Well, Graham is still alive. Graham is still alive. Doctors can't believe it because he has organ failure and sepsis. That's infection. And they brought him from the hospice into the emergency room. But this morning, San Francisco's morning, he was still alive. He's slightly younger than me, I don't remember. He's slightly younger than me, I don't know, six months or a year, I don't remember. But his, all the main points in his, not all, but many of the main points in his life, his marriages, children, etc., I've been part of.

[01:11]

All his... He's an extraordinary person, but his life has been pretty much, more than pretty much a tragedy. Er ist ein außergewöhnlicher Mensch, aber sein Leben ist so ziemlich oder mehr als nur so ziemlich eine Tragödie. Yeah, mostly because of alcohol. Größtenteils wegen dem Alkohol. But in any case, he's still alive, he's got this big spirit. Er ist jedenfalls noch am Leben und er hat diesen großartigen spirit. Now I've been, yeah... Anyway, he got the email I presume I read to you last night.

[02:12]

And because I have to stay in contact, some contact with Crestone while I'm here, I checked my emails once and that's how I knew. David Chadrick and his daughter both emailed me to do something. I prefer not to, but once a day, every two days I do. All these years, I've been, since then, when we first met, I've been trying to reconceptualize East Asian practice in terms that we can practice the terms.

[03:29]

And yesterday I tried out successional repetition. That's what I started with. And then I realized the word repetition is too dead. So I changed it to receptivity. And then I changed it to reciprocal reciprocity. Because reciprocal means backwards and forwards, like tatagata means coming and going. So since Nicole had some trouble translating, figuring out how to translate that yesterday, I thought she might say something about the problem.

[04:39]

And because Nicole had difficulties translating yesterday, I thought she might say something about these difficulties. Anything to say? Yes. On the one hand, I find it difficult to translate it in terms of language, because it's very grammatical, because I can't think of anything with which we can turn a sequence into an adjective. So it's a repetition in which there is a sequence. But I also found it difficult because I couldn't start with it. So in practice, of course, I repeat the exercises that I intend to do. It's clear, but what's the consequence? And I dealt with it yesterday and now I think that it's a useful concept in practice.

[05:49]

And I can maybe say one or two things about that. If I bring attention to the breath and repeat it over and over again, then something changes. Then after half an hour it feels different than at the very beginning of the Sausage period. Or on the third day it feels different than on the first day. And this change in the repetition informs my practice. And so the repetition itself changes. And because the change in the repetition informs my practice and then the repetition, the way it repeats, develops, that's why I can now understand that it makes sense to talk about the fact that there is a sequence. So a repetition that develops, so that the repetition does not always run in circles, but that the repetition itself unfolds a path.

[06:55]

So that's the sequence. And maybe the last thing that I found very exciting to research is that in this repetition with sequence, I don't know what the next step is, but through a receptivity for the changes in the repetition and through this really one-sided connection, contact with the breath or with whatever I practice, durch diese Empfänglichkeit, dass ich da den nächsten Schritt jeweils antizipieren kann. Und dann hat es eine Abfolge. I have a whole new idea what to do. I figure out a difficult term to translate and then I let you give the lesson. This is a new solution for me. Yeah. Yeah. Well, what I'm trying to do, and I for a long time didn't know I was trying to do it, but I'm trying to find ways to reconceptualize what follows from the distinction between entity and activity.

[08:31]

We really tend to think everything's pretty much the same. We human beings, we can reproduce with other people from other countries and races and so forth. But culturally, I'm startled to see how it looks so similar, but it's actually quite different. And when I was in Japan in November, you know, Kyoto's changed a lot, etc. But what didn't surprise me, but also amazed and confirmed my views, is the attentional bandwidth of East Asian people, Japanese for sure, is much wider than ours.

[10:00]

In other words, if there's a situation where there's a hundred things to be noticed, I think we Westerners will notice 20 or 30 of them. And a Japanese person will notice 200 of the 100 and all kinds of in-betweenness. And I don't think it's because they're smarter. They might be. Why not? Who cares?

[11:05]

But I think it's if you grow up in a culture, as I want to give some kind of explanation, if you grow up in a culture where everything is always assumed to be changing, indeterminate, unpredictable, You're just going to develop an attentional bandwidth. The muscle of attention and the attentional discrimination is going to be different. your attention will be different. The focus may not be different between the cultures, but what you're bringing into focus is from a wider bandwidth. And those distinctions we need to bring into our awareness of the teachings and practices.

[12:22]

And so much of what the teachings are is code, not description. It's code for, if you do this... follow through and see what happens. Yeah, it's code in the context of examples. Okay. Okay. Now... One of the things I've mentioned very often, and again, but in a somewhat different and more evolved context, when Tsukiroshi was first in Japan, was first in Japan, first in America,

[13:42]

What the Japanese do when they're first in America is they can't believe the pine cones in California are as big as American footballs. And they get one and send it back to Japan because the pine cones in Japan are about this big. Yeah. And so, you know, somebody asked Suzuki Roshi, I've told you this often. But anyway, ask Suzuki Roshi, what do you notice most about being in America? And perhaps we thought he'd say the huge pine cones. But no, as you almost all know, he said that you do things with one hand. So this little statement of his became for me another one of these small enlightenment experiences.

[15:04]

And I'm bringing it up and calling it a small enlightenment experience. Again, get us more used to the fact that enlightenment, realisational experience, is part of our life, natural life. Yeah, and the difference for a practitioner the practitioner makes use of these small enlightenment experiences perhaps more effectively or thoroughly or fully than a person who doesn't practice.

[16:08]

It's like a musician might hear a succession of notes in classical music or a rock musician and see the possibilities of that succession of notes the way a non-musician would not. Or a painter might see Jasper Johns paintings of the American flag or targets and make use of them in a way non-painter wouldn't even see the possibilities of making use of them. Okay. So when he first said that, And basically I've been studying that remark ever since.

[17:37]

By the way, you know, we should actually get something under the Kesu bell, about six inches or ten inches, because for somebody of Holger's height, the bell's way down here. And you should be able to feel the bell's presence in your space. So we need it to be higher. You're supposed to hit it from below, and Gural hits it from above like this. No, I'm just kidding. From behind. So I've been exploring this comment of Suzuki Roshi for years now.

[18:45]

And I took it, you know, here's this Japanese man who's come to America and somebody asks him, what's the difference? And what does he say? We do things with one hand. It could have been just a passing remark, but no, it was the statement he made. So I took that, okay, he's revealed this to me. And I'm going to find out what it means from inside him if I can. Because that's the whole point of being the disciple of somebody. And that's also the point.

[19:48]

That's what it's all about when you're a student. Again, to run through it. If I hand you this this way. Aren't you going to take it? Yeah, okay. What I've done is I've passed this. And what I watched Sukhiroshi do is he would turn his body. And there's even rules for monks. You don't turn your head, you turn your body. If you turn your head, you're a thinking person. If you turn your body, you're an embodied person. And if I do this with my... But if I turn my body and what I saw in him is that what he does then, his whole body and that with two hands is enough, then he gives himself further.

[21:20]

So I understood it as an act of compassion. An act of accommodating equanimity. And though I didn't have the term then of successional reciprocity. Yeah, and I've seen this confirmed over and over and over and over and over again, living off and on in Japan for 35 years. Yeah. And a friend of mine made a... a film for American public, PBS, a film for a PBS in America.

[22:44]

Called something like the Colonel in Japan, meaning Kentucky Fried Chicken. Colonel, what's that again? The Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken. KFC. And they trained in this movie. He's just watching them open the first Kentucky Fried Chicken in Tokyo. And these are ordinary folks who think Zen is something for... for snowy mountains and no heat. But they definitely teach these employees okay, you're picking up the chicken and the coffee or whatever.

[24:00]

You do it with two hands and you turn your whole body and face them and you don't hand them the stuff until their body is lined up with yours. I And if you couldn't pick up the coffee at the same time or the Coca-Cola or something, you don't just reach back and get it and pass it. You turn your whole body again. Pick up the Coca-Cola and bring it to the person. Now maybe you're going to all say, if this is Buddhism, I'm out of here. I don't want it to be this complicated.

[25:08]

So kompliziert will ich das nicht. Aber es ist nicht kompliziert, es ist nur anders. Und wenn du diesen Unterschied nicht kapierst, dann hast du auch keinen Zugang zu vielen der Lehren, weil du dann den Code oder die Schlüssel darin nicht begreifst. Okay, so for many years I've treated this as, and practice it myself, of feeling I'm passing myself using the excuse of the salt or the stick. But I realized, you know, fairly recently, that means in the last half decade, for me that's recent, But really, yes, it is an act of compassion, an accommodation, equanimity, acceptance.

[26:18]

But it's more deeply and fundamentally related He was passing the activity to the person, not using... He was passing... It was a compassionate act, but it was a larger thing of he feels himself as a field of activity, and he's bringing that field of activity to the other person. And more subtly, we could say space is the condition of activity. And as I say to you very often, in Buddhist view and the view of contemporary science, there is no universal time and space.

[27:56]

As I often say to you, in the Buddhist view or the view of yogic cultures, space and time are not universal. We can re-conceptualize or newly conceptualize time as positioning. Yeah, or successional reciprocity. A forest is an active thing, becoming a forest all the time. It's not just a bunch of separate trees. So if space is not a container, is not void or dead, Objects live through space and space lives through objects and relationships and proportion.

[29:10]

In any case, this is the conception of a yogic culture. Okay, so in a sense you could say I'm passing the space which is the condition of this activity to Nicole or Otmar or whomever. Okay, so now You see it, I see it, when somebody passes me incense. If they think they're passing me a stick of incense, I get the stick of incense. Oh, okay. But if an adept practitioner or a Japanese monk of moderate experience were passing me the incense, I mean, I always start saying these things and I think,

[30:29]

I must sound like I'm crazy and I'd better stop. But I'm doing my best to describe my actual experience and observation. So the incense stick is a chance and it's smoking and it's lit. It's like a lamp that you describe from outside is not the same as the lamp which is lit. So the incense stick itself is an activity. It's burning. So the jisha or anja or whoever it is, bringing you the stick of incense, they're bringing you space.

[31:42]

And so they're bringing you, it's almost like space, if you were under water, you could understand it better. You could feel the water coming along with the stick. And, you know, our culture is playing around with reconceptualization. There's two movies I almost never can see movies. But I read about them, and there's two movies out. One is where everybody is, all the humans are, some of the humans are only two inches tall or something. Yeah, but from what I've read, it's a rather pedestrian reconceptualization based on our size. But there's another movie where some woman falls in love with a water creature.

[32:55]

It's not a human. I don't even know what it's about, but it sounds more interesting. How do you fall in love with an undefined water creature? Well, this I'm curious about. Maybe it's easier than falling in love with an over-defined person of the opposite sex. Yeah, okay. Or the same sex nowadays. It's permissible. Officially legal. At least in America. Okay. So if these filaments of space, there's something feeling like that, are gathered, are organized by the stick of incense.

[34:14]

then how do you offer this space to another person? And I think the more effective reconceptualization or newly conceptualized new conceptualization is to think of it as passing space is more effective, accessible than passing, more effective than passing activity. As a conception. Now, a little footnote. Many of you will know that Buddhism is always talking about all schools of Buddhism about non-conceptualization, etc., etc., but non-conceptualization is a concept.

[35:27]

And as a little footnote, you may know that many Buddhist schools always speak of not having concepts. But no concept is also a concept. Anyway, that would be another five or six day shows. So let's just stay with using some concepts here. And when I have this, the hidden concept is it's an entity. The more fruitful concept is it's an activity. And it represents the spine. And it has characters written kanji written here and different kanji written here. And it has a hole in it. And it keeps the natural grain.

[36:28]

And it was actually based on a back scratcher for itchy people who didn't bathe often. And I can move this anyway, but this keeps returning to the vertical with gravity. So the tassel looks like what changes but in fact the tassel is what always remains the same. It always will, with gravity, just be vertical. So the conception of this is, this changes, but this doesn't change. And this is the five colors, and that's another... And then who gave it to me and all that stuff.

[37:47]

I think that we'll have to cancel lunch. I haven't even got started yet. And this is supposed to be maybe the first ten minutes. Because I want to follow up on yesterday. But life is unpredictable. Okay, so you're gathering the filaments of space with the stick. And where do the filaments of space most fully pass to the other person? Through the verticality which echoes the spine. So for a practitioner you pass the stick of incense as straight as possible and it's put in straight as possible although sometimes it's not going to be straight and sometimes you put in crooked as a form of compassion because the jishas always get it crooked

[39:12]

And the same is true of our bow. You put your hands together. Even if you put them together here, It's evolved through putting them together here. And you feel a little spongy space between your hands like healers do. And you're bringing it up through your front and awakening the chakras as you're doing it. And this is the distinction between the physical posture and the physiological posture. So you're bringing it up

[40:13]

Through your own inner body, your chakras. And then usually you lift your elbows away from the body. And you enter a shareable space. And then you bow, disappear into that space ideally with the other person. So you're passing the space of your spine in effect to the other person. But they don't... At least in East Asian or Japanese Buddhism, they don't explain these things. They give you code for it. How your heel of your hands touch, if your thumbs tend to be that way, not this way, because energetically it's different.

[41:27]

And then you measure your body with your body, so your hands are about the width of your fist from your nose. And some people's gassho is in here. I think they miss their mother. Or they're sad or something. Okay, so this is a terrible space. You're creating space. And one last thing, and this is coded. The instructions when you bow, The basic instruction. You plunge into the bow, almost like you're diving into water.

[42:40]

You disappear. You have your elbows, if you can, if your body works, touch first. And your hands are flat. And you lift with your hands tending to be flat. You lift from the wrist. And you imagine a Buddha is standing on your hands. Okay, that's code for right now. I feel there's an air Buddha there when I bowed that's still there and is spread through the room. That's pure tantrism as the underlying teaching of Soto. So if I say to somebody, well, lift your hands as if the Buddha was there, they think, oh, okay, yeah.

[43:48]

But they don't get it that you actually imagine a Buddha. And the reason that stays there in a mandala shape, how would you spread? You make a mandala the way you fold it. It stays in a mandala because now it's still there and part of the lecture until I go and bow it out. And usually when I say to someone that you imagine a Buddha standing on your hands, they just think, ah yes, okay. But what most people don't understand is that the idea is always that the Buddha is still there and spreads throughout the room and is always there. Just like a mandala. And that's also the reason why the bow mat always stays in place and is built up like a mandala. The problem with my describing it and explaining it is you can decide to do it or not do it or think it's crazy or not crazy.

[44:58]

But if it's not explained to you, You know, it's like Zen is somebody, they give you a guitar and they don't tell you what it is when you're a kid and you figure out, what the heck is this thing I, this, you know, no teaching for the first year or two. Just this object you have. Zen is eher so, dass dir eine Gitarre gegeben wird und dir aber nicht gesagt wird, wie die funktioniert und wofür die gemacht ist oder so, sondern es im ersten Jahr überhaupt keine Lehre gibt, sondern du einfach, indem du dich damit beschäftigst, etwas darüber lernst. So if you discover it for yourself as you lift your hands and then you stand up into that imaginary Buddha, this is the third posture of the Buddha, the imaginal posture, which is maybe the most important. And I'll say why, maybe tomorrow.

[46:06]

Okay, now this all started because I wanted to talk about what Afmar told me this morning, that I suggested the Zendo be a little cooler. And he said people are complaining it's too cold. So, I know we're a lay group. And we're living in heated houses. And I don't expect you to start smashing bricks with your hand. And nobody is asking you to sit out in the snow and dry towels soaked in ice water. But this is sort of part of our practice. I don't know. In America, Fahrenheit and centigrade, I guess the normal temperature in Germany for rooms is about 21 degrees.

[47:14]

I think we keep the Zendo and Crestone about 15 and I remember when Sukershi would give lectures people would sometimes say the Zendo is too warm or too cold and Sukershi I would always sit in the front And he'd often hand me the koan and ask me to read it in English. So I would sit there in front of him. And he would say, I heard him in verse, but once he actually muttered, why don't they adjust their body heat? Now, some of us have, you know, problems with chill blades and medical problems, and, you know, we have to take care of our health. And adjusting your body heat is, you know, the whole culture is based around that.

[48:39]

If you asked a Japanese person when I lived in Japan, why the heck don't you heat your houses? They didn't when I lived in Kyoto. And there's snow outside. The winter has snow and so forth. They would say, is the house cold? Why should I heat the house? The house is, you know... It's the people who are cold. So they have little hibachis. You heat your fingers so you can still do things. And under the table they put another heater sometimes. And the monks, the more sissy monks... That's not a nice term. They have little things like big cigarette lighters, which have chemicals in them, and they slide them under their obi, and they produce heat.

[50:04]

But the Zendos in Japan, I don't know about Hokkaido, But in Kyoto there is no heat in any zendo. It's just the temperature it is. And you can't even close the doors. And the space is big and it's just... I asked Suzuki Roshi to teach me heat yoga. And his first instruction was, it has to be very cold. And then he taught me how to generate heat between my thumbs and spread it through my body and et cetera. And I learned and did it. And one of the signs of an adept practitioner is his or her hands and feet are always warm.

[51:08]

So when I hear a few degrees of temperature in his hand, what am I doing here? And these robes are based on sleeping bags. The reason the obi is around the bones of the hip is it doesn't close off the body and you generate heat in the thing and you fill the inside with heat. So anyway, we keep the zendo in Crestone at about 15. and sometimes it's a little lower, but you just learn to function in it.

[52:20]

And when I was the abbot at Tassajara, there was no heat at Tassajara. There were kerosene lanterns which helped and human bodies which helped. But basically, when I would leave Tassajara for some reason in the middle of a practice period, because of some reason, I would come out and my whole body would tingle from the heat in all these heated rooms. And the Japanese feel, and I think they're right, is you're actually healthier when you don't go from cold to hot, cold to hot spaces. So again, I know we're a lay group.

[53:30]

This isn't practice period. It's not 90 days. In practice period, I think we really should lower the heat in Zendo. But during a session, you're not used to it. Maybe we have to adjust to people's needs. But in Japan or China, the temperature of the zendo is not negotiable. The teacher decides. But in China or Japan, the temperature in the sendo is not negotiable. That is decided by the teacher. In all the years I was practicing Sukhya Roshi, we never had Zabutans. In all the years I was practicing Sukhya Roshi, we never had Zabutans. So I've made it a lot easier. And the question is, am I making it too easy?

[54:36]

Because the emphasis and, you know, we're very, we eat organic food and we take little tinctures and we take medicine. But basically the basic, you cure yourself from inside is the basic view. Unless there's no alternative. I've always preferred to be sick than to cure myself for putting outside things in me. So then I have to find out how to cure myself from inside. I don't always do it, and I'm sometimes sick, but, you know, what the heck? So anyway, I'm not trying to force anything on anyone, but I am saying this sense of developing... Even Aristotle uses the word something like energeia for activity, meaning energy.

[55:53]

activity as energy. It's one of the hardest words to translate from the Buddhist list, which always has something like energy in it. We don't have any quite word for it, but it means you're a kind of fire inside, which is expressed through stillness. So I want to make this practice accessible to everyone. But I need your help, and what should we do?

[56:59]

How tough should we be, or how convenient should we be? It's an open question for me. Thank you very much.

[57:06]

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