Marie-Louise convinced me yesterday that we ought to try a change in format for the discussion or question and answer or mini lectures. Yeah, and so I suggested to Atmar this morning, maybe we could move to the dojo for the second, if we can get the pillows straight, cushions. We can? Okay. The? Platform. We don't need a platform. No, no, I'm going to sit in a hole, actually. Just my head. I don't know if I can hold straight. Beckett wrote a play about that once.

[01:03]

When we get all the pillows over it, Ottmar says, yes, also the pedestals. And then Aschi says, no, not the pedestals. I will even sit in a hole. I mean, the principle of which I grew up with in Zen practice of having an inner questioning about practice going on all the time. Yeah, and being ready to bring that up whenever it's appropriate or inappropriate. and to be ready to address it whenever it is appropriate or even when it is inappropriate.

[02:15]

It's not bad, but I think that we're trying to develop again how to develop ways of talking with each other and discussing the Dharma. So we ought to try to discover what ways work the best for us. Okay, so this afternoon, I guess the second session, first session will be here. Is that right? Well, then we also do the first session in the dojo and start. They have small groups or whatever. Okay. Well, that's all right, sure. Okay. Now, if I take this stick...

[03:16]

when I take this staff. And it's rather difficult to actually see it or read the kanji on it. This is fun, actually. Hi, and... But if I'm also kind of moving, you know, it's even harder for me to see what the heck it is. Well, some basic principles of practice are in this. Clearly, at least if I can remain, the body can remain still, I can have a little better chance to observe it. So, I mean, it's that simple that we find, trying to develop ways and discover ways to still the body so that we can observe the mind.

[04:36]

Clearly, if the body is stiller and my eyes and senses are stiller, I can observe the mind in its movement, etc., more easily. And what is clear or implied in this metaphor, this image, is that mind and body are interrelated they're both they can be and they can be experienced separately and they can be experienced together and they can be connected

[06:07]

related to each other in different ways. So mind and body are both separate and related and can be experienced in their separateness and relatedness. And this means that also that it's not fixed the way they're related and can be changed. Yeah. And... the ways they can be experienced can be different.

[07:22]

You can experience mind one way and body one way and then in different ways. Entschuldigung, dann war das davor, die Art und Weise, wie sie aufeinander bezogen sind, kann verändert werden. Und sie können auch anders erfahren werden. Man kann den Geist auf die eine Art und Weise erfahren und den Körper auf eine andere Art und Weise erfahren. Sie können... They can be experienced separately and understood separately. Understanding is not necessarily experience. Sie können getrennt voneinander verstanden werden und getrennt voneinander erfahren werden. Yeah, okay. And then you could say, yeah, this is basically all of Buddhism is how to deal with this or relate to this. To discover and develop ways to observe the mind and experience the mind, etc.

[08:23]

And Buddhism is a guide to this process. Okay. So in regard to what I said yesterday, part of stilling the body, of course, is doing zazen. And what is the case is that when the body becomes still, because there's an interrelationship between body and mind, the stillness of the body begins to still the mind.

[09:44]

So, practice of zazen is the most thorough way to still the body in a way that stills the mind. The way we still our body is to bring attention to the body. in ways that develop the possibility of stillness. Yeah. Now, the first step in this is really to understand this. To understand that when you're stilling a body, you're also... stilling and maybe distilling the mind.

[11:06]

And we can become intoxicated by practice. So maybe this is a little bit like being a tailor. Because you're studying the fabric of mind and body. And observing and studying the possibilities for sewing them together or re-sewing them. And there's no relationship to the word sutra in my image, but sutra does mean suture to sow.

[12:11]

So we can think of maybe one of the seams of mind and body is the spine. And when we open up the the back so it's softer and freer and open to the movement of experience and energy. Maybe we're also loosening a bit the seam of spine, seam of mind and body, which is the spine.

[13:23]

S-E-A-M. And so when you bring the mind, bring attention to the spine, And you first, let's say for most of us, develop that as a way of discovering stillness in zazen. It can also be a way to establish a kind of stillness in your daily activity. not to hold the spine in some sort of special posture, but just to allow the spine to be a container for attention. No, you can apply that to whatever the body points you've chosen to notice, like perhaps your tongue or your hands.

[14:42]

They become ways to explore the relationship between mind and body. And because you have the connoting of attention present, You begin to a kind of feeling knowing about what to do. And in this kind of practice, it's better to forget about Buddhism, what you know about Buddhism, any scholarship or anything. In this practice, it is better to simply forget about Buddhism, everything you know about Buddhism, and simply forget about the Buddha's teaching.

[16:06]

Yeah, that's all useful to create some kind of intellectual presentation of Buddhism. But in practice you just want to relate to your own experience. You don't want to hold the spine or imagine some way you're supposed to practice. Also solltest du die Wirbelsäule nicht irgendwie auf eine bestimmte Weise halten oder dir eine bestimmte Art vorstellen, wie du praktizieren solltest. The way I'm speaking now is you just release or allow attention in the spine. Und die Art, wie ich jetzt spreche, da geht es einfach darum, die Aufmerksamkeit in der Wirbelsäule zuzulassen und loszulassen, freizusetzen. And then in attention. And then in the breath. And then in breath and spine together.

[17:12]

And then through these body points, the mind begins to arise in a more experienceable way. Not in any way it's supposed to be, just the way it happens to arise in you. And then how that mind generates and informs the space of our context. and then the way in which the spirit brings out the space of our connection, our connection, our connection. Okay. And brings out and informs. Okay. Now again, we can bring this back to the stitching of appearance, the sewing of appearance. I mean, the

[18:13]

Mind and body and the world are sewn together through the stitching of appearances. Okay, so I've said that on every appearance also mind appears. They're inseparable. But we don't notice them because mind doesn't notice mind. So you need a wider field, really an embodied field, which notices mind. And this is such an important practice. If you just did that the rest of your life, you know, I'd spend a lot of time bowing to you. And mind keeps... I mean, you were born with a mind or you were born with some kind of awareness, consciousness, etc.

[19:50]

But really, the mind of the bodhisattva is developed through the mutual attention of experience. You're born with the potential of Buddha mind, but it's generated and developed. It's generated and developed. In other words, for every human being, mind is joined to every appearance. In other words, for every human being, the mind is connected to every appearance.

[20:59]

But only for some people is the awareness of mind joined to appearance. And that makes a huge difference. The ingredients are there. You're born with the ingredients, but you put them together differently if you're a practitioner. No. Now, not only does mind appear with appearance, that appearance of mind can also be a Dharma.

[22:02]

Okay. What do I mean it can be a Dharma? Okay. So, there's an appearance. And that appearance includes mind. But now, you're such a good tailor. You see right between the threads. Emptiness is on the other side of the threads. So with tremendous clarity you see the appearance, but you see right through the appearance because it's simultaneously empty. So you begin through this practice to develop the... It just starts to occur.

[23:06]

You can't think your way to it. Every appearance occurs with a precision, a clarity, a brightness. And you feel that clarity and Precision only for a moment because it has no substantial existence. And you feel this clarity and this precision only for a moment because it has no substantial existence. Because anything that's singular is also multiple.

[24:09]

Alles, was singulär ist, ist auch vielfältig. Okay. I mean, this is a very specific stick, nyoi. Das ist ein ganz bestimmter Stab, nyoi. But, again, it's multiple because it exists from a piece of wood and exists in my hand and exists because someone made it and so forth. Aber es ist gleichzeitig auch eine Vielheit, weil er aus einem Stück Holz besteht und weil er in meiner Hand existiert und in einem Kontext. You can't understand the stick independent of that it's a multiple, that it's a context. Du kannst diesen Stab nicht unabhängig von seiner Vielheit verstehen, nicht unabhängig von seinem Zusammenhangsgefüge. So every appearance is also mind.

[25:14]

And when every appearance becomes really a dharma, every appearance is also clarity and emptiness. And I used the word apperception yesterday. And Nicole said, maybe I should define it. But it's a word used to mean, when you perceive something, you also know your context of its perception. So you perceive the relevant context of the perception as well as the object of perception. Also nimmst du den relevanten Zusammenhang des Wahrgenommenen genauso wahr wie das, was du wahrnimmst.

[26:36]

And Husserl uses... Did I pronounce that right? It's okay. I never do better than okay. Komm über okay nicht hinaus. I probably got it wrong. Yeah, that was less than okay. That was less than okay. Why weren't we all born in America? I wandered off my path and here I am. Okay, but I'm so impressed that all of you speak German. I mean, I love it to be with superior people. Who can do things I can't do. Okay. So, what's interesting to me about these phenomenologists, like the pioneer Husserl and others, and this includes Heidegger and... and Foucault and a whole bunch of contemporary philosophers and scientists.

[27:59]

When I read them, they're all struggling with the same thing I'm struggling with. How do you say these things that I'm experiencing in Western languages? Wie kann man diese Sache, die ich erfahre, in westlichen Sprachen ausdrücken? Okay, so Herschel uses the word appresent as well as apperceive. Appresent. Sorry. I don't know what it is. Appresent means exactly, it's a parallel idea to apperception. It's that the world, the context of the world appears on each perception. That's what he means.

[29:02]

I think it's a neologism. He coined it. The translator coined it. I don't know. It has nothing to do with apps. No. Okay. Now, there is no way for us to experience the cosmological universe. the cosmological universe. In cosmological terms, the universe is 14 billion years old. Is that a long time ago? We say at the beginning of the lecture, in so many million kalpas, you never heard anything as interesting as this.

[30:14]

It just means don't make comparisons. This is where we are, you're stuck with it. What is the teaching of Buddhism? You're stuck with the present moment. Whether you like it or not. Okay. My daughter is 14 years old. That's 14, just as the other day. Some people have, a surprising number of people have more than 14 billion dollars. And what does that have to do with 14 billion years? Anyway, we can't relate to the cosmological infinity.

[31:27]

Auf jeden Fall. Wir können uns auf die kosmische Unendlichkeit, dazu haben wir keine Beziehung. It's just amazing we're here at all. That's all we can say. Es ist einfach erstaunlich, dass wir überhaupt hier sind. Das ist alles, was wir sagen. We have no idea really what that means. Und wir haben im Grunde genommen überhaupt keine Vorstellung davon, was das bedeutet. But Buddhism says, let's discover as much as we can about it and live each moment. Aber der Buddhismus sagt, lass uns darüber so viel wie möglich entdecken und jeden Moment leben. Weil wenn alles, was wir haben, letzten Endes jeder Moment ist, jede Erscheinung, Buddhism is discovered when you say, oh, that's the case. There's each mental and sensorial event. That's all there is. And each mental event, sensorial event, is also a context.

[32:54]

And that context, we can say, well, allness is better than oneness. Oneness, as you know, is a reductionist theological idea. We can't relate to... I mean, allness is changing and emerging and so forth. But maybe we can relate to all-at-once-ness. We can have a concept that it's not just this particularity, but it's this particularity in the context of this moment. Okay, now Dogen works with this a lot.

[33:58]

Each moment is the entire universe, he says things like that. Enter yourself fully in this immediacy and imagine it's the entire universe, he says. So every appearance appears with mind, can be more deeply penetrated and understood as clarity and emptiness, and a third aspect, it appears as an interior and exterior context, And why is it important to say it appears as an interior and exterior context?

[35:15]

Because the exterior context, so-called, is also contained in the interior Individual appearance is also a multiple. Did you want the first part too? I don't care. You all understand English, so it's no. Okay. And each of our own perception, app perception of it, includes our own context. Und unsere eigene Wahrnehmung oder Aperzeption davon schließt unseren eigenen Zusammenhang mit ein. And this is an essential dynamic of the Alaya Vishyana. Und das ist eine wesentliche Dynamik des Alaya Vishyana. Without this understanding, the Alaya Vishyana doesn't have any lively meaning.

[36:19]

So we've talked about the way, we've talked about the mind, and tomorrow we're stuck with the world. And the world in this case, the best we can do, is the all-at-once-ness, the apperception and appresentation, And with the world, the best thing we can do is the all-in-one, the A-perception and the A-presentation. that is the fact of each appearance. And practice is to develop this Taylor-like depth of understanding. Yeah, whatever is good enough.

[37:39]

Yeah, okay. So this... Okay. So if the way we and the world and the mind and the body are sewn together... By each appearance. It's like our stitches for making your own... I mean... Yeah, okay, so... So if this is the way world, mind and body are stitched together, How, if you bring attention to each stitch, strangely enough, and I won't go into it now because it's already time to end,

[38:52]

You calm the waves of the mind by attentionally bringing these stitches together. beruhigst du die Wellen des Geistes, indem du aufmerksam diese Nadelstiche miteinander verbindest. That means you don't just notice the stitches, you enact or inhabit the stitches. Das bedeutet, du bemerkst diese Nadelstiche nicht einfach nur, sondern du setzt sie um oder du bewohnst sie. So, how do you inhabit each stitch, inhabit each appearance? Okay, and so you have to find some way to do it. So you need some little physical act that accompanies each appearance.

[40:06]

And... The most common way to do that is to complete each appearance. To develop the habit of completing each appearance. So a teacher will say to a disciple, Who leaves the door open, say. Please go back and close the door. Yeah. It's not because the door should be closed. It's because the teacher wants the practitioner to develop the habit of completing every action. So even if somebody comes through and closes the door, the teacher might say, would you go back and reopen it and then close it?

[41:14]

And it seems like some sort of nonsense. But it's to get you to enact, give a physical attribute to each appearance. It's one of the ways we use the body to sew the intangible ephemeral world together. Das ist eine der Arten und Weisen, wie wir die vergängliche flüchtige Welt, you said so together, right? Together, yeah. Vernähen. Zusammen. You can end every sentence together.

[42:27]

Okay. Kannst heute jeden Satz mit dem Wort zusammen beenden. Okay, and I'm happy to be together here with you. Und ich bin froh, hier mit euch zusammen zu sein. Thank you very much. Danke. Thank you.

[42:44]

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