I want to offer you Dogen's poem or Philip Weiland's translation with Kaz Tanahashi Sensei, Dogen's poem. Anybody want to translate it? Neil? Everything that is visible comes from causes that you are intimate with. If you go, sit or lie, the body itself is the complete truth. If someone asks about the meaning of this, within the treasure of the lady's eye comes a single dust. So I think that's worth sort of, if you want to keep in mind, as a way of working with this seminar that we've pretty much completed.

[01:18]

All that's visible springs from causes intimate to you. While walking, sitting, lying down, the body itself is complete truth. You could also say, while walking, sitting, lying down, the body completes the truth. If someone asks the meaning of this, Just say, inside the treasury of the Dharma eye, a single grain of dust.

[02:22]

Is there anything anyone would like to ask or talk about, say? Any unacknowledged itches? Yeah. I'm thinking about this forest mind, and I think as a child, if you don't have language as a little child, I think there must be this forest mind in the being of the child. So, maybe it's something we lose when we grow up. So, we have to find it again.

[03:53]

I was thinking about the forest mind, the second mind, that as a small child you have this mind, if you don't know the language yet, as a very small child, you have this mind and that you lose it when you grow up. You have to find it again. Yes, I agree. And I think especially, not exactly before language, but as I've said before, before children have a concept of past and future. The concept of past and future flattens out the present, actually destroys the present. I think children do have a mind, a wide intuitive mind that knows many wise things.

[05:02]

And it's, I think, one of the reasons children's drawings are often so abnormally profound. Even, you know, it takes Elke or Picasso to do drawings as good as a child. But I also think there's a danger in thinking that this is some natural state that babies have or perhaps animals have or something like that. We could look at Buddhism and say it's an antidote to our complexity. Cows don't need Buddhism. But that's not to say they're Buddhas. This is, you know, does a cow or a dog have a Buddha nature?

[06:20]

Of course it depends what you mean by Buddha nature. But when we as adults, in the midst of our experience, realize forest mind, it's not the same as a baby's mind. And it has all the power of our adulthood and maturity and complexity. Yes. When I was walking and standing, I sometimes had the feeling that I was at home, and this reminded me of the situations I had experienced as a child, but they were still more different, and walking became more difficult for me, but when I stopped, it was like a threshold.

[07:59]

You could notice it. During the walking and in particular during stopping and standing I felt something like I started remembering like as a child how I used to experience and feel the forest and things and got an inkling of this forest mind and particularly when standing it was like going over a threshold Isn't it funny that if you were just standing you wouldn't notice that, but if you've been walking slowly and then you stand, you notice it. If you just notice that kind of distinction, it teaches you a lot about our mind and how we exist. Yes.

[09:11]

I had already spoken to a person about winter sleep. At the first moment of winter sleep you get the impression of falling asleep or becoming insensitive or fat, full of food. And then you get up and wait for me. And then I thought, that can't be true, I'm not supposed to get up right away. As I said, it could also be that this state, whatever comes, is not worth it in this winter sleep, where you are distracted. But why don't you just say it's not worth it, it's a winter sleep? What's so special about this winter sleep? It gives me so many questions. I'm struggling with this term vintage love in the sense you explained it and used it and dealing with it and for me the image comes up like I kind of withdraw inside and I kind of eat a lot so I have this kind of fat around me and I kind of get insensitive and don't feel things anymore and just snooze away and I'm not very alive.

[10:54]

And I feel, I mean, this can't be it. You know, I'm just waiting for spring. Yeah, we'll cover you with leaves. Well, I'm sorry, maybe I shouldn't have used the word Interschlaf. I forgot that your bare nature would come out so strongly. Bear nature. But what I meant was in this koan of Dung Shan says, when it's cold, the cold kills you. But I meant what Dungschan said. When it's cold, the cold kills you. When it's hot, the heat kills you.

[12:00]

Sometimes you could translate this, when it's hot, completely hot. When it's cold, be completely cold. But that's really not what he means. And you could sometimes translate it, when it's hot, just sweat totally, and when it's cold, just freeze totally. But that doesn't mean it. You know, it's not something that's so unfamiliar to us, but what's different is that as a continuity of mind. In other words, all of us have been in a place where it's too hot or too cold and you just, you know, say, okay, you do the best you can. I don't know how to express it. It's like you're completely hot, sweltering. I don't know if you have that word equivalent in German. You're completely uncomfortable.

[13:11]

Not only is your body oozing water, but the walls are oozing water. And so you fan yourself. And if you've been taught in Japan how to do it, women find themselves like this, but men have to do it discreetly, slowly from below. To show that they don't really care whether they're hot or cold. But somewhere you don't care. The world as it is, whether you live or die or whatever happens, you don't care. If you can do something, you care immediately. We say, reaching a hand down the 10,000-foot cliff.

[14:12]

The 10,000 foot cliff means something, you know, impenetrable, unclimbable. And it's maybe Zen's wailing wall. We bring our grief and joy just to this 10,000-foot cliff. And if we can help somebody, we reach our hand down the 10,000-foot cliff. But if not, this is in the treasury of the Dharma eye, seeing everything from inside, this inconceivable mind of nirvana, which absorbs all our grief and joy, there's still a single grain of dust.

[15:29]

There's always something left, our aliveness, our compassion, ready to become flowers of the world. So for me, the word hibernation had some feeling of that. You're in a situation and you can't not much to do. So, okay. You have nothing to do and everything becomes very beautiful. You're in hibernation but no one knows it. Excuse me, I'm incoherent.

[16:52]

So, something else? Yes? I'd like to share my experience. Before we went out to do this walking meditation, you rang the bell, you said, you rang the bell, and you said, there's the Dharma. And then we sat for a few minutes. And after the sound of the bell was gone, I said, my God, where's the Dharma now? Because we are always meeting. And then we went outside. Suddenly I had the feeling that Thich Nhat Hanh was teaching us. And somehow I had the Imagine the door of the temple stood open, and the end was there. They think they are found for just keeping. They are found to be with the Dhamma when it comes in from the ground.

[18:00]

It was very nice. You can say that in German. So, during the gene-imitation, we held the bell, for example, and said, everything is fine, everything is fine. And then we sat down for a while, and when the small bell was gone, I suddenly thought, where is it now? And then we went out again, and during the gene-imitation, I suddenly had the feeling that deep metal his teaching in metal. And I also had the image of the opening door of this temple and the monks who were behind it and the act. I have the feeling that, fortunately, someone was there at the time and also a little bit of continuity.

[19:01]

And I think this experience We met Buddha on the road. Something else? Yes. I thought when the shock went by, it was like something so peaceful and desirous, the wake passed by that no one wants to watch. I expected, you know, like a great big whoosh ahead to blow me away. But it was just, he slowed down and drove by. It was like a cow, I know. Just because you have to translate if you want to say something.

[20:18]

I was going to, thinking of passing this frog around, and when it got to you, if you wanted to say something, you could, or you could croak. I mean, no, it's a bad joke. But it's kind of difficult to pass it around. But I'll pass it around anyway. You can please look at it again. So Kuruji liked frogs and toads very much because they'd sit very still like Zazen. But also very alert. So an insect comes by, they go... I gave you, I think, quite a bit... during the seminar, as much as I could anyway.

[21:44]

It felt like it fit together as a useful practice. But if there's something I haven't said you'd like to hear about or hear, please ask me. Yes. I would like if you explain again about breathing during meditation. I only remember about inhale and I didn't remember if you said something about exhale. Usually if you inhale, you soon exhale.

[22:48]

So this image, which I didn't describe, is an image of inhaling like this, exhaling like this, as if it's coming out, and then inhaling with the feeling that it's coming in from the lower part of your torso and up. And, of course, there's the turn of the breath at the top and the turn of the breath at the bottom, which one's mind stays in those two. Well, we breathe out with the feeling that the breath descends and breathe in with the feeling that the breath enters the body from below and rises into the body.

[24:10]

And there are now these turning points of the breath, of course, these two up and down. These are also small turning points for the mind. And you can extend this practice of drawing the air in from below in your feeling and in your visualization. You can extend that feeling to your drawing the breath in from the very base of your torso or even from your feet. And if you're doing the standing practice, as I suggested, with your legs slightly bent, you can extend it so you feel a very big circle as if the breath was coming in through the earth and not through your feet.

[25:19]

And a comparable practice is to working with the inhale, with the exhale. And as you exhale, you spread your breath throughout your body. These are kind of visualizations which help to calm you and spread your mind through your body. But they're also beginning practices to awaken your energy body. One thing, if you don't mind my saying so, that Rika, having to be Eno at the Sashin, discovered that reaching a certain state of mind, she suddenly had a different kind of energy to sit through all the periods and into night sitting, which she'd never had before.

[26:42]

Do you want to say anything? And this kind of energy is outside of psychology and so forth and transforms how you the dynamics of your personality and everything what is presented to you and your problems and so forth. So these practices which I've given you which help spread your mind Throughout your body.

[27:46]

Through the practice of visualizing and feeling your breath. There are also preliminary practices in awakening your energy body. Okay, is that sufficient? Yes, well, right here. You said this is pure land. So logically a battlefield must also be pure land.

[28:47]

It's hard to imagine. You know this is... There's the Zen story. Some of these Zen stories are a little on the corny side. Do you say corny or weedy? You know, a guy is hanging by a rope by his teeth, and there's a tiger down below, and there's a flower on the cliff. Yes, that someone is a little bit too figurative, too obvious.

[29:55]

Someone hangs on his feet over a cliff, and a tiger stands there, and suddenly he discovers a flower. Yes, strawberry, okay. It's another mind that can be present even in the battlefield. Doesn't mean there isn't horror in the situation. Two of the people who now are the leaders at San Francisco Zen Center, Blanche Hartman and her husband, Lou. They were in the peace movement during the early Vietnam War, anti-Vietnam War movement. And they... were in this situation where there'd been, you know, Ohio State, Kent State in Ohio, there'd been these, the police had shot several students and so forth.

[31:17]

And in the early days, the police fairly freely beat people. So they were in one of these early confrontations. They didn't know what was going to happen. And the police were told everybody to disperse and gave them a certain number of minutes and then they charged when they didn't disperse. I don't remember exactly, but I know Blanche decided not only when they charged to charge the police. And she, as she came and the police were coming with their helmets and things, she looked in a policeman's eyes and everything stopped.

[32:27]

And here was this frightened eyes that looked like her baby. And that moment she became a Buddhist. So that's the mind. In a sense even that was the pure land for her. This is not a governmental or societal vision. It's a spiritual vision. that expresses, manifests how we actually exist. In which space and time disappear. As the Diamond Sutra says, if you look for me in form, you won't find me. And the Diamond Sutra asks us to be free of the idea of a lifespan.

[33:45]

Can you imagine being so present here, you have no idea of a lifespan? There's no comparison like that. Anyone, somebody who hasn't said anything? Yes. Oh, Neil. How unusual, you haven't said anything, but it's true. You just translated. When I came out after the last part of the scenario, before we were walking, I just noticed I was standing outside.

[34:48]

I noticed the, well, I imagine I noticed the animates went sort of above the squirrel, and they just went running away, see? And so I could really feel the squirrel, you know, running over me, and just, I didn't disturb them, as usual. Just a bit of experience. Mm-hmm. Most of you seem to have enjoyed the walking meditation. I'm glad we did it. When we made the walking meditation and we turned around and the last were the first. It was a funny experience.

[35:50]

I was amazed how short the distance was. How short? I thought, it must be much, much longer. And it was just 15 meters to the gate. I thought, is this the house? It seemed so long. Yes, how we did the meditation and then turned around. I was right at the end, but then I was suddenly at the first one and was very surprised how short the stretch is, how we got back from the gate. That was at least 15 meters and it took so long. And then I also I was thinking, I was also thinking of Thich Nhat Hanh and the... The doors opening?

[37:06]

The doors that opened. And I was wondering, did he walk that slow with you? Or was it even slower? And today we kind of walked a little faster than today. Sometimes slower. Yeah, that's my... The walk was in distance very short, but for me at least many more things were there than in many much longer walks I've taken. Thank you. It's wonderful to walk. It feels to me often like walking within the pace of some larger being, which the plants and trees are very slow beings. Anyone else?

[38:14]

Yeah. This morning meditation I had. Sometimes I thought about us all together connected as one big animal, like a big snake. That was funny. Like bamboo, I believe, is one big plant that comes up in different places. I'd like to know, to ask you something more personally, I'd like you to maybe again feel it, if it is time. The five fears?

[39:34]

You mean from a long time ago, the five fears? You mean during the seminar I mentioned fears? Previous. The five fears. the fear of loss of livelihood, the fear of loss of reputation, the fear of going crazy, the fear of death, and the fear of speaking before an assembly. Which is the latter is the funniest and the most profound.

[40:39]

The fear of speaking out in this group or the fear of speaking out before your society. Yes? I also have something to do with the topic of fear. I noticed at this seminar that whenever I tried to breathe out, I was caught in a kind of strange slump. Whenever I came to the number 4, there was this word here, so fear. Something happened to me during the seminar in practicing counting my exhales whenever I reached the number four, which in German is vier, which means fear. In Japanese it's death, shi. I mean, I could start feeling fear.

[41:52]

I feel like sort of trapped in this kind of like in this circuit and had to start over again. But once I hope this improves eventually. You know, in hotels in Asia, they follow the Japanese custom, and I think in Chinese it's the case too, of taking, there's no fourth floor. And there's no 13th floor and they follow the western custom. So for a while you think you go up in the elevator where was 4 and where was 13? So maybe you should count 1, 2, 3, 5 And no fourth breaths exist for you.

[43:06]

But it's quite arbitrary that we start with one, so you could just start with five. How can I? Nine is also in Asia a dangerous number. So, I wish you luck and I hope you have no larger problems. Yes? What did Suzuki Roshi tell you about his teacher? And has his teacher the same importance to him and Suzuki to you? And did you ever feel a connection between you and his teacher?

[44:12]

Mm-hmm. Deutsch? I am interested, because I know many students of Belkaroshi who feel a connection to Suzuki Roshi, whether Belkaroshi also feels a connection to Suzuki's teacher and what Suzuki Roshi said about his teacher and how he felt about him and whether he was also so important to him. For me, Sukhyoshi's teaching was that the persons who were most present in his teaching were his father and his lineage teacher and his, you could say, dharma teacher. Because his father was a Roshi but felt that he shouldn't be the teacher of his son.

[45:13]

So sent him to his disciple, Gyokujen and so on, who the Zen Mind Beginners Mind is dedicated to, who is a great, powerful man. And Suzuki Roshi was quite a frail boy, so he was this super strong guy who was a teacher, quite strict. His Gyokujin was an archer. and had a bow which supposedly only two men in Japan could string. And his teacher insisted that they not waste anything.

[46:38]

So whatever, you know, they had to eat everything up and if something spoiled, they still had to eat it. So one time there was these pickles, which were already pickles, and then the pickles were totally spoiled. So the... The Japanese eat a lot of pickled vegetables. It's different than our German pickles. You've had them in Japanese restaurants probably but it's a way of preserving vegetables through the winter. Five or six and I think all ran away eventually except two. And so the monks, these young teenage monks, took these pickles out and found a place under a tree and buried them.

[47:52]

Well, that was all right, except two days later, in comes Gyokojin, So and Roshi and said, heck what I found in the garden. We must eat them. Cook them up, please. So they got the dirt off them and everything from them. They boiled them. They didn't know what to do, so they boiled these damn things. And they were... So they served them and they gave them to Sonaroshi first and they were all watching him and he, you know, ate them away without...

[49:00]

So this young boy, Sukhyoshi, who was at that time Shunryo, he's okay, so he ate them. It wasn't bad at all. When he took away any caring about how it tasted, It was his first enlightenment. Something changed in his mind at that moment. So he would tell us stories about Gyokujen that way. Gyokujen himself was so stubborn a guy, that his teacher made him bow over and over again all day long until he had a big callus here from bowing so often.

[50:15]

I don't think I could ask one of you to do that. I'm shy to even ask you to go walking meditation, isn't it? Maybe I have to become tougher. I don't even do a very good imitation, do I? So, then he had a second teacher, Kichizawa Roshi. And then he had a second teacher, Kichisawa Roshi, who was known as one of the main scholars of Dogen in Japan.

[51:26]

Who was also a Zen master. In fact, Ruth Fuller Sasaki, who wrote Zen Dust, once consulted, went to Sukershi's nearby temple to meet with Kichizawa Roshi to discuss some aspect of dogma. And Kishizawa Roshi had quite an extensive library, which put together a library in those days was much more difficult than today. Kichisawa Roshi took a great interest in Suzuki Roshi. Suzuki Roshi studied with him after his main teacher, Son Roshi, died when Suzuki Roshi was about 31 or something like that. So Tsukuyoshi, in his early 30s, became a Roshi and also had to continue, and he was generally kind of young to be a Roshi at that time.

[52:41]

He tells one story. I can't remember the context. Do you mind my telling these stories? Tells one story. Because we used to, Sukhiroji and I used to have to go to the houses. Sometimes he would, I'd just hang out with him and drive him places and stuff. We would go sometimes to the houses of Japanese parishioners because there was a Japanese congregation connected with the temple in America. And we would go to these, drive out of the city, usually and go to these farmers' houses, basically. And I don't know why the Japanese have adopted this, but it's true in Japan, too.

[54:02]

You know, they offer you a drink, always. Most people, at least I know in America, if they do offer you a drink, they offer you Dubonnet or Campari or something like that, or Port, you know. But for some reason, even midday, the Japanese have this habit of offering you a glass of whiskey. And they're quite insistent. So they pour us these big... tumblers, glasses full of whiskey. And this happened quite a number of times, and every time Sukhiroshi would look at each other, what are we going to do with this, you know?

[55:08]

Well, luckily, the Japanese also like large potted plants. So we'd look around and go... Then they come and fill our glass back up. After we left, the plants are always... But I told you that because that was my experience. She did not drink, and I didn't drink. But anyway, he tells the story of, for some reason, shortly after his... teacher died, he had to go around to everyone's house, the various parishioners. And he tells the story that at every house they kept offering him drinks, and he didn't know how to refuse, so he'd have a little drink at each house.

[56:10]

He started out about four in the afternoon. By eleven o'clock he was falling down. So he knocked on one person's door and fell over. So they had to carry him home, you know. And here was this new Roshi, you know, you're supposed to be so... Tough, you can pour down whiskey and no effect, right? So he always felt he got off to a rather shameful start. But Kichizawa Roshi then, Sukhiroshi started studying with him.

[57:25]

And Kichizawa Roshi took on Sukhiroshi as his main disciple or main pupil. So actually, Kichizawa Roshi left his own temple and moved into a sub-temple of Sukhiroshi's. This was always quite a thing. It was kind of uncomfortable for Sukersi because he was head of a large temple which had about 250 temples. So Kichisaburoshi was in the hierarchy lower down than Suzuki Roshi, but he was his teacher. So in Japan those distinctions are quite important. Yeah, it's all to do with all kinds of things.

[58:37]

But anyway, Sukhirishi generally was bowing to his teacher, but in ceremonies, his teacher had to bow to him. And at some point, Sukhirishi gave me his teacher's teacher's teacher's robe. So part of my altar is this robe. So yes, there's quite a relationship with his teachers. And I've saved many of Sukhiroshi's things to give to you when you're ready. If you want some old musty thing. But this definitely would be Sukhiroshi's dream fulfilled if I could give you something like that.

[59:59]

And just that I'm sitting here and that Ulrika has devoted her life to developing the Dharma Sangha and developing her own practice and our practicing together, this is definitely Sukhiroshi's dream. So is this a good point to end? Does somebody want to say something? So why don't we sit for a few minutes We can get on the road a little earlier. OK. Thank you.

[62:14]

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