of regular period so you can kind of Inoculate yourself before it's time for lecture. And my job then is to try to give lectures which disturb you as little as possible. And I presume that's what Dan and Catherine were doing while I was gone. Because the backbone of a practice, but the backbone of a practice period, especially, is you're working on a question.

[01:01]

A question, really, the first four noble truths is a question. And you have to deal with it as a question. Why is there suffering? What is suffering? The Christians have a harder question, I think, because they have to ask themselves, why is there suffering if there's a God who might be able to do something about it? I think that's actually a tougher question. We don't have anybody who's going to do anything about it except you or us. You as a practitioner, you as a Buddha, you as the Sangha. So, if your practice isn't animated by some kind of question like this, it's hard to practice for very long. You lose it. It's interesting for a while.

[02:05]

First few months, often, first year or two, even exciting things happen sometimes, insights and things. But at some point, it gets dead. And the whole of the Eightfold Path is really a question, you know, because you have to ask yourself if it's true. Is there an end to suffering? What is suffering? Is there an end to suffering? Is suffering really caused? And if it's caused, what are the causes? And can I do something about the causes? What are the causes in myself? All questions revolve around something like this.

[03:07]

I mean, if we look at Dogen, we're reading Sammayo, Sammayer, Genjokon, or something like that. Yeah, we say, Dogen recommends, insists on Zaza. So, yeah, Dogen's practice emphasizes Zazen. You can ask why. But anyway, Dogen's practice emphasized Zazen. But more than Zazen, he had a question. And that question burned in him, functioned in him, went up and down his backbone. And his question was, you know, our question too. Why do we practice? Why should I practice? His question had some teeth in it or bite to it, which is, why should I practice if we're already enlightened?

[04:10]

It's the same question, though. Why should we practice? But his had a real kind of twist that got hold of him. Is it true we're already enlightened? What does that mean? I mean, these are not statements of fact. We're already enlightened. This is a question that you have to resolve. Is it true? If you can't face, look at, enter into your practice through questions, you're out of your practices. It dries up. Somehow, I don't know why it is, but a question... opens the flow of the world into you. Dogen, before anything, he had this question. In the time of his mother's death, why should we practice? Should I practice? Why should I, if the teaching is we're already enlightened?

[05:17]

Anyway, you need to put teeth or a bite into your question, deepening your question. But again, practice period is when you really have a question, you really want to settle in on it. Like a dog gets hold of something, you get a hold of it, and you almost don't want... The reason you come to practice period is you don't want the disturbance of ordinary circumstances. You want to be with people who are also have hold of a question, are alive through a question. You know, Sophia is alive and her energy is carrying her, but in the end she has to decide to stay alive. And if she doesn't decide to stay alive, her own life will dry up. So we're not alive automatically, we're alive When our life is answering the question, why should we be alive?

[06:22]

Because death is always right here. So when you have a question, the blood of a question, the blood of the world flows into you, through you. So you come to a place like this so you can, in as undistracted a way as possible, stay with the question. Then a lecture brings up more questions. You don't want another lecture. You want to stay with your question. Chance to do Zazen, chance to have a life which you don't have to worry too much about choices, decisions. Something like that.

[07:25]

Exactly like that. Some of us are here because, I mean, sometimes anyway, it's the case that some people come to Crest Town because they think it's part of the Dharma Sangha program and they ought to do it once or something like that. Yeah, that's okay, but it's not going to be a very satisfactory practice period You've got to come not because it's part of the dharmasanga program or scheme of things. You've got to come because it's part of your program. Your scheme of things. Otherwise it's just a duty you kind of do. Now there was a... At the end of the... I did this pre-day, which actually worked quite well, and then a seminar. And then... the practice week. And about 30 people, I guess, stayed through the pre-day and the practice seminar and the practice week.

[08:33]

That was quite good. We had a kind of flow of understanding that went through the whole week. And it's actually interesting. If there's a few people in a lecture, seminar, who find the Dharma credible, it opens up the new people to find it credible. If most of the people are new, what is this about, you know? I mean, it just doesn't take at first. And they feel other people kind of with the same reaction. And basically there's a kind of shutdown that occurs. But they feel enough people around them who they can feel and feel these people's bodies, minds are engaged with. Oh yes, this is possible. This is a territory I'm familiar with. Suddenly the new people discover

[09:34]

Oh yeah, I can feel that. That's a territory I'm familiar with. I don't notice it much. So that's really the pre-day in the seminar, in the practice week together, worked out that we could get more and more sense of the credibility and the potentiality and the real possibility of practice. But at the end of this practice week, one of the, you know, one of the people who's been practicing the Dharma Sangha for a lot of years, young woman, and she's very intelligent and well-educated and all those things, you know. And yet she came to me at the end and she said, you know, sometimes I get so discouraged after these seminars and after this one too, you know, on Dogen, I think I'm not intelligent enough to understand Dogen

[10:37]

It hurts me to hear that. It makes me feel kind of hurt and sad. Yeah, because I can understand. But then she proceeded to say, but you know, every time there's certain phrases that make sense to me or catch me, and I find myself, and they come up later, etc., and I find if I... look at look at the text through a particular sentence yet then it starts to make sense to me and works with me and I said well I mean why are you saying you're not intelligent enough because you just told now you're telling me how you make it work and in fact she basically knew how to make the text work but one side of her knew and was doing it another side was you know like am I intelligent enough I read this thing and I can't get an entry and But I'm so used to doing this Zen stuff, if I read something and I feel an entry right away, I say, this isn't interesting enough.

[11:49]

I like it when I can't feel an entry. And believe it or not, in all these years, every time I go back to a koan, I'm like, why am I intelligent enough for this stuff? I read some koan. Dan gives me another koan. Oh, gosh. Dan, what are you doing to me? But you just can't read it in the usual way. Really, you have to learn how to read differently. It's a little bit like a mandala. You know, the New Age has picked up on all this mandala stuff. You know, these kind of like... Let's all go practice shamanism. And they make a mandala and blah, blah, blah. And in Tibetan Buddhism you make a mandala. And you can enter a mandala from various points and sometimes you throw something into the circle of the mandala and where it lands is where you start to work.

[12:55]

Well actually a text like Dogen is a kind of mandala. And you have to enter where you first feel some kind of connection. What's this? And you've got to learn to read that way. Again, you have to remember, these are times when people didn't have books. You only had one book, you had to write it or use it in a way that over and over again you could come back to it. Like a good painting. Hotel room paintings, you look at them... They stick you in the same hotel room with the same painting twice. You think, dress director, look at this thing over the bed. But a simple line drawing of Matisse or something like that, you can look at every day and you think, what is it?

[13:57]

Why are some things you can come back to over and over again and you don't use them up? So Dogen's trying to write a text that you can't use up. Take so what you're gonna find the way down Enter the mandala of the text And it's good in this Zanmayo Zanmay to get a sense of the overall conception of the text and what questions is Dogen asking himself What question question or questions is behind the text? So what is the conceptual framework? It always helps to feel the... The conceptual framework arises out of the concept, the question being asked. What question is Dogen asking? He's asking a question we could be asking too. And the question is apparent throughout the Zanma Yo Zanma.

[15:02]

He was in Japan. 13th century. Christian way of counting, at least. Western way of counting. He goes to China. Comes back to Japan. Buddhism's very new. There's been various kinds of Buddhism. Zen is virtually completely new. There have been Zen strains, but it really came alive in Dogen's era. What's he emphasizing? What does Dogen bring? And there's a lot of dissatisfaction, we can assume, with the Buddhism, where he'd be practicing the Buddhism that's there. Why is he not practicing the Buddhism that's already there? We've been around for 400 years.

[16:10]

Well, The big question is, India is far away. Buddha's time is far away. What's the linkage? The linkage is sutras. But the linkage of the sutras is what all the other schools have. What does Dogen say here? He says, to be in the Buddha ancestors' room transcends any intimacy or depth of the teaching. So much for the sutras. I'm saying that through the teaching you're always outside, so

[17:16]

Teaching the sutras are not a good connection to the Buddha 1,000, 2,000, 1,500 years earlier, 1,700 years earlier or something. Okay, so that's one of the questions he's trying to deal with. What is the connection between Buddha and us here in Japan? What's the connection between Buddha and us here in the United States, in Germany, Europe? This is a question that can animate your practice. Take hold of your practice. If you actually think, is it possible? You have to, like, imagine it's possible. Is it possible for you? Is it possible for our society? Some kind of, like a rope, many various strands of similar questions come together to be the rope or blood or something like that in you.

[18:30]

What did we do? India's far away. Japan's pretty far away. China's far away. Buddha's time is really far away. And Dogen talks about jumping over demons and outsiders, leaping over demons and outsiders. Well, outsiders are non-believers, something like that. Demons, well, there was a whole thing. I mean, you know, in that culture, we're sort of very rational and so forth. but in the cultures previous to it, even a few decades ago, and still there's a lot of it. I mean, as I said, I think at one time, you had to pacify the mountain. You had to pacify the local spirits. You had to pacify the earlier religions, the pre-Buddhist religions. Although Buddhism is so sophisticated, the so-called pre-Buddhist religions were mostly created by Buddhists. They had very simple things, which became complex in trying to compete with Buddhism.

[19:44]

They took on Buddhist ideas. I think it's true of Shinto, it's true of Bon in Tibet. In effect, Buddhism created these so-called indigenous religions. It was a function of the way Buddhism came into this society, a new society. And he says, his teacher says, no incense burning. or chanting the sutras or, what do you say, a reverence, a devotion or something like that. So this is a strong position. And it's a position, if you know something about the history of Chinese Buddhism and earlier pre-Dogan Buddhism, is that Buddhism was very involved in a kind of, what you'd have to say, institutionalized superstition.

[20:57]

beliefs and gods and demons and spirits and so forth, and trying to help the state. One of the big things was when a new religion came into Tibet or Japan was, okay, you support us, we'll support the state. We'll make the state strong. Because Buddhism in Tibet and Japan was very associated with the creation of the sense of Japanese identity and the and the state, the idea of some kind of state, what we'd call a state today. So Dogen's trying to separate himself actually from all of that, and say, okay, we can't depend on the sutras. Japan and China are far away. I mean China and India Buddha's time is all far away, so he says, you could enter directly through Zaza.

[22:03]

So then that gives us a question. Can we enter directly through Zaza? Is whatever the Buddha experienced, is it really not in the sutras, not in... It's in our own practice. I can say that, but for you it's a question. Is it true? Dogen now tries then to make the mandala more complex. I mean, in other words, he basically, the conceptual framework of samaya-samaya asks the question, how do we practice when Buddha, time, and the Buddha's location so far away. So then the question is, what do we do?

[23:07]

So then Dogen tries to convince us that Zazen is the Buddha ancestor's room. Can Zazen be just an ascender? Be such a thing? What kind of zazen do we have to do that it somehow touches, tastes of the Buddha ancestor world? How do we make practice our life? Do we want to make practice our life? How could practice be part of our life?

[24:13]

What is practice? So being faced with, you know, as I said this morning, thank you so much for the birthday parties. As I said this morning, there were a lot of new people in the group. And yet I'm convinced the dharmasangha at present and somehow we dharmasangha somehow by some kind of working together in both places here in Europe and working through seminars and so forth, sesshins, enough people who've come to enough things that there's a kind of Sangha body that's developed. A kind of Dharma credibility is developed.

[25:18]

Dharma is credible. People actually feel it works. Works for them. In many ways, anyway. And... Yeah. Yeah. So I feel that where the Dharma Sangha is now is we're ready to perform Dharma surgery. But the new people, they're not there. They don't know how to perform Dharma surgery. And I mean, who knows what I mean by Dharma surgery? I ought to explain. Maybe you know. So then I thought, geez, how do I make these... newer people have a feeling for. The overall context. So I tried to think of some stages, basic stages of practice. So people could have a feeling for practice and what's... But you know, then some people said stages of practice, you always tell us to practice uncorrected mind and now you're telling us to practice stages.

[26:30]

Well, I'm not exactly saying practice stages. It's more like if you Say we have a wilderness area here, or I imagine a primordial forest. And I spend several weeks, or you spend several weeks, hiking through this primordial forest where there's no paths. Yeah, and then later, someone else is going in. Well, you can't tell them what to expect because there's no paths. But you can give them some hints. You can say, you know, first just get used to walking. You have to keep walking through brush. There's no paths. You've got to get a feel of how to walk. Then you've got to kind of begin to try to find a way to get through the mountain and through the undergrowth. So after a while you can begin to feel the, be aware of the animals, the paths of the animals.

[27:36]

Maybe the paths of the birds or the sense of the birds is silent or when they're silent and they're noisy. Yeah, maybe you begin to feel the kind of path ahead talks to you. So you could say something like this to somebody and they'd say, oh, yeah, there's kind of stages in getting used to how to be in a place where there's no stages. I'm sort of speaking in that way. And so, I mean, I just thought maybe it'd be useful for you to, for me again, to just say basically what I said. First of all, I think for any practitioner, is you get used to practicing. Mindfulness of your breath, mindfulness of your actions. You know, just that's enough. And you get used to try to sit.

[28:41]

Three times a week, five, seven times a week, something like that. And you try to bring some teaching into your life. Yeah, it could be like Dogen says, treat everything like it was your own eyesight. You know, they say that gold in the hand is beautiful, in your eye it's a problem. Gold dust. So somehow if you treat an object as if you were touching your eye itself, you know, that's a kind of helpful, I think, helpful way for a teaching to enter, or the three minds of daily consciousness, something like that. So initially you practice mindfulness of your breath and activity, you try to sit sometimes, some regular way, and then you bring some teaching into practice.

[29:48]

And I think it's also useful to have a general familiarity with the Eightfold Path, which is the fourth of the Four Noble Truths. You have a general familiarity of how your own life overlaps with the Eightfold Path. So I think that's quite a bit. And then, if possible, you add practicing with a sangha, practicing with a few other people when you can, and you add, if possible, practicing with a teacher when you can. So I think I would call that the first stage. The first stage is to try to develop a practice of mindfulness, develop a zazen practice, bring some teachings into your activity, and usually just one. Work with one at a time. and get a sense of the Eightfold Path.

[30:57]

This is very basic. And then, as I say, practice sometimes with a sangha and sometimes with a teacher, if you can. Now, what I would call the second stage is developing a background mind, what I usually call a background mind. So you begin to have some sense of a mind that's present under your activity or within your activity, that's undisturbed by your activity. And the koan which most obviously presents this as a practice is, you know, Dao and Don't you know there is one who is not busy? Now, in a way we could say all practice that goes beyond well-being enters the territory of non-being.

[32:10]

Beyond... How do you say it? It's kind of hard to talk about non-being, but let's say it. You need to develop a background mind. A mind that's present and more and more imperturbable. A kind of detached mind that's also always completely engaged in the present. So this development of a background mind, which arises through the First, mostly through the practice of satsang, through the practice of mindfulness. Because mindfulness itself, when you say, I'm observing, you know, to observe, to not invite your thought to tea, So it means there's a mind that's not your thoughts.

[33:15]

You don't have to invite your thoughts to tea. There's a mind bigger than thoughts. So that mind that's bigger than thoughts is being developed. Then we can call it a fourth mind, as you know. Not waking, dreaming, non-dreaming, deep sleep. Or zazen mind that surfaces into our daily life, something like that. So this development and stabilizing background mind, I'd say, is the most important aspect of the second stage of practice. And until that's stabilized, you can't do any of the more developed practices. And you now also can bring teachings much more clearly. We can bring the five skandhas and so forth.

[34:17]

The basic things. The skandhas, the jnanas, the four foundations of mindfulness all begin to really work when you've developed a background mind. And at any point your practice can be, any stage, all stage, your practice can be characterized by following the precepts, feeling the precepts, the presence of the precepts, and keeping yourself on an edge, existential edge, something, like with phrases like, not knowing is nearest. or I'm always close to this, or just now is enough. Something that is just beyond the edge of conscious formulations.

[35:19]

And that, with the practice of the precepts, can be present in any stage of practice. And you want to begin to observe your moods. So you're just daily moods in the day. You can feel your moods appear. You can feel the structure of your own mind and thinking. You can see that when something's disturbing you, you can see the kind of view that allows that to disturb you. If something disturbs you, but that can't disturb you unless other views permit the disturbance. So the second stage is you begin to have the ability to work with your moods, just like you can notice the transition between waking and sleeping or sleeping and...

[36:22]

sleeping and waking and waking and sleeping, you can begin to feel the transitions from one mood to the other. So now you have enough mindfulness practice and you've got enough of a stabilized background mind, you can begin to study the structure of your own consciousness. This is what I would call the second stage. The third stage is to work more directly. We can say mostly practice. If you do a sesshin, for example, it widens your conventional life. It brings onto the stage of the present. You know, when you're busy and you're in your daily life and normal circumstances, you're your sense of your conventional life is, yeah, usually pretty narrow.

[37:26]

Somehow if we do sashina, practice period, practice week even, somehow aspects of stuff comes up. Often it disturbs us. Yeah, and it's your sense of a conventional life is wider. Why do I call it a conventional life? Because it's still governed by a sense of me-ness, of I-ness. I am the observer that organizes what you're seeing is still a sense of me. Now, to get behind that sense of me, some Dharma surgery is required. to get from the stage of the present, even the wider stage of the present, our wider conventional life, the back of the stage is another curtain that covers the room of the Buddha ancestors.

[38:38]

The Dharma curtain that we can open through practice as well. Okay. Thank you very much.

[38:59]

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